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.

The Hydra and the Anthill: Two Faces of a Troubled India

December 8, 2007

Sonia Ben cries, “The merchant of death! The merchant of death!” spreading the highly infectious virus in the communal badlands of Gujarat.

Overall politics being the game of self-righteousness and self-justification at all costs and whatever the consequences, the sari-clad iron woman of Italian origin, the new version of the Iron Lady, could well be politically justified in continuously raking up the cremation dirt to bring to life the Godhra ghosts. All is well in love and war, they say. And her love is politics. On top of it, it's electoral war. 

So the high-voltage campaign in Gujarat for the State Assembly flares ahead. But she and her funny state leader can't beat Mr. Modi in his chosen field of expert polarization, and in an effort to beat him with his own stick, they too get many bruises themselves.

Mr. Modi might be justifiably or unjustifiably reviled by the liberals, media and intellectuals—that is not the question—but we can't take away his USP under the all-swiping broom of any literary criticism.

Unlike the so-called pseudo-secularists, Mr. Modi makes almost no pretensions. Unlike them, he makes no bones about his reservations about the minority. Unlike them, he flares his religious identity directly, matter-of-factly.

So I find him very true, inside out, unlike the Congress people who stink with schemes and always pretend, and would always do so many things in a different way from what they say on the surface.

And this unambiguity, this sincerity of purpose, is liked by the masses in Gujarat.

But while the sari-clad woman of Italian cast and mould frets and fumes, does she ever give a thought to 1984?

Mr. Modi, the powerful man of Hindutva, marches ahead with his anti-Muslim juggernaut. This is his strength, and he is entitled to take it for his advantage. Just like the Congress tries to take advantage through Muslim appeasement. Fair and square. 

*****

Elsewhere, the Supreme Court judges are still laying eggs over the judgment.

I wish them a large flock of chicks on the hot seats of power and privileges.

The judiciary has to lay eggs and hatch chickens for the system, which in turn brought them into that seat after that incubation period of favouritism, reference and recommendation.

I don't find too many faults with the poor fellows, for the feeling of obligedness is just too natural. Expecting them to fulfill all the roles and responsibilities chartered out in the constitutional papers would be too much and most impractical thing during these times of pleasant reciprocities.

So let them lay eggs and hatch chickens in the coop of corruption, nepotism and cronyism.

God bless them in their productivity.

*****

After all, the system is a hydra-headed monster. It has so many glutinous mouths and bellies with mammoth appetites. In order to sustain the life in its innards, it has to eat its own refuse.

It eats what it throws out—the excreta.

Doing something for the solace, succour and justice of a few hundred odd job seekers would be in a hugely losing disproportion to the pampering of some souls in the high seat.

After all, this recycled excreta will oil so many machineries at the higher levels.

They have to oil their apparatus; let them do it.

The ineffective curses of our innocuous souls are mere ignorable mini-storms in some teacups. Even the rectum burps of politicians are more effective in raising some issues.

Even if, in future, shackled by some unavoidable constitutionality, they do read out the verdict of justice, that would be doubly ironical.

For by doing that, they would lay bare the hypocrisy of the judicial dictum: justice delayed is justice denied.

The damage has been done irremediably.

Any judgment can't undo it.

God bless the esteemed judges.

*****

December 9

Bania is a short, black, bad-skinned guy, a typical representative of the labourer class, most of whom have got nice constitutions to begin with but which degenerate over the malnutritioned and semi-starved days over the years to give them the look of a semi-filled, wrinkled bag.

He is a third- or fourth-generation scion of migrants from the East.

This coming from the East entitles them to a new identity, almost a caste name—the Purbiyas. In the villages around here, you find a few families of these Purbiyas. In the caste hierarchy, officially they are Lodhi Rajputs.

During their earlier days, they showed a definite fruity proclivity, for there were enough mango and berry plantations. But now they have adapted to fruitless agriculture, a cropy monoculture—almost entirely wheat and rice, with a smattering of vegetables.

They take land on yearly lease from the landowners and sweat it out across the season to defy hunger through their tiny plots of vegetables and marigold flowers. In between, they take up jobs as manual labourers.

Across the oft-repeated rut, the similar path, Bania's widowed mother found herself a storehouse for a lot of troubles during her old age. Her daughters had gone away in marriage, while her two elder sons had taken up separate, relatively well-off ways with their own families.

The widow was given one lakh rupees by the obliged two elder sons to ward off hunger with the money's interest. Being the youngest one, Bania Purbiya also got 50,000 rupees as his entitlement.

They married him off, made a little house for him, and after seeing the old matron plus one lakh rupees, the young bride with her few pickings as dowry, and Bania plus 50,000 rupees, they started etching out separate destinies on the new path.

A glossy black boy was born to the young wife, who showed all the signs of not reconciling herself to her fate with the perennially opium-smoking husband.

He did work, but only enough to get his little bit of cannabis and local wine, nothing to save for her pouch.

Thus the domestic crisis skyrocketed. Her family filed a case with the police alleging dowry harassment and domestic violence.

Under pressure, Bania's kith and kin were forced to go for an out-of-court settlement, which took away half the amount he had received from his brothers, much of the rest having been lost in the opium-drawn chariot of hallucinations.

