Useful Garbage

Education

2009-10-03T02:48:00.013+05:30

Isn’t is shameful that I, Siddharth Tyebji, son of a Muslim father and a Hindu Bengali mother, neither can speak Urdu nor Bengali?

- Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Though it’s hard to define the primary goal of education, the result of education should ideally lead to an enlightenment of the student towards the world outside, to provide him with a better understanding of things within him and without, so that he could use those skills in their betterment in some way or the other.

What shouldn’t it be? Most importantly, education should not solely be a means to livelihood, it should not only be the process one has to undergo to earn a living in this world, it should not only mean the passing of an exam or the stamp of a degree.

Unfortunately, it has become to mean exactly that. The idea of a holistic education meant to broaden the mind is almost non-existent today. We live in an era of ‘specialisation’, and it, by definition, demands a narrowing down of interests, a sort of isolation. Where the proliferation of choice is seen as the biggest positive development, it is not a surprise that the belief has percolated to the field of education as well. Education is the ice-cream parlour, the subjects are the various flavours on display. Take the one you like. No one’s better than the other. The vendor has no suggestions to make.

School

Take, for example, the schools under the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE). As early as Standard IX, students are required to select their ‘Second Language’ (it is named so as studying English is, of course, mandatory). The options available in my school were Sanskrit, Hindi, French and German.

While Sanskrit might look like a welcome inclusion in this list, anyone who has been at school knows that the picture isn’t so beautiful when it comes to its application. There are a very few students who take Sanskrit out of natural interest. Instead, most of the people who do are the ones who want to have it easy in their 10th Standard Board Exams. The fact that Sanskrit is a ‘scoring’ subject in which not too much hard work is necessary to get you a 95 out of 100 is known to all.

This has perverted the whole intention behind imparting knowledge about one of India’s ancient languages. A historically rich and beautiful form of communication has been reduced to becoming a way of acquiring numbers on a sheet of paper. A subject that can potentially open up one’s mind to a universe of knowledge is being mugged up mechanically by students, just as they had done for the multiplication tables in preparatory school.

On top of that, the options given to them are French and German. Now, for a child who has been familiar with phrases such as ‘the big, mean world’ and the ‘cut-throat competition’ outside, it is fairly easy to guess what language he or she will choose. In the new globalised India, where one might be involved in workforces constantly in interaction with foreign clients, a little knowledge of French or German is seen as an added ‘asset’. For the urban middle class India today, Sanskrit and elements such as that are part of the old India, the India gone by, and empowered by the chance at financial success and a superior quality of life 1991 has provided them, they are firm in their rejection for everything old. As if we there was actually a demarcation like such, where the old died and the new was born. But in their minds, it is clear.

I would like to iterate here that I have nothing against the teaching of foreign languages. The more appropriate way would to give students an option between Hindi and Sanskrit (and the local language of the place, if different from Hindi) and in addition, provide an optional Third Language option which facilitates the leaning of French, German and the like. The obvious argument to this would be that it’ll further increase the already immense workload the average school-goer suffers from. The obvious reply to this would be that perhaps languages are the only definable entity by which we stay connected to our culture, to the past. To subvert the study of the same for the sake of more ‘scientific’ education can be disastrous. In short, the study of history and culture, or in other words, what connects us to the past is of prime importance. The marginalisation of this defeats the very aim of education.

The underlying belief behind the existing state of affairs, though it might not be stated explicitly, is that education’s primary responsibility is to make products out of human beings. The phrase ‘duniya ke liye tayyar karna’ has taken a wholly absolute meaning today. Children have become raw materials, who are then processed with education, after which they are let out into the big, wide world as finished products. The system of examination prevalent today only furthers the extent and impact of the above style of thinking. We rely primarily on memory-based questioning which encourages students to stack up as much as they can within a period of time, just to vomit it all out on the day of the examination. There is very little emphasis given to imaginative or divergent learning, or to anything that falls beyond the scope of the textbooks.

All this is a result of a society which demands only concrete results. What you know and what you feel is immaterial to them. What matters is only the final number on your grade sheet. This is also a society that doesn’t permit failures. The emotional ostracisation that one has to undergo in case of the same is enormous. The numerous cases of suicides by students unsatisfied with their 10th and 12th grades are a big example of that. If that is not a cause of worry for us today, and if it doesn’t lead to radical change, it’s hard to say what will. The recent measures taken by the government to make the 10th board exams optional is a long-awaited step in the right direction.

Note: As I was writing this part of the piece, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal also came up with a proposal making the teaching of Hindi compulsory across all schools in the country. This, however, is ridiculous as imposing Hindi on a Tamilian is as unjust as imposing Tamil on someone from the Hindi belt.

Universities

Albeit, it is heartening to see Kapil Sibal eager to implement the suggestions made by the committee headed by the 82-year old Prof. Yash Pal (a full copy of the report can be found here). This report on higher education in India spells out the problems it is suffering from and also suggests policies and concrete steps the government should take to overcome the same.

As Mr. Sibal puts it, higher education today has become ‘compartmentalised’. That is not only to say that streams operate independently of each other, but also that research and education, which need to go hand in hand in order to produce quality teachers, are also seen as separate entities. Quoting the report:

It should be necessary for all research bodies to connect with universities in their vicinity and create teaching opportunities for their researchers and for all universities to be teaching and research universities.

While the report acknowledges the importance of imparting knowledge about a varied set of disciplines at least at the undergraduate level, it adds that there already are some current universities that offer such opportunities. For example, there are some engineering colleges today which offer courses on subjects such as history and philosophy. But even at those centres, they are very rarely taken seriously by the students. The report’s suggestion to counter this shortcoming:

One way of improving the quality of teaching of these additional disciplines and stimulating students’ interest is to allow students for whom a subject is additional to study along with those for whom the same subject is primary. For instance, a mathematics student should study and undergo evaluation in philosophy as an optional subject along with students for whom philosophy constitutes the primary subject.

The whole idea behind the report is to make education more inclusive by way of integration, be it in terms of disciplines such as science and humanities or fields such research and education itself. Should only a part of the suggestions mentioned in the report be implemented, it will lead to a significant positive change in the way education is perceived today.

The currently fashionable idea of ‘specialisation’ has taken a totally different form when it comes to universities. While schools, through electives, deprive the child of essential basic knowledge, universities, which are the last step for a student before starting on a job, work in near complete isolation with each other. The many engineering, management and medical colleges around the country have been lacking in this regard, and this does not exclude the much-aspired-for IITs and IIMs. An student who has taken admission into an engineering college is delivered education pertinent to his field of specialisation only; there are but very few colleges in India which encourage the study of subjects beyond its principal scope, depriving the student of exposure to innumerable possibilities where different fields of study interact and co-produce, leading to over-all, all-inclusive development. Development – this is one aspect of education very conveniently forgotten today. The Constitution is unclear about its regard for education as an agent of transformation or change. This spirit is lost when education starts to be seen as something that only ‘adds value’. The proliferation of private educational institutes offering higher education is a prime example of such change in view. Most of these institutions are nothing but money-minting ventures which take no responsibility for what their duty is towards the society at large. Rather than looking at the multi-national firms which recruit people from such places and the fat pay packages they give as criteria for judgement, universities should be judged by how much they have done to reduce disparities such as gender, class and caste.

Boring Road

2009-07-27T04:13:00.017+05:30

He stepped down from the large autorickshaw, and his feet landed straight into a puddle. The autorickshaws running in Patna were different, not like the ones he hired in Delhi, with exclusive usage for the duration of the journey. He had had to share this one with around ten co-passengers, not to mention two others hanging precariously at the back. The rains had arrived and the air was humid. Amir’s shirt, soaked half with rain and half with sweat, still carried the smell of strangers.

He had been dropped at Hadtali Mod. Around him, the traffic went on with its usual business, cars honking and crawling past, the incessant rain just adding to the confusion. Sublime chaos, at three in the afternoon. The old temple on his right, the hoarding for Amrapali restaurant on the left, images from the past past. Still the same, this place, except for the new red lights which did not work.

The house wasn’t far from here. About a kilometre and a half. But it was still drizzling, and Amir called out a rickshaw-wala. Reluctantly (as afternoons were meant for siestas), the man agreed to take him to his destination. ‘Only 20 rupees’, is what the man asked in return for his sleep, and Amir found it hard to deny him that.

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Puku, the old housemaid recognised him at once, and came almost running to the gate, mumbling something beneath her breath. She was visibly happy to see Amir, and perhaps, as Amir thought, couldn’t think of the right words to greet him with after all these years.

‘How are you, Puku mausi?’, said Amir, not knowing how else to start. Having opened the gate, she now reached down for his feet. He dismissed her with a couple of embarrassed utterings.

‘Is Nani at home?’, he now asked her.

‘Where else will she be? She’s here only....come come’, Puku replied, and signalled him to follow her.

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The room, silent, orderly, unchanged. On the bed lay his Nani, his grandmother’s sister, sleeping, with her head turned away from the door. The fan went about its work slowly, as if it too had given in to the inviting afternoon. On a table alongside the bed – tablets, small bottles of medicine, a water flask and a glass, and an empty cup of tea. The table was the only new entrant since he had been here last, almost nine years ago; even the little sofa set and the paintings on the wall had remained as they were before.

‘Nani...nani’, Amir pronounced in a low voice, touching her feet gently. She turned to look, and for an unreal second or two, kept gazing at him.

‘Amir....amir...arey such a long time!’, she cried, and reached out for his face, covering it with both her hands. She looked at him closely now, and Amir wondered whether there was already a hint of moisture in her eyes. As a child, he’d always wondered how grandmothers could cry almost at will, or to put it more mildly - how easy tears were to them.

‘Nani, how are you?’, said Amir, caressing her hands and then taking them into his own. He looked at her hands, the wrinkles jutting out like cracks in a famine-struck land. Her nails, like his grandmother’s, curled completely in a perfect semi-circle. He had never seen a more abnormal pair of hands, and never a pair that was so beautiful.

‘How will I be, beta?’, is all she said in reply, and then asked, ‘How are you here?’

‘One of my friends is getting married. I was in town...so I thought I’ll meet you’, said Amir, and they exchanged a smile.

She called out for Puku now, in a volume so low that it could only have been meant for Amir. He relayed the call, and Puku came, hunching, eager. She was asked to get another cup of tea, and she walked away, nodding.

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‘What can I do, beta? It’s only these four walls for me now. Even to go to the toilet, I have to call Puku. Poor woman, she’s still here after all this....’

The rain had resumed full service. Amir sipped on the tea, nodding slowly from time to time. The saucer now had a small ring of brown in the centre, tea which had fallen down from the cup, and he watched this circle form and un-form as he picked up or placed down the cup. Everything was so slow, relaxed; he wished he could lie down on the bed too, in this peace broken only by his grandmother’s voice, and the soft tip-tip of the rain outside.

‘Time has come to a standstill for me. Days pass and I don’t even remember what date it is...I read sometimes, but even that is difficult to do for long when you are always lying down, no? Everything is so monotonous but what can one do?’

‘Why don’t you change things around in this room, Nani? A little change here might help...why don’t you replace these old paintings for one?’

She only smiled at Amir, said nothing. The smile made him feel uncomfortable, he wondered whether he had hurt her in some way, and lowered his eyes. There was silence for a minute or two. How distant they had grown, thought Amir, in their own worlds now, separated by time, space, memory. And still, everything on the outside had remained the same, the gate outside the house, the room with its old structure intact, the two beautiful hands, the semi-circular nails, her voice.

‘I’m so happy to see you. At this age, what else do we have to live for? Not just me, but anyone. To see you again after so many years, to hear your voice, that’s enough. Otherwise, what is there to look forward to? Just two lonely women living out their respective lives. ’

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On his way out, Puku had handed him one of his grandmother’s umbrellas. When he refused saying that he wouldn’t need it, she thrust it into his hand, adding that it was of no use to the house anyway. It was still raining, in fact more heavily than before. But Amir had decided to walk to the Mod, and he ambled along slowly.

Half-way, he paused to look at the scene around him. The rain had cast a white shadow over everything. So much so, that it seemed to him that even the early evening traffic chaos looked beautiful. A stupid, dangerous thought, he then reminded himself, shook his head, and walked on.

The Death of Familiarity

2009-06-04T15:05:00.009+05:30

“Why don’t we ever learn that all changes of place are for the worse? It’s not love for the place; it’s the familiarity, like old winter clothes.”

- English, August
Upamanyu Chatterjee

How does he start?

It was like being in the presence of an old lover, there was familiarity but also the knowledge that he didn’t belong here anymore, that it belonged or was going to belong to someone else very soon. Yet, everything was there as he had left it, books and papers strewn on the table, the almirah wide open with some leftover clothes, some leftover books and CDs. Even the graffiti on the wall, and the little Mao Zedong mask, hanging rather precariously.

He had only a few hours to himself. His last few hours as the owner of this hostel room, one that he had inhabited for four long years, his territory. He had to check if anything worth of value was still left to be taken away, throw out the remaining garbage and pass on the room possession to the supervisor.

The place almost felt eerie, naked and abandoned. To think that not so long back, this place had been full with conversation, laughter, Floyd and Morrison, was unimaginable. He felt heavy with feeling, something that was hard to explain, even to himself.

How does he start?

He looked into his drawer. It was quite a melange, from everything like newspaper contacts to received rakhis on display. There were also a broken nail-cutter, some shampoo pouches , fee receipts as old as four years and keys for which he had now lost the locks.

He picked up the rakhis; they could not be thrown away like that. The shampoo pouches – they could still be used. And what about the newspaper contacts? Couldn’t they be of use later?

Suddenly, he felt tired, physically and mentally. He closed the drawer and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Was it possible for him to take away everything? Was it even desirable? Was it correct wanting to create an exact replica of this room, with its drawers, racks and closets, wherever he was headed next? Is it right to carry memory as baggage and not leave behind things knowing that they didn’t belong to you anymore, and indeed weren’t even needed?

With some effort, he got up again and headed for the almirah. It had been wide open for the last couple of years, in the exact position as it was now, owing to his lethargy and near aversion to cleanliness. There were cobwebs and dust all around, and retrieving things felt like digging up stuff from debris. There was not much to take really; the few t-shirts, socks and handkerchiefs littered weren’t fit for public consumption anymore, and he let them remain where they were. There were a few assorted CDs too, perhaps the only thing worth taking away, and he pulled them up.

He felt rather exhausted. There was dust on his hands and his whole body was soaked in sweat. Why, he thought to himself. What’s all this for?

It was over. Whatever remained would be thrown away. He walked to the door and looked at the room one last time. He tried to sum everything up – the room and him, but his thoughts failed him, or his intelligence did. Irritated, he switched off the power, walked out and locked the room.

Ready to walk away, all of a sudden, he felt the urge to see the place once more, now for the last, last time. He opened the door again, switched on the lights and had another look. Unanticipated, a wild surge of emotion ran through him.

Why, why does he even have to leave this place? Why can’t he live here forever? Why do we ever move away? Why do we ever leave our homes?

He felt angry, repulsed – whether by himself or the room, it was hard for him to say. He walked out finally, locked the door and walked away, without looking back, with as much confidence as he could possibly fake.

Mirror

2009-05-23T08:35:00.002+05:30

He looks into the mirror and asks - 'Do you wish to become a monster?'

The mirror pauses for a moment and then says - 'No, I'd rather remain a human being.'

Ignorance, Kundera

2009-04-04T20:07:00.006+05:30

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals, but also because they don't hold the same importance for each other.

Words

2009-03-31T04:39:00.006+05:30

You will read the words on a cloudy August morning.

The smells of rain of the night gone by would slowly reach your nostrils. You would wake up, reluctantly, and the first thing you’d see would be drops falling down from the tin roof outside your window. The drizzle falling on the roof itself would make soft, pleasing sounds, and for some time, you will lie there, just listening. You will pull the blanket up to your neck, and contemplate going to sleep again. In a while, you will get up and look out of the window you had left half-open last night. The sky would be an all-white, and the air would be filled with a strange drowsy innocence.

The words, wrapped in paper, would lie on your desk, unattended, almost washed with the rain that had managed its way in through the window. You would pick them up, tear open the envelope. Some of the letters would have lost shape and form, smudged.

Yes, you will read those words on such a cloudy August morning.

And maybe then, if never else, they would make sense.

Dark Man IV

2009-03-18T02:23:00.006+05:30

The near-darkness to which the brown curtains subjected the room was making Amir almost feel drowsy. The heavy thick piece of cloth had something resembling flowers stitched on it. He ran his hand on the contours, absentmindedly, not knowing how really to spend time. It was a holiday, and an afternoon, and with Papa asleep and Maa busy with chores, there wasn’t much to keep himself busy at.

The eyes were slowly giving way now. He was almost half-asleep.

Just then, the door bell rang. Far from being irritated to be disturbed when just about to doze off, Amir felt rather excited. Activity was activity. And on an afternoon with nothing to do, even to open the door for the maid or the dhobi was an event, an occurrence that gave the passing time some shape, some meaning. So before his mother could even call out to him to answer the bell, he was almost there, ready to finally let some sunlight in.

Through the netted door, Amir saw a man, dark, spectacled, slightly bending forward with a beaming smile on his face. Even he, as little as he was, could see that the smile was fake, forced and rather shaky, that of a man eager to please. On his shoulder, he carried a thaila, and in his hand was what looked like a box wrapped in plastic. Before he could ask the man anything, he himself spoke.

‘Bete, mummy ghar pe hain?’

‘Haan hain….kya kaam hai?’

‘Unko jaa ke bulao…’

He had ignored Amir’s little query. Children have to get used to their little queries being ignored.

He gave the man a momentary stare and then rushed inside. Maa was in her bedroom, recording expenses in her diary, the one household task she seemed to enjoy most. Looking at Amir entering the room now, she gave her writing hand a pause.

‘Kya hua? Kaun hai?’, she asked.

Again, before Amir could speak, a question had been thrown at him.

‘Koi aadmi hai. Bola ‘mummy’ ko bulao’, replied Amir, then eager to provide some extra useful information, ‘Lagta hai kuchh bechne aaya hai…’

‘Bolo woh ghar mein nahi hain.’

‘Lekin hum bol chuke hain ki who ghar mein hain’, Amir lied.

His mother looked up from her diary now. For a moment or two, she looked at Amir, wondering whether she should get angry at him, and then decided against it. Instead, she clicked her tongue, threw the diary on the bed and stormed out of the room.

‘Kya hai?’, she shouted at the man outside. She stood in the dining room, in the darkness. The man couldn’t sight her, and as he hadn’t really seen her coming, he took a little while to reply.

‘Didi zaraa idhar aake dekh to lijiye…AquaGuard Zero-B sab bhool jayiyega!’, he finally did, holding something he had just taken out of the box.

‘Nahi chahiye!’ is all she said in reply and then stormed back into the bedroom. The man kept pleading behind her, begging her to give the machine just one single look, offering her the world’s cleanest water, and even free installation of the contraption in the household kitchen.

Amir looked at the man closely from behind the netted door. He appeared exhausted, if anything. Mentally and physically. Sweat poured down from his forehead, pure transparent drops of crystal, like the clean water he promised. The flat was on the 3rd floor. God knows how many such he had visited this afternoon, Amir thought, and how many steps he had had to climb, only to be snubbed at the doorway.

After this latest unsuccessful attempt, the man prepared to pack up and leave. When just about to turn back, he looked at the door and saw the kid gazing at him.

‘Bete…ek glass paani pila doge?’, he asked in a low tone.

‘Haan, ek minute rukiye…’, replied Amir, without even a moment’s hesitation and ran to the kitchen. He didn’t need his mother’s permission. You never deny a thirsty man water if he has asked for some, he remembered having been told by his elders many a time. Surely, Maa doesn’t need to be bothered for this.

He filled a glass with water and walked back to the door. Silently, trying not to attract his mother's attention, he kept the glass down, unlatched the netted door (something that required both his hands), lifted the glass and placed it into the man’s extended hand. He did it all almost like a ritual and it gave him an immense sense of satisfaction. Why, his little mind wasn’t quite disposed to fathom yet.

The man drank the entire glass and gave it back to Amir, saying ‘Thank You’. He himself replied with a neat ‘Welcome’ and closed the door again. He then watched the man pick up his thaila and walk down the stairs, to ring the bell for another potential customer, to sell the world’s cleanest water.

Talking Contradictions

2009-02-27T14:33:00.007+05:30

On a summer afternoon in the capital, the Young Urban Indian happened to be in the company of the Young Jhola Krantikari, at perhaps the only place this could actually happen.

On a DTC bus. Their destinations are same, and for a change, they have taken the same path too.

Excerpts from an unlikely conversation:

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YJK: Do you think we’re shining?

YUI: We?

YJK: Indians. India.

YUI: Well…that’s a good question. On the face of it, we are, aren’t we? In the space of the last sixty years or so, we’ve improved on a lot of our shortcomings. The economy is doing a lot better and is continually on the way up, we have the resources to make ourselves stronger internally and the defence to give ourselves protection from external elements. India, which was yesterday a minnow Asian country, is today all set to become a global powerhouse. In that sense, I would say that we aren’t really shining yet, but are on the right path to do exactly that very soon.

YJK: Stronger internally? The whole country is in deep strife, my friend! There are so many of it parts, be it Kashmir, the North-East or so many others, which want secession, dissatisfied with the power at the centre as well as the state. Ah, and not to mention the menace being caused by the Tamils in the south and the Naxalites in Andhra. You call it strength?

Our defence which you refer to so handsomely also has been proved to be inadequate on many an occasion now. In the last few years, almost every big city here has been the target of Islamic extremism. Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bombay. You call this security?

YUI: You are right in what you say, no doubt. There is a lot going wrong, yes, but there’s a lot going right too. Is any country in the world today free from the threat of terrorism? America isn’t, Britain isn’t. Does that mean that they don’t have it in them to protect themselves properly? Somehow, people like you never seem to look at the positive side of things. Tell me, has India ever been as conspicuous on the global stage as it is now? Leave that aside. Let’s talk about our oldest of all problems. Education. Hasn’t something like the literacy rate risen to almost 3/4ths and is on the way up?

YJK: You talk of education and give me literacy as an example.

YUI: Well, ok, even if you talk about education in the strictest sense, we boast of some of the best schools and universities around the world today. The IIT’s and IIM’s are only examples. As Indians today, we have the power to take our own decisions, to study with, succeed and beat the best in the world. Is that not true?

YJK: Ha! I find your optimism infinitely amusing, I must say. Are you aware that 70% of India still lives in the villages and a greater part of that chunk feels lucky if they complete high school, leave alone ‘competing with the best in the world’.

And yes, by the way, the education you people are receiving, the one which helps you beat the best in the world, isn’t that beautiful a thing, either.

YUI: What do you mean?

YJK: What sort of education is it? What sort of lifestyle is it encouraging? What are the IIT’s and IIM’s, which you speak so highly of, producing? At the end of the day, they all are money-making machines - they take you in as raw material, brainwash and modify you according to their paradigms, stamp their brand name on your foreheads and then let you out in the open to mint money. The primary aim of education, in my view, is to instill in the students the sense of social responsibility. Where is it to be found in today’s urban youth?

YUI: That is just not true. Many of the people I know have made use of whatever skills they have acquired to serve the society in the way best suited to them.

YJK: Yes, they are a few. But how many? Or rather, what percentage does possess this sense of social belonging?

YUI: Well, you can’t have everyone thinking along those lines. Is it necessary for everyone to see himself and society that way?

YJK: I’m not sure whether it’s practically possible but that should at least be the constant effort of education. At present, the people who engage themselves in such activities do so from the weight of their own conscience. At present, the education system does nothing to instill that feeling from the very beginning in every citizen.

