Prashant's Solace

…Three characters who were the best of friends set out on a journey. Shortly after the below picture was taken one of them vomited because of the twisting and turning road from Mumbai to Goa. The happy expressions do not betray the discomfort of at least one of them. Pictures never reveal a lot so I never read too much in one. Times do. The milky waterfall, riveting greenery, the time of the day, the sweeping beauty of rain in Western Ghats presented a wonderful backdrop for one of the many journey’s they undertook together. The memory of the moment serves as a reminder of a bygone era. It had interlocked three wishes; to be happy, find purpose and to make the most of their lives. That era catapulted more or less intertwined lives into three different streams of life. One of them ever-determined to make the most of his life continued his search for meaning of life and happiness. He lives to push his mental and physical self into uncharted waters. People, places a

“Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A…” “Wake up! You idiot.” “How dare you interrupt free India’s first Prime Minister’s speech?” My sister is in a hurry to leave the house. Parents out of station. Before she leaves the house, I must be awakened to do the morning chores. The house maid must be buzzed in. Plants in our garden must be watered. And of course, I have to go to the office. A Prime Minister of a new born country being woken up cruelly when he is in the middle of waking up the whole country! The world has lost its sense of priorities and important issues. “I will be home late. No dinner for me. Don’t you dare waste a second getting off that fart smelling bed.” She is quite nice, my sister, otherwise. Thud. The car moves hastily out on t

Scepticism as oppose to denial is about the believers and non-believers - my little world of people, places, events and perspectives. A question in a school text prompted me to come up with this musing. It asked whether throwing/showering rice ( akshata, in a Maharastrian marriage ) justified when many go to sleep daily without a single meal ! If the child throws this question to a believer parent, teacher or a guardian, they come up with religious explanations for the practice. In the process, they are supposedly quelling the child's doubts. If this child plays with rice at home, throws or tosses it around he/she receives a big smack on the back, a dressing down and lectures on respect, privilege and positioning with respect to poor kids. What adults are doing here is not assuaging the kid's doubts but their own deep-rooted dilemmas. More like suppressing them. Adulthood comes with self-justification and more doubts for any curious child. Maybe I

(NOTE - Term in the title is not about a certain Netflix series, though borrowed from it!) The fact that I write this is a setback of a kind. This one is the emotion of the wrong kind that stimulates me to write. So, have I lost the battle to maintain my sanity? I might as well have vented whatever I felt in the most hurtful words I could sum up. But I held on, proclaiming victory to my conscience. Although the fact that I write about these – a thousand bad adjective worthies - shows that they do take a place in my system. But I fight them as one would fight cancer. And I fight to win. Disastrous, monstrous. People I hate most in the world are around me. They grow upon me like a parasite, unyielding. I cringe at their very presence. But I endure. I seek no pleasure in giving it back to them. Because they are not worthy of it. I only fight my equals in thought. I understand the immense control to hold back might implode me. But causing an explosion is beneath me. In

Part II - MOTION Imagine this motion. You are coming out of a shower and you hear your child's cry. She has just fallen down a swing across the narrow road separating your house and a play area. 'I'll run out as I was!' The luxury of sitting and comfortably analyzing this situation will make you say this, isn't it?'                                                                                                                                                                                                           Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash In continuance with questions clogging his mind, Asid was down. He had no shine; was lost; older in three years and twenty days than he was in 10 years; living in shadows and broken in many ways. Daily motion was hard to come by in every sense of the word! But almost always the best way for a commoner to feel good about self is to watch other commoner's motion. Just when Asid thought he was a f

Part 1 - QUESTION "Bye bye Grandma." "And Asid left the house for work as usual. "When he came home that day everyone except his brother was emotional. His mother, father and the most his grandmother. His world was about to change. At 31 he was against getting married, meaning against the rest of the world which already had by his age. He had simply refused. Was angered, threatened to be disowned he even left the house, only to be brought back twenty days later. His grandmother in hospital sealed the deal for his escapade! But something about this day was different. No sooner did he enter the house than the Dias family Blitzkrieg led by the oldest began. This time it was not an emotional one but a step further. "Let us face it. You like girls, don't you? You are planning to get married one day, aren't you? Knowing you, accept that you are most likely to take only one partner for the rest of your life, will you not? You have already fai

Many people will read sexually explicit and won't read further. Some might, secretly or openly. A growing kind are the ones  outraged just looking at someone looking at these words! One of my friend considers talking about sex, not the verb but even the noun, as outrageous. This one time he was explaining the procedure of filling out a bank form. "First write your name, then address, then the pin code and don't forget to mention whether you are a male or a female." He simply won't say 'Sex'. That was too sexually explicit for him.  Proof that people like him exist aplenty - try voicing the word in any crowded bank branch across this country. The mere mention of the word draws fleeting but definitely uneasy glances from listeners. As if you just spit on someone. Talking of spit, recently DNA samples from saliva of at least 10 guys were collected from a crime scene. The scene, with full sensitivity I state, not surprisingly was the body of a teenage

Once upon a time in 21 st century India, there was a city called Garbage Nagar. It was frequented by foreign tourists as well as domestic tourists. Upon visiting the city, one would think that 21 st century introduced a new concept of modern living far ahead of its time. Gigantic domes of garbage were found on every junction. Lanes and by-lanes were also beautified with neatly spread out garbage. Even road dividers were not made of concrete but garbage. No dump was left unturned for the convenience of Garbage Nagar citizens. Garbage Nagar’s single biggest facilitation, as one could guess, was the ease and leisure of disposing off garbage. One could just walk to the nearest street corner and empty the trash can. For kids it was like spraying beautiful colours onto a huge canvas. For busy Moms, the pleasure of throwing garbage was akin to splurging on shopping.  Citizens of the busy parts of Garbage Nagar didn’t even have to walk. They could throw the garbage right from

 ...Why? How? But she could have... Psychedelic Maya, was she? Did drugs prove her undoing. She was a free spirit after all but then, not the likes I knew of. A heightened sense of self and her environment overpowered all her other instincts. So how could she?  Since Jaipur, we had become good friends. A few misadventures aside, she enjoyed and thrived in Delhi. We went places, rather, I took her places where she never would have been in her wildest dreams. The Delhi of earthy delights, the bizarrely rich and dreadfully dirty lanes, the spiritual Delhi and the intellectual Delhi, the Delhi of spices, aromas and street-sides, the one of annals of power and malfunction. We were riding the wave of life. But Maya's crests and troughs were much bigger. She lived in two worlds. Curiously she disappeared for days. According to her it was required as the Israeli embassy suggested, ordered and advised. One time, she resurfaced after exactly two months. I used to pick her up

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