You are not the one

--Gaurav Sapra

Why am i sad, why am i deserted
The girl I loved does not exist
You come in my dreams, you look like her
But you are not the one

There is no wish to talk
There is no desire to meet
as I will be searching for her
but my heart will soon realize
that You are not the one

If only I can get to your soul
I can confirm
that you are not the one
Not the one I loved
Not the one I lived for

Fringe

My office has so many glass panes that at times it is difficult to differentiate people from their reflections. I am standing at the window smoking, looking at the world outside through my own reflection when Natasha walks through the door in her bright red dress. Natasha always pops out her breasts more than usual when she comes to talk to me. Today I don’t notice them. ‘Boss wants to see you’, she tells me disappointed with my indifference. I am walking to his cabin when I remember that Sahil is out of the country. I open the door and I find Suzanne sitting there. She is repentant and she wants me back. We kiss and I am in her bedroom. She still has all the photographs of her new lover. The door bell rings and I don’t reply. It rings again and again.

I get out of sofa- the room is dark and a cheetah is chasing a deer on television - and I open the door. It was Siddharth and his girl friend. They come in and leave the door open. I lie down in my couch again and Siddharth takes a chair. His girlfriend sits in his lap and they start kissing. I browse through channels but nothing interests me. I look at them and I am disgusted. I think to myself, “Watching TV all day long has made me fat, I should go out sometimes”. I get back to sleeping.

I am sitting at my desk when Natasha comes back. She is wearing a black shirt. She looks flat-chested. She tells me that Sahil wants to see me and turns to walk away. I reach out to her and grab her by her waist. She turns and slaps me. Everyone is talking. There is no one in office but I can hear the murmurs. I walk to Sahil’s cabin. A fat ugly man is sitting in his chair bare-chested. “Do you want your job back?” he asks. “You know, I never cared much about the job”. “Who cares what you care about?” The murmuring rises.

My couch is surrounded by people, a sea of familiar faces and bodies. I get out of the sofa and try to look over the sea to find someone I may want to talk to. I go and stand with Abhishek, a college friend. He is talking to another friend. He says, “If there is no wish to loot, rape and murder, there would be no pursuit of power. The civilization would cease to exist”. I am bored and I walk away. More than bored, I am irritated. I look for the door to exit but I can’t find it. I find my mother. “Did you say hello to Papa? You must. He’s here, he’d like it. When people grow old they like it when children talk to them.” “I would, Mummy.” I run away from there to find the door. I finally find one. But it does not open outside. I find Suzanne and her lover on the bathroom floor. People follow me in and cheer them. I break down crying but I cannot hear myself amidst the shouting. I make way for myself through the crowd and go into a corner.

“That is what people do. They talk and they talk. You cannot keep them from talking. I should not have left the door open in the first place.” I wrap myself in a cozy blanket and wait in the corner for all this to end.

Hail Hitler!

I don't get the fuss about Binayak Sen's sentence. I, for one, am completely with this decision. We should next electrocute Arundhati Roy and other activists, put all tribals in concentration camps and drive non-Hindus out of India. There is so much we can learn from our neighbor Srilanka and Nazi Germany about violating human rights. Or, like in everything else, we can ask for America’s help (which has an awesome experience in this regard) in killing the millions of poor who have too low a suicide rate to get eliminated all by themselves. While we are at it, let us kill all Kashmiri people and solve the Kashmir issue once and for all.
India, let us face it, has never been a land of equality. Even when our emperors sat on peacock thrones the peasants were as poor as ever. So the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice are nothing but a colonial hangover. They suit us as badly as adopted accents, Halloween parties and Pop music suit us. There is nothing to be ashamed of admitting the fact that our forefathers had gone carried away by their foreign education and copied pasted everything flowery they came across. Thankfully, we can always undo whatever they did.
Let us not embarrass ourselves any more with a tight-fitting constitution. Let us, for once, say what we truly believe in and wear what fits us. Lets adopt swastika as our new emblem, choose among Churchill, Stalin and Hitler as father of our nation but first of all give ourselves a new constitution. I am giving the first few lines, please add on: "WE, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Corrupt Capitalist Communal Nepotic Republic ...".

Castrati

In Italy, during middle ages, women were not allowed in churches or operas. So choirs were mostly composed of young boys to provide the high pitch to the songs. The problem with young boys was that after a few years in choirs their voices cracked and they became useless. So the tradition of castrating them started. Young boys, seven or eight years old, were made to sit in tubs of hot water and their testicles were massaged softly for some time and then forcefully crushed. A short procedure gave the society its polyphonic voice. In some parts, these young boys were regarded as pious as the nuns. A small portion of these castrati went on to become very successful in their lives. The rest lived unimaginable lives. But far from protesting, many parents and sometimes young boys themselves applied for their castration.
If one thinks about it, one realizes how most of his or her life has been spent giving respect to various institutions. From those with big corridors and passages to those that operate out of dilapidated old buildings we serve them all. We dress up and we make up and we smile and we oblige. What we do not realize is that an institution, howsoever ostentatiously made up, and whose concepts are howsoever intricately woven into our skins, is still just meant to serve the individuals and not to castrate them. And that one's testicles, one's voice or one's right to hold an opinion should not be sacrificed to any organization. While a nihilist hatred of every structure is better avoided, fanatically upholding an institute's well being is also unhealthy, some times for the institute itself.

