Mumma, I blew up (2018)

Mumma, I blew up my family
Mumma, I blew up your money
Mumma, I got cursed by the moon
Mumma, I couldn't keep the faith

Mumma, I've forgotten to smile
Mumma, I've got so much inside
My mind, my heart and my lungs
Seem full of the dirty smoke of life

Mumma, why did he commit suicide
Why didn't we have a normal life
You burnt yourself to save me
And look what I have become

Mumma, like him, I too got addicted
Mumma, I am so ashamed
Mumma, why are you not with me
Mumma, will you ease my pain?

Mumma I blew up, I'm burning
Mumma I blew up, it's hurting
Mumma, I want to give up the fight
But I won't because of what you said.

Yeah, so I attempt to wonder what I was missing and I found that I missed an outlet, a person, a friend, a brother maybe, or maybe just someone to speak to, open out to, explore the boundaries. And thus I realised that's that something that can be done in two ways, a) Doing it with some friend/wife/brother/sister or b) Write. Yeah, so I attempt to write again.

The marriage was fine. It was nothing great, but there were no flaws that we didn't mind. There were some great moments. There were a lot of smiles, but the one who's not smiling is Ashima. All because of that engagement makeup gone horribly wrong. She was planning for two months for this event, drove me all around Kolkata, while carting all the way to Tanishq all this while, only for a stupid make up artist to get it all wrong for her. Damn the touch of bad.

Brb. Great idea. And that's how this attempt at writing ends.  

I'm all that you made me. And now, nothing without you.

The story of my mom.

As far as I can remember, my mom was my everything. A woman in control of my life. The one who made all the decisions for me. Of my food. Of my playtime. Of my pocket money. Of my studies. Of my everything.

It was about 21 years ago, that God first tried to take my mom from me, in the year 1994 when her kidneys failed. I was 13 then. Shy, quiet, skinny, unsure of myself. It was my sister and my dad who went through hell to save her, while protecting the little me, back then. Back then, I and my sister, realized we had to grow up a little faster than other children. From that time onwards, I remember my mom fighting for us, and us fighting for our mom. For our happiness. For her life.

Life changed when she had this operation. My sister was away to Chennai as a 16 year old girl trying to get her mom operated in an unknown city, where she knew no one. I was told by mom that my sister went through the most torrid time of her life there. We shifted out of our house in East Delhi for a temporary stay at our nanaji's house in South Delhi.

I remember the one or two years we spent at our Naana Ji's house, mostly with the family of our mamaji, Kaka Maama and Nikka Maama. This was immediately after she had her kidney transplant operation in Chennai and had back to Delhi in a serious medical condition with very low immunity levels. I remember how Nikka Mamaji dropping me and my sister during chilly winters at 5:30 am to my new bus stand in South Delhi. I remember the innumerable games and laughter riots with my cousins Gagan, Punnu and Honey Bhaiya. I remember the amazing paranthas made by Kamlesh Maasi. I remember the table tennis games played on dining tables. I remember Rupla maasi unsuccessfully trying for two years to make me eat something. I remember my mother in an isolated room we cleaned twice a day to prevent infection to her new kidney. I'll never forget those days. These memories are a bit too deep to be thrown out of my system.

I remember my father coming and visiting us every now and then. I remember moving back to a new, smaller house, in East Delhi, two years later. My father had to sell our old house because the disease was too expensive. I remember my father queuing up outside his Indian Airlines office for medical help. I remember him fighting tooth and nail with doctors and chemists to give mom an extended life. We all loved you too much, because we were scared of what life is like, without a mother.

I remember moving to Pocket 5 and how we were cheated while buying the flat. And how for many years that were to follow, my dad had to pay up penalties pending on the house that were hidden from him by the man who sold him the house.

I remember that after moving to our new house, that she never looked unwell. She was in command of her life. She had tremendous will power - being able to control her diet and take medicines by the clock to keep her clock ticking, for her children. She never missed a day of school because of her health. She had the maids doing the rounds of the house with precision. Her kids were off to school on time and doing more than okay for themselves. Our life was back to normal. She used to tell me till recently, that the only thing she prayed to God at the time was to keep her alive if her children needed her. God heard her. She saw us through out of school into our colleges. My sister was the single biggest source of strength for my mom back then, sacrificing her studies and her career for our mother.

