Pindari Berth (Fiction)

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Her friends called her crazy. 

Who takes leave at the financial year end to go visit a house that was home thirty years ago? But word had come from her school alumni association that Pindari Berth had been served demolition notice. Pachmarhi, the Queen of the Satpuras, was coming into its own as a tourist destination and frenetic construction work was in progress. She winced at the thought of a greasy crane flattening a lifetime of memories into dust. She had to say goodbye.

Pindari Berth! Named after a glacier in the upper Kumaon Himalayas, the white structure seeped into her view as she stared out of the car at the ghats swishing by in a green blur. She inhaled the air deeply, letting the pungent scent of mahua wash over her lungs. The mango trees were laden at Panarpani where her cab stopped for a tea break. She wandered away from the hissing kerosene stove to reach for a raw green fruit, holding it to her nose…..it whispered of her childhood, of bicycle rides, frilly frocks, birthday bashes and family picnics. A quick nick and her teeth stung with the tangy juice. Urgency took hold of her to reach Pindari Berth.

Dusk had fallen when they sailed into the claustrophobic hush typical of hill stations. The car wheeled into peeling green gates, door banging shut. She slowed at the shadow of a young girl, swinging on freshly painted rails. With a shake of her head, she turned to the cottage, “Phantasm!” A lantern was coming into view, swinging eerily and slowly. It was Mr. Devasher, he was hobbling with age! They embraced and she drew back in alarm at his smallness. He felt papery, wispy and light, a far cry from the gregariously avuncular neighbour she remembered. She peered at him, reluctant to let go the sleeve of his brown Burberry . He disengaged himself gently, “Let us go inside, I have brought the keys. I cannot fathom a hotel coming up here.”

The two shuffled through the rooms, the air thick with reminiscences. There was dust and cobwebs, door hinges creaked and groaned. Her host held up the lantern to significant points, “You see here, your Dad had his bar set up in this corner. And there, beyond that is the area your Mum used as her studio.” She felt drawn to her room. It was just a space, she told herself, concrete and bricks and stone and mortar. But it was coming alive to her, right there as they looked on at nothing.

She heard sibling bickering, all huffy and irate. She smelt childish hurt mixed with disappointment. She sensed her own laboured metamorphosis. A hundred emotions waltzed in the air and there was more! In that window glass besides the bed was her Dad’s concerned watchfulness. On the mantle was her Mom’s nurture. Near the steps outside lay her sister’s cautious affection! Her ears rang with laughter, screams, and shouts. Her nose twitched with smells from her growing years; the Ponds cream whiff, the merest zephyr of Fluffy, wafts of fresh baking. She wanted to spread out her arms and hug Pindari Berth close.

“Shall we go home for dinner? Your aunt will be waiting for us. The builders are coming at 9.00 am,” the voice was tentative.  She turned to pick up the lantern Mr Devasher had left on the portico ledge. He shook his head, taking it from her and leading by the hand. 

She nearly missed a step at the sight outside. The lawn trees were alight, a thousand fireflies twinkling in their lush leaves, like twines of X-Mas lights.

She stood gripping the wrinkled hand, tears rolling down her face. “Goodbye Pindari Berth,” she whispered to herself.

All photo credits to Shashi Nayagam
http://sewingwithmoonbeams.blogspot.in/

http://www.moonbeamworld.com/

Paralysis (Micro Fiction)

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Pic by Aqseer

Simranjit Kaur scrunched her dupatta to the nose, widening her eyes to stave off the itchiness.

Paddy fields were deadly incubators. The pesticide combined with stagnant water making toxic fumes that rose over the railway tracks, curling into her second class compartment where she sat alone, numb and unmoving. She willed the train to move. “Sixty, fifty nine, fifty eight” went her ninth round of reverse counting.

Her mind was treading sluggishly, images fogging and swirling. She recalled her mother, distraught at the birth of a daughter and the harm it would do her social status. There she was again, waving at Simran to come help in the kitchen instead of riding the farm tractor. A steady stream of sepia shots permeated Simran’s throbbing head...memories of plucking gourd with her grandmother and trailing her feet in the tube well canal as the motor pumped rhythmically into the narrow canal wending farmwards.

