Aham Brahmasmi

Re: Bharat Ratna Ghalib

2011-12-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

(this is a post in reply to Mr Markanday Katju's article today in the Indian Express)

“Hui muddat ki Ghalib mar gaya par yaad aata hai.......wo har ik baat par kehna,ki yun hota to kya hota”

One can associate , quite dramatically though, this couplet to be one of Ghalib's last. But instead ,these lines convey intense speculation, and experimentation, that Ghalib applied in cross examining this world.

Mr Katju, today, in his article in The Indian Express expressed his strong will for Ghalib to be awarded the Bharat Ratna. And in his strong(rather rude) critique ,lashed out his anger at sportsmen(read Sachin) and film stars(read Amitabh), for whom there is a popular support for conferring the Bharat Ratna.

His point of view, sadly, reflects the rigid attitude that he possesses. He, through his statement, is in stark contrast with the views of Ghalib and Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay whom he so avidly supports to confer the accolade , posthumously. Ghalib, other than his poetic expertise , is known for his flexibility of thoughts,and his open defiance to type caste customs. Mr katju, sadly, offers , none of such views to the readers.

To keep it simple, he opposes the support that Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan have for receiving the award, calling it a mockery of the award itself. He, however, failed to keep the following points in mind during his rhetoric.:-

1. Cricket is the pulse of India, and Sachin Tendulkar, for the past 20 years , has relentlessly worked to keep this pulse running. He came to the cricketing world at the age of 16, and his battling in this area still , at 38. So for more than half of his life time, he has been represented as the face of India, and he still strives enough to keep that face untainted. One of his greatest contributions has been the self belief that he has imparted to the nation's youth. Coming from humble backgrounds, and working his way out with enormous labor, he has proved to the nation that anything can be achieved provided there is perseverance and determination. One has to observe his demeanor to know how saintly he is, and a look at his statistic will prove his sheer artistry in the cricketing field.

2. Cinema is an interface through which people, irrespective of class , color, ethnicity , interact with each other. Amitabh Bachchan , it will be apt to say, has been the face of this platform from our country. A person ,or rather a combination of sheer artistry, pure gentleness, and unwavering dignity. He has been there at the helm of the film industry for the past 40 years, have been doing diverse kind of roles, and more importantly, at the age of 70, excelling in them. On seeing him act, cinema does not seem to be some blitzkrieg action, but an art form , in which you need talent to perform, and values to succeed. It is a well known fact that through his life, he has been portraying the common Indian citizen, be it the angry young man of the 70’s or a truthful principal of a college in 2011, with sheer perfection

India ,in 2011-2012, is an evolving country. Its not that Ghalib, or Sharat Chandra, are forgotten heroes, , they deserve an honorable place in the archival aisles of our history, but to rule out sportsmen and film stars, when it come to performing artistic, national and scientific service, is totally wrong. Tendulkar and Bachcan , collectively ,for the past 4 decades, have tirelessly labored to keep the baton of India at the top.When the country is at its lowest ebb in the context of corruption and terrorism ,they are the faces that have kept the head of our nation high. Today, sports, and performing arts are an important indicator of our national prosperity. And the two great persons , criticized so vehemently by Katju, have excelled in these fields , thus doing a commendable national service

In the end I cannot sum it up better than by admitting that yes, Ghalib and Sharat Chandra have a right to get the nation's highest Accolade, but awarding it to sporting legends, and cine-artists, will not be a mockery, but a celebration of , the modern and resurrected India and its heroes .

We the people

2011-12-16T03:58:00.000-08:00

“Time is the biggest healer”, and in the present paradigm, this statement glows in perhaps its most glittering sheen. What great age are we living in, when a website in the US is contemplating a presidential nominee , when one of the most autocratic rulers this world has ever seen has been put to one of the most hideous deaths that, again, the world has ever seen. And last but not the least ,when some facebook posts have triggered a country wide revolution, a movement that gave them the flavor they desperately sought for- a taste of democracy.

Democracy- a word with Greek origins that generally has been put into practice when all the other ways of ruling a state have failed. As it is often quoted – the worst form of governance but the best one available. Leftist often argue that a human, naturally, is a communist. But one cannot hide away from the fact that social nature is what overrides any of the inherent tendencies of man.

A normal human being needs social interaction for his hygienic survival. An environment where he can communicate , criticize, laugh, cry thus developing different traits of a personality. A democratic set up is where one gets such an environment with the highest degree of freedom. And what happens when things go the other way round? Imagine a guy in a wooden box with no ventilation, what is the most probable end result?...a destroyed box with an injured but satisfied guy out of it. Today’s Tehrir and yesterday’s Tiananmen were such incidents.

So when democracy helps us to avoid such coups , then why it is termed as the worst form of governance? When every person has got an equal voice, an equal status, there is bound to be a clash, but , in the midst of such heat and fire, we do get the best shaped idea that run a long race but, its the slowness that frustrates. India can be termed as one such frustrated country. The reason is that after more than 65 years of independence and being led by some of the best statesmen , the country still rots in the filth of corruption and poverty. But for a country that was judged to Balkanized within years of its independence , a fairly united stand tells about the magic that the democratic scepter has created. And one cannot help but admit that it was our freedom, our popular stand that helped us to make a transition from a socialist environment to a more open one, in a peaceful way.

Lastly, it will be a gross misjudgment to judge democracy as a form of governance. Its a way of living life in a pleasant oxymoron. Here we have conflicts when we care for a common cause , we fight but we value the hard earned peace, and we often find ourselves plunged in a dark abyss but we know with freedom and ample opportunities we will , someday, see sunshine.

Mahatma v/s Anna

2011-12-14T13:34:00.001-08:00

The words written below are some random thoughts that often clung to my mind when I saw an iron willed Anna adamant and hell bent on fasting at Ramlila Grounds, when a larger than life poster of Gandhi jii glowed from the background.

Let us concentrate on the villains first. In Gandhi’s time, there were the British. Anna today fiddles with indigenous men, who are born out of this country’s very soil and act as its protectors. The British were imperialists, they did not rule our country, they ran it, for them India was a business, and they , for most part of their tenure proved to be good businessmen. Our netas come down from a different genre. Unlike the British, they regard serving the nation as their duty , pledge for upholding the constitution, but when it comes to deeds, they keep it simple, rape the nation .
So when it came to waking the country, Gandhi had a tough job, because he was fighting shrewd tacticians, who, incidentally at that time were best at their jobs, and secondly Gandhi had to arouse a nation which after years of incessant harassment laid numb. Adding to the worries , was the neo rich class, which was largely divided , and too possessive about its stand. Anna got, what Gandhi would have strongly wished for- a healthy environment. He got a vibrant and educated middle class which at Gandhi’s time was extinct.
The populace during Gandhi’s time, albeit ultimately supporting him, were habitual of seeing their nation chained. They never had IITs,IIMs,a booming economy, and a self belief that Anna saw in today’s generation, thus compelling Gandhi for intense introspection and spiritual thesis before arriving at a doctrine. So Gandhi with an impoverished India by his side went on to fight some shrewd strategists, and , it is alleged that on similar lines, Anna with a resurgent youth, raised the baton against the Khadi clad men, who mostly are devoid of formal education, let alone being strategists.
The aforementioned allegation is what I stoutly refrain from accepting. Gandhi, in all his movements simply broke the law. He did this to expose the autocratic environment the people lived under. His unlawfulness was symbolic of the fact that ‘ enough is enough’ and that the tide had risen to unmanageable levels. Along side he told Indians , not to accept the fear, but to face it with all the gusto one could muster. He attempted all this non-violently because he was pragmatic enough to understand that any other path in this poverty struck and diverse nation can never lead to a united and a free nation. His hunger strikes, interestingly, were for his own purpose,. Those were his spiritual takes, his introspective journey, to solve the dilemma , if ever, he was in.
Hunger strike is an arch weaponary in the kitty of Team Anna. But in the midst of all the chaos, we tend to overlook a gift that Gandhi, in due course of time has given to Anna, and which has he3lped in making these hunger strikes what they are-heroic.That gift is a democratic and free India. The freedom of speech, an independent media, a self dependent block of the population, and a good education has made this hunger strike a battle of good over the ugly.

When Gandhi faught and broke the laws, there were no rights, no constitution, no democratic institutions that upheld the sovereignty of the Indians., so Gandhi had no other choice. But today when we have achieved what Gandhi had dreamt of , then a hunger strike , though may seem fascinating by analyzing the corruption levels, ultimately ends up keeping the country’s republican structure at ransom.
Anna’s methodology tends to undermine the governance and politics of the country when the real problem lies in the aforementioned politicians who harass and rape our motherland. It should be kept in mind that the real victory is not achieved by proving a point at Jantar Mantar, but by respecting the constitution, following the ethos of democratic process,thus strengthening the institutions of this country, institutions, due to which for the past 60+ years we have boasted to be the largest electorate in the world.
Having said that the people’s anger is totally justified. But then we should remember that the the anger which has made us responsible citizens would easily have been an illegal action in any undemocratic environment. It’s the freedom given to us that has made us think so vocally about our country. Of course these are beautiful times when so much young blood is there for the country, but then trying to make things work on the grounds of a strike which is becoming synonymous with “my way or the highway” is pushing things too far.

Instead we should try to bring change in ways some people thought we would when they framed our constitution, when they conferred it a republic. It should be remembered that by-passing is no solution but strengthening our nation is one. We should try to analyze our democratic set up, participate in governance, reform various sectors ,and try to make parliamentary institutions citizen-friendly and transparent, which from times immemorial have been used against us, and these can be achieved when we shed the robe of observers and become participants. That way we might be similar to what Gandhi would have been today , otherwise in his very own words, “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”.

BEING ANNA -Reloaded

2011-12-02T05:53:00.001-08:00

Anna* is back again....with a bang or not, only time will tell,but his presence can be felt. Words like parliament,resolution and most importantly hunger strike are bubbling again in the atmosphere. A revolution is being sensed, smelled and expected soon.

If we go by the general consensus, which means views of people which altogether lead a normal life(for some. it’s boring) life, then it’s the rebuilding of the nation that is taking place, times are great, its India shining...or is it?. If it is, then where will we put( in the scale of shine), our constitution that grants us the freedom that has made Anna's act a heroic stance? An act that , 60 years ago, could easily have been another Jallianwaala Bagh episode.

There's no doubt about Anna's integrity towards the issue, but the incessant use of hunger strikes and boycotts are taking the subject to rather unfriendly shores. In a country where each of us have been given equal rights, and most importantly equal opportunities , the path of hunger strikes is a kind of a short cut that contradicts our republican structure. The direct effect that it has on the citizens is that they have started to undermine democracy, thereby developing a scorn towards everything political.

When ,on one side Anna has succeeded in driving the youth to a just cause , on the other hand his philosophy has drifted the young guns from politics and politicians. The hunger strike methodology can, in near future lead to a domino effect , when no matter what the cause is , a similar movement may rock the stage.

Anna , by distancing himself from politics, has become a mere symbolic reality, at times when we desperately need a leader like him. It must be remembered that to uphold the nation's democratic fervour, we have to follow the path that upholds the countries democratic power. And when there is people's control, the only way changes can be made are through elections. We need to understand that common good can be achieved by participating and winning in the elections, by coming to power, and replacing the bad ones by the good and more sincere ones.

Corruption, for which the Gandhian is fighting , is not an issue. It is a disease that everyone is suffering from, and strikes are no way of curing it, rather it makes it more fatal, because of the growing mistrust it creates among the people for the institutions, the pillars of this country. Secondly, Corruption is basically an effect , rather that a cause, as it has been projected. The inept policies against a booming economic growth is a catalyst for increasing this filth. It should be noted that a common man resorts to corruption as a need, not as a habit. Therefore, a mere check may backfire, by that check becoming tainted too. In the long run , only robust policies can paint the picture in desired colors. That is possible when a bravado like Anna plunges into the political battlefield, thus making the whole structure solid.

Anna is no 'second Gandhi', he is the follower of country's father who's dream it was to see the nation being led by its heroes. Today, when we almost hate the khadi clad men that govern us, its time for Annaq to get rid of the hunger strike way, become representative of the people, lead the nation as people's hero , and built an India, Gandhi once dreamt of, and Anna himself, still dreams of.

* = Anna here is synonymous with Team Anna

RELIGION- THROUGH MODERN LENSES

2011-12-02T05:51:00.000-08:00

Religion is a complex term. It will be an understatement to call it just a word in the lexicon. It is basically a subjective reality that appears to be a vast entity, often transcending realism. Religion- on hearing the word ,one is filled with respect,awe and revernece,towards a certain set of rules that we dare not question ,let alone break.

That respect towards religion is anachronistic in modern times because it certainly inhibits our ability ro reason and question. If we have a look at all the modern democracies we will see that there is always a growing tussle between the free spirited thought and the rigid norms of religion. For those nations, which are on their way towards a democratic set up,this friction is more pronounced.

The aforementioned conditions are effects of a wrong perception of religion and religious thoughts, that we have been garnering for centuries. We , round the globe,in almost every case,project religion as unquestionable. It seem to be word handed over by God and mere asking for its validity is gravest of sins. It is easy to analyze and tough to admit that this is a wrong perception of religion.

The correct answer to the question “What is religion?” would be that it is a set of thought processes embedded with principles that helps make people's life smooth and ethically strong. The concepts of religion are never accountable to the wishes of a particular 'great one' as that will make it synonymous with autocracy. Viewing the situation historically and socially, the main reason for religion to come into existence is to render the society a peaceful ethical and to the as much a possible, a life on their own terms, thus making flexibility , the charm of any religion.

Flexibility brings religion as a topic of heated debate. The problem with the society is that we need to look religion as a set of principles that must remain unchanged , unbridled. This creates a collision with the modern social life which is adaptable to changes.

The main motive of religion is to take human life to a better level, but our rigid take on this institution is making things difficult. We often concentrate on the petty do's and dont's and project ourselves as true followers. Any particular principle of religion depends on the historical ang geographical condition when it was enunciated. We should pay attention to only those theories and try to bring to action only those practices which are correct and ethical irrespective of caste , society and time frame.Such a treatment of religion will bring it not only closer to modern democratic principles but will try to fill the rift between various theologies.

What we need is a critical analysis and filtering only those practices which serve for the betterment of humanity as a whole. In simple words it would be catering to what any religion and its practices and philosophies actually asks for.

POLITICIAN'S BANK

2011-12-02T05:49:00.000-08:00

For all those who felt proud to belong to a region that boasted both of Taj Mahal and Sangam, it must have been heartbreaking ,when in Lucknow, the resolution to divide the state into four parts was passed.

The main facets that have bubbled out of this division storm are the emotional outbursts of a simple UPite, who, irrespective of the dilapidated condition of the state ,has fond memories of the state’s cultural supremacy. But in the midst of all this emotion, we regularly ignore the real politik of the leaders of the state ,the beloved Vote Bank policy-an antecedent to divide and rule.

“A vote bank is a loyal bloc of a single community backing a certain candidate” is a rather innocent definition of the term. In the context of UP, it is a strategy of getting votes on the caste lines ,that ultimately lead to the negligence of the development of the region.

The main attraction of the politics of Uttar Pradesh is its casteist flavor. The reason behind the subsequent division is termed as the large size of the state that leads to its inefficient administration. This reason , as per now, is just a mirage to seek political goals. Three out of four regions which are projected as different states are self sufficient as far as the resources and manpower is concerned. The problem is the lack of effective policies of governance, as political spectrum makes it mandatory for every politician to woo a certain caste/group, ultimately overshadowing the state as a whole.

If we look at the state more closely, we will find cotton mills at Kanpur ,once known for their huge output- all closed, the artistic cottage industry of Purvanchal- all dumped up. These are some of the many ‘already’ present resources that made UP, a once prosperous state and an ignorant back towards them has resulted in the present plight of the state. And no prizes for guessing the simple reason – lack of sustainable policies ,because the idea is to stay in power rather than to strive for the development of key zones which have both man power and resources.

The largely unseen result of excessive vote banking is the continuing malice between various caste groups. The malice has always been there, but when the baton of leadership is carried forward by educated leaders, and when the the common man, too is decently aware, then, the persistence of such attitude is an alarming sign. It can be gathered from history that any pogrom is a result of a hybrid mixture of class hatred with education among the youth. The ill-effect growing vote bank policies , which will aggravate with the division, might very well bring the relation among the people esp. educates youth of the region to such a situation.

To conclude, I guess, it would be sensible to relate the state’s development with an effective administration rather than division, which may lead to a lesser say of the regions at the center. Sound policy making and impartial judgment of the issue can only make Uttar Pradesh an Uttam Pradesh, the title it has long been striving to get.

NEW TIMES...GOOD TIMES..

2011-12-02T05:48:00.000-08:00

Ramrajya- a sound that is more perfect than the batting of Bradman,more picturesque than the valleys of Kashmir. It’s a word that is often referred to when we see atrocities happening or seeing something unjust in the present time frame. And we complement it with a word as immortal and as great as the former – Kalyug. Without Kalyug, Ramrajya is null and void, as we admire Ramrajya because we hate Kalyug. But then Ramrajya brings a music to our ears, the sound of which represents order,justice,and peace for all.

Having said that, I am of the view that we have crossed the deserts of the devilish Kalyug. We no longer reside in that separatist culture,. We are in a new phase that is a counterpart, and not a complement of the great era of King Rama- if I may call it CyberRajya- the digital boom. Computers started as a sophisticated helping hand in our complex research work,grew as a technology to assist us in our academic and industrial domain and as per now, have invaded our social,personal and every type of life to an extent of haunting us.

So are we in good times or bad ones? Are we celebrating the fest of technology or ignoring the beauties of nature in a bid to get ‘silicon’ized. Let’s just compare the present day society with the most sought after period of India- the Ramrajya.
The most fascinating thing about Ramrajya was its openness. Openness is a rather vague term that can be further broken into equality, freedom of expression, and that every person from top to bottom was connected to each other- not to forget that Seeta was abandoned due to a comment of a mere commoner. These days when I log on to my twitter account and tweet something to Mr Bachchan, I don’t do it as a fan writing some fan males, but it’s just a flow of a distinct point of view from one person to another, and all the time ,being fully aware that he is going to answer me. Similarly when an American logs on to AmericansElect.com. he does not do it to gather knowledge about the political spectrum of his country, he does it to elect a presidential nominee, thus to change the political spectrum of his country, and all this for free, because as members of this society we deserve it- a bell rings, a behavior analogous to the Ramrajya .

Various cyber tools that strive to keep us connected have broken amongst us various class,caste and status barriers and help built us in individuals who believe in an unbiased flow of ideas to build valid and various thought processes. The commoner, thus has started thinking of himself as an important part of the social machinery, His voice is being heard, his thoughts are being acted upon, he is feeling responsible, thus powerful and hence , conscious for the development of society, country and the world. Looking from the context of India- in a land where there are various languages and cultures , no single person can lead the nation , and inputs from each and every individual is needed, and Cyberrajya is definitely making this need into a reality.

Our mythology tells us that there will be great destruction after Kalyug and the good times will start again. It is all true and the destruction is happening, not in the form of bloodshed, but by destroying customs, old roots, and fighting our way out to keep the current line of thought in place that is the hybrid thinking of the society. And once it is all over, we’ll be living in a golden age,with values we have long sought for.

The IDEA of Gandhi

2011-12-02T05:47:00.001-08:00

It was Gandhi Jayanti last Sunday. I certainly wished to write ‘celebrated’ instead of ‘was’ ,but then I didn’t celebrate and frankly speaking nobody did!! When I track down the national festivals that I have witnessed through my age, I can relate 15th August to ‘boondi k laddoo’, 26th Jan to a disciplined parade in my school, but did 2nd October achieve anything more than a holiday with Attenborough’s Gandhi being telecasted on DD1 ??. I doubt.

A thought ,thereby arises in my mind that we never celebrate the existence of personalities like Nehru, Patel, or Bhagat Singh,like we celebrate the aura and magic of our Bollywood superstars, with media channels dedicating hour long public discussions for those tinsel towners. It will be tough to digest and intense to retrospect when said that the freedom fighters have lost much of their sheen. We gained independence in ’47, and much water has flown in and out of the Ganges since that ‘At the stroke of midnight’ speech of Nehru. We’ve seen IITs ,Emergency, near bankruptcy ,Rushdie’s Midnights Children ,Economic liberalization , 2G scam, and so, reviewing this long list there is no surprise that Nehru ,each year asks for a children’s day ,Patel is somewhere in the primary level GK books as “Iron Man” and confusion prevails over the identity of Azad.

But Gandhi cannot be attributed to such a treatment . he is there, in fact he is bound to be there, in our currency, in govt buildings , parks. In films Gandhi has, a sort of an oxymoronic role to play, because in any sequence where there is intense corruption or injustice being shown , we can see one of his portraits or hear one of his insignia tunes in the background. His gift to the common man ‘Khadi’ is still favored albeit among politicians who are all the more far away from the common man.

But in spite of all this, the birthday of the ‘Big Daddy’ goes dull, Gandhi Ashrams are in desperate need of customers. Gandhi in all its glory is as outside our lives and culture as he is inside

So we can come to a conclusion that Gandhi, not at all a stranger to our lives , has got a sort of an estranged relationship with us, In India we cannot condemn Gandhi ,but we cant embrace him either, He is a puzzle that we have to solve to clear the examination, so we leave it halfway ,to just pass the test.