He could be seen with his infant boy in his arms.

To run a household, you need more than the nominal monthly interest on one lakh rupees, so the diabetic mother started withdrawing money from her account to keep the rats of hunger at bay.

Meanwhile, the search for his second bride was opened.

But as an assetless and landless devotee of intoxication, and a divorcee, the second wife meant spending half of his remaining money in purchasing a bride from a poor family somewhere in the East.

He purchased a wife, which of late was becoming a business of sorts in Haryana, where the sex ratio had taken such a nosedive that many eligible bachelors were left in a lurch.

But then, in India, one tale of sorrow and misery most often loses its heartrending poignancy under the shriller gleam of the hot sun of another tragedy.

So, as per the mathematical law of ever-aggravating misery, Bania was found to emerge as an eligible bachelor to some starving family having many daughters in a slum in Delhi.

The middlemen, the matrimonial sharks who bring about the consummation of relatively high-end and relatively low miseries, found a Muslim bride for him at a price.

Crowded in a shanty, it was a family on the brink of starvation—a large troupe of siblings and their widowed mother.

When the gods of your religion have abandoned you to such a terrible fate, you quite deliberately—or perhaps you are simply left with no choice—cling to any sinew of any type and any hue.

So the eldest Muslim girl became a Hindu bride without much hassle. Her husband had at least a brick house, and that too in the uncongested countryside in a village in Haryana.

The half-Hindu bride thus found herself lucky to spend her days under a pucca roof.

What Bania did in his drunken and opiated state appeared tolerable in comparison to the terrible dramas of that shanty environment in a Delhi slum.

As a young girl, she was supposed to be married. Getting married to a Hindu was less embarrassing than not getting married at all.

Moreover, in the ever-bulging swathes of misery in which millions wallow like gutter worms, where the black sewage mud of misery paints them into casteless, classless, religionless masses, who cares about the fine dress codes of religion, ritual, pride and all?

So this poor worm came out of the nalla, and the wretched husband appeared tolerable.

Her little siblings came to stay for extended periods, as though they were on vacations and tours, even though their errant brother-in-law never spoke to them a single word in a normal tone.

He swore filthily at their sister in their presence.

The tiny troupe wandered through the uncrowded village streets as though they were on a tourist sortie.

Then a girl was born to the Muslim bride of the Hindu miser, who continued to work merely to get his intake of cannabis and alcohol, his mother withdrawing her money to meet the family's ends.

Then a triumphant tragedy struck the impoverished household.

A few weeks before her daughter-in-law was to deliver her first son, the old matron, a diabetic, got her thumb injured on the rusty edge of a hand axe.

Infection started.

Poverty most often makes you unaware of the perils born of a happening like this.

So, within days of the child's delivery—a triumphant arrival—the diabetic old matron got her hand amputated from the elbow.

Her old-age stock, invested by her two elder sons, was now worth only 8,000 rupees.

Her younger son's family now numbered three, and a few more might come unless there was some godly intervention.

A stump where a fully working arm used to be.

A meagre 8,000 rupees where there was once a soul-satisfying sum of one lakh (a financial landmark in poor households).

A few more mouths to feed.

The worms of addiction, fatter and stronger than ever in the family patriarch's heart.

A story of plain misery.

But think of the fact—even this tale of sorrow might sound like a tale of calm and boon if put in juxtaposition against a still poorer one.

And there are bound to be many such stories, for this is poor India, where every misery is being robbed of its sympathy-arousing aura by the dint of a still larger pool of suffering.

And in these swarming anthills of pain and deprivation, what it all must be looking like, I just fear to imagine.

I shudder.

And this shudder brings me out of my sulk and makes me feel like a pampered king.

Celebration of hits and bruises

 

Pandhurna district in present day Madhya Pradesh. There is a sad love story in the local folklore. A boy from Pandhurna tried to elope with a girl from Sawargaon. The villages were situated on the opposite sides of a river named Jam. To stop the Pandhurna boy from eloping with their girl, thus bringing shame to the entire village, the Sawargaon villagers banded together and rained stones from their side. The villagers from the boy’s side also retaliated and pelted stones from their end.

Nobody knows about the fate of the boy and the girl. They are lost in old chest of the past. All this happened in remote past they say. The tale is old enough that none of the surviving villagers can claim to have seen it happening. The people of every generation have heard it from their elders. 

But the love tale, resulting in a stone-pelting squirmish, gave birth to a ritual—an annual stone-pelting battle to mark the old rivalry, boost honor and strengthen identity, and pamper the collective egos of the villagers facing each other from the river’s opposite banks. And thus comes into being the annual Gotmar fair.

In the morning people gather on their respective sides of the river and around 10 am stony missiles start hurling to break rival heads. One can see dozens of bloodied heads in remembrance of a love story gone wrong.

This year also (on August 23, 2025) about 1000 people were injured on both sides of the river. The administration had deployed hundreds of police personnel to handle the situation. Dozens of doctors, paramedics and ambulances waited to attend the injured. It was a battlefield from the look of it. Injured men would struggle out of the chaos with bloodied heads as the women took them to the waiting ambulances. Festival drums, yells, abuses and ambulance sirens filled the background.

