Turning 40

All those years back in mid-2000s, when I was still learning to deal with living away from my parental home for the first time in my life, while handling all the newfound independence to eat/sleep/drink/roam/laze whenever or however I wanted to and generally learning how to live by myself, I got bitten by the blogging bug. Blogging was the exciting thing back then, and the new web (or Web 2.0) as it was called then, had this layer of interaction and communication built on top of it that caught the attention of people around the world, young and old, and inspired them to start “creating content” in blogspace, social media (or whatever its avatar was during those days), or even within snarly “discussion” boards where the newly minted web media editors naively believed that they could solicit public feedback on their media and use it to improve their content — little did they know about how unshackled human minds, and thereby human civility, becomes when provided a guise of anonymity. Truly, those discussion boards were the birthing places of first online trolls, and probably also of those epic “most liked” youtube comments.

Anyway, I took upon blogging because I did feel that I could do something with my love for language, literary humor, and talk about the issues of the time plaguing my young mind. I wrote about everything from politics, break-ups, self-commentary, travelogues, nature of art, current affairs, etc. I also had a somewhat decent output, and I did spend a lot of time on crafting my narrative and chiseling my words. For a while, I did FEEL like writer, and even though no one noticed (or even derided) me except a few friends (which was fair because I never tried to publish anything formally in any case), I still felt content about the fact that I could write about something from start to finish, and hopefully make a few good points along the way. This period of self-expression in my life lasted from 2007–2009, which was also a time of emotional and professional upheavals, and so it was advantageous to have a channel to express myself. In the next few years, up until 2014, I also dabbled in Hindi/Urdu and occasional English poetry. This was mostly due to a great appreciation that I have always had for poetry, and thus the desire for imitation, however talentless that might be! OF course, my dwindling article output too contributed to that. Unlike a long time that it took to conceive of, write, and edit an article, poems were a bit easier to write because those just “flowed” and I could also hide behind abstraction without a need to establish the point being made. The wordsmithing involved was no lesser though. Unlike the political/satirical nature of my English articles, the poetry, as can expected, was deeply personal, and it did give me an ability to convey something without conveying it verbatim, and that was a relief.

In the years that followed, I got busier with life and the professional and personal responsibilities and though I never gave up on the dream that I will write again someday, I actually never did, unless you count emails as “write-ups”! To be honest, I generally gave up on writing because I got too busy in pursuits that took less of time and effort and gave a more “instant gratification” of sorts. Also, I realized that the lesser I wrote, the more I thought about things than can be written about. I made numerous idea notes, and spent many a evenings ruminating on what is worth writing about. Expectedly, mental fatigue set in, and nothing materialized beyond a few sentences.

So how am I here now? Well, I turned 40 recently. So how does that connect to writing? Well, I thought this was an opportune occasion to revisit a blog that I wrote when I turned 25. I was pretty proud of that post at the time, and I still am in a way. However, the kind of dramatic language that I used, apparently to humor the reader, and an attempt at wisdom on the journey thus far and the foreboding that I conveyed for the life ahead made me cringe a bit. Well, cringe is a bit of a good thing because if I agree with what my 25-year-old self was thinking about, where is the growth per se? Anyway, one interesting thing that did catch my eye in that post was the concept of dreams of what you want to be in life, and how a distant target makes you put off the planning needed to achieve those dreams. In effect, my 25-year-old self lamented about dreams from my childhood about who I was going to be when I grew up, and when I did “grow up” (read, turned 25), I wasn’t even close to achieving any of many that I had envisioned. Of course, your childhood dreams do get shaped or even replaced based on your circumstances and experiences growing up, and so the place where I had landed at that age in life wasn’t something totally unexpected or even unwanted. However, in this age, at 40, having some of the very same “dreams” (however evolved those may be from the time) as unfulfilled does make me wonder if I really understood what those dreams were and whether I was prepared to put in the work needed to realize those, especially when I had the time, energy and circumstances to do so. Or maybe, having unfulfilled dreams is the key towards desire and the general zest for life? I wonder indeed.

So, what thoughts do I have on this birthday? Same person, who chose to record his thoughts back then and is doing so again now, and thus it does create a narrative about the passage of time and its effects on me, to anyone interested in knowing. Well, for starters, I still have a sense of perspective on the time gone by and the time left, just like I had back in the day. Also, I continue to think that options of who you can be do get narrower as you age, given the constraints on time and the general brain fatigue that starts presenting itself as you age and which can no longer be hidden by all the energy you have as a younger person. But what is truly different at the age of 40 is the sense of helplessness for what lies ahead, and an inevitability of loss. That you are crossing the boundaries of irreversible changes in you body, your perspective and your relationships. There is also a realization that your life will not center around just you anymore. Finally, there is little to no desire for any new relationships in life, because you are too weary of the work it takes to build those and you have seen how easily those are lost — basically keep what you have close to you and put all the “work” into maintaining and cherishing those.

Those the truths.

