If you like tiger-fur accessories…

This is how you get them:

Snare it first in an iron trap, then beat him to death

Poaching is too mild a word. It doesn’t even begin to describe the heinous crime against the panthera species. Death by electrocution is one modus. But inside tiger reserves, power supply is notoriously erratic. Poisoning depends on supplies. What poachers use most often are powerful 12-kg iron and steel traps. With jagged metal teeth. These need 6-7 people to be prised open. This murderous trap is buried in the ground, and camouflaged with leaf litter. A metal chain is tethered to a tree along a path to a water hole to make sure the trapped tiger can’t escape. Other paths to the water hole are strewn with thorns. In walks a thirsty tiger, one wrong step and the jagged trap jaws snare him in. Only then do 4-5 locals emerge out of the bushes, armed with lathis to beat this majestic 250-kg creature to death, without damaging its coat and with one lathi shoved down his throat. To stop a tiger’s dying roars from echoing in the jungle.

Read the rest of the coverage on the disappearance of the Sariska tigers.

So true!

While accepting his Nobel price for literature, Saul Bellow said about the continuing power of books:

Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us.

This reminds me why I chose the domain WritingCave.

What happened to my book reviewing?

I know, I mean, I remember a few months ago I said I’d be reviewing the books I read here. I had said that I’d share my thoughts on every book I read. There’s a quintessential pre-requisite for writing a review — one gotta read the book :-(.

I haven’t read a book for a long time. I’m not going to blame anything because I know even the busiest people manage to read books. Why reading doesn’t figure anywhere in my current routine, I really have no idea. Not that I’m working at a break-neck speed, not that I don’t have a single moment of respite. If I try, if I want, I can easily allocate at least an hour for reading.

Living To Tell The Tale was the last book I was reading a few months ago. I can’t see that book around which means I have no idea where it is. So many things have moved around so much in our house of late that the book might as well be considered lost and will only be found by chance. This is not done. I must find the book and start reading it again.

As I side note, I’m also a bit put off by my secondary state of domicile.

An afternoon - 2

Today we didn’t have electricity the whole day. This affored me time to sit outside for a while with the camera and take some snaps.

These flowers gave me the idea of taking the photographs. I always used to rue that whatever Gulmohar we have in the proximity never blossoms. This one has blossomed for the first time.

This was my lunch today while I sat outside: 7 almonds and a cup of cold, sugar-less milk.

Another relic we’re about to dispose off. This box has been with us for more than 30 years. I have seen it all my life containing Dad’s college files.

My first attempt at capturing something in constant motion. It’s not very clear. For half-an-hour I tried photographing giant ants but I’ll try that with a better camera.

A ripe ground for mosquitoes?

We got this pot from Dilli Haat to keep it on my table. It had a cactus plant. The cactus died and now the pot is lying outside.

Indian Taliban

The Shive Sena has a solution if you don’t want to be raped. They suggest you shouldn’t wear revealing clothes to avoid rape. Do they mean thousands of women who are raped in rural India almost every month wear revealing clothes? Or these Shiv Sena guys get rape thoughts when they see girls in “revealing” clothes. They can’t keep their peepees down when they see some flesh – innocent or whatever. Instead of making sure the real culprits get punished, such organizations begin blaming the victim. Next they would say stop going out because this makes you vulnerable to a rape attack. If you go out, you are encouraging rapists by being so available. Can someone get these loonies shut up?

Burden, my foot!

Surfing through the intricate links of a few blogs I landed upon this poem by Rudyard Kipling (I’ve never liked the author for his anti-dogs proclivities, Mowgli or no Mowgli). This poem talks about the white man’s burden. He says it was the white man’s burden to indulge in imperialism and save the savage races from self-destruction. So how did the white man carry his burden, the poor, burdened white man? He plundered the savages and made his own country rich. He destroyed the wealth that the native “savages” had accumulated over thousands of years of highly evolved commerce. He enslaved the poor. He destroyed self-sufficient villages and turned them into famine-ridden graveyards. Poor, poor, burdened white man. Here’s the poem:

The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man’s burden!
Have done with childish days–
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

Our new maid

A twinge of sadness gripped at my heart when I saw our old maid sleeping on the floor in the drawing room. Has she ever slept on a bed? I thought. I know everything in our lives happens for one reason or another but sometimes things are just not in our control. What has she done to deserve this perpetual poverty? Take birth in a poor family? Seeing people like her re-affirms my belief that all of us should get an equal chance to break this vicious circle because nobody should have to spend an entire life in poverty. That’s why when I saw our cook’s daughter trying to study (well, seemingly) I felt exhilarated, and Alka and I went out of our ways to help her study.

