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The cover pages of my upcoming books!

Smog, slog and life on winter's doorstep

Just watch out the lilaceous glow on people's faces. It will tell you that winter has just starting spraying its aura around. November is cool. Forget all talks of global warming, pollution, dirty political thuggeries, traffic jams, disappointments on cricketing field. The weather in November puts the common man, the man in the arena of trials and tribulations of saving some grace to see through the day with life intact, on a strong wicket. The glow on common man is just like that witnessed by numerous faces after witnessing yet another century by Sachin.

Delhi is chaotic. But have a round of Connaught Place (thankfully the collonaded facades are up for some renovation) and you will feel the historical smirkness still pervading in smoky, hazy afternoons slowly passing into the folds of evening. Just go there with an accomodating spirit and you will find why despite so many metropolitan outcrops around, Connaught Place is still the heart of Delhi. In the fantastic maze turned up by the white collonaded blocks time, history, modernity all stand captured in a mysteriously pervading easeness.

Elsewhere, you will find four causes to mutter for a single cause of musing. Metro, yes...a massive collective reason for a bigger musing. Flyovers....again do us proud as we saunter over without wasting any time. But have the eyes to spot dirt cheap humanity scattered around below the flyovers. Kids, women, men....black, filthy, sick, torn and tattered dreams wander in equal measure. These poor human souls left out of the gift of enjoying even the balmy effects of early winter. Take a deep look in the eyes of some young female beggar, and you will fing a big chance for a beautiful life and persona wasted. Whom to balme?? I just look at the faceless vault of sky and ask again and again, "Why?" If you can give so much to so few, then why not just common minimum for all of us!!! Anyway, disparities have teased us from times unknown.   

Ateet ke aayne se: Diwali (October 21, 2006)

                            

The Diwali festival was raising its celebratory hood with bang, smoke, splashes and splendor. We bombard, more than the firecrackers, each others with the messages of ‘Happy Diwali’. It is however another matter that in its modern avatar the great myth with its practical substance has been robbed of its true humanistic essence under the internecine attack of constantly aggravating pathos and passion of the modern generation. All those desirous of having a big bang in life get a suitable bombarding opportunity on this day. When people literally surpass each other in a mock war to split eardrums and leave the air polluted to the hilt, it is no longer in commemoration of the completion of that great task undertaken by Lord Sri Rama validating the eventually succeeding nature of the good over the evil. Most of the revelers in fact grin like the progenies in Ravana’s army. The meek mythological murmur is painfully pinched down by the evil’s fire-banging spirit lurking around on the rooftops on this darkest of the night in the year.

On this day, Lakshmi (the Goddess of wealth and prosperity) is worshipped and true to its nature the Goddess blesses a section of the trado-religious section of all the destitute head-bent humanity. These are the traders, entrepreneurs, people of enterprise and business. For almost a fortnight preceding the festival, bazaars, stalls in narrow streets, shopping malls, mega malls, shopping centres and sweet shops are tested to the capacity of their salesmanship. Festival enthused people just beat each other in taking the traders’ profit to a new, newer and newest pinnacle. During evenings the provisions and the prodigious Lalaji burst out of the narrow confines of little shops and get adjusted on the stalls encroaching onto the narrow walkways among the beehives of shops. People just unmindfully bump into each other in the mass trail. Even vehicles baulk, screech and squeeze to have their mechanic share in the fun and funstry from the side of the machine world. Especially the ladies and girls attired for a festive outdoor in jeans, colorful tops, fancy salwaar kameez, flowing duppatas and trailing pallus hypnotically move along this logjam, their minds buzzing with indecision regarding what to purchase and what not. In between are the rangeela elements who frustrated and deprived of female proximity born of the famed sexual divide in India seek solace and scent females from the closest quarters, the world from porn movies giving them glimpses of what lies beyond this. Frustration taking sadistic sips from whatever chance bumps, pats on the buts, brush against the shoulder and even pinch at the most delicate parts.

