Am not really jobless..

..but i did spend a good one month, or perhaps more hunting for the CD or even the lyrics of the song `sansar se bhaage firte ho' from the film Chitralekha. As luck would have it, Vividh Bharati played songs from the film on two occasions in the last one month, but, sadly my favourite was not their chosen one. I searched high and low for the lyrics on the net but could find stray mentions of the song in articles on Sahir Ludhianavi. Well, after finishing my story yesterday, i got back to hunting for the song again.. and after a good two hours of real surfing I found a site from where I could play the song and hastily took down the lyrics.
And now I am dying to put the lyrics here on my blog ever since for two reasons. One, i dont want people surfing for the lyrics of the song to face the problems i did and two.. i just love the way this song challenges just about every philosophy on life, ideals and indulgence. While seekers of the eternal truth describe pleasures of life ephemeral, this song begs to differ.
here goes -

sansar se bhaage firte ho
bhagwaan ko kya tum paaoge
is lok ko kabhi apna na sake
us lok mein bhi pachtaoge

yeh paap hai kya
yeh punya hai kya
reeton par dharm ki mohren hai
har yug mein badalte dharmon ko
kaise aadarsh banaoge?

yeh bhog bhi ek tapasya hai
tum tyaag ke maare kya jaano
apmaan racheta ka hoga
rachna ko agar thukraoge

hum kehte hai yeh jag apna hai
tum kehte ho jhootha sapna hai
hum janam bita kar jaayenge
tum janam gawan kar jaaoge

The pit(fall) of news

(Sorry, if this sounds insensitive but with due respect to the child and the trauma his family went through, but, from an `average’ newsperson’s perspective, I cannot fathom how a child falling into a pit becomes national news.)
A child who accidentally fell into a pit could rake in lakhs of rupees. The government, I am sure, wanted to splurge more. Like, promising a job when he turns 18. Or, promising a career in medicine or engineering, whichever he decides. The child, when he grows into a thinking adult, would some day surely understand how the pit-fall changed his life.
I was forced to think of the umpteen children who are living their lives in pits, literally.
Be it the pit of poverty or illiteracy or simply the pit of government’s indifference to their plight. Child workers working in hazardous conditions need to be rescued too… but that doesn’t become national news. There are many pits in the form of dingy zari units or the pesticide-saturated cottonseed farms. But, the nation doesn’t pray for them or force the government or the local administration to `spring into action’ and `announce aid and support for them’. There are no cameras to record their plight and air it live.
Their families too are poor, many of them live of the money earned by their children. There is no financial aid for them. These are soft stories and they don’t sell, I hear often. Predictably, they don’t make national news.
A day after the child’s rescue from the pit, a news anchor gushed that reality television had come of age. Well, I would like to see `real rescues' before I can say that.
(Pic: child workers at a cottonseed farm in mahbubnagar district.)

Connecting with Bombay

It is not without an ulterior motive that I ask my parents to settle down in Bombay. Though I never say it in as many words. I tell them about how they have been in the city for over 12 years and how they have a rocking social circle. I also tell them that Bombay offers the best medical facilities. What I don’t tell them is that my connection with the city I so love will be snapped once they step out of it.
Yes, I have friends there who will never move out of Bombay and will always draw me to the city, but having family there is a different feeling altogether __ it makes Bombay home and me a resident not a visitor.
My father is due for retirement next year and most of our conversations revolve around where they would want to settle down. They were pretty indecisive until the blasts.
While people were busy, once again, saluting the spirit of Bombay, after the blasts in local trains a few things changed, sadly. A colleague in Bombay who I call up on the hotline almost everyday, declared half in jest and half seriously, “I have to leave this city.” A Delhiite, he had moved to Bombay last year and one of his first experiences in the city was the July flood that left him stranded in office for a good 36 hours.
My father too was stuck in the flood and spent a horrendous night sitting in his car watching the water level rise and eventually stepped out of it and waded through the waist-deep water like thousands of Mumbaikars that night, to reach home, wet, tired but not defeated. The flood did not really break the spirit of Mumbaikars, as they said ad nauseum. But, the blasts surely did.
My mother, who swears by her life in Bombay comprising music and yoga classes, kitty parties, club get-togethers and long walks on the promenade by the sea, told me that she now wants to move out. The blasts, she said, had changed her decision to settle down in this city where her friends were. “You could have been in the local train. I was glad that you are out of this city,” she told me. Now, fearing their safety, even I am not too keen on them staying there though I did tell them that all the cities would be the same one day. How many cities will we move out of?
Nevertheless, the bombers seemed to have succeeded in scaring people. They had not only left hundreds of Mumbaikars scarred for life, but also snapped my umbilical cord with the city.

A bad trip is over and a ban is lifted..

And so i can finally crib about the crib-fest I indulged in the whole of last one week. Or so was my plan. But, got pictures of the trip (that was responsible for the cribbing) developed yesterday and was surprised to see how beautiful the place was. Well, I did realise that the place (B R Hills) looked like a picture postcard when I was there for three days, but, I was either too pre-occupied with the bad arrangement made for us or was holed into a conference room for day-long sessions.
I cribbed the least, which my friends pointed out repeatedly and described me as a `diplomat' and even `politically correct' as I ho did not join them during a showdown with the organisers. Well, the post is not about defending myself but about how picture perfect the place was. And the morning walks were certainly something I could have enjoyed better if I wasn't too worried about having my breakfast on a greasy plate.
Here are some pics I took during those very peaceful morning walks. Wish I could absorb the beauty better when I was there. Sigh.

Kiddo Birthday party

Five-year-olds leave me, well, stupefied. My darling nephew celebrated his fifth birthday in complete style on July 5 at a happening food joint in Pune with his friends from school and day care. They were all from similar family backgrounds, and like my nephew spoke fluent English and broken Hindi and all were familiar enough with birthday party routines and what they should be looking for in them.
They headed for the tattoo counter soon after they handed over gifts cutely saying `happy birthday’ with my nephew nodding his head mumbling his thank-yous. They knew the games they were going to play and didn’t need instructions. In fact, they smartly checked the person who was doling out dos and donts asking him to start the game without telling them how to play it (“we know the game”, girl in pretty pink frock and spaghetti straps squealed at him).
The kids called the eldest in the group “boss” and teased a misbehaved one as the “bully”. I watched them all from a distance, as they jumped, played their power ranger games and gaped at their excellent vocabularies, wondering how evolved the kids were. One of them came and asked me who I was, as I was neither a mum watching over her kids nor a kid myself to which I asked him to find out. He didn’t have to. He said, “you are birthday boy’s masi,” to which I smiled and said yes.
I saw a strange level of confidence among the children. I call it strange because I do not think I was ever even remotely close to this kind of a confidence level at their age or even much later, tugging to my mother’s sari-pallu and being coaxed to eat.
While coming back to Hyderabad, sitting by myself in the train I realized how different our childhoods were. My elder sister and I had birthday parties but they were at home, with mummy with the help of a domestic servant and a few friends from the building managing to cook for the lot. The evening parties ended with my sister and I running up and down the building with plates of food to be given to neighbours. And come to think of it, I felt shy of that too __ of ringing the doorbell and telling the smiling aunties that it was my birthday and that I had got cake and chole for her. And I almost always rehearsed another line that I was made to say several times, "Aunty, please return the plate now only". This, I was explained, was to ensure that they don't have to think of what to fill our empty plates with when sending it back. However noble the intention, the thought of repeating these lines made me squirm.
I am sure the confident five-year-olds some of whom were instructing their mothers not to mix their noodles with manchurian will perhaps even do a better job at asking for empty plates without squirming.