Dantewara; Sania-Shoaib-Ayesha; IPL & Tiger Woods

In the recent past, I was closely following news reports in connection with the events as mentioned below:

1. The Dantewara conflict resulting in the death of approximately 80 security personnel at the hands of local Maoist militia / insurgents.
2. The Sania Mirza – Shoaib Malik – Ayesha Siddiqui marriage and divorce saga.
3. The bidding and the finalization of the Pune and the Kochi IPL franchisees at astronomical sums.
4. The return of Tiger Woods.

These incidents were reported in the print and the electronic media almost round the clock with enormous heat, hype and passion. I was sucked into its tantalizing vortex of reportage and opinions without any realistic resistance.

Once the immediacy of the news had settled in, I got some time to reflect. The issues that came to my mind are:

1. The classical divide between the rich (the powerful who run the state) and the poor (the disenfranchised) has converted itself into a full scale war in the darkness of the jungles, low lying mountains and plateaus of India. The war is between greed on one side and human survival on the other. The upwardly mobile class hangs onto the political idea of democracy and nationalism propagated by the rich (but not practiced). The English speaking media is a complex matrix of organizations that works to the interests of large corporations (including compradors) and is run and fuelled by the most capable and suave members of this upwardly mobile community. The mainstream vernacular media is not free of vested interests; it operates as the branch offices of the mainstream English speaking media. The variance in styling of similar content – more aggressive, insensitive, unrefined and sensationalizing – is worth noticing. The poor has very little voice in the institutions of the state as well as the media. Vast expanse of land is being snatched away by large corporations in the name of development through mining and setting up of colossal industrial units resulting in displacement of millions of people. The total wealth generated by such industrial enterprise is shared between the promoters and the state most disproportionately in the approximate ratio of 90:10 (in the form of revenue received through taxes and royalty). Only 3 to 4% of the wealth accrued to the promoters cascade downwards. The state, as such, who is assigned with the duty of protecting its citizenry by statute, works in joint venture with the promoters of these large corporations to protect their interests by validating their objectives, aims, and methods to achieve such objectives and aims in the names of development and growth. The fact is systemic impoverishment, malnourishment and neglect have combined together to form such an intense envelope of darkness in the mineral and timber rich districts of India that it is beyond imagination today to work out a roadmap for reconciliation between the 2 sides. Do we have any elected representative who has the imagination to suggest a workable methodology to the tribals to continue with their movement non-violently in an atmosphere where private armies and state agencies in cohort run the writ or to halt the locomotion of these armies and agencies? What does a tribal want? First: she does not want to give away her land (the track record of rehabilitation in India is abjectly poor); second: she wants means of livelihood so that she is able to earn food, shelter and clothing for her and her family; third: she aspires to get access to healthcare, water and education to be able to lead a dignified life. But when you are driven away from your own land against your wish you become a hapless migrant. Your chances of survival become minimal. So the tribal today is involved in a bloody battle not to get thrown away from her own land. How does one do it non-violently in the face of these powerful armies and agencies? The large corporations also invest huge sums of money in getting parliamentarians elected so that legislations are made in their favor. Is there any parliamentarian to take up the case based on merits and objective analysis and reasoning and whose imagination is not rooted to the wants and desires of the promoters of large corporations? I feel utterly sorry for the foot soldiers of the state (and the large corporations it sets out to protect) who inundate the jungles, kill tribals and die at their hands; they essentially prowl under-prepared and of course, without knowing the implicit objectives, and have been unleashed on the people most dangerously by their masters. The irony is: People who mask their true interests in the garb of circuitous discussions on democracy, nationalism, and denouncing the use of violence (when it comes to common men having taken up arms against the state in desperation) are neither aware of the scale of hunger and desperation that is fuelling this war nor are they sensitive and sincere to their foot soldiers (on whose account they shed tears in TV studios) who have been (literally) thrown into the battlefields without