October from the Distant Past: Of Memory, Mortality and a Restless World

Grandfather lived up to be richly laden with years and left, still unsatisfied, on May 25, 2001, in the afternoon at 2:25 p.m., at the age of almost 96.

The exuberant target of old age was to hit a century, but the nervous old man missed and got out in the heartbreaking nervous nineties, like many cricket batsmen do.

Like a true heir, my father has truly taken after the constitution of his father, but the similarities end there. Unfortunately.

Lean, athletic, well-proportioned figure. Not a single extra, droopy, unmeaningful fibre on the entire body. Grandfather worked, lived, ate, smoked, drank in exactly the same dreamful proportion. The summary of his life can be viewed as a balanced approach in each and every matter related to life.

On the other hand, father did all the injustices possible to his hard, lean, meagre body. So now he lives on perpetual medications for damaged lungs due to excessive smoking at the age of 70.

Ours has been an illustrious family, at least in the farming community here in the countryside. So to delve into the dusty chronicles, I have to derive one date in reference to the other milestones—that is, deaths, marriages, national tragedies and triumphs.

It starts with a tragedy. My great-grandfather's struggling journey on the path of agriculture was undone by an angry horde of bumblebees one cruel afternoon. My grandfather was in the eighth standard then.

My great-grandmother also soon left the four children and went back to her parents to be married again because she could not become the valiant mother who could raise three sons and a daughter unprotected under the constant harrying by the intrigues of the males and females of the extended clan, who in those days grabbed land almost naturally, without any checks or balances, either by the law or society.

And such unprotected families, in the absence of the father figure, would also come across violence. There would even be murders.

So the mother made the better choice for herself and left the four siblings to their own fate.

It was under such circumstances that my grandfather, aged around 13 or 14, became the patron, being the eldest of his siblings, in 1919, when turbulent Europe saw the conclusion of World War I.

As was usual, he grew up hating his mother for the betrayal, and women in general for being of her species. 'You cannot trust them, he would say.

He kept up the motto till his last days, and that is understandable. He missed the love of a mother.

Grand-aunt was the youngest of the four siblings. Two elder sisters never survived to witness the drama in the family. Married at a very early age, and also witnessing the crude jujubes of matrimony, they died within a short span before the bumblebees went out for revenge on the family.

So the three sons, led by grandfather, grew up working on their own lands like labourers, getting two meals in lieu of all the hard work, while the patrons from the extended family—their grand-uncles, etc.—took the production to their barn.

In those struggling, hard days, the ownership of a piece of land was decided by one's guts to plough it as one's own.

So, bursting with vigour, the three young men, armed with sticks, went to their land on their own and ploughed the land as its masters. It happened when they came of age.

The land had been almost mortgaged or even assumed to be sold to the relatives on account of the tragedy and the consequent law of might is right. And the day they ploughed it on their own, they became its masters.

Father says he must have been around five when his mother, that is my grandmother, died. So we can safely assume that the young lady died in the year of the Quit India Movement.

There was one elder sister to my father, but she died of fever at just the age of three or four.

To my first grand-uncle, who stood six feet two inches and became a Naib Subedar in the British Indian Army, was born Uncle Mahavir in 1946, and after two years was born the first real achiever from our mundane, down-to-earth standards, Uncle Satbir.

So Uncle Satbir was born to my first grand-uncle in 1948. That also is a milestone. 

In 1952, grand-uncle died due to tuberculosis. He was soon followed by his wife a year later, who could never recover from typhoid.

Three young deaths in a span of ten years.

But in these tiresome tragedies, the family had its little shape of triumph: the marriage of the second grand-uncle. The brothers had saved money.

So the marriage party went in a bus instead of the customary bullock carts. That was a big status symbol. 

Meanwhile, the younger grand-auntie fought for a separate house from day one. Right from the beginning, she wanted a separate home and hearth and succeeded after the death of the first grand-uncle.

Grandfather was left with three sons under his care. Again, the same kind of responsibility that he undertook for his siblings when he was merely 13 or 14.

And now a widower, a very disciplined man, well respected for his mathematical skills and the art of land measurement, he had three sons—one his own and two of his brother—to take care of.

Grandfather never remarried, even though proposals would keep coming for almost two decades. He knew that a stepmother would hardly take care of his own son, forget about the sons of his brother.

So again, the struggle kept on.

Grandfather was very sharp in mathematics. Till this date, people remember his calculations. Whenever the Tehsildar or Patwari could not resolve any measurement-related dispute regarding land in the village, they would take the services of my grandfather because he had set up a landmark in accuracy. So his word, after careful measurement and calculations, would be taken as final, and all would accept it, trusting his mathematical skills.

My struggling grandfather had to use all his skills, ranging from farming to mathematics, involving teaching to even going for recruitment in the army once, and taking up little ventures, like starting small brick kilns in partnership, and other ventures like taking buffaloes for selling in Bengal, even though there was hardly any market there. People ate fish and there was no demand for fresh milk like the farmers in Haryana and Punjab had, and even have at the moment.

There are numerous anecdotes of his struggle all through those years, but he just kept on plodding the domestic cart single-handedly.

Like a typical, apparently hard father of those times, he would even spank his three sons because all three were just like his real sons now. He would compromise on anything but not on hard work, and hard work was just about education and studies, and studies meant doing more and more mathematics.

So mathematics meant education. Everything regarding learning centred around it. Mathematics was bigger than god to him.

No wonder, even though my father and my two uncles would always grumble, recalling all those beatings and thrashings, they set up moderate milestones in the village in education.

My father became the first M.A. in English Literature and B.Ed. He was a great athlete at college level, spoke English better than the professors of those times and got a job in LIC, a government job. Uncle Mahavir also graduated with a teacher-training programme and became a government teacher.

But the youngest of them, Uncle Satbir, excelled all of them and was just one of the two candidates who cracked the prestigious IIT exams from the entire Punjab area.

Later on, he would join IIT Roorkee for an aeronautical engineering programme, and even there he would excel in his class, but would always have issues against the professors whom he thought were not capable of giving a proper boost to his scientific wings.

And quite mysteriously, he vanished.

He left in the final semester.

Grandfather got a letter from the institute that your ward is missing, and after two years of frantic search, my father found him as a truck union accountant in Yamunanagar, with a white hat on his head and a bottle of liquor in front on the rough wooden table, and he was doing account work for the transporters.

So such is the journey of my family, but grandfather stands out as the pole star of learning and love for mathematics.

As we were growing up, he would always drag us to the charpai and start teaching us mathematics. It went on till matric, and if at all there is anybody whom I can give some credit for my interest in studies, it is grandfather.

Even though it is another matter that my interest got rechannelled and turned to literature instead of mathematics.

*****

Tendulkar plays his 400th one-day today at Vadodara, Gujarat. A great achievement indeed.

But the tragedy of being Tendulkar is that you have to hit a century in every outing, in a most dominating way, with every shot executed to perfection, with one more record-breaking feat. He has to bear up the expectations of entire India.

This man wears too heavy a crown.

Through his majestic on-field exploits, the man has steadily added to the weight of one billion-plus worshippers that he carries on his shoulders. But then he is the God, and godhood comes at a price.

We would but like to forget the 400th one-dayer. Even though he lugubriously worked up to his career average by making 47 runs, India was bowled out for just 140, and Australians chased it without much trouble.

*****

I very often ponder over the subject of death, for its ultimately triumphant swipe, undoing all the totalizing mirages which drive our interest, fuel our strivings, to the extent of making one's own death appear as some unfanged fact at the most distant horizon, pumping up our strides.

But the cruel fact is that it lurks with equal stealth for all of us.

It picks up its morsels in a variety of ways. Some are plucked suddenly—in childhood, youth and old age. Some die slowly, slowly, fragmented over a period of time by diseases, worries, failures, poverty, disgrace.

Who wants to die in parts?

A cracking statue, skin peeling off, plaster giving away here and there, cracks appearing on fine features, eyes slit, ears gone, brow dilapidated.

