The perilous churning of contrasting elements

 

These are strange, enervating, fuddled times.

Troublous pensiveness in the air.

Languidly palpitant sense of insecurity weaving puzzling spools of illusions.

Bayonet fighting among ideologies has left strange crossbreeds.

Communism has borrowed so heavily from capitalism as to leave the latter pauperized in ideological terms.

Democracy, on its part, has overblown itself so much that democrats need to turn autocrats to put the house in order.

Communism has to cast respectful glances in the capitalist corridors to find out exactly what it meant to do in the first place.

Capitalism has to lay down the golden mantle to seek some new relevance in the masses of grounded depravities among those where it could never reach and who in fact are the real drivers of its engine.

The left went so much to their left that they got scared to fall into an abyss and have to get to their right to regain their footing. They have to stop clearing the mossy tombstones of their founders, exulting internally and mournful outside, and draw new-age inspiration from much berated rightists.

The same goes for the rightists. They are the liberals of their end of extremity. They unbolt the same anger at the same enemy presented in different colors than the leftists.

Tariffs are the new torpedoes of war. They hover around undisguised. Diffidently now; with a potent force then.

Trump has started this new weapon of the new-age war, the war through torpedoes of tariffs. 

Swarms of drones are the new locusts. They seize the hitherto unseizable opportunity; conceive the inconceivable options to take war to the last nook corner into the civilian lanes and alleys. Targeting is more pinpointed, surgical and lethal. One particular person can be ant-picked from among the swarms of humans around.

The imperious desire to be more lethal.

Malevolence moving, humming pacifically. For the kill.

Evil-glowering of destruction and death.

No longer the bestial shouts of fighter jets. No vainglory of ballistic missiles. Just panting timbre of blades carrying the little voice of shaitan. Terror frozen in small civilian hearts.

Humanity with its somber, protracted sigh watching helplessly.

Ringing intonation of mischief taking a U-turn to retain childhood fancies through robotic warfare.

Artificial intelligence a pill for our collective stupidity and dementia. Over a period of time, the autonomic functions of human brain, which have equipped us to rule the planet, will fall out of practice, making us dulled poor masters of smart rich machines.

Robotic soldiers soon will be the elderly general’s childish computer games. Clicking here with a silly boy’s glee; killing thousands of kilometers away with the precision and seriousness of a deadly predator. 

Wild fires will be gone. You need forests for that. Right? So we will have more and more social media wildfires triggered by the weather elements of false narratives, fabricated data, rumors, made-up stories and juicy throng of lies. The spittle string of conceit showered on dunderheads.

The protracted sigh of truth and justice drowned in the liquidating timbre of dark-tongued devil.

We have the inherent streak of violence in our genes to tear flesh in wars. We can’t bear the torment of joy.

Ugliness easily outweighs loveliness.

Festering wounds cast a black magic spell and invite followers to get addicted to them. And they jog-trotting after it. Quizzically. Demonstratively.

Peace and joy will be left behind beckoning despondently. But there will be less flesh to tear and claw because of the mechanization of the human body. Still we will continue tearing each other through ideas, ideologies, business rivalries and ever-combating politics.

Entire earth is basically a big house that always carries undercurrents of violence, stratagems and cunning schemes to outpace the other—your neighbor, your irksome family member, the rival caste men, the rival ethnic people, the rival religion, the rival business, the rival continent, the rival hemisphere.

There is an undeniable, unsavory antipathy towards the other; willfully abhorrent and contemptible.

Existence on earth is defined by self-interest, rivalry and competition across all hierarchies.

Bonhomie is just a mournful conjecture. A way-worn adjutancy.

Humanity is betrothed to the dark woman of violence.

Even the spreaders of love for humanity—the spiritual and religious heads and their sects and institutions—are industrious rivals ingratiating each other in their unusual manners. They bawl and drawl to catch more and more followers. And to validate their brand of ‘love for humanity’ they will easily break the rival heads.

That’s the dilemma of being earthlings.

That’s how life has incidentally evolved on this little place.

That’s what life means to the Homo sapiens, the group of venturesome black head lice.

Love is a mirage and now even the mirage is getting naturally supplanted by hostility.

I sometimes wonder, what would happen if earth is someday challenged by some other form of life, from some far off planet in the cosmos, having a totally different meaning of life than we have here.

