The Changing of the Guard: A Mighty Lighthouse and the Shadows of Political Patronage

 **24 July 2007**

The parliamentarians had a farewell gathering for the outgoing President.

The buffoons, clowns and hypocrites who had cracked jokes about the great man's willingness for a second term paid him glorious tributes.

It was a typically political, formal sham show. Like chameleons, those who had squawked at the mere talk of a second term ate their words, changed colours and presented him as a historic man.

But the question arises: if they think he is so great, why the hue and cry over his second term?

A clear example of hypocrisy!

Now the office is being made ready for the first female entrant to the highest seat in the country.

Since she is the new President-designate, we should all abandon belittling remarks regarding her. But the stature of her predecessor is too large, making comparison almost inevitable.

He, the son of a small-town fisherman, rose through the scientific ranks, propelled by the rocket fuel of sheer, genuine, indigenous talent.

Those fundamentally made of the fabric of excellence—like him—cross the defining barriers of their chosen fields to merge into the universal, almost constant traits of honesty, integrity, discipline, hard work, unselfishness, and so on and so forth.

For such a rock-solid, humongous rise is impossible without the blessed, God-given platforms of all these nouns and adjectives of a synonymous nature.

No wonder he rose from selling newspapers to support his studies to the highest seat in the country.

Under the peerless, bearing rays of such a mighty lighthouse, we cannot avoid casting prying looks at the small lady heading shorewards fast in the longboat of increasingly vindictive, oath-waving politics.

Another lady at the helm—working day and night to bring every office in the country under the loyalist shrouds of the long-standing political family—yelling in Italian accents the inevitability of victory.

So how does the present one look in comparison with her predecessor?

Not taking away anything from the old lady's ascension up the political ladder, her stature appears grossly misfitted for a seat meant for a personality of political excellence.

Her first unsuitability is that she is a full-time politician, with all the negativities of patronage and partisanship.

For without such things, you cannot rise on the political graph.

Accepted that hers has been a story of rise, but in which field and by what means?

A political rise, holding on to a particular thread, a blind belief in the tutorship of the sole instructor.

Then how can you expect impartiality in her functioning as the head of state, when the political game is bound to enter an increasingly muddy, sleazy and criminalised backstage, given the way everything is being politicised?

Thus the sparrings are going to reach far and high, with the opposing sides whiplashing each other.

No alternative, no institution, no post, no part of our parliamentary system is going to be spared.

And here comes the suitability of the lady for the first political family, to whom the lady in question has shown unquestioned submissiveness all along her rise on the political graph.

So, whether we say it openly or not, the Rashtrapati Bhavan will definitely come under the Italian-forged Iron Lady's political fold, at least during the next five years.

With the help of hypocritical thugs, she has been successful in removing the grand old upkeeper of goodness and impartiality from the first building in the country, for he would never have borne such nonsense as is required of modern politics.

As the tiny lady, with her tiny credentials, finds herself—like the ever-mute and meek Sikh Prime Minister—landed in a seat which, in the critic's estimation, her whole being knows she never deserved, she will naturally feel obliged to please her benefactor.

Owing so much gratitude to the Italian-forged Iron Lady, she will obey commands from outside.

And operate as a vassal.

The Last Nail in the Coffin: The Presidency, the Iron Lady and the Meek Prime Minister

 **July 2007**

I heard somebody squirming with judgmental spasms and exclaiming, “So the last nail in the coffin has been struck in!”

And this diary entry is written on account of my discussion with him. These are predominantly the critic's views.

The scene in India, in all its aspects, has been politicised completely.

The President is now a political being, chosen through the muck and mockery of sleazy champions of political campaigning.

The more the election process becomes political, indicated by its increasing distance from consensus, the more the consequences—read the President's tenure—will become grossly, vindictively political.

Earlier, the head of state acted as an impartial check dam to the mightily gushing stream of unbridled politicians.

Now the first citizen of the land will be a tamed dam whose sluices can be used or misused to flood, or to deprive the land of water to the extent of drought.

The witty, Italian-forged Iron Lady, as the helmswoman—see how efficiently she has steered the ship from behind the scenes, so that not a single murmur of dissension and disintegration has arisen from the great jumble of interests—has added another feather to her crown of achievements.

After having appeased the Sikhs enough—the blood of Operation Blue Star runs too deep and perhaps has not yet been wiped away by the fallen Iron Lady's legacy—through the whitewashing and clearing-up job of appointing loyal Sikhs at the highest levels, she now sends another loyalist, a very staunch one, to the nation's highest seat.

The brave lady is taking revenge on all those supposedly staunch nationalists who scoffed whenever her tongue twisted towards an Indian turn instead of the Italian.

She got the job done despite a slew of allegations surfacing against the nominee.

I see the political mud being sprinkled upon the highest seat right into the next government.

If the BJP forms the next government in a year and a half, we must be prepared for the unprecedented gloom of an impeachment motion being brought in Parliament.

Whether she gets impeached or not, only the numbers will tell.

But the mere move will pull the presidency by the collar and make it look very cheap—a cheap political gimmick.

The arrogance shown by the lady captain will also give the future rulers a justification to display their own variety of political jealousy and revenge.

And in the same vein, we can discuss the Honourable Prime Minister.

The critics—this particular critic, in fact—found him poor, docile, barely audible, thoroughly academic, unassertive, uncertain, meek.

Well, the list could go on to include every term sharing some synonymity with the above-mentioned few in the vast repository of languages.

Maybe we ought to give him good marks on this account.

But then the field he has chosen to operate in—or rather, has been forced, bullied or persuaded to enter by the Italian-forged Iron Lady—is mercilessly unsparing.

Even the real highest seat leaves him at the disposal of pranks and puns.

And there are limitless ones which can be woven from the threads of such a persona.

He thus comes down to us as the meekest of meek Prime Ministers.

People do joke that even to choose the colour of his *pagdi*, he asks Madam's choice.

We wonder whether, during all these years at the helm of affairs, he has taken any decision independently.

Perhaps there is none.

So the people take pleasant jibes.

Our poor Prime Minister bears all the force as the stamp in the new Iron Lady's steely hands, while she stamps her approval upon one document after another.

What will be his fate by the time his tenure comes to an end?

We wish him the best of luck.

Secularism and the Niggling Truth: The Uneasy Questions of Indian Nationhood

 **July 2006**

To serve a good cause, sometimes we have to pretend not to see the niggling truth.

I won't even say that we support a false idea along the way. It is rather a sweet, short, tantalising assumption, hanging somewhere between the two.

