Life is Strange, the Law Stranger

On many a night the last few months, I sat with some friends in a park at night, the only park I know in this city that stays open beyond 8pm. We used to sit there and smoke a joint or two, chit-chat a bit about this and that, and then go our respective ways. As always, the outdoors felt good, what with a light breeze and the sounds of traffic long dead.

There is also a basketball court in the same compound, and we used to sometimes see two policemen sitting there and eating dinner. Since we were not really bothering anyone or making noise or being a nuisance in general, they paid us no heed. Everything went by merrily till this incident.

This cop shows up on his bike, and after parking it, heads straight for where we are sitting. First thing he does in the dark is click a picture of us. Not with his phone, but with a proper Samsung digital camera he is carrying around in his pocket. He then proceeds to question us, and then to search us. Sure enough, we get busted for whatever little we had with us.

Since I don't speak the local language, I was spared most of his homilies, which seemed ridiculously hollow, considering he took away the intoxicants and the rolling paper (as they always do), and took a sizable bribe too, to not lock us up in the police station overnight. Happy Diwali for him and his family, that's for sure.

Anyway, so I read up the law surrounding drug use in the country. Strange, at the very least. For one, there are no different classes of drugs. They are all lumped together, from weed to opium to cocaine to amphetamines. Anyway, if I have 1 gram of weed on me or 1 kilo, the punishment is the same. A fine of Rs 10,000 or prison for 6 months, or both. Same for up to 100 grams of hashish. Just hope the presiding judge didn't have a fight with his wife before leaving the house that morning.

But if I proclaim myself to be an addict, and also volunteer to undergo treatment, I get away without any penalty, neither financial nor temporal. Wow. Goes to show that only the most moronic lawmakers can profess such abject belief in the goodness of my shallow heart to actually give up such a harmless indulgence.

Un-Static State of States

After much dithering in the name of consultations, the government of the day has announced the creation of the state of Telangana. More like, ripping it out from the current day Andhra Pradesh, as we know it. But anyway, it has been done.

It is slightly disconcerting to know that the geography of India I learnt in school, and the maps I learnt to draw, don't hold true any more. But when compared to how some scientists decided that Pluto ain't a planet no more, this becomes much easier to get my head around.

People are people, always wanting to cash in the "me-too" cheque they write to themselves. So we suddenly have renewed demands for new states erupting across the length and breadth of the country. I have no stance to take on such demands, but I do have a stance on the mindless violent disruption of public life and destruction of public property that more often than not accompanies these demands.

Of course, there are those wiser than me, having clever things to say about demands for separate statehood. A subject on which, as I just admitted, I have no personal point of view. Take the very enlightened Shobha De, for instance. Or is it Shobhaaaaaaa Deee? Anyway, how many a's and e's she uses in her name doesn't change the fact that she has a stance on the matter, a stance she is unafraid of expressing, because, as she claims, she is a Mumbaikar, an Indian and a woman. Good for her, all three.

But a stance she has. If we take the literal route, which many of our hilarious politicos have taken, her stance will seem to show she wants lots of little little bits and pieces of land all over the place, each called a state of its own. If we take the ironic route, as she herself suggests we do, she seems to be against the whole idea of dividing states.

The question that baffles me is this: what does she know about the creation of a state to hold any point of view on a matter that is very visibly leading to very strong passions on both sides of the debate? Or is being a writer about the social life of Bombay enough to grant one the insight needed?

Drunk Driving and the Police

After what I can now perhaps term an exceptionally bad time back in 2009, things seem to have changed somewhat for the better. I drive more often now after drinking than I did then, and I haven't been busted once. No, I don't want you to tell me how I shouldn't be driving under the influence in the first place. We all have our varying limits, and when I know I have crossed mine, I sleep over. And yes, if it is a lesson I will only learn the hard way, I am quite okay with that. Anyway, back to what I was saying...

I haven't been busted, but I have been taking the same routes, going by the same check-posts and driving as I always do. Sometimes, the cops stop me, but mostly, I don't know why, they don't. In the last 11 months or so, I recall being stopped four times. Once, I had only had one beer, and was well within permissible limits. The next time, the cop leaned in to my window and asked me my name. I had a few whiskeys in me, and the cop should have been able to smell it over the mint I was chewing, but he must have had his reasons to let me go.

