My Thoughts on Christmas

Let's remember all our neighbours, we have long since forgotten.
Let's remember all our loved ones, the way God remembers us all.
Let's cleanse our souls, so that they shine bright as snow.
Let's purify our hearts, so that God's face shines through.
Let's do, at least, one good deed this day to save our souls.
Let's remember Christ, His love and sacrifice made for us all.

My Thoughts on Christmas

Let's remember all our neighbours, we have now long forgotten.
Let's remember our loved ones, the way God always remembers us.
Let's cleanse our souls, so that they shine bright as snow.
Let's purify our hearts, so that God's face shines through.
Let's do at least one good deed, this day, to save our souls.
Let's remember Christ, and His love for all those He died for.

ETERNAL THOUGHTS

"THE SUPERIOR MAN UNDERSTANDS WHAT IS RIGHT; THE INFERIOR MAN UNDERSTANDS WHAT WILL SELL." -- CONFUCIUS

From Words to Words…And Beyond

"Words, words, words"
Hamlet cried
And I fell in love
Young, adolescent, tendentious love –
I caressed and cajoled
Nursed and indulged
Often made them sit on my bare palms
And stared
With long, lingering eyes
Crawled on all fours
Gave them a piggy-ride
Ran around in a whirl
As they sat in the merry-go-round and giggled
Dizzy heights of love
Fell in one swoop
And made me their own
Less indulgent, more possessive I grew –
Weighing, assessing and measuring
I started peddling them
Laid out my thin wares
In garish, gilded frames
Often felt like a whore
Selling her own daughter
Stripped to the midriff
Staring out of the vacant window
Whenever I caught their accusing gaze
I turned my eyes away
Now they’ve grown old
Weak and weather-beaten
In rags and tatters
They lie quietly
In the folds of my wrinkles
The sight of my silver gray hair
Puts them to shame
Only sometimes
They scream from the pit of silences
And make me restive
When I die, my friend
Wrench a string of words
From my silent heart
Clothe them in a corny wreath
And put it on my "mortal coil."
"Words, words, words"
And more words I say
And you’ll fall in love…

A Passenger in Transit

Dear Friends

I had visited England in 1999. That was my second visit.

I've this bad habit of maintaining a diary. That, I suppose,

is my way of staying in touch with myself, and also recording

every little experience I have. Slowly these jottings turned

into an interesting travelogue, which I have tentatively titled it as:

TO ENGLAND, WITHOUT APOLOGIES.

I'm sharing the opening chapter of this travelogue with you, in the hope that

it may strike some chord somewhere in your heart, too.

Here's the text of Chapter I, titled A PASSENGER IN TRANSIT :

