NavDharmyug

" Your majesty, please...I don't like to complain But down here below, we are feeling great pain. I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,  but down here at the bottom, we, too, should have rights. " -  Dr. Seuss in " Yertle, The Turtle " Indian filmmaker and the man with alternate sexual choices who recently came out of closet, to the chagrin of LGBT activists, a wee bit too late, a wee bit too little, is a single father now. This is the front page news. Social media has sprung into action.  This post has been kind of simmering in me for a long time. These are strange times of political correctness. On everything, there are defined positions, which are defined by powers that might be, approved for the lesser mortals as worthy of being taken. If one has some sharpness of the intellect, some audacity of the mind and, well, some brinkmanship of character; one would say that these positions are defined as correct and socially appropriat...

There were many things of immense import which begged to be written. Religion in politics, the art of creating a narrative- how slyly media creates a narrative. I was reading Sol Stein on Writing on the way to office on Friday, and it occurred to me, the total apathy with which a student, a leftist leader from JNU charged with rape is being treated by mainstream media. A regular in TV debates, a known figure from a University much in news for all wrong reasons of late, and media acts as if nothing has happened. The silence is to kill the story, so perfectly dead truth being presented. Nothing beyond facts, no flesh, not blood, not personality caricatures. It is discomforting. But then I will write about it next week. This week, I write about simple pleasures of life. My monthly visits to children library with my eight year old. Here it is, I share my Saturday with you. While on my way from the Car workshop where I had dropped the car for repair, I get a call from Nonu (my eig...

F. Scott Fitzgerald With his Daughter, Scottiee I was, of late, putting together an article on the letters of Francis Scott Fitzgerald or FSF. I have always been enamored by his writing. Fitzgerald had a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, whom he lovingly addressed as Scottie or Scottina. Scottie was borne in October, 1921, soon after Fitzgerald married Zelda, the daughter of a Judge, riding on the success of his first book, This Side of the Paradise. Scott Fitzgerald’s later life was fraught with difficulties, financial and otherwise. He lived apart from Zelda who mostly lived out of hospitals, searching for the cure for her chronic depression. His later work could not replicate the early success of The Tales of the Jazz Age, and The Other Side of Paradise,  and his slip into abject poverty could not even be arrested by The Great Gatsby, which could get its due only after his sad death at the age of 44. He lived away Scottie, and wanted to teach her all that he coul...

Avval Avval ki dosti hai Abhi Nonu is away to visit her paternal grandparents. She has left only couple of days back, but the gloomy silence that has descended seems to be century old. The days are old, gray and wrinkled with her thoughts, like dying, decaying sheets of moth-eaten pages. She calls me in the morning today and weeps for blocked nose. Nothing serious, change of weather, her mother tells me. She also tells me that Nonu told her that Baba would know what to do in such a situation. It was a leap of faith for the six year old, who also calls me Bhoolne waala Papu or forgetful father, on account of my absent-mindedness. She knows that I would have no clue what to do. She also knows that I would have no way to reach out the treatment of common cold to her from Delhi, sitting hundreds of miles away. But she knew that she was calling her father. She wanted to share. A father is that not-so-good looking, not-so-smiling, angel who will have the cure to all our probl...

We like to believe love to be just and uniform. But it isn't. We do not love all the people. We also do not love those we love, equally, at all the time. There is some kind of grading system in love and we love different people differently. It may depend on our general outlook and the way we look at various relationships at one point of time. There are some relationships which emerges out of nowhere and overwhelms our being and all the other relationships. Fatherhood has been one such love for me. Before we had my daughter, six years back, I never could have imagined myself of ever being in such a love. Many things have been said about love. In love, one person loves and the another allows to be loved - wrote Somerset Maugham .  I loved, I loved with vigor, with an angry, audacious passion, but I never could give my last inch into the love that I had begotten into, ever. That one last inch, that last bit of me,  always remained. And then I became a Father. Unlike any o...

Fatherhood is not an accident of nature. I had once posited on my Facebook page and many friends seconded that opinion. You do not become a father by having a progeny. It slowly dawns over you as you struggle to understand what all it entails.  You rush to the airport as the flight is about to close, and your five year old wanders like a little rabbit from the bedroom, eyes still closed and you forget the work, forget the flight. You walk to her and kneel down on your knees and kiss her on the still-closed, sleepy eyes with the sacred dedication of a worshipper. You start to understand fatherhood at such moments. It is not a truth like Newton's apple which falls at some recognizable moment on your head. You learn it slowly. It is a series of moments when you do things which never imagined yourself to be able to do.  I remember the cold chill which ran through my spine when my seven-month pregnant wife tripped while getting down from the car. I almost wept but there w...

Yesterday, I was at the mall, to watch a movie which turned out to be mediocre. However, that is not the case in point. The case in point is different. It pertains to the incident which happened right before the movie. As we reached the mall, and tried to look for a parking slot, we could with our senses fully alert could notice a family getting into a car and about to leave, thus vacating the slot. I halted my car there and waited patiently as the car in the slot backed out. But lo and behold, before I could move into the slot thus vacated, another car which saw the leaving car and my car intending to move in, from a distance, suddenly rushed in and claimed the space. I was aghast at the behavior and shameless attitude. It was deliberate and it was outrageous. I expected it to be some rash young man of neighboring village of sudden wealth to be driving the car. But no, out came a family of three, with one kid, and the man, with clear reflection of education  and affluence...

Fatherhood is not a biological accident. It isn't about a winning swimmer, it is also not about being a source of money and food and object. It is not a proud proclamation of your manhood. There is nothing incidental about being a father. Being a father is a thoughtful and conscious decision. It is a decision to love, to protect, to comfort, to be the buoyant wind beneath soaring dreams. It is a selfish decision to lose the self, and to seek the purpose of life in someone else's goals. It is not a default outcome of an arbitrary natural process. It is the choice a man makes, when he decides to reach out to divinity, by surrendering his own mortality, by lighting the candle of his life, to enlighten the dark alleys of life for his progeny. It would be preposterous though it is extremely common to put oneself on a pedestal for the reason of having given birth to a child. That in itself is the most accidental win, no one can claim actual fame or praise on that account. A li...