403 Forbidden !

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi or Indira as she is fondly remembered now showed us what female empowerment was all about. She portrayed Durga, Lakshmi and Kali all at once. She was Goddess to some and daughter to others, all in all Indira was a born leader. She brought about the Green Revolution, women empowerment and family planning but the leader that she was didn’t allow her to lose – even if the people’s verdict was different. The avarice got the better of her in the later years as she was accused of note for vote scams, embezzlement of govt.   funds for party use and manipulation of electoral votes. As I mentioned in the previous part, Emergency was one dark spot in an otherwise clean democracy of our nation. Indira betrayed us all, our faith and trust. Poetic justice, as it is often referred to, she had to pay for that.   On October 31, 1984, two of her bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, killed her to avenge the military attack on the Harmandir Sahib (The Golden...

“At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, then an age ends and when the soul of a nation , long suppressed, finds utterance”, said Nehru, but nobody in my house was bothered. Yes, I was born on 15 th August, 1947 in a ‘bania’ household and let me just clarify, I am not one of those Rushdie’s midnight children, nor am I R.K. Laxman’s protagonist as the title suggests. I am just a 64 year old who happens to share his age with a nation. Through the years I have watched a new born manoeuvre its way in an opportunist, if not cruel world. India’s journey from being a bread basket to the grain stockpile, through the neo-Malthusian breast beating about the population explosion has been nothing short of extraordinary. I was still very young when Nehru’s Fabian socialism took over the nation. Everything being in the hands of the state meant equi-distr...

TRINNNNG....TRIIINNG.... the alarm clock went on as I put it on snooze for the third time, only to realize later that it was 9:00 AM and I had to make it to the class by 9:10. Hence, began my daily routine; searching for toothbrush I removed, replaced and reinstalled every single object in my room, which basically resembled a sweep-stock. With ‘Mission Impossible’ in mind and reminding myself of the Adidas tagline “Impossible is nothing”, I decided to give it a go, “attend the first period.”  I ran towards the toilets. Now, our toilets are something even Da Vinci would have failed to design. I fail to gather superlatives to describe its cleanliness, which for sure is not next to Godliness. Even God would have exclaimed,” OMG! ”, looking at the mess He created by creating man, had He seen our toilets. According to me though, these toilets have been designed to make us all work hard to get placed in areas having cleaner facilities and to make us all realize that life is not as easy...

There’s this strange term ‘hope’ we come across every day. From the hope of getting good marks to that of getting into a certain well known course to living the life to the fullest and to the hope of getting just one more minute to live, hope is all encompassing. We all want to get into that utopia where what all we want is to let go; to lose everything to the omnipotent. Hope is the energy to some and a way of life to others but it remains an integral part of each individual’s life. In these cruel times however, hope has a different definition. For a Mumbaikar, it’s the prospect of reaching home safely, for a Kashmiri, it’s the prayer to not to lose a loved one, for a child in the tribal village of Bastar, it’s the chance to complete his high school and for a female foetus it’s the wish to make its way out of the womb. “These are desperate times my men”, Churchill would say but our premier doesn’t even have the courage to admit the wrongdoings, the sole reason according to him – c...

I am still gasping, short of breath and short of words. There are some incidents in life that just defeat you, your wit and your will and by some extent even your fortitude. There are times when each one of us has thought about leaving it all – the struggles, the web of relations, the aspirations and the perspiration, the vicious circle called life. It’s not worth it, believe me. In everything I write I try to make a plot and to describe the incidents in a systematic manner but this is one time I am out of my mind. This incident is worth everything I have ever lived for. During my train journey today, I happened to notice the T-shirt of my neighbour. When you read something like ‘MIT’ with its logo on someone’s clothes, being an engineer you do tend to notice. The guy had just returned from MIT after a research trip sponsored by IISc Bangalore, as I came to know after a short chit-chat. We had a brief discussion about his research papers (Of course I didn’t have a clue) and how it w...

After all the batter I received from my father, I finally decided to give it a go. “Study”, I thought, “Change is essential for every individual and after two years of engineering why not be a part of one; study.” Once upon a time I used to study. I really did. Now don’t give me that look! Believe me; I did study to get into this college. What I did after that is another story altogether. It was about some induction machine or a dynamo but what I ‘actually’ remember is that as soon as I finished the first page I began feeling extremely drowsy. Suddenly, a flash of light woke me up. It was in line with my nose and amazingly produced sound and it opened its account with, “Hey dude! Howz ya doin?” I was bedeafened, dumbfounded, flabbergasted and dumbstruck to say the least! I tried to touch the light but it moved away and here it began,” Hey kid!   Stay away from me. I am God.” I was like,” What crap! You better go to Baba Ramdev then. He has been searching for you big time; or fo...

When boyzone sang “It’s only words and words are all I have to take your heart away”, I thought I should believe them but what words actually did was to blow off my head. The problem began as early as my sixth grade when the teacher asked us to make a sentence on ‘moment’ and what I answered was “The moment of locomotives through the jungle was worth watching” and some shithead came up with, “Locomotives can have movement not moment”, I was screwed to say the least. I could never get the twist between an egoist and an egotist and could never even make out if I had to get my teeth treated by an orthodentist or an orthodontist, lost a tooth in the process though. Once my English teacher, the whimsical creep he was, in a moment of outrage, asked me to “Abandon to abaddon.” I stood stunned, not knowing the meaning and without the courage to ask and when his temper softened his answer was “Go to Hell”. Why the hell would you say it like that! As my quest for words began, I had to be tak...

Aaa.....aa....chooo..... and another one went down. It seems like I have been crazily ill since the day I was born. Sometimes it feels like I was born to be a valetudinarian. Things began even before I was born. When my mother began to throw up all she ate, the doctor gave umpteen reasons behind what could have been the case and what could possibly not, including indigestion, diarrhoea, food poisoning, concussion and even brain tumour and “By God   “ as my dad says “ he doubted of dowry and exploitation”, everything apart from pregnancy. Finally on “some bloody 4 th of August”, as my sister would put it, I was born, the same day another mentally ill fella was born who’d later stop outsourcing only because he himself was outsourced throughout his life – Barrack Hussain Obama. “Hey put this jelly bean inside the incubator”, the nurse said,” the kid’s not gonna survive.” Somehow I did! With all my mother’s prayers and father’s money, I had to! As I grew up, well actually what all...