What a man!

Dasharatha decided to coronate Rama, the crown prince. As the day drew closer, it became obvious to Kaikeyi that her own son would never ascend the throne. Manthara fomented and nurtured her insecurities, whispering ever so subtly into her ears about what a terrible fate it was for Bharata to be born after Rama. Dasharatha’s exceeding love for his eldest son exacerbated the poisoning. The declaration prompted her to swing into action. Kaikeyi entered the kopshala, feigned anger and extracted out of Dasharatha the boon he had promised her when she saved him on the battle field. Her overbearing love for her own flesh and blood blinded her, sending Sri Rama into exile – the adventurous journey that we enjoy as the Ramayana.

Rama, now an exiled prince, entered the dense forest tracts of India, accompanied by his loving wife Sita, and his devoted brother Lakshmana. After a brief period of peace, albeit away from the luxuries that a prince would ordinarily enjoy, Rama was forced to face the Rakshasa hordes that had made the forests their fief. Helping troubled sages and rescuing the local populace from the ravages of constant and oppressive Rakshasa raids brought him fame, glory and respect. However, this state of equilibrium was not to last long. Lo, and behold! Ravana, in the guise of a hermit, conspired to and successfully kidnapped Sita. Naturally, and quite humanly so, Rama was distraught. Lakshmana laid the blame on himself for ever doubting his older brother’s infallibility – a careless mistake that led to the consequences the exiled princes were now bearing the brunt of. The princes realised that moping around was futile; action was the only path that was of any consequence. Sita had shown presence of mind, leaving behind her a trail of the ornaments she wore. This trail led to an injured, dying Jatayu who provided them with intel. Rama made his way through the dark and dense forests, forged an alliance with the Vanaras and gained a loyal friend in Hanuman. Rama, with his army of Vanaras, was now a significant force. This army made its way to the very tip of India, built a bridge and crossed over to Lanka. A fierce battle ensued and soon enough Rama and his vanara army slew hordes of Rakshasas. The time had come to slay Ravana, to make him pay for his sins. At that opportune moment, Vibhishana crossed over from Ravana’s campt to that of Rama, giving away crucial information on Ravana’s weakness. Armed with both information and valour, Rama sent a single arrow flying straight towards Ravana. The arrow pierced through Ravana’s armour, tore asunder his tough skin, broke through his bones, rent his entrails and finally lodged itself in the mighty Rakshasa’s belly. The mighty Rakshasa fell. The battle was won and golden Lanka was conquered by Rama.

It is at this juncture that Rama’s exemplary patriotism, his love for his motherland comes to the fore. The Rakshasa lay dead, his surviving sibling was now on Rama’s side. Lanka, covered in gold and entirely defenseless was there for his taking. The unwavering, unfaltering Lakshmana too prompted Rama to think about the idea of assuming lordship over the island-city. Amidst all this, with such a tempting prospect right at hand, Rama’s character – one of immovable loyalty, makes itself unignorably evident. He says to Lakshmana “Api swarnamayee Lanka na me Lakshmana rochate. Janani janmabhoomischa swargaadapi gareeyasi”. What a man! If only such exemplary pervaded my nation’s masses, turning our fate around would be a cakewalk.

Book Review: “Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi”

“Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi” is a fantastic read for anyone interested in a thoroughly argued analysis of the BJP’s trajectory until a little after 2004. Vinay Sitapati, the author, writes in a lively, storytelling fashion which makes the book an easy read. He places LK Advani and AB Vajpayee at the centre of his narration, terming them a jugalbandi. He justifies the title of the book by bringing to the fore the fact that both of them served under each other, being both partners and rivals at the same time. He delves into the personal lives of either person, balancing anecdotes with a dose of analysis. In short, this book has little to no gossip. He plots their course across the political landscape, charting their rise and fall, taking the reader through a myriad of political events and eras. In popular Indian memory, the Nehru Era, the Indira Gandhi period, Rajiv Gandhi’s time in power, and Narasimha Rao’s Machiavellian manoeuvres are most vividly remembered. These events and periods are punctuated by extraordinary circumstances such as the Emergency, assassinations, wars, and economic reforms. Vinay Sitapati pulls the blinds aside to explore how the BJP was navigating its way through these extraordinary times.

The author does not waste words on gossip, but instead makes good use of news reports, interviews, and other available information to sketch the RSS, its relations with the Sangh Parivar and makes interesting points about its role in politics such as its support to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi when they felt the Congress was acting in favour of the Hindus. What makes these points interesting is that the RSS, when it speaks of itself, claims to have nothing to do with politics. He provides credible evidence, in purely academic terms, to support his view that the RSS had a role to play; however, in contrast to the popular conception that the BJP is an organ of the RSS, he paints the two as individual organizations belonging to the same ideological fraternity of Hindu Nationalism.

