Siddhartha Bhasker's Blog, page 6

India's reply to Pakistan, an analogy.

Here is an analogy. There is a co-student in your class who also happens to be rogue and your staunch enemy. He has been performing tasks to trouble you like talking behind your back, stealing from you and hitting you under false premises. You are a good student, hence the onus of ethics are a barrier for you. So you restrain yourself from hitting back your enemy.
This could be one way India and Pakistan are placed strategically. Socially speaking, you could complain to the teacher but she will ask for proof. Even if you collect some sort of proof, she would reprimand him or give him advice on not to continue on this path. Or she may ask you to solve your troubles with him on an individual level. Your enemy is smart too and he will come up with something that you have done to trouble him. The International community is like a teacher here for India and Pakistan.
Going to your parent is like the Indian Army going to the Indian government. The parent will advise you not get into conflict with somebody like him and get on with your work. On further prodding, you may convince your parents to talk to his. Like the Indian government talking to the Pakistani Government. Your enemy’s parents, on the other hand, don’t have much control over their child, the Pakistani army here. Hence your trouble does not stop.
Strategically speaking what should your response be? To neglect your enemy? This is really bad. His actions are taking away your peace; hence you cannot neglect but only pretend to do so. Once he knows that you are in trouble, he will continue with it. To try and be friends with him? If you can’t give him anything other than friendship, most probably he would reject it. You try it and fail. To strengthen your defence? This is important and the first step to be taken. Working hard to minimise your loss is a must. The lesser your loss, the lesser payoff your enemy gets and more frustrated he becomes.
You fear backlash from teachers and parents if you do something unethical to him. Why not teach him a lesson directly and do something that he hates, without leaving proofs. The knowledge that you have done it should be fine, proofs could be a problem. The general notion is that your troubles will increase once you do anything like this. But this is not true. Your troubles should decrease.
A good part of any conflict is psychological.  For him, you are either a fool or a coward even though you can convince yourself of following ethics. Engaging with him by causing him trouble will hit on such psychological superlative and make him run for cover, which means divert his sole attention from troubling you to defending himself. An analogy here is that if you never attack in a football match, your opponent would automatically develop a habit of attacking you, however bad a team it may be. Only when you attack will they need to strengthen their defence.
This will not solve the problem. But in any case the trouble is going to stay so why not reduce yours and give some back to the enemy. Who knows his parents might come to yours to complain one day and be sent back disappointed. Or better, he will find another enemy along with you.
For those fearing a nuclear war, Pakistan is never going to use its nuclear weapons on India. Strategically it will be a blunder. Indian nukes can wipe out Pakistan or at least a good part of it. Hence nuclear war is not happening. Even the Mullahs should know it by now as well.  So let us give the Pakistani army some trouble to reduce ours.
Note: I am not a defence analyst by any means. And have little information of India’s defence tactics. This is a spontaneous post.

Murder novels

What would go in to make a good murder thriller novel? A murder (or murders) has been (or is going to be) committed. There is a suspect; somebody with the job. The suspect is anonymous. The detective has to find the killer.
The detective could be a professional or someone who has been brought in the murder through the circumstances. In Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of the Jackal’, the detective is a professional. The best French detective has to find a man who is going to kill the President of France. He has no idea of who this man could be, how and when the killing will happen or even that a job of such nature is on hand. Information in a good crime thriller novel should be revealed like the melting of ice, slow and uniform until the waters are clear for the reader. Giving too much information at the start would kill interest and giving too less would make the story redundant. Mystery is wedded to information in a zero sum game. More information implies less mystery and vice versa. The Jackal, whom you will fall in love with, never reveals more than he has to.
It is not necessary for the novel to have a structure like the one above. In John le Carre’s classic ‘The Spy who came in from the cold’, there are no clear boundaries between the killer and the detective. The narrative is finely layered and onus of crime well distributed on both parties (in cold war era, espionage was at its peak. Both sides did it.) Both novels have a thing in common. Somebody is out there to make a killing. Somebody else is out there to prevent it. And the reader is hooked to the story to know whether or not it will be done.
What if a murder has already been committed? Something like a serial killer is on the prowl. Time is an important factor here. The detective not only has to find the killer but also prevent the next murder. One is reminded of Seven (later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman). Or it could be a one-time murder many of which Byomkesh Bakshi or Sherlock Holmes have solved. But this knowledge that the murderer is about to make another kill can help finding him/her, if the motives can be found out.
Establishing a motive is important. Mostly it could come from a historical enmity or psychology. The process of killing is also essential to give clues to the detective. A good murderer never leaves clues or leaves them to confuse. If two Professors, one in Gujarat and another in Jharkhand are killed, what can a young Economics Professor and a journalist do to find the murderer when everybody else is sure that it is suicide? They have to get to the motive and find the process of killing. And what if nobody else has ever used the weapon used in these murders? It makes their job a little more difficult.