Better it be a single muscular stroke, beheaded in one cruel blow.

Then you die only one death instead of the multiples that many have to go through.

Even though it means leaving your near and dear ones struck with the horrifying, painful tragedy if you die suddenly; in dying in parts, over the painfully prolonged hours, days, months and even years, their sorrows too are leaked away over a period of time. So in that case it doesn't come as a shock. In fact deep in their mind they want you to just go and be saved from the misery. It's a tiny rivulet that is left when you finally call it quits and your final piece gets chopped off from your physical existence in the form of the last breath.

*****

Moving from death to the political scene. The communists, the beholders of Chinese pride, find themselves in a tough dilemma.

Indian-Italian-led UPA is hurtling fast in its bonhomie with the super-imperial power. It is raising a lot of suspicious ripples in the 'now father of communism', the fiery dragon.

So our comrades get jostled in Calcutta over whether to pull the plug out or not. If they do, then they become the spoilsports, forcing a midterm poll on the people. If they do not, then the book of their ideology gets kicked.

So the fellows are puzzled a lot. And by God, they deserve it too.

The Indian-Italian is getting politically smarter day by day. A very exquisite, exotic addition to the dynasty-born Nehru clan. They are here to stay for a while in the present century, right at the helm of affairs.

Rahul is smart and suave, likeable. Poor people will vote him into power someday. So is his sister. The day the fuel of his charisma runs out, his sister is there in the vanguard. Then there are her two sons, and Rahul too will marry someday.

The soul of Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru can rest in peace, really.

Their other possible rival, Mayawati, is behaving too flashingly, vindictively, revengefully to emerge as the steady star at the national level. The angry, not-so-young lady can't forget her Dalithood and hate for Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The lady will thus get battered and bruised while doing the same to others in the badlands of UP, and she will then fizzle out like a shooting star. I see that it will be the same story of somebody being carried to the peak of popularity by caste-based sentiments. But after reaching the summit, they will find that this is not what they were expecting, and she will topple down. Because to emerge as a messiah at the national level, you need to elongate your spine to rise above the petty acts of dismissing 18,000 policemen recruited during the previous government. In undoing all that was done by Mulayam Singh Yadav, you become more like another Yadav. And if you claim any variance or superiority, then you have to descend from the wrestler's platform.

Outside, the world is boiling in the same vat, like it has been for the years gone in the present century.

Same American mission against jihad, Muslims on tenterhooks all over the world, sectarian killings, occupation, bloody deaths of innocent civilians, the poor fodder being fed into the mill to run the crusher with the bones of the commoners like you and me.

Pakistan is bearing the repercussions of its hateful deeds. The General is without his uniform and looks all set and prepared to don a civilized, cultured sherwani for his innings as a civilian ruler.

The lady seems well set to return at the helm of affairs in some not-so-distant future. Both of them have managed to throw out poor Nawaz, who looks Sharif now after being bundled out like an errant kid.

Mountainous tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are aflame with the resurgent Taliban. Kabul still burns. No efforts seem to douse the fire.

Same Israel-Arab conflict, same civil wars, endless in much of Africa, same dash of the red flag across Latin America, same Russia on the path of retaining its glory under Putin, same poor Britain bursting with Asian immigrants flying to catch up with the golden bird of its colonial glory. But now the descendants of erstwhile subjects fuel its desperate flight.

In India, it is cricket, politics, cricket, politics, cricket, politics, competing with each other to gain the mass fancy.

Masses and classes, classes and masses, massed classes, classed masses.

The world seems all too familiar, but all too different from the one it was in the past.

*****

Yesterday was Amavasya, the culmination of the fortnight-long period of paying homage to the family ancestors, Pitra Devatas. Billions of family devas were propitiated and appeased by the families, and today start the Navratras—the nine days of piousness, penance, charity and fasting.

Tomorrow is Eid, the culmination of the holy month of Ramzan. So over at least two days, both Hindus and Muslims will be fasting for their respective gods—or maybe Godhood gets united on these two days.

But yesterday, misery was hurled at us, both Hindus and Muslims. Separated by the gloom and doom of two mightily gurgling religions, we Hindus and Muslims still have some common breathing grounds, like Sufism.

The dargah of mystical Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer is a meeting ground of the secular, liberal, forgiving, obliging strands in the two behemoths. Both Hindus and Muslims throng the site with equal fervour.

But yesterday, at 6:14 p.m., a ghastly deed was done to tear apart this centuries-old mystical carpet, which has been welcoming the tired and torn humanity of the same colour of misery, hope and redemption.

It is aged, eternal, woven with the sinews of faith—the sinews which have seen the changes across the last eight centuries on the same mystical, majestic carpet.

While the iftar gathering was in full fervency, the blast killed two people and injured many.

A nasty, filthy thing.

*****

Elsewhere, in Delhi, the scourge of Blue Lines is on the rampage. Earlier there were Red Lines, which became the symbols of blood and gore on the capital's roads. So the colour was changed.

But what can the colour do if the course and content remain the same below the whitewashing?

This vast fleet of private buses is manned by illiterate, semi-illiterate, untrained brats from the surrounding countryside of Haryana and Punjab.

We will have to bear this nonsense until the government finds an alternative to the monster. Till then, the god of death will pick some of his prey from the Delhi roads, bearing the criminal imprints of the Blue Line wheels, plied by an untrained petty lawbreaker.

October 13 happens to be my niece Saifiya's birthday. She turns six today.

The birthday thoughts given in the Hindustan Times are very encouraging for any family. Our family's sole member of the next generation so far—a few others are waiting to come—shares the birthday with the Iron Lady from Britain, Margaret Thatcher, an achievement in itself to share the birthday with such an excellent achiever.

The HT paper too has a few nice words for the children born on October 13.

It says:

"Influenced by number four and the planet Uranus, you are smart, confident, energetic, systematic, reliable and a studious person. Your efficiency and determination make you achieve the maximum and stay ahead of others. You always hold positions of immense importance and responsibility, but you need to control your tendency to behave stubborn, jealous and vindictive at times. Your stars bring you fresh opportunities for growth in your career. Those seeking to venture overseas will get to receive encouraging news from people abroad."

So this is the message that the Hindustan Times has for those born on October 13.

It's a nice, favourable, obliging, congratulatory, encouraging piece in the paper—a true birthday gift.

At least the paper should spare some nice birthday gifts for all the siblings of all the 365 days, and also, of course, for those born on February 29.

From my side, a lot of love and affection for the little angel. Hope she really comes to enjoy the true fruition of the papery birthday gift from the Hindustan Times.

How swiftly time flows.

I can still recall that puplish-pink face and wide-open eyes of the one-and-a-half-hour-old newborn in the hospital, Dua Nursing Home, on October 13, birth time at 9:18 in the morning.

And six years hence, the baby whose joy and pains we have shared so thoroughly, she is on the little path of growth.

Hope her drunken father mends his ways, but the fellow seems incorrigible, almost.

An October from the distant past: Of Hawkers, Mahatmas and Ordinary Lives

Street vendors roaming the village alleys on business have real competition, a real business acumen propelling them in an almost fruitless task day in and day out. But they take their work very seriously. They mean it.

For the exactly recurring, like an audio tape played repeatedly, signature calls to attention for their products and services at hand give a clue to their pinpointed focus on the job. These are very poignant calls to attention, sneaking forcefully into the nonchalant ears, creating ripples in bucolic hearts. And as they do it repeatedly across seasons, in the same streets, for years, for the same business, their siren call becomes a periodical, legitimized, branded, copyrighted piece of hawking to attention—their very own typical tones.

There is a subziwala. We call him "leeeyoo." After shouting out the list of vegetable items in his wooden crate at the back of his bicycle, he sums up with a nice, long-drawn, affable, "Leeeyoo!" It is a dialectical variant of lo, le lo—take it.

