Today

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No matter what you do,
The world moves on at its pace,
Break your hand or tear your heart,
Perish your body or sell the soul,
The world moves on the way it wants.
Split the atom or synthesize a gene,
Discover the cell or the basis of life,
Travel the speed of sound,
or its multiples,
The world moves on as it will,
with the same ratio of
Joy and sorrow,
The same degree, scope, quantity and
quality of,
human suffering.
For a stone, spear, arrow or mace,
sword, dagger, knife or gun,
grenade, bomb or missile,
spills the same red blood,
and takes the same innocent life,
As does the atom.
Yesterday,
a thousand spears were raised
to kill a thousand lives.
Today,
a nuclear bomb is enough
thousand-fold.
But the thoughts behind it
and the intentions
are the same.
No matter what you do it’s all the same.
Cure a deadly disease
and a deadlier arrives in its place.
Kill the killer
and you’re branded one.
Topple the top
and you’ll be toppled in time.
Rule the country or the world.
Nothing changes,
it’s all the same,
no matter what you do.
Spend a lifetime in a penance.
God won’t come to Earth.
Create a religion of love today,
tomorrow it’ll be one of hate.
A saviour will come and save the world.
And soon it’ll be in need of saving again.

(This poem appeared in The Asian Age on March 17, 1996)

Never the right size…

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Once a girl told me, “Your dress sense is awful. You wear clothes in any combination. And all your pants are either too loose or too tight.”

While I agree that I am quite careless in matching colours, the second part of her statement isn’t entirely my fault. The problem is that I’ve had too many ups and downs in my life. Literally, practically and weight wise. Especially my weight. I have been falling ill at regular intervals throughout my life. Each bout sees me shedding fat.

My first such experience was at the age of ten. I returned from living in England and I lost 7 kilos adjusting to the new climate. I looked like a stick. Chicken pox after matriculation led to a drop of 6 on the scales. Twelfth class illness: 8 kilos. But the real weight killer was tonsillitis during graduation. After it all died down, the final count was 16kgs! I think I feel lighter by a few kilos even if I have a stomach infection. So what am I supposed to do?

I have my own Newton’s law law vis a vis gravitation:

Whenever my weight goes up, it must come down

Now you can imagine what havoc this must be playing on my clothes. I can’t comfortably wear a pant I bought when I was down when I become up. That’s also the case the other way round.

At one point, I calculated a mean weight and decided that all my pants should be stitched according to that. If I was over this average, I would tell the tailor, “Stitch the pant extra tight as I’m going to lose at least five kilos.” Or, “Make that extra loose!” The result was that all the tailors of the neighbourhood thought I was mad and never listened to me.

That leaves me with clothes of extreme dimensions. Imagine you’re wearing a very tight pant and you go for dinner some place. You eat and eat and eat and become so full that your stomach gasps for breath. Your hand goes to your belt to make it loose. The only snag is that there is no belt. It’s your pant that’s tight. Ouch! So you can only painfully grin and bear it when the warm hostess keeps piling your food with more and more food.

When I start gaining my weight over a period of time, my shirts become tighter and tighter and even tear. I feel as I’m the Incredible Hulk in extreme slow motion. (He Minutes Hulk. Me Months Hulk) Everyone outgrows their clothes as they grow older. For me it’s a lifelong process.

People gave me all sorts of solutions. Wear elastic pants. Yuck! Wear suspenders. Hmm, I can’t see myself in them. My sister finally told me, “The answer lies in India. Become ethnic. Wear a kurta pyjama whenever you go out and lungi when you’re at home.”

I fear that I may be forced to take her advice.

© Sunil Rajguru

Chits and Pieces

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It all began when he wanted to send her a message. He tore a piece of paper, wrote down the message, folded the paper and sent it to her through various hands. That was the first note. And soon a new era began.

Now before you think I am telling you another mushy love story, let me make things clear. I am talking about the latest craze that has hit our small class of post-graduate students—note-writing.

It’s a unique way of having a discussion with someone in the class without opening your mouth. You send a small chit to the person with a comment. The other person replies to you with another chit and this process goes on. Hundreds of such chits are transacted every day.

Perhaps everyone just took a fancy to it. Or perhaps everyone was exhausted with the busy schedule of back-breaking work that our faculty was piling on us and here was something to let off steam. I really don’t know and don’t care. It’s there and that’s enough.

But it really started when we had to go on a field trip to a tourist city. While everyone around us would be on holiday and casually admiring things, we journalism students would be attending lectures and viewing every tourist spot as a story for our training periodical. This concept was too much for anyone who needed a break from endless classes, assignments, subbing, reporting, page-making, project work…

We attended our first boring lecture and started looking at each other. Some bright guy took a chit and sent a message. And soon everyone started tearing pieces of paper furiously and exchanging “notes”… This went on to the next class and soon we were exchanging notes in the dining hall, in the matador and even on the road!