I mean suppose we have a confrontation with a technically superior but a form of life to whom cooperation and common interest (antipodal to our existence centered around rivalry, competition and self-interest) is the basic instinct that has factored their evolution.

Won’t we appear heathens to them? And they would, of course, try to mould it as per their own interpretation of life. However, I know that we will be very strong rivals even when pushed in a corner by a far more technically superior form of life.

The benefits of being a poet

 

Among the fraternity of writers, the poets stand the least chance of pushing their economic prospects with the help of their art. But recently the tag of being a ‘mere poet’ helped me economically.

There are situations where being perceived to be poor helps you save the costs in a project.

Poverty and poetry are synonymous. Sometimes this combination gives pleasure instead of the usual pain.

I went to avail the services of a senior advocate in the high court for my 21-year-old court case about my PCS appointment. He is a very successful lawyer. His house looks like a five-star hotel. I had a discussion with his junior.

When the issue of fees arrived, he went into his boss’ cabin. The groundwork had been done quite diligently by the time I entered the esteemed lawyer’s cabin.

I betook myself with loads of poetic translucence, which is actually poverty showcased for one’s advantage.

‘My staff has informed me that you are just a poet. Merely writing poem-shoems. So you get this huge discount. But please don’t tell anyone about it. We charge standard fees and if you tell others about the discount we are giving you, even they will come seeking the same by pretending to be poor like you. About you we are sure that you being a mere poet must be very hard on money,’ the renowned lawyer appeared full of compassion, sociable and amiable towards a failed poet.

Someone had warned me that he is a headstrong man. But thanks to my status of being a mere poet, I got almost 50 percent discount on his hefty fees. But ironically even after the hefty discount it was a big assault on my smallish pockets.

However, as you all know these are interesting times. We have started to pay for clean water, pure air and clean earth. So expecting justice without paying ample sum of money is mere wishful thinking. Without money a plan is simply a worthless exercise in the art of illusions.

 

The buffalo is bigger than the brain

 

Ask a Haryanvi farmer about his young son and there is a big probability that he will share his qualifications in terms of weight. The mass of muscles holds far more significance in the farming psyche than any other bundles of skills, qualifications, specialties, achievements, etc.

A simple light mind but burdened with excess gravity of land issues thus making it a weight-centric world.

The farmers are light in thought and heavy in hands, so there is this natural inclination to analyze things in terms of weight.

An uncluttered brain, but burdened brawn with society’s problems of bread and butter.

I have heard it (judging the human worth in terms of sheer mass of muscles) so many times among the farming folks that it seems to be almost a natural rule. If the young man is 100 plus in kilograms then the proud father would tell about this with such spirit and enthusiasm that can never be touched by a father whose son has completed multiple PhDs.

Well, in the farming community, the buffalo seems to be bigger than the brain. Their simple straight wisdom wears no make-up. There is just the dust of plain hard work, which turns them prone to look at life in terms of weight.

I recently asked, with a soft academic timbre, a hefty guy about his son. I meant to enquire about the young man’s education and the career he is into. I expected him to mention the boy’s educational status given my domain of books and literature.

‘O, he is going great. He turned 120 kg recently,’ he gushed with pride as he stood with a naturally proud stance. The stance born of being at ease with a head where ideas travel very lightly, but shoulders carry the weight of stony issues of bread and butter.

The boy’s weight almost double of me! Double qualified than me in the farming lingo despite the fact that he is a mere matriculate and I hold three master degrees in different subjects.

No wonder, with my bookish weight, I carry a sultry, stifling air in the company of the farmers in the village.

Weight is a far-reaching elaboration of someone’s worth (by default) among the farming folk.

A farming body is trained by harsh seasons. It breeds lightness of reflection in the head and a capability of bearing weighty responsibilities on the shoulders.

Unadorned thinking in the brain; rock-solid endurance in the body.

A little gift

 

Safed aak (white madar or crown flower) is a shrub having lovely clusters of white flowers with lavender core. Officially named calotropis gigantean it’s a large shrub majorly found in climes on the drier side. According to Shiva Purana, Lord Shiva likes aak flowers, so the garland of aak flowers is offered to Shiva for peace, prosperity and social harmony. Further, its latex is used as arrow poison as well. The shrub has many medicinal uses also.