The discussion about Hindu Nationalism brings us to the academic content of the book. The author, while seeming to narrate a story, makes academic arguments regarding the concept of Hindu nationalism. He lists the prerequisites for the formation of a nationalist ideology – a notion of territory, a people to populate the territory, and most importantly a theory of politics. The Hindu Nationalist notion of politics, he argues, is the product of democracy – of elections. His argument finds its basis in the fact that the Indian sub-continent, housing Hindus – who form 80% of its total population, proved to be fertile ground for the germination of the RSS’ ideology of Hindu nationhood. He argues that Hindu anxiety of being victimized coupled with a one-person-one-vote format of elections, set in that context of a Hindu majority, gave rise to the Hindu strain of nationalism. To bolster the validity of his arguments, he opposes the view that the BJP is a fascist organization by pointing to the BJP’s behaviour when faced with electoral defeat – a quiet acceptance of the results. He also counters the view that the BJP’s electoral performance hinges on its performance in matters of the economy by providing evidence of the BJP bringing more continuity and not change to the economic order. The author ends his narration, and therefore the book, by stating in his final chapter that the RSS-BJP’s obsession with staying united, and that alone, made it a credible alternative to the Congress while other parties broke down on account of infighting; to quote the author himself: “The secret sauce of the BJP, as well as the RSS, was their unbending focus on unity.”

Intent

A man waited under a three storied building, dressed in dirty grey shorts paired with a shirt whose color was fading on account of frequent use and wash. His footwear – a pair of flip-flops, were being kneaded into the floor under his weight; of the average Indian height, he weighed on the heavier side. His face looked grim on account of an unkempt beard and unruly hair streaked orange at places with henna. At a glance he would’ve been mistaken for yet another hosteler standing aimlessly rooted to the spot, however his quick and impatient glances at the phone spoke of anxiety, perhaps even a dash of annoyance at being made to wait.

A silver colored car soon rolled in. The car looked battered from the outside, barely being held together by the numerous stitches, hammer-blows and glues administered to it. It carried in it a woman, small and fair. she was preening over the steering to check if anything was likely to be powdered under the car’s wheel. She steered masterfully to stop right in front of the man. A smile that spread across his face broke into a foolish grin and he quickly got into the car, seating himself next to her.

They drove away from the building and returned a few hours later. This time, the man seemed to be in a hurry to get down and leave. The woman seemed unwilling to leave his side. An argument seemed to have broken out, his face flushed with anger and soon turned into a look of despair as the woman began to cry. He took her in his arms and made what looked like an awkward attempt at consoling her. It would have been a surprise if he did a good job of it, after all he looked more like a goon and less like a gentleman. The man adjusted himself in the seat and eased himself out of the car while the woman stepped out with feline ease. He waddled over to her side of the car, gave her an awkward hug and began fishing his things out of the rear seat. She went to the boot and took a huge basket of food out and placed it in his hands. Her eyes shone with love and his eyes burned with hunger at the sight of food. Looking back at her, a warm smile spread across his face; he patted her head and made a gesture of gratitude. She then handed him a book. She held it very lovingly and pressed it into his hands. He took it, it was an ordinary book, nothing unlike the ones that can be found on the shelves of any of this world’s book stores. There was nothing exotic or extraordinary about it. It was for him. He was satisfied; he was happy that this book was in his hands.

Tagore on food security

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where food is abundant and the bathrooms are free;
Where the portions are large enough to allow you a lion’s share of the pie,
Where burps come out of bellies, loud and free;
Where ceaseless cookery dishes out food, in richness high,
Where the dark, sweet nectar named Thums Up has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sands of diets sugar-free;
Where the palate is led forward by thee
towards an ever expanding appetite;
Into that heaven, my Father, let my countrymen awake!
– Kavindanath Tagore

Far far from the madding crowd – Paderu part I

As we drove along the ghat road, the smell of damp wood and mud filled the air. It had rained not too long ago. Trees in the ghats, pine and fir, let rainwater flow off of their leaves. Velvet green moss grew on the aluminium railings, eating away at the yellow and black paint. Flowers bloomed and bent over unable to bear the weight of water which the showers filled them with. Streams of rainwater trickled down, dodging fallen trees and branches, wetting the mud – making clay.

The black tar of the road glistened as if it had just been laid and flattened and similarly did leaves and flowers glisten. The rain did much to add some shine.