YUI: Instill? That’s a strong word, you know. Wouldn’t that be akin to brainwashing – children being told how to think towards the world from day one?

YJK: Maybe, but it would surely help.

YUI: Well, I’m sorry but here, I disagree. The basic aim of education, according to me, is to provide the individual with choice, to give him the opportunity to decide for his own self. Tell me, aren’t engineers, doctors, lawyers, designers servants of society in their own right?

YJK: They are. Very much so. I don’t mean to say everyone has to become a selfless social activist, but that everyone has to give something back, eventually.

YUI: Well, these people do, don’t they?

YJK: Yes, they do. But look at the IIT’s and IIM’s that you just mentioned - the most popularly sought-after institutions in our country, the ones which produce the so-called ‘cream’. Would I be wrong to say that a majority of those who come out of these institutions live a life of social oblivion, perpetually filling their already overflowing pockets, living their executive life with a wife and two children, totally unconcerned with how they could be more helpful? What do they produce at the end of the day – laptops and cell phones? Who uses them? The elite. So you have it here. The elite making products for the elite, in turn making themselves even more elitist! No accountability to the people who are below them, none at all.

YUI: That is what I’m saying. You’re too judgemental. Why can’t you just let them be? That’s the life they choose. What’s wrong what it? And besides, many of the ‘cell phone and laptop’ producing men are students of science, of technology. They are the agents of industrialization. Wasn’t that the ultimate dream of our first prime minister? It is their job to work in its cause. How are they to blame?

And tell me, isn’t science and technology hugely responsible for what we are today? Look at it broadly, look at what it has given us. Without these men you demean, would it be possible to realize all the innumerous possibilities of energy we have today, would it be possible to stay connected with this ever-so-small globalised world that we inhabit, would it be possible to reach out to the remote parts of this huge country that we live in?

Science and Technology are two of the most uncomplicated things on this planet, in the sense that they are unencumbered by opinion, irrationality or politics. They don’t have any scope for such entities. They are truly free and so are their practitioners. If mankind is to progress, they alone provide the right path.

YJK: Well put. But would you be saying that Science and Technology for its own sake is good?

YUI: It has to be, yes. It cannot be fettered. As a corollary to the point I just made, to inhibit their growth is to inhibit the progress of mankind itself.

YJK: It is precisely this kind of capitalist thinking that’s eating away the whole of civilization today, not just our country. Anything working for its own sake is doomed. If human progress is indeed our aim, everything has to work so as to help us attain this goal better.

YUI: But it is! Can’t you see?

YJK: I can. But who are the ones progressing? It is the elitist again. These cell phones and laptops you make in the name of Science and Technology – whom does it benefit? Not the 27-odd percent that still lives below the poverty line. Instead of using your acquired skills to help them get up, you help the ones who are already so better-off. You further increase the ever-growing disparity, in a country where the top ten percent earns ten times more than the bottom ten percent. You breed discontent. You inspire rebellions. And then when they fight back, like the Naxalites did, you call them terrorists.

YUI: Heh. What else would you call men who engage in the indiscriminate killing of women and children? God’s angels?

YJK: Well yes, their methods have been quite disturbing in the past few years and it’s not that I necessarily have sympathy for them, but what I’m saying is that we need to understand the reasons which inspire such outrage. The more you ignore the common man, the more he’ll make his presence felt, and sometimes in the most violent ways.

YUI: So what do you suggest? We stop all technological research?

YJK: No. Don’t stop it. But make it work in a direction where it takes everyone along with it. Make technology help the illiterate get education, provide the poor with the latest health-care facilities, give the economically backward ways in which they can pull themselves out of the rut.

YUI: Sure, why not? But then, all other forms of technological research are useless? Is it?

YJK: Yes, without a doubt. You tell me what all wonders industrialization has provided us with. For a moment, think about the damage it has done too. The ‘progress’ it has brought about – has it made us any happier than we were earlier? Is your Happiness Quotient better than your grandfather’s? Not that such things are measurable, but they are surely quantifiable.

YUI: You aren’t implying that just because humans would remain in the same state of mind irrespective of the luxuries that are at their disposal, we should stop wanting to achieve higher standards of living, are you?

YJK: Why not? If it ain’t broke, why change it? It is change for the sake of change that I protest.

YUI: That’s just stupid. The way you propose wouldn’t see any human development at all. It is the curious in us that drives us to innovate and invent. If we humans just sit around and don’t attempt to see ourselves getting better, it would kill us for sure. Practically, it’s impossible. To stifle the curious in us is to negate the sheer essence of the human spirit, and this, if anything, would inspire unprecedented rebellions. Of an even graver nature than the ones we today have.

YJK: Maybe. But if you think about it, this is the only way we can survive.

YUI: We shall see.

YJK: So we shall.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They had arrived. And as they now bid goodbye to each other, they knew that they would meet again for many such conversations.

Conversations. Clashes. Collaborations?

Talking Shadows

2009-02-04T13:16:00.002+05:30

She looked at his silhouette in the moonlight, the black curve of his Adam’s apple against the dark blue of the sky behind, the way those two almost blended when he moved a little. They both were drunk; on the terrace where they stood, came the sounds of the living room below. The others were not quite done yet, and sudden shrieks and shouts could be heard from time to time, breaking the silence of the cold December air.

‘Do you know how difficult it is? Do you know how hard it is for me to just let it all slip, to forget it all and move on…’, he seemed to be saying, the frustration seeping into his voice.

‘Hmmm’, she replied, and there were another few moments of quiet. She wanted him to stop speaking, she wanted them to sit together like this and look at the sky together, everything drunk and hazy. But she didn’t have the courage or the heart to tell him so.

So she listened.

‘I called her a million times last month….and on the phone, everything is alright….when we meet with everyone around, everything is alright….but a moment alone, and nothing is alright anymore….I’m sick of it!’

The vodka was making him speak more, and louder.

‘I…I…’

The sound of breaking glass broke his dialogue in the middle. For a moment, everything was silent again; and then, the shrieks and laughs came with even greater intensity. He started to move towards the staircase.

‘Where are you going?’, she asked.

‘Down. God knows what’s happening there!’, he said, glancing down.

‘It’s OK. They probably dropped the bottle or something’, she replied, and then, pointing towards where he had been sitting, said, ‘Sit.’

That’s all the invitation he needed. He didn’t want to go really. Sit and don’t talk, was what she had wanted to say. But the words didn’t come out.

‘Am I talking too loud?’, he asked nervously, in an unnecessarily low volume.

‘Na. Its OK. But don’t talk so much.’

She had finally mustered the strength to say it, half scared that it might hurt him, or worse – put him off.

‘No….no…let me talk…please’

And then he started again. In the limited light the moon provided, she couldn’t see his face, and so, she imagined. She imagined his cheek bones getting stretched in anguish, the nerves on his forehead coming out, the anger making his nose twitch. He looked majestic, like an actor on stage delivering his ultimate performance.

And it was only his silhouette talking.

‘Are we machines or something? No, tell me. That you press a button and wow, it’s all gone? What am I supposed to do? The effort has to come from both sides. This way, nothing will happen. And its killing me….totally…do you….do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes…yes I do!’

This time, the anguish was in her voice, not his. It made him look up.

And in the near darkness of this cold winter night, their eyes met for the first time.

The Wrong in Being Correct

2009-01-27T19:49:00.005+05:30

Let me take the liberty of making a distinction here, a dividing line between the ways in which we react to situations, between the decisions we might make. The reader will forgive me in my choice of words for the same, if they don’t appear to be completely dichotomous to him/her.

There are two ways of responding to a given situation. One is the right thing to do – the easy, obvious way out, the way which appeals straight to common sense, and one which doesn’t take too much mental effort. The other is the correct thing to do – this is the more difficult path; one which doesn’t come naturally but with some deliberation, one which requires an amount of sustained courage and sacrifice, and one which might also amount to self-deception in certain cases, albeit superior in moral terms.

If one goes by the above definition, then India and Indians have always (well, almost) opted for the correct option, rather than the one which is right.

Had the revolutionary movements caught on and had Gandhi not returned from South Africa as he did, we would have ousted the British by force anyway. Post the partition of Bengal and then Jallianwala, the British had themselves put a time limit on their stay in this country. India wanted to be free and Gandhi or no Gandhi, it would be so. Whether sooner or later is a matter of speculation. But the revolutionaries never found enough ground to make a serious impact here. The common Indian did the correct thing – of resorting to peaceful methods of protest, of hartals and fasts instead of murders or assassinations or guerilla fights.

During the partition of the country and the birth of Pakistan, we had an option (maybe unlikely, but an option nonetheless) of declaring ourselves a Hindu state, to say that Pakistan has been created specifically for the Muslims, let India be only for the Hindus. But we didn’t. We did the correct thing – of declaring ourselves secular; India, which since time immemorial has kept as its own and assimilated numerous cultures and identities shall not divide itself on the basis of religion.

Post independence, when the Cold War was gaining momentum, we had the choice of pledging our loyalty to the Soviets - our close friends and a country for which our then Prime Minister had a soft corner. But we didn’t. When everyone in the world was taking sides, wondering what the less harmful option was, we joined hands with certain other countries to form the Non-Aligned Movement. Again, we did the correct, honourable thing.

The correct thing. That has almost always been India’s choice. Needless to say, this choice has been fraught with much struggle and sacrifice, but it has also given us something to be proud of, of making us believe that we are indeed special. We are proud of the fact that our independence struggle was a lot less bloody than others around the world. We are proud of the fact that we are secular, that it doesn’t matter here whether one is Hindu, Muslim or Christian. We are proud that we have a mixed economy, that we are not slaves to any other nation, that we are truly sovereign.

None of the above decisions or any other has hurt us more than our choice to proclaim ourselves secular. These years have seen the Hindu majority clash with every single sizeable minority; the extent of the Hindu-Muslim clash need not be elaborated upon, then we had the Sikhs massacred in ’84, and now, the historically harmonious relationship between the Hindus and the Christians has received a serious battering post the anti-Christian violence in Karnataka and Orissa. Time and again after independence, India has had to pay the price for doing the correct thing. It has had to bear the consequences of upholding its ethical values. And to its credit, never has it deterred from its belief in the principle of secularism and how essential it is for a nation such as this.

But more than sixty years on, there seems to be no end or even the possibility of an end to the issue of religion. The past few years have seen unprecedented attacks on civilians by religious fundamentalists. And it’s not only the Muslims; Malegaon has come as a blow to several self-righteous Hindus as well. But more disturbing than the actual violence has been the people’s reaction to it. Suddenly, it seems that our unshakeable faith in people of all faiths has been replaced by a visible tentativeness. Hindu socialites appear on television acting all pally with their Muslim friends, as if that alone is the proof of their belief in the concept of secularism. Simultaneously, Muslim leaders and elite are being told that it is their responsibility to keep the sentiments of their community in check and stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan appear on news channels speaking on Islam and terrorism, reiterating again and again how one doesn’t stand for the other, as if they were expected or required to do so.

Are we really secular as we think we are? If yes, then what indeed does one mean by being secular? Does just having friends of different religions qualify? Or sharing your bus seat with a Muslim? Or having your food with him? Yes, perhaps, if these above actions are done with zero mental effort or thought, then we are genuinely secular. But do we? Do we not feel uncomfortable when passing through a Muslim-dominated area in the city? Do we still not discourage our Hindu son or daughter from having a Muslim spouse? In other words, do we not treat the Muslims as our paying guests – ‘We’ve given you space here, consider this as your own home, but do maintain a certain distance from us, please.’?

At times, the pretence or self-deception being indulged in by the average Indian comes shamelessly to the fore. Take, for example, the film Chak De! India. A story of a Muslim hockey player who is branded a gaddar or traitor just because he misses a crucial penalty kick. He then goes on to coach the women’s Hockey team to World Cup glory. Thus, he proves his loyalty in the most spectacular way and all is forgiven. What people fail to notice and what’s rather unsettling is the fact that he does have to prove that he is loyal to his motherland, that he is not a Pakistani in his heart. Would the same treatment be given to a Hindu if he happened to make the same mistake? I doubt it. But the predominantly Hindu audience sees nothing wrong. I wonder how the intelligent Muslim would have taken this implicit insult.

If this is indeed the case, if we are not genuinely secular, then we can be sure that there will be no end to communal hatred and violence here. What has been going on for more than sixty years now might just go on till eternity. It is all very well doing the correct thing, but it is also very important to be authentic about it, to believe it inside. Otherwise, all of one’s actions add up to a detailed, elaborate charade, and when practiced on such a large scale, it can prove to be the country’s nemesis. For once, we need to rethink and ascertain the responsibilities that come along with being correct rather than right.

Angrez Chale Gaye II

2008-12-01T11:56:00.004+05:30

A thought: If we Indians happened to be white in skin colour, like the firangs, and if someone saw one of us walking down the street, would he be able to guess our nationality? Would he be able to tell whether we are Indian, or American or European? Probably not. And why? Because today, where everything from clothing to behaviour is being homogenized, where everyone talks the same language, wears the same clothes, similar to everyone else even in mannerisms, it’s only our skin colour that establishes our uniqueness.

Because we are the urban Indians. And like the Americans living on the other side of the globe, we talk in English and think in English, wear t-shirts and jeans when casual and suits and ties when formal, have coffee rather than tea. All whitewashed. If one thinks about it, food preferences are perhaps the only thing that have still not changed; although we love burgers and pizzas and pastas, most would maintain that rice and dal is what is best for everyday consumption.

It is fascinating to see the gradual shift in Indian lifestyle in the years after independence. The British Raj insured that Indians would never again be comfortable with their own identity; the five-cubit-tall sahib would forever hold a psychological edge over the third-world, backward Indian. Even before the British left us, this inferiority complex had settled itself in the Indian psyche. To emulate the foreigner in everything he did, to talk, dress and behave like him, indeed to be him, has always been the Indian’s ulterior, if not declared, goal. Of course, this phenomenon, this aspiration to become someone else is not just restricted to our country, but to many others which have been subjected to colonial rule.

But curiously, this desire to ‘be’ English has faded away gradually. To be replaced by an affinity for everything American. And the sort of maniacal attachment the young urban Indians have for it is rather interesting, when not annoying. One look around and it’s easy to recognize how much American preferences have permeated into our own lives. The introduction and subsequent success of fast food joints, the coming up of brands like Levi Strauss and Dockers, the market for American films (or rather, ‘movies’, which are always, by some unwritten law, better than the material we produce here), the stupendous speed at which coffee joints have opened (and tea centres have disappeared), the inception of words like ‘stuff’ and ‘bucks’ in everyday conversation, our carelessness in spelling ‘colour’ as ‘color’ and ‘centre’ as ‘center’ etc etc. The Indian obsession for education in the ‘States’ tops it all. American college t-shirts are so popular and common now that the last time I visited Sarojni Nagar in Delhi, I even saw a roadside shop selling fake cheap red sweatshirts with ‘UCLA’ printed on them.

Of course, for most parts, this inclination towards American attitudes is but natural. What Big Mac does, the Toms, Dicks and Harrys do it too. The Americans are, after all (and I borrow a phrase rather famous in diplomatic circles), ‘the shaper of global sentiment’. But even if you leave this very human tendency aside, they deserve most of what they have managed to do. American universities are some of the best in the world, Levi Strauss is the last word in casual wear, McDonalds does deserve its status for the sheer quality of the food it has to offer. And till the day Indian brands come up with the same standards, the above are bound to stay on top.

But sometimes, it all becomes too much to take. They can’t be the world’s best in every single darn thing they do, can they? Sometimes, if not quite often, this phenomenon becomes rather nauseating to assimilate. Sometimes, if not quite often, one is bound to feel that that our little tendency here is only an inch short of blind aping. Sometimes, if not quite often, one is sure to think that if this continues to be the case, the Indian in us will slowly fade away, making us what an American Macaulay would love to see us as – Indians only by birth, but Americans in behaviour, lifestyle and education.

Of course, one might ask – Is that a problem we need to address? For me, it is. And yes, there are some solutions too that come to my mind. But leave all that for some other post, at some later date.

The Booker, eh?

2008-11-20T12:54:00.009+05:30

Chetan Bhagat must wonder why any of his novels – Five Point Someone and the other two, whatever their name was - haven’t won the Booker yet. For if a heavily clichéd take on modern Indian civilization by a first-time amateurish writer can bag the prize, surely Mr. Bhagat deserves it too. His efforts if not purely authentic, were at least not cynical or judgemental in any way. At least, they made for good time pass.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger leaves you with no such hope. The plot itself is one that’s bound to make you roll your eyes. The protagonist, a sweet-seller-turned-driver, son of a rickshaw puller, recounts the story of his rise to entrepreneurial success to none less than the Chinese Premier, letting him see and making him familiar with the face of the ‘true’ India in the process. Sounds quite exciting, doesn’t it? Yes, that’s the bait.

What follows is one cliché piled upon another. Almost every page in this book contains some witty remark by the author; you haven’t yet got over the last fantastic conclusive comment when you encounter the next. Very early in the novel, the narrator, Balram (the protagonist himself) divides India into two parts – Light and Darkness. According to him (and this theory takes some gulping down), all the places in the country which lie on the banks of the Ganges (called the ‘black river’ by him) fall in the Darkness. All other places fall in the Light. The Darkness, as its name unmistakably suggests, is an area of utter desolation, where rich and oppressive landlords rule over the poor working class, where no one is ever pleased with his life and hopes to, someday, move to the big cities of Delhi or Bombay i.e. the Light. This ambitious demarcation is not just mentioned cursorily; it is repeated throughout the novel; for example, a fellow member of the working class from Bihar is described as ‘belonging to the Darkness’.

Firstly, what the author fails to realize is that the area he has called the ‘Darkness’, which includes states like U.P., Bihar and Bengal have produced some of the greatest minds of the country. For decades before and after independence, this area has often been the centre of Indian thought. To call it by this preposterous title is nothing but a travesty. Secondly, they might not be in the fittest condition at present, but not all is dark there really. Yes, many people in most of these parts do aspire to move to the bigger cities in search for a better life, but that is only because of the pressures of globalization, the advantages of which haven’t yet reached them in its entirety. Nevertheless, like everywhere else, most of the people do manage to live a content life, and not everyone is as close to destitution and total dissatisfaction as Adiga paints them to be. In his world, every man in these parts is a bitter man, frustrated yet subdued by an overbearing social system, where nothing happens except daughter-in-laws being killed for dowry or husbands being milked for money, treated worse than animals by their wives.

Everything reminds you of some early 90’s melodramatic extravaganza. The villains are the politicians and the landlords, conspiring to keep the poor beneath their feet, adept at murder, rape, bribe-taking and all other possible crimes. When the rich appear, they do like over-savvy maniacs, who are obsessed with wearing designer clothes, going to the malls every second day, who love sending SMSs to their friends in the U.S.A. Generalization upon generalization, so much that it makes you wonder whether all the talk about India’s multi-faceted personality, its diversity, its dynamics is but a myth, whether in reality everything here can be painted in the twin shades of black and white.

But unlike the films, the poor are not really good people either – deeply wounded by being treated like animals, they themselves have become animal-like – excessively bitter, revengeful and ready to play along. They curse the rich behind their backs, leave no chance of pinching money from them, even conspire to murder them. In Adiga’s world, everyone is a negative character, with no scope for human dignity, pity or kindness. You have it in writing here. India is a living hell and all its inhabitants are monsters.

Every great novel, however morose or melancholic, treats its characters and the world around with compassion. Be it Rushdie’s Bombay, Naipaul’s Trinidad or Bellow’s Chicago, even the worst of men in these great cities are portrayed as human beings capable of thought and feeling. And even when the world around is in tatters, there is always the glimmer of hope, the anticipation that things can be set right, that life, however ghastly it may seem at the moment, is better than death. This is where Adiga fails completely. In this novel, which is in the form of a letter, the protagonist finds nothing remotely good about the country to say to the Chinese Premier, nothing that could point towards a possible solution, of a way out of the mess he has taken so much pain to elaborate on.

Adiga gets the Booker. And perhaps it is not that surprising that he did. For to the ignorant foreigner eager to know about India, this book can be very easily assimilated. It doesn’t even attempt to get into the complexities of the new India, the whys and hows, and the foreigner, who has never seen the ‘Light’ or the ‘Darkness’ with his own eyes will take the author’s word for it. A friend told me that Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh is believed to be selling more copies in India than this more recent award-winning novel. And that too is not surprising. For the Indians of the ‘true’ India know better.

Perfect Imperfections

2008-10-31T13:41:00.009+05:30

Bombay is a mad city, and that is probably why, despite its thousand troubles and limitations, it is very easy to fall in love with it, to lose yourself in the madness, become one with it. And perhaps, that is also why someone who’s spent even a little amount of time there finds it so hard to leave it, feeling incapacitated everywhere else. The city, through its imperfections, sucks you in. And if it doesn’t drive you insane, it’ll fascinate you like very few other places ever will.

For example:

Refer to the last post, third segment. There was a snake sighted in the locality I was staying in, and rather than actively taking measures to look for it and possibly save lives, the apartment management just put up a hardly noticeable notice on the walls, saying that if anyone did spot it, he or she was to contact the watchman, who would then see where the snake moves. I doubt if any more sightings of the snake or even casualties would have made a difference to the urgency shown.

Meanwhile, remarkably co-incident with the snake sighting, the front door of my cousin’s flat broke, leaving a small gaping hole at the bottom. When I asked him whether we should get it repaired lest the snake sneaked in at night, he just shrugged and changed the subject.

Given that the city was devastated by blasts very recently, on my way to Colaba by the local train, I expected to be frisked all over. Nothing of the sort happened.

I could have been carrying a live bomb. It was Diwali night. On this day of celebration, the city was one man’s will away from being blown to pieces. Yet again.

During a three-day stay, I came across two instances of people lighting crackers on the road, that too in full, evening, Diwali traffic. In the latter case, the man was setting fire to chakris and throwing them on the main road, while auto-rickshaws, cars and buses turned and swayed and evaded them without complaint, as if it was all a harmless video game where nothing really valuable was at stake.

The man kept laughing all along, his joy multiplied manifold when the cracker flinging sparks in all directions made another man on a bicycle almost lose his balance. He kept laughing even when a rocket launched by him boomeranged onto his own chest, before he frantically pushed it away to avoid harm.

Whichever way one would like to put it, this kind of indifference to adversity, or the confidence of the people in their ability to handle it, is baffling. But that’s how most things in Bombay are. In a city where the cost of living is very high, the cost of life, on the other hand, is very low.

Messages From Bombay

2008-10-30T12:04:00.019+05:30

On the toilet walls of the Karnavati Express from Ahmedabad to Bombay -

Gujarati women are very beautiful lying on my table with their legs open and vagina wide open. I put my finger in their vagina and fuck very hard in their vagina and I am pretending to checking up them.

-Dr. Raj Thackeray

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On the walls of Toto’s, a pub in Bandra, after the recent ban on smoking in restaurants, bars and like with less than thirty tables -

Budweiser
Toto’s
No Smoking

-By Order

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On the walls of the apartment I was staying in, which, given the recent violence on ‘bhaiyyas’ in the city and the near-crumbling state of the building itself, wasn’t, as it was, the safest place to be -

Incase any members sight the snake in the society, please call up the following numbers –

(Name1) (Phone Number)
(Name2) (Phone Number)

Please remember do not panic and immediately inform the watchman who will then keep a check to see where the snake moves.

Hon. Chairman
(Signature)

Mark the phrases 'the snake' and 'who will then keep a check'.

Midnight Halt

2008-10-23T03:08:00.016+05:30

It was barely three hours since the bus had stopped last, and now, the driver seemed to want another break, parking it alongside a roadside dhaba. As the breaks finally squeaked and the thing came to a decisive halt, everyone in the bus let out a collective, exasperated sigh.