The shop-fronts decorated with lighting patterns galore as the high temples of the great Indian mass-psychology driven consumerism. The firmly believing devotees meanwhile with wads of money in their wallets moving in a queue to shop mechanically like bottles get along on a conveyer belt to be labeled exactly the same. Truly the festival colors everybody in the same color despite gravest of differences among all. The high priests meanwhile—the shopkeepers, hawkers, vendors—very expertly perform the plundering rituals of businessmanship. Market becomes the new Dharma. Its scriptural book has the pious injunction: Purchase as much as possible on Diwali eve even leading to your beggarly status during the non-festive days! Uncountable schemes, discounts, credits, cuts, offers and coupons make it seem like the modern ways of subtle pick pocketing! This great predatory peek in people’s wallets using the knife of market principles, using surgically clean and expert fingers by the hand of market consumerism! This is expert encroachment into the corridors of mythology to enlarge its market domain.

The sweet makers start storing the dish and delicacies weeks ahead for there will be a huge rush. Indians are paranoid in certain mass behaviour. For petty selfishness ranging from spitting, peeing on public places reaching to life threatening acts of food adulteration (like fake mawa, urea in milk, poisonous colors in sweetmeats) they behave as easily as just doing the early morning ritual, permitted, allowed both by nature and society. The perishable stale products are attractively packaged to go into religiously blinded guts. On Dhan Teras it is considered auspicious to buy gold and silver. The great myth propagated by the maker of the God, the Super God, the smart selfish mankind. More than any God, it is the jewelers who get propitiated on this day. Inside the glass fronted welcoming exteriors, exquisitely plush furnished interiors, under the glare of all those jewellery items lined almost from the floor to the ceiling, big bloated ladies and gentry religiously put budgetary caution to winds. They stab in their wallets to get finally a bit of pinch on their real skin. Here thousands do not matter. Outside a famished, sunken, skeleton of an old beggar is a pariah and they feel like getting a heart attack even at the thought of giving ten rupees to that unfortunate creature. ‘We do not support beggary,’ they simply quip and take to their smart heels.

A day before the pious night itself, the night of Diwali, there was an unseasonal rainstorm. It occurred at the worst time it can. It stole the festive glitters from the eyes of at least one community, the farmers. Basmati paddy just two weeks away from harvesting, with its grain heads bulging with the pearls of the farmer’s eyes and other varieties (like Sharbati, 1121) already under the process of harvesting, all and more got whiplashed suddenly by the weather spoilsport. Many farming dreams were broken.

The next morning the farmers found the crops flattened. Farmers just got busy in using their mundane calculation abilities to estimate the scale of loss in monetary terms.

‘In the standing crop the loss isn’t much because the yellow traces had started. The grain has been completely formed,’ one quipped.

‘But still it is a big loss. All those grain-heads and spikes which get buried and get into contact with the damp ground will turn black. It’s at least 20% crop loss,’ the other protested. 

‘No no it’s too high. It cannot be more than 10%,’ the simple calculations went forth.

So the farmers debated about the loss. What else could be done? It is the irony with the farmer that both God and the market seldom get propitiated at the same time. They take turns to fuck the farmers’ fate. Just once in a cycle of let us say five years both God and the market bless the farmers concurrently to give them some monetary chance to help somebody go for long-pending house reconstruction, marry off a daughter waiting her dowry to be purchased, buy some long-dreamt electronic gazette, etc., etc.

With fluctuations in their loss figures, their participation in the great and glittering festival time market decorated in cities and towns went up and down. And during those three or four final hours of Diwali celebrations the victorious firecrackers ruled the sky. These were the stars creating a lower vault of human aspirations. With their flash, boom, burst and brilliance, they even puffed out the flickering, faded, silently smiling lamp far away by a poor threshold, a farmer who had possibly lost too much in the storm.                           

                    

Rashe Ram doolah ban gaya!!