We do the same in order to strengthen secularism while taking into account our Muslim brothers vis-à-vis the idea of Hindustan.

To serve the noble and genuine cause of cementing the unity of this big country, we endlessly, without allowing any exceptions, assert that Muslims are the truest of nationalists. Their loyalty to the country is unquestioned. They adhere to their religion just like any other normal follower of a different faith; that they have integrated into the setup (visualised in the constitutional framework) just like any other community; that their visions of the future match those of any other citizen of India worshipping a different God.

But it is a merciless irony that we, in our capacity as secularists, have erected this framework on the examples of exceptional, brilliant Muslim individuals.

We, in fact, went far ahead for the cause of this nation in our idealised assumptions about the community as a whole.

I know also that to state the facts otherwise than we ought to do for a noble cause would be an unpardonable sin against the dignity and deeds of these exceptional Muslims.

I feel like a butcher vivisecting the noble assumption, blood on my hands and blood on my apron, thus stained and stigmatised.

I do say that, generally, the community appears aloof, based on my own experience.

I must add, too much centred on its identity, with its shelf of items like food, dress, modes of worship, modes of talking, education and general outlook.

I know that it only adds to the variety of the Indian diaspora. But to make the national pattern interesting by conniving at an inhibiting, constricting, squeezing, suffocating trait would not be logical.

And what about the poor Muslim neighbourhoods?

Who might be responsible for this poverty, if not, at least in part, the ever-brooding, stagnant education system of madrasas?

This Muslimness appears cramped, always on the verge of bursting its seams.

We have a fairly moderate, integrated Muslim colony in Sonipat. Youths mingle with youths from other communities. No religious rioting has ever been reported there in the recent turbulent past, during the period of Hindutva ascendancy.

But after a soothing session of interaction with the boys, some niggling doubts do crop up as we enter the sphere of cricket in our verbal journey.

Most of them have, just as their elders had, and even now have, their favourites on the Pakistan side.

The notion of pan-Islam seems too strong to put them comfortably in the rut of a common nationhood of the place they reside in.

They cling rigidly, insecurely, suspiciously, to the pole of their Muslim identity foremost.

My young, educated Muslim friend tries his best, in his capacity as a representative of his community, to belittle these worms in my agitating mind by talking, reasoning and thinking in accordance with the great make-believe assumption of secularism.

But below this generous sheen, I can sense his pain, born of a realisation to the contrary: his helplessness at being at odds with his own locality in this matter.

They like Pakistani players for their cricket first, but religion comes later.

He might try to put a balm over the harsh fact.

But there are many in his own locality who won't think twice before reversing the statement.

And whose win or loss do they cherish during a match between India and Pakistan?

The question stares down the barrel with vagueness, mischievousness, some inner and inaudible chuckle, as if it were the greatest puzzle to be solved by the Indian state.

Already, the dry powder for tension and strife was present. The flint has been struck by the great superpower games at the international level and by neoconservatives at the national and local levels.

So, while the fire flares up, we see more and more confirmation of our suspicions.

That Muslims as a whole are being driven into a disintegrating, enclosing, circumscribing enclosure, where, pinned down to the fence, they will fight with more madness, more blindness, more zeal, more zealotry against the enemy—the supposed enemy, the *kafir*, the other.

Laden is the new prophet, a false symbol of resistance against the untold miseries being heaped upon Muslims the world over.

Even in the swanky, posh surroundings of Western countries, even rich, educated Muslims are feeling the warmth of these passionate flames emanating from the dangerous lands.

The Throne of Cruelty: Power as a Primal Strain of Cosmic Existence

 **4 November 2026**

There are fundamental inclinations, or call them elemental tendencies, through which cosmic energy manifests itself to set up the cosmic *lila*.

The scenes and scenarios range from exploding stars to massive stars being sucked up by black holes. Stars hundreds or even thousands of times bigger than the Sun are sucked into the invisible black holes.

And in one of the most stable forms of this manifestation, we have life on Earth, with its moderate polarities—in comparison to galactic events—of good and bad, pleasure and pain, joy and tears.

When I analyse life on Earth, I find that just as there are traits of love, care and sharing playing on the stage of natural forces like gravitation, thermodynamics and the rest of the natural laws accepted by science, we also have inherent strains of the will to power.

These are also as good as natural laws, for they operate inevitably in one form or another.

These are cumulative strains of cruelty, dominance and power, manifesting from alpha males as well as females among animals, birds and insects to human rulers in their social, economic, political and cultural domains.

This cumulative trait of cruelty is one among many other fundamental natural laws through which this cascading cosmic energy expresses itself in different life forms at different places across the universe, or multiverse, or multiverses.

This strain of self-interest and cruelty is characteristic of existence on Earth.

Let us, for example, take the case of rulers.

Leadership sustains itself on power in its direct and indirect forms—subtle and institutionalised, indirectly asserted forms of power in democracies; brutal and direct forms in autocracies.

But even in its indirect assertion, power is ruthless when it is challenged by any opponent.

So cruelty is the fundamental strain in both forms.

They accomplish the same objective through different means.

The throne of power is made of the wood of cruelty.

Its operative part cannot hold itself without cruelty being operationalised in one form or another.

It is a permanent chair of cruelty—the throne, the seat of power.

Only the occupiers of the throne keep changing. They keep coming and going.

All types of rulers are the subcategories of the same category of cumulative cruelty—the primal strain of power and dominance.

There is no point in hating or judging the individuals who occupy the seats of power.

That would be like hating an individual thorny bush for its ugly look and pinching thorns.

The thorny bush is just a manifestation of tree life, struggling to survive at any cost, even if it means fighting with thorns against the cruel elements of nature.

The seat of power, with its wood of cruelty, has sustained itself through the ages.

It has taken different occupiers, from ancient tribal leaders to modern elected representatives.

The seat, however, is the same—the seat of power and cruelty.

There is no point in judging individuals for having these traits.

They are simply the manifestation of the primal explosion in the faraway galaxies, here on Earth.

It is just a subtle expression of the same phenomenon.

This element of cruelty is basically interwoven with other traits in the fabric of life on Earth.

That is why God has not been able to finish it, despite all this war between good and bad going on since mythological times.

And it will remain so, because to exist means only to be like this—at least the way things exist on Earth.

Apathy: The Clever Vampires and the Silent Surrender of a Nation

 **July 2006**

India is now a land of terrible apathy.

