The Neighbourhood Battle

 

In the summers of 2013, China's Himalayan Drills had become worrisome. The retired Brigadier never missed a chance to warn that ‘they’ can anytime put a knife in our back. He always believed that with a bit stronger political leadership and a bit better basic amenities, the fight would have been different. After all he still remembered many soldiers fighting in angora shirts forget about jersey. And it was as cold as you can imagine.   

 

His two neighbours had been at loggerheads for long. One was strong, financially and socially in a decent position. The other was comparatively lesser on all these counts. The stronger one would not miss an opportunity to badger the opponent and never skipped a chance to prove his strength and the other's helplessness. One day he heard the one, who was always at the receiving end, saying, 'I am going to an all out with him. Even if he beats me it’s better to be fully defeated instead of getting insulted all the times!' Driven by the concept and brooding over his insults, he went all out with the enemy at the next provocation! It was unexpected given his unresponsiveness of long. The stronger opponent was taken aback and before others, including the retired Brigadier, intervened he had bloody mouth and many bruises. The Brigadier knew the conditions in which the man had attacked finally. He drew the moral of the story: Sometimes it serves to hit hardest when you are pushed against a wall; when you have been completely cornered!

Each time there was some news of the Chinese wrongdoing in the Himalayas, the soldier’s soul pined for revenge. He openly confessed he hated the Chinese to the core of his heart. When this episode happened in which the unprovoking underdog had finally hit, taking the stronger transgressor by surprise, the polish-mannered soldier had even abandoned his neutrality in the affairs and went to the winner’s house to even congratulate him for his brave battle.

The repeated Chinese transgressions into the Indian territory and India's helplessness in this regard served the ex-soldier a corollary to the episode narrated above. He was telling the man representing India in the episode:

China, on account of the War and repeated intrusions, has taken it for granted that India will remain inert to all provocations. Can India act ultimately like you? If China can cross over into our territory, cannot we go for the same exercise sometimes? Suppose China reacts at the level of using force at our China-type intrusion, we will also earn a right to ward them off at the same level if they play the mischief again. It will only define the LOC more definitely---after all you are supposed to put your stamp of authority on your land through the use of forces to the utmost capacity. It will just balance out the position.    

 

Amarnath Yatra

 

The soul eating focus on the editorial desk gave him a tired and brooding look. He, the young man from The Broken Dream, seven years down after the debacle at the hands of the state, looked different from his still-enthusiastic face at the start of his innings in the publishing sector. The civil services candidates, at least from the humanities background, cram bits and pieces of all subjects to be jacks of all trades and masters of none. And when the sledgehammer of reality smashes the dream, all they are left with is to grope around for some respectful means of earning bread and butter. He had been a bookworm, so faced with this challenge to earn his bread, by default sneaked into the publisher’s world. He had always worked with his civil-services-preparations-born ethos. It only means more and more hard work. But then you have to be smarter at many levels to excel in the corporate. The more he worked, harder became things for him. In the melting heat of July, his life unbearable under the harsh torchlight of insecure bosses and jealous colleagues, his mind literally on the brink of insanity, he escaped to the blessing climes of the Kashmir Himalayas, to find himself, to regain his lost footing, to seek solace, to find a saviour, to be with himself.   

Life is all about exploring the self--its limitations, its specialties, its weaknesses, its strengths. Putting yourself in inhospitable conditions can be one of the means for this. The holy cave of Amarnath is situated in the frigid heights of higher Himalayas. As you move along the rain-lashed, slippery and stony mountain track, you find yourself caught in a dualistic chasm. Pleasure and pain side by side. Sighs of agony as well as excited palpitations of heart over the nature's masterwork. In the misty heights the melting glaciers are a visual delight; but the hazy heights lacerated by gloomy, craggy tops gets into your heart like some ice-cold stare of a corpse. 

Walking on treacherous muddy foot-track, with life and death side by side, with agony and ecstasy mating to give a queer sensation, he felt the little world in Delhi inside the cubicle of an office to be funnily tiny with its tinier characters. How could that little hovel turn his life literally into hell? This boundless, open nature cannot give enough pleasure like that tiny bread-earning hovel can give you the misery. He recalled the faces, the faces that had literally broken his hardworking convictions in the professional life. The selfish seriousness on their faces loomed more dangerously than the risky precipice he was taking a rest upon. Their plotting and strategising appeared gloomier than the threatening raincloud surrounding that mountain top and admonishing to come his way to make the climb more treacherous.

