One Last Step to Glory

As she stood there, on the edge, her entire life flashed before her eyes.

She remembered reluctantly walking to school holding her grandmother’s hands, the night out studies for her board examinations, college and hostel life. Her marriage, birth of her first daughter. It seemed as if she was watching herself through a kaleidoscope. Her thoughts were interrupted when she stole a peek to what lay below her. A long way down, she could see the huge river meandering through the landscape.

Fear gripped her body. She felt numb as she stood there. If the wind were any heavier, she thought, it’d have done for her what she was lacking the courage to do for the past few minutes. A gentle push was all that was needed for the solitary step ahead. Into emptiness. Maybe into a new lease of life.

She closed her eyes. She knew she had to do it. She had thought about it, she had made plans for this moment, and yet when it finally arrived, she seemed to be powerless to actually take the leap. She sighed, as she thought of the loving face of her husband and the cherubic face of her daughter.

She closed her eyes. And taking a deep breath, she spread her arms to either sides. The instant before she actually took the final step, she felt angelic. And she took the last step, she leapt.

The river seemed to get bigger and bigger and she approached it with the speed gravity permitted. The same body of water which was comfortably distant a moment ago, seemed all eager to lap her up, as it had undoubtedly done with a thousand others.

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As she felt the chord tied to her leg tighten, she had a feeling of elation. With that, she mentally crossed off Bungee Jumping from her life’s to-do list.

Cricket in India, and the BCCI of course!

The Board of Control for Cricket in India, commonly abbreviated as BCCI is the governing body for cricket in India.

The much respected P. Sainath, in this column in The Hindu way back in January 2012, expanded BCCI as Billionaires Control Cricket in India. Although much of that article refers directly to Indian Premier League, the essence of the article, almost three years since the date it was published, has remained unchanged and unaddressed.

Sport has always thrived on commercialization. The most popular sports are most often, the most commercialized in a geo-demographic region. In fact, it is more of a bidirectional relationship. Adequate television and media coverage props up sports, as much as valor and glory of sports, sportsmen and sportswomen do. There is a difference of approach in selling a sport and promoting a sport, the latter in most cases, is an investment which, in best case would lead to the former. The difference here is akin to a company’s investment in its Research & Development division. The return on investment is futuristic and speculative. But it is essential to the survival of the company tomorrow. Without a healthy investment in research, a company could perform well today but there is no predictability and no guarantee of what might happen tomorrow. Most national and international sport governing bodies recognize this fact and try to exploit it to the benefit of the sport they represent. This seems to be exactly where BCCI is getting its strategy wrong.

BCCI’s decision not to send in a cricket team in both men’s and women’s events for the recently concluded Asian Games at Incheon, is nothing short of appalling. The Olympic Council of Asia was scathing in criticism when it mentioned that BCCI was killing cricket. Although that might be a harsh way to look at the state of affairs, I do not have a sliver of doubt that the BCCI is muddling into murkier waters in the handling of internal affairs. In my school days, which was when Sachin Tendulkar had exploded on to the world stage and the likes of Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid et al were beginning to offer a glimpse of the bright future of Indian cricket, BCCI was a term very rarely seen in the media. Cricket was a lot more about the on field happenings than what happened in the confines of closed rooms in luxury hotels across big cities in India. Cricket had established its roots solidly in India, and the increasing proliferation of cricket matches, along with some extremely talents players and the emergence of television for live broadcasting paved way for an explosion of cricketing fervor. I’m certain BCCI did have a lot of role to play in the widespread popularity of cricket in India. Those were the good days.

For reasons not completely clear to me, somewhere along the line, things started going downhill. Maybe it was the limitless amount of money pouring in as revenue, maybe it was the increasing clout. Or something else that might be above my level of comprehension. Whatever it was, proportionate to the increase in power, there seemed to a fall in responsibility. Instead of an ultimate target of promoting cricket in India (and abroad), BCCI seemed to fall into a notion to control cricket (as its name implied, quite ironically!). Cricket in India that was not sponsored or organized by BCCI was classified as “rogue” and was hunted down. Indian Cricket League was the biggest target, which balked to BCCI pressure after it was threatened that players participating in ICL would not be sanctioned to play for their countries. There is an ever-thin line of demarcation between between confidence and over confidence, between absolute power and dictatorial audacity. That line seems to have been crossed in case of the BCCI.

They say pride goes before a fall. The BCCI would do well to print out that idiom and have it pasted on multiple walls across the plethora of its offices in India. They would do well to look and learn from what happened to the sport of field hockey in India (and to a less extent, in Pakistan too). Indian hockey teams were considered among the best in the world. This sport has the single largest contribution to India’s Olympic medal kitty than any other sporting event. In its prime, hockey used to be a crowd puller and was quite popular. I do not know this for a fact, but I assume with a reasonable degree of conviction, that administrative officials in Indian Hockey Federation (presently Hockey India) would have felt their game to be invincible. Over the course of time, however, there was a steady deterioration. The reasons for this are beyond my knowledge, and not core to the topic at hand, but the very fact that this happened should make BCCI take cognizance. That cricket might have had a big impact in the decline of field hockey in India is an argument, but that should be juxtaposed with the larger fact that in general, the decline of any sport(s) in any geo-political region will naturally result in an increase in popularity of others, basing on the assumption that people don’t, in one fine day, lose interest in sports altogether. If it can happen with hockey, the national sport of India, it can (not necessarily will) happen with cricket as well. The public perception of BCCI is not very positive in itself is a big hindrance for the monolith. Couple that to the fact that many of the iconic stalwarts of Indian cricket have retired in the past half-decade or so, which has had a negative impact as well. In the recent past and present, there has been an increasing emergence of club level competitions in India like the Indian Super League (for soccer), Indian Badminton League and the Pro Kabaddi League.  The other sporting federations seem to have a good idea of attempting to promote their sports, some (or all) of them might succeed or perish, but the attitude is certainly praiseworthy and BCCI, with its lax attitude, seems to be increasingly uncaring about what goes on.

Another aspect is the commitment of BCCI to promote the sport of cricket domestically and globally. Well, they certainly do have their task cut out when it comes to promoting cricket inside India, they have a firm platform from upon which they need to invest very manageable amounts inside India. But this is not the case with outside South Asia. Considering the fact that cricket is by far not one of the more popular sports worldwide, cricket administrators have a lot of room for improvement. A classic example for this argument is Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), and their attempts to promote soccer worldwide. Soccer is the most popular and widely followed sport in the world and yet FIFA realizes the potential of countries like India where soccer is yet to make significant inroads and is aggressively investing in bringing up facilities. BCCI should realize that they have a very firm foundation from which they can launch cricket to a much wider audience, using the significant presence of Indian diaspora worldwide. BCCI has to father this responsibility as the most financially sound body among all the constituents of International Cricket Council (ICC).

On its part, the Government of India must act to ensure BCCI remains what it is – a sporting body, and not some supreme center of authority (money yes, but authority no). In an affidavit filed at the Supreme Court of India, BCCI claimed it was an autonomous private body over which government has no control. If BCCI, as it claims, is a private body and the players are technically the staff on payroll of BCCI and do not officially represent the Government of India, I fail to see the logic by which the Government of India can confer Arjuna Awards on cricketers. Because technically Arjuna Awards are given to players affiliated to various National Sports Federations which officially represent India internationally. The multiple tax exemptions rolled out to BCCI in the pretext that BCCI was a “charitable organization promoting cricket” were needless and were rightfully revoked. And the government should prioritize getting the BCCI under the ambit of Right to Information (RTI) act, which is possibly the first step for controlling the economic anarchy that happens inside the portals of BCCI.