It sways over the length and breadth of this country, almost unchallenged.

Misery, injustice, corruption, exploitation and helplessness are stuck like millions and millions of lice in a bulky, hairy body.

There are public woes, individual woes, woes ascending to the higher levels, forming monsters.

There are millions of cuts, bruises, boils, wounds and injuries, dexterously, systematically, surgically and cleanly inflicted by the toady-tappers to draw out the public juice; like lice slowly, slowly sucking up without killing, rather sustaining the victim (the institutions, the public, the helpless individual) to systematically sustain their bloodthirst.

Clever vampires indeed!

The systematic, clean-handed, apparently clean butchers!

And the virus breeds in the dimly lit corridors of public institutions, in the swanking galleries of private enterprises, in the files on tables, in the coolly calculating minds of clerks, in the authority-cramped consciences of those in the hierarchy.

Then the public, the crowd of the roads, bazaars, slums and squares, takes its own share.

Roadside slayings.

Who cares?

Perhaps all, perhaps nobody.

Even if someone does care, then what difference will it make?

This first-aid-type treatment at some individual or group level falls flat in the face of this terminal disease.

So, well understanding the problems of the victims, interpreting them at our own levels and debating futilely over the issues, we cross over the street to get to a safe passage, some safe, uncrammed alley.

But all the ways, byways, lanes, bylanes, streets, bystreets and side streets are crammed with blockades, blockades.

Pay for a safe passage, or tear your pants and a patch of skin in the valiant process of jumping over, with the baton of your rights in your hand.

And they mock at the latter endeavour.

Even the most enlightened among us scorn this little piece of legality as if it were a puny piece of rascality, an unnecessary waste of energy.

So all of us earn, at our own levels and costs, our safe passage, helped, guided and welcomed by the doorkeepers of tiny bastardness.

So apathy is becoming a norm, its opposite an oddity.

So, to remain accepted as a calibrated gentleman, one must keep one blind eye to the multitudes of woes in order to get to some safe place.

We have accepted it as our fate.

Perhaps rightly so.

The Black Truths of Kali Yuga: A Dying Monsoon and the Drowning of Honesty

 **22 July 2006**

The heat and humidity are terrible despite the early promise. The monsoon has disappointed thus far. The dreary evenings are intolerable. Perspiration seems to be the most common phenomenon among humans.

Paddy growers have started growing seedlings. The fate of their paddy lies in the life-giving kisses of the showery maiden. The plants now sag down in the warm, smelly pools of water around them, for which their patrons work so hard.

But it is a peculiar phenomenon. For the second year running, we have had hamlets in the desert state of Rajasthan being swept away by flash floods.

So we have started to bear the consequences of climate change.

Let us see where we go from here.

A time, perhaps, will come when all the multi-hued, beautiful, sweetly tantalising, sensationally certain yet uncertain aspects of nature will remain only in the words and pictures of the past.

Unhindered, almost natureless, we will run amok in naked shamelessness on the barren and bland terrain of our disarmed, lopsided, skewed stampede.

We will appear as aliens on the face of the Earth.

We are indeed taking ourselves on the path of alienation; to become aliens.

Those strange, heavy-footed aliens will be unrecognisable.

And in all this gloomy heat, the black truth of *Kali Yuga* strikes.

And I feel terribly gloomy.

These are bad, black times with their big, black truths.

One black truth has now hardened its position. It is taking such a concrete shape that maybe, in the immediate future—or even presently, barring the rarest of rare exceptions, meaning that the last nails in the coffin are yet to be hammered down—it will be perfectly unshakable, inviolable.

This black truth goes like this:

However hard and deep your roots in honesty, truth, integrity and constitutionality, you stand a futile chance of succeeding in your pursuit if you are pitted against a higher authority.

The tools of the game are such that they can be used through underhand manoeuvres—which the superior force does exemplarily—while you are left just a skinny dog battling for your life in the dangerously stagnant waters.

The truth and uprightness of your cause cannot act as your life jacket.

They act as drags, as dead weights, to pull you down into the pits of misery.

The vibrations of negativity are so light now that they take you into the air.

The Political Ship: A Glorious Flagship with Stinking Holds

 **July 2006**

The flagship of democracy is chugging ahead, making a mockery of all the storms and seas.

Its masthead and keel, hull—the framework of constitutionality—creaking, groaning, yet holding out bravely.

The sails and rigging—the democratic institutions—helping it to attain a fabulous speed, to take it beyond the challenge of any pirate ship.

Pirate ships—of dissident militancy, secessionist movements, terrorism, etc.

Its gun decks, the protective instruments, ever ready to spew fire upon any challenge to the hallowed sanctity of the flagship of freedom, equality, fraternity and liberty.

Its crew on the watch bill, the servants of democracy, ever working to keep it on course.

But the ship has rats in its bilges, amassed cargo in its holds, privileged passengers.

There is an unseen world below the open, sunny deck.

There, against the bulkheads, the castle walls, all protests from inside and outside go muted, suppressed.

There are cabins of luxury; there are cabins of misery.

But these narrow, screened partitions between the two make them worlds apart.

In one, there is wining, dining, dance, music, card-playing, full luxury on display; stinking death in the other.

And on the outside, it is just a flagship of liberty, of democracy.

Its captain and officers, the blessed, unstigmatised upkeepers of the baton of human progress.

But there are bodies inside afflicted with scurvy and many more diseases, unwashed, clothing in tatters, lice eating into the raw human flesh.

The whole dim area stinks like a chamber pot.

This proud, valiant, progressive ship—what does it hold in its stinking bilges and cavernous holds?

It is aware of the dangers as well.

There is a powder magazine, the storehouse of wrath and fury.

If some fractious movement causes a spark, the safely locked chamber may undo the entire institution.

So they guard it, guard it with more seriousness than they guard the idealised principles nailed down in the keel.

The god of death is worshipped, feared by all and sundry.

Even those who suffer terribly in the stinking holds are afraid to tinker with the tinderbox because it will mean certain doom to all and sundry—good, bad, moderates, extremists, everybody.

So the ship sails on, with few pleasures and plenty of pains as cargo.

Master Imitators: The Indian Fascination with Westernism

 **July 2006**

If one has to pick up a stock of humans who forego all sovereign pride in treading their own path in culture, tradition and lifestyles, and who still seem to believe themselves to be the subjects of their erstwhile colonial rulers—especially the European, white, tall, beautiful and sometimes richly hysterical ones (of the recent past)—then we Indians will have to take the title upon ourselves.

