As It Comes To Mind

Monu lived in house number 72 in the first row of houses overlooking the main road. Theirs was a sprawling housing complex having rows of single-storey government flats, all neatly laid out, and strategically located right in the heart of the city.  A network of criss-crossing narrow roads connected the various rows with each other. So, each row of houses had a small tarred road of its own in the front and a small pathway led from each house to road. On either side of this small pathway were little patches of garden in which the residents grew different varieties of flowering shrubs and bushes. The first row houses were rather lucky, for they had an additional strip of garden in the front, on the other side of the narrow tarred road in the front. A low brick wall ran along these garden strips, parallel to the first row houses, and fenced off the housing complex from the main road on the other side. The red brick wall was the barricade, the red color forbidding any crossing over. B...

It was almost the end of March in the Spring of 198-.  March was the ideal month to laze around doing nothing and fall asleep on the green grass, just looking up at the sky. Studying was the most difficult during this time as Monu used to inevitably find during her final exams. After all, Nature conspired against all futile attempts at sitting still trying to read any sort of printed matter. Thankfully,  Monu's third standard final exams had just got over. She was a good student and enjoyed school life. But once she got back home, anything connected with school depressed her and she'd procrastinate doing her homework as long as she could. Instead, after having lunch and her afternoon nap, all she would want was to get out of her house and go search out her friends and play with them.  So, now that the school had closed for the end of term, and the holidays, even though only ten-days long, had begun, Monu was going crazy thinking of ways to enjoy every single day of the s...

We live in dark times. We live in times when prejudices abound. The prejudices shared by the fair-skinned and not so (or not at all) fair-skinned against the darker brethren of humanity that range from various forms of racial discrimination and extend to find echo in a mother-in-law’s ecstatic “Ooh! It’s a beautiful ‘white’ baby!”. The prejudices shared by the urban and rural majority (read belonging to both ‘Bhaarat’ and ‘India’) against what they term as the ‘indecency of the well-heeled and minimally garbed women’ who, in their words, ’invite rape’. The small prejudices that we allow to crawl into our minds when say, a new neighbor /colleague/daughter-in-law enters the confines of our neighborhood/workplace/family. Someone (mostly, a supplier of gossip) would say, “Aha! Do you know that he/she said/did THAT, or behaved like THIS.” And foolishly, unsuspectingly, we’d say “Really? Oh my!” letting ourselves fall prey to yet another prejudice. Why can’t we train our minds...

Who or what is ‘Gul Makai’? It is the pseudonym using which a young brave-heart, still only in her teens, decided to take on a powerful and ruthless group of religious fundamentalists.  Although, by the time her writings, mainly through her blog, became public, the power of the religious group had waned to an extent; they still managed to get at the school-going youngster by attempting to kill her in full daylight. Today, the world knows her by her real name - Malala Yousafzai - mostly due to her miraculous survival of the assassination attempt, even though in the process she suffered grievous injuries. The girl who had taken on one of the most fanatical religious outfits had survived to become a beacon of light illuminating one of the darkest periods of socio-economic and political turmoil in her native land. Why did this particular religious group in the name of a supposedly ‘holy war’ decide to target a young girl? What had excited their fury or rather fervour so as to regar...

A traffic signal in New Delhi The car in which I was travelling with my family braked and stopped as the signal turned red just as we were about to cross. We looked askance at the signal and resigned ourselves to some more minutes of impatient waiting. Suddenly, as we sat looking at nothing in particular, a pair of small hands appeared at the windscreen and began wiping it with a piece of cloth. After finishing, the owner of the small hands - a boy about ten years old - gave a shy smile and without a word extended his right palm forward. We placed a couple of coins in his outstretched hand and he moved on to another car. As the signal changed he quickly ran and crossed over just as the sea of traffic surged forward. A residential locality in Dubai The past three days have been rather windy, and the dust quotient of the perennially dusty Dubai gets a few notches higher during the high winds. There’s sand everywhere - on the balcony and windowsills, blowing about in patterns on th...

To start on a humorous note, the first thing that comes to my mind every time I read the heading above is a friend's post on Facebook that went like this:" Love Marriage Vs Arranged Marriage - It's like asking whether one wants to commit suicide or submit to being murdered!" My friend in question, is a regular 'funny girl', posting widely 'liked' and commented upon witticisms on the human condition in general. But after the initial smiles and nods of agreement most people, including I, come to realize a surprising fact of life - that despite such commentaries on the apparent sorry state of affairs regarding the institution of marriage, (which has raised sufficient doubts in the minds of many belonging to the 'Generation Next' as to whether they would actually like to get married or not), it remains a dream of the young and romantic to 'settle down' with someone they love! In other words, not only is the institution of marriage 'a...

The first thing that you noticed about her was her smile, And as soon as you spotted it, You knew you'd found a friend for life. Winsome and genuine, her eyes reflected it back, Giving her face an ethereal appearance, a sprite-like quality. Her frame too was small and slender And the lightness of her footfalls, a gentle reminder That her presence was always by your side, Whether you saw her or not. It was in the summer of 2002 that I first met her; Rather, the end of the hot summer And the monsoons just about to break out in full swing! I'd just entered my Journalism class on the first day And sat down at a table near the wall Away from the first-row benches that I so detested. The class itself was only half-full As the students gradually made their way in And the clock showed that there was a full 15 minutes Before the teacher arrived. It seemed that a discussion On the then President of India was going on. There was some confusion as to his initials ...