The First Grey Hairs: A Losing Battle Against the Advancing Troops of Age

 **November 2007**

I am thirty now.

A few strands of grey hair have suddenly appeared on my chin. A definite clarion call of age.

We do our best to hide the signs of our advancing age. We are pitted against these rebellious outcroppings on our face and head. But we don't let them prevail without a stern colouring, masking and cutting fight while they are still in the minority.

During our thirties, we weed them out, colour them, do everything that cosmetics allow us.

But over a period of time, it proves to be a losing battle.

It takes almost a decade for us to accept the baldy, wrinkled, grim reality by the forties.

The rebel line is beyond our powers, and we meekly accept our fate.

I, being in my present state, have clearly and cleanly cut down the rebellion, for there were only three enemy troops.

It is, however, another matter that I will be required to repeat the feat every time my stubble is a few days old, because I can cut the outer vestiges of age—that's true for a time—but not the roots of it.

They are too deep. They can't be rooted out.

It will happen, as it has been happening always to all of us.

Poverty: The Cruel Unmasking of Life's Beautiful Illusions

 **October 2006**

Poverty might be a curse, but it has its own poor reasons and uses as well.

Your poor clothes, the dilapidated walls of your house, the struggle for a few bucks, helplessness in the face of illnesses—all these make life hellish.

But at the same time, especially if you were fortunate enough to have gone through better days in the past, it does you a great favour by taking you out of the refined, made-up, groomed mould or caste and placing you on the parched, neglected, famished side road, no longer under the spotlight.

You see the real game of life, the illusory goggles blown off your face.

You see the facelessness behind those finely masked countenances.

You see the shameless shamelessness in the eyes which you always wished to be the most gracious and good ones, for you never had a real peek into them because they were always hidden behind the stylish, colourful film of the glasses.

Now, however, they stare at you in their full, natural colours.

The layers of makeup no longer hide the abhorrent creases on the faces.

Though you are lost and suffer much in this sideshow, the main show, with its fake characters, false themes and wrong colours, also comes crashing down before your all-watching eyes.

Now nobody is interested in hiding the ugly self from you because, as a virtual nonentity, you are no longer in the race of outsmarting, outmanoeuvring, reciprocal beneficence, etc.

You are a ragged, cobwebbed, peeling-off figure.

So poverty is not that much of a hellish thing as it is made out to be.

Maybe those who have never tasted good days since their birth, and hence have grown up seeing the naked truth in its full monstrosity, will justifiably disagree with this observation.

It is but natural for them to think so because there never was a *behind* for them; there never was a blinding screen between them and the world outside.

But at least those who fall down the economic rungs should give this much credit to the great curse of society.

It unveils so many things which would have passed for reality forever, had it not been for the fall in economic status.

Even with this great and ennobling service, I wish there were no poor person on the face of the earth.

Because, even with its great service, poverty remains a curse.

God Versus Me: Who Has Let Whom Down?

 **October 2006**

I do not know whether God has let me down, or is it the other way around, or both of us have let each other down, or only one of us—either He or I—has let down the other.

Or none of us has let the other down.

If God has let me down, then I end up justifying all my deeds, which further implies that I have always done what I should, or could, have done under the circumstances.

But since we are designed to learn to do good only through practising the wrong, I ought not to claim perfectionism: certainly, I must have done many wrongs on my path of goodness.

So God has not entirely let me down, but maybe a bit.

If He has created me, then He should have saved me from blunders by putting the right sense in my head while I floundered and committed mistakes.

Maybe He has created a limiting circle around me, making it a rule through providence that I will never be able to break those circular fences—that is, the world outside is beyond my reach, and the world inside is within reach.

And within this built-in platform, you can make or break your destiny.

Maybe I have been banging at the fences, futilely trying to get a passage out, and in the process depriving the self of that hassle-free, cosy, routine, risk-free, ordained circular plaza ride inside the cubicle.

The possibility does exist also that both of us have let each other down in our own ways.

Maybe there were times when His soft, spiritual, guiding voice of sanity divinely whispered logic, prudence and practicality into my puzzled ears, while I decided to be lost in the crashing noise of imprudence, impracticality and nonsense.

Also, there might have been occasions when, sincerely and deservedly, I was crying for help, comradeship and guidance from the cosmic authority, but it somehow left me without support.

If I look at my long trials, tribulations, prayers, undeserved sufferings and pains, then certainly I find myself undone by Him, for what I have done for myself certainly does not deserve what I have got at this stage.

