Between Old Gods and New Dreams: A Lohri Day in Delhi

January 13, 2008

It is Lohri today, the festival of North India, especially the Punjabi community. The festival is celebrated by lighting the torch of warmth, goodwill, joy and fervour against the freezing gusts of winter.

Wished Happy Lohri to Babu, Seth of Ludhiana.

Maybe the destinies of my poor group and his are linked. We plan to leave—me, Babu, his brother-in-law Inder and Shekhar—for Djibouti to explore the possibilities there, if everything goes okay.

My final round of interview with Netlink Digital Energy, Gurgaon, did not go well. From what I had done in the earlier rounds, I had gained immense confidence, which made me bold enough to demand a salary of fifty thousand.

In having so much courage, I surprised even myself. After all, only the IT people demand such figures.

Maybe at the last stage they were only planning to break my confidence so that I could be convinced to settle for a lesser figure. But the way I carried myself during the interview quelled any such action before they could even think of putting up any such effort.

I defended my salary on comprehensive grounds, covering right from professional acumen to philosophical overtones, singing lullabies for my quoted figure.

Now these days so many educated fellows wander around, and since business-to-business writing for web portals involves a prosaic, general, straightforward world of boring write-ups, it can be easily done by any averagely intelligent postgraduate or even graduate.

They can have a couple of eager, cringing, cooperative fellows for my salary, or even three or four for the sum that I quoted.

So most probably they would not have me. In any case that doesn't make any difference. 

After having gone through this drill with a successfully run portal, I went to New Delhi with Shekhar to get a yellow card for him. The yellow card is issued against yellow fever and certain other diseases after giving vaccination for the travellers bound for travel to African countries.

So we went to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, but it wasn't RML's turn to issue vaccinations that day. They said we could get the injection at NDMC on Mandir Marg.

Since we had enough time till 2 p.m., we decided to spend some time at the famous Birla Mandir and Saint Thomas Church on the road.

Now Birla Mandir is a big shrine complex, its yellow and reddish-violet domes shining brightly under the bright rays of the January sun.

Under the open glare of the sky, by its outer wall, you see the locker racks for mobiles and shoes, just as you take the broad, marble-paved flight of steps to the shrine facing the main gate, you see foreigners coming out of or going into the foreigners' visitor room.

On the deliciously cool marble floor, you walk with a superimposed sense of faith and sightseeing as a tourist.

In the front hall, a well-bejewelled and decorated couple, Radha-Krishna, welcomes you with beneficent blessings and cosmic love.

On the inside, you see balconies; pillars are numerous in number. On the walls you have bas-reliefs involving mythical scenes, comprising famous personalities from the world of myth, legend and religion.

Below are written commentaries, the sutras and their English translations, to allow the light of religion and faith to spread far and wide.

In the adjoining dharamshala and Gita Bhavan, you see devotees-cum-visitors thronging the pavilions.

The temple complex is worth watching, but somewhere deep in your heart you find that something is lacking.

Absent is that anciently intricate, ornate, multidimensionality-revealing sense of art and aesthetics, which was so famously carved out by numerous unsung artists during those pensively long-drawn-out hours, during those slow-paced, easy times in which our temple architecture came to acquire the rich folds and forms it is famous for.

So in modern temple architecture, you don't feel that soulful beauty, the intrinsic, basic, inherent beauty.

Modern man can only polish and varnish the outer core of stone. He can't go inside, can't penetrate deep to make the particular piece alive with the devotion of his blood and sweat.

So modern temple art is just a copy, Xeroxing, a gross imitation of the past.

You do not feel that unblemished harmony, balance and unity among different parts of a temple or temple complex.

Just a few blocks away, Saint Thomas Church stands grandly, unpretentiously, even sadly, as if brooding over those busy colonial days.

This red-bricked, long structure stands peacefully. Made in 1931, it saw sixteen years of British rule. The turret at the far end tilted, so a few metres of it had to be dismantled.

There was a quaint silence as we entered the gate and walked down the cobbled length of the wide yard along the length of the church.

The old caretaker, his other attendant and an old female servant eyed us approaching them with a bagful of mixed feelings—anxiety, suspicion, even curiosity—as I sought permission to go inside.

The caretaker waved to his attendant to open the back door by the back wall of the sanctum.

We entered the small room, parted the curtains and saw the long rows of pews.

The closed door at the other end dimly looked down the aisle.

There was pin-drop silence inside.

The fine wooden benches were as intact and compact as seventy-odd years ago. The sanctum, bearing the altar, cross and other offerings, was ordered, clean and peace-giving.

By the entrance door at the other end, there were prayer-book racks containing small-sized hardbound books.

But now it is a silent place.

God's image reposes in silence.

"Only on Sundays we have a dozen or so visitors for the prayers," the Christian caretaker mumbled with slight sadness.

But then, among Christians, the faith quotient is falling dangerously. The church now stands like a relic of the past, except on Christmas Day perhaps.

By the side of the church, St. Thomas School was buzzing with activity.

Bright-faced, energetic preteen girls in their school jerseys and skirts, scurried around the main gate with the agility of a unique type, like little squirrels—happy, curious, full of energy, full of life.

The most interesting and visible parts of their bodies were their full feminine legs. It was surprising to see them with such sturdy legs, even though most of them were just girls around the years of puberty.

We also got an opportunity to travel in the Metro.

Now this really is the pride of India, looking ultra-modern, clean, high-class.

Earlier I had doubts that the ever-jostling crowds of Indians would play spoilsport, but the Metro, its stations and escalators have been set up in the image of the Goddess of Cleanliness, and surprisingly the Indian crowd, which never goes by rules, follows the rules of smoking and cleanliness once inside the fabled precincts of the Metro station.

Metro rail is so user-friendly. You have screens showing the arrival of the next stations. There are verbal messages informing you.

Inside, people stand with decency.

All this is due to the high standards of order, facilitation and cleanliness put in place by the Metro staff.

It is just perfect, so perfect that people feel ashamed of putting a blemish on it.

So it runs ahead, chugs ahead, taking Delhiites on the paths of prosperity, career, ceremonies, get-togethers, dates and much more.

Keeping Busy to Keep the Darkness Away

January 10, 2008

Still feeling the fatigue born of yesterday's laborious, tedious, long-drawn interview process, which I underwent for the job of content writer-cum-editor in Netlink Digital Energy, situated in Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon.

Now again, I still cannot find out why I am appearing for these interviews, even though I know fully well that at the moment I won't be taking up a job, even if offered a good salary, because right now, with Babu Bhai's avid participation in our business venture and even his willingness to visit Djibouti in the coming days with me, it has sown the seeds of hope. It has refuelled the famished tanker of our rudimentary business cart.