Thousands have been injured and at least 15 persons have died in the last three-four decades since the authorities started keeping records. The administration tried to ban the festival a few times but people won’t let go of the custom. So now the administration deploys police and doctors to manage and control damaged heads and lacerated skins.

The opposing sides pelt stones at each other and run to snatch a flag hoisted on a dead tree in the middle of the river. Drunken revelers make it even more chaotic. In the past, a bullet came instead of a stone and claimed a life. Probably someone used the occasion to settle some personal animosity. Once a young man trying to snatch the flag—thus claiming victory and bring a conclusion to the fair—fell into the river and died.   

Maybe that’s how the muscular metaphors and ever-enduring myths take shape—sometimes brightly buoyant, sometimes perversely proud, sometimes mystically magical.

The puzzling game of life and death

 

12 June, 2025. Air India Flight AI 171 takes off at 1:38 pm. It was all over in a minute and a half. The flight was airborne for maybe just 31 seconds. It crashed killing 241 (of the 242 people onboard) and dozens on the ground.

A 40-year-old occupant of seat 11A, named Ramesh, walked out of the mountain of fire, alive, not seriously injured. But who can have an idea of the extent of scars and injuries on his soul? His brother sitting on seat 11F perished in the crash. Such a huge wall between life and death!

I don’t think the fire, explosion and the impact gave him even a fraction of a second to see, feel or know anything about his brother. Their mother’s heart torn in two—one happy for the son saved; the other crying for the dead son. Such tragedies mercilessly divide the same heart! But pain has bigger, stronger swiping powers. I’m sure the mother’s heart is all doused in sorrow. Her survivor son emerged limping from the mountain of fire and smoke. A strong man in white T-shirt, crew-cut hair, a patch of red (blood most probably—his or someone else’s?) on the right shoulder blade, oil marks, burn injuries slowly coming to visibility on his face and arms.

The survivor walked towards an ambulance, not yet back to life, still numb by the heavy hammer strike of death on hundreds around him. He waved off such puny, small motives of the onlookers trying to get a news byte from the luckiest man on earth that day. The hunger of professionalism tried to evoke some response. The crowd impulsive with the rub and rut of life where everyone always feels oneself farthest from the claws of death.

The miraculous survivor went dismissing mikes and phones raised towards his face to get a news-making video. Getting bombarded with questions while he still has to come to terms with the fact of his life among hundreds of deaths around him. Is it the time to pester him with such questions? Would he even be able to speak?

Irrespective of what happens to a few lives, it would still be the world as usual.

The plane was airborne for just 31 seconds after its tyres lifted off the runway. A few passengers were live on Facebook videos, feeling so close to life, full of excitement, sharing their joy with family and friends. It was all so-so normal till the last second. The nastiest and hastiest handover of life to death. The videos show happy chatter, smiles, the earthly objects slowly getting left behind. Then suddenly an explosion. Fire. A few cries. Not enough time for full panicked cries. Gone. Like a puff of wind blows off a candle.

Another video shot by a lovely cabin crewmember showing the staff walking with confident steps into the airport with their trolley bags. All happy people, walking with grace and poise to join the journey of hundreds of others.

The fire of death so pervading that you lose your moorings. A drop of water in the fire; a dewdrop of luck eaten by the sea of bad luck.

A girl missed the flight just by ten minutes due to traffic jam in Ahmadabad. You feel happy for her. For an instant. A dewdrop on your parched skin burning with anguish. Then again your conscience is swallowed by the mass agony, for the hundreds who weren’t lucky that day.

Hundreds of common happy stories turned into uncommon tragic ones in an instant. The senior pilot aged about 50, a bachelor. He lovingly cared for his 90-year-old father. The neighbors are all praise for him. Recently he had told his father that he will take retirement soon and will take full care of him.

A man came to India to fulfill his dying wife’s last wish—to immerse her ashes in Narmada.

A doctor couple with their three little children. The father worked in London. The mother practiced in India with her three kids. She had quit her job here. The family was now on the way to a united living in London. A happy family. Five happy people, as the last selfie in the plane shows, on the way to a fresh chapter in life.

A man had come to India for his father’s cremation.

A family coming home to celebrate Eid in India with their relatives.

A mother going to meet her daughter in London.

A sick man wanting to pass his last days in the land of his birth. His wife brought him to his native place. He passed away a month ago. His wife was on her way back to restart life in England along with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

Happy parents going to join the house inauguration ceremony at their son’s place who had worked so hard to have a home away from home.

A wife on the way to celebrate her husband’s birthday.

A nurse going back to rejoin her duties after spending lovely time with her family.

A young talented girl going to pursue her M. Tech degree. Her father a poor rickshaw puller. She had been supporting her family by taking tuitions during her studies. They had taken loans to help her meet the dreams of higher education.

A crewmember who always called her friend, a fellow crewmember, after safe landings. They would call each other before takeoff and after landing. It went for 21 long years. One of them is left in the world now to hold onto those memories.

A young Indian-origin British couple visiting the land of their ancestors to celebrate their engagement.

Two doctor friends eating lunch together side by side in the hostel canteen where the plane crashed. One finishes his lunch early and leaves. His friend is crushed to death under the falling debris.