In between my mom had multiple complex medical conditions, including surgeries for her gall bladder and for a burst appendix. The appendix burst on the day I joined my first job at ITC, Kolkata on June 1st, 2005. I wasn't even told about it by my family. They all protected me from the troublesome news so as to not distract me from my joining. How I still hate everyone for hiding that from me.

By that time, I was a man. And thankfully my sister had also found a man who had brought her out of hell and changed her life forever - Rajan.

And then in 2007, her health started to fail again. On the day I was getting transfered to Jaipur, I stopped by Delhi to show my mom to a new doctor, because the treatment from one we had consulted for 15 years wasn't suddenly working anymore.

I remember standing in the cabin of Dr. Jasuja in Apollo and being told to ask my father to wait outside as the doc wanted to discuss something in private with me. And he told me that mom's kidneys are dead. Again. And all the horrors on the past came gushing to my memories. He said that she'll have to be put under dialysis immediately. I remember my mom telling me that there's no way she's going to go on dialysis, citing nightmarish few dialysis of her earlier days. I told her to shut up and moved out of the doctors cabin and saw my father lying down on the floor. My father had had a stroke. And my mom's kidneys had failed. Both on the same day. I realized that day that it was all up to me now. By this time, mom's blessings had prepared me to be a man who can take care of her during her old age.

That's where, the company I still work for, ITC, bent backwards to allow me to take care of my parents. A year long struggle to take my father out of paralysis and my mother out of her death bed took a toll on my career. I chose a step down role in Delhi and never regretted it. Next year, dad passed away and my mom and I moved to Gurgaon. This is where she probably had the best years of her life. Rakesh joined me and took over the duties of the son at home, while I worked day and night in office. She felt unwell many times over after she was on dialysis and had to be hospitalized over two dozen times in the last 10 years of her life.

My biggest personal aim in life became that my mom should see a complete life - of her son's marriage and the pleasure of holding her grandchild. I extended her life as much as I could possibly , but somewhere I thought I went overboard in my fight with God to save her. God extended her life, but the last two years were the worst. She had to be hospitalized 8 times in the last 24 months. By the time it was 2013, I was biding time with God, wanting to put Kaku in her lap, before she says goodbye to us. I remember screaming my guts out of exhilaration the day i managed to do it. As I brought her on a wheelchair from Kolkata to Delhi, I couldn't believe that she was seeing this day. I realized that somewhere subconsciously for 20 years - I was fighting for this day. And I won. My mom carried herself out of her deathbed in 1994, with the help of my sister, my father, countless doctors and surgeons, was going to be seeing her youngest child's child. As I kept Kaku in her lap, I realized that I shall never be this happy again.

She spent the last one year as a recluse, being able to barely hear or comprehend conversations. She couldn't walk without a walker for most of her last two years. And in the last six months, was on a wheelchair completely. I remember pepping her up to keep herself going all these last few years. And for most times, she listened and pushed herself to live on.

I am not sad today that she's not with us. What I'm sad is that by the time I was ready to give her happiness, God disabled her physically and mentally from getting it. I wish to be able to get that opportunity again, when she comes back in another form, as another being, into my life again.

Heard or Remembered

We have been a part of a civilization for centuries. There have been many upheavals in the history of our times, and there have been two school of thoughts developed around the world - the rational and the spiritual. As we gain more knowledge, we progress, or rather not, from spiritual to rational. The ancient, especially the eastern ancient customs had an overt spiritual flavor to them as compared to a modern western society, which is predominantly steered by rationality.

Congregated around the Indus river, rose the beliefs of Hinduism that spoke of Shruti (that which can be heard) and Smriti (that which can be remembered). While the debate ensues as to where's the bordering line between the two, the analogical fitment of these ancient concepts to the rational world (the one that can be felt) and the spiritual world (the one that can be sensed) is near perfect. 

Objectively speaking

There’s a good and bad side to everyone

When you’re doing honest business, you touch only the good side.

However, when you appeal to someone’s bad side, you go beyond business. You make him selfish. A part of him becomes yours.

The minute psychological difference that had an impact on the Indian elections

Scratch. To be finalized.

For about six months, since the time the noise around the Indian elections started to get loud, there's been a question that had been haunting me. Why would so many of my educated friends, from similar background, same tastes and even the same thinking till now, differ vastly on the topic of elections?Then I went to a cricket stadium recently and there I saw my country, in its full diversity, all the while searching for symptoms that will explain me the thin line that separated this crowd, that made them choose AAP over BJP or vice versa.

