Our Moon has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita

Our Moon has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita. A poignant memoir, it throws light on tragically understated history of violence against Kashmiri Pandits. Kashmir is too big an issue, and common tragedies of the common people too small. They pale into the shadows of mighty forces fighting for it. Read it and you will have more pragmatic assessment of the contemporary issues. You might even become free of conceptually-aligned, hypothetical-hold of pseudo-secularism. It will help you in criticizing religion-ordained violence without getting scared of losing your status of an enlightened, secular person. Evil mutations of misinterpreted theology are eating into the body spirit of a shared humanity. It has turned the body diseased. It needs surgical operation. Doctoring, knives, scalpel, injection, bitter pills. I wonder are these the only options left to deal with the affliction. Well, beyond critical limits, I think it's the time of decisive action. 

Koh-i-Noor is best suitable for Taliban

Some information for those clamouring for Koh-i-Noor's return. The balooon of human greed has to bust. It cannot be otherwise. The famous diamond has rolled into pockets, only to be snatched away by greater ambitions. Each house it landed in very soon got toppled from the seat of power. Lineages of dozens of kings who grabbed it came crashing down. Finally the ship which was carrying it to England was barely saved from doom. Stricken with plague and lashed by storms it just made it to the destination. The day it arrived on the British mainland, July 2 1850, Queen got a cane hit on her head by an attacker leaving her a black eye and a scar on forehead which remained for years. Also on that very day her most trusted Prime Minister of four decades, Robert Peel, fell from horse and died. BJP shouldn't take a risk. I think Pakistan is more suitable for its ownership. Or Taliban, which is still a better claimant. Haaa haaa

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

The mere idea of death shakes us. It casts a shadow, turns the world upside down, rattles the stage of our ambitions, dreams, hopes and aspirations. We don't even like to think about it. But ultimately death is the only surety in life. Our conscious effort to drive away the idea about our mortality is what we mean by life. The biggest commonality around, still we, still aware of the failure to do it, try not to know or remember about it in our own context. Paul can see it creeping towards him. It is so near that he has been touched by its shadows. The lifeful bright sky over him is losing to the deadly spell. Soon it will be dark. He will cease to exist as others and he himself recognizes himself the pioneer in neurosurgery and possibly its future as a science to deal with unresolved ailments of the brain. He will cease to exit. The consolation can be that he will be part of everything. As per medical science, his domain as a neurosurgeon, it's just months away. There is no hope. Not even in its most hypothetical form. He is but forcing himself to live. To live till his last breath. Life acquires a focus, a meaninful precision, a surety as the finish line looms just a hand away. As the dark Angel creeps towards him, he decides to live. To live substantially. Intensely. He wants to remember the idea of life more than the fact of sure death. Before his body is snatched away at its prime, he decides to jot down the meaning of life. A favour done to lesser mortals like us. In writing this book on his deathbed, he turns Saint Paul. Read it. You will know how fissiparous life can be. Yet how meaningful it is meant to be at the same time. He turns dying a mere phenomenon. And life still bigger one. Read it and you will love yourself and your situations more than you do now. 

RIP Paul. You are an angel now. And part of a better world.

A Common Man's Revolt

'Jana Gana Mana...' It started at hyperpitch in the cinema hall before Kaabil would start. I didn't stand up as a symbolic mark of respect. Just a little, harmless revolt. Almost unobserved in the dark corner of a cinema hall. I was feeling cheated by the system. It was my mute protest against certain things that have darkened the spirit that pervades through the national anthem. It felt like breaking a law. A revenge. But that's the maximum level an otherwise law-abiding citizen can harmlessly reach in protest. Twelve years back a gross injustice was done to a very bright, duly selected Haryana PCS batch. The Congress government opened the floodgates of institutional manipulation. They misused the state vigilance commission to put put the most farcical report. Certain candidates were denied appointments on the basis of such crazy remarks like "the evaluator has cut down marks in one answer from 4 to 3". It was interpreted as a malafied means by the candidate to get undue advantage to get selection. Imagine somebody manipulating the system to get a cut in the mark to get an advantage in the merit list. Craziest and heights of official misuse of power. Hooda government manipulated judiciary later to keep the sanctity of this illogical document. This report stands as the legal basis of denying appointments to the candidates who had worked for a decade to succeed in the exam. Well, it now gets proved that when it comes to misusing power, the Congress in no exception. The present rulers, the BJP, have also smartly upheld the status of this funny, criminal report. Well, that's how things stand in BJP ruled Haryana. 

As a sufferer of this report, guys please tell me, wasn't I right in not standing up to the national anthem?

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Of all types of death, including by disease, accidents, ageing, death born of someone's hate is the worst. Hate-born death slaughters the core principle of being humans. It strangulates the the basic constituent of our collective consciousness to survive individually as a part of the social set-up, a literally must-have for our identity as much as oxygen is must for our biological survival. Hate has potent carriers. It breeds death with the weapons of religion, caste, creed, race, ethnicity. From Nazi Holocausts, communist purgings, to modern day ISIS slayings, hate wreaks the worst form of death. Death born of hate is the very negation of the meaning of life.

Lost in Red Mist

Lost in Red Mist

She is a courtesan fighting for a respectable identity in the quagmire of degenerated nobility, wars, intrigues, debauchery, lust and, last but not the least, love.

She is a foreign tourist in India, raped, picking up the fragments of her violated self, walking with bruised honour, her innate goodness intact, to reach the house of justice to salvage her identity, to redeem her pride.

A circumstantial pawn in the checker-work of sex trade, she passes much of her youth in the muck of lust only to regain herself back, to free herself in her forties, to begin a new life.

Kashmir is burning and in the bigger fire are smouldering little worlds of common hopes, mundane dreams, routine aspirations and regular cravings.

He is huge and lifts unthinkable weights for a living, goes on living and lifting weights only to be crushed by circumstances.

On a badly stomped platform he gathers the nameless pieces of his dusted identity to have a name, a face, an identity of a common person from the normal world.

In the Tsunami ravaged Andaman, she, an Australian anthropologist, survives and looks with hope at the remnants including the sole surviving Shompen tribal.

On the devastated eastern coast of India, he, a mere kid, takes the onerous task of caring for his still smaller sister, while the world around seethes in chaos.

He dreams big from his small village, only realizing later that the dreams that grow in disproportion to one’s circumstances are as good as nightmares.

He, an old man staying alone with a cat, patches up the holes in his present through tales of the past, to survive, expecting a painless end in the future.

She, a Western tourist at Rishikesh, opens her spirits while a whole world drags around her feet.