A Distant Memory.

The paths tread and the places seen, the men and women whose path we crossed, saw, befriended, worked together, irresistibly loved to despise, loved and most of all choose to remember and desired to forget!

 It left me wondering the many faces that passed my gaze. The many I may never meet again, the ones I might want longingly to see again. I began to recollect, to rewind, fitfully though from the first day, I could remember back from a long time ago. Some, who fascinated and enthralled me, some who I loved to hate and some who stay lingering in memory poignantly. Yet some who have been instruments of pain and hurt, of disillusionment and deception, of selfishness and opportunism- and to eclipse all that, just instruments of delight. And some who just passed by as non-entities, and stalked as a shadow, often to comeback into memory.

It is assumed by some that a certain person was the instrument of change in them, a harbinger of sort. To me that has been rubbish to this day. I feel, I’m more disposed to my genetic makeup than an external influence of a stranger, a friend, an acquaintance or just some one. That may be a liability of character, because that can also be the reason why I’m incorrigible.

Many may have vanished and eloped into oblivion after enacting their role in a fleeting life that was not out of their volition. What may have happened to them after I saw them last? The ones who may still be surviving- how are they, perhaps will they ever think of me, remember me? Why must they in this melee and frenzy to stay afloat!

I do not remember his name. He was dark complexioned like the many pull rickshaw men in Chennai. He was tall, well-built and sported a khaki half pants and a woven shirt in cotton. There was discoloration of the fabric around his under-arm, obviously the acidic reaction of perspiration from the glands that worked overtime to keep apace in his struggle to eke out. I remember him sporting a towel of myriad colours around the neck- a towel that may have revealed colours that was not meant to be, awash in his sweat and the dust that wedged on it while it was damp with his toil.

I suppose, I give him a name, a typical Tamil name? No, that would be unfair. He will stay as he will in my memory, a shadow of a figure with no name I can think of.  He was the pull rickshaw man who unfailingly picked me from home and put me with care in his rickshaw and lugged all the way to a distant convent school in Thambaram. That was in the sixties and I was in the first standard and living in Thambaram , while my father was stationed at the Air Force base there. When it rained as it does cats and dogs in Chennai, he used to ensure that I was cocooned safe from being drenched and put his tarpaulin envelope around the passenger area of the rickshaw. And then lug the rickshaw to the school in the torrent and along the streets which soon would be a sewage canal. He would then carry me, my school and lunch bags around his shoulder, and like a juggler, handle a rickety umbrella too, so that I was protected from the rain. And he would leave me safe inside the class room. He was affable and pleasant, I can remember, but do not however recall what he had to talk to me all the while- to me a five year old. In the late afternoon after the school, he was punctual at the class room door to take me back home. I must have called him “mama” as it is always so in Tamilnad – a respectful term for an elder, irrespective of his eminence. I can barely recall through the haze of the years that have went by, the bond that developed between the two of us. But that lasted for a year and I was shifted out of Tamilnad.

There is nothing much I can reminisce of him and the time he pulled his rickshaw with me in it. But years after and often I wonder about this man, whose scanty image is etched somewhere and it comes out lingering. Today it did!

That was forty seven years ago. And he would be, I suppose one hundred or there about if he is alive. Else, let he be in peace after a life that must have been hard on him.

Abu, the son of Adam

What that made me wonder and think, was the movie, “Adam inte Makan Abu” (Adam’s son Abu), in Malayalam and that which acceptably won the National and International acclaim. The movie was a well created one with good visuals and restrained performances.

The story line is about Abu an emaciated perfume vendor whose only wish in life is a pilgrimage to the Haj. To fetch enough resources for the journey, he and his wife ends up selling all they had and even almost gave away their bosom house. However still running short of the required money they are offered the means by a couple of good Samaritans. Since accepting money that is not earned or from the immediate ones is forbidden by didactic Islamic scripts, they are devastated and forlornly cast away their savoured dream of the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The fim has many scenes wherein Abu, swears that the very essence of being born is to touch upon the soil of Mecca. The Creator sends forth Man into the world, to be enriched and salvaged by the pilgrimage to the Haj. The reason being born human being is to journey to Mecca! And, Abu nor his wife, though barely eke out living, has no inhibitions or misgivings in throwing away all that little they possess to raise money for the journey of their life.

I was left wondering on many occasions through the movie, that man’s search and straying after a mirage, a faith, and a concept that is allegedly holed up at the top of the golden stairway has no bounds.

The perplexing psyche is to throw away a life in hand and anticipate a much fancied after life that no one has known, seen or come back to vouch. To barter the life to live for a concept of life in what is called “Paradise” as it is made out. The bird in hand is forgotten in the search and fascination for the two that is alleged to be in the bush. Some like Abu crave for a journey to the Haj and would readily part with the little they have for subsistence. Some murder and kill for the promised stairway up into the clouds. It is a strange matter that baffles comprehension. And we call it “faith”!

