Heart to Heart

         Sharing old memories … In life’s memory-soaked journey surprises come in myriad ways. While chancing into and then exchanging WhatsApp messages with my classmate-friend at the university decades back, he sent me an old photo of our class. That set the memory ball rolling leading to a flurry of more messages. What came as a revelation was his confession about how he had been deeply in love with a Sikh class-girl and suffered heartbreak when her parents refused to marry her to a Hindu boy. She was indeed a pretty, vivacious girl I recalled and even I had a sneaking tilt towards her buried under thick layers of shyness and fear ingrained in the psyche of a callow, provincial lad. On the other hand, my friend was a handsome city boy with a golden voice singing Bollywood songs and therefore the darling of all the girls. But the lady that I had a really serious crush on was a slim, chirpy, giggling one with a fine patrician nose. As fleet-footed time fled by and we entered the PG

     यूं बोली मैना प्यारी मैं हूँ मैना कमसिन न्यारी, ठुमक ठुमक चलूँ इधर उधर आँगन हो या बगिया कोई, हर कीट पर रहती मेरी नज़र गालों में देखो पीला ‘ ब्यूटी स्पॉट ’ ; और भूरे, मखमली पंख-सजा है मेरा बदन देख के मेरे पैर और चोंच सुनहरी, मोरों को भी, सुना है ,   है होती बहुत जलन और उमड़ घुमड़ जब मैं फैलाऊँ अपने पर, देखें है क्या मेरे दर्पण उज्जवल दो ? सारिका, पीतनेत्रा भी मेरे नाम, पर भाये ना मुझे, “ कलहप्रिया ” कह के पुकारे जो बहुत बातूनी हूँ माना, और शाम ढले, हम मैनाओं की चै-चें है भला किसको भाये ? पर हूँ   सच्ची दोस्त चट कर जाऊं कीट सभी, जो खेतों में फसलों को हानि पहुंचाए और सुनो, जब दो प्रेमी ले के मेरा नाम, गाएं धुन, जैसे - “तू है मेरी मैना प्यारी” तो मैं भी झूमूं और दुआ करूं कि कुदरत और मानव की बनी रहे सदा आपस में यारी I                                   *

  How must the Congress resuscitate itself?   The question must surely have crossed your mind, like mine. After all aren’t we all a Prashant Kishor in varying degrees? Middleclass, status-quoist, armchair idlers with bulging political opinions even if based on the trash (I avoid a more apt 4-letter word) we splurge on, served hot on social media outlets and cacophonous TV channels that shout more and inform the least. A self-conceited member of this very elite club, I proffer my own take on this subject, trite though it may sound: As it stands now, this shipwreck of a behemoth, the Congress, perhaps needs nothing short of Garuda’s wings and ambrosia from the very heavens as the magic fuel to make it afloat and navigate the grey, gravid, ponderous skies of Indian politics. An 86-slide PPP by Prashant might have given it breaths of hope but is that enough? I feel that time is nigh for the Congress to go all Gandhian: Gandhian in man, vachan and karam.   That means that it should

                                                        Lament of a small man   Dear citizen, In this unimaginably vast cosmos, brahmaand as we call it, our planet is a tiny speck of rock and metal as that great astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, “where we are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” What then is the (existential) significance of a hubris-intoxicated nothing-me, and my idle fulminations?   Par jo dil men hai nihaan, weh dard jubaan kar rahi hai bayaan !   Putting politics and our individual persuasions/biases aside, speaking heart-to-heart, I have been most deeply disturbed by the current rash of demolitions, the mounting levels of Hindu-Muslim poison in the air and vicious hatred-mongering clogging the social media. Whither my beloved Bharat is turning? I ask myself. At times it gives a frightening sense of déjà vu of the pre-partition/partition days. But then the dialectic was different. It served the masters of our enslaved nation b