Amir wasn’t too pleased either. He wanted to get home as early as possible, the short span of the holidays making every hour of journey seem that wee bit longer. The bus was scheduled to reach Delhi by seven in the morning, but going by the way it was taking breaks, that seemed only to be in theory. Suddenly irritated and feeling half-tough, he got up from his seat, wanting to know what the trouble was now.

He got out of the bus and called out for the driver. There was a group of huge, moustached men standing just a little distance away, and one of them replied – ‘Main hoon. Ke baat se?’. That was enough to dispel all the toughness inside him, and feeling calm again, Amir went back to his seat.

A couple of minutes later, the same man entered and declared that as there was some problem with the engine, they were going to have a half-hour halt, and everyone was free to make himself comfortable at the dhaba. Not knowing what to do, Amir decided that perhaps having a cup of tea wasn’t that bad an idea. There was still a long way to go, a little outing away from the almost claustrophobic bus was probably better for the senses, and for his bums as well.

The dhaba looked nothing special. It was like any other dhaba – one floor, walls whitewashed in a horrible shade of blue, a few wooden and plastic chairs around, and a couple of khats kept outside. One solitary tube light glowed on the outside, and this was where the customers sat. The lights on the inside were switched off, probably because there were not many people eating, the hour being close to twelve in the night. Amir looked for the place’s name, and there it was, just above the light – E-quality Dhaba. They all might be the same when it comes to how they look, but they sure are creative when it comes to naming themselves, thought Amir, and seated himself on an idle wooden chair.

It wasn’t long before the aroma of hot, freshly-prepared aloo paranthas reached him, and though he wasn’t hungry at all, Amir ordered a plate along with the mandatory cup of tea. The boy taking the order listened to him keenly, and after asking him twice whether he was sure he needed nothing else, disappeared inside into the darkness.

It was a full-moon night. Back in college, with the hectic schedule, and the noise around everywhere one went, it was almost impossible to have such an opportunity, to sit alone in the dark, amidst strangers and admire the moon in its entirety. This was a novelty, and it was hard to decide how overly nice it felt.

He got up to look at the open fields behind the dhaba. Nothing much was visible, but courtesy the moon, Amir could at least see that the vast emptiness extended far into the darkness. He saw the outlines of the boundaries that differentiated one tiller’s land from another, and also a small, dilapidated, light-coloured house a few hundred metres away. These small structures seemed to be very common in the countryside, and he had seen many such wherever he had gone - Punjab, U.P., Bihar, Rajasthan. Even as a child, he had always tried to guess what purpose they served, or whether they served any specific purpose at all. And as before, he stopped midway in thought now, wondering whether he was getting fascinated with something totally commonplace, whether his fascination with those little houses was only the city-dweller’s fascination with the village.

The boy, meanwhile, had got the paranthas and chai. He called out, shouting ‘Bhaiya!’, and Amir signalled him to get the things near where he stood, a little more away from the crowd. There was less light there, but more peace. Having seated himself finally, he started with the paranthas. Quite unexpectedly, they were perfect, warm, polished with butter and almost bursting with potato. The tea, on the other hand, was a little less sweet by his taste. He felt like calling out to the boy for some sugar, but then decided against it.

Everything about the place felt good – the food, the ambience, the faint sound of petty talk coming from the table in the distance. Everything was peaceful, and that’s why he had wanted to go home – to get some quiet time, away from the daily set routine of college, away from assignments and deadlines. Maybe, thought Amir, he didn’t even want to go home, just some place away, and this little spot here, somewhere in the wilderness, seemed just like what he had wanted. It was perfect here, to be sitting under the open sky, in this place he hadn’t visited before and would never visit again, having food and tea, while endless, open fields provided the backdrop, illuminated, but only slightly, by the moon above.

Fifteen minutes later, someone declared that the bus was ready to leave. Amir walked over to it, reluctantly, hating the prospect of the night’s journey even more now.

Loss

2008-10-13T21:36:00.007+05:30

Amir woke up today morning to find his Self missing. The realization came to him quite suddenly; he first felt the void in his head, then he sensed it going down his neck, his spine and then travel to every single part of his body. It wasn’t something ordinary that happened every other day. That much was pretty clear. For the void, rather than giving him a feeling of space, made him feel strangely heavy. A vacant heaviness or a heavy vacant-ness - both meaning the same.

He got up from the bed and the void travelled with him. He didn’t know what to do with it, or even what to do at all. On an ordinary day, he would have brushed his teeth, prepared for himself a cup of tea, and then sat down on the balcony with the morning newspaper. But all this seemed senseless at that moment. Inconsequential. Not that these tasks had overwhelming significance in his everyday life anyway, but the futility of it all struck him to the core today.

Therefore, leaving everything, he went and lay down on his bed.

Where could it have gone? Suddenly, without warning. He had felt quite alright last night, nothing had happened to make him uncomfortable. They had had a drink session at Ari’s place, and after hours of dancing and singing, he had returned home in the late hours of the morning, exhausted and happy. Where had the feeling gone? It was replaced by this weird dullness, this inexplicable sensation of loss.

Looking at the parking lot overlooking his house, where a bunch of car-washers were getting on with their job, Amir tried to think of a possible solution. What could he do to make the situation better? Where to look for the darn thing?

Where would he find his own Self?

It wasn’t just a thing, not his wallet or the lighter. It was him. He couldn’t just jump out and try to look for it beneath the bed sheets, or check whether it had, by mistake, slipped underneath the bed, or remove the junk off his study table, thinking that maybe that was what hid it. He could not even tell anyone about it, simply because no one would believe him. They would laugh it off, blaming it on the hangover. This was something so huge, something so personal, that he couldn’t even hope to regain it by talking it over with a friend, or by holding a loved one’s hand, or by looking into someone else’s eyes. This was, and he knew it already, much beyond that.

With much mental effort, he walked over to the bathroom and looked into the mirror. Suddenly, his own face seemed alien to him, the eyebrows, the curve of his cheeks, the mouth, the chin – everything seemed new and cold, as if it belonged to a different person. Who was he, Amir found himself asking. Was he living inside another person? Did this assortment of organs even belong to him? He looked at his hands, his legs, and he felt he wasn’t even real, just playing a character in some video game, using someone else’s body, who controlled everything but had no claim to ownership.

The feeling of emptiness, the loss of Self, was overbearing. He couldn’t stand it and found his legs shaking rather alarmingly. Somehow, he pulled his body, which felt now like a rented piece, to the bedroom. He lay down on the bed again, staring at the ceiling, contemplating sleep. Maybe that would freshen up his memory a bit. In any case, Amir simply didn’t know what else to do with himself.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What he also didn’t know was that the realization that had dawned upon him today was the end result of something that had been going on for many years now. He had lost his Self long ago, misplaced it somewhere and hadn’t even given a damn at the time. Time had passed, and though sometimes he did feel lonely and vacant, such moments were pretty short-lived, overcome by spells of prolonged activity, or lost in the laughter and nonsense of everyday conversation. All this while, he had never felt a desperate need to question himself, to look within and see how he had changed and was changing. The Self had left him a long time ago, just that its realization, which had remained hidden from him until this day, had finally made its presence felt.

And Amir didn’t know what to do.

Pack-up Man

2008-09-23T12:37:00.003+05:30

My name, you ask? What do you want my name for? That hardly holds any significance. If anything, let me tell you what I am and how I look. I’m middle-aged, around forty years of age (no one in my family remembers the exact date of my birth), with a slight paunch, drooping shoulders, and a head that’s getting bald with every passing day. I am dark, around five feet nine inches tall, and keep a beard which has gone completely white with time, at odds with the hair on my head, which is still more black than white. People, intrigued by this peculiar contrast, ask me whether I dye my hair, to which I can think of no reply.

My family has been a family of farmers; since generations, we have known no other means of livelihood. But now the times have changed. With big landlords eager to get hold of as much land as possible, ready to pay amounts which are too hard to refuse for people like us who never know what tomorrow would bring, its very rare for a man with meagre land holdings to get enough to pass his days. He has to look for a new job, that too in a place where they are hard to come by.

I got a job in one of the many multiplexes that have come up in this little town over the last few years. My task, as they told me, was to maintain cleanliness in and around the place. I am not the only one assigned this responsibility, there are a few others who work with me, and together we clean the floors of the porch, the lobby, and also the toilets, once in the morning at nine, and then in the evening at four. The building is huge, with two floors, there’s a lot of ground to be covered, and it turns out to be a tiring task, especially because we rid the floors of dust with a broom first, and then polish it by wiping it with phenyl and water. To make it shine. As the manager, our boss, likes it. We also, along with the above, hold the responsibility of cleaning the halls between shows, empty coke glasses, food packages and popcorn strewed here and there. But that doesn’t take much time.

As the oldest among the workers, and the one who looks most reliable, I have also been given an additional piece of work. On weekends, in the evening, just outside the entrance to the halls, they have a music show. A bunch of youngsters, all of whom look like they have just got out of their beds, come together and sing noisy, mostly English songs. My job is to assemble the equipment before the shows starts and dissemble it after it ends – the stand on which they keep the keyboard, the drum set, the huge black speakers, the microphones.

It isn’t something that takes too much effort, just fifteen minutes before and after. But what’s exhausting about the task is the wait, to stand there and wait for the show to get over, to hope that the song they are playing will be their last for the evening. When the rains are around, I can’t even leave the place for a moment, lest it starts pouring suddenly and the equipment needs to be replaced to safety. The manager thinks me responsible, and I’m too eager not to lose his confidence. So, I sit in a corner and wait.

I sit there and look around, the players - working away at their instruments, looking absorbed and lost in the music, smoking cigarettes without break, one after the other, the crowd – people eating at the cafeteria just behind, more youngsters, some standing and some sitting on the floor, listening to the music, many of them constantly smoking as well, and then there are, of course, the people who are here to watch a film, who just pass by, some pausing to listen to the music for a while.

The variety of people that can be seen near the place is quite remarkable, there are all kinds – boys and girls dressed for their evening out, company executives just back from office, uncles and aunties who wonder what the fuss is all about, and very old men and women, who don’t give the band as much as a glance. Yet, they are all together there, who have come to this multiplex for some form of enjoyment or the other.

Somewhere between ten and ten thirty, the band stops playing. I, in anticipation, go into the crowd and stand there much before that, hoping that they would wind up soon. This is the most difficult part of the waiting, it’s late and I am desperate to get back home. I can see a few eyes turning towards me, giving me a cursory glance, wondering whether I too was there for the music, and I’m conscious of the fact that here, where almost everyone is dressed to kill, having a good time, I look odd, a man who doesn’t belong, maybe even a blot on the landscape. But it hardly bothers me.

When it’s all over, and the whole place seems immersed in sudden, complete silence once more, I pick up everything from the stage and put it inside the store room.

My work for the day is over, and I leave on my bicycle, for my home in a village just a few kilometres away.

This is what I do. Clean. Assemble. Dissemble.

Bridge Chalein?

2008-09-11T20:15:00.007+05:30

All the characters and events in this piece are entirely fictional and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely co-incidental.

From the flashlights of the motorcycle, it was pretty clear to all of them that what stood ahead, just about fifty metres away was nothing but a police jeep.

Their little plan had all it takes to get into the deepest possible shit. It was past one in the night, they, Abbas, Muahid and Tayseer were on someone else’s bike, in a relatively unknown city, without anywhere specific to go, but sure in their minds that they had to go somewhere. After all, they were happy. That’s the least they could do. Go somewhere.

So, having taken a packet of wafers and two Thums Ups for their little picnic from one of the very few places that were open so late, they decided to go to the famous bridge, a broken one, about two to three kilometres into the wilderness. On their way there, the talk was of murders, encounters and cover-ups, and many other possibilities their lives could meet at the bridge, depending on which they might accidentally meet there, the police or some scoundrels. None of them suspected that weren’t after all building castles in the air. The first sight of the jeep was just the preamble for what was to follow.

‘Abey koi hai wahaan pe…truck ya jeep…’, said Tayseer, as if this was a fact that needed mentioning.

‘Jeep hi hai…police ki hai kya?’, added Abbas, fearing the worst.

‘Haan police ki hi hai…’, replied Muahid, and after letting the realization sink in, ‘Waapis chalna hai kya?’

This was a crucial question, the sort which one would rather like to pose than answer. There was a brief silence, not more than a few seconds, as the question needed to be answered quickly, the three of them getting closer to the jeep with every passing moment.

‘Abey chalte hain….faltu mein panga na ho jaaye’, Tayseer, chicken heart, finally uttered. This was all the other two chicken hearts needed, and without wasting further time, Muahid, who was driving, took a U-turn and headed back.

The danger dealt with, the three breathed easy again. Ripples of nervous laughter were complemented by remarks such as ‘Bach gaye yaar!’, ‘Kya kismet hai!’ and ‘Ab kahaan jaaye!’. But this hadn’t gone on for long, before Abbas interjected.

‘Abey waise problem kya hai?...na humare paas daru hai, na kuchh aur…bas 3 dost hai, chips aur cold-drink peene aaye hai…unko isse kya problem ho sakti hai?’

This was another good question, again one which was really difficult to answer. It is hard to say what transpired next, but within moments, chicken hearts turned into brave hearts, the bike headed back towards the jeep, all three infused suddenly with a new-found confidence in the innocence of their little outing.

They parked the bike just a little beyond the jeep, and though it was pitch dark, each searched for the others’ eyes, for a mirror to their apprehensions, waiting for someone to break the uneasy silence. It was broken, but it wasn’t they who had spoken.

From the back of the jeep, came out a moving a torch, and a voice beckoning them. None of them were really taken aback, they were expecting it, almost waiting for it.

As they approached the back of the jeep, it turned out that there were no less than four policeman present at the spot, three at the back with one asleep, and one in the front, who as they would later discover, was their boss. One of the two awake sub-ordinates, whom we would hereafter refer to as Good Cop, was the first to speak.

‘Kahaan se aaye ho tum log? Kya kar rahe ho yahaan?’

‘Kuchh nahi uncle…woh aise hi…’, replied Abbas, leaving Tayseer a little surprised as to how quickly he had moved on to buttering the policeman, calling him ‘uncle’.

‘Raat ko dhai baje tum yahaan aise hi aaye the! Woh kya hai haath mein?’, Good Cop retorted, his tone a bit harsher this time, pointing to the chips and soft drinks in our hands.

‘Kuchh nahi uncle…woh chips hai….aur…’, Tayseer replied, thinking at the same time whether ‘sir’ would have sounded better.

‘Bas yahi laaye ho?....’, Bad Cop finally spoke up, sounding rather disappointed. He sounded drunk, and excited, this little incident perhaps being the only diversion in his otherwise long and uneventful night vigil. ‘Yahin khade raho.’, said the Good Cop now, and both of them walked towards the motorcycle.

What they were looking for was liquor, and had it been found, it would have been the perfect excuse to have the youngsters jailed for the night and extract some nice cash out of them in the morning. But as they found nothing, even after an elaborate search, they returned silently, almost not knowing what to do now.

Having won a point in their favour, Abbas, Muahid and Tayseer now started to ask the cops for forgiveness, saying that they would never come here again, that they were just a bunch of stupid, innocent teenagers wanting a good time, that they had absolutely no idea that a small picnic on a deserted piece of land in the wilderness at two in the morning wasn’t the safest thing to do.

When they had no more excuses left, all three fell silent and there was a rather uncomfortable silence for a second or two. Bad Cop now took over the proceedings.

‘Thane le chalo sabko! Saale chutiye…subah tak inko wahi rakhna hai…tab samajh mein aayega inke…jab newspaper mein photo niklegi na….’, and then, as if struck with a sudden amazing idea, ‘woh India Today walo ko bulaon….haan wahi jo poore din idhar udhar ghoomte rehte hain’

Good Cop had gone on staring at the hapless three all this time, while they looked ready to shit in their pants. They started on their pleadings again, to which Good Cop said he understood but they had to talk to their boss once before anything could be done.

The boss sat in the front seat. He was asleep, probably on two or three bottles of desi liquor. When Good Cop explained the situation to him, he suddenly got up on his seat, as if awakened by a call of duty and scowled at the three.

‘Band karo inko!...madarchod kya karne aaye the yahaan?...bhodsi ke!’, and then as if exhausted by this sudden surge of activity, he dropped back into sleep again.

Bad Cop, now encouraged once more, added that the three must be thieves, as only thieves come out at such hours. To this unbeatable piece of logic, none of the three had an answer.

‘Kahaan ke rehne walo ho tum log?’, he now asked.

‘Dilli ke, sir’, Tayseer replied.

‘Kabhi dilli mein 8 baje ke baad nikalte ho?’

Another stupid taunt. Tayseer wanted to laugh at the policeman, but kept quiet, knowing that this wasn’t what he was looking for.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed in this fashion. The three of them kept pleading, calling the policemen ‘sir’ and ‘uncle’ alternately, the Bad Cop pouring taunts and threats, one after one. Good Cop now started to talk calmly to the three. He explained how there was a suicide by some Maharashtrian youngster in this area just a few days ago, and how much trouble they had to endure for it, and how unsuitable this place was, therefore, for a midnight picnic.

Slowly and steadily, as Good Cop talked to the three, they started to feel that there was still a way out of this, that there could be a negotiation. And no doubt, Good Cop finally offered to let them go, only if they pay the fine for their little adventure.

Tayseer didn’t even have his wallet with him, Muahid had all of forty or fifty rupees, and Abbas a few hundred. They informed Good Cop of this fact straight on his face; he was disappointed, but did well to maintain his composure.

‘Kitne hain tumhare paas?’, he asked, getting down to the bottom of it all.

‘Mere paas to kuchh bhi nahi’, Tayseer apologetically replied, ‘Iske paas 40-50 honge’, looking at Muahid, ‘aur tumhare paas?’, turning to Abbas.

Abbas dig into his purse and said ‘300…350….’

Muahid, who wasn’t really keen on paying the policeman more than a hundred in any case, who even in such dire circumstances was keen to hold on to his money, now reproached Abbas by hitting him on the arm. Good Cop noticed that, and when Muahid tried to speak again, he asked him to shut up and learn some tameez first.

Tayseer now did all the talking, intentionally sounding soft, trying to make Good Cop feel that he could start crying any moment. Good Cop finally gave in, showering elderly advice on the three, telling them again and again how difficult the job of a policeman was, how they had to cover up so much, how the world would break into pieces if they didn’t do their thing. He sounded like a depressed Atlas, on whose shoulder all the burden of the world rested.

Having exhausted (or bored) himself ultimately, he asked Muahid to fetch the motorcycle, and continued talking to the other two.

‘Ye ladka theek nahi hai…chutiya kahin ka!...poori tarah bigad chuka hai yeh’, said he for Muahid, perhaps remembering the earlier fine negotiation, and then for no apparent reason, added, looking at Abbas – ‘Tum bhi aadhe bigad chuke ho…’. Abbas might have wanted to ask him why, but stayed shut for good.

The three got on to the motorcycle, and after saying ‘Dhanyavad’ and ‘Shukriya’ about 5-10 times, sped off. Their little adventure was over, they had come out unscathed, without even parting with a single rupee (the three had repeatedly informed Good Cop that they were 'student log' and could therefore may kindly please be exempted from the fine), and though their nerves hadn’t quite calmed yet, they laughed loudly, maybe at themselves, maybe at each other, maybe at the hour just gone by.

Then, Muahid, the courageous asked – ‘Ab kahaan chalna hai?’

Thamah

2008-08-24T02:02:00.003+05:30

What would you do if you suddenly found your house on fire one night? What if everything you had of value, everything you priced more than your own life, whatever you were prepared to give it for, whatever you loved and adored was suddenly ablaze, you denied even one last look at it because of the cruel, enormous fire that’s around?

One. You could jump from your bed, run around frantic, or look for the nearest source of water, or shout out for your neighbours, or dial 101, or try to find a piece of cloth to douse your dearest belongings with. Or something else.

Two. You could sit on your bed calmly, or maybe replace yourself to safety, and then, without panicking, without losing yourself, watch all that was yours burn in front of your eyes, watch it happening, accept it, come to terms with it, do nothing.

Sometimes, when the world around you is on fire, preserving your peace of mind and not losing yourself in the whole trick is the best you can do. And in the longer run, perhaps that alone matters more than anything else ever will.

Angrez Chale Gaye...

2008-08-21T13:03:00.003+05:30

On my way to Delhi a few days ago, while I waited to get my boarding pass at the airline counter, it was rather hard not to observe and not be amused by the man just ahead of me in the queue. He seemed like one around forty years of age, clean shaven, wearing an impeccable suit and tie, looking all prim and proper like all these senior company executives do. He was talking to the girl at the counter.

‘I would like an aisle seat. Just see if one’s available’, he declared to her, his voice and tone heavy and commanding, which took the girl by surprise a little.

‘Just a moment, Sir. I’ll just check if one is’, she replied quickly, getting on the keyboard.

‘Yeah. If you don’t have that, give me a window seat. But not one in the middle in any case’, out came the second declaration, by which time the lady was jumping frantically on the keys.

Her hurried behaviour seemed rather odd at first; she would be used to hearing a hundred such requests in a day. But what was special about this one was that it wasn’t really a request, it was a declaration, almost an order. It wasn’t its nature but the tone with which it was delivered was what took her aback that little bit.

The man was an executive, a confident, self-assured executive, who knew where he stood, who knew what the pomp and exuding self-belief in his deliverance of the English language meant and signified, that it would impress and rattle the young, naïve-looking female airline employee, and that it would definitely be enough to get him the best seat possible. He knew everything, at the back of his mind at least, if not entirely consciously. He never as much looked at her in the eye, looking hither and thither all throughout. That was part of the game, the performance.

A few moments later, in the flight, having got an undesired middle seat for myself, I started with the novel I was wisely carrying. On my right, by the window, was a middle-aged, mustached man with a rather healthy paunch. One look at his face suggested that he was either very upset or very angry with something. He kept looking at the air-hostesses that passed by, shifting nervously in his seat throughout, as if not sure what posture would look most respectable, and would also be most comfortable at the same time.

Now, it happened that by the time they reached our row for serving dinner, all the non-vegetarian meals they had were finished. In crisp, air-hostessque English, one of the girls explained to him that as they had run short of the non-vegetarian meals, to take the vegetarian one was the only option he had. At this, the man’s already unpleasant expression turned even more so. He looked offended, as if being subjected to a gross injustice.

‘Non-veg nahi hai aapke paas? Yeh kaise ho sakta hai?’, he barked at her, more of an outburst than a question.

‘Sorry Sir. Lekin kuchh problem ho gayi hai. Galti se vegetarian khana zyada aa gaya, aur non-veg kam.’

This apology was all he needed. He didn’t really abhor vegetarian food, after all. Now sated, he murmured something incoherently, to which the girl didn’t reply and handed him the food plate quietly.

After she had left, he laughed and murmured something more to me. I couldn’t get anything of what it was, and only nodded slightly in return, thinking it would be enough to quieten him down. It was. Having embarrassed the hostess as he intended to, and visibly pleased with his performance, he now started with the food in front.

He had surely needed this little tantrum, without which his feeling of dislocation would only have been accentuated. To have this brief argument with the hostess, and that too in the language he was most comfortable in, was his way of getting level with the people around him, all of whom, as he must have noticed, were looking much more ‘sophisticated’ then he, and therefore superior in his eyes.

The English language is, as they say, the best thing the British ever gave us, and in that, I would agree with them. But on occasions (which, by the way, are not rare), it acts as a sheer monstrosity. One that cannot just be ignored.

