Slippers on the head: The crown of fools

Agricultural revolution allowed humans to keep larger population under worse conditions. Industrial revolution took it still further by allowing more and more people under still worse conditions. In the last couple of centuries we have further moved on. Presently, around 8 billion people are kept alive under worse conditions than ever in history. The tiny minority of economically well off people have utilities, but they have huge load of emotional suffering. This generation is the worst suffering in entire history. Why is it getting worse with each generation? Why is it that the current generation suffers more than the previous one? We are caught in a vicious circle. We have been committing the mistake of taking things of utilities as the currency of life, living, happiness and joy. No, they aren't! We have to break this malafide linkage of the items of utility to happiness and joy in life. This grotesque monetization of the meaning of life in terms of the items of utility needs to done away with. The things which should have been under our feet, we have put them on our heads as crowns. No wonder, we are loaded to the limits and tottering on the path. Life and living is mere struggle. Throw down the load of utilities from your mind. Walk over them. Use them. Treat them like your slaves, not vice versa. You know what, how funny it appears? It appears like we are carrying our slippers on our head, taking it to be a shiny crown. It's better we put on our slippers, a place where they need be, not on our heads. Mere utilities off the head, and you have a confident human goin on her journey, the head occupied with better ideas and heart full of sweet songs.

The first drop of life

Billions of years ago, in a little water puddle on a tiny speck of dust in the cosmos, there was the littlest of a spark. A spark that opened a new dimension in the zone of matter energy transformation. It sowed the seeds of a new possibility, a new manifestation of energy, a far more dynamic form, life as we know it, a temporary balloon in the stream, a microcosm of the ultimate cycles, the little drop that contained the essence of the whole.

The matter had been lying in the mold for billions of years before that spark. Now it took the course that would leave it further down to the world of you and me billions of years down the stream. That spark, leading to the formation of the first cell, paved the way for the ever-going matter—energy interplay to be interjected with still subtler transformations in a new dimension, the first drop of life, the first cell, a new possibility, a new prospect for the transformation to evolve cyclically in far subtler forms of not just bodily limbs and organs but emotions, feelings and thoughts.

The single-celled amoeba in the primordial sea ruled as the rudimentary carrier of the delicate most traces of consciousness on this planet. Its sovereignty lasted for millions of years. After the initially blasting stage when earth, this lump of gases, was catapulted into the solar system, it took billions of years for the matter to get into a state of relative stability, like the dust blown by a storm takes many hours to settle down. The evolution of the first cell was no miraculous turn in the state of matter. It was just a phase when the storm of matter—energy interplay and transformation could adjust a new dimension in the same transformation, where it was still about matter—energy makeover but with an additional factor of rudimentary consciousness in the same equation, the new factor hardly disturbing the primordial equation. Just that it self-evolved to maintain the earliest laws as things settled down on this tiny planet.

There being no difference between matter and energy, just that matter is visible and energy isn’t, physical science tries to correlate them through the equation Energy=Mass x square of the speed of light. We can say that mass is that apparent energy that has been stabilized to the extent of so low frequency as to make it visible to our sense perception. It is simply a state of energy. In this apparent stage of relative stability, another dimension of energy opens up to compensate for the shooting off tendency of the energy. It’s consciousness. It opens up as a factor of the square of the speed of light. No wonder our thoughts, emotions and their resultant scenarios building up, forever popping up, are simply the manifestations of that surplus raw energy in its pristine fleeting form that has to somehow spend its creative force in one form or the other.

So starts the game of evolution of consciousness through the suitable means of rapidly emerging biochemical and biomolecular bridges holding matter and consciousness together. Lo, let there be the first drop of ‘life’ the way we interpret it in the form of single cell amoeba in the primordial sea, like a drop of rain in the desert, and it blossomed up. Energy in the form of apparent mass (stabilized to a fraction of square of the speed of light) was now an empty canvas for the creative force to write as many lines as possible in the emerging story. Time was never a factor. Millions of years went with more ease and less change than we see in a decade these days. It was pull for the maximum. Not so soon, millions of years down the first spark of the first cell, we had cells clumping together to form as many patterns as possible. The climax reached when you had mega-flora and mega-fauna. There were dinosaurs bigger than the biggest ship in the seas presently. There were birds bigger than the largest cargo planes of the present. Reptiles longer than trains slithered around. There was no hurry. A day of today is busier than a decade of those times.