There are many reasons as to why the old man, clad in a loin cloth half his life, an epitome of simplicity has become such a complex conundrum. A major misconception is portrayal of Gandhi as a person who brought freedom to India. It was never in his agenda to ‘free’ India. He wanted to lift this nation, make its people a constructive part of its edifice. He never opposed the British in general, but he vehemently oppressed those policies of theirs which downgraded the prestige of Indians, he worked towards a comprehensive building of India , where India was to be a constituted and served by Indians, he didn’t want India to be a private property of Indians.

So did Gandhi brought freedom to India, may be not, but yes he helped India to survive through that freedom process, as one single entity. Gaining freedom was a political process, and looking at the issues from a political point of view - boycott of the Non-co-operation movement and ouster of Bose from the INC ,may not be very much politically correct decisions, and India would have achieved independence quite early had these decisions not acted upon, but would India, a country with multitude of cultures and languages, had survived and avoided Balkanization., that is the main question. If we look at the political scenario of ’45, freedom to India was inevitable, what was more important was how India embraced that freedom. Gandhi thus, strived all is life to prepare India for that freedom. This preparation consisted of taking strict stands, standing by the spoken words, and setting examples by following them. Gandhi was an intellectual for whom nothing was negotiable, thus making him a bad politician.

Another allegation that the poor man faces is that his policies and philosophies are impractical. This is a misconceived allegation. The question should be, “Are Gandhi’s policies realistic in 21st century??” Any thought process, any philosophy is timeless, and ageless. But its implementation changes from time to time and is divided into phases. Any particular phase can be divided into the prevailing conditions, economic activities , and technological advancements of a particular time-frame. The mere thought of practicing the policies in 2011 which Gandhi practiced in 1920-45 is foolhardy in nature. Having said that, the ideals must remain same as India is still suffering from the same problems of poverty illiteracy and socio- economic inequalities as in ’47,but an India which has got a McDonald’s McVeggie as its normal Sunday meal, Gandhi would certainly have had different practices for it to perform

And then fasts. Did Gandhi fasted to make people meet his demands??. And I can bet you that this statement stands completely null and void. unless the demand was to stop Hindus and Muslims to stop killing each other. Otherwise the fasts of Gandhi were to purify himself., to rejuvenate the energy he wanted to use in the service of the nation. It was Gandhi who understood the real meaning of fasts. He used them for introspection, for self analysis. Under the silence and quietness of fasts, he found his God who kindles in him the determination to face all the hurdles.

One question that I often ask myself is that what would have happened had Gandhi not existed?......................Perhaps India would have gained freedom but I doubt if we had the same India as we have it today. There would have been no Luther Kings, Mandelas and Hazares, as there would have been nobody to look up to self -belief like Gandhi.

Self-belief ,yes, belief in oneself is what he gave us as a gift. Gandhi as a human being did things that were right and wrong, but through is self-belief he achieved some above-average things and an above-average status…thereby becoming the father of the nation.

I'd rather not be Anna - reprise

2011-12-02T05:46:00.001-08:00

. If you are an Indian ,then there is no better time than the present time-frame to celebrate your 24-25th birthday . I have not seen the Quit India Movement ,just heard it, as if it was a fairytale, from my grandfather. Neither have I witnessed the emergency period, stories (rather incidents) of which I have heard from my parents. I always wondered what a movement is like , whether its tyrannical, lazy or exotic until I saw one.

The Gen-Y has termed this era as a revolution. I, being a part of the Gen-Y and a democracy disagree completely. This is not a revolution. A revolution to me, both literally and figuratively means a complete overhaul. An upside down strategy required when one has reached a dead end, when the thought process of a state has saturated and when the ideologies upon which the nation has strengthened its roots have deprecated.. What we as a nation want is a deviation in our thinking, a tilt, a subtle and gradual change in our ideology.

Corruption is a cancer ,no doubt ,and it is eating our country out, but then , there is a pending topic of red terror(in simple words, we call it Maoism which is drawn out of extreme poverty)., and also do we have the all time hit insurgencies by China and Pakistan on either sides. But then we can’t hide away from the fact that we are on our way with zooming economy and rock the stage when it comes to demographic dividend. So here’s a 3-dimensional situation with corruption, poverty-cum-terror and achievements as its subsequent faces. This is the rubics cube that we have to solve.

It would be a horrendous task to undermine our civil institutions and the clauses and phrases of our constitution , because they are the galleries of our republic that endorse the freedom to its citizens, freedom that has made this multicultural,multilingual,world’s largest electorate hold its democratic power, a power that has created the great Ramlila Maidan celeberation.

So do I admire Anna Hazare. Yes, I very much do. But having said that, I am not Anna. I am the citizen of India and I have a distinct spirit and have a distinct opinion , which , in all the good senses , is for the welfare of this nation. And perhaps Anna also wants such mentality to sprout. He doesn’t want us to blindly follow him, or write petitions in blood but ,put opinions, discuss the pros and cons of the bill. Never mind if a person is against the bill, he should have the confidence to put forward his issues if he has the zeal to regulate corruption., thereby really supporting him. This way we will strengthen our democracy and its institutions , where there is a rule of the public and which for the last 64 years has been shouting that this land is for the people, of the people and by the people.

In a country where corruption is channelized to each nook and corner and where conducting a referendum will end up being a wild goose chase, the educated youth, and the sensitive middle class should stand up, hold public discussions about the prospects of Jan Lokpal, extend the whole thought process to the villages and all the downtrodden. That will be the only way the Jan Lokpaal will truly reflects our democracy and will amalgamate the interests of the nation’s billion people.

And yes one more appeal, stop saying that we are against corruption, that will be analogous to running away from the truth. The honest and brave way will be to accept that “yes we were corrupt”, and “now we have the courage to reinvent ourselves”. That will be the right way forward, perhaps that will be Anna’s way

P.S. 'I”d rather not be Anna' was the title of a provocative article by Arundhati Roy. I being an ardant fan of her was disappointed by her take on the whole issue.and therefore this reprise versionis an apology anda fan’s take for that article.

Zaveri Bazaar - A travelogue

2011-12-02T05:45:00.000-08:00

It was A’s choice to visit Mumbadevi. I , after a marathon tour of Siddhivinayak,Haji Ali, and Mahalakshmi , was now, caught in a jinx. My adventurous and touring self were in a clash ….with the real , more humble persona of me. Ultimately the daring and touring one got the crown and I ceded to A’s request.

B, the third musketeer amongst us, was in mixedbag. A celebrating and undying spirit of his, both were unable to cope up with the majestic gushes of wind and the oily surface of the Haji Ali causeway. He wanted to go home, lie down in the couch, watch some news, light a smoke,I saw those snapshots of wishs in his eyes for two long minutes, but miraculously at the start of the third minute, it all went off, and for reasons unknown, he also gave it in.

The best way to roam around Mumbai ,or as a matter of fact any Indian city which has got a story to tell is, hire a taxi, sit besides the chauffeur and bombard him with your Q and As.

We took a taxi at the crossection of Bhulabhai Desai Road and Pedder Road. I literally jumped towards the front door. My eyes were like the lion’s when the king of the jungle has seen blood on the front seat.At last with some rare reflexes and with raised eyebrows of the driver ,I caught hold of my seat while things happened a bit peacefully behind me as the other two guys sat quietly in the back seat.

Soon we took off towards Peddar Road

Me : ye Peddar Road hai??

Driver : haan sahib.

Suddenly the weather changed, what was something a little more than a rainfall turned to something less than a storm. The wet and naked roads , devoid of commuters , made the Island city a lot more sexier than it normally is when the town is a financial nerve center. The incessant rain was turning the wet ,moist and salty atmosphere into a sensuous one.

Me (turning towards B) : saale ye hai Mumbai..mayanagri.

Driver looked towards me and ended up in a wry smile.

B : abe ye sab angrezon ne banaaya hai kyaa??

Me : haan, kaafi kuch.

The cab turned left bringing with it a view of the grand sea face which eventually made its way to the grandeur of Marine Drive.

Me : Bhayiaa 26/11 ko to yahaan sab sunsaan hoga

Driver : sunsaan kya sahib sab band tha..kuch allowed hii nahi thaa

C : aur train??

D : log hii kahaan the train pakadne k liye….aur frequency bhi kam ho gyi thi…abhi 5 minute me aa jaati hai..un dino aadhe ghante me 1 train aa rhi thi.

Me : matlab office woffice sab band??

Driver (taking a sharp turn thus, taking us away from Marine Drive) : Are kya office seth, lag raha tha jaise kisi doosre desh ne akraman kar diya ho….

Me : Achca ….saaalaaa…

The driver looked at me, intensely and then, smiled again. I would be lying if I’d say that I was not at all amused by that smile. But in the hindsight I can relate a lot more bravery to that smile. For that driver and many others, this city with all its roads and sea faces , was like a mother, and they had seen their mother being brutally beaten ,looted and raped on 26/11 , and on many more occasions, but at all those times, they had fought and brought their mother back to her feet and the city was again running. I recalled ,that what a soldier does for his nation,these drivers had done, many times for this city.

Me : Achchaa bhayiaajii, abhi waale blast bhi to yahiin kahiin hue the??

Driver (pointing his finger to a congested street) Wo baju me wahaan…wo

Me (partly in disbelief and partly in fear) : Achca ..mandir yahiin hai kyaa??....aas paas??

Driver(finally giving the Bumblebee’s engine a little rest): seth yahaan k baad se taxi allowed nahi hai blast k baad se ..wo raha mandir saamne ….

I am a naturally dumb guy. But in that time frame of stepping down from the taxi and getting the first look at Zaveri Bazaar, my mind was filled with a thousand and one thoughts.

“shall I tell my mother….no no no…it wil be terrible thing”, “so finally I am at the terror hot-spot….I will tell this thing to my friends, may be I could write about it”….”what if..what if Bomb has been planted ..its Saturday, so crowded…”….”shit…common….nothing wil happen….are yaar..saali kahin aakhiri yatra na ho”

Above, is the story of my mind in the first 10 minutes of my landing at Zaveri Bazaar. “Kitna sona hai be”…B’s voice came from the backdrop…and so with the jungle of thoughts in my mind , I walked ahead.

Jewelery is everywhere. No other thoughts can come to anybody’s mind when he stands in the middle of this bazaar for the first 5 mins. From hutment to palaces, everything was – if there is any word like that- jewel-phillic. It seemed to be a street of commoners where the ‘aam- aadmi’ toiled hard and gave away his sweat to bring affluence to the rich and famous.

Gold , for them was not what it meant for us. Diamond was not a lady’s best friend. They were pure and were revered. The people and those rare gems had a relationship analogous to that of the pen and the writer.

Finally we reached Mumbadevi, which to put in a more apt manner ,was intense . As if the almighty was meditating deep on the pros and cons of the recent blasts. After all Gods here had seen Mumbai grow , applauding at her achievements and praying at her struggles and hurdles.

It was my turn now, to be in a mixed bag .Nightmares were still hovering over me. And as a topping, in came a dilemma , My wish to roam around Colaba and have a pint there met in a head on collision with the aroma of the jalebi that was being prepared nearby.

Me: abe chalo be Bus pakadte hai…varna milegi nahi??

A: Abe saale jalebi khaa le. Bahut din ho gaye hain be.

B : haan be ..khaa k chalte hain…mauj aa jaaegi.

I lost. We went inside. A peaculiar combo of jalebi and papdi was served. With the very first bite , I was travelling through time. I was back to the days which started at 7 AM and ended at 1 in the noon, when tension was limited to the pending homework , where there were fights , but no hatred , and where there was fear of scolding but no terror.

Handing over the bill to the shopkeeper we walked out of that hotel.. My fear was now turning towards an intriguing curiosity. I was in a place which was one of the most testing place to be in the recent times but all what I had seen and heard were loud laughter, smiling faces and fast paced seths. I was ashamed to be in nightmares again..compared to those dare-devil jewellers, I was a selfish piece of nut.But I could not help it, the thoughts of an imminent blasts were overpowering the jovialness of the Zaveri Bazaar

A: abe raat k khaane kaa kya kare??

Me(dying to go to Colaba) : abe chalo be ..Leopold chalte hain..dekh lenge khaane kaa

A: abe aunty bhii nahi aaeng banane….

“ARE PACK KARNE LAANE KAA NAA”- a passer by remarked , and almost instantaneously started laughing. I could not control myself , gestured towards him, and laughed out.

I and B laughed out for 2 long mins. A had no idea why we were laughing. I looked back at the Bazaar saluted to it, and started to walk towards the bus stand, to head,finally to Colaba.

Bharat Durdasha- Kya Karein

2011-12-02T05:44:00.000-08:00

That feeling came all of a sudden, grew exponentially within me, and soon I was a slave to it. It was a stroke of pride, an aura of doing something that made my relation to this country firm. In more simple(and dull) words I was filling up the Aadhar UID form.

Such feeling ‘patriotic’ ,if I may call it ,arise seldom these days. For the last 7 months , when life has been categorically defined between work and weekend , fewer have been times when I have thought about the Matrabhoomi…the land,our mother, where we are born and raised.

A month has passed when I met that guy for the first ,and the last time. He was a friend’s acquaintance ,new to Mumbai, and naïve to the zeal ,the spirit that the city sets in you. He was here for a job , and was looking out for a room. For the last two days he had toiled hard,but, without any success . Still , he had a kick, that was driving him, in those torrential Bombay Rains, to look out for more and find a place in the Maximum City which beholds all. The way he finished his tea, the amicable tone of “Bantu bhaai..ghar kab jaaoge”…it was all raining optimism.

I have not met that guy since that day, but a week later I found out that he didn’t get a flat. Well….he was a Muslim The feeling that I had at that very moment was an even mixture of amazement , frustration and helplessness. The picture of Bombay, of majestic Marine Drive and picturesque Powai, which defied tradition and embraced all ,started fading from my mind. I wanted to do something I knew I could not and was sure that I would not. A caricature of that lad came to my mind. A jovial guy, a nice guy slowly immersing in the shallow waters of religious extremism, the waters are getting deeper , the guy is falling, loosing control. Sometimes he could not do anything , sometimes he does not want to do anything……..Suddenly the rain, like lashes , started again…..I ,muttering “saala koi kaise kar sakta hai aisa” came to the serenity of my room.

It was 13th of July…the bus had not come for ½ hr….depression was looming large. I was in a dilemma whether to wait for the red beast or start walking. In the midst of my fondling with the two options,I received the news,” Bantu ,bomb blast ho gaya hai”. I, sure, that the building behind me is going to explode , turned backwards. It didn’t explode, I started walking.

I decided to walk till I found a bus. Amma’s phone came “ Dadar kahaan hai..Bantu, un logon ke area me mat jaya karo”. My phone was constantly ringing. And again I was caught in a blend of emotions- first, a black one of fear of death and destruction , and second , a more colorful thought with a more childish flavor in it- of being in the limelight.

I finally got a bus,no. 27,coming all the way from Worli, which had passed through the bomb affected areas. It was a crowded bus. Infused with the air of sweaty odour and bad breath was a hush of fear,of stories of panic. I finally found a place to stand beside a seat where a kurta clad ,old bearded man was sitting. I made out it his religion from his attire. I clenched my fist, was perplexed. Thoughts were high in my mind that the bus is going to blast. The old man’s phone rang, he said ,”blast ho gaya” and I found my nightmares coming true. I was trying to get rid of such thoughts, I was helpless, those thoughts were like gushes of wind trying to break open my logical doors.

A little later , my stop came, and the bomb blast became an incident and the bus incident was now a matter to laugh at in the office the next day.

When I started writing this article , I wanted to give it a dramatic ending something abstract, yet out of the world, like Tyson’s punch. But now , I realize that conclusion is something we don’t really want , what we need is a start.

Most of us might not have gone through the same incidents, but yes, we all go through the feeling that those incidents created inside me. We feel proud of our nation, we desperately want to do something for it, and when needed we believe in sitting in a couch , eating home cooked food getting entertained by those sensational headlines……….and throughout the bottom line remains…” Kya Kare”

Frankly speaking , I can’t believe that a nation of 1.2 billion cannot rock the whole volume of the parliament in full strength. The fact of the matter is, that most of the times we are the ones who don’t want to change. We are the ones who don’t want to throw cigarette butts in a dustbin, and we are the culprits who are reluctant to opt for a long route to get things, general things , like passport registration, Driver’s License registration, getting flat,systematically done. That guy didn’t get a flat not because of a corrupt government , but because of a sick mentality. Mentality that causes the 2-g scam. The bomb-blast , again a result of that ‘stinking mentality’….and the result of that blast…in huge amount …’stinking mentality’.

The problem is that India is not ruled by government, or by a bunch of bureaucrats . India is ruled by a mindset, That which nurtured by poverty , dreams and religion in such a way that being an IAS doesn’t mean to be changing the system, but, bringing fame and money to the family.

Anything bad that happens , is the case of a psychology. A psychology has been there, be it Babri, 2-G ,13/7,26/11,11/7……..

Solution, well , I am too small to give one. Personally I won’t opt for a revolution. But yes, of introspection. I would like it, many would disagree , but in the way of Gandhiji. We will get there slow, 5 years, may be 50 years, but then, we will be getting to something, maybe a better future, a better nation, a better mother.

602...me v/s the world

2011-12-02T05:43:00.002-08:00

My open mouthed gaze towards one Skoda sports car was short lived because behind that slender beauty….was a voluptuous beast. The atmosphere started getting tense, a ‘hussssshhhhhh’ dominated the scene. I, accidently stepped over ‘a thin as a thread' sandal of a lady , thereby crushing her cute toe. She beemed at me, I got ready to be slapped. But nothing happened , tension was abuzz, it was 6:15 PM . 602 was coming.

5:45- 6:00 – My down the hill walk marking the end of my office schedule often starts with a prayer ,”Lord just give me one seat in that bus…the window one will be great , but then anything worth sitting is fine”. As I reach the office gate , I slowly, narrowly, delllicattely turn my eyes towards left, watch the crowd waiting for the bus and march ,as if a freedom fighter is going to the gallows in the hope of getting his decision reversed, towards the the stop, and start waiting for BEST bus – 602.

6:00- 6:15 - The mind is all set, the body is all geared up, all prayers said , the eyes are focused firmly on the road. The crowd around is increasing, similarly my heart beat too, though at a much faster rate.’Thank God!!!’ is what I say when I see a person walking across the stop, showing no interest, although some mercy on us.”Fuck”(in Hindi), is spitted out as soon as a guy stands besides me , making his intentions clear, that of catching the red devil.

6:16- 6:20 – Like a Jew is unable to explain the Holocaust , a Japanese cannot describe the 1945 Nuclear explosion, similarly,these 4 minutes …no…240 seconds are undescribable, unexplainable and unapproachable. Well , they just happen. Those are spiritual moments. You don’t see your caste, your colour , your clothes , all of them seems to be momentary,what the sages have called ‘Maya’. You see the path towards the truth, you want to catch the bus , you, want to grab a seat.

6:20- 6:30 – I didn’t get a seat , am standing. My prayers have been shown the exit door. I am terrified, am perplexed. There is nothing sadder than this, even if I catch impotency , even if I get to know that this is the last day of my life,nothing beats the melancholy of this moment. Now, when each of my senses are blocked , my nose has become proactive.I can breathe in the stench of all the IT pros alongside me, contributing heavily in the GDP of the nation. I can feel the jasmine of the hair oil the buddy next to me, has poured over his head….I feel as if the conductor is coming towards me…”pudhe sarka..sarka pudhe”..these sounds touch my ears. I can see nothing except for a patch of road, which I am looking through an opening . I use the shape of that patch to get to know whether I am in the Powai region, or have reached the Eastern Express Highway.

6:30 - 7:00 – It has started becoming all right now. I am getting used to the stench, the jasmine, the mob. I am in a trance. Except for my I-card, I guess I have nothing, I owe nothing, I own nothing. I am a loner in this crowd who wants to reach home, feel the warmth of it. We all have transcended our bodies and have become one holy mass ,desperate to see a light, our destination. And then, IIT main gate comes , and I lose that warmth ,I come out of the holy spirit.

IIT was the place I always wanted to be a part of. I knew I wasn’t one of those but the screams of the outer world were too loud for me to hear the inner voice. I gave one year just to get an entry across that gate. I ended up being in a C grade college(though I loved every part of it). Today, I was staring across that gate. I wanted to catch just one glimpse of a student, owner of a perfect grey matter, guys who are revered nationwide,people, who study there, go to US. Study MS, stay in the US, thus ,leaving the nation to its gutters, filthiness and crowds.

7:00– 7:15 – The crowd has started dispersing,the bus is moving fast toward my stop- Kanjur marg. The journey, in hindsight can now be seen as an adventure, a story whose glorious end, I am able to see- my stop. I have gleefully stepped out of the bus, as if I have single handedly won the world cup for India, or have made her a superpower. I turn around, start gearing myself for another bus, another ride……another story.

And the 'Award' goes to....

2011-12-02T05:43:00.001-08:00

Prologue –

Time – Sometime in Feb-March 2010,not many days after Ravi Shastri announced from the commentary box at Gwalior- “Sachin, the first man in the planet to score a double hundred in ODIs”…news channels bustling all around ,should Sachin be the next Bharat Ratna??. The ‘?’ was a ‘?’ for the moneymaker media barons, while it was a decent ‘!!’ for the youth culture and the future stronghold of the nation…and a quiet ‘.’ for the millions of common Indians who , for the past 15 years,silently , yet firmly had made Sachin their Bharat Ratna.

