Saket Suryesh's Blog, page 20

Seven Years of Bliss

There are some events which cuts through one’s life, distinctly breaking it off into two parts like a ripe fruit which has just fallen from the tree. Fatherhood is one such before-after event.
The day is bright one, still bearable for this time of the summer, blessed by unseasonal rains yesterday. Nonu, my daughter, otherwise known as Sanskriti, turns seven today. I still go back seven years back this day. The cool, benign hospital room, her mother slept tired, having brought in a new life into this world. The weather was kind that year as well. Sun was bright, splendid, but kinder than the usual harsh summer day of Delhi. Still remember, walking into the nursery, in a small world of tiny kids, yet unknown to this world, walking into it a stranger. They would open their eyes, tired, somewhat unhappy, out of the safe, comforting womb of their mothers and look a while, disenchanted and go back to sleep.
I went around and saw the third bed and the little one there, held a band on her hand which proclaimed her as Baby of Seema Suryesh. Father is still alien, an outsider to the child, an intruder in the cozy world of togetherness, a magical island of charm between the mother and the child. But I walk to you and hold my finger to you and you wrapped your pink, wrinkled palm around that finger. It is as if we had known each other when you were not yet there beyond a dream. I correct myself. We knew each other even when we both did not exist beyond a dream. As if all my life was a wait for this moment when your palm will curl around my finger.
Daughters are marvelous beings. They are the soft music emancipated from the divine worlds to bless the otherwise bleak, unbelieving world we inhabit. I believe, the saddest, most tired and bruised souls get blessed by daughters as if an embarrassed God wanted to compensate us for having a soul which felt more than what mind could understand. I held you that night, and we slept together. I supported your soft head on my palms, and it was as if your little mind spoke to me through my palms. Little did I know that my entire being since will become centered around you.
I have almost surrendered being anything else other than being a father since you walked into my life with uncertain steps. Then came the school, and still remember being first time addressing myself as Father of Sanskriti. My whole identity, crafted and cultivated all my life will melt into this singular identity- Father of Sanskriti.
We will win and lose together and your pain and sorrows will find a resting place in my heart. You are growing and your world expands beyond me. Sometime, a father may lose out to the mother, especially when you go out to buy all pink from the market. You might be amused when I ask you to run, to play, when I frown at you when you wear your mother’s high heels. But that is all about being a father. I know, I can see your world expanding beyond me. I can see my arms grow weaker, my voice grow fainter. You will have to be strong to be able to live without me, as I will live through you, in you.

That’s is the father for you, a little eccentric, a little paranoid. I try not to scare you when I am scared- for you. Your strength as a person will depend upon my ability to pretend strength when I am scared as hell for your well-being. That and a faith of unquestioned love, which stands beyond my need to look well in family, in the society. I have suffered being measured against the social yardsticks, being asked to prove being worthy of love. I will never hold it against you, not ever. I hope when the world wants me to measure you, against someone else, I will remember myself. I will be the one standing beside you, against the whole world, even when I do not understand you, old and ancient that I am. I will not tell you the right from wrong, I will educate you to know that. We all make our own mistakes, I know you too would make your own.
I will not judge you from the mistakes you make, but by how you bounce back from them. You know, child, father is not a person, a body. It is a cloud which walks with you on harsh summer day and it is a warm thought which wraps around you on cruel winters. I will always be that cloud, that thought. You have blessed my being by the first time you called me Baba, and the first time you smiled your first toothless smile when I came back from the office, in a bright yellow shirt and a brighter tie and you looked at me from your rocker. You have already given me much more than I could ask for by being what you are. I must not want anything more. You are not here to fulfil my dreams, I am there to cherish you flights to the sun, big and small. Go my little Angel, go, be brave and gulp the Sun, for you are loved and watched over.

