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!

The Lamp Blown Out at Liaquat Bagh

December 27–28, 2007

In the warmly lit evening hours of December 27, Benazir was addressing a rally in Rawalpindi with the intention of restoring civilian rule in the badlands of jihad. Liaquat Bagh had many PPP supporters egging on the Daughter of Democracy.

The witnesses say she made a fine speech. But if you harbour any instincts to lead such a radicalized society as that of Pakistan, you are always at risk of being put off the stage. Suddenly. Tragically. 

And exactly this happened with the brave lady of politics from the badlands, who had defied the challenge thrown at her during her reception rally.

The suicide attack, as has so often been proven, showed how a missed chance doled out by destiny can prove to be a maker and breaker in our lives. After addressing the rally, she would have sped away to safety had the urge to greet her excited supporters again not drawn her into committing the fatal error of popping her head out of the sunroof at the top of her Land Cruiser.

The assassin seized the opportunity and fired a volley at her. She collapsed before people could realize what had happened. He followed the ghastly deed with the macabre act of suicide bombing, scattering burnt flesh, torn limbs, clothing and debris on the road.

On the scene, many others were sacrificed at the bloody altar.

On October 18, she had returned home. She now joins the fabled list of assassinated leaders from the subcontinent. Her illustrious father, the famed Bhutto, had been hanged in 1979. She became one of the youngest Prime Ministers at the age of 35. She saw bloody turmoil through her almost two-decades-long political career.

Now the lamp is blown out at the age of 54.

Whom to blame?

Perhaps nobody, perhaps everybody.

The senseless policies of sixty long years drew one more round of blood. Let us pray to the gods of all religions that the bloodbathing comes to an end.

The precincts of Liaquat Bagh witnessed her last speech. People say she spoke well, fearlessly. As her convoy came out of Liaquat Bagh onto the road, shocked, dazed moments hung mournfully over the charred bodies.

Rioting occurred across cities in the wake of the assassination.

It was the same park where the first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot dead in 1951.

Hardcore supporters of the PPP, known as Jiyalas, wept inconsolably.

The Daughter of the East is now no more.

People saw Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in her. Many in the contemporary world thought her to represent the feeble face of democracy in the badlands of sectarian violence, jihadist onslaughts, AK-47s, bombs and terrorism.

Now the onus naturally seems to descend with its dark, ominous shadow over the teenage shoulders of her eldest child, Bilawal Bhutto, who looks like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Bombs and bullets, military, ISI, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, fire spreading Maulvis, barbarically excited clan leaders—Pakistan definitely presents a picture of utter chaos. Its manifestations are heard in distant Europe and America.

Jidahis are now found in society, in households, on sidewalks, in tea shops, in the ISI, in various arms of government, even in the Pakistan Air Force, where elements were implicated in attempts targeting Musharraf's convoy in 2003. The General survived though.

The firestorm launched by Islamist extremism—the pampered kid of the Pakistani government right from the state's formation—is rattling common lives. The fabric of society has been torn. Murders take place with impunity.

She returned to Pakistan in 1986, caught the fancy of the masses and became Prime Minister in 1988. Now, returning after eight years in exile, she was on the same path. But tragically, this time, the hope was snuffed out brutally.

The party founded by her father, the largest opposition party, was pitted against the mightiest institution in the country. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford—how could the illiterate Jidahis trust her? They had reasons to hate and be afraid of her.

Her stints at prime ministership—1988 to 1990, followed by 1993 to 1996. Her two brothers, too, had been killed earlier.

On Friday, December 28, she was buried in the white-tombed mausoleum at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. An Islamic cleric led the mourners in prayers as she was given a place alongside her father and her brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz.

People thronged the dusty fields surrounding the mausoleum.

Sindh is definitely weeping.

Its famous daughter of Larkana is no more.

Now the Pakistani government says that she was not hit in the head; rather, she died due to her head hitting the sunroof of her vehicle. It only adds to the ambiguity and confusion surrounding the mystery of her death.

