Aap or Hum

Lahore 

21st Dec.201

11:02am

Dear Diary,

life is the same everywhere , here or there , at every place on this planet . The human psyche is the same , we all want the elusive , forgetting what we have and the treasures we have in our fist. Always,looking for the unreachable . Ammi , has been dropping silent hints that I need to try again and have  another baby ; which Inshallah this time would be a boy. I am happy contented, Ahmed is happy so why cant we be left alone to live our lives? The pressure, the subtle hints, the tactics, the carrot dangled in the form of a bigger solitaire , money .. 

uff! I wish i could just shout loud , this stifles me. what happened to Fatima? Isn't she important? finally I have regained my life back.. the lost stomach , the droopy boobs finally in shape. The 3 am crazy feedings, the feeling of being a cow and a milk machine.. the cries, the fever, tonsils, rash . I mean all the totkas are known ,every dai's secret method to fix colic is known . But, the pressure to produce the heir to the name. 

Aren't my dolls heiresses in their right? And now I have to go visit someone who will help me with this .. do i give in or its quieter and the tension , hassle is less to fight. Hmm.. hit the speed dial to Allah ..

Chandigarh

21st Dec 2012

3:33pm

Dear Diary,

Urghhhhh! Why oh why ? Why do i have to have another baby? Why cant one child be enough? Don't they worry about the population explosion? Don't they the know that the  earth is going to explode? Hello, how are we going to be sure ? When are you going to ask me, you  nincompoop?When am i going to be asked, that I want a child or not? Didn't men go through the science classes that it's their Y chromosome's that decide the sex and not mine. I do not decide what I am going to deliver .. it's you ! It's as if the world is going to end if I don't deliver the Bouy... 
Save me Babaji ... I want to work , I want to make my business a success...

Children of a lesser God

He walks with a swagger, with a smile. And he walks with a bounce , not knowing what tomorrow holds for him! Mangal is a ten year old who knows not what life is , or where his next meal is coming. No ipads, no smart phones , no gizmos , nothing. Just how to go about life everyday and where the next roti is going to come from.

Punjab is a melting pot of all the migrants who leave their homes for greener pastures (pun intended). They come from all the states like Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and the maximum come from UP. At the farm, we have groups and groups of children, with their parents who come to work seasonally to earn their living. Such a boy is Mangal, who has come with his father and his stepmother brought here to earn and eat his living. When one looks at him, you see this tiny, short, dark as anything boy merely a seven year old. The striking looks, matched with bright as a button eyes proudly claims his age as ten years. Well, Mangal ran away to a nearby village because his stepmother was beating him and then we got him back at the farm.

The little boy is here with me, and his intense looks mesmerize you. What is his fault? Is it his stars? The particular alignment that is blamed for every problem in our lives according to the pundits.  When I gave him mis-matched clothes, a pink pajama with his blue cardigan the smile he gave me was priceless! In fact, he lit up with his warm clothes, as earlier he was clad in a torn shirt with loose pants, with red color on his body. When I asked him, why do you have color on your body? He remarked wisely, saying, everyone knows, no one is going to stand for me, so that’s why they put the marka (screen print color for the gunny bags) on me!

These kids have no one. India, is progressing but at what cost? Elections are around the corner, but the cacophony of voices is just over slander and mudslinging to the nth order. No one thinks about the nameless, faceless children who are lost in the system, living, working worse than animals, losing their innocence in this society. We have tall statesmen, society NGO’s who preach the most but they all get shoved under the mat after elections, before that they are poster boys of garnering votes.

Children of lesser God, deserve better, and I think it is up to us, to change and pave the way for these nameless Chotu’s and Nikkis, rather than asking the political party to change the way. Do your bit and see the precious smile that can light a thousand ships.

Fifty Shades of grey - India Style

Fifty Shades of Grey – India Style

Ha! Got you on reading the article. This is no attempt to introduce you into erotic reading but just describing the political scenario in India. Every youngster (and this comes from my nephew) is confused, literally grey and polarized.  What to do, on one hand we have a n individual who symbolized the IIT dream and the successive rise into a government job who then went on the warpath and gave it up to singlehandedly revolutionize the system and promising us Utopia. India where there was no corruption, a country where jobs were for all, adequate electricity and water, and rights for the down trodden, the common man, the Mungeri lal! Then on the other side we have a right wing mammoth who has taken India by the storm by his clever speeches, the meteoric rise form a chai wallah to heading a successful govt in Gujarat but who can never erase the blot of communal riots. Those riots haunt him, and he never clears but answers back with clever rhetoric and challenging the other character in the arena. Pappu and Madam ji.

Pappu ji, gave his first interview and just bungled as a kid who learnt by rote an essay on The Cow and kept on answering the same answers for everything. I don’t know about his vision for the system it is just juvenile and nothing concrete for the India of tomorrow. Yes, he is a romantic figure and girls swoon over him, but romance isn’t going to run a country!

There is also the ubiquitous third front leader, colorful characters who add the necessary drama, the right amount of blackmail, the essential caste drama, and the very fact they can befool large percentage of our population that is rightly the Aam Janta. India is a country that is sitting on an explosion keg, the youth that is swayed by fundamental rights, emotions, high drama. They are a percentage that get riled up with emotion who have been brought up on virtual networking, face book viral statuses updates, a generation that is more connected to the umbilical cord of whatsapp, snap chat now. They are an instagrammer gen-x who are at once highly private but have their lives on display on their profiles once you break into their secret coven. I know for a fact, I have four boys now young men in the household.

It is a precarious situation where we need to tell them about the lessons of life not by Bollywood rang de Basanti , or Bhagat Singh the revolutionary but by the ground reality and the permutation and combinations of life. Maybe I am getting in my dotage , that I tell them to be patient and not be enamored by politics, this quick rise, make money get rich , have big car syndrome image of our leaders.

It is best for them to realize that life is grey and nothing is black and white as they believe in and coalition is the fifty shades of India.

Ravneet Sangha