Category: Writing

Jo khaaye woh pachhtaye; aur jo na khaye woh bhi pachhtaye; but what is the shaadi ka laddoo all about?

Sample this:

“Marriage is an interpersonal relationship with governmental, social, or religious recognition, usually intimate and sexual, and often created as a contract through custom, ballot or civil process. Civil marriage is the legal concept of marriage.

The reasons people marry vary, but usually include one or more of the following: legal, social and economic stability; the formation of a family unit; procreation and the education and nurturing of children; legitimizing sexual relations; public declaration of love.”

Whoa! And me and my wife thought that we had got together just because I loved her and she couldn’t take the fact that no other girl would ever marry me because of the way I am.

Jokes aside, isn’t that description an awful lot for the two people directly involved in it?

Especially when the majority of us are told – in a very simple, matter-of-the-fact style – from a young age that someday we are going to get married and have children. It’s spoon-fed to us in a steady diet between playing with baby dolls, cricket and computer games.

Girls, I presume, even more than boys are – if you allow me a little Jehadi language – ‘indoctrinated’ into this level of expectation. It becomes very natural to assume that marriage is the next step in the evolution of adulthood.
Amazingly, despite a family coming apart every single day across modern, urban India, the idea of romance remains the most romanticised institution between men and women.

Nothing wrong with that. Except that it doesn’t always turn out that way. And not everyone would want it to be that way!

Unfortunately, because of the conditioning of the society itself, it is always excepted to turn out according to the fairy-tale script and everyone is expected it to want it that way. Or else, one is very swiftly and decisively labeled as the ‘gundee machhlee’.

The point is, if a man and woman get married just because it is one those things that you do in life, then it is pretty much like taking up a job that you would rather not do given other options. It is like a terribly lazy person like me having to do a door-to-door sales job, just because I HAVE to do SOMETHING.

Fortunately, a majority of people do want to spend a very long time with ‘that someone special’. Fortunate because togetherness is something that almost always – except in the case of mad mobs – stand for a lot of good. It encourages love, mild behaviour, relaxed nerves, sense of belonging and support for each other and, most of all, a feeling of completeness, calm and peace.

Of course, I do have a couple of very close friends who tell me that they feel all of the above when being alone too. Some of them just joke about it, but a couple are actually bachelors. At 50 plus! And there are thousands like them across the globe who are single and happy – with or without any kind of physical relation with persons of the same or opposite gender. Clearly, marriage is not mandatory for either emotional or physical needs of a person; not in today’s world where you can have a virtual soul-mate at a social networking site and where teenagers ‘have already been there, done that’ about physical exploration.

And that’s what brings forth the beauty of the idea of marriage. And this comes from a man who is married for more than 4 decades (to the same person, if I may add so :-))

Marriage is two people desperately wanting to stay together – whether or not it involves physical relationship amongst the two.

It is certainly not downplaying the importance of physicality, neither in marriage nor in life in general. Physicality has an immensely important place in life. But my aforementioned take on marriage is just to reiterate that marriage based on either latent or urgent need for physicality is not going to last too long. For, as it is widely documented, humans too, by nature, are polygamous.

So, either you want to be with your partner and are hence ‘married’ to her or him, or you would rather not be with the partner. In that case, you are ‘not married’ to the person. And hence, in lieu of the prison statement, you are allowed to not follow the ‘oft-documented’ rules of marriage! Blasphemous?

Aur ek din, mera bhi aa hi gaya. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to share it with you because my dad does not want the world to know his only child’s ‘actual’ 12th board results. And the editor of League has flatly refused to play the Goga Kapoor of ‘Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na’ by printing my fake marks in this column. (Damn! Another opportunity to become SRK goes up in smoke.)

Last month I was asking for you to pray for my results. Funnily, this month too I’m going to ask you to do the same – pray for my results. Results of the many admission forms that I’ve filled up. And of the many entrance exams that I’ve given, giving and about to give.

Yeh jeevan ek pariksha hai. “And with this lifestyle, you are going to fail all of them” – my dad would say, when he is in a good mood. When he is in his ‘special’ mood, he generally drills me with his eyes and non-cooperation in conversations.

But hey, that’s going beside the point. The point here is – whether you like it or not, every activity of yours bears results for you! But its only the 12th board results that we GLOVADIs make hue and cry about. Curfew on films, friends, fun, freedom and everything even remotely related to the letter ‘f’. Ouch! Hey dad, I didn’t mean…what I hear from ALL my ‘best friends’ a dozen times a day! Ouch, again!

Anyway, if Bill Gates was killed on the basis of his 12th board results, you would not have been reading this magazine, writing e-mails or generally expressing yourself through computers. Ditto for Dhirubhai Ambani. And I’m not even talking of movie and ROCK stars!

Come on parents, give us a break. It’s just a 12th board result. Why is it being turned into a front page circus?

Yes, bad marks in 12th push back your chance to gain DIRECT entry into any medical or engineering college by an year or two. But there are all India open entrances for such colleges, donation colleges for the well-off and scholarships for the brilliant. And unlike previous years there are more engineering seats in Ahmedabad / Gandhinagar than there are students. Arts and Commerce streams too have similar options.

I’ll be doing B. Sc. Now. And I’m NOT going to get into a good college because of my marks. But don’t every college of Gujarat University read the same books of science? And that of arts and commerce? And do the ‘top’ science / arts / commerce colleges provide placements? I’m told even the government engineering and medical colleges (the most reputed ones of the city) offer that. So what’s the deal here, except the non-required noise?