adequate food, shelter, water, mosquito repellents, arms and ammunitions, and above all, a clear-cut strategy. I have another question to ask: Will violence be in the long term interest of the tribals? I think, no. Violence will help them to retaliate and protect themselves in the short term, but it will end up undermining the political battle against the dictatorship of the rich (landlords and large corporations put together) embedded in the idea of democracy as practiced in India. Secondly, violent politics is most likely to be criminalized in the long run. Bhagat Singh’s strategic use of violence was political (as it was being played with an audience around it) and not prophylactic; Gandhi’s strategic use of non-violence was political too and it arose from within the politics of the trusteeship of the rich and the leisured class; violence used by the tribals is retaliatory and prophylactic and is essentially devoid of politics. How does one bring the human civilization back to the idea that its survival rests in the ecological survival of all communities including every constituent of the biosphere? For this we have to move away from industrial economics and the idea of modernity that multiplies consumption and brings every ambit of our existence under commercial laws; go back to our lands and sources of water to live in farming communities without the polluted idea of adding too much to nature in our lifespan in the name of wealth generation.
2. How would you react if a non-celebrity status Indian woman was to fall in love with a Pakistani man or vice versa? What kind of a man marries on phone? What kind of a sports-star marries a woman without seeing her face? What kind of a woman keeps her clothes (dipped in her man’s fluids) unwashed and stacked securely for years? What kind of a woman gets engaged to her childhood sweetheart (publicly and pompously); breaks off her engagement in a few months time (again publicly and pompously); and then after a short break announces her marriage to another man [well, a falling sports icon this time from another country but settled in a different country] (once again publicly and pompously)?
3. Have you read the Koran? Polygamy as described in the Koran has a background context to it of the gory holy-war; it is very different from institutionalized polygamy as enshrined in the Muslim Personal Laws. Divorce by utterance (even in sense) does not find approval in the Koran. However, these are the 2 issues on which the Koran is denigrated by its religious opponents, very wrongly and ignorantly according to me.
4. IPL is plush with funds. Where is this money coming from; who are the real investors? Who is earning, and how much? IPL is the crucible for showcasing of advertisements, and creating an engine for selling and pumping of multifarious products and services in the marketplace. As such, there was a need to showcase it as a huge carnival, bonanza and razzmatazz, where stars from the movie industry work as front men for investors: it is a cocktail of money, movies and a popular sport where the needs of the sportsmen fared last. Forget Kochi and Pune; Kings X1 Punjab (which is likely to come last in IPL 3) is valued now at Rs. 1000 crores: 3 to 4 times more than that of what it was bought at 3 years back. Where do you get such astronomical returns for underperformance? Which means, price of a team in IPL is not proportional to its performance; well, this contradicts the fundamental principle of free market economics! UP, Uttarakhand, MP, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and the whole of North East has 1 team: Kolkata Knight Riders. Maharashtra has 2 teams; all the 4 Southern states have 1 team each; the North has 3 teams. What does this show? IPL is consolidating and underlining the already existing biases in India: that between regions; classes; and, privileges.
5. Tiger Woods is an exceptional sportsman: his career built on passion and hard work. Unfortunately, he was made into a pseudo-cultural icon once again by the biggest multi-national corporations by fabricating (in many cases suitably exaggerating) stories around him: rags to riches; racial discrimination; doting father; doting husband; and, his political and religious correctness. The agenda was simple: Such conformist guys sell products and services much better than brigands like, Muhammad Ali and George Best. Once, Tiger Woods’ personal life was exposed to the hilt (I sympathize with him), the same corporations lost no time in abandoning him. Meanwhile, the bosses found out one thing: The investments made on Tiger Woods have been astronomical and he cannot go scot-free. So, they will take him back once again, when the stories of his sexual transgressions fade from public memory (on which the media at the behest of these corporations has already started working). I think in the next 3 to 6 months time you will find the Tiger is back on the billboards. Conservatism in politics, religious beliefs, and cultural positioning works to the advantage of commercial corporations.