-----------------*-----------------------*----------------------*---------------------*---------------------

Place- Marine Drive ,200 metres +- Wankhede Stadium,I am standing somewhere in the middle of that 3.5 km long stretch. A place that holds true to the saying that ‘Men are from Mars and women are from South Bombay’ is alive and kicking. Cars all around, with bodies partially out of them,bodies with all the animation,waving flags from their hands and having jubilance in their faces, and faces, with nothing but screams of ‘Indeeeya..India’ from their mouths

India finally “after a generational gap of 28 years”(again in Shastri’s terms) had won the World cup and Marine Drive alongwith the whole of Mumbai and the whole nation was like something never before in the past and would never be at least in the next 4 years.

And these days..as was expected from the night of 2nd April , news channels are galore with ‘Indeeeeya..indiaaa’ spirits, be it Sachin, Dhoni, Sehwag, their mothers, wifes , relatives or sisters, there are all welcome in those supernatural, ‘out of the world’ studios ..and Hence another issue has come out of its burial ground…..Should Sachin be awarded the Bharat Ratna??

As a common man I don’t think my opinion counts but…as an ‘Indian’,I guess I should give one.

Yes…I think Sachin must be awarded this supreme accolade ,although he is already one( the supreme) in the eyes of this great nation. But for me, there is one more and only thing(as I may call it) that should be conferred this honour before Sachin. That thing, that era, that religion, that greatness is cricket.

If I may quote Wikipedia , Bharat Ratna is a civilian award awarded for highrst degree of national service including artistic, literary ,and for public service of the highest order.. if for a few minutes I ( and the people who are reading it ) assume cricket to be a human being , then this man has been doing the above mentioned things for the past 75 years., Be it Mumbai, Chennai , Malihabad, Leh, Be it Abhishek Bachchan, Atal Behari Vajpayee, or a poor farmer, the panorama of this guy over each of them is just the same ,irrespective of the fact that some of these guys own a Bentley, some own this nation, and many, doesen’t even own a rooftop for them.

There must be something in this man that for watching this stud people from jammu to kanyakumari, Rajasthan to charapoonji(I know this is a cliché but still) ‘bleed blue’. No matter if it is ’47 ,’84, 26/11, come this man and the nation is united like never before.

And now lets just convert it into a sport, and we see that it isn’t even our national sport,perhaps it needn’t be, because it is our national pride , our national emotion.. it is something greater than religion, because religion we have to follow, while this, we love to follow.

That last six from Dhoni, on that memorable night was not just a six, a winning shot, it was a moment when 1.2 billion Indians had tears in their eyes, were weak at their knees, and were dancing no matter if majority of them had no food to eat , no houses to live in and no occupation to earn from.

This game deserves something from this country, it deserves a tribute, if possible, a Bharat Ratna and if possible (and if I may have the guts to say) before Sachin.

------------*--------------------*----------------------*---------------------------*----------

Epilogue

- The streets of Mumbai have turned workoholic, Dravid has made statement that Sachin is already a Bharat Ratna, and somewhere a craze ,a madness has started taking birth for the upcoming IPL.

TRIVANDRUM.......

2011-12-02T05:41:00.000-08:00

It was my third visit to Kovalam and my first interaction with the sea with the taste of alcohol in my mouth. Craving for beer at one of the best beaches of India did cost me 15 bucks more but then,with that ‘Palone’ kick I saw the Arabian sea in a different avatar. It was like an unlimited or rather limitless expanse of 5:30 in the evening which seemed to me like a combo of darkness nestled intimately with a blurred sunshine coming out of nowhere, it seemed that the sea carrying almost everything and then ,as soon as it kissed and made love to the rocks it was exactly penniless, as if the sea was like Mira who left everything just to be with his very own Krishna which was there on the sides of Kovalam ,from time immemorial, in the form of rocks.

And in the middle of the tsunami of thoughts attacking me that evening ..I uttered “ek bar biwi lo le k aoongaa zaroor”.

Life at Kerala , I thought at that point of time, was becoming interesting. A thought that didn’t come to my mind when I arrived at Trivandrum Central on 14th of Nov ,2010 followed by a failed bargain negotiation with the driver and coolie, only to be dumped , in a greenish ,’kabootarkhaana’ ish room no. 204. And then time started improvising things, it didn’t heal because somewhere I was feeling that there was something missing, but yes, it definitely improvised.

The training done at the tip of this great nation seemed to me in agreement with the premonition that I had on the day when I was interviewed for TCS. “Achcha ye bataao ,tumhe le kyun” was asked by the interviewer umpteen number of times ,and an equally umpteen no. Of times I retorted back..”Sir I have got the hunger ,I will fight it out”. I finally was selected ,but, in those hours between the announcement and the interview I thought-”Am I made for it??,is this the right place for me??”. Incidentally, the same thoughts that I had on the eve of my J2EE lab test.

Java , a word that I hated in college , now became a necessity ,and due to that a phobia of this tremendous language was instilled in me. Sometimes I fell in love with this Gosling’s creation, other times…it was like a web knitted with the poisonous strokes of classes and objects , made only to capture my free spirits. My relation with this ‘programmers’s delight’ started as a challenge to be conquered , went on becoming a phobia , and ended up , still remaining a challenge unconquered.

Technically ,I feel proud to say I came out as failiure. I was proud of this fact because I didn’t run away from the programming intricacies , I faced them all ,although in the end my grey matter losing out to the theory of ‘Platform Independence”.

Friends , were something that I hadn’t expected in the training. I thought it would be all a very ruthless ,dogged professional exercise, where there will be a flurry of associates and a famine of mates, but things turned out to be otherwise . Aruvi Tourist Home , seemed to me as the extension of the hostel life that I had lived and cherished for the last 4 years of my life and needless to say ,was cherishing this period too. Those starry nights, midnight smokes, exuberant bakar(courtesy Ishan and Frusty) were real gem of moments. Kerela , a place which seemed to be a bit strange at first ended up being one where we romed in the nights just to get a cup of tea with fried eggs.

Apart from all the case studies , deadlines and LAAP fears , on 12th feb when when I was boarding a flight to Mumbai for a furthur battle, Kerala didn’t seem all that bad. I had developed a longing for the chettas, was missing the juices of Pattom, and the elegant architecture of Peepul Park. More that God’s own , I think kerala was India’s own, with an awesome literacy rate, co-operatinf people and mesmerizing beauty. It is a state that has clung to its root and is a lesson for the rest of India to look up to and the answer to all those who say “Is desh ka kuch nahi ho sakta”.

All I was able to utter to myself when finally leaving Kochi Airport lounge was …”ek baar saala (biwi ko le k ) aoonga zaroor.

2011-12-02T05:39:00.000-08:00

I Thought a lot about the title....but somethings are better left without one..hence...UNTITLED

2011-03-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

Although I had watched The King’s Speech ,the inaugural scene of Colin Firth stepping towards a majestic crowd at Wembley deserved a ‘second time’.
Standing in my way of seeing two minutess of impeccable shooting was a lady- turning or just about turned 35 craving for a packet of Nachos and an incredibly chilled can of Pepsi(Diet). The boy selling the junk item was not comfortable with the ‘smooth as the flow of Royal Blue in a Parker’ english the lady was jabbering. “No Pepsi …thandi nahi hai Madam “ was all he could muster, but the lady ,unperturbed with his impediment carried his silken Anglicized touch…”Hey hang on..pass on a packet of cheesed popcorn(watch out for that delicate yet all important touch of grammer – Cheese-ed)
The battle of orient v/s the Occident carried on until after 20 minutes I got to utter “2 nachos kay packet Bhayiaa” which could easily have been under 10 minutes.
English ,is often regarded as a gift given to us by the Britishers. A domain .most of the elite Indians are revered to be expert at. It is a language and probably one of its kind which I guess has been a status symbol for the past 100 years, and looking at the respect that the vendor had for that Madame , I guess it will be there for another 100 years.
But along with that respect I was able to catch a glimpse of fear that gripped the guy instantaneously, an inferiority complex that had caught hold of him and this effect is also one of its kind that only English can produce in a country that has a growth rate of 7-8 % amidst dubious recession.
64 years after independence ,many of Gandiji’s teachings are considered to be deprecated. One of these is his theory where he told that an Indian should respect ,know and speak Hindi. If I try my hand at it ,then I would say that Ganndhi wanted a sort of an inner revolution to take place in India, a revolt Which would lead the nation to have pride in itself, to have a satisfaction attained with a glass of Rooh-Afza rather than a diet-Coke, and most of all which would have avoided a scar India is now facing – CULTURAL IMBALANCE.
An imbalance that I experience while going to the office in the envious skyscrapers of Powai via the equally piteous slums of Mulund(both of them in Mumbai) . An inequality that I observe between IT guys like me and the unemployed- forced to be militants Kashmiris.
Language is a fluid that always has to be refined if we want to polish our civilization with smooth development .Language is the simplest definition of a culture which in turn is the granite of the building blocks of any nation. And we all are well aware that this stone is somehow, somewhere crumbling. A scorn at Munshi Premchand ‘s classics for a craze at GRE Barron’s is an ultimate proof of that.
China, Russia , certainly larger in area than ours reached the status of ‘developed ‘ in a comparatively shorter period of time because they had there thoughts to be told and applied in the language they revered and loved and most importantly spoken with pride by all of them.
India today , on the other hand is in a state of confusion..not able to decide what is apt for it- ‘Allah tero naam ‘ or ‘oonce se ooncha banda …poty pe baithe nanga’. The cause – lack of communication because we are not able to gel..’not able to gel ’ due to awkward reasons like avoiding a UPite ,not because of his body odor but because of his simple yet solid Bhojpuri.. Due to some excellent communication we have caught hold of most of the Silicon Valley , and due to the lack of the same we haven’t been able to stop a Naxalbari or a Kashmir.
Problems , be it economical or religious have started sadly, from this imbalance and amazingly the solution lies in that culture itself,in its scriptures ,philosophies and stories which can only do good if each and every Indian understands in the same way, in the same feel , in the same spirit , in the same language-HINDUSTANI..so that in these day when we are bleeding blue …we can live that old adage which has been limited only to our songbooks----HINDI HAIN HUM WATAN HAI..HINDUSTAN HAMAARA………
PS – King’s Speech(though in English) was a feast to watch.
PPS – Sorry for writing this up in English.

A,B...Just like that........

2010-09-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

PLACE - Lucknow
People- A,B( I mean they had names...but the fact of the matter is .....they don't matter...

B : so..you're in lko for how long ??

A : ummm.....22..24. I mean it'll be 24 next summer.

B : kind of boring isn't it?? I mean 'one city- one life'....too monotonous

A ( trying to copy B's style) : well , I had a punch at Bareilly for 4 years but , umm...I usually del that stuff..you know its better off saying ,' been here all the time '.

B : and..you did there??

A : engg

B : eng-bly...bly-eng...sort of ...never heard a college there....you see!!!

A : yeah..there were no FRs ,PVRs..McDonalds...

B : nooo...no no no o..mac is not engg I mean look..its just..ok forget...........so you've been there McDonalds ..haan!!

A : well well..you know the problem with you NRIs...you think we Indians live on a tree top...and our roofs as vulnerable as a leaf...falling over..tripping over...well here's the news we are hosting this year's CWG ....Commonwealth Games...you see now??

B : OK OK..just cool it.will ya..and by the way my family ...its from lko.

A : and??

B : well my father got transferred.(to the US)
so where are we heading?

A: well we ought to go to FR ,have some burg..

B (scanning some paper..or map) : hey i wanna go this..H..U..S..S.AI..N

A : Husaainganj!!!! what for???

B : no no...something like that...its more vowely.

A: vowely??

B : ooh well vowels playing all around ...A B then A ....D.

A : Hussainabad....ok...but what for???

B : you don't know ..there's some place there..IMAM

A : k...Imambara..but today??

B : yeah...problems??

A : well that Ayodh. ok never mind let's go...

B : any problems??

A : no ..not at all..

B (gazing at the Imambara) : CHRIST!!!.....geese...look at that..you know what this is....you remember that dance judge on that dance show saying to that dancing guy.......stupendofantabulofantastic maan.

A guide in the backdrop : this was built by asifudduala at the time of the great famine...hindus and muslims built it....a source of providing people the money they didnt take otherwise.....was built in the morning..destroyed in the night....to give the money to all the citizens........tazia kept inside.....hindus used to built it........

B : wow!!! did you hear that

A : yeah..old story..famine one..oh yeah I've booked 2 seats at the barbecue nation at 4:00.

B : coool..hey what's that??

A : what??...ooh...Roomi Gate...c'mon lets move....

B (staring at a building) : wow..look at that,,thats what you call elegant, decent enough no?? That's what you call a Nawab's Inn..I mean I can relate it to a Nawab..is he still there??

A: what?? who??

B : the Nawab.

A : the Nawab??

B : this is the Nawab's residence no??

A (chuckling) : no no no no no...this is KGMC ...I mean CSMMU.

B : CS what ??

A : CSMMU ..chattrap...well they called it KGMC -King George's Medical College.

B : OK....so what about it....

A : what about what?? a medical college,,100 years old...a sometime great, one time best..and now a decent one. ooh by the way you see that gate(pointing towards the front gate)...there you get some great chole-bhatoore ..wanna have a bite(again copying some accent)

B : yeah yeah..why not??

They parked the car besides a filthy makeshift bookstore. there are some vintage novels lying there. among them lies a relatively political copy of The Communist Manifesto...and there is one more ...OSAMA..World War-3 .....just behind that bookstore there is an ignorable plaque.

plaque : In 1870, the Maharaja of Vijaynagaram first floated the idea of starting a medical college.......first batch started 1911......did a lot of service in World War-1 ...then in 2........

A : so ....how were they? (referring to the chole- bhatoore)

B : well a bit spi...

A : spicy,salty, unhygienic...haa....you always denigrate us ohh cmon u know...

B : yeah yeah..you are hosting the commonwealth games.

Both start laughing

A : what's the time ...2:00 ......perfect we'll be right at the barbecue's at 4:00...oh by the way its Residency ...........magnum opus ( pointing sideways).

B : well what's so special about that...... I mean 2 pillars lots of green grass......what ..... I mean this..a magnum opus....gimme a break.

A : No it is!!!!..oh c'mon the first great battle was faught here we lost though but know what we faught valiantly,,,,,we killed those british residents..those families.

B : you killed what ??

A : families!!!

B : of ??

A : Britishers!!

B : you said VALIANTLY....and you killed kids, families....residents..wha..what the...

A (confused) : well we killed the soldiers before ..or after...and by the way they treasoned against us and we built that thing so....we faught...killed.
B : killed before..killed after..but why kill the families...and building ..why demolish it???

A (now irritated) : I DON'T KNOW...I mean am not ASI....or IAS.....I know that the war started a great rebellion in 1857......leading us to '47 I mean this is the first thing we are taught at school.

B (looking at the other side) : hey!!!! whats that ???

A (looking for something at the dashboard) : The Shahid Smarak..in the memory of the first reb of independence.

B : being renovated ......haan!!!

A : what?? ohh no no.. actually it just got defaced by some Shiksha Mitras....you see they were having a strike here.

B : what ??

A : see..there were these guys ...ok....they got jobs for some education thing....right...now they weren't getting their share...haan....so these teachers...they got angry.....and demolished it....that was how it was....ok....

B (flabbergasted) : they broke it...the 4th of July mon..I mean the independence monument.....

A : yeah.....ooh c'mon it will be renovated anyhow!!!

B : but they were teac.....ooh,,hey they are giving away flowers.....and why so much crowd....and cops...some procession being held ??

A (looking for the date in his watch) : well..there is a judgement pending....you must have heard of Ayodhya....

B : what judgement and why bieng so hyper about that judgemet .....and what A Y O D H Y A.....

A : hey hey..watch out..that's abig judgemnt ....our government rests on it....our economy, our country, me , you -till the time you are here, believe it or not, quote- unquote depend on it.

B (serious, real serious) : why ??

A : hey we are getting late for barbec....

B : PLEEEEAASEEEEE !!!!!!

A : OK ....so Babar the Mughal king built this mosque and they are saying that he built it over a temple.....an ancient temple.

B : WHO???

A : The Hindus!!! now look..they say a temple has to be built here...much has happened in-between the years..i don't know much. That Babri Masjid got demolished anyways...blasts happened, riots....the government changed too......it all happened....

B (as if about to pull hairs....his or A's...don't know) : but..it's just one mosque...you are trying to prove after 400 years......I mean a small plot ..and the government changes..no..no way....

A : ooh ooh...hey..this is India ..not your damn Brooklyn....and yeah we are not that 'NO WAY' I mean after all...hey c'mon....

B (chuckling) : hey cmon...we are hosting the CommonWealth Gamed ...aren't we??

A (slightly offended) : ok ok.....now we are off to Barbecue Nation.....

B : fine ....somewhere near...

A : no way man..its a different place all together.....Shoppers Stop..Burger Kings.you'll like it there...

B : k...hey I am a bit thirsty..can you just drop in somewhere...I need a cola....

A drops B at a nearby shop. B rushes in for a cola. The shopkeepers television is tuned to Times Now and Times Now- COMMONWEALTH VILLAGE UNLIVABLE...WALES,ENGLAND THREATEN TO PULL OUT . A small strip rolls down that India nudging towards the 20,000 mark in the sensex, But B does not see that and he bursts out laughing. It is a strange combination of laugh,amazement,helplessness and a tinge of despair.
A also walks in, sees B ,then sees the TV ......he also misses the 20,000 story ....in the end giving away a wry smile.

P.S. Hours after writing this the babri masjid judgement got deferred till 28th sept.

INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-08-31T01:49:00.000-07:00

5:30 is normally the time when you experience the best sleep of the day, but then, when you are in the compartment of a long-route train, one prefers to enjoy the first light of the day rather than.....doze off.

It was 5:33.....it was Kanpur Central.....and there was me , a 'tea-bagged' tea in my hand ,lying down in the freshly occupied side-lower....previously owned by a cute girl who was heading towards IIT-Kanpur (place I dreamt of heading 5 years back). In my long journey down to the Deccan , 10 days there, and now back in the Doabs, these were , perhaps the most peaceful and serene moments.

The train started off gradually , taking us through the rare morning calmness of Kanpur until,past some jhuggis I saw a boring yellow railway board,,G A N G A..and then what I saw - an expanse of greatness in the form of serene snow-white water ...yet again explaining the greatness of the divine. And I with my tea-cup empty and my not knowing about it, was exclaiming- MAJESTIC.

Majestic is the same word uttered when i first gazed at the Char Minar. Ever since my visit to Hyderabad, I was dying for an encounter with this famous gateway, also wondering why this four-legged structure attracted so many eyes until, I faced it...in the midst of Ramadan, among the crowd of about a thousand waiting for Eid ,a claustrophobic me, was amazed on seeing a minaret-cum-mosque that was constructed by Quli Qutub Shah in the late 15th century to commemorate the end of plague in the region - a building dedicated to the everlasting peace of the region. A thought in stark contrast with the recently concluded Hindu-Muslim and Telengana riots.

Hyderabad, in fact, on the whole is a city of contrast. Here you get to a weighing machine, toss in a coin, only to discover the weight printed in Telugu- one of the oldest and poetic languages of the subcontinent spoken by stalwarts like Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the modern day Vedantist. Simultaneously ,you cannot get away from a flimsy Auto-Rickshawwalllah who, on getting to know my plan of going to the Hi-Tech city told me, " Hi-Tech City kaae ko jaate saab...nakko jaaoo..waan kyaaa haii..oonchii buldingaa dekhnee koo jaatee kyaa??"

A city, it was, I discovered , with a magical culture,a mixed bag, where you can eat Hyderabadi Biryani along with a dosa , without the brows being raised. Here you can note down the Sehri timings from a Sanskritized Telugu paper. Also, can savor the delicacies of Haleen in bustling Ramadan nights(a dish made of meat, wheat,walnut,supaari....phew) only to start the next day with a kadhi-patta flavored sweet of some Brahminical Vratam.

Hyd -a region established by the Qutubshahis,the Asafjahis in the form of Char Minar,Jama Masjid, identified by Potti Sriramulu, who due to his determination, carved out a state of Andhra Pradesh, and alas ,developed, and still being developed in the form of Hi-Tech City by the brains of Eastern- Godavari and Vizag.

An empire that was once the ambitions of Aurangzeb, ending up as the centre of affluence of the Nizams, and today an IT hub, an area of CCDs and SubWays, Hyderabad defines INDIA. A nation, that is not defined by Kareena Kapoors, KJos and Ambanis, nor by the poverty struck lot....identified by the middle class ,the common men, who question the supremecy of the ultra-rich, by bringing the ultra-poor more closer to common life-style. A class which banishes all contradictions and carve them out into beautiful comparisons. A strata which really is the face of Hyderabad,thus ,defining India as- INCREDIBLE.

WORSHIPPING FALSE GODS

2010-07-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

One of the first grammer lessons that I remember to have learnt was to write GOD with a G i.e. capital. Next in line were rules that told 'his, him,he' when refferred to God should always start with capitals.

Capital, bold letters figuratively meant more respect, more deference to the almighty. I was told in the early years of my life to always bow before the God, always to praise Him, sing hymns in repect for Him, never to ridicule Him. And I did all that.....without questioning.