The Media Circus Around Salman Khan Verdict

“Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood, there is life.- Virginia Woolf.
This paragraph picked out of wonderful masterpiece of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as she explains the predicament of Orlando, the man turned woman, struggling to write a poem, a novel is something every writer faces. Ms. Woolf mentions this as a challenge thrown at a novelist every waking day. But I would presume, the challenge extends in even graver proportions to a new set of writer, which is a journalist.
A modern day journalist needs not only blood, she needs a fresh blood, a blood which is not many day old. She writes not as a response to her need to write, but as a response to her need to be read. If she is a journalist of new age media, she further has the responsibility of keeping people glued to her TV channel. She will shout, hound, harangue against imaginary people who are out to kill and exterminate humanity. Human mind is very adaptable. This flexibility is what is great about human mind. This flexibility is his curse. You put him in the mess and he starts believing it to be his home after a while. He will no longer struggle to get out of it. Beneath the veneer of human intellect, he is no better than Pavlovian frog in such matters. He begins believing that journalism is entertainment. The lines thin and merge. On one hand it kills real literature, it obfuscate the true purpose of journalism.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that a Journalist should surrender the right to a position. But all this frothing out of the corner of the mouth righteousness, irrespective of the position which the event takes, one its own, unguided by the journalistic narrative. That is something which does not quite qualifies for journalism. There has to be some sense of proportion in the outrage, some space of silence in the noise. Just because you hold the mike, doesn’t make you a lawyer, a patriot, a moralist, all rolled in one. I may be one of these, with the most silent voice and you should come to me and ask my opinion. If not, then this becomes what is often termed as media circus.
An accident, an unfortunate event is just that. You report it without jumping up on the table and become a studio socialist carrying forward the case for the masses. A movie star runs over footpath dwellers. Thirteen years hence we come around to some justice, or as we later realize, some semblance of it, only a semblance, a pretense. The Gods of the people come around on Television and announce it as a victory of justice. Something inside me shifts in unease. Didn’t we read somewhere, Justice delayed is justice denied? But then, justice is such an odd and outrageously out-of-reach of human mind kind of idea. We dance in absurd happiness about the vindication of the idea of equity of human beings as court, after wise deliberation of thirteen years convicts the star with five year imprisonment for running over people sleeping on the footpath. He is charged with culpable homicide. The story ends. The studio programming goes for a toss. What do we talk about? The ticker had already run about twenty-four hour non-stop coverage of Salman Khan Verdict. Verdict came, story ends. Prosecution lawyer does not come on TV to talk about biryani. Evidently he is not interested in becoming a celebrity beacon of justice in a country where under-trials equal the population of Denmark.
Media is desperate. The man, the heartthrob, till yesterday proclaimed by them as Controversy’s favorite child, has been convicted, and an efficient battery of lawyers has obtained a quick bail and taken him home. The drama has ended prematurely, tossing off their plans of 24 hours coverage, announced prematurely, with a hope of an immediate jail terms, fans running rampage, rolling on streets, tonsured heads- all such stupidity. No Jail, no drama, what to do. Then, Bollywood comes in solidarity. There is a competition to prove loyalty. Someone says, those sleeping on street are akin to dogs and like dogs they died. A respite, a lifeline of stupidity, and the debate turns to the supporters of Salman. The unsure idiots come to studios trying to justify.
“This accidents could not have happened, if people weren’t asleep on the footpath and had government offered them with shelters” – say some. True, in which case her friend could comfortably have driven on the pavement without killing anyone. What man doesn’t want to drive on a pavement at one time or other? What kind of people would come and sleep on those pavements and prevent him from driving there? I am rich, I paid taxes to the government to make those pavement, I would bloody-well drive over them. She doesn’t know what she is talking about. The singer who compared the dead with the canine is even more absurd. Music surely can take you close to the divine, it cannot cure stupidity. It confounds everyone. So far so good, 5 more hours out of the proclaimed goes in covering this. In the meantime, the story turns. Higher courts grant bail to the superstar. The rich gets the machinery move at dizzying past. The same fuel which made the machinery move so slow that it did not catch up with one elusive witness for all of thirteen years, suddenly moves it so fast that within no time that the star is back at home.
The narrative by this time has lost its pivot. It does not know where to go.
Should we attack the star, his loyalists, the victims or the government? It was an accident. It was nothing that the star wanted to eliminate all the poor people from the face of the city like some politician who visited him to express solidarity. There was no case of class struggle. It was an act of accidental illegality, nothing more, and nothing less. What could however be considered an act of class- discrimination is about how the case was pursued by the legal system and how it was covered by the media. In the meantime, from being a murderer of people, the media has to go back to the tag of conspiracy’s favorite child. The act is barely as disgusting as is our response as a society, as a nation, as media to the act of this innocent drunk accident on one September night, 13 years back. Let us pause, mute the TV sets and introspect. The act while turned out ghastly with death of innocent people, is not the first act of drunk driving, nor will it be last. What about law enforcement? How do you enforce law in a city, where the insult of local food is prime concern of lawmakers and they can bring privilege motion to safeguard the feelings of a sad Vada pao, and when a policeman asks license from a lawmaker, he gets thrashed in public. Let us not go on pretending that Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city and the fact it is not has nothing to do with migrants who went in there to build a pretense of a global city.

Faith In The Time of EarthQuake

Tragedy brings out the best and worst of human beings. They take away the veneer of sophistication and morality stands in its nakedness for all to see. Nepal had one of the worst earthquake of the century, with thousands dead. Tragedies of such magnitude have in them the capability to unclothe us of all the pretensions of larger human good that we have.

We are all fair-weather gentlemen (and ladies) when things are going good. It is easier to adhere to gracious dignity when you are fed well and your life is not in jeopardy. Even more important is the well-being of those around you. You do not take advantage of people when you are not in a position to take advantage of them, or rather they are not in a position to allow you to take advantage of them. That is what defines morality. When we are kind to people who we cannot afford to be unkind to that is nothing but animal self-protection. It is when we are kind to people with whom we have no reason to be kind, people who cannot hit us back; that is divine decency.
Among the dead are roaming the religious people of various hues moving around not to protect and serve them, but to convert their faith. They know out of their homes, having lost their loved ones, these children of broken Earth are at the edge of their fractured belief. How can one continue to believe in a God which sits there on a judgment chair, presiding over the deaths of children, so young that they aren’t yet corrupted by life? How can someone explain to a believer that the tectonics plates shifted without the mother earth pausing to hear the cries of despair of her own children? Although, thanks to the atheist communist philosophy, Nepal is not a Hindu nation anymore. The last bastion of arguably the third largest religion in world is no longer that constitutionally. Beguiled by the developed nations, where heads of state still swear oath to the God and Holy Spirits, Nepal had embraced secularism, but the ethos and the faith of its people is still is Hindu. This tragedy saw people in droves coming in telling them not to restore the citadels of what they call ‘pagan’ belief, the temples and all and rather come to the only savior, the Jesus Christ or to the Religion of Peace which is currently causing big trouble to world peace on account of fanatic believers. They propose to serve the troubled with shamelessly undisguised appeal to join their religion in return to earn their right to their service.
I wonder whatever happened to the sense of humanity. Why this quid pro quo? Why can they not stick to their already shaken belief and still be served? When days are bleak and everything that you know as way of life is lost by the enormity of nature in face of which humanity is next to nothing, it is faith, however fractured, kinship with fellow human beings, however distant and hope in future, however disfigured which keeps life going. It is our capacity to keep on hoping which separates us from other life forms, and elevates us. On the same count, it is our ability to spiral into the deep, dark abyss of hopelessness which again separates us from any other human being. A time of disaster is the time to help our brethren to hold on to that holy hope. The roads are dust filled, debris of a devious, devastating nature is spread around, but life holds hope. The Dharahara Tower came down in 1834, and came up, it went down again in 1934 and again came up. It is the proud head of unbeatable human spirit. Let us fill those audacious wings, through broken and tired at the moment, with our prayers, whichever God we may pray to and see them soar high towards the Sun. We are all one in tragedy. The hope will rise from those broken crevices of the earth on the street of Nepal and make a new nation, of people defiant of the cruelty of nature. All they need is little time and faith, for their faith to heal up. They do not need a new faith.