When you are up in the air, the earth seems so inconsequential and insignificant. From the little window of the jet plane, the skyscrapers appear flattened on the ground, their sky-mocking Pinocchio-type noses rubbed into the green of the earth. Whosoever says that the earth is fast losing its green cover should look at it carefully when the plane, having taken off, becomes air-borne and not exactly cloud-borne. The earth appears, unrealistically, unbelievably green. Even the most polluted city would, in such moments, put its worst detractors to shame. Not that I have seen Delhi from his vantagepoint. I never can, for the flights not only leave Delhi but also return to it, under the cover of darkness. I have a feeling that this is part of some international or anti-national (does not really matter how you put it, for in the ultimate analysis, one just means the other) conspiracy. They just do not want the reputation of Delhi to be salvaged even in those fleeting moments when you’re air-borne. In the daytime, they allow the pollutants to have their way and at night, too, they let everyone believe that it’s no better.
The twinkling stars across the surface of Delhi, however, do give you a comfortable feeling that all is not lost, that Delhi still has a sky overhead and sometimes, especially when it’s not wet, it dazzles as well. As one is slowly lifted out of the darkness overhanging Delhi, one strangely feels sad, not comforted. Leaving darkness behind should ordinarily be an uplifting experience but it’s not. Somewhere deep down, I believe we begin to love that darkness, especially if we have lived among its shadows for far too long. Besides, somewhere in that darkness shine faces you have known, of the people you have shared your life and light with. Once you get air-borne, you know that the earth is behind you, that the human settlements are beyond your reach, that among those hazy, lost, black-hole like structures, you too have left a little home or a part of your heart behind. As the darkness gets thicker, with the clouds floating in, faces blur into memories. Over the vast ocean of darkness, when one cannot reach out to the faces in flesh, one clings desperately to the memories racing through the mind. The sound of the over-heated jet engine only makes the mind race faster. Then it begins to fatigue. But now, the plane is very much in a commanding position, steering straight ahead on its chosen path, but you slowly lose control over your senses as drowsiness washes over you. Sleep comes unannounced, unexpectedly, very much like the sound of the pilot or the flight-bursar on the microphone. It comes and goes. Drifting in and out of sleep, you do not quite know which world you belong to – the one you have left behind or the one to which you are so determinedly headed.
Sleeping in one zone and waking up in another – such is the fate of every jet-traveller. The time-zones change for everyone but for most of the travellers, it’s just a question of re-setting their watches, not their mind. We carry ourselves through all kinds of time/space zones, unblinking, without so much as noticing that a change that has occurred demands that we, too, change. How and in what manner, I don’t quite know. All I know is that time zones do something fuzzy to our consciousness, our whole being in a way. It is re-made, re-set like our watches; almost re-invented without our knowing it. And it’s this re-invented being that peeps out the next morning as the plane touches the ground of Charles De Gaulle airport. The misty, rain-swept morning is something like the uncertain, memory-ridden night you have had. As the plane zeroes in upon the runway, you try and shed your bleariness so that you can be more focussed and alert; ready to hurl yourself into the arms of a new day, a new morning. All your dreams of watching the Seine or the Eiffel Tower from the French windows of the airport lie buried under the announcement you’d heard a few minutes before landing, which said: “Paris is some thirty-two miles from the air-port.” There you are. Things rarely turn out the way you expect them to. Having lost the opportunity to get a visa entry to France on your passport, all you can do is comfort yourself, saying: “Well, I did it for a good reason. The evening with the wife and children was well spent.” No, you do not regret it in the least. You do regret not having armed yourself with information on Paris, though. When I travel, I let my wanderings prove to me how and in what different ways have I gone wrong! It’s like the road telling me that I am not walking on the right track. The more I travel, the more knocks I get; the more knocks I get, the less I know, the less I know, the more mistakes I commit. And the more mistakes I make, the more I travel. I am no Ulysses, and I do not have to travel beyond the utmost bound of human thought. For me, travelling does not mean accepting yourself as a superior being, it means accepting yourself as a lesser mortal, as a human being, warts and all.
Paris fails to hold your attention when you are just passing through, when you are a passenger in transit. Not that I have seen it, but I imagine that Paris is somewhat like those French wines that are silently brewed in cold-cellars for long and that demand a connoisseur’s well-attenuated taste and attention. I am more like a non-drinker, walking past a rich haul inside the cellar with the perfunctoriness of someone who doesn’t care. But even the most hardened of non-drinkers have a secret wish to taste the wine, if nothing else but to know how it feels on the tongue. But I have to pass it over. There is hardly any choice. Passengers cannot be choosers, least of all, the passengers in transit. They have things to worry about, things such as their baggage, which terminal to go for their next flight, how to get there, how not to react when the French customs’ official demands that you empty out your pockets and pass through the metal detector, the second time. So wrapped are you in doing what is either demanded or not demanded of you that you have no time to worry. Besides, you almost bless your stars, stop worrying altogether when you find that someone, who has the same colour as you or is perhaps from the country of your origin as well, has been asked to step out of the queue for a more rigorous questioning. It leaves you temporarily disturbed to find that all the white passengers of Air France have been allowed to go through the security check with minimum of fuss. Is this the miracle of your skin, the charisma of your colour that you get more intrusive attention that you can cope with? I do not know. It’s perhaps, too, early for me to thinking such thoughts, too early to form any impressions, good or bad, too early to start judging people or situations. Besides, does a single swallow make a summer? Paris is cold and wet and the summer appears far away, too far for comfort.
With these thoughts criss-crossing my mind, I follow a charming hostess of Air France, holding up a placard with London Heathrow written on it, leading all the passengers across the gate from where we/they have to board the plane again. Another boarding pass, another queue, except that this time round, all of it is rather rushed. From a 336-seater jet jumbo on to a 100-seater carrier, you not only feel somewhat cramped but also diminished. You have been second time lucky. Again, you have found a seat next to the window. As the engine is set into motion, you cast one last longing look at the little strip of Charles De Gaulle (for that’s about the only thing you can see outside) and turn around to look at the fellow passengers. The same couple with a small child, who howled through the night, punctuating your sleep, is now seated next to you. The man is in a white kurta-pyjama and a sleeveless black jacket. He is extraordinarily tall, but his height does not overawe you. It’s either his long nose on an otherwise handsome, well-cut face or a well tied, tuft of hair at the back of his completely shaven head. As you spontaneously mumble ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ he twists around to give you a cold, hard stare. Sheepish, you pretend to smile at his bawling child but your smile withers away hopelessly under the strain of the effort. And you retreat behind the newspaper which he already has thrown open, right next to your nose, mercifully not even half as long or half as sharp. Nursing your nose, you sneak a glance or two at his wife who is not very short but is dwarfed each time he stands up next to her. His voice is self-assured and authoritative, but she only mumbles each time she speaks. Occasionally, he puts his arm around her in a sudden rash of affection, gives her a tight hug or a peck on her cheek. And each time he demonstrates his affection or love or whatever else it is, she appears gratified, somewhat overburdened with his perfunctory kisses and the child’s insistent bawling. Only when she decides to put the child to breast to soothe him do you look away, out of well-imbibed sense of propriety. You are glad that this propriety has travelled with you from your land of birth and has not been left behind in the darkness that hung over Delhi the day you left.
By now, the plane has pierced through the clouds. Huge bundles of rain-washed cotton wool lie scattered all around. No object in sight! It is almost as if the earth has ceased to exist, at least, temporarily. White clouds have pulled themselves over the earth, spreading like the crumbled map of the colonial ruler that used to send all the dark strains into hiding, cloaking the ugly nakedness of the earth almost instantly. The unsettling symmetry of the human settlements as they appear to the naked eye from somewhere in the sky, is also forgotten like Karl Marx’s dream of social equality. Clouds have a way of making you forget that you’re an earthly being, that the earth is not as beautiful as it sometimes appears, that human beings are not equal though the distance might make you think they are. In short, nothing is what you either think or feel it is. Clouds have a way of telling you that you cannot always know or penetrate everything; that there are limits to what your mind can know or your heart feel. Floating on the huge bundles of cotton wool, you feel like a real dwarf, not just an optical one that the tall man’s wife begins to appear as soon as he stands up. Your reverie breaks only with an announcement in broken English, saying, “Soon, we’re going to land on London Heathrow.” The way they put it, it almost sounds as though London is the name of the airport and Heathrow, that of the place. Never you mind. It sounds good the way it is pronounced. Besides, who are you to question it? They like it this way. Why must you always question the logic of things? And whose logic is it, anyway? Yours or theirs? It is certainly not everyone’s.
This time round, you are not as shaky to find yourself at the Heathrow as you were the first time you landed here. That was some two years ago. You had been told to call up the British Council office from Heathrow to find out about your accommodation. Remember how you had gone round and round in circles, trying to figure out how to make a call from the phone booth. Too embarrassed to admit your ignorance to anyone, you had stood outside a booth, observing others make calls. That is how you had found out that calls couldn’t be made without a phone-card. After buying the card, you had kept turning it over for a long time to figure out how to use it. All those memories of wasting almost two hours trying to put a call through are still with you as you confidently walk into the nearest shop to buy a phone-card, almost with the flourish of a native. Calls through, you walk across to a counter to find out about hotels/hostels in London. In your feigned spiritedness, you greet a thickset, bespectacled person behind the counter with a more than usual warm ‘Good Morning,’ He unsettles you by saying,
‘No, it’s not a very good morning. But what can I do for you?’
Still collecting your wits, which get easily scattered in a foreign land, you shoot a nervous query, ‘Please tell me about a decent place I could spend the night in? Reasonably good but not very expensive.’
You immediately realise that it’s your third-world syndrome that has made you add that bit about ‘not very expensive.’
‘What’s your expectation?’
‘Say, fifteen to twenty pounds.’
‘I’m sorry, there’s no place in London as cheap as this.’
You feel guilty for having thought that London, too, could be cheap. You are glad that he has put you straight on that rather early on in your wanderings. You do not even know how this fortuitous remark is a preparation for much of what you have to meet in London, later that evening. Despite the gruffness of his tone, his suggestion about looking for a hotel on the Belgrave Road turns out to be sound one. This road runs close to the Victoria Coach Station from where you have to catch the coach for Norwich, the next morning. You discover that the coach station is not more than five minutes walk from Leicester Hotel on the Belgrave Road, that eminently forgettable place where you end up spending the only night in London.
No, I had not really planned to stay at Leicester Hotel. To be honest, I did not even know it existed. As I was dragging my luggage sullenly on the pavement outside the Victoria Station, wiping the sweat off my face, unable to breathe in the fresh, cool draught of London, I suddenly came across this modest-looking hotel. Modest, of course, it was not by my standards but only in comparison to the other hotels in the neighbourhood that towered far above it. Right across the road stood the majestic-looking Eccleston Hotel, neon-sign beaming even in the daytime. As I was to discover later, Belgrave Road is known for its endless rows of hotels, stretching out in all possible directions. But did I have the patience to check out on the other hotels and compare the tariff? No! It was sheer fatigue of a ten-hour long journey, made worse by having to drag my luggage, which made me enter the first reasonably looking lodging I could. When the young man with a ponytail, sitting behind the counter announced ‘Thirty-five-pounds’ in his heavily accented-voice, I simply gave in. I did not ask him all those questions that the experienced travellers often do ask. For instance, I didn’t ask him if the room was on the ground floor or the top floor; whether or not it was equipped with a telly and channel music; or if there was a porter around to help me with luggage. The moment he said ‘Thirty-five pounds’ I wearily took out my purse and handed him a fifty pounds bill. He slipped in the key along with the change, without so much as explaining the directions. When I asked, his cryptic reply was “The third floor. Walk down the corridor and then go up the stairs.” Until then, I hadn’t quite realised what I had let myself in for, which I did only when I had to carry my huge suitcase up the steps. The climb was simply endless and the steps small. It was not possible for me to rest the suitcase on the steps. It had to be carried all the way up to the floor. By the time I had finished lugging all my baggage up to Room no; 65, my fatigue had reached a breaking point. What was worse, all this effort had made my back-strain return. I cursed myself for not having hired a taxi, for being a stingy traveller, for not having found a hotel with a porter. I certainly hadn’t come all the way to England to feel so miserable. Besides, the prospect of nursing my back-strain through the only evening I had in London was not particularly an encouraging one.
What a mousetrap of a room it is! No bigger than a solitary-cell. Though there is a large glass window overlooking the street, it has curtains that block out the natural light. Not that there is much of natural light, anyway. It is a windy, sunless day. I retire to the bathroom for a hot shower, which almost brings me back to life. The bathroom barely has a space for one person to stand in, but what more? Modest-looking places can be quite cramped and self-limiting, at times; just as the large, open spaces can, sometimes, be frightfully intimidating. It all depends upon where you are and how you are experiencing whatever you are. I console myself by saying it aloud, ‘Well, how does it matter? I just have to spend the night here, not my entire life.’ As I say it, image of worn-out, dilapidated shanties and ramshackle tenements flash across my mind – images of all those cramped spaces, somewhere in a Delhi slum where people spend their entire lives without complaining, without a demur or protest. I have seen one often gets into the habit of complaining only if one has. For the one who does not have, life itself is a complaint. But for the one who has never tires of complaining every minute of his life. It surprises me immensely that I am whining so much. I have not been particularly notorious for it. Does it mean that I am acquiring a new set of habits, too? Is this what the re-invention all about? Time inventing us, and re-inventing us. We, inventing a story, and someone re-inventing it. Repetition. Endless repetition. Of words, of experiences, of stories, even of time. When you are on your own, you have a plentiful of everything but no thought of how to use it, and upon whom or against whom.
My journey has just about begun. I’m still a long way off the destination where I’m supposedly headed. So I decide to walk across to the Victoria Coach Station to book myself on a coach leaving for Norwich, the next morning. Though every kind of information is being put out through the video-screens, I decide to approach the man at enquiry desk. He gives me a folder with complete information on coaches leaving for various destinations in and across England, encircles Norwich for my convenience and directs me to the reservation counter. It does not take me more than five minutes to get the reservation done. The man behind the window, a black with a genial smile and elegant manners is as helpful and polite as anyone could be. As I am about to step out of the station-gate, it suddenly occurs to me that I have not had anything to eat since the last meal served on the plane. It does not really matter when it was, for I had not re-set my watch at that point in time. What matters is that it is 13.00 (GMT) and I suddenly in the grip of severe hunger pangs. Scouting around for an eatery, I find myself outside an outlet that sells sandwiches, bread and buns of a wide variety. I buy myself a cup of tea and three thick-looking buns with black currants, and retire to a bench in the corner. That moment as I sat crouched in a corner, nibbling hungrily at the buns with black currants, I was suddenly reminded of a beggar at Delhi bus station, whom I had bought puree-chana and who, too, had sat in a corner and sated his hunger, just the way as I did now. Is it that the hunger has a way of reducing all of us, regardless of who we are or where we are, to plain and simple beggars? Or is it that on being placed in a situation where we are not observed or watched, we all tend to eat as hungrily as the rest of us? It is strange that we forget our manners when we need them the most, in presence of the strangers.

