The story of a stylish, modern-day canine mom

 

Bhuro is a brown and white rotund bitch in the village street. She looks replete with self-care, in complete contrast to other maternally worn out hassled female canines in the locality. She eats only warm buttered chapattis. She doesn’t give much trouble to her lungs by unnecessary barking like the rest of her ilk. I have seen many famished, worn- and worked-out female dogs due to the heavy burden of puppy rearing. But in comparison Bhuro seems a glamorous, narcissistic post-modern girl. I have never seen her attending her maternal duties. Then the secret comes out. She eats all of her newborn puppies to maintain her youth, glamor and figure. Of course there must be some very significant reason to account for her weird behavior. Mysteries of nature is all I can reckon in this regard.

Her meaning of life is in stark contrast to an old black bitch I remember from my young days. She would embarrass even the human mothers in taking care of her newborns. Once her sole surviving puppy also died. But she won’t allow anyone to take it away for burial. She kept licking and tending to the corpse for many days. Of course, love cannot stop a corpse from rotting. I shooed her away using a feigned demonic show of waving sticks, shouting angry words and stomping gestures. Then I hurriedly buried the carcass, secured the tiny grave with a big stone and many thorny boughs of keekars lest the mother in her digs out the dead from the grave. To her canine sense of motherhood I was the murderer of her puppy, and for weeks it would howl whenever she saw me. It would leave me very guilty.

There was another sweet canine mom who had such a liking for her kids that she would steal others’ puppies and rear them as her own. In comparison to these puppy-loving moms, Bhuro stands at the opposite end of earth in temperament and philosophy of life.

The political nursery

 

It was a hornet’s nest unleashed on us with the announcement of elections for the village panchayat, the village level governing body. Sarpanch elections have acquired such seriousness as to hold the entire village by throat and give it a very serious shake. The atmosphere is clouded with posters, pamphlets, banners and fliers, so many of them as we didn’t even see in parliamentary elections during our childhood. Politics is a lucrative career, in every sense of the term. It’s the biggest key to empowerment.

Most of the power aspirants have little clue about what is to be filled up in the nomination form even though these are in Hindi these days. So a big task awaits me. They appear on the edge of life, so much seriousness about the forms. God forbid if there is some mistake and it might get rejected. So they trust the bookish guy in the village. The form is almost an intimidating booklet with so many instructions and clauses. ‘It left my head spinning,’ one of them looked very sad.

I peer nervously at the form booklet. There are many pages devoted to the ongoing and past skirmishes with law: a record of petty as well as solid falling off the legal ladder. So the government of India fully understands that the contestants will have lots of FIRs, court cases and complaints against them.

But I felt further cut down to even smaller academic size the moment I reached the column for academic qualifications of the candidate. It was just one line at the end of the page, almost inconsequential. By chance the printing ink was very light here to make it even more insignificant item of little concern. So the government knows that the candidates will have just as much academic record as to fill up merely a half line at the end of a page in the form.

Sarpanch elections have acquired massive proportions. Campaigning has become unbelievably expensive. Lots of cash is also distributed among the poor voters. They even have loudspeakers mounted on E-rickshaws proclaiming the credentials of a candidate who would make it a Ramrajya with clean governance. One candidate spent one crore rupees. He did a lot of charity work as well. Many ineligible bachelors were lucky to get brides with the kindness and connections of this candidate. He took large groups of villagers for fully-sponsored pilgrimages as well. He raised a whirlwind with his tireless activities. Then his clever election committee built a narrative that he has spent each penny in his pocket and will commit suicide if he lost the elections. There was a sympathy wave and he won handsomely.           

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.