We imitate them in their language, way of dressing, dancing, singing—and here I would like to pick out the modern girls especially—so much so that they must, at a certain time, start feeling quite at home in all this monotonous, body-baring, consumerist, classless, cultureless and dressless monologue.

Look at our Page Three super-rich people.

Their nightlife, wild parties, smoking, alcohol, free-flowing relationships, hip ways and unconventional sexual cravings among persons of the same gender.

All these put any idea of a unique, diversified, culturally variant Indianness on the backstage.

It is a poor, soulless drama of Westernism.

Westernism only for the look of it, not in the spirit which has at least fetched the Western people unprecedented capital boons and material comforts, high-rises, postmodern utilities, etc.

To be frank, whenever the image of a fair, white, blue-eyed person, with red, bronze or silvery locks and some tall, well-built figure comes to us, it never passes without leaving an imprint of superiority—an imprint of inferiority upon the senses of we Indians.

We always find them superior.

It is in sharp contrast to our poor selves and surroundings.

So Hindi becomes poor, English becomes rich.

Our country becomes a den of misery, theirs a sacred heaven.

Our society, one of pariahs; theirs, of smart, suave, modern, intelligent human beings.

Our ways and culture, degrading and obsolete; theirs, smartly updated, easy and unconstrained.

Our relations, dragging; theirs, easy floaters.

And what else do you expect of the consequences between such high and low pedestals?

So whatever comes from the high Western point perennially flows down into our lower, stinking lands, and we are the ecstatic worms going gaga in our partying in the mucky pools as the flash flood of alien waters hurtles over our heads.

Langda: The Lame Farmer and His Astonishing Gamble with Fortune

 **July 2006

Quite unexpectedly fair-coloured for the boys of his community, a copperish-brown crop of hair and a sparse beard of the same sort distinguish him further, and a deformity of the leg even further.

Nicknamed *Langda* by the uninspiring verbal fact it virtually denoted, the person is an heir to almost nothing from his immigrant lineage in this part of Haryana.

He has to dig a well virtually every day to fulfil the needs of his wife, a dim-witted, buxom, rotund lady, and four equally differently abled children.

We must have mentioned his lanky lad who ran away and whose fate we are yet to finalise, even in our imagination.

The eldest is a sturdy fellow. He can work, but the motivation, cleverness and urge behind the same objective are absent. So he very often runs away from work.

The youngest son is clever and seems to have been honing underhand manoeuvres as he steps ahead on the path of boyhood. Some cases of petty thefts in the neighbourhood have been reported.

The fourth kid is a girl, a rather fair-coloured, not-so-good-featured but decently attractive girl of about thirteen.

She minds her hairdo and the donated second-hand clothes.

The way they live and the circumstances they are in almost ensure the arrival of the day when the girl will lose her virginity, partly on account of her own adolescent curiosity, but majorly on account of some bubbling, bursting-at-the-seams urchin vagabond.

But our main concern is the father.

If not for that missing substance in his leg, his body would have presented the spectacle of a slithery, athletic body.

The man drinks hard, works doubly hard.

In fact, he works to sustain his need for alcohol.

But just as we thought that his way would any day meet an ignominious end, the man has sprung a surprise.

He, like farmers of his ilk, survives on farming rented land, putting all other claimants in a terrifying tizzy.

He has rented land at fully double the prevalent rates—one lakh for four plots of land.

Some say he will meet his doom.

But such guts either make or break.

And they seem to make, if the returns—paddy on an average, ₹25,000 per plot; and ₹70,000 per plot from tomatoes—stick true to his expectations during the coming year as well.

He has sublet the plots to a few others.

And there are as many furrows and sections of different vegetables as are possible under the circumstances.

They are squeezing every penny's worth from the land.

They drink doubly hard and claim that they won't be drowned even if they rented a plot for fifty thousand rupees.

The Girl Child: A Pall of Gloom Over the Birth of a Daughter

 **July 2006**

The Union Government is thinking of bringing in legislation making it mandatory for all pregnancies and medically recommended abortions to be registered with medical institutions.

The aims of the proposed legislation are lofty.

The government wants to check the fast-falling sex ratio in Haryana. But rules in India—a behemoth of population, institutions, sentiments, biases, conservatism and skewed modernism—only give rise to illegal rackets.

The nobler the rule, the more pernicious—and equally high-paying—the underhand economy that thrives around it.

The coffers of the higher hierarchies, which are supposed to help and nurture the bud of the rule, are filled by the racket; ironically, the defenders become the tramplers.

India, we should not forget, is still crammed with ageing mamas and mothers-in-law who ill-treat the girl child, whether in poor or rich Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian or any other community denominating our collective identity.

And the single-minded ones also contribute to all the blasphemy against this soft flower of law and legislation.

They go mourning, stampeding over all the modern notions of equality of the boy and girl child.

The birth of a girl is met by the family as if a tragedy has struck.

There are too many mourning eyes over the birth of a girl child in a family.

It is a silent but unremitting protest by the masses against the government.

Conservatism and old conventions in any age have the tendency to be mellowed down over a period of time, prodded by the changing times.

But such beliefs as the suitability and joy of having a male child are unyielding like a bar of iron.

The convention remains unruffled even though so many changes, which should have acted to corrode the rigid bar, happen almost every day in India.

In the countryside, still, the practice of going into gay abandon over the birth of a male child is the rule.

There are donations, acts of charity, public feasts, dancing, music and other celebratory noises on the occasion of a boy being born in a family; while a pall of gloom falls over the ill-fated family where the *kanya* has mischanced to arrive.

But, ironically, this battle against their own race is usually fronted by the elder females.

This is primarily aided by those household-hardened veterans—the women of the family.

Don't they feel that they might end up extinguishing their own species?

Nepali: The Free-Flowing River and the Dark Detour of Destiny

 **July 2006**

He is nicknamed Nepali in the village.

Not that he is from Nepal. He is a local son of the soil, as much Haryanvi as anybody else in the village. But maybe his features have fetched him this nickname.

There are a few swift-flowing, free personalities, the flow of whose lives is not put to deceleration by the drags and anchors of life, conscience, morality and social conventions.

But despite the absence of such holders, which prevent us from turning into beasts, they are decently tolerable in the society they live in.

The absence is most often masked, or rather takes the garb of bubbling vivacity and unsparing charm, mostly ebullient in pranks, etc.

From his childhood, Nepali was chubby-cheeked, fair-coloured, healthy, and all such things which could have definitely taken him to the destination of the sort mentioned above.