I do not find reasons to be impressed about what some may call faith , or manifestly “blind faith" and precisely because of the halo given to the term, treat it as holy and beyond impeachment. Sacrosanct that it is impervious to logic, understanding, knowledge and all that is empirical. It is secure against all criticism, argument and opinion. Commonsense is jettisoned as being an unwanted baggage. It is a matter of faith and faith is blind, the argument goes!

Well then what is faith?

 When one is blind, what could one possible see? Which means what is argued as the unquestionable notion or faith, is a state of mind that is arrived when one is blind. And since one is blind one is not sure, if it is a journey partially afloat like a drift wood. It is like a cab driver leaving you some where assuring you it is at the door of everlasting asylum and abode of happiness, while your eyes are closed or you are blind to see where he actually left you. And for that journey, you parted with all that you had and enriched life, the loved ones who made your life a cherished one, and with eyes closed faithfully.

There, then, is no faith that is blind and not, faith itself is blind. 

A Damp Squib

If I had a world of my own everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because anything would be what it isn’t. And contrary- wise, what it would be and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?  (Lewis Carol in “Alice in Wonderland”).

But Anna Hazare thinks otherwise. Obstinacy and outlandish mindset seems to be driving his cause and demands. Now, he wants the local Grama Panchayats superseding the Parliament. Effectively that will ensure besides anarchy, the rule of the rouges, more pernicious than what we have from the dispensation from five hundred plus elected members of parliament.

I have been a person with pro ANNA leanings. Mainly because the movement that he created in India ,was after the mass agitation evoked by Jaya Prakash Narayan in the mid 1970’s against the autocratic, corrupt reign of Indira Gandhi, the most passionately evocative movement. The cause was inevitable, and the time was nothing but ideal. We are mauled, haunted and sick of corruption, and looting by politician – business nexus. And a mass agitation to incorporate a constitutional law to address the inexorable slide of the country into depths of economic chaos and social upheaval was most necessary.”Cometh the hour and cometh the man”, one may have desperately thought of Anna Hazare!

Anna Hazare seemed to have risen for the hour. And a conscientious team including the super cop Kiran Bedi lined up behind him. The government as expected tried everything in the book and out of the box to scuttle the movement. A Five Star Yogic charlatan was even made a decoy and planted as an alternative cause centre. Allegations of financial irregularities by some members of the Hazare team were made out and leaked out with surreptitious intent. The intrigues and manoeuvrings were obvious and on expected lines, when one considers the criminal legal minds who are in the Congress party, Kapil Sibal, Abhishekh Singhvi and P. Chidamabaram. But the much required provision for benefit of doubt and being the wronged was given to Anna Hazare and his team.

However it seems that the twist to the game Anna and his team made, such as some of the eccentric provisions of the Jana Lok Pal, the obstinacy that Parliament should pass it within a short time frame and to hell if required to the debates and discussion in the house for such a vital proviso of national and constitutional importance all point to one direction,”south” in terms of sanity. And in between we heard Anna Hazare endorse the man who presided over the greatest mass extermination of Muslims since the partition. Narendar Modi.

Then, the much dramatised act, hand in gloves with the right wing Hindu parties. Anna announced that he will campaign against the Congress, which can only mean he will endorse the BJP.   And the BJP cannily scuttled the very same Lokpal bill in the parliament with ulterior design and intent.

And now look at the picture in this post. Constitution of India it says, and has Sivaji, the Maratha warrior King, the Rani of Jhansi ,Swami Vivekananda, Vinoba Bhave and Abdul Kalam Azad. And only the later was related to the drafting of the Indian constitution. What message does this send? Vinoba Bhave while he was alive was apolitical and not identified with the right wing Hindu clan. Sivaji was a local warrior who fought the Muslim rulers of India.. Rani of Jhansi fought for her right to be the queen and have her kingdom not taken away by a weird law the “Doctrine of lapse”. Swami Vivekananda was not a Hindu fanatic, but a thinker and philosopher. But we see Anna and his coterie  , perhaps with the auspices of the right wing Hindu group, usurper  the Rani, the Swami and  the Bhave  into the group of their iconic symbol- Sivaji. Swami Vivekananda has long since been kidnapped by the Hindutva group.

Wonder what these folks have to do with the Indian constitution? The picture cannot be a coincidence of insignificance.

By now, we see the end of the dream that was a mere pipe dream- an effective law to unravel corruption and punish the guilty. There is much for all to celebrate except the vast majority of the   people of India who still long for a square meal a day.