Urmila (our substitute maid) must be over fifty. In West Bengal she used to work in a rice field and was earning Rs. 40 (less than a dollar) per day. Then her son and the daughter-in-law threw her out and an agent brought her to Delhi. From there my mom brought her home because our regular maid has gone on a two-month leave. She mostly understands Bengali, and what a world of change it must be for her. People were not nice to her there in West Bengal, but at least they weren’t alien. Even if they abused her she could understand the abuses and act (or cringe) accordingly. Here she is trapped with a loud-mouthed Punjabi family where almost everybody seems to be yelling at her (without meaning to, most of the times). Alka and I try to be gentle to her but she doesn’t serve us most of the time — she’s mostly serving my parents and the continuous stream of guests who’ll keep coming until my parents leave for Abu Dhabi.

Seeing her on the floor really made me feel sad. I wish we could give her a bed, but there is often not enough space for our own beds. Ok, time for some soul-searching: when everybody is gone and with just Alka and I left in the house, there’ll be plenty of space. In fact there’ll be a whole bedroom empty. Will we allow her to sleep on the double-bed? I’ll be frank: the thought of her sleeping on the bed we’ve been using disturbs me. But why does the idea disturb me? There are many lousy, undeserving (even dirtier than her, I suppose) guests who have used the bed with great fanfare, sleeping and drooling on its pillows. Seeing them sleeping on that bed never disturbed me. Prejudice? I think so. Can I break its shackles? I don’t know. Am I open to the idea? Again, I don’t know.

On another thought, we have a comfy arrangement for the 24-hour maids that sometimes we have to keep. There’s a jute-mat that can be spread on the floor (floor?); there is a comfortable cotton-stuffed mattress that can be spread over the jute-mat; and then there is a bed sheet that can be spread over the cotton-stuffed mattress. For winter there is a combination of a quilt and a fluffy blanket. So short of a bed, nothing is lacking. So may be because of the terrible heat she prefers to sleep on the floor without the mattress and all.

I digressed for a while; the point is not that. It’s not about sleeping on the floor or a bed. The point is the perpetual poverty she has to live in for all her life. Although not her entire life is gone, a major portion of it has been withered under the burning rays of poverty. My thoughts are frozen at the moment…I’ll try visiting the topic again.

No songs wanted?

I had sent my lyrics samples to a talent management company a few months ago and day before yesterday I sent them a reminder. They replied that there was no current requirement for a song writer. They didn’t say the songs were not good (although I know it is a standard line even if the work is not liked); they said there was no current requirement.

How can there be no requirement for songs? But then, who needs song writers these days? If you listen to current songs, there are standard 15-20 phrases that are repeatedly used in almost all songs. There are around 4 top Hindi song writers these days and they churn up very mediocre songs. Not that they are bad writers: it’s just that, passionate creativity has evaporated somewhere down the line. Arts — writing, painting, sculpting, drama, dance, etc. — have to be passionate; they cannot be commercial products. I’m not saying they don’t have commercial value. I think everything nicely performed/produced attains commercial value. Take for instance painters like Picasso and Van Gogh. Picasso became rich in his lifetime, and Van Gogh’s painting’s fetch millions these days (despaired by poverty, Van Gogh committed suicide). Great works of literature have immense commercial value. Millions of dollars are spent to preserve Da Vinci’s creations. Artists should never have to work for money — it affects their creativity. Money comes on its own if you give your true worth as an artist.

It’s a shame

Although, no irony should be greater but then again it shouldn’t surprise us, the sort of social fabric we have. A few days ago a Mumbai cop raped a minor girl in a police station in broad daylight. This is outrageous, but then a few days ago I read in the newspaper that a father-son due kept raping the daughter-sister until she became pregnant with their child. So I don’t want to comment on the moral putrefaction the society suffers from — this has gone very deep.

The rapist cop had been given the job on “compassionate grounds” as his father was in the force when he died. This was not the first crime the cop had indulged in, and he should have been thrown out long ago. He used to drink on duty; he used to be rude and abusive and he got engaged in various shady activities. He always got away with all this because one of his relatives in the police kept bailing him out. This ghastly incident wouldn’t have occurred (but then, there is no guarantee) had he been dismissed on time. Even when people outside the police station came to rescue the girl, he yelled that he couldn’t be harmed because he was in Mumbai police. So this must have been a great psychological boost for him, and consequently, could have encouraged him to rape the girl.

