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A Resolution Revolution

“Many people look forward to the New Year for a new start on old habits”

Unknown

It takes a lot of time and effort to get the timing right. The New year seems to have managed it exceptionally well this year, what with New Year’s Eve falling on a Saturday which seems entirely appropriate. In addition, people (those of blessed short memory) have forgotten the virus which was a-lurking until last year and are thus set to give an entirely new meaning to the word ‘merry-making’ before you can say Ho-Ho-Ho! If the one hundred and fifty thousand drinking permits issued in the rather strait-laced city of Pune are anything to go by, I shudder to think of the situation in Delhi and Namma Bengaluru! Surely, the roads and alleys are going to be awash in the good stuff as far as the eye can see. People in the streets, wheeling and dealing and then some good old homeward reeling! Promises to be great fun.

New beginnings mean new innings, another chance to set out and achieve all that you meant to. Thus, the New Year fills me with a new found piety. Resolutely planning to turn over a new leaf and becoming the best version of myself, I plan to develop a will of iron, firmly turning my back on all that appears even faintly illicit. A cleansed person is what I resolve to become. To conveniently forget my little trysts with cleansing anything, myself included and the grief that inevitably follows in its wake. If a great Greek hero like Hercules was reduced to tears, having had to divert an entire river to cleanse the Augean stables, well to quote a Hindi saying, yours truly is a mere ‘kis khet ki muli’.

 My list of great resolutions goes something like this:

  1. Learn to wake up with the sun (in true Mumbai spirit, overtake the sun if possible)
  2. Eat healthy (nibble on salad leaves, fruit and the like. Don’t even think of Vada Pav)
  3. LOSE THE FLAB! (at least five kilograms in a month, I know I am being more idealistic than realistic)
  4. Be more assertive (read DO NOT let the spouse and offspring walk all over you)
  5.  Learn a new skill (wearing properly coordinated clothes is an important life -skill in my case)

And so on and so forth. The list of resolutions grows like Hydra heads. Chop one off and two more immediately sprout in its place.

And so, I await the New Year with much eagerness, armed to the teeth with my lists of resolutions and even a list of the lists. That I will soon be fighting a losing battle is the furthest thing from my mind, even though I have as much ‘exprience’ in this as Meenamma had in running away from home in the singularly popular ‘Chennai Express’. And so, I ring in the new with much gusto, already half-way to turning over a new leaf.

A happy week of cleansing and detoxing (which any bride-to-be would be proud to emulate before her big day) follows. The night-watchman has the pleasure of seeing me jog out of the gate at 5.30am on the dot for the first couple of days. The 5.30am gradually starts veering towards 5.45 and then 6am and the jog slows to a walk and a final crawl, until about ten days I am greeted with a “Do din se aap dikhe nahin, Madamji? Beemar ho gaye kya jaldi uth ke?” when he is about to go off duty at eight in the morning. I rub my still bleary eyes, mumble something about the offspring having an early class and vanish before he thinks of a closer cross-examination. That my arm involuntarily springs out from between the sheets at least ten times to hit snooze every ten minutes is a state secret which must never be divulged. Early January in Mumbai is a time when you are not driven out of bed because you are sweating profusely and I am determined to make the most of it.

“Do not despair” is my motto for the year. I decide that a single resolution falling by the wayside is nothing to get all hot and bothered about. Four others are awaiting to test my mettle. The healthy eating brings a howl of protest from the help, “Didi, how much salad must I chop every day? I am working overtime at your place!” The unspoken threat of claiming said overtime hangs in the air. The offspring and the spouse are vying with each other to develop new looks of deep disgust at the boiled-steamed- raw fare which is dished up in the new year, until they lose all semblance of patience and refuse to sit down at the table if a single salad sans dressing is spotted anywhere within a radius of one kilometer. I spend longer and longer hours in the kitchen soothing frayed tempers with delectable dishes, while my frayed nerves gradually get the better of me. On the day the help marches in waving her resignation under my nose, I crumble before you can say “Oh, Crumbs”, and samosa and fried fish are reinstated to power after the brief sojourn of salad and fruit.

Now that the first two resolutions have followed the divine decree of “Dust we are and unto dust we return”, the six-hundred and fifty grams of weight which I had so proudly lost promptly decides to reinvade and reclaim lost territory. Methinks Modiji should take a lesson from the lard and reclaim PoK pronto. He is sure to meet with unmitigated success. Perhaps if it is not too late to worm my way into the Padma Awardees list, I am ready to forward this suggestion to the PMO in the hopes of getting a stray one, but no joy. Giving the weighing scale a wide berth, I sadly fold up the whole new wardrobe which I had so proudly purchased and slip back into the old loose clothes who welcome me with open arms like the friends in need that they are.

Now desperate to make up lost ground, my meek self suddenly turns assertive and begins (or at least tries) to order first the offspring and then the spouse hither, tither and yon to do my bidding, both big and small. Seeing me abjectly disappointed by the short duration of my other resolutions, the offspring initially gives in with good grace because she is a sensitive little soul. The spouse in the meanwhile looks attentive, nods his head vigorously and makes himself scarce only to reappear at some unearthly hour when I have fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion, unable to bark out orders like a field marshal or check whether he has carried out the ones issued earlier, to the letter. Barking dogs, however are known for their inability to bite and after about a week, my new assertiveness has grown old, the spouse has started showing up early and both, he and the offspring have started treating me to the familiar eyeroll and “Let us humor the lady” attitude. In response, I rollover and play dead as usual. I think the Indian Cricket Team learnt how to give a ‘walkover’ at my knee. With assertiveness dead and buried, peace reigns over the household for some time.

When I walk into the offspring’s room with my new found skill of color coordinated dressing, I am treated to the kind of explosion which was heard by the good citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon the advent of the atomic bomb. Only, in my case, it is the offspring doubled over and ROFLing (roll on floor laughing for the uninitiated) at the sight of me. “Where is my mom and what have you done with her?”, is the overwhelming question. I decide that wisdom lies in not waiting to find out the spouse’s opinion on my new found fashion sense and am back in what I usually wear before you can say ‘fashion statement’. I am only thankful that I did NOT take the hairdresser’s advice and weave a single strand of gold dye through my hair which she had so confidently marketed as ‘fetching’. I shudder to think of what he would have fetched if he’d seen me in my new colorful ‘avatar’: a straitjacket.

I manage to wallow in self-pity for some time at the extremely short duration for which my resolutions seem to last. A weak mind, a weak will, call it what you will, I am moody and sulky like a bear with a sore head for the next couple of days. No amount of reminding myself about the length for which the French and Russian revolutions lasted until they could cause even an iota of change can better my ‘ray of sunshine’ disposition. That is until a friend comes visiting bearing not just glad tidings but a large box of Biryani.

With a song on my lips and biryani on the brain, I resolve that the Resolution Revolution will live to see another day……next year!

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 A Happier Horizon

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”

Marcel Proust

Adventure and travel serve to awaken. Understanding different cultures, life styles, languages, landscapes and food not just broaden horizons, but give fresh perspective to jaded and mundane everyday sights. Perhaps the greatest take- away of travel is that the world is vaster than imagined and most of us are mere specks floating along on the winds of chance and change, soaking up different experiences and emotions: excitement, tranquility, patriotic fervor and rage, which strangely combine to give rise to contentment.

Just when I thought that life had settled into its humdrum and even keel, fate, that capricious mistress, shepherded me to a land so enchanting that it could have been something out of a dream. A land of inspiration, of beauty, once torn apart by war but now glowing with a hard-won peace. A land far to the east, India’s very own salute to the rising sun, Arunachal Pradesh.

