Heart to Heart

                     “Graveyard is just another place” We are a devoutly religious nation. Religion runs in our veins, dwells in our marrow, reigns over our neurons, lords over our day-to-day actions, tickles our hearts, resolves our existential dilemmas, guides our destinies and oversees our peaceful journey to the grave with a hope for a berth in heaven. We breathe religion, we sing religion, we shout religion, we fight religion, we live religion, we die religion. The politicians flaunt religion, weaponise and glorify it by building bhavya edifices (while we need world-class schools and hospitals) at taxpayers’ cost and use them as their ‘brahmastra’ to polarize society, bulldoze opposition and win elections.   Religion has its vile cousin too. We call it superstition. Both are in fact conjoined twins often impossible to tell apart. They gel and blend like water and milk. This unwholesome ‘opiate’ breeds fake ba...

  Watch out!   ChatGPT comes sneaking “I think; therefore I am.” This profound Descartes’ quote is fast losing its gravitas as AI-inspired ChatGPT sneaks its way into our computer-savvy world. Not just essays, articles, speeches and text messages but the new technology can churn out even serious research articles that are indistinguishable from those produced by the thinking human mind. And, writers of all hues beware!:   existential crisis for you is at hand. With ChatGPT at beck and call there won’t be any need to rack one’s brains to stitch together a plot and then, burning mid-night oil, weave a tapestry of words and inject emotions, satire, pathos, suspense, melodrama, horror into a laborious writing endeavour. Thanks to ChatGPT, the PC will deliver a sizzling story or a novel in a matter of minutes. So each one of us could be her/his own Shakespeare, Keats, Manto, Premchand or Mahadevi Verma! No wonder that ChatGPT has already made its way into the hallowed corr...

A smile from South May the 13, shone warm and benign. Earlier, it had been February-like: rambunctious, wet and cold. In the silent hours of that lovely Palampur morning, while savouring the avian symphony and the hard-arrived, shy summer’s virginal bliss, I was giving final touches to my ‘Ms Biology’ blog. But a cloud hung over my head. For, every now and then, the thought of Karnataka’s election results washed over me like a suspenseful wave. “What if?” This question rose and fell making it difficult to get my focus right. The morn melted into forenoon. My eagerness was mounting. What were the initial trends, I was wondering but daring not to access the google news, or approach the darkly staring TV screen a finger-tap away, eager to break into its familiar bluster. Later when my wife broke the first news that the Congress was leading, a wry smile came over my face, only to be displaced by vague fears. “What if?” assuming myriad forms and shapes, resumed its assault. What if the lead...

                              An encounter with Ms Biology “Darwin must be turning in his grave while we, the (shocked) living, in delightful awe of his epochal ‘On the origin of species…’  squirm and shed (invisible) tears.  As of now, ‘organic evolution’- one of the profoundest concepts that explains how life on earth evolved - would no longer adorn the school text books. Poor Darwin! He spent years on the remote Galapagos islands keenly observing and documenting organic diversity in all its pristine splendour and finally came out with his monumental work… Never ever thought that with one impudent stroke of bureaucratic pen, his enduring thought and theory would be vanished for the coming generations in a country which boasts of Jagadish Chandras, C V Ramans, Homi Bhabhas…?” I caught these words spoken by a professor- ly gentleman lecturing his young, eager-looking companion, as I passed them by....

Hyderabad diary Weather gods get angrier by the hour; ‘la-Mercury-sans-merci’ goes up north a notch or two every day; and what in March was a benign welcoming smile on the round resplendent face of Phoebus gives way to deepening frown dawn after dawn. Misty greyness shrouds the view. Sky has a grey countenance too, and looks languorous. The air gets hotter. Fans whir at greater speeds.  ACs get busier. This in short is my latest weather diary of Hyderabad. How is life like in an apartment perched up high on the 13 th , and now the 22 nd floor of a high-rise where we have recently shifted? As soon as ‘la-belle-dame’ dawn bids adieu, taking away the soothing quietude, and the sun-god clambers up in its fiery robes, human noises begin taking over. As school children finger-held by their multi-tasking indulgent Mums and Dads hurry for the school bus, life seems to switch gears bracing up to yet another rigmarole of the day’s trudge and toil. That’s all fine. We are all addicts...

                               Mantraheenam, kriyaheenam, bhaktiheenam…   A crippling sense of being “mantraheenam, kriyaheenam, bhaktiheenam…” has sneaked into me that mounts by the hour. It is a sickly, stifling feeling of speechlessness, powerlessness, helplessness, awe and fear: a kind of encircling gloom with no “kindly light” above or around to summon and beseech: “Lead Thou Me On.” Make no mistake please. I have not plucked out these self-effacing Sanskrit words from a redolent shloka out of any great bhakti bhaav (with ‘bhaktveers’ galore, my kind of bhakt/bhakti has no place anyway!)   My spirit of ennui has anthropomorphic origins. I have found myself idly wondering: did indeed God create man in his own image? If it were so, wouldn’t the world today be brimming with happiness, peace and love? Instead what have we? Wars, violence, vandalism, brutality, hatred, greed; man killing man;...

  That enchanting February morn I have pitched my time-worn tent in the historical city of Hyderabad these days. But what an exquisite morn it was when I left the Palampur shores in late February!  As my fellow residents know, Palampur is hardly any Eden of bliss at this time of year. This is rather a dreary month of cold and chill; of grey, grim, rumbling skies hushing us mostly indoors to lie curled up under our rajais or perched before heaters. After wrenching free from home, especially from the weak-armed yet tight hug of a 90-year-old mom, I was barely a few minutes on the road to Gaggal airport when the benign, reassuring face of our big Grandad, the Dhauladhar, beaming its pearly, glittery smile came in view. Dawn attired in shifting hues of gold, amber and silver had just broken. Might there be some celestial lake in the unseen heavens somewhere where it had had its dip-and-swim to look so dazzlingly magnificent? I wondered, spellbound. Whiffs of breeze that caressed m...