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This Night

Laila is playing Holi with her relatives in their ancestral home. In a remote Uttar Pradesh village, this has been the yearly tradition of the Chaudhari family. One that Laila always looks forward to. But this year her anticipation was adulterated with dread. The elders say they will wait for her graduation. But preceding Chaudhari marriages indicate otherwise.

Elsewhere in a village of Haryana state, three men died after consuming spurious liquor. Their wives are crying their hearts out. These tears are mixed with pain; not only from the loss. As they wail, one of the ladies' sore throat hurts. Another woman's badly bruised lips and chest hurt as the salty liquid flows down her face. The third is pregnant for the fourth time and has travelled back from her parent's home for the funeral. As is the practice and widely believed, no, she was not at her parents for pregnancy period but to collect the latest instalment of promised dowry. The wound marks on her privates are still fresh.

Deep within their predicaments is an iota of thought suggesting relief. Quickly suppressed and extremely short-lived.

Moving on, in a flashy and glitzy South Delhi neighbourhood, an ultra-luxurious wedding is being attended by two friends who will die later that night. One of them is a son of a party leader and the other son of a rich businessman.

Apparently, the bride's brother stopped them from a drunk fight at the wedding. To avenge their 'insult', they will dash their BMW onto what their drunken heads will perceive as the wedding procession. Yet another Municipal flyover in Delhi will be amended ...in no defined time.


South of the Vindhyas, it is party time in the state of Maharashtra. People are out on the street in large numbers celebrating the birthday of a great from history. There will be countless drunken brawls, innumerable traffic violations, few hundred girls, office-goers and patients inconvenienced. The values espoused by the great leader will be acted upon - sadly in exactly these ways.

By marrying only fair girls after background checks on their money then controlling their destinies and wishes; by sitting on nooks and corners, smoking and pronouncing judgements on every other person's character; by not attending colleges to study, research and deliberate; by demanding, fighting for and celebrating a false notion of pride in a non-existent yet adhered to social standard.

Toilets, roads, falling education standards, encroaching education-buisness economy, depleting forests, farmlands and farmers, unemployment, women issues, corruption in every single institution are non-issues.  Not especially this night of merriment.  

Long live cheap thrills derived from loudness and innovative pride in abstraction!

Dotting the Indian landscape, routine events are unfolding at the same time as this party. Thousands of women are being raped, half of them mutilated in other ways. About hundred of these will make their way into police records the next day or this night itself, birthing nothing more than a statistical record.

Birthdays, anniversaries, fasts and feasts are being celebrated. There will be mini India's of fight, grievance, complaints, elder-younger, wife-husband, parent-child, mother-in-law-daughter-in-law issues; in these celebrations. But all will be good on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... because we may kill each other mentally, physically but never fail to pose the happy self, family, culture and tradition smile.

Down the peninsula in Karnataka's capital, call it whatever, an RTI application is being discussed. To be filed the next day by a group of three journos. It will talk of the severe sewer malfunction under India's hi-tech city. In a couple of days, it would occupy the front pages of some elusive newspaper of India- regional or national, some website or a YouTube channel. The lead journalist heading this group reporting, will not see the end of this year.

Weirdly enough, next door of this meeting an Aerobic-Yoga session is being held. 'Entry on invitation only.' Read as only a certain class, unmindful of reality can participate.

The small and beautiful state of Goa won't follow even one of the above news. Not with the rest of the country. Religious clashes here - shut down - because a twenty-five year old lawyer eloped with a twenty-seven year old doctor. 

Both are absconding from the state. Now people are absconding from the streets. The enforced law, policemen, the stranded and the homeless will rule Goan roads. For this night and possibly some more.

Tamil Nadu, the representative South by North definition, is hosting a day-night cricket match between India and a visiting team. People are queuing up, not only to get into the stadium, but in one of the stadium's corner for Internet network.

Friends, brothers, sisters, girlfriends and boyfriends want to let their loved ones know- they were there to witness India snatch glory. We are coming-of-age nation. No more underdogs.

The returning crowd will negotiate with another one. Hundreds of loyal supporters of a political leader who was convicted in yet another major scam, are camping on roads this night. Some of the cricket fans will join them and still some will quarrel with them. Long live the leader!

Moving westwards, Kerala state is peacefully in sleep. Dreams of wishes, gifts, photographs will visit its mind on beds. Sons graduating from foreign universities, transferring lakhs in remittances back home from their accounts in every major nation on the earth. All good.

No matter the rapidly lost forests, elephants, land to sea and sea to land. Every representative of theirs will make millions from this loss. Few remain within the state to care. They are comfortable in the knowledge, 'At least we are more literate this night than the rest'!

Five villages, one each in West Bengal, Odisha, Gujarat, Assam and Bihar will mourn this night. Five of their sons, twenty-something men in uniform, were killed. One in a terrorist strike in Kashmir, one rescuing a flood-affected in Uttarakhand, one in a freak accident in a Punjab cantonment, two brutalized by Naxalites in Central Indian forests.

Their mourning, illiterate and other-worldly wives and old fathers will chase this world next day onward. There will be infinite marathons to various government establishments claiming their husband's, son's death benefits which exist only on papers with them. Long live our soldiers!

Of this the Bengal's village won't cry much because it is festival time. Elevated pollution, defying logic, breaking of many civil laws, caste-play within worship as idol makers sleep naked and hungry while buyers will decorate something to be destroyed eventually. Tonight is one of those nights. So it will be easy to get over a martyr's death, this very night.

North-East, meanwhile, just sleeps. It is just there. Rest of India just knows. Isn't it Mary Kom's village? The boxer played by Priyanka Chopra.


In sync with these events, I walk on a beach in Mumbai. India's City of Dreams. I stop for an ice-cream. A vanilla. Less than five hundred metres from me, in a chic hotel, a rich business magnate is planning the next big loot.

A stand-up comedian is dishing out trivial comedy to an upwardly mobile English speaking, consuming middle-class.

Further north in this city, unprotected, illegal and the most unhygienic sex continues this night, like every other night. Some will have the best of time of their lives even as underage girls, children of sex workers and entire shanties will engage the bed first time this night. Goons of a political outfit await unleashing orders, some as they lie in these very beds. Films screening in multiplexes, all around this sex-market, carry happy crowds, family crowds, couple crowds, friends crowds. Some will be targeted after this night. For customers which they encircle this very night will defend their culture being portrayed 'obscenely' in these halls.

Less than a kilometre in upward direction, two flashing planes move past each other. A western pop star is coming over to please his newly discovered huge fan base. Going in the other direction, to attend a multi-national forum, is the representative of my republic. His jet is financed, just like the magnate's scam, by many ice creams like the one I just bought. He will announce to the world later this night - a nation has arrived big time.


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