Day before yesterday I had a strange dream, but before that, a bit of backdrop. My two sources of income have so far been my website — http://amrithallan.com — and my consulting services to Steve Dasseos (for http://tripinsurancestore.com and other websites). Recently I took a break from amrithallan.com and decided to focus primarily on Steve’s work, and little bit on my own personal projects. But you can very well understand how difficult it is to put a business that you’ve been running and promoting for the past 7 years in cold storage.

Now the dream.

I’m at home, but it is not familiar. A Sikh youth of very small stature comes to me and offers to write content for my clients for a fixed monthly pay of Rs. 15,000. Although he is quite young — mid 20s — his beard is completely white and he is wearing a black turban. I want to pay him Rs. 10,000 but then I think, well, even if I pay him the double of what he is asking for, I may have to work on amrithallan.com for an hour or so everyday and end up saving some money. I accept his offer.

Instead of accessing my website, I leave this youth sitting in the room and go to the backroom where my business is supposed to exist. The room is in shambles. A dim yellow bulb glows in the center of the room. The walls are made of just bricks and there are some holes here and there. It looks like one of those small junk rooms you may find in a house that has been abandoned years ago. There is so much garbage, debry and dust on the floor that it’s extremely difficult to walk. I can see a big centipede trying to enter through one of the crevices and there is a big, brown furry animal in the room. It takes me a while to figure out that it’s a monkey. When it sees me it jumps out through another, bigger hole in the wall.

My computer, one of those old IBMs you had to boot off a floppy (I never even had one of those, but one of my closest friends did) was fixed into the wall in the farthest corner of the room. That’s my business. The dream stops here.

Recently the noted lyricist Javed Akhtar posted two Tweets my wife today pointed me to:

“If you plunder from west to east you are great like Alexander. if you do the same from east to west you are a barbarian like Chengiz.”

Here is the link to the Tweet.

Although I don’t have issues with what intellectuals like him have to say about various cultural and historical opinions/facts the duality is really surprising. These are well-read people after all.

Both Alexander (whether great or not) and Chengiz Khan attacked other countries in order to increase their domains and, let us say, that the time was like that, that it was okay to plunder and takeover other countries and make its citizens your slaves. Shit happens during various historical periods (it still happens but we live in denial). This is not the issue.

But you cannot equate both these guys. Alexander had Aristotle as his teacher and he had specifically employed a historian to document his conquests and experiences. Remember the encounter he had with Porus when he attacked India? He received the brave Porus like a king and even though Porus had been defeated and captured he was not humiliated or brutally killed (I am not sure what happened to him after that famous exchange with Alexander as depicted in the Bollywood movies). Could you expect similar civility from Chengiz Khan? I’m not saying that since Chengiz Khan was a Muslim so he had to be an out and out asshole (he was not a Muslim, according to WikiPedia), but he was after all a barbarian with no affinity to intellectual thinking.

Alexander built relationships (not social media and networking relationships, obviously). He was not into burning down libraries and universities and razing cities. He formed many alliances and he only attacked when kings did not except his dominance which is fair enough considering those times.

Not being a history student I don’t know much about both these historical figures but it is silly to rue the fact that Alexander is called “great” and Chengiz Khan is termed as barbarian.

Kite flying used to be a major part of the Independence Day celebrations when I was a kid. Strangely I never experienced the same phenomena once we left Lajpat Nagar.

I remember I could never fly a kite because for that you need both your hands free; when the kite is struggling to get up you rapidly need to pull the string using both the hands and then at strategic moments you have to release it. There are then quick successions of pulling and releasing until the kite is up in the air comfortably gliding on the air currents.

As I always had to hold a wall or my crutch with one hand in order to keep standing it was physically impossible for me to get the kite up. One of my friends used to fly the kite and then hand me the string later on because then it is easier to manipulate the kite.

We had a very naughty kid living in our line, and once he challenged me to have a kite fight with me. In Hindi it is called patang ladana: while flying kites you try to cut each other’s string. The one whose string is cut loses the contest and also the kite. When the kite comes to the ground whoever catches it owns it. There is a famous Hindi movie on the concept called Kati Patang.

Anyway, since it was not possible for me to rapidly pull the string or release it depending on the situation, I was in double mind. Those days I used to have a best friend. In fact I had a couple of very good friends and one of them was always there to get my kite up in the evenings when we normally went to the roof with our kites. So one of my friends prompted me to accept the challenge because none of us liked that naughty kid.

I accepted the challenge and soon that kid’s kite was up in the sky scurrying around with great speed and noise. He was known as a great kite flyer.

