I would count it a life well lived

if all I ever managed was to train a goat like this. Though I can't guarantee it, I think I could die without regrets.

I was five minutes away - were you ok too?

First there was a red-hot fire-engine trying to make its way in, wailing its useless, unheeded lament in the absolute jam of outer circle in the rush-hour. The there was the ambulance, a mere five minutes later and a mere two hundred yards away, swinging smoothly out an eerily deserted inner circle to take its place in the same unmoving wake, crying its cry of urgency against the immovable, obdurate force of too many people encased in too much metal crushed into too narrow a space to allow for manoeuvring. We work so hard to encase ourselves in skins progressively more impervious in degrees - to insulate ourselves from this unbearable environment that we have created and now cannot endure.
The questions begin to be asked yet again. As they have been with increasing urgency for the past few years. And yet, no matter how insistently, vociferously or unanimously put, these questions fail to do what any good questions should - they fail, time and time again, even when answered accurately, to solve the problem. Perhaps, then, we are asking the wrong questions. The question is always, once the initial shock fades - and the shock fades faster each time this happens; we really are becoming quite inured to the idea of private, borderless warfare - a very loud and bloodthirsty 'Who?'
Once the shock fades and reaction sets in, we need some fingers pointed, and we need them pointed quick. The idea of an invisible threat, like the idea of an invisible anything, always hits too close to the bone - the human animal is too used to relying on its ability to see to function. Its telling that we can only make our absolute Authority so completely and unshakeably scary by making it unseeable - why do only invisible gods flourish?
But the real question, the one we are prevented from asking by years of conditioned, ingrained prejudice and instant offensive reactions to insecurity, is the one that would send up a collective wail of dismay out to the far reaches of the universe should the entire population of this planet one day, just for a minute, stop and ask it of themselves: 'why?'
I think the earth would implode under the weight of that collective sorrow, despair and disappointment - the disillusioning moment of agonizing, blinding SIGHT when we take away all the filters and really look at ourselves and our self-important little world.
'Is the goverment too soft on terrorism' a poll immediately asks. That makes no sense to me. When you strip away the layers of emotion both those words have been carefully swaddled in before being presented to us - so that you feel instantly reassured by the one and threatened by the other - don't they mean the same thing? An attempt at coercing the will of someone else through a show of force. Is not the line we are made to endure to get a drivers licence or a passport merely for the dubious pleasure of getting from point a to point b ('which of course we are completely free to do whenever we wish') a form of bending us to a will other than ours by the occasional discreet flexing of a muscle or two that serves to remind us of everything we might risk by disagreeing?
So what's the difference? Oh, that's right, we didn't elect the terrorists through due process, free and fair and completely transparent.
But someone did.

"Those bloody pakis", a friend said on the phone. "SIMI" and "Taliban" were also tossed around. My mother and I, on the other hand, can't decide whether it was the government or the opposition. I thought the latter, and was immediately made to feel like a conspiracy nut. Thank god for my mum, bless her heart, who called a couple of hours later and without hesitation said 'it's the goverment'.
If there's anything that warms the cockles of the hearts of us conspiracy types, it's a nut nuttier than we are.

Passive-Aggressive Love Poem

I get that you’re a little thick,
A little slow, a little quick,
Some things about me make you sick.
Love, we've been played that age-old trick.

Remember when you had the dick?
It made you proud, it made me sick.
Does that still cut you to the quick?

We’re two faces of a coin;
We never face, we never join.

If I were you, I’d never stick.
Why don’t you leave, you dense-born hick?