It had not been without a lot of trepidation that I set out eastwards on this trail, literally trailing the spouse, having left a rather disgruntled offspring behind in the care of a venerable parent, both fending for each other on the West Coast. The mere thought of having to undertake an entire day’s journey back were anything to go wrong on the home front had already left me with a slightly hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I needed much more than a wheel and a prayer, or so I thought. Little did I know that I would be encountering both soon enough, lots of wheels enclosing prayers, the fabled prayer wheels of the Buddhists, and so much more besides.

While driving through the lush green foothills of the eastern Himalayas in the tea garden state of Assam carried a soothing charm of its own, it was the tantalizing glimpses of snow- capped peaks far on the horizon which were truly awe inspiring. That we were to scale those lofty heights in as little as three days and try to discover the stories that these silent sentinels had to offer, left not just the head, but also the mind slightly dizzy.

Unlike Oliver Goldsmith’s famous play, there was no stooping but floating down the impossibly blue Kameng river, serenaded by bird song and rocked by eddies and swirls to conquer the windswept mountainsides which dared us to summit them.  It was a convoy of sturdy vehicles, expertly steered by even more sturdy helmsmen that began the ascent, brows knitted and teeth gritted, in concentration. The drive became one of the most enduring images of the whole journey: the endless road, flanked by impossibly tall craggy summits, covered in forests in varied shades of green, some dappled, others dull and yet others full of vibrancy. Images whirled past outside the windows, lit by a sun which seemed to have forgotten the advent of winter. The sky was deep turquoise, fading to a mild cornflower in the distance, shades of blue which I did not believe existed in nature, until I saw them for myself in this part of the world.

As the way wound deeper into the state and scaled the heights, I decided to stop furiously clicking pictures and capture what I could in my mind’s eye instead, to be perused mentally at leisure, like a favorite sepia tinted album, glowing with the gentle patina of wistful memory. For every view was a picture post card to city dwellers, like most of us. Picturesque little hamlets dotted the Dirang valley, flanking crystal- clear rivers forded by rope- and-wood foot- bridges. Guest houses boasted orchards laden with kiwis, persimmons, pomegranates and sweet lime. Women wrapped in shawls calmly went about, diligently constructing roads, with rosy cheeked toddlers strapped to their backs. Yaks could not even be bothered to lift their heads to looks at us, used as they were to gawking touristy crowds. Tall stalactites of icicles clung to rocky outcroppings like giant, upside down, gleaming swords and sabers.  Monasteries reared their tall slanted roofs, trimmed in gold paint and teeming with prayer wheels inscribed with ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’, an enormous statue of the Buddha holding sway inside. Thanks to friendly monks, we were able to discern quite a few of the meanings of the icons, statuary and history within. A quaint museum attached to the Tawang monastery offered insights into the life and times of the old Buddhist dynasties which once ruled this part of the world.

Once called NEFA (North-East Frontier Agency), Arunachal Pradesh does such a wonderful job of hiding its war-ravaged face under its pristine natural beauty and sweet- natured people, that were it not for the constant convoys of army trucks, defense stations, battalions and war memorials galore, it would have been almost impossible to recognize it as the same place stained with the blood of more than two thousand martyrs of the Indo-China war of 1962.  Abandoned stone bunkers dotted the hills, gory ghosts of the past, mute witnesses to a war fought against horrendous odds, thanks to the short-sight and misplaced confidence on so called ‘moral high-ground’ of the powers that were in Delhi back then. The heart wept and blood boiled for those brave soldiers of ours who sacrificed everything at their disposal (and trust me it was pitiably little in terms of the equipment provided), including their lives, so that an entire generation of Indians could grow-up in peace. The sound of their eternal silence reverberated from the walls carved with the names of the fallen in the Tawang war memorial arousing that much more patriotism in our voices when we proclaimed “Bharat Mata ki Jai” at the end of the unforgettable light and sound show, which was completely worth the wait in the bitter night winds.

That the dark hour of defeat had passed giving rise to the dawn was evidenced soon after, when we visited the Bumla Pass. If the rapid work of the Border Roads Organization and morale of the Indian troops who guarded this part of the Indo-China border was anything to go by, it was clear that lessons had been learnt from a dark chapter of our history. It was even clearer in the confident way a lone interpreter was replying to a Chinese soldier who was in the middle of a voluble tirade regarding some construction over the border. New India flexed its muscles in the deep baritone of the brave heart who told us that the Chinese were friends as long as they stayed on their side of the border, but should they repeat the folly of crossing over ‘to the other side’, they would be summarily dispatched to another unearthly realm permanently.

The calmness of such beautiful lakes like Sungester Lake, Sela Lake (at the enchanting Sela Pass with its backdrop of yet another haunting war story) and the Pang Tseng Tso Lake drove home the truth that long after we were conscribed to distant memory, this land would still remain blessed as it deserves to be. That vast fields of icicles and massive snowscapes would still melt into rills and springs which would keep gurgling their songs as they tripped over smooth stones to find eternity. That this region is home to more than a hundred tribes, each with their own costumes, traditions and language was delightfully depicted by the Monpas, who danced their traditional dances for us to the beat of folk music, just as it had been played for aeons.

It was only on returning and seeing the sun set over the Western hills that the true legacy of Arunachal Pradesh unfurled gradually, like a flower awakening with the light. It was felt in the company of the wonderful people I travelled with, in  Shiva Gurung and his comrades, who drove us safely over treacherous terrain and gave us impromptu local history and Nepali folk music lessons, in all the home stay hosts who fed us simple but wholesome fare flavored not just with fiery chilies, fragrant rice, savory yak cheese and robust wild mushrooms, but also with their affection, in bowls of steaming, spicy thukpas and momos, in the glow of wood fires lit to ward off the cold, in the night sky awash with a million stars, the mighty Jang waterfall cascading down in a roar of misty sound and in the silhouette of the soldiers on sentry duty unblinking eyes on the far horizon, so that we slept in peace.

Perhaps a lot has changed since Rajendra Krishan wrote the famous song ‘Jahan daal daal par sone ki chidiya karti hai basera’, but he must have had this land in mind when he chose to write:

‘Jahan Suraj sabse pehle aakar daale apna phera

Wo Bharat desh hai mera!’

 To my everlasting good fortune, I visited this happier horizon.

Pictures:  Kind courtesy of Dr. S.Soppimath

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Winston Checks In!

Being incessantly stalked by a specter is spooky. Especially during the Halloween weekend. I would have thought that the unfriendly neighborhood ghost who had been mooching around had realized that I, a devout Indian Hindu did not carve out pumpkins into scary shapes, did not dress myself in strange costumes to make myself look like something which goes bump in the night (I manage that perfectly well in my normal clothes, thank you), nor did I encourage trick-or-treating. Which if you think about it, is more about tricking people into giving you treats. But this was no ordinary ghost. It was a foreign one. For a person who had drifted into the world of the living from that of the dead without a valid visa, drifting across the seven seas to India from the great kingdom of Great Britain was child’s play. Brace yourselves for this was my encounter with Winston (Churchill unfortunately), checking in to check with me, when many of us hoped that he’d checked out for good.

He gave me quite a turn, popping up out of the woodwork, more lugubrious than ever, a pink jowly face, tiny glinty flinty eyes, a cigar clamped in the bulldog jaw. Of course, smart Aleck that I am, I initially attempted adroit escape by ducking into doorways, accessing uninviting alleys and locking doors and windows. But the persistent wraith that he was, he had no difficulty seeping through walls, oozing through the flooring and generally making a nuisance of himself by materializing through seemingly solid brick-work. Finally, I realized that the only way to rid myself of this unwelcome presence was to confront him.