His adolescence was terribly shaken by torrents of lust.

His growing years were marred by a few blots of transgressions on the modesty of a few not-so-classy females in the neighbourhood.

Then marriage came, and so arrived the responsibilities.

But all along the twists and turns of these happenings in his life, the sheen of bubbly vivacity was not lost upon his character.

His sentences very rarely came unaccompanied by his grinning, even though the economic circumstances were cramping.

Though he had all the qualifications for entering into small-time crimes, yet he had, till then, warded off all such temptations.

But then we have to reach our destination, like a river.

Most of us take a detour along the spaces of sanctity during our journey. Some, however, take a shortcut at great social and religious costs to go ahead with great guts and daring.

So this very sort of aberration arrived in his life.

A property dispute between a lady on the one side and her husband and son on the other presented him with a chance.

It was a case of contract killing.

So, securing himself a sum of ten lakhs, Nepali, in his free-flowing, unchecked demeanour, as if he was not a criminal but rather a mere worker, walked into the house and shot her from point-blank range.

He was behind bars for a few months.

His unmarried brother, dying of consumption—or was it AIDS?—was chronically addicted to narcotics and drugs.

The brother came to his redemption.

Surely, on his deathbed, he owned up to the crime in lieu of a death with dignity.

So that chubby fellow is free now, with the amount from which he has built the fortune of his small family.

No other cases have been reported for the last few years.

Haryanvi Pop: From Traditional Raginis to the Glittering World of Music Albums

 **July 2006**

The Westerners started packaging their music in albums.

Very efficiently, as we are very apt at it, we took the clue very soon.

The music bazaar was agog with grossly tampered sound, beat-driven, electronically recharged *desi* music albums, which, to an extent, lightened the burden of Hindi film songs to calm the millions of musical souls in India.

Each and everybody who could have any semblance of pretence to dancing or creating music jumped onto the bandwagon, not taking it too seriously from the artistic point of view.

This consumer element in the field carried big bucks for those in the fray and probably provided foot-tapping, mostly boozed-up moments at ceremonies and weddings, which were never memorable but fizzled out like any modern consumer product, giving the baton to some new substance in a modern package.

It but provided classical strength to the *old is gold* type of film songs, which have ruled the roost in our hearts for decades.

Taking a cue from the Hindi album scene, the regional outfits blossomed.

They appealed to limited sections, mostly on linguistic lines.

Punjabis went almost mad with it.

Each day dawned with scores of Punjabi music albums, which went on to blare all night during wedding dances all over North India.

And now the latest trend in the neighbourhood is Rajasthani and Haryanvi albums, imitating all the former elements of all genres.

It is a huge, motley mix of inspired wordings, music and dance themes.

Nothing is original, or perhaps the suave impersonation could not be possible without some originality.

Who takes someone speaking Haryanvi seriously?

They appear simpletons, even buffoons, to some urban people.

But they enjoy their peculiar dialect of simplicity and arrogance.

Raginis have given way to Haryanvi music albums.

Here, the university girls dance in a very naive manner to the crudely, rudely probing wordings of the dialect.

And they are successful as well.

On local cable networks, they blare their raw senses day in, day out.

In fact, they have pushed Punjabi songs from DJ floors during weddings.

Pakistan: The Monster of Militancy and the Perils of Self-Inflicted Wounds

 **10 July 2007**

Make it your sole motivation to dig pits in others' paths, and then one day see yourself falling into your own hole.

Since its formation, that is exactly what Pakistan did.

Made its neighbourhood stumble over the holes of militancy, terrorism, sabotage and wars.

But at a great cost to its own society.

Sustaining the passion for covert games meant radicalising entire generations to draw a sufficient pool for radical seminaries, terrorist camps, spy networks, etc.

A radical person is as dangerous to his surroundings as he is to others in the neighbouring country.

President Pervez Musharraf now devotes most of his own and his army's time to fighting this catastrophic regression in society.

Lal Masjid has been in the news since last week.

Brainwashed jihadis, students, both male and female, buzzing with excitement, forming the defenders of puritanical Islam, are holed up inside with deadly weapons.

The army, equipped with equally deadly weapons, surrounds the mosque.

It is a paradox.

It symbolises their effort to undo what they had been doing for more than half a century.

It is a task more easily said than done.

Though dismantling needs less time than construction, this is no physical dismantling like that of outdated, old structures.

It is the dismantling of the monster nurtured, reared and fattened in hearts and minds.

It has been fuelled by religious zeal and passion.

It draws its sanctity and validity from law, scholars and sacred books.

Bullets can never be its antidote.

Rather, they perpetuate and aid the virus.

It will require an equally big, constructive, humanist and logical movement as that of the forces on the other side.

It is very farcical, very piteous, to have to tend to and bandage self-inflicted wounds.

But wounds are wounds.

Self-inflicted or inflicted by others, it doesn't matter.

They need tending, unless you have suicide in mind.

So helping Pakistan alight from the core of fundamentalism to become a modern, democratic, progressive state is in the interest of all of us.

All believers to the contrary need to look at the consequences befalling the distant corners of the Earth.

For that, we need to forget the bad chapters of history for our own sake, if not for the sake of our adversary.

A person hell-bent upon dying is more dangerous for others believing in life than for himself.

We might try to make him believe in life, peace and prosperity.

Coaching Institutes: The Three Faces of Modern Teachership in India

 **July 2006**

Teaching was never as lucrative, prestigious and dignity-fetching for the chosen few as it is now.

Also, it was never as secure, irresponsible and negligent as it is for some others.

Still further, it was never so degrading, humiliating, fickle and uncertain, with such a pittance, for the rest of the trade.

The first ones are the modern, high-paying tutors from the corporate tutorial and coaching houses.

The second are the lazy bees of a secure hive of government schools and colleges.

The third ones are the poor, lower-middle-class graduates and postgraduates whose skills are just enough to land them jobs of a farcical nature in little, little educational groceries cropping up at every nook and corner.

Coaching institutes are the glittering stars of the corporate world presently.

Fees for entry into lucrative professional courses, civil services and other jobs rob a middle-class parent of almost all his savings accumulated up to that time, if he gets his ward the facility of preparing for a glittering future.

It is such a populous country, with a massive throng standing at the career threshold.

Coaching houses virtually rake in money in their money-crammed back parlours. Packages offered to the staff are unbelievable; the status enjoyed by them matches that of any corporate bigwigs.

And in the middle rung are the government teachers.

