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.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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........... :-)

Of writing woes, bad finishes & an unbridled romanticism!

Two unfinished posts, or drafts, on my post list & about half a dozen unfinished ideas on the hard drive made me take this decision. The decision to put overthought in the dustbin and write straight from the gut over here. I have been a terrible finisher always. And if writing unfinished poems(yup, did that back as a kid - even bordered on the mushy genre occasionally!) and articles was not enough, I have been one lousy finisher in the material affairs as well. Having struck only once in the 7 interviews I faced in my life - that 'once' being responsible for the laptop on which I type this and also for a very sumptuous meal which I had an hour back, I have always had a very hazy idea of what-it-takes. So even a childish phrase as 'pulling your pants up'(as is advised to be done in climaxes)- in my context- becomes nothing short of a herculean feat.
In my romantic delirium, into which I fall a lot while doing a lot of useless activities like writing (& listmus*), I have even contemplated about writing something about writing. You would be amused to know that I got stuck at this idea because I, while writing about it, thought about writing something about writing as a further sub-plot. That made it something like writing about writing about writing, which, as I later assessed, was not exactly what you would call a healthy activity if your mind is the host; thereby making me abandon it totally. The explanation that I gave to my heart for doing something so ghastly? 'The world is not yet ready for it ol' chap! We'll together write a masterpiece someday, and we would include it as a sub-plot in it.' Boy! was he happy!
Then there was this urge to write about the Jaipur blasts. But then, there were already plenty of them around, with their big, lofty thoughts. I, surprisingly, love to write about lofty thoughts, while I hate to confront them myself. Perhaps my heart desires all the loftiness in the world to emanate solely from me, and having to share its dreams with the other sources seems to put it off. Perhaps that is the reason (my love for loftiness, that is) why I, in a moment of intense admiration for Latin phrases, decided to choose the URL for this space as absolutumdominum. But wait a second, shouldn't the 'n' be followed by an 'i' there? Yes it should be, but the original was already taken, and I quite safely assumed the people around me to suck badly in Latin. Hell, they suck in Hindi, forget about Latin!("Guys, 'Shaurya' ka matlab hota hai bravery!" - courtesy, an anchor of MTV Wassup. Got a sleepless night due to a stomach ache that followed the guffaws.)
And boy, they did suck. No one, amongst an enormous, jaw-dropping audience (which consisted of roughly 5 visitors in the first few months) could tell out the glitch. I too, pretending to have forgotten counting beyond 5 as a counter-measure against an extremely low blogger popularity - okay you have it, an extremely low internet popularity (and I'm not going beyond that!) - decided to let it stay, until one day, the romantic delirium returned with one helluva quote, which screamed for itself to be made the headline of the blog -
'Connoisseurs of Latin maybe a touch disappointed about the missing 'i'; but let me assure you, that 'I' has been stolen to be sprinkled over every nook and corner of this space!'
I was bowled over by myself with this one, and it took some time to regain the footing as the pendulum keeps coming back in such instances. It hits you, you smile, and soon it returns, hitting you again. The cycle continues, and takes some time to subside - and with it subsides your smile of self-admiration!
During these moments of intense contemplations, which are usually the moments of romantic deliriums, another queer thought had struck my head. It was again influenced with the extremely low level of visibility that this space enjoys. Well, the thought was about - to put it simply and while maintaining a straight face- a post-apocalyptic scenario in which all the literature of the world has been destroyed. Every single letter totally erased from everywhere. All traces of written text, symbolic or graphical, totally wiped out. Only one piece remains. Yes, you guessed it right - this blog!( This is my space, remember, so the one that remains can never be yours!). What would happen then? I would be a legend, father of literature for the future generations. The greatest writer ever, because, frankly, I'll be the only writer ever - in the eyes of the future generations at least .
Wow! what sweet revenge would that be! On the other hand, it could be a very disheartening experience if the advertisements on or to this page still walk away with the Nobel for literature. (Shivers!)
As I said, just a thought!
Anyways, I think thats enough deliriums for an insomniac for now.
Insomnia and romanticism somehow don't go well together!