“Was that the ghuggi bird trilling, the local dove?” she would wonder from under the dupatta covering her face, on many a meditative noon spent prone on a jute cot under the Kikar tree. The dull shuffling of buffalo hooves returning from the river invariably kept pace with the darkening sky. Twilight on the Sangha Farm was bleak, made sadder by the moans of the muttering hens, picking their way into the coop.

Just as the family women made busy over the makings of supper, her grandfather would stride in, holding aloft a brown paper bag of hot jalebis. Indulgent in the aftermath of a profitable day, he would rib her on her ambition “How can I set you up in a petrol pump? That now, is your brother’s privilege. He will bring us a plane in dowry at his wedding while I will have to gift you one, at yours.” 

She smiled thinly at the image of the hot clay oven that the family women used to singe their arm hair while sticking in the rotis, no waxing needed at the beauty parlour! Inhaling greedily on the cold air now, her thoughts wandered to the farm dogs that would be trotting in from the fields for their last meal of the day. Strangely enough, there was nothing in her mental rerun from her joint family married home.

The train belched, metal clatter jolting her back. She heaved up slowly, peering cautiously through the grimy window of her coupe. No sign yet! The horn wailed raucously, signalling departure. A movement caught her eye, right there near the entrance gate. Simran ducked swiftly, adrenalized out of her dark stupor. She hurried into the train toilet, her mind racing. Her brother-in-law would have found the body! Jaswinder had been her only support through all of her marital torment. He had finally put his foot down that morning at the family’s eternal denial mode, offering to visit them and counsel his older brother.”

“Too late!” she flinched dolefully, dropping her bloody kirpan through the rickety toilet bowl.

The Transition

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It is that time of the year when teachers sit shell shocked, gel pen poised over the final report cards. They shake their heads slowly, willing themselves to absorb the impending conclusion of the session. Any attempt to look back only brings forth a blur. It seems as though the year is getting over before it had a chance to begin.

It was no different the year before and the one that preceded it!

The school calendar is so choc-a-bloc that its sheer momentum numbs. There is a pattern. The year takes off well; there is the novelty of the class and teacher composition. But as the events come steam rolling, there is a Ferris Wheel syndrome. Students and teachers hang on to their seat arms, buffeting through tests, competitions, festivals, tournaments, workshops until their eyes begin to glaze over with the effort to keep up. And it isn't until December that they take their second look at each other.

It is the first time in the year that teachers will feel a pang. The students look dearer, now that they are ready to pass on to the next class. “There is so much more I could have done with them,” some are likely to tell themselves. Their eyes linger on the young faces, knowing fully well that most will be unrecognizable should their paths cross again.

The incoming class does not know it yet but the stage is being set up for the grand comparison. “My last class was so much brighter. You all are not a patch on them,” the pearls will spew forth over the first few months. Then like every other year, just as the familiarization gets underway, the Sports Day and the Annual Function will rear their heads. It is in the translucence of the dust settling on these frenzied celebrations that the new class will reach its peak. In that magic moment of complete synergy between the teacher and the taught, primed for take-off, just as they are slipping into some rhythm, the tail end of the school’s annual calendar will loop into view and they will be off again, hurtling and careening through the remaining year.

The word is transition; it is a time for mixed feelings. There is sadness to see off a batch and excitement at the first blank page with a new class in the new school year. Welcome 2013-14!

(Published in the Times of India Student Edition on 27 Feb 2013)

At your age

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Two things happened today.

A young lady half my age offered to carry my bag. On seeing me recoil, she reached out to grab it and we tugged a bit, my sense of independence rivalling her classy upbringing. She resolved the impasse by insisting her driver see me to the car.

The second event took place as I entered the British Council Creative Writing class room. Another young watched me set up my laptop before declaring solemnly, “I am very impressed with you!” My heart fluttered with delight, steadying itself in readiness for praises of my writing. She exclaimed, “It is wonderful that you have so much enthusiasm for learning at your age!”

At your age!

I have been hearing this phrase of late and have formulated a reason.

It has to do with my veering off the course, I am certain. There is a view of life stages we Indians cherish; the celibate student, the married family man, the hermit in retreat and the wandering ascetic. And even though social realities have transformed beyond recognition, the four stage view remains the bedrock of Hindu socio-religious tradition. Having seen my kids through for instance, I should by extension be throttling back to enjoy life’s hard earned siesta. I am being told in other words that there is a role cut out for me. Be aunty like, content and supportive of the status-quo around me!

