The entire story of Rashe Ram's schooling

 

Rashe Ram went to school for four days, or just three and half to be precise. All families in the villages at least try to put their wards in the shafts of the schooling cart. Most of the yoked imps galloped to freedom without wasting too much time. They still do so in the villages but things have improved marginally in this regard. Master Sube Singh pulled little Rashe’s ears on day one. It was painful. A round of defecation on the carpet in the school verandah earned his ears to be literally pulled out on day two. Day three came with urination on the floor and a bite on the face of a fellow student, which earned him a severe shaking of his head, ruffled hair and big reprimand. Some repeat of the earlier tasks earned him a beating around mid-day on the fourth day. As he was caned, he took an impish opportunity to hit the teacher’s head with his wooden writing tablet. There was blood. He fled from the school forever. But he tried to keep his younger brothers Karne and Munna in school. It was done with a sense of inflicting torture on his siblings. They were in class five and six respectively. Bhoop would get drunk and harass the boys, plundered their lunch and eat it. It became a habit with the big-time neighborhood drunk. So Rashe, all of thirteen or fourteen, beat the liquor lover. He later beat the thinnest sloshed Raame over some issue. These are three violent acts that he committed in life. The rest is all love with three or four poor peasant women who surrender to his animalistic charms as an escapade from the hard facts of life.

Fast, faster, fastest

 

On October 1, 2022 5G services were launched in India. The most interesting marketing feature—that would inevitably see the millennials running to upgrade their network, forcing the middle-aged and the elderly to copy them later—is that a two-hour movie would be downloaded in just ten seconds. With the old 4G technology it takes seven to eight minutes. I’m not against technology but I think we have been running faster and faster to save time. With 6G we would seek to get it done in one second. Then the race would enter the echelons of nanoseconds. My only curiosity is when will we pause to enjoy the fruit of our time-saving technologies. Despite the best of our time savers, we are busier than ever. I think the race against time will finally burn us up—like a meteorite burns to nothingness as it crashes through earth’s atmosphere. And why do we run faster and faster? It’s due to our dynamic belief that found sitting, then walking, then jogging we give the impression of being backward. So still faster we have to run. We have now a vast human sprawl on this tiny planet. So running faster creates huffing-puffing avenues to keep the new load busy and engaged. But then we are heading for an explosion!

Father and Son

 

My brother Amit is a cool and composed IT professional. He has never been ambitious in the sense that we see people toppling apple carts to rise in careers and professions. A handsome six-footer he has never been too eager to shake the stage too enthusiastically to make his presence felt. At the beginning of planning a career he showed zeal for joining the Indian army and gave a serious try but things won’t work out. Then he dropped the yoke of career aspirations for some time. He took to farming on a part of our land and after finishing the tasks in the morning, he would settle down, after taking a relaxing bath, dressed very-very casually, to read newspaper under the neem tree in front of our house. Father had retired by that time and pulled the family cart with his pension money. Father would smoke and drink tea throughout the day. He still maintained his routine of leaving the house in the morning like during his office days. But now it was the little tea shop in the town where a few of his friends gathered to pass time. He would return from the town in the afternoon.

As he reached home, Father would—having failed to incite his younger son into a volcanic eruption regarding career even with almost cataclysmic fatherly outpours of care, concern and anger—greet the newspaper-reading gentleman with a question in great Krishnamurti’s style, ‘Sir, are you a retired pensioner?’ ‘No sir!’ Amit would reply with a slight embarrassment. Later on, Amit made a career in the IT sector, a bit belated though. But now is doing quite well in his job.

The common story of a common homemaker

 

Rajesh comes from a small village in a neighboring district. He learnt the most basic of education concerning reading and then decided to know about life in the living workshop itself. He worked as an apprentice to a lead acid battery maker, commuting daily to work at the town in crowded buses plying on famished roads. Discipline and diligence paid off and he evolved in profession. Now he has his own shop and sells both his own products as well as fancier brands.

His family stays in a nice little house at the town. His children go to an English medium school. Thanks to my buying a few inverter batteries from him, he is now a trustable friend. He seemed very concerned about my financially unproductive writing venture when I told him that I’m writing a book. A few months down the line, during our next meeting, after a frank discussion about the financial prospects of his battery business, he threw the ball in my court. ‘Have you completed that coppy?’ he enquired in all brotherly seriousness. To him writing, page, notepad, notebook, file, diary, book, tome everything is a simple ‘coppy’. I was clueless about this ‘coppy’. Then he picked up his dog-eared tiny pocket diary where he noted the stats of his business, mostly about the errant clients who delayed payments, and brandished it, ‘Yes coppy. You were writing a coppy na?’ So I assured him that my coppy was going well. At least it rhymes with ‘shoppy’. The latter happens to be the farmers’ version of the classical ‘Sufi’ christened upon me by my father.

The hollowness of words

 

Each word is incomplete, just an abstract, broken fragment born of thoughts arising in the mind. And the mind itself is a grainy fragment of the overall consciousness. Words are mere grains of sand. With sand grains we try to make castles, huge castles that we make in pursuance of the ever-missing meaning of life. Sand slips, we go for awkward flips. Words are mere broken arrows. How will one even win a battle with broken arrows? Words are mere sparks, temporary flashes coming out of the endless coffers of silence. They just give a little flash of light around our feet as we grope in the darkness seeking a way out of our puzzles. Words are mere temporary twinklings on the vast canvas of silence. They themselves tell their story of incompleteness, their own meaninglessness behind all the meanings ascribed to them. And the moment we listen to their story, we arrive at the moral of the final story. The moral of their story is silence: silence and emptiness behind all this noise and happening. And as I write this, huge rumblings of megh naad, the rumblings of clouds, buzz across my head. A booming cosmic storm that chucks out the outer shell of words, crushes the stones to spread the sand to go flying with the winds. The words getting sucked into a cosmic cascade and whirlpool of energy. And beyond that silence there is a void full of potential for all the noise.