Legitimate Tears

When your dreams lie shattered around you, do not cry. If you do that you do injustice in more than one sense of the term. One simple mathematical fact: Shedding tears would not help in anyway. Understood that there are scattered pieces of the diamonds you had been working on. Now they are broken, sharp and may cut through flesh if you just close your eyes and prefer to cry. Kids have a copyright over crying and rightly so. We elders can spare this copyright infringement. Just look around the dashed diamonds, your so called broken dreams. Just see the glimmer in still shapely left out pieces. The dream is the soul; it just cannot die if some hammer momentarily dislodges its outer shape. No hammer in the world has the luck to kiss the soul of your dream. Its always safe. That’s its fate. Simply. Plainly. Why cry if the thing has not died. If you do, its just like mourning the death of someone who is still alive. I think we can simply avoid this irrational act. Broken shards of your dreams are, let us say, the blood-thirsty and hard chisels. They can help you in cutting through such mighty rocks as you could have never imagined. So it is simply better to cut bigger rocks for larger prospects instead of allowing the pieces to cut through your physical and mental selves.

Storms

Storms are storms. Just storms. Nothing else. They do not have much to offer both to nature and humans. They swirl, shriek, shake and prance occupied by an illogical spirit. It is just like nature throwing tantrums. But tantrums are never substantial man; they are just a fragile symbol of something going out of loop for some moments. Look at nature, storms are just temporary, tiny speed-breakers on its peacefully laid out benevolent road of survival, sustenance and evolution. It applies to our lives as well. So when the ship of our being gets jolted by the angry winds just remember this is not the substance of your life. It lies in miles of peaceful, dreamy and majestic waters waiting to kiss the hull of your ship. Coming back to the poor storm. It is just a puny piece of funny quirkiness possessed with suicidal and self-consuming dispirited and rampant self. It dances in pain. While it fizzes and fumes, it burns in its own fire. It dies. While its cremation takes place just be a good pyre-keeper and fulfill all the rights diligently. But keep a safe distance from the fire. It is sure to die. And, more importantly, you are sure to survive to see the flowers blossoming in that very dead ash. So please believe in peace, in tranquility, in harmony, in noiseless distances waiting for you while you feel the heat of the burning aberration. Be a spectator. Be a valiant survivor. Do it for the sake of normal, undisturbed nautical miles lined up to allow the passage of your ship to a lush green island of your destination, where you can drop anchor and enjoy the stillness of life for sometime. It has to be done. Because the course of normalcy is self-sustaining, kind, beneficent, forgiving and parental. The storm just burns in its fury. Allow it to do it. Harmony, orderliness and tranquility draw life-giving sips from their own substance, from the core of their own essence. So be a good businessman. Join the latter's’ bandwagon. For you own gain.

Congress Vs. Anna

Congress has derailed Anna movement to a great extent. The old hag of a party! The party and its handlers are too clever, witty and power-lorn to be outsmarted by the social worker. Anna's movement jolted it, to begin with. It was a social movement, a mass movement. Blatant corruption and nepotism had left big scars on the conscience of well-to-do middle and upper middle class of India. Fortunately these literal scars were equal, if not bigger, to the real scars of the poor masses, the aam admi who gave the Honourable Italian-born iron lady a decade to wield all powers without any responsibilities. And what did they do? They just redefined the contours of coalition politics in almost criminal manner. Shared interest policy became just a policy of blindfolding the conscience and constitutionality to allow the allies and cronies to amass as much wealth as possible. They just eyed successful completion of a full term. But at what cost? Who paid the cost? We did it man! We the struggling and toiling masses of India, silently and law-abidingly continued to add to our struggle to match the horribly rising monthly budgets. On the other end of the tunnel, our political akaas just stashed the money of our labour in Swiss accounts. It was an open secret. All of us knew what was going on. But what can a bread-earning bunch of frustrated souls do. It can just grumble. And we just grumbled till Anna gave a voice to all these harmless bickerings. Lo! The sinewy tributaries merged to form a tidal wave at Ramleela ground. It literally submerged the wrong-handlers of our well-meant parliamentary democracy. But Congress is Congress my dears! It will just stick to its ways. At any cost! Under public bombardment, the Congressites dodged, feigned nonchalance, pretended even concern; but all along the way they were up to a smart plan to change a mass social movement to a political one so that it loses its savioural social identity to become a big political gimmick like its own. They know that they can outsmart any group on the political platform. So poor Anna has been systematically dragged into the political arena where the fight is not going to be one-sided like earlier. There will be punches from both sides. Anna was fighting on a holy pedestal where even the semi-goons of Congress were afraid to take direct or indirect pot-shots. Now they have dragged him into a muddy field. The same familiar game. Best wishes Anna sahib! You are up for something new now! Good luck! But please do not feel disheartened by smaller numbers at the next chosen venue of your agitation because the sharp edge of typical tricky Congressite political wit has punctured the high-flying balloon of your ideology.