“What are you doing here, Sir Winston?”, (umar me tum se sau saal bade hai, izzat to deni padegi ne ben? An imaginary Modiji popped up, wagging a stern finger!) I hoped I sounded off-putting and formidable. “This is India, or what you left us of it. NOT your favorite holiday destination. And to be honest, we are not too chuffed to see you either. You are the one exception to our list of ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’. Anyway, thank God that you pitched up in Mumbai. The good citizenry of Kolkata would have lynched you, dead or not! The unfortunate victims of the Bengal famine still haunt the place. There is no room for another ghost, even an infamous one as yourself”, I was quite pleased with my opening salvo.

He flickered unhappily. “Cut to the chase, girl”, he said. “You Indians are taking over everywhere. Every time I turn around, there you people are. From Uruguay to the United Kingdom and from Norway to New Zealand, every place is overrun with you. But the reason I am here is because I can’t go home! I have been happily haunting my corner of 10, Downing Street for decades, not a care in the world when, I am rudely ousted from my place by the sudden arrival of a large loud chappie wielding a huge sword and sporting not just a bristly beard but also a terrifying turban. Calling himself the real owner of the Kohinoor! Saying that he rules the Punjab! And to rub salt, or rather onion and garlic into my wounds, the aroma of fish-and-chips and Yorkshire pudding is replaced by Sambhar and Sarson da Saag. For these smells to waft through South End is one thing, but Downing Street! It’s all thanks to that young upstart Sunak! He has turned it into Teen Murty Bhavan, thanks to that spouse and those parents-in-law of his!”

I smirked. “Well played Karma, well played”, I murmured, taking perverse pleasure in the fact that I was winding him up. “Why blow your top, Sir Winston? And why choose India to manifest? At least three other countries are fighting over themselves to lay claim to Rishi Sunak’s ancestry: Kenya, Tanzania and that infernal country you Brits birthed, Pakistan! A thorn in our side for the past seventy- five years. You could have materialized in any of them. And Sunak himself identifies as a Brit. Born in Southampton! Educated at Oxford! A member of the Conservative party! It is your party literally. And I don’t think, despite all that Trevor Noah says, Sunak is going to sell Ye Olde Country to India, at least not yet, not unless he has to!”

I don’t know if ghosts can shudder, but he looked like a candle guttering in the wind. “But he is a practicing Hindu! The next thing I know will be a cow ensconced in my old bedroom in Downing Street! Wanting hay at all hours! Mooing it’s head off until it does MY head in. And who is going to muck it out, pray? I cannot be a barnyard ghost. Not at my age!” He quivered with indignation like a half-set jelly.

“Well, a good bit of this your own fault. Brexit and Britain for the British has led to everything gradually unravelling at the seams. The United Kingdom is on its way to becoming the Untied Kingdom. Prime Ministers may come and Prime Ministers may go, but the economic downturn goes on for muuuuuuuuch longer, pardon my poetic license for mutilating Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Brook’. Food and fuel prices are up, share prices are down and you have had three different people on the job in less than as many months. Not English! Not Cricket! Not done! Someone has to wade into the muck (of human, not bovine creation) and take charge. Sunak, who doesn’t seem to mind getting his hands dirty, seems to be the man for the job at least for the moment. Remember his exploits in keeping you people afloat during the lock down for the Pandemic? If you will be at the beck and call of Uncle Sam across the pond, you will have to pay the price. And mind you, Mr. Putin is in an even more belligerent mood than he was in February! He is holding Europe to ransom and has no compunctions about it”.

I knew I had ranted enough, but could not help rubbing it in some more to this unapologetic champion of the supremacy of all things bizarrely British, who spoke with a superciliousness about ‘The White Man’s Burden’ which made me long to smack the cigar from his mouth. “Well, Rishi Sunak has moved in lock, stock, barrel and dog. So, deal with it. If Chicken Tikka Masala can be the national dish, a brown Hindu man can be the prime minister. I am sure you know that vanilla ice cream is nothing without chocolate sauce. For once, judge the chap by his deeds and not the color of his skin or his ancestry! I am sure you folk with your sense of democracy and fair play will not hesitate to give him the boot if his performance as prime- minister is below par.” He sneered disdainfully. “Oh, we will do it, don’t you worry. As you pointed out, Sunak is a British citizen who will work in Britain’s interests. You people are taking credit where none is due. How do you folk say it, “Begani Shaadi Main Abdullah Diwana!”.

Despite myself, I was impressed by the old coot’s obstinate beliefs. “Well, you seem to be picking up the lingo well, for your age”, I replied. “In spite of what you think of us, we Indians are far more pragmatic. We know better than to expect any concessions as a nation just because a man whose skin color matches ours rules the roost in a nation of pale men. We are just witnesses to the wheel of time coming full circle and as the popular ad says, we’re loving it!”.

He seemed to be growing more and more vaporous. “I am thinking of checking back in into my old haunt”, he said. “This is still unfinished business.” I could not help a smirk of my own. “Well, a Hindu might well be the final arbitrator in the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury”, I said by way of a parting shot and as Sir Winston Churchill checked right back into 10, Downing Street, wondering what on earth was the world coming to, I now waited hopeful that perhaps the wraith of Harry Winston, the famed jeweler would check in with me with carrying a tangible twenty carat diamond on a platinum chain in his ethereal hand for me to keep as a keepsake!

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Sixty Shades Of…..Shopping!

It’s silly (sorry, I meant saley) season again. Everyone and I mean everyone, the Gods included, put their heart and souls into waiting for the time of the departed souls (called Pitrupaksha) to end so that they can launch into the festive season with zeal. After all, three major festivals, all falling within a month of each other, means laughing all the way to the bank for some and crying all the way there for others. Yes, Navratri, Dussehra and the most important event on the festival calendar, Diwali are just round the corner, beckoning and tantalizing. So, it is time to toss out the rag-a-bones and waltz with the new!  And what with Bollywood holding sway over too many, Karva Chauth has escaped its geographical confines and become the festival of newly- weds everywhere. Although we don’t have a fall season, it is a pretty good time to see your bank balance fall with alarming rapidity!

The markets of course, are decked out early. Clothes of all kinds, pretty earthen ware, lanterns, fairy lights, scented candles, soaps and perfumes, knick-knacks, jewelry, sweets and mounds of dry fruit are on offer at every nook and corner. Clever builders try to make a fast buck by offering discounts on down payments to your dream home. Cleverer car salesmen follow in their wake ready to drive you to said dream home in a spanking new set of wheels of your choice. Banks scheme to offer the ‘Buy now, pay (or regret, as the case may be) later’ umbrella of schemes, too good to pass up.

With e- commerce surging ahead thanks to the recently waning pandemic, you tend to be swamped by the swelling tides of offers on all sites online. If Flipkart makes your heart go flip-flop, then the sharp snapping of the Snapdeal offers wake you up thoroughly if you were dreaming of falling asleep on the job. Myntra has its own mind-games, Nykaa nudges you in the right direction and the Amazon (site not the river, silly) swells and threatens to carry away your solvency on its tide! It’s not just the Joneses, but also the Sharmas, Varmas, Banerjees, Singhs, Baruas, Modis, Kulkarnis, Raos, Nairs and Iyers whom you run to keep up with! The only person who probably really laughs all the way to her office is Ms. Seetharaman, our long- suffering finance minister. She spots the gold, not at the end of the rainbow, but at the end of October, put there of course, by you and me!

Our ancestors were too smart to do anything without rhyme or reason. Back when we were a chiefly agrarian culture, this season meant the season of plenty, thanks to the monsoon which would have recently stopped showering its bounty. The harvest of the kharif crop was at hand. The barns and granaries were full, as were most people’s pockets. And they were ready to spend (not indiscriminately, I said they were too smart). Besides, things tended to come apart in the wet weather and needed replacement. So, to market, to market they went. The habit has remained. Although it is much bigger but not necessarily better.