There is an aak shrub in front of our house. An old man sometimes arrives in front of our gate asking for flour. He is from a group of cattle herders from Rajasthan who roam around with their big herds of large-horned skinny cows. The cows belong to some rich landholder back in the home state. These are poor cattle keepers who work for the sahukar on a fixed salary, a paltry sum barely enough for two times bread and butter. They guide the herds through the increasingly thin spaces of wild growth and public pastures in the north Indian states.

This particular old man asks about the aak whenever he arrives on our doorstep. ‘I would take a sapling whenever I go back to my desh,’ he would say.

India is a land of myth, legends, faith and belief. Maybe the shrub holds some auspicious importance for their tribe back home. The old man has grace and gentility born of a positive acceptance of one’s old age.

This time when he came to ask for a little bowl of wheat flour, he told me that he will be going back to his desh on the occasion of Diwali and wants to take a sapling with him. I helped him in taking out a sapling by digging earth. It was a nice sight to see him walking slowly with his sapling and flour bag.

Let the world fight over big issues. He is happy with his aak sapling. It’s a kind of Diwali gift for his family in the desert state.

I pray that the sapling grows and blooms in front of his house. I imagine and feel ineffably soft whisper of ‘peace with life’ in his yard when the sapling blooms its first flower while the frivolous claimants of bigger greatness go hopping, skipping, grinding groaning, prancing and haranguing.

The somberly gleaming flame of the old man’s dream Diwali gift; the lewd blaze of hypocritical beings trying to assuage the sores on their soles born of endlessly bigger and bigger pursuits. It’s a world of extreme polarities after all.  

Meeting a red sand boa

 

A lovely mid-October evening. The sun setting relaxedly over the paddy fields ready for harvesting. A narrow asphalt road circuiting through farmlands connecting villages away from the state highway.

Traffic is sparse. It allows me a peaceful evening stroll. Glorious rays of the setting sun bathing my face. An empty dumper truck comes hurtling from behind. It thunders past raising dust. Then after going for 40-50 meters it takes a sharp turn, comes very near to jump into the agricultural fields by the side, but then regains its trajectory.

My first impulse is that the driver is drunk, which resulted in this risky jerk to the vehicle on the empty road. And I laugh sarcastically, imagining a drunk truck driver so early in the evening when even the sun hasn’t set yet. A drunk driver—we are so quick to form negative opinions and impressions. It would prove to be a wrong impression as I move on.

A snake is coiled a couple of feet into the road from the right side. I look with restrained animation. With his quick and kind awareness the truck driver saved the snake by taking a sharp turn, thus taking a risk on the narrow road—hardly wider than the truck’s width. Instead of a drunk driver, he proves to be a kind, aware, alert human being. I pray for him and his family for this act of kindness. As I come still nearer I see that the snake isn’t moving. But it’s completely unharmed. However, it doesn’t react with the usual panicked agility and scampering nervousness associated with snakes when a human is around.

It’s a red sand boa. The setting sun’s glorious rays shining on its coiled and composed majesty. As I stand just a couple of feet away, it slowly crawls back to the field from where it had come to cross the road to reach the other side. It enters the harvested field and lies still by the narrow field divider. I take a view of the nearby fields on this side. Empty fields, laborers busy in setting thatched huts for winter mushrooms. The other side has a couple of acres of dense growth, wilderness secured with reeds, grasses and bunch grass. It’s uncultivated public land not immediately under the risk of being cleared for some human-centric purpose.

The harmless slow-paced snake, which barely crawls like an earthworm in comparison to other snakes, is trying to reach that bushy lot. The winters are coming and that part being on the southern side will have plenty of sunshine and sufficient hiding space. So I know the snake will definitely try to cross the road again. But it will take a lot of time for it to crawl to safety to that side. And roads are full of careless drivers. Not everybody is as alert as this kind driver. Some even kill snakes knowingly if they see one crossing the road in front of them.

I really like this snake and my first instinct is to put it in a polythene bag and take it home. There is a myth that it’s very auspicious and billionaires pay up to 25 crore rupees to keep it at their homes. Even at my worst I won’t be greedy enough to sell an animal or reptile into captivity. But to be frank I had this instinctive reaction of keeping it at my home. Greed, to be sure. But then I laugh. Happy to be cured of temptation. Everything has been monetized by the mankind. With our new-fangled ideas, the mankind is delusively pursuing an unquenchable thirst, weightily and contemptuously. Aah amorous, elemental evilry!