He's a short man, this "leeeyoo," most of the time clad in his faded purplish kurta-pyjama, and sometimes it is the grey one. This chubby, round-faced keeper of a genuine smile and gentle manners has his fixed list of clientele, just as others of the trade have theirs.

The other one with the trademark hawking notes is the juicewala—mosambi juice—from Bihar, roaming the street with the citrus-green fruits piled around the hand-operated juicer on the hand-pushed rickshaw trolley.

His siren call consists of a pitchy, high-octaved, crisp, "Juice peeoo!" So he is the affable 'peeeoo' to most of the villagers. 

He too has a fixed list of regulars: the elderly and the sick.

The kabariwala is a young fellow with plenty of enthusiastic twists of his mouth and tongue to sound out the title of his scavenging deeds in a pitchy, pointy, rich-octave voice. "Ee kabbaaddi vaalle" he preens always meaning to clean the houses of their junk. He is the simple 'kabadi' to the villagers. 

Presently, the darling hawker of the ladies in the village is the suitwala, the seller of hundred-rupee-a-piece female clothing.

He shouts, "Sau, sau ke suit le lo!"

Here, sau is the number, the numerical hundred. "Sau, sau ke suit le lo" means have a pair of clothes enough to make a suit and salwar for just a hundred rupees.

He has devised a musical cadence to suit the softer, purchase-lorn souls in the ladies' hearts. His richly varied, highly coloured and printed collection of cheap, hundred-rupee pieces attracts a lot of gathering around him.

Among the other notables is the picklewala. "Aachaarr!" he trills spicley. 

Another is the kabz churanwala—the constipation churan seller.

And then there is the jaggery puffed-ricewala. It is puffed rice sweetened with jaggery.

So these are the notables. All named by the villagers on the basis of their main hawking notes. 

And what I have observed is that the unskilled people of the Indian motherland are the ones who are at the front of the battle for survival because they don't have either the capital to start a business or any specific skills to go into a job or start some venture.

The poor people just imitate each other in making a living. Mostly, they just pass the day wandering around, trying to convince themselves that they are doing something lucrative. 

So you have dozens of vegetable sellers, dozens of other hawkers and vendors. They can just look towards somebody of their level and start doing the same.

And there being so many of them, almost similar in the skills and situations of life, it's a very tough competition for them.

*****

The day has a title. It is October 2nd, and the famous title is Gandhi Jayanti.

The thickly underlined day—it has the heavy burden of the great man's non-violent legacy. On each day of the rest of the year, it has to struggle against all-pervading antonyms, which have now become the mundane fundamentals, pushing, pulling and prodding (and testing) the Father of the Nation's long-winded tale of aesthetics, principles and morality.

But then, on his birthday, the Mahatma's legacy is artfully felicitated.

After all, it is a national holiday.

Thus, the forever holiday-seeking Indians, the children especially, salute the beneficent Bapuji for bestowing them with a day off work for the elders and a holiday for the children in school. They celebrate it as a holiday, as a festival, as a shastra-boosting myth.

We celebrate, we pay a dithering, fleeting homage, we devote, we glorify the man, we vilify him as well.

But each second takes him and what he stood for away and away from us—a fuzzy, grainy, hazy figure vanishing into the mists of the past; a figure on the path of myth and legends, which will further take him away to the path of godhood in the distant future. And equally distant from humanity on the ground where things will be done exactly opposite to what he meant to do. 

The God of disobeying children who will worship him for being a virtual impossibility—Einstein's forecasting homage, by the way.

His legacy will turn ineffective, his works misinterpreted, his deeds misjudged, shut down in sanctified, glorified volumes to be picked up and thrust to the head for a fraction of a second's reverence, just like people do with the holy scriptures in the courts before starting to pour out white lies.

The emerging messiahs of the Dalits denigrate him, and so do the other neo-Ambedkarites. Muslims can't forgive him for being the ringleader of the anti-Muslim League axis, a virtual anathema to the idea of Pakistan. Hindus hate him for being a Muslim from inside. "Why did he allow so many Muslims to remain back here in India?" is the common poor little Hindu's observation.

These are ever-ebullient minor and major revolts against his constitutional status as the Father of the Nation.

The new emerging nationalistic forces want him dislodged from the lofty throne. The only saving grace is the common man's honest conscience that still sees the blood on the shirt of the patriotic zealots.

Misunderstandings about this saint of Sabarmati far, far exceed the glory of his image.

He acted symbolically. The meaning of his actions and ideologies percolated deep, deep into the spirit, beyond the narrow confines of poor letters and words only.

But we, the fuzzy heads with our crippled senses, can't see beyond the barbed reality of mere letters—the concrete, single-minded, one-dimensional, straight-faced reality.

So almost ninety percent of what the Mahatma actually stood for misses our heads because it is in the spirit. It needs nuanced, subtle sensitivities to feel those soft undercurrents of the great man's philosophy.

Thus, we waddle in just ten percent of his letters and farce away and joke and make him a lampoon in the form of a naked clown whose goat ate grapes, as if the poor beast was the real cause of India's impoverishment. And who, in his old age, walked aided on both sides by young maidens, as if the old sanyasi's tale of sexuality was more important than two wrinkled fatherly hands on the shoulders of two daughters.

We Indians are the too small, puny, crippled children of the mighty father. All of us cannot shoulder the spirited mountain of his myth and legacy.

So, led and driven by our practical instincts, we dismantle the mammoth aura to trim it down to our shoulderable size so that we can carry it.

We are the masons, always working, hammering down the big blocks to carry our own tiny, feather-weighted, pusillanimous, able to be trifled with pieces of his mountainous legacy—or we will further drag and break them down to make pebbles and play like kids playing marbles.

Pebbles to be kicked at by the erring brutish footballers.

Pebbles to be hurled through slingshots.

Pebbles to be thrown into the mud.

We, the worshippers of his glory, our feet in the sanctum sanctorum, our arms, meanwhile, busy in creating the paper birds of the present who die, pulped down the moment they come across the first rain.

*****

The common man's refrain is that Gandhi's ideas were bigger than his deeds. The latter appearing puny, pint-sized, beggarly, cowardly to the present generation, bursting like a balloon with the fussing and fuming gas for power, status, money and advancement, victories and triumphs.

This is a generation of new knights in shining armours, the belligerent commanders of the consumerist field, where everybody wants to lead the columns, with none contented to be the humble, honest foot soldier; all lacerating their capacities to outdo the fellow battle-worshippers.

It is a parricidal, fratricidal field, a modern battlefield. Blood and gore of selfishness, individuality, shortcuts, infidelity—and they have encircled the great man's sanctity at statue-bearing squares, which still somehow commands the rule of traffic through his checking, harking philosophy. But the day is too short for obeying rules, and the night is always enough for flouting them.

Decent work of many sunny, normal, legal days gets undone in a single dark hour.

So the naked fakir finds himself, stick in his hand—but it was a support, not a weapon—encircled in a noisy, clattering, white-blooded invisibility. A gory mass of apathy. His frail figure, draped in the cotton armour, appears dozing, the puddles of his life's very antitheses spattered around like homages and offerings at his nimble, poorly, lightly sandalled feet.

So October 2, the holiday, has come and gone, garlanded hurriedly by white-blood-smeared. The great man still has many bhakts. But they are poor, voiceless, almost naked, and they hide behind the curb around his statues. They are scared for being off-beat: non-violent species in a violent world. 

Many of his former pupils and disciples turned belligerent commanders. Khadi, in shining armour—Khadi commanders they are—with their homespun new convictions of survival in a belligerent world of angry politics. But they still elaborate on the vestry around the poor Godfather, whose persona could be amply defined in a few pencil strokes on a blank white sheet of paper. Such simplicity.

They now, to add colour and excitement to their role of great pedigree keepers, fill it with brilliant hues to stake higher claims on account of being sired by a great, blemishless soul.

There are glittering columns of obituaries to historic figures, from individuals, from organizations, from parties, from government, from media persons, newspapers dated October 2, where the presence of the light sage's—light-robed and light-staffed—quick march, like a miracle worker, his soul seems to dawn on printed pages, on tongues.