Gasping like a fish without water, for the oxygen was seriously low, he found the next little step as the most unachievable task in the world. One look however at the melting glacier on the opposite side of the valley uplifted his spirits like Phoenix. He saw the signs of warmth triumphing over snow: emerging pastures side by side with snow. Yes, green gives solace! The mountains lost in their massiveness just took his tiny existence into their mystic oblivion. He just surrendered! Even their selfish, smart, suave, polished, over-imposing selves, that always intimidated the simple human being in him, appeared a puny little, inconsequential piece of craziness against such massiveness surrounding him. It became bearable for him. Their triviality and this massiveness. ‘We should realise that we are mere parts of nature that can simply smite our existence away in just one angry stroke of little finger!’ he mused and seemed to admonish his detractors.

He looked anxiously into the sky for the traces of rain. The clouds building up around the surrounding hilltops sent down still chillier sensation down his spine. But then a look into the deep gorge across the sheer precipice carrying the track, gave him an outwardly sensation of fear and excitement mixed with a strange elation that cannot be explained in words. He saw fellow devotees struggling along the labouring ponies. These were the rare moments when one can really feel the agony of a fellow human being because you are put in the same cauldron.

The last portion of the valley leading to the shrine was still covered with heavy snow. As he walked over it, he slipped and regained control like a toddler learning to walk. ‘After all we are always God's kids,’ he had a smile on his face. A smile that was so comforting that it could outweigh hundreds of unshed tears in his eyes which they had given him. Despite all the quagmire of terrorism, he felt Kashmiri Islam to be beneficent. At no other place one will find a Hindu religious occasion being supported by so many Muslims. All the hawkers, stall operators, tent owners, porters, foot massagists and alms-seekers were Muslims. At no other place in the world you will come across a Muslim stall operator welcoming a tired Hindu pilgrim: 'O Bhole come and take shringaar for Mata Parvati' In delicious Kashmiri and warm hospitality the locals called him 'Bhole!'. And once inside the majestic cave, he just found himself lost in the divine trance of the ice lingam, Baba Barfani!

He felt safe and sheltered there. The Ice God giving him warmth that his lacerated self needed so much after all of their cold gestures and frigid petty selfishness had turned him to hypothermia, even though Delhi was burning with heat. But he had to go back to the fire. Mustering up courage he started his journey back. Back to where he began from!

 

Luck, the Slippery Eel

 

He vividly remembers one Holi. At least seven or eight years back. Drunk and mired in cheap colours like toads in filthy waters, they had hitched upon a tractor and went to the district city to spoil the appearance of their friend's beautiful wife. After spreading disharmony in his household, the Holi-smitten lampoons were coming back to the village. The tractor was giving a stiff competition even to the cars on the potholed road. They yelled at the top of their ebriated, coloured rascality. There was a scene by the roadside. Such a scene instantly gives an ecstatic high to almost all Haryanvis. A man was thrashing his wifie; possibly the result of an argument while they travelled on their scooter. Poor Bajaj Chetak was the mute spectator to this gross act. The hooligan-carrier tractor came to a halt and the first instinctive reaction of the demonic group of friends was: 'Aur maro s*** ko!' And they laughed all inclined to get free entertainment from the spectacle.

As a presumably better educated human being his instincts immediately clobbered down the common Haryanvi instinct and he yelled: 'Aurat pe attyachhaar!' They respected him, those father-defying idiots. So they just jumped down and many heart-felt fist strikes found the man bleeding from mouth in just few seconds. The lady cried: 'Harramjado he is your jeejaji and works with Haryana police!' So all daredevilry was gone in an instant. Totally slouched, civil-dress-clad policeman was dazed beyond all limits. He looked a perfect Hindi movie villain. They were aware of the consequence, even though he was not on duty and was doing something that should have taken him behind the bars. But then it is not the convention. The policemen can be allowed such freebies sometimes. Realising this they just chickened out of the scene even more efficiently than a murderer ever did. His friends cursed him, ‘Your bookish ideology got us in trouble. It would have been better to laugh. The Police in Haryana is held in fearful awe by the common mortals, at least by those who are just common citizens without any background defined by wealth, prestige and the so called connections.

A bloodied policeman can get you in serious trouble. The tractor was mired in mud, even the number plates. So by appearance it just gave clue to its manufacturing company, nothing more. All nasha gone, they washed it clean in the village pond and took a vow to send it to the sheltered barn for at least a month. He had heard the fabled stories how the policeman spanked the naked bum with a leathered monster. His poor bum already twitching against the painful strikes, he prayed to all his Gods for rescue. But luck certainly falls in our laps however unlucky one might be feeling. He could not believe what happened onwards. Next day, one guy from the beating squad was reading newspaper by a roadside barber shop in the village. A policeman came and asked for the approach route to a neighbouring village. 'What happened' the scared reader asked. 'Yaar yesterday some goons on a red tractor gave a bloodied jaw to one of our policeman! Look at the guts!'  