A Passenger in Transit

When you are up in the air, the earth seems so inconsequential and insignificant. From the little window of the jet plane, the skyscrapers appear flattened on the ground, their sky-mocking Pinocchio-type noses rubbed into the green of the earth. Whosoever says that the earth is fast losing its green cover should look at it carefully when the plane, having taken off, becomes air-borne and not exactly cloud-borne. The earth appears, unrealistically, unbelievably green. Even the most polluted city would, in such moments, put its worst detractors to shame. Not that I have seen Delhi from his vantagepoint. I never can, for the flights not only leave Delhi but also return to it, under the cover of darkness. I have a feeling that this is part of some international or anti-national (does not really matter how you put it, for in the ultimate analysis, one just means the other) conspiracy. They just do not want the reputation of Delhi to be salvaged even in those fleeting moments when you’re air-borne. In the daytime, they allow the pollutants to have their way and at night, too, they let everyone believe that it’s no better.
The twinkling stars across the surface of Delhi, however, do give you a comfortable feeling that all is not lost, that Delhi still has a sky overhead and sometimes, especially when it’s not wet, it dazzles as well. As one is slowly lifted out of the darkness overhanging Delhi, one strangely feels sad, not comforted. Leaving darkness behind should ordinarily be an uplifting experience but it’s not. Somewhere deep down, I believe we begin to love that darkness, especially if we have lived among its shadows for far too long. Besides, somewhere in that darkness shine faces you have known, of the people you have shared your life and light with. Once you get air-borne, you know that the earth is behind you, that the human settlements are beyond your reach, that among those hazy, lost, black-hole like structures, you too have left a little home or a part of your heart behind. As the darkness gets thicker, with the clouds floating in, faces blur into memories. Over the vast ocean of darkness, when one cannot reach out to the faces in flesh, one clings desperately to the memories racing through the mind. The sound of the over-heated jet engine only makes the mind race faster. Then it begins to fatigue. But now, the plane is very much in a commanding position, steering straight ahead on its chosen path, but you slowly lose control over your senses as drowsiness washes over you. Sleep comes unannounced, unexpectedly, very much like the sound of the pilot or the flight-bursar on the microphone. It comes and goes. Drifting in and out of sleep, you do not quite know which world you belong to – the one you have left behind or the one to which you are so determinedly headed.
Sleeping in one zone and waking up in another – such is the fate of every jet-traveller. The time-zones change for everyone but for most of the travellers, it’s just a question of re-setting their watches, not their mind. We carry ourselves through all kinds of time/space zones, unblinking, without so much as noticing that a change that has occurred demands that we, too, change. How and in what manner, I don’t quite know. All I know is that time zones do something fuzzy to our consciousness, our whole being in a way. It is re-made, re-set like our watches; almost re-invented without our knowing it. And it’s this re-invented being that peeps out the next morning as the plane touches the ground of Charles De Gaulle airport. The misty, rain-swept morning is something like the uncertain, memory-ridden night you have had. As the plane zeroes in upon the runway, you try and shed your bleariness so that you can be more focussed and alert; ready to hurl yourself into the arms of a new day, a new morning. All your dreams of watching the Seine or the Eiffel Tower from the French windows of the airport lie buried under the announcement you’d heard a few minutes before landing, which said: “Paris is some thirty-two miles from the air-port.” There you are. Things rarely turn out the way you expect them to. Having lost the opportunity to get a visa entry to France on your passport, all you can do is comfort yourself, saying: “Well, I did it for a good reason. The evening with the wife and children was well spent.” No, you do not regret it in the least. You do regret not having armed yourself with information on Paris, though. When I travel, I let my wanderings prove to me how and in what different ways have I gone wrong! It’s like the road telling me that I am not walking on the right track. The more I travel, the more knocks I get; the more knocks I get, the less I know, the less I know, the more mistakes I commit. And the more mistakes I make, the more I travel. I am no Ulysses, and I do not have to travel beyond the utmost bound of human thought. For me, travelling does not mean accepting yourself as a superior being, it means accepting yourself as a lesser mortal, as a human being, warts and all.
Paris fails to hold your attention when you are just passing through, when you are a passenger in transit. Not that I have seen it, but I imagine that Paris is somewhat like those French wines that are silently brewed in cold-cellars for long and that demand a connoisseur’s well-attenuated taste and attention. I am more like a non-drinker, walking past a rich haul inside the cellar with the perfunctoriness of someone who doesn’t care. But even the most hardened of non-drinkers have a secret wish to taste the wine, if nothing else but to know how it feels on the tongue. But I have to pass it over. There is hardly any choice. Passengers cannot be choosers, least of all, the passengers in transit. They have things to worry about, things such as their baggage, which terminal to go for their next flight, how to get there, how not to react when the French customs’ official demands that you empty out your pockets and pass through the metal detector, the second time. So wrapped are you in doing what is either demanded or not demanded of you that you have no time to worry. Besides, you almost bless your stars, stop worrying altogether when you find that someone, who has the same colour as you or is perhaps from the country of your origin as well, has been asked to step out of the queue for a more rigorous questioning. It leaves you temporarily disturbed to find that all the white passengers of Air France have been allowed to go through the security check with minimum of fuss. Is this the miracle of your skin, the charisma of your colour that you get more intrusive attention that you can cope with? I do not know. It’s perhaps, too, early for me to thinking such thoughts, too early to form any impressions, good or bad, too early to start judging people or situations. Besides, does a single swallow make a summer? Paris is cold and wet and the summer appears far away, too far for comfort.
With these thoughts criss-crossing my mind, I follow a charming hostess of Air France, holding up a placard with London Heathrow written on it, leading all the passengers across the gate from where we/they have to board the plane again. Another boarding pass, another queue, except that this time round, all of it is rather rushed. From a 336-seater jet jumbo on to a 100-seater carrier, you not only feel somewhat cramped but also diminished. You have been second time lucky. Again, you have found a seat next to the window. As the engine is set into motion, you cast one last longing look at the little strip of Charles De Gaulle (for that’s about the only thing you can see outside) and turn around to look at the fellow passengers. The same couple with a small child, who howled through the night, punctuating your sleep, is now seated next to you. The man is in a white kurta-pyjama and a sleeveless black jacket. He is extraordinarily tall, but his height does not overawe you. It’s either his long nose on an otherwise handsome, well-cut face or a well tied, tuft of hair at the back of his completely shaven head. As you spontaneously mumble ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ he twists around to give you a cold, hard stare. Sheepish, you pretend to smile at his bawling child but your smile withers away hopelessly under the strain of the effort. And you retreat behind the newspaper which he already has thrown open, right next to your nose, mercifully not even half as long or half as sharp. Nursing your nose, you sneak a glance or two at his wife who is not very short but is dwarfed each time he stands up next to her. His voice is self-assured and authoritative, but she only mumbles each time she speaks. Occasionally, he puts his arm around her in a sudden rash of affection, gives her a tight hug or a peck on her cheek. And each time he demonstrates his affection or love or whatever else it is, she appears gratified, somewhat overburdened with his perfunctory kisses and the child’s insistent bawling. Only when she decides to put the child to breast to soothe him do you look away, out of well-imbibed sense of propriety. You are glad that this propriety has travelled with you from your land of birth and has not been left behind in the darkness that hung over Delhi the day you left.
By now, the plane has pierced through the clouds. Huge bundles of rain-washed cotton wool lie scattered all around. No object in sight! It is almost as if the earth has ceased to exist, at least, temporarily. White clouds have pulled themselves over the earth, spreading like the crumbled map of the colonial ruler that used to send all the dark strains into hiding, cloaking the ugly nakedness of the earth almost instantly. The unsettling symmetry of the human settlements as they appear to the naked eye from somewhere in the sky, is also forgotten like Karl Marx’s dream of social equality. Clouds have a way of making you forget that you’re an earthly being, that the earth is not as beautiful as it sometimes appears, that human beings are not equal though the distance might make you think they are. In short, nothing is what you either think or feel it is. Clouds have a way of telling you that you cannot always know or penetrate everything; that there are limits to what your mind can know or your heart feel. Floating on the huge bundles of cotton wool, you feel like a real dwarf, not just an optical one that the tall man’s wife begins to appear as soon as he stands up. Your reverie breaks only with an announcement in broken English, saying, “Soon, we’re going to land on London Heathrow.” The way they put it, it almost sounds as though London is the name of the airport and Heathrow, that of the place. Never you mind. It sounds good the way it is pronounced. Besides, who are you to question it? They like it this way. Why must you always question the logic of things? And whose logic is it, anyway? Yours or theirs? It is certainly not everyone’s.
This time round, you are not as shaky to find yourself at the Heathrow as you were the first time you landed here. That was some two years ago. You had been told to call up the British Council office from Heathrow to find out about your accommodation. Remember how you had gone round and round in circles, trying to figure out how to make a call from the phone booth. Too embarrassed to admit your ignorance to anyone, you had stood outside a booth, observing others make calls. That is how you had found out that calls couldn’t be made without a phone-card. After buying the card, you had kept turning it over for a long time to figure out how to use it. All those memories of wasting almost two hours trying to put a call through are still with you as you confidently walk into the nearest shop to buy a phone-card, almost with the flourish of a native. Calls through, you walk across to a counter to find out about hotels/hostels in London. In your feigned spiritedness, you greet a thickset, bespectacled person behind the counter with a more than usual warm ‘Good Morning,’ He unsettles you by saying,
‘No, it’s not a very good morning. But what can I do for you?’
Still collecting your wits, which get easily scattered in a foreign land, you shoot a nervous query, ‘Please tell me about a decent place I could spend the night in? Reasonably good but not very expensive.’
You immediately realise that it’s your third-world syndrome that has made you add that bit about ‘not very expensive.’
‘What’s your expectation?’
‘Say, fifteen to twenty pounds.’
‘I’m sorry, there’s no place in London as cheap as this.’
You feel guilty for having thought that London, too, could be cheap. You are glad that he has put you straight on that rather early on in your wanderings. You do not even know how this fortuitous remark is a preparation for much of what you have to meet in London, later that evening. Despite the gruffness of his tone, his suggestion about looking for a hotel on the Belgrave Road turns out to be sound one. This road runs close to the Victoria Coach Station from where you have to catch the coach for Norwich, the next morning. You discover that the coach station is not more than five minutes walk from Leicester Hotel on the Belgrave Road, that eminently forgettable place where you end up spending the only night in London.
No, I had not really planned to stay at Leicester Hotel. To be honest, I did not even know it existed. As I was dragging my luggage sullenly on the pavement outside the Victoria Station, wiping the sweat off my face, unable to breathe in the fresh, cool draught of London, I suddenly came across this modest-looking hotel. Modest, of course, it was not by my standards but only in comparison to the other hotels in the neighbourhood that towered far above it. Right across the road stood the majestic-looking Eccleston Hotel, neon-sign beaming even in the daytime. As I was to discover later, Belgrave Road is known for its endless rows of hotels, stretching out in all possible directions. But did I have the patience to check out on the other hotels and compare the tariff? No! It was sheer fatigue of a ten-hour long journey, made worse by having to drag my luggage, which made me enter the first reasonably looking lodging I could. When the young man with a ponytail, sitting behind the counter announced ‘Thirty-five-pounds’ in his heavily accented-voice, I simply gave in. I did not ask him all those questions that the experienced travellers often do ask. For instance, I didn’t ask him if the room was on the ground floor or the top floor; whether or not it was equipped with a telly and channel music; or if there was a porter around to help me with luggage. The moment he said ‘Thirty-five pounds’ I wearily took out my purse and handed him a fifty pounds bill. He slipped in the key along with the change, without so much as explaining the directions. When I asked, his cryptic reply was “The third floor. Walk down the corridor and then go up the stairs.” Until then, I hadn’t quite realised what I had let myself in for, which I did only when I had to carry my huge suitcase up the steps. The climb was simply endless and the steps small. It was not possible for me to rest the suitcase on the steps. It had to be carried all the way up to the floor. By the time I had finished lugging all my baggage up to Room no; 65, my fatigue had reached a breaking point. What was worse, all this effort had made my back-strain return. I cursed myself for not having hired a taxi, for being a stingy traveller, for not having found a hotel with a porter. I certainly hadn’t come all the way to England to feel so miserable. Besides, the prospect of nursing my back-strain through the only evening I had in London was not particularly an encouraging one.
What a mousetrap of a room it is! No bigger than a solitary-cell. Though there is a large glass window overlooking the street, it has curtains that block out the natural light. Not that there is much of natural light, anyway. It is a windy, sunless day. I retire to the bathroom for a hot shower, which almost brings me back to life. The bathroom barely has a space for one person to stand in, but what more? Modest-looking places can be quite cramped and self-limiting, at times; just as the large, open spaces can, sometimes, be frightfully intimidating. It all depends upon where you are and how you are experiencing whatever you are. I console myself by saying it aloud, ‘Well, how does it matter? I just have to spend the night here, not my entire life.’ As I say it, image of worn-out, dilapidated shanties and ramshackle tenements flash across my mind – images of all those cramped spaces, somewhere in a Delhi slum where people spend their entire lives without complaining, without a demur or protest. I have seen one often gets into the habit of complaining only if one has. For the one who does not have, life itself is a complaint. But for the one who has never tires of complaining every minute of his life. It surprises me immensely that I am whining so much. I have not been particularly notorious for it. Does it mean that I am acquiring a new set of habits, too? Is this what the re-invention all about? Time inventing us, and re-inventing us. We, inventing a story, and someone re-inventing it. Repetition. Endless repetition. Of words, of experiences, of stories, even of time. When you are on your own, you have a plentiful of everything but no thought of how to use it, and upon whom or against whom.
My journey has just about begun. I’m still a long way off the destination where I’m supposedly headed. So I decide to walk across to the Victoria Coach Station to book myself on a coach leaving for Norwich, the next morning. Though every kind of information is being put out through the video-screens, I decide to approach the man at enquiry desk. He gives me a folder with complete information on coaches leaving for various destinations in and across England, encircles Norwich for my convenience and directs me to the reservation counter. It does not take me more than five minutes to get the reservation done. The man behind the window, a black with a genial smile and elegant manners is as helpful and polite as anyone could be. As I am about to step out of the station-gate, it suddenly occurs to me that I have not had anything to eat since the last meal served on the plane. It does not really matter when it was, for I had not re-set my watch at that point in time. What matters is that it is 13.00 (GMT) and I suddenly in the grip of severe hunger pangs. Scouting around for an eatery, I find myself outside an outlet that sells sandwiches, bread and buns of a wide variety. I buy myself a cup of tea and three thick-looking buns with black currants, and retire to a bench in the corner. That moment as I sat crouched in a corner, nibbling hungrily at the buns with black currants, I was suddenly reminded of a beggar at Delhi bus station, whom I had bought puree-chana and who, too, had sat in a corner and sated his hunger, just the way as I did now. Is it that the hunger has a way of reducing all of us, regardless of who we are or where we are, to plain and simple beggars? Or is it that on being placed in a situation where we are not observed or watched, we all tend to eat as hungrily as the rest of us? It is strange that we forget our manners when we need them the most, in presence of the strangers.