It is a chaotic, make-believe world of crippling infrastructure, mismanagement, almost total absence of responsibility or motivation for improvement, and misuse of funds.

But amid all this academic filth, the staff at least enjoys the security of pay at the end of the month.

So they while away their time in all other things except teaching, while a few dozen poor, low-cost children keep the formality of the place going.

At the lowest rung are the poor academicians, ill-trained, holding certificates just for the sake of it, themselves not knowing much of their subjects, working in these educational groceries.

The proprietor tends to run it like a tiny manufacturing unit—extracting the maximum, which means unwanted authority, nagging and lordship over the staff.

They are hired and fired at the whims and fancies of the owner of the education shop.

They are exploited like manual, illiterate workers.

The best of talents—which most often means the proportion to which you can appease the owner—fetches around ₹2,500 per month.

That is the impoverished face of modern teachership in India.

The Moneyed Class: The Hidden Price of Being Rich

 **July 2006**

There are rich people, and there are super-rich ones also.

The latter might have their own phenomena which we might not find too easy to explain, for an almost insurpassable gulf exists between them and we commoners.

So our talk must primarily concern the former ones—the rich people whose paths periodically run close to ours; who, in the process of making a sufficient amount of money, aren't, due to the nature of their occupations, capable of shutting their lives completely from passing through the busy, buzzing thoroughfare of petty struggles, huge pains and almost no gains, of hope, strife, etc., witnessed by we the commoners.

And enviously, the people at the lowest rung stare at them, hate them for their miserly treatment when it comes to paying for the labour done for them by the labouring class, their scornful and haggling ways in criticising the poor ones, etc.

Very often, the poorer ones estimate the incomes of those local moneywalas, minus the apparent costs of living, and then arrive at a huge sum as the balance.

They wonder why this constant nagging and haggling is done by them even though they have so much surplus in their accounts.

To some measure, they are justified in this, but not completely.

Why?

Because a great source of outflow from their coffers remains unaccounted for in the process.

It is the price they have to pay for earning big bucks while rubbing so close a scornful shoulder against poverty, destitution, misery, unemployment, crime, corruption, frustrated crowds and much more.

Their trophies shine too brightly in this melee.

And mind it, they don't live almost fortified like the super-rich, who have their similar problems at the super level.

So they pay, and a considerable sum, for enjoying their status.

They pay to the bureaucracy, to the politicians, to the police for protection and to keep their wheels running.

Then these rich scions from towns, small cities and posh localities in big cities pay to the extortionists who threaten them with murder and kidnappings if they deny the amount demanded by them.

It is a big sum.

So the cost of enjoying their status is far, far higher than we think it to be.

If we arrive at the exact figure, we won't be too jealous of them.

Three Sevens and a Thousand Knots: The Auspiciousness of Human Imagination

 **7 July 2007 (7-7-7)**

Three sevens in the day's denotational worth have put—now this is a surprise, given its universal reach this time—the people in India, not so particularly, and Western countries, not so generally, into some astrological pit of specialness, auspiciousness and uniqueness.

We do not know where the spark to this effect came from; we do but certainly witness its matrimonial configuration on a global scale.

Lakhs of marriages have been fixed for today.

Banquet halls, reception halls, chapels, temples and hotels—all are in for a tough schedule. Their capacity to get the new couples done within a cramped schedule is to be tested throughout the day and very late into the night.

Coming to the special day and the belief behind it.

We are the ones who make or break such things.

So if the common conscience jumps onto the bandwagon, then nothing wrong with it.

Matters, after all, mean a lot in our lives.

So if the yoke is put on a supposedly auspicious day, then we, just for the sake of criticising astrology, should not run in to rob this mundane day of its special status.

All days are the same.

So if we decide, for our sake, to make some of them special, then what is wrong in that?

Good, bad, ominous, auspicious.

All these are our fantastic, civilised thinking constructions.

We have sired them, not vice versa.

So why browbeat over our own offspring?

We will dump it as easily as thousands of obsolete ones in the past, the moment we sire a more suitable, updated, renovated, improved one.

So let us raise a toast to the day's auspiciousness.

Let us drink to the happiness of thousands of souls who will tie the knot today to become partners in pain, pleasures, loss, gain, summer, winter, weepings and joys.

If the day entails such a happy phenomenon, then it itself becomes sanctimonious.

A rationalist might find it illogical, but then this is what differentiates us from our creations—the machines.

Our quotient of humanity derives sustenance and survivorship from this innocent, illogical, pleasantly irrational, pliant, softly veiled, hazy, misty, murky pool of our frailties, weaknesses, uncertainty, vagueness and zealous sureness.

The Driver, Not the Machine: Artificial Intelligence and the Dharma of Creativity

 **3 November 2026**

Who wins the race in a car rally?

Is it the car? Or the driver? Or both?

Before we answer the question, we have to consider a few facts: What purpose does a car serve in a rally? What purpose does a car without a driver serve in a rally? What purpose does a driver serve in a race without his car?

Both serve a purpose in combination with each other.

But still, the human contribution—as the operating part, with its dynamic consciousness of the situation—is given predominance in deciding a winner.

Are cars declared winners?

No. The driver gets the trophy.

The same applies to other domains involving humans operating machines, gadgets, computers, or controlling animals—or anything, for that matter—in a competition setting, be it sports, politics, economics, arts, or anything around you.

After all, humans are laying down the rules of competition to have human champions. So that is inevitable.

Human-centrism is inevitable in competitive settings among individuals and institutions where Homo sapiens are the creators.

When mankind wrote on rock walls in caves, it still was the human scribe.

Later, pen and paper, word-processing tools in computers replaced typewriters and physical dictionaries. But still, the limelight was always hogged by the operator.

That is man.

I think the same would apply to music, painting, sculpting, writing, and any other creative domain, including even hardcore science, including mathematics.

Human brains will keep using the latest artificial tools in creating something fundamentally original.

Artificial intelligence is the inevitable evolution and advancement upon grammar and editing tools available in Word documents.

As creators, the restless human brain will think of newer and newer ways to build upon what is stored in algorithms, drawing from the already established collective pool of knowledge, information and facts.

To create something different, the operator has to be there with time, dedication and willpower to create something new.

As long as that intention is there, and there is no shortcut to quality, and the creator avoids mere quantitative addition to the cumulative source in the algorithms of large language models, the modern artist will always find ways and means to create something out of the artificial tools.

With this spontaneous creativity, the artist, with his focused attention and passion for creating something new, will always cross the boundaries which the large language models set for him.