Well, what are the lessons on the journey so far then? To begin with, the very fact that you’ve had a journey is something to be very proud of. There is gratitude towards that and the chances you’ve been offered because you’ve seen many journeys falter or derail, or even fail to start. Secondly, there is an acknowledgement of memory being a fickle thing and that forgetting details of your everyday misery goes a long way in keeping you sane — sometimes this also breeds a false sense of nostalgia as certain periods of life seem much better than they actually were, but that is a bearable side effect. Lastly, there is a certain sense of relief in financial wellness that you achieve at this juncture in your life, and while it is not guaranteed for everyone, people in all walks of life can attest to the fact that you tend to have more dough at 40 than you had in your 20s.

How about the plans then? In writing this piece, I have overcome almost a decade of writing block, and given how much I have liked doing this, I hope to keep it going. My wit and observation-power may be at a near zero level now, and I would have surely seemed self-absorbed to a fault here, but hopefully I can explore some other facet of my writing in this phase of my life! I hope to inculcate deep-insertion hobbies and quit the whole trying-it-out-before-buying-it attitude towards interests. I also hope that I develop fortitude for the personal experiences I’m going to have in this decade of my life, which will inevitably be completely alien to what I have seen and been through so far.

Au revoir, and let’s see what this fifth decade brings!

Bihar Govt comes clean

(http://ibnlive.in.com/news/forbesganj-firing-still-no-action-by-the-govt/159686-3.html)
Faced with heavy criticism over its silence on the stout defense of a an upcoming starch factory to be built on a highway in Bihar (a first of this kind) by Bihar police from the marauding villagers opposing it, the government has finally announced the state police awards for the heroic acts and selflessness of the policemen involved.
Confirming the development, Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi said – “We apologize for the delay in official recognition of the bravery of Bihar Police in the incident. They have not only contained a war unleashed against the nation, but have also set an example in police procedure to be replicated across India.”
The anti-national agitation by the villagers of Forbesganj was a resultant of their senseless opposition to the starch factory that has been commissioned to be built on the connecting road between Bhajanpur and Forbesganj towns. Announcing this unique location proposition in a press conference, the company had attributed the idea to its core team of engineers, who found that “the existing foundation laid down for the road could be leveraged for the factory foundation, thereby leading to sustainable saves”. However, when a reporter present at the conference pointed out that the road in question had been constructed without any attention to frivolities like foundations, he was informed that the road in question was part of the Golden Quadrilateral project of an erstwhile Prime Minister and its integrity was un-debatable, just like the same of the erstwhile Prime Minister. The road anyways had little or no traffic and the people of Forbesganj were hardly ambitious enough to move out of the town (because had they been, they would have already done so), they further reasoned. However, if the villagers still needed to move around, the company promised to build an alternate pathway, but naturally after the factory had been built and a breakeven had been achieved for the business.
Following a quick official sanction to this innovative idea, the company started the construction, following which the villagers of Forbesganj attacked the construction site, heavily armed with lathis and stones. The local police, ever committed to the idea of sanctity of private property, launched a brave defense of the construction site, armed with nothing more than conviction to the cause and a few hundred innocuous bullets. Also, during the incident, a few policemen, paying no heed to their personal safety, proceeded to play a game of football with the head of protester(still attached to the torso), bravely showing to the world what ‘kicking-out-the-protest’ literally meant. Despite being outnumbered by a dangerous creed of outlaws, including a pregnant woman and a 7 year old ‘goonda’ (rightly decreed as one by Forbesganj police about 2 months back as part of the state police drive to identify future hooligans in their childhood itself), the policemen displayed conspicuous courage in containing the mob.
Lallan Singh, a police constable, who single handedly shot a protester in the head from close range and was also the one behind the football symbolism, was awarded Bihar State Police Medal for his ‘indomitable courage in face of seemingly insurmountable odds’. In a chat with us, a visibly buoyed Singh championed the Forbesganj model of policing and vowed to take it in every nook and corner of the country, which is visibly troubled by similar protests against nation building.​