Veil

2008-07-31T13:55:00.007+05:30

Shehanshahon ke shenhanshah, the emperor of emperors, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar looks down at the blisters on his feet. He has walked miles on stone and dust, in the heat of the midday sun, like a mere commoner, to this little town called Sikri, just to seek the blessing of Shaikh Salim Chisti, the revered saint.

What his heart aches for is an heir to his throne; he is till now, childless. The Sufi saint did indeed bless him, predicting the birth of not one, not two but three sons, three possible heirs to the glory of the great Mughals.

What Akbar, childless and almost broken, doesn’t know is that the son he has asked for, the son who’ll ultimately be born, proving right Chisti’s prophecy, the son whom he’ll name Salim in honour of the great saint, will grow to be an obnoxiously rebellious offspring, and when the time came, will plot his own father’s overthrow, breaking his heart in two. Forever.

Today, Akbar knows nothing of that. For he is lost in the moment, in the promise that these blisters will not be for nothing. He is hopeful, believing, content.

The Chronicles of Dood

2008-07-24T00:12:00.017+05:30

Warning: This post should, preferably, NOT be read.

Three or four thousand years from now, when the world we know no longer exists, when mankind itself has ceased to be, when the earth we today inhabit as our own stands as a hopeless shadow of its former self, then a few curious creatures, doing what the archeologists today do, might unearth, to their utter surprise, around the present Gangetic plain, around a town called Sitanagar to be exact, and near the western tip of the Indian sub-continent, where land meets the Arabian Sea, near a town called Gandhipur specifically, the proof that there once lived a dude the sight of whom had killed many a babe and who, in the above manner was single-handedly responsible for the heavily lopsided male-to-female ratio prevalent in the area at that time.

His name was Denzongpa. Dood Denzongpa. He was born in the small, humble town of Sitanagar to parents who had absolute no idea what a lethal roll of dynamite they had just given birth to. And didn’t until much later, by the time the whole world did, by the time it was so very late! And they couldn’t be blamed either. Dood, in his childhood and adolescent years, showed absolutely no signs as to what he might become later. Till he got out of his teens, Dood was just an angry, fat kid, unattractive and unwholesome, the sort who gets bullied by every second guy in town, and who then goes and buries his demoralized self into his mother’s lap, crying and complaining.

The event that marked the transition in Dood’s life, and consequently changed the course of mankind, was his admission to HH-IBS, Gandhipur, the Hugh Hefner Institute of Babeology and Sexology. Now slim, trim and sexy, Dood with his greek-god looks is supposed to have taken the entire college by storm. A report of his first day in college, a startling piece of evidence found in the Sex and the Sexy journal, claims that there were no less than twenty six cases of babes fainting at the sight of Dood. It also adds that after an emergency meeting held in the early hours of the following day, the authorities advised Dood never to show his face in its entirety in public to any babe, and try not to show even a part as much as possible.

But Dood couldn’t help it. Overwhelmed by his newly discovered Casanova self, Dood unleashed himself mercilessly on the babe masses. How much the fainting spree of the college had gone out of bounds can be ascertained by the fact that a certain emaciated babe by the name of Devi fainted six times in one day, just at the mention of Dood’s name. It was only the pity and compassion that Dood felt for his beloved babes that forced him to slow down a bit in his latter years.

Another significant influence on Dood during his years at HH-IBS was his room-mate, Khoosat Budhau. Khoosat, who had showed signs of ageing in childhood itself, was the exact opposite of what Dood was. While Dood was handsome, Khoosat was unbelievably unappealing, while Dood was soft-spoken, Khoosat almost always scowled, while Dood had a seductive smile, Khoosat is reported to have smiled only once in his lifetime, just before he breathed his last. Nevertheless, having the big, kind heart Dood did, he tried desperately to give Khoosat a chance at the youth he’d never enjoyed, but Khoosat, as his name suggests, was adamant on carrying on with the same sad life, and preferred watching the blank of the ceiling above for hours rather than getting his hands on a babe or two. Dood, after many an unsuccessful attempt, finally left Khoosat to his dwellings, saying ‘Kya jhand zindagi hai!!’, a hint of exasperation all too evident in his voice.

Although Dood and his legend grew popular with every passing day, he had a feeling that he had not thus far met anyone whom he could call THE BABE. This conspicuous void in his life was filled by a girl that went by the name of Happy Dood. This marked the beginning of a new chapter in Dood’s life. With Dood’s killer looks and Happy’s perfect figure, it was as if Casanova and Cleopatra had come together. Moreover, they fell in love instantly. While Dood was never short of jokes, Happy was never short of laughter. They were like the two lone pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, waiting to be united.

Gradually, with the coming of Happy, Dood started seeing the advantages of simple family life. From the quintessential sex symbol that he was, Dood became the typical lover boy, completely enchanted by Happy’s never-ending laughing sprees. Around the same time, Dood also seems to have developed a keen interest in poetry, and he wrote many a heart-wrenching composition with his beloved babe at the centre. It is a matter of great shame that as he regarded most of those pieces as deeply personal, very few of them met the public eye. What a wonderful blessing it would have been for mankind to have Shelley and Casanova rolled into one! Alas, it was not to be.

Thus, Happy and Dood got married, and went on to have dozens of children. The exact number of the same is difficult to determine; official sources put the count at thirty-six, after which Happy could handle no more. Post Happy’s heart-breaking demise, Dood sunk deep into private life, coming on surface once in a while to publish papers on subjects such as Dudeology, Babeology and Sexology, notable of them being How to Woo a Babe in Thirty Seconds and The Role of Non-Veg SMS in the Obtainment of Babes.

This was the story of Dood Denzongpa. As I.C. Balu, perhaps the greatest historian of those times, put it – “There are two kinds of people in this world. One who treat sex as a sacred act of procreation, and one who treat it as a simple act of enjoyment. Dood Denzongpa was and will remain the indomitable champion of the latter.”

Slowness

2008-07-23T01:18:00.003+05:30

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himeself from a thing still too close to him in time.

The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Milan Kundera. Slowness.

Tea & The Sky

2008-07-10T02:20:00.009+05:30

Dear Mani,

Though there is no point in writing letters anymore, I just didn’t know what to do with the irrepressible temptation to do so tonight. It’s been quite a dull day, all throughout the clouds have stayed overhead, the rain teasing, without any wind. The sort of day that passes without making you realize that it has. The sort of day you love and hate for the same reason. And strangely, because I don’t know why, the desire to talk to you on such days becomes practically irresistible, even if it’s only one way, only like this.

Sometimes, on such days, when I lie on the bed in the afternoon, watching the white of the ceiling above, the blankness gives way to images and memories. Images in the form of memory. Memory in the form of images. And almost always, on such days, they are of you, and one other thing.

I see the both of us, like an approaching stranger would, sitting at the chai wala near the government school, the same which gave the tea in long, over-sized cups, more suitable for beer, which always made you feel that you were only being given half of what you paid for. Do you remember?

Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. But regardless, the image of us at that joint remains fresh in my mind, and comes again and again on such slow, uneventful afternoons.

Why, I don’t know. I’m not sure why I even remember it so vividly. Does it bring me comfort? Pain? Ache? I have no answer. Maybe it is the feeling of timelessness we felt in our meetings there that fascinates me, the joint but unspoken feel of being suspended in time, as if the moment before and the moment after didn’t exist, as if the world was restricted to the few square metres of the shop, as if the world beyond was only a fantasy of our minds, as if anything we did before and after didn’t matter, as if this was what we were born to do, to sip tea beneath an empty sky and talk about anything outside the realm of consequence. How limitless and ecstatic would it be if our lives got frozen there, beside the chai wala, with the cups of tea in our hands, all the innumerable possibilities of our lives reduced to a beautiful, complete zero!

Consequence, consequence. How powerful and dangerous can that be! Yes, maybe it was the absence of this in our meetings and conversations that still make me remember it.

Do you remember? Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. The shop doesn’t stand there anymore. The school authorities had it removed on the grounds that many students used it to bunk classes and have a smoke. But it is there in my mind, exactly as it was then - unscathed. As it will always be, as it will always come, on such days, which, in their stillness and completeness are quaintly similar to it,

Good Bye,
Manu.

Chai Ho Jaaye!

2008-07-01T01:20:00.011+05:30

‘Tara, chhat se kapda utha!’, shouted his grandmother, in a tone so filled with alarm that it would have sounded more appropriate if the entire house was on fire. And without waiting for any confirmation from the maid, leaving the brinjal she was slicing in the kitchen unsliced, she ran frantically to the balcony to do the needful there.

The monsoons had arrived, and to little Amir, it seemed that it rained nowhere in the world as it rained in Patna. A moment before, it seemed like a perfect, idle, hot, summer afternoon, and now, all of a sudden, all hell had broken loose. The unlatched doors banged against the walls ferociously, the clouds roared, all tree tops pointed horizontally to one direction, as if showing a stranger the way to his destination. It was perfect, sublime chaos, turning the impeccable tranquility of the entire household to over-frenzied activity in a jiffy. As Amir saw, everyone in the house was running, everyone had suddenly sprung to action.

He ran to the terrace and stopped at the door, looking at the maid who was busy picking up as many clothes as she could in one go and depositing them at the nearest dry place. No one could have been more efficient right now; she did it as if her whole life depended on it.

‘Kuchh kapda tum bhi utha lo. Khade ho ke dekh rahe ho!’, she shouted above the rain when she saw him.

‘Rehne do na. Kya jaata hai? Bheeg jayega to kya hoga?’, he replied, teasing her.

‘Kya hoga! Agar tumhari Nanima ne humko baad mein daanta to? Tum bachane aayoge?’

‘Kyun nahi?’, Amir said, smiling his most mischievous smile. Leaving Tara behind, he now walked back into the house to see what the rest were up to.

His grandmother had returned from the balcony, satisfied and exhausted, and sat at the dining table, just below the ceiling fan. The look on her face was almost triumphant, as if she had just diffused a time bomb only a couple of seconds before it was supposed to go off.

‘Kitne jaldi aaya baarish. Bhaagte nahi to sab kapda bheeg jaata!’, she said when she saw Amir, explaining the supreme importance of the task, waiting for someone to commend her for her effort.

‘Hmmm’, Amir replied and went to the kitchen to fetch her some water.

The maid returned, the clothes replaced to safety. All was still once more, the household relaxed, only the sound of rain falling outside to be heard. His grandfather, who had carried on reading the newspaper quietly all this while, unperturbed by the abrupt bout of activity the world inside and outside had been in, also came in and sat down on the divan.

‘Chai ho jaaye!’, he cried, as always, as if the moment called for a celebration of sorts. In a way, it did, thought Amir. The rain always called for celebration, even in Patna, where there was never any scarcity of it.

Tea was brought, and as little Amir wasn’t allowed to have it yet, he sipped quietly on his Bournvita. The coming of the rains was almost a ritual, everything happened the same way every time – the runs to the terrace and balcony, the subsequent tea session, the small talk. Watching everyone have this unplanned chat, with the sound of the rain in the background, Amir felt strangely happy.

Suit & Tie

2008-06-28T00:18:00.019+05:30

The malls. A showroom. A mirror.

I look into it, trying to judge whether the dark black trousers suit me, whether they produce awkward creases, whether the sleeves of the shirt I have on are too long, whether the shiny, black shoes I intend to buy would go well with the entire outfit.

I’m tense, a little irritated and very tired. And in between all the noise around and inside me at that moment, I stop and it occurs to me that this is the way it has always been.

And will be.

Where's the face, you ask?
Oh never mind, that hardly matters!

Your life is lost in this perpetual charade of trying to look like someone else, so much so that sometimes, you get scared of just being yourself. Trying to look like the well-dressed schoolboy when you are only a kid, being told to wear T-shirts more often when kurtas suit you fine, and now – trying to look like a prim-and-proper executive when you are at least a good one year away from actually being one.

And they do in the name of discipline. Even if one agrees to dress codes in schools and institutions, to ask someone to appear in suit and tie for an interview is totally preposterous. For once in the institution, the powers that be have the right to dictate how they want you to appear, and as a member, it is only correct that you follow the rules. But to do so when you are only applying for admission into the same is something that I don’t understand.

Isn’t it true that they are conducting the interview just to know you better, what you are and of what use you can be to their company? If the answer is yes, won’t it be more helpful for them and easier for you if you appear as you really are, be it unshaven, dirty or haggard? Doesn’t it harm the ‘selection’ process if everyone appears as if in uniform, with the same fake ‘confident’ smile, giving the same prototype ‘smart’ answers? Won’t it make things simpler for everyone involved if they decide to see each person in his own mould, his individuality shining through, and isn’t that what they are actually here for?

The whole exercise, as it stands, is a sham. It is, and excuse me if the phrase sounds a bit exaggerated to you, a perfect example of identity assassination.

But oh well, if you think I’m going to have my own way in this and play the harbinger of change, you can’t be further from the truth. The companies arrive in ten days time and you can be sure to find me all nicely dressed up in suit and tie, wearing the ‘confident’ smile, giving the ‘smart’ answers.

I

2008-06-14T19:03:00.002+05:30

Marvin, IC tagged me again. And though he didn’t expect me to complete this one, I found it quite interesting to do so. Ah, how I love these tags! Not the substitute for the real good stuff I should be coming up with, but who cares.

I am for whom the bell tolls. At least, that’s what I like to believe.

I think alarmingly more than one should think.

I know a lot many sad PJs.

I want roses in my garden when I do have one to call my own.

I have something really special in me. What it is exactly, that I’m still trying to ascertain.

I wish I had ideas to write on and not just be completing such tags for time pass.

I hate the man without a purpose.

I miss my old grandparents’ house where I used to spend my summer vacations as a kid.

I smell good most of the time. People can’t normally tell even when I haven’t bathed for a week.

I crave for the simple rice and dal meal I used to have at home.

I search myself in everyone I see, and eventually end up disappointed every time.

I wonder if God exists, and if yes, whether he has a conscience.

I love my grandmother. She is the strongest and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

I care a lot for my brother and sister. But I can never tell them that. I hope it shows.

I ache for rain all year, only to have it for a little time.

I am not many things that people think I am.

I believe in the principle ‘Live and help live’.

I dance only when I’m feeling silly. And only when I’m alone.

I sing quite well, but not many, like my mother, agree with me.

I cry “Pushpa, I hate tears. They are nothing but saline water.”

I don’t always mean to be rude but often am.

I write pulp fiction.

I win in almost all that I attempt. Because I often only attempt things in which I know I’ll win. And I know it’s wrong to be that way.

I lose my ‘usually dependable reasoning powers when I’m romantically trapped’.

I always end up confused. (Had to copy Marvin on this one)

I listen to Dire Straits when happy, The Doors when sad and Floyd when just myself.

I can usually be found on the bed, idling away effortlessly…na…effortFULLY.

I am happy when watching a Satyajit Ray movie.

I imagine myself as something incredibly grandiose in the distant future. Not that I’m going to tell you.

I tag Calvin and Jezuz yet again, though they haven’t still completed the last one I sent them.

Water

2008-06-12T20:08:00.007+05:30

The rain comes. Uninvited but welcome, as always. The sun is down now, its almost night. The already darkening sky becomes even more so due to the cloud cover above. Everything’s hazy. Everything’s beautiful. Everything painted a dull white.

The rain has come and it’s washed everything with its colour. All white – the sky, the trees, the roads. The world suddenly looks cleaner – all the dirt washed away suddenly. It’s as if it needed the rain once in a while to purify itself.

You remove your glasses. They are the last thing you need right now. You lift your head to the white sky and close your eyes. The rain falls on your face, and for a moment, just for a moment, you feel that it has cleaned you too.

In the background, Gilmour sings –

The rain fell slow, down on all the roofs of uncertainty
I thought of you and the years of all the sadness fell away from me

The words don’t fit at all and fit just right at the same time. Combined with the rain, they produce a weird sensation, something like a cross between the most irrepressible ecstasy and the dullest ache.

And you wonder, you just wonder - could there be anything more complete than this?

Nai Dilli

2008-06-02T19:05:00.016+05:30

Let me start by saying that when Marvin, IC tagged me some time ago, I wasn’t very keen on penning down a flashback on my home of many years - New Delhi. For the simple reason that it’s close to impossible trying to write about something you have been so closely related to, and for such a long time. At least not without letting your emotions get the better of you. But as I’ve been suffering from the Dearth of Ideas syndrome again of late, I thought I might as well give this a try. If nothing else, it would make the old man happy.

Hmmm.

When I first set foot in the capital, I was about 4-5 years old. I was then staying in a little town called Sindri in Bihar and had come on a visit to my grandparents’ place in Saket. Within a few hours, I urged my maid to take me to the park opposite the house. Slides are meant for sliding, one might slip and things might happen. The recollection of what happened in the park then is only a blur in my memory. All I do remember is that there was quite a lot of blood, a few stitches and a little boy crying, shouting, cursing the city, saying repeatedly – ‘Ab dilli kabhi nahi aayenge!’. Later, when my grandmother had moved back to Patna and I to Delhi, and I wouldn’t get to see her often, she would tease me and say – ‘Look. You said you’ll never go there. And now you have become a permanent Dilliwala!’

Around two years after the incident, my father left the job he had in Sindri and as was the trend then for all ambitious, moved to Delhi. After a one-year stint in a particular flat in Vasant Kunj, a place of which I have no real fond memories, we then moved to another a little distance away. This was to be the place where I would spend the next five years of my life.

One of the first things I remember noticing about the place was that the flat was on the 3^rd floor, the steps were steep, and so everyday, coming back from school, with the big heavy bag on my shoulders, I had a taste of how Edmund Hillary would have felt trying to climb the Everest. That was perhaps the only disagreeable thing about the place, as the rest was perfect – a balcony with a view of the entire colony from it and a huge park just opposite our flat with swings, skating rinks and a whole lot of empty space to play cricket on.

My first introduction to how Delhi was different came through the neighbourhood. In Patna and in Sindri, every flat had the same sort of people, all like you, middle-class, friendly, always full with unnecessary smiles when they saw each other. Delhi was different. It was the proverbial big city – hustling-bustling, busy, always in a hurry, smiles - yes but twisted, the sort which never encouraged you to start on a conversation. Unlike Sindri, not many uncles or aunties came to your house, not many asked you which school you were studying in, whether you could recite a poem or sing a song for them.

The difference was also in the variety of people. Before, I had only encountered people from Bihar in my life. Delhi, on the other hand, was a zoo of different-looking people. In the flats below us lived two Bengali families (loud and unclean), and in the ones opposite lived a family from Punjab (financially better placed than us, I remember thinking), one old South Indian lady, who looked rather lonely, and therefore friendly, and a Nepalese couple on the ground floor (they scared me every time I saw them. Even to my little mind at that time, they looked the sort of people who would be making explosives and stuff, a belief strengthened when they later covered their windows with black chart paper). Our apartment was a mini-India in itself, I still remember thinking.

The routine all throughout my stay there was rather fixed. School till two, lunch on the floor consisting of rice, dal and mashed potatoes, a brief study period, getting milk from Mother Dairy using coupons (which fascinated me no limit at first), off to the park for a two-hour cricket session, returning home like a weathered soldier, another brief dash at homework, dinner and sleep. All this may sound mundane to the reader but there are thousands of memories intertwined in this daily drudgery – like playing cricket from six in the morning to one in the afternoon on Sundays till our bodies ached and heads reeled from the heat, fighting ferociously with one of my best friends over a controversial run-out till I tore off his T-shirt resulting in he giving up and running back home crying, being mistaken by the man at Mother Dairy for a servant, shitting in my pants at school and being slapped by my mother when she discovered so at the bus-stop, being hit by a gunda called Shakal (what a suitable name, I thought!), kicking him back impulsively in return and running away, waiting for Shri Krishna on Doordarshan desperately on Sunday mornings, thereby watching the whole of Krishi Darshan also in the process, and the best of them all - mixing water colours in the terrace tanker on Holi with my partner-in-crime.

Then, when I went to Class 6^th, we moved to Chandigarh. But Delhi was what we would eventually return to, and so we did in a couple of years, again taking shelter in Vasant Kunj. That was the start of another six years in the capital. But I wasn’t a kid anymore, rather a boy trying to act like a man. Reading and writing overtook cricket, surfing the net overtook the mythological serials, listening to George Michael and Queen, to an extent, overtook idling away with friends.

Love also entered thoughts somewhere. Falling in love with someone and then falling out in a month was the usual trend. It is amazing to think now how I got myself deeply infatuated with every second girl in sight, and ruminated over her for hours continuously, and then due to mental exhaustion, in the end, forgot her entirely. It was almost as if January to December, there was someone new every time, like the Flavour of the Month at an ice-cream shop.

With time also came an increased emphasis on studies. And the final three years of my school life were absorbed in wanting 80 when I got 70, 90 when I got 80 and so forth. First there were the 10^th board exams, then coaching to get into ‘THE IIT’, and then the 12^th board exams again. Being the reluctant science student that I always have been, the coaching proved to be futile with me failing miserably in all competitive exams. Result – while my friends got busy with their first year at college, I had to stay at home and drop a year.

I would be deceiving myself if I say that the last year of my stay in Delhi wasn’t the worst of my life thus far. Coaching continued, and also my awareness of the futility of it all. In January, helpless, I moved to a flat in a place called Jia Sarai, which I fondly refer to as The Shithole. The move was supposed to help me concentrate better, away from home and between fellow students. But it hardly helped; the four months stay there was slightly better in terms of studies, but was accompanied by long late-night walks to Hauz Khas or Munirka to keep my sanity intact. The desire to leave Delhi, the city where I had grown and the city which I had loved, was overwhelming and it was no little relief when I did so finally in August 2005, putting an end to the eleven years that I had lived in the capital.

Three years have passed since then. The family has moved to Gurgaon now, a place so self-sufficient that Delhi seems like a part of the past. Trips to my old home are made only to meet up with friends at CP or to the railway station to catch the train to Gandhinagar. Delhi is always so near but always so distant, not just in terms of distance but also in terms of years, and in terms of memories - some good, some bad - but as a whole package, strangely warm.

I am not an expert on Delhi and Delhi life, nor do I claim to be. My association with the city has almost entirely been with only its southern and central parts, and there is a lot, as some have pointed out, that remains to be seen. But this was how I knew the city, and the city knew me. Maybe someday I’ll return and see the capital in its entirety. Maybe. Someday.

To carry on the string of tales, I tag Jezuz and Calvin.

P.S. - And now that Zinque is with us, I invite her as well to tell her story. After all, small, insignificant places deserve a mention too ;)

Flat 608

2008-05-23T11:05:00.005+05:30

He pulled up near her house, in that familiar jam-packed parking lot, uncanny in its crowded resemblance to all other parking lots in Vasant Kunj. Nothing about the place had changed, as he had half-expected to – the flats with their illegal balconies jutting out, the parking with every car from 800 to Tavera on show, the sheer cave-like look of the place. After all, it was only two years before that he was here last, walking up to the 3^rd floor of the apartment and ringing the bell for flat 608.

He did the same again today, but with an inexplicable urgency, as if he wanted to start or end with something very quickly. The servant answered and when he took her name, the man quickly disappeared into the house, no hint of emotion on his face, as he was expecting him already.

Then she came, walking up to the door, trying to get a glance of who it was through the netting. She finally did recognize him, and with the faintest of smiles, she said, ‘Is that you?’

‘What does it look like?’, he replied.

She through the door open, and looked at him carefully, as if to check whether he was really what he sounded like, what he looked like, what he claimed he was.

‘Hello’, she said, after she was convinced that it was indeed so.

‘Hi’, he said quickly, not wanting to say it.