My dad would not say that to me, but I know that he’s proud of the fact that I’m writing for a classy magazine at 17! It doesn’t pay me much (sorry Editor), but at 17, I feel I have many years ahead to earn. For now, I’m happy with my learning and the pass class.

Orthodox side of every religion, in one way or the other, would teach us that God is present in every single particular of this world – either as a resident or the landlord of that particle. Furthermore, anything that takes place or is made to happen is either God on an auto-pilot mode or acting through a ‘worldly driver’ (human being). And that apart from the teaching of God living in our heart or in our inner soul.

Is that the ONLY or absolute truth? Does God really live everywhere?

If you read the first paragraph again, you would end up feeling like an X-Box 360 or Playstation gaming console – designed by someone, directed by someone, for some purpose. Is that what we humans are; mere puppets of God?

That can’t be true for many reasons. But the biggest one of them all is that I’m sure God would want to give a little more respect to his best creation – the human brain. Of course, some atheists would suggest that it is the other way around, God is in fact the human brain’s best creation. But we shall not get into the subject of the ‘presence’ of God itself. We shall stick to the present subject of the omnipresence (if at all) of God.

According to all religions, God – even at the darkest hour, from all perspectives – stands for everything good. If there is despair, God stands for hope. If there is craving, God stands for contentment. If there is anger, God stands for peace. So on and so forth.

But hey, read all of that again. If God stands for hope, then what is that despair about? What is that despair’s origin and ‘composition’? If God lies ‘within despair’ too – as per the teachings – then “why that despair so despairing for us”? Why isn’t that despair actually hope for us right from the beginning – meaning, in effect, the death of despair (at the hands of God?) right at its birth itself?

Yes, if God stands for hope and God is everywhere, how can despair even exist on this planet?

Alternatively, if God stands for despair too, then how different is HE from us humans, with all our strengths and failings? One often take solace in the presence of more of the same kind, but he doesn’t surrender himself to them, does he?

The hope vs despair example can be extrapoleted to almost all the sitautions of this world. Some babies are born healthy, some are not. Some women give easy births, some even lose their lives. Some people get away with murders, while some die of a stray sniper bullet. Some people lose their lives to evil people, while some die at the hands of nature’s fury. Some lead a healthy, happy but short life, while some suffer bad health and unhappy mind for long years.
If God is everywhere, why is there such blatant ‘discrepancy of destinies’?

I believe that God has sent us here to this planet and has now moved back. HE is watching every move of every individual and giving ‘grades’ in accordance with a person’s conduct under various circumstances. But HE is not ‘in the ring’. He is like a cricket coach, done with his job and now watching – from a distance – the performances of his wards.

Once back in the pavilion, the players would either get a sack or get the cap for another match. The coach is just at one place. At a place from where he can see all the players. And if players concentrate a little hard, they too can see the coach in the team balcony. Now, whether to play straight or tamper with the ball is in the hands of the players.

So take your call friends. You can do whatever you wish to. God would not stop you from doing it. HE can’t; because he is sitting at a distance. But HE can see us all at all times. Because he is the only one amongst us allowed to use the binoculars and log in our every move in his computer.

God is not everywhere.

Dear fellow castist Indians:

It gives us, the talking heads of Castists United (henceforth referred to as Cas Utd.), great pleasure in sharing the details of the first Castists United Rashtriya Sammelan, Etawah (CURSE).

It has been noted that not enough number of castes in India have been allowed to get lower in the caste hierarchy. It is an even worse form of exploitation than not being allowed to move up in the caste ladder. After all, what does one get in becoming a higher caste than the present one? If today, in any big Indian city, you say you belong to higher caste you would either be called a castist or would be told “those days are now gone”.

While we too agree that those days are now gone, it is extremely painful for us to learn that a person with static mentality, who is proud of his present caste, is equated with our group – a group of downwardly mobile individuals . We have repeatedly lodged complaints with concerned authorities about some people trying to malign our noble organisation by casually using the term ‘castist’.

The term cannot be allowed to be used casually. The whole point of struggle today is to eventually become a lower caste today and much lower tomorrow.

For the purpose CURSE has come up with a healthy, peaceful, democratic and noble dialogue – about an individual’s right to continuously downgrade his caste for the purpose of serving the mankind. Or for national integration. It can even be about greenhouse effect. Or for just about anything. As they say in Hindi, “yeh toh sochne waale ki shradhha par hai”.

But how can this happen when some people are already proud of their castes while others don’t want others to learn the art of living by means of belonging to a politically lower caste. The present system is full of corrupt people, who want people to either be happy of their caste or rise about caste. They do not want to make any more divisions to their pie. They are trying to stop people with aspirations for lower caste pie by calling ‘pie’ a western concept, “gorey logon ki saazish”.

We say it is complete nonsense. And only an excuse to not give us our rightful share.

We might be of any caste, but we shall never give away our right of being of a lower caste. In a democracy, it’s the lowest common denominater that should rule. And the lowest common denominator says that everyone should be brought down to the lowest common denominator level. When there’s no inequality, there’s no injustice. Or something like that. Maybe.

But the point arises as to how should we go about achieving our target of making India a nation of consistently falling caste index.

One rightful method would be to burn public transport buses to attract attention and instill fear in the minds of the authorities. But the quality of government buses raises serious doubts about the safety of our boredom fighters during the operation. And targetting private properties would take away public support.

That has left us with no other option but to organise CURSE. We have not been able to chart any plan of action or roadmap. But we have managed to generate some demands. Kindy find them attached after this letter.

Jai low, lower, lowest castist.
~ Cas. Utd.