The cook in the mess left to deliver tiffins to doctors, leaving behind his wife and granddaughter to manage the canteen. Now he is waiting for their bodies to be recognized at the mortuary.

Dozens others perishing on the ground including doctors and relatives who happened to be there, including a 15-year-old son of a woman tea seller who operated her cart in front of the ill-fated hostel. He had brought her lunch. She went for some errand nearby leaving the boy to look after the stall. The calamity struck. A car is just lucky to turn off from the margins of death. A few more yards and it would have joined the inferno. The woman is running by the car’s side shouting for her son’s help. The son dies. She is trying to find him, bearing incalculable weight on her soul and fifty percent burn injuries on her body.

The bodies burnt beyond recognition. The relatives facing the trauma, giving DNA samples to identify their near and dear ones. Just a few bodies recognizable. Are they the lucky ones in the mayhem?

The flight will no longer be called AI 171. It’s AI 159 now.

The world as usual. A minister gets his impressive reel shot—with background sound—while visiting the crash site. The VIPs love photo shoots. Their presence is well marked. The plane’s tail tip jutting out of the gutted building. The VVIPs stand under it looking pensively into the scene of tragedy, asking questions maybe. The questions that they never like to be asked by others. The photographer must have lain on his back on the ground to get this historic angle. The VVIPs and the only remains of the ill-fated plane. The impressive photos cover the front page of newspapers the next day. Of course these are social media days.  

Sunjay Kapoor posted a sad, sympathetic condolence message on the tragic air crash. He wrote about life’s brevity and fragility. He died shortly after the message. A wealthy businessman, he died in the most unexpected way. He was playing polo; didn’t fall from his horse to suffer injuries. All nice buds of life encouraging for survival, joy and happiness around him. A safe cocoon, except a little dot of bad luck—a honeybee. He swallowed the bee while playing the elitist game. The bee stung him in his throat. The swollen windpipe choked him. A cardiac arrest followed. A chance arrow of bad luck (death) picking out a life from the arena of joy, laughter and prosperity.

In contrast, the seat 11 A survivor, sitting on the least preferred seat in the unluckiest aircraft that day—they say seats 11 A and 11 F are least preferred because they are right in the middle and the passenger can be easily the last one to deboard—survived. The luckiest man that day, surviving due to a chance arrow of luck (life) among the mayhem of death and fire in which hundreds were charred to death around him.

Two mysteries at two opposing ends, drawing the thread of good and bad luck (agony and joy; pain and pleasure) between them. The irresolvable ironies of life. A drop of water surviving in a sea of fire. Chance. A dot of fire surviving in a sea of water. Again chance. We can just marvel at the stroke of luck. The flash of hope. But that’s brief like a shooting star. Very soon we are blanketed by the weighty silence of darkness. The pain and suffering of so many for little strokes of luck for so few.

Futile human desires, ambitions, fears, jealousies cast shadows even on death, forget about life. Kuki-Meitei ethnic conflict, which has ravaged Manipuri society for years, has transgressed into the corridors of this air tragedy. Two female cabin crewmembers of the ill-fated plane, two beautiful young women, came from Manipur. Nganthoi Sharma was Meitei. Lamnunthiem Singson a Kuki-Zo. Local administration, police, and community leaders are holding talks to resolve the issue.

Hundreds have died in the conflict. Thousands displaced. Kukis have left Imphal and surrounding low areas and have gone up the hills. The Meiteis have done the reverse. They have their own armed militias for security. The central forces working like a buffer between the two warring communities.

Where will Singson’s body land? That’s the question. The Kukis don’t enter Imphal. Earlier her family lived in Imphal but they fled to the hills once the violence began. The police promised them a security cover in case they were ready to receive the body at Imphal airport. Imagine the plight of the bereaved families. The dead deserve dignity and respect.

There was a fear that they will be attacked if they went to Imphal. Even if the police gave them a cover, there was a concern that their own community members might get angry about their Imphal visit.

Kuki Students Organisation was helping the family in receiving the body. So it was a community matter now. They didn’t seem comfortable about taking the body first to Imphal. They suggested that the body be first flown to Dimapur airport in Nagaland and then take it by road to her place. The route didn’t have any Meitei areas on it. The other roads from other airports nearby passed through Meitei areas.

The girl had lost her father early. They had to leave their house in Imphal. The house was looted. It shows to what extent the societies are fractured on social and ethnic basis. Even the dead bodies can’t create a natural sense of respect and security to facilitate their passage. Perhaps people have seen so much blood to turn callous in soul. Hardened souls. They finally settled for the safe option—taking the body through non-Meitei areas.

The mankind has not been satisfied with being human. He wants to create something far more powerful—machine. The machine is more important. The proud creator. The creator of the religion of the machine. An entire system of business rituals around the Goddess, the brutal machine. Profit making, the sole dharma.

Aviation corporate is one of the biggest money churners on the planet. The budget of leading aviation companies can surpass the financial worth of entire continents like Africa. To keep the money-churning religion of machine going, the mankind takes the blame on himself, or puts it on fellow human beings, thus saving the sanctity of the machine.

