Monday, October 22, 2007
Rebirth
Its been a long time. I had resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't be blogging anymore. Call it an impulsive decision caused due to a sudden lack of enthusiasm towards making my feelings known or me getting just too damn busy to type in a few lines every now and then, only a certain person knows the real reason. Well, the reason doesn't exist anymore, and I have been on a week long trip to home which has mysteriously re-awakened the blogger in me. I suddenly have lots to talk about, lots of opinions, lots of comments, and yeah lots of memories too. So here I am. Byzantine is back from the dead. And byzantine will make himself heard again.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The End
The night sky wore a dirty mud-like hue to it. I lay sprawled on my stomach on the bed, arms and legs flailed, like a four legged insect who had been gently squashed against the wall.
The rain God had been as hesitant as a pimpled face teenager in his first season of love who is not sure when to reveal his feelings to the girl who sat in the first row in class. A solitary mosquito buzzed around my left ear for a while and then quietly settled on the back of my neck, sucking my blood. I let it stay there, not caring anymore, so that the mosquito slowly had its fill and then, too heavy to fly away, just kept sitting there, quite oblivious of the droplets of sweat that surrounded it. The fever was in its third day now. It was no longer regular but arrived in bursts - high in the morning, low during the afternoon and evening, and then rising again as night approached. I could feel a fresh wave of shiver run across my wasted body as the fever was on the rise again.
During my last trip to the washroom, I had noticed the first signs of a rash on the side of my neck, a pale pink patch, like a dash of strawberry juice on a brick of butterscotch. The doc had warned me against this a long time ago - "Watch out for rashes, and don't scratch them. As if it mattered, i thought as i reached back lazily and dug my long and now dirty nails into it. I had lost track of time, not sure which day it was, not sure if it was still June or July, the thin streak of light that peeped in from the crack under the door acting as the sole guide which told me if it was a day or a night.
The bowl of cornflakes with mashed bananas laid untouched and cold by the bedside on the table. Even the slow tick tock of the wall clock had stopped bothering me. I laid there, slowly waiting for the end to come, taking solace from the fact that it would be painless, just a shadow that will come and cover my eyes, and stay there forever.
They said that just before one dies, his whole life gets replayed in his head - images, snapshots - like a slideshow which isn't of uniform speed - speeding through the happy slides and almost halting to a stop on the painful ones. They were wrong. No slideshows got played, no images formed. Maybe, the wise men who said that hadn't taken into account the fact that the death of a cancer patient was different from other deaths.
I died sometime during the night (or it might have been morning, I am not sure). The maid discovered me the next morning, put her hands on her mouth to suppress a shriek and fled away, and a couple of hours later, members of a local NGO arranged for my body to be removed and then consigned to the electric crematorium a couple of kilometres away, while a group of ants slowly but steadily carried the carcass of a dead mosquito, its belly still full of cancer infected blood across the floor, and soon disappeared into a small hole on the floor by the side of the western wall. I died an anonymous death, no obituaries came out in the newspapers the next day - while the ants in my room had a grand meal - cornflakes and mashed potatoes dried in milk, and a lick at a dead mosquito every now and then.
The rain God had been as hesitant as a pimpled face teenager in his first season of love who is not sure when to reveal his feelings to the girl who sat in the first row in class. A solitary mosquito buzzed around my left ear for a while and then quietly settled on the back of my neck, sucking my blood. I let it stay there, not caring anymore, so that the mosquito slowly had its fill and then, too heavy to fly away, just kept sitting there, quite oblivious of the droplets of sweat that surrounded it. The fever was in its third day now. It was no longer regular but arrived in bursts - high in the morning, low during the afternoon and evening, and then rising again as night approached. I could feel a fresh wave of shiver run across my wasted body as the fever was on the rise again.
During my last trip to the washroom, I had noticed the first signs of a rash on the side of my neck, a pale pink patch, like a dash of strawberry juice on a brick of butterscotch. The doc had warned me against this a long time ago - "Watch out for rashes, and don't scratch them. As if it mattered, i thought as i reached back lazily and dug my long and now dirty nails into it. I had lost track of time, not sure which day it was, not sure if it was still June or July, the thin streak of light that peeped in from the crack under the door acting as the sole guide which told me if it was a day or a night.
The bowl of cornflakes with mashed bananas laid untouched and cold by the bedside on the table. Even the slow tick tock of the wall clock had stopped bothering me. I laid there, slowly waiting for the end to come, taking solace from the fact that it would be painless, just a shadow that will come and cover my eyes, and stay there forever.
They said that just before one dies, his whole life gets replayed in his head - images, snapshots - like a slideshow which isn't of uniform speed - speeding through the happy slides and almost halting to a stop on the painful ones. They were wrong. No slideshows got played, no images formed. Maybe, the wise men who said that hadn't taken into account the fact that the death of a cancer patient was different from other deaths.
