School Days

Today morning while walking up to the location of my carpool pick-up, I experienced something which swept me back to my school days in a strong current of nostalgia. At the first turning on the Botanical Garden Road, there is a school titled Jain Heritage School. I’ve been starting later than usual, at around 8:10 am, from my place these past couple of days, and the moment I passed by this school happened to coincide, in these past two days, with that time of the school which marked the start of the day amid the chatter and babble called morning assembly.

St. Edward's School, Shimla

I’ve studied up till 10^th standard in St. Edward’s School, a convent school which was also among the best in Shimla. It was a vast campus sprawling over an area large enough to manage 20 simultaneous classrooms (2 sections each from 1 to 10^th standard) and a few 10+1 and 10+2 classes that had started towards the end of my tenure. The school complex was nestled within the tall deodars on all sides and 2 playgrounds out in the front, one larger one the size of a football field, and the smaller one that of a hockey field, and the smaller field at a marked elevation from the bigger field of about 25 meters in a step-like structure. The mottled manner in which the sunlight managed to reach the school premises only in part ensured that there were areas and locations within the campus which were full of bright sunshine, warm and pleasant, while others which were shaded and drafty throughout the day, with an obvious drop in temperature at such places. There were nooks and corners on the campus, all of which I could visit right now if I close my eyes. 10 years spent at a place for 8 hours each day has created a mental map of the entire campus in my mind, so strong that I can walk the entire place and know it like the back of my hand. I realize that some of these memories may have been gradually distorted, for when I visit the campus again today, those very intimate places may appear quite different in reality. But the place in my imagination is sacred and personal to me, much like the characters we imagine after reading a classic novel. It is always a let-down when we watch the movie based on that book and it almost always falls short of the richness we imagined the characters to have.

Morning Assembly at St. Edward's School

The instructions by the PT teacher this morning through the microphone felt eerily similar to those I remember from my school morning assembly. It made me even wonder if the same PT teacher as we had may be working in this school in a corner of a faraway Hyderabad. I dismissed the notion as soon as it occurred to me for its improbability and craziness. “Atten-shun! Stenda-tees! Atten-shun! Stenda-tees!” was what the sounds started with. It was followed by “7^th class, check your line. 7^th class!”. This made me laugh loudly as even yesterday, 7^th class was the one that was being chided for standing in a not-so-straight line. I mused that probably 6^th and 7^th standard were the classes where the students are the most unruly, speaking also from my experience in being the “Prefect” of Class 6^th in my school when I myself was in Class 10^th. Ashish, my best and childhood friend, was the one who, along with me, strove hard to manage the undisciplined monster that was Class 6^th! We ended up making a lot of chiddi friends (the term that was popular for any junior in school), and quickly realized that standing aside and allowing the chiddis to vent out some of the bubbling energy, if not all, was the best way to keep the pressure cooker simmering, and thus preventing total mayhem.

A view of the school premises

While wondering about this, the voice announced “Okay! Now take one arm distance again, all of you. Yes, and keep the lines straight”. This announcement seemed straight out of our own school assembly, redolent of all the naughty laughs that formed what was morning assembly for us students. The Pledge, which was usually followed the Prayer, had a statement “ -- and all Indians are my brothers and sisters”, which was usually suffixed by “ – except one” in hushed and cackling tones, while trying to hide our giggle behind the head of the guy standing in front of us to prevent detection. With a lot of students in a queue trying to adjust their respective heads thus, one can safely imagine why the “lines” were always anything but “straight”. Once the assembly ended, the black shoes had to be shining and school belts were to be present around our waist, and non-compliance in this regard was penalized while on our way back to the classrooms. Black shoes used to be inevitably covered with a thin layer of dust while on our ground which lacked a grass cover (something that was heard to be made fun of during our school fete by girls from other top convent schools in Shimla) and it could easily be cleaned by rubbing each toe against the back of the dark grey trouser on the other leg. It was a simple ceremony which used to make us feel like geniuses. But there was no easy escape if the belt was forgotten, and one was sent off to take a couple of rounds of the football field as a punishment.

