Of Boats and Feet

“You know, I’m never going to get married”, blurted out J, as I licked off the last of the chocolate from the dripping cone. “Huh!! They all say that, but they finally end up marrying. Trust me, you would be no different”, I reassured the fair, dark haired beauty, my words muffled by the crunchy cone that I was chewing.

Ok, time for some background.

J had been the first girl that I dated, way back in high school and then in the early part of my engineering days. But then, two years down the line, we (rather I) felt that she really wasn’t that “someone special” for me, and so we parted ways. But, the friendship still continued over the years, and in fact had grown stronger over the decade since I first set my eyes on her. She was now “committed” to a 6 feet tall, shoulder length haired hunk who loves her with his life (or so she says, and hence I believe, the last part of the sentence i.e.). Sounds all hunky dory, eh? Well, not quite so. The guy belongs to, umm, let’s say, the minority community as politicians – specially the so called secular ones – refer them as.

On the other hand, J belongs to a family of much respected Brahmins – a large joint family, with a temple inside their courtyard that is well known in the small town she belongs to, just on the outskirts of a city. To make matters worse, she also happens to be the younger sister of a body building freak (with a brain like one too) who happens to be the follower of the saffron party.

So when this cute little 23 year old replies, “Everything is not that easy Sabya, I know one day I might have to choose which boat to put my feet on, and I don’t want to let go of either of the boats”, I wonder for a moment how much the little kid seemed to have matured since the time we used to be together many monsoons ago.

“Don’t worry, just concentrate on your career, stick to this domain (IT, no points for guessing that), next year when I enter, or rather re-enter the corporate world, I’ll pull you through. Rest, let the future take its own course. We’ll discuss this again, its getting late. I have to rush!!”

And thus I separated myself from her for the night and went my way, feeling a bit sad for one of my closest friends, and castigating myself yet again with the fact that had I not broken up with her, things would have been so different. But then, that thought flashes through my selfish mind for just a moment, coz had I not done that, I would have never met …....

Lots have been written about the caste and religion divide that exists in our country. Anything that I add will just seem to be a repetition. But I will still write my two pennies worth.

The country, or rather its people, could never really digest the separation that came as an incentive to independence. We still relate a black burqha clad coterie to be a byproduct of our not so friendly and often back-stabbing neighbor. The atrocities, so well described in “Train to Pakistan” and countless Bollywood flicks have ensured that we always look upon the minorities as foes, no matter which side of the border they belonged to.

I was also a product of the same environment. The Babri Masjid demolition made me rejoice till I was sick, the nuclear test of the 1990’s, so famously coded as “the Buddha has smiled” made me grin from ear to ear. And every defeat to Pakistan on the cricket or the hockey field was a personal loss to me.

But then, that was ages ago. Having developed a habit of reading profusely (thanks to my parents, ironically, coz they will still shut the door on me if I were to marry a Muslim), I now have a much broader view of things. I’d rather think and analyze about the pricing strategy that a major IT vendor should adopt for an I Bank that is its client rather than read newspaper articles which state that the percentage of Muslim population in the country had risen by X %. And, I would be safe to assume that these sentiments are shared by most of the people who belong to my generation.

I can go on writing cliché’ after cliché’, how we are all human beings first, how the colour of the blood is the same, how….. u get my point, don’t you. So I’ll save the rhetoric.

The only silver lining is that today’s generation is much more mature than our parents’, and I’m sure my children would never have a friend who would be in the same dilemma as J. It will be a world where you don’t have to choose which boat to put your feet on, it will be one big yacht where you can just put your feet up and soak the sun.

I am sorry if this post is dangerously teetering on the edge of being a political speech, coz I have no time for the P word. But then, I ask, on behalf of my cherished friend, that if she doesn’t have the freedom to marry the person of her choice, then aren’t we just about as free as the inmates of the Russian prisons in the Siberian desert.

