The stinging metallic bees of death and destruction

 

The drones came and changed the war. They are more effective than fighter jets and ballistic missiles. A cost-effective mechanical killing by coordinates. Safe sustainable murders measured in pixels. Distance from the war fronts is no longer a measure of safety. Death is delivered remotely. An annihilative silence before sudden erasure, bodies falling, screens going dark.

Death no longer a tragic, intimate, bloody reality. It’s something remote, algorithmic, unblinking, surgical, clinical. Even death disembodied from its evil but still human game of providing chance at equal footing to the combatants, for blood at both ends, for casting the dice for either a win or loss. It’s completely bloodless at one end, the end that holds the cursor and clicks a command from a remote cozy coffee-tabled safe cocoon.  

When low on battery, having failed to attack a military target, the bloodless vultures can stealthily wait and then suddenly take off and attack some civilian target who happens to be near around—some jogger, cyclist, a couple in love or a car full of innocent civilians. Target locked autonomously by the mechanical agent of death, the machine-led relentless predatory prowl and then the precision kill.

Russia is honing the art of drone warfare: the dehumanized, mechanically calculated, cold, inhuman sky-borne violence. The drones smirk like gods without heartbeats. The killers who never blink an eye before slaughtering an innocent life. Death outsourced to these darkly buzzing angels in the sky.

Recently Israel used a bird drone to eliminate a Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. Soon we will have fly drones, followed by mosquito drones and still more mini drones, micro drones, to enter the next level of taking the frontlines to streets, courtyards, small alleys and bedrooms.

We have great capacity to manifest violence in myriad ways. A predilection to disarray, disorder and chaos. We are steeped in the tradition of violence.

Given the digital footprint, each global citizen can be scanned, surveyed, analyzed, condemned and punished by using these micro-drones without the sufferer realizing how and why did it happen.

A new kind of violence and punishment. From sporadic vicissitudes, war will turn an eternal reality. The air humming, buzzing with the underpinnings of some lethal machine barely visible to the naked human eyes.

War reduced to cursor’s movement. Fingers which never touch blood can safely fly steel vultures in the sky to unleash a violence with no witnesses. Massacres would turn mere footage. Just footage.                  

 

Puzzled gods and confident humans

 

Sohan Lal appeared for the post of constable in Delhi police. His father, a retired subedar major in the army, got a fresh dose of faith in gods and goddesses as his son moved from the physical fitness tests to written examination to finally reach the interview stage.

The ex-soldier always ends his day with a few pegs of whiskey. With the prospects of his son becoming a policeman, under the pious gaze of the pictures of gods and goddesses which his recently awakened faith had adorned on the walls, his tongue turned all reverential for kind gods. The soldier seemed full of humility and truthfulness.

Then this stream of faith and love stopped suddenly. His son failed to qualify the interview. The offended soldier got into the war mode against the heartless gods and goddesses. Altercation and verbal skirmishes to begin with.

Then the cask got lighter than normal. More alcohol in his system, the girth and certitude of faith went down the gutters.

A trigger of untruth and antagonism. The evil hoodwinked. The snake of suspicion sneaked in. A volley of unmentionables. The gods dethroned—the grand-paternal patronizing look gone.

The soldier bore a long-suffering look. He over-drank his rebellious self and yelled at the pictures of the deities smirking at him from the walls.

The war started. He tore down the recently purchased pictures when the sun of faith was bright. Now it was dark and gloomy. The gods dethroned and relegated to thorny ground.

Tarty tonalities gobbled up legends. Faith dismantled. He put the pictures in the street and beat them with chappals.

The next year his son got selected. Someone joked, ‘Even gods need threats and beatings these days to bring them to their senses.’

But it’s good that his faith was restored. The fallen deities reclaimed their lost positions on the walls in their house.

Well, these are testing times for both gods and humans—hard days of mechanical give and take.