But the miracle-performing soul seems outdone. For those who help perpetuate a legacy, what else is a miracle? They have outgrown the patriarch's shoes. They don't fit well. They just wear them uneasily, grimacingly, for a short, brisk, unpaying, unrewarding walk as a ritual, a ceremonial ritual on Gandhi Jayanti.

All said and done.

Still there is a huge silver lining—optimistic, inspiring, almost life-giving, drawing one out from the gut of desperation.

The morning today has been blessed by the pen of a man who normally blesses with willow. Sachin Tendulkar has written his first-ever signed piece exclusively for the Hindustan Times.

It is a long, inspiring, illuminating chain of words from the man, laid out systematically, iconically, like he plans, prepares and executes the scheme for every single run.

In this write-up, the maestro coolly, calculatedly, honestly, candidly dispels many a veil from around his mythicized persona to emerge an Indian first and foremost, an exceptional human being, writing down his glittering destiny from the pen of his own ink and nib—a family man, a friend, a philosopher and a guide, with his scriptural trail of dreams, hopes, efforts, strategies, competition, achievements.

Reading the write-up, I realize if one has to excel in any field at such levels, the brain has to imitate a smart, fast, ultramodern computer, and your heart at the same time has to be spacious and fragrant enough to embosom the whole splendiferous essence of the most beautiful vales in the world.

And I am proud that our cricketing god is just like this. No shame in idolizing him; he deserves it absolutely.

October 4, by the way, is the birthday of my friend Pardeep, born just a couple of days after the Mahatma.

He surely justifies the Mahatma's non-violent legacy. The guy is calm, caring, affable and absolutely incapable of any type of violence. So we still have tiny Gandhis here in India. But they are poor and suffering. Weakness, poverty and deprivation appear so close to the image of the Mahatma in the present times. So close that any talks of nationalistic strength has to treat him as a redundancy, an unfitting element in the equation. 

September Chronicles from the past: Between the Monsoon, the Match and the Nation

The world has moved on unmindfully, unrepentantly, optimistically on the path of forgetting the losses and magnifying the gains.

The tragedy of the 21st—cousin brother's death—and the triumph of the 24th—victory in the Twenty20 World Cup—are left behind like a black dot and a shinier one, though a bit larger, put side by side in the dustbin.

Metallic and biological lives hurtle on the iron and cell rails respectively.

And such is the journey that, with each passing hour, both the tragedy and the triumph now acquire the same colour—that of unimportance and insignificance; a big greying happening in which the victor and the decimated, winners and losers, happiness and sorrows burn and boil in this elaborate vat of the past, to turn it into the sticky, flabby, tarred, dredgy fluid of the past.

Despite early promise, the monsoon has failed miserably—not a single shower of significance in the months of August and September to this date.

But despite this unfaithfulness on the part of the drenchy maiden, the paddy, thanks to the irrigation canals and channels kissing the fringes of the agricultural-scape of the village, is lush green, promising, sturdy and healthy.

A bumper crop the farmers expect.

So the farmers don't bother too much about this meteorological miss.

The sun during the month of September is very vigorous. So is the greenery around, and both, in a tango, make an eye-blinding canvas of nature.

The monsoon is gone. Almost. 

The almost blazing blue sky is now dotted with independently moving, fluffy white and grey wads of clouds, travelling lugubriously, aimlessly over the blue bosom of the sky.

The rear guard—all disheartened, dispirited—moving to reach up to the main columns of the Goddess of Rain.

These scattered clouds are the rear guard of the main columns of the Goddess of Rain.

In Myanmar, red-robed Buddhist monks, armed with the pistols of begging bowls and the war cries of peace and brotherhood, are moving in a massive march to raise a non-bloody resistance against the military junta.

But if not now, then in the coming days it will turn bloody anyway.

Given their legendary patience their robes can soak much blood.

Much blood. There seems to be more and more demand for shedding innocent human blood. 

*****

Cricket, cricket, cricket, and more cricket.

That seems to be the national credo.

It is the mighty banyan of modern India, with new shoots, saplings, roots, after the Twenty20 triumph.

So much so that overenthused players as well as fans, forgetting the past pains and humiliating defeats, proclaim us as the true champions now.

Much-piqued Mr. Ponting, the Australian, warns us to look back and notice the Aussies' triumphs in the Tests and 50-over one-dayers.

But overzealous fans don't pay any heed to the different versions requiring better skills and the likes at the higher hierarchy in the game.

Everybody seems to shout:

“We are the latest true champions.”

But it is very precarious—a beautiful vale and a precipice.

One single victory takes the entire cricketing scene to the beautiful vales of popularity, money, status, shouts and celebration.

But the precipice is just one step ahead, always.

One misstep and all is lost, all is forgotten.

Funeral dirges are sung.

I fear the very same this afternoon during the day-night one-day match against the Aussies.

The big three, the old veterans, will be returning to action.

Cricket, however, is a cruel game, and so are the fans and media.

Every action of the old pros, the time-tested heroes of the past two decades, will be scrutinised through the overexcited, overdemanding, overadolescent lenses framed by the new crop of swaggering hitters and fast runners.

It is an irony that the most boisterous section among the fans is that which thinks cricket is just a game of hit and run:

Hit, hit, hit.

Run, run, run.

Faster, stronger, stronger, showing a no-nonsense and powerful urge towards the cause of entertaining cricket. No place for test match class and elegance. 

The shouty fundamentalists and terminators, the crazy amateur fans who are not serious about the classics, the fundamentals of cricket, prattle that the gloriously grizzled feathers on the heads of old, ancient kings should be snatched and put on strong new shoulders.

The majestic trio thus have to wage a war which goes beyond cricket.

It is about outdoing their own robust pasts.

It is about outshining the vagrant urchins shiny and showy in their theatrics.

It is about winning matches in different styles for a different audience.

*****

Let's move away from the frenzied cricketing lanes.

Away from the frenzied cricketing lane, let us enter the silently hobnobbing back alleys to find out what is cooking. Secretly. Sinisterly. 

We are obliged to enter the back alleys because there are no open main streets in the swarming city of politics for we the common people.

What cooks there is either too simple or too complex, and thus missed by the poor masses.

In both cases, it is too simple if we understand and keep in mind a few subtle blocks beneath the political facade—the contrite art of indirect fight, using the pawns of blind masses, unsuspecting followers, constitutional machinery, channelising the frenzied, passionate, etc., etc.

But such dusty, cheap nuances are scattered unpretentiously around our feet to attract any critical glare.

Okay, be it so.

*****

The communists always—it is their soul force—want to shake the stage with ideological theatrics, even when they are part of the game and plot. The ever-cringing urge of revolution, I think. 

So the UPA government led by Mr. Manmohan Singh, the meek and the sleek and the most learned of the lot, is getting some serious jolts from the red shirts, crying foul over India's nuclear deal with the sign of imperialism, America.

So from the soldiers of liberation from capitalism, there is a war cry.

Belligerent China is much mellowed in its grip regarding India because it now has its band of wayfarers in the form of Leftists in India, the orchestra fuming with ideological fury.

So the Leftists shout:

“Go back on your treaty with the bully.”

They order the apparently meek Mr. Singh, while the new foreign-made Iron Lady fumes aggression into the oddly humble, turbaned mentor of the country.

The supporters of the treaty say that it will ensure the transfer of the latest civilian nuclear technology to India, as well as take us into the good books of the superpower.

The detractors and critics say there are unseen ghosts in the closet of weak clauses in the treaty, which will cut India's nuclear weapons programme, increase our distance from our traditional ally Russia, create more ruffles in the red feathers of the Chinese dragon, and naturally make us an object of targeting by Islamic jihadis.

The revolutionary communists are thus threatening to pull the cart of the government.

But after witnessing the initial all-round condemnation of their blackmailing, they are going cautiously now.

Let us see which way the camel takes a turn? 

This way?

That way?

How can we, the common people, know?

