The Wild Rose and the Other Shore

March 4, 2026

Met her after almost 12 years.

It was in Delhi when we had met last time. We had a few months of sweet intimacy and then drifted away. We seemed to be following almost antipodal forces, and it was a beautiful transitory convergence when we crossed each other's path, sweetly embracing each other's presence without expectations, without rigidities and insecurities, without possessiveness.

It was a kind of relationship that is not bound by any conceptual expectation in a typical man-woman relationship, where there are expectations and needs at both ends, and that kind of builds up a contract, call it social contract, even if it is not written or formalized. But still there are unwritten rules of the game, with its clauses, do's and don'ts. So this type of relationship is basically defined by a framework.

But here it was something completely different.

She, a wild gust of breeze; me, a gentle, disciplined soft breeze blowing through a so-called civilized alleyway.

She, unbothered by what people think or say, following her own path, facing challenges, enjoying beauties of absolute individual freedom and free will, side by side paying big costs very dearly for not becoming a part of collective institutionalized security with its social norms, moralities and other standard rules of the game.

Basically, she was a rebel.

Me, on the other hand, expected by others as well as by my own self to follow social mores, norms, become successful, respected, always expected to be in line, to toe the line and stay a good man, always bothered about what others think, say or opine. She was exactly opposite. 

It was an exciting intermingling in the buffer zone, where contrasting impulses commingled.

For those rocking few months, me, the anchored one, enjoying the freedom of untethered free wind in the uncustomized sea of our existence; she, the bottomless, endless sea, coming to the stationary safe cove of my being on the shore.

She then receded, as the waves are supposed to, and both of us moved away.

No hard feelings, no quarrels, no heartburn, no blame game, no feeling of guilt, no feeling of victimization, no feeling of either dumping or getting dumped.

It was quite mysteriously peaceful. Taken so naturally by both of us as we take the end of a day. 

She had a few lovers before that and has had a few after that as well. But she could never get in touch with a man who could provide a reasonably safe anchor to the restless, heaving boat of her existence.

A German man of Kashmiri origin seemed to promise some anchor, but then he let her down, leaving her broken, the only time in her life when she felt caged in the beautiful tentacles of a relationship, feeling possessive about the man, and also yearning to be possessed by him.

And when he let her down, she crashed down from the peak of absolute freedom.

She attempted suicide, was in a coma for a few weeks, and returned to life when the doctors had all but given up hopes for her survival.

They say near-death experiences open up spiritual portals. It has definitely done so in her case. She has met death, so she knows a lot more about life than most of us do. 

A spiritual diva she became after that: exotic hair braids, extensive tattoos on her very fair, almost milky-white skin, body piercings, an absolutely exclusive style of wearing her clothes in a way that she would appear as a standout beacon from the normal mass around.

And all these give her a Roman gypsy kind of look.

She would pass as a hippie from the '70s if she doesn't speak and give a hint about her Indian roots: a nose ring from the middle at the base of the nose, a tattoo of Ma Kali covering her entire back, exquisite religious and astronomical symbols on arms, hands, chin. Almost everywhere. 

Her beautiful face has little freckles, a weather-beaten, wind-lashed look of a rose, a wild rose that has seen the open fury of Mother Nature, that has been caressed by a bright sun smiling from the azure blue skies, that has been shaken by cold breeze, that has seen torrential rains and snowfalls, that has tasted the sips of agony and ecstasy in utmost solitude, that has felt terribly lonely, that has felt amazingly full as well. And agonizingly empty also. 

A big basket of experiences.

And that makes her a gypsy exotica.

Her style makes her stand out in any type of crowd. Everything she wears, from stole to shoes, stands out as a mark of freedom and independence, an assertion of her own concept and idea of life.

The women look at her with jealousy. The men, of course, like spellbound black bees. Watermouthed. 

We had no clue to each other's course of life after that exciting encounter about a dozen years ago.

Then about two and a half years back, I received a mail. It was some abstract comment in the form of a question on one of my blog posts. The sender hadn't introduced himself/herself, but just looking at that small phrase, I knew it was her.

We shared our current phone numbers, started interacting.

She is about 11 or 12 years younger to me, but the way she now spoke left me surprised. A mature woman with deep thoughts in spiritual and philosophical realms.

She was running a homestay in partnership with a friend near Manali. They were planning spiritual retreats there. She wanted to meet. In fact, invited me to stay at her place and be a part of the meditation retreat plans.

I have never felt easy about becoming a part of any type of system, so I kept dilly-dallying. I was busy in solo travelling and writing books.

Before long, it was two and a half years since we were communicating, and she keenly and I casually talked about meeting someday.

On her free journey and open relationships, she spends a lot of time at Rishikesh as well. I also go to Rishikesh regularly; still our paths did not cross.

This time when I informed her that I would be in Rishikesh for a week or ten days, she said she would be there on one of these days.

“Great, let's have chai on the banks of Ma Ganga,” I quipped.

She seemed very excited to meet me after all those long years.

“Coffee on the banks of Ma Ganga,” she said with nostalgia.

On the appointed day, I am standing near the entryway to Parmarth Niketan Ashram, the place where we are supposed to meet. She will be coming over from the other side of Ma Ganga, from Tapovan side. I am staying in a hotel on this side.

Now it is about half past eleven at noon. The usual crowd of tourists and pilgrims.

I am looking at murals on the sidewalls. There are so many saintly eyes looking at the throng of people.

And then there she comes. I see her after 12-13 years here on the banks of Maa Ganga. The wild gust coming to meet the anchored shore. Excitement in the air as two different types of winds meet again. The beautiful gypsy walks to the anchored man. A brief convergence after more than a dozen years. 

I see her from a little distance. She walks gently with loads of warmth and comes into my arms.

Her presence felt almost the same.

After more than twelve years! A lot has changed. She has grown, evolved. She is in the second half of her 30s, and one can see signs of it on her beautiful face and exotic features, style and carriage.

The same exotic deportment in combination with her looks, style, clothes, tattoos.

She is a head-turner in her typical way. Walks with aloof majesty. An exotic spiritual diva. 

Beyond all this attractive cloud of exclusive femininity, I see traces of fatigue, weariness, a sort of exhaustion, which is inevitable if you have been floating on your own path of absolute freedom without any collective securities or assurances.

It is like constantly flying against the wind.

She walks with me. Many eyes follow her movement.

Women yoked into conventional safety of family and routine relationships look at her with jealousy. That is palpable. That is clearly discernible. They know their partner's eyes will follow her till the point it is possible.