So, from this point of view, He has certainly let me down.

If He designed or created me to do something else, which I, a mere mortal, have been fighting so far, then I have overgrown my shoes and certainly let Him down.

For He, being the Creator, reserves the final right.

Then maybe none of us has let the other down, He being He and I being I.

He, the greater God in His own sphere, and I, a lesser one in my own.

But the entire debate thus far has been from the angle of my sufferings only.

Have we ever cared about God's sufferings—either in His own world, not connected to ours in any way, or in His own cosmic, patronising relation to us as the Supreme Father?

Looking at the extent of pain, miseries, sufferings, unhappiness and tragedies in this world, it sounds improbable that there exists a safe closet in this vast cosmos where such things have no meaning.

Maybe in that heavenly space there are pains of their own type.

But we humans, in our exalted, mortal, ignorant selves, ignore the larger picture and are ever focused on our sufferings.

Isn't it a rule that my pain is some earthly worm's gain, and vice versa?

Whatever we lose, we end up doling out some opportunity, some luck, some leverage to some fellow earthling.

So this perpetual reversal of roles between pain and gain among ourselves—the thread of our existence, the cords that make us puppets, the players on the stage—creates the hallucination or illusion that there are vast, separate, unjustified pools and chunks of pains and pleasures, while in reality the constant sum of pleasures and pains remains the same.

It is a grand quotient involving both the darker and brighter aspects of nature.

But all this futile hypothesising does not make me oblivious to my own unredeemed sufferings.

It stings at my head, screams justice, screams for justice from Him as well as the earthly beholders of it.

But nothing changes, and time just fruitlessly flows away.

And now it has started to bypass me, copiously taking long, cruel draughts of the sap of patience, prayers, faith, belief and confidence in me.

Now I no longer battle for anything.

I just stand like an item of vegetation, waiting for the happenings.

They may be good or bad.

It makes the littlest of differences.

Ladies in the Higher Reaches of Power: A Feminine Antidote to the Muscular Culture of Corruption

 **September 2006**

There are not too many in this country, especially among those of the stronger sex, who would put their thumbs up to a proposal enabling a higher percentage of ladies in the highest echelons of power—for example, in the Supreme Court, High Courts, state and central legislatures, higher bureaucracy, etc.

I, however, belong to that section, however large or tiny it might be, which wholeheartedly supports the view.

There are very well-poised, delicately shaped, femininely docile facts in support of my view.

Looking at the sorry state of affairs, like the criminalisation of the system, politics-bureaucracy-criminal nexus, systematic bypassing of laws, criminal negligence of honest causes and misuse of power, people of my bent of mind do hold that all these pointy, bloody, dangerously jawed saws used to cut our innocent flesh can be rasped to suit our deserved, honest public causes.

Just see how all this undeserved, unwanted wantonness has surfaced on the stage of our system, upon which we walk daily, and you will find the muscular, brawny mix-up of persons of all categories (legal and illegal), mingling over cocktails, wines and meat.

That boisterous environment in which the higher ones are cut down to size and the lower ones are falsely raised in stature.

And all we see is a mass of common heads with varying interests throbbing inside their hearts.

People—the muscular guys—who let their tongues loose, hearts unbridled, minds racing with the horse races of benevolence, protection, patronism, slavery, give and take, to raise the common stakes of their class to a higher level.

In this traditionally male society, people in the higher echelons of power do mix with each other like nocturnal birds of prey, and through these shared bonhomies, many ill foundations are laid down.

But put more and more decent, cultured, well-educated, well-bred ladies in the corridors of power, and they would not go on these nocturnal escapades like their male colleagues.

So there would be less intermixing with the wrong elements, most of whom are of the opposite sex.

And less would be the decay in the system.

Nothing is perfect in our human affairs, but ladies are certainly relatively better at cleanly managing the affairs under their authority.

Independence Day: The Shackles of Freedom and the Long Shadows of Justice

 **August 2006**

There is one earth-shattering historical fact which, leaping over all the voluminous past and present load of August, defines the month, at least for the Indian citizen—the title page of this month.

What is it?

Well, it is August 15, our Independence Day.

What cause have I got to celebrate?

The institutions of the country are meant to help a common citizen of India like me in the better realisation of the self, through aiding and helping our cause mentally, physically, spiritually—at all levels.