Kindly do not think I am a secularist or a leftist; I am neither of these. But I am very unhappy at: the way consumption, greed, commercialization, and justification for going to war and violence unleashed on the powerless by the powerful have taken over each and every existential microcosm of our life. I am also deeply saddened by the decimation of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many others in Africa on one pretext or the other.

Is there a way to move forward or have we been irrevocably entangled in a downward helix of self-annihilation of the human race?

Yesterday I saw a wonderful film: Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone – US Army on their deceitful trail to find WMDs in Iraq and they ended up finding none!!!

Some Recent Thoughts

1.

In Bharatpur bird sanctuary I came to know of two things. One, there is a specific variety of birds that pick on the teeth of tigers. A tiger having had a dense meal sits leisurely, possibly drooling, with its teeth open to the sky. These birds come and sit on the tiger’s mouth and feed on the tiny morsels of meat stuck between the spaces of its teeth. So, this results in two things: the cleaning of the tiger’s teeth and feeding of the hungry bird. Second, woodpeckers peck on tree stems in search of food like ants and insects of variety, resulting in creation of warm labyrinths, which are then enjoyed as homes by parakeets.

Nature has devised wonderful complimentary patterns of survival that hints at the fundamental grammar of melody and ethic.

2.
If rape (in the sexual context) is defined as sexual assault and act of hostile intercourse against the wishes of another person, how then can rape be gender specific? But the problem is: it is hardly defined in a gender neutral manner! It is always meant to be an act of sexual aggression by men on women. Rights activists argue that a man can never be raped; at the most he can be sexually harassed. What about men being sodomized by men and transvestites, and transvestites and eunuchs by men? Because men have disproportionate power in the realm of the real world compared to what women have, hence acts of all kinds of aggression (including rape) on women by men will of course outnumber similar acts on men by women. Further, the rape of a man is likely to be least reported in the present context because involving in a sexual act is seen to be macho behavior (and, men do not enjoy being projected un-macho because that’s just so un-cool!) and as such, shying away from sexual activity (where opportunity permits) is seen to be cloaking oneself ungainfully with feminine traits. I have listened to many stories where the men had to be involved unwillingly in sexual intercourse with their wives (yes wives!) to demonstrate: their interest in marriage and their partners, and their ability to perform; they were threatened by their powerful wives (on account of having more access to wealth and accompanying beauty in most of these cases) that otherwise they would face desertion and public humiliation of the worst kind. In such cases, these men have reported to have felt the very act of getting aroused excruciatingly tormenting. This is not rape but not very different from rape either.

Although, I do agree that men cannot be physically or emotionally bruised or violated or put to risk to the extent a woman can be in an act of rape.

While rape laws should be written considering the existential realities arising out of the enormously disproportionate gap in power between men and women in every sector of our society, however, there is every reason to alter the gender specificity of the act of rape in its literal meaning: just because it is not true.

3.
Children rob you of your basic freedom to rebel. In this context children are seen to be obfuscation or an impediment to ones individuality whether they are born to a plan or by default. I know of innumerable incidents where parents have abandoned their children both under impoverished as well as privileged conditions for multifarious reasons. There are situations akin to abandonment even in cases where the parent might not have left the family physically. I must add: I have also met parents who have gone out of families due to discord with their partners, and yet have been very dutiful to and protective of their children.

I have often wondered about the possible incentives in abandoning your children (although considering respectfully that in all the cases it must have been a very painful experience for the parent). There is of course the life of Buddha in search of truth having abandoned his family and kingdom. It is complicated but the life of Buddha (specifically his act of abandonment) can be viewed in many ways. Parents, who abandon, in most of the cases, alter their memory to find an underlying justification to abandon to unburden the weight of guilt that sits on their soul like a monster. The souls of children get mauled in the process of abandonment for they do not understand and their vulnerability, both emotional and physical, alters their understanding of life and existence.

There is a violent world prowling around us.

If we have children it is ethically incumbent on us to protect them from the shadows of this ever-increasing violence, and try to help them grow as fine individuals.

4.
There is so much talk all around about the reforms in the modern education system. But nobody in power seems to be talking about reducing the burden: both in terms of the number of subjects and the constituent syllabus, especially up to high school. Education is no longer contemplative and is not aimed towards sharpening our faculties to understand and realize. Education must help us to observe the universe and our lives with sensitivity and humor, and must help us to think and question. But that is not the aim of the education industry and mafia for sure! I want to write about this in greater detail sometime later. To end may I say: The examinations per se are not bad but the format is?

Psalm 23

Human soul is a cloud of confusion and contradictions. There is no straight-cut formula, approach or ideology that will help us decipher it. The randomness of the human soul and consciousness is the biggest challenge to the human civilization.

Art, literature and entrepreneurship over the years have thrown immense light on the strange workings of the human soul and consciousness. What can you conclude having read the Anna Karenina or the countless theological and literary interpretations of the Feast of Sacrifice (Binding of Isaac or Binding of Ishmael) or the enigmatic questions of life and death in the Upanishads or Meursault’s journey in the Outsider or Amal’s fall into the silence of death in the Dakghar or having traveled through the majestic trappings of the Walt Disney’s empire? We can simply conclude: It is nearly impossible to conclude.

There is a rational engine embedded in our soul and consciousness that helps us to understand the universe and our existence, and take decisions for ourselves in order to survive according to our aspirations and circumstances. At the same time, there rests an amorphous wave in the unseen quarters of our soul and consciousness that makes us realize that in each phenomenon that we encounter or know of, there are other traits that travel through the discovered laws, repetitions and patterns like transversals of sudden lightning, which are not easily subject to reasoned analysis.

