Heart to Heart

  Lost and found: kudos to HP Police Cyber frauds, we know, have become notoriously routine news these days … perhaps next only to headlines on CBI and ED raids on the so-called desh-ke-dushman civil society activists and urban Naxals! Their common recurrence and ubiquity have even fired the imagination of an ingenious TV producer to bring out an interesting serial ‘Jamtara’ to shine the light on how the clever fellows dupe not just the gullible but even the cyber-savvy. Therefore this personal story in this context needs telling. Months ago with body and mind still licking Covid-inflicted woes, my wife decided to break the monotony of a sequestered two-some life by an online purchase. However, eventually she suffered her own Jamtara moment losing about 50,000 rupees in the process. Well, though moneywise I am rather loose (but not characterwise: being a sanskari Hindu-Indian after all!) but this loss did hurt. A pensioner’s pittance already scythed short by the unsparing hand of I

  Brush with a bus On a bright balmy day in early, rain-sullied October, in a sunny mood, I was on an errand to Holta on the Palampur-Baijnath road. The vaahan I was driving was our humble, old little Maruti-800 that a friend of mine calls ‘hamaara chaar pahiyon ka scooter’! About half-way, I noticed a red-yellow bus in my rear view mirror. I knew which private bus it was. All private bus operators are notorious for their might-is-right ways, caring too hoots about traffic rules. Being law unto themselves, overcrowding, over-speeding and blowing off your very brains with pressure horns are typical of their ‘muscular’ approach in general towards driving. The one coming behind me was no better - rather worse - as I knew from old personal experience. It represents an old, well-established transport house of the region with a sizeable fleet and epitomizes all the dirty tricks most transporters generally employ to run their businesses, and their writ runs far and wide on the Kangra roads