Time

The God of men picks up a black pebble, flat on its faces.
The still lake awaits.
He swings his arm, lets the pebble go.
The black pebble: living, breathing, purposeful;
It dances off the surface.
The still lake ripples, the rippled lake changes.
God watches amused; names the pebble 'Time'.

Storm

The air smells of golden strands on mango trees;
the sun shines on a magnificent, bright hour.
The bird's ears whisper from the breeze.
She watches the horizon, feels its power.
She sings in happiness – the orphaned kind,
Just then a lightness has fallen on her feathers, she finds.
She looks again, the disguising day still surrounds her with smiles,
yet she knows: a storm lurks within gentle miles!

The Pathology of Rebellion

Now a days, a new disease has hit the markets – rebellion. Walk into a classroom and you will see all testosterone filled bodies sporting a half-trimmed beard whose proper name is yet to be invented;  it is not even days from a rock star movie that sales of colored, designer dhotis in a metro city starts putting potatoes and tomatoes to shame. And when every other sense organ of the body is enjoying the bliss of Rebellion, why would the tongue stay behind – like waist lines of a talent-less actress, common phrases start shrinking to a point where their mere mention becomes an exercise of facial muscles. Yet for some reason secret to a rustic like me, it is widely claimed in the Rebel world that that new language sounds pleasing (Read – ‘cool’)! The time is not far when the proud Rebels of my country would put all other English speaking countries to shame by their innovative invention of new words and squeezed phrases. As you can see, the time has clearly come for a shift in history and leaving all other Indian demarcations (religion, gender, language, caste, locality, choice of bike and car…) behind, we, the youngest nation of the world are headed towards joining people together – soon, one would only be a Rebel or not. Nothing else will count! What a marvelous thing for national integrity!

                Now before the Rebel group starts working on the sacred ritual of my assassination, please let me assert that for reasons lingering in dark corners of my heart, I am a part of you – unaccepted, unwanted, unyielding, and everything else that makes up our disease. Though as far as dressing and appearance are concerned, my crimes are only limited to repeated defying of my school’s dress code; not sure if the general absence of a dressing-sense counts as crime in both worlds, but who gives a damn!

Other symptoms of my disease: a ravaging, iconoclastic madness, a  carelessness, fearless, and a perpetual wondering if a place exists where things make more sense. So, you see, I am one of you. However, I am different! Why wonder? – even bacteria mutate. Whereas your bacterium tells you to be free of everything and everybody else, mine tells me to be bound to myself. My symptoms range from being foolish to the extent of doing something for somebody else even if that act threatens my very existence (Mr. Darwin, please forgive my bacteria here!). Needless to say that in such transactions, there are no returns! The acute inability to follow someone popular is common in my kind (the tendency of reading a book that someone recommends doesn’t count here). Often, and in stark contradiction to my mainstream Rebel brothers, my kind follows the rules – but only if there is a greater good involved, and only if someone might get hurt in doing otherwise. Perhaps I am the primitive kind, who, in a burning desire to appear different, doesn’t end up following a mirage before finally becoming a second kind of what I disdained in the first place. A kind for whom lines between self and others and not drawn on stone. My kind are people hung in a place where gratitude and time still have a resemblance, and where in our hearts, still remains a corner for all those who might need us at times.

Yet the mind, the stubborn rebellious mind, would walk with a resolve of not hoping for anything in return. If you like my kind, your mutation is not difficult.

The Sensitive Indian

Without a shadow of doubt, mine is a rich country. Not talking of the black-money here─although the figures are endowed enough to give new definitions to the fabled word ‘Honesty’, and rightly lead the youth of my already-glorious country in the best direction possible! So all the brothers and beautiful girls of my country, I am talking about things like culture, heritage, a little extra flock of people here and there, little bits of over stated corruption! There is a multitude of languages and dialects, cuisines ranging from absolute native-delight to stomach wrenching foreign imitations. Daily sops based on the sacred relation of mother-daughter-in-laws are also found in abundance here. No wonder that family values sit on the top of our lists and heads when counting the exclusive and abundant list of virtues on offer within the borders of this vast nation. In addition, no other nation would have such talented and worthy politicians─where else would a local politician understand how painful it would be for his subjects if the name of their city (or, a whole state) was not changed from what has continued from decades, if not centuries; or if a new state was not formed out of a larger state─which by the way, is now the acid-test and a hobby of a true, nationalist Indian politician.
     Apart from all these exclusively abundant virtues, there is one that is largely ignored whenever the world talks of our India. And that is the number of fathers and mothers each one of us has. Let me put it this way─I have a biological father and mother; in addition, I am expected to have another father whose ideal candidate (oh yes, there is a choice) could be the idol in my local temple. The spot of my extra mother─I have been told─has been taken by Mother India. No choices here! However, that is for me. There are many others who themselves live within the boundaries of Mother India, yet have somehow chosen amongst one or the other mothers living around Mother India. No offense to anybody, second mother is purely a personal choice! Feel free!