We are all guilty of opening overflowing cupboards, thanks to our stashing stuff away all year long and wondering how to fit in a couple of festival newbies in them. Perhaps we could teach pack rats a thing or two! But, this ritual yearly inspection (if you happen not to get round to cleaning) helps in taking stock of what we lack and then we get down to the job of buying the missing items with gusto. Gifts, corporate or personal, make for a large chunk of what we shop for. It is guilt- free splurging when we are buying for someone else, you see!

On the personal front, I keep planning to turn over a new leaf when it comes to festival shopping, each year. With much fanfare, I make a list in the ‘notes’ section of my smart phone. This I decide, is the beginning of a new, Zen me, who lives a minimalist life. It will not be like that memorable year, when I ended up with four identical kurtas because they happened to be stashed away in the back of beyond, forlorn and forgotten! To further get my shades of shopping right, I decide that I will need to visit three markets at least. The flea market for knick-knacks, the mall for the pricier stuff and my phone for the thousand and one things which disappear from over wrought memory and which become (un)necessary online purchases. But, by the time my lists and plans are made, I realize with a start that I am as usual left with precisely ninety-six hours to get my act together.

Battling my way through all this is easier said than done. The flea market is best approached on foot, leaving the comforts of the car far, far behind! With the air of a gladiator, I plunge into the arena that is the flea market. Crowds jostle, people mill, gawkers gawk, dogs bark, vendors yell and my head swims with heady excitement and that strange smell of expectation. I stagger away with ‘knick-knacky’ essentials, and look for a rickshaw which will haul all the loot and my sorry self, back home so that I can hunt, gather and forage some more!

The mall demands a blood sacrifice before letting me into its hallowed precincts. I have to battle horrendous traffic and scrape my precious car before I can find a spot in the parking lot bursting at the seams. My car is wedged in a narrow space between a pillar and the wall and for some time, it looks like a losing battle before I extricate myself from it and stomp inside, the offspring who is giggling irreverently, in tow. The scenario here is worse because the crowds are now confined indoors, gawking at the beautifully decorated ceilings far above and nearly causing a stampede on the escalators. My well-laid plans of purposefully marching into a few select shops, going about my business with laser like focus and marching out again fly out of the window in the first five minutes. What with the glitz and the glamour and the enticing ‘sale’ signs everywhere, I forget my actual rather venerable age and act like the kid in the candy store, until the very mature offspring rebukes me sharply and tells me to put a sock on my silliness. I subside abashed. Truly, the child is the father or in my case, the scolding mother of woman.

Three and a half hours, a much- needed rejuvenating meal at the food court and several irate phone calls by the spouse later, I have shoved the thought of the much lighter bank account to the back of my mind and am trying to wedge myself into the car which is overflowing with the results of my excursion. A mental pat on the back is sorely needed, I decide, ignoring the black looks the offspring is offering. The decorations, cutlery, clothes and a majority of the gifts have been sorted or so I think. My happy trance lasts for all of the half an hour required to drive home.

Mumbai homes are cozy places with very limited spaces and I am unceremoniously jerked from my happy trance once I see the living room square footage swallowed by the fruits of my hard work. Getting down on my hands and knees, I begin the stashing exercise. As I clear away old and not-so-old stuff, I feel like the evil magician from Aladdin, exchanging old lamps (in my case literally) for new. The person who smiles beatifically in the background is the maid, as she walks away with quite a few prize- finds which I thrust at her as I follow by ‘stash and run’ policy with unerring regularity. Zen me has survived in the wilds of shopping for exactly two days.

As if I need more salt rubbed into my throbbing wounds, I discover several dry, desert islands in my sea of shopping. The tops are here, but what about the bottoms?  The beautiful Maggam work blouse does not exactly match the saree and although I have picked up six beautiful mugs from Home Center, what about the strainer I really needed? The new Amish Tripathi novel which is to be released is also sorely desired. And thus, Zen me turns into Regular me, rushing to Amazon Express armed with American Express. A cursory glance through the previous orders shows that quite a few things which I had ‘picked up cheap’ will be arriving over the next twenty- four hours.  Until now, they have been conveniently relegated to the back of my memory. But this is no time to brood. An hour of meditation (read picking and clicking on sundries) later, I feel truly cleansed. I make another of my golden resolutions: who needs the traipsing in the sweltering October heat if one can pick and click at leisure on the net from the blessed comfort of home? and hence physical shopping will henceforth be banned.

The moment of truth arrives exactly a day later when first the disgruntled spouse, and then the offspring begin arriving with large packages tucked under their arms every time they return home, both wearing identical black scowls. No amount of reassurances on my part that the yearly shopping has ‘been put to bed’ succeeds in cajoling them out of their pre-festivity blues. And as the cherry on top, I soon begin receiving frantic calls from the building supervisor regarding the number of packages which have found their way into the lobby, all bearing my name, causing an obstacle course for the elderly, amusing none and could I please take them away? I trudge downstairs to comply. I happen to meet a nosy aunty on the way back. “Oh, Diwali preparations! Been shopping?”, a loaded question if ever there was.

At last, all the shopping is put away, all the gifts sorted and everything matched and color coordinated. Clad in brand-new apparel, with a spring in my step, I set out for the ‘festive get-together’ hosted in the building. I meet a neighbor who regards me from top-to toe. “I am so glad to see you recycling everything and wearing your old clothes. Not wasting money on truck-loads of stuff! You have put out recycled diyas too!”, she says.

Luckily, she steps out of the lift before I bang my head firmly into the wall after throttling her. My face is changing color into sixty different shades of ….shopping!

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Colonialism, Chicanery And The KOH-I -NOOR

“Indians paid for the privilege of being conquered by the British”

Shashi Tharoor

I look up to Mr. Tharoor. I wish I had his flair for calling a spade a spade in such a convoluted and grandiose way that even Shakespeare would be put to shame after he figured out what Mr. Tharoor had set put to say (and trust me, good old Will must have had a lot to ponder on). And what I admire the most is that he does it not in his mother tongue, Malayalam, but in English, the very language of the conquerors whom he has set out to conquer in his book, “An Era of Darkness”. My rather dubious claim to fame is that I share this much with the illustrious Mr. Tharoor, I write in English too, not in my ‘Mai Boli,’ Marathi.

With the passing of Queen Elizabeth, the Second, Great Britain has been in the news for quite some time now. Whether the ascension of King Charles the third or the funeral for the late queen, the media has left no stone unturned in covering several aspects of the monarchy. And one picture which has been front and center is that of the coffin of the late monarch, flaunting some of the best jewels in the world, all studded into a stunning crown. The sight of the jewels has sent the Twitterati into a frenzy, voicing a demand which the government of India has already put forth twice, a return of the most famous jewel of them all, the 105 carat Kohinoor.

One of the largest diamonds in the world, it was mined in the Kollur mines of India. As with all precious objects, it has changed hands several times, its bloody trail well woven into the pages of history as it made its way from India to Persia and back via Afghanistan, thanks to the exploits of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab. The Indians had been unable to hang onto to it during the Persian and Afghan Invasions, but these were tales of conquest.

When the British chose to ‘acquire’ it from the ten- year- old Duleep Singh, the only remaining heir to Ranjit Singh was when chicanery first entered the picture. And thus, it made its way over the seas to Queen Victoria to become part of the Crown Jewels, where it has remained since 1850. Of course, India made two demands for its return, first in 1947 after gaining independence and again in 1953 during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Of course, the possession of the diamond was termed non-negotiable and the demand was summarily rejected.