So I experienced all of the above, rather faced it with no other option left, and so did many of my contemperories. We, if born in the Hindu society are always told things the same way.slowly, but steadily we become Hindu,we start reciting Hanuman Chalisa, Gayatri Mantra, we make it a habit to visit the temple on tuesdays and saturdays, it becomes a rule to avoid the non vegetarian food on Tuesdays. Gradually, the pride of bieng a Hindu turns into an arrogance, we ridicule the neighbouring Muslim, make him a Mullla,make fun of his beard and scorn on his baking the chapatis on the other side of the pan. And then......PERIOD. no we dont start a riot,we are now saturated of our thoughts,and now we start to live life in a normal way...to put it as cliche ......life goes on.

The above paragraph's a general trend followed by most of Indian Hindus, we feel good in discussing it because we know everybody feels the same way and its somtimes good to be 'just another guy'.

But come what may there's always and as I see it, in each of our lifes, a second and contradictory phase. We begin ..... no we don't begin, we question the Divinity. It never is a logically taken step, it is an urge. We doubt the Saturdays and the Tuesdays. We fail to recognize the Chalisas and the Mantras,we compare the Metaphysics and the Physics of the Dharma. The conflict goes on and on, there's a fight going on in the inside...we think we have sinned and our religion wins the battle not for the love of it, but because of the fear of it.

Let's give this FEAR part a little bit rest.

Atheism , a word I started hearing quite often since 2006,when I started my college life. I found three kinds, rather categories of guys in my ambience. There were these kind of guys as mentiond in the last pararaph...those who feared.second in the list were those ,lets say them Atheist -1 who defied God just to be in the scene "ARRE YAAR HAMEIN IN SABSE FARK NAHI PADTAA " types. they are the ones who question divinity so that prople can see them questioning divinity. They to , in a way fear God , they too, in a way long for a support, a divine support ....when exams get screwed up , when life gets screwed up, but then "HUMEIN FARK NAHI PADTA"

And then the third kind...guys i have found out more recently, ATHEIST-2.People who put forward their disbelief quite openly and question the ethics quite confidently. They doubt the existence of the ultimate but marvel the spirituality of the Kashi Vishwanaath. he is one of those guys who want to find logic in his answers but then he thinks that his queries are not satisfied by his own DHARMA,,,and thus he drifts apart.

As a Hindu and as a 23 year old, I have come across these three breeds of Hindus. there are people who think HINDUISM is a religion, followed by following some special principals some specific activities, and they will be ridiculed, they will be abused or land up in hell, if they question it, so FEAR and for the fear they follow the rituals, or in their language, HINDUISM.

Secondly 'humein kyaa farak padataa hai?' , these guys are helpless, they are helpless in exploring faith, of feeling the joy of following a particular DHARMA, the joy of bieng pure..,.no furthur comments on them.....and then the third kind, who have the questions but they fail to get the answers, or dont want to get the answers, they abstain from the religion, without really knowing the religion, they want to find the answers, but then , they don't want to LEARN how to find those answers.....in my opinion 'a confused lot'

But for india...for me...for all of us....they are all Hindus...reciting HANUMAN CHALISA, not eating non. veg. on tuesdays etc etc...but then they do not follow hinduism, they do not follow the religion the ARYANS have given to us. Just because, this thing cant be followed , it has to be imbibed, Hinduism is way of living and leading a life.

Etymologically, a HINDU is a guy living east of Indus river, implying the whole of INDIA (with parts of PAKISTAN )is a flood of Hindus. Well abstractly, my definition ,kind of matches the geographical definition given above. For me Hinduism is a synonym of freedon, a freedom to live life on our own terms, a life where we can question the illogical, defy the contradictions, and thus believe what is implicit. It doesen't ask us to join our hands , recite the mantra 5:00 AM sharp but it expects us to enjoy the beauty of this place, the justified symmetrey of this mother earth, the mathematics of this universe. We dont have to fear God to live a life of a Hindu, we have to live life of peaceful accord to be a Hindu, we dont have to modify to a specific culture to become one Hindu, instead Hinduism is the name of a force that binds our culture together as culture is too pure be modified.

Its just that somewhere, we go wrong, when we become one staunch Hindu by sacrificing a sheep in a KAALI mandir, but defy the religion, in eating the same sheep on a Tuesday.It might be the perception of ours, perhaps, that God has made this a religion of 84 lac divine biengs, of scriptures, of rules. but then this religion is like the divinity itslef, shapless, formless, guileless. Of course, those 84 lac divine biengs,our very own RAMA ,KRISHNA, and the scriptures, they become fallacy if the growing beard of Mussalman, and the baking of the roti on the other side of the pan becomes a ridicule for us, because those Muslims , if they follow a path of principle,a path of peace, combining both which becomes a path of culture, then they are also the purest of hindu. As Hinduism is nothing but a way , of living a life and a process, .....a process of exploring truth, of exploring wisdom,

10 years back, the topic of my first speech was FEAR OF GOD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. i won the first prize in it. Much to my ill-fate, its not the fear , but the process of questioning God, asking God, about the path of real truth that brings in real wisdom to lead a peaceful life.

* The above title is basically the title of Arun Shourie's book.

LETTER TO AN ACTOR

2010-07-07T00:45:00.000-07:00

To,
Mr Shah Rukh Khan,
Prominent actor (Bollywood),
Address- A lavish bunglow,somewhere along the sea side in Mumbai,

sub : A plea to empower India

Sir,

With due respect I beg to state my thoughts that I wanted to confide in you for so long.

First of all,I am one of your biggest fans.From Deewana to My Name is Khan , each of your flicks have been watched by me, felt by me. I have cried , laughed ,faught in real each time you did the same on reel.

You are a guy who made himself into a man on his own terms, never compromising on values, and never making adjustments in family life. You did things every Indian does, and achieved things the same Indian craves for.You revered the Gita, respected the Quran. You played Raj in DDLJ and the whole India fell in love,you enacted Mohun Bhargava in Swadesh, and the whole nation went back to the villages.This time , on behalf of the whole of India, I want you to play the role of an Indian.

Indian culture,the oldest thriving lifestyle after the Egyptians, a jewel which reflects the shine of valour, affluence, penance and honour. Indian Culture, a candle which is toward its end, of which most of the sons and daughters have forgotten about.

These days we watch 300, we admire the reflexes of the spartans, but somewhere we forget the courage and strength of Rana Pratap and Co. We watch without the blink of an eye the classics of World War-2 when the solidarity of the Azad Hind Fauz of Subhash chandra Bose, somewhere gets lost amongst us, when thw world remembers the jews and the Holocaust through Schindler's List , no body here cares to reminisce that sanguinity of Partition. We watch a 3 hour motion of Alexander, but then we forget the grit of Porus, who moved the former, the Great one.

How do we bring back that past to the knowledge of every Indian, sir? Through History books? Whose boredom has made these unforgettable incidents into Forgettable chronicles.Through leaders, politicians? who change the whole course of our past , just for a 5 year reign.

They are your films , which , apart from cricket have influenced every Indian.Films, that for the last 80 odd years have been giving a 3 hour fantasy life to a common man.

Perhaps.....no..... for sure...... ,a common India needs a 3 hour acting from your side to underatand the realities , stories , glories and of course the atrocities of India. The nation at the edge of becoming a super power cannot be one if it remains blind folded to its glorius past.

Rana Pratap, Samudra Gupta, Shivaji, Bose, they need to be endorsed by you, enacted by you, so that India can come to know how great India is.Ashoka needs something more than his love life to be shown by who, so that the world , let alone India can Understand the meaning of Greatness.

The patriot of India needs you to awaken Indians from the deep slumber they are in .

I have chosen a letter to interact with you in this e- generation of Twitters and Facebooks 'coz letters have made revolutions, haven't they ? Marx compiled Marxism through them, Gandhi became Mahatma through a pen. Be it the World Wars, or the Papal Conferences, be it the Nazis, or the red cross, they ran the world in thier own ways through letters.

And then, a man, called Jawahahar Lal Nehru, above all the comeplexities of power politics , away from all the intricacies of diplomacy, very innocently taught his daughter about Indian Culture through letters. With such powerful proofs of the power of letter from the annals of history , I have tried to write to you what I feel is to be done at the moment.

I will be grateful if you will act in the affirmative.

Yours Sincerely,
a common man( of INDIA)

BAREILLY.........

2010-03-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

These dots, yes, those right after Y,circles filled with black ink,representing nothingness,representing void,a riddle, where you know you’ve got something to offer, to explore everything,yet nothing is achieved. These dots for me are bareiily, unclear, unimaginable,underestimated yet so unruffled, So unfettered .

In the first go, I hate bareilly, I vomit at the mere thought of abhaipur. Those memories of “Band Samosa” of Aslam (my MBIC canteenman) bring tears to my eyes when Kaushal’s daal-parantha meets the retina. I feel impugnant when after every 30 minutes there is a long jam covering all what’s there in Kodesia.”Kyun koi rehna chahega is shahar me” vikas Singh shouts in the midst of the jam. Me responding, “haan yaar, kahe koi rahega”. There are no parks,no malls,name any chicken dish and you’ve got the same taste. Road minus bumps equals nothing, cut the crap..its hideous.

Second round of thoughts , and I go down memory lane. I get wet with the colours of holi we play with ,every time at station. There are those tasety nights ,filled with chicken bhuja,roasted chicken and the uncle at Anand shouting ,”aaj aap log bahut dino k baad aaye”. One cannot loose those BP Mondays , guys clipped with accessories , smothered with perfume, and full of murmurs.” Abe aaj wo bhi aaegi!!”. My mind also comes across quiet moments of syndicate book house, only to get a book of choice, ending in failiure everytime.

Brain ,now turns creative, no, calculative, ‘coz now it counts the first timers, those maiden ones, the first time I started living alone, the first bunk,the first Monday,the first time I liked a girl,the first time I had a full plate butter chicken with only 1 leg piece(trust me , it happened),first time short attendance, the first curfew.

And here’s when the road takes a sharp turn, we’re at the by-pass, Raja and me in the college bus, 11 march, 2010 going to post our admission forms. The ride to junction(as station is called ) is always full of excitement ,as mostly it’s a trip down home, but this time I witnessed peace, no, quieteness.

There were no tempowallahs shouting “CB Ganja a jaao”…CB Ganj was hit with riots. The by-pass was looking like a dumb guy, shops all closed, everything deserted ,as a few days back, it had turned dumb to a mockery of humanity, shops all burnt ,everything destroyed. We are now on our way to fly-over and except for the choti li ne train,nothing at all. Tilak Inter College, the epitome of education in Bareilly was looking like a symbol of apocalypse.the ground opposite to that..no kids, no cricket..just mud with patches of dust.

We move a little further—a truck full of people shouting slogans. The driver stops the music. One faculty sitting looks around carefuly, sighs and says,”Truck bhar k jaa rhe hain, aaj fir bawaal hoga”. The bus moves through a different route this time. I didn’t see Syndicate , BP, Selection Point. Places, I was just imagining ,where I had searched for my definition for 4 years, how were they in riots, in plunder, the book house, the chicken hotel, those model shops, the ‘outlaw’ showroom. Heartbeat was getting faster, eyes were getting closed.

My fourth round of thoughts were ending, we were reaching junction, I was missing bareilly I hated. we were moving through a place where on one side there were green flags fluttering , in stiff competion with the orange ones on the other. Somewhere in the middle there was a Gandhi Ashram shop still carryin a tri-colour..Jai Hind written all over it.

P.S.
B.P. Butler Plaza
Anand Anand Chickem Shop.

RDB+FPS+3IDIOTS= VARUN PANT??

2009-12-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

I have seen 3 Idiots….
I have seen it first day, first show…..
I have seen it 4 days before my end-sems…
And here I am, at last …..writing something about it….but first…

MARCH ’06 WAVE CINEMAS, RDB

It was , like a month before the JEE, I knew I was not made for it, but still was craving for it. On top of that I found it hard to choose – the knowledge that I was not made for it , or that craving. So to calm my nerves down, I went, for the first time in a multiplex, to a movie where aamir khan has till date the sexiest haircut. I sat down, looked at it, cried during the end credits, chose it the best movie I ever saw, but during that rickshaw ride back home I discovered, that I was a part of the youth RDB focused on. Suddenly a spirit was born , and an agility to change the things took form. The ‘craving’ won the battle as I waited to become successful, to be distinct, the environs around me were roaring…

stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….

SEPT’06 …UNIVERSAL BOOKSTORES

I read FPS* when I entered into this chapel of technical knowhow, I had started doing engineering with a crash landing of rank 6914, and it was not long after I started having shivers of ED classes that I got through this book. Two reasons that I chose to read the book
1. The book was by an IITian and about the IIT.
2. I was studying in UPTU**

I started reading because I had the curiosity of what these temples of modern india were like, what an IITian, was like, wanted to experience the life of a person my parents dreamt me of becoming, a person I knew I was not made to be..but still…..
I read the book, didn’t get that IITian, but….got to meet a person who lived a life that I had started to live, I got to know a hosteller, I got to know an engineer, I got to know friendship. Bieng the only son, being the ‘most protected one’ who learnt cycling at the age of 14, I never liked hostels, I never liked late night studies, midnight smokes, and random whiskies, but FPS, kind of, told me spot on…

stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….

DEC ’09……NATRAJ HALL

3 idiots was my 3rd movie after becoming a day scholar, a day scholar who still thought the hostel time of room no. 67,10 and 38 as the best time of his life, a day scholar who went to the college in the day all right but SCHOLAR …. I doubt..and so I went to see a dashing aamir khan , a 0-figured kareena, and a possible steamy scene, but then I got that was something more than a steamy scene.

I got to understand passion, apart from all the glitz ,and the zoobi-dooni’ness, it told about passion, or something more than that -following that passion, or even something more,-capturing and living ur life with it. Madhavan’s academic dump seemed to be the story behind my 65% aggregate. I realized perhaps that designing websites in ASP.NET cannot be my forte. And his later adventure in Brazillian rainforest as a photographer told met to follow your dreams , let loose of yourself, accept your heartbeat, and follow its words..that said..

stop living life like a cliché(dead and worn out)…live it like a joke(laughing it all away)….

P.S. …I don’t know which of the phase was right..or wrong, but cut these three phases and I find Varun Pant aka me difficult to imagine.

*FPS= five point someone

** UPTU- a rare univ where you get the rarest species of engineers-CRAMineers.

FACEBOOK...naam hii kaafi hai.....

2009-12-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

There are times which are not just times. They cant be reduced to hours reduced to minutes, seconds…etc.These moments revolve around an axis, they revolve around a persona,that defines that moment , that rationalizes that time. Some great person , some great object carries the baton of that time with him and then that interval cant be defined in dates, it becomes much more than that,it surmounts to an ERA.

Eras, there have been many,that which came like a lightening with chengiz khan, or that which was came like an ordeal of peace with Ashoka. Sometimes it proved apocalyptic, when carried by guys like Hitler, Mussolini, and sometimes a tyrant like Mao, reconstructed the whole era. But, if I have taken even the minimum amounts of pain,in developing those nuero cells in my brain,I may not be wrong in saying that perhaps for the maiden time in the history of civilization, any era is in progress to be made out of questions like “WHAT TYPE OF KISSER ARE YOU”, out of quizzes like “WHAT WOULD YOU MOST LIKELY GET ARRESTED FOR “. Such an era is constructed by cyberscenic and worked out by biz-frieks ,only to be played by “PEOPLE”,and the sovereign, socialist , republic of this mother earth calls it….F A C E B O O K.

FACEBOOK, nothing extraordinary , when I saw the web page for the first time, just a subtle combo of white and blue, and yes there was something I used to admire a lot in it,and that was SIMPLICITY. Little did I knew that those sober pages were made to control the psychology of the most intelligent animal on the earth, ’the human being’. Facebook started to counter with our lives when I was still a hosteller, the craze of G-Talk, was still above the limits, with status messages getting longer and longer, and now that orkut was banned by the firewall, facebook sneaked in from somewhere.

“abe is par America se bhi dost ban jaate hai”, “abe ye bahut zyaada secure hai”,”mast hai be”, were the reasons I used to get when I asked them “why facebook”. Actually the problem was , I was in love with ORKUT. I loved its insecurity, the way it used to rip apart our privacy. I never can forget those days when I used sneak in any profile just grabbing some acute personal info about that guy, or as happened in most cases ,that girl. So I took a vow,not to use it, but sadly the others didn’t. and the classic blue of orkut, the colour of the sea where we used to float our heart out transformed to the gentle white of facebook, the color of sky where guys used to soar along, higher and higher.

“ha ha ha, abe karra comment tha ,”,”abe wo waali quiz mast thi be” , these were the general sounds that I started hearing as I became a day-scholar, at first I thought there might be some weekend program organized by hostel athaurities. But quizzes are not what they call a hosteller’s forte, so what was that. Slowly and steadily I got the answers, not through any explanations, but thorough a vivid observation. When I saw the PCs of our labs where we we were to make c programs turn white and blue. Classrooms became quiz centres and the would be engineers were the future quizmasters. The server of facebook turned to a sorcerer, which told you about your best friends, expalined you about the car you resembled,and as I have said prophesized the kiss that I would take in the near future.

I was going mad now, I was the only one who was there with orkut, blabbering about orkut, its themes ,its quizzes, but as it turned out orkut was now the thing of the past. And then there came a day, I created a facebook account and commented “F**K OFF facebook,orkut rules” and signed off,.then again signed in and saw that comment was counter-commented by many,I felt good, again scribbles something,signed in again, and this scribbling with comments continued until I played the quiz,” what personality are you”, and after sporting a string a question I got yhe answer “DOMINATING”, - now for a guy like me who failed to even become the monitor of his class, who loved that last bench of his in schools and colleges, loved the word ‘dominating’ and so I endeavoured into a new world of quizzes and comments, and a subsequent divorce to orkut was given.
Its been 3 months I have been following quizzes in facebook, and in these months have tried to understand me and my friends; madness for it, what I have got is as given below
There is nothing big in the magnificient come magnanimous craze of this F thing,its just contains 2 logistics:-
1. Applying a 3 tier Client Server Architecture.
2. Knowing the art of reading the minds of people.
The first one is developed by geeks, constantly jabbering around servers, redundantly manipulating the I-Protocols. The second logistic , is done by common men, who got no degrees, they might have been college dropouts, but knew what the other person wants in the crowed. They knew it well that “MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL”, and there, too, stressed on more on the ANIMAL instincts of man. they will give you what you want from it and thus it'll end up being the thing you will crave for.

p.s.- last night after 3 months I opened orkut, I felt like it was crying, as why I had cheated upon her, why I moved on to facebook. I couldn’t say a word, just logged off, and then aftera few minutes, started playing a quiz..”WHAT TYPE OF A CHEATER ARE YOU”.

AS THEY SAY 'DREAM COME TRUE','LIFETIME WOW'...blah blah

2009-11-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

As per records, I am doing engineering ;well according to my Orkut profile’s Professional page its ‘forget it..just ‘cram’eneering. Anything ,in these 4 years…differential equations, tower of Hanoi, PDA ,Codd’s rules…..etc etc….have not been able to influence me (or I am not able to…who knows). Its always my ACCENT,my DEBATES, my “ANGREZI” that has given me respect, sometimes given me internals and one time , I guess, I got a GP of 49 marks. But to tell you the truth, I am not comfortable in it, I seriously love hindi, the language in which I scored distinction in class 10th, the language in which I learnt to talk with my parents, the lang in which I learnt friendship, and also how to abuse friends. But still for all that it has given me,I must respect the LINGUA FRANCA of this world and so….lets visit in cloak of this respected language, the “dream come true” and “life time wow” of this ‘cram’eneering session..TOUR de MANALI come ROHTANG come CHANDIGARH.

The night that brought us from the 6th to the 7th of September was not an easy one. Apart from the excitement and observance of the excited status messages of pals,it was the night when I had seen a hint of reality, of professionalism, which had confirmed me pf the fact that this mother earth is not perfectly spherical but a little deshaped and that’s what makes all the difference. So 7th started with an alarming call by Niteesh, the shrillness of the ring tone signified the height of exhaustion(and enjoyment) that we were going to face, and thus at about 6:30 ,the sun about to rise,the weather (at last) devoid of the clouds, we started our march towards the bus,towards a dream ,towards ecstasy.

My first impression about our TITANIC, the bus, was of coziness, which gradually changed to congested. The first voices heard inside the bus was a song..”aaya rey”..i liked it..started tapping my feet, until I realized the technical faults of the tape and thus the tapping and the liking slowly vanished.
And now, at last we were off, for me it was still a dream, which, a day back I was convinced would be a nightmare. All 40+ of us, girls, boys, girls with boys, digicams, everything was bustling…like boiling milk*. I don’t remember much about the first hour, as the 3 musketeers of A-6 , Shastri nagar(raja ,me and vikky) choose dozing rather than singing Love Aajkal’s ‘aise kaise ho gayi re’ which was an instant hit for the last 4 rows of the bus.

The bus moved on……

BREAKFAST TIME…and my dreamy, dozing self found some heavy breakfast. “Yes !!! it was true…the tour is really on..yipee” I was thinking until Ramandeep singh announced…”HOD was angry in the project lab, have to report him next week.” All my dreams, of playing in the snow,dancing in the bon-fire,immediately changed to nightmares of cut short internals,deducted GPs, Year Backs etc. I tried to bring the nightmare down for the next 7 days as Muradabad was the next target, both for the bus, and us. Basically our target was Pankaj Singh, Muradabad was just a buffer for that, came Muradabad and guys were charged up as if we had reached the ultimate, songs were instantly made,poems were immediately created with finesse, just to watch the glow(or not-so-glow) of Pankaj Singh’s face. “kisi din banoongi main RAJA kii RANI” was echoing in that enthralled atmosphere until my dancing,enjoying persona drowned again in a grand siesta.