But then even creation has to follow the law. It just cannot go larger and larger in size even if in this new dimension moderated by an evolving consciousness it felt excited like a child exults after getting new set of toys. For minion and millions of years since the days of the largest roamers on earth, when rudimentary consciousness rode mammoth bodies, there has been a decline in physical stature of the largest mammals, reptiles and birds on earth. 

When Homo sapiens indisputably controlled earth around 40000 B.C., the largest creatures were mammoths, mastodons, earth sloths weighing 10 tons, tortoise weighing 3 tons, and cats were bigger and fiercer than the modern day lions. These last big creatures were not lucky like their predecessors and vanished too quickly as Homo sapiens, the epitome of consciousness, not in size but in mind this time, quickly threw the forces of creation into the domain of ‘mind over matter’. Under these forces, the rest of the biggest animals, birds and trees bowed out. Mankind’s mind was buzzing with that huge surge of energy, which had abandoned huge bodies to take the course of bamboozling consciousness.

It would be foolish to think that consciousness is peaking in human brain only. Corona is far more intelligent than us. It has unique structure to beat our immunity and any other medicine and cause death and launch literally a third world war. Mankind may be standing at the top of the food chain in a world where the plant, animal and bird species are vanishing altogether. However, in the emerging pattern of the diminishing flora and fauna, the counterbalancing forces will arrive from the smallest quarters. The counterbalancing arm of consciousness will arrive through nanometer-sized means like Corona.

We have been investing too much to ward off visible threats from our fellow human beings as well as other tangible threats in nature, building up huge armies and stockpiles of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Little do we realize that all along this time, while we triumphantly gesticulated over our supremacy over the fellow human beings as well as other lesser species, the counterbalancing arm of consciousness has taken the path of nanometer-sized foot soldiers, where our armies will be redundant. 

Beware Homo sapiens, it was easier to kill mammoths in Siberia 12000 years back. But killing invisible bacteria and virus isn’t that easy. Millennium after millennium we have fought against real animals in the forests and later our imagined enemies bigger than any animal on earth to make bigger and bigger weapons, wasting our precious resources in its wake. The chink in the armor is glaring now. Our unpreparedness to fight against the ‘small’. Corona teaches us a bitter lesson.  

Is there any solution? Of course there is: Instead of pushing the stage of creation into a corner, from where it decides to launch fusillade through nano-arrows, learn to balance things in all walks of life. Don’t push nature too far into a corner. It always has the option to hit back. It may not be able to hit tangibly in the form of a dinosaur, it can but surely do the same through invisible Corona and many more. 

There is a reason why we have pushed mother earth too far into the corner, our intra-Homo sapiens rivalry. Earlier we fought as a unit as Homo sapiens against far physically superior species. Now those threats are gone. So drop your weapons my dear ever-scared jungle man, who is almost biologically molded to keep fighting now after millions of years of fear and insecurity. Saving other remaining species from extinction is important, but far more important is to stop the virtual fear driven animosity among nations build upon false assumptions of ideologies, faiths and beliefs.

All that is needed is a collective feeling of Homo sapiens. When our ancestors set out from Africa 60000 years ago, they could overpower far superior enemies in the battle of survival. Now we stand at the crossroads again. Now the enemy is invisible. It will manifest through nano-particles and other imbalance-born outbursts of mother earth. Fight as a band. Fight as a species. As a globalist. Sow the seeds of love and trust among all the nations. 

All the divisions are man created. We can easily remove these. Love for our fellow human beings will sow the seeds of love for this little planet, our house. Don’t try to land on Sun; try to use the precious resources where in case of health emergencies our best cities in the world don’t bear the insult of the doctors and nurses fighting without even proper masks. A ballistic missile worth millions of dollars rusting in a bunker and a life-savior doctor fighting Corona without PPEs! See, what have we turned this world into!!

Soul's Scars from the Past

In my past birth, I was a simple Taoist follower in a quaint mountain village in China. Then the atheistic Chinese Communism breached the fort of our peace and silence. I fell victim to their blatant, rampaging force creeping up the hills to forge a new China. A ‘making’ that first involved million times ‘breaking’, the so called revolution. And revolution drinks a lot of blood like an ever-hungry glutton. At the time of leaving that body, two extremes sealed my fate, the driving differentials that create karmic force to propel the soul to adopt another body: my love and liking for Taoism on the one end; and my dislike (almost to the extent of repugnance and hate) for the atheistic Chinese Communism. The past can’t be shaken off too easily. We carry our karmic imprints, the scars on our souls that need a few lifetimes to heal. I carry mine in the form of my surrender to Taoism and my frustration at the ways and manners of the Chinese communists. I know this chasm stalls my own evolution, and forgetting and forgiving will surely facilitate my spiritual evolution. But maybe, just knowing it isn’t sufficient to do the same. This lifetime of hate, and my consequent stagnation in my spiritual evolution, will help me balance out the negatives of karma. Forgiving will surely settle the score this very moment. I know it. But is forgiving that easy? Especially when you are carrying the scars from your past birth!