When she appears, the majority of men can't help but look at her with eyes full of desire.

I become very conscious while walking with her.

We walk to a café. It is a nice little eatery overlooking Ma Ganga's broad current, visible through a glass front. We occupy a table near the window to enjoy the holy river's flow.

The café is just opening. They are still cleaning and arranging things.

Over big cups of cappuccino, we fall into conversation.

Her logic is sharpened. She is sweetly aggressive in defending her point.

I know she has been judged very harshly for her efforts to defy the conventional stream.

I used to be her idol philosopher when she was growing as an adolescent girl. Now it is a schoolgirl's fancy to prove a point to an old professor whom she meets after a long time.

The last time when we met, she told me that she was in love with me since the age of 13 ... her first love.

Now when we differ over something, there is a risk that she might take it as if I am judging her and finding fault with her. So I have to balance it out by putting things in a general way, so that she doesn't feel targeted or judged.

She is in her own zone, very solidly, assertively.

Lots of energies are flying through her psychosomatic system. That makes her a unique type of diva whom men can't help but follow with covetous eyes.

The discussion takes the direction of the recurring pattern in her life, the pattern of betrayals in relationships and business partnerships. The same discontentment and disappointment with people.

Despite all the exclusive finery of her appearance, she is a very, very simple girl, with an open and frank and honest approach to life. She isn't tricky like women usually are while dealing with men, using secrecy, shrewdness and coquetry to deal with male superiority in physical strength.

The simplicity and honesty leave her open to be used by selfish men.

It has happened repeatedly in her life.

There is a pattern.

So we are talking of recurring patterns.

It's a general experience with all of us that there develops a pattern, either positive or negative, making us feel either lucky or unlucky in our life.

The pattern gets established like a runnel of rainwater on an open field, a definite channel decided by the flow of events and happenings. The same proclivity of an individual destiny to get entangled in similar situations, relationships, events, challenging circumstances, making them mostly disappointed.

Now if you aren't satisfied with the pattern in your life, instead of blaming others and destiny, the onus is on oneself to try to break that pattern.

I have heard her gently cribbing about disappointment with people in terms of personal and professional business relations.

“Don't you think there is a pattern in this?” I ask, and she feels I am judging her on moral and social values, that I am blaming her for all that has happened.

“See, a pattern is not good or bad,” I clarify. “It just exists in Mother Nature. What I mean is that if you are not satisfied or happy about patterns in your life, you should try to break their recurrence and repetition in your life. It's not at all about a pattern being morally good or bad,” I emphasize.

We keep chatting over big mugs of coffee.

All along this time, a fat woman is eyeing our table with palpable greed. She has already asked us once if we are done, even though there is still coffee left in our mugs.

People have started coming. There are empty tables where she can enjoy coffee, but she wants this particular table, right next to the glass front, overlooking the broad sweep of Ma Ganga below.

Taking pity on her, I decide to get up.

She giggles slightly over the woman's schoolgirl's fancy for a particular seat. The woman runs to grab the prize the moment we get up.

We leisurely walk in the narrow, pleasantly congested bazaar street.

I have to buy her a gift, and books are my favourite items.

We enter the bookshop in the market. I feel very safe ensconced among books.

I propose to buy her multiple books. She keeps saying no to all my suggestions.

Finally, she settles for an Osho book which is displayed outside in a glass rack by the entry door. There is just one copy. The shopkeeper has to open the rack by removing the cello tape, get the book and re-tape it. It is showcased. What else can you expect from her? Even the book has to come from a sealed showcase. 

That is so typical of her, an exclusive free choice not bound by suggestions and limiting circumstances.

She says she wants to sit somewhere among the trees, so we start walking to the east towards the wooded hills.

It's noon and pretty hot. The deciduous forest with thick undergrowth of bushes and ferns doesn't sound welcoming.

So, walking on the road cutting across Rajaji National Park, we take a turn to the right and walk to Chaurasi Kuti, the famous Beatles Ashram.

She isn't interested in the famed spiritual ruins.

We sit in front of a large crumbling structure on a makeshift bench of plank supported over stones at each end and fall into deep conversation.

When you meet after more than a decade, you have hundreds of topics to talk over.

We keep talking for almost two hours.

It is already afternoon when our tongues need a bit of rest.

As we walk outside, she has to cover her head under a stole.

“My cellular structure cannot bear direct sunlight,” she says. “I feel like I'm melting and being drained of all my energy.”

She has turned pink in the heat.

Many people stare.

She holds my hand from the elbow, a very friendly and caring proximity. I am comforted by her touch. It feels very natural, honest, like the brace of warm sunrise on a cold morning.

We walk into a restaurant in the narrow congested bazaar street. Eyes follow her with curiosity, lust. jealousy, even suspicion.

She can be taken as anyone: Iranian, Arabic, East European, European or Latin American.

A white man is eating lunch with his partner. He gives her a comprehensive look, much to the unease of his partner.

She wants to eat typical street food, so orders aloo puri. I order a paratha, strawberry lassi we both order.

The aloo sabji does not match her street-food expectation. It is bland.

“Do you like it?” I ask.

“Not at all,” she says.

In any case, she finishes her plate.

We walk to the riverside and sit on a stone bench just near the water current going swiftly, just a step down from the stone-paved platform.

There again we keep talking into the evening.

Then she has to leave.

We walk to the other side, walking over the new Janaki Bridge, from where she has booked a Rapido bike taxi to go to Tapovan, two-three kilometres away, where she is staying at a friend's place. Her friend owns a spiritual yoga shop involving yoga, retreats and herbal massages.

She embraces me and gives a long, warm kiss at the side of my neck, below the right ear; a long, lingering, well-meant kiss, soft, full of love.

She clings tightly to me for a prolonged hug.

The bike cabby is smiling as she performs this loving goodbye ritual.

Her touch is personal, warmer than a formal friendly hug, slightly colder than a burning passionate clasp of a lover. Balanced. Bordering on unconditional love. 

A warm, respectful touch and acknowledgement of my significant image in her mind and heart.

I walk back over the bridge, not knowing whether we will meet again or not.

And in this way, the girl whom I met after more than a decade melted into the mystery like she had arrived suddenly ... so symbolic of our different paths.

I am walking towards the other shore of Ma Ganga, and she is going on the other.

I know she has immensely evolved over these years in the furnace of bitter experiences, but she has retained her individuality, her sense of absolute freedom.

She asserts her right to lead her life on her own terms without any compromises, and for this I really salute her for maintaining the sanctity of her concept of freedom, life and living.