Arbit Angst

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
The above are lines by a SP, taken from an Arundhati Roy article on Maoists that appeared in The Outlook magazine.
The war against Maoists is more than just about a nation’s sovereignty or about minerals that the tribals are sitting on. It truly is, as our government claims, about bringing those tribals into mainstream. They cannot be allowed to sit there alone with a culture and richness of their own and be a pimple on the otherwise ubiquitous smoothness. It is about aesthetics but more than that it is about the need to show them a better way to live. A life style where happiness can be taken for a test drive out of big glass- showrooms and spirituality can be wrapped in glossy plastic to be sold to whoever may be willing to buy it. Where love can be wired internationally and dreams can be downloaded from any online store. Television is just one of the tool used for flattening, education is another.
But it’s not the welfare of tribals that I am concerned about. It is something else. The world, as I heard lately, is turning flat and somehow this is supposed to mean something good. People are born and nurtured into a standard template. Muslims drop their beards to appear harmless and Asians mask their accents to get jobs. To strive for normalcy is common and to be common is good because it is normal. Rat in a maze is more than an algorithm-problem; it is a lifestyle. Fashions and ideologies are global and often interchangeable. Those who lag behind in fashion are guided by glossy and colorful hoardings and billboards on their way. People are categorized and compartmentalized based on statistics and statistics matter more than life itself. And because this is all good for business, without caring much about what is puncturing/ bulldozing the world to flatness we are ready to take absolute flatness as the hallowed aspiration of the civilization.
Development is a name they invented to provide the atheists of post-modern era to worship and then it filled the hole left behind by the death of God. I know it is just a name but then only a name could replace God. Names abstract perception from meaning and thus can make an entity be loved or hated independent of its truth. Nice names made atom bombs sound cute. And now that development is sacred, it demands sacrifice. It is as this sacrifice that we are beginning to live in a market now. Every city is like other every other city. It is like living in a big Pizza Hut. We live, and die, acting as a consumer and a laborer alternatively. We are even referred to as capital, as human resource or labor market and we don’t mind such dehumanization. Any other role we may wish to take up is just a deviation and a waste of time. We do not want to be freaks or punks. If we are not a seller or a buyer, what justification do we have for our existence?
Look at the privacy-deprived lives of millions of people who have to live in flats and slums that look like cages for poultry. Or go to any shopping mall on a Saturday or Sunday and you will find the cattle class grazing in large numbers there. Excuse me; I should use my words carefully. Once someone had referred to cattle class as cattle class and they were all so offended that they slapped that smug smile off his face. Nobody contradicted him but they all said it was a sad thing to say. And sad it was because often it is sadist to say the truth. Especially, when it hurts the little pride that most of us have to live with. Even more so because it risks the downfall of the whole setup. It is a big project and tacitness is an indispensable discipline. It’s a big dream they have induced and nobody is allowed to wake anyone up. You have to walk with softest of steps. And when dead silence is an ingredient, truth is ineffable.
In all of this, arts have been reduced to petty entertainment meant to please the tired laborers and clerks every night so that they may work better and harder next day. They have been reduced to being refreshment for tired minds and bodies. But arts and culture are meant to be more than prostitutes. They do not need to derive meaning from dynamics of civilization, they are meant to provide meaning to it. They are supposed to be an end in themselves. And by arts I don’t just mean paintings, sculpting, literature or philosophy. I refer to any expression of human knowledge and condition, from Einstein’s relativity to Kafka’s Trial and to the dances and rituals of tribals of Chhattisgarh. Irrespective of whether that expression entertains us or not and whether we can apply it to our daily use or not.
In absence of these arts, in an ideally flat world, a world of economics, if technology is able to keep pace with flattening, we would all be cyborgs. If it does not, we’d all be zombies. We would all be instances of same definition. Our individualities would be obliterated to the extent that even our names will not be important. We’ll all have our alphanumeric roll numbers with pound signs and underscores. We will be grown in fields, ground preparation for which has begun.
This may sound like speculation of a cynic but it’s more than that. It is about the concern for human spirit that should define us but which we are ready to exchange, cheaply, for a place in statistics as aggregates.

“ No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; ever one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.” - Friedrich Nietzsche on a state that he feared mankind might tumble into.

Kites

Kites is a movie straight out of the Bhansali school of film making. And, therefore, it is a hollow story of dumb but good looking people caught in most over the top situations and thereby expressing most artificial of emotions. And to top it all, it is boring. If you had liked Devdas or Black ( don't be ashamed, media had made it difficult for anyone to not like it), read no more and go and watch Kites. You'll love it.
For others, Kites is a kind of movie that directors, mistaking themselves for good film makers, decide to make when they are bored and half drunk in some party. “Let's make ourselves a nice, little classic”, they'd say. And because there is an abundance of free capital flowing around they always find some asshole to put money into their dreams. Or maybe in case of Kites it was the other way round. Well, guess what. Cut, copy and paste collages never make a Mona Lisa. Not even if you lace them with million dollar ribbons. So, please spare us the torture.
And a word or two for Hrithik. You might not have noticed but there are many more differences between a movie and a shirt commercial than just their running times. In a movie looking good is not enough. At least once in a while you actually have to act, dude. Anyways, if you think just wasting time between movies will make you Aamir Khan, well, think again. Maybe you need to go the Akshay Kumar way.