It happened like this. The lady who was being beaten had her maternal uncles in the said neighbouring village. She had spent some part of her pre-marriage time at her mamaji’s place and was seriously aware of the family feud going on between her mamaji’s family and a peasant family in their neighbourhood. That day some elders from this rival family had reached the eventful spot and intervened while the real culprit group chickened out. Nursing insult and unfathomable anger, and not being able to find the real rascals, she and her husband had conveniently farmed these people who had in fact resolved the issue. Pure bad luck for them. Well, somebody’s good luck is at the cost of someone’s bad luck. Luck changes hands man, impersonally, mechanically, like the coins flow from one pocket to the other in the bazaar. It might slip out of a King and land up in the beggar’s bowl and the vice versa.     

 

Homage to the Martyrs

 

The professor with unconventional historical sense was fighting his mini battle of rights. He took it as his little movement against the exploiters. His pension and other funds on hold, he was waging a war in the court. It was just a week short of the first anniversary of his revolt, the fateful speech. So much tortured by the injustice to his righteous self by the stronger exploitative state force, he drew massive parallels between himself and the martyrs who had sacrificed their lives on this day, March 23. Having lost his enthusiasm for dust-raising speech, he now appeared all eager to vent out his angst in his journal. He firmly believed, and now more than ever, that those who really shed their blood for independence occupy just a few pages in the history books, and the ones who enjoyed the fruits of independence have manipulated history books. He was writing some more pages on behalf of the revolutionaries, thinking it would be handier for more convenient times under a more suitable government. His heartbeat up patriotically, he was jotting down: 

While you go full throttle on weekend enjoyments, take out a moment to remember three martyrs who on this day decades ago kissed the noose of death with such love and affection that no pining pair of lips can ever match the selfless compassion behind the lock. March 23, Sahid Divas of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev! At each step we take liberty for granted. We see the signs of growth and prosperity for ourselves in all directions, we can go out and shout regarding the causes of our grudges, we can afford to be totally individualistic and still be counted as the best people around, we can afford to allow the greatest injustices right there before our eyes and still be counted as legally clean, we are even free to take socially permitted actions to cut down the freedom of our fellow citizen, we are free man! Free for the best and the worst. But they were not free. At each step they knew that their fates lay in outsiders' hands. Their spirit always felt the cold iron of fisticuffs. They knew one single step as a free man is far better than 100 miles travelled as a slave. Even if it meant cutting their lives in the nip, while their youth was blossoming like a spring rose. They had their sip of justice and freedom. For a larger cause they defied this strongest instinct of self-preservation. They found themselves defined by their identity as Indians, not just self-seeking individuals. They died for a vision. For freedom. Was it just from the colonial rule? No, it was a dream to set all individuals and Indians from the slaving chains inside, chains of narrow parochial means, of moral apathy, of criminal negligence of murderous assault on ones fellow human being, of blindness to self-evident acts of abuse, of saddest old eyes left on road looking at the Mercedes shooting away, of abused young women left on the roads to bear more and more criminalised behaviour by the people of the same species. As a homage to these martyrs, let us open our eyes and see the larger picture. At least be a bit more caring for the world around us. As free individuals we have to pay this nominal fee at least!   

Nirbhya

 

She was somebody’s daughter with common girlish dreams. She had a name like any other girl. She was looking up to future like any other girl. She was just like any other girl seeking her share of happiness in the hustle and bustle of Delhi. Now she has an official name Nirbhya, the fearless. But as she died, it is unimaginable to gauge the fear she must have faced, the agony she must have undergone. People know her as the victim of an unimaginably gory crime. Her honour decimated, her innards pulled out by the rapists. She died to bring many surviving dead souls to life from the killing apathy. There are no Christmas festivities in Delhi. There is no festive air. Nobody is bothered about welcoming the year 2013 waiting less than a week’s soufflés away in the dying wintery year. India is in the grip of a mass realisation: It’s high time they show respect to the girls and the women.   

This is the longest night! Our conscience frozen into an inhuman hibernation! In the frigid gloom, the devils shed bloods on the white snowy sheet of our social fabric. A painful cry echoes through the land of lifeless corpses! It pulls the dead souls out of their quilted, warm graves and they swarm around the tombstone of the higher mortals’ graves, crying and shouting to awake them out of their perennial, impotent sleep!

