Legitimate Tears

When your dreams lie shattered around you, do not cry. If you do that you do injustice in more than one sense of the term. One simple mathematical fact: Shedding tears would not help in anyway. Understood that there are scattered pieces of the diamonds you had been working on. Now they are broken, sharp and may cut through flesh if you just close your eyes and prefer to cry. Kids have a copyright over crying and rightly so. We elders can spare this copyright infringement. Just look around the dashed diamonds, your so called broken dreams. Just see the glimmer in still shapely left out pieces. The dream is the soul; it just cannot die if some hammer momentarily dislodges its outer shape. No hammer in the world has the luck to kiss the soul of your dream. Its always safe. That’s its fate. Simply. Plainly. Why cry if the thing has not died. If you do, its just like mourning the death of someone who is still alive. I think we can simply avoid this irrational act. Broken shards of your dreams are, let us say, the blood-thirsty and hard chisels. They can help you in cutting through such mighty rocks as you could have never imagined. So it is simply better to cut bigger rocks for larger prospects instead of allowing the pieces to cut through your physical and mental selves.

Storms

Storms are storms. Just storms. Nothing else. They do not have much to offer both to nature and humans. They swirl, shriek, shake and prance occupied by an illogical spirit. It is just like nature throwing tantrums. But tantrums are never substantial man; they are just a fragile symbol of something going out of loop for some moments. Look at nature, storms are just temporary, tiny speed-breakers on its peacefully laid out benevolent road of survival, sustenance and evolution. It applies to our lives as well. So when the ship of our being gets jolted by the angry winds just remember this is not the substance of your life. It lies in miles of peaceful, dreamy and majestic waters waiting to kiss the hull of your ship. Coming back to the poor storm. It is just a puny piece of funny quirkiness possessed with suicidal and self-consuming dispirited and rampant self. It dances in pain. While it fizzes and fumes, it burns in its own fire. It dies. While its cremation takes place just be a good pyre-keeper and fulfill all the rights diligently. But keep a safe distance from the fire. It is sure to die. And, more importantly, you are sure to survive to see the flowers blossoming in that very dead ash. So please believe in peace, in tranquility, in harmony, in noiseless distances waiting for you while you feel the heat of the burning aberration. Be a spectator. Be a valiant survivor. Do it for the sake of normal, undisturbed nautical miles lined up to allow the passage of your ship to a lush green island of your destination, where you can drop anchor and enjoy the stillness of life for sometime. It has to be done. Because the course of normalcy is self-sustaining, kind, beneficent, forgiving and parental. The storm just burns in its fury. Allow it to do it. Harmony, orderliness and tranquility draw life-giving sips from their own substance, from the core of their own essence. So be a good businessman. Join the latter's’ bandwagon. For you own gain.

Congress Vs. Anna

Congress has derailed Anna movement to a great extent. The old hag of a party! The party and its handlers are too clever, witty and power-lorn to be outsmarted by the social worker. Anna's movement jolted it, to begin with. It was a social movement, a mass movement. Blatant corruption and nepotism had left big scars on the conscience of well-to-do middle and upper middle class of India. Fortunately these literal scars were equal, if not bigger, to the real scars of the poor masses, the aam admi who gave the Honourable Italian-born iron lady a decade to wield all powers without any responsibilities. And what did they do? They just redefined the contours of coalition politics in almost criminal manner. Shared interest policy became just a policy of blindfolding the conscience and constitutionality to allow the allies and cronies to amass as much wealth as possible. They just eyed successful completion of a full term. But at what cost? Who paid the cost? We did it man! We the struggling and toiling masses of India, silently and law-abidingly continued to add to our struggle to match the horribly rising monthly budgets. On the other end of the tunnel, our political akaas just stashed the money of our labour in Swiss accounts. It was an open secret. All of us knew what was going on. But what can a bread-earning bunch of frustrated souls do. It can just grumble. And we just grumbled till Anna gave a voice to all these harmless bickerings. Lo! The sinewy tributaries merged to form a tidal wave at Ramleela ground. It literally submerged the wrong-handlers of our well-meant parliamentary democracy. But Congress is Congress my dears! It will just stick to its ways. At any cost! Under public bombardment, the Congressites dodged, feigned nonchalance, pretended even concern; but all along the way they were up to a smart plan to change a mass social movement to a political one so that it loses its savioural social identity to become a big political gimmick like its own. They know that they can outsmart any group on the political platform. So poor Anna has been systematically dragged into the political arena where the fight is not going to be one-sided like earlier. There will be punches from both sides. Anna was fighting on a holy pedestal where even the semi-goons of Congress were afraid to take direct or indirect pot-shots. Now they have dragged him into a muddy field. The same familiar game. Best wishes Anna sahib! You are up for something new now! Good luck! But please do not feel disheartened by smaller numbers at the next chosen venue of your agitation because the sharp edge of typical tricky Congressite political wit has punctured the high-flying balloon of your ideology.