Salutes Delhi

Salutes Delhi! You are two-eyed. But they have different visions, different dreams, different destinations. One of your pan-shots swankily zooms on the glizz-nd-glamour of resurgent India. Whether it is right-eye pan-shot or left-eye, I do not know. But yes the other eye's camera shot pervasively covers the classic tragedies spread out in black and white. Its a grizzled, murky screen having classic comicities and tragedies spinning, whirring around the same axis. Its Muhharram today. Many a offices are closed. It just means you can drop your purse on the DTC bus floor and still left with a realistic chance of retrieving it. So at least you could see a fee feet around you. Great solace. The air too was not stuffed with guffaws let out by infected throats and lungs, disordered stomachs, cheap scents and Deos from Palika Bazaar and above all the usual individual and collective frustrations. See when TATA offered these buses (along with the kickbacks per piece and which was more important to our rampant governmentvallahs ) the real cost of the machine was just meant to carry this type of load. The festival load. Once in a time load when people do not travel on account of holidays or some other emergency.

On this observable stage a 14-year-old man-kid jumbled into the finally justified interiors of the poor green line. Boy he was the man! Carried a pole that would tower above the poor bus if their vertical components competed. He slanted it, his small hands manoeuvred it smartly and the camel was safely in the room. The pole was the dancing axis of so many types of cheapest kid toys as you might say can be afforded by the childhood mushrooming in slums. All fellow-riders watched him in half amuse and half irritation. Lampoons like yours truly even laughed at the free show. Anyways, coming back to this character valiantly playing its part in the grizzly black and white ever spooling movie. He rushed to the conductor seat after killing all the apprehensions and objections of the busvallaha about the pole falling and the kids-stuff getting a playground on their heads. The boy-entrepreneur got DTC day-pass costing 40 rupees. Man o man! How much this kid earned to afford the pass. Anyways that is none of our concern like most of the Delhi things should not be. One fact was inescapable: the well-meant boy was well-prepared for the day. The way he had tied the muffler, the way his cheap jacket was buttoned up to the collar, the way trouser well-fitted his thin legs and the way well-cleaned shoes purchased from the road-side hawker, all these portended a good successful business plan.

One problem with new DTC bus is that its door opens too invitingly with a hiss, as if it is specially inviting you for a joy-ride. Carried by the swift winds of one such invitation, an Advasi family raided the semi-occupied bus. The conductor baulked, 'Not without tickets you thieves!' 'Hutt you miser, we have money!' the black old lady draped in a big raggy blanket shouted. God knows how many of them were! It was a collectively lampoonish unit cocking a snook at the organized hordes of Delhi. One monkey-like infant immediately grabbed the hand-rails overhead and tried gymnastics. One of its hands also busted the balloon tied at the upper end of the toy pole. Both its owner and conductor shrieked painfully. So many raggish kids carried their unsuspecting selves to the empty seats and dumped the gypsy spirit for a while. Their neighbours almost vomited. A sleek lady carried a toddler on her shoulder, one infant in her lap and most probably the another one inside her as the glossy black bulge of her abdomen shone from the short kurti she was wearing above the gracious folds of a dirty long skirt. It just became a thoroughfare. The conductor fought for tickets. They stood their positions, gibberishly, savagely. And where were they going? Whole of NCR was their destination. It was just a matter of holding onto the ride till the fight with conductor acquired serious colours. And the moment it did, they just dumped themselves with the same teasing indecency like they had raided the bus and vanished from the scene. Delhi, salutes! You bear witness to the two movie-makings by the camera lenses in your eyes!