Outside, people just don't believe the official version. After all, the state of Pakistan naturally kills any urge to accept the sound bytes coming from the land of jihad.

The people waging daily struggles for life here in India, to whom neither time nor circumstances allow the sight of the full picture—unbiased and critically analyzed—regarding Pakistan, consequently see Pakistan and its army-political-jihadi axis as a behemoth: a vague, opaque, thick, single-faced entity. They tout that the murder has been arranged by Musharraf.

The common person finds the General, now in civilian clothes, a charming, wily fox who can dazzle anyone in any way. More than hate, they appreciate him, even if it means paying such compliments laced with crude jokes full of expletives and comically uttered foul words.

She was perhaps the best political face, and thus, in their eyes, the best prospect for the return of order and normalcy in Pakistan amid the chaos.

And certainly, the whole world bears this loss in one form or another.

Democracy has been kicked again in Pakistan.

The Launchpad of Dreams and the Amoeba of Life

December 27, 2007

India started the Boxing Day Test on a very positive note, bundling out Australia for just 343. Though it is a decent score by all standards, but when it comes to Australia, which is a class apart, the scores deemed decent by other teams are found to be below par by the mightiest team in the world—a team which is a class in itself, which sets its own parameters and raises its bars of excellence in every department of the game.

Pitted against such a marvellously organized team, all the other teams in the world hope to salvage some pride by making the Australians sweat harder for their victories. You find some solace even in a defeat against the Kangaroos if you make them exert extra pressure for their victory.

In this matter, our Indian team, carried valiantly by our legendary veterans and exuberant youngsters, has rubbed, heated, argued, slanged and close-shouldered with the number one team in the world. We definitely lack in some skills in comparison to the Australians, but of late we have been trying to make up by getting aggressive, sometimes unnecessarily as well, on and off the field in order to reach nearer to the victors.

Kumble, the knight captain, leading from the front, flummoxed the batsmen, took five wickets and bundled them out for a total which many would consider well below Australia's strength. So, at the end of day one, the Australians looked circumspect. Indians looked well pleased with their achievement.

But all this euphoria was very short-lived.

They struck back with a vengeance. Though the Little Master, during his fluent 62, provided some glimpses of hope, like a pack of cards the wickets fell once he was back in the pavilion. India today got out for the paltry score of 196.

So, at the end of day two, the customary smile is back on the Kangaroo faces, and back are the glum faces which, unfortunately, also look customary on our players' faces—on the captain as well as his brood.

And as I have been writing these diaries from September, October to this time, taking time out from our Djibouti venture, I have also been taking care of business affairs here.

Apart from writing these diaries, in the night I went to IGI Airport, the launchpad of dreams and destinations, to see off Sajjan Pal on his way to Djibouti by Ethiopian Airlines, scheduled to depart at 2:20 in the morning.

The departure lounge was buzzing like a beehive, and here, as a rural man, even after having multiple experiences of entering the posh lounges at airports, I get a bit apprehensive about standing as a misfit—a commoner in the midst of all those classes which are customarily thought to throng airport lounges, classes superior in money, manners, looks, clothes and whatnot. Against them, you find your rusty rural self just a poor and pathetic figure.

But these are mistaken apprehensions, given the boom and burst in the Indian economy and the consequent unfolding—the supreme unfolding of the petals of international interactions at the individual, group, institutional and state levels through business, education and cultural activities—times are changing. Rapidly. 

Now airport lounges no longer speak of a class bastion with their refined, reserved attitudes. They are, on the other hand, lively places of common people with upwardly mobile dreams and aspirations.

There are noisy crowds humming with uncontrolled gesticulations. They are dressed in their customary colourful finery. They talk and walk around freely, bump into each other, love to push the baggage trolleys, love to ogle at beautiful air hostesses. All in all, most of them are common people like us. You don't feel like an alien object among them. You feel a part of that lively throng.

You see many eager, desirous faces on the verge of tasting the skies for the very first time. Their family members troop around, fully drenched in the airport feeling of being special, shedding genuine tears for the coming months and years of separation.