X: A tale of exams Part II

For those who haven't read Part I, do go through it here.

It is like a hurricane, a tsunami, a whirlpool only few can escape. X never even tried escaping it. School, parents, advertising boards and local shopkeepers make sure that you prepare for IIT JEE. ‘Unka ladka abhi US mein hai. Kharagpur se padhai ki thi usne.Tumne bhi shuru kar di hogi.’ Ashok Uncle reminded him when he went to buy paan for guests in his house. Every paanwala close to the colony in which X lived knew this.
What books to read, what coaching teachers to approach? These questions never ceased to come up in discussions. ‘You should start with NCERT texts, basics clear hoti hai unse, aisa Amit ke bhaiya ne oose bola hai. Abhi IIT Bombay mein hain. Fir H C Verma padhna. Uske baad Irodov.' Tips flowed like water in nearby Damodar.
XYZ Sir had many batches of Physics running simultaneously. But if you went to the morning batch you could attend school directly after that. He taught close to school. PQR Sir Classes should always be attended after school. ‘Agar Sir kisi sawal pe atak gaye to class nahi chootti. Rukna padta hai.’ But he was the only teacher to be open about questions and tried (and solved) every question that came his way. ‘Organic Chemistry to bas ek hi banda paar laga sakta hai. He has developed his own 4 step process to understand these complex mechanisms. Poori batch bhari rehti hai uski. Wo bhi aati hai.’ X’s friend informed him about another schoolmate of theirs who used to attend these organic coaching classes. ‘Fiitjee mein kya enrol karega, same teachers aa ke time slot mein padha jate hain. Fiitjee test series mein enrol kar le.’ And the saga of exams continued with All India test series in which most of the questions were unanswerable for X. One had an All India Ranking which fluctuated like mobile signals on Mumbai local. How can the same student slip so much in All India ranking within one week? X did that though.
Fortunately, during those times, professional coaching had not reached his city as it has now. Most of the classes happened in the car garage. Teachers did not seem interested in aesthetics. If you reached late in a popular coaching class, you could be sitting stuck to unpainted brick walls. It was worse if they were painted. Another issue was the cycle stand. Neighbours would complain regularly. ‘Yahan cycle mat laga,’ even when you could see few cycles standing.  If the class was 2 hours long, the teacher would not mind asking his family to bring him tea. For one of the young teacher classes, this was an incentive for some students. They were more interested in his wife who brought tea than the board with complicated formulas. Why did these students attend coaching? People like X were serious. But they were not. Attending IIT coaching class was a fashion, a requirement, even though passing in board exams could have been difficult for some of them.
X got used to a routine in Class XI. Wake up. Read if there is no tuition class. Go to school. Come back and read. Go to bed and sleep. The only place one could get to relax and socialise was school. And that is how it turned out to be. School teachers are bound by CBSE curriculum. And it had entered X’s mind that if you are well prepared for IITJEE, CBSE would be a cakewalk. Some of his friends thought it too. So they made up a gang and named it Panther. Panther gang had 3 founding members including X. Its job was to maintain order in class. There were few set of rules one had to follow. Anyone disobeying it would get a handkerchief slap (it really hurts if you know how to stretch a handkerchief and provide an impulse to somebody close by). Entry into the gang was through stern tests which cannot be talked about here. Hindi film ‘Josh’ had released sometime then. It had Eagle and Bicchu gang as enemies. Shahrukh khan was the head of Eagle gang in the movie. Panther, it was decided, needed an enemy. Hence one of the peaceful fellows of the class was made the sole member of the Bicchu gang. And whenever there was nothing to do, the Bicchu gang was attacked. Each member had an imaginary girlfriend who would come up in discussions of the gang. This was what X had for entertainment.
Romance had little space. All one could do was impress girls in the Maths, Physics and Chemistry class. But there were many smart people present. His section produced more than 10 students in IITs. Competition never left him.
Class XI passed in stern preparation. ‘Best hoga agar 11 ka portion khatm kar le aur 12 ka bhi thora sa padh le.’ One of his friends had suggested. It didn’t happen for X though.
Note: Just like the first one, if there are atleast 20 comments on this post, the tale would continue further.