A par of huge hands

 

Manoj has massive hands which could have made him a great boxer had he been serious about it. He is a farmer, outspoken and very extrovert about his propensity for speaking on the side of justice. As a result, he is found to be engaged in regular social skirmishes, brawls and quarrels. 

A few times his hand also comes into action. But mostly verbal fights with a threat of putting his huge hand ‘there’ off balances the opponents. They chicken out trippingly.

He has this habit of threatening to put his hand in the enemy’s bum, spiritedly gesticulating and brandishing the extra-sized hands.

I’m not saying that this threat is ethically lasting but it wins him big brawny points. This oft-repeated powerful self-assertion has made the gesture of hand and its verbal accompaniment literally a copyrighted act to him.

There is a teeny bop audience that looks forward to him in the craft of feigned punching and thrusting his big hands ‘there’.

In any case, most of the opponents are tweety featherheads and puny tricksters, so they take to their heels at the mere mention of his big hand going ‘there’.

In the contiguous corridors of local folklore, his tongue and hand carry a significant weight. Someone joked that the cattle and buffaloes are lucky that he didn’t turn out to be a veterinary doctor. They, the veterinary doctors, usually put their hand ‘there’ to take out dung to make a diagnosis for cattle diseases.

Indeed it would have been quite difficult for the animals had he become a vet doctor, just like it would have been tough for the opponents in the boxing ring.

The lady with a manly grip on life

 

Bla Bla car pool with a woman and her daughter from Mathura to Sonipat.

We take an early morning bus from Sonipat to Mathura, complete Govardhan parikrma by two in the afternoon after starting at nine, and then seek the most feasible ways to return home.

The return journey is usually challenging because there is no direct bus to our place in the afternoon. We take multiple buses or car pools to reach Ballabhgarh—outside the real log-jammed traffic congestion in Delhi that might take hours—then take a metro train (with one changeover on the way) to reach Subzi Mandi, then some passenger train to Sonipat, then ride or drive back to our village in either our car or on bike parked at the railway station at our hometown. We get back around eleven at night.

But this time we are lucky to get a Bla Bla car pool to Sonipat. A direct car pool to our hometown is a rarity.

The car owner is a criminal lawyer from Kurukshetra practicing at the Punjab and Haryana High Court for the last two decades. A strong woman with manly attitude to take life head on. She means business. Short and simple. Her daughter had law entrance examination at Mathura so she published a ride for three people. The third passenger is a serviceman going home for Diwali vacations.

She drives her Ciaz car like a racing driver, continuous honking and flicking dipper with utmost urgency, clearing and changing lanes with gazelle agility. She is talkative and shares her story.

A confident woman she drives her car even to Bihar in pursuit of her cases. Her parents died early and she was raised by her relatives. She was an orphan and felt like one as well under the care of insensitive relatives.

Later, her supportive husband proved a great factor in her law practice. She now supports education of five orphan girls and helps innocent juveniles unjustifiably snared in the net of law.

She is grooming her daughter quite well. The girl, aged nineteen, is running a café and plans to join her mother as a criminal lawyer after completing her degree.

Her two boys are in school. But they aren’t interested in studies. They mean business and give their mother a logic that even after education one goes on to make money so what is the problem if they can make money without big degrees. She agrees with them to a great degree. They are already earning through stock brokerage and internet marketing. ‘They are already earning more than many PhDs. So I don’t believe in this talk about quality education in prestigious institutions,’ she makes her point.

She says great lawyers and big businesspersons are groomed by the book of practical life itself.

Well, the entire family has a big consensus on earning huge bucks of money. And what is wrong in that? It’s their right, just like anyone else. On top of it, they work very hard to earn honest money. More importantly, the lady lawyer says she has the conscience to help the needy through her legal knowledge. She even works extra sincerely when she is fighting the legal battle for someone whom she thinks to be innocent.

I wish her all the best in this fast journey about hard work and money. She is a successful lawyer, supportive mom, good conversationalist and a furious yet safe driver. She has chartered the specifics of life with firm-jawed determination.

