Love, Life & Happiness

At 2:15 AM last night, the gang rape survivor, having suffered cardiac arrest, internal organ failure and brain injuries, the physiotherapist, embraced death. The days of her mental and physical agony found answer in death, of which CP Surendran wrote, "there is no grief which death can't address."

A pall of gloom descended over a charged nation, anger gave way to anguish, shame and pain. Government, getting to grips with the awakening of a demography, did respond with some semblance of empathy with its citizenry, but the unease, insecurity and mistrust in it's own citizen gave away with all messages ending with appeal to maintain law and order. The curfew was enacted in central districts of Delhi and ten surrounding metro stations were closed.

They presumed the generation which was content with creating a protest page on Facebook will not be keen enough to walk long distances, to be part of condolence at Jantar Mantar, while police kept hold of "strategic&quo…

Today, on the 29th day of this cruel December, before the year could slip into another one, she, the one with no name, raped, brutalised and left for dead, on 16th of this month died at two fifteen AM, India Time.

She defied death for long, in the deep agony of emotional and physical trauma which can not even be interpreted, she sought to live. A deafeningly deaf nation will have none if it, as day before yesterday she was shifted to foreign lands, some say for political reasons, to die there. The sad news of her demise thundered into the country, bludgeoning the collective conscience of those who have it.

Some twenty three years back, she would have stretched out those tiny arms to her father, as my daughter did to me. Just as me, her father would have passed on her hand to her, as she would have held his finger in her curled, tiny pink arms. He would have picked her and held her close in the protective embrace and swore to never let as much as an evil wind touch her in life. She wo…

As the night peeps through the horizon, and a fog-dust laden day breathes its last, a world of grey takes shape. This is a strange world, where vision is shaky, and sight unclear. The Sun in this world is not a sharp, round splendour, but a red, wrapped in smoke, spilling over the edges of poorly defined circle. It struggles to render the light on the dusty lanes of a sleepy city, tired after a broken battle, but fails at the night which spreads its sinister tentacles over the city. The brave Sun of the noon, retracts to it's corner, defeated, ashamed at the disappointment of those who needed it to see the world with clearly defined edges.

There was a time, when the smog was not there. The splendid Sun shone in its glory, defining each corner, every edge of the buildings, houses, streets, pronounced, and illustrated to clarity in it's white light. That was a world which lived in black and white. That was a world easy and difficult at once. It was the world which asked it's…

Cynicism is most common malaise of a modern day, middle class man. When they had shown large crowds on television, in the most recent anti-corruption crusade, I took it with a pinch of salt and blamed it on creative camera angles.


Last week, a young physiotherapist, all of twenty three years of age, boarded a bus, ILLEGALLY plying in Delhi, the capital city, at nine thirty in night to reach home from a quite populated location in South Delhi, in munirka, place always streaming with young human sea of students, BPO professionals and the like. It is one such place where night at nine thirty can be safely termed as broad daylight. The unsuspecting girl boarded the bus with her friend, unaware of the misfortune which was to fall on her and her friend and how it will push in the coming week nation to the edge of anger and the non-mango people to the edge of their power thrones. She was gang raped, and the humiliation was supplemented by unimaginable brutality, as thought to be dead, she wa…

Delhi is the city which houses the capital of the country. This city is a city of despair, doom and death, and as history has it, this city has risen out of ashes like Phoenix, seven times. But that was history which happened over centuries of existence, today the city dies a thousand death every single day. This city of forts which kept safe empires in fast is the citadel of power so impotent that it can no protect its women. Last checked the statistics touched more than six hundred an year, close to two in a day.

The newspaper today screams of the rape of a physiotherapist, at nine thirty, right at the heart of the so called educated and snob section of the city, the south Delhi in a moving bus. The scream is shrill enough to shake you out of the slumber, which is so characteristic of the Indian middle class today, and is dripping with a painful wail of helplessness.

The rape was followed by usual condemnation by the political class, a commitment to take tough action on the people …

Wrote Wordsworth of Lucy,

"Thus Nature spake-the work was done
How soon my Lucy's race was run
She died and left to me
This Heath and this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been
And what never more will be."

It is not death which brings the pain, the sorrow or sadness to the fore. Death is but a definite truth which awaits us with comfort when we reach at the other end, bruised and battered with life. What transforms death from a neutral, unfeeling truth to a cold knife which cuts deep into your senses is "how soon my Lucy's race was run."

Last week has been cruel, 28 kids shot dead in a school, Sandy Hook Elementary, firing in Connecticut, a girl raped, brutalised and left for dead, all of four years Pakistan, another six year old forced fed alcohol an…

I guess, no one can understand the sorrows of tomorrow better than me. Last week I had written on the importance of discipline. I had kept that blog off from getting public for quite sometime, while the idea was raging storm in my mind.My earlier blog on Discipline This was one blog which I refrained from writing purely out of sense of shame, how can you write about something, when you are yourself a victim. But then I deliberated with myself, toying with whether it would be sensible to put forth for the whole world to see my daily failures. And I thought writing is not only about sharing your victories, but also to be forthright and cruelly honest about one's failings. When you write it down, you are better positioned to differentiate between cause and symptom. So I wrote, trying to understand the inherent cause of my unforgivable sloth, and with a hope that maybe, my own blog might be able to shame me into action.

Anyways, that blog prompted me to embark on the experiment with …

Winters are now getting cold, and cruel. As the thermometer slides, my girth expands. Chill has descended, however, it is not yet so bad in the warmth of the bed. My last visit to the gym has been such long time back that even the memories seem to be fading. Starting today, Nonu's school bus time has changed from Seven-fifty in the morning to Eight-twenty. By this time, however, mesmerised by lovely winter mornings, she has already lost almost half the month of classes.

I am worried and concerned. My missed visits to the gym is compensated by weekend jog of close to three or four kilometres in the neighbourhood park. But then, as my growing girth would tell me, that is the game an intelligent man's intellect plays with him, making a complete idiot out of him. Thus, the weight swindles back to the glorious old days, trousers reach their designated location on the abdomen with a struggle of strong will. Fortunately for me, till today it has held back. The cruel whisper is howev…