That is how it is going to be, whether we accept it or not.

On-principle denial of artificial intelligence's role in modern creation would be as childish as a writer who prefers to write strictly with pen on paper, judging the one using an Apple notebook to write his articles and scribblings.

Both are basically driven by a sense of curiosity and creativity.

They are merely using different tools.

I think, as a creator, the person operating a modern tool has to always keep in mind his responsibility to keep trying to create something fundamentally different, intrinsically original in nature and scope.

As long as this creative honesty is there, and it keeps pushing him to go on and on without taking any shortcuts or settling for some pale imitation, directly or indirectly, of something already existing in the algorithms of large language models, the dharma of creation isn't tampered with.

You are still keeping the dharma of creativity as long as you have this genuine urge to create something new and are always aware of the fact that, however hard you might be required to try, or however long it takes for you to create something that meets your passion, you are keeping the dharma of creativity alive.

Artificial intelligence gives a fantastic scope for research, reorganisation, summarising and assembling the vast pool of data, knowledge and opinions.

There are so many quantitative processes involved within the qualitative endeavour of original creativity.

That can be handled by artificial intelligence while you keep focused on your work, like an ancient sculptor, musician, painter or writer, engrossed in his task.

The spirit of creativity remains the same, be it an ancient rock carver centuries back or somebody working with artificial intelligence tools.

The endeavour is the same, the pursuit is the same, and hopefully the results will also be the same.

In the Good Books of Birds: A Little Nest and the Meaning of Luck

 **3 November 2026**

Housing is a human-centric term—one of the powerful terms that have defined life and living on Earth only from the human perspective.

Food, eating, drinking, birth, death—everything, in fact—are now the natural parameters in human terms. Everything else is auxiliary—subject to whims and fancies.

Systematic sprawl and chaotic sprawl of human housing mean the rest of the species hardly have any rights to shelter on Earth anymore. That merely depends on our sense of charity now, and the sense of charity keeps varying.

A wire-tailed swallow couple comes nesting every year—sometimes they use the ground-floor veranda, sometimes the veranda facing my upstairs writing, reading, living, sleeping, meditating room.

This year they have nested in the terrace veranda, the nest visible from my writing table.

They say having swallows building nests in your house is lucky.

And I would say luck means to be in the good books of a bird couple, to be able to provide them a sense of security.

It means the birds have the natural vibes of safety and security in the environment around you.

And that is as good as having come across a stroke of luck. That is a vouchsafing by birds that the environment you have built around you is not intimidating to them.

And it is a significant thing in its own way.

If your house emanates such safe vibes for a bird couple, already you are lucky.

Yes, there are bird droppings—a slight inconvenience.

But isn't it worth it when we know that it will give birth to a beautiful, metallic-blue-and-white new generation of wire-tailed swallows?

More swallows darting in the sky are far better than fighter planes, drones and missiles cutting across the blue canvas.

As the chicks jingle with excitement to eat more from the beaks of labouring parents, it sounds musical in this quarrelling, noisy world.

They make sounds like the little jingling notes coming from a toy meant for an infant.

And it is a beautiful interjection in the pleasant monotony of my reading and writing.

The world becomes instantly better with birds around you.

Poplaine, the Reluctant Hunter: A Cat, a Cruel World and the Kindness of God

 **2 November 2026**

 

There was this feral cat, three-quarters wild and one-fourth domesticated. One-fourth just sufficient enough to allow her to come purring into specific homes, not regularly, but sometimes in the evening, and have her little piece of chapati or a bit of milk, as the host found suitable.

It was a nice, disciplined cat, but a great hunter.

Every year, when she had kittens, she would be shifting the brood to the chosen houses. She would pick out safe places like houses with front yards with big boundary walls or barn verandas so that the kittens would survive within them. She would leave them and go out to hunt, and would arrive with fat rats to feed the kittens.

And during that time, she would literally famish and lose a lot of weight.

It was such a dedicated cat.

Every year, her brood had their time in our courtyard as well. Sometimes they would stay for fifteen days, sometimes for a week, and grow up. She would continue hunting. And then, one fine day, they would start going outside the yard walls to begin their own journey of self-survival on their own.

And later on, the male cats would turn into almost fully feral cats. And the female cats would turn out to be like their mother.

Last year, in June, as usual, as per the routine, she arrived with two kittens, both males.

And it went the way it had been going for the last few years. She would just tire herself out in search of prey, and she would hardly eat the catch herself.

And the kittens were growing fast.

But then, after fifteen days, she stopped coming.

And since then, I haven't seen her. During those last days, she had grown very weak. So, most probably, she did not survive.

But due to her selfless mothering of her kittens, by that time the kittens had grown sufficiently to survive on their own.

They needed—they still needed—some support from our end. So, for a month, they got supplements from our side.

And then the little garden in the yard, the little group of trees, was buzzing with chaos.

Because every year during monsoons, there were so many nestings in our clump of trees and plants, ranging from warblers in the plants to tailorbirds, Oriental white-eyes, bulbuls, doves, spotted munias and a few others.

But this time, these two top predators of the small yard and garden wouldn't allow the birds to nest because they were expert climbers. And due to their little weight, they would even reach the top ends of the branches.

So no branch was safe.

And there was hardly any nesting in the little garden.

They even killed most of the shrews. It was a group of shrews that used to stay in the garden. And shrews are considered to be lucky by people in this part of India.

And usually, cats don't eat shrews.

So these two little rascals just ended up killing all of them, and I would find them killed unnecessarily, not eaten.

So that was quite irritating.

One of the kittens was introverted. It would prefer to stay within the yard. The other was quite outgoing.

And gradually, with the passage of days, the outgoing one was enjoying the freedom of wilderness. It would go outside, would continue coming back and play with his brother.

And then it would even somehow manage to take the introverted guy outside as well.

And during one such outing, the introverted guy was killed by the stray dogs.

There are so many stray dogs in the villages now. Every street has a band of dozens, and they are always fighting for their territory. It's always noisy. They howl, they bark and chase cats.

They have killed many cats.

So that is a very sad sight.

So the introverted kitten was killed.

And ironically, it was killed by a dog that had been crawling on its front legs because its hind part was paralysed due to being hit by a car driven by a drunk farmer.

And it was just passing its time, laboriously pulling itself ahead using its front paws only.

But look at the irony!

That day, when the band of dogs chased this introverted cat, which had been playfully pulled out of the yard walls by its more outgoing brother, it escaped the smart and swift dogs.

