BLEEDING CIVILIZATION

(All the above pictures have been clicked by me at 8.45 pm, February 23)

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. You’re just awake. Perhaps enjoying a hot cup of tea. You might also be in a mood to turn a few pages of the Sunday newspaper. If you’re not interested in current affairs, it doesn’t matter. It’s a Sunday and you will always seek pleasure from the pleasant things of life. Am I any different from you? I too will follow the same. And, I might also feel very displeased, if someone decides to ruin my Sunday by bringing me face to face with something absolutely unpleasant. None of us will be interested in leaving the comfort zone, made freely available by every Sunday of our lives; one after the other. But I am helpless. I am eager to seek your company in something that’s immensely unpleasant in nature. 

For the last five years, the country’s leadership has been trying its level best to ensure a ‘Swachh Bharat’, a so called ‘Clean India’. And, let me remind you, this vision is not of an intolerant political party but a vision once shared by the father of our nation; none other than the ambassador of peace Mahatma Gandhi. He had once said and I quote – CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS. And, this cleanliness is achievable, only when we, the people decide to be civilized. But, we seem to be failing at it every day. Yes, we are!

Ever since rules/duties of ‘Swachh Bharat’ have been implemented, we have been doing our bit to ensure adopting them in our day to day activities. But, there is no dearth of uncivilized minds, who will make sure that India continues to look unclean. I think their minds will continue to remain sick like the self-proclaimed NRIs of our school. Not all of them, but a handful of them from our 1993 batch (specifically 2/3 of them). These minds are so sick that at the sight of anything clean, they will try their best to leave it unclean. The same happened to my car, last evening. I think, a group of tobacco/gutka/pan masala munchers couldn’t digest the cleanliness standards, I maintain for my car. The shade of my car being white, such wrongdoers get easily attracted to it. So this group or individual made sure that they smear the front door, some portion of the window glass and the door handle with their red colored spirit. I had parked my car in a silent lane. Immediately after a span of mere 15 minutes, when I came back to my car, I saw this ghastly site. The first few words, which came to my mind instantly were – OUR CIVILIZATION IS BLEEDING. This is third time in the row, when such a thing has repeated itself.

Honestly speaking we are not yet civilized. I think, at times some of us decide to program an ecosystem of one-sided revenge by simply choosing to act in such uncivilized manner. I’ve no idea as to at what fault, my car was! Or, did any of my action was so hurtful to anyone that they chose to leave the car door painted in red. For a second, it almost felt that a bleeding civilization had left my car to bleed alone. I must actually be saying that the so called modern civilization is bleeding. The bad blood within them is going to take some time to flow out.

This action of the unknown, unseen miscreants have not angered me. But I am concerned about the state of coming days. Are we going to fail the dream, the mission, the vision of ‘Swachh Bharat’ or ‘Clean India’? Are we going to fail the father of our nation, who at one point of time belonged to a tolerant political party? Or we will sit in front of our television sets to be a voiceless participant in the mindless debates, which break out against the current leadership of the country. 

Through this post of mine, I wish to make an appeal; if a little bit of pride of being an Indian is left in you, stop being a part of this bleeding civilization. Stop being a part of a civilization, which bleeds for no reason and makes cleanliness bleed every day, makes clean things bleed every day. At least for once, stop being like those self-proclaimed NRIs, who have fled the country to embrace slavery and cleanliness of foreign nations.

- Virtuous Vociferous | February 24 | February Blog-4 | Never Settle | 2019

A REVOLUTIONARY BEGINNING

Some hours are deliberately or nonchalantly spent in writing shit; in the name of being a professional and for the sake of a designation, which sticks to your ass like a long lasting ailment. You try your level best to get rid of it and yet it stays stuck there, to your ass, not wanting to be healed and treated. So what do you do then? Die of pain or churn a way out!

When there is nothing else to be passionate about; but writing, writing and more writing every second, every minute, every hour, every single day and every moment of our lives; we need to think of something that liberates us. We need to liberate ourselves from being repeatedly insulted by rotten mindsets and stinking demands by those who don’t have any inkling about writing.

I, for instance, having migrated to a new place to seek solace in the richness of writing had already started feeling stuck. The people, I’ve been communicating with on an everyday basis, for the last few months, were conspicuous in their approach towards ‘just another’ creative writer. One of them from the top management also had the audacity of asking me or rather warning me against throwing tantrums. After a decade old journey of writing, I haven’t come across myself as a tantrum throwing weirdo. Still, I gathered my thoughts and decided to mend some things around me. But I kept missing out on one thing and that was freedom of writing.

Rendered breathless and hopeless, I had stopped reading books, stopped observing things around me and had almost stopped giving up. Then a message arrived on the WhatsApp Messenger, which read, “I want to write, will you help me with how do I start?” Not in the best of my mood, initially I had decided to simply ignore it. But then there was something that was very interesting about this proposition. Here was a soul, a soul still not brazen by all the bullshit of an otherwise uncreative life, who was eagerly sharing a desire to want to write. I kept aside my iPhone and then revisited the message.

First and foremost, writing, especially independent or creative cannot be straightly taught to anyone. But yes, there is no harm in helping someone to improve upon his or her writing skills. Therefore I gave my consent and thus began the process. The first step itself was effortless, so effortless that all it needed were two mobile phones and a WhatsApp messenger to unify and initiate it. Neither did the need arise to meet in person and begin writing nor was there a language barrier to stop us from starting, what I now term as a writing revolution of sorts.

We zeroed in on a topic, which had two characters; a man in his mid thirties and a woman in her mid forties. Two stories were born in a short span of time; both written independently without letting out a word about the central theme. The stories were absolutely different in their treatment and in their telling. Secondly we followed no rules while writing them. None of us spoke about the grammar or how precise, we should be about the date, time and day of the events, which take place in the story. The only norm, we followed was to write it as a first person account.

The two stories, which emerged from this revolution of two minds, threw open a new avenue of not a mere collaboration but also the formation of an entity. An entity, we ‘now’ as partners in crime are in no mood to reveal. I know the word ‘crime’ doesn’t suit us. But still there is lot of crime involved because we are going to spill loads of ink.

Here am I raising a toast to the new beginning of writing unabridged.

-vociferous