* listening to music

That Nasherkan Legacy

(Ahem(clears throat)...Ladies & Gentlemen, I hereby assume great pleasure in announcing that I have completed my first ever work of fiction. It is full of amateurish glitches and inconsistencies, but it is nevertheless mine, and, as a proud Father, I firmly stand by it. I also got it published on Sffworld here, and would be waiting for some frenzied criticism from all quarters. Brickbats ahoy!)

Odin watched in horror as the sweat drop fell to the floor, splattered against the surface & disintegrated into numerous droplets. For hours he had been guarding against this very event and now just a short nap had undone all the hardwork. The alarm soon reached its crescendo, and even in midst of the cacophony, he could hear the clamour of machine parts down the tunnel. He had about 5 minutes before the installment’s tracker application pinpointed his location in the maze, and another 30 seconds before he got executed through a high voltage jab sent at the corner where the sweat drop was detected – his corner. The security system always worked this way, ruthlessly terminating any attempt to transgress the boundary of the installment. It had been a bad idea to escape, right from its conception, but still Odin wanted to take his chances. After all, a chosen death is preferable to an inflicted one.
It all started off with a simple game of Nasherkan. It was in this very installment that he had challenged Oni. Odin had always been a good player, but more than confidence in his skills, it was a sense of adventurism that had made him challenge Oni, the reigning champion of Saarga multiverse. In his hot blood, even Oni’s dark & mysterious ways hadn’t deterred him. An uproar was expectedly caused when Oni put down his conditions, as was customary for the challenged. The game was to be played locked out in this installment and the loser was deemed to be terminated. There was no way out, he contended, when the clash is for the title of ‘Champion of Saarga’. These conditions were ratified by the Council, Nasherkan’s regulatory body, and it was decided that all the other rules would be kept intact.
The game of Nasherkan was played in a two player mode in Saarga (though in other multiverses, there had been instances of multiplayer games too). The game was both virtual and physical in nature - virtual for the players, as they viewed everything in the game with Nasherkan headgear, and physical because the actual action was performed physically through the simulation controllers. The game’s playground was a small spherical ball known as Terra, portions of area of which were divided equally between the two players, the division being sporadic like polka dots, as per the player preferences. The players were then expected to create their own ‘growths’ – patterns of quasi-intelligent characters and surroundings, collectively known as societies, with the help of the simulation controllers, placed at a short distance from the Terra, which was enclosed in a glass chamber. A Ring of Ignorance (ROI) was also established around the Terra, so that the growths remain concerned with themselves. These growths were reared to be antagonistic towards each other and, in the ensuing warfare, the player whose growth got eliminated first was deemed the loser. Thus, the wholesome objective of the game was total annihilation of the rival growth, and any steps taken for building, and maintaining growths were mere means to the end. The moves were made in real time and could be made even simultaneously; and the players had full freedom to manipulate their growths in any way they wanted. None of the players were to directly expose themselves to their or their rival’s growths, but, with the help of the simulation controllers, they effectively ‘played God’ to their societies. The Terra to be used was to be picked from a heap of lumps from the installment itself, as per the rules of Nasherkan. After a read-out of this full charter of rules, a bluish lump was chosen as Terra and the game was on.
It was fascinating to see the two of them play – one a hardened champion, the other a courageous rookie. Both went about their jobs with utmost dexterity, working out patterns, surroundings, & characters effortlessly with the simulation controllers. In the initial part there was not much to do. The players had mutually decided to increase the time rate on Terra to 2.3 Billion of the rate on Saarga, so that the game could be over in just under 2 days time. Initially, both of them went about creating characters with little or no intelligence. As they had put in tough surroundings around these characters, the societies became more engrossed in survival than in countering each other. As a result, no evolutionary version increase was being achieved. Without a version increase, the growths were lesser likely to fight, and there was the danger of the game ending in a tame draw. So, both the players agreed to wipe off everything, and make a new start to the game. After a brief lull which followed the wipe-off, the players moved on to create their most effective foot soldiers – the Naras.
The Naras were totally different from the characters that had been created till now. For the first time, the most effective weapon (MEW) of a character race was not physical. In fact, the Naras were one of the weakest characters on the physical scale. But they were provided with an unparalleled intelligence as their MEW. This set them apart and changed the whole approach to the game for both the players. Instead of the earlier skirmishes & petty fights between the growths, now planning and strategy came into the picture.
While being almost perfect miniature copies of their creators’ race (as a tribute) in physical terms, the Naras were engineered to be far different on the cognitive scale. The people of Saarga had long renounced violence (it existed only in virtual games like Nasherkan now) and related grade II attributes, whereas the Naras were made to be suspicious, quarrelsome and inimical towards each other, the society, and the surroundings. This constant sense of enmity in Naras was crucial to the game’s outcome, and was thence mandatorily incorporated in them by the players. As they were provided with the superior most intelligence on Terra, with its help they gradually spread over to each and every corner of it, and became the ruling class – perfect for the battle setup of Nasherkan. But because of their enhanced intelligence and resulting inquisitiveness, it was difficult for the players to maintain the ROI around Terra which had been easy to maintain in the case of the prior characters. Ever since their conception, it was not uncommon to spot a Nara looking up towards the pseudo-sky (which had been created along with the Naras, as a key component of the ROI) with a puzzled expression on its face. This increasing curiosity made the Naras attempt research in a major way, and, though this was desirable to the players as far as the research was military, it was anathema for them if it turned non-military. For any non-militaristic research had a chance, even though a miniscule one, for overcoming the ring, and such a scenario would have resulted in immediate termination for both the players. Also, both Odin & Oni wanted more control over their ‘foot soldiers’ – who, given their intelligence, had a very high chance of going the peaceful Saargian way. So they gave the Naras’ cognitive scale a loophole in the form of superstition & herd mannerism. As direct contact was not allowed in Nasherkan, this was the perfect channel to control the Nara mind. And with its help, every major attempt at non-militaristic research was vanquished by the players by turning the majority against a handful of researchers. However, a little quasi research was allowed to be carried on, as a part of the ROI.
After all, ignorance too has to be taught in order for it to remain ignorance.
In order to exert their influence and strengthen their growths, the two used entirely different modus operandi. Odin relied more on symbology & myth-dispersement, mostly extolling grade I attributes in filling up the Nara scale with an unwavering faith and commitment to Odin. The approach was direct and, given the natural Nara affinity to revere grade I attributes - much akin to the Saarga people - was convincingly successful too. Hordes and hordes of Naras joined the ranks of the Odin society, and Oni’s growth started looking hopelessly outnumbered. The Nara design had been a joint venture between the two players and both had retained an equal number of Naras at their conception, but the influence of Odin slowly proliferated even the highest Onian Nara ranks, and an exodus of sorts towards the Odin side happened. Odin, naturally buoyed by this success, went about creating societies with the same theme, and made his many symbols to be worshipped by each one of them. Whatever that belonged to Oni was labeled as an arch enemy, and was deemed to be attacked on a spotting. Grade II attributes, another Oni domain, were ostracized and shunned, and thus that every possibility was thwarted which could have possibly become an attempt by Oni to access & influence a majority of Naras.

