My Orkut "Today's Fortune"

I am no sucker for those trite thought-of-the-day quotes, though I have begun to enjoy the occasional "Today's Fortune" on my orkut page. There was one I quite liked some time back and I had sent it to some of my friends, especially the ones suckling gloriously on Facebook, which incidentally, with some notable exceptions, gathers every triviality under the sun under its imbecile aegis. Well that day the fortune was:

Watch what you say — of those who say nothing, few are silent

But what I got today made me write a blog post. I did send that one too but without any catty design. It was, in fact, I must admit, a moment of edification. Some friends did reply. Here are some of the responses:

1. I miss orkut :(
2. Couldn't agree more. Thanks for sending it my way. Here is something similar: Imagination is the reality waiting to be created. Or, Imagination is reality-in-waiting.
3. Fabulous quote. True and liberating.

I was glad that these words did have a power to lighten up quite a few of us. It seemed to provide a key to some of the issues we continue to grapple with inside ourselves. It did give us a reason to be hopeful. It spoke gently and confidently to something deep inside us that refuses to surrender to hedonistic cynicism of the times. And most importantly, it became alive because we shared it among ourselves. By the way my orkut "Today's Fortune" read:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

First blogger's park

Five of us met for the pretentiously named "First Blogger's Park" on Tuesday, 3 November 2009. I was glad that we all could make it despite it being a weekday. We already have one blog post on that meeting. Fellow bloggers it was great to spend time with you! Writing has meant so much, and so many things, to each one of us. I am sure we can have a series on this one topic alone—what has blogging done to, or done for, me. There were many things that we randomly picked and mostly left unfinished but perhaps that's a good sign; we all are brimming with ideas, which would sooner or later be turned into "written expressions". And while I hope we are encouraged to spend more time in solitude tapping on the keys, I also want to make some time in coming months to sit and unwind in the same company. Looking forward to meet you more and grow together with you all. One regret! We did not click any picture. So I am putting this painting I came across by chance on the Internet, by "a professional quilter, author, fabric and pattern designer". (Picture: http://valoriwells.typepad.com)

Dirty education!

A little distance from the new house we have recently shifted to is a slum. Our house is in Mohali and the slum technically belongs to the union territory of Chandigarh, the quintessential modern city that was supposed to be "unfettered by past" especially the filth that that past has accumulated over centuries. While I drove with my wife this morning past that slum, euphemistically called a "village", we wondered what happened to the residents in the monsoons, for some houses were actually built over the sewers while a channel of dirty water flowed below them. And as we were trying to clear the scenes of that obscenity from our minds, I caught sight of two little girl students of a local school relieving themselves in the open. They were in their uniform so they couldn't have been two urchins who were never taught the rules of propriety and the need of hygiene. Their classmates played close by and some of them would have taken a "bathroom break" sooner or later. Yes, it was a school.

A naïve question. Is one allowed to run a school without a bathroom? Schools are being run without libraries. Schools are being run without classrooms, furniture, blackboards. Schools are being run without teachers. Who gives a damn about bathrooms when schools are being run without conscience? The conscience of a nation is dead when two little school-going girls have no option but to sit on a garbage heap close to their playground to pee. The conscience of a nation is dead when the poor are deceived with empty rhetoric of Right to Education. The conscience of a nation is surely dead when, quite literally, the filthy rich businessmen begin running the education show, and that too with only one aim—to find ways to fish for another rich man's fortune through the fishing rod of his child with a bait of "world-class" education.

This is not a one-off incident. Today itself I found two reports in the city edition of The Tribune about abysmal conditions in our schools. One is about a school in another "village" around the city of Chandigarh, where 200 students share one toilet and about four are locked for the use of teachers. Another one is a story about a school in Fatehgarh Sahib where fire-fighting equipments are thought to be as useless as bathrooms in our neighbouring "village".

(Pictures: From the two news reports)

Before I lose more

While clearing my table this afternoon, I came across a piece of paper on which I had scribbled something while I was in Goa in April. On the last day of our national sales meet, just before the closing, I wrote this in a jiffy. I might lose the paper sooner or later, so posting this here.

I thought I lost my pen
But what I lost were
My thoughts
A 24-hour journey from Delhi to
Goa was spent
Playing cross and noughts
Without the pen, of course

The mind was at work
Though it couldn't quite work out
The whole point of journeys
Of life, the mystery of
Lost clout
A pointless discourse

Many things were going on
Were all put on hold
One thing went on unstoppable
You see, couldn't help growing old
Nothing else got worse.