I died sometime during the night (or it might have been morning, I am not sure). The maid discovered me the next morning, put her hands on her mouth to suppress a shriek and fled away, and a couple of hours later, members of a local NGO arranged for my body to be removed and then consigned to the electric crematorium a couple of kilometres away, while a group of ants slowly but steadily carried the carcass of a dead mosquito, its belly still full of cancer infected blood across the floor, and soon disappeared into a small hole on the floor by the side of the western wall. I died an anonymous death, no obituaries came out in the newspapers the next day - while the ants in my room had a grand meal - cornflakes and mashed potatoes dried in milk, and a lick at a dead mosquito every now and then.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Day Dream
Sleep seeps into my eyes
The bitch, how I missed her last night
As I toodle between yawns and sighs
A blanket comes and covers my eyes
Oh, how I dreamt of that long lost girl
That pink necklace with a singular pearl
That misty night, the boat in the lake
The call of the wild, and me lying awake
And then I see a light in the dark
I get ready for the enemy's attack
But then I saw that it was her
Hey! Fighting beauty was not my knack
We made love till early dawn
And then she slipped away, a white, serene swan
I woke up too late, and I woke up alone
My eyes seeked her presence, but she was long gone
And then I heard a shrill bell ring
I woke up wit a start, my head still on wings
The classroom was empty, once again I was alone
My sole companions were my notebook and my phone
NOTE: Writing poems is not my cup of tea. But this was actually written in the classroom last term during a boring lecture, just to keep sleep at bay as the concerned prof. used to feel very offended if he caught someone sleeping in the class
The bitch, how I missed her last night
As I toodle between yawns and sighs
A blanket comes and covers my eyes
Oh, how I dreamt of that long lost girl
That pink necklace with a singular pearl
That misty night, the boat in the lake
The call of the wild, and me lying awake
And then I see a light in the dark
I get ready for the enemy's attack
But then I saw that it was her
Hey! Fighting beauty was not my knack
We made love till early dawn
And then she slipped away, a white, serene swan
I woke up too late, and I woke up alone
My eyes seeked her presence, but she was long gone
And then I heard a shrill bell ring
I woke up wit a start, my head still on wings
The classroom was empty, once again I was alone
My sole companions were my notebook and my phone
NOTE: Writing poems is not my cup of tea. But this was actually written in the classroom last term during a boring lecture, just to keep sleep at bay as the concerned prof. used to feel very offended if he caught someone sleeping in the class
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Paper Boat
The clouds looked menacing in the distance. The hills that normally looked like blue sentinels guarding the bustling city of Guwahati were already hazy, meaning that the rain had begun there. The needle of the odometer of my trusted bike edged towards the 90 mark as I raced against the clouds and hence the rain, hoping to make it to my home before the rains caught up with me – more so because when it rains in Guwahati, it pours, for days, sometimes weeks.
My earliest memory of the monsoons is that of making paper boats and placing them gently on the puddles outside my home. We used to live in a small town called Bongaigaon then as my Dad was posted there. A really small town a couple of hundred kilometres away from the capital city of Guwahati, its only claim to fame being home to a huge tea estate and, later on, the hub of most Bodo insurgencies.
Many an afternoon had been spent egging the boats to make it to the other side of the puddle which was wide enough more me not to be able to jump across it at that early age of 4. I also remember the snails that would come out in the open, the sound of the toads that would croak for the whole night, for consecutive nights in the nearby marsh, and the horde of insects and other living forms that would come to life after the rains.
That was two decades ago. As I remember those days, the pictures in my memory look like snapshots from another age, a black and white movie of Satyajit Ray perhaps. Last year, I was driving from my birth place in Assam to Guwahati after meeting my ageing paternal uncles and aunts – a distance of 300 kilometres. Something on the way made me take a small diversion of 30 kilometres that took me to Bongaigaon. My first visit to the place where my initial years were spent in 15 years. Like everything and everyone around us, the place had changed as well. All the roads were paved now, and a great deal wider. The people seemed to walk on the roads with a purpose. A number of new shops had come up. And yeah!! It wasn’t raining. I drove slowly through the street on which the house was where I used to stay. It was shut down, and the small field in front of it looked like it had not seen a trim in six months. I stepped out of the car, opened the iron gate and gingerly made my way through the field, careful not to step on any snakes or scorpions. Even though the walls and the doors could do with a fresh coat of paint, I could see that the landlord had changed the colours – from green walls and blue doors & windows to light yellow walls and brown doors & windows, which meant that my chalk drawings on one of the doors was gone for ever. Suddenly I felt a sting at the back of my eye balls and could see my vision blurring. I knew that this was probably the last time I was standing there. I was about to leave in a few days for my MBA course to begin and I knew that my career would take me places, but Bongaigaon certainly didn’t figure in that list of places. I wondered about my little friends – with whom I used to play in that very field – where must they be now.