Then there are seeds of class amidst this throbbing mass. They seem to be losing their class colours in all this hullabaloo. They know that this place no longer belongs to them exclusively, so they surrender to fate.

Taxis and cars arrive with full, eager force before the glass-fronted departure lounge. For every prospective passenger, there are many on board. It buzzes almost festively.

The electronic signboard showing flights—on time, delayed, check security—draws constant beams of eyes.

In bright royal-blue-coloured business suits and skirts, the air-hostess staff of a Western airline descended from a luxury bus. A dog played with them; maybe it came by the hotel bus with them.

They were plump, healthy females, full of life and courtesy. Their shiny, well-massaged, moisturized legs shone under their skirts. The dog, standing on two legs, its paws in her beautiful hands, tried to lick her rosy cheeks. I am sure there were many in the crowd who must have felt envious of the dog for bearing such luck as to be fondled by that beauty in royal blue.

One of them even flirted with the handsome-faced, small-featured and slightly built luggage boy of the bus. She even gave him a lovely pat on the cheek and a lovelier word of bye.

When a place becomes the hotspot of middle-class masses, you find chaotic streaks requiring the lawkeepers. So here as well, your attention is constantly drawn by the shrill whistles blown to direct the taxis and cars to drive away quickly after seeing off their wards. For the stubborn ones, challans are issued.

But go to any nook and corner of India, even the most luxurious place, and you are somehow made to realize that there are still masses—impoverished masses—many, many rungs below the upwardly mobile airport-lounge mass.

These are the poorest of the poor, the porters who take the trouble of easing the load of some super-rich who might not have the intention or strength to fetch a trolley for a few yards and put their baggage on it.

These poor, beggarly masses all ambled in one or sprawled on the porch before the glass front of the esteemed roof opposite the departure lounge.

Poor, hungry people, clothed poorly, treated miserably by the circumstances of life—in their torn shawls and chadors, shivering, their bodies curled up under the lashing of the cold, their knees against their bellies.

They were lying almost heaped up against each other to garner the human warmth available in one another, while the world around them, on the brightly lit stage of high-flying dreams and soaring destinations, went on with its aromatic excitement.

The milky-white world was trying to remove shadows from around, trying to undo the shadows in the nooks and corners of the airline passengers and their wards.

But all this dreamy hoopla threw its unwavering, unshadowing rays on the sleeping common mass—the amoeba of life.

The distorted, contorted, misshapen cluster of limbs.

The great rays of light failed to penetrate the fragile shell of this amoeba, the poor creature of the sea of hopes and riches.

It goes on all through the night, flight after flight, well into the other day, when the sun reclaims its lost ground. The soaring, roaring world never gets tired of its hectic speed, of its business, of its ever-flying hopes, of its glitter and clamour.

And once the real passengers enter the gates, leaving behind the mass, it appears as if they have gone into a different world.

Old Bachelor Boys and Their Changing Tides

Old bachelor boys are free floaters. They are swayed in four directions by the petty waves of circumstances, emotions, sentiments and changing winds.

Unlike the poor familywalas, who are anchored to their liabilities, tensions, pleasantries, problems and issues of children and other relations, they are voyaged instinctively by the circumstantial gusts.

I have two uncles belonging to this free-floating category.

Sometimes it can be very annoying and taxing while coping with the tsunami-like surge of their reactions, both sympathetic and irritating. But that is what being a free floater is all about.

They might lead you to the brink of craziness sometimes. For example, on occasions when, unjustifiably, you are standing vis-à-vis their relations, your relation with them is shaken precariously, because they—what else do you expect from the free floaters?—shake and sway, creating ripples around, splashing the cold water of anger, and sometimes real, unpretended hate as well, in your face.

You are left gasping for breath.

But such instinctiveness on their part should not become a lasting block of your heartbreak with them. As it stands, nothing is permanent with them.

Next time, you are sure to be drowned in the sea of sympathy and kindness. Their voices will be choked with real pain at your loss. Tears will surge in their benevolent eyes.