Of writing my first Novel

It’s been more than a year since a new post. Not that I haven’t tried to write. Like our judicial system lagging with so many cases unfinished, my writing folder contains unfinished stories. They just kept dragging on and on. Hope justice comes to them someday.
A good deal of focus had been turned to the publication and marketing of B Ground West, my first novel. After the initial hustle bustle, things have settled. So I am in a mood to write and finish a blog post and save it from being a prisoner of the draft folder. A collection of my experiences while writing the novel would serve this purpose well.


Source: Biography Writing Service.com
The first draft, most of it, was written in a studio apartment in Navi Mumbai. Writing is a lonely job, more so when you have to make your own food! One thing that does help you through this process is music. The entertaining hindi movie ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ had released somewhere around the period. I fell in love with the title song which has lines ‘Kab tak giney hum dhadakne…Dil jaise dhadke dhadakne do..Kyun hai koi aag dabi…Shola jo bhake bhadakne do.’ The song was on loop for a few months. The lyrics are inspiring and the music soothing. The song is etched in my memory and it transports me to those time even now.
For me the best place to get the flow of a story is to stand near a (not so crowded) Mumbai local train door. The trains in Navi Mumbai do provide this luxury during non-office hours. I was working at a coaching Institute, hence could afford this luxury. Standing at the wide door with the wind hitting you hard as the landscape of Navi Mumbai rushes through like film images, you are suddenly visited by the elusive link in the story you had been waiting for.
If you are a smoker, you will tend to smoke more while writing. When there is a craving for cigarette and you take out a cigarette from the pack, place it between your lips, search for the match box on your table and open it only to find that you are out of matchsticks; it unsettles you a good deal. Then you search the whole room for that one small wooden piece on which the inflammable material is still intact. The bed, floors and kitchen don’t have any. One cannot ask anybody for the matchbox in the middle of the night. The only option is to go out and find that lonely chaiwallah on a cycle to light a cigarette, cursing all the way ‘yaar tune maachis kyun nahi kharidi cigarette kharidte waqt’ while the street dogs are on the prowl. A bigger issue may arise when you are out of cigarettes and the chaiwallah decides to go on a leave. Then the one rickshawallah who could lend you a bidi will save a story from being deleted from your mind.
 One of the parts of the novel is when four friends are smoked up. I was unable to write that scene satisfactorily and decided to do something about it. Some of you may have heard about getting into the skin of the character, few actors do it. Taking some inspiration, I decided to recreate a similar state of mind while writing the part. You can find few things close to the police station in one of the major areas of Mumbai! It was only when I could get into something myself that the narration came about.
Thankfully while at Navi Mumbai, I had friends from Kharagpur, who would listen to the novel as it was written and offered comments and feedback. Bineet, Ashutosh and Sarosh were the people who were stuck with me in these moments but like good friends, they always gave their suggestions.
The final chapter of the novel was written at the IIMA library. PhD students, when I joined were supposed to take classes with the two year MBA students in the first year. I had to take time out of that schedule to complete the chapter. Most of what was written has been removed in the final version though.
These small experiences, only few of which I have mentioned make the writing process interesting and attractive.
Would love to get comments, if you like this post (and may be interested in reading further) or by chance have read my novel. 

La' Garmi Ahmedabad and beautiful North east!