Early winter musings

Farmers are always done in...fucked in fact. Either it’s the impersonal hand of God that simply holds them by ears and smilingly makes them see the mysterious spectacle of undoing all their hard work. If God gets ready to do some more important undoings somewhere else, thus sparing the tillers for some time, Government does it from His side. Low prices hit the farmers even worse, because here they complete the crop cycle with certain dreams but return almost empty-handed from the market. So caught between these two supernatural forces, the poor farmer gets just one weather-saved and market-saved crop in four seasons. And that surplus keeps him on the path of survival. This time paddy has been fucked by the Govt.-cum-market forces. I have seen light in an old farmer's eyes, 12 years ago, when he sold Basmati rice at Rs. 2600/quintal. Mind it that was more than a decade ago. Can you believe the same stuff fetched a paltry 1400 to his son? Almost half! Meanwhile costs of farming inputs have skyrocketed. It just defies logic. Capitalism how can you leave a certain section in lurch like this. A landless farmer from my village had taken a portion of my land on rent for paddy farming. The sum we agreed upon was just on the basis of expected price of 1800/quintal. He returned from market and did as you can image. It was just a sentimental landvalla and a crying landless farmer. So I had to share his loss. But this act of philanthropy left a hole in my pocket. If market forces and the shining economy of India, for their survival, presume such acts of kindness from semi-poor guys like me, then to be hell with such a system. I think those who have lakhs of crores in Swiss accounts are better for this task. But you beat the Swami who talks of getting that money back. Another farmer, nursing the market insult, was just hatefully staring at the stunted growth of his winter tomatoes. An ex-serviceman, in late forties, this farmer has been working with all his army ethics on his small landholding. 'This country is up for bloodbath, I tell you!' he fretted. Gosh! Guys there was real fire in his eyes and practical intent in his words. 'The fuckers have stashed all the money in Swiss accounts. That’s our money man. While they cheat us through low agricultural product prices and very high cost of livelihood. The behen****s... ', sorry guys an angry farmer cannot do without gali-sali, 'have fucked farmers at all fronts.' 'Unemployment...these graduate farmers of 21st century India are not dumbos like their forefathers. Believe me man the day will come when they will just barge in Parliament and just kill the lawmakers there!' Dear-o-dear what a stormy spectacle it became. He was literally shaking as if we just had the first leader of peasant uprising from this part. Just imagine what if Anna-type movement is caught in the whirl-wind of such disgruntled hard workers! The future seems really up for some jerks and pulls.

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Why does truth pinch most of the time? Simple! Because it is no chocolate, sugar candy or mellowable sweetie-pie lump of ice cream. It is hard, sour, iron ball guys. It has pinching rough stony edges to its surface. Come into contact with them and they will take a few flakes from your skin leaving a red or purple bruise depending on the intensity of truth contained in it. Now the question arises, 'Why does it almost always leave a grimace on our face instead of a smile?' The simple fact that all of us almost always rub cold shoulders against this ironed ball having thorns for our soft skin, proves on fact: that we are not subjectively inclined to accept the objective reality as it stands in abstract. But does not that mean that we have moved poles apart from truth and its manifestations while going on the path of individual and collective improvisations at the subjective level. May be the reason for our success in emerging at the top of food chain in the game of 'survival of the fittest' is that we have institutionalized ourselves to negate and defy, and do without, certain basic truths that form the core of creation and nature. Nothing wrong with that! It, however, is paradoxical that most of these scions of truth--against which we have always been taking cudgels--form the core of our moral, humanistic, religious, spiritual and aesthetic vision enshrined in preach books. Strange!