Whenever there is some aviation accident all efforts are employed to keep the machine’s image and reputation intact and malign the mankind—the human error. This case is no exception. The narrative of one of the pilots deliberately turning off the fuel switch has been let loose in the news market. Even though aviation regulators had raised concerns about the plane maker’s fuel switch locking system.

Who cares about the reputation of a deceased pilot? He was a small fly. The corporate is a behemoth. The latter has to be saved. So an individual can be sacrificed on the altar to appease the goddess. Who cares about thousands of flying hours that made crores of rupees for the employer and helped thousands to reach home safely?

The aviation company’s stocks shouldn’t fall. The man is liable, not the machine. Money, money, money. Only money is left, mankind is no more there. It’s an obituary to the collective death of humanity among the Homo-sapiens by this poetic man.    

Interlinked fates

 

There is an interesting report. Food experts have noticed a change in the Chinese palate. More pork and less duck and goose meat is being consumed in Chinese restaurants and homes. The rise in the consumption of red meat and fall in the birdie delicacies means the poultry farming business going down. Loss for poultry farmers; gain for pigsty owners.

There are other consequences also in different regions, especially India. The cost of shuttlecocks has gone up by as much as fifty percent. The lesser the duck and goose meat in kitchens, the lesser the feathers available for the Chinese shuttle makers.

China has near monopoly over the shuttlecock trade, hosting the premiere brands in the segment. So the Indian importers have to pay more.

Now, it directly affects the financial fate of Indian badminton academies. They have to spend more money on training young shuttlers. As a result, they are forced to charge more from the trainees, majority of whom hail from modest lower middle class in society.

Boys and girls from economically and socially sound families are not usually drawn to spend the crucial period of their youth in sweating out in unknown, unglamorous corridors of sports training. They have better choices to excel in academics, elite jobs, entertainment and business. Most of the sporty sloggers come from the middle and lower middle classes. They carry the weight of expectations from their struggling wards to make a name in the sports arena, earn loads of money and heave the family’s social status in one clear jump. So they are willing to sweat out with aching limbs and bruised skins.

Shuttlecock prices going up by as much as fifty percent just because the Chinese are eating more pork is a spin-off of the modern-day travesty—the countries are interlinked more than ever before; and they are divided more than ever as well. The countries are getting more and more interdependent side by side becoming more divided politically. Economics pulling this way; politics pulling that way. Like two hands churning milk. The fates of millions of common people getting churned by the economic-political churner—some of them being badminton players in developing countries.

And what will come out of this churning? It will be ghee for the select few corporate houses and oligarchs, sour buttermilk for some more people, and absolutely nothing for the teeming masses. The last in the category are sold forever-unfulfilled dreams. At high prices. They pay it through almost un-paying labor, hardcore bone-breaking labor. 

Memories

 

Memories melting to flow like ravaging mountain streams, cutting gorges in the heart, throwing boulder chunks of my unstable self. And my identity would fall like fragile mountain slopes.

It would feel like the streams were unmaking me. But that was just the beginning. One shouldn’t analyze too early even if the slopes of your identity are falling in avalanches and landslides. They were fragile slopes.

As one will find later, the sand would be transported to fertile plains. The furious streams would acquire the curved gentility of maturity and wisdom in the plains.

The heavily laden stream of consciousness would feel and see the light. It would disburden its loaded self of the sediments, sand, gravel and dust of the painful past. It would flow with ease and comfort; settle down to a reliable identity. It would find its path very fruitful and meaningful—a ripening—so much so that it would be joyful in reaching home, the culmination of its journey, the destination, the bird-footed surrender to the sea’s loving receptive sprawl.

Then the boulders of memories, which were hacked away painfully from your tormented self, would become vapors in the sea. They would ride the fleeting clouds to travel far and wide, drifting with the whims of mischievous winds. They would then forget the former names, dates, enemies, lovers—the specifics—as they float in the formless generality.

But the elemental generalities remain. For nothing gets destroyed completely. It just transforms. They precipitate and again fall onto the ground to do the same, love and hate the same, cry and laugh the same in a new identity, new name, new costume, new belief, new faith, new set-up.

It feels like I’m simply as good as a molecule of water cycling and recycling endlessly. Forever. Here and there in this form and that. A mere turbulence, a tiny span, a brief pause between rigidities and surrender to a larger sprawl. A faint trace of symmetry in the utmost random fabric of eternity. A little cycle within cycles and still bigger cycles. A journey from an icy clog on mountain cliffs to water in the sea to a cloud. Then repetition of the same.

Just a pattern, a momentum, a habit of the unknown. A design born of unknown cosmic caveats. An incident-filled ripple—sometimes oppositional, sometimes collaborative.

The Cosmic Czar

 

Building a meaningful life is as good as creating a masterpiece. And where do we draw meaning from? Mostly we do it from our pain, while cruelty becomes the crafting tool.

Love is just the tree under which the crafter drops the tools at the lunch break to eat, rest, recuperate for a little time and then go into the old business with reinvigorated self. Even cruelty can’t survive without the little sips of temporary lovebites.

But despite all the apparent gloom, love in a single heart is enough to surpass malice in thousands of its darkened brethrens—just by being there. The former gives a natural right to the latter that they too can exist.

The enigmatic power of love! Was there anyone who could master the art of perfect love?