But why the Kohinoor? Because it is not just a diamond for a large section of the populace. It is a symbol of all that was wrong with our part of the world for the better part of the last century, the vestiges of which we are still trying to fight off. It symbolizes the yoke of colonialism, during which we lost the better part of our identity and heritage, to have it replaced by an apologetic attitude to our beliefs and culture. It is a symbol of oppression by a race who for reasons unknown placed so much belief in their infallibility that they still refuse to acknowledge the horrendous effects and loss of lives they wrought on those whom they believed to be ‘leading towards the light of Western Emancipation’.

 It is stained by the blood of the victims of several man-made famines, the most infamous being The Bengal Famine of 1943, thanks to the policies of an unapologetic racist and imperialist like Winston Churchill, who is lauded as one of the saviors of the free world, thanks to winning the Second World War. Its sparkle hides An Era of Darkness, for the thousands of Indian soldiers, forced to fight a war which was not of their choosing. Its facets reflect the tears of the hapless loom workers who lost their thumbs and livelihood so that the colonists could usher in a new ‘Industrial Era’ in their country.

It is rare that a single object captures the imagination of millions for so long, but the Kohinoor has achieved the feat. It inspires not just awe, but also revulsion when one thinks of the innumerable lives lost for the realization of the dream of a free India. What we now want is for the world to acknowledge what was done to us. That while the thought of the ‘Commonwealth’ is all nice and fuzzy, there is nothing common about the wealth which was looted by charlatans who now dare to preach about ‘human rights’ and want bygones to remain bygones.

History is funny because it still remains an imperfect record of what actually came to pass throughout our long tryst with British rule and its excesses. Often written by or at the behest of winners, it hardly ever gives us the real picture of what was so that we can reforge what will be. It is up to us therefore to from a collective consciousness as a nation and decide that we will no longer tolerate that which denigrates us, which tries to prove us inferior, whether the color of our skin or the veracity of our beliefs.

Whether the British develop their own much touted sense of ‘fair-play’ or not and choose to acknowledge their excesses matters little. In all fairness, we know that the Kohinoor will never be returned. Until then however, we have the satisfaction of knowing that an Indian who not until so long ago was discriminated against for the color of her skin was an honored invitee to the funeral of the late Queen. We have chosen to shake off the yolk of slavery in the real sense because we are a Republic, where any Indian irrespective of caste or creed can be our head of state, unlike our ex-rulers who still maintain a hide-bound tradition of heredity, exemplified in our current president, Shrimati Draupadi Murmu. And thus, perhaps the Kohinoor has served its purpose without returning to the land of its birth. A constant reminder about the slaves who chose to make better lives for themselves, giving a whole new meaning to ‘Uneasy lies the head which wears a crown.’.

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The God Of All Things

“The beginning is the most important part of the work”

So said Plato, the wise Greek. But we, we went one better and have a God devoted entirely to beginnings, so that all our work is carried out without unnecessary hitches, glitches and near misses!

He is totally suited to the new millennium. Besides being many-armed and kitted out with myriad weapons, he is multifaceted and a multi-tasker par excellence. Although beginnings are His forte`, He controls many other celestial departments. Obstacles need removing? He is right there in a jiffy. Need extra help in the knowledge department? ‘Fikar Not’, as they say. Need help in the arts? Got it! Need some stories to tell the kids about a little God who is kind and cuddly? Look no further. Your search ends with Him. You need it and He has it.

Such is Ganapati or Ganesh, a universally worshipped and beloved deity of the Hindu pantheon who also finds mention in some sects of Buddhism. Such is His reach, that He is worshipped in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia and has travelled as far afield as the Philippines. He is not just revered and respected, but also loved. You find him in the likeliest of places (no Hindu home is complete without His presence) and in the unlikeliest too (think vehicles, museums, notebooks of Indian students abroad, on bags, key rings and even on Indonesian currency).

Perhaps many people (especially Westerners) are befuddled if not downright alarmed at the sight of this divinity with the body of an overweight human and the head of an elephant, but it is His calm visage which brings comfort to many. He embodies the philosophy of the ‘Atma’ or soul of all creatures being one, being universal. He is the combination of opposites, a divine example of the concept of duality. He is proof that opposites can, not only attract and coexist peacefully, but meld together beautifully to create something larger and better, a whole definitely more than the sum of its parts. His lore teaches that life is what we make of it, irrespective of looks and what we do or do not possess. His message is that there is always a new beginning, a new dawn after every darkest hour.

It is no coincidence therefore, that when the crescendo of the raging monsoons is waning to gentle showers, when there is the happy anticipation of the bounty of nature in the form of the harvest, one of the calmest of all the gods presides over a colourful, charming and wonderfully chaotic festival held in His honour, chiefly in the south- western states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa. His much- heralded arrival is one of the most highly anticipated events of the Hindu festival calendar and preparations begin months in advance. Idol makers, especially the more sought after and reputed ones begin their work well in advance, so that no one returns disappointed that his Ganesh idol was not ‘just so’.

This festival has an interesting feature. It is celebrated both publicly in the form of ‘community pandals’ which can be as small as the tiny ones in the lobby of a housing society to some large ones which have gained name and fame all over India, the ‘Lalbaugh cha Raja’ in Mumbai being a prime example and privately with many homes and families hosting their own Ganesh. But, where ever He resides, His status is irrevocably that of a favourite and much anticipated guest. His advent is a blessing, an honour He bestows on those whom He favours. While most families host Him for anywhere between one-and- a-half to ten days, ranging through five and seven days, it is His arrival rather than the duration of His stay which is of the essence.

I have fond childhood memories about this festival, the excitement if setting up a special ‘Makhar’ or pandal and decorating it with bunting and strings of fairy lights of all kinds, interspersed with seasonal fruits and berries, without which the decorations were deemed incomplete. It was an age of innocence. Yes, we used Gasp! Plastic in our decorations, but we laid them away carefully after the festival to be reused next year. No one had heard or cared about Greta or Greenpeace. It was just the glory of Ganapati. And yes, we were greener because we reused everything, from the pandal to the decorations and even the bits of string used to hang them up!

Fresh flowers, a special kind of grass called ‘Durva’ and five types of leaves, called ‘Patri’ formed an essential of the pooja and most households summarily dispatched youngsters to procure the same, which meant official time to frolic in all the gardens and most of the meadows in the neighbourhood. Yes, we were lucky that ‘urbanization’ with its manicured lawns and curated gardens had not made as big a headway and most gardens did not even boast respectable fences, much less paths. We filled our baskets with glee in addition to the necessary flowers and leaves, scrapes, pricks by thorns and insect bites notwithstanding.

 You will rarely find a God as devoted to the finer things of life as Ganpati. A complete foodie! What could be more delightful? Other than the special ‘Modaks’, ‘Idlis’, ‘Kapa or Fodi of Fagala (spiny gourd)’ and a delicious mixed vegetable stew called ‘Khatkahte’ all prepared in His honour and for us to gorge on unabashedly! Combine this with the evening ‘Arati’ and you had another heap of delicacies, all vying for special spots, ‘Rava Ladoos’, special banana ‘Halwa’, mithai of all kinds, topped off with a large handful of puffed rice or ‘Kurmure’ mixed with dainty slivers of fresh coconut. Provided you were not tasked with producing the said stuff, you could easily take to imitating His body type after a few days of hearty feasting.

The evening Arati was an event in a class by itself, with several voices singing His praises in perfectly discordant harmony, some mumbling, others stumbling (many memories gave up the ghost because these prayers were not sung as chorus for the rest of the year) and yet others simply lending a tone by much enthusiastic rhythmic clapping, while stubbornly refusing to open their mouths. Of course, back in the day, the door to the massive halls of the even more massive ancestral house were kept open all day and screen doors were not dreamt of. The recently concluded rains meant verdant shelter for swarms of mosquitoes and the singing on occasion was accompanied by shuffling or hopping from foot to foot which could easily be mistaken for ritual dancing!