While I was thinking of all this, a loud honk ahead of me jolted me back from my pleasant reverie. School times are undoubtedly the best times, unsullied by emotions like anger, envy and desolation. There are no inhibitions, no self-doubts and no one to tell us we cannot do something. It’s a time of infinite possibilities, and the heartbreaks, the unqualified and unending chatter, the games and the simplicity of it all usually qualifies those times as the most memorable ones in each of our lives.

Udta Punjab - Welcoming the unapologetic in Bollywood (Spoiler alert)

Today I watched Udta Punjab. I found it to be a bold treatise on the drug mayhem (I would not euphemise it by calling it “scene”) being played out in the plains of Punjab. It has spread its tentacles so deep into the society that almost everyone has a cousin or a nephew (if not a son or a sibling) who has a pathological addiction to drugs, causing widespread familial disruption and economic ruin. The movie thrilled but was not a thriller, it definitely talked about the “high” but did so without glorifying it, and it made me laugh out loud on countless occasions, but was definitely not a comedy. I would describe it as an accurate portrayal of the state of affairs, the convergence of the venal and the immoral that stalks the youth today and has already been imbibed by the society.

It portrays how even a silent spectator is indirectly responsible for the flagrant corruption of life. It unapologetically shows a lead actress stabbing a man on the face repeatedly till the life passed out of him, and you feel a strange tingling of elation. It depicts an addicted boy of not more than 13 overdosing himself, lying in his own vomit, and his elder brother believing that it must be his friends who forced him this one time, “humara Balli to acha ladka hai”. It is unapologetic about a lead actress getting raped repeatedly, and the other being stabbed to death by a junkie in a fit of desperation. It is unapologetic about a lead actor becoming a part of the system by accepting a regular bribe for turning a blind eye towards drugs being transported, unknowingly for the very drug which destroys his own brother’s life, and the other actor basking in his own pool of vanity, arrogance and puke. It is as unapologetic as real life can be, and therein lies the impact. Watch this movie even if you've read this review despite a spoiler alert, as the strength of this piece of art is not in its storyline but in its direction, dialogues and acting. Give the movie makers an honest day's earning and watch it in the theatres rather than the leaked print. If you've ever watched something for its in-your-face brutal honesty, this movie is for you.

The A**hole

I stepped back, looked towards both sides, trying to figure out not which is the smallest queue – as most of the queues had 3-4 people in it – but which is bound to make me reach the counter the fastest. Now there are a lot of factors which are required to be considered for this – i) the amount of stuff people in the queue ahead of you have accumulated in their shopping baskets, as this is directly proportional to the amount of scanning time for that individual, hence increasing the waiting time of that particular queue, ii) the apparent quickness of the guy/girl at the counter – to be judged in not more than 3 seconds, iii) the queues nearer to you are of higher priority as you don’t want to criss-cross between so many queues of people to reach the row at the other end, and moreover, you don’t know how well do that factors i) and ii) above apply to the queues farther away, and iv) other miscellaneous subtle factors like the anxiousness of the people waiting in queue, as it is directly proportional to their desperateness to get the billing done quickly, which may be important.

So as I stepped back, I made a quick judgement about the smallest queue and joined it. That’s when I saw the gigantic guy. He was not very tall, though definitely at 6 feet. He seemed shorter because of his enormous circumference around the waist. He was bulging from every end you can possible call a corner in the human body. If you could pump air into a huge piece of ginger, it would look like him. Though I did not have enough time to analyse all this before I saw what he was buying. There in his basket I saw three jars of Organic India Green Tea! Hello! No way was he going to lose any apparent weight by drinking Green Tea! For heaven’s sake! He needs to stop with all the namkeen packets he had stacked up in his basket, waiting to be billed. He needed to move around a little to lose weight, not have Green Tea! I mean goodness! I almost laughed out loud!