It is such a secret game out there in the top echelons of power.

Nothing can be certain when the matter at hand involves our dear red shirts.

Anything and everything can be expected from them.

After all, they are a class which will not blink an eye in shedding blood for some utopian cause. As it has proved world over. 

So smothering some ideological stand for commitment to peace; or tearing away any understanding they have with their partners -- these are beyond the cognitive reach of those who can't fully gauze the idea of killings for common good.

The earlier an understanding is made, the more digestible it will be to their supporters.

At least it saves their shirts from getting still redder. In mind at least. 

So while the red tinge on the Leftist brows gets redder, the pale-faced, learned Prime Minister, dumped helplessly at the helm of affairs, shows surprising defiance.

He has Righted the Leftist ways a bit, because his humble facial expression, by the side of the iron lady, was totally unexpected.

The allies wanted a far, far weaker response from the economist Prime Minister.

But the conservative fellow must have surpassed even himself by taking a strong verbal stand.

*****

Idgah Colony is Sonipat's poor Muslim locality.

Two or three thousand poor Muslims live in this crowded, narrow-laned, dingy-housed neighbourhood. A humble minority surrounded by people of other faiths, totalling about three lakhs in the city, mostly Hindus.

Terribly outnumbered, they have their own world of insecurities, inhibitions, visions, hopes and despairs.

Pakistan, with its brand of pan-Islamism, which of late is crumbling apart, is too far. They need to survive through manual, semi-skilled means and are somehow facing more trouble in making a living in these times when traditional occupations are losing their hold in rapidly modernising India.

So Pakistan might indulge in domineering slogan-shouting for the cause of Islam, but that does not change the ground reality of poor Muslims here in India.

In fact, it makes it tougher for them.

Against this background, life here in this locality moves slowly in the side lane.

During the last almost sixty years, Sonipat has had a decent communal history. Just for some tiny exceptions. A tiny cubicle of a mosque by the erstwhile railway crossing—which has been removed now with the coming of the first flyover—was perhaps the only exception.

A small group of vandals, acting big on the clarion call of nationalism, had broken a few tiles and bricks from the tiny mosque's small façade in the aftermath of the Ayodhya happenings.

Some patriotic organizations have their branches in most of the cities. No problem with patriotic organizations at all. They have done great work during instances of national calamities. Just that petty holligans join their bands during times of emotional upheavals and spoil the name of the organisers. 

Sonipat has its own.

Their fiercely focused agenda makes me uncomfortable. A bit. For my beloved Bharat Mata. Or maybe I don't know enough about them to give judgments on them. I want it to be peaceful, prosperous Hindustan and for that we need social harmony. 

Midway through the Twenty20 World Cup final, the cable network in half of the city and in most of the villages around came to naught. Connection was lost, leaving people fretting with anger. 

A rumour spread that the Pakistan-favouring Muslims in Idgah Colony had snapped the lines passing through their neighbourhood in order to stigmatise the taste of victory.

Frenzied cricket devotees, their devotion double-dosed with the help of religious divides, hastily arranged for a public screening at Mission Chowk, and they celebrated the victory with a triple dose of enthusiasm.

Triumphant firecrackers were burst before the mosques in the colony.

Two or three thousand supposedly sulking Muslims surrounded by two or three lakhs jubilant Indians. I thank god that no untoward incident happened later that night. 

The equation is too skewed to lend any credibility to the rumour.

I plainly accept that they can't dare to do any mischief.

They just cannot. Can't afford to do it. 

So I explicitly smell a conspiracy—some mischievous group trying to create more social division—and they have made a start in a populist manner.

It does not portend well even for such small cities, which have scatterings of minority religionists in a sea of the majority.

All I can do is to pray for our majestically multi-cultural motherland, one of its own kind in the world. 

The diary of a girl

Given below are the poems and notes from the diary of a girl. A girl who suddenly arrived in my life. And was gone with the ease with which she had arrived. Just like you have a lovely drizzle suddenly wetting you, then gone. There is a beauty in such arrival; there is still beauty in such departure. The little space in between measures eternity. Through unconditional love, not the needy love that we are acquainted with. 

As I tried to regain my footing in the almost labor-intensive world of the publishing industry, after civil services and business ventures having gone wrong, nothing to show off, high on academics, having spent my entire life in books, and a few years then in business, here I stood almost at the level of average graduates the struggling publishing houses of Delhi NCR.

And one winter night, the girl, about twelve years younger to me, arrives. It was a cold December night. In pink woolens, very fair-coloured, high boots, loveliest smile. I stayed in a poor locality to save on rent, and she was class, elegance, style and modernity symbolized to the last curve of her charming presence—a real head-turner.

There she approaches without any circuitous coquetry that you typically see in females. Even if they desire you, they will take the indirect path, ultimately forcing the men to take the lead and ultimately get all the credit and later the blame for having built up that relationship. That's natural, actually, because man himself has been doing so many negative and aggressive things regarding our softer but equally capable part of humanity, that is, womenfolk.

She told me that she had been in love with me since she was thirteen, a fan of my poems, which she avidly read on my blogs. She had heard a lot about me. Her father knew my father, and she had seen me two, three times as a girl growing up with the dreams and vision of the purity of love that she thought was coming through my poems.

And then, for a decade, we were out of connection. There was hardly any clue about what was happening in each other's lives. 

She got married very early, I think just at the age of nineteen, and that was the forced arranged marriage, I suppose, by her family—because she was so beautiful, and they thought that in a conservative society it might bring problems. She was daring, gutsy, not reserved at all, and there was always a line of boys and men pursuing her. So, in order to avoid any eventuality of scandalous kind, they married her off, but it was just like putting her into imprisonment.

She had talent. She had deep emotions, a good mind, a vast heart, and her husband was a normal, average, rich guy. Within a year, she became a mother to a boy. But, as was inevitable, that narrow domestic confine would never ever hold her like a prisoner, and she escaped.

She left everything—the comfort and millions of rupees of her husband and his family. Her own family also almost discarded her. So she was all on her own, surviving in this big, bad world, and she has been paying a big cost for having grabbed her share of freedom.

On a chilly winter night, she arrives in my life, at my modest room, and comes and approaches and kisses, and in natural surrender, evolving, telling me the truth that the idea of love in her young heart germinated in my form through my poetry when she was a very young girl of thirteen. And now, ten years after that, she just finds it almost natural to find me in her arms. It was destined to be, she said. 

I was a bruised soldier from the battle fields of civil services and business in Africa, so it was a wonderful feeling to have her around. Her sweet presence lasted for about six months. She wasn't intrusive at all. I felt here was a girl who would totally surrender to a man but still would stay completely unpossessed by him; and won't possess the man from her side as well. Just a state of meditative being in the loops and folds of unqualified, unending love. An open love without the costumes of roles, responsibilities, expectations and needs. A naked slice of truth, raw, natural, cosmic, not something manmade. 

The girl, without any cleverness to manipulate a man, or sharpness or shrewdness to manage or control a man to meet her ends, to fulfil her needs; just like the natural flow of a wild stream. A wild river, I called her.

And those moments with her, in the entire ecstatic broadness of intimacy, generated some of the most wonderful passionate poetry during that phase in my life. I had faced so many failures in my life, and she, always embracing with her fully expressed love, appeared like a cushion support. An all-embracing entity. 

She arrived like a beautiful spring full of flowers—flowers fragrant, lovely-coloured, cool breeze—enough to make me forget about the wounds and bruises of life.

No expectations from either side, no plan. We just enjoyed each other's presence, just like two free shapes of clouds travelling in an azure sky, coming to touch each other, slowly, gently merging into each other, acquiring a big mixed shape of pleasure, love, ecstasy, joy and happiness.

Then the natural winds.

And both of us simply drifted away, moving on with altered shapes, which was the proof of being in each other's presence. An evolution.

No grudges, no blame, no quarrel. She was too soft to speak even a single harsh word. She could just smile. 

So the girl was gone, leaving behind her diary—a diary containing her poems. 