The third incident was quite funny. These cops didn't have a breathalyser on them, so one of them asked me to breathe out as he quite literally stuck his nose in to my open mouth. If he had just asked me, I would have told him I had been drinking, but maybe he liked smelling stale alcohol on strangers' breaths, who knows. Anyway, he pulls away, and with a grin that showed his teeth in the dark, said only one word: "Drink!" I told him I had been drinking earlier, but hadn't consumed alcohol in the last six hours, and that was pretty close to the truth, actually. Not six, but about five hours, was what it was.

Since I can't speak Kannada and he couldn't speak Hindi or English, I had to get out of the car and meet the "senior" cop standing by his bike. He told me the legal procedure, and I assured him I was well aware of it, and that I would love to abide the law. He asked me my name, what I did, where I stayed, and then asked me why I wanted to go through the hassle of going to the police station to get my breath analysed, and then have my car impounded and then go to the court to pay a fine to have it released. I told him such was the law. This nonsense went on for a while, and in between, there were two bikes that, in their bid to get through the check-post quickly, crashed in to each other right next to the cops. I was amazed to see that the "senior" cop was still entirely interested in only me. Anyway, at some point, after I had refused his offer to "settle" things 4-5 times, he said, and I almost quote, "Just give 200 rupees and go." To my defiant "Why?", he gave the most ridiculous answer imaginable, and here I quote verbatim, "Because you are owner."

He wanted me to give him money merely because he thought I could afford to. Wow. What a moron. And so far removed from the nice man who stopped me last night, who stopped me with his breathalyser on the ready. As I rolled my window down, I could hear the resetting beeps as he fingered it, and the moment I put my mouth towards it without saying a word, he pulled back, smiled, and asked "Are you drunk?" I think that was close to the last thing I expected at the time, and didn't even comprehend what he said. "Huh?" Repeat smile, repeat question: "Are you drunk?" Honestly, I answered in the negative, and he said, smiling "OK, go."

So much for cop-bashers, who paint all of them with the same brush. And in a somewhat Cartman-esque way, he knew how to respect my authority!

New year greeting verse

This year's verse: a bit late in coming, and a little too nice for my own liking. But all the same, here is 'Post Mayan'.

The past was hell of a blast
and the present is similar too
Rift in the emo-time continuum
can cause various shades of blue

Ah, bah, who gives a blah?
Loss teaches more than it takes
So learn to pick out those gems
from among the sack full of fakes

Don't fret over what's gone away
Don't worry about what's left behind
Life goes on, generally beautiful
Stay healthy of heart, strong of mind

Winner

This story won me some money recently, and there is some talk of it being published too, as part of an anthology. Anyway, neither of those will concern you as much as the morbidity in the story. So grab something to to munch on and enjoy The Perfect Closure :D

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As the sky grew dark outside, Sheetal sat by her window, sipping her coffee that had long gone cold. She shivered a little, the coffee providing no warmth, and hugged herself tightly. She took one long last look at the growing darkness and stood up, closed the window and faced the unlit room. Meandering around objects that she couldn’t possibly see in the dark, she made her way to kitchen, rinsed the cup and placed it in the sink.

Back in the room, she switched on the little night lamp, and by its feeble light, saw the body that lay next to the couch. These last few years, she had loved him with all her heart. And now, he was dead. All those years of loving and caring came to nothing, it seemed. All she was left with was a hole in her heart and dead body to deal with. Thankless bastard, she thought to herself, leaving her all alone to deal with the mess he left behind.

She sat down on the floor next to the body, and held the lifeless head in her lap. It wasn’t her fault that he was dead. She knew he had a weak heart, and she alone knew how much of her meagre salary she had already spent on his health. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it was only a matter of time, but she had constantly put the thought away in some recesses of her brain that she never accessed. So, expected as it was, the death came as quite a blow.

Such a transient thing, life, she thought. We are born, we live, we eat, we love, we hurt, we die. And if we are reborn, we do it all over again. What is the point anyway?

As she sat in the feeble light of the night lamp in the grip of existentialist thoughts and feeling a sense of great loss, she heard a rumbling sound. She looked up with surprise, and then realised that it was her stomach signalling hunger. Drawn back to the reality of everyday bodily matters, she once again wondered what she should do with the body of her dog. She considered burying it, but couldn’t bear the thought of maggots eating away at her dear Monty. She couldn’t just dump it some place remote, for that would be too cruel to the one being she had loved selflessly. She definitely couldn’t afford a cremation. And she sure as hell couldn’t just leave it lying next to the couch.

