Our choice, Our lives.

P for pistol. P for power. And in India if you have both, you have it all. After all it’s probably the only democracy in the world where you can go Scot free after shooting someone in the head in front of three hundred people. Or for that matter, massacring innocent school children for turning out in the Independence Day parade of the country they live in.

A country with an extremely short lived public memory, we are quick to jump on the bandwagon but equally fast to forget too. We are people who wear our hearts proudly in our sleeves. Driven by passion , our hearts invariably rule over our minds and as Indians, we are probably the most self righteous race in the world and claim to have a clear idea of what is morally correct and what is not. Almost funny as we have what is officially the most unsafe city for women in the world as our national capital. The Jessica Lals and the Priyadarshini Mattoos are sad testimonies to the fact that amidst all the tall claims of being the culturally most evolved nation of the world something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong.

Abuse of power is so common that it is perceived as routine today. A top cop of one of the most prosperous states of the country repeatedly sexually abuses a teenager, young enough to be his daughter, ultimately forcing her to commit suicide. A minister’s son has the audacity to yank out a gun in front of hundreds of people just because the barmaid rightfully refused him his drink and then has the luxury of being defended by one of the best lawyers of the country, ironically also a former union law minister. Whether it’s the local municipal collector’s car being parked in a no parking zone or the rich businessman’s drunken son’s latest sports car running over sleeping people on the road, such cases are countless and reflect India’s power population’s brazen contempt for laws.

And back home in the beautiful north eastern state of Assam from where I belong and take pride in, it definitely defies my logic as to how a certain Arabinda Rajkhowa was so easily let off by the state government and more surprisingly forgiven by the people of Assam as is evident from the hero’s welcome he was accorded with at a lot of places in the state after his release. Torturing and killing thousands of innocent people on pretexts so obnoxious and juvenile, it hardly takes rocket science to establish that the motives of the organisation (read terrorist outfit) that Rajkhowa chaired had changed drastically over the years. Both the money laundered from various sources in the name of the ‘War Chest’ of the organisation and the power accumulated through a spate of fear inducing activities had got into the heads of the self proclaimed revolutionaries giving them the license to kill at will.

From the landmark ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign to protest against the lunacies of an outrageous religious fundamentalist to candle light processions disapproving the faulty judicial system of the country, the youth has pitched in vociferously. Time and again, Generation Y has reiterated that Chalta Nahi Hai. Not anymore. A new wave is slowly but surely setting in. The winds of change are blowing. It’s high time we buckle up, pull up our socks. And it has to be a deliberate decision. A choice we have to make- whether to silently take in our sisters, friends and girlfriends being groped and touched by someone just because he has power in his head and a pistol in his hands or to give it back. A decision as to if we will let a bunch of uneducated goons dictate terms on the basis of their petty whims and fancies, killing and bombing the very people they had supposedly set out to emancipate in the first place or fight back. It’s a decision that will shape the future-ours as well as the nation’s. A choice that we the people will have to make –to keep suffering silently as we always have or fight for our rights. And this choice will decide where we stand as citizens of a civilised country and, of course, as humans.

United we write, divided we..err...

The year was 2007. The month probably August or perhaps even September. It could not be October. I clearly recall the stickiness adding to the uneasiness of the situation. The date I do not remember. Two teenagers, just out of high school, were discussing ‘business sense’ against the backdrop of a freshly painted yellow house adorned by a big blue board which read ‘Individual Maths Classes for IIT –JEE by....’Like all other discussions between 16 year olds, which when faced with the slightest of difference of opinions turn into full fledged wars, this one too was heading the wrong way. Egged on by a few other boys also waiting for the Maths tutor who claimed to be an IIT Bombay alumnus (something always debated upon during the entire length of the course specially on days where a particularly peculiar function would just refuse to get integrated by him), all of the same age who though were morally mature enough to know that the tension in arguments like this one needed to be diffused immediately to avoid serious damage but not grown up enough yet to resist the fun of seeing a few blows and slaps, the two of them directed all they knew anything even remotely relevant to the topic towards ascertaining supremacy over one another. And as it almost invariably is with such arguments, this too ended prematurely with the arrival of the IIT Bombay pass out maths tutor (since there is no concrete contradictory evidence as such, we give the man the benefit of doubt) without any consent reached at. Incidentally, this happened to be the first time the two had seen of each other.

As fate would have it which in this case acted in the form of private Maths Coaching Classes to aid the IIT Coaching Classroom Classes (pun intended), the two of them kept meeting again and again. And with time, the hostility let way for a subtle friendship. The place, the schedule didn’t allow friendships. But between Tutorial Sheets and Extra Classes, the most powerful human emotion almost always took over. In an alien and unfriendly atmosphere of Integral Calculus and Binomial Theorem, a passion for rock music and an unwavering devotion to Chelsea brought the two of them close too. From chance encounters at the departmental store to the occasional visit to each other’s rooms, the two started meeting up more often for no reasons obvious; something people termed as time wastage and considered as one of the gravest errors an IIT aspirant could commit in this town called Kota where everything that people cared for began and ended with the Indian Institutes of Technology. An idea both of them were not comfortable with for it was beyond them to sit in their stingy rooms for hours at a stretch and just do math but that’s another story.

The two hellish years passed, albeit painfully slowly, like all bad things in life. Both failed their joint entrance exams for admissions into the IITs.  But nevertheless both got admitted into decent engineering colleges on merit. The story wasn’t over. After sharing their horrid experiences with the much glorified aspects “engineering” they came to know they had much more in common. Like any other not-so-grown-up person cursing the present situation, they claimed that they belonged to the more creative side of this universe (or rather the opposite of what they were in), even ‘writing’ got them high, much more than any of the rusty lathe machines and binary mathematics. The resonance was most pronounced and they knew what they had to do. Reserve a space to put down their thoughts. Maybe just in order to look back at it in the future and laugh at the immaturity the thoughts bore or maybe just for the love of writing. Or maybe just in order to get a ‘life’. The easiest way was to start a blog and that looked COOL, people writing blogs have always been considered to be cool so why not?  Much water has flown in the Chambal (for those of you who don’t know- The Chambal is a river that flows through the town of Kota and again the pun is intended) since that juvenile debate on their first meeting. The two of them or rather the two of us –Siddharth Kotwal and Arunabh Saikia, have moved over Rock and the Blues is what really gets us on now, Chelsea is in the middle of one of its worst ever phases but we still remain faithful to the Blues, Blues music on the other side is well just like ‘crack cocaine’ for us. Connected by the Blues and separated by what we don’t really care; here we come again for this new blog of ours where we will discuss everything from spiritualism to sex!

Happy Reading Guys!! Cheers!!