I do not expect much from the BCCI to happen, at least not until cricket really does start treading on a path to downfall. That event might not necessarily happen. But there is a chunk of people, this author included, who were slowly weaned away from cricket after the retirement of some of the iconic legends in cricket that we grew up watching. People like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly mesmerized a generation of children and adults and to many including myself, they represented cricket. Their retirements, along with all those off-the-field cricket news that started to fill the media space today than on-the-field cricket news, have weaned the interest of many. Too much of anything is seldom good, and it seems the same thing has happened with cricket as well. Especially with the advent of the Indian Premier League (IPL), one gets the feeling that there is an excess of cricket that happens in the country. And for the cricket administrators of the country, this overall should be a worrying trend. But am sure they won’t worry. Not until the train actually leaves the station. That is when they will dust off and start the process of introspection, which I fear, might be a tad too late. History points to a similar situation happening with the national sport of India, hockey. BCCI’s current (in)action points to that potentially happening some day in future to cricket as well.

I’ll borrow the last sentence from Mr. Sainath’s article I quoted at the beginning, “We need to think about how to revive the domestic game, rescue cricket from the billionaires club and restore it to the public domain.”

Racism in Indian Media

Media, in India is often touted as the guardian angel of democratic principles. Since Edmund Burke, the “fourth estate” has been regarded as something that checks and if need be, re-balances the division of power(s). I would credit the media to, more often than not, be doing an exemplary role in acting as a controlling factor that prevents the executive and legislature from going significantly against the wishes of the majority of people, criticizing the state in situations where it crosses some unwritten thresholds. However having said that the media is not perfect, nor should I expect it to be.

I have always been skeptical about the role of media in India. This is not to downsize the role they have played in what India has grown to be today, this is in no way to malign the toil, hardwork, bravery and integrity of some of the most talented men and women who have braved the odds to bring us news about the positive and negative happenings to our television screens, newspapers or the internet portals. In many cases, the media has played a crucial role in swinging public opinion, the most recent example that comes to my mind is that of the highlight of India Against Corruption movement in the earlier part of this decade. However, they do, sometimes, tend to go south. A penchant for increased TRPs or overtaking a competitor, news is often sensationalized and misquoted. There are instances where I have read news items which have got their facts wrong and a lot of media houses lack the grace to publish an admission of error or a letter of apology. Quoting “unnamed or undisclosed sources”, for many, seems to have become a way to stuff their personal or organizational opinions and ideologies as news event than news analyses.

However I write this piece to ponder upon my thoughts that media in India is getting especially negligent about news from North Eastern states of India. I’d go a step to cal it the racist attitude of the mainstream media in India. Yes, I know I am entitled to a criticism that this is more of a issue of regionalism, but I think I’d rather call it racism. Why? Because the media often quotes this term. Not against itself, but against us, the citizens of India.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we, the people are racist. Okay, my definition of the term racism is strictly not according to how Wikipedia defines it. Most people of India are biased against the people from their own region of birth, against the people who do not share their mother tongue or their cultural background. I am from a state in Southern India who had the luck to go for my undergraduate degree in a college in the Hindi heartland in North India. I faced issues, mostly miniscule and negligible but issues they indeed were, where I was typecast into a stereotypical South Indian and judged, analyzed more based on that than who I was. I am certain that there would be many North Indians who would have faced the same issues in Southern India. That I think is quite understandable (and if you ask me, made for a lot of instances for me and my friends from across India to sit around tables and cafeterias and share a laugh!) and as long as it does not cause significant physical or mental agony, it should be something that is taken as the natural fabric that comes with a country as diverse as ours. However sometimes, incidents happen that do cross the unwritten barriers of physical or mental agony and cannot be ignored. That happens mostly with people from the North Eastern parts of India.

Yes, people who natively belong to states in North East, are most often, from a different race as the rest of India. And incidents happen when they are targeted for their race or ethnicity in other parts of India. Atrocious incidents have happened in Indian cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi etc, with increasing frequency. Whenever such instances happen, the media highlights the issue. There are endless debates and editorial pieces condemning the attacks. But amidst the din and charade that accompanies the debates and the glorified condemnations, you, I and the presenters miss one point – that the media themselves are racist.

The incident that prompted me to write this piece, to title this piece as it is, was the coverage of floods that ravaged the North Eastern states of India last month. And the stark contrast to the way the media covered the floods in Jammu and Kashmir this year and the floods in Uttarakhand towards the middle of last year. Almost all national media competed stiffly (and I would add, commendably) in covering the floods that occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, the impact, the severity, the rescue and relief and a host of other related aspects. A lot of them telecast their prime news reports from ground in Kashmir. But no media house (at least among the ones I follow) showed the same fervor and arduousness when covering the floods that ravaged in Assam and Meghalaya the very same month. When the waters started receding from Jammu and Kashmir, water levels started rising somewhere far east in the country, mainly in the states of Assam and Meghalaya. Surprisingly, the cyber world seems to be no less culpable. Wikpedia, which is the venerated encyclopedia of anything and everything, has no page related to the floods in North Eastern India. The page of List of 2014 disasters in India is conspicuous by the absence of North East floods. Normally I wouldn't have placed this arbitration against the media because it is quite understandable the amount of coverage their editorial boards decide to give various incidents. But this time, I think it went too far. Someone like me, who regularly surfs multiple media websites daily for news updates, came to know of the floods in Assam almost a full three days after they first reportedly happened. And if I consider myself an averagely avid news junkie, I can be uncomfortably reasonably sure that this news did not reach a significant households in India outside of the affected region. The media which is reputed in conducting periodic autopsies of the symbolic and on-the-ground acts of the new Union Cabinet, covered the visit of Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi to Jammu and Kashmir with true importance it deserved. However, the news item about Mr. Tarun Gogoi’s criticism that Mr. Narendra Modi did not visit the flood hit regions in the North East (which I think is quite matter-of-fact) gained only scant coverage in the media. Why, media? When you declare the majority of Indians as being biased against people from the North East, did you give a thought to look inside your own house to see if everything was well?

To me, it seems absolutely pointless that there needs to be some sort of communique from People’s Republic of China for Arunachal Pradesh to get a mention in the mainstream news media. It is pointless to talk about Manipur when and only when there is some news around Irom Sharmila. As long as the news media maintain this lackadaisical attitude, the citizens from other parts of India will continue to remain unaware and alienated from that part of their own country. And when a part of your citizenry do not get their fair share of exposure from the mainstream media, they are right to be felt ostracized and alienated. As much as “we” do not make “them” feel a part of the same country by all those dastardly acts, these kind of acts from the media would no doubt make “them” feel less integrated into the fabric of India. The blame certainly does lie with the citizens of other parts in the country, but some of the buck stops right in front of the media houses in India. 

Disaster Management in India

October 12 is the date of my birth. So by the standards propounded by the bourgeois and elites worldwide, I am supposed to celebrate it in a pomp and spectacular way, at least on a personal note. However, this year and the last, two of the hardest disasters India has faced in her recent past have chosen to hit the land on that very (in)auspicious day – Cyclone Phailin in 2013 and Cyclone Hudhud in 2014. Both of them, categorized by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) as “Very Severe Cyclonic Storm” as they made landfall along the Coromandel coastline in south-eastern India.

India is a densely populated country and thus, any natural (or man-made) disaster is, bound to impact several thousands of people by simple arithmetic logic. More so in case of cyclones because their direct zone of impact generally tends to span tens of kilometers into hinterland. Yet what stands out impressive, if I may be permitted to use the word, is the casualty figures. Fewer than 50 people were reported dead in the state of Odisha due to Cyclone Phailin, of which more than half was a result of floods which were a result of the cyclone. The number of deaths caused by Cyclone Hudhud has also been significantly low so far, it stands at 41. Of these 38 were in the state of Andhra Pradesh, which was where Cyclone Hudhud made landfall and 3 were in the neighboring state of Odisha.

