Mad Men

Mad men

On a hot, dusty evening, a man fell to the ground beside a heap of rotting garbage. He skinned his knees and the side of his face as he hit the asphalt. His tattered pajamas did little to hide his modesty.

He lay there, sucking in short, sharp breaths. He was supposed to feel an emotion, but which one? Perhaps anger… or was it shock?  He tried to play dead, hoping the boys would move on to some other prey. Like bears. But he couldn’t stop his gasps of breath. The more he tried to stifle them, the more his body jerked. He was conscious of how his body had started to writhe again, uncontrollably.  

Today he was a stupid man, stripped of intelligence, stripped of sense. He was so stupid, he couldn’t even play dead. So when the pelting started again, could he blame them? He curled his beard in front of his face and put one hand over his eyes, the other over his genitals as the men laughed.

Mad men

As far as he could see, the world was a remarkable place. So many shades of sunshine. If he closed his good eye, he could only see the white hot light glinting off another bauble at the trinket store. And when he tried on another pair of sunglasses, the world was suddenly bathed in blue. The shopkeeper didn’t mind. It cost him nothing to keep the khyapa amused. 

And when khyapa smiled, it was so weightless that for those few moments, every customer at that roadside shop would feel themselves unplugged from the world and its cares.

Smiling comes easy when you’re in step with your world. When people do as you do, you smile. When the light looks just right, when the shade is cool enough or when food is found, you smile. When sleep comes easy, and you wake up because you’ve slept enough, you smile. When the body does what the mind tells it to, you smile because you’re harmonizing. 

And then when you can play with the world, that smile becomes a laugh. When a child comes and sits beside you, you can laugh and help her laugh too. When another day goes by, when you didn’t have to lie, about where you’ve been or what you did, you can laugh. If they’ll give you a roof for the night, where you can make your bed in plain sight, you can laugh, even if it’s in your head. When the rules line up neatly with what you were anyways planning to do, just laugh.

Mad men

So today was a good day. After an arresting conversation with a friendly constable (both of them parted, step-in-spring intact), he figured that the imbalance he struggled with, wasn’t so bad. Sure, he didn’t see why people needed to walk around as though wearing straitjackets, nor really why their up was down, and their down up, but as long as everyone got along, did it really matter?

When the shopkeeper had had enough of him, he’d give khyapa a fiver to send him on his way. The money meant little, and khyapa would later give it to a beggar, but he understood this signal - It meant ‘enough now, leave’. See? He knew what was what. 

Now, as the sun blustered in the evening sky, khyapa had grown thirsty and hungry. The buildings all seemed to slant in the wrong direction, so no cool shade was on offer as he looked for food. He knew better than to knock on doors, and some sense of esteem prevented him from sitting on the road to beg. 

That’s when he stumbled upon an open garbage pile. A maid from a nearby colony was dumping the kitchen waste. There was bound to be food there – homemade, at that. The promise of solid pickings started him on a clumsy dash towards the garbage, drool dripping instantly from the side of his mouth.

He perched himself on a brick and lunged from his squat towards half a boiled potato, nestled among some broken egg shells and cauliflower stems. How people could waste perfectly good food like this he didn’t know, not that he minded. 

A laugh rang out somewhere in the distance as he was about to bite into the potato. The next moment, he felt a sharp pain at the back of his head, and immediately after, a sting in the recess of his knee. The stones were sharp, almost as sharp as the taunts that accompanied them. A man broke away from the group, ran up to him and kneed him in the back. On that hot, dusty evening, a hungry man fell to the ground beside a heap of garbage. Mad men we are.

Commonwealth Games 2010

From numerous articles on the net about the mismanagement of funds at CWG 2010, here are some gems:

• 1 Treadmill rented for Rs. 10 lakh ($21, 500 US) for a period of 45 days

• 1 roll of toilet paper - bought for $89

• Payment of $429,000 to a British film company (AM films) helmed by one Ashish Patel, to supply outdoor display units for a ceremonial function in London last year. The firm had a paid-up capital of £1 and one share held by Ash Patel, i.e. a one-man shop, until one week before the function.

• 43 lakh pots for a whopping INR 30 crore ($6.437M USD) to beautify the venues in Delhi. - First of all, pots? Secondly, Delhi police have told the CWG organisers that these pots cannot be placed anywhere near the venues for security reasons. Back go them pots.

All of this money comes from the pockets of the tax-paying public, and the Organizers are toying with the media, the junta, and the money itself. I guess they figured it's Games with the Common Wealth after all, so what the heck.

Soccer World Cup

Overheard (or made up, not sure which):
Reporter on the street doing spots for a news show. Catches a random soccer fan and:

Reporter: So, who do you think is the dark horse for this year's cup?
Fan: India.
Reporter: India? but they aren't even part of the pool.
Fan: And that's just how dark they are.

Apologies

S'troo, I haven't posted the last couple of months. A thousand apologies to those that stopped by. A thousand more to those that stopped by more than once.

I'm creating some more time, you should see something new up here pretty often now over the next quarter.