I take a sad look at the endangered snake. Then I seek out a shisham tree’s branch and touch it softly with its end. It coils itself into a defensive posture. ‘Relax! Don’t worry! It’s Ok!’ I say. Lifting it by putting the branch’s end into its coil, I carry it safely to the dense wilderness on the other side and put it among a thick clump of grasses. Here it can safely pass the coming winter. I feel very happy about helping it to enter a safe zone. But the real hero in the little episode is the truck driver who saved this rare sand boa. Let him be blessed with peace and joy in life!

The germs and seeds of animosity

 

There are irreconcilable communal tensions in various societies world over. The bug of communalism has rebranded itself in post-modernist world with shinier, more attractive colors.

An uncle from another state is all praise for the Haryanvi Jats: ‘They wiped out their population to make it all clean in Haryana. But the Hindu farmers in our state weren’t up to the mark in their cleaning act. In fact the Haryanvi farmers had put up a proposal to us, “Your area still has lots of gochani (a wheat and chana mixed crop, a weak variation and not sufficiently productive) left, so we will come to cut the harvest and make it just wheat. The chana has to leave or it gets obliterated. One crop only. Only the wheat crop is beneficial for the farmer’s economic welfare. Mixed crops spoil the taste. You guys just have to provide us food while we reap the harvest and make it a suitable monoculture.” But then this chap Gawahaar Lal butted in and undid their plans. Military was deployed in the area. And lots of gochani was left in our state. We have been bearing its consequences since 1947. But the sage ruler is now doing good to make it feel like one crop in the field. We feel safe. Earlier it was impossible to even set out of the house after the dark. They are too violent and have criminal tendency and hence ruled as mafias and dacoits. But now they are forced to be well-behaved and are minding their own business thus leaving us in peace.’

Humanity is like an ever-boiling soup comprising ingredients proud of their insolubility in the broth of unified goodwill. What follows is brazen zealotry in the name of religion; human flesh and bones strewn around like fish scales and entrails. An infuriated mis-creation throbbing with devilish pulsation. The communal debauchery. Ground squelching with muddied blood.

And what does all this come down to? It writes a few lines (the same stale lines written with bloody ink smelling of hate) in the same chapter (the very same chapter plotted by the blood-mongering parasite of hate) in the very same book (the book written by the ever-tormented souls) of anxiety, fear, phobias and intoxication with power.

Dirty talk in countryside

 

Two young Jat boys wrestling in the idle-fields of brash youthfulness with crude humor and rough words. A reprehensible upbraiding of the opponent, grotesquely shattering all civilized norms and disfiguring all etiquettes and civilities.

A plain disrobing of any sense of civility. Plain rascality, bottom up or down. Well curated ragtag metaphors of the god of idiocy.

The impossibly strictest sense of lewd humor. The youthful spirit brutishly bungling, hell bent upon exterminating each other’s honor.

A linguistic representation of some weirdly carnal wrath through stabbing humor.

But the word humor falls short in conveying the entire meaning of this vulgar jocularity.

Boy 1: ‘You and your clan can’t even tear a single pubic hair from my balls. And if you do, you can’t straighten it.’

Boy 2: ‘We will give such hard slaps to your father that he will become a mad monkey.’

(Now how does poor father enter the mud-slinging duel straight after the lancing attack flaunting the steely strength of pubic hair?)

Boy 1: ‘Only your mother will tell what powers he possesses after he rides her.’

Boy 2: ‘Did he ever ride your own mother?’

Boy 1: ‘Yes he did! That’s why I was born.’

Boy 2: ‘Who says he fathered you? Old Bhola rode your mother and then you were born.’

Boy 1: ‘My grandfather is the real father of your father. Ask your granny, who rode her better, my grandpa or yours.’  

I heard this vitriolic verbal duel as I passed by them. The words slaying and shattering the reputations of both clans to smithereens. The thuggish revelry slinging around and spinning webs of their words’ unforgetability. The red and raw mass of its effect turning me conscience-stricken for the sake of our farming community. There I moved away from the scene dominated by these groundbreakers like a recluse and a valueless part of the community of Jats.   