The Many-Handed God with a Willow

January 25, 2008

In the first innings of the ongoing Adelaide cricket Test, Sachin has hit his 39th hundred.

Earlier, he had not been that successful at this ground in the land of the Don, the cricketing legend Don Bradman. But during this sparkling innings, the Don of our times, as we talk of him, and the real Don are so often spoken of in the same vein, while not taking away from the exploits of other mortals, even if their performances are not that common.

But then it is not for us to confirm the stamp of greatness.

Greatness is made of glorious hues, the dye of this colour being honed by nature, the colour of this flower being of unusual appearance and fragrance.

Only the maker knows fully what he has made.

Greatness is a very comprehensive term. Its sprawling field cannot be defined within the narrow confines of a particular arena, like writing, science or sports. And if you do it, then do it at your own peril.

Contours of greatness reach up to the farthest, mostly unrealized limits of our consciousness. It flashes in our face, and we, the ordinary denizens of a struggling world, are taken in by its glitter and glare.

Every time Sachin flashes his willow to register a trademark boundary, we see the actualization of that ever-fleeting mirage of hopes, victory, dreams.

Sachin is a many-handed god.

He has millions of hands to hold the willow. He has countlessly wide and broad stroke-playing horizon to send the leather out of the boundary. He has uncountable bowling enemies to decimate their pride.

The predators muttering ... wicket hunt, wicket hunt. The prized wicket. 

He has a teeming swarm of fielders to scan the leather through the flesh of their palms.

If this is not Godhood, then tell me what other stuff it is made of.

The Chain-Cutting Past: India’s Triumph at Perth

January 23, 2008

The last week will be remembered for a long, long time in our cricketing history, or call it overall Indian history, because cricket now has a stranglehold over milestones in our cricket-crazy country, because we defeated the Aussies at Perth.

The WACA pitch has seen so many merciless, stampeding triumphs by the number one team that the impervious grains carrying the fastest bounce and exuberance on their backs must still be mulling over the fact about what went wrong this time.

The pitch bears so many kangaroo marks and milestones of triumphs, and still manifold tales of tragedies befalling the visiting teams, that the reversal in roles clashes with mighty impetuosity at the sky.

In beating the mighty Aussies at a place where their brand of cricket is utilized to the hilt, and that too after those agonizing, frustrating and distracting anecdotes during the previous Sydney Test, the Indians proved the glittering fundamentals of success in the face of all adversities.

Well, the fundamentals of the route to success are just the same.

You have to take the strongest of lessons from the past, while at the same time you have to forget all the distracting stuff while putting those lessons into application.

There is a very delicate, sharp-edged, fragile line between remaining lost and mired up in the past, and analyzing the past mishap to churn out a plan of success for the future.

The latter can very easily be replaced by the futile pangs of the former, thus dragging one further and further into the pangs of the past—the deadly snares of losses in the past.

So the past can be deadly cycles imprisoning you forever, as well as the chain-cutting tool to set you free.

What we want it to become, it is for us to decide.

Much to the credit of our almost worshipped cricketers, they acted as per their status of godship that is showered on them here in India.

We have a calmly calculating and stormily applying captain at the ever-busy helm of affairs.

The way Anil Kumble handled the turbulent situation after Sydney will go a long way in defining the role and responsibility of stewardship.

Here was a man whose team had a fantastic opportunity to level up the series, and thus an opportunity of getting the rarest of opportunities—beating the Australians in their own backyard—only to be undone by all the non-cricketing stuff: seemingly provenly biased umpiring, the win-at-any-cost attitude of the opponents, drawing them into the snares of false charges, false appealing, lies, deceit, sledging and many other unsportsmanlike things.

But Kumble has seen too much in his cricketing life.

You don't reach such status and position without the basic fundamentals of greatness in you.

Such qualities are universal, not just limited to the cricketing field.

Put them in any mould, any system, any game—you get champions.

And true champions always come out smiling, triumphant, out of such nudging, testing circumstances.

Kumble, no wonder, a true champion as he is, did the same.

The veteran remained terribly focused.

Even after the humiliating losses and dustings, there is always something to look forward to, to try for victory. At least you play or plan to redeem some pride, to have some final blow, to keep the doors of the future open.

When a Brother’s Anger Becomes a Prayer

January 14, 2008

Binni—she is my younger sister, elder to me by about two years—a very hardworking girl. So hardworking that just sitting in the house without doing any type of work would come almost unnatural to her.

So we have seen her, right from early childhood, taking care of household chores, helping Mother within the house as well as in the fields. Even while she was doing graduation and post-graduation at the town college, she would first dispense with hard tasks in the barn—clearing the barn, taking the cattle dung away, putting fodder, milking the cows and buffalos.

A very strong girl, typical of the farming community, and on top of that very beautiful also.

But the pattern of our life, the design of bad luck, somehow keeps denting our prospects. That has been the story for the past few generations, beginning with grandfather, great-grandfather, father, and now we four siblings. The entire village says that we have been treated very harshly, unjustifiably, by destiny.

Binni's married life is on a very precariously shaky stage at the moment. In fact, now it seems as if it was destined to be this way right from the beginning.

Many a time I think, had we—Father, me and my brother Tina—been more proactive regarding finding a suitable match for her, maybe things would have been different. But then either we commit mistakes, or are led into their trap through our actions or inaction.

The fact can't be changed.

Uttam, her husband, is a weakling in every sense of the term, while his parents and sisters are the nastiest of fellows. He has never ever come forward to take responsibility for his better half. He has never ever intervened when they have unjustifiably quarrelled, shouted, schemed and plotted against my sister.

Now, to face such wretchedly dirty odds, one needs a strong partner. I think poor Binni sorely misses one. As a no-nonsense, brave girl who has been holding her dignity and position all alone, she just keeps herself busy in household chores.

Her mother-in-law is a typically horrible character, a lady with a humpbacked appearance; but the most serious contender for the not-so-good title of 'the evil incarnation' is her second sister-in-law, who is married to an army officer.

She misuses her privileges and power because she feels that she is empowered, she is protected, she is privileged enough to insult my sister at the mere drop of a pin.

Right from the days of stepping into the life of that poor army officer, the idiot has been up to all sorts of mischief-making. He beat her, to begin with, pulled her hair, thrashed her, shouted obscenities, turned her out to her parents' home—but to no use. She has turned worse than before with the passage of each day. 

The creature has such a nastily stinging tongue that it can put even prostitutes to shame as far as foul language is concerned.