The only catch was that Oni had no such attempt in mind.
Oni was a Champion of Nasherkan. And Odin forgot that. Oni’s technique was never confrontational. Instead, it was better off for him to have his growth reduced to miniscule proportions as it made detection more difficult and even resulted in collateral damage to his adversary in form of fake encounters. But what Oni conspired was something far more sinister and damaging that a collateral damage.
The two growths fought a slow but steady war for most of the time. Sometimes the conflict was made to reach a crescendo deliberately by Odin, so as to get a decisive verdict sooner. War I and War II were the result of such efforts. The wars were a treat to watch, and on more than one occasion, it looked as if the game would be over in a few more Saargian microseconds, but at the last moment, due to one glitch or the other, the wars could never be decisive. It was a glitch to the neutral and the Odin eye, but it was a maneuver to the Oni eye. He believed in slow and steady eating up of the Odin growth as it spoilt itself with its own grandiose & imagined achievements. With each war, which Odin seemed to have won, he actually became weaker. Soon, it dawned upon some Odinian Naras that war itself could be the root cause of their downfall - if it ever happened - and they decided to counter it. And it was here where Odin made his biggest mistake of the game. He paid no heed to the non-militaristic viewpoint of his able and intelligent growth yet again, and chose to eliminate the section of Naras which had gone the anti-war way. What could have been a winner strategy was curbed even before it could materialize into something substantial. The inevitable War III happened, decimating all Nara population with it, barring one – an avatar which Oni had judiciously kept out of the war zone. Avatars were the Nara versions of the players, which were totally controlled by the players themselves, and were another way of controlling the growths. This avatar had been the major disperser of grade II attributes into the Naras as it roamed around even in the rival growth without arising suspicion. But just prior to war III, it was safely tucked away by Oni, only to be resurfaced at the war’s end, proclaiming the Onian victory. Odin had been caught totally unawares by this, as he had expected complete annihilation. Had that been the case, the game could have been continued with creating new characters and societies. But now, it was all over.