They need to know that we, who haven’t seen them, breathe for them and pray for them to our Gods which might be different for theirs. It is just a coincidence, a stroke of luck that we are not in the news that we watch and luck, as we know is pretty capricious. Let them be with their faith and be loved as human souls. Let us not deprive them of whatever of faith is left with them, ashen, dust-filled it may be, it is theirs. Let us not hit the people when they are down.  No religion can keep those tectonic plates from moving, or the volcano from erupting in Christian Europe or Tsunami from hitting Indonesia. Religion can help survive these disasters and help us keep the hope alive. I am not a religious person and I do not know if God exists. As Jules Renards once famously quipped, “I do not know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t”, my sad despair shakes head in agreement in the face of such large-scale, heart-wrenching disaster, but then I also agree with Voltaire in the interest of my best reasons, which I would call hope, that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”.  
It would be necessary to restore faith, not to exchange it with a new one as those people that Internet defines as soul vultures, who would scout troubled grounds for religious conversion. I have spent years and years in sales. I still remember when I had been to Nepal for a sales meeting with a prospective customer. The morning when I landed, I got a call from the customer asking if I have reached safely and to further surprise me, asking if he needed to send a car to pick me for the meeting. When was the last time it happened to me that a customer proposed to send conveyance for me for a meeting- Never. Not in India, only Nepal could do that, pamper you as a guest and disarms you as a friend with complete trust. A nation like that needs to be preserved with its faith and philosophy. It would do well for the rest of humanity to preserve such a nation without attempting to scavenge over its dead, to make such a sweet soul subservient. Let us stand by Nepal and preserve the old in the new we build. When the Tectonics moved centuries back, a glorious mountain came into being. A glorious nation will emerge this time as well, glorious, defiant and brave. 
(I hope Rubesh Jha and his family, Deepak Shreshtha (who wanted to send that car) and all the Subishu Staff and their families are safe in this disaster. I hope, my pen-friend, who I lost track of years back, Rhicha Maharjan who ran a book shop in Thamel is fine. You are all loved and thought of, and prayed for. God bless you all.)

The Illusion of Politics- The Politics over Land Acquisition bill

We live our lives in kind of mixed reality. It is a world of illusions and smoke-screens. There are people whose only purpose is to act as props for people who sit in the background. They make a nice picture- that of a kind, ethical doctor, the hardworking engineer, the moral teacher and the latest media darling- the poor farmer.
The very purpose that these props are carefully cultivated by the media is because they make us emotion and throttle the reasoning. You cannot talk much to a reasonable man. He will see the reason together with you, if it exists. He cannot be persuaded by your literary skills. If you cannot talk much to a reasonable man, you can, as well, not much write to him and as a media entity, if you cannot write much, what do you do then?
So what you need is a prop that elicits emotions, thereby impacts reason and then create an outrage around that image which, even if untrue, brings forth human feelings. That is what is happening to what is being termed as Farmer agitation. The prop here is the hungry, poverty-stricken farmer, which Munshi Premchand wrote about. He sits about in the village, lives in a hut, begins the day early, and toils through the day to make ends meet. He lives in absolute hopelessness. He is a sorrowful figure, who sweats in the fields, while the owner of the field sits at the village chaupal, smokes a hukkah and discusses important things like how jeans causes rapes and maggi is a social evil. The man who toils in the mud, sits on the electoral placards and the man who deliberates and debates in spotless clothes, makes the government.
The poor man in the field, needs roads, schools to change the course of the fate. He needs it to be able to hope for the sake of his kids. He is the landless farmer. His ancestors lost out on wealth distribution when it was being distributed. He is a farmer without land. He does not know anything about reserve price, which is a big electoral game for those who are agriculture industrialist. They have lands they do not want to part away with. Their acres ploughed and nourished by the sweat of the landless farmers bring them the riches to fuel their SUV, and funds the nightly adventure of their young to malls in neighboring suburbs. The farmer, the real farmer has no hope for himself and thanks to these land-sharks, has no hope for his future generations.  
One need not be an economist or a financial expert to understand that only way to wealth which can appear out of thin air is knowledge and all it needs is opportunity. The man, the last man in the line, doesn't have the transportation to walk to the development growing in patches in one of the fastest growing nations. You need to bring development to him, opportunities to him. You need to get him schools and roads and hospitals, so that he can ensure that his next generation can move out of the squalor that he has been doomed to. That is the farmer who needs caring, not the pretense-farmers who run diktats in the villages, from behind their hukkahs. Latter only claim to be farmers and are in fact, for better part of their times are what they truly are- the land capitalists. It is plain logic and you do not need to go away to foreign lands to introspect in order to gain insight about it. 
Let’s not fool ourselves. This protest on Land acquisition is not a farmer’s protest, it is a protest by landlords to maintain the status quo. They would not, with their chubby cheeks and well-fed body look good on the protest placards, therefore the less –privileged farmer comes in and sits in as a theme-picture of the protest and make up for the numbers to threaten a government, fulfilling the political dreams of the status-quoists, is desperate to come back to power, who for sixty years maintained the status quo with all its ugliness of social disparity unchanged.