How can you escape being swallowed by the big tidal waves of this genuine emotion?

Such are my uncles, Uncle Jaisingh and Uncle Satbir, and such are their reactions, belonging to both ends of the emotional spectrum.

Though often problematic, it is worth savouring that emotional cocktail in the company of old bachelor uncles.

Christmas Fog and an Unhealed Wound

 December 25, 2007

Merry Christmas.

The real winter is here because we have the first foggy morning of the season—a shivering, exciting gift from the great charitable Jolly Santa.

Today, the twilight sneaked a peek through the silvery-grey, moonlit swathes of fog. Wispy waves of fog ride chillily while the great festival is celebrated all over the world.

Snow-white beard, red cap, furry coat, bag of gifts on the shoulder, reindeer sleighs—the great character symbolizes so many nice things for Christian children all over the world.

If not in the countrysides and small towns, at least in the metropolitans, the festival is celebrated with equal fervour by the new urban class, internationalized in its attitude.

“Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell” now sounds familiar from the lips of kids of all religions the world over, and it is good. After all, the children belong to all of humanity.

They like to dress up as Santa—the grown-up generous kid. Innocent flirtations, hilarity, fun and frolics.

*****

Moving on to other things.

Tomorrow, the Boxing Day Test is starting in the summer-charged atmosphere of Australia. I hope Sachin doesn't miss the three-figure mark this time. I hope he has had his fill of nineties now and will oblige us with a century further.

Recovering from the great injustice inflicted by the Honourable Supreme Court, and not even getting the time to lick my wounds, I have started to look for alternatives in the face of such gross misuse of state power.

Mine can be a classic case of turning into an anti-establishment element, but I know that in that case I will be accruing further losses because the state is too big, those in power too incorrigible.

I can write; I can't fight.

Even if I have the slightest iota of respect for myself, I should go to Bastar to join the Naxalite movement to have my little share of justice myself.

Looking at the ways in which the mightiest arm of justice was twisted into confusion by the still brawnier and more muscular strong arm of politicians, I do have genuine reasons to feel that there is no real justice under the current setup.

But it is a futile complaint because I don't have the strength to take even a single step against this wrong done to me and my batchmates by the state itself, using the dagger of constitutionality.

The way the case went in the Supreme Court, I have very strong reasons to believe that the Italian iron lady, being prompted by her chief crony in the state, had definitely something to do with it. But she will definitely have her cup of woes. Fates change in politics. Just wait and watch. Bigger political lions will settle scores for common people like us. 

The myth and cult of the Nehru family will be eaten by fast-spreading termites let loose by Mayawati for all the socially, economically and politically depressed classes. She had given enough cuts in the recent Gujarat elections to Congress and will slowly, slowly eat away the support base of the family which has, for the last sixty long years, kept the idol of the Nehru family aloft on its frail shoulders without getting any remuneration.

Curse to Congress. That's what a wounded citizen of India can do. I hope it's not illegal to vent out one's frustration against injustice. 

When the Cold Nanny Lost Her Teeth: Winters, Smog and Supermosquitoes

December 22, 2007

Winter solstice, when the sun shines over the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere, far away from the Northern Hemisphere. Right there it shines overhead in the southern part of the globe to vent out its summer fury, and here it signals the pleasant fury of winters.

But of late, during the past two decades especially, the cold nanny has further lost its teeth. The winters have been checkmated by global warming.

Thus far, we have not had a single foggy day. Now, what are winters without the real fog?

Though there has been fog in Delhi, it is carried on its tepid back by the nuisance particles of pollution, and it is smog, which disrupts airlines and further wreaks havoc with the lungs of Delhiites.

Here in the countryside, a new breed of mosquitoes—the supermosquitoes—has cropped up, which still plagues our sleep. Even though the minimum temperature raised its freezing sight to three degrees Celsius one day to wipe out the remaining bloodsuckers, but they still remain.