Recently I sensed a conflict in my own soul: While in real life I am not given to mysticism or spirituality (in fact, I shun them and in public forums argue against them being aware of the havoc such things create on gullible people), there lies a deep longing within to surrender and submit to an ‘enlightened soul’. If taken forward, this could extend to the point of giving up my Self to this ‘enlightened soul’ (could be a theological or political or corporate ideologue); this would as a corollary relieve me of the critical stresses that modern life generates because of its omnipotent commercialization and hyper-consumption and end up reducing me to a vegetable where I am no longer required to take any decisions about myself but follow a path that is laid out for me.

In a way, the conflicting strains are between the rigors of decisive action and the longing to be a renunciate.

The challenge is: How to stay away from dogma in participating in both the experiences – the path of natural science and the tunnel of metaphysics; it is also important to know that a complete path is one that can contain both the experiences.

Somebody who does not know me well asked me a few days back: What do I read when I am despairing? Actually, nothing came to my mind, so I ended up saying: Well, sometimes I read the Psalm 23. The questioner practically frowned at me; he said: And, your friends say that you are an atheist!

I kept quiet not knowing what to reply.

The Psalm 23 is given below; you may read it if you wish to.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.

Chasing

(A long story-poem written in 3 chapters of free verse)
1.

The true art is in the art of chasing not ideas or dreams,
But people who interest you all of a sudden at street corners,
At railway stations, at ice cream parlors, at grocery shops, at libraries,
And graveyards, inside hospital lobbies, so on and so forth.
What draws you closer to them,
Could be the strains of mist in their eyes,
The waves on their hair,
The incongruent stains of food on their shirts,
Or, even the dogged hunch of their backs.
2.
I have mastered this art over the years.
A few years back on a sunny winter afternoon,
I was eating a chicken cutlet at a street joint near Shyambazar crossing.
These are times when I become an obsessively self possessed man,
Almost severed from the rest of the world;
The pleasures of eating street food are such!
When I was devouring the last morsel of this giant cutlet,
Deeply immersed in a happy reverie,
I caught the sight of a hapless man (from the edge of my eyes),
Standing a few yards away from me,
Eating something that looked like a well done fish fry,
Inanely gaping elsewhere at a spiraling vortex of darkness unfolding,
Non-existent to normal eyes like mine.
What struck me was his spiritual distance from the delicacy that he was eating!
Having chased this man through the length and the breadth of the city,
Crossing its densely populated and abandoned avenues,
Streets and labyrinths during days and nights, across seasons and storms,
Rising buildings and heaps of debris,
Following him inside shops, restaurants, malls and cinema halls,
The strange scents of my pursuit still linger in my mind.
On foot, on bus, on local train and underground train,
On boat and on rickshaw and auto-rickshaw,
The story of this man was revealed to me,
As riddles start unlocking in dreams ending with more complex riddles to solve.

