Heart to Heart

  INDIA and Elections ‘24 Dear citizen:   Elections ‘24 are almost upon us. Given the country’s present mood and pulse, it would be moot to ask “who will win?”, for the answer seems so obvious. Exultant after its recent assembly election wins the BJP is already breathing brimstone and fire and flexing its muscles to deliver a fatal blow and knock the living daylights out of the haggard, famished, fractured Opposition. As a simile it is almost like a dangal between pehalwan Dara Singh and the poor fumbling (‘drunken’) Kesto Mukherjee- our Bollywood comedian once. Thinking about the INDIA conglomerate, nothing but disgust washes over me. What a silly mess its constituents have made of it! Marked by two grand meets of its stalwarts it took off well engendering hope while giving jitters to the BJP. But alas! they flattered to disappoint. Succumbing to personal (‘Nitishian’) greed, self-interest, insatiable lust for power and perhaps some sam-daam-dand-bhed stratagems employed by their

  ‘Carry on Jatta!’ “Love is a Many-splendoured Thing”. So goes a popular song in the movie with the same name perhaps borrowed from Han Suyin’s bestselling novel’s title. Though I relished reading this beautiful book decades ago, but the true import and transcendent power of ‘love’, its many splendours, its mystic beauty and purifying fragrance that it bestows on us had not descended into my wayward soul in those flippant years of youth. Regrettably, the wisdom leading to my nirvana dawned a bit too late in life: my ‘wisdom tooth’ having only caused pain (and fattened the dentist’s bill) than shone any light of understanding. Well, I am no Rumi, Bulleh Shah, Shakespeare or Keats. Neither Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, nor Kant. Nor am I Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone (much though I adore them for their trail-blazing, self-practiced ideas and ideals). No Bertrand Russell either– a towering intellectual I would love to emulate, though.   No ‘love-guru’ Osho am I too: in a sense the most unsai