The voltage jab came as soon as this thought process of Odin got over; it was often said in Saarga that all the moments in a person’s life flash before his eyes before he dies, but somehow it was only the fast forwarded memory of this game that touched his eyes. After that, it was only white light as Odin of Saarga was terminated as a prisoner trying to transgress the boundaries of the installment.

In Heaven, meanwhile, God punched his palm in exasperation as he suffered another setback while playing the game of Nasherkan with Lucifer on that lump called Saarga.

An Arthouse Interpretation...

Well, I wanted to pen this down before the worldly opinions & factors malign my pure thought yet again. So trying something different now – writing what I felt after watching the movie Khoya Khoya Chand about half an hour back. Three scenes stick to my mind indelibly-

1. The male lead, Zafar, is directing his debut movie. He chooses the story to be that of his own life – a childhood and a youth ridden with angst against his casanova father. In the climactic scene that he shoots, the actor in this movie – which is actually a screen avatar of Zafar himself, asks his father something that he wanted to ask all his life, but could never do so until now. The sincerity and the painfully curious, screaming-for-an-answer-look is shown to be shared by both the actor and the director Zafar, before and behind the camera respectively. Zafar is so emotionally involved in filming this scene that, for him, the difference between reel & real ceases to exist. He looks earnestly, searchingly towards the father, and, in the process, forgets to ‘cut’ the scene.

This scene shows what art means to an artist. Art is not only self expression. It is also a medium to attain salvation for him. It gives him a chance to rollback his life, change things he wished he could – even if those changes are on something as mercurial as a celluloid. A piece of art can be understood cent percent only by its creator for this very reason; it is a self constructed code language, a sort of personal diary, an expression which is, to a certain extent, directed towards himself. A commercially viable piece of art would be directed more towards the audience and would have practically no personal connection with the artist, while a non-commercial one would be directed almost totally towards the artist himself – being as unintelligible to others as scribblings in a personal journal are. The difference between these two lies totally in the target audience that they have.

2. Zafar’s movie’s premiere is greeted with yawns and other general displays of disinterest. Watching, a critic asks Zafar, who is sitting besides him, his opinion on the whole debacle. Zafar watches him broodingly for a moment, seeming ready to burst out in exasperation any second. He does burst out, albeit into a big, ear-to-ear grin.

This scene is a continuation of what I said above. After making a personal-journal piece of art, and understandably not being understood by anyone, there is nothing left for an artist to do but to smile. There may be two reasons for this smile – One, he smiles at others’ ignorance. In a mocking way, he may consider himself to be ahead of his time. He may consider others dumb because they couldn’t understand his metaphors. Two, and this one is difficult to explain. The artist is so deliriously submerged in his art that he doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s opinion on his work. Visually, the situation looks like a sculptor who, after creating his sculpture, has settled down to worship it, as we worship our idols.