When I first started mentally grappling with the issue, I began by thinking that this was merely a difference of the extent of honesty a person would allow in his life's ecosystem. Beyond a point, excessive honesty can make you a Yudhishthir and he's not as revered as the not so honest bigger Hindu God, Krishna. However, we know that there's got to be a certain basic minimum shameful quantity of honesty required in every God, else you run the risk of being compared to Kansa. I'd concluded that the ones in support of AAP were on an average more honest than those in support of the BJP. This may still be true, however it was semi-convincing for myself. Honestly.

And with every passing day, around me at work, on social media, the voices on TV, in the newspapers and so on, as I saw the crowd rooting for BJP grow larger and louder, I realized that the wave took away a lot of my honest friends - the ones I grew up with, studied with and enjoyed with. They were getting attracted to BJP despite something that didn't seem right. It was surely not just honesty, I thought, because the ones who were swept away were in no clear way either more honest or dishonest that me. The discovery of honesty as the thin line was not to be my Eureka moment. I concluded and thence struggled for months to follow, that honestly wasn't alasthe most significant difference that makes the AAP and BJP supporters tear into each others' ideologies.

I kept trying to draw parallels and separate the two tribes. I kept looking for similarities and dissimilarities. The random mental sampling threw up things like AAP supporters have sharper features or maybe more likely to have a beard while the BJP guys were usually louder and did not have sharp noses. And that the AAPians usually heard rock and thus had a slightly higher rebellious streak in them, whereas the BJPians were usually at discs in the night dancing away to Bollywood and Punjabi numbers, all this while chuckling and then chiding myself that I have way too many other things to figure out in life than draw these ludicrous parallels.

Then to my mind, came the second almost convincing argument, something about which I didn't openly write about, because that argument seemed completely wrong to me myself! I'd started to think4 that the AAPians had a greater proportion of the extremely intelligent variety, knowing very well that I'm going to end  up sounding a fool. Some of my friends who'd scored far higher in examinations (which is a lowest common measure of intelligence in our kickass education system) were BJP supporters. And then I concluded that BJPians were usually more aggressive, with greater ambition and far more competitive.

All these six months, knowing very well that what's different is so subtle that it's not going to come easy. There isn't much difference between me and my friend from college Kunal with whom we've shared similar passions and tastes in cricket, teamed  up together and worked in tandem during table tennis and had great many laughs together. There isn't much difference between me and Devansh, a common friend of my brother in law, whom I found among the more sensible people I've met recently. There isn't much difference between me and Kashyap, having passed out from the same school, the same post grad college, working in simular jobs and having similar family set ups. It left me grappling with the question. Whenever I thought hard and discussed, it left me baffled.

Then couple of days back in that non-descript cricket match that my brother in law dragged me to at Delhi Feroz Shah Kotla. I drove down to Connaught Place, parked my car there to take an auto rickshaw that will avoid me the hassle of parking near the cricket stadium. Reached about fifteen minutes into the match and high fived my friends and sat to watch, but couldn't get a full view. There was this guy (pictured below) about whom I thought what I renamed the picture below before uploading, "The biggest idiot watching the match at Feroz Shah Kotla on 18th May 2014.jpg". The six feet few inches tall guy just won't sit, despite a dozen requests by people behind him that they can't see the match if he stands, whereas he can very well see the match if he sits.

I'd come to watch the match not knowing which teams are playing and this was going to be a perfect source of entertainment. One guy besides me shouted, "Baith Jao", and whack a paper ball was hurled towards the Lambu. Good idea, we thought and started to tear and roll all placards we could find to manufacture paper balls on the spot at Feroz Shah Kotla. Soon there were about twenty people, guys, girls and children alike, all united by hatred towards this buffoon, rolling paper balls and throwing at this guy, who refused to pay attention to all who were irritated behind him. The first innings was a lot of fun. Some hit the guy's butt, others just whisked past his ear and the ones that got the bulls eye, bang on top of his head, were cheered by the crowd behind him that grew larger in bewilderment of how ridiculously indifferent this guy can be towards others for a wee bit extra fun of his own. He refused to budge, turned around once or twice, largely ignoring all the haters behind him and just turned in anger once shouting to the effect of "Ask people in front of me to sit!".  The first innings was not a lot of fun, for some. The old couple who'd been sitting disquietly observing the younger generation squabble it out in the first innings left the stadium after the first innings.