De-cluttering

Nature is not with anybody. Neither is it against anyone. It’s for us to decide whether we are with it or against it. The onus is on us. Since we are merely its part, it suits our purpose if we go with it. Going against it means going against ourselves. But that is what we have been doing presently, especially since the industrial revolution. Our brains turned the crowns of our ownership of the planet as the sole proprietor species. The weakening of the overall system manifests primarily in the weakening of its constituent parts.

In a single-species environment, the rest of all subservient species get threatened with extinction, just like Corona virus imperils our cells. The exponentially growing species may think that it’s moving towards the crowning glory in terms of development, it’s in fact moving towards a pointed summit where maintaining a perch is impossible. So why move so laboriously towards a little point, only to topple down and start all over again after the crisis. Why not maintain a less ambitious broad high point, i.e., a plateau. The rise will be full of pause and the perch of pinnacle point will be safer and broader. Why do we aim for pointed summit which is unsustainable? Why can’t we raise the bar a bit less seriously and move to another plateau only at a higher elevation. I would say it finely graded growth. It doesn’t collapse rapidly.

Corona is now the most dreaded word. Corona positive is the most fearsome status. It’s stalking the entire humanity. The enemy is invisible and quite wisely we have locked ourselves in the safety of our houses. Meanwhile, the high points of our economic and financial hills fall down.

It’ll be too shortsighted if we just consider Corona as a malady in abstract. Corona isn’t something that has somehow surfaced randomly. It’s merely a symptom of the greater malady with the ecosystem, something to do with the entire earth. It’s just an indication that there are far bigger problems than what we may envision just looking at Corona.

Suppose there is a body having severely compromised immunity. Naturally, things are supposed to collapse. But there will be a trigger somewhere in some part, in some organ, to let the manifestation start. Corona is just one of the triggers that indicate the grievously harmed immunity of mother nature on the planet. Beyond the point of whether the Wuhan virus is lab-created by the Chinese regime or jumped out of inhuman gluttony cascading through live animal markets in China, the basic point is that it’s a symptom of an ailing planet. If not Corona, something x, y, z will unleash the same consequences. If not some virus, it will manifest through the virtual virus of human minds to create phobias, fears, greed, humongous egos and envy to catapult destabilizing forces to penalize the errant society.

Open-ended are the options for the effects to manifest in lieu of the cause, our unsustainable practices. The effects can manifest either through man-made mediums such as wars, civil strife, terrorism, natural calamities, or these can simply manifest through the rulebook of nature in their unseen, intangible ways. I am no perpetual doomsayer, but my only point is that with our awareness we should have known better. We could have done better. It’s not simply enough to go after inventions and discoveries. An equal amount of our energy and resources to estimate the consequences of our actions could have turned our practices more or less sustainable.

In the face of this pandemic, where are the earth-shattering issues like Brexit, trade wars, geostrategic brainstorms in top government offices to control regions, military pursuits, tensions on borders, etc.? If we can survive without them as we do during the lockdown, we can do the same even post-endemic. As we sit in silence after many decades, let’s just cast a look at the mountain loads of unnecessary things that we have crammed in our minds, houses and bazaars. Let’s start de-cluttering.   