But still I went. Maybe I am just trying to exhaust myself by keeping myself busy, so that I cannot reflect or think too much about the past. It's a nice way to beat the ghosts of the past -- make yourself busy, as much as possible, so that you are forcefully shackled in the present. The past ghosts die temporarily because they are not getting the oxygen of your attention. 

Now, coming to this Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon interview, first of all, reaching there was quite a ride with tough experiences.

India is struggling. India is strugglingly buzzing ahead, crowds of people hallucinated, masses of people lost in the dream world of wealth, chugging and churning around you like a busy beehive.

On the roads, potholed and smooth, vehicles and people trundle ahead nonchalantly all along. In fact, everywhere you see tiny outlets of survival, the little dots of enterprise scattered around at every available corner.

Rich ones, cozily encased in luxurious cars, cartle ahead fastly. Poor ones move ahead as a compact unit, their dreams, destinations and motivations strongly glued together. All of them, ambulating through public or private transport, lurch ahead with their fair dose of bantering, bickering and haggling.

The journey is full of sweet-sour anecdotes.

As a part of this big individuality or collectivity, you do expect—and it would be better if you do—the best or the worst, the fairest or the wantonmost, ecstasy or agony.

So, open to all these possibilities, I reached Gurgaon in an agonizingly slowly moving vehicle.

Gurgaon, with its real estate development, plus mega malls, complexes, glass-fronted official blocks, rich cars, poor crowds scattered like dots upon its entirely welcoming urban body.

After getting down from the accursed private minibus, as I caught onto my perch at the back of an auto meant for the Phase 5 area, I was horrified to find the right thigh of my trousers smeared with a big, wanton, ill-smelling blot of kerosene oil.

This dirty map on my trousers glared like the unbearable face of India's disorderly march ahead.

I have not the least idea where I could have got it from. Moving across such creepingly buzzing chaos, such things can always be expected. I should only feel lucky that it wasn't cattle dung. That would have been more problematic. 

The strange map was smiling with its deadly chuckle, its ill smell reaching my nostrils with its dirty pout.

I wanted to cry. Just 15 minutes away from my presentation, and my dress was in such a bad shape.

For the slightest of a second, I had the idea of abandoning the presentation altogether, but then, being basically a lazy sort of person and understanding the real value of all that is required to plan a visit to a place 60 kilometres away, I thought it better to move ahead on my path.

I knew that I had nothing to lose, all ends being open for the people of skill and calibre in the dreamland of enterprise that is Udyog Vihar.

So, without allowing the thought and smell of kerosene to plague my conscience, I took a rickshaw to reach Plot Number 571, the pleasantly furnished destination block.

Having penned my entry in the gate register, I went ahead to meet the enterprise- and profit-friendly ambience safely closeted in the three-storeyed block.

Its glass entrance door appeared to apply and exert some pressure against the guy with a blot on his pants.

Yet unconcerned, I went ahead.

It was a high-ceilinged reception hall, square in shape, its two walls having glass in aluminium frames. The glass panel facing the entrance door opened the work vista on four floors, including the basement. The glass front to the left side opened into a rectangular restroom with its table and chairs.

Now, one of the good things with successfully run private houses is that here chairs are padded, cushioned and comfortable even for the chance visitors.

Coming back to the reception room, it had black velvet plush sofas, but they were too plush, too soft. You just sink into their fluffy folds. It even makes you uneasy, as if it has grabbed you, holding you like a prisoner.

After all, when we need to sit, our bottoms should be supported against something holding its feet on a sound platform. Here the thing shakes and you feel as if it will slip away from under you. So you sink down, your knees protrude above, and you sit as if in the armful grasp of that thing, strangely pretending to be familiar with you.

The perky, active and agile receptionist sitting behind the circular reception table gives the whole ambience an air of alertness, aloofness, familiarity, businesswoman-like shape, etc.

She sat there in front of her desktop as the veritable conduit of the house with the outside world of clients, information seekers, job seekers, visitors, etc.

Since I had applied for the post of content writer, I was given a question paper to judge my writing prowess and skills, my style of writing, my expertise in grammar, etc.

You know, sometimes you end up writing a brilliant piece. Some other times the creative juices just refuse to flow out of the coffers of your creativity, while at many other times you just end up doing your bit as a mundane, commonplace writer.

I performed as mentioned in the third category, but in the mercilessly professional and objective world of business, even commonplace output seems a sufficient share to satisfy demand, as was proven later.

After that, I was interviewed by a young, hesitating sort of guy who, it seemed, was as hesitant and nervous as me.

Many a time, both of us came to the help of each other, and it went on without him getting the best out of me and me getting any impression of his being an expert interviewer, but he had the grace of forwarding me to the next level.

He told me that since I was new to technical writing, he would test me in this regard.

I was given a topic, Microsoft Silverlight, to search on the web and write a short, brisk account of this newest web application and why the borrowers should go for it.

Though I didn't know anything exactly about what the thing really meant, yet I picked out tidbits about the thing from the internet and wrote a coherent piece, which appeared to give a fair bit of idea about what the thing was really about.

Since I don't know typing, it was a bit tedious typing my write-up.

Then this printout and my earlier write-up were handed over to the HR head, a lady of grace, pleasant buxomness and graceful manners, yet strangely authoritative in her own way.

She did not beat around the bush and easily accepted my writing prowess. I got the stamp of approval once I showed her my two published works of poetry.

Then we came to the most important part—the salary part—which I had cleverly left blank.

She smiled and asked what I expected them to pay me.

In a very easy, honest and simple manner, I answered, "Ma'am, give me the maximum you can afford."

She was amused by it as a human being, but that appreciative smile and glint of unprofessional familiarity were soon clouded over by the business-like air of professionalism.

"No, Mr. Dahiya, we can't go like this in this manner as far as this part is concerned," she said.

So I remarked, "Ma'am, I have very sound reasons to hold myself in modestly high esteem. My work is at least 35,000 rupees per month in hand."

That meant, from the company's point of view, it was above 40,000.

She was visibly impressed with what I had written and the way I had performed.

Now I was set for the final step, the all-important interview with the CEO.

The meek girl who told me about this scheduled meeting spoke in a subdued, hushed voice, as if the top boss would hear us.

Then it was quite late in the night. The boss had gone to a conference.

I was given the option of either waiting for one more hour or leaving for my place and coming back within the next couple of days.

Today I decided to take a rest after all that hurly-burly chain of experiences.

Tomorrow is lined up for the D-day—the meeting with the top boss.

I will go with a positive attitude.

I do wish to settle down for a quiet life with a secure job, safe income and secure future for my family. After all, they deserve this much after all that they have done for me all along my life.

But the problem is, again, I am iron-sure in my mind that it will be very difficult for me to convince myself to take up this job even if they offer 50,000 rupees in hand per month.