If the land acquisition policy, the new one, needs amends, let there be amended. Let this not be a mean to create unrest solely for the purpose of paving the road to ruling the nation for a listless, disinterested and undeserving crown prince. A writer is not a social scientist, not he has the brains of a financial guru. He only has a heart and penetrating eyes which can see through the lies. His is only to share his vision of truth with those who are being misled by cultivated images of untruth, to tap on their emotions. Don't throw your intellectual force behind the illusions. See to it that for the child of landless or even marginal farmers, the only way out of the quagmire of social injustice is joining the army or becoming a migrant labor.  Let us not use farmer suicide as an argument. That farmer would not have committed suicide even in case of failed crops if he had rural infrastructure to give him parallel employment option, to carry his produce faster to farms, easy bank finance to support him, and a roof over his head by affordable housing. Let the truth be out in all its ugliness. Then the experts can walk in and measure things on facts.
(Until 2013, Land acquisition was governed by Land Acquisition Act of 1894, through sixty years of congress rule and no land lord, who now pretend to be poor farmers,  was outraged, since it followed the British policy of keeping the landlords on their side. The incensed and outraged political side, in a rush to crown their prince, forgets that while they object to five sectors which are kept out of ambit of consent requirement- Industrial Corridor, PPP, rural infrastructure, affordable housing and Defense for sixty years had all the government acquisitions immune of dissent and the first son-in-law happily acquired the land around the DMIC Industrial corridor. Now, with the latter three, no-consent provision, I don't think anyone whose heart bleeds for the real farmer would have an issue, the other two need to be made clearer, but then as I said above, let experts do that.). 

Love and Forgetting

As I readied myself for a two-day business trip, I saw my six year old, just up from the bed, looking at me from the bedroom doorway. She walked unto me, hugged me. Then, she signals me to bend down, so we may indulge in our ritual of running our noses together. The hugs me with all her strength and then sit on the chair in front of me as I have my tea.  She smiles. Her smile is somber and sad. I ask her why she was sad. She whispers something inaudible. Did she say that she will remember me when I am gone for the two days?  I prod her again and she smiles, with that smile which only kids have when they are six year old, with broken teeth and unbroken faith. "Why are you sad?" I ask her. "I am sad because I will forget you once you go. I will go play and forget that you will not come back in the evening. I will think that you have gone to the office in the city only." Says she. I am stunned by the profound honesty and the denseness of the feeling which wraps around us- me and my daughter. I want to console her, to alleviate her sadness by telling her that Bangalore is couple of hours flight from Delhi and that I will be back tomorrow. But the sad truth that she just spoke cannot be sullied with grown-up's rationale. It is so sacred that one can only kneel before. The truth that when we say that we will remember, we may not be always truthful. But what can be more loving than the lamenting the possibility of forgetting those we love. That is most mature thing one can hear anyone speak, let alone a six year old girl.  Loving, remembering and forgetting, will happen and coexist all our lives, shadowing all our relations, like passing weathers. We may not be able to remember those we love all our waking moments. But love would mean we will lament the fact that we are not able to the remember them always. It would also mean that when we remember them, we feel the tinge of pain over the moments during which their memories left us alone in the cold. This is all that one should hope for, not to be remembered for all the time, but when remembered to be remembered with the same fondness which stay unblemished under the dust of time. That is love and that is remembrance. I whisper to my self that this love and this forgetfulness, I shall grant my daughter and I wish this innocent honesty of her to last her lifetime. I remember the poem in Urdu I read long time ago, when I was a studying, which went something like, granting translation error and errors of age "O Ocean, whose name you call with such longingAs you rush towards the shore?Is there someone of your ownThat you are looking for?You might have forgotten the  love itselfBut you must be still remembering forgetting that love." As long as you forget me and remember forgetting itself, I will still sleep in peace believing that I am loved. The damp weather will still bring the smile to me, long after you have gone to build a world of your own. Like many other things I have learnt from you, love is not being with you always, not never losing you, not even forgetting you, Love is not forgetting the act of forgetting. There are of course incentives of poor memory as long as it is innocent as Nietzsche would say, " The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time .”     

Nirbhaya's Plight- Lost on Noise?

There are matters on which one cannot take sides, at least not clearly. Things are, at times, so hazy and complex that whatever side you take is wrong. The matter of Leslie Udwin’s documentary “India’s Daughter” on the infamous Nirbhaya rape case, is one such matter.It is hard to understand the opposition of the documentary. Beyond a decibel level, every truth ceases to be truth. The noise on rival channels makes one doubt their outrage. The same channel sometime back got the same lawyer for the accused rapist on their debate. How come the same man making similar arguments in a debate is not outrageous while doing exactly the same thing on a documentary proposed to be run on a rival channel is insulting to the victim? The whole campaign smacks of hypocrisy. It is absurd to be up in arms about the documentary on the fact, and not be concerned about the fact itself.
Eloquent politicians who went silent when their own party chiefs made obnoxious statements like ‘Boys will be boys’ have suddenly got their eloquent tongues back from the cats. In parliament, they cry hoarse that this is insulting to the victim. It is not the public admission of thoughts which is a matter of concern; it is the thought itself which is of concern. What good it would be if the lawyer, the convicts, does not speak but the thoughts keep on creeping into creepy minds, looking for a dark alley, an empty bus to come out like evil creatures of the night? Why not introspect, not only about the ghastly crime, but also the response of the establishment to the spontaneous outrage which spread out on the street in response to the crime. What happens to the false murder case slapped on young men who went to protest? Who orchestrated that brutal action, which failed only because the movement could muster enough numbers to challenge the might of the state?
On the other hand, the making of the documentary itself was an act of absurdity. The claim of the maker of the documentary that her making of the documentary is justified because she herself is a rape victim is similar to the claim of erstwhile Home minister that he could be trusted with rightful action since he himself was father of daughter, and is as erroneous.  Her rationale for making the documentary itself is skewed. What is there to understand about the mind of the criminal? It always leaves me uneasy. This whole club of untrained psychologist is an institution of idiocy. All men (I mean, Human beings by men) are not same. There are people who are evil. There is no reason, no logic of them being evil. Why would one want to understand them? They are evil whether rich or poor. It has nothing to do with their societal status or economic status. Evil rich is evil because he is rich and evil poor is evil because he is poor. This is just crap. Evil is evil because it wants to be, not because it has to be. Chesterton wrote famously, “.. This is a real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease..of healing sin by slow scientific methods..The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. ”
Furthermore, there is nothing specific about Indian men. It is a universal situation. We consider moral education outdated and legal system lingers on forever without reaching anywhere. Now that the documentary has been made, however stupid that endeavor is, blocking it is even more stupid. Leslie makes strange arguments like this is an attempt to understand the  mind of an Indian man, as if Jack the Ripper had migrated from India, and so are all the ISIS fighters. On the attempt of government to block the documentary, a guaranteed to fail attempt, she says, “This society is sick” which I would hope was a statement out of desperation only. The resolution of such matters is not censorship; it is to look inside, inside the smallest unit of humanity- the family. The way to counter crime is not to restrict crime-reporting, it is to restrict crime. We are being stupid. Why are we not asking why the Nirbhaya fund is lying unused, and what is the point of adding another 2000 Crores to unused 1000 Crores? Why that fund cannot be used to put CCTV cameras, to light up the dark roads, to fund fast tract courts?