I balanced myself properly with my back firmly stuck in the place where two walls meet, holding the string tightly in my left hand. I could either release the string or I could use it like a saw by wildly flailing my arm. It was a windy day. On windy days you can move your kite extremely fast in various directions by pulling the string with force. That’s what the kid did. His kite was at quite a distance from my kite but it approached my kite with great speed as he kept on pulling the string. When I knew that his string would take just a few seconds to clash with my string I simply released my string and my kite started losing altitude as if the sting of my kite was already cut. After the swoop his kite started rising upwards with a sharp inclination and his string missed my string narrowly.

After reaching a certain height he directed the nose of the kite downwards and dived towards my kite. At this moment I stopped releasing my string and stretched my arm forward as much as possible. Since I had been releasing the string for a long time and then I suddenly stopped releasing it, the kite trapped a current and started rising upwards with good speed. Now that kid’s kite was coming down towards my kite and my kite was going up towards his kite. He was pulling his string furiously and he was already glancing sideways at me with a smile of victory while my friend stood behind me cursing in excitement.

At this particular moment my sharp eyesight was the only upper hand I had. I had the confidence that I would be able to see the exact point where both of our strings would meet. Just half a second before that I needed to pull my arm backwards and if it didn’t work it wouldn’t work it all. I did exactly that.

Just when the strings were about to meet I pulled my arm backwards with such a great force that I fell on the ground. My friend was laughing and clapping with uncontrollable happiness and that naughty kid was pulling fast to salvage as much string as he could. With the string cut, his kite was gradually going down. Since I had fallen my friend had taken over and held the string with one hand while trying to help me with the other.

Not that we do good to make people feel obliged, but often the outcomes are surprising. We always extend a helping hand — in monitory terms and other ways — whenever we can, to people who need help. For instance, we got Vasudha’s previous maid (around 15 years) admitted to a school. My wife went with her, met with the principal, and bought books and dresses for her. When she was caught letting our daughter eat mud in the play ground (our daughter was around 3 then and the maid was simply looking at her while she ate the mud — Alka saw it from the balcony) we asked her to leave. Then we thought, well, let us give her another chance, as she had just started going to the school (she used to come to our place after her school and still we paid for the entire day) and we thought it’d be very bad for her to leave. So we called her back while she was leaving.

In the evening her mother came and said her daughter was not going to work for us as we had yelled at her. Although we told her the reason, she said no. Then my wife told her that her behavior was totally uncalled for, especially when we had got her daughter admitted to a school and we were still worried for her schooling despite how nasty she had acted. Her reply: I never asked you to get her admitted.

Although it never crossed our minds that they should feel grateful or something, but by this we were totally caught off guard.

Similarly there have been many incidents in which we were simply trying to help people and instead of acknowledging they simply made us feel as if we had to gain something out of it.

So, we’ve been quite confused. Why do people act so nasty even when you are so nice with them? I found a partial answer today while reading “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham.

Thinking he had done a generous thing, he had expected that Monsieur Ducroz would overwhelm him with expressions of gratitude. He was taken aback to find that the old teacher accepted the present as though it were his due. He was so young, he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them.

“he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them.”

Whether this is right or wrong, it does manage to explain a bit.

Just quickly went through this article that talks about how your level of happiness increases after having your own kid or kids. The article also refers to a survey that established that people are less happy after having kids.

Whether having kids makes you happy or not depends on lots of factors. It depends on your economic condition, your health, relationship between spouses, the aspirations of both the parents, facilities available in the area, and the support system the couple has. Having a child can totally turn your life upside down. Recently we saw a movie “Marlie and Me” and somewhere the character of Jenifer Anniston says, “Parenting is the toughest job in the world and nobody prepares you for it.”

Clichéd as it may sound, as a couple who have had a baby who, despite being exceptionally intelligent and talented, has some issues when it comes to eating, sleeping and paying attention to things that can make life a bit easier, we could totally relate to the statement. Since Vasudha’s birth we have totally been on our own, as neither my family nor Alka‘s (my wife) family was in a position to be around in case we needed some respite. She’s going to be 5 this July, and not even a single day, or even a few hours she’s spent without us. So for the past 5 years our lives have pretty much revolved around her.

Although I work from home, due to my cerebral palsy, beyond a certain level I cannot help Alka much, especially when Vasudha goes through periodic disturbed sleeping patterns and Alka ends up getting just 2-3-hour sleep for weeks. Sometimes Vasudha used to wake up just when Alka had fallen asleep. And it’s not just sleep. She doesn’t like to eat food but every other thing that can be chewed. She won’t write sometimes even a single alphabet or number without extensive prompting. When she’s not at school we cannot have a single sentence without her interference — spending even 5 minutes together ends up in something disastrous sometimes. She takes minimum one-and-half hour to have a meal. Getting her to fall asleep at night becomes an hour-long or even more project. Whatever you tell her to do the standard reply is “no”.