Now again the question arises: why am I taking all this trouble?

Maybe I am just peddling around to give myself a feeling that I am giving my best by putting myself in such testing conditions.

Maybe I am just creatively trying my best to engage myself in a way so that I am not lost in the darkness.

Maybe it is just a means to avoid falling into full depression.

Beyond the Boundary of Sportsmanship

January 7, 2008

Yesterday, the second Test in Sydney, Australia, ended in a farce.

Though the Australians play their game hard, from now on it would also mean that their toughness applies practically to every skill, psychology, technology, plan, demeanour and, last but not least, misdemeanour.

If you are blind about winning only, if the only aspect of sport you are acquainted with is victory, forgetting the other lesser-gleaming facets like competitiveness, sportsman spirit, attitude, etc., then you become athletic brutes who will improvise newer and newer, filthier and meaner mechanisms to dislodge the opponent who is otherwise giving you a tough fight in the conventional aspects of the game.

Now the Kangaroos, seething with the memories of the India tour and the greed to win this Test to equal their own record of 16 straight Test wins, did everything shameful to win against a toughly fighting opponent.

Everybody will accept that Anil and his men fought really hard and didn't deserve to lose.

But horrific umpiring by Steve Bucknor and Mark Benson ensured that the Australians kept their record.

It is always human to err, the umpires being no exception, but the pattern of mistakes and misjudgments, and that too to the disadvantage of only one of the teams during the entire match, leaves it beyond any shadow of doubt.

The pair was supposed to keep the principles of free, fair, frank uprightness aloft in the gloomy sea of our sleazy cricketing battle, but quite disgracefully they let the sense of justice down. They almost became participants in the cricketing duel from the Australian side.

Otherwise, why would almost a dozen misjudgments go against India only?

Australian batsmen stood their ground even though they knew they were out, while the umpires appeared gleefully ogling at their conniving faces.

A couple of stumpings were not given out, one even by the third umpire.

At one time, Ponting himself got crowned as the umpire. The umpire asked him if he had caught Ganguly, and even though he had taken the ball on the first bounce, the Punter said yes.

Disgraceful.

The Australian team and the umpires made a travesty of it.

And to rub salt into the wound, the Aboriginal fellow, Symonds, who sadly behaves in a monkey-like manner on the field, instigated Harbhajan while the latter was batting beautifully with Tendulkar, taking the Indian score to 532, 69 runs above the Australian total of 463.

So Symonds instigated Harbhajan into a verbal duel and immediately complained to the umpires that he had called him a monkey. Without any audio, video or witness proof, the match referee held the Turbanator guilty, slapping a three-Test ban on the off-spinner.

The whole of India is seething with anger. People are really demanding that the tour should be called off immediately.

It is for everybody to see that the Kangaroos have taken many a filthy, unethical, unsportsmanlike leap in romping to victory.

Let them enjoy their feat, but it is for everybody to see what type of techniques they use in every match, because the happenings in this match are just a larger version of their overall approach.

This thing should not be analysed as an exception. It is the rule with them.

They deserve to be condemned.

When Tendulkar’s Century Became My Own

January 4, 2008

A very successful day for the Indians.

On the third day of the Sydney Test, Tendulkar hit an unbeaten 154 to break that jinx of the nervous 90s which plagued him, and almost the entire India, throughout 2007.

The New Year has started on a promising note for the maestro, and we wish him to score a century in every match, to put it even beyond the minds of the following Australians, especially Ponting, any thought of equalling the maestro's record.

Tendulkar is the pulse of India. When it feels better, the country feels better. If not, then the country will shake with sickness almost.

And how do I tell you, as an ardent Tendulkar fan, when he hits a century right at the beginning of a New Year, it seems like a collective success. In fact, my very own success.

Just as 2007 was disappointing for the maestro for getting out in the 80s and 90s, the same has been with me.

But it is such a tremendously elated feeling of achieving something when you see your idol raising his bat, acknowledging the applause after hitting a brilliant century in tough conditions on seamer-friendly wickets in Australia. And to watch even the Australians, who are very enthusiastic sledgers in the game, applauding the master batsman—it gives a feeling of pride.

And encouraged by this century, I can forget my own individual losses and failures for the time being, because I know it's a celebratory day, almost a festival, and I have forgotten most of my own disappointments in the innings of this life.

How I wish that Tendulkar continues hitting centuries after centuries. Then I think many thousands like me won't need anything else at the level of personal achievement to prove anything to anybody.

We will be happy just with Tendulkar's centuries.

So you can imagine what status the great man has for us here in India.

On the Tarred Road Between Job and Business

January 3, 2008

Now, to give a clue to how much puzzled I seem to be between making a career in business or seeking a job, I set out right on the next day after the interview in Noida for a business trip to Ludhiana.

I travelled in a car, a friend's car, on the National Highway.

Travel is pretty perspective-creating these days. It is, after all, the massive drive of development, constantly being upgraded, broadened, to add more and more economic vitality, to make it flow through the country's body.

Mechanized layering of tar and stone-crush is now very easy, so they do it more often. The road-making equipment and machinery have risen in the ranks; they have brought in new machines. So road-making and repairing have become much easier now in comparison to earlier lazy road-rolling days, and it takes less time as well.

So this Grand Trunk Road has become the high-speed corridor.

Now fast-speed cars, SUVs, public and private carriers go along thundering—easily, irritably, noisily, silently—all along the highway.

On both sides, you see a massive buildup of enterprise and business. Mammoth flyovers and bridges now provide an inescapable monotony, as if the National Highway would never have borne a different look at any period in the past.

The finger line drawn by Sher Shah Suri during medieval times has now become almost a living, growing, throbbing, tarred biological corridor, which has its own soul, perhaps even beyond the control of mankind slipping over its wheeled surface.

Ludhiana, the industrial town, is spread out like a large open-cast mine of labour, struggle, profits and gains.

It is a big city, like a big, irritable, slow-paced chariot of mammoth proportions. The mighty Sardars pull it along, possessed in a lighter, adventurous way.

Since it is a major place for scrap dealers and iron works, if you are not that energetic in your market manoeuvres, you tend to stick to any average, tolerable guy in the market instead of hunting around for better sources.

We had sold heavy metal scrap to Mr. Babu in the past.

He is a lighthearted, silently calculating young businessman, and I was successful in getting him interested in the business opportunities in Djibouti.

He has agreed to visit the place in order to see the chances of working with us in the form of a partner, and I think after some time he will fly with me to have a firsthand experience of how we are managing there.

Being a very clever businessman, he first wants to see our setup there, and he also knows that we are simple people, so seems to have some plans up his sleeve.