If cities had split personalities, Ahmedabad would be among the afflicted, especially the campus I live in. There are two campuses- one in the summers and the other in the rest of the year. In the summers you will find the campus mostly deserted to aid loneliness, shops closed adding to food woes, hot rooms inducing sweat and insomnia, occupied libraries with A/C to aid sleeping and dogs running helter-skelter in search of shade and water. I have had the experience of three summers here now and it is safe to say that if you are the kind of person who cannot make plan beforehand and get stuck, you are in for some experience.
Not that everything is bad about it. One does get time to spend alone which has become a costly commodity nowadays. Sometimes the breeze in the night feels so sweet, you want to sleep on the grass. I am reminded of the NCC camp we had during our college days where in the midst of all the discipline and physical work, a biscuit of 5 rupee pack of Parle-G had attained a value of mythical proportions. People fought for it, made and broke friendships for it. But the wind here shows up only intermittently. It knows the value of scarcity, it seems.
On top of it a friend of mine who stays on campus works on Climate Change. I told him once that he has come at the right place to do this kind of research. Necessity is the mother of all inventions after all. Where else one can find the need to reduce temperatures if not in Ahmedabad! My friend is a funny guy. He replied that the challenge is the same on the other side, which is to make all efforts to thwart any research on this topic and let the temperatures soar. In this respect it may not be a good idea to stay here, he said. I found him struggling in his work for some days, maybe he was right. This seemed to be a head on collision until my friend ran away to Northeast of India one fine day.
Another bad thing about summers here is that the addictive fluids which we would normally enjoy become useless and in fact bothersome. I am talking about tea and coffee here. Alcohol is banned in the state of Gujarat if you were having other ideas. Mentally, people like us are addicted to drinking tea at dhabasbut at a temperature of 47 degrees how can one drink a hot liquid! Still the struggle goes on; we keep drinking tea hoping that the gods may have some mercy. This is similar to some of my bachelor friends who are single and extremely reluctant to change their attitudes and habits. Chalta hai chalne do, kuchh na kuchh ho jayega.
Contrast this to the other personality of the campus. There are people all around; there is movement, rain, football, food and a sense of chaos.
My friend who ran away to Northeast came back recently. He described to me his journey on the scenic roads from Kolkata to Siliguri, the metropolis of Guwahati, quasi western Shillong, the peace of small town of Bongaigaon and the incessant rains at Cherapunji. At one place between Cherapunji and Siliguri he was reminded, amid the green mountains, mist ridden clouds and a noisy river flowing beneath, of the abode of gods. At Cherapunji he said he did not come out of his car even once for the fear of getting wet, what a joke! The only time he came out was to visit a cave called the Mawsmai Cave which was a nice experience.
The best thing he said, apart from the sunny weather were the rides. Lonely roads, picturesque surroundings and temporary halts on roadside tea stall with close friends. On top of that the driver, like many drivers was an interesting man in himself. I think there is something in the profession of driving that makes you interesting, probably the act of sitting close and tolerating strangers every day. He laughed at their jokes, cracked his own and urged my friend to go to Bhutan someday. They also passed the village famous for Bodo killings amid the keen eyes of the security personnel.
At the main market square of Shillong where they stayed, the shops, the people in their latest trendy outfits and a couple giving sermons of Jesus Christ on loudspeaker to a group of people gave it a western feeling. I asked him if he bought anything, he said he bought a bhutta (roasted corn) to eat. He said that under such weather, he had a sudden urge of having one. They also passed a signboard of IIM Shillong and in a matter of youthful fascination, all his friends decided to come one day as faculty members of this institute. Sometimes how much of our decisions are driven by factors unknown to the mind, only known to the heart! It’s not that I am asserting these people would come back but one does feel the power the surroundings can have.

It’s raining in Mumbai and we are waiting for rains. Who knows the weather in Ahmedabad might win our hearts once again!

Turning 30..Whats the big deal!