Both stared at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say, afraid that one word might spoil everything, just trying to let the moment sink in, examining each other’s faces as if they expected to see sagging wrinkles, white hair or deep hollows below the eyes, as if it had been not only two years but eternity since they had last set eyes on each other.

‘Come in!’, she finally exclaimed, first conscious to the un-reality of the moment. This woke him up from his trance too, and he nervously shifted his feet.

‘Can we go out for a cup of coffee?’

‘You know I don’t like coffee.’

‘Yes. Tea then?’

‘That’ll be good. Give me a minute.’

She rushed in again, leaving him at the door. He was confused. It was almost as if he had been sure that his invitation would be refused, as if he had expected or even wanted her to say ‘Oh yeah?’ and slam the door on his face. But she hadn’t. This was what he had come here for, this was what he had feared. He suddenly found himself wanting to run down, get into his car, and drive away as if nothing had happened.

But he didn’t.

Then, she reappeared. She hadn’t changed anything really, she was her casual self – a blue worn-out top, dark blue jeans, a black hair band - failing miserably to fulfill its purpose, and dark green Puma floaters. On her way out, she murmured something to the servant, and rushed down the stairs, leaving him behind, as if it was not he but she who had invited him for the outing.

As it has always been, he thought, trying to catch up with her, and failing as usual. When he finally got down, she was already alongside his car in the parking, her hands on the door handle, waiting for him to unlock it. He smiled weakly when he saw her, and she smiled back.

Tea was had at a roadside ‘settlement’ near the Central Market. Five rupees. Full with sugar and milk. Like he liked it. And she.

They walked around the place for a while, flipping through the magazines on sale, gazing mindlessly at the passing traffic, she pausing to ask the man at the music store for a cassette he knew she would never buy.

‘How’s college?’, she finally asked him, casually, in a tone more suitable for asking someone whether he liked strawberry ice-cream.

‘Good, good’, is all he could say in return.

‘Found good friends?’

‘Ya. Was a bit lonely in the beginning but its getting better slowly. Found a nice group of people.’

He was not sure whether this was the most correct thing to say, whether this was what she wanted to hear, whether she even wanted to hear something in particular.

‘What about you?’, he asked, trying to be polite, trying to keep up his end of the conversation.

‘Ah I’m still trying to adjust. I had expected an engineering college to be this way. And it has surely lived up to my expectations!’, she said, laughing with sad eyes.

Desultory conversation followed, straying to the courses they had studied, how and where aunts and uncles were, how and where old school friends were. It never got too personal, how-are-you-s and why-don’t-you-s where spared - things both wished passionately they could say or ask, but none having the final required courage to do so.

And then slowly, it was dark. They headed for the car without saying anything, as if the time to leave had been fixed by prior understanding.

When they reached the parking lot near her house, she got down slowly. Then, having closed the door, she bent down and looked at him in the eye through the window.

‘When am I going to see you next?’, she asked. It was the first remotely intimate question of the evening from either of them.

‘Soon. I’ll be here again in the summer.’

She nodded, and said ‘Don’t say Bye this time.’

And in an instant, she turned, ran and sprinted up the stairs of her apartment, not looking back. He was a little surprised with the abruptness of it all, but he thought he understood, and tried to smile to himself. Then, he backed his car, and left the parking lot, longing already, in a very strange way, to visit it again.

Tag, aur kya?

2008-04-25T19:16:00.018+05:30

As I simply have nothing better to do, (exams might be around the corner, but that doesn’t count), I have been tempted into accepting the tag by Marvin, IC. Here it is. Mast bak hai!

Last Movie Seen in Theatre Jodha Akbar. I had been waiting for it for a long, long time. And though it disappointed most people, I found it an entertaining watch.

Too long? Don’t care.

Historically incorrect? Don’t care.

Book Being Read None right now. Exams coming up. Plan to start with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude soon after that.

Favourite Board Game Has to be Ludo! I’ve played Monopoly and Carrom as a kid, but nothing beats the sheer unpredictability and senselessness of Ludo. Ready for a game anytime!

Favourite Magazine Imagine a cricket-crazy kid who can tell you with unbelievable precision how many runs Dravid scored in the post-tea session in the 2nd test between India and Australia in 2001….that was me till around five years back. Thanks to Cricket Samrat and Cricket World and Wisden Cricket and the rest.

Then one day, I found myself looking at Alfred in the mirror, pulling my front teeth out and saying “What, me worry?” and its all been pure MADness since then.

Favourite Smells Nothing like wet earth. Without the shadow of a doubt.

And yes, the ‘smell’ of idle summer afternoons.

Favourite Sounds The rhythmic sound of drums and bells played together at Durga Puja. I wait for DP every year so that I can just close my eyes and for a moment at least, forget everything but that one sound.

And one more. OK. It’s a very ordinary, commonplace sound, I know. But I’ve always been in love with the sound of ceiling fans. Might have to do with my fascination with summers again.

If I think about it, those big, noisy coolers sound nice too.

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up? Simple. How can I get back to bed?

Worst feeling in the world Many of course. Hard to pin-point one. But being ill and alone at the same time has to be somewhere at the top.

Favourite Fast Food Place McDonalds. McVeggie Burger with cheese. Affordable and fulfilling.

Future Child’s Name You know what? I’ve been silly enough to actually decide on one. Not that I’m going to tell you.

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…” be confused about what to do with it.

Do you drive fast? Sometimes. Rarely, in fact.

Ek baar bahut zor ki potty lagi thi, tab kasam se bahut tez gaadi bhagayi thi!

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? No. Of course not. Happ!

Storms - Cool or Scary? Dumb Question.

Do you eat the stems on broccoli? Zara hindi mein samjhayyega.

If you could dye your hair any colour, what would be your choice? Black. So that it amounts to not dyeing my hair at all.

All towns/cities you have lived in Patna, NewDelhi, Patna, Sindri, Patna, NewDelhi, Chandigarh, NewDelhi, Gurgaon, Gadhinagar. I wish Bombay is next.

Favourite sports to watch Cricket. Nothing like spending the whole day on bed, watching a test match day from morning to evening.

Football and Tennis are a good watch, but only if there are big names involved.

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you Dumb Question.

What’s under your bed? Two brooms, a discarded pair of floaters, countless number of thrown biscuits and chocolate wrappers, and a whole lot of dirt and dust.

Would you like to be born as yourself again? Yes. Weighing this against that, yes.

Morning person or night owl? Morning, for me, is the most dreadful time of the day. I think you have your answer.

Over easy or sunny side up? Ya Ya…

Favourite Place to Relax My grandparents’ house in Patna, with time suspended.

Favourite Pie Yaar main to ek hi pie jaanta hoon. Chocolate Pie. Wahi favourite hoga.

Favourite Ice Cream Anything with chocolate. Like Vanilla and Strawberry too. Free mein mil raha ho to koi bhi chalega.

And now, because most of the people I could tag have already been tagged, I invite only Calvin and Alien to carry on with the crap.

Also, now that Jezuz has shown signs that he is still alive on Blogger, I tag him too ;)

A Feast Of Friends

2008-04-21T18:00:00.003+05:30

Did you know freedom exists in school books?
Did you know madmen are running our prisons?

Amir looked out of his window. On a tree branch, the tallest among all the ones around it, there sat a crow. Black.

We're perched headlong
On the edge of boredom
We're reaching for death
On the end of a candle
We're trying for something
That's already found us

The bird sat still, almost looking dead, as if she was bored. Amir looked at her, almost waiting for it to fly away any moment. But the bird wouldn’t budge from its position, it just stayed there, with eyes transfixed on a spot on the ground below, almost looking philosophical.

Wow, I'm sick of doubt
I’m sick of dour faces staring at me from the TV
Tower, I want roses in my garden bower; dig?
Royal babies, rubies
Must now replace aborted strangers in the mud
These mutants, blood-meal for the plant that’s plowed.

He had thought that he won’t move from the window until the bird did. But she didn’t. Maybe, she was dead. Amir finally gave up, and took his eyes away.

CG Road

2008-04-14T13:49:00.002+05:30

I sit down beside a chai-wala, on the pavement, the evening traffic rushing by in front of my eyes. I am tired, I have walked miles around the market in search of the shop Maa asked me to go to, and get this thing she so sorely wanted.

I feel like I’m half dead, the legs hurt and it takes considerable effort to keep my back straight. So I sit down on the pavement, without any thought for decency, place the tea cup on my side and light a cigarette.

Everything feels unreal, as if from a half-dream. The mind feels numb, the noise of the cars and their horns hardly proving to be disturbance.

There is an auto rickshaw at a few feet from me, and having convinced myself that I can’t possibly find the shop alive, I decide that I’ll take this promise of relief and go back to Income Tax, and then to the college. There are not many such promises to be seen around where I’ve sit, and I hope this one stays glued to the spot till I’ve finished my short break.

A few minutes pass by, and a dark man walks up to me. He is carrying several figures of clay, mostly of gods and goddesses, all for sale. This is the last thing that I need right now, and I try not to look the man in the eye, wishing that it puts him off and he goes away. But he doesn’t, he shows me a face sculpture of Ganesh, and asks me whether I would like to take it.

I try to get rid of him without any more conversation and not be rude at the same time, something that always requires a lot of effort. I say that it’s nice but I don’t have any money. He of course doesn’t listen to it, my clothes and demeanour betray me. He persists, saying that he could give me a handsome discount if I like the thing so much. I stop listening and concentrate once more on the traffic, the mind going numb again.

I give the rickshaw another look, the driver sits on the front seat, relaxed, doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. But I know I am stretching my luck, and its time I get going. The dark man meanwhile stops speaking, and instead just stares at me with almost accusing eyes. I look at him straight for the first time, pull both my front pockets out, showing that they don’t have any money, hoping that he would finally take pity on me and leave.

The tea is finished, and so is the cigarette. The auto-wala sits on his seat as before. The dark man stares at me as before. The cars rush by me as before. I get up, with some effort, planning to take the rickshaw.

But as if in a dream, a real dream this time, as soon as I rise to my feet, the dark man and the auto rickshaw leave, almost together, as if this was a joke they had planned on me beforehand.

The tea is finished, and so is the cigarette. The work is not done. The auto rickshaw has left, and so has the dark man. I am tired, and I now have to walk to the next red light almost a kilometre away, just to get a ride.

Have you ever felt that the whole world is against you in some dark, unbelievable conspiracy? I have.

Ran Out

2008-04-08T22:01:00.004+05:30

Somewhere in the icy cold mountains of Kashmir, a soldier woke up this morning. He brushed his teeth, took a freezing bath, and dried himself with his night clothes. The soldier then wore his uniform, put on his belt and gave himself a short glance in the small table mirror beside his bed. He finally put on his army boots, and marched out of his room looking like a man on a mission.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Somewhere in the boiling hot plains of Delhi, Amir woke up this morning. He brushed his teeth, took a nominal bath, and dried himself unnecessarily with a towel. Amir then wore his kurta and jeans, put on his belt and gave himself a rather self-conscious, prolonged stare in the large mirror opposite his bed. He finally put on his floaters, and marched out of his room trying very hard to look like a man on a mission.

P & P

2008-03-31T19:04:00.003+05:30

We’ll talk about lovers tonight.

We’ll talk about a couple, but not about Laila-Majnu, not Soni-Mahiwal, not Heer-Ranjha, not Chirkut Lady-Kekda Man, but about a pair whose relationship has transcended the concept of time, a love that can actually boast of being truly, singularly eternal.

We’ll talk about Poetry & Prose.

Yes, we’ll talk about P & P, two entities who differ as matter of principle, by the way of definition, who are said to be two opposite sides of the coin, but who, as a matter of truth, are linked to each other as two inseparable souls, their destinies so intricately intertwined, that, at times, it takes an effort to recognise who’s who, both working for the same purpose, the same end, but through varied means.

Maybe as they are, after all, when one thinks about it, two opposite sides of the same coin.

And why should we talk about them tonight?

Because reality, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Reality, as the name itself declares, is real, and when the real gets into its own, the two lovers cease to exist as two different entities, they cease to exist as two opposites, they combine and mix into each other to an extent that its impossible to determine what is Poetry and what is Prose, everything taking the shape of Poetic Prose or, alternatively, Prosaic Poetry. Call it PP, the order of occurrence of the lovers’ names depending on the observer’s choice.

Because when reality hits you, it hits you in the form of PP, not as the demarcations of Poetry & Prose, which are just, when one thinks about it, products of man’s passion of convenience.

Hmmm. Done. We’ll talk about Poetry & Prose tonight.

In Colour

2008-03-25T12:23:00.002+05:30

It’s all in super slow motion. Amir is running, but not too fast, on a brown dry narrow patch of land. On both sides of the path, there are lush green fields – without end, the sun shining majestically above.

He feels like a marathon runner, about to complete his final lap, almost reaching the finishing line, the slow, lazily moving surroundings accentuating the feeling of triumph. Not only this, there are a countless number of people on the boundary of the path as well, held away from Amir by a strong, taut rope, the sort one sees at such races.

And like the races, most of those people look frantic, trying to reach out desperately, extending their hands just to have a touch or grab at the centre of attention – Amir. There are others too, who stand quietly by the side, just watching him pass by. Some look angry and some forlorn, gazing at him through the emptiness in their eyes. He can even see a woman holding a handkerchief in one hand, wiping away her tears. For some reason he doesn’t quite understand, all the faces seem familiar in some way or the other, as if he had personally known these people at some point in history.

But nothing clicks.

Their faces suggest that they might be shouting, shrieking, urging him on. But all is mute. All Amir can hear is the sound of his own breath, the motion of his own muscles, his feet thumping on the ground again and again, the sound too, in super slow motion.

People keep passing by, faces appearing and disappearing in the space of a moment. But the finishing line is nowhere in sight, and the jog continues. Slowly, Amir gets so used to the rhythm of it all – his breath, the movement of his limbs, those familiar but unknown faces – that he doesn’t feel anything anymore. His mind has almost gone numb.

And then he sees his mother in the crowd, standing serenely, looking at him with eyes that tell just one emotion. He sees his father too, and his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, the maid at his village home, the kindergarten ‘best friend’ he had almost forgotten the name of, the first girl he ‘fell in love’ with back in Class 2, his junior school class teacher, the bully who pushed him repeatedly against the wall every morning at school, the person at Mother Dairy from whom he used to take the milk every evening, his father’s friend whose sight he couldn’t stand as a child – everyone! Everyone!

Amir watches perplexed, trying to call out to these people, but no words come out. He tries desperately to say something to them, a Hello maybe, but it’s as if his vocal chords have disappeared. He finally gives up, and instead, waves at them as they wave at him, smiling at them as they smile at him.

It feels as if it would never end, new faces replacing old ones, more and more of them coming from the recent past.

And then, he wakes up. It’s a dream.

He smiles to himself, and gets up from the bed, feeling oddly enlightened.

Yummy

2008-03-22T18:02:00.002+05:30

Ladies and gentleman, welcome to Khana Khazana! I’m your host Bery Vored and today I’ve got something really special for you people. It’s called the LSA.

Ha ha, don’t be afraid! It’s not what you’re thinking, just a simple, clean, easy-to-make, easily-made dish, and one that’ll leave you wondering what it really tasted like!

Getting to the recipe, start with a Day Without Anything To Do. Boil it over a Morning Spent In Bed for a minimum of three hours, maximum - as much as you like, and leave it in the Hot Summer Sun for about half an hour.

Pretty easy, isn’t it? And you know what? Half the work is already done!

Now take the pan and put some Indigestible Paranthas to it. If the mixture burns and lets out violent, pungent fumes, you know you’re on track! Take the above and if you so wish, put a pinch of Movies Played And Stopped In Between. To add further spice to your very own LSA, you can even add a little of Newspapers Flipped Through And Closed.

You’re now almost done. To add colour to the thing, you can add two teaspoons of Cigarettes Smoked To The Filter. This is sure to give the mixture a tinge of bright, effusive yellow. If you’re the dreamy type, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add a handful of Absurd Plans For The Evening as well. Just for fun, I mean.

Last but not the least, be sure to put in some Tongues Clicked And Sighs Sighed. This is perhaps the most crucial part of the recipe, giving all the previous actions meaning and form. In a way, summing them up!

All this done, go ahead and have a bite at the yellow, placid looking solid in front of you. What you have got, ladies and gentlemen, is your very own Lazy Summer Afternoon!

I hope you liked what I had on offer today. Your host Bery Vored promises to be back at the same place, same time next week. Till then, its goodbye!

Madman

2008-03-14T00:42:00.004+05:30

The madman sits beneath a tree, from morning nine to evening five. The tree provides him relief from the sun overhead during the day, perhaps the only comfort he has decided to bestow upon himself.

He is always dressed in a grey full-sleeve shirt and white trousers, colours of both being judge-able only through close examination. He looks young, hair all black, skin unwrinkled, almost like a boy in his teens. His skin is jet-black, so much so that no one can tell where the forehead ends and the hair on the head starts. His eyes are small and weird, as if he was suffering from permanent eye-flu. The pupil isn’t even visible; all one can see is a small, dirty white in a forest of black.

He sits cross-legged, carrying a string of beads in his right hand, which he keeps turning incessantly. His left hand is free, resting on his thigh. He doesn’t sit still under the tree; he shakes, twists and turns, jolting all parts of his body vigorously, like a man delirious with fever. He mutters things under his breath, loud enough so that you can hear the sound, low enough that you cannot make them out.

In between this act of pure, crystalline madness, he stops. Suddenly. As if he was in a game and someone had just said FREEZE. He then gets to his feet, moves a little away from the tree, looks up at the skies, smiles – first to himself and then to the intrigued strangers around him, and gets back to work.

He is a madman. His work is madness.

Dark Man III

2008-03-09T00:49:00.011+05:30

‘Dada, come here…’, Amir heard his younger brother Ari shout to him.

‘What is it?’, replied Amir, sitting under the mango tree, reading a book.

‘Come na!’, Ari shrieked again. This time, Amir could detect a tremor in his voice, a tension. He walked over to where Ari was.

Ari was standing in front of a neighbouring house, leaning with both hands rested on the wooden door. He was as tall as a six year old boy is and could see the scene unfolding in the backyard behind the door only between the planks of wood.

In the backyard, there was a dark man squatting on the ground. He was clad only in a white dhoti, everything else about him being black. In his left hand was a chicken, fluttering desperately. In his right was a long knife. The man was trying to control the chicken with his one hand, but the chicken seemed to be in no mood to give it all up so easily.

Ari watched the chicken. Amir watched Ari.

The dark man, finally fed up trying to stifle the chicken, pressed all its feet with his right leg, and in one quick action of his knife, separated the creature’s head from its body. The head flew in the air and fell a couple of feet away. The dark man recoiled sharply from the spectacle, as if in deep disgust.

Ari watched the chicken head. Amir watched Ari.

The rest of the chicken’s body still fluttered for a few moments, Ari constantly staring at it, waiting for it to finally stop.

It eventually did. Amir tried to pull his brother away from the scene, but Ari wouldn’t budge. Amir finally decided to leave, unsure of what had disturbed him more – the incident or the look in Ari’s eyes.

The above is a shot-to-shot description of a scene from the movie Pratidwandi by Satyajit Ray. Liberty has only been taken with the names of the characters.

Morning Blues

2008-02-27T22:18:00.004+05:30

It’s Sunday morning. 11 A.M. Amir gets up, all groggy.

He totters to the door, in search of the newspaper, the only possible excuse he can think of to leave the bed. But it’s the 27th day of January, and as if the world had stopped functioning at all the previous day, there is no news to be found at the bottom of the door.

He unlatches the thing, but there is no milk packet left outside either. Seemingly, the cows and the doodhwala too had ceased to function in deference to our secular, sovereign republic. There won’t be any newspaper or tea today, thinks Amir, and feels like falling on to the bed again.

He switches on the TV, but its morning time, and they have nothing to show but old, stale news of yesterday, old, stale repeat telecast of yesterday’s game show, and the old, stale highlights of yesterday’s match, where India lost by more runs than they actually scored.

Cigarettes!, thinks Amir. There has to be a cigarette somewhere. He jumps for his jeans, but is heartbroken to find no packet there. He remembers distinctly that there was a packet, and there were at least a couple of cigarettes remaining. He runs to the living room, looking on top of the desk, on the sofa, on the divan, on the TV. But there is nothing. He goes back to his bedroom, searches all over again, keen, desperate eyes dying to be sated. But there is nothing.

What a torrid start to the day, thinks Amir, and lies down on the bed again, looking at the ceiling. No tea, no newspaper, no TV, no cigarettes – nothing at all.

Then, in a sudden surge of inspiration, he gets up, runs to his jacket lying on the chair alongside his bed. After all, that’s where he had left the cigarettes last night. He pats on the under pocket, and is overjoyed to find the thing after his heart, relieved to find his saviour.

There is just one cigarette left, but one should be enough for now.

He slides open the matchbox.

There is just one match left, but one should be enough for now.

He strikes fire with that solitary promise of relief, and brings it closer to the cigarette held in his mouth.

The promise burns with promise at first, then starts to die out slowly. Like a dying man - half hopeful, half believing - desperately trying to hold on to life, Amir hurries the thing to the tip of his cigarette. But only a part of the tip catches fire. He sucks frantically at the other end, still hopeful, still believing. But the all-too-obvious happens.

The foul taste of half-burned tobacco in his mouth is the icing on the cake.

It’s Sunday morning. 11:20 A.M. Amir goes to bed, all fed up.

Sums & Differences

2008-02-16T15:30:00.003+05:30

‘Sum me up’, she said, excited and afraid at the same time.

Amir looked at her, as if for the first time, trying to find meaning in her face, her hands, her hair.

And then he spoke.

‘You see it’s impossible for me to do that. Everything that I would say about you can never be more than half of what I really mean. And if I really think about it, it’s not for me to say what you really are, because what I think I know about you might just be 0.0000000000000001 % of what you actually are. Of what you actually are.’

Silence. 11 seconds. Of the uneasy type.

‘So I might as well say nothing. Nothing – that’s 0.0000000000000000 %. You see it doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 0 at the end, if you have 20 0’s preceding it. After the decimal point, I mean. I hope you see that.’

Silence. 9 seconds. Of the uneasy type.

‘Do you?’

She didn’t.

She didn’t answer. Nevertheless, Amir had successfully negotiated the challenge.

The Temple

2008-02-08T20:22:00.001+05:30

Overnight Rain. Mud. Temple. Outside. Corner. Amir. Standing.

Question: Why is Amir standing in front of the temple?
Options:

A) Amir loves standing in the mud.

B) Amir regards this as the garden spot of the city. He is just drinking in the view.

C) Amir is a sleepwalker. He doesn’t know. He is just sleeping. He is just walking.

D) Amir is bored.

Correct Answer: D

Amir is bored. Why? Because there is nothing to do. Nothing to do! He is waiting for the aarti to begin. And finish. There is quite some time left before it did, and his parents, intensely devout that they are, are determined not to leave the temple without having witnessed it.

So, escaping the repeated insistence of his father to sit with them inside, he came out for a walk.

Question: Then why is he standing?
Answer: He soon found that the stroll wasn’t quite a good idea – the monsoons were on, the road was muddy, with puddles aplenty. So finally, without any options left to consider, he decided to stand at a corner and look.

But look at what?

Question: Describe the scene in front of Amir.
Answer: The place outside the temple is crowded. It is evening; time for the aarti, and therefore people are flocking in, smelling of their undiminishing, unshakeable faith in religion. There is the smell of incense too, coming from the shops on his right and left, selling just about everything you might associate with worship – coconuts (for prasad), cloth (for the Gods to wear), specially perfumed agarbattis to simply take away, etc etc etc.