And, well, there also are a few, who, with their ingenuity, understand this beautiful but abstruse piece of art, and end up smiling too, albeit for reasons entirely different than those of the artist!

3. Zafar, who had left the industry and his actor girlfriend after the failure of his film, has returned after many years – in order to make a comeback, only to find that his ex-girlfriend has become disillusioned & alcoholic since. While talking to his friend who has since taken care of the girl, about her condition & his reasons for coming back, he says, while looking straight at the girl, who is immersed in an intoxicated slumber –

‘Kya karein bhaisaab, ab in se duur bhi to nahi raha jaata’.

I found this to be swashbucklingly brilliant. The identity of ‘in’ here, in my opinion, is two pronged. He is referring to the two things which were irresistible, and probably irreplaceable in his life –

i)the film industry: An artist can never run away from his art. No matter how much he may try, whatever else he may dabble in, or however disillusioned he may become, he just can not throw his art out of his existence. Perhaps this is the difference between an artist and a non-artist. The commoner has taught himself since childhood that an unproductive part of your being should be cut out from your existence. There is no reason whatsoever for retaining anything so unworthy, so unusable – and so, he adapts himself to any vocation that will satisfy his material wants. An artist can’t do that. He is a person who will retain that pencil with which he has practiced all year long for the final test, even though it may have reduced to such a small size that it is practically unusable.

ii)the girl: This excessive sentimentalism is evident is his human relationships as well. Even well after they end, he can perhaps never get over any of them. Just as he can’t cut away his creative organ however unrewarding it be, he similarly can’t do away with the people he loves. But because his self-expression would be as abstruse as his art, he would be constantly uninterpreted (or worse – misinterpreted), giving way to his failures in these relationships.

So these were some riveting moments from the movie. But watching this movie added more fuel to a greater debate raging inside me for quite sometime now. This debate concerns itself with the relevance of art today. Do we really need it? Does it represent a useless outcome of human creativity? Does it not, by the virtue of its existence, and by its propensity to hypnotize minds, waste human time and effort? These questions can be better understood if we take a peek into what we aim to head towards. Human upbringing is all about mechanizing. Since childhood, we are taught discipline, laws, doctrines, manners, etc. and are constantly conditioned to become ‘civilized’. The rules stated above are imbibed in every inch of our existence, and are generally viewed as prerequisites for living in an organized society. Any deviation from these is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Our ideal existence looks, thereby, to be chillingly similar to a machine part. We are intended to be the well oiled, formulaic & unwavering pieces of a larger machine (visual imagery*: a clock mechanism; also a military parade for the broader sense) known as the human society so that it may run ad infinitum. In such a pursuit, art is necessarily an unneeded enterprise.

And art becomes necessary just because of a need to demechanize. Both its construction & understanding involve the uninhibited side of human nature. A side which is perhaps the sole factor distinguishing us as human beings (to quote a character in The Matrix Reloaded – ‘To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human’). The keywords here are ‘uninhibited’, ‘free’, ‘creative’, ‘romantic’, ‘impulsive’, ‘un-dogmatic’, and, to a certain extent, ‘illogical’ – with the definition of logic which one chooses making the difference here. And it is these words which represent the basic tenets of the concept of art. Art involves a skill which is almost totally impulse based. Its outcome is an expression which is not externally controlled or dogma-resultant, but is free. A shackled expression can therefore never be called art. Art is inherently iconoclast, because human spirit is inherently unrestricted.

And therefore art is needed - to give an expression to the demechanization. By giving an output to this unrestricted side through the medium of art, we keep some semblance of that human element alive in ourselves in this fast changing world.

‘Of all lies, art is the least untrue.’ ~ Gustave Flaubert.

Pretty apt, eh?

* Refer to the previous post for more elucidation on visual imagery