Instead I have jumped off headlong into ever growing adventures. I have taken up new fields of study, am working at acquiring new skills, and am busy exploring new situations. There is so much more time to reach in that the radius of my capacity to reach out has been expanding. It in fact is oddly liberating to have this authentic world view that comes from living a full life to come back to rest where it started, with me! My reflection becomes sharper with every challenge I take up and the process puts me in ever greater touch with myself.

Is this not life, in the final analysis. After all, the familiar, non-threatening and limiting orbits are not getting anyone far; there is only so much that you will gain by driving the same path, sitting in the same chair and meeting the same people, over and over.  It is safe yes, but it is also numbing and stunting to be in a sanitized environment full of order and convenience.

You live so that you may know yourself. You breathe so you can shape yourself better. You engage for the permission to nurture yourself. You therefore need to continue growing and learning to the end of your life.

Oh yes, if you loved yourself enough, you would hear what life has to say: you owe yourself big time! 

Indispensable

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The world is kinder today. It is expected to be at any rate. Witches burn, children starve, civilians perish in wars, women are raped but not without protest. There is a strong pretence at civil liberties; an educated progressiveness that is synonymous with a repugnant horror at inhumanity and injustice; to that extent we have evolved as a species.

Some beliefs persist nevertheless, unchallenged and unquestioned.

No one is indispensable! This is the golden one at the workplace. There isn’t an employee who has not had this unappetizing negation hurled at her or an employer for that matter, who has not flourished it with the swagger of Salman Khan at some time in their respective careers. I would say these infamous words reverberate across board rooms, offices and corridors of power. No one is special, we are told. One pair of hands is as good as another. An employee’s absence does not mean a hiccup to her company. Just about anyone can replace her at any given time. Her personality, her background, her ideas, her strengths, her convictions are as easily substituted as a pair of pencil cells in a torch.

This is the biggest ever bluff that needs calling.

How come in a world so full of talk about human rights, there is not a squeak about a good worker’s professional self-respect? Truth be told, every golden employee at a place of work is indispensable. How very regressive is it to speak of people in terms of holes that merely needed plugging! A company is the sum total of its employees and every solid piece in the puzzle adds value to the jigsaw. Take away one and there is sure to be disturbance to the group dynamics.

The world has long moved beyond the assembly line production days of initial industrialization. Job opportunities and requirements have metamorphosed to include a mind boggling skill set; it is no longer about just a pair of hands. Work involves personal integrity, value judgement, and risk evaluation, sense of loyalty, creative solution, professional investment, and willingness to learn and grow in addition to basic and relevant competency. Surely the range involved here begs the demeaning insistence that one is just as good as another. It even sounds callously inhumane!

People are unique. They bring a very special value to their work spaces. And companies stand to gain huge returns by acknowledging this immutable but long denied truth.The reluctance to acknowledge signature contribution has been a convenient mind-set that has saved employers bother and effort. Imagine what would happen if they were to admit people were indispensable! How would they dismiss and control in a culture that viewed employees as individuals, needing sensitive handling. It would involve acknowledging their exclusivity thus admitting their value to the company. Perhaps business heads are wary of losing negotiating strength thus.

It is time though! Is it not time leaders began to care more deeply? It is high time they thought more, applied more and took the trouble to keep pace with an employee’s growth. This destructive cliché has placed productivity in a self-fulfilling downward spiral. Bosses refuse to admit people are indispensable and so crushed does this make the employees feel that they begin to act dispensable.

In the complex and modern work place that we literally live out our lives in, every single worker stamps the company's growth story in her personal way. People are crucial, central, cardinal.

The Execution

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Like a plump seed, rich with promise

Of growth and flush branching

Springs the idea of a friendship

That will endure life and ravaging

There is hope shy, timorously tender

A twenty four carat witnessing?!

Of you that is more than their reflection

In that moment begins the dying

One day you do not water the bond

Then ease out on the weeding

A veto on mulch is bound to bring

Whispering wheeze from sapling

Rooted in that yawning pain

Bothered at the blighting

Combating blast and howl and canker

The cusp comes into sighting

And yet it weathers the life force hardy

Through night and day yet smiling

For ties do not make us

We execute the tying!

The Legacy (Fiction)

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“I am Napoleon!”