The lady is ever prone to sudden outbursts of hate, anger, jealousy, maliciousness, madness. The filth and muck that burst out of her stenching interior can sway and drown many decent bodies.

Picking up a minor domestic straw, she inflamed it furiously.

Poor Binni appeared at the receiving end of a never-ending stream of fusillade thrown by this woman.

This woman, she hurls prostitute-kind of vocabulary and words. I grabbed the phone from my sister's hand, and what happened later was completely shocking and eye-opening.

I can't believe it even up to this time. How can a woman who is supposedly a part and parcel of the decent world, being the better half of an army officer, use such prostitute-like language?

Since I could never have matched her in the language of the devil, I just summarized my understanding of her character:

"You act, behave—in fact, you, from all apparent angles, can put even a prostitute to shame," I shouted.

Thankfully, the shadow-prostitute of the civilized world cut the phone, and I was spared from coming to know some more horrible words from her side, which are frequently heard in the red-light area.

Having tasted the cut, I really have sympathies with my poor sister, for she has gone through quite a few nasty experiences at the hands and tongue of that horrible woman.

The greatest punishment for that evil soul can only be to be thrashed by the angriest fellows till she bears blue welts all over her body.

I can even go to the extent of wishing that God takes her away for the betterment of life here on earth, for there is no shame in decreasing the weight of poor, meagre and humble Mother Earth.

Such dirty souls only spread filth around. The earlier they are dispensed with, the better it will be for mankind.

How I wish that I could do that.

But for a basically decent human being, removal of even such worms becomes a matter of sin.

So I have left her case with Mother Mahakali, whom I worship daily. I hope the Mother Divine, the symbol of cosmic dark energy, the purveyor of supernatural wrath to the wrongdoers, does the required work of doing away with such pathetic existence on earth.

For this creature is a stenching filth and needs to be eased of its wretched form on the earth. I just pray to God for this.

I will earnestly continue to pray to the Mother Divine to bring infinitely comprehensive sufferings to her and all those who stand up for her evil cause.

Let the curse turn her being on earth into nothing short of a moment spent in hell, because she deserves it.

Delhi, the Overburdened Mother: A Winter Journey Through Many Worlds

December 12, 2007

People say Delhi's winter has its many charms, but on this foggy, smoggy, overclouded day, it appeared a cross caricature.

The prevailing monotony of crowd, traffic, noise, stuffed shops and offices—all embalmed in a peculiar, disinterested lostness.

The nullah along the National Highway, opening its tarred, beaten arms towards the Karnal bypass, stinks like hell. Humanity crammed in the slums buzzes like beehives behind this invisible, monstrous, disinterested veil of stench, filth and foul fumes.

And they live in this crammed world—a world inside the bigger world of Delhi, or rather, one of the different worlds of Delhi.

As you reach the Karnal bypass, a little garbage hillock, created over the years by the mammoth wasting and discarding forces of consumerism, stands with its polythene-dotted slopes.

Here, the coldness in the air seems to be subdued by the foul smell of the garbage dump, vehicle exhaust and human waste.

Delhi, the overburdened mother, has many children—poor, beggared, crippled, shiny, modern.

To make ends meet, it is forever trying to rise above the chaos and the clutter of cramped humans, buildings and vehicles.

So many flyovers have cropped up during the last decade that it is almost impossible to recognize the old shape on an old map. Though mobility is eased a bit on the toll bridges and flyovers, the ever-burgeoning sea of needs and requirements, sucking up miseries, hopes and aspirations from almost the whole of North India, still finds the system cramped to the gills.

Near ISBT, the Tibetan refugee colony, little bazaar and monastery stand discharmed with their religious picturization—flags, buntings, prayer flags, prayer strings, Buddhist robes and mute prayers.

On the road, you see everything from the most dejected, dispirited and hopeless looks of an unwed beggar mother to the pearly sparkling of a girl in Western outfits.

Just look around and you see the miseries against the background of ecstasies, surrounded by all such bird-caged noises.

Poor Lal Qila, the monument of red sandstone, the sign of Mughal imperialism, the watcher of colonial upheavals, stands like a poor, mute museum piece placed in the open under the mercy of the elements of time, history and modernity.

Its still-sturdy walls clasp in their stony hold a piece of culture, of architecture, of a golden era; its eyes afraid that the old child in its arms might be crushed under the mercilessly hurtling wheels of consumerism, encroachment and real-estate business.

Rajghat, the shrine of the man of peace, stands like a lush-green artificial superimposition over the shabby walls reeking with moisture, peeling plaster and dropping limewash.

It tries to hide many things, just as the legacy of the great father still tries to cover up for the misdeeds of the errant children.

It is a garden shrine. The beautifully undulating, lush-green avenue only accentuates the agony of the Mahatma's legacy.

The trees rustle their leaves with their natural messages, yet the honking noises from around are too many, and the whispers of peace dither back and creep towards the stony monument surrounding the great man's ashes, trying to find some real sympathy in the green eyes of some foreigner. For most of the eyes of his own children are cold, hard, mocking at the moment.

The soft carpet of grass under your feet tries to balm the bruises on your soles, but the feet which have got used to pummelling the stony hardness of tarred surfaces no longer listen to such murmuring softness of some great solace and sympathy.

In the posh areas of South Extension, rich people and rich enterprises try to shine like a lighthouse over the ever-turbulent sea of wants, miseries and needs.

They throw their flashes around through shiny, glass-fronted, multi-storeyed business centres, malls, big cars, smartly clad people and well-off gentry.

But the heaving waves of the gloomy sea are forever reaching up to drown the lighthouse, to make it invisible from the picture.

The Hyatt Hotel rises majestically with its brownish-yellow, stony loftiness. Its façade of prosperity is at least successful in holding its chin above the turbulent sea around.

Luxury is closely, safely fitted against all the unwanted ghosts of hunger around.

A garbage dump occasionally raises a protesting cry in the near vicinity.

Here, the road workers piss out their woes while the Hyatt-wala passes with a hateful look from his car.

The piss spots—the oblations at the feet of the goddess of wealth, offered by the ones not so lucky so far.

Nearby rises the glum, faded block of the Regional Passport Office.

Here are lined up the ones with the shiny Western stars in their eyes—the West, where your prosperity is not so heartrendingly tainted by poverty and gloomy contradictions and divisions.

All of this stony block seems clasped in the tentacles of touts who throng it from all sides, making it almost impossible to get your work done without becoming a part of their conniving scheme.

