Frog Fella

There was this frog fella in a well, in a village rather; for what else is a village--a small world, where the water in the well, they think, is the world, and the round patch of sky visible above is the whole universe. This frog fella croaked a bit differently from the rest of them. So the mustached bull frogs who croaked like worst-throated donkeys declared him the prince Alexander who could conquer the world. 'Son now is the time to jump out of this narrow confine and tell those non-frogs outside who make so much of noise that we mean business now!' they croaked in chorus.

They propelled him out and it landed in the noisy big world of super-sophisticated frogs. It nearly got crushed under the wheels of a speeding car! Well, the Alexander frog on a mission! But what to win and run after!? The world of these smarter frogs seemed lost in directionless circles, madly frenzied, circles after circles, and still going nowhere!!! 'I will take fastest circles!' the new arrival thought. Caught in a dizzy it fell and rolled out of the trajectory to find itself by a cheap wine outlet. When it came to its senses, a stray dog stared at it sympathetically. 'I licked your face to bring you back to senses!' the dog-humanist smiled. So our Alexander aspirant reconsidered its options. These fellows cannot be beaten in circular orbits, I have to revise my strategy. So the frog reconsidered its options. It just decided to walk, not run, in circulars. 'At least I would not fall and get a face-wash from a dog!' it thought.

Back home there were buffalo female frogs, who could carry him on their strong backs. Strong, sturdy, manlike!!! Here the frog saw, for the first time, the ones who would pass by your side and still not create typhoon around you to make you land on your poor ass!! 'Ohhoo...its a wonderful place yaar' our dusted, to-be-Alexander frog fella mused. He denounced the old world full of brutes and devils. Fell in love with the new world. There was this still prettier phenomenon. Male and female frogs going around with uneventful bonhomie! It was in sharp contrast to the pairing back home: it was just fighting both in lovemaking and the rest of the time.

Its eyes popped out of its sockets when it saw such a beautiful girl frog. The poor guy just lost his sense. It put all that world-beating, gung-go and brave spirit into one particular surrender to a sentiment. Back home it earns a few kicks by the whiskered bull frogs or even by the man-like girl frogs. The frog guy put all his bravado in open submission to this sentiment. It felt like a world beater! Just landed in a pool, confined itself in this sweet prison. This is the world, it thought. In the silent pools of its majestic waters, it swam backstrokes on full moon nights and sung love-croaked songs in the noisy chaos around that no longer existed for it. Now it would not listen to the Tau-frogs. 'Come out you idiot, we will pull out you skin and make a cap for the ugliest boy frog in our place!' they threw pebbles. It just dived and did not resurface for amazingly long periods of times, staying underwater in hibernation, lost in that girl frog's imagination.

Off and on that girl frog playfully threw a few stones into the water that created further storms both in the water and in its heart. Few of these pebbles even hit its snout and turned it redder than before. But it felt so happy for its bloodied fate. They sounded better than the embraces of those devilish girl frogs back home. 'You just take care fella, if we find you out we will just de-juice you in a crusher along with you hypnotized spirit and love-infested heart!' the fattest Tau-frog yelled. 'Tau you just go back and get beaten by Tai in your effort to ride her!!' our love-lorn prince protruded its tongue at venerable Tau, even showed index finger, its latest learnt things at the smarter place.

They just waited for him. Silently. The chap croaked so many love songs day in out that its throat gave in. Summers came. Furious. Smart girl frog had many cooler things to attend to. Water in the encaging pond started evaporating. It went on getting muddier with the rising temperatures. So our frog fella appeared blackish, mossy like a tiny crocodile. 'Let me see U Chappaganjuu how long you remain out of my stick's strike' Tau-frog waiting patiently by the ingressing shoreline harked. 'Tau go away, i will throw mud at you!' it tried to defend.

So, guys, one day as it was supposed to happen, our frog fella was found almost half-dead in the muddy moisture of his escaping prison. Tau just picked it up, gave a few good strikes to steal its still left out senses. They then dragged him back to the old world, threw him into the small well. 'See how much mud it carries' they croaked. ‘Turned out to be bad,’ someone said. ‘No its not his fault, there is just mud outside,’ another one consoled. ‘It’s a city-returned, I will take care of it,’ a sturdy girl frog volunteered and lifted the half-dead, muddy prince.                    

Homage to the Martyrs

While you go full throttle on weekend enjoyments, take a moment out 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. 23 March, Sahid Divas of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev!!! At each step we take liberty as 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 Indians. 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 criminalized 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!!!!   

My Friend Peelu

Weekends in my village are sort of rejuvenating moments. These are fast changing times. But village and villagers still hold onto lot of so called outdated, traditional stuff which is both exciting and objectionable both at the same time.

There is this street dog named 'peelu' that is getting stronger on collective offals at various doorsteps. It belongs to all and to nobody at the same time. It will acknowledge your acquaintance by swaying its tail as you pass through the street and barks through night as the watchman of the area.

Yesterday I decided to have a stroll by the village pond and the loyal animal, its tail taut as a mark of respect and loyalty, followed me to this village-side bunch-grass and shrubbery dotting the pond's shoreline. There was this donkey, medium built and really docile looking, that caught my attention. A village is a village. I can recall so many moments from childhood when we had rides on donkey backs, held them by ears, sometimes three boys riding at the same time. Those reflections caught hold of me. There was this innocently rascal urge to hold this innocuous being by ears and go for a ride.

I tried to approach as harmlessly as possible. But just as my fingertips said hello to the animal's ears, it got unjustifiably offended. After all its the duty of a donkey to carry load man. But like most of us forgetting duties, it started flailing its legs in four directions. Panicked I took an evasive leap. This is where the dog decided to intervene from my side. Peelu, the carrier of this tag of being man's best friend from ancient times, gave a few more twists to the emblem of its bravery and loyalty, its tail, and attacked.