I got back into the car but still kept thinking of those friends. And of all the friends that I have made since then. Not been in touch with many of them since years. Is life really like a train journey and friends just co-passengers who get down at their destinations, never to be seen again? Gripping the wheel, I gazed into the distance lost in such thoughts when suddenly, without warning, the heavens opened up. And something made me make a paper boat using the photocopy of the car insurance. I still have that paper boat with me, it reminds me of that unplanned trip into memory that June afternoon in 2006.
My earliest memory of the monsoons is that of making paper boats and placing them gently on the puddles outside my home. We used to live in a small town called Bongaigaon then as my Dad was posted there. A really small town a couple of hundred kilometres away from the capital city of Guwahati, its only claim to fame being home to a huge tea estate and, later on, the hub of most Bodo insurgencies.
Many an afternoon had been spent egging the boats to make it to the other side of the puddle which was wide enough more me not to be able to jump across it at that early age of 4. I also remember the snails that would come out in the open, the sound of the toads that would croak for the whole night, for consecutive nights in the nearby marsh, and the horde of insects and other living forms that would come to life after the rains.
That was two decades ago. As I remember those days, the pictures in my memory look like snapshots from another age, a black and white movie of Satyajit Ray perhaps. Last year, I was driving from my birth place in Assam to Guwahati after meeting my ageing paternal uncles and aunts – a distance of 300 kilometres. Something on the way made me take a small diversion of 30 kilometres that took me to Bongaigaon. My first visit to the place where my initial years were spent in 15 years. Like everything and everyone around us, the place had changed as well. All the roads were paved now, and a great deal wider. The people seemed to walk on the roads with a purpose. A number of new shops had come up. And yeah!! It wasn’t raining. I drove slowly through the street on which the house was where I used to stay. It was shut down, and the small field in front of it looked like it had not seen a trim in six months. I stepped out of the car, opened the iron gate and gingerly made my way through the field, careful not to step on any snakes or scorpions. Even though the walls and the doors could do with a fresh coat of paint, I could see that the landlord had changed the colours – from green walls and blue doors & windows to light yellow walls and brown doors & windows, which meant that my chalk drawings on one of the doors was gone for ever. Suddenly I felt a sting at the back of my eye balls and could see my vision blurring. I knew that this was probably the last time I was standing there. I was about to leave in a few days for my MBA course to begin and I knew that my career would take me places, but Bongaigaon certainly didn’t figure in that list of places. I wondered about my little friends – with whom I used to play in that very field – where must they be now.
I got back into the car but still kept thinking of those friends. And of all the friends that I have made since then. Not been in touch with many of them since years. Is life really like a train journey and friends just co-passengers who get down at their destinations, never to be seen again? Gripping the wheel, I gazed into the distance lost in such thoughts when suddenly, without warning, the heavens opened up. And something made me make a paper boat using the photocopy of the car insurance. I still have that paper boat with me, it reminds me of that unplanned trip into memory that June afternoon in 2006.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Meter Down
I have a strong dislike towards riding autos since a long time. I have always felt it to be an unnecessary indulgence. However, the illegible routes written in Kannada on the public buses coupled with a new found sense of laziness made me take the seemingly easier option more than a couple of times, specially on weekends. The auto rides would go on to form an integral part of my memory of the last two months here in Bangalore. And here are a few reasons why.
Auto rides in Bangalore can have an ending as surprising an O Henry short story. A ride from BTM to my sister’s house where I was put up would cost me anything between 32 to 50 bucks. “Strictly by meter sir.” But the fact that surprised me the most on each of the auto rides was that I always managed to reach home unscratched. I had the reputation in my engineering days of being the safest rough biker in college, but often the manoeuvres of the auto rider would often have me gripping the rods in front of me tightly and tightening every single muscle of the body in anticipation of that inevitable crash.
Auto drivers in Bangalore are also wont towards striking off a conversation with the passengers. Often I had to sit the entire stretch from Banashankari to Silk Board, with the driver blabbering away in incomprehensible Kannada, and me just murmuring haan or nahi, (yes or no), the choice made absolutely at random. On some unfortunate occasions, I would encounter a driver who knew a little bit of Hindi. Unfortunate because he would expect me to make proper comments rather than the random yes and no.