But when it was finally leaping to safety, it happened to be caught in the jaws of the crawling, handicapped dog.

And it shut its jaws on it with such force that even a few beatings by a peasant woman who was nearby were not sufficient to set the prey free.

And it put so much effort into the kill, as if it was making up for all the lost opportunities in the fun game of a dogly life.

So the kitten was killed.

So only one was left.

And we took it as an orphan.

Its mother was no more. Its brother was also gone.

So we thought of supporting it a bit more than the other kittens because we always knew that supporting them beyond a limit would just tame down their wild instincts, and they wouldn't be able to survive in the open.

So this one also got a name.

We named it Poplain, after the earthmover, the earthmoving machine.

I don't know how we came to christen it Poplain, but it seemed to suit it very well.

But I don't think it accepted the christening because it never, ever responds to the call.

It is more open to "Pushu."

The moment you call it "Pushu, Pushu," it comes running down to you.

But keep calling it "Poplain, Poplain," and it doesn't even look in your direction.

So it has got a very strong sense of likes and dislikes.

Poplain grew, and it would spend almost fifty percent of its time in our front yard, and fifty percent of the time it would be out.

It learned hunting, and to supplement its natural catch, we would give it whatever eatable suitable for a cat was available at the house. Mostly, it was milk and chapatis.

It turned out to be a very friendly cat.

It would go to some other houses as well, where kids would play with it.

So Poplain grew to be equally balanced between wilderness and domesticity, enjoying the best part of both sides.

Then one day, it went missing for four days, and my sister saw the carcass of an exactly similar cat which had been mauled by the dogs in the street.

So we ended up giving heartfelt obituaries to Poplain.

In fact, we even missed it.

But then it returned suddenly, out of nowhere, after four days.

And we were very surprised that it was still surviving.

After that, Poplain has been quite lucky a few times.

One day, it literally came out of the jaws of the most dangerous dog in the band, in the street band near the house.

The dog snapped its jaws at its neck, but in the last fraction of a second, Poplain must have been very agile, and the dog ended up catching it on the back.

It somehow wriggled out of the jaws of the dog.

Had the jaws snapped on its neck, it would have been gone.

And when it came back, I had never, ever seen a cat more scared.

It was literally on the verge of a heart attack.

It couldn't breathe out of fear.

With such struggling, snappy breathing, it was very, very difficult for it to take even a breath.

And it kept lying for a day or two as if it was on a sickbed in a hospital.

But it recovered.

Thankfully, there was no major injury.

Now, there is another black male tomcat which comes and thrashes Poplain sometimes.

So I thought of feeding it cat food so that it grows stronger than this rascal tomcat.

And I got cat food for Poplain.

But the problem here is that since the day we started serving it cat food daily, it would just abandon all sense of hard work.

It would just keep lying, and within fifteen days it had grown overweight.

Its tummy was bulging like a pregnant cat.

And that was a disgrace!

So I know that in order to survive, it has to stay slim, smart, alert and swift.

Because if it keeps on putting on weight, that day is not far when a street dog will catch it sometime and kill it.

So I keep the amount of cat food served to it just enough to keep it svelte, so that it is forced to go out and work hard and look for some rat in the bushes around the house.

But it is so stubborn that it thinks that as long as it keeps on entertaining us, making those purring and sycophantic types of sounds, we will ultimately feed it.

But now I have devised a very nice way out.

Whenever I see that he has crossed the limits and won't go, despite the fact that I'm not going to feed him any more that day—and that is for his own good—instead of shouting at him or trying to chase him away with mock attacks, what I do is throw water in his direction.

Now, a cat is very much scared of water.

So Poplain makes very accusatory sounds.

I can make it out. He gets very angry.

He makes very loud, howling sounds whenever I throw water in his direction, and looks at me very, very angrily.

And then jumps over the yard wall.

But that is for his own good.

I have to keep him hungry just enough so that he goes into nature and does what a cat is supposed to do.

That is, have patience, go into hiding and hunt rats and other cat prey.

That would keep him smart, active, athletic.

And that would help him in beating the dogs in their chase.

The other day, I was thinking: just like I am trying to discipline Poplain by making things a bit difficult for him, maybe God also does the same to us when He puts up little, little challenges in our path.

Because if we get everything without doing anything, we will grow overweight like Poplain, and then we will become victims of circumstances.

So now I realise that maybe God, as a very kind father, does the same to us.

Cinema: The Fading Magic of the Silver Screen

 **July 2006**

In small towns and cities, there was a time, till the early nineties at least, when the quotient of budding youthfulness in country lads was measured by their contrived, stealthy, hard-fought escapades to the cinema halls.

Cinema then fashioned the ways and modes of bravery, for gangs of youth fought with knives and hockey sticks over tickets and seats inside.

Cinema was the harbinger of fashion, of love, of relations, of ideology, of knowledge, and whatnot.

Entertainment on television was in its infancy.

A cinema hall with broken panelling, decimated chairs by overenthusiastic audiences, its interior crammed with peanut shells and other discards from eatables, presented a cramped cabinet of adequate entertainment, replacing all the past elements of entertainment like theatre, visits to fairs, festivals, magic shows.

Film stars had as big a persona as those figures on the mammoth screens.

Sitting with their smallness from the small places, people, abandoning all their egos and authorities, looked spellbound, clapped at favourite dialogues, booed at and yelled at the villains, sang and danced to the tunes with the stars, with the heroes and heroines, whistled, threw obscenities at the characters with negative shades, passed livid, sexy remarks at the heroines.

And during the interval, the canteen inside got swarmed like a thirsty pack of cattle around a tiny, muddy waterhole in a desert.

In excitement, who cared for the cheapness and staleness of patties, snacks and other articles of eatery at exorbitant prices in the cinema canteen?

Alas, within a decade, all that is gone with the wind.

Cable TV has turned the tables head-on.

The small screen has hit the big one with such impunity that the behemoth is tottering to its fall.

People have it all on their small screens—24 hours, 365 days in a year.

Many illustrious cinema halls are rarely able to meet the running costs.

Some have closed.

Those who still stand in the fray, they bear the ignominy and ridicule of vacant seats in the first show of the best movie.

And mind you, the canteen!

The canteenwallah is the most pathetic figure these days.

Out of a dozen-odd spectators, very rarely somebody comes forward for a thing to buy.

"The cinema is dying," I heard a canteen keeper saying with sadness.

The cinema is dying, at least in our town.

I agree with him.