Also when it comes to this particular case, it wasn’t even crime. It was evil. It was not the act of criminal passion, nor was it the question of illegality or immorality alone. It was all these things added. When a person in power exercises it merely to crush those who are less powerful, it is not crime, it is pure, unadulterated evil. If such evil was ever allowed to propagate, human race or any race for that matter has little chance. It was not a crime against woman, it was a crime against nature. Therefore it was evil and there is no point in wanting to understand evil. She would have done better to have interview the earlier CM of Delhi and asked her, what did she mean when she advised women to not be adventurous, or asked the earlier police chief about who directed him to file false cases against the protesters and also she ought to have asked the news channel anchor crying hoarse as the guardian of social morality that when will it stop giving air space to the political party whose chief made the Boys will be boys statement. She should have interviewed the power –that-be that why justice is such a long-winding road when the criminals are not even attempting to deny the crime, they are merely explaining the crime. This study of evil is plain stupid and this banning of the stupid study is stupider. 

Book Review: Love in the Time of Cholera

 My Rating: Must read. You will Like it if you are, going to be, have been in Love.The book was first published in 1985. The translation in English was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in the year 1988. Nobel winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known to be proponent of magical realism. This book is truly an example of that.
Apart from being a literary benchmark, it is so true about the life itself. The most magical moments arise out of the simplest ones. There could be a glance thrown in your direction, a hand holding your arm, innocently helping you from slipping- there are stories building up of magical beauty out of these seemingly commonplace activities. Sometimes these stories get written and sometime it is only life which writes them. But then there are some worthy minds to which life at times, offer this great opportunity to pen them down for the future generations to believe in the extraordinary magic of the ordinary. Gabriel Marquez is one such worthy mind. His pen rises to the meet the magic of love in this novel ‘Love in The Time Of Cholera’. He actually said as much in his Interview to The Paris Review where he states, “The trouble is that many people believe that I’m a writer of fantastic fiction, when actually I’m a very realistic person and write what I believe is the true socialist realism.”
This is a story of love, a love accomplished and sure in its being, a love thirsty and waiting to happen, sensual love, a love which is more of an act of habit, an unrequited love and a deep love, which sustains till it seeks, patiently and painfully lying in wait. The true art and capability of a writer is visible in not inventing sharp turns in the stories, and still keeping the reader hooked on the story by the sheer honesty and intensity of the life as we all know it. There are no sharp edges in the story. It is not a story told in hurry, nor is it written with the cunningness to impress the reader with the drama. It is a soulful river running through a beautiful and silent, blue night.
In very short, this is a story of a love, very ordinary, but very touching by the virtue of its sheer ordinariness between the almond-eyed beauty Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an old couple grown old across the decades of togetherness. The man, a very habit-driven, custom-oriented hero for the community with a pronounced sense of societal propriety and his wife with a simmering sense of rebelliousness, come up as a creature of habit, a lovely couple very much in love. Then it is also the story of unrequited love of the eternal optimist, Florentino Ariza, who finds solace only in the end.  
The story begins with the visit of Dr. Juvenal Urbino to the death of his acquaintance, an Antillean Refugee, Jeremiah de Saint Amour- who quickly slips into a backdrop, not to come back again. The beginning seems merely to serve as a foundation to describe the social stature of Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his personality. He uses the journalistic devise of picking up and incident and builds a character over it. He is a dispassionate story-teller, whose allegiance is only to the story, not to the character. If one looks very carefully, one would find that he doesn’t attempts to get love, hatred or even sympathy of the reader to his character. He places the characters out for your scrutiny and allows you to wander through a maze of changing emotions towards them as the story progresses. He explains with a sense of passive seriousness which is descriptive to the extent of being journalistic. His facts create a world of fiction in which you not only believe, you also fall in love with. To quote him, he once said that it is, “a journalistic trick you can also apply to literature…” ..and that “…Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality.” He gets you to believe in his fiction with factoids and imagery which may not always be true in strictest sense.
He is a master in total control of his art. He is not helplessly flowing through the story, he steers it. He said in an interview that there is a purpose to the even the first, seemingly purposeless river trip of Florentino Ariza, that is to describe the river, so that it need to be described the second time over. Every word written serves the purpose of plunging you as a reader deeper into the story, so that you feel as if you know all the characters as the ones you knew from your own life. He carefully architects a world which the lady love of Jeremiah calls the death trap of the poor, in which to quote the author, the great old families sank into their ruined palaces in silence, as the world around collapsed into “the condition of honorable decadence..”We find the visual imagery of Joseph Conrad which makes a fictional world breathe in front of us.
 