Then with a jolt, I got the answer to the question - What is the easiest thing for us humans to be? It’s being an asshole. I was passing judgement on that person without knowing an ounce of information about him. I was showing a typical conceited attitude that constitutes a typical asshole. And I caught myself in the act. All this happened within 15 seconds, but those 15 seconds shook me back to reality, brought me back to the ground. We do not know what goes on in the lives of others, we don’t know what compromises they have made, how much hard work they have put in, how much adversity they have faced in life. We don’t know jack about anything for that matter, yet we strut around, handing out judgements to people like candy to children on Christmas. To top it all, we have the smugness to be defensive about it if someone else points it out to us. Truth is hard, but so is an asshole. So everyone, I would suggest whenever you find yourself making an opinion about someone, any opinion whether big or small, turn the mirror towards yourself and just see the look on your face while you are at it. It may not shame the piss out of you, but it’ll at least wipe that smirk off your face. 

The Doorstep

Not so long ago, we used to be little kids. Beyond caring and full of reckless abandon, we used to drift along in life like a little twig in a mighty river. Not thinking twice before blurting out anything on earth, our shenanigans were outmatched only by our unrestrained passion. Then one fine day, we grew up. We started minding what we said, when we said and where we said. We started appearing ‘proper’ in front of guests and on our Facebook walls. What changed? A lot of things, of course. But what is that one primary thing which made us change every aspect of our public behaviour? We started judging each other. Habit of judgement based on first impressions is formed on the basis of the biases and prejudices that are formed over the years through learning (or a lack of learning). We need to undergo a lot of experiences which shape our thinking, which the children inherently lack.

A more apt statement would be that things change when we become aware that others are judging us; that others are watching us intently with an oblique eye, tracing our every move, waiting to pounce upon us with an Ahaaa in their minds, judging and labelling us in an instant, for ever. This singular awareness inherently changes everything we do. From here on, all our actions filter through the thick lens of judgement, are tempered and controlled, lest people call us wild libertines, unpolished and rustic. I would not think it an exaggeration to call this the single biggest switch in human behaviour, the doorstep leading us from childhood to adulthood. 

Don't Judge a Person by the First Book He Names

I always find myself in a conundrum when someone asks me my hobbies, because that leads me to mention that I love reading books, and then, since I have proclaimed my ‘love’ for this clichéd act of ‘reading books’, an act which many proclaim pretentiously, I have to quickly get down to defending my proclaimed love as pure and honest. This is a situation in which I find myself in a lot of interviews as well, though it’s easier in that case because everything I have to say is already prepared – I know who will I name as my favourite authors, which will be my favourite books, and I will know (because of a quick summary revision the previous night) the motivations of the protagonist to the most subconscious of details.

Coming back to the act of defending my love as pure and honest – whenever the situation is unexpected, I fumble for words. My mind goes blank and I’m not able to remember the book or books I’m reading. It’s usually in the plural – I have a habit of reading more than one book at a time. One will be a fiction, which will mostly be a paperback – literary fiction like Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, etc. or one of the classics; another will be a non-fiction usually being read on my phone during loo breaks – either a historical work – most often about Indian partition, or ancient Indian history, or some biography of a historical figure; or a business management related work – Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Dan Ariely, and their ilk; a third category is the one I’ll be reading on my Kindle – mostly authors that are otherwise either inaccessible because of their books not being available in India or those one-time but must-reads which I don’t believe in buying physical books for– these days it’s the A Song of Ice and Fire series – hope you get the idea.

So whenever someone unexpectedly enquires about the book I’m presently reading, my mind goes blank. I used to wonder why it is so every time. Lately I believe I might have grasped the reason. There is a subconscious struggle in my mind whenever I face this question. As I mentioned earlier, invariably I would have been reading 3-4 books at any given time, and when I have to give a name, I face an instant paradox. If I name the lesser known work that I am reading (if I’m reading one), I fear the other person would not have heard of it at all, and the conversation would end right there. Also, the other person may be a casual reader and I would like to make him/her curious about what I read so that he/she can also talk about what he/she is reading. Such a turn off is definitely not the right way to go about it. I could also say the name of the very famous work that I might be reading (e.g. these days I’m reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank – an extremely famous work which I should have read years ago but always missed it somehow or the other). Now I always pause before mentioning such a work. Would the other person judge me to be someone whose reading prowess extends only to the most famous of works? No, I do not want that. The breadth of what I read is considerable, and I would want to be recognized as such. So I do not want to say the name of that famous book, even though I might happen to be reading it at a given point of time.