Under the open sky, taking a prickly snoop at all the lapses of administration, the touts sit around like hawkers in a mandi market, as though they are the unofficial employees of the building.

October from the Distant Past: Of Memory, Mortality and a Restless World

Grandfather lived up to be richly laden with years and left, still unsatisfied, on May 25, 2001, in the afternoon at 2:25 p.m., at the age of almost 96.

The exuberant target of old age was to hit a century, but the nervous old man missed and got out in the heartbreaking nervous nineties, like many cricket batsmen do.

Like a true heir, my father has truly taken after the constitution of his father, but the similarities end there. Unfortunately.

Lean, athletic, well-proportioned figure. Not a single extra, droopy, unmeaningful fibre on the entire body. Grandfather worked, lived, ate, smoked, drank in exactly the same dreamful proportion. The summary of his life can be viewed as a balanced approach in each and every matter related to life.

On the other hand, father did all the injustices possible to his hard, lean, meagre body. So now he lives on perpetual medications for damaged lungs due to excessive smoking at the age of 70.

Ours has been an illustrious family, at least in the farming community here in the countryside. So to delve into the dusty chronicles, I have to derive one date in reference to the other milestones—that is, deaths, marriages, national tragedies and triumphs.

It starts with a tragedy. My great-grandfather's struggling journey on the path of agriculture was undone by an angry horde of bumblebees one cruel afternoon. My grandfather was in the eighth standard then.

My great-grandmother also soon left the four children and went back to her parents to be married again because she could not become the valiant mother who could raise three sons and a daughter unprotected under the constant harrying by the intrigues of the males and females of the extended clan, who in those days grabbed land almost naturally, without any checks or balances, either by the law or society.

And such unprotected families, in the absence of the father figure, would also come across violence. There would even be murders.

So the mother made the better choice for herself and left the four siblings to their own fate.

It was under such circumstances that my grandfather, aged around 13 or 14, became the patron, being the eldest of his siblings, in 1919, when turbulent Europe saw the conclusion of World War I.

As was usual, he grew up hating his mother for the betrayal, and women in general for being of her species. 'You cannot trust them, he would say.

He kept up the motto till his last days, and that is understandable. He missed the love of a mother.

Grand-aunt was the youngest of the four siblings. Two elder sisters never survived to witness the drama in the family. Married at a very early age, and also witnessing the crude jujubes of matrimony, they died within a short span before the bumblebees went out for revenge on the family.

So the three sons, led by grandfather, grew up working on their own lands like labourers, getting two meals in lieu of all the hard work, while the patrons from the extended family—their grand-uncles, etc.—took the production to their barn.

In those struggling, hard days, the ownership of a piece of land was decided by one's guts to plough it as one's own.

So, bursting with vigour, the three young men, armed with sticks, went to their land on their own and ploughed the land as its masters. It happened when they came of age.

The land had been almost mortgaged or even assumed to be sold to the relatives on account of the tragedy and the consequent law of might is right. And the day they ploughed it on their own, they became its masters.

Father says he must have been around five when his mother, that is my grandmother, died. So we can safely assume that the young lady died in the year of the Quit India Movement.

There was one elder sister to my father, but she died of fever at just the age of three or four.

To my first grand-uncle, who stood six feet two inches and became a Naib Subedar in the British Indian Army, was born Uncle Mahavir in 1946, and after two years was born the first real achiever from our mundane, down-to-earth standards, Uncle Satbir.

So Uncle Satbir was born to my first grand-uncle in 1948. That also is a milestone. 

In 1952, grand-uncle died due to tuberculosis. He was soon followed by his wife a year later, who could never recover from typhoid.

Three young deaths in a span of ten years.

But in these tiresome tragedies, the family had its little shape of triumph: the marriage of the second grand-uncle. The brothers had saved money.

So the marriage party went in a bus instead of the customary bullock carts. That was a big status symbol. 

Meanwhile, the younger grand-auntie fought for a separate house from day one. Right from the beginning, she wanted a separate home and hearth and succeeded after the death of the first grand-uncle.

Grandfather was left with three sons under his care. Again, the same kind of responsibility that he undertook for his siblings when he was merely 13 or 14.

And now a widower, a very disciplined man, well respected for his mathematical skills and the art of land measurement, he had three sons—one his own and two of his brother—to take care of.

Grandfather never remarried, even though proposals would keep coming for almost two decades. He knew that a stepmother would hardly take care of his own son, forget about the sons of his brother.

So again, the struggle kept on.

Grandfather was very sharp in mathematics. Till this date, people remember his calculations. Whenever the Tehsildar or Patwari could not resolve any measurement-related dispute regarding land in the village, they would take the services of my grandfather because he had set up a landmark in accuracy. So his word, after careful measurement and calculations, would be taken as final, and all would accept it, trusting his mathematical skills.

My struggling grandfather had to use all his skills, ranging from farming to mathematics, involving teaching to even going for recruitment in the army once, and taking up little ventures, like starting small brick kilns in partnership, and other ventures like taking buffaloes for selling in Bengal, even though there was hardly any market there. People ate fish and there was no demand for fresh milk like the farmers in Haryana and Punjab had, and even have at the moment.

There are numerous anecdotes of his struggle all through those years, but he just kept on plodding the domestic cart single-handedly.

Like a typical, apparently hard father of those times, he would even spank his three sons because all three were just like his real sons now. He would compromise on anything but not on hard work, and hard work was just about education and studies, and studies meant doing more and more mathematics.

So mathematics meant education. Everything regarding learning centred around it. Mathematics was bigger than god to him.

No wonder, even though my father and my two uncles would always grumble, recalling all those beatings and thrashings, they set up moderate milestones in the village in education.

My father became the first M.A. in English Literature and B.Ed. He was a great athlete at college level, spoke English better than the professors of those times and got a job in LIC, a government job. Uncle Mahavir also graduated with a teacher-training programme and became a government teacher.

But the youngest of them, Uncle Satbir, excelled all of them and was just one of the two candidates who cracked the prestigious IIT exams from the entire Punjab area.

Later on, he would join IIT Roorkee for an aeronautical engineering programme, and even there he would excel in his class, but would always have issues against the professors whom he thought were not capable of giving a proper boost to his scientific wings.

And quite mysteriously, he vanished.

He left in the final semester.

Grandfather got a letter from the institute that your ward is missing, and after two years of frantic search, my father found him as a truck union accountant in Yamunanagar, with a white hat on his head and a bottle of liquor in front on the rough wooden table, and he was doing account work for the transporters.