The Diary, a repository of her young heart. 

And again, for more than a decade, she would be gone, without giving a feeling of heartbreak or pain to me, seeking her freedom, paying a big cost of condemnation, jealousy, judgments by mainstream society with its chains and check-dams.

Then after a decade on her mysterious path, she suddenly drops a message through email.

I met her on the banks of Ganga Ma. A flower that has seen the hoary blizzards and storms but is still full of freedom, smile and beauty. Fiercely independent and free in her loving softness. She has grown to be a highly evolved spiritual being. The raw love is polished by the furnace of life. It seeps through her majestic presence. 

It was a wonderful day of coffee at a table overlooking Ganga Ma, walks on her majestic banks, visits to bookshops where I gifted her books, talks about life sitting near the holy stream. A beautiful sharing of each other's presence. A mystical, platonic feeling.

We both know we have gone too far on our own paths, so accept it with grace and dignity. Our distinct lives have been shaped too forcefully.

There she walks, giving even foreigners pangs of jealousy and desire with her majestic style and standout beauty and lofty bearing. And after a wonderful day on the holy banks, there she gives a gentle kiss on the side of my neck and again melts away on her path. I don't look back as I take leave of her. There is no pain, just fulfillment. 

We don't pursue or disturb each other. Just sometimes drop messages when some faint nostalgic push connects a thread.

And to make it evident how deeply in love she had been with my poetry, I can see a couple of my poems in her personal diary, where she outpours her innermost feelings; feeling so close to the emotions in my poems as to present them so near to her own poems. Most importantly, the words become your own if you connect to them so intimately. 

Of course, when you connect to something with such deep authenticity, they are your own words.

And these are her poems.

Oh Lord; I wanna cry
cry my heart out.
Is it the world or thy
on whom I wanna shout.
Overwhelming ecstasy of the moment
has shaken the swooning heart
And left behind the fountain of pain
Though.
It was a threatening thunder
Yet I thought love was about to rain.
Thy shower all the fragrance
on this poor creature in terrain.
Happiness although departed,
not to return
Yet left behind the stream of
this painful remembrance
Me a mystic on thy path.
a salvation they say.
This heaving heart of mine.
long kept captured but preserved
wants to break the cage now
and dissolve in divine river.

——— ◇ ———

"Dead sea are they
drowned is man in
Modernity and archaic old.
making them immortal.
Shrinks world today
with deadly spasms
Its small size not a sign of human
but a stone-like
exploiting dead society
useless is human real; for few new heights
As centuries tread away 

man becomes more
inhuman & intolerant.

Yes only hope lay in tolerance divine,
The thing humane most, able to do good all."

——— ◇ ———

“Chance to survive lie
not so in modernity
As in a human real
Intolerant is not which
like a machine, emotionless.”

——— ◇ ———

“There are crushed hearts;
not to be broken.
Mine me think is one
Else I would not wake & weep.
when you to slumber gone”.

Narrow is the lane of love
two exists not.
When I was the Lord was not.
Now he is, I am not.

“It's a rare delight
in lonely nights.
whispering to my love
and hearing replies.”

“Mind you oh gust of wind
Dare, if you ruffle the locks of
my beloved”

——— ◇ ———

Security is mere a superstition,
one cannot consent to creep,
when one has the consent to
soar.

Drop the mind that thinks in
prose,
Revive another kind of mind
that thinks in poetry
Put aside all your expertise in
syllogism
Because heart is closer to
mysteries.

——— ◇ ———

OH. my child I miss you
Every day I miss you even
more. Just thinking of the
time you were in me.
You made me feel what
they say life inside life.
Each day you grew more
and made me feel enlightened
In my womb's warmth,
were you, making me feel
the urge of love to live.
To live my life with you, for you.
Your kicks in my womb.
entangled me with happiness.
What ever I do you were
in me, saying MOM I care.
Slowly & gradually came the
day, of beautiful pain ever.
The pain of happiness I
must say.
And here I see you.
OH! So beautiful it was.

——— ◇ ———

Love although a body of lies.
Knowing it now, my heart smiles.
Was it never love, or just
it was attraction, so called lust.
In just a phase, I had felt.
lost in love, my heart had melt.
Now knowing the truth, I am surprised
the beliefs were fake, I have realised.
my deeds I thought were sins invincible
Penance and austerities now the principle
of getting off this suppressed old soul
to rejuvenate in life being the goal
Now when life laughed at me
the love in air has now flee.

——— ◇ ———

Poor heart is mourning a lot.
words now are helping me not.
Oh! the rain of love
where are you residing.

——— ◇ ———

If you have a friend treat
him with care, you'll know
his worth when you see his
empty chair.

We have limited time on earth
and once departed shall return
no more.

He who felt greatest misery can
feel the greatest happiness.

And by and by my soul
returned to me, and answered
I, myself am heaven and
hell.

Death is not an event in life
we do not experience death.

——— ◇ ———

Never seek to tell your love
love that never told can be,
for the gentle wind does move
silently & invisibly.

The wise world should look into
your moon & mock you

The secrets of eternity neither you
know, nor I. And this
riddled letter neither you read!

Difficult now to shed tears of
blood; no more strength in the
heart to bleed.

Sleep & bliss comes easy to
him in whose arms lies
your tresses

——— ◇ ———

Seeing her I became
cheerful, she thinks the patient
is well.

The secrets of our life,
are like the leaves of the book
our friends can but read only
the title

It's a rare delight in lonely
nights, whispering to my love
and hearing replies.

Enough have I seen of this
earthly show; Prosper you my
friend, I depart for home

My restless heart unleashed a
storm, its wailing raised a
doom-like din.

——— ◇ ———

She won't be beauty conscious
Nor I conscious of Love
Such of joy of innocence I know
not where to find.

Why I alone did seek, cure
of my pain, Are there no
others afflicted worse than me

The silence of the stars at
night compels me to weep
unique is my love, unique
my wails.

——— ◇ ———

Now go and live in a land,
O — with none to share
your secrets & song, build a
house without doors & walls,
with none as guards and
neighbours none; No one to care
if you fell sick & none to mourn
when you are dead.

Who is there for you to call
your own? my heart, for
whom you shed your fertile tears,
The world is there. let it be
your own dear. life is hardly
your own

——— ◇ ———

He gave me tokens three:
A look, a word of his
winsome mouth & pain for the
rest of my life

forget not then you own approved
the one which so long had
you so loved, whose steadfast
faith yet never moved.

I am a person known to be
candid but — he never took
me as I did. I was pure
with my soul that's what I
am as a whole to make
away from me he played a
magnificent role only for that
he was bold, for being
emotional my heart was sold.

——— ◇ ———

life I know not what you are
But know that you & I
must part. And when, or
how or where we met to
me it is a secret yet.

There is a pleasure in the
pathless woods, there is a
rapture on the lonely shore
There is a society where none
intrudes, by the deep ocean
of my heart.

• Ah Love! could you and I
  with fate conspire, to grasp
  this sorry scheme of things
  entire. could we scatter it
  to bits & then remould it
  nearer to the heart's desire.

——— ◇ ———

I am monarch of all I survey
my right there is none to
dispute: from the centre all
round to my heart. I am
lord of the soft and brute of
my heart.

what, silent still? & silent all
Ah! no. — the voice of the dead
sound like a distant torrents
fall, its but the living
who are dumb.

The things that depart which
never may return, Childhood
& Love's first glow - have
fled like sweet dreams
leaving me to mourn.

——— ◇ ———

These common woes I feel,
one loss is mine, which you
did not feel, deserting me
you leave me to grieve. thus
having been. You should cease
to be.

I thought my self to be gone
thou all seemed to be the
one. Most tough for all the
love but dear know not how
you came and made me
fall again.

oh my only friend, my
best beloved, the gates are
open in my heart -do not
pass by like a dream.

——— ◇ ———

Now death can part us,
or make you less my own
It is sweeter sleeping at
your side, than watching her
alone.