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Early winter mornings are fresh even in the polluted and dirty sections of NCR. Heavily encumbered sectors in Noida do have their share of early-morning charm as they try to find out the order and symmetry meant for them in master plans. They cannot see much among the defecating, exciting, commercial, crash and crying hulla-bullo going around. The buildings are semi-daunting: a curious mix of residential-cum-commercial styles. You see a bit of house, a bit of manufacturing unit, a bit of service industry, a bit of business, a bit of exploitation, a bit of comfort, a bit of pain, a bit of life and a bit of death. It is a self-absorbed world, a cesspool, a whirling system drawing so many survival-lorn masses from nooks and corners of India. They live identity-less here. The enterprise thrives here. The malik goes smirk in his big car. The labourers go pitifully, deeply shackled by the duties and falling bodily and mental notions of being a human--and how can you expect to be Ganga-clean if you eat, drink and sleep at the very place where others and you defecate and procreate at the same time. You find a kid left alone in this non-caring world. A small sack on his back. The rag picker. He has manly eyes and a kid’s stature. When you are left alone so early in your life to enjoy or suffer life on your own terms, you just become one of the thousands of flies fighting for as pace on shit and sweets with the same relish. You just know one side of life--survival. By any means and at whatever cost. And what does this survival produce: stunted, frail. sick, dehumanized, spiritless multitudes who just add to the census sheets of India. But they serve a purpose. They carry the shining tag of economic boom and growth on their frail shoulders. They survive by any means. That is their biggest achievement. The widow, the prostitute, the raped girl, the mad women(carrying the sex toy for so many frustrated and hungry souls). They beg, pickup rags, sell their diseased bodies, operate tea stalls, try to pick out the moments of the day while someone ignores the cancer warnings to buy those poisonous sashes carrying gutka and tobacco. They even cock a snook at the great plans in the plan books for this great Delhi suburb, the pride of Uttar Pradesh. They just settle down at any place in between the industries. Their tiny hovels,a curious world of dwarfs. But they live as tall people who sleep and fuck proudly in congested hiccuping afraid air and bring about additions to their world like ant swarms. You will see their holy places as well. A drop of gangajal in the sewage nullah gurgling with puss and bacteria of uncaring humanity. The mandir stands nonchalantly. It’s Gods having forsaken it. It was never accepted as their earthly shelter at all. Anyhow a poor man's God is no God at all. It has been proved. The mosque minaret too sulks over this majestic swarm lost in a terrifying fatality just somehow holding onto faith like their broken spirit holds onto their more broken bodies. A mere purposeless appendage. They have their open shit plots. The stench too overbearing and thus fighting to retain its status and repel any encroacher coming with a non-shit purpose. Just imagine what will be the garbage dump site of this bigger garbage pit—it is literally a hell hole. It but serves as the playground-cum-business-cum-schooling arena for the orphans, half-orphans, bastards, urchins, nameless boys and futureless girls. In this hell of a hole, a fat pig brushes its shit-smeared muzzle against the holy mouth of a robust bull chewing the half-shit fodder and lying at ease in this kaliyuga playground. Well, well...you just have to pass through just one street and get the gist of life in these perilously throbbing veins. The blood is poisoned. The organs are diseased. What is its future? May be even God does not know. Probably, He is not concerned at all. And why should he be! Because He is the king of heaven. Why should He have any business with such hells?

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Always there are easiest of routes to the toughest of destinations. Every hard situation has the softest of a solution. So there is no hard problem in the real sense. Our solutions make them so. When in the face of a tough situation blame your solution not the situation. Isn’t life all about taking smart short-cuts to beat the puzzling array of problems randomly cropping around us? So be the solution provider. Behind most complex of a phenomenon there is amazing simplicity. Read that. Those cute fundamentals will tell you that every situation is a living being. It has a soft and sympathetic message for you only. Listen to these delicate murmurs and it will help you in breaking hardest of superficial, outer cores.

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For the lovers of freedom, responsibilities sound as prison chains. Responsible people on the other hand find themselves squeezed in a tight corner by responsibilities which do not allow them to enjoy freedom. The question is: Are freedom and responsibility inherently contradictory in nature? Is it really possible to make them complementary to each other by melting the contradictory edges? 

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HOLLLAAAAA!!!!!!

For good people its very difficult to enter a relationship and still more difficult to come out of it! For bad people its very easy to get into a relationship and still easier to come out of it!  

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I think it always (without exception) helps not to lose your temper. When you lose your temper, you not only deprive somebody’s chances for more happiness; you in fact deprive yourself of the same. So why fall in the trap of such a bad bargain. If nobody gains anything out of it (except perhaps that hypothetical and flimsy enemy of ours, called “ego”) why invest in such a loser scheme?  —Sandeep Dahiya

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May be there is a fixed quota of suffering in the cosmic account book of karma to be doled out to the humanity. If that be the case then feel proud for bearing the heavier load from the destiny’s side, while so many others trudge ahead with unjustifiably lighter weights on their shoulders. Feel proud that God considers you as a tough guy capable of handling the issues on the wrong side of the fence. While you sweat it out with the larger issues, possibly your each and every step paves the road for some easy stroll by a frail fellow human being. Just carry on mighty guys! No use in browbeating now! You have been chosen for breaking the tough nut so that many a weak teeth can munch survival crumbs.    —Sandeep Dahiya