Indian Winter

I'm in Bangalore for the next couple of weeks. It's sweater weather, and there's not a chance of snow. The idea is to put my feet up and do little - very very little. The agenda is to meet old friends, and check off the usual offenders:
1. Fanoos rolls
2. Avatar 3D
3. Gemini Circus
4. Talk to local politicians about the progress with the Metro project
5. Cleanse the city of all pollution
6. And all corruption, while I'm at it

More updates to follow in this post.

Prison Money

A friendly prof. sent me an article about the currency in prison. In the U.S., the old, gold standard - cigarettes, has now been replaced by "macks".

Mackerel fish. A can of the dastardly stuff goes for about $1. Two macks buy you a haircut, 400 macks a cellphone. There's obviously some elasticity in there, compared to the outside world. The prison has a cellphone-to-haircut ratio of 200 and the outside world, a ratio of about 6 (regular haircut, non-smart cellphone).

Explained easily enough:

Long hair, short hair, who cares? ...

The cellphone, OTOH, lets you keep tabs on your drug-peddling , allows cyber conjugal visits, helps plan the escape, etc...

So the currency is macks.

Me, I'd have thought it was simply the £.

Sorry. Prison joke.

No contradictions

Clinton (the Ms. of the Hill-Billie jodi) had strong words for Pakistan during her recent visit there:

Al Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,’ Clinton told senior Pakistani newspaper editors in the country’s cultural capital, Lahore. ‘I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,’ she added.

Harsh words, blunt words, but she said what many in the US have felt for the last few years.

Pakistan has recently stepped up military offensives against the Taliban in the Waziristan region. And the Taliban has stepped up the bombing. Here's a brilliant link to images of the strife in the country.

Tangled webs we weave
Pakistan's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, claims Indian sponsorship of this new wave of Taliban attacks. It's difficult for the layman to knock this claim, given India's recent assimilation of embassies in Afghanistan. India is doing great work in Afghanistan, building roads, improving healthcare facilities, etc, but many feel this is part of India's strategy to undermine Pakistan's influence in the region. Perhaps it's all a front to provide the Taliban the means to wreck further destruction in Pakistan. Analogous to Pakistan's (ISI) efforts to build a nexus between Indian insurgent groups (IIGs) and Islamic fundamentalists in Bangladesh and to install Pakistani maulvis in Bangladeshi madrassas to catalyze anti-India sentiments.

Back to Hillary: She snapped at some students at a University in Lahore as they tried to grill her about how the US has mistreated Pakistan, a long-serving ally.
(paraphrased)"But we've given you billions of dollars".
"If you want to see your territory shrink [by allowing terrorists to expand their space], that’s your choice. But I don’t think that’s the right choice."

But the point of my post is this: The US has indeed given Pakistan billions of dollars. The US will continue to pour money and guns into Pakistan. But the effect on the ground, despite Pakistan's intentions, hasn't been proportional. In fact, the Taliban today are bolder, more aggressive in Pakistan than they have been in a long time. What's the plan to tackle this?

How thoroughly has the U.S. has considered the long-term effects of this supply of gun-money?

What if:

(a) The Taliban gain more ground, and defeat the shaky force that Pakistan's military presents - through building allies in the government, and among the population, through bombing civilian targets till the country grinds to a halt, among several strategies. The U.S.-provided ammunition would fall into hands that would turn, now far more resolutely, against the U.S. themselves.

(b) Pakistan's military is able to defeat the Taliban...The military pledges a feeble allegiance to the government. A new General, a new coup - everything's possible in that neck of the woods. Who's to tell what their policy will be towards the U.S. then?

Essentially, the same machinery that provided arms to the Mujahideen (of which the Taliban was a more fundamentalist subset) to defeat the Soviets, only to have the Taliban come back and strike the U.S. after, is at work again. I hope history does not repeat.

News

The parental units are touring SE Asia.

The brother has them out of his hair, they have him out of theirs. These twin joys will be short-lived though.

In the papers:
There are storms and floods in Southern India. This is a great opportunity to give. Same with the earthquakes in Indonesia and Samoa. I suspect these flash crises receive a fair bit of public aid. The instant destruction tears at your heart, and hopefully loosens purse strings.

Not in the papers:
In India - the slow erosion of human capital (and the silent crumpling of little lives) when underprivileged children escape the quicksand of hard labour to attend school. The schooling is often free, but the children attend school on empty stomachs.

Imagine sending your child hungry to school. It probably hurts you to imagine such a day. You might've been running late, a water pipe might've broken, or for whatever reason, your child missed breakfast that day. You'd hurt. Imagine then that you weren't able to pack her lunch, and she didn't take her little purse, the one you keep the emergency lunch money stuffed in. The poor thing would have to sit through hour after hour of class running on last night's dinner.

Imagine next, a situation where this empty, whimpering stomach isn't an accident - you just aren't able to feed your child. You want her to learn, you want her to build a life better than yours, but you can't afford to feed her one square meal. Perhaps if she helped you till the land, repair the neighbour's clothes, you might have been able to feed her, but then she wouldn't be able to go to school. Your life hasn't amounted to anything, and you're powerless to make your daughter's life any different.

Akshayapatra provides food for underprivileged schoolchildren. Please give.