Now you might ask, what’s so big in a chit and why am I going gaga over it. Well, apart from being an extended discussion between two people, there are other options. I ended up asking such questions to people which I never dreamt of asking on their face. I exchanged life’s philosophy with some and got an insight into people I didn’t know well. One girl wrote to me in a chit, “I think this note-writing in some vague way brings two people closer.” I can’t help agreeing with her.

With others I exchanged nonsense. It’s also fun to pull someone’s leg through a piece of paper. A girl and I started exchanging notes in rhyme. This caught on and I was amazed at the poetic talent running in the class.

Now all this is done with such impunity that the person giving the lecture cannot fail to notice. Note-writing has reduced us to a bunch of rude inattentive scholars. Once when note-writing was in its primitive stages, a guest lecturer’s daughter sat with us. The whole atmosphere was too much for her, so she got up, fired the class for not paying attention. After that she burst into tears and went running to the faculty. Sigh! We were such a mean bunch. Another lecturer asked us if we were on some sort of “paper-chase” or something.

But now the course is coming to an end and note-writing is the thing I’m going to miss the most. “Don’t worry,” said my friend, “We’ll continue this glorious tradition to our work place.” Even if we manage to do that, I don’t think the same magic can be recreated again.

© Sunil Rajguru

Divide and Misrule

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broken-1739135_1280How can a person feel lonely or isolated in a world of around five and a half billion? It’s not difficult. Man follows the policy of ‘Divide and Live’ — he keeps on dividing the population into ever smaller groups, increasingly isolating himself. First, the world is divided into the living and non-living. The living into plants and animals. The animal world is further classified into vertrebrates and non-vertebrates. Vertebrates into mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds and fishes. Then there are two clear distinctions in mammals — humans and non-humans.

Then mankind is spread over five different continents, which could well be five different worlds, separated by race, language and skin colour. The ‘white’ropeans, Americans and Australians, brown and yellow Africans and Asians. Continents are further divided into countries, each fiercely independent and engaged in a rivalry with each other. The Russian-American cold war of yore. Anglo-French antagonism which has seen the two countries in opposite sides in seven wars in the past. Indo-Pakistani clashes. The long Iran-Iraq conflict… The list is long. ‘Love they neighbour’ is a dream; most neighbouring countries have had atleast one major conflict, or are at a perpetual state of war.

As if this isn’t enough, many countries have secessionists who want separate lands. The former Yugoslavia has been torn apart by ethnic conflict, while Afghanistan’s internal turmoil in the 1980s saw much of its population either dying or fleeing the country. The Kurds are seeking a separate homeland in West Asia. Pakistan was split into two in 1971. And India has faced secessionist militancy in Punjab and Kashmir.

There is further division on the basis of religion. All religions talk of God and service to mankind, but history has witnessed the bloodiest of campaigns when armies of two different religions have met. The old world saw many battles between Christianity and Islam. There have been four Arab-Israel wars over religion. It was antagonism against a particular sect that caused Adolf Hitler to court disaster with his infamous ‘Final Solution’. India also has had its communal riots. Almost each religion has conflicting sects. The division chart continues. Hinduism has been divided by untouchability, Islam by the Shia and Sunni factions. In Christianity it is the Catholics versus the Protestants, with many other sects.

There are differences in political ideology. Socialists and capitals, blocs and pacts. The Left, the Right and the Centre. Factions and groups within a single party. There are divisions on the basis of money in one’s pocket — the upper class, the middle class and the lower classes. Two different classes can’t mingle, as oil and water don’t mix. In a country like India, there are states with different languages, cultures and traditions. There is no unity in diversity. Each state is hostile to outsiders, and sympathetic only to its ‘sons of the soil’, granting them special privileges. These sons are further classified into various communities. There are agitations to have existing states divided, and we have Jharkhand and Uttarakhand movements. There are wheels within wheels within wheels…

Finally, your neighbour must fall into one or another of the above categories and you still don’t get along with him. This leaves  you with your family. With the passage of time, brother fights brother and they part. So, in the end you’re left alone and the whole world is out to get you. Five and a half billion divided by five and a half billion equals one.

(This article appeared as an Edit Page Middle in The Times of India newspaper on May 22, 1995)

French Window is a Door

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You have all heard of Russia, Portugal and Turkey. But have you heard of Russian roulette, the Portuguese man-of-war and Turkish delight? Do you know what they mean? Or exactly what is an ‘Indian summer’?

Merely knowing the meaning of certain words is not enough, you have to know the usage of combination of words too. Like British, French and German might simply mean ‘of’ Britain, France and Germany respectively. But when used in combinations with a particular word, the result is quite different.