With you the dreams of my love
come true. Every thought of
my reason is yours. In my
last humble prayer to the
spirits above. that my name
shall be mingled with yours.

Tired with all that, from that
would I be gone, save this
to die, I leave my love
alone.

——— ◇ ———

“How do one stay faithful to
a person, one have never even
slept with”

My son is my son till he have
got him a wife.
But my daughter is my DAUGHTER
all the days of her life.

OH death! One's dearest friend
the kindest & the best.

Whose empire is the name you
weep upon. within that
circle none dare walk but I.

——— ◇ ———

Reading good books is like
a conversation with finest men
of past.

for today I don't have a tear
to shed, for so many sufferings
I have. once I was able to
unleash a flood for just a
small pain.

Who needs wine for pleasure;
to forget myself alone I drink.

——— ◇ ———

By the time you swear you're
his shivering & sighing. And he
vows his passions is infinite,
undying — Lady make a note of
this: One of you is lying.

WHY are always unanswerable to the
mind. It seems that whenever you
can ask a why, it can be answered.
But that is one of the false
assumptions. No ‘why’ has ever been
answered or can be answered.

——— ◇ ———

All the aims left behind; just
seek the peace in me, Oh
Lord, put some light
and courage. Grant me this
much I pray, hope I am
not being too demanding.

Truely we name feelings as
EMOTIONS, this little heart
fluctuates in fractions of seconds.
Just a glance & it smile, in
a blink it sheds away tears.

——— ◇ ———

31/07/2011

A feeling of nothingness, once
in imagination I had, facing
the hard facts of life I
know, neither happy nor sad.
Long run to know what I
want from life, Cruelty is
from world or it we who strive.
What ever happens we blame
the world, but it's nothing but
our thoughts swirled.

——— ◇ ———

Smiles seem to be far away,
Is as close to my lips.
although just about to hug,
the way we stand on shore
watching the sea in
sky's arms. Beholding each
other but far apart.

After a long war of thoughts
arrives a deep silence.
Strangely the war freezes
no one wins & looses the none.
mind, the player still running
around, seeking new desires.
Alone I shall walk through
enough of being with crowd.

——— ◇ ———

Bangkok, the very name is evocative
of the orient. Thailand's spectacular
capital city, Bangkok, or
Krung Thep as it's called in Thai —
is one of Asia's most famous
tourist destinations.

A blend of gleaming skyscrapers &
ancient oriental shrines.
Bangkok's every street has a surprise
in hold for the visitors.
Bangkok attracts holiday makers &
travellers from all over the globe
with its temples, shopping centres,
bars & clubs.

——— ◇ ———

Bangkok is as intoxicating as it is
diverse.
A melting pot of exotic aromas,
interesting sights & visual delights.
One of the most vibrant cities in
South East Asia. It's a place
with infinite layers which you
need to explore to reveal its hidden
secrets.

I am thinking & you are
watching & I guide. Bangkok,
I am going to take you on a
tour to discover what has given
this city its iconic status.

——— ◇ ———

Bangkok is as intoxicating as it
is diverse.
A melting pot of exotic aromas,
interesting sights & visual delights.
One of the most vibrant cities
in South East Asia.
It's a place with infinite layers
which you need to explore to
reveal its hidden secrets.

Diary 2026 - Sweet September

September—the season of stray big clouds floating in the azure blue sky, like big wagons acquiring different shapes. This is the season of the retreating monsoon, and instead of the grey and black widespread canvas of monsoon clouds, like in the earlier months, which results in widespread rains, here in September you have sudden drizzles sent down by these mischievously floating clouds.

So, a sudden drizzle here, sunshine there, and due to the rainy season, the trees have a lush green canopy.

There has been lots of nesting by the birds, and a few survivors. Like in a typical nest of a bird—suppose there are four eggs—two or three of them are able to successfully come out of the nest for the first few days of basic training in survival. After a couple of days, I think hardly one or two survive, and at the end of it, possibly just one bird takes full wing to start an independent life for Mother Creation from its end. That's what we call successful nesting.

This is the season of gentle breeze, and you can see lots of children flying kites from rooftops, kites swaying against the various shapes of clouds in the sky.

For the past few days, a group of Asian green bee-eaters has arrived in the area. It's a beautiful bird, sending down trill, trill notes as it flies, taking dives with agility, stalking its prey mid-air—mosquitoes, moths, bees and flies.

Honeybees, I think, hardly form the core of their staple diet as of now because there is hardly any honeycomb left. But yes, houseflies have increased tremendously. So should we rechristen them as fly-eaters instead of bee-eaters?

On the Parijat tree, on its grey trunk, I could see a circular mating of monkey caterpillars. This is the particular pattern that they make in order to stay as a unit and survive.

The trees in the garden have nourished their canopy to such an extent that now the entire garden has a roofing of leaves, with barely any sky visible above.

And look at Mother Nature's beautiful way of maintaining balance. You have these voracious leaf-eaters, the caterpillars, who eat up entire leaves. Just like if you have many rats, you will have snakes. If you have rats, you will have cats. Just a balancing act.

They survive in a group, in a colony, these monkey caterpillars. But those who have fallen from the colony on the leafy Parijat are waging a long survival fight to go and make a shelter somewhere, crawling on the ground, their fate decided by so many chance factors, accidental circumstances which decide whether they reach home. Many of them get squashed under human feet, and possibly, while being left alone in the open on the ground, crawling slowly, some naughty bird with time on its hands tries to break the fuzzy resistance of their bristly hair.

Some of the caterpillars even manage to reach inside the room, and one of them I found in my shoes. I wonder what it would have eaten there.

As far as caterpillars are concerned, it's a very symbolic tale of transformation, like so many other species, phenomena and processes going on on Earth.

The larval stage, the caterpillar, is its feeding stage, with fuzzy hair spikes serving as a defence mechanism against predatory birds. And if it manages to reach the pupa stage, these monkey caterpillars don't form a smooth chrysalis like butterflies. Instead, they spin a silken cocoon, weaving their shed hairs into the silk to make it stronger and save themselves from the predatory beaks of birds.

And inside this cocoon, the famous metamorphosis occurs, and a moth comes out to take flight as an independent entity, taking its lineage further into the cosmic folds of expansion.

These monkey caterpillars are processionary caterpillars, and I found a little colony of them on the host tree, the leafy Parijat, the night-flowering jasmine, trying to survive as a colony, as a unit, aggregating on the trunk and then moving up to devour and eat the green leaves.

The solitary monkey caterpillar that I see crawling on the yard bricks looks like a fuzzy, thick, brownish mass crawling from a distance. But as I look closely, I see its fine, long, brownish-grey bristles spiked along a greyish or dark brown body.

But the Parijat loop was quite interesting, where they were aggregated as a unit. During the daytime heat, they form a circular mat on the tree's main trunk, almost blending with the tree trunk's colour to hide and remain cool. And they break the pattern, as if waking up at dusk, and move in a file or a procession line, heading towards the leafy canopy to eat the green foliage through the night.

And after surviving this phase, they will spin cocoons and then metamorphose into monkey moths.

The monkey moth is a medium-to-large fuzzy moth, having broadish tan or brownish-yellow wings streaked with delicate, wavy patterns—a nice design of Mother Nature on their wings. They are called monkey moths because the adult moth's face and legs have thick, woolly hairs resembling a little monkey's fur.

And one has to be careful. Forget about birds—even humans have to be careful about touching them because they have urticating, that is, stinging hairs. They can give you itching and rashes. And if your hand brushes a bit more forcefully against them, you may end up having bristles stuck in your skin.

And as a colony, they are quite strong eaters. They skeletonize the leaves, meaning they eat the entire leaf, leaving only the veins.

Now, as far as their procession is concerned, they are kind of follow-the-leader champions. If you see them breaking their loop and starting to crawl up the trunk to reach the leafy canopy, it will count as a kind of military-grade procession. The leader leaves an invisible silk trail or pheromone trail, and the leader's rear is followed by the follower's head, which is almost touching the leader's rear.