The lessons for this success started in the failure that accompanied the Super Cyclone which hit Odisha in 1999. Official figures put the death toll in that cyclone to be around 10,000.It seems that the governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh learnt, in a bitter way, about what could go wrong in that instance. It is a combination of that which resulted in better preparedness of the state government machinery, plus the advancements in climatic monitoring technologies and smooth co-ordination of the multitude of bodies like the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the Indian armed forces. For over a week before Cyclone Hudhud struck the eastern coast of India, IMD started putting out bulletins related to the various aspects of the impending storm – the movement, the speeds and other related information. The IMD, which had issued warning of the 1999 Super Cyclone only about 24 hours prior to it making the landfall, started issuing detailed and accurate warning about Hudhud five days before Cyclone Hudhud struck. And this data was used very productively by governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in pre-emptively relocating populace from the impact zone. The preparedness was phenomenal, and commendable. The prompt predictions from IMD ensured that Odisha administration shifted over 9,00,000 people to safer places before Cyclone Phailin hit the Indian coast. The figure was over 7,00,000 in the state of Andhra Pradesh in case of Cyclone Hudhud this year.

While it is agonizing that it took a super cyclone which cost the lives of over 10,000 people and crores of rupees in terms of economic losses for us to learn the lesson for better preparedness and better disaster management system, the gratifying part is indeed the fact that the lessons have certainly been imbibed. We are much more used to sedentary responses from state governments and their general reluctance to imbibe lessons from the past and inculcate a healthy way of preparedness, the government and bureaucratic machineries of governments of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, along with agencies such as IMD and NDRF have shown us a bright spot indeed worthy of emulation. The other federations in India and the union government itself must take a leaf out of these incidents and replicate it across the country. In a country like India, natural disasters consistently wreak great havoc and it is incumbent upon us to learn the lessons from what happened yesterday so that if the same things happen tomorrow, the impact will be much lesser. The recent floods in Jammu Kashmir, floods in North Eastern states in India, 2013 Uttarakhand Floods and several other incidents in recent and distant past point to a dismal fact, that our levels of preparedness is often caught short. True, quite often it is not possible to predict natural disasters. But disaster is something we need to be prepared for. Every ounce of extra preparedness can make the difference in the life or lives of an individual or a family, a humongous price that justifies the extra preparedness. We now have a rock solid example of how Andhra Pradesh and Odisha did it, clinically. Maybe we should take some time and imbibe that.

In our natural tendency to criticize governments for what they more often than not fail to do, let us warm ourselves to congratulate the governments and the personnel involved for all the efforts they put in to minimize the impact in terms of casualties these cyclonic storms had. The kudos goes to every single known and unknown individual who did their two cents for the country, from that unknown electricity lineman who struggled to restore electricity in some remote colony or village, to those secretaries, ministers and other functionaries of the governments who oversaw the planning and implementation before and after the disaster. Kudos, my fellow countrymen.

Afterthought: For anyone interested in the naming convention of (past and future) cyclonic storms around the northern Indian Ocean, this document provides an interesting insight into the naming convention, so to speak.

Ice Bucket Challenge

It was a day of light showers when I hopped on to a bus that would’ve taken me homeward. There were a group of guys sitting in a section of seats in front of me. All of them seemed to have one of those latest smartphones and needless to say, their attention was riveted on those four or five inches of backlit screens. Possibly due to lack of awareness of propriety that spanned beyond those phone screens, their conversations were loud enough for me to overhear.

“Hey, look at this. Akshay Kumar just took the Ice Bucket Challenge. Hold on, I am sending you the YouTube link.” Said Person A.

“Oh yea, I saw that, someone shared it on my Facebook timeline. He looked cool, didn’t he. He certainly seemed to have a ton of people throwing buckets of ice on him.” Replied Person B.

“Who challenged Akshay Kumar?” Person C was curious.

“I don’t know. I saw Riteish Deshmukh, Abhishek Bachchan and Mandira Bedi’s videos yesterday. I don’t remember the person who challenged Akshay.” Person D chimmed in.

“The ALC Ice Bucket Challenge has gone viral hasn’t it?” asked Person A.

“Oh true. How many people have taken it. Last week I was seeing videos of Harrison Ford, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Spielberg take the ALC challenege.” supported Person B.

“Wait, hold on. Is it the ALC bucket challenge? Wasn’t it something else?” queried Person C

“I think it is ACC. Or maybe was it ACL?” Person D opened up more possibilities.

“Whatever it is, it is funny to see celebrities downing ice buckets like crazy. I love it when those female actors do it, you know. Mandira Bedi, Sunny Leone, Katy Perry, Kaley Cuoco…. You know these damsels make ice bucket challenge real hot.” Person E came out of his silence to add another dimension to the conversation.

“Gwyneth Paltrow as well dude. Did you see her ice bucket challenge? She posted a video of her doing it with a bikini.” Person C chimed in.

“Shut up dude. Respect the cause for this celebration.” Person B silenced Person C.

“I forget what the actual name was. I saw it even today morning in Sonakshi Sinha’s Twitter handle. She had tweeted about it.” Person A was scratching his said.

“You know the funny thing with Sonakshi Sinha, no one challenged her. But still she took it upon herself.” Person B was anecdotal.

“The initials, I think it represents the company that came up with the idea. Think of it, they come up with such an idea, they promote it, and suddenly it looks ‘cool’ to dump a bucket of ice over your head and post the video on Facebook.” Person C shared his wisdom.

“Is it? It is amazing that these marketing people come up with such amazing ideas. Such a ‘cool’ idea of publicizing one’s own products dude.” Person E was not be silenced this time.

“Well, they are paid to do that. And they are paid heavily to do just that my sir.” Person C was supportive.

“No no, I don’t think that’s some company. If that were the case why would people like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and Bazooka guys do that? Why would they promote some other company than theirs?” Person A was looking at it rationally.

“Bazooka? Who’s Bazooka?” Person B couldn’t recognize.

“You order so much from Amazon, you don’t know the founder of Amazon? That’s Bazooka” Person A retorted with a guffaw.

“It isn’t ACL guys. I googled it, that is Ambuja Cements. Obviously, they have got nothing to do with it.” Person C said without taking his eyes off his phone screen.

“Okay, let me look for ice bucket challenge on Google.” Person A was busy switching windows on his phone to bring up the browser.

“Got it, it is ALS. Ah, they have a big Wikipedia page. Who will read through whatever that is? It doesn’t seem a company because I don’t see a logo in their Wiki page.” Person D emerged triumphant.

“Hey you know what? How about we do this ice bucket thing over the weekend?” Person E suddenly had a brainwave.

“Yea, that’s right. You anyways don’t take bath over the weekend, so it would be certainly beneficial to your flat mates at least..!” Time for a potshot.

“Am not joking. Let’s each do it, make some funny video and put it on Facebook.” Person E ignored the potshot part of the previous commentator.

“What he said makes sense. I’ve not been posting anything on my Facebook wall for a while. If we can make this video funny, I’ll end up getting some ‘cool’ likes.” Person B was supportive.

“Plus let us challenge some girls from office as well. Who knows, they might also do it. Would be fun to watch.” Person C chipped in with an idea.

“We definitely should challenge Person X. He’s a darn coward but his posts in Facebook gives the impression that he is the coolest dude in town. Let’s challenge him, I bet he’ll piss in his pants than take the ice bucket challenge.” Person A was in a vengeful mood.

“Totally agree. I’ve always wanted to expose him, he irritates me posting all those fancy photos and statuses on Facebook.” Person B exhorted.

The automated announcement filtered through the bus’ speakers indicating my stop had reached. I picked up my bag and alighted from my bus and walked away, pretty sure of what was going to appear on the Facebook timelines of these unknown fellow travelers over the next few days.

For the curious, you can read more about Ice Bucket Challenge, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis a.k.a ALS, and ALS Association in the respective links.

The Shortcut to Vigilantism

We, in India, have been brought up with news of celebrities. Well, celebrities would not be the perfect word, because it is not all positive imagery that is propagandized. Quite a lot of our idols we worship (or hate) to a great extent, have been contributed by the entertainment industry, sports (read cricket), religion and politics to name a handful. Their actions (and inactions) are followed almost religiously, and they are appropriately covered by the media in India. Their good samaritanism is generally lauded widely and propagated to be emulated, and any slight leaning to “the perceived other side” are retorted by means ranging from simple criticism to undignified vandalism.