Arupa Basu looked up. There was something about the volume and pitch; a shade of surety she did not associate with ten year olds. Her eyes locked on him briefly before turning back to the admission forms on the worn table, faintly irritated at the hot blast from the window. The Resource Center was on the top floor, a sauna in summers and a cellar in winters! Lunch was an hour away and she was only half way through the first day.

She furrowed her shapely brows, “Tell me YOUR name. Your full name!”

“N-a-p-o-l-e-o-n. Just Napoleon,” the young voice enunciated deliberately. She snapped him off, shaking her head and muttering darkly, “Parents!”

In her thirty years at this highly selective school, Arupa had seen the gamut of student body. She did not expect to be surprised any more. There may have been a time, during her first few years of teaching, that the uniform subjugation of free wills called education bothered her but twenty years of having taught the same syllabi, over and over, had put her in a pleasant stupor, primed for an equally long and predictable cruise ahead.

“Napoleon!” What kind of a name was that?! It grated on her ears. She tried curling her lips around the nomen. “This kid is a loser with that title. What a pretentious moniker! People will dismiss him at hello,” she told herself, turning the ignition key of her Sunlight Orange diesel Micra. A mere fifteen minutes later, she was letting herself into the quiet home, glancing at her husband’s garlanded portrait in the hallway as she slit open the envelope she had pulled out of the mailbox. It was a fund request from her son’s Ivy League school. ”Why would they bother sending these to parents of students on financial aid?” she pondered.

Arupa suffered fatigue nowadays. The government’s child friendly policies had turned the teachers powerless to check truancy. In any misjudgement, both the management and the parents stood firmly by the children. From an authoritative delivery of bookish knowledge, the school day had become about staying safe. It was important to be popular with the students. But with Napoleon, no way! What a name! “I must remember to air it in the staff room,” she turned in, reaching to switch on the air conditioner.

Teachers all over were struggling with an evolving role. In addition to the challenges posed by technology, the modern teacher was doing a lot more than teach. The relentless roulette of correction work, record maintenance, continuous evaluations, secondary duties and lesson preparation paused only for some moments of dark humour, invariably at the expense of students or the establishment. And with a name like Napoleon?!

Her reaction was barely logical, she knew. But the name put her teeth on edge. She declared to her colleagues in the corridor at work, “India ought to have baby naming rules just as Denmark so no name becomes a burden to the bearer.”

Days melded into months and the year avalanched on; the calendar term chock-a-block. It was during an inter school event that Napoleon beeped on her radar again. Their school registration was due that day and with all the noise in the classroom, Arupa was struggling to be heard at the other end. “Tanmay, Rishi, Priyanshu and Napoleon…yes, yes…it is Napoleon. N-a-p-o-l-e-o-n….you heard right. Napoleon as in Napoleon Bonaparte,” she glared at him, standing still by her side. “Why did your father name you Napoleon?” she demanded in the brusque tone of a veteran teacher, swiping her phone off. “I will ask him,” the boy stated gravely.

Before long, the march of the wall calendar swallowed up Napoleon. He moved to the senior wing, dropping entirely out of sight. Leaves continued to turn relentlessly until the day of Arupa’s retirement party, a decade and more later. It was attended by an uninvited guest.

“I am Napoleon’s father,” he was holding out a book to her. She squinted at the transparent cling wrap uncertainly.

The jacket read:

The other Napoleon

How my name shaped my destiny

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

She tried to focus on the echoing voice; the room felt oxygen-less, “I did not want my kid to fit in. I wanted him to stand out. It was my idea to give him a unique google legacy.”

Driving off, for the last time, from the black iron gates, the words rang in Basu’s ears, “Imagination rules the world,” Napoleon Bonaparte.

Note: Pics by author; art by students of AFBBS Jr. Wing

New Gender Values

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Teachers are human. They need periodic nudges to remind them how powerful they are.

The demands of a regular school day tends to lull them into thinking an efficient run through has been good enough. But every teaching day gone by without having inspired a child or forced them to think has been a monumental, criminal waste.  It is one more day of abandonment; another 24 hours we have left them at the mercy of the Radio FM blaring its Fevicol song, the late night serial eulogizing weeping women or a facebook update celebrating risky behavior.

For all the bluster of India’s economic forges, equality is struggling to happen here. There is a swelling unease at the widening chasms: Indo-Pak, VIP-Aam Aadmi, Police-Citizen, Traditionalist-Progressive, Dalit-Brahmin, Penthouse class-Basement underclass…all brewing under the dark shadow of corruption, a hazed out bureaucracy and our dyslexic government. Watching this national hutspot going bad is the mushrooming middle class, nursing its heartburn and fighting down a reflux.