This IPL madness is getting a little annoying. Not to mention extremely hard to avoid. And I no longer mean just driving past Wankhede two hours after a match and still being stuck in a jam for thirty minutes. I mean going out anywhere with a TV for dinner and being unable to hear anything over a room full of random strangers busy cheering god knows which player from god knows what team doing god knows what. Except of course when Bhajji slaps whatsisname. In which case even I can no longer avoid knowing what is going on with the damn thing. Anyways, though I still resolutely refuse to get involved with the whole thing, there is one interesting thing that struck me about the whole charade. Unsurprisingly, its to do with entertainment.
Even less surprisingly, considering what a horny country we are, the entertainment has to do with titillation.
I'm talking about the cheerleaders. The dubiously titled "cheerleaders". I mean, c'mon, who the hell is even going to try and pretend you need someone to get Indians excited about the cricket they're watching. Though no one can logically explain it, even less can anyone deny that they're all crazy about the damn thing. Inexplicably, and against all reason, but still. Bet you can't even hear them at all over the roar of those crazed crowds.
But my point is not the validity of their existence or lack thereof. I'm no one to run down a little raunchy entertainment just because it doesn't entertain me. And I'm sure they're easier on the eye than our , let's face it, pudgy players with invariably bad hair.
No, my point is that they're all foreign. And I'm guessing fairly expensive. And there was, not too long ago, the very infamous Dance-Bar ban in maharashtra that resulted in thousands of people losing their livelihoods. So while there are thousands of unemployed, possibly destitute, female dancers roaming the streets in a confused daze of hunger and implied shame, we are now importing women from abroad to come and entertain us in pretty much the same way, only much more public. Is that one of the by-laws of morality: as long as the participants exceed a thousand it is alright. Any act, once public enough, becomes tolerable?
Reading back, this sounds, funnily enough, like one of those conservative arguments doing the rounds in the US against outsourcing and immigrants and the mass unemployment they are causing. But that isn't the point here either. These jobs weren't lost to competition (fair or otherwise); they were lost to huge stinking piles of politically motivated moral grandstanding. And then conveniently swept under the carpet and forgotten. As usual, a half-assed cure. The usual problem of continuity and coherence that comes in with any primarily verbal culture, I guess. We make our statements and then we forget. No records, no memory.

Incidentally, from repeated prolonged chats with my rather bored old land-lady, from whom there is no escaping, I gather that this flat I live in was previously inhabited by one such dance-bar girl. A Christian, who later got breast cancer but then got alright, and always had a lot of money in her pockets and a lot of plants on her balcony. An unfortunate combination, it turns out, because her greedy – or desperate – mali planned to kill her for the money in her wallet. Fortunately he talked about his plans before-hand and hence was prevented, and the dancer went on to keep watering her own plants for many months to come. Until she left. About the time of the dance-bar ban I would like to think. Anyways, apart from that she was a model tenant, with only one boyfriend who occasionally came over with a couple of bottles of beer and then left at a reasonable hour.
It’s amazing, and a little scary, just how much our landlady knows about the private lives of her previous tenants.
And she goes through our garbage.

There is a line of faded old wind-horses on the rooftop next to ours. (Those colourful rectangles of cloth with Tibetan prayers printed on them that they tie rows of. Everytime the winds touches the flag, it carries the prayer up to heaven.) It is tied to a dish-antenna at one end and a black water-tank at the other. I don’t think any Tibetans live there anymore, though they must have at one time. The wind-horses look very old, but that isn’t saying much for frail pieces of cloth that endure the harsh Delhi weather and sun day in and day out. I like to think though, that they are ownerless, up there for no specific purpose or person, but rather as a general sort of prayer that has lost its specific purpose and now serves us all. A faded, forgotten, fluttering old prayer for humanity.
There is an ingrained aversion in Indians to removing any sort of religious symbols or decorations (notwithstanding the Babri masjid demolition). Or maybe the landlords just never go up to the roof. Whatever the case may be, the wind-horses are still there. I live too far away to be able to tell whether the prayers written on them can still be read or the sun has bleached the ink right off. But as long as there is a breeze, they go right on doing what they were meant to do, regardless of their current condition and situation. They hang there, not defeated by neglect or abandonment, resolute in their purpose, joyful in their daily dance with their free old friend, the wind. By no means on their last prayer yet.

Inaugural

" Enquiries are pouring in from various parts of India on the availability of camel milk. The camel breeders tell us that their animals are too wild for milking. However what we notice is that once the she-camels get adjusted to the practice of milking, they start liking it." - Ilse Kohler Rollefson, founder, Sansthan. In The Hindu, Wednesday, April 9, 2008.