And then there was the excitement of the fireworks which were a major part of the festival. Before Priyanka Chopra or Sonam Kapoor or their dogs require hospitalization for an exacerbation of asthma or acute deafness, let me clarify that all the kids pooled their fireworks and carefully divided them into small lots to be lit on as many days of the festival as possible and then again, for only about half an hour or so. Since restraint and conservative traits came to us naturally and on all days of the year, we refused to be hobbled by artificial ones, just the way we refused to run amok on New Year’s Eve with the fire work displays.

It was with heavy hearts that we bid adieu to our Godly guest, with many actually sobbing unabashedly at the thought of having to wait for a whole year for Him to return. We meant it when we said “Pudchya Varshi Lavkar Ya (Return earlier next year)”, because the house felt that much emptier and drearier after He departed, lovingly deposited into the nearest waterbody, which in our case happened to be the well. Before you come up with a gasp of horror and say “Oh, but haven’t you heard of water pollution?”, let me assure you, most houses boasted wells in the backyard and held private immersion ceremonies. Nothing was exaggerated, neither the number of pandals in a given town or city, nor the size of the idols. This was the age before Netflix and Disney Hot Star, you see. OTT had not been heard of, much less seen. Everything was as it was meant to be. A beloved God, his devout followers and a few days of festivity which purified both the body and the mind.

The times may have changed, families may have moved away and modernity may have crept in everywhere. But Ganapati has adapted too. He is happy whether He is made of chocolate and immersed in milk to be distributed as prasad, He is happy in a green pandal of banana leaves, He is happy to be a metal idol which can be reused the following year and He is happy to share selfie space with his devotees. He is always ready to begin a wise new trend, for He is the God of beginnings after all. His message is eternal: You can always begin anew and find wisdom in whatever you do!

Even as my family and I celebrate a centenary of this beloved festival this year and whoop “Ganpati Bappa Morya”, we know that He is our God of all things not just for a hundred years, but for millenia!

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The Tale Of Two Salmans

We forge the chains we wear in life

Charles Dickens

Salman Rushdie is no stranger to controversy. In fact, he has served as its poster child since my childhood. He has had to dive into unfathomed depths of living incognito, only to surface occasionally like a breaching whale, has had to seek protection from Scotland Yard, have his children visit him only at midnight and has had his painstakingly composed verses termed ‘Satanic’. It was a different matter when he termed them so himself. They were his brainchild, his creation to raise or destroy. But to have a price on his head for more than three decades is not cricket, as the Brits, whose isle he calls home, would say. The long arm of the fatwa issued against him caught up with him in New York a few weeks ago, much to the horror of everyone. Hunted down in the Big Apple! In the land of free speech! What was the world coming to?

Of course, the perpetrator was caught, but it means little for the aging writer who stands to lose an eye and has spent several days on the brink. What strikes one as strange is that terrorizing people who say things you don’t like seems to have become the accepted norm rather than the exception when one particularly sensitive religion which was birthed in blood shed in the Middle east is concerned. Perhaps Salman Rushdie was far too trenchant in his remarks. Perhaps he acted with malicious intent and did hurt sentiments. But a price on his head and one which was almost extracted after thirty years makes one wonder who is wrong and who is the wronged one here!

Considering that Salman Rushdie was born in India, several Western fingers were pointed in an easterly direction when his book ‘The Satanic Verses’ was swiftly banned in the subcontinent in 1988 following a meek ‘toe the line’ capitulation by the then ruling dispensation. It was a victory for those forces who believed that might was right, for those who carried their religions on their sleeves. Salman Rushdie, however, had his moment in the sun as a brave heart who did not fear to speak his mind. His quote “To read a 600- page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended”, is a classic. He rightly points out that seeing a book which offends him in a bookstore does NOT give him the right to torch said bookshop.

This is the tale of Salman the first, a man who unfortunately had to keep a date with Nemesis, whose fate caught up with him, in his twilight years half a world away from the place where he was declared persona non grata thanks to a blind world which refuses to call out religious fanaticism even when it is staring them in the eye.

A buff, arrogant looking individual, who swaggers as if he owns the earth and all that is in it (apologies to Rudyard Kipling for the plagiarism) and who has so far stayed quite a few jumps ahead of the law of the land, Tyche’s favorite child, that is Salman Khan. This controversial self- proclaimed Bhai or Big Brother at large has often found himself in the eye of a storm of his own making. He has courted controversy because in the business in which he dabbles (if you call it that), no publicity is ever bad.

From running over pavement dwellers while under the influence to running over some black buck merely because the fancy took him to violence against women, he’s been there, done that. But the reason why he is merely termed ‘wayward’ or a boy sowing his wild oats (at the age of 56? Get real, people!) is because he is ‘Being Human’ of course! Court judgements are overturned before the ink dries on the paper and Bhai enjoys the ‘Bail Life’ rather than the jail life! If you have a fan following longer than the tail of Haley’s comet, you, my friend can apparently do no wrong in the universe. Your crimes cannot catch up with you even if they live right next door, forget half a world away.

Yes, his heart is probably in the right place, yes, he probably does a lot of charity and social service, but that does not and should not make him larger than life, placing him above the law of the land. The larger- than- life Robin Hoodesque story of Salman the second sets one’s teeth on edge at the sheer injustice of it all.

Every good tale ends a moral. And what do we learn? That today it is the popular perception of your thoughts which determine whether you are right or wrong, the facts of the case be damned! Take on the powerful and pay the price, ride rough-shod over the helpless and see yourself rise!

And that is why I often find myself thinking of Dickens when he wrote ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us”.

Our own Dickensian world beckons us to answer who was right and who was wrong, who faced a travesty of justice and who made a mockery of it in this Tale of Two Salmans!

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Aisa Des Hai Mera

“India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified”

Erin Reese

Alight at any of the international airports (which seem to be mushrooming all over the place, faster than well…mushrooms) after even a brief sojourn in foreign lands, and presto! you know you are in the land of your birth or ancestors, as the case may be. Everything in India seems richer somehow. While you climb out of the relatively insipid environs of your 747 or Airbus or even the private Gulfstream, a bouquet of aromas gather round, long before you are presented with the bouquet of fresh flowers or the more traditional garlands which sundry relatives or business associates may have got you. These range from attars, whiffs of sweet and/or savory snacks or the sweaty armpit of your co passenger. There are very few places in the world which declare their presence with such brash insouciance.

That we are a country of over a billion people is of course reiterated at every step, whether it is the jostling crowds or the need of the people to jostle even where there is plenty of room for everyone. I once read somewhere that India has been blessed with the impatience gene, and it should thus come as no surprise that Indians leap before they look. Leap out of seats, seatbelts, planes, trains and automobiles. It can be extremely disconcerting if you come from let us say, a strait-laced country where people actually follow rules and are hung up on the concept of ‘personal space’. Once you have won the battle of the baggage claim, you stagger out into the embrace of the ‘des’, where you see all that needs purifying at extremely close quarters.

Depending on the time you choose to visit this land, you are greeted by weather patterns galore. Hot, hotter or hottest. Cold, colder or coldest. Thunder and lightning or raining cats, dogs or even cattle. You battle with the elements and thankfully sink into your wheels to carry you to your destination only to realize that though the battle has been won, the war has just begun. And traffic always wins. You may be reminded of the song ‘Mother knows best’. Well, here traffic not only knows best, but also knows all. Horns honk, engines idle, brakes bawl and screech, dogs bark and in the middle of it all, the holy cow sits, placidly chewing the cud. The symbol of this des of ours, overwrought, yet unflappable, laid back even while in a hurry. Yes, it is a country where controversies court you at every step.