The bus moved on…

I missed the chance of watching rest of the Uttar Pradesh. i discovered twilight when I woke up, and instantly I was told that we are somewhere near the Haryana-Uttar Pradesh Border.”wow we are entering in a new state, so finally a new state visited!!!”, again repercussions of “yes the tour is on” were in full throttle. In came the night and on came the Jat’s land, I realized that there were some expert information that was coming about the state, I soon confirmed that “saali beer keval 40 rupaye kii hai”..was all that was being announced. To add to those “just 40 rupees” I realized that road turned quite smooth and yes,I needed some more sleep. Well that was last of my sound sleeps.

The bus moved on…

Dinner time..was a normal one and here we got out first taste of Haryanvi-Punjabi culture as ‘maa ki daal’ was served to us. 10:00 PM and back to the bus and..sleeping was not allowed and thus started a session full of songs, full of shayari, the college life that I dreamt of during my struggling days at TRIVAAG was coming true on that midnight. All the fines that we had given, all the fights that we had done, all the cold wars that we were engaged in were just being washed away,until we discovered by the topsy-turvying of the bus that the mountains had arrived.

The bus moved on….

That night was quiet. Everybody was rich with sleep except me as the last seat of the bus did two things to me….draining me of sleep and allowing me to admire the mountains, the divine conic sections which made me felt proud of being a kumaoni. The prudence increased as morning came and Manali was welcomed. It was the second time that I was seeing snow-clad mountains..and least to say..i was glad. Manali was much like my Uttarakhand, scenic, confirming that greenery was still alive somewhere also confirming the presence of endangered yak. My 3 years in hostel have filled me with one piece of information that a girl looks most beautiful on her wedding night. Although it was day time but Manali was gorgeous like a newly wed bride. One felt like kissing them as one saw those greenish hills.
About those temples we visited: they had nothing in them ….still acquainted with something..they weren’t the worship domes of Creators, they were the cottages of the creators , the builders, the magicians of the universe. Everything was quite, serene seemed as God was having a date with us.

The night was firy. …seriously it was.. there was fire and we were dancing around it. Again the dance was different. Chacha’s b’day was the first occasion when I first danced my heart out, and then there were many, where we flaunted our joints,but this one had some chicks,had some fire, and then there were we, ever so desperate to bring the Elvis out of us, also there was the IT branch which was dancing along, probably reminiscing the 3.5 years long journey that started from 17th aug 2006 and were dealt with repercussions, reverberations,which today were adding more to the music of the DJ. Night came and the guys still jumping with that unity circle* thing , ate and slept to discover another mesmerizing ‘snowy’ day.

The night carried along……

After a long time we were in a room with a television + a bathroom+ a western toilet. The cozy quilts made our journey to Rohtang late by an hour.a hurried breakfast and a short stream of photo sessions was all that was needed to pull up our socks and head on to see the snow in all its feast and fervor. So at last ,we were there in a Qualis and I finally was heading towards seeing snow for the first time. Rohtang was the icing of that tour, the reason why half of the people of our tour were with us, it was a dream we were dreaming from academic blocks and canteen, we all had fancied and fantasized different faces of Rohtang and now we were about to unveil the prized veil of that gorgeous lady ‘always’ in white. There were some halts…
1. When our normal ‘tourist self’ was converted to an abnormal ‘eskimo self’, courtesy” that protective suit and
2. When we realized that that goggles that was worth ‘rs 100..bargained to.. rs 40’ suited us and we had an avalanche of photo sessions only to discover that battery was discharged. But still….

Our quails moved on…

And so…seeing a live demonstration of dealing with a land slide, and experiencing a mile long jam we finally were with the snow we were anticipating. It was like those fantasies where we are locked in the room with the girl we stare from our balcony. “why called rohtang pass??” ,was the question still disturbing me but those frozen water falls, and foamy snow were degrading that disturbance. And so finally the end point was reached, we discovered that we were there in that Leh-Laddakh Road and finally I understood the meaning of Rohtang Pass , its relationship to the silk route and admired myself to have reached there.

That snowy hill and the 9 of us…

That snow was shining up the mountain and we were dying to kiss it. We discarded those donkeys besides us, and we chose the hard way, we believed in our feet and for sure what a belief it was!!!! We started marching, there were , at that time just two differences between us and Bhagat singh, one we were not going to the gallows and two we didn’t know ‘mera rang de basanti chola’. So we continued and slowly but STEADILY the Bhagat Singh inside started fading away and breathlessness showed its colours, we took a rest, we were 22, felt like 82 but had that temptation to go up still like a 22, so we moved on…we stopped for a tea, which acted like a bisleri in the Sahara and incidentally I got my best ever snap (as Harry told) clicked there. The vegetation seemed lesser, the snow seemed nearer the legs seemed weaker, the excitement seemed tougher, at last God was felt closer and Bingo!!!! I had reached it,I was there in the snow, playing, caressing, admiring, except writing somebody’s name on that snow,,perhaps I had to wait for another destination for that. That snow point was where, I guess I was kissing snow and making love with success, I was discovering it, there was this sweet taste I was tasting which I got by overpowering the breathlessness, the exhaustion, it was beautiful and I was enjoying it.

Coming down I had just started celebrating our trek until I found out that I had lost my purse, with that my right to drive a vehicle( DL) and my ‘cash in palstic’(ATM). But then again, all was fair in love, war and rohtang. Back in the hotel the sorrow of purse was gulped down with the tea and so from that tops-turvying we were heading towards the ACHTECTURAL AJOOBA….the land of goddess …CHANDIGARH. And 10 PM sharp our journey to witness the modern wonder of India started.

The bus moved on….(this time a little quickly)..

This time I got a little sleep in the bus, as I was exhausted singing those medival times songs and screaming more than singing. we got no deluxe rooms we got dorms with no TV ,no western toilet , but with smoke detectors, that were not there in that deluxe room. Buzzes of ‘daaru yahaan bhii sastii hai’ were still buzzing around . Some sleep some paraanthaas and we were there in the INFY campus , on our way, watching, for the first time, more surds than normal shaven guys.

Eye-opener INFY

It was here that we were confirmed of the fact that not only we know nothing,but we also do not have a goal, we might have played with snow, bought beer at half rate, had travelled 4 states but PRO-ness was what we were devoid of. One thing we did there with confidence…eat that good quality lunch..though the custard was a bit like a Pain killer, but, perhaps we deserved it. ‘INFY.we will be back’ with this in mind and a snap clicked with its counselors we moved in to Rock Gardens. Rock garden was a gem,that’s it, nothing more, ……OK ..something more, it showed the perseverance of a single man, the creativity of a single self, that ‘life is not to waste but to cherish it’ was all that was written over it. We were having snaps clicked like anything but it was a place to be snapped in mind as that garden was telling the colours of life, all sewn to one, be it love , hatred, lust, everything being a subset of creativity….again Kudos.

The evening was spent admiring the BROOOOOOOOOOOAD roads of sector 17, 2 snaps (one infront of woodland) and an hour’s search for a food joint which ended with one chicken burger. You see,if manali was beautiful, rohtang was majestic, Chandigarh was ambitious, it showed realism,modernity. If manali was worth admiring, rohtang worth worshipping, then Chandigarh was worth experiencing,learning and imbibing, and so taking a rickshaw, studying the architectural intricacies of the city and with my maiden snap in the rickshaw we reached back to the dorm
‘Wake up SID’ was in the store …again just 2 statements for it
1. As vikky said…’it ended where it should have started’ and
2. Mota’s b’day coincided with that of Konkana in the movie

The day was over , the tour was over, the dream that we were dreaming was coming to an end , but we all were determined to cherish it forever. Next day, the journey back was filled with dumb-charades, songs, dahi-parantha ,a jam near Rampur and in the end I was woken up at Izzat Nagar, I wondered why,until I realized that I had become a Day-Scholar and life was somewhere in the city. Next day ,I woke up at 12:00, and …………

At last ‘life moves on and on and on……’

* Sorry for that bad similie
* a memorable moment where were not individuals , but IT-06 and also proud of it
P.S. – dedicated to Birju and Shashi Kant Sir..no need to tell why.

NAZAR K SAAMNE.....and now JIGAR K PAAS

2009-10-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

I'll be true to you...i write blogs to learn something, to master this art of wasting ink and also for some respect like.."arre waah yeh to BLOG likhta hai"
And so i respect the criticisms, if there are any...but for this post...i dont give a fuck to any criricism...as this is my heart in front of you...this is dedicated to ME....(sorry for that 4 letter word..couldn't help it.)

So today , was yet another goofed up bunk….’GOOFED UP’.. I use this word because I find it interesting, count it among those words of which you don’t know anything but use them because they sound interesting, make even a piece of crap look like something serious. So coming back…another bunk…added with the news of my current attendance score as 70% made the whole day a little creepy. 70 % is not that bad a call, but when you have to deal with a fine of 400 per % below 75 that call becomes a scream , a LAMENT rather. So with dreams of mastering LINUX still struggling to prosper, Bill Gates’ “The road ahead” suffocating somewhere below the pillow and attendance drooping to an all time low..i thought of blogging…thought of penning something great , something …..something as luscious as those seekh kebabs, something tasty as that ‘late’ coffee at that ‘late’ Nescafe ..something as steamy as that por…oops!!....but something about that time ….when we made a trip…a trip down memory lane…a trip down holy lane….where probably half a century ago….my father was born…..implying technicaly…that on some unlucky (depends)day ,I was born too…

So back to 18th oct 2009……an ‘EVENING WITH A DIFFERENCE’…….
The evening had started…. Rather jostled to start…some friends had visited my place…as they said, to‘wish Diwali’..and as I took it,…’to burn fire crackers out of me’. With a whole lot of witty bombs and great no.of NON VEG. ROCKETS.(code for obscene talks)……shooting up to the sky…I was easily shown dust in that war of wits. I was being made fun of ..i was joked about, I was being done at everything that I used to do to people before, but this time I was just looking ,partly at the clock to chao my friends off….and partly looking at the door just in case anybody might here those largely on the air NON VEG. The clock ticked 9, friends were off and in came a news. Babba (father) had won bucks at a cards party, he did lost some playing blind, but thankfully the deal came out positive and thus destiny decided upon a memorable evening for us.

So the party started with a cousin added, and within a white Honda City we(uncle aunt,amma, babba, cousin, me) started off… babba was exploring Lucknow to my cousin…..you see …I am thought of as a home-alone kind of a guy…who knows nothing about lko except that he also lives there. But things have started to change…I also had started exploring the city and this was the time I wanted to tell it all. Who does not want to impress upon a cousin landed straight from Mumbai and that too…from an aeroplane?. Unluckily I never got a chance….and I too…saw..the university..colvin etc etc much like a tourist….the urge to speak that ‘I know too’ grew irresistible…and luckily one voice from behind came ….”whats that” and I yelled …vomited(more accurate)..”that’s saadat ali’s tomb…under control of ASI”…a bit hush hush from behind and I thought I had won the war…I was elated…until I realized that it was time to dine…more than that it was time to show my culinary knowledge as since 2 years I had been WIKIing lucknow’s taste laboriously. Well, it’s a dream of every lucnowi to sit in a famous non veg joint with his guest and tell him/her about the cuisines, not important whether he likes the dish or not, not important whether he fills his tummy…he should like one’s knowledge, he should fill his mind. And I saw such a moment coming before me .

Again unluckily I didn’t get a chance… I proposed ‘shakhawat’ for dinner…plea rejected and here again pops had won,ordering dishes that I had never even heard of..let alone telling facts about it. I silently ate it all cursing Tim Berners-Lee (founder of world wide web) and Wikipedia.

So the day was coming to an end …after being the subject of friend’s pranks and then with a broken dream of exploring lucknow to everybody we were heading to have paan ..of which I seriously had no idea.

The paan shop was not found and instantly it was decided to visit Nazarbagh. ‘NAZARBAGH’….this is the word that easily would be the most heard word for me….heard sometimes from my mother ….with twinkling eyes…sometimes from my father..with a nostalagic throat….this word was always there for me….it was a place which was my first home after the maternity ward of Lady Dufferin’s..but still I never had any sentiment to it…nazarbagh for me was just a place and 69, Nazarbagh( a mansion built by my great grandfather a century ago) was just a house where by chance my father got born and by his choice I also had the chance of calling it my first home…but as you see I never seriously and sincerely honoured this fact.

So with chitters and chatters the ‘white Honda City’ moved on….it kept on moving ….until it stopped and with that stopped the race that the people in that car (except me) were running to survive in life..for the 4 people in that car (amma, babba, uncle, aunt), the race converted to a walk down the isles of the rosy past whose petals had nurtured them to become the strong individuals that they were. We had reached Nazarbagh and now we were in a place that had ,to me, stories to tell. All of them were looking at those buildings , those landmarks, where they had played cricket, where probably they had their first smoke, got drunk for the maiden time, and perhaps had fallen in love umpteenth times.

Seeing a mixed bag of emotions I too asked my mother “apnaa waala ghar kaun saa hai ….wo to dikhaao”…..and amma with 4 years of residential experience but with 40 years of storytelling guided me through a ‘little more’ broader lane and there stood a daunting white building…recently whitewashed…and on the backdrop was my mothers commentary….”yahaan babba money-plant lagaate the..yahaan khidkiyon pe grill nahi lagi thi….i didn’t know why, I didn’t know why…but I also was swimming in the pool of Nazarbagh….i started imagining myself as a child…how I used to cry? how I would have started to learn walking on foot…i tried to capture that 100 year old monument but the 2 megapixcel glitter didnt prove enough.

Meanwhile babba’s nostalagia was overflowing ….as I could hear…Laal Makaan and Pista Niwas was same as ever…those roads were not a complex organic compound of carbon, but had been a mirror where my uncle and babba were on a past expedition. I used to think that living out of home,in a hostel and now independently, I have enjoyed and will have memories that my father would always be devoid of. I got to know that day ..how wrong I was… as my father, too had an exubherent past which was having a showdown for me that night right after diwali.

With the heart and eyes longing for more , but brain longing for some sleep, we moved to our homes..having a hard time to accept that nazarbagh is not ours now..we finally accepted the fact that ‘property 50-60 saalo se zyaada nahi rehti’…

So the day ended . I ,who wanted to impress upon my cousin had to be content with her e mail id. And then at the doorsteps, babba finally admitted that today he had grown sentimental…somewhere there my heart also clicked, not because father was growing senti…perhaps I had started growing senti for nazarbagh…I , from now on had started honouring the fact that 69, Nazarbagh was my first abode after the cesarean in the maternity ward at Lady Dufferins’

CHALLENGES...1 .2 3 4 ...GO.....

2009-09-13T08:25:00.001-07:00

Its been time since I’ve written my last post. And each time when I try to think and care about that gap…many things flood down this rather small cerebellum. To be true to all of you…esp. those who have taken pains to take my blog count to 130 (and esp esp to those 6 musketeers ..the followers), the time is not good at all. Its been moving with that speed that even ‘lightening bolt’ may feel shy to achieve, and I as a trainee for a long boring marathon, is perplexed by that. That unfathomable* Manusmriti challenge is over , but the new ones are more senile, more variegated *. so why not explore them and let me put them for you in a “what I love” tabular way.

CHALLENGE 1…. Indian Philosophy………………the oldest of ‘em all ,the grandest of ‘em all. This massive storehouse of knowledge has been a point of chaos for my grey matter. Its all a great theory, where logic is undermined as hell , though this undermining is great news for chaps like me who have hated maths .thus logic, but still 4 years of ‘as I call it’ crameneering as made my brain understand some ACKs and NACKs (courtesy..tanenbaum and NETTECH) such, that the ‘Radhakrishnan’s dualism, his distinction of self and not self, seems a bit , you know…unnetworked(courtesy.. ditto). Its been the second week of my issuing of our second president’s epic..but still, the caricatures of Atman and Brahman haunt me.

CHALLENGE 2… Recession………..aah….this is a veteran challenge, and we are still playing it down. This great word made its debut when our sky blue placement cell was all hustled and bustled with a BPO coming in and slammed us after 3 months when the ,all the more blue cell was all barren, all silent as if Obama’s Guantanamo replacement was this bluish arcade. It was a mourning that started with “TCS not coming” news around the campus, continued and watched Jackson’s death, submitted our training reports like a massive meal’s starter (didn’t even burp after that),and is now having some dezzerts with some more call centres and words like “TCS still not coming”

CHALLENGE 3… C#.....this is the latest challenge..a new one ..a teenager but c’mon Sachin was also a teenager to start with. Though it’s a new challenge, but its revelation was quite an expected one as, for at the end of 4 years when you still think twice before compiling a C program, when words like TCP/IP seems like some skyscraper in downtown New York, when you can’t , after 25 days of mugging concepts grow cold in explaining… “what is a server”…and then at the end of it all..log in happily and play those quizzes in Facebook, then such sharp revelations are understood. So in final year, as this mega project seems to be a mine of 250 marks..and I ,still confused with ins and outs of Visual Studios ..,my relation with c#,till now seems to be paradoxical.

CHALLENGE 4… WRITE GENERAL..so finally my blog, one of the homes that I made last year where I can make love with my thoughts (and that too without a condom!!!!) is now falling over me. “write general”..”write easy” phrases have been tossing over this poor soul, just to come down and split my blogging brain to two. And that’s a challenge I have been working upon, trying to work it out, sport out with some AS YOU LIKE IT..’general words ’.
There are more of them , infinite in no. but then its like an onion, peel out those layers from me, and I’ll be gone( that’s one thing I learned from Indian Philosophy). So well, my next quest , ummm…lets convert that marathon into Asafa Powell (c’mon..he’s just second to BOLT.

CHALLENGE 5 ….No onions in dinner tonight..now that’s not fare.
*-sorry if they are not general,part of “learn at least 2 eng words aday,you sucker” program. Had to add

PS- Vimarsh Kar , I will keep up my promise in the next post.

PPS - SAMAJ KALYAN GROUP, I take a vow , something great will be written on you.

1 BOOK..7 DAYS

2009-08-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Ashes has at last been won, Ponting at last (with a sigh) is down in the dumps. So a victory much needed at last arrived at the shores of Thames. Again a sigh……too many though ,but this month has been a month of sighs. Sighs of many types, like the one that came in the hope of having an internet connection in our room, that which came when all the grievances of the project were satisfied, or that golden one which came when I answered nine back to back word meanings asked by a batchmate (who like others made 2 mistakes- considering me Norman Lewis of English and asking from Norman Lewis’ Word power made easy). But amongst all these sighs the one that was penchant, ticklish, exorbitant, exuberant and having all such multisyllabic emotions of the same kind, was when I returned that book in the library, that book, that ‘great’ book, which made me the ‘Mahatma’ for seven days of its issue.

Barely a month have passed when I have started discovering Bareilly city as one of my hide outs, as I have left the hostel. Still that hostel building calls me, to relive all those magic moments of the past three years, for one more year, one last year…and I bewildered and amused, take refuge in that grand citadel of ours , the library. That building dipped in limestone has always been the same , like an introvert ‘n’ obscure father, who has been there to listen to the wishes of his son, in the same manner, both the times, when he was a hosteller and now ,as a day-scholar. ‘ In that heaven of my college’ I found a book.

Great people, even not so great ones have talked about intuitions, about premonitions, where in before doing a thing you are able to perceive with a crustal clear vision the consequences of that deed(generally grave), but still you commit it. That book looked at me..err.. it winked at me, there was something unusual in our meeting, I could calculate the ‘raised eyebrows’, ‘wide opened mouths’ that I had to face through this book, but still I was induced to it. I looked here and there, opened some pages, shuffled it with my hands , knew something wrong was happening but my relation with that book was turning to an enigmatic love affair. At last I decided , I issued it, I made it my guest , my mate, my partner for the next 7 days. The book was “MANUSMRITI”, , it was in “HINDI”,was an ancient indian “SHASTRA” and I HAD ISSUED IT.

AT THE ISSUE COUNTER : That robotic librarian,stopped like an old hanged XP machine, saw my reg. no. and branch twice, assured that I was a B. Tech. student , and murmuring a few words, gave it to me.

DAY 2: I carried that book with me to the lab, all the compilations and interpretations of an old C program of crypto were being done, suddenly a girl saw that book in my hand , all the compilations stopped, programs stopped giving results, lab was, as if , in a complete chaos , what happened? She had seen that book in my hands.

DAY 3 : Till now I had understood all my premonitions of the library, I was reading the book, and more than that I was reading people who were reading me at that time. So I took a day off and started analyzing that book, had study session

DAY 4: My roomies saw it. That’s what happened , nothing, they watched me, I peeped more into the book, they tried to savor me with their touch, I tried to find the meaning of its Sanskrit shloka. One of then , I saw it, didn’t blink for about a minute, and then suddenly burst into a laughter that made his eyes watery for at least an hour, nowhere to go I slept and that laughter continued.