The character of Dr. Urbino is defined through a comfortable abode with all the assurances of familiar certainty, a parrot, a library, lovely house, throughout which one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on the ground. From here we slowly become familiar with Fermina Daza, the good doctor’s wife, who is seventy two when the story begins. Gabo writes that, “Her clear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her wedding portrait but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character and diligence. The lady is sharp-witted, even if subtle and their story is a story of mild humor which makes up every decently happy married couple’s life. The wife loves pets, husband doesn’t as he tells her, “Nothing that does not speak will come into this house” and she responds by bringing in a parrot. The doctor teaches parrot Latin and spends evenings with the parrot until one day the parrot eventually causes his death by falling.
As the author describes the loving couple, one could almost fall in the trap of traditional romanticism, almost. But then with playful innocence of a journalist, Gabo describes that…they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other or without thinking about the other before one is lost into the mushy-mushy feelings, he comes back ..neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love of convenience, but they never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer. I would presume this is what is meant by magical realism. There is an interesting description of their life, a charming life of togetherness, wherein she clung to last threads of sleep to avoid facing the fatality of another morning…while he awoke with the innocence of a newborn.. and her compliant that..the worst misfortune in this house is that nobody lets you sleep. This was a daily ritual, a game that all married couple play, that Marquez calls, dangerous pleasures of domestic love.
Then there is an endearing episode of missing soap in the bathroom, which hits their blissful lives in thirtieth year of togetherness. He proposes that they go to the Archbishop and then seek his intervention on whether the soap was there or not that day in the bathroom. Fermina responds with the near-blasphemous thunder of “to hell with the Archbishop”. By the time, after four months of sparring in silence, one evening as Dr. Urbino waited in their bed for his wife to come out of bathroom “It felt so comfortable to be back in his grandparents’ featherbed that he preferred to capitulate  and says he “Let me stay here,…there was soap.”, the reader is sunk deep in the feeling of a love so subtle, so dignified, so ..lovely that one also loves the couple. With this peaceful conclusion about the couple in love, about our own love for the couple, suddenly catastrophe hits with the parrot which tries to escape and trying to catch the parrot, Dr. Ubrino slips. It is brings too close the fear of old age death of someone deeply in love when he writes about the dying moments of Dr. Ubrino.
‘He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you.”
It is not often one reads such writing which so poignantly reminds one of the eternity of love and ephemeral nature of life as Fermina Daza
‘..prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past…the grief exploded into a blind rage against the world, even against herself..” and one is hit by the immensity of the widow’s sadness when, before the coffin is closed she, ‘..took off her wedding ring and put it on her dead husband’s finger, and then she covered his hand with hers, as she always did when she caught him digressing in public.”
 This is when Florentino Ariza appears, during the funeral, a useful and serious old man. While we wonder about who this man is, he to utter distaste of the readers, tells the grief-stricken widow, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love” Before being thrown out of the house. From then beings a love story of the past, a love story of innocent youth, of young Fermina and Florentino. The story goes more than five decades back when Florentino was a poor young man, whom, Fermina’s cousin at one point calls, “He is ugly, but he is all love.”
Florentino is any other young man, reading love poems, believing in the infallibility of true love, and aware of the difficulty in such dreams of love given his own social station in life, as a fatherless child and poor young man. He finds Fermina, a lovely girl of a rich by dysfunctional family under the care of her aunt Escolastica. There is then, long period of waiting for the girl in park facing Fermina’s house reading his books, mustering courage to write to her. Then the first letter, and then more, letters, hidden in one place or other. There are such lovely descriptions of soaring, innocent love of youth which is brave and afraid at once. As he writes about Fermina who would lock herself in bathroom at odd hours and for no reason other than to reread the letter, attempting to discover a secret code, a magic formula…..in the hope they would tell her more than they said”.  One forgives the first appearance of Florentino, after the death of Doctor Ubrino as one goes through the yearnings of Florentino’s struggle as young lover and eventual failure. The rationalist in Marquez comes back as eventually young Fermina is able to get over her love for Florentino as surprisingly as she fell in it. This was after she had formally accepted his love with a note sent to him which said, “Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.” This after she fought with her formidable and brutish father when  he found her a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.
Her aunt is sent away and so is she, but when she comes back, she finds her love is not there, that she has gotten over the love which she once had for Florentino Ariza. She goes on to marry Dr. Ubrino and Florentino slips into a dark abyss of lonely wait for the love which he still hopes to win back. There are flings which Florentino has in between, but they are more in line with the realism which Marquez writes about, but those flings are never able to touch, disfigure or damage the love, the magical love which flows in his heart for Fermina. Florentino is a dreamer, much like Jay Gatsby of Fitzgerald, who continues to hope even after Fermina’s marriage to Dr. Ubrino. He struggles through sadness and solitude, and eventually at the funeral of Dr. Ubrino once again confesses his love. Shunned by Fermina initially, and once again oppose by the society which stood against them, when they loved young, this time they bring out enough courage to sail into the sea together right into the sunset of their lives.
Marquez once spoke about this book in an interview, “This book was a pleasure. It could have been much longer, but I had to control it. There is so much to say about the life of two people who love each other. It's infinite.” As a reader, I would agree to him. This is a book you end with a tinge of sadness, not because the story is sad, but because the story has ended.  This book is a work of love, it celebrates love in multiple forms. Rare is to have one story which can contain so much of love in so many forms, hues and colors.  Amazon Book Link: Love in the Time of Cholera