 Another aspect which never ceases to amaze or bewitch is the rich vibrancy of the colors. Greens, blues, yellows, reds and pinks, the more vibrant the better. The cringe-worthy thoughts of garishness and loudness are for the wimps. That is the general motto of the land which even devotes a festival to this riot of hues. You might join in in the general mirth or shrink back in horror at getting in the face of perfect strangers, but we have our own slogan of ‘Holi for all’, no matter how unholy some find it. And to cap it all, we have our own (rather unhealthy) obsession with the basic black and white. We prefer white in the skin, though we are not averse to collecting a wad or two of black money, until the tax man turns up, asking to fill his brown satchel with the ill- gotten gains. This of course, lies in the gray zone of negotiations, which is both dark and shady.

Not just India, but the rest of the world is now familiar with the ‘quick-fix’ solutions that abound here. Better known as the ‘Great Indian Jugaad’. From multiple appliances plugged into a single and sadly spluttering outlet to makeshift shanties, from pirated versions of anything under the sun to hole in the wall repair shops which can fix anything from broken bones to laptops, we are nothing if not innovative when it comes to saving some time and money. Almost everything has a cheaper, hardier and upcycled version and we are irresistibly drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. That said, India is also the land of bargains. People here have honed it into a fine art. Need to pick up sabzi or fish or clothes? Start off with either double the actual, or half the actual price depending on whether you are at the seller or buyer end of the spectrum and ten minutes of eloquence later, both part with self-satisfied smirks of driving a hard bargain. I’m sure we have managed to convince Putin of throwing in a couple of thousand tons of coal with all the oil that is being imported.

Perhaps it has got something to do with lying in the tropical and temperate zones, but the ‘des’ is also a land of warmth. It is not just seen in the weather, but in the people too! In fact, Indians may be guilty of over-familiarity much to the consternation of Teutons, Scandinavians and the like, but the bonhomie and good cheer which generally prevails engulfs everyone who comes here, whether they like it or not. Visit any home and the question which you are invariably greeted with is ‘have you eaten?’ irrespective of the time of day! Even if you reply in the affirmative, some food is always brought out and pressed upon you, with the hosts being mightily offended if you refuse to at least nibble on the offering.

But what strikes one the most is the sheer resilience of the people. It is a land where ‘having next to nothing’ is a reality for a large chunk of the populace. With the people vastly outnumbering the available resources, living hand to mouth takes on a whole different meaning. But somehow, we thrive. Is it will power? The obstinacy of a mule? Or a philosophical approach? Several researchers have tried and failed at finding out what makes India tick. And it is this enigma which brings people to our shores in droves. For once you succumb to the magic that is this country, you are hooked for life.

We are on the verge of celebrating seventy-five years of our existence in the modern world, but the idea that is India has existed in the minds in the minds of mankind for millennia. Even as most of us participate willingly in the ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign, it is time that nay-sayers realize that though there are several things which need bettering in this des, we can at least unite under our flag, which consequently will make all citizens treat each other as their own. This might be a small but significant step in weeding out all that stops us from getting ahead.

As we wish each other a Happy Independence Day, it is time to contemplate on

‘Jo koi aaye yahan pe,

Iske rang me dhal jaaye

Iske liye na koi paraya

Ye sabko gale lagaye,

Aisa des hai mera, Aisa des hai mera!’

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(Molotov) Cocktail!

“Everyone has a hidden talent they don’t know about until the tequila is poured”

Think cocktails, and wondrous visions of delicious stuff in elegant flutes, coupes and cocktail glasses swim into view, bedazzling one with their contents. Many are left shaken AND stirred to the depths of their souls (since not everyone has Bond’s panache or cool). Without a doubt, the cocktail hour advertised in so many uber chic establishments for w(h)ining and dining is one of the more brilliant marketing heists ever pulled. The mere whiff of a complimentary cocktail and guzzlers gather by the gazillion.

You can get a Hanky- Panky down, while comfortably ensconced in a Sidecar. And who needs to worry about mundane little details like doctors when despite Last Words, you can always be brought back from beyond the veil by the Corpse Reviver? Feeling like a Zombie? Well, just get on a Moscow Mule and you will be the Bee’s Knees in no time. It is easy to tour Manhattan, explore Long Island via the ice-tea route and sling Singapore into the bag as well. Well, enough of the playing with the names of cocktails before a strait-laced teetotaler like yours truly is mistaken for hic! a dipsomaniac like Captain Haddock!

Humans, as we all know, are social animals. Unless you are one of those few precocious souls who truly seek enlightenment and communion with a higher power, or have been possessed by William Wordsworth’s worthy spirit and wish to see the dancing daffodils flash before your inward eye, you will not find much solace or bliss in solitude. You will tend to congregate in herds, droves, gaggles or perhaps even murders?  and hobnob with your own kind.  And what better situation to do this than a party and a cocktail one at that? A perfect place to let your hair down, put on your best war paint, short frocks and rocks, network busily and ‘build up your contacts’, for doesn’t the world work like that these days? and get up to all kinds of wild shenanigans cloaked in the relative anonymity of large crowds and the happy thought of someone who is not you, not only getting down to the nitty-gritty of organizing the whole shebang, but also footing the bill.

Some of us however, are cursed with a recalcitrance which borders on the phobic. We take our cues from Bertie Wooster and set a nor’ nor’ east course if we get the slightest hint that a party is taking place sou’ sou’ west. It is not we do not like to interact with people, but we refuse to be crowd pleasers or let our guard (much less our hair) down when surrounded by relative strangers. Our conversation can be sparkling and scintillating, but we prefer to do that without the prop of a beaker of bubbly. Anonymity is not our license or ‘buzz’ for raucous behavior and only serves to put our guard up! For us, these cocktail parties mean only one type of cocktail, the good ol’ Molotov!The one which literally goes bang, before you can say ‘New Year’.

Being surrounded by crowds ‘Sha-la-laing’ or ‘Zing-Zing-Zingating’ with an overbearing DJ and zealous hostess/host exhorting everyone onto the dance floor to show off their moves (never mind if they succeed in accidentally beaning someone over the head or taking someone else’s eye out with their overflowing cup of joy) makes some of us feel as if we are carefully negotiating a mine-field, blindfolded. One false move and you will never know what hit you in the face! We look around with a sense of wonder at what people who are perfectly sane most of the time are capable of when the ‘happy juice’ gets going in their veins. The Romans had it right all along, ‘In vino, veritas’. In wine, lies the truth.

It is at times like these that I paraphrase the lyrics of ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ from ‘The Sound of Music’. All I can think of is “When I’m with them and confused,out of focus and bemused, and I NEVER know exactly where Iam….!” This brings to mind my recent tryst with destiny at a rather ‘large do’ hosted by a mover and shaker. If I’d hoped that there would be at least some of my kind (read wallflowers) clustered around, with whom I could at least exchange a smile in passing if not anything else, I was in for a rude shock.

As a conscientious ENT surgeon, I make it a point to remind all my patients about the hazards of noise pollution, even printing it on my prescription sheet and the fact that a party being held on the second floor could be heard in the parking lot did not bode well for my rather sensitive sensibilities. The sights went one better. A jostling crowd around the bar tender, tall tables topped with glass, awash in glasses of every kind, filled with enough stuff to give you a high by its mere sight. As if this was not enough, once people got going on the good stuff as well as on the dance floor, they miraculously lost their moorings. The sight of a well -respected, much older couple setting the dance floor on fire (after indulging and then some) left me wondering if I was aging in dog- years and fearing for their safety as well as that of those in their vicinity (on account of the wildly flailing limbs).

