The two main blasts occured in Paharganj and Sarojini Nagar and strangely, we were contemplating visiting them in the evening. The only reason we didn’t go was because it was already 5:30 pm and considering the evening traffic, we could have never made it before 7. We need to buy curtains for the new apartment. I had gone there to take the measurements and had asked Alka to be ready so that as soon as I came back, we would leave for one of these market places. I was already feeling that we were late and should postpone it till the next day, but it was Alka who expressed that we should postpone it, and instead, visit the local Saturday market to purchase crockery and cutlery. In the afternoon while going to NOIDA I had noticed a roadside shop selling mattresses for beds. So first I took Alka there when we went to the Saturday market. While waiting in the car I received a call from my friend who is in Bangalore. He advised us to go home because blasts were occurring in Delhi at various places. It’s the festive season. Immediately the images of devastating stampedes flashed through my mind. Once home, we kept experiencing the ghastly images on TV.
Just day before yesterday I was in Paharganj purchasing a floor mattress. Some of the lanes are so narrow and crowded that you have to squeeze yourself in. In times of such tragedies, one cannot imagine how fire tenders and ambulances can reach there.
When I was in school the Sarojini Nagar market used to be our regular haunt. We used to bunk classes and spend time wandering around aimlessly, stopping at this stall or that stall, crowding the magazine seller who discretely kept adult magazines with him, sitting upon the pulleys and chatting. Every corner of the market was like home.
It’s chilling to see such familiar places dotted with blood spots and blown up bodies.
I don’t know how it happened (OK, well, I know it) but all of a sudden, there is so much work and so little time, and on top of that, there is so much at stake, sort of. It’s all due to blatant mismanagment of time and resources, as the management and lifestyle gurus would say. I need to sort out things fast in order to be able to write something self-ingratiating.
I used to think people have a very complex way of thinking whereas it is not so in most of the cases. Most people are so straightforward about the way they think that it is amazing that such normalcy can actually exist. While thinking about characters for my story, I think I unnecessarily try to make them very complex individuals. I’m gradually concluding that complex plots originate out of mundane (so called mundane)
A long time ago we purchased a Hindi translation of a charming Russian book for childred: Jab Papa Bachche The (When Father Was Young). These are the stories written by a doting daughter about her father when her father was a child. In one of those stories, she mentions a peculiar character of her father’s:
The boys knew that Papa didn’t like it when someone waved a finger in front of him. They knew that he would cry if they waved a finger in front of him. So they waved their fingers in front of him and he cried.
This is how an average individual — even a grownup individual — deals with life, with situations, and with people. Particular actions elicit particular, set responses. People are scared to think out of the box; in fact they don’t want to think at all. That is why there only a few people who really achieve something in their lives because apart from bizarre exceptions, it takes thinking and hard work to do something really meaningful and fulfilling. Anybody can be a Kolhu ka bael (English?).
I generally don’t take up issues through this blog — it is a literary blog — but then there are certain issues that deal with writing, that deal with freedom of expression, and that deal with dignity. Only last evening I commented that most bloggers are the yuppy types that go underground the moment someone challenges them. Gaurav has proven me wrong. If you cannot make sense of what I’m talking about, you may as well visit some links for background knowledge:
Higher Education Sector in India Again!
Lies, damned lies and fake blogs
and this is the stuff that perhaps started it all…I’m not sure:
The fraud that is IIPM
I’m not going to go into the right or wrong of the debate but I do respect Gaurav for sticking to his ground because I think there are very few people who can do that. If he believes in whatever he is doing, even if he ends up being a lone crusader (which, I don’t think he is going to be, going by the storm brewing in the Indian blogsphere), he deserves immense respect. There are very few people in India who can take a stand.
This incident also highlights the power blogs are emerging out to be. Good! Really. This is a very potent tool both in the hands of right people and wrong people. Right people are always blamed for inertia, for latency. Blogs give them power to raise their voices from the cushy confines of their bedrooms or study rooms.
I hope some more issues rake up storms in the blog world.
One must read the kind of crap people leave in the name of comments. Rashmi had written what a sham of an institute IIPM is and as a reaction, some of the IIPM sympathizers have proven one thing: we might not know “What they don’t teach you at the IIMs,” but now we certainly know “What they do teach you at IIPM!”
The day before yesterday I had gone to Nizamuddin to get a cage for the recuperating parrot that I had purchased from a small boy. The existing cage was very tiny and it was deforming the tale of the parrot. Although we were planning to release the parrot as soon as we thought it could fly (we let it fly yesterday as we discovered it could fly), we thought it needed a bigger cage where it could move around or at least it could properly stretch its body. You often get bird cages and such stuff from Muslim areas because they generally keep birds as pets. My driver, Ranjeet, and I decided that our first stop would be Nizamuddin.
We soon realized it was a mistake.
There was hostility all around. It was as if all of a sudden we had stepped on a tinder box and at any moment there could be an explosion. Ranjeet moved the car inch by inch as the people moving on the road showed no sign of giving us way. Groups of unshaven and rude-looking guys had spread their chairs and cots everywhere blocking half of the road and even when it was clear that our car was practically stuck there, they didn’t move. It was like, touch us and we’ll kill you — those were the looks they gave us. Ranjeet started sweating in no time. He is 19 and quite short tempered when people make remarks on the road, but at that time he kept quiet while people left and right kept throwing nasty comments at us. Even a small sign from us could trigger a catastrophe. Youths in white topis and with big beards kept staring at us while talking to each other as if saying, “Hello! what are you doing here?” A few thumped on the car. “Have we come to Pakistan?” Ranjeet mumbled.
We kept a straight face and acted as if we were not bothered. We had gone in — quite in (after all, it is our own city) — and there was not enough space to turn around 180 degrees and get out of the area. We couldn’t move forward as there was no point in it, and we couldn’t reverse because the place was too crowded. We had passed by a small open space. We needed to reach there in order to turn the car around. Trying to ease the air, I asked around for the cage. They replied condescendingly that they didn’t know. It took us good 20 minutes to move back the car 30 feet. I must admit Ranjeet has good control over his nerves. Although there was immense tension dripping off his body language, he maintained calm and not even once honked or touched anybody. When we were out on the road (the one that goes from Ashram towards the Humayu’s tomb) Ranjeet suggested he would park the car by the side and go back to ask for the cage. I refused: I didn’t want him to take any unnecessary risk.
In a stark contrast, prior to heading for Nizamuddin, we had gone to a village named Madanpur Khadar that is behind Sarita Vihar, where we live. Gujjars live there: a community known for its hot-tempered manners. There are no roads and the paths are studded with massive holes. By mistake we took a few wrong turns and ended up in lanes where it is difficult for even bi-cycles to ply. Not a single raised eyebrow we encountered. We were practically inside the houses. In fact when we were waiting for a bullock cart to by-pass, there was an elderly man on his motorbike who was coming from the opposite side. He had very politely asked Ranjeet, “Beta zara piche karoge gadi ko?” (son, would you move your car back a bit?).
If this was the kind of atmosphere in Nizamuddin now, I wonder what would have happened had there been some sort of communal tension.
Normally I’m the one who keeps feeling an earthquake — once or twice a week. And when an earthquake really came a visiting I couldn’t feel it. It was Alka who told me that we were having an earthquake while I was lost deeply in hundreds of lines of code. Even when she had told me it took me a while to really feel it. It was only when we had gone out and I saw the main gate shaking that I actually felt it. Well, so much for being earthquake-phobic :-).
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