And yes, they are also selling what might be called religious memorabilia – small artefacts, paintings of Krishna and Radha, even watches with Krishna playing his beloved flute on the dial - which devoted followers can buy to remind themselves of their devotion, and foreigners can take away to show off to their folk back home.

“Hey Barney, what do you have there?!”

“Oh I got that from Indyeah. It’s a Krishnay-Radder painting, one of the Hindu gods, quite a character. And that’s his wife… no no… mistress… na… girlfriend… well, something of that sort.”

“Fuckin’ Beautiful Man!”

“Yeah. Exotic! Heh heh.”

There are many foreigners to be seen here, not in the clothes Amir would associate with them, but in saffron, with brown beads worn in a mala, dressed just like sadhus, the sort he’d seen in the movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna – long blonde hair, one chilam in the mouth, one in hand, doped to the bone, singing bhajans as if they really meant it.

Harry-Om-Harry! Harry-Om-Harry!

Face white white. Clothes saffron. So that if you gave them a green turban, they would look like the tiranga ulta. The tri-colour inverted. Ha ha!

There are some which are in their usual attire – tourists – looking like something out of a Woodland advertisement. Bottle green jackets, khakis, brown mountaineer shoes. There are a couple standing in front of the shops, enraptured by the sight of an infant eating bread crumbs, picking them up from the ground itself.

“Rick, look at that!”

“Yeah…got it”, says Rick, clicking on his state-of-the-art camera (Canon EOS1. 10 megapixels. 10X Zoom. Wow.), with a triumphant look on his face, glad to have his Indyeah! - and her blood-sister Poverty - on film.

The crowds slowly thicken. Twenty minutes pass. Amir can hear the bells ringing from the temple. The aarti has begun. He heads back.

Question: How does Amir feel?
Options:

A) Amir is relieved. The wait is over.

B) Amir is angry with himself; he missed the start of the aarti!

C) Amir is sad. It was fascinating looking at the crowd around him.

D) We can’t say. We don’t know. Amir is a sleepwalker.

Bapu

2008-01-30T23:48:00.001+05:30

What does one think when he or she says the name ‘Gandhi’ in his mind? How does one see him - as a man, a phenomenon or a myth? Whatever you suppose him to be, how do you approach the entity, how do you make sense of him and his legacy, how do you understand what to do with it, how to put all of it together and even sum it up, if possible?

It is far from easy. Not just for an inexperienced, relatively uneducated youth like me but also, it seems, for people who have spent a lifetime ruminating over him.

The Gandhi Ashram today was not quite its normal, serene self. There was an air of activity around, more people than usual to be seen in the museum, around and inside Gandhi’s kutir, and on the edge of the Sabarmati River, admiring the view.

It was his 60th death anniversary, and there were to be a series of events taking place in his memory, from the morning Prayer to talks by eminent sociologists and Gandhians during the day. I reached the place at around one (thanks to three silly lectures in the morning), long after the Prayer and the first round of talks, missing the opportunity to listen to none other than Ashis Nandy speaking.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to listen to some other esteemed speakers, including our own professors Tridip Suhrud and Ganesh Devy. Some talked of his relationship with religion and secularism, some of his take on nation-building, and some on counterfactual questions such as how different history would have been, if he had lived 125 years, as he jokingly (or maybe not) said he wanted to. I listened with unwavering attention, trying to grasp and understand as much as I could. And I daresay I followed much of the discussion.

But now, as I try to think of what I learnt from the day, how much it helped me to understand the man, his life and thought, I find myself at loss yet again. As before, when I try to gather my thoughts on him, to sum him up, there is nothing that comes to mind.

All blank.

And why is it so? Perhaps, the biggest reason why he eludes all reason is because Gandhi simply could not be classified. Humans rely on classifications for their understanding. We find it convenient and surer about a person once we see him as a part of something bigger. For example, the labels we put on the friends around us (like ‘Oh he’s a politician’ or ‘Saala nerd hai’) ease our mind, helping us to understand the person, seeing him as what we have defined him as.

In this sense, it is impossible to classify or label Gandhi. What would you call him – a religious thinker, a politician, a social worker, a designer, an educationist? What, if anything, defines him? This is almost beyond me to determine. And until I’ve decided on that, the approach, the man will continue to escape my understanding.

For some time to come anyway!

An Evaluation?

2008-01-23T19:02:00.001+05:30

This is a ‘personal’ post. So, kindly bear with me.

When you’re 21, you are used to changing your views as frequently as your clothes. Views about everything, be it people, places, or events are under constant scrutiny sub-consciously, if not consciously. Things that you absolutely deplored as a teenager can be the very things you follow earnestly now, and needless to say, the reverse is also true.

Now that I find my self quite deeply engrossed in the phenomenon of Gandhi, courtesy the course I’ve been offered at my college on his ‘life and thought’, it was rather amusing to go through an article I wrote for the college magazine about two and a half years ago.

Two and a half years is a pretty long time. And for someone as philosophically inconsistent as I regard myself to be, it sure is a pretty long time! Anyway, the article was interestingly titled ‘Gandhi-An Evaluation’ and without being too boastful, I would like to say that I found myself more-or-less correct in my convictions even then.

I’ll leave the reader to make a better judgement.

Gandhi – An Evaluation

Gandhi – never has a name in history evoked so much admiration, yet so much disdain, so much faith, yet so much disbelief, so much love, yet so much hatred ! It is undoubtedly the most researched name in Indian history, yet the man and his thought process to this day remain enigmatic to his own countrymen.

No one would argue about Gandhi’s contribution to the Indian national movement, of which he was undeniably an integral part. His twin ideals of ‘Ahimsa’ and ‘Satyagraha’ formed the pillars of India’s struggle for independence. Gandhi, a man for whom public behaviour was simply an extension of the self can be credited with playing a leading role in the birth and realisation of that something we today call ‘Indian Nationalism’.

Then why, one asks, does he receive so much indignation at the hands of his own folk ? Why does a man who is generally accepted abroad as one of the greatest man to have set foot on this earth get so much disgust in the very own land he served ? Why doesn’t the “Father of the Nation” appeal to India’s youth, as India enters the new millennium?

The answers are quite hard to find. After all, Gandhi was the man who urged people to think about “India’s starving millions”, who gave Harijans their name, who stood for the emancipation of women, who dreamt of a proud and independent India, who in earnest, dedicated his life to public duty and sacrifice.

But Gandhi’s biggest flaw was a product of his ultimate source of inner power – his ego. Gandhi’s tendency to see public life as an extension of his inner self, his inability or simply the disinclination to keep those two separate was his biggest shortcoming.

One can cite various instances to provide proof of his self-obsession. His decision to call off the Non-cooperation movement after the incident in Chauri-Chaura, despite huge protests by the men who had wholeheartedly chosen to support him, gave way to the belief that he placed his own thoughts and beliefs above everyone else. Another example would be his refusal to keep away Bhagat Singh and co. from the gallows, when he was in a strong-enough position with the British to do so. The martyrs could have been saved, but unfortunately, they stood for principles Gandhi fundamentally opposed.

But his detractors often get tempted in taking criticism too far. Gandhi has often been indirectly held responsible for something as gory as the partition. The Muslims claim that Gandhi had a soft corner for Pandit Nehru and wouldn’t let Jinnah, the Muslim representative assume the highest political post in independent India. That, they say, was one of the biggest reasons behind the division which took the lives of millions. Interestingly enough, the Hindus on the other hand feel that he appeased the Muslims too much and often gave in to their “unreasonable demands”. It is not merely a co-incidence that Gandhi was murdered by one of his own religion.

But to understand Gandhi, to admire him, one needs to go beyond these actions to the underlying philosophy. It would be unfair to see him only as the architect of the Indian freedom struggle, as its greatest leader. The real greatness of Gandhi lies in his simplicity of thought, in his application of his “Experiments with Truth”, in his vision of India. Gandhi fought for an India independent, politically and economically. He dreamt of an India free from unemployment, illiteracy and fundamentalism. He envisioned a state without violence and terrorism of any kind. This unshakeable belief that violence bred more violence and it eventually led to the complete moral decay of the society was the foundation his thoughts and actions stood on.

Today, when the world is caught in a grip of hatred and violence, in a world where terrorism has become bigger and better than ever before, can we afford to forget that “half-naked fakir” ? His message, due to its simplicity and straightforward logic is ever-relevant, something that needs to be remembered if the human race hopes to avoid eventual doom.

As General Douglas MacArthur once said, and I quote him – “In the evolution of civilization, if it is to survive, all men cannot fail eventually to adopt his beliefs.”

And let us all hope that we don’t.

Of Screams & Grunts, Scratches & Tears

2008-01-13T00:15:00.002+05:30

Dear Mr. Verma,

It has been almost fifteen years since you passed away. But on this cold December night, with the fire burning alongside and me lying awake in bed, I still can’t help feeling that you have remained with me, like an albatross over my heart, soul and mind, all throughout these last few years. I want to make clear that this letter to you is not about this night only, or the last, but about many such sleepless nights I have spent thinking about us, about that fateful afternoon. The afternoon that gave us both new lives. Brand new.

Fifteen years in a normal man’s life is quite a substantial period of time, Mr. Verma. No one remembers the petty details of everyday drudgery such a long way into the past, like what he had for breakfast, whether he had bathed that morning, or whom he met, relatives and friends. Or strangers, with long, unordered hair and sideburns, a patchy beard. But this day was different, wasn’t it? What happened on this day, as I said, changed two lives forever, making us both, in a way, newborn twins, with intertwined destinies.

But really, it had all started as just another day. I had gone to work early morning, having eaten the leftovers of the dinner the night before. I hadn’t been that hungry anyway, one and a half chapattis and a bit of salt was all I needed for breakfast. Mai and Bhaiya were still asleep when I left home. It was still drizzling outside, last night it had poured as if the gods had suddenly emptied their bowels, having kept their piss preserved cleverly for the last few weeks, saving it for this special day.

I had a job in the well-off houses on the other side of the pond, where every member of every family had a car or scooter to call his own, where the women had beautifully bordered red saris to wear every October for the Durga Puja, where the children had corn flakes for breakfast. My task was to finish washing their clothes, dusting away the dust from their exquisite bedroom drawing room artefacts, clean the floor, first with a broom and then with a wet piece of cloth, which more often than not, was the Saheb’s discarded vest or T-shirt. I had taken the responsibility of just one house, as the work was quite time-consuming and tiring too. I was only eighteen years old then, after all, a little girl with a restless mind and a restless body.

But oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Verma, maybe I’m digressing. Why should I burden and bore with such irrelevant details? How would you be interested in what I did before we met, how tired I was and what I had planned for the evening? Pretty foolish of me, I must say.

Let me come back to the point, to the epicentre, the afternoon that gave us new lives. Brand new.

So I went back home that afternoon, bolted the door from inside, joined two paav-rotis together and sat down leaning against the wall, watching the wet exterior through the little hole in our wall, munching away. Mai and Bhaiya had not been back from work yet, and there was nothing much to do.

Barely five minutes had passed when I heard a knock on the door.

It was you, wearing a pyjama-kurta, your hair long and unordered with sideburns and a patchy beard, smiling broadly. I asked you what you wanted and I suppose you remember what you told me.

Where’s your Bhaiya, you asked.

Not back yet, I replied.

And as I tried to close the door, you just stuck your hand in, and asked if you could get a glass of water. Sure you can, I had said and then went in. To this day, I can’t believe how you, without making any noise at all, got into the room and bolted the door from inside. All I remember is that you then grabbed me by the waist from behind. I was shocked, I forced myself away. But you just smiled, came slowly towards me again. Then I realised what I was in for, I asked you to back off. You didn’t and leapt for me again. I don’t exactly remember what I did at this precise moment, but I think I must have screamed (did I?), for you then took out a handkerchief from your kurta pocket and thrust it into my mouth.

What followed is only there as a blur in my memory. But I suppose we both know that too well. Why get into the details, the details of the event that gave us new lives. New. Brand new.

But to put it briefly, among many other things, there were muffled screams, violent grunts, a painful scratch or two and a piece of cloth torn so savagely that nothing remained of it after those fifteen eventful minutes.

Can you recall those fifteen eventful minutes, Mr. Verma? Can you recall the screams, grunts, scratches, tears? Can you recall anything?

Anyway, so much for nostalgia. Coming back to What Happened Next, I later heard that the villagers had come to know about our little meeting, about the screams, the grunts, the scratches and the tears, about how they pounced on you in an intensely grotesque realisation of the power and legitimacy of self-imposed justice, about how they punched and kicked you till you could breathe no more, about how they then threw your peaceful self into the nala, to be eaten away by dogs and pigs.

I offer you my condolences, for I have nothing else to offer.

For, to me, what they did to you afterwards held no meaning. They also could just have cut your penis off, chopped it into little pieces, and fed it to the crows, or something even more appropriate. But the issue is that it wouldn't have changed my life in any way. Lives don’t change twice so drastically in just one day, Mr. Verma. My fate, in other words, was sealed.

Fifteen years since that fateful afternoon, and it is still fresh in my mind. To this day, all I need is to strain my uneducated, illiterate brain a little, scratch my head a bit, and I can live it all again, I can feel you on my body the same way again, and again, I hear some screams, grunts, scratches and tears.

And I have a gut feeling that I’ll take those sounds to my grave, or even to my next life. Who knows? For those sounds are the irrepressible reminders of how everything can so easily change, how the ordinary life of a poor, village girl can be transformed so quickly into something absolutely new. Brand new.

In this, I feel that you are an integral part of my life, and my fate. In other words, if you would kindly grant me the liberty to say so, you are my best friend, my closest confidant.

And how do I end this stupid letter, this ‘The Story Of My Life’, Mr. Verma? One way would be to curse you, abuse you, saying that I hope your body rots in hell, if it didn’t reach hell already rotten, eaten away by the dogs. But that’s what’s expected, isn’t it? Though a part of me wants to wish the same for you, I would like to think otherwise. For I, fifteen years from that day, remember you with what I’m quite embarrassed to call a fondness, a queer closeness, and I think I know why. Because you, you alone, on that afternoon changed my life into something different. Something new. Brand new.

For the better or for the worse, is another issue.

God Bless You
The Girl
(For you wouldn’t know my name anyway)

Amir

2008-01-05T00:56:00.002+05:30

It might be a dream. Only a dream. But Amir can’t be sure.

The figure in front looks real enough. Amir glances at the window. The curtains are drawn and just below them, he can see a thin blue carpet of morning light. It must be around five in the morning.

How was he awake? Nobody woke him up, his parents were asleep in their bedroom upstairs and he was almost sure that there hadn’t been any noise or rattle to break his sleep. Yet, he had woken up, more peacefully than ever before, as if he wasn’t actually asleep, only lying down with his eyes closed.

And then when he looked up, he saw this man, sitting on the corner of his bed, feet down, only his silhouette visible by the light coming from the adjoining dining room. For more than five minutes now, Amir had been looking at this figure, the figure looking at him, both silent. Oddly, Amir felt no great surprise or fear at first sight of the figure, almost as if he expected it to be there, as if he wanted it to be there.

It can’t be a dream.

‘Who are you?’, the figure finally broke the silence. His voice was even, controlled, like a man sure of what he was saying or asking.

‘Who are you?’, Amir asked in reply.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

Who was he? For a moment, Amir felt like getting up, switching the lights on, to kill the suspense, but something within urged him not to do so. He wanted to move his legs, his hands, but they seemed to have frozen, unable to move. Or was it he holding them back? He couldn’t be sure.

‘Why do you ask me this question? What is that you want to know?’, Amir asked after this brief moment of hesitation.

‘Just describe yourself.’

It was quite a funny game he was playing here, Amir thought. This might be a dream (can’t really be reality, can it?), and if it was a dream, where was the harm in getting on with it?

‘I am Amir…a nineteen-year old boy…born on the 7th of June, 1985…living in New Delhi right now… with my parents…ummm…thats it.’

‘Be precise.’

‘What do you mean?’

The figure sighed, shuffled a bit in its position, his face fixed on Amir all the time.

‘Are you sure of what you just said?’

‘Well,’ Amir said, half laughing, ‘there is hardly anything to be sure of. I am Amir and I was born in 1985. Is there anything to be wrong about there?’

‘But that isn’t what you said.’

Amir stared back at the figure. What was he exactly getting at? What sort of answer did he want?

‘OK. I am Amir, born into this world on the 7th of June, 1985. Does that satisfy you?’

‘How can you be so sure about the date?’

Now, this was getting silly. Amir began to feel a little irritated, not able to see the point in it all.

‘You don’t think I was there to note down the time and date of my own birth?’, Amir replied, a hint of restlessness very much noticeable, ‘My parents told me that it was in the evening of that day that I first saw this world, and I choose to believe them. Will this do for you?’

‘Tell me what you know. You alone.’

Amir clicked his tongue, tired of this seemingly silly dialogue. What does this man mean when he says ‘You Alone’? Did I know anything straight from my birth, from my mother’s womb, or wherever and whatever I was before that? Isn’t everything I know been told to me by the entities around me, living and non-living? And did I ever have a choice not to believe them and think otherwise?

‘I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean, but if I do, then I’ll just say that if there is anything I know, if there is anything I’m reasonably sure of, it is this – I am called Amir, and I’m living in 2004 A.D.. Saying anything else would be incorrect as per your question, I think.’

‘You answer correctly, my dear friend. Well, almost! Make sure you remember this answer. Remember that there is hardly anything else you can be reasonably sure of, and absolutely nothing else you can be confidently definite about.’

‘I don’t think I understand you.’

‘You will, eventually. Just remember what I’ve told you.’

And then, the figure disappeared, his silhouette dissolving into the air, as if it was never there anyway.

Amir woke up from his mother’s call at around eight in the morning. He could recall the meeting with the mysterious figure with remarkable clarity, but he couldn’t really make up his mind as to whether it happened for real or was it only a dream, a fantasy.

Unclaimed

2007-12-23T02:14:00.001+05:30

To make love to a stranger is the best.

There is no riddle and there is no test -

To lie and love, not aching to make sense

Of this night in the mesh of reference.

To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,

And understand, as only strangers may.

To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart

Preferring neither to prolong nor part.

To rest within the unknown arms and know

That this is all there is; that this is so.

Not mine. Vikram Seth's. Exquisite.

Denver Paaji !

2007-12-15T22:06:00.002+05:30

I walked into Music Station, a place selling music and film CD’s and DVD’s. I was there to return the Bhool Bhulaiyya CD I had rented the day before. There were two people already at the counter, and I waited for my turn, looking at the various shelves having a host of movie discs on show.

On the other side of the shop, standing aside the pair of headphones and the couple of music CD’s you can listen to for trial, were two typical Haryanvi Jats – tall, burly and with an air of unmistakable menace around them. One of them had the headphones to his ears, while the other was going through the adjoining shelf.

“Paaji! Aap yeh gaana suno….paagal ho jayoge aap!”, cried the first one, suddenly.

“Achha ji? Lao!”, replied the other, and took over the headphones.

A few moments later, he handed them back.

“Denver hai na yeh?”

“Haan ji…aapne suna hoga yeh gaana pehle…”

“Haan suna hai….teri gaadi mein hi kaafi baar”

“Magical voice hai ji, is bande ki….”

“Hmmm.”

The man on the headphones now went on to listen to the song with sheer delight on his face, almost dancing along with the tune. He was singing as well, and his voice was as horrible as horrible could be, but I got enough words from them to recognise the song –

“Country roaaaaaaaaaaaadddds, take me hommmmmmmmmme
To the plaaaaaaaaace, I beloooooooooooong
West virginiaaaaaaaaaa, mountain mommmmmmmaaaaaaaa
Take me hommmmmmmmmme, country roaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadddds !”

“What a voice, yaar, what a voice!”, he finally concluded, putting the headphones down.

It was amazing, to see two of these so-typical desi Haryanvis, whom I had seen previously only as local kirana shop owners, traffic policeman or bus drivers (and found it hard to associate them with anything else), to be discussing John Denver at a posh music store.

And then when I thought about it, I discovered that this is exactly what Gurgaon has to offer, which is different from all other places in India.

Here, you have desi Jats enjoying Denver and other western artists, big, over-sized aunties going about in fashionable, obscene-looking, designer trousers, and teenagers, ‘cool dudes and dudettes’, all dressed to kill, enjoying their evening out at expensive coffee parlours.

It is fascinating, when not slightly irritating.

Stream Kya Hai ?

2007-12-11T00:04:00.003+05:30

He was a heavily moustached, heavily built man of medium height. We shared the same coupe on the Ashram Express from Ahmedabad to Delhi. It was seven in the morning, there were at least three hours before the train reached its destination, and it was out of boredom, and boredom alone, that this man had started asking me questions of no or little significance to him.

I had been sitting on the lower berth since 4 A.M., numbly looking at passing stations, unable to withstand the blast of the air-conditioner while trying to sleep on the top berth. The cooling system had been strengthened especially after Jaipur, to leave the coach feeling like Simla, and even three blankets, one stacked over the other, weren’t enough to help me forget that fact.

The man had joined me at around six thirty, and sat down, looking out with a stoned expression on his face. Then, after some time, getting out of his trance, he took out two packets of manufactured bhujia from his handbag. He offered them to me, and when I refused (because I wasn’t keen on taking my hands out from my jacket pocket, more than any other reason), he insisted, and did so repeatedly, until a vocal, assertive “No, no” from me silenced him finally.

After about two minutes of silence, he then asked me if I was a student. When I said I was, he stared casually at me for a while, munching away, as if trying to decipher the meaning of the encrypted piece of information I had just communicated to him.

“Ahmedabad mein?”

“Haan.”

“Kaun sa college?”

“DA-IICT. Dhirubhai Ambani……”

“Engineer?”

“Haan. Engineering”

“ Wo to Reliance ka hai na? Aapki naukri to wahi lagti hogi?”

And for the 572^nd time since I’d been an engineering student at DA-IICT, I explained that there were other companies that came for placements, that the people absorbed by Reliance formed a very small percentage.

He seemed slow at taking in this answer as well, and there was another pause of about two minutes.

“Stream kya hai?”

And as on countless train journeys and family meetings before, I had to explain to him that I was doing a B.Tech. in ICT, what it meant and what exactly the course structure was like.

He listened attentively, nodding quite vigorously in between, trying to show that he understood. After having taken the almost mandatory few minutes’ silence again, he began to speak, now about his family. His way of pausing between questions had an unsettling effect on me – every time he became quiet, I felt glad at being left alone finally, only to have him start another line of conversation a few moments later.

“Mera bhatija…wo bhi engineering kar raha hai…wo jo college hai na…err…err…Nirma.”

“Oh Nirma…”

“Nirma.”

(A shorter spell of silence this time, of about 20 seconds)

“Uske board mein achhe number aaye the….”

“Haan?”

“Mera bhatija…10^th mein 90-95 percent laaya tha….12^th mein 80-82 aaye the…”

I nodded. Solemnly.

He went on to tell me about his entire range of bhatijas and bhatijis then, how much they had scored in the various examinations they had given, how talented they were, and what they were doing with their lives as of now.

After a little time, about half an hour, I realised that seeing me listening to him attentively, he felt encouraged to tell me more, to carry on with his discourse on where his family stood professionally.

It was rather weird; to see this man whom I’d known for just a couple of hours, when we hadn’t even exchanged names, to talk to me about his entire family, about their goals and aspirations, about what he thought about them, it confused me, it made me feel uncomfortable, and I wanted to end it. Yet courtesy allowed nothing else.

But with conscious effort, I tried to look less attentive - nodded less, looked out of the window more, fiddled around with my handbag. He was initially slow at taking in this clue as well, but he finally did, and then gradually assumed silence. I was relieved; the rest of the trip passed without any further dialogue.