If I was looking for entertainment, I had found it in the near constant whistling (I am still on therapy for deafness, how ironic!), the throng who downed enough shots to shoot down a Rafale, an older woman with enough war-paint which would require several knives to scrape off and a sort of conga line which grew like a caterpillar from the dance floor to engulf the entire room before you could say ‘beat’. Oh yes, Molotov was here all right, ignited and whirling around the room spreading merry mayhem, one bang, one crash at a time! I spent the evening neatly side stepping all the merry makers who seemed keen to set a record of stepping on as many toes as possible, without making too much of a spectacle of myself. As I rued to myself later,if I had been expecting the quiet class of the cocktail hour, I was looking for it in the wrong place!

When it was finally time to go home, I staggered out, unfortunately punch-drunk, knowing exactly how the shell-shocked soldiers of trench warfare during the first world war must have felt. I knew that I would never take the peace of a quiet night for granted ever again. A feeling of kinship for Wordsworth and his penchant for solitude sprung up, for who knows, before he retired to his ‘couch’,he might have been a victim of such a ‘do’ too!

To meet with fellow beings and destress is very essential in the modern world. Perhaps many people would swear by the adage ‘We all deserve an alcoholiday’.  While it would be wrong to sit in judgement on the ‘party scene’, it is equally wrong to do away with all the norms which make us civil society. Eat, drink and be merry by all means, but with an eye on what is enough and what is excess.Because aMartini can turn into a Molotov in the twinkling of an eye and a mellow evening can be literally set on fire before you can say ‘incineration’.

One of the best reasons why you should keep your wits about you (health reasons notwithstanding) instead of getting carried away with the flow is that you should KNOW when you are having a good time!

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The Good Book For All Indians

‘A religion that doesn’t interfere with the secular order will soon discover that the secular order will not refrain from interfering with it’

Archbishop Fulton. J.Sheen

I am coming clean. I am not very aware of the finer nuances of cricket. Although I follow it as avidly as the next person, and prove my staunchly Indian credentials (especially if the match happens to be against Pakistan) by cheering loudly for the sixes, remaining glued to the screen for a nail-biting final over, or celebrating an Indian win wildly, mid-on, mid-off, long-on, long-off are all the same to me. The only bye I know is to wave somebody off. I digress today, because I have become a firm fan of Amit Mishra. I had no clue about his existence in the world of cricket until a couple of weeks ago, and would have continued in this blissful state of ignorance had it not been for a war between him and another more famous player, Irfan Pathan, whom I had surprisingly heard of often.

Barring the formidable Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, most wars are now fought on relatively safer turfs like Twitter and WhatsApp (though with Elon Musk wading in, Twitter may soon be a far different battle ground from the La- La Land it is today). DO NOT be fooled into thinking that Twitter wars are anything as simple as a couple of birds disagreeing with each other with melodious chirps. An all- out claw- and-draw blood is how this war of words is fought, replete with attacks on the manners and morals of men. What is that you say? Quit beating about the bush and get to the point? Right!

Getting to the point, it was the result of one such Twitter War between M/s Mishra and Pathan that I became a fan of Mr. Mishra. Mr Pathan tweeted “My country, my beautiful country, has the potential to be the greatest country on earth. BUT…” He might have meant well, but the cryptic tweet so open to interpretation, meant that he was up to mischief. Mr. Pathan thought that he had bowled well and would be rewarded with a wicket. Imagine his chagrin when his well-pitched ball was lifted for a six by Mr Mishra who came back with an even more cryptic tweet of his own, “My country, my beautiful country has the potential to be the greatest country on earth…only if some people realize that our constitution is the first book to be followed”, leaving behind one miffed bowler who had no idea what hit him. Of course, when last heard, Mr. Pathan had displayed the preamble of the Indian Constitution on his Twitter account with a request that it be read and re-read. And that brings us to the ‘Good book for all Indians’, The Indian Constitution.

The Preamble to it is a harbinger of the great things which lie within. Adopted in 1949 and coming into effect in 1950, the original preamble resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, democratic republic. So far, so good. But then, along came Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Not satisfied with merely declaring a state of national emergency in 1975, she pushed through several amendments in our good book, taking it to the brink of being unrecognisable. In the forty-second amendment in 1976, the words ‘Secular’ and ‘Socialist’ were added to the preamble. This was later given the green signal by milords in black, the Supreme Court which ruled since the preamble was a part of the constitution, it was subject to amendments, pretty much in the way the constitution could be amended via Article 368.

Of course, this comprehensive amending of the Good Book of India was done a long time ago, but the Book is now apparently in danger of being swept into oblivion if any of the incendiary information which regularly does its rounds on media, both social and conventional is to be believed. Before the brouhaha of the secularism business began,was there no peace in India? I very much doubt that. Secularism as a concept is very apt and practical for the running of a country, seeking to keep religion away from national policy. India, with its plurality, home to myriad religions, each with different philosophies, practices and holy books, needs this for its progress. Then where does the hindrance arise you may ask. Haven’t we already given ourselves the frame work of laws needed for all-round progress?

The problem arises with the discrepancy in the theoretical teachings and practical applications of the concept. True secularism means an equality of all religions in the eyes of the law of the land, irrespective of whether one religion is followed by the majority and another by the minority. It is a rather strange precedent therefore to protect the minority religions (and then again only some and not all) to such an extent that injustice is rendered to the majority, simply because it is IN majority and may misuse its strength of numbers (the factual truth of this be damned). This, therefore smacks of malicious intent. Again, where true secularism is practiced, the law is the same for all religions, with the personal law of each either codified uniformly or rendered null and void before the law of the land, what can be termed as ‘Uniform Civil Code’. In the wake of the secularism wave, Article 44 of our Good Book which states that ‘the state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India’ has been languishing on the back burner for so long that many Indian citizens have perhaps forgotten its very existence.

For the larger part, secularism has been used as a convenient cloak for appeasement, particularly of theminority religions.Since it is the duty of the ruling dispensation to safe guard the rights and interests of all its citizens, it naturally follows that there should never be the spurious ‘First Among Equals’. Did the greed for power loom so large that the majority of the population had to be ‘othered’ ironically on the basis of religion? The question is moot.

But the consequences were not pretty. Even children as young as one and two recognise favouritism when they see it and act up accordingly, turning into obnoxious bullies if they discover that they can get away with it. So, to not expect the same from the unnecessarily pampered adults, is either the height of naivete or stupidity. I have a third explanation, since our politicians maybe many things but are neither naïve nor stupid. It was the insatiable greed for power of the few taking precedent over the interests of the many. And the results are before us for all to see. Hostility and belligerence, especially when the miscreants, who had long believed themselves to not just be above the law, but BE the law when occasion demanded were brought to book. When they were forced to set aside whatever other books they followed and were made to toe the line of the Indian Good Book.

Whether it is the protests against the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, the CAA and NRC, or the illegality of the Triple Talaq, the recent protests against the High Court decision about the wearing of the Hijab as part of the uniform in institutions or the Jahangirpuri riots in Delhi, one thing is certain. When a pampered and cosseted child is suddenly met with a firm ‘NO’, a tantrum is inevitable. And this is the precise situation today.That the ruling dispensation has suddenly changed from “minorities having first claim on resources” to “Secularism is India first. Justice to all appeasement to none”. And thus, the hue and cry because the heat is on. Not just that, the ‘Platinum Card’ of secularism is being rejected by the majority before you can say ‘ATM’!

That is actually the reason for Mr. Pathan’s ire. Which made him misjudge the length and bowl a no-ball (abject apologies if I am murdering cricket terminology). I think his advice deserves to be followed. But let us tweak it just a little. Let us read and re-read the ORIGINAL preamble of the constitution, the one and only Good Book for anyone who truly believes in India!

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