One simple fact: One should not reach the flailing range of a donkey legs from behind, even if you are a lion. The effort will award you with at least a broken jaw or rib. But then overzealous Peelu had to prove that he is worth all the chapattis that we offer him. These are bad times man. Loyalty fetches you many bruises and few trophies. The poor thing got a good shot in its flanks. The impact found it rolling on ground. Then boy O boy, all the ideological stuff out of its brain, it ran at unheard of speed, its tail between legs, and whining that sounded more cursing me rather than the donkey.

'Peelu you idiot, how can you leave a friend in lurch like this!' I felt like shouting from behind. But it had forgotten everything. Just vanished out of sight, From a distance I said sorry to the offended animal. Man these are the days of empowerment across species. Gone are the days of those rightless, mute, uncomplaining animals of the past who gave us some of the best moments of our childhood. 'Sorry boss, this craving to ride your back without your permission was illegal and you are within your rights to create repercussions of these sort!' I said from a distance. It snorted and gave me angry, offended looks. I increased the distance between us lest it should carry the notion of justice too far and set after me.

Back in the village I saw my run-away friend. It limped and walked with its tail free to hang in any direction. 'Peelu how are you!' I said. It did not mind me too much now. Just turned its head a bit in my direction and simply walked away as if was no longer interested in such risky friendships. 'But a friend in need is a friend indeed!' I thought of saying it loud and make it more bearable for him. But my friend was already out of sight. Bad days, very difficult to keep friendships alive.            

Pissable Parliament

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 bodies 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!

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. The people gathered on Rajpath to march towards 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 social-cause-conscious individual. Each and every individual braving 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 systematized stage show! It is simple; it is from heart; it is fought with a faceless, selfless bravery! These are bleeding hearts; carrying over the plight and pain of the girl fighting for life in 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 and 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 house-hold chores, and guiltily watching it on TV, even in my most Hind-movie-driven heroic fancy, I could not visualize myself more than pissing on 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, in just its near vicinity does not deserve better treatment.

Forget about law, justice and 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 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 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 women is getting sharper teeth to tear the moral fabric to pieces, then shame should be painted 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 princess thinking 365x24x7 just about retaining the political clout of the family to ultimately install 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 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 civilize 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 capital punishment, it was under the blind belief that we have become civilized sufficiently 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 fundas 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 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!

The Dragon will eat dust in WWIII

In a hostel I stayed in Delhi for my civil services preparations, I came to be called as a bada bhai by many IIT and engineering aspirants preparing for their entrance exams. All of them were normal boys having pleasant mix of vulnerabilities and directionless strengths as conditioned by their teen years. But one chap stood out as Godzilla. It was not just on account of his size, for there were definitely some others who may also have been christened similarly is only size could have been the only criteria. What made him the common enemy was his arrogance and his effort to portray himself as the exceptionally powerful for the ordinary bunch of schoolboys around. Their was a strange swagger in his walk that cried, ‘Its between you and me!’ So guys it became an issue between one versus many. Confrontation was inevitable. One night many smaller ones pounced upon the hated Godzilla. War cry was: ‘Maro saale Godzilla ko!’ It resulted in—as it always happens in a conflict between one versus many (or few versus many) — a terrible defeat and consequent loss of face for the giant.

Guys, moral of the story is clear: Thousands of nice acts of civility and good behavior may not fetch you even a single genuine friend, but an act of arrogance and aggression is definitely bound to fetch you many enemies. There have been WWI and WWII. The trigger point was the power going astray in some aggressive form of nationalism that puffed out belligerent winds in four directions. Aggression wins you very selected friends. So in both world wars, the so called axis powers had lesser parties to their boasting kitty and the so called allied powers were able to muster up the support of many nations across the world. Whatever may be the amount of bloodbath, the result inevitably has to be in favor of the allied powers, like it happened in both world wars. The fireball escaping its burning guts is ultimately bound to douse the genie. Moreover, the leadership of the allied powers earns the right to take world leadership.

China is going much on the pattern of axis powers presently. Its inflated sense of chronic nationalism has made it blind to the bitter facts of the previous world wars. The way dragon is hissing fire around it has all the potential to trigger a third world war. But believe me, Chinese missiles and bullets might taste enemy blood in all the nooks and corners of this world, but its defeat is inevitable and ordained by the laws that governed the first two world wars. What Hitler let out through his individual manic personality, the Chinese leadership is doing it collectively. Result: They have all enemies in its neighborhood and across the world. In South Asian context, only a failed state can be counted as its real ally. If by dumping cheap exports in poor African countries, Chinese leadership has come to believe that it has dozens of allies, then it’s a gross miscalculation of strategic facts. By crossing all the limits of diplomatic niceties vis-à-vis India through claiming vast Indian territories as its own, it has taken its art of statecraft 70 year back to the Nazi era. By stepping on the toes of smaller nations around South China Sea, it has created a sort of one versus many situation. If there is a WWIII, believe me Chinese fate cannot under any circumstances be better than the belligerent axis powers.

In cooperation with America, India can play a great role in this coalition of forces against the arrogant and blinded-by-power Godzilla and beat it like those smaller boys beat the bully who ran down the stairs utterly terrified and may be even pissed in its pants. Every Chinese act of belligerence driven by madly chronic, expansive nationalism is going to earn it more and more enemies. USA beat Russia in Cold War because there was NATO. It never trumpeted its status as the sole decider of world’s destiny, even though it could have done so. It always kept many allies to its side, even though they played a marginal part in its campaigns. So China carry on with your enemy-making juggernaut, we Indians will meanwhile cooperate with Americans and your ever-longer list of enemies to beat the Micky out of you in the possible WWIII.