The regular textbook can hardly justify and limit knowledge exchange taking place in the classroom under these circumstances. Students need help, more than at any other time in Indian history, to make sense of their environment. Indian ionosphere is sick with toxin. There are dishonest advertisements, sexually charged songs, irresponsible messages of pornography, pressures of competition and the constant struggle for acceptance and a dignified existence.

Parents are just about able to keep the physical nurture of their progeny going in a system that will not guarantee them efficiency nor safety and certainly not any facility. That leaves the teachers with class rooms that have become the new ground zero, the only spaces with a semblance of sanctity, authority and naivety conducive to instilling healthy beliefs. The software wiring of young minds has to happen in schools while the students are young enough to harbour an inherent sense of right and wrong, fair and unjust.

Teachers have to remind themselves often of the huge investments they are making in their students. Their children listen to them. Classes have to be told that the human reality is changing and that we need new recipes for survival. They have to be spoken to of the skewed gender ration that is threatening peace and democracy in the nation. It must be explained how we are creating bare branches on family trees by killing baby girls before they are born. What are the surplus men going to do? They will live and roam in loose groups of unattached, unemployable cess pools of anger, with a nil stake in societal order; all the time blaming successful women for their own failures.

This generation must not grow up thinking that girls are fairy tale characters, and boys prince charming on horseback. Let them appreciate that the two genders are real people with real problems. They will see that the roles that worked when we were a farming community no longer apply in our modern, industrialized, information driven democracy. Girls deserve permission to be as naughty as boys who in turn ought to feel free to use their tear ducts! Boys should be able to study psychology and girls should be able to join the National Defence Academy. Far more than femininity or masculinity, it is humanity that our survival needs cultivating today.

In time, the young will grow up to realize the challenges ahead; the immutable but bitter truth that whenever a power equation is threatened, balance has to be wrested; it has never been given on a platter. For this, they have to develop an ease with discourse, debate, dissent. The current rigid hierarchical structures employed in most schools heap shame upon them. They need liberation to follow their hearts and listen to their own voices so they can grow up with a strong sense of self-esteem. It will be the modern young’s duty to contest and protest.  Every word, every thought, every gesture counts. Fundamental rights for all, irrespective of caste, colour, creed, gender, status, religion is the goal we are staring at and these are not just western values; they are universal, humane values.

The human race is in a process of evolution, of evening out power. The rich have fortressed themselves, much like the Ostrich. While the rest of us wait for speedy justice, accountable leaders and a protective police force, we can embrace gender sensitization. We can change our behavior, beginning with an empathy with our own and the other gender. It is time to examine long held beliefs and question the realities everyone thought they knew.

A very close, inter dependent and transparent world is growing around us. No one can survive in this spacecraft like claustrophobic closeness unless they are good human beings. Gender sensitization is a step in that direction. There is a call for systemic changes.  If we do not alter our ways, we are going to leave behind a terrifying world for our children. We owe our young the space and freedom to achieve their highest potential.

Teachers are not merely uniquely placed or wholly equipped to prevent gender becoming their students’ destinies; they in fact are the only ones in any position to do so.

Note: With cerebral inputs from Aqseer.

The Buck

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Damini. Amanat. Nirbhaya. And now Jyoti Singh Pandey.

India’s airwaves are thick with comments and critiques and that generic canard.   

Just as soon as her friend appeared on TV, a virtual electronic frenzy broke out.  I first caught news of the interview on Facebook. It was late night. The laden air sagged under the chill outside and sobering thoughts of the daughter leaving home the morning after made the barrenness of his narration even more despondent, sucking the air out of my lungs. It all hit together. The shame, the regret and the unbearable bareness of his pain. The only edge of annoyance was with the cameraman. Where was the need to zoom in onto his nostrils, watering eyes and the dry lips? His burden was writ large on the screen, screaming agony for all to see.

This was the “aam aadmi”, the “ordinary citizen”, the “regular folk”. This was you and me, I thought.