When our container of scrap iron landed in Ludhiana, we simply reached his scrap yard because somebody had referred his name. Since we were new to the trade, we could not bargain, and we got the average price.

But when the container was opened, he was wonderstruck because it was such heavy scrap, including heavy machinery parts and engines.

In fact, there were even heavy machinery rims of tyres which could easily be used here in India after painting.

So after that, he has been giving us some importance.

He knows that we are at a place where there is profit.

So I am happy that I have been able to gain his trust.

He has never travelled outside India, and if somebody who has never gone out of the country agrees to visit a poor country in Africa, that means he has started to trust you.

It seems to be an achievement.

Let us hope that we soon go to Djibouti with Mr. Babu and take him around on visits to various scrapyards, so that he gives us advance money, assured that he won't be losing it and that we won't run away once he sees our setup firsthand there, so that we can start a kind of business cycle.

With his advance money, we can pay the scrap owners there and bear the cost of cutting, loading and shipping.

And once the containers reach here, for the next lot again he will send us some advance money.

So this is what we expect.

As I sat with Mr. Babu in his posh office, almost as a partner, as a business owner, it gave me a very strange feeling that only yesterday I was there in the poor suburbs of Noida, in another plush office, but there as a struggling job seeker intending to join as a content writer.

So when I look at it—my destiny being stretched in two directions—it is a strange feeling. I don't know what am I seeking really. Seem to have lost the way during those hard days of civil services competition. 

The Corporate Lighthouse and the Boatful of Strugglers

January 2, 2008

New Year resolution also containing some tidbits regarding earning something, and driven by this pull, not satisfied with the way things are going at the business front, and despite knowing that I won't be taking this job and instead would be focusing on the scrap iron and used-oil business, still I went to Noida to attend the interview for a job for which I had been called—the post of content writer with a web portal for business-to-business writing, called B2B writing.

The company was IndiaMART, situated in Noida, Sector 8, B1.

But before that, let us talk a bit about Noida.

All the developmental gears have been put into place in this Delhi suburb. Most of Uttar Pradesh is still poor and impoverished, yet here the real estate business, corporate houses, business moguls, shopping malls and multiplexes provide something to a poor state to look forward to—the days of prosperity.

So it works as a kind of lighthouse for the impoverished hinterlands to look up to and be guided along the waves of development and growth.

Massive concrete pillars for the Metro project stand as a new mountainous artery to throw new life, mobility and enterprise into the city.

Coming back to the web portal, it is ranked among the first in the business, with an annual turnover of 19 crore per annum.

But the little dusty, half-stone-crusted, half-dusty bylane leading to it is dotted with pinching realities on both sides.

It seems to be the industrial section where they are operating this service enterprise. It certainly is situated in one of the poorer sections of the city.

You have meat shops on both sides, carcasses cleaned and trimmed for cooking vessels and meat lines. The air is thick with the feel of meat. It is even stinking.

Small tea shops with their rickety, shaking benches, poor people having their luxurious sips.

Tyre works and automobile repair shops have their customary greased, dirty working staff. Since it is cold, people pile up leftover tyres, putting them on fire to have some heat in this cold. But the thick black smoke makes the air unbearable.

Rickshaws roll over the uneven, uneasy paths.

People walk around, lost in the bitter struggle for survival.

Amidst this impoverished scenario stands the three-storeyed building of IndiaMART. Its yellow colour, in one way exaggerating its business, money, enterprise and well-off people, and the high walls around the main rectangular block try to keep off the real world from the world of business and enterprise, created by skilled people with the help of faith and endeavour.

Registering my entry with the security at the gate, I got my interview card, put it around my neck and entered the pleasantly furnished ground-floor reception hall.

Miss Rosie, the plump, young, energetic receptionist, in the company of a sleek, sophisticated companion, entered the hall filled with job seekers with a feeling of corporate authority.

Like all other successful private enterprises, this place too was devoid of the sickening, stagnating, strangulating government work culture.

Here you grow fast, perform highly, and if you will not do that, you perish.

There were plenty of young, energetic guys and girls, who flutteringly carried an air of hope and passion, which further carried the institution aloft on the path of progress and profits.

Against this background, I felt like an old, dispirited, energy-sapped person.

In the interview, though I performed well; yet it was a shaky performance.

The HR had understood my position.

She asked for my salary expectations. I said 30,000 plus.

But why would she have me if they can have young, fluttering energy at around half of this amount?

I have been asked to wait. Most probably, I won't be selected.

But I don't feel the pinch of it because I do know that even if they call me, even for 40,000 rupees, I will not join.

In fact, even if they offer 50,000, I don't think I will be able to convince myself to join because the priority now is just our business, which is putting up more and more challenges.

Then the question arises: why did I come here?

So that means I have lost my path somewhere and need to sort it out.

I need to sort out the thing.

And it means it turns out to be just a step taken to come out of boredom, to beat the pools of gloomy, depressive clouds around me, to get an outing.

So, all in all, it seems to be an outing.

And once you see so many people struggling in poor corners, struggling humanity on the roads in urban cities, you somehow don't feel cheated.

You feel that you are sailing in a boat full of similar people.

The Topper’s Crown and the Poet’s Mirage

Sad, Retiring Memories

On the first day of a new year, I sit back and look into the past.

The days after my matriculation have tragically swooned and swirled away. I must have passed through these fifteen years without knowing or being fully aware of myself.

Two years at S. M. Hindu Senior Secondary School were strangely undefinable, indefinite, directionless and excitement-free. Adolescence in me was severely subdued by the harsh fact that I was no longer the topper, the coveted position I had gotten used to in the almost competitionless environment of my class in the village school.

In fact, during our ten years of studies at the village, we were the same bunch of kids who grew up enjoying ourselves in the class. Once I established myself as the academic peer, it became a sort of convention to accept me as the first one in that bunch of thirty-five to forty odd kids from rural families where education was never given the kind of serious attention it deserves to fully blossom the petals of an academic flower.

There was no fresh influx of talent because the children from the neighbouring villages were equally poor academically and equally rich in childhood flirtations. So that left me as the topper till matriculation.

But the topper's crown was rattled severely at the town school.

In fact, during these two crownless years at the senior secondary school in the town, I enjoyed myself as if relieved of the burden.

Our teachers at the village school were all good, except at studies. They talked well, managed personal relationships well, thrashed and beat well, joked well, told interesting anecdotes quite well. But when it came to real studies, the poor fellows performed really badly.

So in school, we just passed our time sitting, talking, fighting, bad-naming the teachers, getting beaten, etc.

Now non-medical subjects at the senior secondary level demanded understanding, not cramming, as I had got used to doing to emerge the topper in my poor class. I had to cram because there was no real teacher to explain anything. So the only alternative left was to cram things straightaway, even if they hardly made any meaning.

