All it took is a fasting seventy four year old man to bring the entire nation together. Well, almost, the entire nation, except for the not so common people who govern the country , and of-course some Autowallas of India‘s very own Silicon Valley.

A familiar head
lay in my lap
on sultry afternoons,
on rainy nights
and on an occasional
dawn and dusk

The other day I read an article in the New Yorker by Paul Rudnick. It was a spoof piece on the sexuality of India’s most famous Gandhi titled ‘I was Gandhi’s Boyfriend ‘. Paul Rudnick’s piece was inspired by Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of MK Gandhi, Great Soul. The book was 422 pages of Gandhi’s struggle for social justice and hind swaraj and two pages of his relationship with a certain body-builder while his time in South Africa. Yet it was banned, a book that was never published in India.

Many hardworking young people are keen about on making the best use of their time. Their daily to-do list – the action plan for each day – mostly involves learning new things, going through a stream of inspiring information, and occasionally spending some time on checking out the movies or books known to be the best. Despite all this heavy work for making each minute productive, we can still come across a writer’s block or a general inertia in coming up with a fresh new idea.

A couple of days ago I read this article on the Bangalore Mirror that went with the header ‘More women in the city hit the abort button.’ I am torn in deciding the tone of this statement. Is it an accusation or is just the result of a random survey taken by a random agency (that perhaps does not agree with the concept of abortion?) At this juncture I am going to ignore the sexist undertone of the statement for I have something else on my mind and I will not talk about rape victims either, that would be a digression from the topic I want to discuss.

The other day I overheard a conversation between two men from my countries. (yes, ‘countries’- for whatever my passport says, I am both Indian and American) The American was telling his co-traveler that he would really like to visit Mumbai some day. My upcoming smile froze midway when I heard the Indian respond ‘Oh you will get robbed’. I was too shocked to actually say all the things I wanted to – and I still regret not having said anything.

Most of us start our morning with, barring the compulsory natural deeds and facebook-ing – news papers or news channels. Since the vernacular news medium is not in fashion among the educated class, so let’s discount that medium and talk of the more sophisticated English medium of news supply, I stress on supply.

It has been over half an hour since I have been standing in the queue. I have left 7 metro trains and still just managed to reach half the distance from where I started. “Please do not push the passengers while boarding and de-boarding the train”.

A Bengali who does not eat Hilsa is ‘Ahilsa’! But the topic here is “ahimsa”.

Baba Ramdev is sitting on fast unto death at the Ram Leela Ground of Delhi. Thousands of his devotees have already arrived in the city. Baba want to change India and bring the illicit Indian money in the foreign banks and asking the government to declare that a national asset. Baba also want Hindi and regional languages be promoted at our educational institutions.He is also calling for a ‘direct’ election of the prime minister. He talks of Lokpal but also want to exclude the prime minister and Judiciary.