The story goes like this:
The man belonged to a family of grocers in the laid-back town of Malda,
He had inherited a decent store in the downtown supermarket,
He had a well cut-out life like his other two brothers,
Who had inherited similar stores like him in the city markets.
He obviously had other plans,
He wanted to build a factory for kites.
His understanding of aerodynamics was phenomenal,
In school, he had become a legend as a kite-maker and a kite-flyer.
One evening while returning from his secret workshop where,
He experimented with kites of different shapes and sizes,
He saw a lovely woman with radiant skin and a wondrous face,
In a lane that was barely illuminated by the lights of advertisement boards,
Displaying soaps, iodized salt and digital watches.
As soon as he saw this woman embedded in a world of her own,
Whom he thought to be a ball of magical light,
He knew his life was soon to meet a decisive change.
He followed this woman at a safe distance,
She taught English at the Evergreen Coaching Class.
The next few days he locked himself up in a room,
Meticulously planning how to make a move at her.
Ten days later, the face of this woman still playing on his mind,
He sat in the cash-counter of his grocery shop,
Reluctant, absent-minded, unsure and unaware of a concrete plan,
When this woman walked into his shop to buy three bars of Liril.
You can imagine the crescendo of his happy heart beating,
Facing this woman from such a close distance.
He took charge of the transaction with shivering legs,
The two things that made our man go crazy with longing,
Were the softness of this woman’s honey colored skin,
And the luminescence of her eyes.
After she paid the cash and took the bars of soap,
She spent a few seconds looking at the other things behind the cash-counter:
Deodorants, shampoos, multiple grain biscuits, basmati rice packs,
Colorful pouches of pepper and spices and likewise,
Then she turned back and made a move to exit the store.
The man said something almost inaudible and quivering to her:
Do you like kites?
She looked at the man, pleasant clouds swimming in her eyes
She replied to him in English: Are you telling me something?
Yes, I’m saying: Do you like kites?
Of course, I like kites and my brother likes them even more!
The man brought out two colossal kites with frills and laces:
One done in red and black in the shape of the face of a monster,
And the other a green and blue one in the shape of a mango.
Giving her these kites ceremoniously, hiding his embarrassment he said:
These kites come free with three bars of Liril from the store owner,
And these are designed by me.
The happiness the woman felt at this grand gesture is difficult to describe;
Once she had taken the kites with her,
She looked at him more closely (although hiding her scrutiny intelligently);
She was overwhelmed by her mounting desire.
The next two years were years of sunshine,
Devoted to a pair of wild lovers who met,
In the mornings and nights unseen to society,
In the kite-maker’s workshop to pour,
The warmth of their longing in each others bodies and souls,
Everyday without a break.
What struck the man about this woman was:
She loved her body to the point of being shamelessly selfish,
And openly enjoyed the act of making love to him,
Demanding all the manipulations of pleasure,
Which he thought were tricks of fallen women and whores.
This unnerved him for some time;
Later he came to terms with it concluding,
That all her acts were endeavors to heighten his pleasure;
These were true signs of sacrifice that a woman in love could do for her man.
Needless to say: He was unconvinced by his own logic,
He remained constantly smitten by bouts of angry jealousy,
Emanating from his belief that she had enjoyed innumerable men before she met him.
The woman loved his acts of jealousy,
And did nothing substantially to douse his fire.
A few facts here:
This woman came from an English educated Brahmin family,
The man came from a family of traders with very little formal education,
And he was seven years younger to her.
These became terrible obfuscations to a proposal of marriage from either side,
She was married off all of a sudden to a doctor in Calcutta in the third year.
A friend of this man, who was invited to the marriage,
Had been going up and down the town circulating news like:
The bridegroom is a FRCP from Edinburgh,
Tall and good-looking, almost dashing like an actor in a Hollywood movie,
And the couple looked shrouded in a thick blanket of bliss and happiness,
Whenever they were together.
Our man was gradually destroyed,
Almost decimated in the next three years,
With the acuteness of love pains which struck every organ of his body,
Most importantly, his brain,
Falling deeper in a ravenous depthless pit each day.
One fine morning he decided to make a journey to the city of Calcutta,
(Which had become Kolkata by this time) and come face-to-face,
With this woman and talk to her for the last time;
For he had three questions to ask.
He was sure this was the only way to heal his oozing wounds;
The questions were idiotic and sentimental to say the least:
Were you happy with me?
Are you happy now?
Why did you break my heart?
The point is: The woman was happy in her marital life!
Why did she do what she did:
This question of course flamed in my mind.
It’s difficult to answer this,
I found no clues to it but I’ve an answer:
The man was inconsequential to her in the real sense,
She wanted a settled and a secure life for herself,
But before she could attain it she secretly wished to avenge,
Her disciplinarian and righteous upbringing,
By breaking free for a few intervening years,
And taste the unfettered shadows of life that true love transports with it.
This man that I chased was far from getting healed,
Observing the happiness of a warm home,
Where his lover was the queen surrounded by her children and husband,
The situation had ignited a dark passion in the deep quarters of his soul.
One winter morning swimming gaily in the river Hooghly,
He must have planned to shoot her on a new moon night,
For it was after this bath that,
His actions of accessing the gun market had become most decisive.
I was a witness to the murder,
I was spellbound by his commitment to the act.
After killing her and seeing her fall limply on the marble floor of her bedroom,
In front of a teak-wood paneled florally carved box,
He laughed for the first time since I had seen him on that sunny winter afternoon.
He felt relieved, ready to be taken,
His body faintly lit by the light of celestial bodies in an otherwise dark night.
3.
I chase women too,
I had started chasing my wife (well, she was not my wife then),
By the side of a dry fruit store in a shopping mall on a misty spring evening.
What had struck me was the deep melancholy,
Rising from her eyes like steam and the beauty of her softness.
She told me once which makes me worry quite a lot:
I must wear some cosmetics darling at least to show to the others,
That I’m happy with you.
I argued against cosmetics in social forums quite successfully;
But I was getting defeated hands down by the logic that cosmetics
Could beam somebody’s inner happiness as if it had no light of its own.
We fought over this so hard that we ended up making love.
There are nights when my wife lives with her mother,
And I am left all alone in the house to fend for myself,
I get up in the nights sleeplessly and wonder through the house,
With lovelorn thoughts of her hovering dangerously in my mind.
This is when I go to her wardrobe and light it up,
As my sight travels over her perfumes, lavender, moisturizers,
Creams, skin foundations, talcum, nail-polishes,
And lip-smacks in the finest bottles of glass and metal,
Adorning the trays and empty spaces of fine cut wood,
I can sense the loneliness that I feel without her,
And the aching feeling of how much I want to make her mine.
My room gets flooded with a spray of smoke,
And I can see a simmering image of her in the mirror,
From where she looks at me with pure desire.