I count it as the story of an educated, successful, confident, empowered woman.

The roots

 

A fair-colored slim boy of twenty-two, Ayaz Ahmad is a Muslim from Kashmir. He works as a truck driver with a contractor specializing in earthworks.

I ask him if he can understand Haryanvi. ‘Of course, I can understand most of it. I’m a gujjar. I understand Rajasthani language because it’s the language of our tribe, the nomads, our ancestors!’ he says with perky pride.

Then I realize that Haryanvi and Rajasthani are similar in crude countryside intonation. ‘Haryanvi is similar to Rajasthani,’ I hear him saying with a touch of Haryanvi in his Rajasthani-based dialect.

His ancestors were wandering nomads from Rajasthan. They must have been Hindu. Those were relatively easier times for crossovers—geographic and religious. They must have migrated to Kashmir and there they took up Islam.

The way he says, ‘I’m a gujjar!’ gives an idea about his feeling of pride for their primary ethnic identity. ‘Gujjar’ connoting more about an occupation, a pastoral living, a distinct nomadic culture. And the way he puts it, it seems that he is more secure in asserting this base identity than he would be in asserting his religious identity which is an add-on to his basic identity.

People, however far they might bloom in the sky in the form of flowers, fruits and new shoots, have a devotional respect for their roots, the roots hidden in the soil, grit, grime, dust of time. They maintain a mythic connection even with the most distant roots they can recall.  

Romancing with food

 

Well, this episode is from the last Mathura journey. We are travelling in the early morning bus to the holy place. It’s quite dark at six in the morning. There is a little halt at Ballabhgarh to allow new passengers to board.

It’s also the time for some to relieve themselves almost inside the sheds of a makeshift vegetable market where there will be a buzzing market after an hour or so. Many passengers go and look around for a little space to squirt jets of extra water in the bladder onto the heaps of garbage lying in open just behind the empty vegetable market.

But the best use of time is effected by a passenger, a thickset man in late thirties. He also goes down and comes back with a disposable bowl full of piping hot gulab jamuns. He carries the air of an eager boy looking forward to an early extra-sweet breakfast. The cold, staid interior of the bus is sweetened to the core as the vapors from the heap of sweetmeats and his slightly embarrassed smile infuse the chilly air with love, harmony, peace, food, smile. 

The man appears a cute gentle giant. ‘Let this silly world get anxious about big things and get diabetes even with salty samosas. Here I’m enjoying my life in this little world with my gulab jamuns,’ he seems to exult.

He has a horse-like mane at the back of neck but his crop is thinning at the top.

Here he arrives with his little mound of hot shiny gulab jamuns and scans the seats for a suitable place to enjoy his early morning food. It turns a sweeter world with his sugary appearance.

A nice start of the day beginning with the worship of stomach to be followed by worshiping Radha-Krishna in spirituality-smitten Vrindavan. What a sweet man! An embarrassed smile conveying a simplicity lying in a big mound in this man who looks all of heart and hospitality.

From all angles, he looks a person who is not affected by everyday annoyances. A sweet man carrying robustly sculpted taste for sweetmeats. I would always welcome such sweetened souls rather than acrid thugs high on the steroids of power, wealth, influence and dominance.  

The romance of pilgrimage

 

Me and my brother love going for Govardhan pilgrimage during winters. The weather is good and walking on naked feet for 22-24 kilometers is great for mind, body and soul. Every step you take, every breath you inhale, every word you chant in devotion to Radha mai takes you to a higher dimension of evolution.

We start in our small car early in the morning at four-o’-clock, park it at Sonipat, catch the 4:40 bus to Mathura, deboard at Govardhan chauraha, take another bus to the pilgrimage town 22 kilometers away, have tea and take breakfast of home-cooked parathas prepared by our loving and kind elder sister, and start walking among the excited throng of devotees.