A recent item in the news created that much furore in the country was the news about the abysmal levels of attendance of Sachin Tendulkar and Rekha in Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Parliament of India. This led to lots of debates and statements in the print and electronic media and everyone was suddenly taking the same side, which, in itself, was a rare feat. I too mentally joined the noise and din created by the likes of Mr. Arnab Goswami and his counterparts across the various channels as they dissected the issue from all angles and concluded a very predictable judgment. The print and electronic media in the country unilaterally passed the judgment that Tendulkar and Rekha were on the wrong side, and urged them to respond in a positive way and make themselves more present in the floor of the sanctum sanctorum of the Indian democracy. In the comments posted below the links mentioned above, the public were quite scathing in their condemnation, some of the comments were quite insensitive in my opinion.

All was well, we got an issue, we reacted sharply, a reaction that most of us, including this author, found quite logical and justified. The sun rose again the following day, the media shifted its focus to more contemporary news items which continuously kept emanating. It was more than a week after that I got myself thinking about this piece of news. The more I thought about the more I realized that we had only scratched the surface of the issue. The celebrity-ness of this news item ensured that the problem was mentioned and . But the very same celebrity-ness ensured that the solution proclaimed was skin deep, and none close to sustainable.

There was this article in Dawn, by Mr. Abbas Nasir, a former editor with the daily. All credit to the author who penned down a piece that almost completely mimicked my thought, quoting an incident of Mr. Rahman Malik, a former minister in the Federal Government of Pakistan, being thrown out of a PIA flight by irate passengers. The news item received attention in India as well, with Mr. Arnab Goswami choosing to vent his fury at the VVIP culture, in the wake of this incident. But Mr. Nasir delicately puts forth one very pertinent question in his article, before we passed the judgment, did we care to cross check the facts of the incident? Did any of the news media or the people who reacted to the incident, was able to base their opinion on conclusive proof rather than piecemeal, unsubstantiated versions of the incident? The author in that article, makes an exhortative call for refraining from judgment before verifying the facts from both sides of the involved parties, and not coming to a lopsided verdict based on the past character of the person(s) involved. And that fault, lies as much with media as with the people. Why do I say so?

The public, here, is at fault because of the lack of civic sense. Mr. Nasir makes this very case in a subtle example he references in his piece. I reside in the United States, and I completely understand when he makes a case of an ambulance stuck in a traffic jam. I have seen it here that even when there is hardly any room to wiggle, but people generally tend to make an attempt at shifting their vehicles, whatever little they can, to ensure a smooth passage for an ambulance or an emergency vehicle. Contrast this to the case in India, where I have seen that people, tend to be a lot more reluctant to attempt to do that. In fact, I have seen people use ambulances as shields to make their way through a difficult traffic situation. They tend to tailgate behind ambulances because there is a lot more possibility of an ambulance making way through a traffic jam and they try to use that to their advantage. To add to that example, littering on streets is quite low in the United States even though I do not know of any severe penalties associated with it (even if there were, not every street and junction can be manned by police personnel to effectively enforce it) whereas in India, we take it as our birthright to litter wherever we feel convenient. These are two very simple examples that come to my mind when I contrast the civic sense in societies of India and the United States. And in my opinion, it is an extension of this civic sense (or lack thereof) that seems to cause the original problem I started to address in this article.

The lack of civic sense to a great extent, has made us place a great deal of importance to my rights of free speech and opinion over the rights of dignity of others (including celebrities). Celebrities are often convenient targets of our ire and wrath, and we often do not give a second thought to shooting from the hip in those cases. Which might result in two problems – one, we might cause ill-repute to someone who might not even have been guilty at this and two, we might end up overlooking a bigger issue because of the names of people involved. In the case of Sachin Tendulkar and Rekha, by passing a unilateral verdict , albeit the fact that it is correct and substantiated by facts (unlike the PIA incident), we missed out on the second problem I alluded to.

To give an insight into what I refer to here, I went to the website of PRS India, an independent research institute which has a lot of facts about the MPs in India and did a bit of digging. I retrieved some astounding figures from their website. According to their data, Mr. Rahul Gandhi, the Vice President of Congress, asked no questions during his tenure as MP in the 15^th Lok Sabha compared to a national average of 300 questions per MP. His attendance in the house was 43%. If you thought that was low, I saw some more mind boggling statistics, there are some inconsistencies because of incomplete data but the pointers are sufficient for this discussion:

• Mr. M. K. Alagiri, former Union Minister and son of Mr. K. Karunanidhi of DMK, attended less than 10% of parliament sessions after he quit as minister of Union Cabinet under Dr. Manmohan Singh in March 2013. No participation in debates, and no questions asked in the period from March 2013 to February 2014.
• Mr. K Chandrasekhara Rao, present Chief Minister of the State of Telangana, has an attendance of 13% over the course of 15^th Lok Sabha. No questions raised on floor of the house.
• The late Mr. Baliram Kashyap, who passed away in March 2011, seems to have recorded an abysmal rate of attendance in between May 2009 and March 2011 as evident from the session wise break up of his attendance. No participation in debates and zero questions raised.
• Ms. Vijaya Shanti, a former movie actress, shows up in the Lok Sabha 14% of the time. No participation in debates and zero questions raised.
• Mr. Shibu Soren, former Chief Minister of the state of Jharkhand, attended the Lok Sabha 23% of the time. Again, no participation in debates and zero questions raised.

This is, by no means, an exhaustive list. I do not disagree to the spirit espoused by S. Pushpavanam in his article in The Hindu, which claims that members should not be judged by their attendance in Parliament, but even the author in that, must agree to the limited justice you provide to the people who elected you by being present in the House less than one out of five working days. Even if it is low, there is a threshold of attendance beneath which it seems apparent to me that no positive work can be done. I would not expect someone like Sachin Tendulkar or Rekha to champion the cause of people in their constituency to a high degree but I certainly would expect each and every one in the list above (and potentially many more) to attend to their regular duties in Parliament because that is the understanding with which people voted for them. Because for the people I mentioned above (and for a lot of others), politics is a full time occupation.

There was another broader issue which was hidden behind the façade. And this was the historical case of celebrities nominated to the Rajya Sabha. This article in The Times of India gives a lot of insight about  the performance of people of non political eminence in the Rajya Sabha. With a lot of respect to all the people mentioned in the article, it would have been beneficial for our democracy if this incident had indeed triggered a debate of the larger picture of persons of eminence on Rajya Sabha, with facts to back it up one way or the other. The article points out to the fact that the celebrated singer Lata Mangeshkar and legendary filmmaker Mrinal Sen, who were nominated members of Rajya Sabha, had dismal attendance records. It also points out cases where there have been people with impressive attendance records as well. Which naturally triggers the question, does the nomination of people of eminence from multiple sections of civil society, have a constructive or negative effect on the system of legislature in this country? I am not trying to pass a judgment here either for or against the cause, I am trying to make a case for a healthy debate (which never happened) on the sidelines of the original issue that was raised.

In the din and clamor (glamour?) of Sachin Tendulkar and Rekha giving Rajya Sabha sessions a miss big time, we the civic society lost to focus on the big picture, which is how they stack up against some of the full time politicians this country has produced. And the bigger cause of nominating persons of eminence from multiple fields into the high echelons of legislative bodies in India. When the original issue came up, it would have been a good time to look at the two issues mentioned above as well, as lending completeness to the problem at hand, but slogging the celebrities is often an easy solution to a lot of debates. We, the people, missed a chance, and the media too was reluctant to probe much deeper underneath the skin. Shouldn’t we be having a healthy culture of rapping ourselves on our knuckles in such circumstances?

Mumbai Mail

Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus is the busiest station of India. At any given instant of time, any part of the day, the station is flocked with people and thus, never short on activity. People from all walks of life – from the mighty company executive to homeless peddlers for whom the domes served as a roof atop their heads, always amalgamated with the station. For some, this might mark the beginning of a journey, maybe an anxious or an enthusiastic omen, for some others, it is signals a terminus, the end of a pleasant or an unpleasant voyage. It was in the middle of this hubbub of activity that I found myself a few minutes after the sun set on the famed Mumbai skyline.