The Tower

(A long story-poem written in 6 chapters of free verse)
1.

The tower where we live is a tall and a lonely tower,
Standing outside the limits of the city.
It reaches into the white tufts of clouds
From a huge expanse of land once used for potato farming.
This tower among other towers has a name,
It is popular by its name: Dream Tower.
Sometimes I wonder about the dreams of this Dream Tower,
Dreams of its architect, dreams of the masons who worked on it,
Dreams of the seller and of the buyers of its apartments,
And of the mafia which craftily squeezed the land out of wide eyed farmers.
The tower stands erect like the timeless portal of an arrogant crown.
As I walk up its spinal stairwell at nights,
Pondering over this multitude of dreams, I know,
These are dreams which still linger in its labyrinths like ghosts.
2.
There are times when I stand at the window of my apartment,
Looking at the city where I was born.
Searching for symbols and patterns that I know exist,
Beneath layers of rising vapor in the air of this city.
The smog invariably clouds my vision.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of familiar bridges and a few monuments.
Mostly I look at the airplanes taking off and landing incessantly,
And the cars that seem to glide on the highway that dives past the distant tower.
The farmlands and wetlands around the tower look plundered and ravaged,
Destroyed by the monstrous man made construction machinery,
Giving way to spectacular buildings, deluxe hotels and shopping malls.
I tell a lot of people (not caring to hide the strain of pride in my tone):
I live away from the city, amidst greenery and water bodies and clouds.
I know this is a lie; yet I prefer saying it,
It makes my acquisition look like a prize possession.
Soon the ever swelling concrete jungle will engulf everything;
The nooks and corners, the parks and shady grounds by the lakesides,
Where I chased solitary beautiful girls during winter picnics long time ago.
3.
I have a friend who is a film critic – progressive, well read,
And talkative on all the matters on earth;
I hope you understand what I mean.
This guy after eating a sumptuous meal at my place summed it up:
Sandy, this property makes you look like a man!
Men are no longer known for their chivalry,
Or, by the charming ways they treat their women.
Rather, when we talk of men coming back nowadays,
They are actually referring to sedans resembling angry war planes.
My friend’s words made me wistful for some time, and ponder:
Was I at all a man enough before taking my place in this tower?
4.
My son and daughter have wonderful faces like those fluffy angels in a dream.
I have been thinking: Can one see such dreams in this tower?
My wife who loves me like a magnificent queen,
And is my partner in all the crimes that I have committed till date,
Was the one who made all the installations in our home:
The wood carved fine leather upholstered furniture,
The ornate lighting, the embroidered carpets,
And the stainless steel digitized contraptions to do this and that to perfection.
My God, the things look so nice and cool,
And provide you with such deadly comfort,
That our home almost looks like the insides of a medieval fortress.
In this cave, at times floating on strange clouds, we play hide and seek,
Make fun of each other, quarrel, see horrendous films, listen to rock,
And sleep and eat and defecate and party, coming and going,
Coming and going, day in and day out.
Do we get bored in this tower? There is no definite way to tell you this,
Because when we get bored we skip channels, change our gym routine,
My wife orders for new food, we try out avant-garde stuff in films and theater,
Read poetry, and make love on different beds,
And even change drivers and servants.