My friend X told me today that it dawned upon him he has turned 30. I asked him what is so special about it. He was not very sure. But then he had read articles like ‘20 things you should do before you turn 30’, ‘Turned 30: Time to look to your finances’, ‘30 and still a virgin’ and stuff like that. Plus his family and friends frequently keep reminding him that all the girls of his age group would get married, now that he has turned 30 and he would have a smaller pool to choose from. Hence he should not waste any more time. He was asking me what to do in such a difficult situation. Asking ME of all the people in the world!
Picture SourceBut then X seems to be worried and I tried to help him out. I asked him to look back at his achievements so far. He started recounting his board marks, his competitive exam results, his certificates, salary and time spent with family. For a moment he took a pause and then said that he had also taken a trek with friends in college. But his finances are in disarray as he had to pay his education loan and currently he doesn’t earn enough. His parents have given in to his demand to choose his own partner. But they get enraged when he reports that he has been unable to do anything till now on this front. His friends are getting married at a frantic speed, every day similar pictures pop up on his Facebook wall, only with faces changed. The women of his generation seem weird creatures to X. Half of his life lived he has little idea of this other half of human species.
I then ask him what these write-ups about turning 30 actually say. Travel, he says; do what you want; live your dreams; save money and things like that. He told me that there are write-ups that talk about 10 places you should go before you turn 30 and X hasn’t even heard of 5 of them, leave aside the option of going to these places. My friend looks sad so I tell him that 30 may just be a number, one can always travel as long as one is alive. As for the issue of women, I assure him that there are many men like him still waiting in the lurches and those who have tied the knot face their own set of problems. But I am not sure how much that worked as the pain of a lonely heart is a difficult one to heal. So I told him some sugary stuff one gets to hear. Love can happen anytime with anyone. You can’t force it, let the time come and grab it once it’s there. Some get it early, others late. Just make sure you are not into too much shit if you get one. Patience I assured him is a good virtue in these decisions.
Then what have you done all this while, I asked? You must have done something. You seem to be a decently hard working man. Yes he says. I am in the process of getting another degree, one of the highest rated ones. So that’s an achievement, I remind him. Yes it is, he says. Did they talk about it in those write ups? No he says. Probably there are too many people like me; hence it doesn’t ring a bell to the readers. Or maybe those article writers don’t consider it worthy enough. I said fuck the article writers, what do you think? He says he is happy at doing what he is doing right now. Let’s leave it to that I said.
What else, I ask? I have published short stories before and written a novel. I am trying to publish it, he says. What is it about? It’s about my days in college. This sounds pretty boring, I say. It may sound but it is not. My novel is not same as the others, it’s experimental. His college which coincidentally is mine as well, IIT kharagpur is just another character in his story with its merits and deficiencies, he says. So is it some sort of college romance? No there is not much romance we had in college, you know that. I said yes that is true. When is it going to be published, I ask? He says he has no idea, it’s been some time he has been trying but not much has happened. I wished him all the best. This means you ARE living your dream, I remind him. He says probably yes. But I still haven’t travelled as they suggest. I tell him you may not been able to write if you had travelled like the others.
X was feeling better now. But then something struck him. What about the virgin thing?  What about it I ask. I mean you know. Yeah Yeah I know. Fuck off!
So 30 is no big deal, he asked. No it isn't, I said. You are on the right track. I quote Oscar Wilde for you “If I had 6 years to cut a tree, I would spend 4 hours sharpening the axe.” Let’s assume you live for 60 years so this means you still have time sharpening your axe. Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said that, he tried to correct me? And it was 8 and 6 years if I remember correctly. Ohh my mistake, how does it matter, I say. Just go cut your fucking tree and let me live in peace!

Gunter, Conscience and Guilt

“Gunter, Gunter…” Oskar would be crying..His creator has died. Gunter Grass, the author of ‘The Tin Drum’ died recently..He was the man who created Oskar Matzerath..And what a creation!
A three year old Oskar decides not to grow up, drums most of his life, can shatter glasses through his scream, falls continuously into love  and travels through Germany during the second world war. A figure of innocence, a man in the body of a child who through his experience enlightens us of the conditions of those times through the medium of literature. Both the powers of symbolism and the finer depths to which literature can take us have been exploited by Grass in the novel.
One has read  the facts of how many deaths, what weapons and what grave injuries were committed which bespeak of the horrors of the war. Every generation after the war rues its occurrence sans those who speak of the brilliant scientific discoveries which it led to. Yet to know the situation through a fictional story, through a unique character who has his own whims and fancies and wades through the characters and events of those times, look into the world through his experiences is completely different. One is invited into his world, gets to see it and then evaluates it on what they perceive. There are no numbers, no big data and most of times we have both sides of the story to choose from. To add that this is true of other stories as well, just that Grass has done it in one of the better ways possible.