I had a train to catch. The outbound Mumbai Mail to Chennai which would be departing in an hour and a half. And I had two three tier Air Conditioned coach tickets with me. I picked up a coffee from a stall. I moved towards the center of the station where there were a group of chairs for waiting, perched atop one of them and started the agonizing wait. The station in all its grandeur, never failed to capture my imagination. I watched as railway network put people on the move. There were laughter of joy, sighs of relief, and tears of painful farewell. The station, as would be the case with most stations on the railway network, was a cornucopia of emotions. My mind was not focused. I realized that I should be feeling tense, but I was surprisingly calm. I had seen in movies that during such moments, your mind wades through a mélange of moments that happened all through your life – the good ones, the bad ones and the ugly ones. But there was nothing of that sort puttering through my mind, it was empty. The group of girls sitting near her were chattering non-stop about the latest Salman Khan movie. She longed for serenity, some peace. Mumbai was a tough place to find peace, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus was the last place one could hope to find serenity. Finally the chatter reached such a point that she could no longer take it. She picked up her bag and moved, in measured paces, towards the main entrance of the station. There was always a swarm of people pushing into the station every minute, and it was where she hoped to catch a glimpse of Sooraj.

As she waited, she was fidgeting with her mobile. For the past two hours she had been calling him, but there had been no response. She had messaged him multiple times, to call her back but there was neither the call back she had been waiting for nor a message indicating that he wasn’t in a position to. She finished three coffees one after another, and kept waiting. She waited for him in the busy railway station for more than an hour. Inside she was debating if she should simple walk away and board the train. She had the ticket, after all. And he didn’t know the details of which compartment they were reserved in. She had to take care of everything, from start to end because he was not in a position to. As if on cue, the announcement came, “Passengers, your kind attention! Train No. so-and-so Mumbai Chennai Mail from Mumbai CST to Chennai Central will depart from Platform No. 6 at two-three-one-five hours.” This was followed by announcements in Hindi and Marathi. She looked at her watch, and then her mobile. No messages. The train, if on schedule, was due to depart in twenty minutes.

She had to make a decision. She could not go back. She carefully stared at the net batch of incoming crowd pushing and shoving to get inside the station. No, Sooraj wasn’t there. She turned around and started walking in the direction of Platform No. 6. The decision had been made. There was going to be no more waiting for him.

She boarded the Mumbai Mail, located her berth, placed her bags and settled in. After the tumultuous past couple of hours, the silence around her seemed eery. She moved to the door. Maybe she was hoping if he did manage to come at this last minute, that he could still find her. The engine blew its horn, signaling the intent to commence the journey. The guard flashed the green light. And slowly but steadily, the lights of Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus was moving against the direction she was going. She was still at the door and her coach had almost reached the end of the station when her mobile phone signaled a message received, “My wife came back today. She is still not willing to divorce me, we fought over it again today. I couldn’t get out of the house. Let’s make a plan for another day when she will be away at her parents’ place. Come to Marine Drive tomorrow evening, we’ll decide.”

Without a second thought, she instantly replied, “I waited for you, you didn’t turn up. You cheated me, you are cheating your wife as well. Don’t wait for me, I am going where the Mumbai Mail takes me. Goodbye.” She sent the message and switched her mobile off. Tomorrow was going to be a fresh day, a fresh start. 

Frozen in Time

It was a lazy Sunday morning. We were playing cricket on the small maidan on the banks of Meenachil river. Playing cricket midday till Sunday was a ritual practiced vehemently by our gang, there were only seldom Sundays when the event did not happen. Not that playing regularly improved our game by any measure, but it was an unwritten tradition. Humid southern Indian summer or torrential south westerly monsoon, the game invariably found a way to happen.

There was another tradition which accompanied our Sunday morning game. The journey of Achutan, with his long fishing rod, accompanied by his son Ramu. Achutan was a peon in the nearby Government Polytechnic College. And Ramu was in kindergarten, at the local Anganwadi. The game used to pause when they were passing because they had to cross the field to reach the bank of the river where Achutan used to fish. Little Ramu used to wave to us and we used to wave back at him. The father-son duo was a sight for us to watch. The son used to always walk three steps behind his father, it was almost like a two person march past. Achutan would be holding his fishing rod over his shoulder whereas Ramu would be holding a small earthern pot which normally would be filled by the time they used to make their return trip back homeward.

Achutan and Ramu used to talk loudly about a lot of things when walking along, could be about Ramu’s school, Achutan’s job at college, fishing, household stuff. A lot of things. On most occasions, Achutan used to be the speaker and Ramu used to be the listener. Achutan was very patient when answering Ramu’s question. It was evident that he was not well educated, so he had his limitations. But he was always mild and patient when talking to Ramu. The scene was virtually the same every Sunday, our game, the duo’s arrival, our pausing of the game to let them pass, and their return through our ground again after a couple of hours or more. They used to fish very on the bank adjacent to our ground, so we could hear Ramu’s cheerful shouts whenever Achutan caught a fish. The pitch in Ramu’s shout was in direct proportion to the size of fish, we knew Achutan caught a big fish when loud ecstatic cries from Ramu used to reach us. When returning back, the walk would be reversed. This time Ramu would be running ahead and stopping for his father to catch up, with the pot generally full of freshly caught fish. And Achutan would follow behind, contendly smoking his beedi. 

It has been ten years since then. The landscape in our small village has more or less remained unaltered. We still play cricket. We still pause the game when Achutan and Ramu cross the pitch to their usual spot on the banks of Meenachil river. Barring a few differences. All of us used to be in school back then, wearing shorts and shirts with more holes and fewer buttons. Now we wear lungis and random branded T shirts. Our cricket graduated from makeshift bats chiseled from coconut tree branches and tennis ball to BDM bats and cork balls. And Ramu has advanced from kindergarten to high school. And they don’t walk. Ramu pedals on his bicycle with a grey haired Achutan on the pillion. But the sweet camaraderie between father and son has remained untouched.

Time doesn’t keep everything frozen but it certainly does preserve the essence. 

The Wrong Number

I like to keep my mobile phone almost perennially in silent mode. I have never quite determined the reason for it - whether it is my innate irritation to unnecessary noise or my misconstrued sense of civic propriety which makes me believe that it is duty-bound of every one to reduce the noise in a public place. I often hear flak for it because this habit causes me to often miss calls, especially from my mother. But I was what I was, I’d rather be scolded than to change some mannerisms. Stupid, me.

But I did not miss that call. Going by the usual probability I should have. I was in kitchen preparing dinner, and it is not common that I hear the vibration of my phone over the cacophony of noises in kitchen. But somehow I did hear it. I rushed to my bedroom desk where the phone lay expecting it to my mother calling. The display read “Private number.” Okay, so that was not my mother. This might be one of those tele-marketing companies who have made it a habit of calling from random numbers so that you can’t block their calls. Skeptical, I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello dosth. Yaar I decided enough is enough. The credit card bills I had pending for the past few months, they’ve caught up with me. I begged them for an extension but they are in no mood to relent. They said categorically that they were going to press charges against me. You know how sever it is here, in Saudi Arabia with the Sharia law if I am sued for financial fraud. I begged them, I told them that I used that money for my mother’s treatment, but they weren’t willing to hear. I pleaded with them that I will start repaying once I complete my studies and I get a job. I begged them for a three month extension but they were in no mood to give in. I’m not left with any alternatives yaar. Of all people, tumhe toh pata hai. My mother and sister back at home depend on me with all the financial troubles back at home. I had taken education loan for my course after which I ended up with this job here. Visa ke liye bhi kaafi kharch karna pada. And two months after I came here, my mother fell sick and was hospitalized. Her hospital expenses made me max out my credit cards for three months in a row. It was not like I was spending lavishly on myself, but these people don’t understand. Mother’s hospital expenses, my education loan, all these huge credit card bills. I do not know how I will handle it. Till the other day I was confident that I will be able to take care of everything, that I will work hard. But last week, Lehmann Brothers collapsed and they were our biggest customers. My manager mentioned to me today that there were going to be layoffs in the company, and if that happens, junior staffers like me would be the first to be chopped. I’m done with facing all these problems yaar. Am sick, tired, and dejected. I have decided to end my life. Future kuch dikh hi nahi raha hai yaar….”

