Kangleimaichou

It was a cool summer evening in North Delhi, a place known for its university campus and the colleges affiliated to the university. The only reliable shopping area in the whole of this place is Kamla Nagar; there must be hundreds of property developers who would have happily planted shopping malls, had space never been a problem. On this side of India's capital city bicycle rickshaws, mostly ridden by migrants from Bhiar and Utter Pradesh, are abundant and their clients are the students from other states of the country. While sitting in one of the rickshaws ridden by a migrant in wretched clothes, one is exposed to the unceasing senseless commotions. If one were in one of the hatchback cars, the most widely used and affordable cars of middle class Indians, with the window glasses rolled up then one would be less bothered. But a sun-bleached canopy and the side bars provide nothing, except the decorative details which the crude designer needs. What is iro...

As soon as you put down your bag and stood in the cement courtyard ,where you once stood as a child with hands on your hips, your aunts and uncles swarmed the place , each person delivering his and her remark: You have grown fat, have you not been eating well. All that you wanted to do was to sit there feeling the breeze in your nostrils while rocking the old chair without a word. It wasn't allowed. In a way you were lucky that they didn't poke you  with their cracked fingers  to probe. The room where you had once slept was now occupied; but your mother had arranged another upstairs. The book shelf was moved, there were some more books, you couldn't see yours. The ink-stained tablecloth and the rough wooden table were gone as well.  Perhaps you didn't notice the changes when you were here few years ago. But those things from the past existed in so many things, which were still there, but placed at   different places. Besides there were many of them which ...

Works of human i magination  should be preserved and studied, and it's entirely up to the conscience of individuals to reject or to embrace them.  Which fiery mullah or sage caked in mud or churchman with a melancholy mask would  comprehend and ever contemplate attempting such a daring enterprise, given their remote and one-sided understanding? It's a shame that the culmination of a person's first-hand anxieties, emotional deliriums amid adventures in strange settings processed through an eventual intellectual endeavours is allowed to be confronted by fanatics brandishing machetes breathing installed wrath. And what is even more disturbing is that the fact that the state turns out to be a party to it. Sentiment they say, but it's religious intoxication which is twisted only to be  presented as a humane one, like a beautifully painted grenade thrown at and everybody is scrambling thinking it's a ball; in another metaphorical expression: a malicious ma...