One night – the stars and the half moon twinkled so brightly in the sky,
While the lights from the city looked sad and diffused –
I was teaching electrostatics to my children.
You must be aware how tough it is to teach adolescents,
Something like charging of a gold leaf electroscope by induction.
As I jumped into the most dramatic part of my discourse,
My daughter furrows her brow, raises her hand and blurts:
Sandy man, I’ve something to say.
Although I felt irritated to the core, but you know,
When this tiny fiery woman has something to say, you can’t stop her,
My son feels agitated and almost taking my side reacts sharply:
Come; say, what all you have to say quickly,
Don’t you see Sandy man is making such a bright effort?
Then my daughter asks me this question:
Tell us you Sandy man; how far is the soul of the city from our tower?
My son becomes thoughtful at the question and as a rejoinder asks:
How can one say, Sandy man, where the soul of a city lies?
Frankly, I feel like a charged electroscope and I end up saying:
The city is so far away from us and its soul, my dear children, lies buried
And if at all you want to find it, you need to unearth a prickly riddle.
At this point my wife makes her glorious entry into the scene and declares:
Sandy let us all go and live, by the side of a sinuating river,
You promised to build a cottage on an enchanted shore during our courtship.
Memory is something you are incapable of forgetting,
And I marvel at my queen’s memory,
With which she strikes me almost every time at the right hour.
The children start singing a meaningless song,
Boisterously breaking the dead silence of the night,
Amidst this increasing cacophony, my tigress gives me a look,
Which tells me she will fall in my ferocious embrace the moment,
I leave all this mess and catch her.
It happened just then,
Our tower took off into the sky like a rocket!
5.
When we do not feel like sleeping which happens many a time;
I tell them: stories, mostly spooky stories.
I told them one a few nights back:
I got down from my car, proceeded towards the elevator well in the tower,
The tower consists of two elevator wells facing each other.
(We are the only residents in this tower).
Both the elevator cubicles were waiting tirelessly at ground zero,
For somebody to occupy their space.
I feel very confused about which elevator to board,
So I have made a principle of sorts:
While descending I will drive down the southern well,
Whereas on my way to the top I will drive up the northern well.
I board the northern cubicle, hungry and tired but happy to be back home.
The doors of my elevator close making an unpleasant sound,
And I push the button for my floor.
My eyes by fleeting chance fall on the opposite elevator with doors shut;
It looks utterly glum and is melancholically illuminated by its fluorescent lamp,
It’s vacant and at rest; I find in it a ball of smoke encircling like the ring of Saturn.
As my elevator kick starts and rushes upwards I find,
The opposite elevator rushing upwards all of a sudden almost at an equal speed.
When we race past each other through the intervening floors I can sight,
The other elevator momentarily through the glass panels of our respective doors:
The emerging ball of smoke growing inside its somnolent chamber,
Into something more concrete which I cannot readily grasp.
As we leave the sixth floor behind,
The ball of smoke was gone and instead I found a man,
Standing in a grotesque posture looking vacantly at me.
He hardly moved; his hungry gaze on me more intense with each passing floor.
Once we had crossed the tenth floor the other elevator accelerated,
And crossed mine leaving me terror struck and suddenly I realized,
That this man almost looked like me (he was my body double),
Wore the same clothes and carried the same bag and file of papers;
It was this mesmerizing similarity that filled my soul with endless darkness.
Was this man a heinous imposter?
Was this man a terrorist?
Would he harm my wife and children?
At last, I reached the floor where I live,
My chest thumping and heaving against my frail rib cage.
My hands shook as I pressed the entrance bell,
A few seconds later, our maid had opened the door.
When she found me standing in front of the door,
She instinctively turned around and rushed inside calling for my wife.
When she was turning, I had glimpsed the shock in her eyes.
Surprisingly I did not enter or make any move,
As if I was waiting for approval of others to enter my own home.
My wife came and the children followed,
She came to the door; I saw a queer look in her eyes (the children looked awestruck).
When she spoke, she sounded restrained and withdrawn:
What a look alike, unbelievable!
Nobody can believe this.
My dear man, don’t harm us, my husband is back at home,
He has gone to the washroom to take his bath.
Tonight we will leave to see the mother of all rivers;
As you would know, it is a long and a tedious journey.
Spare us my good man,
If you need anything, anything from us I am willing to give,
If you want our home in this tower, you can have it,
We will be leaving for good.
6.
My wife belongs to lands where fables are written,
I snatched her from a fable and made her mine.
In doing so I made her the heroine of one fable,
And a vamp in another.
There are days when we go to the terrace of this tower,
Soaking sun in our burnt out bodies, standing taller
And looking breathlessly at the city,
Which feels like a crouching demon, inching towards us.
Will we feel like immigrants forever on this planet?
To douse our eternal fears we pray; we pray like devotees are required to pray.
We end all our prayers with one line:
Let this city keep some space for our children,
Whose faces resemble those fluffy angels in a dream!

Ascent of Sap

A few days back, I was teaching my son: ascent of sap (Biology). It is all about how nutrients flow through root capillaries to the upper reaches of a plant and its leaves.