Crossroads Galore: Part 2

What I really found missing in the last post is a character profile of the main player – that would be me – in this tale of asinine stupidity. Your’s truly, as I like to call myself affectionately at the time of debacles, thinks that he is a celebrity traveling in vintage Europe whenever he is traveling in a train in India. Cashless travel is thus a way of life to him. And this cocktail of assumptions becomes even more intoxicating on a day when he has already had quite a rollicking dose of ‘attempted-and-failed’ travel, like on the Tuesday in question. If you get the drift, when I was seeing that new train standing on the promised land of platform number 4, I was cashless. Real, hard cash I mean to denote to be bereft of, apart from the customary couple of hundred’s bills in the wallet. In a strange enthusiasm which clouds your mind when you are panicky and you happen to come across anything that will take you out of the panic state, we(me and the law student cum businessman guy, hereafter referred to as ‘Guy’) boarded the train on platform 4. Of course it helped that the train, Gondwana Express, stopped at both Bhopal and Jabalpur on its way to some obscure destination in Maharashtra, making me and the Guy real lucky people.
Once in, we sprawled on the first available, as-of-now free berths, and, ‘gizmo freaks’ that we were, logged into our laptops, visited irctc.co.in to cancel our ticket in the missed train, and get a new reservation done in the current one. Truly the ambassadors of a new, emergent, & technologically driven India, weren’t we?! Well, almost. E-tickets, unlike the normal ones collected at the ticket counters, can’t be cancelled after a train departs and they can’t be booked after chart preparation of the current train. So, after all the excitement we caused in our fellow passengers, as is caused by any ambassadors of a new, emergent & technologically driven India - identified solely by their laptop usage - we sullenly closed our machines and let out typical system-is-rotten sighs. The public gaze, earlier fixated on us filled with amazement, slowly turned into one filled with sympathy as it became apparent that we were traveling without ticket.
Now traveling without ticket, as you must be aware, isn’t the colossal sin that it used to be. An on-the-spot ticket dispatcher , not a TTE, is present on most of the long distance routes and sells you the tickets at an amount he arrives at by adding up a lot of variables which include a fine amount & the fare based on the distance desired to be traveled. That the train-commuting denizens of this penurious country, who are also its true representatives by the virtue of them being poor, would be quite laboured to pay the hefty amount, is paid scant regard to while arriving at the final figure of payment for the above mentioned transaction. Penury is of course a virtue, and you are obviously subject to state benefits if you happen to be somewhere between a pauper and a BPL(below poverty line), but ignorance and indiscretion are subject to formal state discouragement(as it should be in a society that firmly aims to tread the path of reason), this discouragement showed primarily by the swelled ticket amount. That the nation is in a state of kakistocracy since time immemorial is obviously not subject to such frivolous and opportunist line of reasoning though. Ah, how I tend to digress!
Coming back to the situation, we were then summarily introduced to the ticket dispatcher(TD), who gave us the final amount of our tickets’ cost, which neatly shot off our current cash reserves by a margin of about Rs 700. We then indulged in some frantic and actually romantic efforts to convince our man that we would pay the remaining amount after getting down at our destinations, to obviously no avail. He however pointed out to us the importance of a need of camaraderie & trust amongst fellow passengers, ending his note with a hint to borrow the money from a couple of men sitting on the yonder seat. In a space of 30 odd minutes, we were reduced from a burger-munching, cola-sipping state to beggardom. Well, beg we did, telling the men that we were merely borrowing the amount, with a promise of repayment at Beena station which boasts of an ATM on the platform itself, as informed our wise TD. Beena is the last station before the train’s arrival at Bhopal, which the train reaches at 12:00 AM in the night, with Bhopal being reached by 2:00 AM. The lenders were surprisingly generous with their money, as human compassion won over materialism in what should be a lesson in marketing for prospective borrowers. The tickets were bought, and we settled, once again, for a ‘comfortable’ journey back home.
Meanwhile, I witnessed the following conversation happening between a typically & hopelessly overweight constable(OC) of the GRP and a hapless passenger(HP).
OC: “Sat Sri Akaal Sardaarji!”
HP: “Sat Sri Akaal Saab.”
OC: ”Coming from? Going to?”
HP: ”Coming from Delhi, going to Nagpur.”
OC: “You look like a tough man. What work do you do?”
HP: “Well, I run a small machine workshop.”
OC(sitting down): “Machines! Interesting! What kind of machines Sardaarji?”
HP: “Mostly power related. Generators, inverters, etc.”