Well, the fate of the farming community of Haryana seems in dire straits. The linguistic vulgarity giving a clue to some mysterious discomfort with cultural ethos, an inherent streak and slitter of vulgarity and a peculiar disconcertment with civilizing forces.  

The outsider

 

Ashiq Dar is from Kashmir. An operator of heavy machines (Poclaine earthmovers), he works very hard, presently working for a contractor who is into legal sand mining from slightly high sandy plateaus of agricultural land in the plains of Haryana.

Ashiq earns 22000 rupees per month. We have a parcel of land on the elevated agricultural plateau called thali in local parlance. The surrounding farmers have removed many feet of sand to level the fields to make it more productive and arable with irrigation from the field channels. Our land thus stood as a tiny tableland, its margins caving in, the slopes falling.

It came to a point when it was no longer arable. So finally we are forced to remove a few feet of sand to level it up like the surrounding fields. And Dar’s heavy machine is shrieking with force, removing sand.

They work late into nights. ‘Isn’t it too much? The working hours?’ I ask. ‘Just doing my duty. The owner paid us full salary even during the two months of lay-off during the monsoon season,’ he says as a man of conscience. A hardworking man has certain compunctions by default.

Earlier he worked in a company where he operated the machines for 18 hours daily for three years.

This contractor provides food and shelter. He leads a sparse life, almost in isolation and exile. You can imagine the sparseness of his life by the fact that his monthly expenditure is just 2000 rupees including the phone bill.

He was married three years back. I ask him about his marital status. ‘Well, what to say? I’m married and unmarried both,’ he says resignedly. His wife quarreled and forced him to separate from his parents right after marriage. But things took still worse shape even after setting up a separate home and hearth. She left him to stay with her parents. There have been brawls, shoutings, beatings, police reports. Laws have changed in favor of the Muslim women. If he goes for a divorce, he will have to pay maintenance money to her. So the issue is painfully lingering on.

‘She is able to give me 24-hour headache. That’s her full time job. During the time when I’m not operating the machine, more and more updates keep pouring in. They lodged police complaint and got my father arrested. Then it’s about my public image as well. She is still my wife officially and imagine someone telling me that your wife was standing there in the market, talking to this man or woman, doing that,’ he looks in pain.

I understand his frustration, the grating cry of his loneliness. He takes cover behind non-stop work and douses himself with more work to forget the tension at home. I know I have heard only his side of the story. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, either this or that way of centre. But despite that I have a feeling that he is a wronged man. It shows from the way he works non-stop.

I give him sweets as Diwali gift. ‘Happy Diwali!’ he says. ‘Happy Eid in advance to you whenever it comes,’ I say. He is genuinely touched. I can see moisture in his eyes. Honesty has unaffected manners.

A hardworking Kashmiri man working day and night here in the plains in north India, saving every single penny, leading the life of an ascetic almost. Facing scores of domestic problems born of a marriage gone sour.

And then it’s only such people, working hard and innocent of any wrongdoing, who suffer on account of some communal flare-up.

There are scores of such little stories lost in the dust, confusion and oblivion of daily grind of life. The real traitors and betrayers go scot free despite their incendiary motives and vulgar desires.

The cunning paradox

 

In the lonely courtyard of being, where plain paper’s desolation listens for the first breath of meaning.

A purling, gnawing restlessness. A haunting mysteriousness. Insistent. Persistent. Rock solid with its uncompromising illusions.

The love-lotus in the life-lake trembles. Beatific, pampering, unfading. Claiming authentic affiliation with divinity, purity, piousness.

It sways, titillated by the waves of wicked, wild lust, as if desire itself were a dark mantra whispered by time. Seeking divinity in rag dolls. The curly headed cherub, carrying his train of lusty entreaties, striving to put life and excitement in her rag-dolled, impassive self.

From its quivering stem rise fruitless fantasies—visions so fragile they appear next to miraculous, vanishing even as they are born. These futuristic amalgamations of flesh and foresight drift like omens, silently heralding a controversy between instinct and illumination.

