Love, Life and Happiness

We are living in an extremely cause-heavy world where causes - real and imagined cloud our minds. I saw this in the case of the movie - Beauty and The Beast . There the quarrel of the social commentators was that it explored the gay angle of one of the characters only briefly, only fleetingly. There can be nothing more absurd than that. You are demanding more from an artist than possibly he can offer. Art is a profession of lonely persuasion, and it serves the purpose its creator desires it to serve. Nothing more and nothing less. It is sad and unfortunates that the liberals, which in Indian context largely translates to Leftists, insists that art is nothing but a vehicle that should be provided to them for their political agendas and narratives to ride on. It is like insisting that the reference to the Negroes in the " The Great Gatsby " should have been expanded to cover racism in detail. The brief episode was merely to substantiate the character and nothing more. Jus

Sometimes truth is so simple that it escapes the eyes of the clever. Clever people are naturally inclined to search the subtle, to investigate the infinite. Unfortunately they oftentimes end up being victim of their own ability. This we saw in wise people declaring 98 percent and no less possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming the US president. Closer home, we saw the wise predicting the same in UP, in Punjab and in Goa. The municipal elections of Delhi have concluded and the results are out. The results of the election are as under: Total seats contested: 279 The tally Party-wise is: BJP: 181 AAP: 48 Congress: 30 Others: 20 To be honest, past MCDs ruled by BJP have dismal record of performance with ghost employees, ghost schemes and absolutely disheartening corruption. The common sense and sense of the wise political analysts predicted rout for BJP and either a spectacular victory for Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party or a return of Congress. The results have amazed

We live in a cause-heavy world. We have too many causes hounding for attention in public space. So many, that we have stopped taking them seriously. Furthermore, the elite, rich and English-educated in India, who consider themselves as the inheritors of what is called a “White-Man’s burden” have further made the masses cynical towards the causes they endorse on account of great hypocrisy that they have come to represent. So they will write editorials about empowering women and downtrodden, but then we find them tweeting about their maids not having bank accounts or citizen-identification to enable them to move to digital economy; you will find them tweeting about how their hearts are shattered at cruelty against dogs, but the next tweet, five minutes later, you will find them salivating over cow meat. Real causes have become a casualty here.           Amid all this frivolous noises, old classic literature, thinkers from the past offer a rare hope. This is evident not only in th

Life is brutal and boring most of the times. What makes it still bearable are some sudden moments of sensations which stir the soul and sets the spirit soaring. Such moments are far and few and fickle and feeble. The moment which in the middle of the excruciating pain of longing of immense loneliness suddenly transforms into a tranquil sense of solitude give a rather engaging turn to a boring life limping under inevitable ordinariness. The moments when pain and ennui, without any notice to us, turn into magical and mysterious, funny and forgiving are rare and accidental. It is therefore very difficult to write about life as it is and still sustain the interest of the reader long enough for the magical to emerge from the mundane, for truth to arise from travesty. One does not find such writing often. Call it experimental writing, call it new-age writing, call it whatever, it is the art of telling the plain truths of uneventful life in such an eventful manner that continues to ke

“Once you label me, you negate me.” – Soren Kierkegaard Today is the birth Anniversary of Dr. Bhimrav Ambedkar . Whole of Indian landscape is dotted with statues of Dr. BR Ambedkar, while it is very rare to find anyone who has read him. The father of Indian constitution has been pigeonholed into “Dalit” thinker and leader. This disservice to his memories and this grave injustice to a great scholar, philosopher and sociologist has been done by none other than people who themselves go with the label of “dalit” writer and thinker. As a writer, I have always found such labels as absurd as I find them insulting to the profession of writing, in general. Since when your birth began flowing through your pen- is what I always want to tell those people. Most writers who proudly tag themselves such have largely done so to pass off their shrill, poorly-researched work as literature, succeeding in captive market, separated from the large open literary space. They thrive on ghettoizing an

Vande Mataram is the outrage of the day. Unfortunately, this happens on the day which marks the death anniversary of great writer and revolutionist, Shri Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya. We have come to a decisive state in the life of our nation. A nation which gained independence in 1947, and struggled to get on its feet for seventy odd years, scraping through periods of emergency, has come on its own. There comes a time in the life of its nation, where it stands up on its feet and asserts itself. A nation is not a piece of land, nor is it about its building. Nation is an idea, always an idea. Secure minds create an idea of nation which is unapologetic, independent, guiltless, proud and assertive. Such an idea is always open and stands above the ideology. Insecure minds imprison that Idea. Then they try to tell you as a nation how you should behave. That is my problem with forty second amendment to the Constitution, which was sneaked in by Congress leader and then Prime Minister