Since the villages don't have a running sewage system, the latrine pits dot the area. Mosquitoes have now found new breeding grounds in the covered latrine tanks. They keep in touch with the outer world through the gas pipes, slipping in and out of the stinking corridors.

These new-age mosquitoes, big and black like houseflies, courageously carry the banner of their stinginess through the nights. They have chiding sneak peeks at the noses of villagers sticking out of quilts. They bite, have heat from the breath, and dance away to glory.

Many are now forced to keep their ceiling fans on at slow speed to ward off the nuisance.

All in all, the mosquitoes have become an all-year phenomenon.

Footballs of the System: Fifteen Months Between Hope and Betrayal

December 20, 2007

I have very particular reasons to hate the Congress and Congresswalas as a class. Some might find it a political thing, but no, it is a real one in my case.

Merciless, cold, vindictive steps taken by the Hooda government have almost destroyed my career. It is an irremediable dent in my life, in my career, in the prospects of a long-due happiness for my unjustifiably suffering brothers, sisters and parents.

The state roller-coasted over us—the entire HCS 2004 batch—like a great stone crusher, a great road roller, a massive juggernaut, making dust of the unwanted pebbles of me and my fellow batchmates, crushing our dreams, the fruit of our efforts, mercilessly, heartlessly.

For fifteen long months, the Honourable Supreme Court of India—dishonourably played the game of cat and mouse with us, showed us all the possibilities of justice, and in the end, apparently in order to appease the iron lady at the helm of affairs, allowed the blinding cloth on its eyes to turn a blind eye to the pathetically suffering cause of common men, common men like me.

The Nyaymurtis, according to me, in my suffering judgment, appear like annyaymurtis without even a single moral ruffle in their souls. They gave a green signal to the bandwagon of politicians playing ping-pong with every type of constitutionality.

“The government has the power to do what it wants to do. We can't interfere with the judgment of the High Court in this matter.”

This is the summary of their happy chorus.

They don't seem to be prepared to ruffle political feathers for a little cause like giving justice to commoners. If they were so helpless in this matter, then why, in the name of God, did they entertain our SLP in the first place?

The sham show of fifteen long months could have been avoided. At least some of us, like me, perennial believers in the uprightness of the Honourable Supreme Court, would have been saved from further delay in charting our alternative plans to make a career.

This belief in the system of justice has boomeranged like a fatal, self-inflicted arrow through our ribs.

And where do I stand today?

Thirty years of age, yet to earn a single penny for my near and dear ones.

People will easily put my tray full of agonies in the dustbin by saying I should seek alternatives, or rather should have done so a long time ago. But what of the betrayal by the very same arm of constitutionality which is always portrayed as the keeper of your rights and dignity?

Where are my rights and dignity after all this nonsense at the highest level in the judiciary?

If the Honourable Supreme Court judges are recommended and appointed through a thoroughly political process, how can they—the poor human beings pretending to be gods, or nearly so—escape being shackled politically when the matters involved are related to the mammothly inflated egos of those who facilitated the ascension of a man from a lower judicial status to that of a judicial superman?

Why aren't there any clauses in the Constitution to put the errant judiciarywala behind bars like a criminal if proven guilty? They keep all the laws in their pockets. This fraternity to always protect, at any cost, their class interest has now spawned the gutter of illegalities ranging from bureaucrats and politicians.

Where is real justice in India?

It is a false play of justice. In reality, the political class has its unlawful say in the end through the grossest misutilisation of state resources.

They are too big boulders, bigger than the puny iron wheels of the dispenser of justice, which enjoys its worth and significance through its crushing, crunching, dusting forays over weak, fragile pebbles like me.

So, a big shame on the face of the judicial system. What else I can say after my decade long hard work being splashed into the gutter by powerful political forces? 

I now consider it just like any other petty government institution, always under the threat of being misused to settle political scores that crush the spirit of justice.

The macho man drunk with power and thousands of glasses of alcohol—I wish he were his own urine drinker like Morarji Desai—now rules in the coveted seat, claiming it as a political victory of his government over the Chautala government.