Quite soon, animals began coming out of their homes. Mammals and birds shook themselves dry while crickets and frogs competed to be loud. Soon enough the forest was filled with a variety of sounds – the cacaphony of birds, insects and frogs. Snakes slithered by, some coiled themselves around branches, some along the railings, yet others unwittingly crossed the path of speeding vehicles, losing their lives at the altar of mindless human rush.

The sun set, unnoticed until it was too dark to ignore. The road then started seeming dangerous. The black night, unlit by streetlights, seemed to lead into an abyss. Only then did I realise how precarious our position was. One wrong turn would lead to instant death. Luckily, a little further I caught a glimpse of dim yellow lights – the kind you would come across in a village.

Welcome to Paderu.

Work stops by six o’clock, families have dinner by eight o’clock and shops shut within a half an hour thence. The entire village sleeps by nine o’clock. Around the shady corners you may chance upon a lone man clad in a grey lungi, sitting on his haunches next to a freshly started fire, puffing on a beedi.

The damp climate adds to the heavy silence engulfing the town, subtly nudging you to hurry home, to tuck yourself comfortably under blankets.

To be continued.

Chaparai – rediscovering humanity part I

Hyderabad

Under Begumpet flyover is an Urban Homeless Shelter run by an NGO. Residents of the Homeless shelter are given bedding and are required to arrange food for sustenance by themselves. They need to register with the NGO by providing all relevant details. Most of them are unemployed youth or aged men eking out a living some way or the other.

On speaking with them for a while a few months ago, some of them told over chai that not even their kin provided them with lodging for free. As they narrated stories of migration from various parts of the country to Hyderabad in search of employment and income generation only to find out that cities eat away at the hearts of humans leaving them devoid of humanity itself, I found myself dejected. Somewhere deep in my heart originated a sinking feeling about where the pull-effect of cities and urban economies is leading us.

Chaparai

After Ranajilleda Waterfalls our next destination was Chaparai. By this time I had made up my mind to live with the tribal community there.

As soon as we made our way close to the stream that flowed down from the hills, the delicious aroma of a blend of spices being cooked in bamboo over white-hot coal wafted towards us. We made our way through the jana-samudram to the very first stall and found out that it was the smell of “bongulo chicken”. My friends were excited and immediately began haggling – we were students after all and had to save every rupee we could! Being a vegetarian, I lost interest in the delicacy and started scouting the marketplace along the banks of Chaparai Waterfalls for any vegetarian food.

Groundnuts! I glimpsed an old lady selling groundnuts and that immediately drew me over. I soon slipped into a conversation while having groundnuts I purchased from her and in the due course of conversation told her of my intention to stay in the village with them. She looked elated, but soon enough, her face fell and she said “You city kids cannot live in our houses. They are far to small and far too uncomfortable for you. You wouldn’t even want to share a meal with us!”. Her statement pained me. I probed further and found out that less than a week prior to us having this conversation another group of tourists had come saying the same thing and had left cursing the old lady. She was reluctant to let us in.

I hesitated to pursue the issue any further but my heart would heed none of what my head said. I cajoled her and wheedled out information on who had room to let seven of us stay. Thus I first met Lakshmi akka. She showed me the place she could set aside for us and immediately said that she would give us mattresses to sleep on. I joyfully assented.

Little did we know that winter in Araku could be so cruel. The chilling cold crept into my bones from the floor right through the mattresses. Worse yet, I wasn’t carrying anything that could keep me warm. I barely slept that night.

Soon it was dawn and Nanda woke me up. I wanted to stay wrapped in the only blanket there was. Her persistent efforts got me off of the mattress and onto my feet. All of us changed into day clothes and were soon making our way towards the waterfall. Five minutes from the shanty we lived in was our destination and soon enough we were there.

A number of rocks had lodged themselves into the soil and the flowing stream was eating away at them slowly. The gravel under our feet tickled and the water swept us off balance. We discovered that walking against the current was impossible for us. Some of us, including me, made our way up the rocks. Somewhere higher up, amidst larger rocks, I safely sat down and put my feet into the cool stream. I was staring into the empty sky when something hit my foot. I looked down and found a buffalo skull. I was used to it since I had come across buffalo carcasses in various stages of decomposition at HCU, so I picked it up with a stick and flung it down towards my friends without warning. Their shrieks of alarm were worth witnessing! “Aartanaadamulu shravanaanandakaramuga unnavi” Ghatotkacha with SV Rangarao’s voice boomed in my head and found expression as a grin on my face .

To be continued when words flow like a stream.

Of ghosts and their habits

It is unknown if there are races of ghosts barring all the different ranked supernatural ghost-like beings animated in The Arabian Nights, perhaps Aladdin or Badr-al-Budur would know better about how many kinds of djinns exist and what their favourite haunts were back in the day. I read about djinns carrying away sleeping princesses to help them fall in love. Then there were stronger djinns called ifrit – I recall them as being capable of intelligent conversation and to plot for or against people.