Rashe Ram is a low caste landless young man. But he has his specialties. He is dark, muscular, works like a bull as agricultural labourer. He has no land of his own but has the unrivalled farming spirit. He is special in other ways as well. There are many who think he is dimwitted. It sometimes gets verified when many a time he puts more physical effort like a bull and misses the small witticisms expected of even a 10 year old.

He stays in a 30 square stinking, hot, unplastered brick hovel, no ventilation, just one door. His father was Lame Dheere Ram, christened so because he limped and walked dheere dheere, so they started calling him Langda Dheere. Dheere worked faster than any two legged man. Most efficient of workers, he coked a snook at the society by going into drinking unchecked and then shouted through the night, targeting particularly an ex-sarpanch for what crime God only knows. We can only surmise that possibly that village headman had denied him a BPL card that would have entitled him to some government run charities and subsidies. He did a favour to his children by not dying somewhere else than a state road. So one night when he was hit possibly by the car of another drunk man on the wheels he had at least ensured that his family will get something in road accident claim. So they got 10 lac for the patriarch getting crushed under the car. One drunken man getting paid for another drunken person’s binge driving.

So Rashe had a 30 square yard house, 10 lac rupees in balance, a strangely looking mother whom people say is just marginally better than a mental house case, and a younger brother who appeared far better. On top of that he is of marriageable age now. But there is no bride for him in the conventional arranged marriage set up. In Haryana already sex ratio is very low. In such competition who will give him his daughter. But then without marriage what is the purpose of Rashe Ram’s life. So all his relatives gang up to purchase a bride for him!

India is teeming with unfortunate human beings. There are millions of Bangladeshi settlers in slums who just sell their daughters to the leftover grooms in Haryana. Then there are criminal gangs who abduct girl children to later either push them into flesh trade or semi prostitution while occasionally selling them to the ineligible bachelors in Haryana, old men still having the dream of an heir, or widowers still having dreams of domestic life. Generally these caged birds, the purchased brides, do not even understand the language. Right from the beginning it is a fight. The girl’s effort to run away and join back her gang to be later sold again as a bride. It is a good business. Smarter ones just vanish time and again, getting multiple few-night husbands and more money for the gang-keepers or even their own parents and relatives.

Having been squarely rejected in an arranged marriage proposal, Rashe’s anxious relatives and well wishers searched some middle man who would get them a bride at a price. So the bride was arranged at INR 60000. Strangely, just a day ago a proud Jat farmer in the neighbourhood bought a buffalo at INR 83000. So it was considered a good bidding for the groom Rashe Ram. She was sharp eyed. Pretended not to understand even a single word of Haryanvi. Allowed Rashe Ram three nights as a husband and then in the wee hours on the pretext of going out for the loo in the open vanished into the dark folds of night. Much angry the groom-side again approached the middle man. Threatened dire consequences. They ladkiwallas said, ‘See it was your duty to keep her within control.’ But they said since the middleman is strong enough to get you a second chance we will send someone else but you have to ensure that you retain her this time. So within a week Rashe Ram got remarried, the ceremony included just garlanding and then running away like they had abducted the girl. His second wife appeared on the older side. She was really docile and appeared keen to stay. Possibly she came from even more wretched surroundings. By now much spoilt Rashe Ram had an issue. He told something to his anxious relatives. All of them agreed she was not fit for now eligible Rashe Ram. They even took her to a doctor to explore the prospects of children. Population census of India waited with anxious beat of heart till the doctor declared she cannot bear children anymore. She had borne children in the past in her previous innings as somebody’s borrowed wife. ‘Even her stomach had been cut…there were stitching marks,’ they told the middle man again and complained of wrong delivery. Strangely he again got under pressure and promised to provide a better one. The golden moment of third marriage arrived just in a week. This time all concurred that it is the best option. So Rashe Ram thrice married, with dreams of children, his broken teeth smile and intangible words is at the threshold of marital bliss.

I asked my mother why is she waiting so long to give bridal saugat to Rashe’s wife, a goodwill gesture as a fellow villager. ‘Let them finally confirm her as the real bride. Then I will put my 500 rupees to risk..who knows about these people!!”