I also don’t want to name a non-fiction book as it can generate strong impressions. For example, I am reading Nehru’s The Discovery of India these days, but the name Nehru these days prompts a political connotation which has nothing to do with this seminal work. I cannot always explain that I am also interested in the works of political commentators like Noam Chomsky, Arun Shourie, Shashi Tharoor and Amartya Sen, and my present political view has been shaped by immersive reading of many others socio-political writers like Sunil Khilnani, Edward Luce, Ramachandra Guha, Gurcharan Das, Louis Fischer, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, among others. In such a scenario, it feels cruel to let yourself judged by people based on the first book you name. But such is the way of the world and I must learn to live by it. My suggestion to the world – like you should not judge a book by its cover, you should also not judge a person by the first book he names.

Falling Head Over Shoes

09-Nov-2008

A sharp rap on the door is what roused me from the deep slumber. Was it morning already? I wondered as I felt my way to the door of my room with half an eye open. It was Chinku and it seemed night time. Was it so early in the morning? “Get ready dude! We’ll miss our movie!” So it was evening. He was standing there with his towel and other accessories, evidently going for a bath. I grunted, not finding my voice in the grogginess.

I took about 20 minutes to get ready. By that time Anshu had also arrived with his car. As I descended the stairs to the ground floor, I found Anshu and Suvdeep already in Parag’s room. We proudly considered us among the few who did not give two hoots about the performance of Hard Kaur that day of the PEC fest. We had planned to go for Quantum of Solace, the Bond movie that was expected to be as good as Casino Royale, its prequel. Chinku arrived all excited and jumping, chanting “Chalo chalo” and we left in Anshu’s car from the hostel.

While passing through 11 sector market, I asked Anshu to pull up as I had to get a recharge done. I heard Chinku come up behind me. “Kaunse chips lu?” he asked. And then, “Oye look. That girl looks good for you!”. He said it while winking and poking me. I knew what he meant. There was a girl wearing a Linkin Park black coloured t-shirt, 10 steps away from us and facing away. I used to call myself a Linkin Park fan during my initial years at PEC, and that label had not gone away, however much I wished. So that was the only reason Chinku had brought it up. But as I looked on, I could not help saying to myself, “hmm, the girl doesn’t look bad at all!”. That’s when it happened.

As I was checking her out, she turned towards me while talking on the phone, lost in the conversation with her eyes wandering unfocused all over, finally coming to a stop on me. In that fraction of a second, the first thing I noticed was that she was pretty. Extremely pretty in fact. There also rose from within me a recognition. I can explain you the feeling if I slow down the time to a tenth. It’s a feeling which bubbles up when we feel we are looking at someone familiar. It happens with all of us now and then, and in my case I was very sure that I knew her. The idea struck home when her eyes locked into mine and she suddenly broke into a smile.

That’s when the feeling took hold of me. The heart taking a sudden plunge which you hope is not visible on your face, but which actually is, with the eyes slightly larger, pupils slightly dilated, lips slightly parted, nostrils slightly flared, and no blinking at all for those few seconds. An abrupt inhaling as your lungs suddenly feel devoid of oxygen, your eyes smiling but your lips really not. The very famous feeling that writers have described time and again - Falling in love. At first sight, probably not in my case, as I had been introduced to her a couple of times in the past 8-10 months, and probably seen her profile on Facebook, even talked to her on the phone a couple of times. But this had never happened before. It’s difficult to explain a feeling when it has taken hold of you, shakes you to your roots, tells you that from this moment on your life will be very different, all this in probably half a second.