I watched and heard him, unmoving  and what I really registered was his non-verbal cues. In his tone and pitch and volume was that defeated resignation, almost a dignified acceptance that defines us ordinary citizens.  He was oddly apologetic about expressing any hope. There were no histrionics, no playing to the gallery. He was matter of fact. I did not hear any peppering of bitterness or expectations. He did not dramatize, did not glorify, did not embellish. He skirted the gory details with socially acceptable words. He described it skeletally, exactly as it had unfolded.

A regular Indian citizen was out with a friend, there was no safe transport and when the two came to be assaulted, there was no system in place to alleviate their misery. The structure that should have been their safety net presented itself as a useless goulash of bickering police vans, impotent onlookers and inefficient hospitals. Their horrific experience followed a predictable path ending in loss of life and limb. Their fault?!  Bad timing?  Wrong country? Ill informed decision? Or an outright immorality?!

These questions beg answers for now. It is the hot air balloon however, that has been set afloat by some in the aftermath that I find the most astonishing.

I am being told it is us, you and me, the junta that has blood on their hands. There were people around who stood gawking at their naked, wounded bodies on the cold, hard road, we are being told. Vehicles slowed down, took it all in and throttled away. The citizens of this modern democracy who cry themselves hoarse demanding professionalism from their state failed the most basic test of humanity. Like faithful mirror images, they reflected their leaders’ narcissistic dismissiveness of another’s pain.

So there is this talk of finding us, the ordinary citizens, punishing us, hanging us and castrating us!

And I am wondering! When did we come into this power to influence events? We have been invisible so long, I barely know me. I am the aam aadmi with my cyclic, one day ballot power. For the rest of the year, I remain dormant, rendered impotent by the corrupt inefficiency and toxic politics of my government. I am the product of a system that has banished the word “integrity” from its lexicon. I have grown up believing you either need money or contacts to breathe easy in the country I was born in. I truly believe that an honest, hardworking, tax paying Indian citizen does not count for much. Have you not seen my tribe on Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) or Satyam-eva-Jayate (SMJ)?  Those are the only two forums that have bothered with me. And for all their smart marketing, I have laid bare my soul to them, sharing my life’s experiences with that same hallmark decency I show every place else.

But the din in the air continues to credit me with far more. Perhaps the term “ordinary citizen” is a misnomer in that case. Before I accept the guilt of inaction that the powers that be are trying to heap on me, I am trying to decide where in our modern democracy the buck really gets to rest.

Does it come to a stop at all?

The Catharsis

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For more than sixty years these people have been invisible

.

With India having declared her “tryst with destiny” they disappeared into their homes and got busy with the India developing story. You would see them in private photos and spaces but barely ever on the democratic canvas. While they labored over raising decent families, the political evolution of the country was left to a strange breed of Indians. These either rose to become leaders through labour union conflicts and college youth politics or came to inherit dynastic crowns. 

Whatever their mode of entry, this power hungry brand of Indians were one in sullying the word “leadership”. From a fight for freedom from the Imperial crown, politics came to mean the fight to usurp power and money for self and the next seven generations to come. Bloated with a sense of self-importance, our MPs and MLAs cultivated the convenient delusion that the only India that mattered wore the tag “disadvantaged”. They dismissed, ridiculed, and even mocked the middle classes. The political growth of the country thus came to read as the story of educated India’s marginalization. By declaring politics dirty, the ruling class effectively put it out of reach of the regular God-fearing, family values driven, sanitized Indian citizenry.

This bulk of polite people grew increasingly disconnected with the drivers steering their destinies. Escaping to foreign lands was the most they did to deal with the mess their country was becoming. One profession they tabooed their children from considering was politics. While the good India stuck their head into the sand, the leaders grew fatter with the lucre of misappropriation. It was tolerable when limited to an inefficient, rude and corrupt government but all that changed on the 16 Dec night when a young, paramedical intern was beaten and raped in a private bus, only to breathe her last thirteen days later.

The inhuman brutality of that attack ending in the brazen throwing out of her mutilated body onto a busy road made India’s somnolent bhadra lok sit up. This was too close home. Cries of “it could be me” rang across the subcontinent. India’s sleeping giant was raising the head. The Lilliputians began to scramble off in rage and fright, dusting off years of apathy and resignation to step out, in twos and threes, in groups and clusters.

I joined them at Jantar Mantar, walking up on leaden feet, alone. There were grim faces, not a few teary eyes. I stood around, breathing the air of pained incredulity. The only two faces I recognized were those of Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury, both senior CPM leaders. Some NSD persons and TV channel bosses rang familiar. But it was the faceless crowd that I was most at home with. It felt strangely like family. It felt like a complete emotional and mental and moral spa. At long last we were thinking community.