Two phrases stick after reading articles and commentaries on Gunter Grass: “Conscience of the nation” and “National guilt.” I am not a German so not suited to comment on how apt they fit. But one does think of what they mean and which author in India can hold those titles?
A nation just like a person has a journey, its an entity. Right and wrong are pretty subjective for it. A murder committed by a woman is wrong until you know that it was done in self defence to prevent rape. An act of charity is good until the selfish quid pro quo arrangement comes to light. Look any day on your Facebook wall and one can find people trying to establish the rules for evaluating the good and bad for a nation, arguing with each other over it. Numerous studies and discussion have done so, will continue to do so. There is little agreement on most of the things. A conscience of a nation like India in this era, hence will be a pretty troubled one that's for sure. Any sane and practical person will have to take sides and bask in the comfort of a faction. And any person in a faction will be a bad candidate for the conscience. The stories told by the writer have to be above all the factionalism but embedded in them. And most importantly a conscience has to speak the truth. One can still write a true story even after being in a faction but it seems a difficult proposition. If one is not in a faction and tries to portray the truth it could be difficult for him/her. The people of the nation should be willing to accept that truth in their hearts however indifferent or conflicting it may sound to them. Finally and the core of it all, because its a story, it has to be gripping, it has to hold the reader. If any author comes to your mind do write a comment.
Guilt again is subjective. National guilt is too sensitive to talk about in India. The only entity to benefit from this is Facebook, it witnesses a spurt of activities. Politicians too benefit in the short term but borrowing from fight club “On a long enough time line the benefits of guilt in politics drops to zero.’ To feel shame, a wrong has to be committed. A nations shame is when it commits a wrong as a collective. India has not committed a Nazi like atrocity outside so that goes out of picture. But it has been a dynamic country on its own in terms of conflict and violence. Can one think of one single act of violence which can put all Indian’s to shame?
One can argue that for Gunter it was easy, Nazi atrocities have a ubiquitous wrong tag. So he didn't have to search hard for one. It was given to him on a plate, he just made a good delicacy out of it. But I don't think so. The role of an author is not to tell people directly about the crime they have committed and then make them accept it. It is much more difficult. It is not easy for a person to accept his actions as a crime, logic more often than not can be argued from both sides. More than that, the cover of ideology has reached far and wide, one can argue his crime with reference to an ideology. I am talking here about personal beliefs because that is where guilt  has to be placed or mined. For a person to feel guilt, the shackles of ideology have to be broken not only by counter arguing with another ideology but by showing the futility and pretentiousness of his own ideology as it has led to the crime in the first place. A child cannot be made to study and let go of his/her rebellion by forcing him/her to sit with books and giving examples of his/her more illustrious friends. The best way would be to generate interest by making him/her aware of the charm of books and joy of gaining knowledge and let these drive the will. .
That is how guilt has to be brought in. The ones who committed the crime have to feel the guilt and not forced to accept it. And anybody who knows how difficult it is to do it for a child can guess how difficult it is to do it to a person for guilt and how magnanimous it will be for an author to do it for a nation. This is where lies the genius of Gunter Grass.