Like the locked compartments of a train, the entire chain of these caterpillars then moves up the tree.

And there have been very funny experiments in the past to test to what extent they can go into this processionary linear path.

While they are resting during the day to keep themselves safe as well as cool during the hot September sunny noons, it's a big fuzzy group hug. In the hot day, they don't hide individually under the leaves. Rather, they form a tight circular mat. It is a kind of group hug to stay cool and stay safe.

They look like a big hairy circular mass, a single one, and possibly it scares the birds. They find it to be something very big. And if a predator still reaches them, the entire group mat pulsates with a violent hairy rhythm to scare away the bird.

So that gives the moral that strength lies in unity—one and one makes eleven.

These lessons are clearly written over there in Mother Nature. We just should take small pauses and read them. This is an entire endless book of endless lessons of wisdom and practicality.

So these are characterized by synchronized marching with military precision, group hugging to survive as a unit, and when the metamorphosis takes place, these are miniature winged monkeys on closer look—the monkey moths, a kind of funny flying winged monkey.

Now there was this entomologist, Jean-Henri Fabre.

He was an interesting guy. He had the patience to watch and muse over the small world of insects and bugs. Alongside, he had the masterful playing spirit of a child, full of puns and jokes. And when these came together, they would provide funny anecdotes along with so many nice golden bits of truth that he extracted from the existential fabric of Mother Nature.

So he performed an experiment on these processionary caterpillars. It turns out to be a classic dark comedy as well, and the experiment earns the title of the "Circle of Doom."

He saw the hairy caterpillars in his garden. Very cleverly, he coaxed them onto a very big clay flowerpot with a broad rim, and then he manoeuvred them to move around the rim of the flowerpot in a circle.

The leader took the lead, and as it was moving on a circular path, very soon it found itself at the rear end of the last caterpillar.

So now everyone was a leader as well as a follower at the same time, in a closed loop. No leader, all followers—or all followers, no leader—in a never-ending marathon.

So symbolic of the way things go in the human world as well.

So we have to choose our leader very, very wisely.

The poor caterpillars, blindly trusting the chemical trail of the one in front of them, went on marching in the freezing cold at night. During the hot day they paused briefly and rested in a mat. Then, with the arrival of the new sun, they again started on the same circular path.

And it went on for seven days.

On the seventh day, a few starving and exhausted caterpillars stumbled out of the loop. Either it was incidental, or maybe they were pioneer caterpillars, just like you have pioneers in the human world. They laid out a new chemical trail, and the remaining exhausted and wearied followers again followed them—to food and safety this time.

So possibly there are pioneers in the human world as well who have the capacity in them to break the wearied, fatal and doomed loop, and they create an offbeat path that leads to something new.

In real life, there have been a few instances which are quite funny. Jamie Dornan, the star of Fifty Shades of Grey, was playing golf with his friends in Portugal. They were so engrossed in playing that Jamie and his friend brushed quite vigorously and forcefully against a line of pine processionary caterpillars, and they had many bristles sticking into their skin.

They took it to be a minor itch, rubbed themselves with their palms and went on playing.

By evening, Jamie's friend's left arm went completely numb, and his heart was racing. He thought he was having a heart attack. Dornan himself found his hands and legs going numb.

So a medical emergency was declared. They were taken to a hospital, and doctors told them that they had borne the brunt of a passing line of marching caterpillars and ended up having many bristles in their skin. After rubbing, the reaction had become much worse.

Coming back to Jean-Henri Fabre, he had the patience of a lama in a cave, and he combined his childish sense of humour with a lama's patience and meditative presence. It made a very, very striking combination for looking deep into the lives of bugs and insects, even though it made the life of that particular individual bug or insect quite difficult for some time.

His dung beetle prank is quite famous.

Dung beetles roll balls of poop to bury, and while one rolls its booty, a friendly beetle may arrive, apparently to help.

But don't get it wrong.

It comes to steal it.

And there is a fight. The owner beetle has to chase it away.

Now, in order to test the value of the hard-earned dung ball for its owner beetle, Jean-Henri did an experiment. He saw in his backyard, which was his experimental stage to study beetles and bugs, a beetle rolling its dung ball.

After reaching its destination, just when it was about to bury its ball in the ground, Jean-Henri struck a metal pin through the ball and anchored it into the ground to make it unmovable by the beetle.

The beetle kept pushing.

It tried its best from all sides—top, bottom and sides. It even dug underneath to get at it, using all parts of its body to move the ball.

Having failed to do so, it allowed even the thief friend, who had come to steal away its dung ball, to come and push it, as if checking, let us see whether both of us can move it or not.

But then, finding that it was having no effect, it chased the thief away again.

Finally, when the owner beetle realized that the ball could not be moved, it chewed it up again to make a new dung ball and spent hours on it.

So that is the spirit of being possessive about one's booty.

At so many levels, we humans are just repeating the same thing, only on a larger scale. These basic characteristics that we come across in humans seem to be written into the code of existence, and we are just mere, poor, instinctively drawn followers on the path, almost helpless in doing so.

The other experiment that Jean-Henri did was about the cicadas.

The summer air of southern France would leave the entire area buzzing with cicadas, raising such a high-pitched ruckus. People thought that possibly these were mating calls or some sort of communication.

But Jean-Henri had other thoughts.

He arranged a festive cannon, of the type used for blasting on festive occasions, and set it up under a tree in his backyard.

The tree was almost shaking with the high-pitched sound made by hundreds of cicadas. It was such a big vibrational commotion that it would even drill a hole in your mind. It was so strong.

So he blasted the cannon.

The thunder was so loud that his hat fell off his head. It was such a loud bang that even the panes in his windows shook with the effect.

But much to his surprise, the cicadas did not stop buzzing even for a fraction of a second.

They went on with the same high-pitched ease as earlier.

So now it turned out that cicadas could not possibly hear their own noise. They were deaf.

And that makes them a very noisy little bug, because you have such high-pitched intensity and force to make a loud noise, and at the same time, you cannot hear either your own or others' noise.

So that possibly sums up their excitement in making the air so noisy during the musty, hot days.

Post script: And mother existence provides me a live demo of Jean-Henri's experiment. A stray monkey caterpillar, beating its lonely path away from collective security, happens to get onto the rim of a plastic bucket. Now, this, according to me, is quite incidental. Had it gone some linear or curving or serpentine way, I mean anything short of a circular one, it would have at least moved ahead, searching for some chemical trail of a fellow caterpillar, seeking a chance to arrive some leafy shelter even after taking a long cut. At least there was a probability of it reaching some bush or plant if it was lucky not to be squashed under human feet or turned into a hairy uneatable protein ball some over-curious babbler. But it happens to be unlucky to be on a perfect circle. The rim seems inviting, a clear path, an enticing loop. And since they have this natural trait of leaving their pheromones in their wake, it gets into a vicious circle of circular chemical trail. Then its own trail seems like left by some other caterpillar's and there it goes on and one, caught in the vicious circle of its own traits, tendency. It's so difficult to break the futile loop of inherent tendencies and collective identities. And here lies a great lesson for we humans as well. We have to break the loop if we really want to grow and evolve. We have to seek our own path, however lengthy, haphazard, random it seems to be. It should at least not close into a loop. Because in that case you end up reaching from where you had started. 

I saw it at night and the poor thing looked tired the next morning after the nightlong procession on its circular path, going after its own scent. So I picked it up on a leaf and left it among food and safety among plants. So maybe luck too plays a massive part in where we land up, as big as chance. But then luck is nothing but a positive chance. 

Post Post-script: Most often the futile loop laid by someone else, and later consolidated by scores of other followers, becomes our own loop of futility. The collective confirmatory chemical trail, taking you in the same beaten circle. So this morning here is another follower of the trail. The previous caterpillar, salvaged by luck through my hands, left its pheromone trail across the circular rim and here comes the instinctive follower, going in circles thinking it will lead it to food and shelter.