It’s relaxing to be part of a commonality, a generality, a healing collectivism of being Radha mata’s and Giriraj’s devotees. It melts the too heavily concentrated sense of individual identity wherein one’s own issues and problems feel too heavy and burdensome. No wonder one feels light as a part of this devotional herd. The people who would have otherwise sunk in the bog of loneliness feel light, connected to fellow humans, to a greater cause while walking on a pilgrimage with fellow devotees.  

The return journey is more exciting—changing buses, metro ride and finally a night train. It feels almost like an extension of the pilgrimage. It sometimes tests nerves but then gives very nice lessons in practicalities of life and the art of being realistic.

We try to go for the pilgrimage every weekend during the winters. This Saturday the bus to Mathura stands cancelled. The buses have been ordered to go and attend some political rally by the government.

We stand dejected. Just imagine getting up at three in the morning and then come rushing to take the bus to find it cancelled. But then we hear a conductor from a nearby booth harking a sweet invitation: ‘Hardwar-Hardwar-Hardwar!’

His words chill, thrill and trill in the chilly, foggy morning like an aesthetic waterfall.

The bus to Hardwar is ready to move. And so are we! We board the bus, reach Hardwar, take holy bath on the pious Har ki Paudi, ascend the little hill to have darshan of Mata Mansa Devi, enjoy the sweet-sour vibes of the narrow market street along the Ganges, take ride in the galloping spirituality of the pilgrimage town.

An exclusive experience: arresting, exquisite, strong and sumptuous. Just because we stayed open to faith, pilgrimage and joy.

We return at night with the same smile and satisfaction as we would have if we had gone to Mathura as planned.

A little cocktail revolution in the ordinary day of a commoner. This much all of us can manage.

Dear reader, always remember that sometimes mother existence has a different plan. We just need to be open to it. Many times, it turns out to be better than the one we had chalked out ourselves.  

 

The perfect wife

 

Rampal is a hardworking farmer. A submissive, uncomplaining man carrying a peculiar kind of long-suffering look. But there are traces of a kind of indefatigable spirit, a resourcefulness, a subtle versatility which is seen in hardworking people.

When he is busy in some work one can see a taskmasterly air around him. The reason is his bossy, nagging, overbearing, imperious, voluble, commanding wife. In the throes of strange restlessness, she is very exacting on the cool temperament of her farmer husband.

The meek, uncomplaining husband prefers working in the fields. But when there is nothing to work in the fields, his wife uses the resource with nice human resource management skills.

She is a highly querulous woman—speaks at least hundred words for his single word muttered under his breath. So when he is free from the farming duties, she has a list of all the pending repairs, modifications, amendments in anything ranging from masonry, carpentry, electricity, plumbing, cooking, kneading and much more that misses my mind at this moment.

He is very comfortable with the idea of learning something new under the command of his human resource manager wife. The proud hubby is always there to fulfill the plans of his wife with an open-chested maneuver.

The multi-skilled husband is busy in the year-long symphony of coy domesticities. With her hands-on matriarchy, she has groomed a jack-of-all-trades to plough their domestic cart.

A self-taught (wife-taught rather) multi-skilled husband, his case can be a notable discourse in feminist studies.

All said and done, he is indeed an unconventional icon in a critically patriarchal society.    

A small sad tale

 

It happened about three decades ago in a village in Haryana. Subhash son of Kuchi Ram Valmiki was good in studies at the village school. His elder brother was a cleaner at the school. The teachers would praise him for being good in studies and standing first in the class.

A lone eagle in the little community of untouchables who had it in him to cut through the vital voices of casteism and undo a bit of historical injustice carried by the small community in the conservative village.

During middle school, he would go and clean classrooms after the school was over. One has to do something extra to undo the inherited disadvantages at the caste and community level. So the boy would work hard in studies and in cleaning the rooms to somehow beat the intergenerational disadvantages and lead a normalized life without too much of road-blocking social stratification. And education was the tool to offer resistance to the caste-born structural, oppressive ‘othering’, a systemic dehumanization of the low-born people.