DAY 5,6 : I locked myself,didn’t do anything , just tried to find the answers, of that non stop laughter of last day, that unrun program, of last to last and that librarian’s weird looks. Now I was just looking at that book, I was not giving attention to the book, but , I was asking that book. And that book, it seemed, on hearing my question was jumping with laughter, those hindi words , that pure Sanskrit script, danced before me, and told me the reason for that librarians’ weird looks. That classic title, MANUSMRITI , came forward, hugged me and whisphered to me all the logics of that hallucinated lab. And at last the title , the honour of being a dharmashastra, came forward and uttered the answer for that laughter night. Later I knew the concept of those premonitions, those premonitions were the visual definition of a modern youth where a young gut esp. an engineer was not supposed to read hindi, let alone shastra. We were in an age where we were moving towards tomorrow and as if paying homage to the roots of our yesterday was not in vogue. That book, by winking and laughing was telling that falsified reality.

DAY 7 : I read the last part of it, enjoyed it, went to the counter to return it,to my surprise the new librarian didn’t show any emotions. And now came out with Khushwant Singh’s “In the company of women”……next day I gained some respect, perhaps that of an engineer, thus having the greatest sigh of relief.

63rd......

2009-08-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

So Nescafe is still like that tomb which despite all its affluence and glamour, still signifies hopelessness. But here it is again, as I call it, as Shakespeare might have called it, the ‘ides of aug.’ the day when we came to know the meaning of that Spiderman dialogue “with responsibility comes power”, the day when Raisina Hills, seemed to be ours, the day when Mall Road seemed more Indian, the day , frankly speaking , when we got independent.

It’s a different kind of festival, celebrated more by law, than by heart. That’s why , we the descendents of Aryans like to treat it as holiday, nothing else. A holiday which is more or less cloudy, a holiday when the most powerful man (the P.M.) comes at the most powerful looking place (the Red Fort) to utter the most powerful words of his life with perhaps the weakest will, the weakest intention. If that is the irony, or pure logic(of power politics) I cannot say, for me its been a tradition, repeated 40th time when I was born, and this time ....62nd time, when I am, perhaps at the most crucial point of my life.

Traditions , yes , they are something good old mathematicians, called axioms, great rulers called rules and the flamboyant bureaucrats call them sections, points, “which come under IPC so and so”. So we have been following traditions,right. Traditions of hoisting flag at sharp 8, tradition of watching an odd movie as a matinee show, and then sleep/make love according to ones requirements for a brighter tomorrow.

Everything above is logical , it happens, it does execute on that rainy August 15 , we wake up, we hoist the flag we watch movie, sleep ,make love, except for that last few words, ‘brighter tomorrow’. Now that is a bit miraculous, a bit illogical, as those mystics might have said, beyond language, beyond words.

Because , for all the other things the mission was one the target was one, me, I, our ego. Simple logic. For that last thing we have to be a bit altruistic, a bit generous, we have to be miraculous. Miracles, as the great Yogis say, let yourself become infinite, let yourself feel that ever so constant light, that ever so constant divinity, and materialize or dematerialize, a child’s play.
But are we, in that situation, or lets put it like this, what if we are in that situation. When we are able to be above all ego, when we are weightless ,when we are able to feel what Kashmir feels when each hour its childen are attacked ruthlessly, what those martyrs feel when they see that those who planned an attack at our parliament are still roaming around freely, when we are able to see the thousands of swords that have risen in revenge against “god knows what” in the North East. Then we will be able see that solution that way, of breaking the rules, cracking the tradition, modernizing the orient, making a way for the 200+ year old IPC to go to the gallows so that peace may be born the next day.

Then it will all become mathematics, having , in Tagore’s words a clear stream of reason, reason for everything, a secure Mumbai, a beautiful Kashmir, and a prosperous North East.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

2009-08-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

DAY 1 : There was a big lock outside. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, a total , abysmal atmosphere. I was missing her throughout the 2 months. No doubt I was disappointed, but waited for another , brighter tomorrow.

DAY 2 : Again a lock, now everything, in and out was becoming jittery. Omens were being produced and reproduced before me. Something unusual was to happen, I knew that.

DAY 3: Nothing was normal around that place. Everything , it seemed ,as if, was implying to a mis-hap. That place where I used to find her, was not normal. Some guys stormed in, something stormed out. I tried to drift my attention away,only to find it pinpointed there . My thoughts conjured up this time, something unusual was happening.

DAY 4: It finally happened, the doom’s day finally came , and judgment ,at last arrived, all the penultimate restlessness resulted in an ultimate assault. It was gone, that reddish grace was no more , that bombastic atmosphere was killed by some abstruse enemy of mine. My love, my Nescafe , finally was gone ,don’t know why, don’t know where, but……gone.

They say, I don’t know why, “TIME HEALS IT ALL”. Does it? Or time itself is like that old grandpa whose camaraderie with tensions, socio-political wounds, is an obscure yet profound truth. Or even it is not a truth globally, for me, it has been locally, a mantra. If I recall the 3 years of my college , right from those ragging season, to this year of penance at Shastri Nagar, I have been drowned in tension. Tension, sometimes, it seemed act as a soother for me.
It was all a matter of questions, arising baselessly in me, until I found a tacit answer. ADDA LAAL BAADSHAAHON KAA”. A place, where I tended to forget all the syntax and semantics of life. That cup of coffee, bina pani , was as pure as those last wine drops of Jesus. That red bricked border of hers, where I tested many dreams, most of them finally rested in peace. Those sips, which used to take us to soaring heights of magnanimity, just to relinquish, for a split second those awful tensions.

DAY 5: That white blank space is still visible to me. That coffee is doing a razzmatazz in my mind as I, newly formed day scholar, is having a bout with my tiffin. And at last as I gulp down my last bite, I see a structure being carried in front of me, to the other side of the canteen. That bright red Nescafe was being shifted to the other side. “In a better style”, somebody said,”in a better way”.
A sudden feeling arose, what type of, I can’t tell, old days were laid to death last day, only to be buried today, so as to give birth to a small set of memories. There was a ticklish, feeling, a perfect combo of excitement, nervousness, pain, and joy. Perhaps now, I was understanding my inner turbulence after becoming a Day Scholar. My love , the Classic Coffee of the Nescafe, had , by taking a reincarnation, taught me the ethics of time. Time , I understood,was healing in form of wounds. It was giving answers, in form of more complex questions.

DAY 6: The new Nescafe is being constructed, and I as a Day Scholar am eating my Tiffin ,calmly.

TIMES OF TRAINING 'n' ASHES......QUITE STRAIGHT THOUGH

2009-07-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

These vacations were real hectic, after a “one on one” heavyweight bout with the deadliest of all papers, with a hope of apocalyptic results, I was all set to be drowned in a sea of training, where some more Loch Ness were ready to gulp me down. But as the archaic saying goes ‘Time and tide waits for none’, so happened in my case. It all went, bringing with it, MJ’s death, the master, with whose ‘Dangerous’ I inaugurated my course of English music, the typhoon of dance, the Aristotle of songs, the connoisseur of style went away, in ,perhaps, the most stylized way.
The last eight days of the vacations, or probably the only days of my vacations, were spent watching that recurring “My daddy strongest” act of Jackson’s daughter. That crying phenomenon served as a fulsome week’s package for our agencies.

The politically more important salami that made a handsome sandwich for the news guys was ‘article 377’. Gays are now in vogue, lesbians are rollicking hard, heydays for straights. Long gone are those days when guys like Turing committed suicide and gave way for trademark of companies like Apple*. The most HOMOgenous of all decision resulting in the STRAIGHTest of all debates.

“Pappu pass ho gaya “ was the champ in one-liners until “Article 377 pass ho gayaa…. “ went way ahead of the former. As my chronic struggle for getting in the general compartment of the train continued this time, I still managed to get inside swimming through massive pool of enormous bodies,and as I peeped out to get some Oxygen ( with its faintest hope), I got ready for facing the “ now a clichéd “ grin and listened that “ now an over clichéd” …”article 377……”. I realized that my back was in close contact with a man’s trouser and so temporarily, yet affirmatively , I was declared a gay.

One more great news of the term, esp. for me as I have a soft corner for England , was the Ashes, and a convincing , determined win at Lord’s. Its not that I hate Australia, as I have rolled over the googlies of Shane Warne big time. But c’mon man, now everybody wants a change, and who does not enjoy, Freddie Flintoff savaging the middle stump and KP hovering for a towering six. Though we never saw that six, but still I enjoyed that ‘voodoo’ of Lord’s (as one commentator had put it that way).

And as time again has started jogging down the track, lets hope for a safe haven for MJ’S soul, great life of all the homos and c’mon England “ whip’em hard”.

*Alan Turing was the revolutionary Computer Machinist who is undoubtedly the father of modern computing. Fate proved him to be a straight. And as he was a code breaker with England in World War days ,it was not considered apt to give him independence, so he was given Solitary Confinement”, and within an year he subjugated and killed himself by mixing poison with apple. The time when his body was recovered , a half eaten apple was there, and to commemorate the great scholar Apple kept their symbol that way

TO ALL THOSE WHO ASKED , “WHY LEAVING THE HOSTEL?”…A TRUE ANSWER

2009-07-27T03:58:00.000-07:00

“YEH RAATEIN NAYI PURAANI….AATE…..AATE JAATE…..
LIKHATI HAIN….KOI KAHAANI…….”

Nights for me are something sort of an oasis when I am a thirsty one all alone in a lonely desert. Where I quench my thirst, I fulfill my heart. Nights are like a fresh morn where it all seems to be new, like a laborious noon, where a kind of ‘wanabee’ spirit rolls down my mind, alas, like that gorgeous twilight where after all the trials and tasks done , heart lives up and says ,…..”C’MON LET’S PARTY’
This time alone in my room, and incidentally in a dark night, my mind lingers on to those days which perhaps, made me start discovering the life that I was made to live beforehand. Those days of hostels , of those rooms, of those lobbies, and of course that awful mess-food, those days that perhaps will never come again as I have dropped them in the aisles of history (reasons I’ll tell later.)
If I roll back myself and start recounting those days, the moment that tops the list contains a letter of a mother and I ,a freshly ragged son of her reading it, a point where he understood what that home he left behind was for him, what that letter and those feeling inscribed in the blue ink were. I was wearing a filthy uniform , but that was the last day (or moment) that I was pure, and knew what relations actually meant.

Friends ,or rather partners, no, shall I say mates…..or I don’t know ,perhaps beyond language, they were guys, who acted as parents, as girlfriends, as something unimaginable. They are still there….yes….they are…its just that ‘I’M NOT’. Still remember those sleepless lobbies, where the night crawlers (all of us), used to crawl away days, nights, weeks, away from all the hindrances, all the struggles, all the realities..perhaps.

Hostel for me was like a school, a school where I learnt what life was, what I was, what the near ones whom I had left far behind were, what home cooked food was …….. It was fun; it was all like a riddle whose answers I knew beforehand until….
Until I realized, that this was the fun I was not supposed to have, this was the riddle I was not supposed to solve. I was somewhere in a huge, long mango orchard and I well knew that perhaps, that it was the arid Sahara that I belonged to, or rather I deserved. I wanted to prove something, I wanted to prove that I can convert my Sahara into a fruit orchard, wanted to prove, that I can take a decision, struggle with it, but stick to it, hate it again, but ultimately gulp it down so that the reality can be digested. This was all I wanted to prove to myself.
So I took it, and am out of the hostel, of that PMC, of those night strolls, of many things. Electricity is not there this time in my rented room,, everything out and out dark, sweat flowing like a distant Campty, but somewhere inside, a faint lamp , of introspection, is burning, burning low , burning slow, but burning deep, burning steady. And somewhere along that low battery radio, in some distant channel a song is being played………

“YEH HAUNSLA KAISE JHUKE…..YEH AARZOO….KAISE RUKE……”

WHEN A MANGO TURNED PRO....

2009-07-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

SUMMER OF ’09 … warm and sweaty…. Summers always have been the same story ,of heavy electricity loads, pepsi, those funky chocobars and “not so” funky Dermicools. One thing you can’t forget if you hail from this heveanly part of the state of U.P. are those mangoes….those glib.,Yellow,smooth, acts of ecstacy. Mangoes , to me, have been , like a savior, like a friend,like a wife. Now like a savior, because mango only came for my rescue when I was mercilessly raped by these tropical villains. Friends , as I had spent those countless summer afternoons with this yellow cutie and believe those noons were as pleasant as that night of first love. And of course as a wife because it gave me everything…..pain (when not there), pleasure (when there ), support (against that sun when it was inches away from my mouth).

But come this summer and I was devoid all the three. I became alone, lost a friend and consequently became a widower. Why….well…”AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, WHEN INDIA SWEATED, ME (WITH 2 MORE) WERE SET TO PERSPIRE IN JAIPUR. We were there for a networking course. That meant something , in fact many things, like downloading , uploading ,webhosting, but where was my fruit, my love , my life, my mango. It was not there, all downloading seemed empty, uploading seemed fake. All the virtual world of web was turning unreal for me. Until…… love finally spoke, it finally excecuted and gave me the reward. Next day, in the lab , with all the state of the art facilities , I got a username “M A N G O” Now …I don’t have words to describe it, 600 kms from my home , 600 kms from those dussehries , I got my love, though as a username but I got it. I was now all set , to climb up the virtual world….how wrong I was ..in fact how unknown I was …..
They say that this whole holy world is just a mere probability of interconnections, some times its there , sometimes it is not. For me this web world of internet was something identical.

So now I ,as a mango for the next 25 days, started gearing up , lets say for the inevitable. The next day, now it might be a cliché but I have to say that the sun rose for me, and me only ,the rays of the sun , pinching me , forcing me towards ruthless labour. That smooth sunshine inspiring me towards professionalism. Yes that’s the word, “being PRO”. The course, in a certain sense was null and void, ‘coz all I got in those tests were null and void, i.e. zero. 10 zeroes in a row. Physically I was exhausted, that sprawling Jaipur campus no longer enchanted me. Mentally , I was down in the dumps but from one anonymous part , I was all spiriited up, and that too unanimously.

For me those zeroes and those failiures were not emptiness , but a ‘suchness’ one cannot describe. Yes,I was unknown before as that virtual world was a real professional world we were climbing to. I guess this generation z (or z++) is quite crazy about professionalism , but perhaps while approaching that , we tend to loose it…..loose it all. There is a thin line between professionalism and practicality. We , quite often tend to forget that. Being practical , is more or less like being ‘I’, like being a mango, which is eaten by that mango itself, there are no ways, there are no possibilities, everything is for a specific reason, for that ‘I’. While being ‘pro’ was being true. True to the profession , true to the world , to the almighty. Those, are the professionals who behave like an ‘I’, serve the ‘you’ and targets the ‘us’. Those 10 zeroes and loads of internet told me all that as with each of them I was getting up close with my goal but not emotional towards it. I was getting truthful for it, not selfish.

These 2 things , Internet and the mango , told me a lot of things. There is hardly a day I pass without tackling my fingers over the address box, internet’s like a friend . like a mate sometimes, but for the net I am nothing more than a login id ,a code. Why? because its true , its pro it seves ‘you’ and targets ‘us’. Similarly the mango, my love whom I adore. But for it, I am just one of them , whom it has to serve, from season to season, orchard to orchard.

So now, back home , with dusseharies , bustling around me, I was in them, eating enchanting , caressing them all this time , a bit professionally.

EXAM TIME-3..Tanny and and an affair with his (E) book

2009-05-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

I know I am not that big of a blogger (am I ?). OK I am not, but so what…..i try to start my write-ups in a different way. But this time I am caught, caught in a big fishhhhhh……
.
.
[This was what I got through when I looks at just 1 post in the month of may..but the experiences of the second week made my fingers ….travel round the keyboard as under……]

Don’t know him ,never even thought about him..he is some protégé of Berkeley..California university. Made some system called the MINIX., and yes married some Dutch(poor she..tch tch..). so that’s it,nothing more, NOTHING MORE , till came the networks subject, and got just 3 mins of swashbuckling intelligence in a 3 hour long paper. So what was to be done, I thought of buying some intelligence from this Dutch’s husband. Well , he was ….Andrew S. Tanenbaum. T. A..N E…N….too tough a name , lets call him..”Tanny”.

So Tanny wrote a book on Networks, and I had to study,for that I had to have a book, which I had not, so I had it have it, technically speaking, I was out of one book and had to buy it. You know buying for me is a tough task as I carry a euphemistic wallet with not so euphemistic “ only 50 Rs. in it”. Now I was at the crossroads of taking a “udhaar” (sorry don’t know the the right English) …then going to the bookshop, and getting success in galore or just….walking towards the gallows of the backpaper. Talking of the udhaar I got nothing, neither the udhaar nor the book shop.

What I got was a network phobia, what to do…all those protocols …what to do….those layers that were like piling up likelayers of my grave….what to to….and then tired with all those what to do’s , my trembling hands went to that Brin’s and Page’s miracle GOOGLE ..and typing some free ebook and passing through the seas of links ….at last found 1 Rapidshare link. And so I found a real friend, as if rescuing me in those gallows like a counter terrorist, I found Tanny’s book, without udhaar and the shop. They use to call it the E-book. So a new relationship…was in the making…

This e-book of mine , was a strict disciplinarian ,like Tanny I guess. I have this knack of feeling a book, touching its pages with full passion…but this time when tried to do it with this book, it said,”DON’T TOUCH, we’re here for study so don’t be PHYSICAL.” Unlike all my books at the almirah, kissing dust at every nook and corner, this new aristocrat friend of mine resided on my Rs 40,000 prized possession ,the lappy. And we used to look at each other , and just look,….sometimes scrolling , just to feel that we were alive. This e-book thing was turning out to be a boring marathon. No flutter of pages, no division of books, no pride of the possession of a thick book. Just scroll, read ,scroll, read…..

Prior to this event, I used to develop an emotional bondage with books. I used to be filled with passion when buying a new book, smiling on seeing the attractive paperback, elated on finishing each page, celebrating while finishing it all,even crying on torn pages. But this time I was just, as I said before scrolling, scrolling. I was like a man who married a lady who took over my mansion and now I was just..scrolling and scrolling. Also I had to digest the wide eyed looks of all the mates on seeing me and my electronic partner together.

So 10 days got over until a paper came whose real BOOK I had and I just caught hold of the book, and instead of reading its content , I held it and cried and cried.

(The deluge has not yet ended, still operating with that e-book( electronic name for studying), lets see what happens in the paper.)

EXAM TIME-2 ..OF MIDSEMS, IPL AND NETWORKS

2009-05-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Teacher : How many states are there in India?
Student: 8
Teacher: Name them?
Student: Punjab Kings, Delhi Daredevils,Kolkata Knightriders, Deccan Chargers, Chennai Superkings,Bangalore Royal Challengers, Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians.
Now your chance , what would you expect teacher does, a slap, a tooth busting punch,or a scolder ,well all wrong , it’s a shot of Rs 100 in the table on a match between KKR and CSK by the teacher. Quite a cliché now but “such is the madness of IPL these days.”
And back in our island, our hos, we are in a situation where we got to realize that the difference between 12 in the morn and 12 in the dark is just that the former is white and the latter is pitch dark as the ” sleeping factor ” has been taken by a chronic devil called Midsems. Period where we get indulged in a 5 days relationship with books, fall in love with the notes ( of others’ of course..) and marry all those booklets that give you a fizzer that these are the Q ‘n’ A that there in the papers.(the otherwise always happens though ,but you see it’s a marriage).
But you know the IPL , phew…..its like South Africa are the exam centres, and the match statistics are the questions, of course Lalit Modi being the paper checker. The tradition seen in the matches is the one following which Azharuddin missed in centennial test by a whisker, of course BETTING From 5 to 50 to 100 to 1000 everything for you players. Its all happening out there. Even the smoking of Marlboro Light by SRK is talked with as much delight as a sixer hit by Tendulkar.
So coming back…. apart from the festival that we are celebrating from 4:30 to 12:30 in the night (IPL). We get to remember that we have our midsems too, of course sometimes this chronic devil gives us the taste of its blood. So it was our Networks paper , morning 8 ‘o’ clock, we reached the centre containing the madness of the game played last night, but then, ooh then, what to tell?. Seriously how can you describe a paper 3 hrs long and you know just the 3 mins portions of it.
Well that paper was an incident as most of us , the normal guys had to pass the 3 hrs- 3 min of that paper without moving the pen. Apart from few scribbles of some protocols, some of us were( esp me) were there thinking about the chicken that we were to have the same evening, some were practicing their shots with their wrist cum bat just emulating the hero of last night . And some tch tch tch for them who were trying to spend half of their time in the toilet.
So these days with Midsems on and IPL blazing , networks also rolling somewhere near, its all happening here in this outlandish campus the other way round….yes we are “:watching xams and writing matches.”
Lets see what happens in the endsems.
(P.S. : Humble appeal to ICC not to keep any INDIA matches in that season.)