But what cause are you left to celebrate when the very liberating tools are used to put shackles, leg irons and chains on your body by the persons who are in their seats to help your cause, but decide to—take a deep, deep breath of power—torture you?

There can be no greater crime against you.

But all this goes unnoticed because the persons doing it wear the clean, polished shirts of constitutionality, legality and the rule of law.

It is a terrible whitewashing of misdeeds.

You stand alone as a bespattered, tortured, wrongdoing individual.

The same has been my fate.

The last refuge, the Supreme Court, shining in its unstinted, unstigmatised and hallowed glory, is lugubriously basking in the sheen of its judicial glory.

The mighty banyan, with its sturdy canopy and long-hanging roots, oblivious to the weeds sprouting under the sphere of its shelter.

For the fifth time during the last three or four months, our court case date has been deleted from the order of proceedings.

Every whim and fancy of the larger parties and individuals with mightier interests is getting undue priority, while our case is being pushed—somehow, and without a word—into the background.

I not only smell something rotten here; rather, I would say frankly that it is no mere coincidence born of the large number of cases pending in the court.

Our case is being bedraggled into the dusty back corridors.

If those who say that justice delayed is justice denied are right, then we have been denied justice a long time ago, because nothing practically has been done so far.

It is not a tedious case involving cumbersome elements requiring a long and winding process to resolve the issue.

It is a simple case.

An obvious yes or no.

So even if we hear *yes*—and that seems improbable—then, unfortunately, it will be too late for me to celebrate the victory of the rule of law.

For the path thus far has been an interminable ordeal, smelling of all the wrong facets of the misuse of power by those who are supposed to protect you as their subjects.

Incarceration: A Prison Without Bars and the Long Road to Justice

 **September 2006**

Incarceration!

Well, this is how I would prefer to sum up my life during the last two years.

You can be directly imprisoned as a punishment for your transgressions against the socio-legal norms. At the same time, you can, more tortuously, find yourself incarcerated in a ghetto informally, for no direct fault—or even any fault at all—of yours.

After a decade-long wait, watch, patience, hard work and prayers, I landed myself this HCS selection.

Even a threadbare examination of my attempt from beginning to the last stage of the process, my hardwork and flawless honesty without even the typical minutest indiscretions at the interview level (which sadly is the norm) would make even the harshest of critics agree, at least, that I deserved the selection in the real sense.

Earlier I was interviewed for the IAS; interviewed for the PCS and rejected. But I chose the path of following the straight path of discretion at the last hurdle, while the smarter ones got utilitarian shortcuts on this final threshold of selection and rejection.

So my moralist, honest conscience gives me a clean chit on my belated final selection for the post.

But then the Congress government decided otherwise.

Like greater gods, they disposed of the proposal of my lesser gods, whom I had prayed to so fervently all along during those sleepless, bookish nights.

Definitely, I felt a victim. And a victim I am of the power game at the higher levels.

So, in the battle of kings, viziers, elephants and camels, we, the poor pawns—the hundred-odd batchmates of this HCS 2004 batch—got lanced.

The case in the judiciary has dragged on for two years.

It is an unsparing, mercilessly long route to justice, all strewn with tiny, bruising cacti of injustices.

So, even if you are lucky enough to see the sun of justice at the end of the long tunnel, are you sure your battered body, lacerated self-esteem, injured pride and confidence will forget the past?

Perhaps not.

For the experiences along the way are too horrid.

Some say that instead of fighting obstinately for one thing only, like a pony with blinkers on, I should have searched for an alternative.

But I spit in the face of such nice, goody, practical suggestions, because by this theory, you own nothing.

You don't own the price of your sweat, your luck, your destiny.

You have to abandon it at the first dispute.

So, in order not to abet their crime by acquiescing in my own suffering, and before the gods, if there are any, I have incarcerated myself in my house.

Now it is stifling hot. During the perspiring morning monsoon lulls, you feel like dying, closeted in the house.

Electricity is absent most of the time.

The Supreme Court is going like a careless elephant, moving along the path of justice, unconcerned about the plight of common citizens.

The merciless gaoler, meanwhile, is in the highest heaven of power and pleasure.

The Broken Sail of Endurance: Tendulkar's 91 and the Cruelty of a Single Decision

 **29 July 2007**

Third day of the second Test at Trent Bridge.

Not too many people are bothered about an Indian victory, or when and how it comes. The goal seems only one—the maestro's 38th century.

If India wins later, that will be only icing on the cake.