OC: “So, they are big?”
HP(flummoxed): “Hain ji?”
OC(extending his arms): “ Big, BIG? Are they large in size?”
HP: “Yes Sir, they definitely are.”
OC: “So it implies that your workshop is also big!”(by now his arms had reached their maximum natural limit. Belly protruding, arms stretched. He was quite a sight)
HP: “Yes Sir. By God’s grace, we somehow manage.”
OC: “Yeah, God’s grace shines on a lucky few. BIG machines, BIG workshop. So obviously you must be earning BIG money as well!”
HP(shifting uncomfortably): “Well, as I said, we manage somehow.”
OC(punching HP in the arm): “C’mon Sardaarji! You can tell me! I’m not going to order a tax raid at your place”(laughed uncontrollably for 2 mins after this)
HP: “Yeah its good, if you wanted to hear that”
OC: “Now Sardaarji, being so rich, won’t you like to help a poor constable of the railway police, who is deployed 24x7 to ensure your safety?”(OC’s expression at this point of time was more pained than that of Somalian children, minus their impoverished bodies, of course)
(HP now looked like a man suddenly enlightened.)
HP: “How much Sirji?”
OC: “Arrey, I just want to have some chai-paani. 100-200, whatever you can dispense with.”
HP quietly took out a Rs 100 bill and handed it over to our enterprising cop, who merrily got up and walked off. And that, folks, is the most bizarre transaction of ‘convenience money’ that I have witnessed over the years. The Guy, simmering with all the anger that his 22 years could muster, with the anger quite conveniently coming up after the cop had left, swore a couple of choicest abuses at him. One other guy lamented the system, not too long after he had bribed the TTE to get a confirmed seat. I, meanwhile, yawned at the spectacle, and dozed off.
We arrived at Beena by midnight, i.e. at the right time. This train, as I mentioned earlier, went to both Bhopal & Jabalpur. At Beena, it divided itself into two parts, with one going to Bhopal & the other one to Jabalpur. The stoppage was supposed to be of 30 minutes. I was jerked awake by the Guy who promptly reminded me to get the borrowed money from the ATM. I, quite drowsily, ambled off the train, leaving my luggage with the Guy, in anticipation that he would wait for me, and thus quite idiotically forgot that in order to proceed for Jabalpur, he had shift to that part of the train which was supposed to go towards the same. So off I went to the ATM, off the Guy went to the other part of the train, and in the ensuing time, apparently, off went my handbag, firmly clutched in the hands of a thief. I became aware of this third movement after coming back after withdrawing the required money and paying up our benefactor.
Now, how does your average Indian reacts to crime & injustice? Iconic ones don the role of a gut wrenching, sweat dripping, muscle flexing role of a fighter. Their deeds are immortalized in cinema, like those of Shankar - played by our very own ‘Gunmaster G9’ - in Gunda( I have always believed that Gunda was based on a true story, with the depicted surrealism always getting linked somewhere with stark realism of its time). The weaklings run away, crying foul. But the average guy? Especially when the crime, theft here, has occurred on a train that is supposed to break into parts which are going elsewhere? Well, one can rake his/her mind to search for that right reaction, not me. Because, ahem, for that to happen, I have to be average. Cutting short the suspense, I, after finding my bag to be absent, imagined that it, for some godforsaken reason – security, perhaps - would have been taken by the Guy, and hence, got out of the train again to search him out in his part of the train. Forever a believer in the inner goodness of man, theft was obviously an out of question proposition to me. Well, find him I did, sans my bag of course. And by the time I reached back to my compartment, or rather the area on the platform which housed my compartment, all I found was fresh air. The train was there, chugging off into the darkness, with its tail light disappearing. The philosophizing part of the preceding post I forcefully clobbered this time.
So, effectively, there went my train number 3 for the journey.
And even that is not all folks. Due to a sheer lack of knowledge of the geography of Madhya Pradesh(this despite spending close to a quarter of a century there), I chose to hop on into the part of Gondwana Express going to Jabalpur with the now-my-great-friend Mr. Guy, in my quest to reach Bhopal, when maps, railway time-tables, and idiots-of-the-first-order(as succinctly put by Dad) know that Beena is only 2 hours of railway time away from Bhopal. This last error in judgement is however outshined by the ones preceding it, and therefore may not come across as too glaring. But the GRP cop ensured that it did; read the epilogue please.
(I reached Jabalpur at 7 in the morning. Guy’s family showed tremendous hospitality in putting up with me for 2 hours and cooking a sumptuous breakfast for me. It took a couple of trains, with a change at Itarsi, to finally reach Bhopal at 5:00 PM on Tuesday a good 46 hours after I had set out on this travesty of a journey. I now wonder how could the term ‘journey’ be ever used as a metaphor in philosophy!)