My countrymen, who are ordinarily gluttons for TV cameras, celebrating even if it is their elbow caught on the screen, were pushing the gadgets away.  I stood by, watching with pride as some young Indians took the mike to speak with quiet but impassioned dignity. There was no shade of awkwardness. They communicated with confident clarity, quiet pain…no scramble for glory, I did not see any posing for the cameras, and for once the gadgets were inconsequential.

This was a gathering different from the usual raucous, grimy and unthinking milieu. I was caught off guard to receive a couple of apologetic "sorrys" in the crowd on accidentally brushing against strangers! People shifted and made space so you had a better view. When a voice rang out, requesting people to sit down, they promptly obeyed. I saw complete strangers using  their grey hair to advantage, delivering motivating speeches to young groups. The crowd kept the odd misbehaviour in check. There were people pouring thoughts and emotions on paper lining the road. Twenty year olds spelled inconvenient truths into public address systems and people applauded affirmatively. I heard astonishing words and sensed a simmering anger born of frustration and fear. 

There was a master mind in the throes of a public catharsis out at Jantar Mantar that day. 

These ordinary citizens are the rightful owners of India’s airwaves, I thought to myself. Their education and self-sufficient means gives them both the onus and the ability to reclaim the Indian story. Let them come out in greater numbers, I prayed. Dear God, for far too long, they have sanctioned the moth eating of their country with their silence.

Pledge, pledge, and pledge...I screamed in my head. Pledge to raise our sons and daughters equally. Pledge to protest gender crimes. Pledge to speak, write, and communicate anguish at injustice. Pledge to reach out and connect. Pledge to demand a safe, equitable and clean India. Pledge not to let this assertion die.

I came away with a mental shot of the sign a protester carried, “I have not felt this hopeful in a long, long time.”

It is not about you!

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I should have learnt this lesson earlier in life.

But it is one of life’s ironies that most Eureka moments come too late for application. The next best thing you then want to do is to try and save your children all the pain and hurt and disappointment that go with a lifelong negotiation. It is entirely likely that they will want to make their own mistakes in turn but at the least, you would have done your moral job of highlighting the red markers.

Take our earthly tenure. There is a socially defined blueprint we spend our alive moments trying to fit. In the process, we are swamped with inputs and feedback, quite a bit of it uninvited.  Judging is such a full time human engagement, it begins to look like our social and religious edifices are built with the express purpose of crushing our fragile human spirit. So there are comments, observations and assumptions about your looks, mannerisms, actions, decisions, observances and otherwise.

Alterity is undeniably critical to survival but we never seem to take a break from it. The insidious fillip to this “otherness rant” comes from our notion that we are the centers of our universes. So there life finds us, alternating between being martyrs and heroes. Every moment is grand, every twist is personal, and every scrape is deeply felt. Thus we stumble through our days with our armload of pain, all bluff and bluster one breath and tears in the next, until the day we look under the bed to find the bogey gone; there never was one in the first place.

Life’s enduring lesson I would have my girls know therefore is that most of what causes grief is rarely about you. It is not about you at all. You barely exist for those you credit with the capacity to hurt you!! How ironic that we should go through life refuting and explaining and denying and justifying when all we are addressing is a vacuous space, too caught up with itself.

But of course, I catch the whiff of skepticism  You do not believe me. Well then, recall the last heart to heart, clear-the-air session you took the luxury of indulging in. Did it conclude with a life changing affirmative action or are you, as I suspect, back to square one? Did your partner in conversation hear you, see you, acknowledge you or was their lens pointed at themselves?

Sometimes, and rarely, there come along evolved beings that have the periscopic vision of empathy. Quite simply put, they get you! But for the most part, home, office, public turfs are about coming to terms; about lowering expectations; about ignoring stuff; about getting on. The degree varies from one person to another. Somewhere along this path you get to work out how much you are all right giving and taking.

Out of this balancing and evening out emerges the flicker gaining strength  that there is something bigger and way beyond these negotiating tactics of which, you are a significant wedge or slice or crumb. In other words, you alone are about you. Oh what sweet liberty! The power to change what you feel and think suddenly seems round the corner.

The only thing left to learn thereafter is to tell what is about you and what is not about you at all!