He no longer races to the three-figure mark with the exuberance, flamboyance and arrogance of his twenties. But an experienced Tendulkar, slowly, calculatedly, maturely, sometimes doggedly, sometimes with his one-time blinding aggression—like a patient ship captain at the helm, bearing all his experiences on his weather-beaten sleeve, steering sometimes painfully towards the coast—is still a treat to watch.

Today he did it till 91.

Then a horrible decision broke the sail of endurance.

It is not that Tendulkar dominated the bowling one-sidedly in his innings. The bowlers had their chances. But then, in this game, one has to be adorned with luck, particularly on every delivery.

The peculiar glory of the game: all seems to be in your hands while you play the ball, and perhaps nothing is in your hands.

Here chance, mischance, luck, sweat-laden hard work, power, enthusiasm and broodings all get jumbled up in a fantastic mosaic of interplaying factors.

Tomorrow the press will be screaming that Simon Taufel denied him his 38th hundred, which was much needed for the fans on tenterhooks, for the Aussie captain is on a blind three-figure spree.

As Hawkeye, and even the normal eyes of mundane spectators, showed, the ball was pitched too much outside the off stump and would definitely have missed the off stump.

Poor umpiring!

So much to look for on every delivery.

So we can spare a bit of sympathy for the umpire. Poor umpire!

Do an excellent job, provable by technology, and you get just a wink for doing a thing always expected of you.

Miss a thing, and the labour pains of a silently gnawing workload get undone in a moment.

A most unrewarding, unredeeming, unsung job on earth—the cricket umpire.

Knowing all this, I still can't spare this huge grudge against Mr. Taufel.

It indeed—the decision—pricked the sporting conscience of the great player. Thanks to the critics' never-ending forays into his sporting affairs, the man walked out with the rarest of rare complaints.

Poor umpire!

Then, to bring him further under the wrong spotlight, another wrong decision went against Sourav Ganguly.

The show must go on, I think.

A Tendulkar without his 38th hundred in this game is still equally great.

Twenty20 Cricket: The Gentleman's Game in the Age of Mallets and Stones

 **August 2006**

Name a thing which has not been robbed of its sweet charm, its pleasantly surprising, laboriously detouring, exotically curving, notably escaping scene and aura—we would like to sum this up under the one title of classicism, for it is an emotion rather than a concrete thought—by the mercilessly shortcutting, concretely revolving, unsparing, sure-shot, certain onslaught of cutthroat technology, modernism, consumerism, globalisation and capitalism.

Everything, from arts, sports, culture and entertainment to lives and relationships, has been put upon that sure, certain, predictable pedestal in the public square.

It has definitely robbed life of its exquisite, varied charm while making it comfortable.

Comfortable, but not interesting.

The less we knew and the less sophisticated the tools we had, the more it meant that we tried. We laboured, we wept, we laughed with joy while slowly working on the thing, process or relationship—in fact, everything related to us.

So we arrived at the classical contours of architecture, entertainment, literature, painting, music, romance, fights and feuds, and whatnot.

Now we, our products and our modes of doing things are the bland, bald, charmless, lifeless surfaces having straight faces and sharp corners, whitewashed with modernity in its sulking, juiceless monologues.

From our perch of monotony, we look with awe at the classical aspects of things of the past.

Now cricket, in its classical, unruffled, unfazed avatar, was a gentleman's five-day affair.

It was not at war with time.

The few spectators were players themselves.

But as we rolled into the last decades of the last century, we sabred the long-drawn affair—to cut, to trim, to manage the charmingly wild, overgrown affair.

One-day matches, with their money, glamour, competition and noise, were a step towards the semi-classical.

A bonsai of the reality.

Now we are hurtling too fast to take even the one-day affair as too classical.

Fast-rising superbrands, consumers tonking our heads, money overflowing the pockets.

A whole-day affair is too tedious.

So we have the Twenty20 avatar of cricket now.

An ungentlemanly version of the quiet innings of yore.

It is fast, furious, sure-shot, certain—a headlong plunge into the deadline with power and muscles, without much use of mind or heart, in sweating, pulsating notes.

It bears the same relationship to its forefathers as the grand things of earlier times bear to the modern luxury items of the contemporary period.

Coming back to Twenty20 cricket, I can take pride in being a part of its harbingers during the early nineties of the past century.

It seems really another era, even though only a decade separates the two.

