Being an Indian yet not being one

Is this the India I wanted to see,
when I was growing up with all the diversity in me?
To be pulled apart in different directions,
stabbing the soul or Indianness as I knew it to be.

I shouted to all my identities torn apart, "Let's save our soul!".
They replied back, "We are secondarily Indians, so why should we even play a role.".
The alien feeling of separatism was simmering in them,
like the hidden embers of burning coal.

My immortal Indianness has now been mortally injured,
by the splinters of caste, creed and religion, year after year it has endured.
The gangrene of difference has spread too far.
Is there a panacea that can have it cured?

Erased has been the history of ages we have shared.
When we had held hands and for each other cared.
When we showed the world how fulfilling it is to move in multitude
and in breaking us apart had nobody ever dared.

But now the world laughs at us with pity.
For the internecine show we have put up with amazing ingenuity.
With all the glory lost and years of history ignobled,
lost is the principal virtue of our Indianness - integrity.

The Redundant Tale...

It was a red dark world called the amniotic space,

which the two of them inhabited in an entangled way,

it was coexistence at its peaceful best,

and no one was a tad better than the other.

They still had darkness in their eyes,

their brains ignorant of what can happen,

unable to express themselves vocally,

it was the sense of touch they celebrated the most.

They were connected by the same cord of life,

the same food kept them alive and kicking,

they slept on the same soft bed everyday,

with the dream of emerging to see the light of the day ticking.

They both provided the same amount of joy to their creator,

and also the same amount of pain,

she tolerated their mischievous punches and kicks,

but never asked the question with why or who then.

Nine months of darkness was about to clear,

as the day of emergence arrived,

for one of them it was a dream come true,

and for the other a life ending sigh.

The one who lived basked in the glory of a won battle against destiny,

a battle to produce a boy child as against a girl child or an unbearable burden you may say,

the eternal tragedy you may call it, but what's the point,

you need a heart to let the tragedy sink in, but no feeling hearts are left you see.

Religion...

Religion is a dictator,
Extremism it practices,
Losing its practicality,
Inequality among communities it relishes.
Gory crusades it loves to fight,
Invoking hate in the form of a river of blood,
Ogling at peace with lewd infectious eyes,
Nemesis it has become even for the innocent heart.

Away From Home

I woke up in the morning to breathe a never before smelled air,
The first rays of the sun that infringed the darkness of my room had a different shade of yellow,
The birds sang to me the tunes of expatriation,
Among them I felt a lonely fellow.

The trees seemed distant relatives with their partially outstretched hands,
The flowery clouds did not greet me with new formations,
The water in the lakes were placidly indifferent,
I felt intoxicated with an alien potion.

Pondered why the window of dawn was so unknown and uninviting,
Found it to be a nightmare, later,
It came and left without much ripples,
But not without making me feel that home was far and far more better.

AI DS...Still the four letters of hate

Billions of rupees are being spent on research to develop a vaccine against AIDS, but how do you inoculate the illiterate, primitive mindset of people of the even more infectious virus of the misconceptions about this dreaded four letter word?
Its the 21st century and still no sign of coming of age. Experts are using every bit of their breath to spread awareness about AIDS, but still this unreasonable attitude refuses to leave the mind of the masses. AIDS victims are still denied compassion and support and are ostracized to extreme limits. Not even the children are spared from this wrath filled show of the non HIV ones. Otherwise five HIV affected children wouldn't have been refused admission to a primary school. They just wanted to defeat the mental part of the disease by expressing themselves academically. But alas! The axe of denial was on the prowl there too. As for the other students, they got a lesson on how to look down at their affected but full of life, would-have-been friends with disdain alongside their primers.
India has the image of being a tolerant country and see how tolerant an attitude was exemplified by the parents who protested against their admission.
A disease always has two aspects. One is the physical aspect and the other is the mental aspect. To defeat the physical aspect one first needs to win over the mental hurdle.
AIDS is one big mental game and our social circumstances are making it that much harder to win over it by repeatedly reminding us that living with AIDS is still a stigma.

Liberalisation pays off...