But in the city school, amidst a new academic culture, I found myself within no time amongst the backbenchers.

But then being a backbencher has its own set of advantages as well. Because the onus of performing like a top-notch star is no longer on you.

You are free.

At the most, the teacher chides you sometimes or gives a dejected look at you when you turn crapper despite the best of his efforts to make you understand a particular thing.

Those were completely mindless days. I just allowed myself to be waylaid by the directionless wind of ignorant times.

A school is, after all, a school. You ought not to be unduly serious on its account. So it was a welcome extension to the school days at the village.

Like a balloon, I blew morosely, waywardly in four directions, and one such foolish circumstantial gust of wind carried me to the institution of dotards, the Jat College of Sonipat, for graduation.

Now, it was an institution which was as far away from education as is possible for a college to be within the limits of retaining its place in the UGC ratings.

Here the young, erratic, wrestling types, mostly Jats, got admissions only on account of being poor scorers and almost illiterates despite having senior secondary certificates.

Anyway, it was a boisterous place.

In winters, the students played cards, smoked beedis, told the budding tales of their romances, lying on the lawn. It had big rooms, the college, with long rows of benches. But during the class, only two or three rows of benches could be seen occupied.

For most of the students, coming to college meant a hearty, boisterous chatting session on the precincts, and then, while returning, following their love interests around the city streets to the bus stand. They squeezed the girls in the crowded buses. It was the most interesting incentive for coming to college for them.

The other was saving their skins from breakneck labour in the fields back at home.

Since I wasn't this type in any sense of the term, I felt like an alien in the college.

Here even the faculty looked like a bit more refined version of the students.

In this way, I had made the first and the most fatal mistake of choosing such an institution for myself. So the career prospects were surely to be dented, and these were dented, as the coming times would prove.

In the name of career, I had, in my senior secondary class, attended an SSB interview for the coveted NDA.

In the countryside, even stepping stones, the first ones, fetch you respect and publicity, as if you have brought heaven on earth.

So I got bouquets in hugely misplaced euphoric disproportion to my achievement. People treated me as if I had become a commissioned officer.

But at the SSB Bangalore—by the way, it was my first long-distance journey by train as well—I felt like a tiny frog out of its dirty little well for the first time.

The first thing with the SSB is that you are forcibly taken in by the urge to speak English even if you have not uttered a whole sentence of English in your life.

So there were many of my sort trying their hesitant, shivering, obstinate tongues at the imperial language. Though I surprised myself by being able to speak a few sentences while in leisure time with the other candidates, the effort and endeavour were too puny to carry the lurching cart along the road on which the shiny, convent-cultivated, fluently whizzing linguistic vehicles of status moved—the kids of senior bureaucrats, senior army officers and rich families.

Right from the start, I knew that I wasn't there to give some real challenge to some would-be big officer. Rather, I was there just to fill the ranks.

So after doing my shy, hesitant, immature, unripened fruit of duty, I came back to my little sleepy place, and the poor fellow croakers croaked.

They never had any doubt in my abilities—said that I had been unjustifiably done in by a corrupt environment. Some even went to the extent of saying that my calibre was of such a high degree that the army could not have digested it.

So I should go for the IAS.

Once this thing had been put into my head, I allowed the graduation years to roll over my head unproductively.

I will become a civil servant, I decided.

So I remained at home, went for self-study, read extra things beyond my graduation syllabus, and performed just to the level of first division in the exams.

But the glorious sun of civil services shone illustriously. It very dexterously removed any specks of shadowy doubt from my conscience.

After graduation, I appeared for two more SSB interviews, but I entered the selection centres with a hugely relieved self, basking in the enlightened feeling of superiority and benevolence that I was here just for an outing.

This feeling very easily quelled any suspicion or doubt over my true capabilities which could have arisen in the wake of my miserable performances in the interviews.

I forgot to mention one thing—a poetic thing.

While I took the first tottering, uncertain, shaking steps on the precarious path of civil services, the poetic bug infected me.

One day, I came across an advertisement about a competition in The Times of India, put out by the All India Poetry Association. The winner was to get an excursion ticket to England. The competition fee was rupees ten per poem. One could send as many poems as possible.

And then the poetic lava accumulated over the years erupted without any rhyme or reason.

Every human being's posse of emotions is special in one way or the other, mine being no exception.

To be frank, I had never read poetry seriously, not even the poems in the English syllabus during graduation. Yet I had, right from the beginning, profound faith in its ability to carry the intangible, vague, mystical, mythical load of your cravings, passions, ecstasies and agonies in its lyrically briefed, silently smiling, subtly weeping lines and words.

So without caring for the styles, forms or format, I let loose my chariot of poetry at a hurtling pace.

I wrote around fifty poems.

I called them poems just for the fact that while writing them, I felt like a poet.

Those stanzas seemed to convey deeper meanings which I could never have expressed either in talk or prose.

I liked those free verses in the sense that their free space and flexibility allowed a whole lot of emotions to be briefly concised in a stanza.

It is just like plucking out flying wisps from the perturbably changing, speedily spaced, impermanent world of dynamics.

Nothing is permanent in poetry.

You can very easily glorify something in one poem and criticize it like hell right in the other, without being dragged into contradictory discussions, because everybody accepts the fact that when you write a piece of poetry, you are immersed in that moment. What you were, what you say or do later, has no meaning at all.

Though the fairy-like kids born of that instantaneous impregnation of some creative instinct by emotion—these flower children—have a permanence.

They glimpse like stars on the distant horizon, on the dynamically unflinching base standing at the high pedestal. The lighthouse is standing on the rocky outcrop, throwing guiding rays around the treacherously lolloping storm waves against the cliffs.

They provide solace, sympathy, succour to some lone struggling man with his boat in the darkishly crazy waves.

Their magical rays travel over the ruffled, wavy surface and seek out some eye, some heart which needs that companionship.

Such is the beauty of poetry.

This slim, fair lady has maternal, maiden, lovely powers well beyond the contoured proportions of its fair, sinewy body. Its breasts have enough girth and milk to allow the hungry child to suckle nourishing milk; it has enough charm to allow lovely kisses. It can take many different hues, colours, motivations and realizations in its arms.

So without caring for the exact parameters of conventional poetry, I allowed myself to be taken along by the wildly hilarious fury of this gushing, gurgling river.

And what do you expect of such pure emotions? You find and fondle them right there at the top of the facts.

So I entertained all hopes of winning the prize and going to Europe.

But as all such hopes are bound ultimately to be shattered, I didn't win.

I thought I had been cheated. I thought that the draw was not fair.

I wrote an angry letter to the society and asked them to send me back all my poems, including a ten-rupee note as the value for return postage of my submission. I also demanded that they act in a poetic way befitting the status of a poetry society.