EXAM TIME ----OF WATERMELLONS JAMMERS AND EMINEM

2009-04-27T15:31:00.005-07:00

“Adrenaline shots of penicillin could not get the illing to stop.
Amoxacilin is just not real enough……”……….damn it another miss, do wahatever in all the holy hells you can do…except for learning this Eminem number.
Well that was me…a few days ago…learning an Eminem song. I don’t know why I do it but I do it for ….ummmm…I guess for myself. You know I am a kind of a guy who has spent a score of his life debating, blabbering all the way through, getting an image of an intellectual(though failing in physics many a times in that intellectual marathon). Debates are good but you know what… I wanted it all. There are times I see myself as a dancer movin’ feet with Usher…times I am playin’ the “head over heels” drums beating away with a Linkin Park number. But each day I wake fuzzed up in myself and see a “Varun Pant” knowing nothing about anything and desperate to enter the loo.
These days are a bit comfy as we have landed our ships to the shores, we(i) wake up at 12(in the morn) and its such a pleasure (as of course the loos are also empty). Xam times..folks…apart from all the networking algos and operating system analogies, its always a time to have a love affair with ..”TIME” as we have it all. For the past 2 years this time has given a sort of ticklish reverberations (at least to me). Things take a subtle turn…you see subtle as they always seem to be straighter. From love to lust..from fight to fright..everything gallops and makes its way in these waters of exam time.
This time it was a bit different ….yes. due to some illegal activities(lets just not ponder over that) one of the gravest(or greatest…confused with v and t) decisions of the mngmt of the college in the last few years. Well.. jammers were jammed upon us. Signal and Systems might define it another way, but for all the others of us, it was no mobiles, as no signals. The God of all electronics has been sympathetic on us as till date jammers are not installed but that period was exceptional..everybody had his or her worries and tussles with jammers…lets categorize them

1. People like me…”My goodness how will I call my mother. You see 1 call everyday. No mobiles so P.C.O. and 10 Rs for each day. Man what about my coffee…:(.

2. People better than me….”….” well no words.. he is too stunned to speak, as this mobile phone was the place where those 2 herats used to beat together(of his and his girlfriend…he stands up..walks..then cries..(some TYPICAL INDIAN ABUSES) and then goes down, as if never to come up again.

3. People (much..much) better than me….”shit all my contacts are gone …al the more difficult for all the GATES and CAT. Aaargh!!! Don’t know how to bust out the soul of this campus.

4. And some….i guess NOT better than me …capitulate on the situation by just abusing the place where we are for doing 4 years of Technical Time pass.

And someday later…till now the jammer news was a bit under the bed…so we celebrated this “going under the bed” through a “watermelon treat”. And yes, to everybody’s surprise I was eating this up for the first time. You know I am a guy(guess I am) who has lived on a lot of B-complexes, and Liv-52(medicines). But water melons and sugarcanes…”naaah not my type. But now I feel that I have gone past a life of typos and am living it with a zeal, travelling with a heart as solid as a Maverick and getting to taste the sweetness and the surrealness of “Ganna and Tarbooz”, just to find out and learn that life is sour…just make it sweet by the sugar of your ability of taking chances.
I have laernt it all here..in room # 67, 10, 38. So cheers to college(n hostel) life.
(P.S…. pray that jammers are not jammed up…if not for me then for that “Reliance Connection”)

The GREAT INDIA(in hindi)

2009-04-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Quite recently I celebrated my 22nd b’day, so that meant a lot of things…a day to feel special, when all around you seems to be “all about you”, a day made for you,with quite a no. of SMSes ,calls and…if you are a scrappofreak then you get about 20+ scraps on that single day. So cheers, I had a fantastic b’day. Well the point is not my b’day ,the point is that I completed my 22 years on this earth. No, not like this I completed 22 x365x24 hrs on this earth. Perhaps not, as for those 20 odd years I was made live a life I didn’t know, I just lived it, as in I was made eaten, made seen, made go,that’s why made live. So after 20+ I stopprd living ….and I started exploring, exploring myself and the world around me…..and still I am the same old explorer ,no doubt enjoying it. During this exploration last week I came across an 18 gb epic the largest in the world in electronic style , it was called the Mahabharat, quite rightly it is a MAHA bharat.

I don’t know the etymological origins of the word ‘epic’ but no doubt this word means something solid something sturdy, like that rock of Gibralter,stoically digesting those waves. Whatever it means, Mahabharat quitely fittingly provides all the requisites of the epic. But in our indian culture we , quite often dichomotize things, thus making them perfect , sometimes larger than life, thus forgetting the sourness which makes sweetness the greatness it is. We call Mahabharat from our mouth and we recall in our hearts the HEROIC Pandavas and the VILLANOUS Kauravas. This thinking alone is the marring of the great theory dealt by Vyas.
Life , more importantly ,living life is all about opportunities, getting them, grabbing them, stealing them, but cashing them. It doesent matter whether you are hero or a villain in that process , cashing that opportunity makes you a hero in all senses. Everybody amongst us is a villain, everybody amongst us is a hero , so if you are a hybrid, then you are a human. For me Mahabharat is based on the above principle.
If you were to ask me , nobody was a hero , nor anybody was a villain. They all were humans(though exagerrated). They all waited for opportunities to come ,and cashed on them. Whether it was Arjuna, mumb when Eklavya got his thumb out of place, whether it was Duryodhana in that game of dice. If Yudhisthira was such a personification of law, then why did he kept Draupadi at stake, knowing the atrocities of the game, and why Draupadi mocked at Duryodhana who was elder to her, if she was such an innocent girl, not to miss Duryodhana’s opportunism in various places of the story. So they all enter into a dead lock state , where none can move without each other, they all in a way sinned thus providing the way for more and more sinner stories and thus …..a bloodbath.

Now the war, which often recites the heroics of Pandavas, where they won with a modest army against a hurricane of Kauravas. Lets look into this whole heroism from a different angle. Arjuna didn’t want to fight , who persuaded him, Krishna, so war was started in an a way through Krishna who was one of the closest of Pandavas. Why?? Perhaps because he saw the opportunities in that war for them. This war,which can be regarded as the focal point of all the trajectories giving this story a parabolic stint, is one of its kind, like a test match, with scores of rules, incidentally,all of them broken at one point or the other, some times by the Kauravas, the other by the pandavs(who what heroically!!!!). Abhimanyu was murdered mercilesly, ruthlessly by the Kauravas, creating a mockery of injustice at the battlegrounds. And then, started an uproar of Pandavas, a cavalcade of whatever they could do, to oust those enemies. One can point out here that Abhimanyu’s death which is regarded as a mountain of tragedy is an opportunity for Pandavas to get their foes through the same old tricks. And look at stalwarts who were the preys, Karna, Dronacharya, the old warrior Bhishma Pitamah. So wasn’t the deal doen fair ‘n’ square here? What to say more when the signature killing of the battle was done (Duryodhana) by the lavish undoing of rules.

So who’s at fault, Pandavas , Kauravas, I guess none of them, they all did just what the ticking clock ordered. We often confuse the story with God, divinity, its never like that, it is(Mahabharat) a story about human biengs, their natural instincts, which compell them to go for success at any cost at any time. Nobody is God in it , even Lord Krishna is a human bieng with quite visible traits of human emotions(when he pulls on his Sudarshan Chakra against Bhishma, bieng animated by the latter’s skill). If Kauravas see the opportunity in the dice game, then Pandavas apply every tactics in the war. If the sari pulling of Draupadi was inhumane then the formers’s pledge of getting the blood of Dushasan is equally insane.
It’s a story that happened once, happened more, and still happens, amongst us many times. And unknowingly we many times create that same epic , many , many times.

AN ESSAY RE-WRITTEN......

2009-03-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

“Bachpan kay din bhula naa dena”, this is one of those songs that is true both philosophically and psychologically(as for some philosophy is a science of fools and escapists. We play,wander,roll around,with the least care given to its consequences. But ,but….that childhood of our’s has some follies,has some phobias, which make us cry, which let us awake in the midst of a dreamy night, and yes, they are serious. One such fear was essay writing. Those long, ever so solid ,structures of prose, to me , they were like some ghost ready to gulp me in one go. But like all those poor chaps ,me too passed those days.

One of those ghost riders that I got in the examinations were “WHAT I WISH TO BECOME IF BORN AGAIN?”. The mere sight of the length of the essay perplexed me. I was close to getting loose motions.(It’s another matter ,though that I used to take some pills before exams).I forgot all those verbs, adverbs, passages, be it seen or unseen. The whole situation was prooving to be an anathema of sorts. So after grave research, I came to the conclusion of becoming SHAHRUKH KHAN ,if born again( as I was in awe of those flowing hair of DDLJ,and of course that KKKKK KIRAN…muah).
But now days have passed since then,much water has flown (and got polluted) in rivers of India. But still I think sometimes , that Shah Rukh Khan was a messy choice. Ok fine ,he has given a score more hits since then, is king, baadshah whatever but stilll ..c’mon man. All the more I still dream of becoming something, something kool, something like a razzmataazz if born again. So here is an essay of class 3rd revisited………………….
“they say you get this body, once in every 84 lac count. But they only say that we have seven back to back births. I don’t know if they are fools or what but yes what’s the harm in getting a rebirth. So what would I become, or tend to become,and after some stuoid research I come to the conclusion that I would like to become AHEMM…. A DOG….a barking ,sniffing,bone licking dog. I hear you cry, “what for why for, whom for”. I guess for me bieng alive what I need right now are reasons. Quite clear, crystalled reasons.
So here they are….one thing I lacked in my 22 year old career as a guy is atheleticism, 100 mtrs, 200 mtrs. are a dream for me which I win in my dreams only,and dogs with their unobscure sprint can get me out of that slumber win. Most importantly there is no discipline, anything( I mean it) can be done anytime, no need to worry, about recessions, year backs, love affairs, do it when you feel like doing it. Thirdly for me bieng any success as a man, I have to be a hard worker , you know one who burns that midnight oil, I know its utter shit, bur sometimes you have to smell that buddy. But bieng a dog,no shitty business, just get born in a good breed and somebody like Paris Hilton will take you in her arms , and thereafter get your nails trimmed, expenditure equivalent to the cost of my hostel fees.

There are some other reasons I love about dog but for a dog, they are the reasons why it dies dog’s death. Bieng a dog at least I would be able to serve those who once served me with never ending affection. Bieng a man we never realise the importance of parants, our well wishers, bieng a dog at least I’ll get rid of bieng selfish. Bieng a dog I’ll wait for someone I loved ,someone I cared about, perhaps I may die too, but surely what a death it would be. At least I will be getting rid of that “moving on in life”. Homo sapiens are said to be making the best use of the brains, in a way killing emotions. Emotions, which doesen’t meke you live life , but enjoy life, savour this gift of God. That’s why bieng a dog , I, if nothing, want to enjoy life.
So that’s my ambition , my mission , if born again….BOW VOW till then."

AN ALTERNATIVE.....

2009-03-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

India , as we all know from our naive years, is a land of festivals. There are thousands of them some joyous, some pious, for each scrap of human emotion we’ve got a festival of it’s own. One great multicultural,multilingual,but uni dimensional festival we started celebrating since ’52, we gave it a more technical name,which so on and so forth was more apt…”THE GENERAL ELECTIONS”. We tend to celebrate it every 5 years, if something goes wrong in between ,we celebrate it again with the hope that everything goes right again.(remember…..its just Hope….)
So for this term’s elections, in order to make it memorable one great pol party leader announced….that we will (I don’t know if ‘must’ was included here) build the temple. You see, elections are those swords which redesign those lines in our hand, consequently improvising our future. And temples, according to me, is a place,where you meet the infinite, a force with undefined acceleration, which doesen’t take you towards your dharma, but guides you towards your karma. So temple,elections, and our future our quite relative terms, are’nt they?
We all know about that dreaded history of that temple(once a mosque), or the mosque(once a temple). Keeping them aside I often wonder, purely as a to be engineer, that “is building a temple on that dreaded site the only alternative. I mean if one general election’s temple manifesto, is defining our future, then how can that temple end the recession we are facing. Can that God’ abode clean the Ganga at Kanpur. These days when I pass my days studying subjects of pure logic, I find the aims of that temple a bit illogical, so to speak aimless.
So are there any alternatives? What if, we built a school in that place, school which tells you about your country about you duties , responsibilities, about the comforts we have taken and the penance we have to take? What if, we built a hospital there , treating those infants which quite well be the apostles of our development, those war heroes that stand on that snow just to make our lives a degree warmer? And what if, we built a residence for those slum dwellers who submit their days and nights for the people who have a lot more bucks, in the end finding nothing for them, absolutely nothing.
Well , I am not giving any conclusions, I don’t believe in them,as dynamism is the charm of the universe. I am just placing it in front of you. So won’t these aforesaid buildings take us towards the goal we always wanted to achieve, towards that karma we always wanted to be guided to?. Won’t we in a way built a temple of our own…our own India. I gues we will.

DATE WITH DIVINITY

2009-03-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

I had once gone to Kanpur for some ICAR examinations,so on my way , well ,I don’t remember the place,I saw her. She was not that majestic ,as people called her,mystique though she was. And that mysticism was something which enthralled me towards it. But…..nothing crazy about her..all the more,I didn’t get selected. Next year same place, same journey, same mysticism,and phew…same result….not selected.
That image was not a containable image and in due course of time seeing some somnasoporific beauties I clearly forgot about it. A bit darkish, not quite slim, and most of all quiet, not silent ,but quiet because you see silence is quietness with added beauty and mascara. It was as if that lady is quiet after seeing some hundred, what hundred , a thousand years of penance, torture, and what I wanted was a silence,beholding her, taking her proudly above the seventh heaven .
This time ,barely a couple of days back I saw her again ,(this time in Haridwar and Rishikesh). Or you can say, I saw her for the first time because formerly it was my devilish incarnation that saw it, as the beauty was majestic, divine,bovine, reminiscence of the greatest bliss God has ever blessed earth with. She was a figure models envied, that stretch of her from the groin to her stomach, was indispensably seductive. There I found that silence, that flowing silence, those breath that she was taking ,eventually converting the whole atmosphere breathtaking. That walk of her,which carried a caress, a push that pushed the world to dance to the tune of her rhythmic gate. I loved her. She was /is my latest crush, her name is GANGA…sometimes she likes being called the GANGES.
I did’t know her profession ,didn’t know who her parents were , what I knew was that she’s got her home somewhere in the heart of Himalayas from where she had stolen all the greatness of the never ending snow. So what…. I loved her, so,I got to know her, I didn’t call her, nor mailed her, but met her, talked to her(in Haridwar). She was a simple girl, but had got moods , sometimes she was jovial, luckily with me she was. Sometimes she was aggressive, falling from the mountains as if announcing the Doom’s Day. Sometimes she was just great, how could I explain her greatness , when we the Upites are bye-products of her greatness.
If you have not slept throughout this write up, I told you that back in Kanpur , it was the mysticism that enthralled me. Well now it was a question mark(exclamation too). It was, like, what is in her despite my love for her I want to close my eyes before her. If I wanted to kiss her, some force intervened and I started worshipping her,with that much joy. Some times I thought she was mine, sometimes she was of the whole world. That exclaimed me, as well as, irritated me. And I asked her,what’s so special and what so different about you that my simple love is turning out to be a sacred worship. She smiled and turned away.
Next day our last day of our trip(this all happened on the trip to Haridwar/rishikesh), we went for river rafting. There in the middle we all jumped in the water,but I was taken aback ,by a flow , a gush of water,no she was Ganga, but I saw water all around. I thought I am drowning, I am dead , but in between my commotion came the most comfortable thing of my life. It was the voice of her,but she was no where I cried within myself,” where are you, where are you???”. A voice came,”I am here , there, everywhere, in that rock ahead, in this chilling water, in your raft for the adventure, in this drowning for death. You wonder that why you worship me,perhaps because you imagined me as a girl, you got that feeling that each one of you gets. The problem is I am not a girl, not a guy either, I am force serving this country for years, that’s why I am nothing but mystic in Kanpur, because there I lose it all except for my spirit to serve. So love me kid, man or darling whatever you are but do remember for me, service is the greatest love and vice versa which eventually is love.”
Sooner I got out of the raft , stood near Ram Jhula, closed my eyes and joined my hands , this time with utter satisfaction.

MOVIES …MY VIEWS…

2009-03-01T10:43:00.001-08:00

I missed the Oscars this time. If I go in the right path via my medulla to my sub-conscious mind ,I used to watch it with an awe, awe of don’t know what , but , yes there was something fancier in the Oscars than the BAFTA and the Globes, for sure. I watched Denzel Washington grabbing it, even watched it slipping from the hands of Amir Khan, saw Russell Crowe admiring it and even saw Mel Gibson accepting it with a Brave Heart.
This time as I have stated before, didn’t see it but such was the range of hearing the vibrations, the fascinations of the event that it went past all the benevolence of my vision. Slumdog … was in it, though a British film but as the critics say its body heart and the brains are made in India. We won it, won it big time now and, also in a big way, but somewhere the foreign element remains. They say that the fair skin that slender rim, of Danny Boyle, and hopefully the posh brain of his did the trick. No points still are given to Indian style, Indian songs , Indian actors and therefore amidst all the jubilation a simmer comes that…”had this not been a foreign film then ..tch..tch…tch.
The point is that after so many ‘ladies in gold’ we still , I mean the Indian films still find themselves suspended in a rusted iron chamber. Movies here come and go, perhaps in largest nos but still we lack, lack many things , let’s list these so called accusations in a point form……

ACCUSATION 1 - We lack the ever so important thing, the concept, the logic, which you know is the backbone of a motion film.
MY VIEW – I guess for a film we need not have a strong concept, it’s the feel, the emotions that matter, eventually which turn out to be the divine logic. And films here or anywhere are not made for a particular engineer or a doctor ,to churn out all the logics, its made to give a person a new world of 2.5 hrs. which we surely do provide.

ACCUSATION 2 - The songs, useless dabble of 3 minutes, should cut them off.
MY VIEW – If they are so , so useless then why have you kept it in the Oscars. And yes, songs are not dabble, they are like rivers that take past the boats of our feeling in the most peaceful way , to an island, which we fondly call heaven. They are not 3-4 MBs of space , but a soulful 4 minutes which fills the heart with unnerving ecstacy , thus defining humanity, they are pure, there are pious and we, the followers of a 3000 old great culture, are proud that they are the part of our films.JAI HO…

ACCUSATION 3 – We are too long….2.5 to 3 hrs. are too much.
MY VIEW – For us , films are not a lesson , they aren’t a chapter either,they are like a story, a story which is created for a person, not just to see it but to visit it, get inside it and live that story. We don’t make film of 3 hrs , what we do is that we make a world of its own which plays in you, lays in you, lives in you for 3 hrs. 3 hours, this way is a very short time.

ACCUSATION 4 - We are not committed (esp. in intimate scenes). We don’t have guts to move further.
MY VIEW – Yes you are right , we don’t have guts, guts to move against our values, our tradition. You know where we fall short, eventually catching the soul of the film, its just that we bring film for the masses, not for stringently divided classes. And as far as intimacy ,the euphemism for sex, is concerned, sex is too great, too divine, too logical a thing to be shown in a film. And as far as boldness is concerned movies like Page-3, Corporate are enough bold , enough committed to even teach us a thing or too.

ACCUSATION 5 -We lack stories………..
MY VIEW – To this lot of people I want to say that, first watch RDB, watch the ever so serene Saransh, get a closer look at Devdas, and then take home the idea of what a story is all about, what a script is all about. Of course there have been copies, I would be lying if I deny it, but I will be lying all the more if I deny the fact that the stories of ours are like a guitar ,cords of which give goose bumps to the westerners through the Oscars taken by Gandhi and Slumdog.

So like these , there are many other accusation, but let’s stick to them. These aren’t that much of our problems, the problems are the people who make them and sadly they are WE. Yes some of the bigger hypocrites amongst us. Bigger because someway or the other we all are hypocrites, never admiring our own , but yes envying the other one’s , all the more if its TRANS ATLANTIC. The need of the hour is not to answer those accusations , but to shed that cruelity in us and believe in the BPL’s logo ,’coz we certainly are the BEST.

KNOTTY affair

2009-02-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

Believe me I am damn serious when I say that I seriously wanted to write something serious this time. Something enervating, something that just pulls the real you from you and makes you the real…you know ..YOU. That’s why , this time I took time , and tried to write the real stuff. I would have written had that marriage not been attended by me. The marriage that fell on the lap of this earth on the ides of feb,gallows which seemed like aisle of the ecstacy. That marriage, what a marriage………
Anybody who has been a hosteller may forget everything about it but…..but the mess. That long hall with that so long table, with food that is beyond description, ‘coz you got to have to see the food to describe it. And the food in one word….is HIDEOUS. And living in such a world when somebody gets you an invitation of a marriage ….it’s like “PARTY TIME ..FOLKS”. Something like that happened to us, when Ronny brought to us the invitation of the a marriage of his distant relative. Immediately, the day was seen,The mess food was seen and the plan was sealed. Finally there were 5 of us who went out of the college gates like those “Mohabbatein” guys, not to love but to eat, eat till the tummy twitters.
A truck, a tempo and a 2 km walk was all needed to get to that marriage place. During our journey we were all dreamers, who dreamt of food, dreamt of good food, dreamt of great food, of … well, only food. So , we went there , we saw the place, and we just went on seeing. It was awesome, it had savaged our fantasies of food, of marriage as the grandeur was much ,much more than that. Ronny was a bit conscious , so he said as we were 5 in total,”2 first and then 3 after that.” The plans were followed and thus we entered.
As a mature guy I was attending a marriage for the first time. Normally it had been with parents, relatives and all meeting and asking ,”aapka ladkaa kya kar raha hai”, it was about half eaten plates, and yes, about Rs 101, Rs201, Rs 501,etc etc. This time it was different. Seriously ,no caustic affair this time. It was surreal.it was divine, more than that it was pure. It was like a pure mountain getting the river of our culture to flow through it. I was thinking about all this with French fries in one hand , cold drink on the other and a fab. remix of a song of Raaz 2 in the backdrop.
The DJ was absolutely rocking. Cool,no,they were kool remixes of some foot tapping songs. Those taps made us journey through the future and we started contemplating the plans of each other’s (5 of us) marriage. We were about to give birth to children when one “not so good” number broke loose our sojourn. For the first time I started believing in the magic of the sari. “What a wear maan”, was all my inner voice was echoing as that bride with scores of perfume poured over her passed by my side. No matter what was happening our Mission Food Court was on, every thing was , as a future software engineer was tested and then implemented.
Everything was just happening there. Don’t ask why, don’t ask when but it was happening. There was a sort of order in that grave disorder. There was tension in the faces which implicitly produced a sort of calmness. There was heavy make up somewhere but from somewhere inside that the simplicity was coming out somehow. Everything was happening in a complex unison as a dynamic change was nearby. It was a celebration ,to go one step furthur, step that was changing the phase changing the life,changing it all.
Thoughts , like this were coming and going, new crushes were made, destroyed on getting to know that they were married, songs went on and off, food though kept coming in. handing over that crisp 100 rupee note , and with a chilled bite of ice cream, we decided to move out and wait for 5-6 years(or more) to witness this eternal change.

matter of an answer

2009-02-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

That was perhaps the first time when I didn’t get a convincing answer of what this love, marriage, love marriage is all about. Bro’s wedding was the first time when I wanted to enquire about this thing which if put in poetic synchronization…would be something like this…

Love….a riddle…that makes you , me , everybody insane;

Love …an animal…that some greats did tame;

These days also,I am the same old stupid who hasn’t understood the meaning of those 2 lines( though I , myself am the composer of them). From that bombastic wedding to these unimaginable hostel nights, I have been, curious about this thing which some call an insect, some call poison, some even call it the reason for life, reason to live, to be more specific.