The abrupt shoot-out at Virginia Technology University has been a painful piece of news to swallow. Innocent aspiring lives were made to meet their ends in the worst way possible. The suspect a gutsy 23 year old armed with two powerful guns shooting at sight. What prompted him to behave in this way? Perhaps an uncontrollable outburst of emotions which was channeled out the wrong way. Emotions which induced in him hatred against his own clan and forced him to pick up arms which is so freely available in the United States - a liberal show-off they practise. My rage is directed towards this open sale of arms. Is it necessary? Ask them and they will reply, "See, ours is a mature and open market, not like yours. We trust our people. We are and always will be liberals." Quite a bold answer but I guess they refuse to go by the demographics of criminal offences and the sales figures of arms. On top of that they make no effort to find a link between these two. As consequence, we get to see such a horrific history of university and school shoot-outs. Will and should the U.S. Administration still pride themselves on their extravagant liberal decisions?

What lessons do we learn from Nandigram?

The Nandigram incident was indeed a spilled bottle of blood on the ambitious plans to transform West Bengal into a major commercial hub. It’s always painful to see unreasonable loss of human capital, but the more horrific face of it is the game of raising fingers at each other, the political masterminds have started, to gain political mileage. The solution is no where to be seen, just a clog of charges and counter charges. The operations of the media being stifled, exact details of what happened are hard to find. With the emergence of the concept of SEZs, the issue of land acquisition was sure to create hitches in its implementation. So what have the administrators learned from this unexpected incident? I feel the primary lesson they should learn is to allow time to help mature the minds of the people so that they can understand the importance of such projects. India is an agrarian country. Agriculture is still the main profession of millions and as consequence land is worth their lives. Seizing land from them for the purpose of implementing SEZs and other commercialization instruments was bound to be difficult. How much you compensate them, loss of land to them is still like the separation of soul from the body. A lot of brain racking is being done at the Union level regarding the SEZ policy but no satisfactory solution has been reached yet.

While acquiring land for industrial development one should take care of the fact that fertile land is not sacrificed. But from the point of view of the SEZs, the area should be easily accessible and satisfy other industrial requirements. Such perfectly positioned fallow lands are not an easy find. As a result a compromise has to be reached where the interests of one camp or the other is sacrificed. And in most cases it’s the camp of the less resourceful that suffers.

I feel the defect is in the grass root. How many policies you frame, if the nitty-gritty’s of it do not reach the ones to be most affected by it, you cannot expect a sustainable solution. When acquiring land, the views of the ones whose land is to be acquired need to be taken into account. It’s just not taking them into confidence by presenting them with a rosy picture, but making them aware of each and every implication of it. Then comes the compensation package which should be sufficient enough to secure their lives.

But with the poisoned politics around a peaceful consensus can never be reached. To gain political mileage and secure their position each and every party is taking advantage of their illiteracy and presenting them with distorted pictures.
But the bottom line is that this bloodbath should not have happened. It was too gory to be tolerated. This incident should be totally condemned and the administration should ensure that such inhuman clashes do not reoccur.

Endangered Existence...

We lived on a spheroidal spread of land and water,

all the biotics and abiotics together.

As mutual dependence was the order supreme

together flocked the birds of different feathers.

The wild beasts roared, the birds chirped merrily,

Man was for man, there were no rivers of blood,

Nature was at its neutral self, neither acidic nor basic

as the ice didn't melt and the oceans didn't flood.

We still live on the same spheroid,

but with all the perfect balances distorted.

Where reigns Hostility as the order supreme,

with the bonds of mutualism busted.

The shadow of extinction hangs over the wild,

the birds have started making untimely migrations,

Man is scripting his destiny with blood,

Nature is at its violent best, unleashing devastations.

Our fate will be decided at the tribunal of Nemesis,

for all the ills we have done to induce this decadence.

Time won't give us a second chance.

Let's turnaround now or be ready for repentance.

The Spirit of C.S.E...

The journey of togetherness

we started collectively as C.S.E

to cross the deep sea of engineering

and set examples for everyone else to see.