So such is the journey of my family, but grandfather stands out as the pole star of learning and love for mathematics.

As we were growing up, he would always drag us to the charpai and start teaching us mathematics. It went on till matric, and if at all there is anybody whom I can give some credit for my interest in studies, it is grandfather.

Even though it is another matter that my interest got rechannelled and turned to literature instead of mathematics.

*****

Tendulkar plays his 400th one-day today at Vadodara, Gujarat. A great achievement indeed.

But the tragedy of being Tendulkar is that you have to hit a century in every outing, in a most dominating way, with every shot executed to perfection, with one more record-breaking feat. He has to bear up the expectations of entire India.

This man wears too heavy a crown.

Through his majestic on-field exploits, the man has steadily added to the weight of one billion-plus worshippers that he carries on his shoulders. But then he is the God, and godhood comes at a price.

We would but like to forget the 400th one-dayer. Even though he lugubriously worked up to his career average by making 47 runs, India was bowled out for just 140, and Australians chased it without much trouble.

*****

I very often ponder over the subject of death, for its ultimately triumphant swipe, undoing all the totalizing mirages which drive our interest, fuel our strivings, to the extent of making one's own death appear as some unfanged fact at the most distant horizon, pumping up our strides.

But the cruel fact is that it lurks with equal stealth for all of us.

It picks up its morsels in a variety of ways. Some are plucked suddenly—in childhood, youth and old age. Some die slowly, slowly, fragmented over a period of time by diseases, worries, failures, poverty, disgrace.

Who wants to die in parts?

A cracking statue, skin peeling off, plaster giving away here and there, cracks appearing on fine features, eyes slit, ears gone, brow dilapidated.

Better it be a single muscular stroke, beheaded in one cruel blow.

Then you die only one death instead of the multiples that many have to go through.

Even though it means leaving your near and dear ones struck with the horrifying, painful tragedy if you die suddenly; in dying in parts, over the painfully prolonged hours, days, months and even years, their sorrows too are leaked away over a period of time. So in that case it doesn't come as a shock. In fact deep in their mind they want you to just go and be saved from the misery. It's a tiny rivulet that is left when you finally call it quits and your final piece gets chopped off from your physical existence in the form of the last breath.

*****

Moving from death to the political scene. The communists, the beholders of Chinese pride, find themselves in a tough dilemma.

Indian-Italian-led UPA is hurtling fast in its bonhomie with the super-imperial power. It is raising a lot of suspicious ripples in the 'now father of communism', the fiery dragon.

So our comrades get jostled in Calcutta over whether to pull the plug out or not. If they do, then they become the spoilsports, forcing a midterm poll on the people. If they do not, then the book of their ideology gets kicked.

So the fellows are puzzled a lot. And by God, they deserve it too.

The Indian-Italian is getting politically smarter day by day. A very exquisite, exotic addition to the dynasty-born Nehru clan. They are here to stay for a while in the present century, right at the helm of affairs.

Rahul is smart and suave, likeable. Poor people will vote him into power someday. So is his sister. The day the fuel of his charisma runs out, his sister is there in the vanguard. Then there are her two sons, and Rahul too will marry someday.

The soul of Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru can rest in peace, really.

Their other possible rival, Mayawati, is behaving too flashingly, vindictively, revengefully to emerge as the steady star at the national level. The angry, not-so-young lady can't forget her Dalithood and hate for Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The lady will thus get battered and bruised while doing the same to others in the badlands of UP, and she will then fizzle out like a shooting star. I see that it will be the same story of somebody being carried to the peak of popularity by caste-based sentiments. But after reaching the summit, they will find that this is not what they were expecting, and she will topple down. Because to emerge as a messiah at the national level, you need to elongate your spine to rise above the petty acts of dismissing 18,000 policemen recruited during the previous government. In undoing all that was done by Mulayam Singh Yadav, you become more like another Yadav. And if you claim any variance or superiority, then you have to descend from the wrestler's platform.

Outside, the world is boiling in the same vat, like it has been for the years gone in the present century.

Same American mission against jihad, Muslims on tenterhooks all over the world, sectarian killings, occupation, bloody deaths of innocent civilians, the poor fodder being fed into the mill to run the crusher with the bones of the commoners like you and me.

Pakistan is bearing the repercussions of its hateful deeds. The General is without his uniform and looks all set and prepared to don a civilized, cultured sherwani for his innings as a civilian ruler.

The lady seems well set to return at the helm of affairs in some not-so-distant future. Both of them have managed to throw out poor Nawaz, who looks Sharif now after being bundled out like an errant kid.

Mountainous tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are aflame with the resurgent Taliban. Kabul still burns. No efforts seem to douse the fire.

Same Israel-Arab conflict, same civil wars, endless in much of Africa, same dash of the red flag across Latin America, same Russia on the path of retaining its glory under Putin, same poor Britain bursting with Asian immigrants flying to catch up with the golden bird of its colonial glory. But now the descendants of erstwhile subjects fuel its desperate flight.

In India, it is cricket, politics, cricket, politics, cricket, politics, competing with each other to gain the mass fancy.

Masses and classes, classes and masses, massed classes, classed masses.

The world seems all too familiar, but all too different from the one it was in the past.

*****

Yesterday was Amavasya, the culmination of the fortnight-long period of paying homage to the family ancestors, Pitra Devatas. Billions of family devas were propitiated and appeased by the families, and today start the Navratras—the nine days of piousness, penance, charity and fasting.

Tomorrow is Eid, the culmination of the holy month of Ramzan. So over at least two days, both Hindus and Muslims will be fasting for their respective gods—or maybe Godhood gets united on these two days.

But yesterday, misery was hurled at us, both Hindus and Muslims. Separated by the gloom and doom of two mightily gurgling religions, we Hindus and Muslims still have some common breathing grounds, like Sufism.

The dargah of mystical Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer is a meeting ground of the secular, liberal, forgiving, obliging strands in the two behemoths. Both Hindus and Muslims throng the site with equal fervour.

But yesterday, at 6:14 p.m., a ghastly deed was done to tear apart this centuries-old mystical carpet, which has been welcoming the tired and torn humanity of the same colour of misery, hope and redemption.

It is aged, eternal, woven with the sinews of faith—the sinews which have seen the changes across the last eight centuries on the same mystical, majestic carpet.

While the iftar gathering was in full fervency, the blast killed two people and injured many.

A nasty, filthy thing.

*****

Elsewhere, in Delhi, the scourge of Blue Lines is on the rampage. Earlier there were Red Lines, which became the symbols of blood and gore on the capital's roads. So the colour was changed.