Jumping off the tightrope

You become your least version, when you enslave your emotions and feelings  to your mind and take logical steps to be a mechanical achiever. You also become equal to your least version when your emotions enslave your mind, leaving you in the fiery whirlpools of abnormal sensitivities. You become your best version when your thoughts as well as feelings are master and slave of each other at the same time. Mind playing the master when emotions falter. The emotions playing master when mind burns out. Balance buddies, balance! It's like walking the tightrope with the pole held expertly. The two ends of the same entity, the very same pole, thoughts and emotions, counterbalance the fluctuations. You need them because you have chosen to walk on the tightrope, on the thin linear dimension drawn taut and straight by the tension forces of ego. In this dimension, the best version is an unfaltering walk with the pole held almost horizontal with the opposite ends of thoughts and feelings straight, at the same level. That is rarely possible. Only the realised souls who somehow decide to walk the tightrope, may be to guide humanity ahead, are able to manage this. There is still another option. You can decide to jump off the tightrope, onto the broader plane, onto smooth motherly land, where walking isn't a torture, where fears of falling fall away just because the thin course defined by the ego tension drops off. It doesn't mean that you will lose your thoughts and emotions. They will be there, just that these won't be mere survival tools, nibbling into each other's territory to define a limited, curtailed, scared walk that life turns out to be. As you walk on a broader plane, thoughts and feelings don't compete against each other because your fears, defined by ego and self preservation, have vanished. You walk leisurely. Your thoughts and feelings simply stored in their sovereign domains. These are no longer emergency ammunition to wage a battle of survival. They become mere faculties. You can use them at will, or not at all. They lose their grip on your consciousness. You feel free. You float. From a sweating, struggling walk on a tightrope, to a leisurely walk on a broader plane, and still ahead to a free floating flight in multiple dimensions. These are the options all of us have. Take yours!

Be a creator!

Life is supposed to be a big, fat, intriguing and interesting book. Literally a cascading cocktail. More the chapters, the better it is! Creation is ever eager to expand from the tiny edge, the little point, of your existence. Facilitate it. At this point, you exist at the interface of matter and consciousness. It's a far more dynamic state of wonderful transformations in comparison to either pure matter or pure consciousness. There is a heaving pull. A pulsating throbbing born of love--hate relationship between matter and consciousness. These are the teasing pulls from opposite direction. A tantalising see-saw churning, giving rise to myriads of forms, shapes, thoughts and emotions. Of course these are temporarily built, like you have waves in the sea. This is what we say the manifestation of the tiny crests and troughs in the cosmic sea.
So be a creator. You have the option. In the fleeting fluidity, you write mundane and not so mundane tales. Of course, these are like lines drawn in the air or on water. Almost inconsequential! But that's how it's supposed to be. The inescapable urge to stamp a momentary inscription on the slate continually changing designs and patterns. But your choice guides the waves further. Your options glide through the cosmic medium. It might be temporary, but it can't manifest without you! So create well, manifest well!
So if a particular chapter goes stale, wind it up and save ur book from becoming boring. No need to waste energies on a plot that isn't building up. Create fresh characters. Start a new chapter. We are the writers of the book of life. So keep creating life and living out of the infinite pools of cosmic energy. Keep your book interesting!

A poor Hindu with his Choti swotted away

On this Hanuman Jayanti, April 8, when the biggest, brightest and the nearest to earth since 1948 super moon tries to dispel the dark like a night sun, PM Modi has followed the age-old Indian principle of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, meaning this entire earth is one family, by allowing drugs to the countries most in need of it including the US. As a 14% bigger and 30% shinier moon blazes in the night sky, the temperamental US President has praised his friend Modi through a happy tweet, where he also mentions Hanuman Ji and Sanjuvani Booti. Indian Gods are acquiring a global status. Of course, we need a Hanuman and Sanjivani Booti to tame the rampaging Rakshasha of Corona. I think, Modi will not only manage the affairs in India, he will emerge as a world leader post this crisis, when there will be a spate of critical rethinking about our collective priorities and certain ‘wrinkles’ in the fabric to be smoothened and ironed out by hook or crook.

Elsewhere, you have the foot soldiers waging pitched battles against the pandemic. Spirituality seems to have gone into hiding with the pious crowds vanishing from Haridwar streets. Gods appear to have abandoned we poor humans in this needy hour. A burly policeman has decked up as the fearsome Ravana, the demon king. He dons a huge fake mace, an elfish crown and intimidating handlebar moustache. He is thundering and hollering death threats into a microphone if someone dares to step out. ‘Corona is my Yamdoot, he is roaming around to take anyone loitering around unnecessarily!’ he lets out thundering peals of laughter, sufficient to push the hiding devtas still deeper into the Himalayan caves.

How I wish we had followed the Gandhian philosophy of fulfilling ‘need’ not running after ‘greed’. Now we have been taught in a hard way. A super-luxury carper maker is making sanitary masks, again proving the fundamental point that it’s primarily about fulfilling needs, and saving it from falling into the clutches of greed.

People have been torn between duties defining their responsibilities and emotions defining their personal life. In Indore, a young doctor, fighting in the front line against the deadly virus at one of the most affected places in India, has isolated himself from his family. He has to save patients by being with them. But he has to save his family also by not being with them. During his off duty time, he has set up his house in his car. His family and little kid can at least see him from a safe distance in their balconies.