In India most couples who can afford, have a maid, but unfortunately, our experience with different maids has been quite disturbing. In India most couples occasionally have parental support which, as I mentioned above, has been missing from both our sides. I was living at my parents house when I got married but we had to move to a new place when Vasudha was just 3 months old.

In the building where we live, almost all the couples every second month call their mothers so that they can tend to other things while there is somebody with the child or children. People even go on holidays leaving their kids behind with a relative! The parents of one of our neighbors totally shifted here so that they could keep the kid while his mother went to office. There is nobody with whom we can leave our child for even 3 hours and go somewhere.

Actually it’s very difficult to relate unless you yourself go through a similar situation. The point is, if you try to attach a halo to the experience of having a child and bringing him or her up, I’m going to hit you with my crutch.

Again, as I mentioned above, it depends on your social-economic coordinates. Had we had the support many people take for granted (NRI couples make their parents visit them from India when they have a kid) may be I would have been writing a different experience.

Am I complaining? No, I’m just stating the facts and it doesn’t mean we haven’t had our share of happiness with our child. It’s not her problem that we have had a tough time. In fact, despite all the difficulties we’ve gone through, she’s the best thing that has happened to us, and I’m not saying this just for the sake of saying. She gives us a direction, a purpose. We know that with her around, the only option we have is keep on fighting and moving ahead. And it’s not just a litany of troubles. We have great times together. When she softly touches my face with her small hands or her cheek, the world stops and there remains no other desire. When she is lying by my side, ready to fall asleep, if I want to define heavenly bliss, that’s the time to define it with. We swell with pride when she effortlessly sings songs during school functions and parents and teachers are amazed at her talent. A mere sight of hers lights up the surroundings. She makes our world, our togetherness complete, and we wouldn’t have been us without her. She was our conscious decision, it was just that, we were ill-prepared. As she’s growing up, we’re able to communicate more and things are easing up a bit.

There, I was just going to write a small paragraph on the above-mentioned link. Having children and bringing them up and the related feelings depend on lots of factors, but yes, if you ask me if we ever regretted having a child, definitely not. It doesn’t make sense, but I guess this is how nature makes us. It’s kind of a sadistic pleasure you can say. Right in the midst of a highly chaotic day we do have that WTF feeling but that doesn’t last for long. The above-mentioned article ends quite aptly:

You will lose the freedom to go out on Friday and Saturday night, without a care in the world. You will lose freedom, period. You damn sure will lose sleep. But once that child is here, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without him. You will know contentment at a level beyond your imagination.

All alone, forsaken by her own children (she was over 85), in an old age home being funded by her brothers (my maternal NRI uncles). When I think of her, the old saying “swarg-naraq sab yahin hai” (heaven and hell is all here) again and again comes to my mind. Nobody ever liked her because she was so selfish — always thinking about how to cause trouble in other people’s lives, how to do as less as possible for someone else — and directly or indirectly she imparted the same values to her only son. In her last years he told her to get lost. She was my mother’s elder sister (and good that my mother doesn’t read my blog).

It may seem crude to write like this about her, now that she’s gone after a painful death, but I’m not writing this to denigrate her. I’m just wondering what made her so ill-tempered and sinister. I never, ever saw her happy. All her life she had to depend on others and still she was never nice to people who tried to help her. She had to flee from her husband (a drunkard and a gambler) who was planning to sell his own daughters to afford a few bottles of liquor. At her mother’s  place she would deny food to her brothers’ kids but would give the best food to her own children, while totally depending on her brothers for support. Whenever there was a catastrophe she would just make arrangements for herself and her kids without bothering for the others.

Among three of her kids (two daughters and one son) the eldest daughter and the son turned up just like her and hence, could never keep her with them. The only daughter that took care of her died of severe diabetes in a young age.

If I think her circumstances turned her like that, then my mother says she was always like this, even at a younger age. None of her siblings liked her or respected her, and they took care of her just because in India we have this conditioning of taking care of the elderly no matter how foul their attitude is.

It’s a live example I’ve seen (something that we read in moralizing stories) of a person who always thinks bad of the others lives a miserable life and dies all alone.

The new studies have shown that how clearly you can see depends a lot on your attitude. Here’s the link to the news.

This is something I have actually experienced. My vision gets blurry when writing a check (cheque) because I always think I’ll make a mistake, or my signatures won’t match. This is because due to cerebral palsy my handwriting depends a lot on what’s on my mind and how I’m sitting and what’s the level of the platform where the checkbook rests.

My problems with my checkbook percolated into other writing activities and soon it affected my laptop vision too and consequently I had to get my eyesight checked and start wearing glasses. But I never picked up the habit and always forgot wearing the glasses and now I no longer need them. Although my problem with the checkbook remains.