Mr. Kaul, the society's secretary, sent me a letter.

With anticipation, I opened it, but what did I find inside?

Not a line written in response to my aggrieved onslaught.

He had returned my ten rupees—not complete, rather torn into halves.

No accompanying letter.

Just the value of my materialistic paper turned into a torn ten-rupee note in two pieces.

Two halves of a ten-rupee note. What a response? 

Maybe, in a fit of poetical fury, Mr. Kaul responded in a free-verse manner.

His reaction shows much which no amount of verbal philandering or behavioural gesturing can explain.

And I accepted it as a befitting reply to my unnecessarily raising a storm in a teacup.

But my engine of being had been put on the poetic rails.

I called myself a poet.

Even during the present hard times, when the soft language of humanity has almost lost its war against the sharp-edged hoot of materialism, fascination amounts to decency.

So, lost in the shine and sheen of my defeat, I typed free verses.

I thought, acted, behaved like a poet.

Writing something can get you addicted. It surely does. Addicted to the thought of getting published, like chronic addicts, writers and poets go to any extent—even to the extent of doing injustice to their economic as well as physical being—to see their work in print.

Publishers, the hounds of the trade, prey upon the soft rabbits. They have their clever ways of exacting money, exploiting these sentiments.

Blinded by the same sentiments, I was robbed of rupees 72,000 by the clever, foxy manager of the Minerva Press, India branch.

I acted like a sheep, he like a butcher.

The consequences I should not even mention, for they are too predictable.

The result being that I had stabbed 72,000 rupees out of the already famished pockets of my poor, weak, retired pensioner father.

It was a grossly ill-planned and illogically carried-out plan.

Indirectly, it meant that the foxy, wily Sardar had cheated me of my money.

But then every price you pay fetches you something in one form or the other.

I had my reputation soaring in the local area, in the countryside. The kind of society, the illiterate simpletons I am a part of, finds it one of the greatest achievements to be published—provided you keep the secret from them that you had paid for the publication.

So at least now, I and my family played our cards well, forgot about our money, and basked in the countryside glory of praising words spoken by illiterate mouths, rolling their fingers over the glossy-bound slim volume of my poems.

Too Much Is at Stake: Still Left with Great Things to Fight For

January 1, 2008

Start of a new yearly unit of time. I thought it would portend some new freshness in my stale life, but while I write this, around 11 in the morning, I am in one of those terrible swirls of moodiness, boredom and snappiness.

Even depression, when you feel that your existence is the greatest weight on your shoulders. When you even go to the extent of wishing how great it would have been not to exist at all, replaced by the painful ennui.

I just toss around in the ring of pain, depression, gloom and doom.

People will even say—it is a psychological case. But what even if it is? Who wants to get himself nettled in the dangerously, poisonously lugubrious waters?

Please do not interpret it as escapism or a case of putting the onus on external factors if I say that most of what has become of me is due to multitudes of external factors—the factors against which I could have had very little effect even if I had tried my best and exerted my full potential.

Factors like luck, fate and destiny are too far and vague, and my ideas regarding their blameworthiness are as conspicuously vague, undefined and impermanent. All in all, they stand on a very shaky foundation.

There are concrete causes—stony, barren, cold—which stare me in the face, plague my chances.

They are many, and I won't take the trouble of naming my enemies.

The mere simple logic of it requires that I should try to shake off the Baitals from my long-loaded back. But they won't go, so strongly are they glued to my back.

It is not that I have not tried to rid myself of them. In fact, the largest chunk of perseverance, management, efforts, toil and boil has been dedicated against them. But the stubborn ghosts would not go.

Now they seem threatening to my vitality, freshly rejuvenated after each depressive pang. But those parasitic suckers, creepers, shackle me comprehensively.

It is an almost annihilating web. It keeps sticking onto your hands, face, clothes and all.

Who knows, I might not be able to clear myself of these bloody vines till my last breath.

I will be like a half-dead, crippled cockroach, being eaten alive and dragged in all directions by a pack of ants. So tiny are they, yet such a big force to reckon with in their combined, lined, chained ferocity.

They gnaw away the threads of my existence, chop off the limbs, suck away the juicy vitality, and I just keep giving everything, every moment, in order to give myself the belief that I am alive.

But is it life?

Constantly defying the annihilatory overtures is perhaps no life. It is merely a gloomy, dark journey through the passage of death.

It is completely shut off from all the lively worldliness, pleasantly scattered around at every nook and corner, at every step, at every drop or rise of a moment.

But the invisible stone walls of this dark, invisible tunnel to the ultimate gloom don't allow you to feel, smell, see and enjoy the things which exist for you, which were perhaps created to fulfil your purpose of being on the earth.

But once the things on which you hold all rights on natural accounts and deeds have been shut off from your being, aren't you the person sinned against fearsomely and criminally most?

I leave the sinners with their sins.

Ultimately, every sin, every misdeed boomerangs on the committer. So I hope. So I leave them with the same fate.

The causes of my pains are bound to suffer for their misdeeds, later or sooner. May God provide them courage and bearability during those hellish moments.

Thus, whiplashed by the circumstantial storms from all sides, I am clinging to the sinews left over to me.

My niece, Safia, is there, and to bear all agonies in order to ensure even a slight good thing for her future can be—and in fact it is—a good thing to keep always in mind.

Then there is my brother, Tina. How can I allow myself to be eaten by oblivion without taking some definite steps for the safekeeping of his future?

I have noble causes to bring smiles to the faces of my suffering sisters.

I have the greatest causes in bringing happiness to the souls of my aged, weak, ill parents.

Too much is at stake.

I am still left with great things to fight for.

The Netted Fish and the River of Revelry

Thoughts on the new year's eve, 2008

Taking some inspiration from the Phoenix.

Now, after a treacherous wait of three long years, I have started to focus more on our business venture. And where else to look out for products than on popular sites on the internet?

As far as the prospects are concerned, computer technology has beaten rival fields by an almost unbelievable margin. Computer professionals get such high packages that the poor fellows belonging to other fields, be they even entrepreneurs, find themselves in a poor state, almost poor bunnies.

But one great thing about the computer and its shining armour is that it facilitates other, not-so-fast, smartly moving fields. Where else to go to look out for fresh business opportunities, looking for products, looking for new markets, new prospective partners, new opportunities in any hidden corner of the world, still unspared by the stampede of multiple business people running to grab a small opportunity?

And a cyber café is the place where one can sit and try to find out some rare opportunity that might still be there.

For too long I neglected the computer call, and now I realize doing so is harmful to me only because this is going to be the future. Be it any branch of career, this is the basic skill, the repository of entire information.