The power of love so absorbing and multilayered that even a battle-hardened cruel butcher has to feel the beautifully vivid, intricately evocative and gorgeously lush touch of humanity sometime or the other.

Edifying vividness of the game—miniscule of love with its dreamy air; the sea of cruelty with its realistic flair. The love point—the axis; the cosmic cruelty spinning around it in its infinite immensity.

The mystical combo—both revealing and concealing its scandalous affair forever, at each step of manifestation.

Love the sovereign, almighty potentate; cruelty his teeming army of slaves.  

The prize-winning bull

 

Father’s death anniversary falls on March 1. Me and my brother go to a gaushala for donation. Here things are challenging and cramped for gaumata. But something is better than nothing. Hundreds of cows get food and shelter at least. And we can think of improving the conditions as long as cow shelters exist.

There is a bull whose front leg is broken from the joint leaving it as a crooked and unusable stump. It’s a sad sight. The caretaker is from Bihar. He has been working here for the last five years. He holds a scrubber in hand to give them a nice scrubbing. He tells the story how the bull got injured. The villagers bring their cows for mating. This cow was in heat and was tied at a distance. The farmer then untied the bull. It ran too fast in excitement. Love is blinding after all. Risky. The bull slipped on the uneven brick flooring in the compound and met a nasty fall. It broke its leg. Now it’s a very difficult handicapped life.

Golu, another bull, is standing nearby. It has won many prizes at cattle fairs. The last was a first prize of 51,000 rupees at Kurukshetra cattle fair. There are far more bigger and muscular looking bulls at the cow shelter. But Golu has beaten all of them here and at other shelters because it has a huge hump which gives it the USP and the top prize. Thus Golu is a revenue maker. One can feel that it carriers extra confidence in comparison to other bulls.

Lessons from a parking lot

 

My friend gets diabetic retinopathy treatment at an eye hospital in Dwarka, Delhi. It’s a long treatment involving frequent visits to the hospital for routine check-ups and retina injections. On the days when his eye gets an injection, it needs to be patched under a dressing for a few hours, so he isn’t able to drive back to the town. On such occasions usually I drive him to the hospital in his car.

He understands that I prefer to use my time in reading and writing. So keeping me away from my study table for a whole day makes him embarrassed sometimes. That shouldn’t be a problem at both ends because what else is friendship. If someone can’t do even this much then he is a mere acquaintance. And helping someone continue reading the lovely book of life is always better than reading a few more pages in a book.

It’s a big, glass-fronted hospital, imposing like a corporate office. Rich people come here for treatment as one can guess from the series of big cars parked in the parking lot.

The other day we reached there early in the morning. He has an early appointment; before the normal opening time. The parking lot has a few cars, the rest of parking slots defined by yellow lines are vacant. There is a big car parked wrongly covering two slots. Many slots are empty on both its sides. I know the value of space—there are fights over parking space in Delhi, which sometimes result in people killing each other—so I’m parking by its side, leaving about three feet space between the cars.

The parking guard is frantically waving hands trying to guide me to park the car within the next slot because by adjusting to the first mistake I’m adding to the series of wrongly parked cars partially occupying their slots and transgressing into the next.

In my opinion lines don’t matter as long as there isn’t too much or too less space between two cars parked side by side. So I park the car as I deem it fit—partially occupying two slots, in balance with the first mistake, even though there is just three feet space between the two.

As I come out I see a big cloud of disappointment on the guard’s face. I tell him that if I park the car in the next slot, it will leave many feet of space between the cars and this space isn’t sufficient for any car so it will be a loss of space. The same will be the case on the other side. It means one car will occupy two slots leaving big gaps on both sides.

‘I understand but in this way the entire series will be broken,’ he points to the rows of yellow lines, ‘and they,’ he points to the people high up there on the swanky floors above, ‘have big issues with it. They say I can’t get even the cars parked properly.’

‘O come on, it hardly matters… such a small issue,’ it casually escapes from my mouth. I try to smile at him and cheer him up but he doesn’t smile, instead I can feel utter helplessness blanketing him.

My friend’s car is a big one and incidentally I’m wearing formals today. He thinks I’m a bada admi with a big business or job. I sense that he is trying hard to take in a big draught of belittling insult; a situation where a better placed person can defy his little authority in his small job space in the parking lot. ‘That’s how it is! Who cares? Big cars, big people!’ he sighs resignedly.

My friend’s appointment time is nearing fast. Just a couple of minutes left. And before that the paperwork has to be completed at the reception. So we just rush in leaving him there in a sad mood.

Leaving my friend in the care of doctors, I come out. I see the guard sitting on his chair. A short, very frail man in mid fifties. I flash him a smile. He doesn’t smile back. Probably he thinks that I’m mocking at him from my position of a more privileged guy.

Usually I’m in my shabby track pants, rumpled shirts and worn out slippers. When they see me in my small dented car, the parking guards are very confident in handling me and show me the right path as if thinking, ‘He isn’t a bada admi…must be someone almost equal to us.’ Here bada admi means a rich man only. What other definition a poor man can have? But today the car is big and I’m wearing decent clothes. So he thinks I’m a bada admi teasing him after showing him his lowly aukat.