The Modern Mela

2007-12-02T23:31:00.001+05:30

Mr. Seth adjusted his tie, pushing the knot to the right just that little bit. As had always been his habit, he wanted everything absolutely perfect before he left the house. The coat was spot clean, the trousers as well pressed as they could possibly be and the black shoes shone gloriously. The shirt, however, did have a light yellow spot on the left arm, but that also would be hidden away with the coat. Anyway, there was no other option, the rest of the shirts were either dirty or in the laundry.

She would have hated this! “Sit at home if you don’t have a clean pair”, she would have said. But who’s watching now?

It had been nine days since Mr. Seth had arrived in Delhi at his son’s place. The inertia with which he had spent all the years following his wife’s death at their Kanpur residence had finally been broken by his son’s repeated insistence to give him a visit. Realising that he could not put off the trip any longer, he had agreed on a two-week stay.

He was more than half way into it now and the big city hadn’t made much sense to him. It was a circus existence, too busy with itself, without any time for an old, simple, retired bank manager like himself. Kanpur was better, with the huge balcony, the open garden, friends and her name written all over the place. Nevertheless, living here was an experience in itself, one which had to be had. There were things to admire here, the wide roads, the tall buildings, the new state-of-the-art malls. Yes, the malls! That’s what Mr. Seth intended to see today.

Anil and Priya had promised to take him shopping one of these days. But they hardly seemed to stay home, leave alone taking him out. Both left early morning and came back late, after which they seemed too exhausted to do anything else but eat and sleep. Even the only Sunday that could possibly have been used for an outing was spent with Anil on the laptop. How much do these corporate firms make you work? Can’t you even have one day left to yourself, even one Sunday?

Mr. Seth eventually decided to make the trip himself. It was two in the afternoon, he had had his lunch and there were at least six hours before Anil and Priya returned from office. Going at this time had an added advantage – there wouldn’t be too much of a crowd at the malls. So, he gave his tie another look in the mirror, and when satisfied fully with the symmetry of the knot, picked up his phone, his purse, the keys of the flat and left.

It was December, and though the sun was out, Mr. Seth felt glad that he had brought the coat along. The mall that had just come up, Anil had told him, was just a kilometre away from the flat, opposite to the central market. I’ll walk, these legs still good enough. Mr. Seth walked past the fruit and vegetable shops, the petrol pump, and turned right for the mall.

The entrance of the building looked singularly spectacular. Huge advertisement posters of movie stars and models hung on either side, and in between was an electronic display flashing the latest news in red. The crowd, unexpectedly, was substantial. Even on a weekday? Even at this hour? Mr. Seth pushed open the glass door and went inside, passing through the automated security check.

The sight inside was nothing short of spectacular as well. The structure was of a longish rectangle, with three stories, screaming out a countless number of brands. The huge posters were inside too, on the far side of a white girl dressed in corporate attire, holding a mobile phone quite provocatively with its flap open. Mr. Seth could sight some benches positioned just a few feet away, he decided to sit for a little while and give his limbs some rest.

There was an ice-cream shop near the benches and he saw a couple asking their two sons which flavour they would like to have. One opted for butter-scotch while the other for chocolate. Having taken the ice-creams and paid the money, the couple proceeded to sit on the bench opposite Mr. Seth. They looked distinctly Punjabi, the man tall and stout, the woman wearing a shiny salwar-kameez and bangles up to her elbow. The children, having got what they wanted, started to wander off in random directions. When the woman noticed that keeping an eye on them wasn’t going to be easy in the crowd, she called out – “Sanju Pintu come back to Mamma. There there! See the ice-cream’s all over your shirts!”. And although the ice-cream wasn’t quite on their shirts yet, Sanju and Pintu came back to Mamma obediently.

After a while, Mr. Seth got up and walked further to the end of the rectangle. Right in the middle of the ground floor, he could see Barista, a coffee-shop which offered a whole lot more than just coffee. One look at the prices was enough to convince him that a stop here wasn’t really going to prove lucrative. Oh God! Is the Chocolate Truffle topped with jewels or does one of every twenty Café Frappes contain a diamond at the bottom of the cup? Having given the prices a long-enough, satisfactory stare, he then decided to explore the other floors.

The other floors were pretty much the same. All the difference they provided was in the name of the brands, selling everything from cosmetics to music discs. He could see a couple of teenagers trying out a pair of sport shoes at Reebok, typical ‘high-society’ women flipping through all the salwar-kameezs on offer at a designer clothes outlet, people munching noodles at Yo China!, talking animatedly to each other behind glass walls. The atmosphere, overall, resembled celebration, of each celebrating the power of choices with oneself. What if I stood in the middle and screamed at the top of my voice? Would anyone notice? Let alone noticing, would they even hear me? And if Mr. Seth had expected something different on the top floor, it wasn’t to be. The place was largely occupied as a gaming zone, offering everything from bowling to video games. People of all ages seemed to throng especially to the bowling area, where a queue of at least fifteen people awaited their turn to get inside. The only other places except these were PVR Cinemas and Haldiram’s. And having been lured by the familiarity of the name, Mr. Seth decided to take away something from the food outlet.

Haldiram’s itself was stacked up to the maximum, in fact more than any other restaurant he had seen before. It looked like a hall-sized mela, where two hundred hungry people had been shoved in and asked to “Please Accommodate”. Looking at the counter queue, it wasn't going to be easy getting a Butter Milk for himself. I am here now, so I might as well take something. So, he joined the line, waited for around five minutes and having taken the chit for the milk, proceeded towards the food counter. There were two men there, taking the chits from the hungry folk and returning with the desired items. Mr. Seth, not quite in the age to go barging, putting his chit in front, waited while the younger ones had been satisfied. The only consolation in all this was that the Butter Milk was of very good quality, almost, just almost worth its cost of forty rupees.

Now convinced that he had seen all there was to see, Mr. Seth decided to leave. And having successfully negotiated the challenging escalators he had previously experienced only at airports, reached the ground floor again. Just then, he spotted, in between all the hullabaloo and crowd, something called the Om Book Shop. What is a book shop doing here, at this circus? And glad that he had finally found something to suit his taste, he decided to give the place a visit too.

Nor did it disappoint him. The place was noisier than book shops normally are, and a lot more crowded. But in terms of size and the variety offered, it was easily the biggest of its kind that he had ever seen. In a corner near the entrance, there were magazines displayed, almost all of which had names he hadn’t heard of before. Probably imported. And beyond that, he saw rows and rows of books, dealing with almost everything – fiction, lifestyle, health, travel, cuisines. The sheer enormity of the place overwhelmed Mr. Seth, and he found himself tempted to pick up a book and sit on one of the chairs kept in the middle. It was only because he could not decide on the one thing to read that prevented him from doing so, and he finally decided to leave.

It was almost evening now, and the crowd outside was beginning to thicken, as if it wasn’t thick enough already. Mr. Seth, gave the place one last look from outside, admiring its enormity more than anything else, and then walked past the petrol pump, the fruit and vegetable shops to his flat.

The house inside felt abnormally quiet. Anything would, after coming from the place I’ve been to. He suddenly found himself tired, mentally more than physically. All the noise and crowd had taken a toll on the old man. So, he had two glasses of water, changed his clothes and decided to get some sleep for a couple of hours.

Evening came. And so did Anil and Priya. For some reason which even he couldn’t sum up, he decided not to tell them about his little trip to the modern mela.

Patiya Ma

2007-11-28T18:42:00.002+05:30

When my mother was a kid, there was a maid who used to live with her at my grandparents’ place. She did the cleaning and washing for the house, and also looked after the children when my grandparents were away. She stayed with my family for about ten years, returning to her village home when my mother moved out after her marriage.

Everyone called her Patiya Ma. I don’t really know what her real name was, and what Patiya means, if anything.

Anyway, some years ago, on a visit to our village, my mother and I went to meet Patiya Ma at her place. Patiya Ma now lived alone, her children having deserted her with all the money after her husband’s death. She had a house, but it hardly could have been called so. It was a kachcha makaan, with a tin roof placed on top to prevent sunlight from coming in. She herself showed no sign of well-being, old, wrinkled and thin.

All I remember of Patiya Ma from the brief meeting is she squatting on the ground, hands joined together, wearing a worried expression on her face. She said she wanted to die, and when my mother asked her why, her reply with a faint, twisted smile was “Jiyab ta ki ki nai dekhab”, which translates roughly as “If I live, god knows what more I’m destined to see”.

She repeated this line after almost every thing she talked about – her family, her health, her shortage of cash.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

But why am I writing about it? What’s the point?

It’s just that for the last few days, when I’ve been having all kinds of examination papers dished out at me, when I’m feeling utterly helpless trying to cope up with it, when the world seems to leave no chance to annoy, trounce and demoralise me, I feel suddenly reminded of Patiya Ma and her favourite words.

Jiyab ta ki ki nayi dekhab.

Another Dark Man

2007-11-12T15:58:00.001+05:30

Gurgaon Railway Station. I have just got off my train from Ahmedabad. As I keep the luggage on the back seat of my car parked just outside, I feel my throat dry. I walk over to the market opposite to the station to get a bottle of mineral water.

The scene here deserves special mention. This is old Gurgaon, not the sort of place you associate with the name, poles apart from its savvy incarnation. There are no malls here, no six-lane highways, no high-rise apartments.

Instead, there are narrow and dusty roads, a bunch of innumerable estate agencies and liquor shops, cows and pigs. For all you know, this could have been your local village bazaar. There is also the sun right above, putting on the heat. Everyone around looks busy with himself, typical mid-day time market scene.

Amidst all this, on the narrow road divider, there lies a grey-white cement sack, and a man. The man is dark, and very thin. He is wearing a white shirt and a dark blue lungi. He lies there in a very peculiar position, as if he had first dropped down on his knees and then, had suddenly dived head down into the sack. His face is buried deep into the cement, the sides covered by his hands which seem to be holding the hair above his ears.

For some reason, he looks annoyed, angry. He looks annoyed with his world, like a child would be with his mother if denied a bar of chocolate. Something about his demeanour suggests that he is determined, very sure about the fact that unless his world comes up to him personally, gives him his bar of chocolate, and apologises, he won’t move an inch. He’ll stay right there all day, with his head buried in that sack, like an angry, spoilt child.

The world, meanwhile, gives a yawn. No one takes notice of the man. The sun above shines its November shine.

A Game Of Mutual Favours

2007-10-31T22:00:00.001+05:30

They finally decided on a game of Mutual Favours.

It was the final resort after about one month of general dingling-dangling. Nothing else seemed to have worked so far. Conversations still ended abruptly, arguments ensued over petty issues, and tension loomed large over the entire household, like an albatross. The apparent misunderstanding and distrust in each other had reached such huge proportions that one hardly felt comfortable in asking the other for even ordinary help. So much so, that He didn’t even ask her for a glass of water when he had a headache last Friday. He preferred walking over the kitchen himself and fetching it even while She was in the adjoining room, only a shout away.

This, as expected, made living under the same roof very difficult and uncomfortable. It was as if for all practical purposes, each was living alone with the other’s ghost. And having observed all attempts to better the existing situation fail miserably, She was the one who ultimately suggested this particular game to him.

The rules of the game were as follows:

Each was to ask the other for every help they needed, big or small.
If the other had agreed to help, his or her doing so would count as a favour to the other person.
Each favour one did the other on that particular day would be recorded on the white board hung on the kitchen door. There would be two columns made, one for favours done by He and one for favours done by She.
Before going to sleep every night, the number of favours done by each for the other was to be totalled and written below the corresponding column.
If the Favour Count for the day for both wasn’t equal, then the one who had done less favours had to compensate for it on the following day.
Each Favour Deficit would be carried on to the coming days, as backlog.
Even actions which helped both like bringing the vegetables for dinner or paying the electricity bill would count as favours.

The rules of the game agreed upon, He and She decided to start playing from the next day. On the first morning, He asked her to make tea for him. She made it for herself too but as per the rules, that counted as a favour. Nor did she forget that; she was quick enough to make an entry, inaugurating the white board. She, in turn, asked him to fetch the newspaper from the main door and He was happy enough to have one entry to his credit too. Nothing else happened the rest of the morning. Each made their own breakfast, corn flakes, milk and sugar, not requiring any help from the other.

Evening arrived. Both reached home within fifteen minutes of each other, completely exhausted. He asked her to make tea again for him, to which she solemnly agreed. He, meanwhile got the Marie Gold biscuits and namkeen out to have along with the tea. 1-1 so far. Once it was decided that paneer was to be had for dinner, he brought it from the Mother Dairy store close by. She, on the other hand made dinner for both of them. At night, He prepared the bed, folded the removed bed sheets and put them in the closet. And finally, before going to bed, each tallied their list of favours. For the record, He had beaten She 4-3 on the first day.

Days passed, the white board wiped every morning to give space for a new list of favours. Backlogs also took place for both at times, were brought to zero by heightened effort, and then finally turned to backlogs for the other. That is, on days when the backlog for one was quite a lot, he or she acted doubly kind than he or she actually was, helping the other with almost everything, eager to bring things to zero again. On those days, the other would have a wonderful time, with absolutely no useful work to do, only to find himself or herself in debt by the end of the day.

But after about ten or twelve days of playing this game, both found making entries on the board a very boring and inconvenient exercise. Walking over to the kitchen, just to make an entry in your column was quite effort-taking in itself. So by consensus, they decided that serving the other with drinks, making the bed and other such small tasks could be avoided mention. Now, entries would only be made and favours would only be counted if the work was substantial enough, either in terms of time or effort.

Also, with the passage of time, the entire game started looking rather silly and childish. The thought of playing Mutual Favours between themselves seemed idiotic more than anything else, when one considered that they were still Husband and Wife. The prime example of such a feeling was when She fetched him a glass of water in the middle of the night once, when He had suddenly got up holding his head, wincing in pain. He never asked for it but She brought him the water and Crocin anyway. When He asked her to update her table with this latest favour, She just stroked his chin and said that it was hardly necessary.

So as one is bound to expect, one thing led to another. With every passing day, more and more activities ceased to be seen as favours, seen now only as duties a man and a woman must perform quietly to keep the house running. The day came when entries were forgotten and many favours were done out of goodwill and affection. Slowly and steadily, the board ceased to be of any use at all. But none of them dared to move it from its position on the kitchen door. Conversations might still have ended abruptly, arguments might still have ensued over petty issues and tension still might not have left the household, but the board reminded each of the fact that all the above was no excuse to stop caring for each other, to stop loving, to stop existing as Husband and Wife.

Therefore, the game of Mutual Favours was a draw. It was a draw, such in which both sides had triumphed.

The author drew inspiration for this short piece from A Temporary Matter, one of the short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's debut book, The Interpreter Of Maladies. He uses the word 'inspiration' and the reader is expected to take it as that only.

Simple Things

2007-10-19T19:12:00.005+05:30

Sid dear had been very kind to tag me in his last post. And as I’ve nothing better to write on right now (going through a dearth of ideas, as the sophisticated novelist would put it), I choose to elaborate on his crappy topic. I choose to make it even crappier.

Be sure to refer to his piece before you have a look at mine.

http://sleepingtablets.blogspot.com/2007/10/you-got-tagged.html

If you don’t do so, you might end up taking me for a bored, sadistic idiot, something that I might actually be but something I would rather not confide to you.

So here it is!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the age of 21, you are neither a kid nor a man. You are somewhere in between those two states, unsure about yourself, about what you must retain and what you must change. Self-obsessively lost in your endeavour to make this transition peaceful and coherent, you forget the little things that you used to do earlier, things that gave you great joy in the past and those which you might be embarrassed to execute now. Now, that you are unsure.

Well ‘Keep It Simple’, as the old clichéd saying goes. In an attempt to do the same, I shall now make a list of small things that you might have loved doing in the past and which you must try doing from here on -

1) Fight with your kid sister – Ah! Remember the last time your sister and you tried pulling each other’s hair out, and having been frustrated doubly by your eventual inability to do so, satisfied your desire to inflict pain with a big thump or two on the back? Deeply satisfying, wasn’t it? You’d never realise how much so it was, but once you start doing it again, you’ll relive the same boundless joy you felt the first time. After all, this was your personal home version of the Fight Club!

By the way, you can fight with your kid brother as well, if you don’t have a sister. The joytitude would be almost the same, I presume.

2) The Knock-knock bluff – This is something I used to do a lot as a kid. On days when we friends didn’t get the bat and ball to play with, to pass time, we rang the bell of any house in our locality and then disappeared into some nook or corner waiting for the response of the person who opened the door. More often than not, the flat chosen was of the Uncle or Aunty who was the most khadoos (the ones who scolded us before giving the ball back when a sixer reached their terrace) and it was immensely satisfying watching him/her annoyed at finding no one at the door. Also, if the person was someone who had actually never returned a ball that had reached his/her terrace, we rang the bell multiple times till each one of us was convinced that that particular ball-eater had been given ample punishment.

3) Mixing colours in the water tanker – This is something you can attempt during Holi. After four or five hours of mutual decoration, when the people in your apartment have retired to their bathrooms to wash their vividly colourful selves, you and your friend can go to the terrace and pour colours into the water tanker. People dying to get the much needed bath would be aghast to find red, blue and green coming out of the taps. I’m sure that would annoy the Uncles and Aunties no limit, which is again something that is sure to give you stupendous joy and satisfaction.

That’s just three. The Dearth of Ideas Syndrome again. Well anyway, you can add an idea or two of your own here. The rule is simple and easy to remember: Anything that gives others agony will give you joy! Do such simple things and you would find yourself becoming a child again, happier and less caught-up.

Thoughts & Smoke

2007-10-07T22:48:00.002+05:30

He always smokes in his room, sitting on the chair lining up music on the computer, or on the bed, lying down, staring at the ceiling, or standing at the window, looking out. Like the places, the moods vary too, from extremely upbeat to extremely melancholic and everything else that lies in between these two celebrated states.

His thoughts come out in fumes from his mouth, gently oozing out, reaching different parts of the room. The smoke is the carrier, his dwellings are the carried. That is to say, if you look closely enough, you’ll see him missing his home and his mother on top of the suitcase on the almirah, covered in a grey, thick layer of dust. If you observe the cobwebs in the corner of the room minutely, you’ll see locked between the shreds, him having second thoughts about his angry outburst the other day. And if you happen to look underneath the bed, you might just be surprised to find a few dreams – some nurtured and some murdered.

Etc Etc.

So in this way, everything that he thinks about stays close; it doesn’t disappear, drifting away from reach. It stays close, within two or three metres of where he stands, sits or lies. And in this little thought fortress he lives, like a king guarding all he has.

Mr. India

2007-09-27T00:43:00.001+05:30

What if when on a walk down the street, you were to meet India - the man? How would you recognize him? What will he look like and what sort of person will he be?

Let’s see.

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Without the shadow of a doubt, he would be a man of huge build, roundabout seven feet tall, conspicuously rising above every other person around. But even for a man so tall, he would look rather smallish, as if the lord above had tried to put too much into that seven feet frame. The muscles on his body would bulge rather awkwardly, almost as if it wasn’t being able to hold them intact anymore, as if the flesh would tear the skin and come out anytime now, as if it was too heavily packed.

The body would not make any sense at all as a whole. It’ll look as if different parts of it had been taken from totally different individuals, and then put together to make one continuous piece. The left hand might be shorter than the right, one part of the body might have a lot more hair than the others, and the legs might be too thin for a man with such bulky arms. To put it in a nutshell, the body would give a rather incongruous look.

Several parts of his body would give the appearance that they don’t actually belong there, that they were striving to cut off from the main, that they wished to be independent. One of the arms or legs might just be hanging precariously, as if it was almost ready to fall off, as if Mr. India was just barely managing to hold on to it. Such complexities would of course be a cause of great worry and even pain for the man. There would a constant wince on his face, he would always look to be in great distress.

As far as his mental framework is concerned, he could be called A Psychiatrist’s Delight. A one-in-a-trillion sort of man. Quite obviously, a person with such unique physical characteristics wouldn’t be completely relaxed in the head. In fact, with such remarkable variety inherent, he would be someone totally confused about his identity, about what he really is. As mentioned before, his mind and body would make no sense as a whole and he would spend hours, days, months, years, and decades trying to give some meaning to it, to find his ‘identity’.

He would also be a man totally clueless about his past. He’ll remember the events alright, and he might take great pride in the victories he’s had over other individuals and feel deep shame over his innumerable defeats, but would not able to pinpoint why things happened as they did. In fact, a closer look would tell you that he is not even interested in learning about that, that he is close to being completely ignorant about himself. Whatever conceptions he has about the past might just be nonsense, something just jumped to without proper thought or reasoning. He might even tell you that he was once called the The Golden Boy by his friends at school, but that might actually be something only his mother called him to make him feel happy. On the other hand, there might be truth in his claim but you would find it rather hard to believe seeing his present state.

As far as the present and future go, he would tell you that his condition is far better than what it was some time ago. He would say that things are getting better for him by the day and people in his neighbourhood have started acknowledging his presence around the place. He would tell you that his financial condition might not be fantastic as of now, but his business is moving in the right direction and things are bound to get rosier. The only thing bothering him is his health, he would say, the unique assortment of body parts, the various components always threatening to slide away.

All in all, he would be a man like no other. One thing that you could say with sureness about him is that he’ll be a singularly kind man, the sort anyone would like to become friends with. He might not be the strongest, or the largest, or the most intelligent person around and he certainly won’t be the richest of them, but he’ll be unique, a subject of envy to his neighbours and of great awe and wonder to everyone else.

As said before, Mr. India would be A Psychiatrist’s Delight. A one-in-a-trillion sort of man.

My Own Little Museum

2007-09-18T23:00:00.002+05:30

My room is a museum of sorts. Only a very dirty, disorganised one. This is how it looked about a month ago and I daresay it still looks the same, if not worse.

And as I’ve always wanted to give the place an ‘exotic’ look, there is a lot of stuff borrowed, or shall I say incorporated, from outside too. Like –

1) KJ’s red-and-black Bridgestone bag – That worked its way into my life about a year back and to its credit, has been able to find itself a nice permanent spot in here, next to the almirah, on the floor. K had been kind enough to give it to me for a Diwali trip back home and for no apparent reason, she never got it back.

2) KJ’s white socks – I really feel no shame at all in telling you folks that I borrowed a pair of grey-white socks from a girl. It happened on a cold November evening last year, when K seeing me shivering rather violently in my Bata slippers, took pity and gifted me the pair with warmth-filled tears in her eyes.(Though she later claimed that she merely lent it, didn’t gift it, but you know whom to believe, don’t you?)

3) GA’s Walkman – The thing is a bit scary. It looks like something straight out of Star Wars, with a shiny blue body and silver outlines. Very techno, if you know what I mean.

And that’s not the only reason it’s scary. Once I pushed the PLAY button and I heard a man speaking, as if for an interview. There was a lot of disturbance on the tape but I was attentive enough to catch some words like – communist, sweat, toil, revolution, affected districts etc. I jumped on the STOP button then and there and have never touched the thing again. It has been lying undisturbed on my room-mate’s table for almost two weeks now.

4) GA’s jug – That is another one of those things my ex-room-mate left behind as part of his legacy. This is a brown-coloured water jug made up of brass which looks like something the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan would have loved to keep in his living room.

5) Someone’s headphones – Now this is slightly weird. Believers might take this as an act of God. Atheists, on the other hand, might shrug their shoulders and say that I need to pull my brain socks up and stop thinking too much.

Whatever you wish to take it as, here’s the story. I found this pair of Frontech headphones on my table last April. I have absolutely no idea how it got there. When I first saw them, I thought I was still half-asleep and seeing things. So I went off to brush my teeth and when I came back, they were still there. I left my room to bathe, came back, and they were there, as before. I stayed out all day, busy with lectures and labs, and in the evening, when I came back to my room, they hadn’t budged from their position even the wee bit.