To tell you the truth, when I got admission to the engineering college, I vowed that I would emerge out to be a technical tank, out of which , bullets of equations, paradoxes, lemmas , will zoom and boom,24x7, but it s proved to be the slight opposite. Today in the third year I have been devoid of a tank, eventually, of those bullets too. What I have transformed into , is…. a plane, gliding through the clouds of relationships, thus increasing, all the more, my thirst and agony of knowing what isLOVE.

Avinaash , I still remember, was cuddled up in the blanket. He was my recently made friend and tp pass through the night I went to his room. His room partner , as soon as I entered, warned me “ Shhhhhhhh…..don’t disturb….talking”, I didn’t disturb him(c’mon I am that much of an obedient ), but yeah, kept on thinking, as to why, he was cuddled up in his bed. “Cheap cell phones….tch tch….”, I thought. Minutes later, the structure of that bed changed, and there emerged Avinaash, shining, fresh, as if, was taking a bath inside the blanket, and most importantly, with a Nokia 6600 in his hand, which instantaneously erased my apprehensions about him. Avinaash I knew was a bit different from the Avinaash I was discovering now , who was staring in the mirror, smiling, laughing in the middle, then came to me , hugged me, and finally spoke…” Great girl..maan”. I now, was, understanding the whole story.

That was the first idea of love to me, which was more of, blankets, and Nokia 6600. As I said , that this was my first one as , now in my sojourn as a “ would be engineer “, I saw many things. I saw those guys……..drifting away from Linkin Park to Roop Kumar Rathod. I saw “ facialled” faces every week, that great Rs 100 note was often observed by me, which was kept in the purse, with a longing that she would come once in the cafeteria and a maggi would be shared. So I started getting an idea of what this love was all about. “ It was fun”, I thought, “Though a bit expensive, (coffee and maggi all the times) , but c’mon”.

So days passed on, I had my idea of love intact, until one day, I heard that one pair(with maggi and coffee) was badly harassed, and abused. I was more surprised , on coming to know that the guy in action was , just days before, quite an ardous follower of this love. Now my definition began to dwindle a little. “How can the most beautiful thing in the world be harassed like that, this is not not done”. So, my confusion prevailed, until I found one of the most decent pairs in our campus. They were looking quite cajoled in themselves, and as I was staring them one voice came from behind,” abe in par comment mat karanaa , inkaa serious hai”. Instantaneously I got the new avatar of love. Simplicity with devotion, decency, and beauty that became love for me and that pair became God for me, until……Two weeks later that girl used to roam around aimlessly….by some searching I found out that that guy took him to a hotel room and……everything became serious. So another “Love Definition” which survived 2 weeks , finally died.

I was all confused now, from mobile phones, to cafeterias, to, hotel rooms, even chat rooms, every thing was tried and tested, and failed. So I developed my own theory…..that…ok I am nervous..but here it goes….love is a mixture…a homogeneous mixture , I guess not of souls, nor of bodies , but of thoughts. What you think, is what you do what you do ,is what you reflect, and that’s what makes a person fall for you. It’s that mental keenness towards each other that makes a relationship go ahead , boundlessly, thus letting love rise high.

But still I am confused, let’s see what happens when this happens to me….till then best of luck…to you and to me.

AS A MATTER OF FACT……

2009-01-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

It was the first time that a Prime Minister didn’t attend the Republic Day Parade. Never mind , our Defense Minister, the man responsible for showing the powerful muscles we have developed to bust our neighbors out attended it, more likely he deserved it. And the parade went off well, though shortened to 90 minutes, the parade was filled with all the bravery, the gallantry, the valour, it was like a tabloid that was used to convey , that here we are facing the old world, creating the new world , and as Nandan Nilkeni said,”The playing fields are leveled” .
So, India, technically, became 59 years old, can say it like this that it became 59 years of self dependent. We got so much on this day, and we can’t forget and neglect the “ides of Aug.”, when we licked , tasted and enjoyed the freedom for the first time. We owe a lot to these days, though quite truthfully speaking they are not celebrated but, ……. . And my pen stops, yes , they are not celebrated…..oops….sorry not celebrated ….so what do we do, we hoist the flag , sing the national anthem, abuse the british, eat a “laddoo”, then again abuse one Briton, watch a movie thereafter, and a puff of abuse again reiterates. At the end of it all, a voice comes , “Had British not come here…”.
After throwing this voice in the mid air , one turns on the heater and goes to sleep, the voice , though, lingers down in the ground, craving for an answer. Last night, I saw the dying voice under my bed, I quickly arranged some medics for it, and then when it laid in the bed, I went to search for the most important medicine of all “ it’s answer”. And I was amused , exasperated, not because I could not find the answer, but because I had found one. It was as under….
Had they not come , India would…, oh sorry, there would have been no India then, small petty, states glued to each other. What would have Mahatama Gandhi done then. Ooh …shit, why Mahatama Gandhi would have come. My thoughts were going on a roller coster of a ride. No 1857, no struggle, no Mangal Pandey, nothing , every thing would have been a vacuum. Our NCERT based History books would have been half as thick.
Then I turned my attention towards the partition, ok so now , had British not come, we (India and Pakistan, would have been one. So no India Pakistan matches, no 1971 war, no Kargil, no “ Border”…I was now in the gallows of my thoughts. We would have been neighbours of Afghanistan, thus tormented by Al Quaida (and US) all the more. Jia-ul Haq and Parvez Musharraf would have been our patriots.
The language , ummmm…English was out of the question, so what, Hindi, for that half of India had to be cut, urdu, tamil, …. It was hard for me to assess that ,especially, when India was the best English speaking county of the world. As India then, would have been about a thousand of states, so, there would have been no IAS, no PCS, thus, no dreams. My adventurous journey was now tainted by fear.
The architectural paradise of India , would have fallen short of a few bricks, bricks of the likes of …Rashtrapati Bhawan, Victoria Terminus, and as I was thinking about the other names , I thought the list would be too long. There would have been no Mall roads, no Shimla, no Nainital.
In that January cold , a tiny drop of sweat went out for a walk on my forehead which helped to divert my attention towards that ailing friend (that voice) of mine. It was smiling now. Perhaps it had got the proper treatment it needed. Me too, gave him the most stupid of my smiles, laid down in the bed , this time not abusing, but amused , by the fact that ..” Had they not come……”.

CHATter CHATter AS WE FLOW

2009-01-22T07:12:00.000-08:00

The answer sheet landed as smoothly as the flight 1549 did on the Hudson. And then….with all the agony that I guess Antony would also have fell short of ,(after Ceaser’s death of course) , our algorithms’ teacher told that lonely student…….,” Who , in the bluest of all hell do you think I am, I teach you the big ‘a’ ,don’t try to show me this scorn lang. otherwise I ‘ll whip you’re ‘a’ ….understand”. The lecture got over and a flock of “WE , THE ENGINEERS” got bizzark to see that acclaimed answer sheet. The answer sheet went as follows:-
“NP Completeness is a f9 teknik. T study is still goin on. But it’s just gr8. :). V’re gonna c tat v will not b able to do ny further if v don’t follow t heirarky. :( . Bii….c ya….tc…..gn…..sd…..”. so we were laughing , rolling on the wooden chairs of the lecture theatre…with a feeling of jubilation as we had understood the situation …GTalk had done the trick again.
We , in our hostel are deprived of some good things, in fact great things …..eg. cell phones …television…and many more so we developed a passion of exercising our vocal cords. We used to chat in our rooms for long hours. About mom , dad, girl friend…and what not. Chatting was an ultimate friend, a philosopher in disguise…and a guide to follow. So last year the management found out the tiresome hectic schedule of our friend and gave him days off. And we got a new present….Wireless Fidelity…oops sorry …WI FI.
During the first few days of that Wi FI, our H.O.D. met all of us and told ,” Make google your best friend “. Who knew, I would repeat it again, WHO KNEW that the assistant of that google ..GTALK will be our life , our soul…to an extent that as I write this thing out …a chill surmounts my spine.
My laptop was a few days old when I saw a horde of people, requesting for my ID…AND YES ,only gmail ids were allowed. I , to be very frank, was a bit amused, firstly because I didn’t understand what they meant and secondly , I was a Yahoo man throughout. I don’t know I had an affinity for yahoo, my first ID was on it , I had learnt Emailing through it….Gmail …..yucks…..it sucks. To satisfy my amusement I went to the rooms of my friends.
Well, what to say , they were all glued to that TFT…as if that white and blue backdrop of gtalk was some kind of a midas’ touch. The fingers were running on the laptop as if some kind of 100 meters sprint for the fingers were organized. I was …..forget what I was doing….all of them were talking wireless. The vocal cords exercised only when some fairer sex came online…” hey man..she has come…go get her…only for 5 minutes”. One faint sound of running footsteps would then come from one end.
“What a heck of a thing …a big hell to GTalk…I am not of this sort.” Two days later idofvarun@gmail.com was ready to shower the bullets of the words, that too , WIRELESSLY. So now started our grand journey that started from the tips of my fingers kissing my Compaq lappy…. to the eyes of the he or she whom I was in acquaintance with. Those were the days man….no football….no assignment…nothing…she is typing….i am typing….we all were typing.
It was 2 -3 months now with that wi-fi. Chatting was now in our blood. One lappy….one off white window in it…and a green light flashing was all one needed for life. Life became all the more beautiful when a girl came…peeping through that window carrying that same old green light. One night I was strolling in my lobby ..one faint voice came from behind….”hey dude I told her what I felt for her…so from tomorrow…5-6 ..Coffee”. I asked in amazement, “Man , how can you, c’mon you,ve been down with loose motions for last 3 days…how can you just …”. As I was asking him , my eyes caught hold of his fingers which he was moving artistically in the air …and I got it – Gtalk was the trick. We used to nickname guys…that was funny,now a new trend was started , guys and girls were referred to by their ID. Those who had found their love through chatting used to blush while hearing their e-name.
Everybody was enjoying ..sorry njoyin life. Life had become narrow, but we enjoyed, lovers used to sit for hours alone, with the green light in search of their counterpart light from the other side. Some other place, one green light used to deal with the other one and every dialogue was the result of 100 advisors who were hidden. The guy with that answer sheet was quite happy last night saying that he has increased his typing speed through GTalk.
I guess this chatting thing did have an impact on us. It’ll be wrong (esp for introverts like me) to say that it is just a waste of time. Although people boast of the length of the chat they do and how fast they do the chatting ….stilll at least at some places it proved miraculous. Some found friends , some found relationships,some discovered relationships, the others rediscovered relationships(some even dumped it!!!!). Considering my experiences and of the others I guess if cyber world has developed any thing emotional….it’ll be this chat machine. Thanx buddy…tc.

When it was the first time to Disco…..

2009-01-17T22:55:00.000-08:00

(Words start things , they are the one that ends it…so women like those words are referred by A ,B ,Z…)
That teady beer was costly…..I have to say..But neverthless,I liked buying affluent gifts especially when you are invited by a girl…esp when it’s the first time a girl has invited you. She was quite courteous when she said, “Tommorow I’d like you to drop at my place….it’s a small party..a DJ party.”
Those words were like Wordsworth’s nature tour, which I was witnessing in that Darjeeling toy train, but,.those last three words were like …like an old LaPlace equation, I tended to solve in the choked steam engine.
But , I the great one, had to solve that equation , I had to dance, so I at 5 on that day of judgement , with 6 of my friends ,in a white short shirt and 1 of my neckpiece was all set to move a foot in Z’s birthday.
I call her Z…..as Z’s the the word after which explaination,narration everything ends there is just a picture, an undefined ,faint, unexplainable pic…..so was she.
So me , my 6 friends , teddy bear and Jovan Musk on my sleeves, reached her place at about 6.
Now ,that teddy thing was dealt upon, during that course whatever was done with that teddy by her…I swear ,for the first time in my life wanted to be…guess what….a teddy!!!. Such was my envy with that teddy that I forgot that my vow to be footloose was to be tested.
So I came in, saw it all, and I ……..went out. I was startled , those dazzling lights, that shiny floor and those girls….those girls who were there in salwaar kameez in college, dancing to the tunes of BJTs and OPAMPs were there wearing clothes….moving….umm…..startled.
Slowly like that sand dune, I collected all my strength, I dragged myself back there , dragged , because I was walking as if I had gumboots frozen in ice , forget about being footloose in the first place.
I saw those girls and thought …..no matter... what I thought ......in the end came the voice ,” God is great!!!!!”. The song changed....... the moves changed before that. Hey there was A ….a sweet girl …well….she was jumping, don’t know why ..But she was jumping
My eyes became my enemy. They were all dancing. they were doing something I couldn’t do. Every move of theirs was like a demon eating me making me all the more weaker.
“Why do they keep DJ parties??”. I was about to answer this self imposed question when B met my eyes. She was looking hot …..hot enough for that ice on my feet to melt. Those black hair stuck to that ever so glossy sweat around her lips was enough for me to cover the distance from my chair to the dance floor.
So I was there, in the middle of it all. So many processes started happening inside me that I got hung for sometime and my mouth could only move and deliver , “Ooh Shit!!!”. I was looking all around where to go. B’s hot face with sweat transformed into a cold one with blood all over her eyes. Everybody dancing was 1 step away from kiling me and those who asked me to dance were already kiling me. I was used to see the crowd of the debates, that mob was making me mad. So I started running, don’t know…just ran. During the second sprint a distant voice came, “ Look , he has started a train, let’s join him” and suddenly I became the messiah. I was leading a dance group. I wondered whether running is a dance ,but as long as I was applauded, I didn’t care. I ran 20 rounds all the others followed me.
Now I got the confidence . I started shaking my head; my legs were moving swiftly as Maradona’s. I was moving such ….that it was hard to recognize me in one go. But I didn’t care nor did any body because I was submerged in that. All through my razzmatazz , my moving body, the DJ lights the floor, the floor,A,B….were all teaching me that DO WHATEVER YOU WANT, DO JUSTICE TO YOURSELF, DANCE TO TO THE TUNES OF YOUR LIFE AND THE WORLD WILL FOLLOW YOU…..so now it was the time for disco.

2009-01-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS ( REALLY!!)

"HELL DOWN UNDER!!!...yess Hell down under, now this will be on Orkut “ , Nits was euphoric about it, it was not a place to be euphoric as we were lying down in my bed , chained with each other , through our arms and legs (we’re not gay.....it’s just the ”cold” we can’t resist )
Orkut , the so called superset of all the community sites has always been.....umm.....an emotional outburst.......well....you see like that borosil test tube (Gosh!!! they were expensive,orkut’s free ) which solemnly, subtly executes the reaction of our emotions .....emotions,our life processes bieng the reactants, those ultimate scraps being the catalyst , and finding the 100+ odd friends as the need for the reaction, the gaseous exothermic products are formed as the dashing punch lines, about me’s......
So from the wires of the main server of the orkut....to room mo. 38,my bed ,Nits’ head....”Hell Down Under” was being celebrated by relentless clattering of fingers , by that obscure sound from the mouth, as if that slimy water of mouth was having a boxing match with the inner furnishing of the “not so white teeth “ .
Now, if you don’t mind .....let me shift your attention to the other side of the bed .....that..was ME, who just 2 minutes before that impeccable creative deluge by Nits ,had got a premonition that the rest of night’s going to be sleepless.
Actually, HELL DOWN UNDER.....was....the.....the fruit....of the tree....of the news ..that....one big MNC Simplesoft had got the placement freezed.
It was 10th Aug 2006 when I started engg as a dream... of a dream which was quite an incredible dream (yes it was not credible , I may say so now ). An year later the blue walls of our placement cell were constructed which came as a rescue of my watching helplessly those red walls of our college's lover’s point. With that rescue also came, let’s say a target of......of getting a job, emerging from those blue walls to end the blues of oneself, of one’s family, to give those 4 years a name , a post, a location. But Satyam’s ordeal with fate is now eating out that credible blue dream of our’s ( mine, nits’ and many more) like anything.
Now I guess that “Hell..............” thing might have attained some weight for you. This line that from the next day was going to be the punch lines of Mr. Nits Gupta’s profile , was the punch lines of our life, our dream for a month. We were able to feel and experience the shrillness of the pitch of each word as it came to our ears...H...E......
Newspaper which, for some was a white thing with a black design,a scoreboard of Man U, or a treat of raunchiness personified was now a devil....a devil with white suite with black bullets up it’s sleeve.(the latest being Satyam).
Birthday bashes are a big thing for our hostels. My friend P G is 22 years old today. What I am thinking and he too, must be , with all those dance moves that he is 22 years OLD (without a job!!!).
But the dance will continue to make our bodies move, the music will continue to make our souls thrive and as I am seeing the b’day cake cut into pieces, I can assess that that last candle which is about to finish is burning brightly as....it has to burn more.....don’t know where .....but..Somewhere.

"SINGHS ARE KING "

2008-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

"Hey Neeraj, can you please get me a ticket.....in black",words of "the dream girl" of our college,Tanya.I was speechless,so to speak,overwhelmed.Neeraj too would have been,had he not been two pegs down.Actually...we(or rather she ) were interacting for the first time.Neeraj in his gregarious tone announced "Its Singh is King , not your streaked hair we've come to watch,that way ma'am",and there was that rickshaw walla standing.
So on that emphatic(at least for me) note we started our sojourn in Singh is King.It started, and we laughed....Neeraj "now 5 pegs down" Sharma hooted.....interval, we again enjoyed ..till the climax, that laugh of mine took shape of a kind of thought. Thought , which ,more often than not, don't come to me.Thought which hooted that ,is this the sardar who is the king ,the zenith of the country's development?. The tribe that derived its identity from the Aryan legions,the punjabies, the sikhs, has Happy Singh a.k.a. Akshay Kumar justified it?. Perhaps,no. films ,after trains the most lively lifeline of our cultural harmony , in general has gifted us the sketch of a sardar who is ....a comedian... agonizes funnily at 12 noon. but while appreciating that sketch , we forget the photograph of Bhagat Singh, the scion of indian aggression come intellect, Milkha Singh,the ,man who epitomizes athletics in India.Manmohan Singh who many a times harboured for India's economic demise.We always say they are the kings , but we fall short to mean there "BARON" standard.
Those bearded,most handsome giants are probably,the innovators of India. The reason is simple enough..right from the Mughal dissection, to the cultural divorce of '47 , to the havoc of '84 , they've seen it all,done it all, and most importantly, came out of it all.That's why a sardar who had a statue shop in the aisles of Chandani Chowk has a complex at Cannought Circus.A surdar who owned a fish counter owns a regallious continental bazaar.So where does the problem comes, why arn't we able to recognize their efforts?. The problem ,moreT than logical, I guess, is social.The social identity of a Sikh in India is a bit mismatched. Our films, our media has taken them, slightly, in a wrong way.We remember their comic nuances( which of course is their "life life king size"ness) but we tend to forget their perseverance, their razor sharp mind which on the cricket field also turns the ball the other way.
Even if we forget their intelligence quotient, let me remind you of their cultural counterpart,impeccable , they , to be frank , know how to live a life , a life which although on their terms is a dedicated one.It was perhaps this impeccable combination which saved Indian women from the Mughal tyranny, guarded India's pride when it was almost raped by the Pakistanis in'47 and to add to facts, became the only region in the whole wide world to wipe of terrorism completely from itself. Right from going to the gallows to trying a hand at bhangra, they are always exubherent,always daring.They are not just the surds in whose tone we always find mindless comedy but they are those,in whose minds we find a vision , a mission. So now ,the film was over .My thought ,though slightly large,was over.Neeraj was vomiting in the toilet and Snoopdog's rap was being shown, and I went out of the exit door, dancing to the tune of snoopdog humming ,"King is singh,King is singh ....har koi jaane........".

VARUN PANT (idofvarun @ gmail.com)