Basmati, Sachin and Two Million in My Inbox: A December from Another Time

December, 2007

It has been a good agricultural season for the farmers thus far. Rice varieties across the spectrum have fetched them anything between 25,000 to 55,000 per acre.

Unbelievable.

As prices hurtle towards Mount Everest, this similar gallop shown by agricultural commodities does save them from getting too far behind while corporate India hurtles furiously on the fast-wheeled machine of consumerism and capitalism.

Though the farmers' lurching carts and tractors can't whiz past with the same impetuosity, they have enjoyed a ride—fast as per their rickety, slow-paced, nondescript parameters of earlier.

So the Basmati has been sold at 2,800 rupees per quintal on average.

On the back seat of a night bus, I met two young farmers returning from the market. They were drunk. Jolly well, prattling like schoolgirls, for a good reason, I think. After all, the rice had fetched 2,873 rupees per quintal. More is lying in the fields, they said.

“Today we will have a great time in the fields,” they prattled coarsely, one of them smirkingly drawing the fellow passengers' attention to two bottles of English liquor.

But for so many ecstasies, there are agonies as well.

And the agony amongst agonies is that Sachin is still yet to get over that bad habit of getting out before completing the three-figure mark.

In the ongoing second Test at Kolkata against Pakistan, he was batting aggressively, masterfully, and just when the feeling was vaguely sinking among the packed crowd that the maestro would not deprive them of a treat this time, he got out on 82.

This year he has given us almost dozens of 80s and 90s, but then it is considered a failure if you happen to be a Sachin Tendulkar.

The maestro needs to do something about it.

This nation guzzles on his centuries.

Otherwise, we feel starved.

Internet, getting faster and faster, digitally pumps more and more adrenaline and blood into our mechanising systems while we hurtle away to glory in the present century.

We never had such open, almost unlimited, all-pervasive, efficient means to communicate, get knowledge, process it, store it, manage it, manhandle every bit in the world.

No doubt it has done wonders in bringing instant flash to the realisation of our dreams.

But then, like any other technological device, this thing is a double-edged weapon as well. Those who intend to harm society in some way take up any technological innovation with as much acumen as those for whom the thing is really meant to be.

Yesterday at the cyber café, when I opened my email ID, my heart missed a beat.

I took the message in letter, missed its prankish, treacherous spirit. For me, for no fault of mine, it sounded so genuine.

It was a message from an International Promotional Lottery.

I had won more than two million in a draw among the other emailers. Registration of the society was written. It looked technically perfect. Telephone and fax numbers of the dignitaries concerned with the thing were there.

I was required to make a claim to the agent by giving him the file, batch and draw numbers mentioned in the email.

With my heart missing many a beat, all gullibly, I jotted the information down on paper and forwarded it to the required agent.

Like an instinctively drawn flea to a piece of sugar, I was glued to the first message in the inbox.

After all, the dream of making such big, fat moolah in one go is so strong that it paints almost all of us in the same grey, exulting paint.

A toy-shaking kid, oblivious of all the higher, more intricate realities around us.

And then the realities unfolded, because it was too unreal to be real.

There were twenty such messages, all informing me of my incidentally hitting against bigger and bigger treasure troves. Even though almost fully understanding the fundamentals of such junk mails, I kept on sleepwalking under the initial spell of that initial push and responded to most of the emails.

It was done in almost two hours.

During this time, I forgot the concrete, realistic, rational things—surfing for literary agents and job sites.

One guy claimed to be some official from some ministry in China. His only reason for being interested in me was my status of belonging to some other place than China. He wrote that he had some nice business proposal for me.

But the offer of one from an investment company in Africa busted through the tiny computer cubicle in the café.

He informed me that one billionaire had died heirless, and since he had invested millions of dollars in their company, the treasure was lying unclaimed.

Through some divine intervention, he had chosen me to lay claim as the legal heir to the late rich man.

“All the documents have been prepared. All that is left is for you to lay claim to the treasure,” he wrote.

Well, all in all, a great place for such flabbergasting, interesting fables.

They bombard your mailspace with such impetuosity that it takes many minutes before you have slain the greedy ghost to the dustbin.

But then, who knows? You might end up sending some genuine piece of luck, some treasure, under the all-destroying mace—the simplistic mace decimating all the perfunctory pieces of unrealities.

But then the only way left could be either you read all of them, or none, and move on to more pinching realities.

*****

It is well over three months since the Supreme Court judges have been laying eggs over the judgment.

Now every person with decent common sense is entitled to have some suspicions and make some claims without the fear of moral or constitutional wrong: that all is not well even at the loftiest tower of the Indian judicial system.

The judges have not announced any intention or reason under which the process could have taken so long.

We have every reason to believe that the government is using its all-pervading power to delay the judgment.

Not only are we getting killed, but killed in a halal manner—a blatant cat-and-mouse mockery.

It is as if they want to show us that they not only have the power to deny us water, but they have the power and immorality of making us run after it like a mirage in the desert, to make us run to our death under the fatal illusion of a final spring of water.

The judiciary thus acts, in my eyes, as a subsidiary arm, mercilessly, of the mighty state.

I don't blame the state.

But when the state comes to mean only Mr. Hooda in Haryana and the iron lady forged in Italian mold now ruling in Delhi, then you are always under the risk of being put upon the tormenting scaffold, the chains of legalities tied around you.

The state now becomes the multi-armed centipede.

Even if you get yourself lucky enough to be mollycoddled by one arm, another one will, at some other place, stab through your soft flesh.

For who are you, if not a soft-fleshed caterpillar? If you can't become the hard-shelled constituent of the state, you might cling to some arm for protection or favours.

But how long?

It can't last forever.

In fact, seeking favours with one, you make so many enemies around.