NavDharmyug

Monsoons are here. The day is a typical Monsoon day, all fresh, washed clean day, as if ready for proper parting of hairs and to be sent to the school. It is a perfect day. I slept through most of it. In between, I thought about what the day signifies. It is Friendship day. I am at the age, on the wrong side of forty. There are articles in the newspapers proclaiming that forty is the new twenty. But than those are just pretentious words of solace as the life slides faster than before. I feel pre-historic, ancient on the days like this. It is not like we used to jog with the dinosaurs in our days. But we did not have the days like in our days. I still remember going to Archies, near Sharda Chowk in Raipur in 1993. It was a new entity and was relegated, me and my Engineering roommate had first encountered Valentine day there. My room-mate, Arvind Gupta from Balaghat, was freshly in love and thought of buying a card. We both looked at each other, clueless of what it meant. Tha...

Tragedy brings out the best and worst of human beings. They take away the veneer of sophistication and morality stands in its nakedness for all to see. Nepal had one of the worst earthquake of the century, with thousands dead. Tragedies of such magnitude have in them the capability to unclothe us of all the  pretensions  of larger human good that we have. We are all fair-weather gentlemen (and ladies) when things are going good. It is easier to adhere to gracious dignity when you are fed well and your life is not in jeopardy. Even more important is the well-being of those around you. You do not take advantage of people when you are not in a position to take advantage of them, or rather they are not in a position to allow you to take advantage of them. That is what defines morality. When we are kind to people who we cannot afford to be unkind to that is nothing but animal self-protection. It is when we are kind to people with whom we have no reason to be kind, people ...

" Every Parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection" so said the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer . A journey filled with tearful departures- a string of them, begun from the engineering college, NIT Raipur, where I spent a great part of foundation on which my later life was to stand was made. That was the place where to put it poetically, we turned from tadpole to the butterfly, and to put it plainly, we turned from boys to men. This 13th, September, we had a reunion.  It was in Bhopal, for two reasons- one was logistical connectivity and secondly, the city somehow had the most enthusiastic lot, the lot which could protect their enthusiasm through the years of growing up and growing old. I wanted to go and was inclined but some I spoke to weren't much. Why should I go? who was I to meet?   Is this whole exercise is to meet balding, graying men with slight paunch, like me, struggling to establish their own station in life and on some...

A silence descends over us as we age. As we grow, we start classifying words as meaningless and purposeful. Those defined as meaningless, struggle hard to keep their dignity with feigned grace and feigned deafness as people call them names. Life breathes through those puerile words and they struggle hard to keep breathing.  This struggle between adult meaningfulness and childish happy play continues till the time those meaningless words of vigor, hope and sensitivity start dying, alphabet by alphabet. We then, devoid of the brightness of those lovely words, stand in the gray, darkness with angry winds of silence bellowing with feral fury. We are left with wise words which descend far and between and even they loose relevance in a while and stop visiting.  What you speak, what you write may not change the world, may not bring earth-shattering changes to your life. They do not exist to serve you. They are the butterflies on the sunny days to fill them with beauty ...

Courtesy: Old Friends By Rupa Bhaty Her work is at  https://rupabhaty.see.me/ We grow up with our own ideas of the world and life. From a weak existence, which is sure of its own ideas, we grow into an existence of power when those ideas take wings. We trust in those ideas, talk about them and argue for them. We love them truly and dream about surrendering our selfish well being to propel those ideas. As the Sun would set in the backdrop of tea stalls, we would speak with the conviction of a sage who has found his truth. Life hits back. It throws at us a rule book framed out of the lowest common denominator, the law of average. Every word is countered by the already tamed society with a rare vengeance. We conform to the social mold. Each act of conformance is an act of violence against the sacred spirit which we are borne with, a stab on the Will to live. With each small surrender, a word dies, one after another and the next rain flushes away the dead, through the dark n...

I am currently reading Letters by Kurt Vonnegut. It is an amazing collection of letters, loaded splendid wit and amazingly disarming honesty. I have been off and on worrying about the dying art of letter writing, in spurts. Last I went into bout of sadness about the fact that no one writes letter anymore was when I had heard the rendition of the letters of Ghalib, the great Urdu poet, in the magnetic and soulful voice of an equally great Urdu writer, poet of the day, Gulzaar. What imagery, what honesty, wrapped in such shiny, twinkling couplets like " Jamaa karate ho kyun, raqeebon ko/ yeh tamaasha hua, gilaa Naa hua" (Translation- The way you gather those who strive and compete with me for your love to listen to the woes of our love/ Turns what would be Otherwise a plateful banter Between two lovers Into a vulgar spectacle) The visual description and verbal imagery transports you into a different world, when you read and imagine Ghalib writ...

Winters are lovely times. There is nothing as magical as the snuggle in a jaipuri blanket with your little one. It is difficult to get out of the blanket in Delhi winter, even to watch the tempting television debates, with most articulate aggression one can get. The sun is mild, and the green in the neighbourhood park looks fresh as a child. Days are not yet unkind, though chill has made appearance in the dawn. The most agonising part of the winters is the mornings when the kids have to be readied for school, which Nonu dutifully misses at least three days in a week, much to the chagrin of her mother. I, as silent co-conspirator to this, on account of my own sloth and my distaste to what appears to me as unnecessary torture to the little one in the name of organised education, cooperate in her staying at home oftentimes. In fact, had a discussion with her mother today on this, and when I contested, stating the I could even sail through my engineering with shaky attendances, and in th...