One day, while I’m keeping a close look at the meter, trying to determine if its running too fast, the autowaala’s voice breaks my concentration. “I want to have a job. A proper job. A helper in the canteen of an IT company maybe. I am not getting a girl to marry. Everyone rejects me. Even though I earn more than what a helper in the canteen of an IT company does, no one wants to marry his daughter off to an autowaala.” His last sentence confirms my fears about a rigged meter. But the mention of my favourite topic for discussion (marriage) gets me distracted. “Why do you want to get married? An extra mouth to feed, maybe a couple more in 3-4 years. Spend the money that you are earning on yourself, and enjoy life.” The autowaala replies something inaudible amongst the multitude of sounds of the traffic outside, and I know better than to ask him to repeat.
Another day, an autowaala asks me my salary. Not sure what to answer, since my sister had warned me against auto waalas who “take you to deserted places and then rob you at knife point. It happened to a software engineer last week, you know”, I flick open my cell phone, excuse myself and call up an imaginary number again and again, with an expression of disgust at the jammed network of Hutch that evening.
My sister’s warning actually turned out to be a source of amusement in the auto rides where the drivers turned out to be reserved. When not shutting my eyes at the view of a fast approaching Volvo from the other side on a collision course which the driver averts with a deft left-right of the handle, I imagine the auto waala suddenly stopping the auto, flipping out a knife and asking me for all my valuables (“they take your ATM card, will make you reveal the PIN and then withdraw all the cash, you know”). I would then plan out the exit route (lesson learnt after reading “The Bourne Trilogy” years ago – Rule No. 1 - Always plan your exit route) The exit route planned would depend on the physique of the auto waala. Since all the auto waalas in Bangalore, and I dare say Southern India, sport a commendable paunch, my favoured route of exit was always to run away as fast as possible as soon as the auto made an unscheduled stop. I often still wonder why that unfortunate software engineer who got robbed last week didn’t think of the same plan. Ah! He didn’t have a sister like me I guess, who could warn him off.
Auto rides in Bangalore can have an ending as surprising an O Henry short story. A ride from BTM to my sister’s house where I was put up would cost me anything between 32 to 50 bucks. “Strictly by meter sir.” But the fact that surprised me the most on each of the auto rides was that I always managed to reach home unscratched. I had the reputation in my engineering days of being the safest rough biker in college, but often the manoeuvres of the auto rider would often have me gripping the rods in front of me tightly and tightening every single muscle of the body in anticipation of that inevitable crash.
Auto drivers in Bangalore are also wont towards striking off a conversation with the passengers. Often I had to sit the entire stretch from Banashankari to Silk Board, with the driver blabbering away in incomprehensible Kannada, and me just murmuring haan or nahi, (yes or no), the choice made absolutely at random. On some unfortunate occasions, I would encounter a driver who knew a little bit of Hindi. Unfortunate because he would expect me to make proper comments rather than the random yes and no.
One day, while I’m keeping a close look at the meter, trying to determine if its running too fast, the autowaala’s voice breaks my concentration. “I want to have a job. A proper job. A helper in the canteen of an IT company maybe. I am not getting a girl to marry. Everyone rejects me. Even though I earn more than what a helper in the canteen of an IT company does, no one wants to marry his daughter off to an autowaala.” His last sentence confirms my fears about a rigged meter. But the mention of my favourite topic for discussion (marriage) gets me distracted. “Why do you want to get married? An extra mouth to feed, maybe a couple more in 3-4 years. Spend the money that you are earning on yourself, and enjoy life.” The autowaala replies something inaudible amongst the multitude of sounds of the traffic outside, and I know better than to ask him to repeat.
Another day, an autowaala asks me my salary. Not sure what to answer, since my sister had warned me against auto waalas who “take you to deserted places and then rob you at knife point. It happened to a software engineer last week, you know”, I flick open my cell phone, excuse myself and call up an imaginary number again and again, with an expression of disgust at the jammed network of Hutch that evening.
My sister’s warning actually turned out to be a source of amusement in the auto rides where the drivers turned out to be reserved. When not shutting my eyes at the view of a fast approaching Volvo from the other side on a collision course which the driver averts with a deft left-right of the handle, I imagine the auto waala suddenly stopping the auto, flipping out a knife and asking me for all my valuables (“they take your ATM card, will make you reveal the PIN and then withdraw all the cash, you know”). I would then plan out the exit route (lesson learnt after reading “The Bourne Trilogy” years ago – Rule No. 1 - Always plan your exit route) The exit route planned would depend on the physique of the auto waala. Since all the auto waalas in Bangalore, and I dare say Southern India, sport a commendable paunch, my favoured route of exit was always to run away as fast as possible as soon as the auto made an unscheduled stop. I often still wonder why that unfortunate software engineer who got robbed last week didn’t think of the same plan. Ah! He didn’t have a sister like me I guess, who could warn him off.
Monday, May 14, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
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.
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