Epilogue
"Sirji, tell me seriously. You seriously want to file this FIR, or shall I give you the number of a very good psychiatrist? I think your son needs counseling.”

Crossroads Galore - Part 1

Analyze this. Yours truly, while aiming to travel from Delhi to Bhopal, missed 3 trains in 28 hours; took 44 hours to complete a journey that should ideally have taken 10; survived on a couple of sandwiches, equal number of cold drinks & an amazingly inedible Railways 'thaali', coupled with a Good-Samaritan sponsored utthapam during the ordeal; had zero cash for about 11 hours in which he resorted to begging to uplift his economic status; lost(or rather gifted, as suggested by a sarcastic cop of the GRP) luggage that included ‘sheerly worthless’(suggested again by the same cop) items like branded shirts, trousers, joggers and- hold your breath femme fatales(though I wish you actually did)- about 50 photographs of yours truly.

Zoom back to a chilly Monday night on the roads of Delhi. I, with my unparalleled wisdom, thought that 2 hours is enough time to reach Hazrat Nizamuddin station from Noida via Green Park. Now, any Delhite wouldn’t find anything particularly wrong with this assumption, unless he/she knows that this 2 hour window lay in the infamous rush hours of Delhi traffic. Add to this the fact that I had already missed a flight in Delhi owing to the same traffic an year before during the same rush hours, and so, ideally, I should have been wiser, which, as it turned out, is something that should be a life time goal for me. But nevertheless, the journey began smoothly enough with the rickshaw driver crooning classic Kishore Kumar numbers, laced with sudden genitalia describing outbursts at erratic drivers, with the blaring speakers of the vehicle complimenting his, ahem, unique voice, while I enjoyed the night view of Delhi, peeping out of the rickshaw like Tarzan visiting a city for the first time. When the lights whiz by, you don’t exactly get to know the speed, and to make it worse, it was me. Rest is legendary stuff as, after hitting Green Park at 8:40 PM, we(the rickshaw driver & me) still tried to make a dash for H. Nizamuddin, in a bid to outshine Schumi or, lately, Rossi. Which we obviously could not, though it was heartening to note that we were only 10 minutes late, a delay about which I boasted almost pompously about in a later encounter with Dad, about which I would talk, quite naturally, later.
“What touches me most about missing flights and trains is the philosophical angle to it. The disappearing lights of the locomotive signify the adage – “so near, yet so far”, they give you a reality check as to how your cherished goals leave your side even as you watch them go, they also signify the lullaby of life and the ultimate truth that you leave everything behind…….” –
(the intention now is to create a loud, jarring moment here which denotes that my phone rang, but it was on vibrate mode, and the ‘jarring moment’ is thus better understood than expressed, so…anyways, lets just leave this crap)
“Hello?”
“Boarded?”
“No Dad, actually I missed….”
“(pause)…Quite so expected when you are concerned!”
“Ya, I mean I just missed by 10 mins. Remember, you too missed it once?”
“Yes I did. So?”
“So nothing…I’ll just call up when I manage a contingency boarding”
“No boy, I’ll list out to you the earliest options which you have….blah blah”
“Fine Dad, I’ll see what can be done and call you back.”

Can/could notwithstanding, what was wanted to be done was to find a comfortable reservation for the next morning, and sleep off the ensuing time, given the mental fatigue that is common if you spend a full day at work doing, well, nothing. So I did the same, and logged off comfortably from the current ‘adventurous’ day, after getting the reservation done for a train due to depart at 2:17 PM from Delhi to Bhopal(New Delhi – Jabalpur Superfast) the next day, oblivious of what lay ahead.

Next day, I strolled into the Hazrat Nizammuddin station again, almost whistling Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be wild’ – ‘almost’ because I have always believed that it would be quite bizarre to do so actually, movies notwithstanding - taking an intelligent margin of 17 minutes. Not one of those who get all worked up and act silly after a minor mistake, I introduced a sexy swagger with a cocked-sideways-gaze while walking up to the ‘Enquiry Window’ and enquired about the platform at which the specific train was supposed to come. “4” came the reply from the utterly bored human sitting across the window. Hence I marched to the platform number 4, found a train with the words ‘New Delhi – Jabalpur’ & ‘Superfast’ written on it, confirmed the train with a fellow passenger and perched myself on the allotted coach and seat number. All seemed perfect. The luggage was tucked in. The fellow passenger was a law student cum business man – an interesting case for fruitful conversation, given the fact that I had rapturously laughed at a lot of lawyer & businessmen jokes recently. The weather too was perfect and I looked forward to reaching Bhopal by 12 AM in the night.

Only, the train just didn’t start.

Not at 2:17 PM, not at 2:30 PM, not at 3:00 PM.
While we shifted nervously on our arse a couple of times while looking at our watch during our very engaging conversation- which covered almost everything from Laptop power issues to the Chennai lawyers going berserk over their ‘brethren’ in Sri Lanka- we didn’t exactly panic until a family came in and started settling themselves in the adjoining seats, casually mentioning that they came a tad too early before departure. By that time, during our conversation, we had scoffed at a couple of bachelors sitting around, asking whether they had reservations or were just freelancing on railways and had smirked at their miserable existences when they had sought to confirm the train name, which was, incidentally, different from what we were assuming it to be. The family angle brought a lot of credibility to the now grounding theory of ‘wrong-train’. We rushed out to check the train name and lo behold, this was actually a certain Mahakaushal Express, which indeed goes from New Delhi to Jabalpur, at a super fast pace, but does NOT stop at Bhopal in between.

And it was standing on platform number 5.

Yes, yours truly mistook platform 5 for 4, & thus got into the wrong train which was incidentally going towards Jabalpur, and watched the right train leave the platform over the edges of a lively but ultimately futile conversation.
So effectively, train number 2 missed.
Now, my eyes drifted to the original Promised land – platform 4. There was another train standing there as I watched, now with a strange & sudden fear of trains on the ascendancy.
(to be continued)

“And Here We Go”

– I muttered, in as Joker-esque fashion as possible. Curious eyes, had they been there, would have followed my gaze all the way yonder, expecting an explosion (ala ‘The Dark Knight’), but would have been exasperated to find the gaze ending on a clock having its hours, minutes and seconds hands doing a simultaneous vertical handshake, reminding them of the infamous conspiring clockwork theory all over again.

While I, well, would have stifled a yawn, which I dutifully did.