Soil is rich in mineral nutrients dissolved in sub-soil water. Root hairs of plants are deeply embedded in soil layers. Capillary action sucks these nutrients upwards. The nutrients with the help of chlorophyll and sunlight create food for the plants in the miniscule chambers of plant leaves. Life will not continue with this fundamental process getting interrupted and diminised.

In the night, a thought struck me: How marvelously nature has contrived with all its constituents and resources to sustain life on our planet!

At one level this thought made me feel uplifted bringing tears to my eyes. As we all know in such moments of self-discovery we are prone to deflect our wavering minds to finding a meaning of life. How can such complex processes leading to creation, reproduction and sustenance of life have no meaning or not transport an implicitly coherent symbol? During these spells of intense sentimental thrusts playing inside my chest I have to hold myself not to get carried away.

Around midnight I started looking at the phenomenon more clearly: The amazing beauty is in the comprehensive effort of nature. It is brilliant and perplexing in all its magnitude, relentless and unyeilding. The birth of life including the birth of intelligence and consciousness, I believe, is without any preconceived design or purpose. It must have happened because of a specific series of random movements, sparks and collisions that happen otherwise in every nook and corner of the universe countlessly in a micro-fraction of a second. What an accident it must have been that resulted in the birth of life and later intelligence and consciousness.

As pale beams of morning light lazed inside my room I realized an old strain of thought rising in my soul: The matrix of consciousness is infused with two forces - one, that helps us to feel in harmony with the darkness of the cave from where we emerged and two, one that makes us insecure about it.

This insecurity is at the crux of all art, enterprise, philosophy, ideology and political experiments. We have created an alternate nature of civilazations that works on the machinations of its various institutions.

Man created primeval institutions while engaged in battles against natural hostilities in the early years. Thereafter these institutions have been gradually made into grasslands of power battles run on emotive ideas in the name of good for the human civilization.

Religions, nation-states and family evolved in the process. Industrial economics and retail consumer markets have hit the final blow to the evolution and sustenance of communities (as the largest unit of mankind) and the individual (as the smallest unit of mankind).

I am sure about one thing: A man in the 15th century felt much happier and contended than a man in the 21st century because at that point in time we were still evolving. We did not know we had chosen a path that will kill all of us. We did not know we had built this path fanning the darker force of consciousness that gave us power to interpret; find meaning; assign meaning; and add, subtract, divide and multiply on nature. One does not need to go into history to know that. Art and literature will prove my point.

Morals and ethics ...

Morals and ethics are built around the idea that life is meaningful. Elsewhere, it has been amply established: life is meaningless. We know it for sure (from our own intense experiences of life); we may not voice it. Once we start believing that life is meaningless the burden of passing time, which essentially life is all about, seems monumental and nerve shattering.

We like to believe: we are here on a special mission; we are special people cut out for special purposes. Chasing this belief we fend ourselves from the weight of time.

Morals and ethics are about good and bad based on various frames of reference. We aspire to goodness secretly desiring goodness to be returned to our own lives in some way. When we end up doing something bad we pray to reverse the effects of badness (committed by us in the first place) shadowing our lives. We think implicitly that such cause and effect exists in the universe of morals and ethics.

I had come to know of a queer woman from a friend. She was (I’m saying in the past sense because I’ve no knowledge of her in the last 6 years) an instinctive sexual carnivore. She was happily married and had a steady family. She was hooked on to a rare breed of men – rich, intelligent and full bodied. It’s not as if she did not want to check herself from sleeping with these men. She did (in fact she suffered from a serious moral dilemma) every time she changed men [as confessed to my friend] and every time she cheated she felt sick of some illness or the other. In the thickness of her suffering she vowed every time to lead a devoted family life henceforth; thinking that the pain of illness was nature’s way of punishing her for her unbridled craving for sexual gratification.

I also know of a man who is sickly successful in almost every endeavor that he takes up in spite of employing minors in his house for doing all the tedious household chores and behaving with them in the most uncouth manner possible; I’ve also heard of rumors of his beating them up at times. There are people who are envious of his success more so because they want his ill treatment of minors to be avenged in the most immediate manner possible.

The universe of morals and ethics, I’ve concluded, is an imaginary one and more often than not is a swing ball used by the powerful against the powerless.

The universe is a chaos.

Our minds are warehouses of chaos.

We are always on a ride to comprehending the extreme ends of the chaos, one outside and the other inside.

Morals and ethics do not help us in this journey of comprehension …