The Life of A Salesman

I am a salesman. I have different names. I am called sales leader, seller, executive, Account specialist. Sometimes when the organization I work for is happy with the business I get and the people who adorn the chairs and decide the chessboard of ruthless corporate games get excited, they call me fancy names like strategist or corporate warrior. I go to people talk to them about things the organization where I work, makes and prod them to buy them.  I do not sell harmful things. I sell things people need but do not have because they do not know sometimes that they need them. I wear suites and ties in sweltering heat and walk through the dust, cursing the eccentricities of the weather of my city. My face is full of grimace at every parking where I try to locate a place to park my vehicle. I try to hold on to my laptop when I am thrust from one end to another in public transport. I walk thinking about my little daughter lying in temperature unattended at home. But I reach my clients place and in one neat gesture wipe off both grimace and sadness and paste a warm smile on my face seeking time. Then the secretary, the sad lady with a smile as fake as mine tells me that the boss is late because his daughter is singing in school. I am once again sad and I smile even more as I wait.  I carry a card with fancy designation and am backed by the might of a billion dollar organization so I do not get pushed out. But I am also that man who admits that he has of late started forgetting the names of his customers but claims honestly that he knows them all. I am also that thin, feeble man who answers to even wrong allegations with, "I totally agree with you" and I am that man who carries a laptop bag on his shoulders and walks with a mild hunch through the Sun, while kids half his age drive across in fancy cars.  I am also that man who fakes knowing people that I have no way of knowing because I need people to believe that and because, well, my daughter is still in fever at home. I am that man who slips a twenty rupees note to the gate-keeper to enter the citadels of power which I elect every five years. I enter those citadels because I need to tell them what they need. I curse them and I tell myself, "I totally understand". This is one statement which helps me bear numerous people I meet through the day. I am all those people who walk the streets of cities and towns. I am honest person, who carries the burden of an image of a liar. I am not dumb. I do not get the glory of people who tells what great products they made. I tell people what those product could do for them. I bring money for people to make those fine products and to pay people to count and talk about the money which I bring. I live in shadows where the grays breathe, they shine in the splendor of the public suns. We carry the knowledge and we tell people of new things. We bring those things to people and change their lives. We are the Prometheus who carry the fire to dark lives of people and fill them with light. I am Arthur Miller's Salesman, William Loman whose life isn't celebrated, but whose death becomes a classic. I am known as the company I represent. I am rarely seen as the person I am. I am the person who reads Dostoevsky, who smiles at daffodils, who goes home and looks into the eyes of my daughter, who waits for me on the days when I wear a coat and board a flight. PS. I have not written any post for such a long time. I longed to write, to read, I longed to long. I wrote this unstructured post, with whatever came to my mind.

Why Did I Run My First Half-Marathon?

Eye of The TigerI have been athletic but never sports oriented in my life. In between, I had faced my own sins of youth, arrogant decadence of all ills of youth- smoking, drinking, an incandescent conscience and an unyielding spine, aggravated further by constant strife between my refusal of all social judgments and an insistence by the world around me to judge me, nevertheless. It hit me, hit me hard. I went down with a feeling that I will never come back again. I remember those bleak days, fourteen years back, when every step taken would be precarious ringing with a hissing fear of death in its sound. I was hit by affairs of the heart, and with that I am not referring to my courtship which culminated with a marriage resulting in excommunication by the society and family. It was odd feeling. It was unexpectedly expected. I was told that was to happen, but being an only son, believed that warning from the parents to be hollow. Boy, solid it was, they held social pride dearer than the only child and I was a young man, trying hard to restore the semblance of a family. It would have been easier to handle with a lesser sense of duty and propriety and sightly numb conscience. But we don't make our circumstances, we live in them. And then it hit me, through nicotine-laden stress.
 I fell down one evening. I did live to talk about it, but only talked about it in vague terms for the fear of effecting the relations which were normalized, at least for the sake of pretensions in the years that follow. I walked out of the hospital after close to ten days in the hospital and I still remember, I had almost forgotten how to walk. I remember when I was told not to laugh so loud as it could wreak my weakened heart, and also remember being told that I ought not ride motorbikes as the wind could hit me back with a worse heart ailment than I have had.
So I stopped exercising. Bike I did drive because being in sales and with no other vehicle to drive; it was a chance I had to take. Not being a provider would hurt my idea of masculinity more than it would hurt me to end up dead driving a bike. So I did take that chance and I drove. First, with a lot of trepidation, then with abandon, at least till the time a WagonR arrived on the scene- my first car. We always chose the advises which are the worst. I chose to ignore the driving advice, chose to ignore eating advice, but stuck to the advice of not exerting myself physically- for twelve years. I bloated to eighty two kgs, rediscovered the pleasures of writing and ate with the excitement of a man right out of the prison. But then I was hit by a looming threat of diabetes. Days were morose and colorless. I would fret and frown but did not for a while, surrendered.
Then one day, do not know what hit me. I trust it was looking at my daughter who wanted Me with Nonuto play with me and I shouted at her. It hit me then. She is six years old and I shuddered at the thought of what I will be when she hits twenties. And I, having given up the failed attempts at gym, I hit the trail. I huffed and puffed through the first round in the nearby green oasis of the Deer park.  It was a struggle with uneven track, and the first round of 1.35 Kms was a severe challenge on my out of shape body. But it was away from the prying eyes of the trainers in the gym, no one to suggest when to begin and when to stop. Some people love that gentle nudge by well-bodied men in the gym, not yours truly.  So I went out and bought the wherewithal required to take running as a routine. If you treasure your solitude like me, running is the thing for you. Well, biking, swimming could also qualify, but running is all that I have ever done. Sir, those shorts, that expensive running shoe came in right under the disapproving gaze of the missus. She would look at those fancy bags and then at the stationary cycle long since being used as a clothsline to dry washed clothes. I could see the anger, cynicism and mockery in those eyes which once sailed a thousand ships for me. Believe me, sir, in weakness, we are always most alone. It is a double-edged sword, we are weak because we are alone and we are alone whenever we are weak. With the old song of Michael Bolton, When I am back on my feet again  humming in the back of the mind, I would go about buying things. I would ignore the scorn, the cynicism. It was reclaiming me. I would remind myself of the old Ayn Rand quote that even in “I love you”, ‘I’ comes first. Without I, there is nothing. Mostly, when in love, we let go I, which is one of the most fatal mistakes which results in a feeling of loss, and at times loss of health and many other things. For those newly in love- never surrender ‘I’, that is the solemn promise our maker has made to us, to make us different from anyone else. The two shall never merge, the two shall come together and bloom together, but never must one fuse into one other.
Well, missus got me an iPad Nano. I got it loaded with NikePlus. With all the expensive gear which I had mainly bought to ensure my commitment to my new cause, and with loud music from my days of youth- the Rocky theme song-“The Eye of the Tiger” and “Brilliant Disguise”  in my ears, I hit the street with a vengeance. I would run, struggling with each mile up as a steep challenge. I would whisper my daughter’s name, assuring her that Baba will make her proud and run another mile. And then, I sometime in August, stepped out of the close confines of the park. My left knee ached, my heart pounded but I would on weekends hit the road with the metro card in my pocket. I would run to the India gate and come back by Metro. It was a good six miles run. It was feet over asphalt, what people who know term as urban running. The inclines were within limit but the trail was hard. I bought a knee supporter, but after a while, ran without it. After some distance, the pain would vanish, only to come back few hour after the run. I began to realize that the feet, the body is merely the tool. I did not need to manage the worker, I needed to get the boss on my side and rest will follow. And then, once I ran 10 miles. I was happy. My mind told my body to run one mile and then another and it followed with minor protests. Then in October was I registered for the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon with an almost clear mind of making a fool of myself. To get a finisher medal, you need to complete those 21 Kms in less than 2:45 hours. I felt in my heart that I will turn out to be the last guy on the track, huffing and puffing, reaching in around three hours. But having come this far, there was no going back. I would come back from office and go out for run. Winters had arrived and parks would close. So I would run on the street. I would travel for business and carry my shoes. One additional luggage, but then I would run in Bangalore and Kolkata.
The day of marathon came and I did run. It wasn’t very easy for a lonely runner. I did not have back-slapping pals who would come and wake me up at four in the morning on the day for the run. I was a middle aged man struggling to stay alive in best form possible. I wanted to be new for my daughter, for my wife. I would after my sickness many times would wonder if she would have felt that she made one big, wrong decision in life. I wanted to be the right person. She had seen me as infallible man, infallible in strength, in principles during courtship. I wanted to be that man. I had to do it alone, but then every man has to do it alone. Few are able to do that, to emerge out of that darkness. I went and I ran. My Airtel record came at not-too-embarrassing 2:22 minutes and my NikePlus was kinder to me with a reading of 2:17 minutes.
I felt redeemed, renewed and refresh. I wanted to write this post to figure out for myself the reasons. I am not able to. But then it is a mix of the reasons. As I ran more, I read more about running. I also learnt that contrary to the mythical writer, writhing in addiction of alcohol and drugs, waiting for an imminent death, can chose to be healthier. And to my surprise, I realized that most writers are. In fact, it would be hard to decipher if Maugham was not a better writer because of regular swims he went on. After a while, running becomes meditation, things become clearer. Haruki Murakami has anyways written a whole book about running (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running).  If he can run and write he must be doing something well. It is not very easy for a writer to do an Apple (I read, that people lined up outside the bookstore through the night before the release of his latest book). It is not necessary that we all run, but dance, swim, bike but don’t sit idle. Don’t say you do not get time, don’t say your body doesn't listen. Bribe the boss with arguments which would appeal to its reasons, the workers will follow. See what works for your mind- your wife, your child, your ego, your self-love. Whatever it is, stroke that feeling. Running is not physical. It is emotional. It is all about your mind. The wheels of the chariot of time rolls in only one direction. Let’s render significance to our ordinary life on this ordinary planet to an ordinary star in this vast galaxy of time and space. Let us live our lives to the full. Let us forgive others and ourselves for the sins of the past. The journey out of the deep, dark well of desperation is always lonely, but there is light at the end of the tunnel and we have friends and fun waiting for us there. 2014 is gone and done with 2015 awaits us. Let’s reach out to this New Year, do new things, reclaim our lives.  Let us run, friends, let us run. Let us decide, to quote Edgar Allan Poe, that we
“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of the day,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Failed Schooling