I have got in touch with some scrap dealers and used-oil traders, hoping that we can set up a sustainable relationship with them. I have carefully prepared our company's profile, and the moment, on your letterhead, you have a foreign office address with a telephone number, they take you seriously.

It is better—I mean this business venture, as its owner—it is better than humiliating myself by entering offices to seek tiny jobs, recalling that I could have been in some hot seat a long time ago.

So at least I have this feeling that I am making something new, and it helps me from brooding about losing the coveted civil services opportunities due to the harakiri committed by the politicians.

I have talked to certain people after getting their contact numbers from the internet, and in between, on a gloomy day when I ended up sending my résumé for a content-writer position at a firm in Noida, I got an interview call, even though I know that I won't be joining.

Because imagining myself in a cubicle, on a chair, lined up along with poor graduates, tapping, typing inconsequential stuff day in and day out for marketing websites about products—the content that is not read by anyone—that definitely puts me in a tight corner.

Even though they said that I can expect a salary of 20,000, I don't think I am ready to start from that base level.

From bureaucrat to a content writer is too big a chasm to cross.

So I am bracing myself with my business venture.

My life has stagnated like a mountain lake, even though there have been huge influences, huge influxes and outfluxes at both ends, but the lake has retained its shape.

Embroiled in the slowly swirling waters of this lake-type being, I have anchored my identity around a few boring things, like my pains, my efforts at alternatives, meditation, yoga, prayers, reading and efforts at writing.

But how can you continue writing if you are not getting anything out of it except the hollow satisfaction of being a writer?

It has now become a drag to me, taking me lower and lower into the depths of papery, classical, romanticized gloom.

I had thought that this thing, this passion for reading and writing, would support me like a lifesaving jacket in the stormy sea of life.

But see what it turns out to be.

I am a netted fish now.

Those fish of destiny, fate, chances, missed chances, self-inflicted agonies, madness and craziness entangle for some futile ending.

But I haven't given up.

I am having my face fully laid against the wires and netting around me.

It is around five in the evening. The partygoers must be waiting in glee.

People just force themselves to be in a party mood on New Year's Eve. After the invitation, I am still in two minds whether to go or not.

Shekhar, Pardeep, Jita and a few other chaps—they are waiting.

Don't know if I am in a suitable frame of mind to go.

And even if I go, it won't make any difference.

The chief mismanager of the Italian-forged Iron Lady has almost devastated my life. And what is ironical is that they don't even know that an ant has been crushed under their feet, hurriedly hurtling through the corridors of power.

Am I in a position to celebrate New Year's Eve after such irremediable losses, after such unprecedented pains, after such unredeemed suffering?

Definitely no.

And if I still do, then it would just be like allowing myself to be waylaid by the fast and furious river of revelry.

When the Old Year Dies and the Revellers Return to Earth

 December 31, 2007

The last day of this disappointing year.

I hope 2008 will be friendly in many ways. Isn't it that there is a dawn after the darkest of nights? This is what they say, and I want to believe in it.

Well, whatever might happen, what is wrong in being optimistic?

Last night, the temperature hit the coldest of the season.

Well, talking of time, the only thing about it is that it flies so swiftly. Six years ago, on this day, I was in Goa with some friends to celebrate New Year's Eve.

A quick flashback to those ebullient, exciting revelries makes the intervening period, full of plentiful agonies and almost no ecstasies, seem almost inconsequential, of no significance at all.

It was a time without any milestones, without illustrious signboards—a gloomy period when I slogged out, in and out, here and there, in this field or that. I struggled, but it did not mean anything. All it meant was that I, tethered to my pains, took longer and longer routes to my failures.

Also, a lugubrious, oblivion-raising time came—a stage when you are in a state of delirium—when I, deliberately forgetting my pains, depressions and disappointments, allowed myself stony, impassive rest and repose.

I won't now take a single step towards any sort of achievement, I resolved.

Perhaps some milestone will itself get attracted to the barren, sandy vacuum in my being, I had thought. But harbouring such thoughts is exactly equivalent to believing in miracles.

The draw of luck is drawn in the invisible heavenly lots, and it may sometimes find you the achiever. But there are almost uncountable poor, deprived ones whose case is equally strong as yours. Even if you happen to draw the lot in your favour, that would only mean depriving a fellow poor, perhaps in even more dire circumstances than you, of some long-cherished chance.

Thankfully, no such chance came by itself, and since I was not going after any goal particularly, I missed the train completely.

Well, coming to the New Year's Eve revelry, I can't forget those excited, oblivious-colored, intoxicated, crowded, abbreviated, dancing, flirting, carousing, boisterous moments spent in Goa on the night of December 31, 2001.

Every nook and corner of Panaji, and almost the whole of Goa, was crammed to the gills with tourists from all over India and abroad. Hotels, motels, lodges of all types and categories were brimming to the ceilings.

Call girls and prostitutes who wouldn't have attracted any notice from clients during the off-season now drew attention and money like the unmatched queens of the trade.

Wine, cocktails and local brews filled up minds with mighty storms inside the valleys of revellers.

Musical concerts on the broad avenues, where ear-piercing sound bites blared in all directions, would leave you shaking with a dangerous rhythm.

The festive ignition provided by Christmas was now bursting like a big cracker to sprinkle fire, light and a storm of excitement around.

Lovers lost in each other's arms, lovers of the moment lost in paid shelter, singles drowned in the arms of liquor.

On beaches dimly lit, dotted with shacks, shops and restaurants, people challenged the sea's dark waves by creating their own sea of yearning hallucinations, its tide turning unnaturally, terribly, carrying a strange mystique and mist of light and dark.

The sea of revelry rolled, yanked, puffed out liquored breath, toned by crazy music, soldiered by numerous foot soldiers of the sea of oblivion.

The sea of riotous revelry, teetering excitement, make-believe love and boozed bonhomie.

It challenged the sea, the real sea, lashing the excited beaches to console the sand on fire.

Under the impact of this wild revelry, true love looks as if it has taken to its heels and stands suspiciously at a safe distance.

It is a fire of crazy passions, crazily carried by the madly hilarious crowd.

The year on its deathbed is furtively being carried to its grave. So many hands are eager and protrude fists to fill the grave with earth, and then the storm breaks out to celebrate over the field of the grave for the arrival of a new one—the newborn at the zero hour.

They cradle, cuddle, fondle it, thrust mad breaths into its cherubic face, drop to their knees, caress it, and the painfully stressed, beaten hours of the night draw away to the sea, kissing the beaches to pacify the ruffled, bonfire sand.

Goa's New Year revelry—liquor, noise, masti, music, love, lust, brawls.

Next day, you find beaches and streets littered with enjoyment-making leftovers. It takes weeks to bring the badly shaken house to order.

Then suddenly Goa's full bowls are emptied.