A PRAYER

Dear Friends

Often when we are down and out, it's the magic

of prayer that works. Prayer is not just words,

it's the scream of an anguished heart, it is

a way of connecting with our deeper self,

it is a way of connecting with the cosmic self, too.

Here, you'll find a prayer, not specific to any religion.

This was given to me by a Reiki Master.

Do try it out, if you like. Who knows,

it just might work for you as well.

Believe me, it has always worked for me.

Good luck and God Bless.

The text of the prayer starts now:

I thank thee, O Lord!
I thank thee, O Lord, for this wonderful Creation
I thank thee, O Lord, for the blessings of Gods and Goddesses
I thank thee, O Lord, for the blessings of Gurus and Elders
I thank thee, O Lord, for this gift of human life
I thank thee, O Lord, for this gift of human body
I thank thee, O Lord, for each and every organ, bone, nerve and muscle in this body
I thank thee, O Lord, for the brain that thinks
I thank thee, O Lord, for the hair on my head
I thank thee, O Lord, for the smooth forehead
I thank thee, O Lord, for the third eye chakra
I thank thee, O Lord, for the eyes that see
I thank thee, O Lord, for the nose that smells
I thank thee, O Lord, for the lips that move and speak
I thank thee, O Lord, for the tongue that tastes and rolls
I thank thee, O Lord, for the teeth that smile
I thank thee, O Lord, for the cheeks that glow
I thank thee, O Lord, for the jaw that opens
I thank thee, O Lord, for the ears that hear
I thank thee, O Lord, for the throat and food-pipe that swallow
I thank thee, O Lord, for the neck that supports
I thank thee, O Lord, for the right arm, right elbow and right wrist
I thank thee, O Lord, for the left arm, left elbow and left wrist
I thank thee, O Lord, for the hands that help
I thank thee, O Lord, for the fingers that write
I thank thee, O Lord, for the chest and ribs
I thank thee, O Lord, for the lungs that breathe
I thank thee, O Lord, for the heart that beats
I thank thee, O Lord, for the solar plexus
I thank thee, O Lord, for the navel that binds
I thank thee, O Lord, for the liver that secretes juices
I thank thee, O Lord, for the hara chakra
I thank thee, O Lord, for the root chakra
I thank thee, O Lord, for the pancreas
I thank thee, O Lord, for the kidneys that flush out
I thank thee, O Lord, for the intestines that function
I thank thee, O Lord, for each and every vertebra in my spine
I thank thee, O Lord, for the lower back
I thank thee, O Lord, for the hips, thighs and knees, right and left
I thank thee, O Lord, for the calves and ankles, right and left
I thank thee, O Lord, for the feet, right and left
I thank thee, O Lord, for the toes on both the feet
I thank thee, O Lord, for the soles of both the feet
I thank thee, O Lord, for the sun that shines
I thank thee, O Lord, for the vast, blue sky
I thank thee, O Lord, for the stars and the moon
I thank thee, O Lord, for the water, air and fire pure
I thank thee, O Lord, for the animals and plants
I thank thee, O Lord, for the bounties of Nature
I thank thee, O Lord, for watching over me each minute, each second of the day
I thank thee, O Lord, for all your gifts
I thank thee, O Lord, for giving me the strength and the words to thank thee
I thank thee, O Lord!
I thank thee

Through the Eyes of a Teacher

With my back turned on them
Many-a-time
I’d caught myself
In the act of scrawling
Feverishly
With broken chalk pieces
I’d shaped many-a-letter into words
All this while
The polished surface kept up the sheen

But now
The sheen is slowly fading off
And the chalk is dwindling
Into flakes of dust
Gathered on my bare palms
Smudging the lines of Fate

With slow, gray hands
I hold yet another chalk-piece
In my frail fingers
Scrubbing the board
I step back
Rubbing my eyes
As letters lose their shape
Dissolve into words
And words into nothingness
A graveyard of unknown faces.

I wonder
If they ever knew
What I could not
All those who drilled a hole
Through my back
Peering hard all these years.

E-eavesdropping

Dear Friends

Here's another of those juicy pieces, which I occasionally write as a respite from academic writing. It's based upon a real incident, as much as most of these pieces often are. That's about the only 'intro' I'd like to give. You must read it to know whether there's something worth reading about in there. (Incidentally, this has been published in The Tribune, November 29, 2008 as a middle on the edit page).

Now the text of the middle:

You may wonder what this ‘e-Eavesdropping’ is all about. No, I’m certainly not saying that ‘e’ stands for ‘eavesdropping,’ which it does, but I’m sure, you don’t expect me to state the obvious, or do you?
Well, you may have heard of all sorts of e-words. Please for e’s sake, don’t get me wrong. I’m only saying, e-words, not ‘f,’ ‘g’ nor ‘h’ words. And though ‘e’ does figure in the middle of ‘swear,’ I’m certainly not using it in that sense, either. None of the ‘s’wear words, I suspect, ever begin with ‘e’ or do they?
‘E’ was known for its ‘elephantine’ associations, once. At least, that was the case when we all used to learn our alphabets. I don’t really know what children do these days. Perhaps, they have moved on to ‘e-learning,’ already.
In the past few years, ‘e’ has become a short hand for all things ‘electronic.’ So, our lives have suddenly been invaded by all kinds of hyphenated ‘e-ees,’ such as e-mail, e-transfer, e-teaching, e-shopping, e-commerce, e-management and now e-governance.
But again, I doubt if you have ever heard of e-Eavesdropping! Until very recently, I didn’t even know, it existed. But wasn’t it Nietzsche who said, if God didn’t exist, we would have had to invent one. So I simply went ahead and invented this phrase, without which I couldn’t have possibly shared this experience of mine.
One fine morning (or was it a foul one!), a message was flashed on my mobile, saying, “Wah, mukti, Kya baat hai! Life is looking rosy 4 me after that, and I hope 4 u 2.” Though I keep getting all kinds of ‘bizarre’ messages, this one seemed to beat all of them hollow. Mystified, I rolled it down to see if I knew the sender. Of course, I did. It was a friend, but with her I had no known history of ‘ex’-changing ‘coded’ messages.
Believe me, being a very ‘insipid’ person, I only send straight-‘forward’ messages, not the ‘coded’ ones. All my efforts at decoding the message failed to yield results. Even my little knowledge of literature didn’t help much. What is literature, in comparison with the mysteries of the e-world, after all?
I was wondering, when and where did I talk of either my ‘nirvana’ or hers? And what mystical experience was it that transformed both of us, all at once, leaving the fragrance of roses in the air.
I immediately checked with my diary to see who all I had met over the past week, and in what connection. I know, you’re tempted, but don’t you say ‘eeks’ now! When nothing worked, I turned to my friend for help.
Her answer was a real damper. With a single stroke, it took away all the fragrance of roses, leaving me to my dowdy pre-occupations.
Her message simply said, “Sorry, wrong number! Not meant for u.” Do you now realize what this ‘e-Eavesdropping’ is all about? And tell me, do you have a better word for whatever happened? Don’t you tell me, you aren’t ‘e’-mused!