The statement that birthdays used to be pure, unadulterated fun at one point of time seems to be pure, unadulterated comedy today. Back then, my pretty uncelebrated existence seemed to wait for this day to dawn, in an almost frenzied, nail biting anticipation. There were two very solid reasons for this anticipation in the pre-adolescent times. One, you got a bagful of toffees – the possession of which is a highly coveted, but perennially insatiated (thanks to the prevalent dentist propaganda) desire among kids – which you were supposed to distribute amongst your classmates, with that being the only day in the year when you yearned for more absentees than ever. Two, you got to wear the ‘coloured dress’ - stating colloquially - which, given the mundane dress code of the school, was a pretty refreshing change. That’s it, two reasons to commemorate my arrival on planet Earth – toffees & ‘coloured dresses’. Thankfully, I think now, I wasn’t asked to write an essay on “My Birthday” back then - when writing ones on “My Dog” & “My House” was a commonality. Because of the presence of the above-mentioned reasons and the absence of the usual teacher-friendly rhetoric in the essay, the Parents-Teachers meet would actually have been in a danger of being pre-poned, or worse, extended. Needless to say, few things in this world are more demonic than a PT meet – and this is a fact that would be known by any person who never ever topped in his class, or liked to talk to his friends in the classroom, or preferred a quick peek in the textbook to burning his midnight oil in case of a test, or used to bunk a whole lecture under the pretext of emptying his bowels, etc. Phew, good-possible-riddance!
As I entered into adolescence, the onset of September itself started bringing out the good human being in me, much to my inner chagrin, and much to the amusement of my family. But it was inescapable if you wanted money for that party you wished to throw. Money that bought balloons, cards, return gifts, and, quite importantly – pop music. 90s was an era dominated by the likes of Ace of Base, Aqua, Vengaboys, Backstreet Boys, Dr. Alban, and that song called ‘Macarena’ , all of which were, I must admit, damn good dance instigators. So once we were done doing our bits of being gawky teenagers eyeing each other sheepishly in those parties, some noble soul or the other used to muster up enough diligence to politely usher the elders out, and turn on the music, volume max. And then we used to dance our ‘a double star’ off on those numbers. Thankfully, such parties used to be usually stag; otherwise our already diminished reputation in front of the fairer sex could have suffered a final, beyond repair damage – it being directly proportional to the radius of our gyrations. What we never realized then was the fact that the feared damage had already been done(perhaps due to some other, equally grotesque acts); this being the real reason for the stag nature of those parties, and NOT that widely circulated, albeit fake theory which projected girls as mere irritants to the process of having fun.
Then came college, where the term ‘birthday’ finally came out of the dreamy-anticipation mode into the territory of stark realism, if not fear. There was this realization that there are people in this world who were so damned euphoric at your birthday that they go a step further than the usual, boring old-school handshakes and hugs – they lace your arse with the choicest of assaults. Assaults that started innocently enough with a few harmless pats and kicks, but which soon deteriorated into a full blown attack involving punches, slipper-slaps, leather belts, sticks & what not. The ordeal was stopped when the decibel level of the screams of the birthday boy passed a certain threshold. This crucial data was provided by a person designated specifically for this part; a person who was seemingly non-violent, but derived immense sadistic pleasure out of watching the greetings unfold on the birthday boy’s arse. This was, of course, followed by a gala for the ‘well wishers’ in one of the dhabas located around the city – a treat which they deserved after tiring themselves out by extending their wishes in so unique a manner. For the uninitiated, the greeting affair was called GPL. Its quite amusing, that inspite of not being a masochist, I kind of miss it.
Once you move out of that cocooned existence you enjoyed at college, things change radically. Hairs grey, paunches knock – saying a very unwelcome ‘Hello’, and birthdays become quite an insipid, if not irritating, affairs. It’s a usual day after all, your senile mind reasons. Same climate, same surroundings, same people, same damned brush-to-hush existence. Hell, even after prolonged deliberations on my contribution to the society by the government, its not even a dry day. Perhaps the only thing that looks to be different is that you can strike off one more year from your pending time on Earth. Every other point regarding it induces a yawn – and that includes the cake with the number of candles on it equaling your numeric age.

Perhaps the time, my friends, has come when I should say that I am aged 26 years, or that I’m a 26 year old, hoping that you grasp the obvious emphasis put accross through the emboldenments.

A Looming Orwellian Summer

There is an eerie silence that follows an explosion. Something that sounds like vacuum, piercing your ears. It lasts for a while, and in that time frame everything becomes sluggish, everything exhibits a similar kind of vacuum silence - rather than emanating sound from itself, everything looks to be sucking it inside. In that moment, if you are a victim, you seek a place where you can hide and save your life, somehow. If you are a perpetrator, you celebrate, perhaps. But if you are an observer, you think, seek justification, & look to find at least some semblance of reason even in insanity.
I am playing the third role.
I try to empathize. With both of them.

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The victims, my heart goes out for them. No one was spared. Not women, not children, not the sick housed in a hospital ward which was bombed.

I stop midway, and abhor whatever I have thought about. Over the years, these are the very people who have been silent spectators to and some even perpetrators of violence, discrimination & exploitation of my community. Their innocence is a myth because both the meek spectator to injustice and the one who commits it – are equally guilty.

Do you think the unborn child or the 10 year old boy who died in the blasts understand even the literal meaning of the words ‘discrimination’ & ‘exploitation’?

In great causes, minor damages should be overlooked. There is always some collateral damage in a war.