Recently my dad purchased a cheap Chinese version of Blackberry and since he never intended to use it, I borrowed it from him. This instrument is quite ill-designed (of course, since it’s so cheap), and although it solves my purpose (sending text messages to my writers and clients and other associates) it’s difficult to maneuver it in the lying position. So my vision gets blurred when I’m trying to set the alarm in it or trying to play a song. I never had this problem with my normal Sony Ericsson phone.

I don’t remember if it was on We The People or the Big Fight (debate programmes on current affairs broadcast by NDTV), they were discussing the pressure of media and public opinion on recent judgments like the Jessica Lal murder case, the Nithari killings and the Arushi Talwar murder case. An eminent lawyer, Ram Jethmalani was ranting (perhaps, holding his evening drink) about how the media affected the case of the client he was representing (Manu Sharma), while the judge, sitting in the panel, vociferously denied that.

It was shocking to watch yesterday how a youth from Gaziabath was killed, allegedly in a false encounter by the police. It grew murkier by every passing hour and by late evening every major news channel was covering it. If it hadn’t been for the TV channels, this would have turned into any one of those hundreds of encounters carried out by the police. None of the reporters were trying to carry out their own investigations and trying to take the law into their own hands, they were simply pointing out the loopholes — since most of the policemen are basically stupid (they are powerful, nonetheless), they couldn’t even concoct a proper story around the brutal murder.

Whatever was the reason and whatever was the motive, you just don’t pump 5 12 bullets into the chest of a person who is trying to run away. And anyway, policemen are instructed not to shoot above the abdomen unless under extreme circumstances. Another reporter said that the police had claimed there were two more friends of his that were absconding. The jungle (where the encounter took place) wasn’t being combed by the search parties and police dogs.

Anyway, the point is not whether he was guilty or not or whether the encounter was legitimate, everybody knows that crimes go unpunished in our country. 10s of encounters take place all over India everyday with no valid inquiry. In media the common man/woman finds a voice. If the police doesn’t file an FIR, or bullies a small businessman, they can approach a news channel and they’re are more than happy to highlight the transgression. Of course some go overboard, but it happens everywhere. Police goes overboard — criminals have a less fear of it than the common folks. Corrupt politicians have become folklore stuff.

The growth of news media is I think the best thing that has happened to India. Of course channels like NDTV and CNN-IBN mostly act like the Congress mouthpieces and it is often embarrassing to watch them, with more and more aggressive news media, it is increasingly becoming difficult for the powerful people to commit crimes and get away with them.

If you swallow a seed or if a small seed gets stuck somewhere inside your nose or ear it can sprout and start turning into a plant. No wonder our mother used to scare us that if you swallow a seed along with the fruit a tree will grow out of your stomach.

Well, it was high time. By quashing section 377 the Delhi High Court has given a ray of hope to the citizens of the country: good things happen here too, it’s not just about politics, religion, racketeering and money-making. The law against consensual gay and lesbian sex was enacted by the British way back in 1860 and it has long been abolished by the British themselves in their own country.

I don’t think there is much social opposition in India, and it was just due to laziness and nonchalance. We Indians are the epitome of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude.

Personally I feel the ancient liberal sexual practices in India are way overrated but yes, we were already indulging in libidinous exercises of byzantine complexities while in other civilizations they were mostly doing the doggy sex behind the bushes. In fact we have had many androgynous gods having sex with themselves and in fact such tendencies were as normal as giving a peck of familiarity to a total stranger in a page-3 party.

So does it solve the harassment problem for gays and lesbians? Hardly. Harassing and annoying people is our cultural obsession and it has got nothing to do with your sexuality. In India you can be harassed for being a woman, a child, a disabled, a poor person, a person with no connections, a minority, a majority, a tourist, a dog, a cow, a buffaloe, I mean, you can be harassed just because you exist, even if you’re a stone. The local policeman will kick you in the butt even before you can utter “human rights”. So forget a harassment-free life. But yes, it’s a progressive step. Some blokes will challenge it in the Supreme Court, but there is a fat chance the apex dudes will reverse the judgment.

Of course protests will come from religious quarters. Take for instance this moronic outburst by the Sikh clergy:

A member of radical Sikh group Dal Khalsa said on condition of anonymity: “This day should be remembered as a ‘black day’ in the history of mankind. We are unable to understand that how our judiciary can push the whole humanity towards deterioration, just to make a handful of eccentric and wayward individuals happy.

I mean, a “black day”? So much shit happens around us, and they call this a “black day”? Anyway, this is just the beginning of religious looniness on this subject. Reactions from the mullahs and Bajrang dalis will be eagerly awaited.