The trailing off of his voice was the first time since I initiated the conversation that I got a chance to speak up.

“Hello sir, I think you have got the wrong number. But jo bhi hai, aapka problem unsolveable nahi hai. We can…”

“Oh shoot. Isn’t this abc-xyz-4710?”

“No brother. This is abc-xyz-4711.”

“Oh sorry bhai, sorry for the trouble. But thanks anyways, that you were patient enough to listen to my rambling all the while. You’re the last person I’m speaking to on this planet. Dhanyawaad. Khuda Hafiz.”

Before I could utter anything more, he disconnected the call. Khuda Hafiz, the final words trailed in my ears.

I do not know if he kept with his decision or changed his mind. Thousands of Indians commit suicide in the Gulf everyday, I have no means to know if he added himself to the tally. I do not know if he ended up calling the correct number. I do not know if the person on the other end of the line coerced him into changing his decision. I do not know. I will never know. Or maybe, I didn’t want to know what I already knew.

It takes two to tango

He was napping on the sofa when the doorbell rang. He opened the door and saw her tired physique and an exasperated visage.

“The dinner has been on the table for more than an hour now. I’ll heat it up.” He said, as he turned his back and shuffled towards the dining table. She didn’t take her eyes off her phone as she made her way into the bedroom.

A few minutes later, with the clock all poised to strike eleven, both of them were seated at the dining table.

“You didn’t eat?” she asked.

“You know very well I hate to have dinner alone. It is something I avoid as much as I can.”

They munched a few morsels in silence. “We need to talk,” he said.

“Please..! Not today. It was a bad day at office. Am in no mood to talk. I know what you are going to talk about. It is not like I wouldn’t want to come back home earlier, but my work forces me to stay late often.”

The conversation trailed off. One liners and short bursts of speech were becoming more and more common.

As they went to bed, she felt sorry for him. “Am sorry honey. I will take more care. I will try to give you more space in life. Somehow I always get tied up in work, but I will try to come home earlier on a regular basis. I love you. Give me a hug.”

“No. You give me a hug.”

She rolled over and embraced him tight.

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For the umpteenth time, he sighed as he picked up his phone and went through his dialed numbers. Her name showed twelve entries. He had called her twelve times over the past two and half hours, and every single time, it had gone to voicemail. Every single time. He sighed, cast a forlorn look for the dinner he had prepared for this day’s special occasion. He got up from the dining table and paced around the room. He saw the China teapot, he had got for her on a trip to Shanghai couple of years ago. Wall paintings they had so thoroughly searched and bought together. Her smile when he used to give her rose bouquets back in the days. Back in the days, seemed so long away. On the calendar though, it was a month under two years.

He wished that life was simpler. That she would barge in with some surprise, on this special day, the anniversary of their marriage. As if his thoughts were read by someone, the doorbell rang. He rushed to open it, with anticipation.

Opened the door.

His arms about to stretch out.

“Madam is coming. She is on a call, so she didn’t take the elevator.”

Saying this, her driver handed him her bag with a big smile. Without a word, he took the bag and turned back, leaving the door ajar.

A couple of minutes later he overheard her voice over the phone, growing louder as she approached closer. “No Mr. Johnson, I can’t allow that to happen. Our company does need an advance payent of fifty percent. I cannot authorize the transaction until you pay your outstanding dues.” She didn’t look at him when she entered. Her energy was focused on the phone, and getting the money from some random Mr. Johnson. She headed to the bedroom to change.

He sat there, drained of emotions, drained on energy. As he scrolled through random forwarded messages on his phone, he had made up his mind. 

Daughter

Today is my daughter’s wedding.

But neither was she blessed as much to get into the mandap after touching my feet, nor was I blessed as much to run around shouldering the responsibilities of arranging the logistics of the event they call the grand Indian wedding. Will she be knowing the pain of a father, who is unable to hold his daughter’s hand and give it to the groom, the pain of a father who is seeing the wedding sitting undistinguished as one among the hundreds of guests? I doubt it. There would be other, much more pleasant thoughts racing through her mind right now.

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College life is special for everyone. The memories never fade, the day it dies is the day you cease to exist. Memories could be sweet, bitter or a blend of two in arbitrary proportion. Possibly the first impression almost everyone has is the apprehension he/she has when he/she goes to attend class on the first day.

It was that day I saw her first. She was in the same batch as I was, but we differed in our majors. I was majoring in Chemistry, and she was into Mathematics. I can’t recollect how or when it happened that we became close. I guess it is that inevitable process that occurs so commonly – acquaintances through mutual friends, friends through mutual acquaintances, buddies through passage of time and then it somewhere unknowingly, that threshold too was crossed. Sharing some subjects did their bit as well, we grew a lot cozier over those late night study sessions in library and the campus canteens.

There were a lot of instances. Campus life is always enriched with instances. We had so different tastes when it came to food but inevitably we used to end up going to canteen together and we used to enjoy sharing food with each other a lot. In one such instance, I was reading a book while she was eating from my plate after she had finished hers. Suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me, “Which raga is love in?”. I was taken aback, I was absolutely ignorant about the nuances of Carnatic music. “Hmm… I guess Shriranjini”, I retorted back with a mischievous grin. The truth was, that was one of the handful of ragas I knew about. “No, you’re wrong”, she replied. “It’s Mohanakalyani.” I remembered the peculiar look in her eyes when she said this. And she disappeared fast feigning the excuse that she had a class for the hour. I the dumb could not decipher it. Another time she asked me what my favorite color was. Green I said it was. For the next week or so she wore a green tinted salwar suit. It did send me some signals, but I was perplexed. I always believed (or maybe I liked to believe?) that all those craziness was a part of the friendship between us.

On one other occasion, we were sitting in the library, I was immersed in a magazine. I concede she did have the knack of taking me by surprise. And she didn’t fall from the standards she set herself when she asked me, “What does a woman, take me as an example. What do you think I desire most in my life?” That did catch me unawares. As usual, I was ignorant and ended up guessing a lot of answers. “Good job with a comfortable salary”, “being a good and loyal wife”, “a well-off and caring husband”, “professional glory”…. She looked disappointed with my answers. In fact, she actually looked hurt that I stopped the misadventure abruptly. She never bothered to give an answer to that question. Though I was curious, her reaction when she heard my answers prevented me from bringing up the topic again.

I didn’t realize when I crossed over from the realm of friendship. It just happened. There is no hard-and-fast rule for that. The boundaries are where you define them. Looking back, I think she had erased the lines from her side quite a while back. Or rather, she attempted to erase them. It was me who never really caught on the signals. Can’t say I’ve grown any wiser today but the fact that I am able to understand why she did what she did on a lot of occasions which at that time, seemed out of place to me, did make me feel a bit more intellectually mature after all these years. I’ve tried unsuccessfully a lot of times to recollect when and where it was that I started having feelings for her, but the crux was definitely that I started having feelings for her. Her role in my life graduated from that of a very special friend of mine, to being that very special someone in everyone’s life.

Everybody perceives campus life to whiz past at a pace you don't realize. It was the same in our case. We had our falls and springs in our lives, as any other pairs you’d find in any random campus landscape. Romance, fights, reconciliations, then again back to romance…. The wheel was never any different. Our relationship grew stronger over the years. As they say about college life, one has got all the time in the world, but one never has sufficient clunk in his pockets. We enjoyed each other’s company, lavishly in time and frugally in economics. We became inseparable.

Towards the end of final year in college, we started getting worried. We knew that a separation was on the cards, but either of us were unwilling and unprepared to confront it. We started spending more time with each other, and often times, periods of silence started overcoming periods of chatter. The whole thing was depressing. It was unfair, we never really spent enough time with each other. What would happen after college? I would have to go and search for a job in a big city. What about her..? It was those times were girls were typically married off early, as soon as possible after graduation. Both of us were engulfed in those depressing lines of thought.