I knew her from a common friend. As she recognized me, she waved and started towards me, preparing to hang up the phone, as could be seen from her expressions. I smiled back in return, flushed and cursing myself that a moment ago I was checking out this girl, only to realize that we knew each other. So it was this slightly embarrassed me with eyes slightly larger, pupils slightly dilated, lips slightly parted, nostrils slightly flared and no blinking at all that I approached her. We mainly jested about how overclothed I was with the muffler and all, on how I was too cool for attending a Hard Kaur performance, and some jokes on similar lines. The banter lasted for less than a minute before which we bid farewell to each other.

I turned around and walked to the car, with everyone waiting for me with expectant glances. Chinku especially was amazed! He just points out a girl to me and I go up to her and strike a conversation, and that too as if I knew her already? When did I become so awesome all of a sudden!? I pretended not to care much, just said that I knew her already. Others were involved in an ongoing discussion, so no one really cared much. But for me, everything had already changed.

5 months and a lot of effort later, I was successful in wooing her. Today, exactly seven years later, I am happily married to her for over a year. Chaku! Thanks for the million smiles you have given me and so much more. Thanks for being so awesome! I would not have been the person I am today if not for you. Happy 7^th anniversary of own little “9/11”! Cheers!

Frozen

The world as we see it, we imagine it as green. If we are surrounded by peaceful waters, we see it as blue. The world may be coloured brown by the mighty mountains or the dry grass. Or it may fade to black once darkness descends. But it can only be a special place and time when you are blessed by pure whiteness from the heavens above. This whiteness is what I grew up amongst. Every winter, Shimla has that ability to hide itself underneath the woolly blanket of snow, cozy at sight but frigid at touch. One unsuspecting morning you wake up to find unusual brightness lighting up the world outside, and on peeping out of the window, you realize that the world around you has turned white.

For those who have not had the blessing to experience a snowfall, here’s how it goes. You read the forecast in the newspapers about the expected snowfall, and you ascertain it by the dark and brooding clouds, ominous in their immensity, monstrous in their surliness. They come silently, without the usual pomp and show of their brothers of the plains. The day darkens and the inhabitants of the earth scurry home to save themselves from the seemingly impending doom. The doors and windows are tightly shut (even though there’s hardly any wind), boiling water is poured into rubber bottles for warmth, heaters are turned on, burning coals spread their fangs in the angeethees and people rub their hands and pretend to be warmed. The night does its magic and the morning is a new world. The only time I have experienced ‘deafening silence’ is on these mornings. There is no sound of any vehicular movement, no person can be heard walking about, even the birds go on mute and refuse to sing. There is absolute silence. It’s heavenly.

But as they day breaks and the sun comes up (it’s always sunny after a heavy overnight snowfall), typical sounds step up their play – sounds characteristic of this particular moment. Sounds of thawing snow, of water thus produced dripping drop by drop from the sloping roofs onto the path below, clearing away the snow where it falls, of dogs pawing their way through the soft fresh snow, leaving behind their footprints as if on freshly laid cement, of mynas stepping out gingerly from their corners in the trees, of heavy trudge of the early risers, inadvertently clearing away the snow for the lazier ones to go to work later, of playful shrieks of little children forcing their dads to make a snowman in the backyard. It’s a wonder, is what it is. Growing up in Shimla has given me a world of sweet memories but the experience of a snowfall is one of its kind.

  

uuaaann..

My sister is being opened up by a surgeon as I write this. And I am scared. I wish everything goes well, and my rational self tells me it will. Just that my irrational self is acting all stupid and taking control of me. It’s making me nervous. In another half an hour or so, a new life will be brought in this world. He/she will utter the primal cry of life, the suddenly risen crescendo of the uaaann of a baby, followed by gasping breaths just to make himself/herself ready for the next loud whine. It’s a miracle, the human life is. From a fist-sized everyone’s plaything, the one entity capable of making man oblivious to everything else in his life - all his worries, his job, his hunger, his entity as a living being himself – this round little ball of life, capable of feeling only the most primal emotions, develops into a grown up individual, capable of making his/her own decisions, fending for himself/herself in this cruel world. This is the miracle of life, my bhanja/bhanji who is going to come into this world today.