But in what way does Mr. Chautala suffer from the judgment?

In no way.

The Puffy Gullu can't even dare to touch the strongman of Jatland. So the poor liquor-guzzler, with a puffed, bloated face, joker-nosed, is having potshots at anything related to the past government. As a wronged citizen of India, seething with impotent rage, this is all I can do to keep my sanity -- call names like a cheap idiot. 

Whenever there is a rally in Haryana where his mai, his Italian mai, comes visiting, the poor idiot, the believer in feudal aristocratic democracy, fumbles for words, always falling short of ideas in the presence of Madam, his bones shaking with fear as if she will drop him from the throne for any miscalculation.

So the ever-cringing chief schemer at the state level presents her with gold-framed pictures of her late husband; ever singing accolades for the first politcal family to keep sticking to the hot seat. 

Put to smithereens by the storm, lashed by him, I cling to hope.

What hope can there be for me?

As the elections come near, I am left with no alternative other than becoming a full-time noisy worker of Chautala party.

The Honourable Supreme Court has allowed us to remain as poor footballs, being kicked from this side to that.

It would have been better had the Honourable judges dismissed the petition altogether. In that case, at least there would not have remained any further possibility for political kick-starting.

But as it is, it is one of the most depressing, ambiguous, vague, slightly open-ended judgments, leaving us at the mercy of a political shark who will play cat and mouse with us.

The Garbage Plateau and the Corridors of Boom

 December 18, 2007

By the side of Karnal Bypass, the black-bluish plateau of garbage vents out its displeasing fury quite effusively in all directions. It is breathing, as though visible in the form of bluish-black smog hovering around.

How can Delhi escape the tentacled dregs of this massive pile of garbage—a kind of garbage-child clinging to Mother Delhi to suckle the airy breasts of the capital in this mystifying zone of pollution?

Vehicles ply in four directions, the stench giving them a nice cuddly slap on the back a good hundred yards away, down or up the road.

Along the footwalks, supported by cemented side rails, dirt-cheap, earth-level business thrives in the form of chaatwala, chholewala, fruit seller, puncturewala and many others struggling and striving to carve out a foothold on the slippery path of economic survival, their feet staring down the precipitous slope yearningly. And there, in the filthy nullah of starvation, humiliation and death, beggars crawl like hand-and-feetless subhuman creatures.

In blind contrast to this gutter-level misery, there is the emotional, economic and cultural heart of Delhi—Connaught Place.

Those massive, wide rows of colonnades harbour the corridors of luxury, business and enterprise. Cultured, educated, modern Indians and some cocktaily interjection of fair- and black-skinned foreigners tap the cemented floors, the conveyor belts of business and boom.

Many an Indian now rides the belt of boom.

Offices are plush here, with calm, tranquil air, which takes you, at least for some time, away from the cluttering miseries eating into the limbs and organs of Delhi.

Here, fragrance is good.

The light shining from the glossed and glassed eyes of high economics makes everything refulgent with hopes, removes the underside darkish odor. The blinds on the windows don't allow the sun of realities to have a sneak peek at this marvellous sun of human desires and strivings.

Parking lots are crammed with all varieties of cars. Here you are charged hourly, and it takes a marvellous effort of ingenuity by the staff boys to get your car out on the road from among the packed chessboard.

Connaught Place avenues are almost always, save some couple of hours late in the night, full to the gills with cars and autos.

Beneath the colonnades, the luxurious shopfronts show you the resurgent face of India. Even a paanwala with his tiny table appears a man of consequence. Even a chhole-bhaturewala makes bucks reaching to a thousand during the day.

In the tiny glassed cubicles, the money exchanger greets the foreigners, now not with a cringing smile, rather with the pride of equality.

Perhaps the days of colonial hangover are gone. Perhaps we no longer feel inferior at the mere sight of a white-skinned foreigner.

Here, ticket-booking offices have endless streams of gentlemen and ladies to keep the smiles on the dummies and staff ready forever.