A war is a physical act of conflict between military arms of two rival ideologies. The pre condition for any engagement to be termed a war is that the two sides should be armed. In case one of the sides is unarmed, the engagement is termed genocide. And if you call these damages something that can indeed be overlooked, why don’t you overlook the deaths of your kin caused at the hands of the State enforcement agencies during their search and cordon operations? Why do you then term it part of a bigger conspiracy against your community?

You are saying all this because you haven’t had any hardships in your life. You were born into a safe environment, with complete financial & social security. You got a hassle free existence, which you used to get educated, get a job & lead a privileged life. All this time, you least cared about what happened around you. Now, after settling down for a comfortable life to follow, you open the newspaper, get to see a news item about some explosion somewhere, and out you come with an opinion and a twisted logic to back it up!

You have to decide on which count do you hold me guilty (and thereby sentence me to death in a bomb blast) – being an enemy of your community, or having a more privileged background than yourself. If it is the latter, as seems apparent, is it not a similar birth-based discrimination you yourself harbour that you claim to be fighting against?
And what does drudgery brings about in men? For winners, a drive to excel; for others, jealousy. And a violence that brews from jealousy can NEVER be called a crusade. At best, it could be termed a vengeance, a revenge which you take on others for your failures!

It is indeed a crusade, as it is fought with valour by wronged people against the enemies of righteousness and religion. We are fighters of the God, unafraid of any consequences whatsoever, and are ready to sacrifice even our lives for the causes we believe in. If this is not crusade, then what is it? Where else, but from God, can we get such determination and success?

How do you define valour? Is it sheepishly entering a harmless crowded area, benefitting from the basic trust that humans show towards other humans? The trust which isn’t shown towards animals, like stray leopards, which are usually killed when they enter a human locality. Or does valour lie in leaving a scooter laden with explosives in that area, while walking out surreptitiously, carefully avoiding inquisitive glances on your way out? Or does it lie in celebrating your ‘combative action’ holed in a hideout hundreds of miles away from the point of action? Or perhaps in running away and hiding from the law enforcement agencies in a manner similar to what hunted animals adopt while evading entrapment? Or -in the case of being captured- in hiring a lawyer, applying for the Presidential pardon, and in parading your parents, wife & kids in front of the media to display a more ‘humane’ sight of yours to the public?
Isn’t it so with you that the mere possibility of danger or death (to you) in your actions seems to make you a coward? Don’t your actions to evade punishment end up validating the same law and constitution you claim to fight against? And from where does the word ‘sacrifice’ come in your dictionary? Sacrifice may be of two types. One is self-sacrifice, in which man himself dies for a cause, after waging a battle. In the other, man sacrifices a loved one – akin to Abraham’s intention of sacrificing Isaac, as I read in the Bible story. You do neither. What you indeed sacrifice is an unknown human, your compatriot mostly. What ‘loss’ do you refer to while talking about sacrifice?
And for your claims to divine warrior hood, here is something which I once read written somewhere –
“There are two types of warriors-
The first fights injustice, the second creates it.
The first protects the innocent, the second kills them.
The first sacrifices himself for others, the second sacrifices others.
The first is a tree that provides shade, the second is a tree for firewood.”

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And so on goes the conversation.
Meanwhile, people keep dying. Not by old age, not by diseases - which are greatest killers in our country, but by being blown into smithereens by crude bombs in the prime of their lives. What remain are the remnants – a severed head, a torn abdomen etc. of what had once been a vibrant, lively human, with its own set desires, dreams, and its capacity to carry other, much newer, lives on its back.
And meanwhile, India’s electronic media keeps asking for citizen reporters on the blasts. “We want pictures, videos” one popular news portal says, of anything that “you see around you regarding the attack.” Implicitly, it means that if you can spot gore, why reserve it for a private viewing – let’s share it across the world so that the wounds of the unfortunate become the cynosure of the public. Pictures taken hours after a blast are impact-zero ones, and hence don’t sell. So let’s get it straight from the horse’s eye!