I go to him and say, ‘Sorry, we were in a hurry! Now we have all the time to do it exactly the way you want it.’ He is surprised a bit but gets onto his feet with a nice sense of duty to his job. I feel respect for this man as we walk towards the wrongly parked car to correct things. He is doing his job with dignity and commitment.

This time I follow all his instructions. A parking guard has a nice manner of moving his hands giving you instructions about directions. You have to trust him. His hand movement has confidence now. I park the car exactly the way he wants. And this time when I smile at him he smiles back. Who would withhold your earnings from your smile?

It feels so good to bring a smile to someone. In hurrying I had given him a grimace. Now I’m lucky to bring the smile back. What a dedicated man—parking cars exactly between the lines!

The fight, the perennial strife

 

There is a dramatic and pulsating drive to build among the humans. Most of what we build is born of fears. Fear seems to be the predominant element of life on earth. Peace is a dream. We are always either fighting or preparing to fight. Therefore, the global military expenditure is 6.7 billion dollars per day. This huge amount of money is willingly spent, even eulogized under the jingoistic nationalistic banner. It’s taken as a matter of pride. On the other hand, at the climate summit the major countries are fighting to muster up just 300 billion dollars for climate financing. It seems unimportant to us. Little do we realize that climate-induced ocean heating leading to a super-cyclone dents the economy by as much as the entire amount proposed for climate financing.

We are comfortable to kill each other on a dying planet. We are fundamentally inclined to lose our peace and feel restless. We get bored even with love and create disharmony and disputes. We even get bored with our freedoms as well as the mechanisms and institutions meant to ensure our individual and collective freedoms. When we get bored with freedom, we turn cynical and show apathy to the organized degradation of democratic process and institutions. Presently, the world seems to be bored with democracy. Democracy is gradually degrading over the world. Autocratic maneuvering is stealthily taking a firm grasp on the throat of democracy.

On the face value, democracy seems to follow the time-tested process, but behind the screen the indirect, subtle forgeries, lies, manipulations and misuse are eating into its soul. It’s not that people can’t see and feel it. They understand. They know that the spirit of democracy is being compromised like never before. But just like we get bored with love, we are receptive to the processes of democratic degradation. It’s like we are ready for chaos and autocracy; a collectively depressed, anxious society getting addicted to autocracy.

While we smoothened and plastered our walls as the outward measures to cover the gaping holes inside our souls, the sparrows lost chances to build nests in niches, grooves, holes and crevices in walls, roofs and ceilings. The sparrows are now fighting to grab the abandoned wire-tail swallow mud-nest in the verandah. The mud-nest cup has a little space where they can put some grass sinews and lay eggs. The sparrows are cheeky, chirpy, petite, querulous ones. About a dozen couples are fighting to occupy the prime property. The moment a couple lands on the property, the others chase it away with angry, shrill notes. It’s a big fight since morning—a little ounce of the same ghastly battlefields where one country is bombarding another to grab land and resources. They twirl, swirl, dive and shout to discourage each other from occupying the property. Finally, the most stubborn couple will win the rights. One angry couple even chased the poor flycatcher around the yard. They just banged into him the moment it perched anywhere. The sparrows in bad temper and the poor flycatcher has to pay; just like angry world leaders make the common people pay for their bursting tempers.  

The petty neighborhood tyrants

Fight for a kingdom and be a king. That's your 'right' beyond the debate of moralistic right or wrong. But remember kingdoms have their consequences. It's very natural for the kings to be killed by their own sons. Just a natural consequence. You hand over the lust for unrestricted power to your son. He will be a worthy inheritor of your legacy and would dethrone you on the chessboard of power when he comes of age. 

In the same vein, if you have been lucky to have official powers and privileges -- for which you get paid and are expected to do your service strictly as per the contract-- you will sometimes get an itch to set-up a mini-kingdom by going out of your domain and misuse your power and privileges for unjustified gains. That of course is also your right. But remember your son will inherit the same mini-kingdom of misuse of your privileges beyond your official domain. He will dethrone you when his time comes. He will also kill you to occupy the little throne that you have set up by inflicting injustice through the misuse of your powers and capabilities. He may not slit your throat directly but will definitely do it indirectly. He won't respect you, he would be indisciplined and you will see your little kingdom falling apart under his erratic lifestyle. That is as good as a son killing his father. Again it's not about right or wrong. Simply cause and effect. 

The more you 'make' as an angry, arrogant and violent person, the more you expose yourself to be 'broken' by the bigger forces of similar nature. And the rot begins at home, remember this. Again, simple cause and effect. Nature doesn't operate on moralistic principles. It's only about what you are doing at what frequency. Life will give you back a hundredfold of exactly what you are investing in the same currency. If it's arrogance, ego, greed that propels you, the trajectory of your life will be defined by the same factors. Keep fighting. When will you ever stop? And if petty, tyrannical fights of this nature make you feel like a soldier, it's a nice cover for the demons inside to be decorated with honorable military dress.

If you see yourself in this write-up and get angry then I'm sorry. As a writer, I just hold a mirror in front of the reader. What you see in that is your own making, your own labour. If you don't like the image that stares back at you, change it. If not, keep the angry fight till your last breath. You may achieve anything but not peace. 