India under Siege

It is not just another terrorist attack. It's an attack on the sovereignty of India. It's a breach of India's territorial integrity. It's literally a war against the Indian state. A handful of intruders (I prefer to call them 'marauders') enter Mumbai through the Gateway of India, breaching the maritime boundaries, unnoticed by our coastal guard, escape the vigilant eyes of our security forces and storm inside Taj, Oberoi, Trident, Nariman House and CST, killing hundreds of unsuspecting, innocent individuals, Indians and foreigners included.

And what do we do? We sit in front of our television screens, watching the sordid drama of mounting tension and death-toll figures, listening to the sound bites of the hostages who manage to escape or flee, waiting for the siege to end, waiting for the nail-biting finish. Hasn't our life become more theatrical than theatre itself? Mumbai is not under a siege, India is.
Our Prime Minister goes on the air and in his characteristic monotone, spews forth a few predictable phrases, a few shibboleths he himself doesn't believe in (but certainly expects the people to believe in them). The news-hounds are chasing people, in search of the elusive sound-bites, competing with the rival channels to get on air just one exclusive story, just one rare sound-bite that would put them ahead of others.
Paratroopers are air-dropped on the Nariman House, NSG personnel take their positions in and around all the main buildings the 'terrorists' have laid siege to. And the bleeding, traumatized 'rescued hostages' are bundled into already choked ambulances, rushing off to the city hospitals.
Amidst all this, something lies completely torn and tattered, even irretrievably shattered...and that is the concept of India as a Nation, as a State. Somewhere, I think, we deserve all this. In a country, where the politicians are more interested in labelling 'terrorism' and less interested in dealing with it, we deserve no better. (Have you forgotten how Amar Singh and Mulayam S. Yadav pitched in for the 'Muslim terrorists' and L. K. Advani and Rajnath Singh plumped for the 'Hindu terrorists'? Who will ever tell them that the terrorists have no religion and that the only religion they practice is the religion of violence, gore and blood-letting? And who will ever explain to them the urgent need to exercise restraint in face of such crises of national importance and character?)
My suspicion is that one day, we shall wake up to this (c) rude and sordid reality that 'Muslim terror' and 'Hindu terror' are simply two sides of the same coin. One day, we shall realize that beneath the surface appearances, Muslims and Hindus are driven by a common lust for money and life that ultimately drives people into becoming 'hapless' or 'willing' accomplices in the terrorist crimes.
In a country, where people are up for sale and every human being, regardless of his status, position or power, has a price-tag around his neck, anything and everything is possible. In a country where money can buy and sell people almost as easily as some others can trade in the stock-market, terrorism is bound to prosper and flourish. It's 'crisis of credibility of the system' and the 'crisis of character of the individuals' that often combine to give birth to other more serious crises within the family, the institutions, the state and the nation.
And this is where every citizen of India has to do some soul-searching and ask himself this vital question: where have I gone wrong? In what way am I contributing either to the cause of the national security or to that of national threat. If I'm accepting bribe in my own 'small' way, am I not becoming anti-national in some unknown 'big' way? Watching the sordid drama of terrorist attack on the television is certainly not the only way of demonstrating our national concern. This would neither help us exorcise our collective demons nor establish our credentials as good citizens. This would only make die-hard voyeurs out of us or just plain and simple, charlatans,
Somewhere we need to ask ourselves: Haven't we failed miserably to perceive 'terrorism' as a national problem? Have we been able to rise above the narrow, sectarian and partisan party-lines to develop a national perspective on an issue that demands 'national consensus'? How long will we keep serving our narrow party interests and how long shall we continue to sacrifice the innocent human beings at the altar of sectarianism, communalism and terrorism. How long shall we continue to taint our souls with the blood of innocents?
Though Mumbai might ultimately find its liberation (as more than forty hours have gone by, not many are willing to lay a wager on 'when' it shall finally become a reality), you take it from me that India shall continue to remain under siege (M. J. Akbar, a seasoned journalist, had predicted that in his book titled: India Under Siege, several years ago) so long as we don't develop this national perspective.
Will we ever rise above voyeurism? Will the better sense ever prevail among our politicians and citizens, alike? Will we ever rise above narrow, sectarian interests and start thinking in terms of a 'National Government'? I bet, if we do not start thinking about it now in what may only be described 'as one of the darkest moments in the recent Indian history,' then we may soon become 'history' for the rest of the world.

India Under Siege

It's not just another terrrorist attack. It's an attack on the sovereignity of India. It's a breach of India's territorial integrity. It's literally a war against the Indian state. A handful of intruders (I prefer to call them 'marauders') enter Mumbai through the Gateway of India, breaching the maritime boundaries, unnoticed by our coastal guard, escape the vigilant eyes of our security forces and storm inside Taj, Oberoi, Trident, Nariman House and CST, killing hundreds of unsuspecting, innocent individuals, Indians and foreigners included.
And what do we do? We sit in front of our television screens, watching the sordid drama of mounting tension and death-toll figures, listening to the sound bites of the hostages who manage to escape or flee, waiting for the siege to end, waiting for the nail-biting finish. Hasn't our life become more theatrical than theatre itself? Mumbai is not under a siege, India is.
Our Prime Minister goes on the air and in his characteristic monotone, spews forth a few predictable phrases, a few shibboleths he himself doesn't believe in (but certainly expects the people to believe in them). The news-hounds are chasing people, in search of the elusive sound-bites, competing with the rival channels to get on air just one exclusive story, just one rare sound-bite that would put them ahead of others.
Paratroopers are being air-dropped on the Nariman House, NS Guards are taking their positions in and around all the main buildings the 'terrorists' have laid siege to, and the bleeding, traumatized 'released hostages' are being bundled into already choked hospitals.
Amidst all this, something lies completely torn and tattered, even irretrievably shattered...and that is the concept of India as a Nation, as a State. Somewhere, I think, we deserve all this. In a country, where the politicians are more interested in labelling 'terrorism' and less interested in dealing with it, we deserve no better. (Have you forgotten how Amar Singh and Mulayam S. Yadav pitched in for the 'Muslim terrorists' and L. K. Advani and Rajnath Singh plumped for the 'Hindu terrorists'? Who will ever tell them that the terrorists have no religion and that the only religion they practice is the religion of violence, gore and blood-letting? And who will ever explain to them the urgent need to exercise restraint in face of such crises of national importance and character?)

My suspicion is that one day, we shall wake up to this (c) rude and sordid reality of 'Muslim terror' and 'Hindu terror' being two sides of the same coin. One day, we shall realize that beneath the surface appearances, Muslims and Hindus are driven by a common lust for money and life that ultimately drives people into becoming 'hapless' or 'willing' accomplices in the terrorist crimes. In a country, where people are up for sale and every human being, regardless of his status, position or power, has a price-tag around his neck, anything and everything is possible. In a country where money can buy and sell people almost as easily as some othes can trade in the stock-market, terrorism is bound to prosper and flourish. It's 'crisis of credibility of the system' and the 'crisis of character of the individuals' that often combine to give birth to other more serious crises within the family, the institutions, the state and the nation.

And this is where every citizen of India has to do some soul-searching and ask himself this vital question: where have I gone wrong? In what way am I contributing either to the cause of the national security or to that of national threat. If I'm accepting bribe in my own 'small' way, am I not becoming anti-national in some unknown 'big' way? Watching the sordid drama of terrorist attack on the television is certainly not the only way of demonstrating our national concern. This would neither help us exorcise our collective demons nor establish our credentials as good citizens. This would only make die-hard voyeurs out of us or just plain and simple, charlatans,

Somewhere, we need to ask ourselves: Haven't we failed miserably to perceive 'terrorism' as a national problem? Have we been able to rise above the narrow, sectarian and partisan party-lines to develop a national perspective on an issue that demands 'national consensus'? How long will we keep serving our narrow party interests and how long shall we continue to sacrifice the innocent human beings at the altar of sectarianism, communalism and terrorism. How long shall we continue to taint our souls with the blood of innocents?

Though Mumbai might ultimately find its liberation (as more than forty hours have gone by, not many are willing to lay a wager on 'when' it shall finally become a reality), you take it from me that India shall continue to remain under siege (M. J. Akbar, a seasoned journalist, had predicted that in his book titled: INDIA UNDER SIEGE, several years ago) so long as we don't develop this national perspective. Will we ever rise above voyeurism? Will the better sense ever prevail among our politicians and citizens, alike? Will we ever rise above narrow, sectarian interests and start thinking in terms of a 'National Government'? I bet, if we do not start thinking about it in what may only be described 'as one of the darkest moments in the recent Indian history,' then we may soon become 'history' for the rest of the world.