Rigid looking cops have, surprisingly, lots of creativity which is blooming forth in the crisis. Gujarat police comes out with a Corona band. The lead singer is a handsome young sub-inspector. He can go into making a nice actor from the looks of it. They sing beautiful Corona safety songs imitating the composition of popular Bollywood songs. Those romantic songs by celebrity singers and bands hardly hold any appeal as of now. The Corona band is ruling the charts.

We are all into this. It’s a collective punch at our conscience. In Taiwan, people are lining up to donate to help Corona patients in Italy. Full of gratitude and compassion, they have already collected more than 3 million USD. They still remember those testing times 75 years back when Italian priests had built hospitals in Taiwan ravaged after the Second World War. Now they repay that kindness with lots of love in what can be safely called Third World War. Long ago was shown the act of kindness and now it bears fruit. An act of charity seldom goes undercoated. You can say, the seed of kindness, once sown, rarely dies. It has to blossom up. It seems to be almost a natural law.

From all we can see, we have solid reasons to suspect that the Chinese communists have a lot more role to play in this than it appears. I won’t be surprised if it comes out into the open that it’s a lab-engineered virus, a biological weapon. This and what Markaz Jihadis have done in India leaves me quite flummoxed out of my senses. I even get a poetic outpour:

The rabid Chinese communist thugs,

And fundamentalist Islamic bugs,

Will tatter and tear

the majestic carpet to bloodied rugs,

Don't take their bait,

Don't engage them in hate,

At level theirs don't fight,

For it'll be devil's delight,

Love is the sole remedy against the bug,

Go, give them a sweet hug,

Goodness lies in every human heart,

Only on the surface bad doth dart,

May be they will realise,

It's the only harmless weapon

to cut the devil to a decent size,

Civil disobedience against

the Chinese communist thugs,

A loving embrace

to the blinded suicidal Islamic bugs,

Only this will quell the doom,

Or be ready for the devil's boom!

The real Corona has its genesis in a deadly ideology. World peace and harmony in future depend on whether we are collectively able to dismantle that ideology or not. The outside world cannot directly inject a remedy. That would be catastrophic. It can only help within limits. The real antidote is democracy and the people caught in the grip of this ideology have to fight for it themselves for their own and world peace. Sanitize the real ideological bug driving Covid 19. It’s high time to systematically neutralize the real ideological virus driving Covid 19.  

One may wonder, why would nature allow such agents to get such evil ideas and ambitions? It simply is a reflection of our own atrophied selves. The Chinese and the Jihadis are simply the sour fruits of the tree that we have all sown and nurtured. They are the tools for the inevitable consequences to occur. Even the consequences need a medium to operate through. They are simply the part of the same recipe that has gone further sour. Punishment comes in this or that form.

Surely, Mother Nature is angry! As the last of millennial old Baobabs fall in Africa, Mother Nature seems to be withdrawing her blessing hand from us:

Not all is well,

Another Baobab fell,

The millennial old sages,

Mother's blessing arms for ages,

They now bid a sad bye,

Her blessings withdraw with a sigh!

Every adverse situation is counterproductive. You see Himalayas shining in their crowning glory from the farfetched dusty distances down south in the plains. Yamuna has bluish waters after ages. In Delhi! Can you believe it!? All is not lost buddies. A more beautiful world is waiting to welcome you as you come out of this troubling phase!

In Hong Kong, a pair of Pandas is seen naturally mating after 10 years. Meanwhile, the experts and zoo authorities tried their level best to artificially stimulate love between the sulking pair for a decade. It bore no fruit. Now, with the peeping Toms gone, and Mother Nature whispering mischief into their ears, the hearts of these cute giant Pandas bloom in privacy, and the flowers of lovemaking drizzle down. There seems to be some gain, in lieu of all this Corona pain! Well, of course, we have to learn to calculate that gain beyond our strictly human-centric economic models.  

A peculiar situation has built up here in the local agrarian society. Wheat harvesting is staring at the farmers’ worried faces. Already inclement weather has chucked out a major portion of the crop. To make it worse, the migrant Bihari laborers have gone to their native places. The local labor, the low caste Hindus who bear the ignominy of sarcastic undercutting by the high caste born, can pull a few strings now. They are quoting 300 Kg of wheat and an equal amount of chaff fodder for one acre. On top of that, the otherwise aggressive and abusive farmers are forced to use courteous words when talking to them to save any offence. Even then the local labor is hardly sufficient to harvest even a portion of the left out crop. So the modern day farmers have to toil like their grandfathers did in the field to salvage at least that much of what that would stave off rats of hunger from their stomach in the coming year.