Following the Ahmadabad blasts, in an interview with the Gujarat Home Minister, a journalist pops the following points - “There is a perception that such blasts were expected in Gujarat after the 2002 riots. Also, add to that the dimension of most riots victims still not having got legal justice.” and “Some people argue that when riot victims do not get legal justice they feel like taking revenge.” Hats off to the lady, who did exactly the task for which the terrorists planted all those bombs! She, through her ‘insights’, echoed the very ‘logic’ that the terrorists so erringly tried to champion – that in order to make the deaf listen, you need explosions! Only, unlike in Bhagat Singh’s case(if you recognize the dialog in the previous sentence), these explosions killed innocents. Why does a discussion involving mindless, savage acts like bomb blasts needs to seek any explanation/logic for the occurrence of the same, everytime?!!
Lastly, another piece of rattling stupidity – a news portal recently published the name of an anti-national, venom spewing, (and absolutely irrational, if I may add) blog which is written by suspected terrorists, in a speculative article regarding the new names acquired by familiar terror outfits in India. They didn’t publish the link, noble souls, but the esteemed fellows don’t seem to know that naming anything controversial in a public news forum actually incites a lot of readers to seek it out, and read it through, especially in an information friendly world like ours. I’m pretty sure that the morale of the blog writer in question would have soared by quite a few degrees, seeing so many hits all of a sudden, mores so because the blog was almost inconsequential and irrelevant for most of its pre-fame life. Secondly, his ‘message’ may now actually be in a position to spread into some unpolluted but nevertheless fertile minds, thanks to the site in question. And how is the blog, the one and only update of which came almost an year back, still floating in the public domain? What have the scissor-quick honchos of the Department of Telecommunications and Information & Broadcasting ministry been doing, apart from banning television channels & ‘obscene’ films? And the only sane answer to this problem, which will eventually conceive in the minds of these ‘information controllers’ would be - and which I personally fear the most - block all blogs; similar to the traditional strategy that has been employed to get rid of all the world’s evils over the centuries.
The same strategy that seems to make sense in this mad world today - destruction– of people if they differ from you, of information if it doesn’t corroborate what you say. Simple, efficient & with immediate results. At its start you have something, at its end there is nothing. Nothing but thin air. And you don’t need any theorems to prove zilch.
An Orwellian summer somehow doesn’t seem to be so far away now.

Fawk'es' eyes!

There has been this tendency with the conspirator, this extra special orientation, towards realizing the threat probability to everything. So, as a kid, he used to look for loopholes in a shop’s security in case of a theft, when others starry-eyed the toys. The conspirator always used to wonder about how in the heavens name would the short, potbellied shopkeeper, in all his engrossedness with his account book, would come to know about the unprotected, hanging GI-Joe being quietly plucked off its lowly abode by the conspirator - for whom even the counter wall separating the Joe from the shopkeeper’s vision was well a metaphor for the Himalayas. This question lingered on until he came to know about RFID tagging, of course; but by then, the possibility of an implementation had obviously become negligible, it being inversely proportional to the conspirator’s ever increasing height.

Also, when the conspirator, in his grown up, but still uncanny self, stumbled on into the John Woo way of Indian airports, it was revelation time. He found, after doing so, that he could transport a pocketful of crude firecracker bombs in his backpack through the security checks of the national carrier, all the way to its destination. The motive behind the coup was innocent enough – the conspirator didn’t want to miss out on his Diwali celebrations, his first and hopefully the last in Andamans - but that is outside the scope of this discussion; if at all this be considered to be a discussion (It is expected that the conspirator’s young and tender age & innocuous intention will be excused). And if that was not sufficient enough, the conspirator found that he could reach as deep as the international terminal waiting area entry gate, without, repeat without, his handbag being frisked, let alone even glanced at. The handbag could have contained anything from something as harmless as Reader’s Digest to, well, use your imagination. All this analysis has been done while assuming, for obvious reasons, that the conspirator was not ‘frisked’ by any intangible sensor rays enroute to the waiting area. Its a situation that may perhaps go untested forever, unless he decides, at at a later point in time, to explore the interiors of a Tihar cell.

The last pin in the straw came when, after being enlightened ad infinitum about the grandiose & political importance of the European Union and its headquarters at the Berlaymont building in Brussels while travelling towards the same in a Belgian metro, the conspirator found, to his utter shock, that the train stops right below the huge EU edifice, and that the stairs towards the ground level(from the underground level of the metro station) lead directly to the entrance of the building through an alley flanked by its support pillars. Mind you, to the entrance of the building, not to the entrance of a compound surrounding the building. In fact, there was no compound, as a compound area is usually characterized by a surrounding wall, which, in the case of the European Union headquarters, was absent! Lo behold, there was a structure, which supposedly houses ALL of the European political elite and their attached machinery, at a stones throw from the conspirator without a S of security, or a P of the famed Belgian politie. He could conveniently go to the nearest support pillar, place a bag not containing Reader's Digests alongside, and walk away whistling, in a trademark John Woo fashion(sans the cigarette, of course), with the building going up in flames at his back. Makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it, Mr José Manuel Durão Barros?
But don't you worry Mr. Barros, he is no Guy Fawkes, you are certainly not King James I and there is a difference of seven letters between the words Belgium & England- with the difference being obviously more than linguistic.
Talking of the politie, or 'our esteemed contemporaries of the government enforcement staff' as Erle Stan Gardner called them, they happen to be be one of the most missed species by the conspirator here in Europe. Well, 'missed' may not be the right term as their absense has given the conspirator an opportunity to get into an overdrive with his element major time. That restaurant could be bluffed, that signal can be trespassed, this house could be broken into - the list is endless. After the Berlaymont surprise, only one question had come to his mind - How could Poirot hail from Belgium, of all places?
Now he knows. Practice makes a man perfect, and one needs incidents to practice the art of detection. Lots of them actually. And there is no better 'incident' incubator, than the vast, unpoliced Belgian/European hinterland.
And the only fitting reply that Europe can give to him for all the above crap is getting him arrested for criminal suggestion within 5 minutes of his publishing this post, the probability of which is........... :-)