Class, Ideology and Politics of Globalization: Story of Adiga’s Success

It is after more than a decade that the prestigious Booker has come to an India-born author for a debut novel. (The Inheritance of Loss for which Kiran Desai won the Man Booker in 2005 was her second, not her debut novel). Last time, it was Arundhati Roy (1997), and this time round, it’s Aravind Adiga.
Apart from the fortuitous first letter of alphabet they both share, there is very little one is likely to find worthy of comparison between these two Booker sensations.
Arundhati Roy’s was undoubtedly a ‘rites-of-passage’ novel, whereas Adiga’s work is not even remotely connected with his personal life and/or milieu. Arundhati turned to journalism only after her resounding success as a novelist, whereas Adiga has ventured into novel-writing after many years as a working journalist with Time. Somewhere, all of this is reflected in the way he has gone about crafting his novel, The White Tiger, with a razor-thin prescience and almost clinical objectivity.
Arundhati found inspiration in her Syrian Christian background and the childhood days spent in the backwaters of Kerala, whereas Adiga descends into the dark alleys of Patna and Delhi, to create a story of India, at once, disturbing and fascinating. No wonder, Michael Portillo, the head of the Booker jury, went so far as to say that Adiga’s novel had literally ‘pulled his socks off.’
While many people, including the other aspirants, are busy adjusting their socks and shoes, Adiga is well on his way to become the latest literary icon. Newspapers are vying with each other to fill their columns with articles on and interviews with him; while the reviewers are getting edgier in their bid to canonize him.
Perhaps, he is zealously being hounded by the banks, too, both Indian and American (ever since they heard him say that he was looking for one) to lure him into opening an account with his prize money of 50,000 pounds.
Of course, the gaze of his publishers, like that of the eternal ‘sensex- watchers,’ is constantly riveted on to the soaring sales figures, both in India and abroad. After all, these are some of the ‘professional hazards’ of becoming famous overnight and Adiga, too, must be getting used to his share under the sun.
In the midst of all this whirling confusion, it’s important to look beyond the glare of publicity and ask some serious questions. We must ask ourselves, for instance, what kind of future does this Booker augur, not only for the author (a purely speculative enterprise!) but for Indian fiction in general, and/or Indian English fiction in particular?
We must also ask ourselves: Is Adiga charting a new territory or breaking fresh ground in this novel, something that has never been explored before? Or is he simply returning to the well-trodden, over-beaten path that so many of his predecessors, both in Indian English and regional languages, have traversed already?
Beyond that, one may also go into the question of what kind of impact overvaluation of Man Booker (media suddenly goes into an overdrive each time this award is announced, hailing it as a ‘global event’) is likely to have upon the growth potential of Indian fiction, both in English and regional languages?
It is being argued by a good number of reviewers/media critics of The White Tiger that its main strength is that it puts the question of ‘class’ back on our ‘literary plate.’ While some would have us believe that this is where the novelty or originality of Adiga’s novel lies, others are willing to push the point further by claiming that the question of ‘class’ has surfaced in our literary imagination, perhaps, the first time ever.
Someone is busy comparing the novel to ‘the rooster coop,’ about which Adiga’s protagonist says, “(it’s) the greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history.” Doesn’t this analogy sound somewhat like Rushdie’s “chutnification of history”? And so, doesn’t it then remind us of his notorious comment on ‘poverty of Indian fiction,’ too? A media-watcher has actually said that “The book gives expression to the underclass anger, which the privileged ignore.”
Undoubtedly, such preposterous claims may not actually stand the scrutiny of history. In presence of history and its multiple burdens, such claims begin to fall apart sooner than we expect them to. For as long as one can remember, Indian English fiction has prospered, thanks to the exclusive patronage of the middle-classes, and enjoyed an equally exclusive affiliation with the bourgeois ideology, too. This was partially so, owing to the fact that novel has everywhere been regarded as a genre, closely tied to the apron-strings of the bourgeoisie.
Rarely do we come across such avant-garde novelists as Mulk Raj Anand, who in Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936) and The Village (1939) portray the downtrodden and rural poor with both compassion and sympathy. Most of these novels are dictated by an egregious impulse to overturn the bourgeois ideology, so that fictional space for the lower classes or the marginalized groups could effectively be mapped out.
In a way, it was the residual effect of the Marxist ideology and its strong hold over Indian literary imagination that had initially propelled it towards the question of ‘class’ and/or ‘ideology’.
As far as Indian fiction in regional languages is concerned, this process started somewhere in early 1930s. That’s when ‘the progressive movement’ got off to a resounding start, slowly seeping through different regions of India, luring scores of writers into its fold. Much before this question could leap into Indian English fiction, Munshi Prem Chand, Phaneshwar Nath Renu. (the pioneer of Anchalik Upanayas in Hindi) and several others had already projected it through their fiction. One is reminded of Prem Chand’s Kafan and several similar stories that deal with the plight or sufferings of the landless peasants in a predominantly feudal Indian society.
This was the phase of ‘critical realism,’ and the portrayals of the peasants, workers and/or the poorer sections of society were largely matters of personal conviction, ideological preference, and cultural necessity (this being the high-mark of ‘nationalism’). In the context of Punjabi fiction, however, the phase of progressive writing started around 1950s, with the novels of Sant Singh Sekhon, Narinder Pal Singh and Amrita Pritam.
It’s another matter that the real concern with the twin questions of ‘class’ and ‘ideology’ didn’t enter the lexicon of Punjabi fiction until Gurdial Singh. It was in his person that Punjabi fiction acquired a true representative, a forceful, genuine advocate of the subaltern and the oppressed. Marhi Da Deeva (The Last Flicker), published way back in 1964, was hailed as a landmark novel precisely because it sought to push the socially and economically challenged common man to the centre-stage of fiction. By doing so, he not only energized Punjabi fiction but also paved the way for re-examining the history of Punjabi society and culture from below.
Those times were different, and so were the impulses behind such fiction. Such a fiction was mainly the outcome of a society in the throes of change and transition, poised delicately between the pulls and counter-pulls of tradition and modernity. The overarching context of socialism, within such stories often flourished, has now long ceased to exist, both as a seductive idea and impinging reality.
It was the growing awareness of human dignity, freedom and personal worth coupled with a political consciousness generated by Nehruvian socialism that ultimately brought Dalit writing to the fore in 1960s. And it was in Dalit writing that ‘class’ and ‘caste’ entered into an entirely new sociological equation, perhaps, the first time ever. Though Dalit writing is known to have flourished in other Indian languages, too, yet it was Marathi language and culture that became its nodal epicentre.
Unlike other novelists, such as Anand or Munshi Prem Chand, who chose to focus on the problems of the marginalized, despite being middle-class themselves, it’s the inwardness and exclusiveness of Dalit writing that makes it truly pungent, even distinctively authentic.
Such writing was an attempt to reclaim Dalits’ true voice and idiom, a form of articulation that enabled them to represent themselves, rather than being represented by the ‘other,’ as had happened earlier. No wonder, it was in this form of writing that the ‘subaltern’ truly began to rip apart the facetious, bourgeois logic of Gayatri Spivak’s rhetorical question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
In this respect, one may think of the significant contributions of Baburao Bagul, Daya Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal in Marathi, Om Parkash Balmiki in Hindi and Prem Gorki in Punjabi. All of these are vibrant, strong and assertive voices, which have not only challenged the limits of societal and political conventions, but also the literary and cultural norms.
Moreover, they have created new literary landscapes, even aesthetics that lie beyond the ken of our middle-class sensibility, much in the manner Balzac, Maupassant and Charles Baudelaire had done in the middle of 19th century. That’s how Dalit writers have managed to re-inscribe the rules of what it means to be human in an unequal, unjust, exploitative and repressive world.
Significantly, most of these voices have emerged in the regional languages, not in English. One may ponder over this question, however, why Indian English fiction chooses to construct its sociology differently from the other Indian languages?
Why has it not always dealt with the issues and problems that perennially engage writers in the regional languages? Could it have something to do with its inherent dominant ideology per se; or its peripheral engagement with Indian social reality, or its nagging anxiety to target an audience out there in the West?
It is against this backdrop that Adiga’s novel must necessarily be seen or read. For he certainly constructs the sociology of his novel very differently from the way it is being done by most of his contemporaries, especially in the Indian languages. But the question is, could there be a hidden agenda or a definite politics behind it?
Of course, it is for the readers to ponder some of these questions, as they pore over the pages of The White Tiger. But while doing so, they must remember that we, in Indian English fiction, are yet to witness the kind of literary movement supporting the ‘working class ideology’ that England saw in the Post-War period.
Even at the risk of sounding presumptuous, let me say that with all its hype and hoopla, I don’t expect Adiga’s novel to trigger off one such movement at this stage, now. If we do understand the history of Indian English fiction, we’d know that it hardly ever had a perceptible, identifiable movement, only passing trends that come and go.
We have writers, who either plough their lonely furrows or just keep up with the Joneses, doing what is trendy or t(r)opical. Perhaps, we aren’t really as fortunate as some other cultures that have had the benefit of such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukas, Raymond Williams or Frederic Jameson. Critics of such stature alone could have lent credibility to our literary causes, turning them into self-sustaining, literary movements.
In 1960s, if Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and several others were around to theorize on the working-class culture; John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Alan Bennett, too, were there to inscribe this culture in their works. In our context, apart from Dalit writing, which definitely did evolve into a full-scale literary movement, with its own historical and political logistics, our literary concerns with the ‘working class ideology’ have remained, at best, only perfunctory, and, at worst, fitfully sporadic. .
Now, this is where Adiga’s story gains its literary and historical edge. He has chosen to focus his attention upon the Marxist notions of ‘class’ and ‘ideology’ in an era of hard-core globalization. This is where the ‘politics of globalization’ or that of the insidious market forces essentially takes over. To some of us, the magical sales-figures may appear far more seductive than the actual content of the novel. Besides, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that Adiga’s novel sets out to critique the invasive forces of globalization. Quite simply, he is legitimizing their pervasive sweep, power and influence.
Does it not speak for the vicious-hold of these forces over a common man’s imagination that even a small-time driver Makhan Lal, born and brought up in Bihar (the underbelly of India), develops a strong yearning to participate, even capture this mirage of success and glory they prop up?
That he happens to nurture this dream in the times of ‘global meltdown’ is only one of the several ironies this novel is tempered with. Variations apart, Makhan Lal’s story throws us back to the dark days of the ‘Great Depression,’ reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby.
However, the final answer to all the queries is provided by the symbolism of the title itself. It nudges us into believing that regardless of how we choose to look at Indian reality, as an area of darkness (with its definite resonance of Naipaul’s anti-India bias) or as a continent of light (not ‘Circe’ as Nirad Babu saw it), everyone, including Makhan Lal, simply wants to ride this ‘white tiger’ called ‘globalization.’
And the only rules for riding this tiger are that there aren’t any rules. This tiger is ‘white’ (with all its racial and hegemonic undertones) precisely because it won’t allow us any longer to retain our distinct cultural identity, stripes and all.
In context of the recent ‘global meltdown’ (which coincided with the publication of the novel, but certainly pre-dates its conception) this ‘whiteness’ acquires a totally new signification. This ‘tiger’ has been as ruthlessly bleached as the American economy, thanks to its unreliable financial institutions and wayward ‘sub-prime borrowers.’
Our altered economic realities lend to Adiga’s novel a sense of urgency, even poignant topicality and immediacy. The extent to which Makhan Lal shows a typical picaro’s lack of concern for ethical norms in his search for personal success, this novel almost ends up valorizing the dubious ethics of capitalism that sustains itself on the predatory principle of ‘foul is fair and fair is foul’
And why ever not, when it offers such an alluring, albeit deceptive, promise of upward social, economic mobility?
For all the disclaimers of Adiga, this novel fails to become “a potent instrument of social dissent and protest,” and remains out-and-out status-quoist. One really wonders what is it that Adiga is actually protesting against when his complicity with the ‘politics of globalization’ is near total.
For Adiga, globalization is not so much of an exclusionary choice as the only choice available to most of us, even those residing on the periphery or in the backwaters of India.
Only if one were to read this novel along with the recently released Global Human Index (which paints a hopelessly grim picture of rural India, where 47% of all Indian children suffer from severe malnutrition, and three fourths of our population still survives on an income of Rs.25 a day, if you please!) would the complete picture of contemporary India emerge before our eyes!
And needless to say, such a realization makes this novel, truly an over-hyped, ‘celebration’ as well as ‘lamentation’ of our times. Of course, the paradoxes never cease to surprise us.
Whoever said that India is a land of gloomy, not groovy, paradoxes, perhaps knew it better than most of us!