In 2003 or perhaps in 2004 we were introduced to monochrome Telugu movies – Mayabazaar, Paataala Bhairavi, Chikkadu Dorakadu…, quite a few of which were from Madhira Subbanna Deekshitulu’s Kasi Majili Kathalu and bore remarkable similarities to stories from The Arabian Nights. Yet again ghosts, djinns and their Indian counterparts – which were, in my view then, much more sinister were major characters in the stories.

As time passed I watched Dayyaala Kota, Pisaachaala Veta excellently dubbed into Telugu by Sri Lakshmi Ganapati Films (the lady who voiced the advertisement sounded a lot like the lady who used to scream Narayana and Sri Chaitanya Techno School ads on AIR) along with my cousins in the sticky summers of Chirala. Midnight trips to the kitchen were scary given how streetlights hadn’t yet invaded that little town, leaving the sleeping residential area under a pitch black sky with an ever so slight breeze rustling the leaves of every tree surrounding us – much like in the horror films we watched.

Over the years, having watched a number of English, Telugu and Hindi horror-thriller films, I’ve observed ghosts all over the world have some common habits –

1. English ghosts are not beauty conscious – they can be faceless, formless or can manifest themselves in objects and will even possess ordinary looking humans but will almost never take over bodies of beautiful women – it is a rarity! On the other hand, most Indian ghosts have a penchant for beautiful female human bodies. You see, it is always the beautiful woman, the heroine more often than not, who gets possessed!
2. Most often ghosts belong to royalty and were nice people when alive. All of them have a history of facing betrayal by close friends or relatives ending in cruel deaths – leading to the birth of a bhoot or a pret or deyyam or pisaacham depending on the type of vengeance they seek to exact.
3. Ghosts love rocking chairs, swings, doors, windows, bulbs – basically anything that they can use to mark their attendance.
4. Ghosts like lifting weights – Chandramukhi lifted a cot all by herself, Bhagamathi could twist and break a person’s arm while beating another person, Pashupati could break out of incarceration in an iron strong box, Imhotep could shift large amounts of desert sands! Being possessed works better than gym!
5. Ghosts find old, dilapidated buildings comfortable. Dilapidated buildings have enough rotten woodwork and creaking doors which can be used by ghosts to mark their attendance.
6. Indian ghosts do not damage much the possessed body while English ghosts set it to bleed and rot. It seems as if Indian ghosts can take better care of human bodies – until they leave.
7. All ghosts, across the globe, achieve full power only before they are eliminated. Such a waste of all the 90 minutes they spent powering up!
8. Most Indian ghosts are stuck in a time-frame perhaps because they are shut-ins in general, they happily assume that centuries of waiting in a building is going to keep their tormentors alive for them to kill!
9. Ghosts kill time plotting centuries-long revenges!

Ranajilleda – in our footsteps lies destruction

My fascination with “The Brook” by Lord Tennyson is simply never-ending. A thin stream flowed down from the holes in a government built check dam, slipping, sliding, glooming and glancing all the while eating away at the rocks over which it flowed. The water formed a pool where it hit the earth with some force. On either side of the waterfall was a thick foliage of trees, shrubs and vines, rendering invisible the source of the flowing water.
I stepped into the pool it formed, the water was surprisingly cold given how hotly the sun was beating down. As I rested my feet in the flowing water, I looked around and saw chicken bones, broken beer bottles, disposable cups and plates, human excrete, discarded clothes and a group of city-dwellers adding to the garbage. Right across there were three tribal kids standing atop rocks witnessing the slow destruction of their home and their source of potable water.
They wore hostile looks when I tried to climb to the source of the waterfall. After all, I was a city-dweller too – an outsider hell bent upon destroying their home. They told me that they had blocked the way up since people were spoiling the source itself. I accepted that reason and decided not to climb any further.
Later, I sent my friends ahead and struck a conversation with one of the kids. I pestered him until he yielded that they hadn’t really sealed the way up but had taken up the issue with their sarpanch. He told me “…all the garbage is thrown in this stream, it contaminates our drinking water. Do you see the fields there? They get water from this stream. People in villages locates as far your eyes can see get potable water from this stream. We fall ill because these outsiders pile garbage here…”. It was not something I was unaware of, but looking at the fields and the people working there for a living gave me a sense of the magnitude of damage we cause wherever we go. Walking along the dusty roads to the waterfall I realized how these hardy forest-dwellers resented our actions.
I did get to see the source and the water was sweet.