Notwithstanding humanely institutional interludes—schools, scriptures, ceremonies—man remains basically a beast, evil’s epitome disguised in scriptural eloquence. Mud and filth slinging from lusty skin hidden under striped jersey and quilted jacket. The pock-marked face hidden under a fleecing, lisping mask. Vapid smell doused under clouds of stabbing absurdity of deodorant and perfumes.

Beneath the polished rituals of virtue, there is a gruesome mushrooming of appetite, ancient and insatiable.

Even the aquiline educationist, hawk-eyed and ascetic, senses the unhealed rift: the goldsmith’s preciously precise way, coaxing perfection from fire and patience, and the ironsmith’s grossly wholesome way with metal, striking truth into shape through sweat and thunder.

Between these two rites, the human spirit is forged—half prayer, half wound—forever oscillating between what it dreams itself to be and what it cannot cease becoming.

Notes in the air

 

An ASI demands money from a man in Delhi. Otherwise I will implicate you in a false case, he threatens the man. The filthy dark side of misuse of official position; the little hatchlings of despotism running their miserly, avaricious show at little nook corners where small-time people get caught in the net of their greed and have to pay to get out to run the show of their pitiable daily life.

The man but carries some counterbalancing courage and secretly lodges a complaint against the corrupt cop. The latter is put under a scanner.

In consequence, a vigilance team keeps watch from hidden quarters while the complainant hands over 15000 rupees (crisp 30 notes of 500 denomination) to the bribe-seeking cop.

As the vigilance team pounces to catch one of their own ilk taking bribes, the corrupt cop, sure of the futile striving of any other sort, hands over the possession of money to the free air. He throws the notes into the air. As if the sky, in throes of cosmic generosity for this little erring kid, would take all blemishes on its blue apron thus absolving him of any wrongdoing.

There the notes fly like little kites. Money in the air. The complicated code of alchemical panacea for the impoverished human soul. It must have been a dreamy sight to so many hungry souls bustling with the undying desire to add more weight to their wallets. The sight of money carries an enormous leverage over our moralities, conscience and ethics. It can brusquely change the course of one’s life, forcibly holding one by the collar. So much so that even a man going to a temple for puja would comfortably run to gather some free bucks in such circumstances as unfold in this episode. The gap between what is preached and what is practiced is pleasantly, mischievously narrow. It’s naturally bridged in such situations.

Dozens of passersby jump to grab the free booty on offer. They give a tough competition to the vigilance cops in collecting the money.

Less importantly, the vigilance team could collect only 10000 rupees, some of it they had to take by force from the looters. More importantly, some people managed to run away with 5000 rupees.

A pious inauguration

 

A young couple goes to buy a Thar Rox from a Delhi showroom. The purchase formalities are completed. All documentation is done. The simmering niceties of the courteous staff. Richly fine smiles of the receptionist. The entire establishment smirking obligingly.

The brand new SUV is displayed on the showroom’s first floor; parked there with its well-defined compactness. Magniloquently. The beckoner of distant dreams on country paths and curved intricacies in the hills.

The proud, excited couple is sitting in the SUV accompanied by an employee from the showroom. The vehicle heralds the exciting prospects of many off-road journeys. Lovingly lolling journeys calling munificently.

But before that they want to complete a ritual, which our honorable defense minister performed in France while buying Rafael jets—a lemon squeezed under the new plane’s tyre. As per our cultural traditions, squeezing a lemon under a new vehicle is considered very auspicious. Our beliefs propel our journeys from bullock carts to fighter jets to space ships.

The excited owner but accidently presses the accelerator too hard. Futuristically over-imaginative maybe. The SUV jerks gruffly and moodily. There goes the SUV on its first journey on the path of excitement. It’s an interesting off-road journey right from the start.

The brand new SUV crashes through the glass panes and lands on the road below. Luckily there are no injuries to the passengers. No passerby injured either. Just a poor man’s bike gets a little damage.

Well, that proves to be a successful crash test at least. The company will take pride in the fact. Free real-life testing it turns out to be.

I hope it doesn’t breed distrust between the partners. The wife might get doubtful about her husband’s capabilities of being a good driver of the SUV of their matrimony. I hope this momentary goof-up isn’t incisive enough to be detrimental to their matrimonial health.  

Maybe time itself was overcautiously overloaded and thus nervously goofed up during those moments.