A ruffian boy from the dominant farming community also accompanied him sometimes. This boy was exploring his adolescent sexuality in a deeply traditional society where the word ‘sex’ was a taboo. Not being able to find any avenues to vent out his curiosity, he wrote sexually explicit messages on blackboards in girls’ rooms. The valmiki boy was blamed for it and severally penalized for the offense. Deeply, historically entrenched practice of untouchability was still powerful enough till that time to allow the teachers to touch him very intimately through sticks, slaps and kicks.

He was kicked like a dog by many teachers (all upper caste guys, diehard conservatives and very eloquent in making a low caste realize his low status). With inherited pride they pulled his hair and he was dragged around by the exclusionary social patriarchs—menacing marginalizing motifs of casteism and stigmatization.

The punishment must have been far less severe for a boy of upper class. Without any doubt about it. Punishment for the same offense is hierarchical in nature. Inequitable distribution of justice. This also seems to be a powerful social law, as effective as any natural law.

After the humiliating punishment, he felt stripped of all dignity and social standing he had built for himself through studies. His enthusiasm to rise through social ranks was silenced forever. He crashed into the lowly place of his untouchable community, lost interest in studies and after some time dropped out of school altogether.

A small, malnourished, black, fox-faced boy he then tried to turn handsome like his ideal hero Mithun Chakrovarty, kept stylish hair, wore heeled shoes, went to Bombay to pursue his dreams, and finally returned to the village to work as a casual laborer to feed his four children and a cantankerous wife. Little summary of his life: a subtle fossilization of caste identities.

Strange are the pathways taken by the lurching lorries of our fate. Some erring moments unleash massive miscalculation and topple the table itself on which one is trying to play the cards of destiny.   

 

Linguistic mayhem

 

There are some cute Haryanvi versions of English words. The self-made dialect born of farming twistology wherein the unpolished, earthbound senses, fuelled by rawitude and pehalwan-pride, give hammer strikes at the sharp, cutting-edge linguistic blocks to make smooth, round pebbles which are easy to manage with rustic tongues.

Raw, earthy, playful, brimming with innocent swagger and unlettered wit, the soil-born spirit knows how to get the high-flying linguistic puzzles down and dusted and make a new product as per the rhythms of lowing cattle and screeching tractors.

No matter how chaotic things appear to an urban guy, the Haryanvi farmers will give the feeling that everything is perfectly arranged and there is no scope for further improvement. They have simple tongues, which know how to figure a way out of complex phonetics.

With a sudden surge of bravado and confidence, you may hear a farmer making a ‘Llounsement’ which stands for ‘Announcement’. Don’t jump out of your seat if you hear it at an airport coming out of the mouth of a well-dressed, educated appearing Haryanvi.

Take or Tek stands for heart attack. Many farmers have heart issues due to the traditional fatty diet, which turns out to be too much for the system in an era of far less work in the fields due to the mechanization of agriculture. Less laboring work and the same diet of doodh, dahi, makhan and ghee mean clogged arteries. So one hears this word many times in local parlance these days.

Konch is coach. One hears it many times because there are many wannabe Olympic gold medalists seeking coaches in various sports especially in kushti and boxing.

Staap is staff. You stand a reasonable chance of hearing it in state roadways buses. Some policeman would tell the conductor, who approaches him demanding ticket, that he is ‘staap’ and thus need not pay the bus fare.

Tractor is taktor or taktar. That’s bow the children grow up treating taktar to be god, the boisterous farm-wise super-vehicle to smoothly play rough with life.

These innocently twisted words carry lots of weight. Rustic tongues possess hilarious ingenuity to smoothen complex words like a mighty river smoothens pebbles and stones on its bed.

With much pride and rustic confidence, making a mockery of the authority of language, the farming community fabricates its unique vernacular ethos. The charming exaggeration of their attitude adds icing on the cake.  

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!