Picking it up, Sheetal took it to the kitchen and put it down on the table. Rummaging through her refrigerator, trying to decide what to cook for dinner, she realised that she was all out of groceries, except a carrot which was hardly sufficient dinner. She took it out anyway, washed it clean, sat down on a chair facing the body, and began munching on it, while trying to decide what to do about dinner and the body on the table.

And then, it struck her. Sheer genius, she thought, and whimsical as it may seem, it was surely a great idea to eternalise her love for Monty while solving two of her more immediate concerns.

When the meal was over, and she had put away a substantial amount of leftovers, she made herself some more coffee and went back to her window to stare at the darkness outside. In the clear night sky, she traced Orion and Taurus, and thought of Monty’s soul up there in the sky. She tried to conjure up another constellation in his memory, and when she failed at that, she tried to pick a star that would always remind her of him.

Satisfied with a bright star a bit off Orion, she felt a double sense of contentment. No matter where she was, she only had to look up at the sky to see Monty in the unnamed star she had picked for him. And no matter where she was, she had to only rub her stomach to remember that Monty would forever and always be a part of her.

Sheetal couldn’t have asked for a better closure.

Two Deaths, Four Days and 175 KM Apart

What truly set apart the deaths of Bal Thackeray and Ajmal Kasab was not the time or distance between their occurrences, but rather, the reception that they received by the general public. While the former's demise saw lakhs of mourners gather in the streets of Mumbai and generated words of condolence from all and sundry across the political, corporate, entertainment and other aspects of public life; the latter's drew thousands to celebrate joyously by bursting crackers and distributing sweets, with some even saying the death took too long in coming.

Both men were religious fanatics, or at least behaved as such. While Thackeray may not have killed anyone personally in his life, he was directly or indirectly responsible for more deaths in Mumbai than the 166 that Kasab was given the noose for. Kasab was a part of a 3-day 10-man blitzkrieg on the city of Mumbai, while Thackeray ran the city like his personal fiefdom for decades, using gangs of hundreds and thousands to instill fear in whoever he chose to brand as anti-Maharashtra at the time of his choosing.

Kasab confessed to his crimes and provided information about his handlers in Pakistan, information India can leverage (not that it has successfully done much with it yet) in its relations with its neighbour. Thackeray publicly confessed his admiration for Hitler and used mobs of rioting youth to paint a cosmopolitan city his own version of saffron.

Even after he was hanged, Kasab's photographs were stamped upon and burnt in processions in various parts of the country. Voices of dissent, those opposing the death penalty in principle, were called anti-patriotic. And even in his death, Thackeray's followers caused Mumbai to shut down for at least two days. Someone who refused to deify this architect of communal divisions, let alone insult him, was promptly arrested.

Not that it justifies his actions, but at least Kasab could be thought of as a misguided young fool. Thackeray's crime, however, was misguiding young fools like Kasab. Good riddance, I say.

Not that this blog is nearly as popular or famous, but now, should I wait for the police to come knocking? :P

Better Judgement

Earthquakes are hardly understood even by seismologists, people who spend years studying the movement of tectonic plates and call themselves experts on the subject. And along comes this court in L'Aquila, telling seismologists that they knew better than they claim they did, and hence ought to have warned people more about an earthquake that claimed a few hundred lives three years ago.

So now, we have judges telling scientists what can and cannot be known and predicted by science. Reminds me a bit of what the church did once upon a time. Seems like whoever holds the keys to making and upholding laws goes a bit bonkers from time to time.

While I cannot agree with this decision, I cannot be too harsh on the judges either. After all, we all make bad judgements from time to time. And the truly terrible ones are those that we label as "despite my better judgement". A swim in a choppy sea because you are at the shore for only a day; a drunken drive back home when you can't even walk; going hunting at the bar when you already have a cougar in your bedroom; blah blah blah.

I like to live in the garden, but I don't want to call it home because... because well, for one, the garden has seasons, some likable, others not so much. And a home should be home for all seasons. For two, if the garden gets used to my caring for it, and if I suddenly stop living there one day, what will the garden do about the many flowers it plans to sprout? For three, even if I adapted to reason one and the garden adapted to reason two, how does one live in a garden that is in another part of the world?

Despite my better judgement, I called it home. And then, my home slammed its door in my face. :)

Losing the Past

Even as I use technology in many aspects of my life, and appreciate fully well how it has made certain things easier to do, I still don't like technological progress in many ways, and digitalisation the least of all. And yet, as so many of us now do, I have so much personal information saved in the digital format that it would fill up half my room were it all on paper.