The twisting dance of life and death

 

A moment in a town’s crematorium. Rows of cremation spaces under an open shed. A couple of pyres still burning; one breathing its last. Time ashen, smoldering, carrying funereal stillness. Grief-soaked, tremulous air hanging low like impenetrable fog.

Some pyres gone cold. The powdered remains of bones still slightly visible among the ashes. The ash ready to collect unshed tears. The air heavy with a deadly finality.

The smoldering wood lets out a crackling sound from one of the burning pyres. It sounds like time’s fabric is cracked with farewells and separations.

A discarded hospital body bag lying nearby. Blood spattered on it. Maybe it was an accident victim. Fleas on the blood; buzzing on the painful shadows of endings and farewells. A very discomfiting sight. Smoke going up, leaving hope and tears behind.

In a nearby unplastered wall, a sadabahar flower high up in the wall, sprouting from a crack among the bricks. Life invincible. A flower on its crown. Beautifully bejeweled. A purple bloom. Resilient. Unwithered. A wildflower in the cracked stone. A silent fleeting witness to the endings and beginnings, renewals rather. A breath-born luminal mortal. A butterfly-light lone flower’s endurance in the pyre-lit domain of death. The insistence of life through the stony cracks in death’s fortress.

And a butterfly on the flower in the garden of death with its ashen rows of mortality. The butterfly stitching color and beauty from the grotesque black and white of grief. A flowery pause in the long sentence of death. A flowery comma.

Fleas on the dead man’s blood; a butterfly on the brave flower’s proud head. Life and death; death and life.

Death: sandily crumbling life. Life: meritorious, meteoric defiance by the will to live.

But life still prevails with its baby-step maneuvers as death goes elephantly lumbering.

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.

Gen Z

 

Gen Z, aspirational youngsters aged less than 28, went on rampage in Nepal. Restless youth, no longer comfortable with inherited stagnation in power structures breeding the same problems in the name of solutions.

The digital natives, experts in online activism and itching to resist systemic misuse of authority, went out seeking accountability, questioning power structures. A tsunami: terribly disruptive and revolting against entrenched norms and hierarchies.

The youth face scores of problems popping out of everyday lived realities. The generational frustration spills over and a leader-light, post-ideological, narrative driven movement bursts forth. The hordes of animated and hope-infused youths go on rampage. It’s a cross-class cutting across caste, class and ideologies. It hijacks the system under a strange sense of moral urgency.

The native fuel is there for the fire; but the trigger is managed by the vested interests from outside. As they say, there will be no fire without the local fuel however hard the outsiders try.  

Inspiration instilled perspiration casting a hypnotizing cloud over the non-conformist, transformational generation seeking opportunities and demanding structural change.

Normalcy is illusory now. It’s a randomly creative and chaotic crux. A fuming flux. Millennial strides of the youth clamoring for governance and public good. Silvery magic of civic minded layer over the typical youthful brashness to just fall into mischief and vent out unspent, unguided energies.

An outburst against the preposterous undertakings of the old political order. The moth-eaten democracies trying to drag the deprived masses into the seductive quagmire of mediocre (that too illusionary) triumphs.

I know there are deeper conspiracies apart from what they say—the young people boiling with anger over the ban on social media applications.

Earlier it happened in Bangladesh. The discontent fuelled by the cocktail of economy, polity and religion.

It happened in Sri Lanka. Gubernatorial hype of Rajpakshe clan with their imposing lies about nationalism that was smartly sold out to China.

It keeps happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan now and then in slightly varying colors. In Pakistan, there is a persistent attack on democracy. The exceedingly titillating cocktail of theology and military always brewing nefarious broth to throw it like acid-attack on the beauty and growth of India. No wonder, the institution of democracy there has been spiritlessly mediocre.

There is a ring of fire around India—the fire of discontentment and disenchantment with politicians. It affects the entire political sphere in the subcontinent. Normal procedural slip-ups (stage-managed) prove disastrous in the long term.

In my humble opinion, the Indian politicians should now be careful. They can’t take things for granted. The ring of fire around us can creep in with mischievous pampering by big powers on either side of the block.

Only sound democratic norms in practice, and not just hypothetical lip service to the constitution, can save the fire from creeping in. Only the coolant of constitutional norms in honest practice will douse the fire.

We have to stay vigilant because the idea of fire and arson is contagious in these social media driven times.