Salutes Delhi

Salutes Delhi! You are two-eyed. But they have different visions, different dreams, different destinations. One of your pan-shots swankily zooms on the glizz-nd-glamour of resurgent India. Whether it is right-eye pan-shot or left-eye, I do not know. But yes the other eye's camera shot pervasively covers the classic tragedies spread out in black and white. Its a grizzled, murky screen having classic comicities and tragedies spinning, whirring around the same axis. Its Muhharram today. Many a offices are closed. It just means you can drop your purse on the DTC bus floor and still left with a realistic chance of retrieving it. So at least you could see a fee feet around you. Great solace. The air too was not stuffed with guffaws let out by infected throats and lungs, disordered stomachs, cheap scents and Deos from Palika Bazaar and above all the usual individual and collective frustrations. See when TATA offered these buses (along with the kickbacks per piece and which was more important to our rampant governmentvallahs ) the real cost of the machine was just meant to carry this type of load. The festival load. Once in a time load when people do not travel on account of holidays or some other emergency.

On this observable stage a 14-year-old man-kid jumbled into the finally justified interiors of the poor green line. Boy he was the man! Carried a pole that would tower above the poor bus if their vertical components competed. He slanted it, his small hands manoeuvred it smartly and the camel was safely in the room. The pole was the dancing axis of so many types of cheapest kid toys as you might say can be afforded by the childhood mushrooming in slums. All fellow-riders watched him in half amuse and half irritation. Lampoons like yours truly even laughed at the free show. Anyways, coming back to this character valiantly playing its part in the grizzly black and white ever spooling movie. He rushed to the conductor seat after killing all the apprehensions and objections of the busvallaha about the pole falling and the kids-stuff getting a playground on their heads. The boy-entrepreneur got DTC day-pass costing 40 rupees. Man o man! How much this kid earned to afford the pass. Anyways that is none of our concern like most of the Delhi things should not be. One fact was inescapable: the well-meant boy was well-prepared for the day. The way he had tied the muffler, the way his cheap jacket was buttoned up to the collar, the way trouser well-fitted his thin legs and the way well-cleaned shoes purchased from the road-side hawker, all these portended a good successful business plan.

One problem with new DTC bus is that its door opens too invitingly with a hiss, as if it is specially inviting you for a joy-ride. Carried by the swift winds of one such invitation, an Advasi family raided the semi-occupied bus. The conductor baulked, 'Not without tickets you thieves!' 'Hutt you miser, we have money!' the black old lady draped in a big raggy blanket shouted. God knows how many of them were! It was a collectively lampoonish unit cocking a snook at the organized hordes of Delhi. One monkey-like infant immediately grabbed the hand-rails overhead and tried gymnastics. One of its hands also busted the balloon tied at the upper end of the toy pole. Both its owner and conductor shrieked painfully. So many raggish kids carried their unsuspecting selves to the empty seats and dumped the gypsy spirit for a while. Their neighbours almost vomited. A sleek lady carried a toddler on her shoulder, one infant in her lap and most probably the another one inside her as the glossy black bulge of her abdomen shone from the short kurti she was wearing above the gracious folds of a dirty long skirt. It just became a thoroughfare. The conductor fought for tickets. They stood their positions, gibberishly, savagely. And where were they going? Whole of NCR was their destination. It was just a matter of holding onto the ride till the fight with conductor acquired serious colours. And the moment it did, they just dumped themselves with the same teasing indecency like they had raided the bus and vanished from the scene. Delhi, salutes! You bear witness to the two movie-makings by the camera lenses in your eyes!