Now all I want to say is that I never believed these headphones had supernatural power and would fly off suddenly, while I was away. But I thought that somebody might have left them on my table the previous night and would, sooner or later, come and claim it back. No one actually did; I call them my own now.

6) GSN’s slippers – That’s the latest import. A very simple pair, blue in colour, of Bata, made in India. It’s a very long story of how this ended up here and I’m too tired to write about it now. Maybe, I’ll put up another post with the details later. For the time being, let’s put it all down to Divine Will.

Well, that’s just six of them. There are countless other articles, some visible, some hidden which previously belonged to some other human being. As I've said before, I just brought them over here to add spice to the place, to my little museum.

Surface Extract

2007-09-15T14:30:00.001+05:30

A piece of text from Siddhartha Deb’s Surface:

A long time ago, when the world was a far better place than it is now, there was a divine couple, a god and a goddess deeply in love with each other. Their love was so perfect that a quarrel broke out between the two about who loved the other more. Even the court of the gods couldn’t settle the dispute, so the two agreed to put their love to the test by being born in human form. The challenge was to see who recognized the other first. They would have no knowledge of their heavenly past, being in possession of nothing more than average human memories of their human lives.

They are born in different corners of the kingdom of Manipur, she as a princess, he as a commoner. The years of their childhood pass in ignorance of each other, without a single encounter. Then the commoner comes to the court from the village one day, and they meet accidentally in the palace, and they recognize each other in the same instant. Their love is still without imperfection, still equal, but just then a battle breaks out between factions in the court and both are killed in the fighting. The dispute is unresolved.

So they take birth as human beings again, and again, and again, and each time the same thing happens. They meet as adults, recognize each other instantaneously, the kingdom is pitched into a war, and they die in the ensuing battle. People in Manipur believe that when things are very bad in our human world, when it is a time of war, it means that the two are around in human form, slowly drifting towards each other. Each is looking at the other without really knowing it, attracted towards the partner by the force of their divine love, and the terrible battle of our times will coincide with their mutual discovery.

……Their coming together in the human world with death following immediately is a sign of the perfection of their love and how it can’t be contained within the imperfection of our world. But there will be a time when they meet and admit that it is a draw, that they love each other equally, and that there is no more or less for either of them. They will see, they will recognize their love for each other, and they will not die. When that happens and their contest is over, our world will end in the final apocalypse.

Man

2007-09-09T00:59:00.001+05:30

Another straight question(s) –

What does it mean to be a man, at this present moment, with millions of millions come and gone before you, and countless yet to come?

What does it mean to be a man, in this age of mechanized power, of industrialization and of machines, where everything is automated and you’re there only to push the button?

What does it mean to be a man, with each one living an independent life, yet being so inevitably dependent on everything and everyone else?

What does it mean to be a man, when you’re an island and a parasite at the same time?

What does it mean to be a man, when you have no answers to any of the questions above?

The Window

2007-08-30T01:39:00.001+05:30

The room has just one Window, a big one, about four by four feet. Except that, there is nothing that qualifies even remotely as an outlet. No ventilator, no smoke chimney, not even a door. Just those four by four feet. Nothing more.

And a look out of the Window offers no beautiful gardens or landscape, no high-rise towers or buildings, no bazaar lanes, nothing in relation with the immediate world outside.

Just images.

It offers images, vivid and alive, of the past and the future, of childhood and of old age, of birth and of death. The pictures are personal, therefore engrossing. Each one stays there for about half a second, and then slowly fades away, being superimposed by the next one, before disappearing altogether.

The pictures offer insights into the years gone by, of childhood, like his first day in school and the hours he cried and cried, like how hard he held his mother by the waist when he first stood under a waterfall, and how his heart was filled with limitless pride when he bought his first novel with the earnings saved out of his monthly ‘pocket money’.

They also offer insights into the years to come, of the tension and turmoil of adult life, of a one-storey house with a narrow mud way leading to it, of one wife and two kids, and of death, cold and serene.

He can stare at the Window as long as he likes. Sometimes, so intriguing are the pictures, that he can’t move his eyes from it, even if he wishes to. Sometimes, they are too ugly or distasteful and the images change hastily, as if the Window was remote-controlled by his mind.

Interestingly, some keep coming back, from time to time, and he ponders over them for hours, like a ruminating cow does over a mouthful of grass.

They never cease. The Window is always open, always available, much to his pleasure and displeasure.

That’s all there is to the room. It’s a beautiful world. Four walls, a floor, a ceiling, the Window and him.

A Bird's Eye View

2007-08-25T02:13:00.001+05:30

There is something common about all contemporary Indian authors in the English language, be it Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai or Raj Kamal Jha, and that is that they have all spent a substantial amount of time outside India. Some have stayed there for education, some for work and some have made it their home, peeking in on India when they so desire. If you loosen the argument just the little bit, you can even include writers like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry. They’re of course not Indian, like some of us do claim, but are of Indian ancestry nevertheless.

Some pretty big names, aren’t they?

The startling fact is that the above is true for most acclaimed Indian authors. There are very few who have spent their entire lives here and have still been able to come up with writing that is comparable to some of the masterpieces by the names taken above. Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra, to name a couple. But there are too few, and why is that?

Living abroad didn’t necessarily improve their style of writing; I doubt if anyone else could ever produce a novel as powerful as Roy’s The God of Small Things. And also, it wasn’t that the years away from India helped them gain insights into the world inside and outside in ways they had never been aware of before.

Maybe, and I think I might be right here, those years in the West gave them that much-needed privilege, which is something we all wish we had, that is of being able to observe and understand something so personal to oneself from a distance. Maybe, this place is too complex and confusing to fully understand when you are living in it, as one of its countless little parts. Maybe, one needs a bird’s eye view, the chance to lose oneself in the maze completely, and yet not be overwhelmed by wild, uncontrollable emotion, the type which is bound to come when you think about this great country.

The End Is Not Near

2007-08-17T22:30:00.002+05:30

When I was about 5-6 years old, one of my Mamaji’s friends seeing me with a pen in my hand, trying to solve a sum, had remarked – “Mat pakdo beta…mat pakdo…ek baar is cheez ko pakad liye to phir kabhi peechha nahi chodegi.”

Words of wisdom, if there ever were any.

When I was in primary school, I was promised that mathematical tables and crappy essay assignments were only part of the learning curve; this would pass eventually and +2 is all about bunking classes, going to the theatres, having fun.

When I was in +2, I was promised that the Board exams were only a meaningless hurdle which had to be passed and passed gracefully nonetheless, that the nerve-shattering entrance examinations were that price I would have to pay for a comfortable life afterwards, that college comprises the best years of a person’s life, I was only to wait.

When I’m in college, I am promised that all I need to do is to work hard for good grades and get myself a nice job. A fat salary, nice start to my corporate career - everything’s going to be an easy ride after that. Life begins at 40, isn’t that how the famous saying goes?

I have this gut feeling that when I’m 40, I will be promised to slog it out for another decade or so; after all, I’ll have a family to take care of, the children’s education, big, never-ending loans to pay off and whatnot.

By the time I’m 60, thanks to Classic Regular, I guess lung cancer would surely have had its final say.

So tell me, my dear reader, when I’m dying, ready for the final goodbye, with the pen no more in my tired hands, will the priest at my deathbed promise me a happy, hassle-free afterlife? And more importantly, how credible would that last promise be?

The Hard Way

2007-08-15T15:08:00.002+05:30

“Not that way, moron!”, he says after about a minute of loud, non-stop laughter. I lie on the cement, feeling my bums, trying to smile, see the humour of it all.

This is my first try at skating. My friend had bought a pair of skates just the other day and he asked me if I would like to learn. He is pretty good at it, he has done it before.

I decide to give it a try. There are two round skating rings in the park opposite our apartment, each around seven or eight metres in diameter, with the floors made of cement, and boundaries lined with netted grills, probably to prevent novices like me from crashing out.

“The secret to skating and skating well is to keep year head slightly forward, ahead of your body, so that your entire weight is taking you in the direction you wish to go. You know, that way your Centre of Gravity…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just keep your head slightly forward. You can’t possibly fall on your back that way, and nobody falls forward really, unless he's stupid.”

“OK.”

I do exactly that. And as he had said, I don’t fall.

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But he was wrong. I found that out this morning, on my way back from the galla. It had rained severely last night. With my Bata sandals so slippery that I might as well have been walking on two banana skins, it was hard trying to stay on my feet.

Then, I remembered what my friend had told me that day.

I jutted my head out in front, bending above the waist just that little bit. The little bit slowly became a little more, and more.

Result: I slipped on my toes, the Centre of Gravity got too far ahead, I think, forcing me down.

Lesson: When it rains and your footwear doesn’t have a good grip, you can fall either way, forwards or backwards.

"About A Night"

2007-08-14T01:13:00.003+05:30

A straight question: What’s the most uncomfortable you have ever felt in your life?

Was it when you were sitting at the dentist last month, with your mouth embarrassingly wide open? Or when your father punished you for something once, when you were seven years old, asking you to stay watching the wall for ten eternal minutes? Or is it when you went to a get-together and the best friend you were depending on for company failed to show up, leaving you with a group of strangers, without anything to talk about? Or maybe when you waited with a container in your hand at Mother Dairy, waiting to get the coupon for the milk?

No. For me, it isn’t any of these. It is something more common, which happens too often to get used to it (no irony intended). It is when you lie awake in bed, sleepless. It is when your body is tired, you would love to get some sleep and wake up early, but your mind, restless as ever doesn’t let you free.

Like, for example…

It’s raining. You can hear the rain falling on the trees outside. It is cool, the fan’s running slowly, humming away, as it was meant to be a lullaby. You have the blanket over you, blocking the swing, making you feel all cosy, ready for some nice slumber.

But no, it won’t come that easily. What did you think? Twenty minutes go by. So you get up, switch the lights on, put on your t-shirt and go out to get some coffee. There is nothing else you can think of at that moment.

You come back after the little break but you find out, to your dismay that the coffee hasn’t helped at all. It has made matters even worse. Thanks to Nescafe, now you don’t feel like sleeping at all. But still you give it a chance. You lie down and it’s the same story again – rain, tip-tip, fan, blanket, cosy, no sleep. This time you accept the helplessness easily, you get up with the air of a man on a mission, who has just realised what he was sent down for. Fuck it, I shall not wait for sleep, shall try to pass time better, it’ll come when it has to.

You switch on the computer. Check your scraps on Orkut, there are no new ones. A new mail maybe, even if it’s a Sardarji joke, but no, nothing new there as well. You feel the sudden pinch of utter helplessness again. What am I doing, I should be trying to sleep. Wasting time waiting for people to mail me. Who’ll mail you at 2 A.M., fucker? After all, you checked your mail just an hour ago, didn’t you?

So things are back to square one again. Rain, tip-tip, fan, blanket, cosy, and of course no sleep. Stray thoughts enter your head now – the assignment to be submitted on Friday (god I don’t have a clue!), the school friend you didn’t even bother to call when you were at home last (what will I say if he asks me why?), the little nap you took in the afternoon (maybe that’s what's keeping me awake). These don’t help, they don’t induce sleep, only make time pass quicker.

Hell! I have spent almost an hour and a half in bed now. And things look no prettier. The bones are still heavy, the body aching, but crucially, the mind and eyes are as fresh as ever.

I wish I was like Papa. He falls asleep within five minutes of going to bed, irrespective of whether the TV is on at full volume or whether I’m playing Led Zeppelin in the adjoining room. Soon, you can hear him snoring away in bliss, oblivious to everything around. How does he do that?

Frustration slowly seeps in. There can’t be a worse feeling. It’s almost three already. There is a lecture at half past eight. But what can you do? You’re helpless, and you know it. That adds on to the frustration – being aware of the helplessness.

You close your eyes again. I can’t possibly fall asleep if I keep them open. So let me at least pretend that I’m preparing to sleep. Maybe I’ll fool Father Wakefulness by doing so, maybe he’ll think that I’ve already dozed off, and he’ll stop trying to pull me out of it.

My life’s a mess, it is. What is a man if he has no control over his own sleep? What good is winning the world, when you can’t even win such a small battle, over yourself, with only sleep as your adversary?

What good is anything?

P.S. – And then it comes, you don’t realise that final moment, you least expect it. Yes, it finally comes and you’re asleep. Your conscious calls it a day. Call it night.

Bom Bom !

2007-08-10T00:38:00.003+05:30

I hail from the capital, New Delhi as we all know it, the NCR as I sometimes call it (with one eyebrow slightly raised above the other). And I don’t claim that it’s something I’m ‘proud’ of, as that doesn’t make much sense. I moved to the place when I was six and a half years old, my father took up a job there, and coming to the big city was hardly a conscious decision on my part.

But having spent more than twelve adolescent years in and around the place, I have obviously developed feelings for it which can be labelled loosely as affection. I would be the first to concede that it has no inherent culture, not much greenery and natural beauty to boast of, and that it’s the country’s most unsafe city with its alarming crime rate, but it’s where I grew up and each joint and locality has memories attached to it, holds special significance.

So when I, a staunch ‘Delhi-ite’(don’t ask me to pronounce it !), hear someone go ga-ga over Bombay, ‘the financial capital of India’, the land of Bollywood, of the beautiful Nariman Point and Juhu Beach, my first reaction is to give him the I-couldn’t-care-less look, make a few nervous movements here and there and move out of the room saying that whatever it is, however grand the ‘necklace’ might be, it may have a thousand Hanging Gardens, but Bombay can never be what Delhi is, what the NCR is(the eyebrow is in action again).

But, as it turned out to be, when I went to the port city for the first time two years ago, to that ‘great, ruined metropolis’, I found my baseless defence melting away. For there in front of my eyes was a city which offered everything, which was a world to itself, a world of the beautiful and the ugly, of fire and ice, of the rich and the poor, and of everything that lies in between.

In Bombay, just as you get out of the air-conditioned comforts of the airport, you are confronted suddenly with something totally different. There are no towers, no buildings, nothing to suggest that you are now in one of India’s metropolitan cities. Just small, dirty-looking houses and slums, people sleeping on the pavements, some even on the road, inside temporary roadside tents and below the flyovers. People everywhere; much more than the city can afford. You are reminded suddenly of all you have read and seen in movies about Bombay over the years. Bombay is the city to which more and more people flock in every year, in search of a job, of food, shelter and security. They come from everywhere: some with hopes of getting into the film industry and many others with no clear objective at all. They live on the footpath, struggling to make ends meet, because even if the city wishes to, it can’t adopt them. Not anymore. The contrast is startling; on the right are high-rise apartments, on the left you have people sleeping amidst their own shit and piss.

The same contrast is written all over the city. For every Malabar Hill, there are a hundred Jogeshwaris, for every Infinity, there are a hundred Crawford Markets, for every Amitabh Bachchan, there are a million wanna-bes who keep trying unsuccessfully every day, settle down on the sidewalks, or in the slums. This violent collage of modern existence is exhilarating, when not disturbing. Bombay is, as Suketu Mehta describes it, the ‘Maximum City’.

And tell me, which city could present you with such amazing sights, as the one I witnessed sitting at the Hilton, of the people below walking along the seacoast, of families with the children holding colourful balloons, of couples strolling hand in hand, admiring the water, of old men, out for their evening walk, gossiping away like teenagers. That view, I remember distinctly, developed a sudden, violent urge within me to leave the air-conditioned restaurant, to leave my five-star coffee half-drunk, to get up from the heavily cushioned chair I was sitting on, to run down and do what those people were doing, talk and watch the sea.

All very romantic, you say, what about the problems, the horror of living in a city like Bombay? What about the floods you have there every monsoon, when the city breaks down, submerged up to the neck? What about the problem of living space, Abhinav? Have you forgotten how you and your cousin went running around Bombay looking for a flat to take shelter in, when you had given the poor chap a sudden visit last year? And have you also forgotten how wretched you felt at Crawford Market that day, with the rain belting down, and a million stall-keepers shouting in your ear? Remember how you swore that you’ll never set foot on this blasted piece of land again?

And I will nod, I will say yes, and then I will tell you that it is not the only thing that matters, that there is a certain kind of beauty the eyes cannot see, which only the heart can feel, that there is something beyond logic, something about the city which sucks you in, however clichéd it might sound, it is the city’s history, its dynamics, its spirit.

So would you be surprised, if I tell you that given the chance, when I grow up and have a job to call my own, I would like to have an apartment flat near Nariman Point, facing the sea, and that I would love to make weekend trips into the old city, uncovering secrets yet hidden about the ‘great, ruined metropolis’?

P.S. :

I call it Bombay, not Mumbai, and I have my reasons:

1) First and foremost, I am not a Shiv Sainik, nor wish to become one in the coming time.

2) Naming the city on the basis of it being a port, or a bay, sounds more logical than naming it after some goddess called Mumba Devi.

3) And yes, to bring out the hidden sentimentalist in me, Bombay sounds romantic; has been its name for quite a long period of time. Names, like places and people, have histories behind them, and the past cannot be erased all of a sudden by a bill passed in the parliament.

Girl at Andheri

2007-08-02T15:28:00.003+05:30

She stood at the side of the road outside the Andheri railway station. I, with my cousin, had just got down from the auto to catch a local to Bombay Central.

She wore a short-sleeved top and a pant, the colours of each being hard to guess. They might have been white originally, maybe light pink or maybe even blue. All they looked to me now in the limited visibility the street lights provided was dirty brown, at some places dark and at some places light, in patches all over the cloth. Her hair looked brown too, but the yellow light above gave it a somewhat orangish touch. Her face was beautiful - innocence written all over. From her two eyes came out two thick drops of water, both heading down but vanishing before they reached her mouth. On the face still were the dried remains of many such drops her eyes had shed during the day. And of course, she had nothing beneath her feet.

She was thin and small. Not more than 7-8 years old – I’d have thought.

She held her hand out shyly. She was asking me for money.

Kudo Thakur

2007-07-29T15:40:00.003+05:30

His name was Kudo Thakur. A barber by caste, he had been so all his life. From age 15 to age 70. In his own words - “From when my hands learnt the trade to the time when the same hands started shaking when I picked up the scissors.”

But he was a very old man now. He said he thought he was something like 80, but he looked more like 120 to me. Most of his teeth were gone. And it seemed that the ones which were still there were so only out of goodwill and respect for the man. All of them jutted out, irrespective of whether he was smiling or frowning. All that was left of the face were those sagging wrinkles. If there was a competition for the World’s Most Wrinkled Man, Kudo Thakur would have bagged the first prize for sure. The hands and legs were as thin as thin can be, you could easily circle his legs with your palm, and make your thumb and index finger meet, like they do with their hands at the pillar near Qutab Minar.

Surprisingly, he wasn’t bald. Not by a long way. Specks of white on his head shone in the sun and I think I even spotted some which were still black. This for a man who had almost lived the entire last century ! He carried a stick with him, a piece of wood really, pieces peeling off the surface all over. I couldn’t help noticing that his stick was as thick as his two legs, so that if you saw his silhouette, you might just be deceived into thinking that he had three of them, three legs or three sticks to stand on.

Everyday, while I was there in the village, he would come early morning and evening, and sit there on the bench in the veranda, gazing at everything around him. I found his stare somewhat uncomfortable at times, his head always positioned slightly forward, aggressively, as if he was a teacher, asking you why the homework for the weekend wasn’t complete. He had a constant expression on his face, what I would regard now as a cross between a jovial smile and a disgusted frown. I remember thinking to myself that if Kudo Thakur had to laugh or cry at something, the expression on his face would remain exactly the same. One face for all emotions. One expression to express all expressions.

“I have shaved your Nanaji’s head too, once, when he was even younger than you are”, he told me one day. I gave him an as-if-I-believe-you look. For me, small that I was, the image of Kudo Thakur shaving my Nanaji’s head, with a pair of scissors in his hand and the mirror in front, was not that easy to imagine. He was the oldest man in the village, one person who had watched everyone else grow and many perish before him. He was conscious of this fact, he seemed proud of it.

I took his presence in the village home as granted. So when, a few years back, I hadn’t seen him since I had arrived in the village, I asked my grandfather where he was.

He was dead. No one knows whether he completed the century, or just failed to do so by a year or two. Even Kudo Thakur himself wouldn’t have known, I imagine.

Dark Man

2007-07-28T22:12:00.001+05:30

I climb up the stairs and step into the medical store. Its name is 98.4 degrees, one of the many such private outlets that have risen around Delhi in the last few years. The tagline, just below the company logo of a hand holding a flame, says Your Chemists For Life.

I walk to the counter. There are two men, one sitting on a stool and the other standing up, both in white coats, as if they were doctors at a hospital (Lets call them White Coat 1 and White Coat 2 respectively, for convenience). White Coat 2 takes the prescription from my hand, studies it briefly and then goes over to the racks at the corner of the room.

Meanwhile, a little, dark man, (And we shall call him Dark Man) in a white shirt and navy blue trousers enters through the glass door. He then pauses, gives everyone present a glance, looking conscious of the fact that everyone’s eyes are on him too. Dark Man is short in height; he looks ragged, sweat dripping from his forehead, visible on his eyebrows. His overall demeanour doesn’t betray the first impression that he is at maximum, only a peon or chapraasi. He walks quietly towards the two White Coats, taking position alongside me. After pausing again for a second or two, he takes a piece of white paper out of his breast pocket and murmurs something to White Coat 1. He hardly seems to take notice, not even looking up from his register, in which he seems to be making some sort of entry. Dark Man doesn’t look hurt, gives me a slightly embarrassed glance and stares back at White Coat 1, still holding the piece of paper.

White Coat 2 now comes back with what I asked for. He shows them to White Coat 1, who then looks at them and proceeds to make the receipt. White Coat 2 then puts the two strips of medicine into a white envelope and hands it over to me. My turn over, I expect him now to listen to what Dark Man wants. He doesn’t and Dark Man, still as courteous as he was initially, murmurs something again.

Just then, a tall, burly man (Let’s call him exactly that, the Tall Burly Man) enters through the door. Nonchalantly, he walks over to the counter and hands over the doctor’s prescription to White Coat 2. As with me, White Coat 2 gives him an affirmative nod and leaves to get the medicine.

White Coat 1 finally has everything ready for me. He gives me the receipt, I say “Thank You” and turn towards the door.

As I’m about to get into the car, I can’t stop myself from giving the shop one last look. I see Dark Man standing there, leaning over the table, still looking humbly at White Coat 1 the way he was earlier. Tall Burly Man, meanwhile, gets his receipt made.

On Second Thought

2007-07-28T15:02:00.001+05:30

You look at the dustbin, it's more than just full. The garbage is spilling out, the fan above helping the chocolate wrappers, empty strips of the tablet you took in the morning, the paper you regarded unnecessary and tore away, everything that you threw into that little basket gently glide to different parts of your room. It annoys you, the room needs to be clean. So you pick the bin with one hand, walk out of the door to your backyard and with both hands now, you throw over the filth to the space just behind your house. But all of it doesn't go really. Pieces of paper break away from the heap in mid-air, and float back gently to the backyard. You click your tongue, pick up that paper and just as you are about to throw it over too, you give it a glance.

And what do you see ? What do you think ? Perhaps, I should keep it with me. This isn't garbage. Might be of some use. For some time. For a day or a week, maybe a month, a year ? Maybe not that long. But I shall keep it. So you wipe off the dust that’s settled on the paper, take it inside, and keep it on the table.

Months pass. More such filtered garbage finds a place in your room. Some old ones are eventually thrown away but many more manage to find the way back. You have a folder now, where you keep them all together.

You call it your blog.