On our uneven, rough, amoeba-shaped playground outside the village, we played Twenty20 cricket, both during friendly intra-village combats and during local inter-village tournaments.

Given our playing conditions, equipment, ground, skills and spectators, a Twenty20 affair was the maximum limit within which we could exploit all the elements of cricket.

I see no difference between that classless, farcical, ignorant British development of ours and our swankily clad musclemen wielding the bat like a mallet and hurtling the cherry like a stone.

It is a harakiri—boisterous, bawdy, noisy and indistinct.

In its classical version, the bat becomes a pen to slowly, dedicatedly write new chapters in history.

The ball is a living object which responds to the hardened nerves on the fingertips of the players.

In Twenty20, just as we did up to a decade ago, the vagrant boys hurl stones and the mischievous guy swings the mallet amid levity.

Sweat, perspiration, noise, money, nonsense.

Such bland games have to be cherished at the kids' level.

We enjoyed them during our unguided, unsuspecting adolescence.

Let others do the same, while watching and playing the same game.

But the more we are into it, the more the classical gentlemanly game becomes a candidate for a museum piece.

For even if the much-abhorred conservatives and conservationists cling to the older form, it will lose its real sheen in the coming decades, because modern architects feigning to erect a Taj are farcical.

The game will become obsolete, given that the players are all wielding mallets amid levity and hurling stones.

Take up any other issue or thing related to our lives and draw the same analogy.

You will see the panoramic shades of the classical, mystically lost in the background of the gleam and glitter of modernity.

The Rubber of Goodness: When Patience Is Stretched Beyond Its Limits

 **5 November 2026**

Testing someone's patience—which is a part of his personality—or some other goodness (patience is a subtle manifestation of goodness only, by the way) is like stretching rubber.

Inherently good people will allow you to stretch them. That is their nature.

But as a puller of the rubber of goodness—the advantage-seeker drawing upon the sap of someone's goodness—you have to realise that there is a limit to everything.

Pull it beyond a limit, and the rubber breaks.

If, in the throes of your self-seeking passion, you snap someone's rubber of goodness, that is as bad as killing a part of him.

I would count it as partial murder.

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

 **24 July 2007**

The parliamentarians had a farewell gathering for the outgoing President.

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

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

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

A clear example of hypocrisy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And operate as a vassal.

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

 **July 2007**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps there is none.

So the people take pleasant jibes.

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

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

We wish him the best of luck.

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

 **July 2006**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what about the poor Muslim neighbourhoods?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 **4 November 2026**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So cruelty is the fundamental strain in both forms.

They accomplish the same objective through different means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is just a subtle expression of the same phenomenon.

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

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

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

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

 **July 2006**

India is now a land of terrible apathy.

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

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

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

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

Clever vampires indeed!

The systematic, clean-handed, apparently clean butchers!

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

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

Roadside slayings.

Who cares?

Perhaps all, perhaps nobody.

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

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

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

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

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

And they mock at the latter endeavour.

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

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

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

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

We have accepted it as our fate.

Perhaps rightly so.

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

 **22 July 2006**

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

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

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

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

Let us see where we go from here.

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

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

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

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

Those strange, heavy-footed aliens will be unrecognisable.

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

And I feel terribly gloomy.

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

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

This black truth goes like this:

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Ship: A Glorious Flagship with Stinking Holds

 **July 2006**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole dim area stinks like a chamber pot.

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

It is aware of the dangers as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Master Imitators: The Indian Fascination with Westernism

 **July 2006**

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

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

Look at our Page Three super-rich people.

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

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

It is a poor, soulless drama of Westernism.

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

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

We always find them superior.

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

So Hindi becomes poor, English becomes rich.

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

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

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

Our relations, dragging; theirs, easy floaters.

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

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

Langda: The Lame Farmer and His Astonishing Gamble with Fortune

 **July 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But our main concern is the father.

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

The man drinks hard, works doubly hard.

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

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

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

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

Some say he will meet his doom.

But such guts either make or break.

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

He has sublet the plots to a few others.

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

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

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

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

 **July 2006**

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

The aims of the proposed legislation are lofty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 **July 2006**

He is nicknamed Nepali in the village.

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

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

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

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

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

His adolescence was terribly shaken by torrents of lust.

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

Then marriage came, and so arrived the responsibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

So this very sort of aberration arrived in his life.

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

It was a case of contract killing.

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

He was behind bars for a few months.

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

The brother came to his redemption.

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

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

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