403 Forbidden !

“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...