Alarming news! A tiger has fallen prey to Corona infection in a US zoo. Far away in my village, the common quail is letting out its alarmist repetitive notes of ‘pakadleo pakadleo pakadleo’ ‘catch, catch, catch’ as if it’s shouting from the side of war-mongering Corona. I would prefer phonetically similar sounding ‘Kapildeo, kapildeo, kapildeo’ as a eulogy to the famed Indian cricketer. ‘Pakadleo, pakadleo, pakadleo’ turns the situation still more alarming, as if it’s egging on the devil Corona.

There at a distance, a kala teetar, black francolin, is more dignified in its burst of four-worded calls ‘Dekh Ram Teri Kudrat’ ‘O Ram praised be thy creation’. A Muslim would prefer ‘Subhan teri Kudrat’. In fact, ‘teri’ and ‘kudrat’ are so indisputable and clear, as if spoken by the human tongue, that even fundamentally divisive Hindus and Muslims concur at least on this. Or you can say Muslims are more comfortable with ‘kudrat’ being an Urdu word. ‘Teri’ stands neutral.

A male cuckoo is voicing the song of passion for the rapidly fading spring, which hasn’t augured well, at least for the human world. The female’s sound isn’t melodious and sonorous. It’s an excited burst of squeaking notes. Still the most irresponsible mother in the birdie world gets the sweetest of a lover. The male cuckoo lets out honey sweet, sonorous notes which ride the crest of excited spring air to play around many an ear. Her luck, what to say!

I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel after the current lockdown phase comes to an end on April 14. The way things are aggravating, it will surely be extended. My hair has grown wildly to give me the look of an old porcupine, which is shivering for life under an elephant foot. It’s better to look a man-handled ape instead of walking into some Corona infested saloon. I aim for an Einstein look. But then after a time my head looks like a worst caricature of the spiked corona ball. I can’t bear the ignobility of sharing a look with this devil incarnation. I decide to get it done, I mean the hair job. My brother gleefully awaiting the opportunity to give experimental furrows on my head is the only option I have. My trimmer, which has furrowed the crop on my chin, must have been feeling sadistically elated to taste unchartered waters. My niece is eagerly looking forward to some entertainment amidst the Corona boredom.

I politely ask him to give an all-swiping clean off job, knowing fully well that one doesn’t need much of an expertise in swatting the entire crop in Toto. I have accepted my fate. The trimmer buzzes around my ears, with the elated notes of my niece giggling, as he decides to try some hairstyle first. You dare not, I warn. He hardly cares. The first furrow is already there. It’s a point of no return. Despite my repeated admonishments to do an all-clearing job, he takes his styling job too seriously. Everyone wants to learn newer things during the lockdown.

How would you feel if someone tries to force a look of a dandy on your grand daddy face? I have an inkling of what they are up to. They are trying the cock-type spiked look of an adolescent boy in the neighborhood. I can feel the sides getting cleaned. My reverie is broken by my niece’s uncontrollable giggle. They are done with style number one. They hold the mirror to my face all this while trying their level best to convince me that it’s fine and looks normal even for someone who has crossed forty. They put up a mock show to be damn serious. They are trying to convince me to say ‘yes’. I am mesmerized by my old cock-crested look. My reactions gone numb. Far away from all reactions, I feel like searching for some oddest new reaction to this.

I then break the reverie and come with my only possible reaction. All this while, they have built hope that I may agree to their proposal and give them everyday entertainment, not just this fleeting sadistic pleasure at the moment. I give it all in expressing my resentment. Their hopes are tossed out. ‘An all-clear job is best for you idiots!’

They have the prey again in their clutches. I am helpless. They try a few more styles and leave me literally a rakshasha. Ultimately, when they can no longer carry on with experimentation, they try to do what should have been done right in the beginning. Now, I plead to at least get a well-managed clean job instead of giving me uneven furrows here and there. They hold me with such authority. I feel like an errant kid getting punished. Then they declare it is done. My choti, the signature of my sanatan dharma, of me being a Hindu is also gone under the deft strokes of ebullient enthusiasm. They have forgotten to keep a little patch of hair on the crown of my head, as a mark of respect to my highest chakra. Scandalous! Heresy!

In the Corona communalized environment, I pray I won’t fall into the hands of over-zealous Hindu mobsters who will penalize me, mistaking me as a baldy Muslim without the trademark Hindu Choti. But then I will hold out another trademark insignia of not being a Muslim! Heehee!!