I couldn't gauge the mentality of such a creature, who would go to the extent of discomforting everyone in bargain of his tiny selfish pleasure. In the second innings, everyone started off much better. Everyone was seated for the first two overs before a fat lady in a suit stood up to get a clearer view. Ready with our paper balls, we chucked for a couple of overs, only to see the crowd who were now standing and were seemingly more frustrated grew. So I decided to tackle it the right way. I jumped a couple of rows and asked the person to sit, and got the response, "Ask the person in front of me", so I asked him too, only to be led to the front of the seating area, where about 50-100 people were standing in front of those seated in row 1. So much for the row 1 tickets, I tried explaining to those people who everyone should take their seats so that everyone can enjoy it. One 20 something guy turned and uttered some explanation to me which defied any logic and I insisted that he take his seat. Everyone with the unfair advantage of having a lesser seat stood standing there together, unwilling to budge, not caring about the 20 rows discomforted behind them. They were the least bit concerned about the misery of those behind. They wanted their own welfare and the lawlessness of the land was allowing them the luxury of the survival of the fittest. We tried a few times and then gave up, and walked to the police busy watching the match and they replied, "Sir, nothing is possible here. No one will listen." We gave up and went back to watch the match behind the tall guy who still didn't care about any of the abuse he got all this while we were away.

I was convinced that no matter how much of a benefit of a doubt I gave this guy, no matter how big a rebel he was, which music he heard, whether his features were sharp or not, whether he was uncorrupt or not, whether he was Muslim or Hindu, he was not a guy who'd ever believe in AAP. There was a trait in him or the lack of it that separated him from anyone who has an inkling of liking for AAP. I'm certain that many of those who were throwing paper balls at him were also not AAP supporters and leaned towards BJP, but there was something extreme about this guy. Something, that struck me while having dinner today.

Empathy - the fine line that separated the supporters of BJP and AAP. All AAP supporters, irrespective of the extent of the honest streak that run in their blood or irreverence towards our established system, were individuals who were distinctly more empathetic than BJP supporters. Empathy, be it towards the massacred Muslims, or the poor whose money is being spent to fuel the election rally helicopters, or towards the people trying to save Narmada or towards the RTI activists murdered in their quest for information, the thin emotional line that separated the two sides of the globe was that of empathy.

Is being empathetic all that good? Well, its a nice sounding word and no one in our civilized world is that fond of ruthlessness either, so most likely people would say, yes. But there is literature of people hero-worshipped for not being empathetic, in other words, being decisive, bold and selfish (in the nicer sense of the word) like the John Galt of the Atlas Shrugged.

Not being empathetic isn't as bad a trait as some that we associate the BJPians with. They do care about the country's development, but what they don't care about it whether its lop-sided or not. They do care about the future of our minorities, but what they do not care about is what happened to Muslims in 2002. They do care about corruption, but do not feel for the plight of the common man who endures it every day. They do care about a united India but they do not care about LGBT rights. They are neither insensible nor selfish nor loud nor abusive nor unintelligent nor corrupt. They are all, just a bit less empathetic.

The fine line of lack of empathy is what separates them from the AAPians. Their decisive, bold, shrewd, unempathetic leader is Narendra Modi. He does not care about Pakistan or Muslims or the poor people whose monies are going to fill the pockets of the corporates. He will give you solid governance which will come at a cost only a very empathetic person would be able to feel.

For the majority, who're aiming to become better off than the other, who're willing to step onto the toes of the next person to climb up, who're unwilling to care whether the crowd behind can watch the cricket match or not, empathy isn't an emotion to be breaking one's head about. It's irrelevant, because if empathy comes to power, it will come at the cost of their own selfish development.

Stand By

I'm sorry that I trouble you so much, but what do I do? I'm nothing without you. I can't breathe without seeing you around me. You are my food and my shelter. My nanny and my best friend. My pillow and my sleeping bed. My toilet and my wash basin. My peace and my distraction. My mother and my father.

You gave up your life, your sleep, your peace and your body to grow me this little big healthy and smiling. But I'm still very small Mumma. I promise to grow big one day, and stand by you.

Till then, I am what you make me, and nothing without you.

To the best mom a little boy could've had,

Happy Mother's Day

Kaku