     Now, one thing to notice is that where there is a multitude of parents, the children are rightfully bound to sensitive. That is our birthright! So what wrong we do when the whole nation opposes a biography where the author dares to mention that our favorite batsman is not his favorite? Criminal! In India, everybody MUST like only one batsman! And we do absolutely no wrong when we burn books of another foreigner who claims that one of our revered politicians (another good candidate for the extra-father position)─whose death is now older than his life─had a penchant for a married woman, some eengliss mem. Kill that writer! Why, just why, would our revered politician ogle another woman? And say, say for one moment, if he ever did, was there any scarcity of women in India? I say cut his hands─he points his fingers on our revered politician, and he doubts the quality (and perhaps, availability) of Indian women!

     Let’s move away from books. Why? Because, a majority of my country is allergic to books! Illiterate is not the right word as many believe! That is all a hidden agenda of foreign powers, I tell you! Let’s talk of sports. Why should players from Mothers neighboring our dear Mother India be allowed to play in prestigious sports tournaments of my country? Try it, and we shall dig up the sports grounds and stop movie releases nationwide of any actor who says otherwise. Try and utter a word against our gods─we would set whole cities on fire. We can tolerate anything against your gods but nothing against our own. Such is the unity we share within the broken communities of our glorified Mother.

     We won’t change: come what may. If you have to live within our Mother India, make sure you live like you’re told to; like everybody else does. Do not try to express yourself or the government would have your phones tapped, have your emails and internet usage monitored; have your blogs filetered meticulously to decide what section of Indian Penal Code can be applied against you. So what if our jails overflow with slime and criminals, we would find a spot for you there. And do not─just do not─play with our sensitive dispositions. We are very emotional. Though out of the truly marvelous history that this country has witnessed, there have been countless men and women who have led by example, the moment they are gone, we have no one to guide our emotions rightly. Therefore, it is our right to be misguided by politicians or any one else with a manipulative mind and a sweet tongue. We do not mind being misled by them and we do it with unparalleled national pride. So beware because we just do not mind being prostitutes to the politicians of this country.

Disclaimer: Author doesn't intend to hurt any sentiments.

Girl With a Pencil in Her Hairs

If we were to believe Shastri-ji from Janmanas Co-operative Society, there would only be one man in the whole wide world─Shastri-ji himself. Everybody else is a 'character'. Take Mr. Subbarao from the third floor who happens to be the society chairman─who is an expert at finding ways of increasing society maintenance charges and has equal skills in digesting those funds without a burp or fart. To Shastri-ji, he is a swine. The 'always-overdressed-Mrs. Chandni' is 'Chhamak-Challo'. Grocery store owner Durgadas, who has always been a firm believer in the time-tested religion of adultery, is a dog─and not just any dog, but one that deserves a public execution. Gatekeeper Chandu Pandey from Chhapra who has an uncanny knack of vanishing off the face of earth at the first signs of trouble is a .... Well, I won't say it! And if such common men and women couldn't escape the measuring eyes of our Shastri-ji, then what chance do our politicians and traffic policemen stand? For their breed, Shastri-ji has names that he would only speak when he is with men of his age, or when he is alone.

Or when he is angry to extremes─which he often is.

But why blame him for that─such depth of observation has never blessed but men of extremely short tempers like our dear Shastri-ji. And anger has always been his faithful friend. It was there to throw away the bat, when in those forgotten days of childhood, he would be clean-bowled by a useless bowler. It was there when his wife committed the heinous crime of adding an extra pinch of salt in his daal. And it was there when Shastri-ji would rightly drive his scooter in the middle of a narrow road and some foolish young man of 'today' would honk his horn behind him. However, the only problem was that his old friend, Anger, needed a lot of space to live─in Shastri-ji's head. So anger took all the space there and… well, there went all his hairs, save the remains of that lush, black glory on the sides of his head that can neither be kept nor removed. Why shouldn't he be angrier? He should be! That's his right! After all what kind of God would allow a corrupt policeman to have a head full of hairs while an honest, peace-loving man like him went without that absolutely necessary asset of life? But there lay his other problem─God and he could never get along very well together. Then why should he expect any better off his wife of twenty-seven years (Mrs. Haldi-devi, or, Hitler), or even worse, his maid─a young fifteen year old girl whose least loved thing in the world was the work that paid for her mismatching, extra colorful bangles and oversized bindis.

By the way, the maid was named 'Heroine'.

So that fine day when Heroine was absent again and while Mrs. Hitler was busy complaining about the careless, pathetic maid─a sentiment that Shastri-ji shared─Shastri-ji did what every troubled 'man' would do under such grave circumstances – to take a walk. Through bazaars he walked; through roads full of smoke, cars and horns he crossed, and before he could realize, he was in the middle of narrow lanes surrounded by dirty, smelling shacks full of flies and people. 'Animals,' he muttered and sped up. Just when he was about to cross that hell of human excrement, he noticed something. Or someone.

There she was─Heroine.