(Note: Edited version of this commissioned article was published in THE HINDUSTAN TIMES , October 26, 2008)

_____________________________________________________________
The writer is Professor of English at Panjab University, Chandigarh and can be contacted at rananayar@gmail.com

Dear Friends

You'll find here the unedited version of a middle I published in The Tribune last month. The newpapers are always short of space. And they keep telling you to reduce the length of your piece. That is, if at all they accept it in the first place (which is hard enough, anyway). Sometimes, they give you the unkindest cut of all by chopping off your piece rather arbirtarily. And you know, how possesssive all the members of our tribe are about their 'writing.' Just one word out of place is enough to make us start tearing our hair off. So, putting these unedited versions on the blog is the only way we know of indulging our vanity. I suppose, it's your turn now to indulge yours by reading it (or not reading it!).

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
So goes a popular adage. I gathered so many of these all along the way, as I grew up in the backwaters of a Punjab village. It was our Class VI mathematics teacher, perhaps, who drilled the importance of ‘savings’ into our thick little heads, saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Often, as he uttered these words, he’d also tug at his trousers, slipping over his protruding belly, with the sudden jerk of his elbows. His characteristic habit of fumbling into his over-bloated pockets as he did so, made us suspect that he was feeling crisp, currency notes inside. Looking back, I now realize that frayed cuffs and collars of his shirts had quite a different story to tell, though.
Our Class VIII English teacher, who preferred to sport a pint-sized dhoti and a half-sleeved khadi kurta, was very fond of repeating “Always cut your coat according to your cloth.” All of us knew that his father was a Gandhian, and had taken part in the freedom struggle, too. Occasionally, the boys laughed up their sleeves, wondering if he had lost his only ‘coat’ to the ‘greed’ of an Englishman or the desperate ‘need’ of a street-beggar.
God be thanked, those days, ‘economics’ wasn’t taught in schools. In my case, though, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, even it had been. All my efforts in college to wrestle with knotty problems of ‘economics’ (something I was forced to opt for) invariably came to naught.
The intricacies of both the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ continued to elude my naive mind. And so did the laws of taxation or the hard-to-grasp theories of ‘income and expenditure.’ Despite all the inputs, the curve of my economic understanding never showed an upward, bullish trend, receding instead like the laws of diminishing marginal utility.
Of all the nerve-wracking lessons in undergraduate economics, perhaps, the only ones I still remember are the harrowing tales of how we had failed the Indian poor and poverty after independence, or more sordid ones of how the British had looted us in the pre-independence era.
And yet, all this and so much more had failed to impress upon me the virtues of an over-glorified Indian habit of ‘savings,’ which my teachers, too, had tried so desperately to instill in me. My first teaching assignment took me to Shimla, a pretty expensive town in the early 80s. Worse still, I was expected to survive on what my MBA daughter now describes as ‘a ridiculously small salary of a thousand odd or so.’
The going was pretty tough. In the first month itself, I ran into rough weather. Fortunately, a colleague of mine, whom I had befriended in good time, played the ‘World Bank’ and bailed me out by offering a liberal loan of two hundred or so. Then on, I started borrowing from him frequently, almost as if it was my birthright to borrow, and his to lend.
Into the third month, he bolted, saying that if he continued to help me through, I’d perhaps never learn the much needed lesson in self-reliance. To convince me of his theory, he narrated how in the early 70s, when he had just started out on a salary of less than five hundred, he lived within his frugal means, often cutting down on essentials like ‘newspapers’ and ‘books,’ too.
Reading of the ‘global meltdown’ recently brought back memories of another era, when money was still paper, not plastic; when the ‘savings’ were still sacred; and the ‘sub-prime borrowings’ hadn’t yet begun to squeeze us.
You may say, the times have changed, but have they? The common people continue to look skywards, as they always have done since time immemorial.
The only difference is that earlier they watched the ‘vagaries of weather;’ but now they observe the ‘swings of sensex.’
Why ever not? After all, this ‘sensex,’ too moves as unpredictably as the good old ‘wheel of fortune’ once did. No?
By Rana Nayar

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Dear Friends

You'll find here the unedited version of the middle I published in The Tribune last month. Somehow, the newspapers are always short of space. As a result, the meaty sections of the write-up often get excised. The writers are known to be quite possessive about their writing.

But they have no choice but to submit to the arbitrary editorial cuts. The only other option is to start your own blog (the way I have done) and inflict your write-up twice upon the readers.

Well, it's also being done for another reason. Often the readers of the blog and that of the newspaper(s) live in two separate worlds.

Here is the unedited version for your eyes:

So goes a popular adage. I gathered so many of these all along the way, as I grew up in the backwaters of a Punjab village. It was our Class VI mathematics teacher, perhaps, who drilled the importance of ‘savings’ into our thick little heads, saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Often, as he uttered these words, he’d also tug at his trousers, slipping over his protruding belly, with the sudden jerk of his elbows. His characteristic habit of fumbling into his over-bloated pockets as he did so, made us suspect that he was feeling crisp, currency notes inside. Looking back, I now realize that frayed cuffs and collars of his shirts had quite a different story to tell, though.
Our Class VIII English teacher, who preferred to sport a pint-sized dhoti and a half-sleeved khadi kurta, was very fond of repeating “Always cut your coat according to your cloth.” All of us knew that his father was a Gandhian, and had taken part in the freedom struggle, too. Occasionally, the boys laughed up their sleeves, wondering if he had lost his only ‘coat’ to the ‘greed’ of an Englishman or the desperate ‘need’ of a street-beggar.
God be thanked, those days, ‘economics’ wasn’t taught in schools. In my case, though, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, even it had been. All my efforts in college to wrestle with knotty problems of ‘economics’ (something I was forced to opt for) invariably came to naught.
The intricacies of both the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ continued to elude my naive mind. And so did the laws of taxation or the hard-to-grasp theories of ‘income and expenditure.’ Despite all the inputs, the curve of my economic understanding never showed an upward, bullish trend, receding instead like the laws of diminishing marginal utility.
Of all the nerve-wracking lessons in undergraduate economics, perhaps, the only ones I still remember are the harrowing tales of how we had failed the Indian poor and poverty after independence, or more sordid ones of how the British had looted us in the pre-independence era.
And yet, all this and so much more had failed to impress upon me the virtues of an over-glorified Indian habit of ‘savings,’ which my teachers, too, had tried so desperately to instill in me. My first teaching assignment took me to Shimla, a pretty expensive town in the early 80s. Worse still, I was expected to survive on what my MBA daughter now describes as ‘a ridiculously small salary of a thousand odd or so.’
The going was pretty tough. In the first month itself, I ran into rough weather. Fortunately, a colleague of mine, whom I had befriended in good time, played the ‘World Bank’ and bailed me out by offering a liberal loan of two hundred or so. Then on, I started borrowing from him frequently, almost as if it was my birthright to borrow, and his to lend.
Into the third month, he bolted, saying that if he continued to help me through, I’d perhaps never learn the much needed lesson in self-reliance. To convince me of his theory, he narrated how in the early 70s, when he had just started out on a salary of less than five hundred, he lived within his frugal means, often cutting down on essentials like ‘newspapers’ and ‘books,’ too.
Reading of the ‘global meltdown’ recently brought back memories of another era, when money was still paper, not plastic; when the ‘savings’ were still sacred; and the ‘sub-prime borrowings’ hadn’t yet begun to squeeze us.
You may say, the times have changed, but have they? The common people continue to look skywards, as they always have done since time immemorial.
The only difference is that earlier they watched the ‘vagaries of weather;’ but now they observe the ‘swings of sensex.’
Why ever not? After all, this ‘sensex,’ too moves as unpredictably as the good old ‘wheel of fortune’ once did. No?
By Rana Nayar

