About Me

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Hi, this is somebody who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street was too intimidating. Passing through the quieter by-lane I intend to reach a solitary path, laid out just for me, to reach my destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy. (www.sandeepdahiya.com)

Monday, December 11, 2023

My noisy neighbors

 

I’m the most abused person this morning. You can say it with full confidence if you have a tailorbird couple training their just-out-of-nest chick in the art of calling, flying and survival. They have turned ultra-sensitive and start abusing with staggering impertinence the moment I step into the courtyard. My morning newspaper reading corner has been grabbed. The freshly hatched chick is flapping its wings for little flights from one branch to another in the clump of plants in the corner. It’s almost as big as its parents minus the tail. As I try to focus on the news in the paper there is a constant barrage of drilling notes into my brain. Even the noisy news items look so peaceful.

The longer-tailed gentleman is more audacious, comes nearer with warning tweets. He has a nice bow-tie kind of spot on the neck and carries a rusty brown head. Whenever I get up from the garden chair, they change their tweeting as a mark of victory, of the enemy being routed. Well, defeat might be surrender sometimes, but victory is a matter of perception only. They have a right to perceive it as a victory. Sometimes Papa bird comes very near as if to take a nibble at my nose. Luckily for me he missed it. Then they tried bird-dropping upon me but the tiny spot on my newspaper proved that they missed it as well. It seemed to make them angrier. Their shrill notes can drill a hole in any brain. It’s better to accept defeat.

The ant hole is just nearby where I sit. The ants have put on weight. Believe me, they have! If you look carefully, you can even see the ants putting on weight. They look darker and glossier now.

An ode to a snail

 

Next time you come across a snail give it a bit more respect than you did earlier. They move slowly as if carrying carefully cultivated, standstill reflections but they hold the recipe of beauty as well. Latest skincare products use snail mucin, snail secretion filtrate, which is found to be effective in skin healing, regeneration, works as a nice exfoliant, soothes and hydrates the skin, has anti-aging properties, removes acne scars and much more. Currently the Korean culture is high-riding the fame horse from music to movies. Snails have been a part of Korean beauty concoctions since ancient times. O thou conjuring satraps, whenever you come across a snail next time, slow down your pace to its own, take a pause, move a few centimeters alongside the guy always at ease, salute it. Maybe being balanced, poised and at pause holds the secret secretion of beauty.

Run your race

 

A Haryanvi woman, Rambai, aged 105, has set up a new record in 100 m sprint at National Open Masters Athletics Championship in above-100 class. Why should age cut on your burgeoning aspirations? She was the sole participant but that didn’t stop her from improving the record from previous 74 s to 45.40 s. The old woman with a young spirit set up a record, overcoming the old-age hurdles as if egged on by a kind of spiritually sustained surge. So sometimes the mere decision to run and participate makes you a champion. You start as a winner even before you take the first step if you have overcome the mental block and broken the conservative cliques that tame you. And how will you set your individual best if you choose not to run at all. Forget about nine something seconds. Focus on your own timing and try to improve it. However, a bit of competition is also handy in pushing one to better limits. Rambai would have done even better if there was some other octogenarian participant helping the champion just by her presence.

Ink-smudged fingers

 

The major advantage of using fountain pen was in having this proud feeling that you have worked really hard in the laborious, extremely engaging art of penmanship. Who won’t feel this way at witnessing blotches of ink on one’s fingers after writing a few lines? One surely felt like a hardworking ploughman. You feel like you have been busy on the piece for weeks and very near to contriving perfection. The ballpoint pen hardly leaves a mark on your fingers even after writing many pages, leaving you in doubt whether you have been really committed to the writing task at hand. 

Friday, December 8, 2023

A saga of diminishing libidos, love pursuits, PDA and PDL

The lethal most Public Display of Lust (PDL) I have witnessed goes like this. It was a bull in full heat of the moment—in hormonal terms. Sadly there was no cow in sight. The red-hot excited bull must have had a great sense of visualization. If not for this how would you digest the sight of a bull riding a scooty. The bull visualized  the scooty as a cow. There are always alternatives. Aren’t there? The scooty was parked by the roadside. A nice white scooty, smaller than a cow. So the bull raised its front legs and landed on it for lovemaking, mating, raping, call it whatever. It shocked and jolted the human senses for a moment but then everyone laughed, hollered, guffawed.

The craziest, all-defiant love pursuit I have seen goes like this. It was a massive male buffalo. A free-roamer allowed to graze in the fields in return for mating with domesticated buffaloes to sire colts and getting fresh milk in the family. It would go lumbering across the village streets, graze in the fields, cordially welcomed to fulfill the needs of the buffaloes at the time of seeding. The buffalo bull should have treated all the females in the village equally, with equal affection. But then it fell in love with a young filly. It was a very attractive young buffalo. He just went crazy for her. He knew that she would come of age soon and then he would get an opportunity to be the father of her colt. He lost interest in the rest of the buffaloes. She would be there in the shade of the barn and he would wait in the street, sitting in burning June heat, waiting for the evening to come when they took her out for watering at the village pond. Then he would accompany her to the pond, walking fondly with her, gentling shoving her, licking her skin. He won’t go into the fields to graze and thus was losing weight. Spellbound by her, he wasn’t be interested in mating with other buffaloes. The people started calling him Majnu. The owner of the young buffalo filly took it as an attempt to tarnish their reputation. People started joking it as if it was an attempt at the family owner. The farmer would beat him with sticks. But he would bear all this just to be with his love interest.

The grandest fight one gives to prove one’s libido even in old age was presented by the village’s one-eyed community buffalo bull. We called him Kana, for he had lost one eye in a fight with a rival. He was a massive bull. In his heydays he sired hundreds of colts in the village and was thus the cause of bringing fresh milk to scores of rural houses. But then age caught with him. He but would try to keep his fiefdom still intact. I remember it once when he fell down in an attempt to get onto a young buffalo. The onlookers laughed and made derogatory puns at his vanishing stamina and strength. Maybe the old buffalo took it to heart. And to prove a point that his power was just the same, he carried the momentum right there on the ground. We saw him convulsing with lust on the ground. The poor old bull was trying to drill a hole in the earth to prove a point. It was pretty hilarious that day. When we try to be what we are no longer, we simply turn a joke. Don’t we?

And just today I saw the bravest Public Display of Affection (PDA): A cow and a bull standing right there in the middle of the busy road at the entrance to the town; in full foreplay mood, licking each other with the very same pleasure treasure that each species seems to run after on earth. We respect cows and the vehicles would divert to the sides to allow them this holy PDA. And here I am going on my scooty marveling at their holy audacity. The only point of mismanagement was that he chose the wrong moment to try to materialize the peak of affection. He went for the heave just when I was crossing over. I was at a safe distance but still the shuffling and movement brought them precariously close. It was a momentary scare. He would have risen in love to the crest of ecstasy and I would have fallen as a fruit of their love. I’m glad not to have become the casualty of a PDA.