— 9 April 2009, Cidade De Goa, Goa

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Elections 2009 – II

The good was, of course, the freshness of youth. Young MPs have been in focus and to many this is sure sign that politics of this country will change for the better. But this optimism is paradoxical. The good and bad are not that distinct perhaps. Vir Sanghvi has made a point. Most of the young MPs are actually second- or third-generation politicians, heirs of a family business. Commenting on this he says, "A disturbing proportion of them were born into political families." Disturbing indeed, as he goes on to name the political heirs running the nation. And mind you, not all are young : Farooq Abdullah, Prithviraj Chavan, Salman Khurshid, Dayanidhi Maran, Selja, G.K. Vasan, M.K. Azhagiri, Parneet Kaur, Ajay Maken, Bharatsinh Solanki, D. Purandeshwari , Tushar Choudhary, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada, R.P.N. Singh, Prateek Patil, Agatha Sangma, D. Napoleon. And then Sanghvi goes on to name other dynasties. Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu, H.D. Deve Gowda and his son. I think he gave a special thought to this sentence when he wrote about the Badals: "In Punjab, the Akali Dal is a family business run by Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal and his millionaire son, Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal." I found that truly amusing. He points out dynasties in BJP: Vasundhara Raje, whose son Dushyant Singh is an MP, Manvendra Singhand so on. Towards the end of his Counterpoint in today's Hindustan Times he makes a chilling observation:

But family-dominated politics is a closed shop. Entry is open only to those with the right credentials of birth. Outsiders are banned from entering. And slowly but surely, true democracy is replaced by a kind of feudalism in which the peasants are given the right to choose between various aristocrats. The peasants can never enter the ruling class because the wrong blood flows in their veins.

Good and bad are in front of us. Intertwined. Can we begin a process of untangling the two? Sanghvi pins his hope on the "dynast" to free politics from the clutches of "dynastyism". But shouldn't the reviver search for talent beyond the obvious quarters. Maybe he is doing his best. But maybe the aam aadmi shoudl do his bit. Perhaps there is a way the youth of this country can serve in politics despite the lack of the dynastic patronage. That will be good indeed.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Elections 2009 — I

Let's start with the ugly. That's easiest to spot. While in the NDA rally in Ludhiana on 10 May, Nitish Kumar clasping Narendra Modi's hands was a slimy sight, what was uglier than that was Badal Junior, Sukhbir, hugging the Gujarat chief minister. As a member of a minority community that suffered state-sponsored pogrom, one wonders how Sukhbir could embrace that shameless trader of death. What values, or lack thereof, does this espousal exhibit? That's for students of politics to decipher. I would go back to poetry. To a poem to be exact that my friend Laltu wrote after the Gujarat riots of 2002. The poem was in Hindi. Here is my English translation that I discovered recently on my hard drive.

It's too late

Little black drops can be seen from afar
Sitting in the bus we overlook them
Assured no matter how difficult the journey may be
In the end each one will get back home

The cold that freezes on the windowpanes
Pushes us close together
We don't know that what rains out there
Is clotted blood; even the blood of the real
That burns
And we still smell it in coals of memory
No longer startles us
Suddenly the bus turns on a bend
And with a start we wake up

The sound must be of the clouds
We think and our bus
Plunges in chemical smoke
It's too late
By the time we see
Gujarat
Written on each other's faces.

© Laltu

Key to the Deadlock

I

Deadlock is a curious situation. The whole universe is caught in a state of an intriguing impasse. Nothing is really happening. Nothing of consequense, that is. Yes, there are terrible things happening, like the massacre in Sri Lanka, but if one looks closely, this is a stage in deadlock where one contending faction has made a manoeuvre and the other is going to respond soon to neutralize it. And by factions I don't mean Sri Lankan Army and the LTTE. In old-fashioned terms, in T.S. Eliot's words

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil

There is a fight of principles. Each has a bag of good and evil mixed, out of which they hurl the sin-stained clusters of their innocence on the other. A lot is happening in Nepal, Pakistan, the general election in India too and far off three ladies (four, if you count his mother, or some failed love affair) have pushed the success of one man in South Africa. But is there a breakthrough in sight? There is a seeming movement though. People are wanting to get married. Houses are being bought. A friend is graduating in the USA. Another one is going for poetry reading in Europe, despite the fact that poetry makes nothing happen. Now the latter phrase is W.H. Auden's who was a 'committed' poet himself and wrote that line to commemorate another 'committed' poet (W.B. Yeats). Poetry does not break the deadlock. Poetry, in fact, is the mainstay of any deadlock, promising deliverance, yet not delivering on the promise. It is the opium of the aesthete. It gives hope. It defers the fruit of that hope. Yet in this janus-faced relationship with deadlock and hope, poetry performs a useful function. It helps survive in the deadlock, in the eye of the storm. Auden comes to mind again as in his "Musée des Beaux Arts", he highlights the co-existence of suffering and indifference, the deadlock of apathy and tragedy. This record, this recognition compels endurance, the grandest virtue for this age. There are few things possible, perhaps, only in poetry.

II

It's 11 May today and by sheer coincidence I chanced upon this little gemstone of a poem by Joel, which, incidentally, he wrote on this very day many years ago, when 'existentialism' was in vogue and people typed not on computer (which means I exercised my editorial discretion while italicizing "can" and "may" at the end).

can/may

Always, of course
One chooses: the eternal
Curse of the blessing of free will.

One may praise
If one wants to,
Though
One may not die
If one wants to

One always can
But not always may

© Joel V David