End Note: My parents heave a sigh of relief that i never fell for a girl outside my religion. I consider it to be a personal loss, coz some of the cutest girls i've seen belonged to religions other than Hindu.

A Place I Called Home

Country Roads
Take me home
To the place
I belong
West Virginia
Mountain Momma
Country Roads
Take me home

John Denver sang out from the car stereo as I struggled to negotiate yet another pothole on the roads of the IT brain centre of the world, Bangalore, while on my way to work.

Having been brought up on a dose of Metallica, GNR and Pink Floyd, American folk music is not necessarily my cup of tea. But Radio City 91 FM had been playing crappy Bollywood music since morning, and rummaging through the car drawer of my brother in law who was sick that day, which meant I could take his car to work instead of going through the ordeal of changing three buses as on a normal day, John Denver happened to be the only person there whom I had heard about.

And as usual, I let my mind wander while standing still in serpentine queues, waiting for the red lights to turn green.

I had been away from home for almost 3 years now, discounting the week long holidays I spent there once in each of those years. The north east, where the virgin blue hills and the red waters of the Brahmaputra blur into each other in the distant horizon, where the people walk with such leisurely steps that you will feel that life goes around in slow motion there, where every sunrise promises a beautiful day and every sunset is a shepherd’s delight. But then, the red water of the Brahmaputra has got redder from the blood of the terrorists, army men and civilians, where the blue hills still echo with the wails of newly wed women, either at the death of their husbands, or because they were being raped by certain army men who were/are even worse than the misguided terrorists, or in most cases, both.

I had always been lucky to stay in the capital city of Assam and the gateway of the North East – Guwahati. There, it is easy for one to be oblivious of the happenings in the interiors. Of course, the newspapers every morning would bring out horrible stories of atrocities, and the retired old men who spent their time reading them inside out in the pan shops would swear that more than half of the stories are censored, but then one could always just shrug and go his way. After all, in the youth of your life, you would still like to believe that the redness in the river was just the work of sediments, and the only sounds that echoed in those hills were of exotic birds and wild animals.

Other than terrorism, the other but equally disturbing bane in my region was that of linguistic divide. However, I never realized the undercurrents till I was away from home. Even though I belonged to a community that had often being the target of mayhem in the 1980’s, stories of which were narrated by my mom to me after she felt that I was matured enough to take in those stories, all my friends were Assamese, and I rather found people who spoke my language to be the progenitors of most of the troubles that took place a couple of decades ago. But then reality struck me hard when the local people and the Bihari workers clashed, and it was difficult to fix the blame on either party. While local girls were brutally raped in front of their brothers in train compartments when the trains passed through Bihar, innocent daily wage earners were massacred in the very farms where they worked in Assam.

And the story continues. And what is the end result? No industries of repute, no companies where one would be proud to work in, a handful of foreign tourists who walk with fear in their eyes and constantly look back over their shoulders, and hordes of intellectual capital who migrate to the metros in search of a better life, away from the filth. And I confess that I belong to the latter group of people.

Even though I’m an optimistic person and very rarely do I not see the brighter side of life, I don’t see the situation changing at all. As long as the political parties, which sit at New Delhi, and the puppet state government that resides in the sprawling complex at Dispur exist, expect no change. Life will continue to move on in the north east, as it has done for three decades and more. It is a part of the life there now, and the people have started to accept the fact a long time back. The sarcastic part of my brain thinks that just because the people there move in slow motion makes them an easier target of the bullets. Read between the last line.

Even though John Denver’s song took me back to my childhood for once, I know that there is no way I’m going back home. Like many other parts of my life, that part will remain as a blur with me till the day I mix with dust. And till then, I’ll continue to be just one of the millions teeming on a Monday morning in the pot-holed Bangalorean roads, waiting for the signal to turn green. Or maybe one of the hundreds in an on-site assignment in a foreign land, trooping off to the nearest theatre showing a hindi movie, even if it’s a Yash Raj Production no-brainer sob story, just because I yearn to hear the language of my land.