The final exams were on the cards. Torn between the desire to spend maximum time with each other and the necessity to prepare for the examinations, we started studying together. Initially, the venues were the college library, cafeterias and other places inside the college campus. I stayed with a couple of my batch mates outside the college campus and occasionally she used to come there and we used to study till late hours. What was between us was known to my roommates and so they never had any problem with accommodating her.

“The End”. That was the last line I wrote before I handed over my answer sheet to my invigilator one final time from the portals of my college building. I can’t precisely remember what went through my mind while I was handing that paper out to the invigilator, but looking back a couple of decades with my not-so-highly-rated memory, I am reasonably sure my eyes would have been moist. But I distinctly remember me walking with her from the examination hall to the college canteen. The same walk which we used to do at least twice a day for better part of two years, that ever so familiar route seemed to detach away from us. For the college, the buildings, the halls, the labs, the campus, the canteens, nothing would change. An x would be replaced by a y. That would be about it. Every year she sees off a hundred students walking away from her, never to return back and the she welcomes a new set of a hundred fresh-faced eager and enthusiastic group into her fold, only to see them off the same way after three years.

We sat in the canteen silently, over a cup of tea. We had done that a thousand times before when we were never short of things to talk. A wide array of topics used to occupy our canteen time, from hostel gossips to astronomical discoveries, from the relevance of Leninist ideology to the price increase of beeda we used to have at the shop outside the college gate. That was the usual case, today was a world unusual. We spent the day roaming around the campus, reliving memories. Talk was sparing and sentimental. Neither of us could fathom that we had actually finished our degree, that we’ll have to move out, possibly to separate cities.

It was a full moon night. The clouds obstructed the view of the stars but the moon was present and bright. Lying beside each other on the basketball court, we were seeing the same moon. We were seeing the same dream. We didn’t speak a word but we both knew that the same thoughts were going through each other’s mind.

We got up. I looked at her to find her looking at me. I could read her eyes. I suppose she could read mine as well. I’m sure both of us knew what we were thinking was far from ethical. There are times when even the most rational of individual shelve ethics and morality, when fundamental human instincts trump everything else. That full moon night, technically the last day in college, was the night when I felt the magnetic power of my feelings overshadow every sense of right I had.

My roommates were partying, I knew that. That’s the first thing they plan when the examination schedule is put out. The night after the last examination is something every college student invariably looks forward to. The rhetoric may be different, the celebrations may wildly differ, but the anticipation is palpably same. So was the case with my roommates. Over the past couple of years, it had become a ritual of theirs to go the bar far in town and get drunk to the fullest. So much that the guys at the bar had a copy of the examination schedule every time. Both of us knew my room was empty. We walked the long walk.

We knew it was going to be wrong. We knew it was going to be irreversible. But I needed it. And she also needed it. It was as if we were challenging whoever constructed the framework of ethics for human beings. Sometime in the dead of night, when most of the world around slept, and most of our batch mates were exploring varying levels of alcohol-induced mental highs, we shared each other.

The following days in my memory, remain fuzzy. She did not tell me when she vacated her hostel room and left for her hometown. I enquired with her friends, but they didn’t have much information to help me. I just knew her hometown, I didn’t know her home address. Nonetheless, I went there and inquired around. A guy looking for a girl doesn’t generally go down well in southern Indian towns and the case here was no different. Not only was I unsuccessful in getting any info, but things reached a point where I started to get threatening vibes from some of the locals. Tired and dejected, I took the bus back home. I prayed that things be well for her. That’s the least I could do for her. In those moments, that was the most I could do for myself.

The societal pressures of economics and conventionalism caught up with me in due course of time. As was the case with a lot of my contemporaries, there was this period of my life where I searched for a job and then I got a job. And then, before I realized it, I was married to a girl half a decade younger to me by age. I settled into the rhythm of a conventional, uneventful yet happy life. All the while she occupied my mind, but as they say time is a great healer and the passage of time, tightly coupled with pressures of life, did a fair amount of work in ebbing my thoughts about her. I had never told my wife anything about her, I really couldn’t ever come around to look in her and eyes and tell her that her husband was not as pious as a wife would expect her husband to be. Never had the guts to tell that, so I never told.

Until that day. Almost six years after I stepped out the last time from my college, she came back for me. Magically. One summer morning, I open the doors of my house to a knock and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her standing in front of me. Such a thought never occurred to me in the wildest of my imaginations, but there she was, standing in front of me, in flesh and blood. A charming young girl wearing a polka dress and ponytailed hair was shyly holding her hand and throwing glances at me. I invited her in, introduced her as a classmate of mine to my wife. It took a good deal of composure to introduce the two women to each other, and looking back, I am surprised about how I was able to do it. Thankfully for me, both the women took a liking to each other and they quickly became friends.

Over the course of next few days, she told us her story. She had married an army jawan immediately after college. Just over a year after their marriage, he was killed in action along the Indo – Pak border in Kashmir. As a result of that, she had got a job in a nationalized bank. After working for a few years outside the state, she got transferred here to my town. And she and her daughter Sreelakshmi moved here. I did not ask her any details about when the marriage happened and so on. Though I wanted to know about it, I thought it might make things between us awkward. Plus the presence of my wife warranted my restraint from asking too many questions.

Years rolled by. Barring a few transfers lasting few months, she and I ended up staying in the same town. Sreelakshmi grew up into a fine young girl. Over time, I felt an increasingly lot of similarities between she and her mother as she grew up. I saw her going to school the day before yesterday, inter college yesterday and today, I saw her going to degree college… time flew. So fast that I was shocked when her mother told me that she was starting to consider marriage proposals for Sreelakshmi.

One day she came up to my office. Said she wanted to talk to me. In the confines of our guest lobby, when the whole world rumbled along like any other day, she said, “I can’t keep it anymore. I can’t keep it from you any more. I am imploding within myself, I need to tell this to someone, and I can’t tell it to Sreelakshmi….” Her voice trailed off in the muffles of her light sobs.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’ve lied to the world. I lied to Sreelakshmi, I lied to everyone. I lied to you. I was married to a jawan, but at the time of my marriage, I was carrying Sreelakhsmi.” Saying that, she burst into tears.

I was shell shocked. I sat there, speechless. My mind raced back to that night after exam. And her quietly disappearance from college. Lack of information regarding her with any of her classmates. I perfectly understood everything now. Everything was crystal clear.

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As I sat there and pondered, the marriage ceremony was over. Sreelakshmi was now married. My daughter was now married.

Fundamental Duties : A Rethink

At the outset, let me state that I am not a very big fan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I do hold the opinion that none of the parties in India are secular (and possibly can’t ever be), and the BJP is possibly the biggest one to openly admit that they are not entirely secular. But irrespective of party lines, I do respect individuals who I personally feel, deserve to be respected. Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee is a person who I hold in the greatest respect from the party. To me, he is someone who transcended the line of a politician and grew to the stature of a statesman. I candidly admit that till a few months before, I did not have a very positive opinion about Mr. Narendra Modi. Even during the heights of the campaign for general election of India this year, Mr. Modi, in my opinion, exuded hope for the people, but courtesy of the often disappointing political class of India, I mentally had a block of skepticism towards Mr. Modi and the party he represented. And to most other political parties and individuals in the fray. But his words and deeds since forming the Union Cabinet of India three months ago (from the date of this post), seem to me, to be statesmanlike.

The biggest contribution to that change of image of Mr. Narendra Modi in my mind, was the speech he made from the ramparts of the Red Fort, on the occasion of the sixty eighth Independence Day of the Republic of India. That speech reminded everyone of one great aspect for every citizen – that the Government needs me, you and everyone else to build and strengthen India. My respect for Mr. Modi shot up a few notches when, in an era of government sponsored freebies and goodies, he stressed that it was not, and should not always be a one way traffic, from the government of the day to the people. There have been many aspects of that speech that have been analyzed in detail by the media in India and worldwide, but this specific aspect made me to pen down my thoughts.