The girl was merely taking a walk on the road with a male friend. As it often happens in the chauvinistic society, the cop thought it was his moral right to ask the girl why she was roaming around (at around five in the evening!) with a male. He took them to the police station where he decided the girl could be easily raped and he could easily get away with this.

Since it has evolved into a national issue, the Mumbai police, after initially trying to hush the matter, had no choice but to arrest the cop. The protestors literally demolished the police station in a spate of anger — that’s quite understandable. I hope the police don’t say that all evidence was lost.

We live in times when ordinary citizens have to deal with three kinds of anti-social elements: the criminals, the politicians and the police. One thing is common in them: they enjoy power and the associated impunity that ordinary citizen does not have. The ordinary citizen is the lesser mortal. He or she can be yelled at and bullied; he or she can be easily cheated; he or she can be easily deprived of his or her fundamental human rights. Money can buy you protection for a certain extent, but it is not as powerful as the three kinds I mentioned above.

Visit to the hospital

Last Saturday I needed to go to the St. Stephens Hospital to get my knee checked. It’s a government hospital and they make sure you feel that way. First of all, the staff (most of it, but I’m sure there are exceptions) is as indifferent to a visitor’s problems as…I was going to say the man in the street, but men in the streets are not as indifferent.

My mother had accompanied me to the hospital. She wanted to fetch a wheelchair for me because my knee had a terrible ache. She was made to run from one ward to another just to get the wheelchair because nobody could give a clear direction, and whomever she asked gave her a direction despite having no idea. After visiting four wards — totally exhausted — she arranged for a wheelchair and a ward boy to push it. Our meeting with the doctor was at 10:30 am but we had reached there at 9:00 am, fearing one or the other delay. The attendant and the nurses who were sitting in front of the doctor’s room to accept the OPD cards were unfalteringly rude to everybody. This is democracy at its best. You feel like you are in a common plane, because no matter who you are (as long as you’re not a minister), you get yelled at thoroughly just for being face to face with them.

My mother and I submitted the card and waited for the doctor. To pass our time we watched the attendant and the nurses yell at all and sundry. I wonder for how long these people live if they yell so much every day.

At precisely 10:30 am (I was impressed by the punctuality) we were summoned into a narrow corridor — I can bet it was not more than 4-feet wide. Beds with dirty linen were laid in a line like the seats in a narrow rail compartment. The place looked like a junk-room. There was a broken chair there and thankfully I didn’t have to sit on it because I was on a wheelchair. The wheelchair had to be placed at the door of the corridor because there was no space for it to go any further.

I regretted coming there but then the doctor we had gone to see is one of the best orthopaedist in the city. A youngish doctor came to see me. Definitely he was not the doctor we had gone to see but he talked very nicely. He noted down whatever I told him, advised me to get my blood checked for RA (rheumatoid arthritis), and told me that the actual doctor would come at 12:30 pm.

I got my blood checked (I feared getting infected but at that time I couldn’t refuse) and thankfully the RA test came out negative. At 1:15 pm we were again advised to go to the same claustrophobic corridor, now that the doctor had arrived and was checking different patients. This time I had to leave my wheelchair and go there walking on my crutches. The beds that are lined in that corridor are so high (for the convenience of the doctor) that one has to climb up a few steps to lie on them. I refused to climb because of my pain, so the nurse made me sit on the broken chair that could have collapsed any time. There was hardly any place even for the doctor to walk. One by one he checked on the patients, gave answers and allayed fears whenever he could. He passed by without checking me to the adjacent room, maybe because I was not lying on a bed and was simply sitting on a chair. In the room he spent another half-an-hour. Then he came out, and was again passing me by when I called him.

He checked my knees, felt my nerves, made me walk, and then he said I might need an operation to loosen my knees. He couldn’t be sure about the pain as he said a massive wear-and-tear has already happened. Due to the stiffness and a perpetual bent, my knees go through intensive stress when I walk. For the probable operation, he asked me to meet him again with an X-ray of my knee.

I came home, satisfied with the diagnoses, but not sure about the treatment. I have started relaxation exercises and a few homeopathic medicines. There is a lot of improvement. The pain hasn’t completely gone but now I can move around with ease and get up from a chair without much ado. Both Alka and I are sure now that I won’t need the surgery.