A Chance Encounter: Harishankar Parsai

At the Oxford bookstore in Delhi, among the Booker Prize winners and other big names, there was a thin little book titled ‘Inspector Matadeen on the Moon’, satires by the inimitable Harishankar Parsai. At any other bookstore where it would have been lost among the crowd one would have seldom noticed this book. But placed nicely on a milky white self, standing all by itself in the bookstore I picked it up. It had been some time since one had read satire.
It seems that our minds have been programmed in such a way that when we read something by an author of an Indian name and that too Harishankar, the first impression of its quality is low. Its equivalent to guilty until proven innocent that is bad until proven good. At least I find it in my case. So when I started reading the first story the satire seemed pretty dull, the situation forcibly superimposed. An expert had been invited by the Government of Moon to train its police officers under a Cultural Exchange Scheme. As no other senior officer wished to go, Matadeen a senior inspector was asked to perform the task with a request from the house of SP sahib to bring a heel polishing stone from the moon for his lady.
Once on the moon the inspector took charge. His first step was to order a decrease of wage of police officers. After that he took such drastic steps that the number of cases increased and so did the convictions. He became a hero on the moon and the moon parliament passed a resolution to thank the Government of India. When the Indian Home minister watched the proceedings he started making plans to make a goodwill visit to the moon. Then one fine day after a secret emergency meeting of the moon parliament, Inspector Matadeen was asked to leave. He was offered triple salary on earth by the moon government. The moon people had realized what he had done to the place. He refused to bulge from his duty and left only when the moon government wrote to the Government of India. The story ends with a part of the letter sent by the moon government to the Indian government. It was an exquisite piece of satire, indirect yet hard hitting. I decided to buy the book immediately.
Each of the stories in the book is a slap on the face of the pretentiousness in the Indian society. The second story, my favourite is about a man who is asked to go and he does go on a fast to win a married woman who has no romantic interest in him. It is a story of how false promises and manipulative people can change the social viewpoint causing immense harm to the disinterested and unprepared. As the man’s popularity on the fast rises big leaders come to meet him and take their own sweet profit from the situation. The woman’s husband proposes that she tie a Rakhi on the man’s hand to resolve the situation which no body is ready to accept. Finally the poor woman tries to commit suicide but is saved. The poor man who is on the verge of dying is saved when the government forms a committee to look into the matter. He then joins politics. Behind all this is a manipulative Baba called Sankidas who keeps the fast going. One wonders how applicable this story is in different walks of the society at present.
There is satire on sending a Divine Lunatic mission to America as we have more or less sent everything we have to that country including Kamasutra. There is a brilliant story on a businessman giving his reasons on why he is opening an educational institute and how it is supposed to be run. In the end of the story there is a 15 point agenda for the institute, one of which says “In the college yard mango, papaya and jackfruit trees should be planted. All the produce must always be sent to our house. If the principal fails to do so, he may be sued for breach of contract.” There is a story on research as well where four lines penned by an amateur poet when discovered 100 years later become the four lines which were penned by the greatest poet of the last century and research was able to prove the same. There are a number of other good stories as well.
The final story though is a short memoir of the writer himself. It’s called ‘The Days of Gardish.’ Gardish here stands for Restlessness, which the author had all through his life and which he counts as his motivation. From having a poor and struggling life to travelling ticketless on trains to asking for loans to fighting the relentless attacks of the world the author writes these line “The crying of the one who is awake doesn’t end. The Gardish of a satirist never ends either.”

The stories were written in 1960’s but none seem to have lost their relevance. Harishankar Parsai as I later found out was a winner of the Sahitya Academy Award. The English translation is published by Katha.

In Delhi during election results

Two days back I got the opportunity to visit the AAP office of a local ward. I was accompanying my Uncle who is a member. I did not have any affiliations in the Delhi elections.
It was a small room occupied by around 12-15 people which filled up slowly till it was full at the end. The members comprised of both men and women. The mood was obviously ecstatic. A better part of the initial time was taken to decide the details of celebration on 10th. The impending certainty of good news had stirred them up. The present emotional consumption of future success is a strong driver for people who are marred in day to day mundane activities. They own it especially if they have contributed, take their own sweet time in reaching it. 5 minutes of certainty was stretched to an hour or so. There was supposed to be an LED television for live news feed, speakers and victory march on the day of the results. All members accented to be present. 
The room was probably a classroom because there was a white board with a question of projectile motion written on it. While the AAP members mulled over how to celebrate, I tried to test my physics skills to solve the problem. It was not a tough problem for a fresh mind but for a rusted one it did pose a formidable challenge. My mind wandered from quadratic formula to acceleration equations to trigonometry to recall the way we used to do it. Finally in the midst of sweets and speeches the probable solution occurred to me.
Later an important person came into the room who my uncle told me later was a Sanyojak. He came with the woman who had fought Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareilly. The Sanyojak gave a short speech interspersed with management lessons. He made the members feel how important they were to the party and how their contributions were valuable. He laid down the primary mechanism of party workings which to me sounded merit based. One thing that caught my mind was his emphasis on learning by doing. Members of one ward should not spend too much time helping those in the other ward lest they take too much load and the others start free riding. Every ward should develop its own mechanism of campaign organically. It also sounded like they had implemented it but taking a politicians speech as a guarantee is like believing a writers blog. Both prefer to ride over the idea than plough to action.
Every election you hear that this is a make or break or something or someone. This is the brain child of a bunch of unemployed people, unemployed in the definition from the first principles or I would even say negatively employed. Today in a shop where few Uncleji’s were discussing the results sitting on chairs sipping tea, I overheard their doomsday prediction for Modi. Then while shopping with my mother in the Lajpath Nagar market, while she was arguing the prices of a handbag another young man was putting out reasons of why AAP will again loose the next Lok Sabha elections badly. He was dead sure as sure as of Congress losing the present elections. This is how people try to convert probabilities to certainty. Science may have moved away from it but the human mind does not wish to. 