Over a mid-sized boulder that seemed awkwardly misplaced, she sat. A touch of freshly wiped tears marking her stretched cheeks, and the disheveled madness of her dry, untied hairs spread all around her back. Someone screamed from the nearest shack─perhaps a drunk father! Heroine screamed back, burst into tears and ran across only to sit over another boulder that seemed to appear out of nowhere. From that distance, Shastri-ji saw her lips move in anger before her hands produced something─a piece of crumpled paper and two pencils. One of which she stuck in her hairs and with the other she lost herself in the wrinkled world of that little piece of paper that she seemed to treasure. Shastri-ji waited, watched. Minutes passed, perhaps hours. Around Heroine, screams died down and the ghetto moved at it’s own pace. All that changed in her was that smile─that honest tint of joy that only blesses a new born. With her pencil carefully traversing the crumpled paper and creating on it a world only she knew of, perhaps the troubles of her little, worthless life pulled out. A few other girls gathered round her, all of the same age. They tried to peek, they giggled, Heroine laughed, perhaps Shastri-ji saw a tint of shyness. Another moment and she was the same Heroine, lost in a world of her own with nothing to bother her. Shastri-ji looked at his watch.

Only a few minutes─and a careless girl morphed in front of his old eyes into a melancholy woman, into an angry recluse, into a frail human being, and back again to what he had always known her to be.

Shastri-ji walked away, wondering, thinking if the world could really be broken down in such narrow segments as he believed from time immemorial. Perhaps not, perhaps what he saw was only a garment clothed around the true spirit of life; of which a spirit had no ends. The hidden truth, perhaps it was always to be; only to be seen when he walked down the narrow, dirty lanes of secret lives. Perhaps the truth was that girl with a pencil stuck in her dry hairs, not that careless maid who didn’t do justice to her job. Yes, that was it! Shastri-ji knew, and then he never judged. And he started to smile. So much that for a few days, gatekeeper Chandu Pandey from Chhapra thought that our dear old Shastri-ji has been diagnosed of some cancer that often befalls our favorite heroes from Hindi blockbusters and after which they start to spread all the love and happiness around, make young women cry and want to marry their posters. Well, Chandu Pandey never got to know the reason, but Shastri-ji still smiles. His wife is not Hitler any more. Subbarao has ceased to be a swine.

Secretly, Mrs. Chandni is still a Chhamak-Challo.

Heroine is still a heroine for him. She would always be the girl who taught him not to judge. She would always be the girl with a pencil stuck in her dry hairs.

Sufi's Song

The dawn came with rains. Lots and lots of it! Mountains far away hid behind a cloudy veil of grey and white. A gifted treasure of rain drops sang on earth─perhaps that’s how silence was meant to be. The civilized world vanished as if it was never there. A song, a kiss and a Sufi! The energy of being one, the emotion of an honest servitude, the burning will of sacrifice, the lust for their god! Aah, the Sufi in a man, the follower in him, the master in him! Trees stood still, birds hid under shelters! That was just man and nature, the purity of silence, the presence of the unseen, the undisturbed harmony of being there in the middle, yet being so far. The absent, unrelenting silence; the still, unchanging distance! The Sufi knows: this is what Inspiration looks like; smells like the fragrance of wet soil; this is what it sounds like─the splashing rain on firm ground; the moving, ecstatic songs of a mystic.

The [Re]Discovery of India

In his book, The Discovery of India, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru kindly gives us the etymology of the term ‘Hindustan’. The name refers of a land across which the mighty Sindhu flows: Sindhu… Indus… Industan… Hindustan… Now, contrary to popular belief, the name does not entitle a large sect of people to an enormous piece of land with splendors and grandeurs of its own, yet the past few decades have been lived in complete contradiction of it where men and their petty, personal  insecurities have shaped the days and destinies of a great nation.

                However, just when everything had become a habit, I found myself one day standing in the middle of many─pizza-boys, college beauty queens, middle-aged housewives with vermillion lined foreheads, peasants and shopkeepers in white kurta-payjamas and dhotis, fathers, mothers, their student children  and over-earning IT professionals, all marching together in one voice and spirit in support of a man. Now, whereas I have personal─and perhaps misplaced─reasons for not following someone in flesh and blood, I have absolutely no qualms in following the idea that The Man is proposing and making millions across the length and breadth of this country march as one. I wondered, where have I come? This is not the country that mine or my father’s generation has known. Ours has been a divided land where ambitions are disguised as virtues. Yes, I know today, I have come to some other place where ‘unity’ is a real thing; where One Man has shown us a country that we all read in books.

                It reminds me of another incident I read in a book, this time involving Pt. Nehru: In the dawn of independence, Pt. Nehru found a Hindu and Muslim fighting each other─both, more than willing to kill each other─only a little away from the huge migrant camp that our recently divided state was finding difficult to handle. Pt. Nehru ran between them, stopped them and screamed on top of his lungs, ‘Is this what we got Independence for?’ Pt. Nehru, take my word: If your spirit hovers around today, your disappointments would be washed away for today we all see the free India that many of your days died for.

I might not be a hero, I am certainly not Mr. Hazare, but today, without a shadow of doubt, I, like countless others, am Hindustan.

If this is home, then home never felt so good.