A Different Revolution

You came out from the bush in a mangled bus with a seam-bursting fake Nike bag, then on a packed train for nights only to be in one of the mainland cities. To those whom you left behind you had a promise keep, the new place held everything for you. It should since all of your parents' were poured into that place so that you could live comfortably and pursue your dream. It was cool and people here spoke a different language, what they did was the benchmark of everything and each time you tried something you measured yourself against them.


The bulky man in a white sedan with windows rolled down, loud music blaring; this is what you have to be, but man like him comes from a different place, where a highway blockade for few hours builds pressure on New Delhi, and at least ten of their leaders would come out with threat that will make the biggest man in the largest democracy shriek.

Years after you had gone through the tunnel of British leftover education and picked up a job in some BPO  your mental pictures of the place behind has become dimmer. Those once-a-year visits would only make you gloomy; the sight of those pot-holed roads and their dust casting veils all over everything nearby, the whitewashed buildings which looked grand and nice years back, now blanched and plaster coming off, bridges which replaced the wooden ones in your childhood now look as old as those medieval ones.

Changes you have noticed, the changes in people and in the clothes they wear; they are no more people with self-respect, they are a self-defeated and then a defeated kind who can readily take any blows. But today they are seen in better western clothes and well-stitched formal attires imported through the capricious highways. When you see them, you don't feel that they are the natives of the land; rather like some snobbish tourists who have come to this doomed place by mistake.

Farmers they were only a decade ago, then they built shops on their paddy fields to sell China-made and Mainland-imported goods. So, in a decade they also started importing rice which they used to grow and now have become completely dependent on imports. It is no surprise that they import rice to socks ,and when the channels are blocked they become terrified and shriek with fear as though they are possessed and only a foreign power can   liberate them.

It hardly makes any sense for you think, those whom you left behind are now old, the young ones have migrated in the place where you have been living. Everything is there, the place promises everything and you know they will grow up and have a grip on grander things; you have been just a corporate dreg. You can only be submissive to maintain a place but haven't tried beyond that. But you don't know that this incompetent personality of you is one reason why you have been fretting when you are exposed to impacting news from home, also the reason why didn't even look at that guy from the same village working in Shopper's Stop department store.

This anger does no good to you, for it swells and each day and after reaching a limit it shrinks and sinks inside you as a heavy stone which you feel when you begin to walk.

We have so many of you, many who can easily fret, but hardly anyone who can fret less and think for remedies. While you strive to submit more and more not be a dreg anymore, you have copied that sedan man  and have outdone him.


While you are fretting in confusion every village and every street is given a Nehru-Ghandhi name. It was expected; the place had been hollering below a borrowed name and people have long been living in a state of denial , some say, it's just that they don't  even have newspaper knowledge and courage to convince that it is indeed a corrupt name. You seem to be alright with that, though. Even when those savages in black suits ,dispensing Bilblical English when not a word of their own can be uttered, blocking the highways, just like some  kids being placed near a nuclear button, even for not getting the chance to fart it isn't hot for the Anna Hazare newspapers. You know this, but you have no problem in hugging it.


Time does the trick, in your case it will beguile you and make you think there is nothing for you to look at, then you turn to the North India democracy, the India on the move in big cities, while the rest of the country are living in stone age. 


Just walk past the apex court's building; that court can override any verdicts. It expressed it concerns when those 2G scam suspects were denied bails by the CBI court and elaborated the irrational side of the CBI's contention.Then it thundered out the order with  granted bails, everyone began to think the country was talking sense, even though it hasn't been for decades in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East. It has concerns for few 2G scam suspects , while it can't afford for those millions in those regions under AFSPA. Money does talk louder in this largest democracy than elsewhere in the world.


RK Prithiviraj Singha from Nehru Vihar, Imphal , you will be happy there with your next generation. But there are few of us who want a revolution, a sophisticated one: slit them where they bleed the most so that they can feel what it is like to die feeling every bit of death and then to be surrounded by those hawks.


On the second thought, why would we lower ourselves, just because those hypocrites vegetarians have started devouring our kind secretly doesn't mean that we have to do likewise. How easy it would have been, if they were my students. But they have become unmanageable monsters in modern clothes who talk nasty things in diplomatic language and do inhumane things with a friendly face.


Will a new revolution be the answer? Will it be inevitable? It seems a must, but it has got to be a different one. Yes a very sophisticated one!