And then, one day, my hard disk crashed. As it happened, I had been in the process of shifting etc, and hence my usual back up sources were not quite updated. And having shown my hard disk around a few places now, I have resigned myself to having lost all of its contents. For ever.

This resignation towards this sense of loss of personal symbols of my past has been almost cathartic. It has been a great loss. Twelve years of writing, almost entirely lost save a few bits here and there. And of course, all the electronic communication outside of email from the one who shall not be named but is a constant presence in my mind. Vanished, to never be read again. Her poems too, zany, so full of love and hate, humbling. Eight years of photographs, which included almost all my travelling outside of school days. And of course, all the memories that they could remind me of. All those happy times and even some of the sad ones. The mind gets lazy when it has photographs to help recall the past. It starts to get hazy about the details and forgetful of entire incidents.

Now it is all gone, without leaving behind the faintest trace except the dead weight of a useless hard disk. I was furious at first, and then, at some point, I realised I was doing what that other character in Hocus Pocus kept saying he did but never actually did: I was laughing like hell. I know now that it didn't make me feel any better, but it didn't make me feel any worse either.

Instead of trying to recall everything I have lost of my writing, I am working from scratch to fill up my hard disk anew. Photographs will come in their own time. Photographs of and writing from her, however, will not be coming back since she has no desire to be in my hard disk any more.

Making a break with the past is difficult in more ways than one, I realise. It is not easy to make the break yourself, and if it gets made for you by circumstance, it is not the easiest thing to accept. And once you accept it, you take a step closer towards being Buddha. But it is a giant step, and I am still in mid-stride. Sigh.

Politicising Sex

I am sure there will be those who will argue that sex is always political inherently, just like everything else is. But I am not walking that academic path, where everything is seen through the lens of power equations with no room for reciprocated feelings like such as those of unbridled lust or sublime love that have no regard whatsoever for power or politics.

However, women are Togo are planning to thoroughly politicise sex. There are calls for the President to resign and at least one woman feels that the men of the country are not doing enough to ensure his resignation. So her group has called for women to withhold sex from their husbands/lovers/partners for a week, in the hope that the lack of action in the bedroom will prod the men in to taking more concrete action against the President.

A novel idea, I thought, if not the smartest one. But apparently, it has been done before in Liberia about a decade ago. I don't know if it worked there in its calls for peace, but I doubt its efficacy in general. If you want the President to resign, ask his wife to stop fucking him. And if you can't convince her, why deprive your own husband? Next thing you know, you have a country full of women complaining of marital rape and such. Instead of solving one problem, you create another one.

The Chinki Fleeing Terror

Alarming text messages, doctored videos, sensational posts on social media, and of course, the good old word of mouth whipped up enough hysteria for chinkis from various states to flee whichever south Indian cities they were in, to go back to the safety of their homes. The government has now blamed elements in Pakistan for the mischief and what is being labeled "hate terror". Maybe the Pakis have a role to play in this conspiracy that I find particularly sinister, maybe they don't. Either way, I don't care.

Whoever planned this, however, must be an intelligent person with his (his sense of deviousness rivals that of a woman) finger squarely on the pulse of modern humanity. Send someone a fucked up text, it will reach 100 others. Minimum expense, even less effort and spectacular results that take on a life entirely their own. This whole business is based almost entirely on fiction, with not a single factual element to substantiate it. He must be orgasming constantly at the mere thought of this mobile & Internet age.

Junta has been obsessing about showing solidarity with the fleeing chinkis and leaders from the Muslim community, allegedly responsible for the threats, have been making regular appeals for peace and for the chinkis to return. All very commendable and back-slap worthy. But what about the actual effects of these people leaving?

My Manipuri friend has not left town, but he hasn't been going to work either. He is enjoying a 5-day weekend, helped by the two days he took off between Independence Day and the weekend. Because of the risk his life faced had he stepped out of his house, living as he does in a neighbourhood dominated by Muslims.

Security agencies in town are having a tough time. My own building complex has depleted security staff, prompting the managing committee to issue a notice seeking resident volunteers who will patrol the complex late at night and early mornings. Great way to teach the youngsters about vigilante behaviour. And what happens if there aren't enough volunteers? Should I feel unsafe too? And all because the chinkis, feeling unsafe, have left? Should I also leave town then? But where do I go? For me, this is where home is.