Levelling

 बहुत सारे महानुभाव मुझसे चीड़े रहते हैं आजकल। ऐसा कुछ खास नुकीले कोने भी नहीं हैं मेरे व्यक्तित्व में। बस थोड़ा सा संतुलन लाने की कोशिश करता हूं। बहुत सारे लोग हैं जिनके ऊपर मान सम्मान की गठरी का बहुत बोझ होता है। थोड़ा बहुत आध्यात्मि रुझान होने के कारण करुणावश उनका थोड़ा सा बोझ कम कर देता हूं। उनसे थोड़ा सा सम्मान का बोझ उतारकर किसी ऐसे आदमी पे डाल देता हूं जिसके होने का किसी को आभाष भी न हो, जैसे कि वो भेड़ बकरी हो। जिसके पास सामाजिक सम्मान नाम की चीज है ही नहीं। उनके ऊपर एक किस्म का वैक्यूम सा होता है। लगता है जैसे कि होना और ना होना बराबर सा ही। जिसको बहुत से लोग सम्मान देते हों आप उस बेचारे को और वजन से बचा सकते हैं। मैं तो जी भिखारी, रिक्शा और फेरी वालों के ऊपर सम्मान का थोड़ा कुछ मिलीग्राम वजन डालता जाता हूं, ताकि वो भी थोड़ा जमीन पे सामान्य ढंग से चल पाएं।

The Croakings of an Old Toad -- 9

 

The huge sense of self-righteousness has its origins in a very little dark space in our egoistic chamber where mammoth ghosts of judgement and opinions burst to their seams. They have been suffocating in a little dark space and that’s why they run wild to assert and claim more territory in other’s mind once the door gets unlocked.

۞

Ma is still around and taking care of us even though she left her body almost two and half years ago. The other day, one of my aunties in our extended family lost her gold earring. Now it’s a catastrophe for a woman to lose her gold ornament. Apart from the economic loss, they take it as a bad omen also. Give her two for her lost gold piece, she but will still be sad and sullen about the lost one. My aunt is a very hardworking woman. She has a set-up routine of household chores like my mother had. Aunty gets up early and her day involves morning walk in the fields around the village, visit to the temple, many rounds to the cattle barn at a distance from the house and the rest of the routine tasks in their sprawling countryside house. Given her large area of movement over the dusty village streets, even to think of pinpointing some specific location where the probability of finding the earring was higher than others seemed a futile exercise. She and the family looked into all nook corners of the house. The temple premises were scanned and so were the streets and paths where she had walked on that day. Much disturbed she tried to sleep at night but sleep was nowhere nearby. She was in tension. Around half past three in the morning, she got a short span of sleep and my mother appeared in her dream. Auntie says my mother was seen brooming the streets on the side of the house and the little square falling on the other side of our house. Mother always cleaned the surroundings after cleaning the house. Young women less than half her age won’t even think of cleaning the neighbourhood streets for others to walk. But that’s how mother was. She lived a life that wasn’t strictly chained by mine or your boundaries. In the dream, cleaning the street in front of the house, mother said to auntie, ‘Don’t take so much of tension. Now go to sleep peacefully. You will find your gold earring. It’s lying near the platform facing the street by our house. There is a splinter of bamboo near it.’ Well, around eight in the morning auntie recalled the dream and went out to the said place. The earring was found exactly at the place mother had indicated. Just imagine dozens of people had been passing the spot and nobody spotted it. But nothing can miss a mother’s eyes. She is still around, keeping a watch over the proceedings of our follies from a higher dimension. 

The Croakings of an Old Toad -- 8

 ‘I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute.’

__ William Cowper

۞

‘Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.’

___ Henry David Thoreau

۞

‘Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.’

__ Henry David Thoreau

۞

‘I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.’

__ Henry David Thoreau

۞

He was cold fire. She was hot ice. So he got summer cold and she winter fever. This happened after a brief spring.

۞

Keep poking the rays of your efforts through the chinks. It’s fruitful even though Thoreau is cautious, ‘The rays which stream through the shutters will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed.’ But still I feel those harbinger rays have their special place.

۞

Keep evolving and avoid the hard boundaries of concepts, institutions, cemented dogmas and hardened beliefs define you within an impenetrable stone wall. Be like Thoreau when he says, ‘I love a broad margin to life.’

۞

Our ultramodern intellect pushes us into the corridors of folly. As Thoreau says, ‘Up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.’

۞

Most of our perceived shortages are in fact our inability to accomplish the intended wastage. It’s not about the real shortages of basic needs. Those who really lack the basic needs are not haunted by the mental spectre of shortages because they are fully into the game of survival, hardly having any time to get mental suffering about the shortages. Those who really suffer—mentally—the shortages are the ones who feel helpless and feel relatively poor because they can’t splurge money like better off people.

۞

‘Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep your own track, then.’

__ Thoreau

۞

Let’s celebrate the Environment Day! Mother earth is the root cause of all our joys. Go close to nature. She needs your healing touch. If Mother Earth stands any chance at all, it lies there if we treat each day of the year as the Environment Day. Everything less than it falls well short the least redemption.

۞

‘Why should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs, when it leads to such pleasant consequences? I don’t regret it therefore.’

___ Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House

۞