Standing by each other in testing times

we learnt it all from scratch

brilliance looms all over us

we never have had any match.

Affairs, break-ups and supplis'

we have seen it all

but at the end of the day, the bottomline says,

CSEians still stand tall.

It has been four long years

and the road of life splits up from here

only to converge again

in the future, someday, somewhere.

9th February, 2002

It's that day of the year again when my age gets incremented by one. It's like the addition of an annual ring to the stem of a growing tree. Well, the day is no doubt special because love and affection pour in from my near and dear ones with special offers like 20% extra, 30% extra, etc. Jokes apart, it's one day you want to relive everyday (but I guess there's something called impossible). I start my day with the much awaited birthday special kisses by my Ma & Bapi. I just long for them. But there's a third kiss which I miss the most. For the last five years I am being denied and will continue to be denied the most coveted presence by Someone's will, which I was so seasoned to. It was the presence of my grandmother. Her presence was all that I needed for a perfect birthday recipe. Now it feels so incomplete. It's a burden of the nullity of her presence that I am carrying over the years and will have to carry in the future too. Her presence meant a world to me.
In my previous birthdays, she used to stay the night of every 8th February over at our place. In those days, the first wish I got on the morning of the 9th was from my grandmother. What bright mornings they were, brightened up by her very presence, leave aside the sun. If it was a weekday, I used to leave for school savouring a bowl-full of the heavenly 'payesh' she used to make, only to return to enjoy the fruits of the labour she used to put in throughout the day to reproduce the delicacies I craved for year and year again. The conclusion to the day wasn't liked by me, as she used to leave me to comeback the next year again to repeat the entire process in an exact manner.
But shielded by her affection - as so used to one, I could never think that while she left me on the night of 9th February 2002, she would not comeback the next year, she would not comeback ever.

I call these JPEG memories...

We have been enjoying each others company for over three and a half years now - the four inseperables: sid, soup, tatha and myself sandy, but never has an evening been such yielding as the Jan 11 one.
Well, we were to meet to celebrate Soup's birthday, but the evening translated into something more serious, something thoroughly crude (to be taken in a positive sense). It led to the complete unfolding of ourselves.
The evening started with a cup of coffee and ended with a cup of coffee too, but was interfused with gulping of some gastronomic delights at KFC and sudden bursts of mad photography sessions.
That evening we finally stationed ourselves at the roof top food court 'Hang Out', where we occupied a table with a view. Fuming coffee arrived soon and thereon started the journey that made us peel each other to the core. It was a process of upholding the postives and negatives of each of us. It was a thoroughly enjoyed discussion and certainly had considerable weight.
But an obvious question surely pops up, why such a discussion?
An obvious answer follows it. Because each of us as individuals have a dream of becoming a conjunctive best.
So cheers to our time unbounded friendship.

Today the CAT result got revealed. I got a 96.89 percentile. It apparently seems a happy figure, but there's the irony...its just not enough for the IIMs'...just inches away. Though it was my first CAT, I had expectations from it. So it was really hard for me to digest the fact that my fingers were inches away from the button which would have opened the door of the IIMs'.
What if the great P.C.Sorcar(Junior) had altered the positions of 6 and 8 in my score with his illusory skills...I'll tell you what. I could have acquired a chair of confidence regarding a call for the interviews. But that's not to happen...as still illusion and reality are two extreme concepts.
People say time heal all wounds. This can be counted as one of my first major wounds. Perhaps it will heal over time. But mind you a wounded tiger is twice desperate and effective compared to a non wounded one. I will bounce back again and again to remind you who I am.

Friday was a day of glory for my group members and me. We had just won the inter department presentation competetion beating everyone else. But within all the happiness is concealed one of my best days in college till date. I will never be able to the smile I saw in Tania ma'am's face. It happened while I was up on the dais giving my part of the presentation. She was looking at me and that smile...........I am short of words to express what it was like. For the first time I saw her in a saree. She was really looking like a princess. The way she made her hair...............I just saw and saw and saw..............just couldn't move my eyes off her. One good thing I did is presented her with a chocolate.