A huge outflow of tourists, a reflux of them.

Buses, taxis, railway stations, airports—all are cowed down under the hangover-imposed increased weight of bodies now attracted to the earth with more stony force.

Because after that flying, frolicking, lofty highs, now they are dropped down on the hard, bare ground of realities once again.

Mending the Shipwrecked Boat: A Battle into the New Year

December 30, 2007

Sajan Pal is back there in the exotic chaos in the Horn of Africa, in Djibouti, and I can visualize his innocent puns and attempts at fun at the cost of the giggling maids there; Sandeep with his typical Casanova approach to life; and the slow-paced life over there in stark contrast to what we see here.

It's a completely different world out there.

I have to take care of our business affairs here for the time being till I return, and Sandeep probably will come back to India for some time to spend time with his family. So we are thinking of planning it in rotation: two of us there and one here.

Now, coming back to the situation here in India, thankfully, a hugely, mammothly ungainful year is on its deathbed. Today is its penultimate breath. Tomorrow will be the last one.

Well, thankfully, the year 2007 will die, but not before giving me a big bouquet of disappointments. Most of it has been ungainful, except the time in Africa, where life is experienced in a different, slow-paced dimension, as well as the few dollars that we have saved after bearing the high cost of living there and managing business by greasing palms at every step.

The rest of it seems to have gone almost in loss—ungainful.

But even with its mercilessness, it plagued me straightforwardly. It did not play hide-and-seek. It did not encounter me stealthily. All it did was in utter, cold, unflinching disdain and mercilessness.

How did it do this?

Well, by laying bare all judicial pretensions of justice, fair play and uprightness at the apex of our judicial system.

Why did I wait for three long years for this thing?

Thank God I have this African business venture in partnership with my friends to put in the face of the critics who might say that I haven't done anything. But still, alongside this so-called business, I have been hoping for justice and for availing what I truly deserve—my HCS post.

And for that I have been pinning all hopes on the judiciary.

The reason is that I had absolute faith in the system of justice at the Supreme Court level. But as it has turned out, it is just a central-level version of the state-level judiciary.

Otherwise, how can the annayaymurti dishonourably and criminally neglect the plight of a hundred job seekers who are hopelessly pitted against the mighty state?

I now see the state as a mighty sabre-rattling agent, subduing puny foot soldiers like me and my batchmates.

Once again, the urge to go to Bastar to have my little share of justice myself arises, but what can a poor, frail writer of still poorer words do to entertain such revolutionary sparks deep inside his heart?

The simpler reason for turning a blind eye to such glorious ideas is that I am afraid to die. The forces will easily kill me. And there won't be slightest noise against it. 

I know that I will be wiped out like an inconsequential speck of dust, like a little worm, if I am brave enough to go to the Naxal areas and become one of them.

I am thoroughly a pen soldier, with body battered and bruised, with weapons and shields lying in the dust, with hands lacerated and in no position to wield even the pen now.

So I am left with no alternative but to stand silent like an uncomplaining, mute sheep and then, in all humility, honouring the constitutionalities of the mighty state, start on the work of restoring the storm-wrecked little boat of life, now lying in the sand, upturned, its planking disarranged, its bottom moth-eaten.

Though this work is infinitely tedious, I have decided to go along with it, even though it means gulping big sips of humiliation and enduring pinpricks from the justice-seeking conscience.

It is perhaps still easier to carry such a load of your wreckage to build another boat, to sail off in the same sea of your doom, rather than beat your chest standing on the shore and challenge the mightily surging waves.

Those who think that they can challenge the fury of these waves might be right in their own ways, but given my fondness for what I have left, given my weakness and fragility, given my fears and inhibitions—given all this—maybe I am also justified in forgetting about the sin against me and not harbouring any thoughts of revenge against the mighty enemy, for doing so would be sheer foolishness.

If hideous Hooda and his Italian-posturing lady master have stage-managed a wrong, it still only represents, in my mind, a wrong done by the state. But since the state can never be wrong, it turns out to be no wrong at all.

So now I have started focusing more on our ragged, jagged business venture in the exotic chaos of East Africa.

I hope destiny will finally give us tiny bits of luck in the form of little opportunities that will help me in mending my shipwrecked boat of life.

The sea monster heaved it and beached it on the humped shoal of its constitutional back, and then tossed it like a puny slingshot against the sheer rock face.

Thrown against a rock, broken, I limber back to some sheltering grove, hoping this time my little wormy path won't wrongly cut across any politically shiny superway.

How good this country would have been if the type of politics being perpetuated hadn't existed.

It would have been blissful to have a political class which does not put unguarded, puny, weaponless foot soldiers in the position of having to guard themselves against the warring factions among the politicians.

Because very rarely does a political shot go on to hit the political rival directly. It kisses the poor flesh of some poor citizen, pitted, jammed in between the mighty, heavily guarded foes.

So they have their heavy political potshots, breaking many a poor head.

Let them enjoy this bloody game.

The time will perhaps come when the wormy, bleeding swarms will arise en masse to push back against all the surrounding charioted parties.

Yet it is too optimistic to think of such a revolution in our current setup, because the evil cronyism now carries a huge chunk of the upwardly mobile middle class on its pampered back.

And these neo-super units are too obliged to join the poor ones. They, in fact, enjoy the prospects of having their own types of potshots against these filthy, impoverished fellows.

They are the check dams which will prevent the river of agony from going out of control.

The exploiters are strengthening the flood banks.

In all probability, the river of agony will remain tamed.

Now I have learnt to live with my pains—pains in the soul, pains in the conscience, pain in the head—going round and round in a vicious circle, one giving rise to another and vice versa. It is not even clear which breeds which one; all father one another.

Though it is usually discomforting to have such pains always nagging, gnawing at your existence, I would be really happy to have them as long as I live, provided they don't wipe me out completely.

I am fighting it out all alone amongst them.

All alone.

My weapons and shields consist of self-derived and self-supported beliefs, willpower, negation of certain realities—a well-managed package to erect a model of pseudo-reality in which I manage to believe myself surviving at an average level.

But as time grows old and circumstances change for the worse, which I have reasons to believe surely will, the army, the agents of pain, will multiply like termites to eat the tree of my life.

I know that the odds will turn in their favour.

But what can you do under circumstances over which you have no control?

I will just do what I can manage.

I will continue with my battle.

Painful and taxing as it is, it has its own excitement and pleasures. I am not sure. I am not aware of lesser or greater pleasures, for there are many in both categories in comparison to my own.

But my little kits of pleasures and huge bundles of pains constitute the identity of my being.

It is a bloody battle ahead, and I am preparing for it.

I certainly will lose portions of myself in the bloody, unsparing battle.

Well, God bless me!