 

The cold-smitten dates of the third week of December raise some hopes! Anna Movement, Kejriwal Movement, Ramdev Movement, all had a leader fighting for a common cause. But the people gathered on Rajpath to march towards the Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament House to shout at their indifferent red stone walls are not doing it for glory. They are driven by a mammoth shame; a collective feeling of guilt; they need an outlet to shed their share in the tragedy. These young boys and girls are no followers of some socially conscious individual. Each and every individual braving the cold water and police batons is a leader to himself/herself! It is not for media; it is not for a long plan of action for a dream future; it is no systematised stage show! It is simple; it is from the heart; it is fought with a faceless, selfless bravery! These are the bleeding hearts; carrying over the plight and pain of the girl fighting for life in the hospital. Thousands shout her plight; thousands cry for justice. Caught in the jaws of death; her life torn apart by the very hands that could well have been solacing brotherly, if the devil inside the perpetrators would have been aware of the word ‘sister’—she now has a reason to get a forgiving smile for these thousands of brothers and sisters crying for justice from her side.  

Thousands of young people throng the area around the citadel of power. Each and every member is a pioneer, a leader! It is a movement started by the leaders. Busy in petty household chores, and guiltily watching it on the TV, even in the most Hindi-movie-driven heroic fancy, one cannot visualise himself/herself more than pissing on the Parliament after somehow managing to sneak through the barricade. The beholder of such impotent law that allows such criminal acts against women, and that too one after another, does not deserve better treatment.

Forget about law, justice and the government. People are foremost. A cause has to first jolt the courts in their hearts. We are responsible for this nasty assault on humanity. We have allowed things to culminate in such an inhuman tragedy. Thousands of cases of molestation in varying degrees pass on a daily basis as routine things. People allow them to occur; criminal apathy! This pandering of the smaller evils by the court of conscience in the thousands of spectators on the footbaths, crowded buses and metros and bazaars just leads to criminal loopholes at the administrative levels. First thing: If you are a good human being and theoretically shout ‘Capital Punishment to the rapists!’, you have to get eligibility to shout this slogan by at least taking a vow to interfere when some petty male molests a girl or women in any form or degree before your eyes. If the courts of humanity inside us will not allow thousands of such indecent things on a daily basis, the higher courts and administration will also not spare the evil-doers at bigger chronic stages.

We are the law! We hold the court inside our civilized hearts. Leave the bigger crime acts to the judiciary. We, as the carriers of that tiny court of humanity inside us, can well afford to dispense justice from our own ends in street-side regular cases of violations of norms against women, by promptly condemning the criminal for the deed, to be followed by a few hard slaps to serve the cause of justice. The case has to be closed then and there and spare the over-burdened judiciary to continue settling thousands of self-evident ghastly crime acts that are pending for decades.

The latest incidence is not in abstract. It has come to hit the last nail in the coffin of women plight in Delhi to seal its fate to suffer and survive in fear and insecurity even in the broad day light. Hundreds of such cases and incidences have been tonking at the courts of our conscience and the thick walls of governance for decades. It has been caused by a bigger criminal act by all: individuals, society, government, police and judiciary. Delhi is being run by an experienced old lady for a decade and half. If the intensity of crime against the women is getting sharper teeth to tear the moral fabric to pieces, then shame should loom large on her face if ever her inner voice gives her some credit for being a successful administrator! India is being handled in proxy by another lady for a decade. It is high time that she feels finally like a woman and not like a mechanically principled Nehru family Queen thinking 365×24×7 just about retaining the political clout of the family to ultimately install the Yuvraj as the King of India.

This country is not short of those bookish theologians who will drag you into the psychology of crime to prove the ineffectivity of the capital punishment. To be hell with such idiots and put their analytical brains in boiling oil and feed to the rapists in jails who fatten themselves on our public money. Capital punishment serves its purpose. Hang these six bastards and then see the crime graph in Delhi.

There are undercurrents of good and bad in almost all human beings. We came out of the caves to civilise ourselves by taming the beast by putting up chains of deterrence in various forms: social conventions, ethics, family relationships, beliefs and lawful punishment. When they started wagging tongues against the capital punishment, it was under the blind belief that we have become sufficiently civilised to self-contain the bad in us to a degree that would not allow us to get into heinous manifestations of crime. But dears, these assumptions fail miserably in the devils still lurking around in stinking corridors of sub-human existence interspersed with the cleaner faces of our society. Socio-economic development in these grey areas is a generational shift and the theoreticians can dump their capital and jobs and work in these slums to change their surroundings and material possessions and then later on clean the shit of their brains. We but in the cleaner by lanes of the society want safety for our law-abiding generation by having this feeling that there is capital punishment against the crime that is tormenting the body and souls of almost all the women and girls in Delhi.

Hang them please!