First the French effect. A French window isn’t a window from France, but a glazed folding door. A French door is simply a glass door. What type of leave do you take when its without permission? French leave of course. A lot of ‘French’ is used in cooking too. A French bean is a kidney bean; French toast is bread dipped in a batter of egg and milk and fried, French fries are deep fried potato strips, and French dressing isn’t a type of dress but salad dressing prepared from oil, vinegar and seasoning.

Then the Dutch have a reputation for being miserly. Hence a Dutch treat is one in which each pays his own expense. An auction is a sale in which articles are sold to the highest bidder, but what if you found yourself in a sale in which the price was reduced till a purchaser was found? You’d be sitting in a Dutch auction.

A Dutch bern is one consisting of a roof supported by poles. A Dutch uncle is a person who criticizes with unsparing frankness and a Dutch door is one which is divided into two units so that they can be opened separately. You may not be able to speak Dutch, but you speak double Dutch many times. That is the term for incomprehensible jargon. Do you know how a drunk behaves? He disregards authority, speaks what he likes and could not care for the world. Such courage, got out of strong drink, is called Dutch courage.

Russian boots are high boots with cuffed tops. Roulette is a gambling game played on a table with a revolving centre over which a ball runs, but Russian roulette is a game, in which each participant in turn, using a revolver into which one bullet has been inserted, spins the cylinder, points the muzzle at his or her head, and pulls the trigger.

The Portuguese man-of-war is another highly misleading name. It doesn’t denote a belligerent from Portugal but a type of ocean invertebrate animal having a bladder like structure.

A Roman nose is a nose with a prominent bridge and a Roman candle is a firework consisting of a tube that emits sparks and balls of fire.

Indians are people of India, but Red Indians are the original inhabitants of America. India rubber is one which rubs pencil marks; India ink is a dense black pigment used in drawings or the ink got from it and an Indian file is a single file. ‘Indian summer’ denotes a period of mild, dry weather in late autumn or early winter.

(This article appeared in The Hindu newspaper on 11 February, 1995)

Of adages & reality

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post-384929_1280When I was small, I was battered with golden sayings, proverbs, adages and maxims of all sorts. They were there in our ‘Thought for the day’, school diary and liberally in our teachers’ speeches. All of them got registered on my mind as truths of life, but as the days progressed, they started to make less and less sense.

Take ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ I don’t know about the healthy and wise part, but I haven’t heard of a single wealthy man who doesn’t go to bed late. Another gem is, ‘Speech is sliver, but silence is golden.’ Saving a few situations here and there, I don’t see how far you can go with silence. You have to be a good talker to make your way around the world.

But I’ve faced the greatest problems with ‘Practice makes a man perfect’. There are certain people who have a natural talent for a thing and are near perfect with their first try. And there are others like me who for years persist and get nowhere.

For example, take football. I watched stars on TV do wonders with the ball and got attracted to the game. I started playing seriously at the age of seven. I played during the breaks, after school and in my spare time. After three years, I was still where I started. I joined a boarding school where we used to play football daily. Let alone master the ball, I never could even score a single goal in a single match.

Once in a match, 22 players were crowded near a goal. I got disgusted and came out. To my luck, the ball popped out of the melee and landed at my feet. I excitedly took the ball and started running towards the opposite goal. The whole crowd froze, staring at me in silence. After some time the opponent goalkeeper also took off.

I thought it would be simple, but the ball just wouldn’t stay at my feet. It moved far to the left, then to the right and then to the left again. I was zig-zagging desperately as the goalkeeper gained on me. I reached the goal after what seemed like ages. I fumbled and kicked the ball to open my account. But out of nowhere, the goalkeeper dived and it was a save. I passed out of school and remained goal-less after a decade of football.

It’s the same with my handwriting. I had the most atrocious handwriting in class. My teacher told me that the more I wrote, the better it would get. I patiently wore out practice books and even chose a greeting card with beautiful handwriting to imitate. I don’t know how many hours I spent in all that and was it worth it? Today, after all that practice I have a handwriting that looks like, as my sister puts it, ‘squiggly ants’.

When I became an adult, I was exposed to two things — shaving and driving. When I shaved for the first time, I ended up with blood and leftover hair on my face. A thousand shaves later, I am just marginally better.

Each time I ride my scooter, I say my prayers. When my father started to teach me to drive in school, he was a very frustrated man in a matter of weeks. Today, after being on the roads for 7 to 8 years and driving in a tough place like Jodhpur where nobody follows any rules, I am what I was.

And it’s the same with a dozen other things.

(This article appeared as an Edit Page Middle in Deccan Herald newspaper in 1995)