I am no expert in history but I assume the notion of “Me doing something for the state, not expecting much in return” would've been one of the platforms of India’s struggle for independence. And after attaining independence, the Constitutional Assembly authored the Constitution of India, a document to the newly formed state that was expected to be the Bible. The Constitution promised every citizen a number of fundamental rights. The rights were supposed to be equal to every citizen of India, and there have been famous court judgments that have criticized the governments or punished the culprits on instances of violation of fundamental rights of an individual (or an ethnic or religious group) by someone or the government of the day. In fact, Mr. Modi himself has been dragged to court over litigation on these. But among the clamor and commotion over the rights guaranteed to me by the Constitution, somewhere as decades passed post-independence, I conveniently forgot about another aspect – fundamental duties.

The Constitution of India mentions a total of eleven fundamental duties of every citizen of India. To quote a few, they obligate all Indians to promote a spirit of brotherhood, protect public property, abjure violence, respect the national symbols of India, and so on. However, fundamental duties are non-justifiable. The Constitution merely exhorts every citizen to follow this, but there is no legal sanction on non-compliance of any of these. And that, I have come to believe, is where the convenient forgetfulness of the Indian citizen started. He forgot that he was supposed to promote a spirit of camaraderie with his co-citizens, and he became narrow minded. Protection of public property became much less of a priority for him. All those and much more, because yes, he knew he was duty bound, but somewhere his attitude became “If my neighbor can do it, I can also do it. And if I stop doing it, will it change the schema of things in this country?”

To add to fuel to the fire, the political class migrated as well. Jawaharlal Nehru used to stress upon the role of every citizen in building the India he dreamt of. Somewhere, his posterity turned the tables around. Somewhere along our progression as a nation, the “leaders of the masses” starting downgrading the importance of this and increasingly started stressing on the aspect of the state giving to its people. The political class of the country pledged more and more to the citizens and mentioned less and less about what the citizens are obliged to give to the state.

Get it right – no government can take care of the needs (and often greeds) of over a billion people. It is against all theories of economics, ethics and pragmatism. In my opinion, every citizen is morally obligated to give back to the state in a degree he or she can. There could be a lot of arguments about how to give, what to give and so on, but I wish to stress upon only two examples here. They are, by no means, exhaustive, but to me, each one points to a unique aspect of the concept of India which was great at the time our founding fathers proposed it, but which, as a result of constant and blatant misuse, is in dire need of revision after more than six decades of their proposal and implementation. The two examples are that of subsidy on petroleum products and the concept of reservation based on caste. I would like to present a brief case on how I, as an individual, could put in my two cents to these issues, as my fundamental duty.

India has been subsidizing the petroleum products her citizens’ use, possibly since Independence. I do not know if the subsidies extend beyond Petrol, Diesel, Kerosene and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), but I’ll confine the discussion to this four. India was conceived as an economy which was supposed to be a mixed bag of capitalist and communist ideologies. And around the time of independence, the people dependent on the heavily agricultural economy were poor in majority, most of them would’ve struggled to make their ends meet. At that point of time, when there were a large majority of people deserving it, and subsidy on petroleum products would directly impact every household in the country. Imagine the impact of diesel subsidy on a farmer, who could save a lot of money on the tractor – for both tilling his land, and for transporting his produce to the nearby market or to a storage location. And when India en masse started switching over from inefficient wood to efficient LPG in her kitchens, LPG subsidy would’ve gone a long way in incentivizing and economizing her kitchen expenses. But we have come a long way from those days. One big difference between then and now is the emergence of a salaried class. A lot of them in fact, came from agricultural families. True, there still are the farmers, peasants and the marginalized classes of people (the proletarians, as they call them in Communist ideology) who might be in majority, but the salaried class (including people working in public and private sector) has emerged as a significant player like never before. And I argue that these people are the unnecessary beneficiaries of the subsidy regime. For a daily wage laborer or peasant who earns hardly Rs. 100 a day, subsidy for petrol and LPG is necessary and warranted. But for someone who earns upwards of, say, Rs. 30,000 a month (a totally imaginary figure), it is morally incorrect and unjustified to roll out subsidies. I can understand if someone on a simple motorbike, commuting to work gets subsidized fuel, but I, for all my brains, fail to understand when a chap in a Harley Davidson motorbike or in a sedan car enjoy the same benefit.

This is where I would argue that fundamental duty should come in. If I fall in the upper tax bracket, I should consider it a fundamental duty of mine that I should voluntarily give up LPG subsidy. That sense of voluntariness will not come by default. As I mentioned earlier in the article, various factors have made us forget our duties, and we would need a bit of coercion to move in that direction. An interesting article recently by Mr. Ishwari Bajpai, a senior journalist at NDTV, hits the nail right on the head when he mentions how the establishment can filter out the “affordable class” from the subsidy list. That is a bit stringent in the measures it proposes, but the intention is indeed noble. Even though I believe this should be done more on a voluntary note, with a sense of duty towards the nation, I should expect that to happen in a Utopian world. To quote from the article, he mentions a few potential steps for the government to identify people to be removed from the subsidy program:

•  All government servants including those in the armed forces and railways, PSU employees earning more than Rs. 30,000 a month (an arbitrary number, again).
• In a city like Delhi, where house tax rates are determined by "class of colony" no delivery of LPG at subsidized rates to Class A and B.
• Work with the local motor vehicle authority and eliminate the 21 million car owners from the subsidy list.

The other facade I wished to cover here, is the topic of caste based reservation. Again, historically, this was highly relevant in a society where untouchability and caste based discrimination was rampant, and if we were to bring those sections of the society on par with everyone else, they needed that extra incentive, that extra push to propel them forward. And India needed them, as she needed every citizen of hers, to move forward for the nation to progress. Something that was initiated as a step towards nation development, stooped down to become a strategy of caste based appeasement. The concept of reservation is very powerful, if it is applied in the true spirit – one of uplifting a section of society from centuries of oppression to being players in building a modern nation. And thus, it is quite warranted that one or two generations of those who have been oppressed for centuries, reap the benefits of the scheme. But, on a realistic note, it has been over six decades since the policy has been put in place. A significant majority of the people who have deserved it, have used it to empower themselves, thereby, in turn, empowering the nation. But, to quote Shakespeare, “something starts to rot in the State of Denmark” when generations, one after another, keep using this policy, crossing over from use to abuse. If someone has benefited from reservation during the term of his education and/or employment, it is imperative that he not use the same policy for his child/children. The intention of the law was to bring a section of society to speed with the nation. The fact that someone has benefited from it, that someone has achieved success educationally and/or professionally implies that the purpose of reservation is served for him and his descendants. He or she should make it an obligation towards the nation that they will not use the extra privileges granted to them by the Constitution again. I know it is a big ask, but this is the very fundamental duty I mentioned earlier which every citizen has to perform. There are a significant number of our population who still need reservation for making them a part of nation building, shouldn’t you and I be making sure that we bring them forward, rather than keep abusing the reservation system so that generations of the same set of people keep using it?

Human resources they say, are a state’s greatest strength. Let us realize that we might need to make some sacrifices to keep it that way. As the incumbent Prime Minister said, if each of one hundred twenty five crore populace of India keep a step forward, it would be equivalent of the state of India putting one hundred twenty five crore steps forward. Let us ensure that we keep that one step forward for our country, irrespective of whether our neighbor keeps it forward or not. I just mentioned two facets of our democracy which I believe need to be examined by every (responsible) citizen, in an individual capacity. Let me do what I can for the country which cared for me, irrespective of what my neighbors may or may not do. A considerable amount of effort would be needed to orchestrate this turnaround of mindset. Mr. Narendra Modi has created the spark, let me conclude with the hope that the establishment and the people take this forward – one step at a time, one person at a time. If that could be done, India will owe a lot to the incumbent Prime Minister.

FOOTNOTE : I’ve been inspired by two articles which came on NDTV. The articles, authored respectively by Mr. Harish Khare and Mr. Ishwari Bajpai, can be referenced here and here.