But what can the colour do if the course and content remain the same below the whitewashing?

This vast fleet of private buses is manned by illiterate, semi-illiterate, untrained brats from the surrounding countryside of Haryana and Punjab.

We will have to bear this nonsense until the government finds an alternative to the monster. Till then, the god of death will pick some of his prey from the Delhi roads, bearing the criminal imprints of the Blue Line wheels, plied by an untrained petty lawbreaker.

October 13 happens to be my niece Saifiya's birthday. She turns six today.

The birthday thoughts given in the Hindustan Times are very encouraging for any family. Our family's sole member of the next generation so far—a few others are waiting to come—shares the birthday with the Iron Lady from Britain, Margaret Thatcher, an achievement in itself to share the birthday with such an excellent achiever.

The HT paper too has a few nice words for the children born on October 13.

It says:

"Influenced by number four and the planet Uranus, you are smart, confident, energetic, systematic, reliable and a studious person. Your efficiency and determination make you achieve the maximum and stay ahead of others. You always hold positions of immense importance and responsibility, but you need to control your tendency to behave stubborn, jealous and vindictive at times. Your stars bring you fresh opportunities for growth in your career. Those seeking to venture overseas will get to receive encouraging news from people abroad."

So this is the message that the Hindustan Times has for those born on October 13.

It's a nice, favourable, obliging, congratulatory, encouraging piece in the paper—a true birthday gift.

At least the paper should spare some nice birthday gifts for all the siblings of all the 365 days, and also, of course, for those born on February 29.

From my side, a lot of love and affection for the little angel. Hope she really comes to enjoy the true fruition of the papery birthday gift from the Hindustan Times.

How swiftly time flows.

I can still recall that puplish-pink face and wide-open eyes of the one-and-a-half-hour-old newborn in the hospital, Dua Nursing Home, on October 13, birth time at 9:18 in the morning.

And six years hence, the baby whose joy and pains we have shared so thoroughly, she is on the little path of growth.

Hope her drunken father mends his ways, but the fellow seems incorrigible, almost.

An October from the distant past: Of Hawkers, Mahatmas and Ordinary Lives

Street vendors roaming the village alleys on business have real competition, a real business acumen propelling them in an almost fruitless task day in and day out. But they take their work very seriously. They mean it.

For the exactly recurring, like an audio tape played repeatedly, signature calls to attention for their products and services at hand give a clue to their pinpointed focus on the job. These are very poignant calls to attention, sneaking forcefully into the nonchalant ears, creating ripples in bucolic hearts. And as they do it repeatedly across seasons, in the same streets, for years, for the same business, their siren call becomes a periodical, legitimized, branded, copyrighted piece of hawking to attention—their very own typical tones.

There is a subziwala. We call him "leeeyoo." After shouting out the list of vegetable items in his wooden crate at the back of his bicycle, he sums up with a nice, long-drawn, affable, "Leeeyoo!" It is a dialectical variant of lo, le lo—take it.

He's a short man, this "leeeyoo," most of the time clad in his faded purplish kurta-pyjama, and sometimes it is the grey one. This chubby, round-faced keeper of a genuine smile and gentle manners has his fixed list of clientele, just as others of the trade have theirs.

The other one with the trademark hawking notes is the juicewala—mosambi juice—from Bihar, roaming the street with the citrus-green fruits piled around the hand-operated juicer on the hand-pushed rickshaw trolley.

His siren call consists of a pitchy, high-octaved, crisp, "Juice peeoo!" So he is the affable 'peeeoo' to most of the villagers. 

He too has a fixed list of regulars: the elderly and the sick.

The kabariwala is a young fellow with plenty of enthusiastic twists of his mouth and tongue to sound out the title of his scavenging deeds in a pitchy, pointy, rich-octave voice. "Ee kabbaaddi vaalle" he preens always meaning to clean the houses of their junk. He is the simple 'kabadi' to the villagers. 

Presently, the darling hawker of the ladies in the village is the suitwala, the seller of hundred-rupee-a-piece female clothing.

He shouts, "Sau, sau ke suit le lo!"

Here, sau is the number, the numerical hundred. "Sau, sau ke suit le lo" means have a pair of clothes enough to make a suit and salwar for just a hundred rupees.

He has devised a musical cadence to suit the softer, purchase-lorn souls in the ladies' hearts. His richly varied, highly coloured and printed collection of cheap, hundred-rupee pieces attracts a lot of gathering around him.

Among the other notables is the picklewala. "Aachaarr!" he trills spicley. 

Another is the kabz churanwala—the constipation churan seller.

And then there is the jaggery puffed-ricewala. It is puffed rice sweetened with jaggery.

So these are the notables. All named by the villagers on the basis of their main hawking notes. 

And what I have observed is that the unskilled people of the Indian motherland are the ones who are at the front of the battle for survival because they don't have either the capital to start a business or any specific skills to go into a job or start some venture.

The poor people just imitate each other in making a living. Mostly, they just pass the day wandering around, trying to convince themselves that they are doing something lucrative. 

So you have dozens of vegetable sellers, dozens of other hawkers and vendors. They can just look towards somebody of their level and start doing the same.

And there being so many of them, almost similar in the skills and situations of life, it's a very tough competition for them.

*****

The day has a title. It is October 2nd, and the famous title is Gandhi Jayanti.

The thickly underlined day—it has the heavy burden of the great man's non-violent legacy. On each day of the rest of the year, it has to struggle against all-pervading antonyms, which have now become the mundane fundamentals, pushing, pulling and prodding (and testing) the Father of the Nation's long-winded tale of aesthetics, principles and morality.

But then, on his birthday, the Mahatma's legacy is artfully felicitated.

After all, it is a national holiday.

Thus, the forever holiday-seeking Indians, the children especially, salute the beneficent Bapuji for bestowing them with a day off work for the elders and a holiday for the children in school. They celebrate it as a holiday, as a festival, as a shastra-boosting myth.

We celebrate, we pay a dithering, fleeting homage, we devote, we glorify the man, we vilify him as well.

But each second takes him and what he stood for away and away from us—a fuzzy, grainy, hazy figure vanishing into the mists of the past; a figure on the path of myth and legends, which will further take him away to the path of godhood in the distant future. And equally distant from humanity on the ground where things will be done exactly opposite to what he meant to do. 

The God of disobeying children who will worship him for being a virtual impossibility—Einstein's forecasting homage, by the way.