Of late, a video of teachers in villages and small towns in India went viral with teachers not knowing the spellings and basic general knowledge like the names of presidents and prime ministers so on and so forth. It invites many comments, acerbic, funny, condescending, demeaning. To me that whole video was so sad and heart-wrenching. It is a sad commentary about our schooling. It is thought-provoking. What is the point of putting kids in school when they are neither equipped nor evolved enough  to be place for learning. They are not place for sharing of knowledge but rather a place where a kinship of ignorance is kindled. Teachers in most government schools in India are broken individuals who as a result of failed fate or abysmal aptitude couldn't do anything better but to teach. 
They aren't overwhelming souls brimming with knowledge, but have dark gaping holes of ignorance churning with sadness inside. They are teachers since they couldn't be anything else. And it isn't not as much about salary and compensation as about the falling gratitude of parents and students alike as a society. I am yet to come across kids studying with an intent to become a teacher when they grow up or parents who want their kids to become teachers when they grow up. It is a failed profession. True, there are some really great teachers, who really love the fact that they hold the solemn responsibility of moulding the next generation of people. Someday, those little people walking awkwardly with bags bigger than their bodies will become the custodians of the nation and the world. How many kids have access to them? I remember recently having seen a movie on the flight in which the English teacher gets into a tiff with the newly arrived painting teacher over the primacy of their respective subject over the other. How many of our teachers take that kind of pride in subjects they teach? How often they come out as playing, worshiping and nurturing the subjects they teach?Until the day we have people wanting to be teachers, dreaming to be teachers and have a general access to teachers like that, such videos are nothing but a source of sadness for a nation that wants to be a world teacher. Teaching is a very special job. It is not about teacher's training. A great teacher need not necessarily be trained in handling kids well, he should be trained to handle his subject well. He must want to, love to get his student love his subject, and yes, he must believe his subject to be holding the key to human evolution. Without improving the quality of teachers, the campaign like No child left behind is useless since schools itself are being left behind. Teaching has to be a profession of joy and patience and godliness. Teachers have to be Demi-God and we must create an environment in which they could become one. They should be able to set example and we must let them be able to do that.