Raj Thackery & His (Maha)rastrian Pride

It appears that Raj Thackery has raised this new bogey of (Maha) rastrian pride to steal a march over Uddhav in the ongoing war of succession raging between the two. The internal wranglings of Raj and Uddhav are proving to be too costly for the rest of the country. While each one of them is trying to outdo the other in his effort to win friends and influence voters, the whole concept of India as a nation lies in shreds around Bal Thackery's feet. But is he doing anything, except yawn lazily over it?
After the linguistic division of the states, what are we trying to achieve now? Demanding that all the non-Maharastrians be thrown out of Maharastra is certainly no way of creating a (Maha) rastra. Over the years, Mumbai has gained reputation as a truly cosmopolitan city. Repeated acts of terrorism and subsequent communal riots have already taken toll of this cosmopolitanism.
What are we waiting to do now? Dump the concept of Mumbai along with its long, chequered history into the Indian Ocean? Mumbai came into existence with several little islands coming together. Do we now wish to go back and restore status quo ante? Let's not allow such narrow, provincial forces to prevail. Let us find ways of getting rid of all those politicians who only serve their own petty ends at our cost. Let's not allow ourselves to be guided by their false rhetoric and be eager to shed each other's blood. For their greed knows no limit, and no amount of human blood shall satiate their insatiable lust for it.
It's time we stopped following these "agents of devil" and started thinking where our redemption lies. It lies in protecting each other, in developing a sense of brotherhood and in marching together towards a NewIndia. Let's not sleep in darkness but wake into light.
Hey Indians! Shed your hatred, not your blood; shed your prejudices, not your compassion; shed your so-called 'leaders,' not your ability to lead. India, the time is now ripe for you to take over. Down with this defunct, decadent and rotten 'leadership.'

RTI Act & Common People

RTI Act is a legislative measure with radical, rather revolutionary, potential. For the first time, you and I can peep into the official files and know why the bureaucrats and politicians have taken the kind of decisions they have. It's our opportunity to look beyond the iron-curtain and penetrate the layers of Official Secrecy Act (1923). Now you can have as much transparency as you wish to have. Democracy is no longer the prerogative of the more privileged or the less educated. RTI Act has truly introduced an element of public accountability into our system. But friends, don't expect it to work like a magic wand. It's an instrument of power in the hands of well-meaning people and can actually help us move towards the laudable goal of establishing a civil society (right now, we are far from being one. Aren't we?). But at the same time, it could also become a subversive tool of arm-twisting and subtle manipulation of the powerful, even power-brokering in the hands of those who only know how best to serve their own selfish ends. So, let's use this great tool of empowerment of common people in the service of the common people and furthering social causes, thus triggering off a tiny revolution in our decadent system, as and when and wherever we can. Let's not use it to further our own petty ends, but only to create greater public accountability and transparency into our system. Without this, democracy is nothing more than a pack of 'demons' 'crazy' for 'power,' which has been the story of our nascent democracy since Independence.

My Thoughts on Diwali Day

A well-known politician sent me Diwali greetings through sms.
My initial reaction was of surprise coupled with shock. Once I'd
gathered my wits, I sent him the following message. The text
is being reproduced for your benefit:
"I'm really touched by your gesture that you thought of exchanging
Diwali greetings with a 'small fry' like me. I hereby reciprocate your
sentiments and wish you a very happy Diwali. But if you really wish to
make me happy, please ask your field workers in Orissa to bring some
'light' into the lives of those they brought to ruin."
Note: Obviously, the gentleman belongs to a particular political party.

Hello Friends & Viewers

Here's wishing all of you a very happy Diwali.
May this festival of lights bring good cheer and joy into your lives.
May God watch over all of us and give us the strength to walk through the dark corridors of life, with little candles in our tremulous hands.
May Allah protect us from harm that the dark forces around are only waiting to inflict upon us. May Christ show us the right path each time we are tempted to go astray.
May Satguru keep us in mind each time he doles out peace and joy to His people.
All our wishes and prayers must be secular in nature, if we have to realize the dream of creating a truly secular nation.

How to improve University Education in India?

Ever since Chadha Committee made its recommendations about the pay-scales, there has been renewed interest in the teachers, teaching, role of higher educattion and great deal of talk on how we can firm up the college/university (read higher education!) by offering higher salaries. Yes, I agree, if we have to attract 'talent' into teaching, we have to offer higher salaries (or salaries comparable to other professions such as bureaucrats, doctors, engineers, MBA's etc).
But tell me, what kind of 'talent' are our colleges and universities producing at the moment? How many of us would like to back up that 'talent'? And ask yourself: Is 'talent' (if it does somehow emerge in our society, despite all our efforts to snuff it out!) actually valued in the kind of mediocrity-worshipping society we have created for ourselves? After all, if our universities are not producing much 'talent' worth the mention, how do we expect 'mediocrity' to become 'meritorious' overnight? Those who think salaries alone can make all the difference need to think twice, or perhaps, several times over.
We are caught in a vicious cycle. We have little 'talent,' our society has no mechanism whereby it could sift grain from the chaff, and then we think, money will overnight create the much needed miracle. If our entire focus in higher education has been on quantity, we can't become 'quality-conscious' overnight and expect things to change dramatically. When quantity thrives, quality suffers. If you're not convinced, go ahead and read Marx's Das Capital.
Let's create a society that shuns 'mediocrity' and valorizes 'meritocracy.' That demands that we create a social mechanism whereby 'mediocres' are separated from the 'meritorious.' Let us put an end to the culture of 'sifarish' and 'nepotism.' Then we may be able to bring 'talent' or whatever is left of it into 'teaching.' High salaries alone won't do the trick. Those of us who think, it is so, are as myopic as our policy makers or politicians.
Let's not miss the wood for the trees.

Baba Farid de Shloka

1. The day a young girl is betrothed
The wedding day, too, is announced
And as the saying goes
The Angel of Death comes calling
To anoint the ceremony of ‘face-showing’
One day, wrenching the ‘poor soul’ out
By battering the bones dry
He sends out a message, loud and clear
That soul, his bride, shall abide its share of ‘allotted time’
And when the moment of final parting comes
With groom, waiting to take the bride away
Clinging to the shoulders of all, she shall cry her heart out
Now whose help shall she seek, and who would she turn to?
Haven’t you heard of a ‘bridge’?
As thin as human hair
Suspended between life and death
Journeying through hell, all souls must cross
Fearing their fall, forever,
O Farida! You sure can hear all the cries
As you stand on the shore, so delude no more!

2. O Farida! You are no more than a fakir
Hanging outside the door of your Sain
But with little bundles of worldly cares
Pressing down constantly upon your head
Go about as though you are a man of the world
Now if you seek Him, why not cast the bundles off?

3. Life is a puzzle, none can solve
Life is a mystery, none can follow
Life is a raging fire, none can douse
O Sain of mine! Had you not poured your Grace divine
This fire would have charred my limbs beyond recognition.

4. O Farida! You knew it well how few the seeds of sesame were
Then why didn’t you pick on each with caution and care?
Had I known that Breath, my Lord, was so impatient to go
I, the bride, would have been less vain than I was.

5. O Farida! Had I known that my ‘veil’ shall be in tatters soon
I wouldn’t have tied the ‘knot’ so hard and strong
My body has roamed the world all so free
But it has seen none as great as Thee.V

Hope you enjoy reading these shlokas.
Rana Nayar

Can I Afford to Sleep Tonight?

Terror was there, out there
In some distant, far-off countryside
Growing wild amid corn and wheat
Like some straggly, old country cousin
I didn’t have to hear
The sound of the gun
I didn’t have to see
The mounds of corpses
I could sit pretty in my bed
And read the headlines
Or rush to the office
Poring over facts and figures
Buried in a heap of piles
I could easily forget

Terror came out of the countryside
It was still there, not here
Haggling in the market-place
Dressed as a well-bred city guy
I didn’t have to hear
The sound of the gun
I didn’t have to see
The mound of corpses
Sometimes in the afternoon heat
I’d attend funeral of a city boss
And walk back home
Laughing over a hearty meal
I could still forget

Terror started stalking the streets
Here, there, everywhere
Posing as a postman
Went to all my neighbour’s with a news
I didn’t hear
The sound of the gun
I didn’t see
The mound of corpses
Late in the evening
With my windows barred and shut
And doors latched securely
Sitting in my drawing room
And watching news on TV
I could pretend not to remember

Now the terror is at my doorstep
Knocking hard, banging the door
Looking somewhat like a policeman
Promises to deliver me of my enemy
I may not hear
The sound of the gun
I may not see
The mound of corpses
But I can see the blood spots
On my children’s faces
And mortal dread
In my wife’s eyes
Can I now pretend to forget?

Can I afford to sleep tonight?