His legacy will turn ineffective, his works misinterpreted, his deeds misjudged, shut down in sanctified, glorified volumes to be picked up and thrust to the head for a fraction of a second's reverence, just like people do with the holy scriptures in the courts before starting to pour out white lies.

The emerging messiahs of the Dalits denigrate him, and so do the other neo-Ambedkarites. Muslims can't forgive him for being the ringleader of the anti-Muslim League axis, a virtual anathema to the idea of Pakistan. Hindus hate him for being a Muslim from inside. "Why did he allow so many Muslims to remain back here in India?" is the common poor little Hindu's observation.

These are ever-ebullient minor and major revolts against his constitutional status as the Father of the Nation.

The new emerging nationalistic forces want him dislodged from the lofty throne. The only saving grace is the common man's honest conscience that still sees the blood on the shirt of the patriotic zealots.

Misunderstandings about this saint of Sabarmati far, far exceed the glory of his image.

He acted symbolically. The meaning of his actions and ideologies percolated deep, deep into the spirit, beyond the narrow confines of poor letters and words only.

But we, the fuzzy heads with our crippled senses, can't see beyond the barbed reality of mere letters—the concrete, single-minded, one-dimensional, straight-faced reality.

So almost ninety percent of what the Mahatma actually stood for misses our heads because it is in the spirit. It needs nuanced, subtle sensitivities to feel those soft undercurrents of the great man's philosophy.

Thus, we waddle in just ten percent of his letters and farce away and joke and make him a lampoon in the form of a naked clown whose goat ate grapes, as if the poor beast was the real cause of India's impoverishment. And who, in his old age, walked aided on both sides by young maidens, as if the old sanyasi's tale of sexuality was more important than two wrinkled fatherly hands on the shoulders of two daughters.

We Indians are the too small, puny, crippled children of the mighty father. All of us cannot shoulder the spirited mountain of his myth and legacy.

So, led and driven by our practical instincts, we dismantle the mammoth aura to trim it down to our shoulderable size so that we can carry it.

We are the masons, always working, hammering down the big blocks to carry our own tiny, feather-weighted, pusillanimous, able to be trifled with pieces of his mountainous legacy—or we will further drag and break them down to make pebbles and play like kids playing marbles.

Pebbles to be kicked at by the erring brutish footballers.

Pebbles to be hurled through slingshots.

Pebbles to be thrown into the mud.

We, the worshippers of his glory, our feet in the sanctum sanctorum, our arms, meanwhile, busy in creating the paper birds of the present who die, pulped down the moment they come across the first rain.

*****

The common man's refrain is that Gandhi's ideas were bigger than his deeds. The latter appearing puny, pint-sized, beggarly, cowardly to the present generation, bursting like a balloon with the fussing and fuming gas for power, status, money and advancement, victories and triumphs.

This is a generation of new knights in shining armours, the belligerent commanders of the consumerist field, where everybody wants to lead the columns, with none contented to be the humble, honest foot soldier; all lacerating their capacities to outdo the fellow battle-worshippers.

It is a parricidal, fratricidal field, a modern battlefield. Blood and gore of selfishness, individuality, shortcuts, infidelity—and they have encircled the great man's sanctity at statue-bearing squares, which still somehow commands the rule of traffic through his checking, harking philosophy. But the day is too short for obeying rules, and the night is always enough for flouting them.

Decent work of many sunny, normal, legal days gets undone in a single dark hour.

So the naked fakir finds himself, stick in his hand—but it was a support, not a weapon—encircled in a noisy, clattering, white-blooded invisibility. A gory mass of apathy. His frail figure, draped in the cotton armour, appears dozing, the puddles of his life's very antitheses spattered around like homages and offerings at his nimble, poorly, lightly sandalled feet.

So October 2, the holiday, has come and gone, garlanded hurriedly by white-blood-smeared. The great man still has many bhakts. But they are poor, voiceless, almost naked, and they hide behind the curb around his statues. They are scared for being off-beat: non-violent species in a violent world. 

Many of his former pupils and disciples turned belligerent commanders. Khadi, in shining armour—Khadi commanders they are—with their homespun new convictions of survival in a belligerent world of angry politics. But they still elaborate on the vestry around the poor Godfather, whose persona could be amply defined in a few pencil strokes on a blank white sheet of paper. Such simplicity.

They now, to add colour and excitement to their role of great pedigree keepers, fill it with brilliant hues to stake higher claims on account of being sired by a great, blemishless soul.

There are glittering columns of obituaries to historic figures, from individuals, from organizations, from parties, from government, from media persons, newspapers dated October 2, where the presence of the light sage's—light-robed and light-staffed—quick march, like a miracle worker, his soul seems to dawn on printed pages, on tongues.

But the miracle-performing soul seems outdone. For those who help perpetuate a legacy, what else is a miracle? They have outgrown the patriarch's shoes. They don't fit well. They just wear them uneasily, grimacingly, for a short, brisk, unpaying, unrewarding walk as a ritual, a ceremonial ritual on Gandhi Jayanti.

All said and done.

Still there is a huge silver lining—optimistic, inspiring, almost life-giving, drawing one out from the gut of desperation.

The morning today has been blessed by the pen of a man who normally blesses with willow. Sachin Tendulkar has written his first-ever signed piece exclusively for the Hindustan Times.

It is a long, inspiring, illuminating chain of words from the man, laid out systematically, iconically, like he plans, prepares and executes the scheme for every single run.

In this write-up, the maestro coolly, calculatedly, honestly, candidly dispels many a veil from around his mythicized persona to emerge an Indian first and foremost, an exceptional human being, writing down his glittering destiny from the pen of his own ink and nib—a family man, a friend, a philosopher and a guide, with his scriptural trail of dreams, hopes, efforts, strategies, competition, achievements.

Reading the write-up, I realize if one has to excel in any field at such levels, the brain has to imitate a smart, fast, ultramodern computer, and your heart at the same time has to be spacious and fragrant enough to embosom the whole splendiferous essence of the most beautiful vales in the world.

And I am proud that our cricketing god is just like this. No shame in idolizing him; he deserves it absolutely.

October 4, by the way, is the birthday of my friend Pardeep, born just a couple of days after the Mahatma.

He surely justifies the Mahatma's non-violent legacy. The guy is calm, caring, affable and absolutely incapable of any type of violence. So we still have tiny Gandhis here in India. But they are poor and suffering. Weakness, poverty and deprivation appear so close to the image of the Mahatma in the present times. So close that any talks of nationalistic strength has to treat him as a redundancy, an unfitting element in the equation.