UNITED BUT BIASED

India is a land of Unity in Diversity. This was the first sentence in my Civics Textbook in School about India. Well, more like a statement than sentence. As a kid, all I could derive from this was that India is a multicultural or multilingual country and that we get holidays on Ied, Diwali, Gurunanak Jayanti and Christmas.

But as I grew up I saw, read & heard things, many things which were a total contradiction to this heart touching statement. I learnt about India Pakistan partition, which was more based on a division of Hindus and Muslims. I learnt about Babri Masjid & Ayodhya even more deeply when my Dadaji got a framed huge poster of ‘Shri Ram’ and displayed it in our front yard only to show his inclination (The poster is still there ‘Inside’ the house now).  I learnt more about it when Sikh Sardars were hunted down and brutally killed when two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards, assassinated her with their service weapons during 1984 Anti-Sikh riots. I learnt about it during the “Ethnic” cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits where approximately 300 Kashmiri Pandits were killed in one year. I learnt some more about it with the Godhra riots where so many innocent people were killed on the name religion outside but truly for power.

These and so many more such lessons I learnt on how “United” we really are.

You will mention that whole India came together to support Anna Hazare  for ‘Jan Lokpal Bill’. It certainly is commendable- the cause and the support both. Kudos India! By the way do you happen to know who Irom Sharmila Chanu is? Does this name ring a bell, atall? Probably not, simply because her 10 Year fasting against Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA) in Manipur is of no importance to us.  Having refused food and water for more than ten years, she has been called "the world's longest hunger striker and for all of yours information Irom Sharmila has been regularly released and re-arrested every year since under IPC section 309, a person who "attempts to commit suicide" is punishable "with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year. How united are we when we don’t care about what’s happening in the North East of our own country?

Lets talk about today, London Riots News flash - “South-Hall Sikhs guarding mosques for Muslims to safely offer prayers”.  I am so proud. Truly.  But do we really have to be in a different country to be humane? Why not follow the same in India?  After all the saying is “India” is a land of Unity in Diversity.

Unofficial National Anthem

How well do I remember my childhood?  Mostly, just the school picnics, summer vacations, birthday parties, Dad’s India trips etc.  So basically I remember most of it.  But out of all the things of my childhood I most fondly remember ‘Doordarshan’.

‘Doordarshan’ was often just ‘Door’ with no ‘Darshan’.  But even with so many ‘Rukawat ke liye khed hai’ and just plain white noise at times, DD had its own charm.  Every Sunday morning my Dadaji instructing Dadi and Mom to have the breakfast ready by 8.45 am so we all (and by all I mean not just my family but our next door neighbor’s  Chaudhary Uncle’s family as well) can sit together and watch ‘Mahabharat’  which used to play on DD then at 9 AM.   I still remember the sound of the ‘Shankh’ at the beginning of the program and the ‘Yada yada hi dharmasya’ and I get goose-pimples just thinking of it J

DD was good TV. Yes the picture quality was well below average the content made up for that.  ‘Jungle Book’, ‘Potli Baba ki Kahaniya’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ , ‘The Sword of Tipu Sultan’, Some Dinosaur  Cartoon which I can’t remember the name of, ‘Vikram Betal’ and so much more which I loved as a kid and secretly still do J. ‘Rangoli’, ‘Surbhi’, ‘Shanti’, ‘Chitrahaar’, ‘Hum Log’, ‘Swabhiman’, ‘Fauji’, ‘Circus’, ‘Tehkikaat’… the list is endless.

There was something else which I dint find very interesting then but now thanks to You-Tube when I came across ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’ this morning I couldn’t believe what I felt.  A sense of pride, nostalgia and patriotism all together!   It was so overwhelming to know that there are total 18 languages captured in this one song.  My memory of the song was lyrics wise ‘Miley sur mera tumhara to sur bane humara’ and video wise Amitabh Bachchan looking extremely handsome and walking forward, looking up at the camera and singing (lip-singing).   To my surprise there are so many more celebrities in the video Kamal Hassan, Mithun Chakraborty, Revathi, Jeetendra, Waheeda Rehman, Hema Malini, Tanuja, Sharmila Tagore, Shabana Azmi and the list goes on… And did you know Piyush Pandey wrote ‘Miley sur’?

I guess we just relate to the film-stars better than politicians… ‘Mile Sur’ for me is definitely our unofficial National Anthem.

Season’s Greetings!

Most of my childhood memories revolve around my dadi (Grandmother).  She is a very amusing and loving lady.  Very commanding and dignified yet very humble and ignorant.  She believed in following a proper routine as opposed to a typical Sindhi household.  Probably, because unlike most of the people of our community my grandfather was not a businessman.  He worked as a Line-Man in the Government Forest Office.  An honest line-man! (Why that expression? That’s another story).  To be in sync and serve as a perfect housewife she, like my dadaji (Grandfather) followed a time-table.

Every morning the first thing I wake up seeing is my dadi praying.  And after our routine ‘Hare Ram’ (praise the lord) greetings her next sentence would be “Go take a shower”… well mostly!  You see, when you have grown up in a small town in India you would realize that a few basic “necessities” are actually “luxuries” and ‘Water in summers’ is one of them.  I would remember crying my eyes out and begging my mom to spare me a day of shower in winters since it used to be extremely cold but she won’t.  But the scenario in summers was totally different.

The municipality will run the water-supplies for 15 minutes every morning at any arbitrary time and one person from every house-hold was supposed to sit next to the water tap to start the water-pump first when that happened.  If you are the last or the second last from your lane (neighbor-hood) to start the water-pump then no matter what you do, you have to wait for another day.  Of-course there were solutions like more powerful water-pump or water-tanker or borrowing a bucket from a neighbor, mostly you had to live with what ever little water you had stored for your family.  People who couldn’t afford a water-pump would complain to the municipality head and there would be random “motor check raids” and confiscation of a lot of water-pumps which there after were used by employees of the municipality for their house-hold needs. 

So mostly it was first come first serve.  But there were actually two kinds of people.  The one mentioned above who would religiously wait for the water supplies by the municipality and the ones who had a tube-well or a bore-well as it was called then.  Those were the rich and powerful of the lot.  They had water for the plants, trees, cows, dogs and their kids.  They had water to wash, bath, cook, waste and sometime to lend.  Well atleast some of them did.  You also get to hear things like “We can only give two buckets otherwise our bore-well will dry out.” or “We have guests coming over!” or “You know how much electricity is consumed by the bore-well motor?”  So from borrowing a bucket or two from the rich neighbors to standing in the queue near a municipality tanker to waiting for the ‘not-so’ regular water supplies, I knew for a fact that when the spring is gone and summer comes with that bright and hot sun smiling at my small town my dadi had to condense her morning greetings just to a ‘Hare Ram’ (praise the lord).