The Verdict

In our Vikram Sarabhai library which had become my second home for quite some time, the literature section is on the second floor. It’s not a big collection but large enough to sustain a PhD student who needs dozes of fiction in between. One only needs to climb a bunch of stairs to switch into the world of fiction. Many literary giants are present. They stay there all hunched together in silence beside PhD thesis and large bindings of newspapers and old datasets. Within them in a small section lies the collection of Katha Prize stories. Every year the Katha institute brings out the collection of the best translated stories from different languages in India. One good thing about a short story collection is that it’s like a T20 match, gets over in a short while. A novel on the other hand is a Test match, needs a big stretch. Our library has the collection of the Katha Prize stories over a number of years. Today at the end of the year I read the story ‘The Verdict’ by Maitrey Pushpa.




In this story the protagonist ‘Basumati’ has been elected Pirdhan (pradhan or head) of the village just as a cover for her husband Ranveer who is the Pramukh. The story is in the form of a letter Basumati is writing to her teacher narrating her experience on the post. Her husband does not approve of her taking any decision in the village matters. She is expected to take care of the daily chores at home.
Then there is Isuriya, the goat herder who speaks her mind. She has been punished for her truthfulness by Ranveer before. Basumati is well aware of this. She also knows that her victory was a consequence of village women voting for her in expectation that she would address their dismal situation. But her hands are tied and her soul is being torn apart by her inability to help them out.
One day an old woman knocks on her door. Her brother in law tries to drive the woman out but she is adamant to meet Basumati. When Basumati arrives at the door she is pleaded to take the case of her daughter. She was locked up and was not allowed to go with her husband who was on a holiday from army service. The father had denied permission as he would get money orders from his son in law only if his daughter was with him. Also the daughter had gone to the city 3 times for abortion, the reasons for which are made clear later in the story. It’s a bone chilling case. Basumati gathers strength, goes with the old woman and signs for her daughter’s release. In the night Ranveer rebukes her for doing this.
Isuriya breaks the news to Basumati in the morning wailing outside her house. Hardai, the woman who was locked by her father had committed suicide. Somebody had reversed Basumati’s decision of freeing her during the night. The guilt of suicide was placed on Hardai’s husband and the police were searching for him. The story says ‘After getting the Panchnama written, Ranveer sat in Darogaji’s jeep and they drove off in a blaze of glory.” Basumati felt "under the guise of holy matrimony, the association of a tormented bird and a powerful hunter."
The elections for the post of Pramukh were to be held and Ranveer was in the fray again. “True enough, Ranveer was extremely clever. His campaign was not based on ordinary tactics like say, sponsoring liquor. He was the kind of person who was useful in moments of crisis.” He had only one opponent. But on the day of elections, he came back dejected, shivering in fact. Basumati writes to her teacher ‘Maasav, this is nothing to write about, but I did everything I could to comfort him. I prayed I could overcome his agitation by making my mind and body one with his.” It’s only when she hears that her husband lost by one vote, she confesses “I couldn’t kill the Isuriya in me.”

Above is the simplified account of the story. Only while reading it can one grasp the intensity of the rural setting of Dariyapur described by the author. Nice read to end the year.