I have no idea if it is going to be a boy or a girl, nor do I know what my desire is leaning towards. If it’s a girl, it would be my honour to teach her a thing or two about life, to show to her all the beautiful things in this world, gift her and read out from books that have played a huge part of who I am today. If it’s a boy, I would be sure to teach him how to play the guitar, fool around with him and be his partner-in-crime. I would consider myself blessed either way. But I would be the most happy to make way for the new generation to take their first steps in the world.

EDIT:

It’s a baby boy J

Rob you, Rape you, Kill you!

Why do we find it so difficult to break stereotypes? It’s a question I have asked myself many times. We, as a nation of believers, like to have our own opinion of the world around us. Sadly, most of that opinion is shaped by a need for conformity, a desire for acceptability, manifested contemporarily as an itch for “likes” on a picture, a habit of appearing politically acceptable, of “networking” and “creating contacts” in today’s hyper-connected world of super-globalisation. If we think about it, it’s easy to see what we left behind. There are no moral underpinnings to our behaviour, no value strings attached that can hold our actions upright. In such a constraining and compromising environment, it is no surprise that it becomes all the more difficult to come out of the stereotypes we as a society have bathed in, since centuries together.

Staring at a black African more stingingly than deserved, with that enquiring, revelatory look which we give to a giant panda we see for the first time in a zoo, is a common sight in our great country.  Little do we realise that if it’s fascination for us, it’s humiliation and degradation for the other person. Walking the streets of Mumbai, or exploring the mohallas of Delhi, or strolling through the alleys of Kolkata, he is badly discriminated against, again and again, so much that he turns inwards. He is frightened to talk to people, as anyone he tries to approach is already staring at him with panic, or mildly disguised disgust. In a nation of brown skins all around, although not much different from them, the guy with the black skin becomes a loner. People say, yeah, see I told you, those niggers are not to be trusted. They keep to themselves, always devising a devious plan to rob you, rape you or kill you. Beware! And the stereotype continues.

The same can be said about the transgender community. There are fears propagated, since millennia, in the Indian society and a strict direction to stay away from them. We look at them in disgust, always wondering why they don’t have anything better to do than pestering us when we're going to the office, or persecuting us when we are travelling on the train (Gosh! There’s nowhere to escape! It’s dreadful!), or pushing their hand towards our face when the auto-rickshaw we are in has stopped at a signal. We do not want to realise that they do not have a single profession to look towards, as for all of those professions, organised or unorganised, transgenders do not exist at all! They get no employee benefits and are forced to look at “immoral” vocations like prostitution, beggary or whatever we call the confronting-and-asking-money-on-the-train. This very act of theirs further cements our stereotype. See I told you. They are not human beings. Stay away from them or they will rob you, rape you or kill you!

There’s another group of people among us who are not visually any different from the “privileged normal” ones among us. But precisely for that very reason, when revealed who they actually are, they are reviled, threatened, pressurised and bullied in the most horrendous ways. They cannot be easily avoided, as they are allowed the same jobs that the “privileged normal” amongst us enjoy (since they look exactly like the “privileged normal” – unlike the blacks and the hijras, in common parlance). They are the ones who have lived in a psychological cage, where they grow up with the trauma of the realisation that they are quite different from everyone else, especially from how everyone expects them to be. He realises he is attracted to his guy friends, a tendency which, around him, is already cruelly joked about. She grows up confused and one day accepts herself for her same-gender sexual preference. Still, he and she are expected to behave normal, be normal, accept the institutions of marriage (with a person from the opposite sex ofcourse, you silly!); while those among them who have behavioural characteristics of the opposite sex, are made a pariah early on in their lives, and being stigmatized, lambasted and attacked has been a norm for them. We destroy a person’s will to live. 

For the others, some dare to come out of the closet. The others are forced live a life of conformity, looking for means to “vent” their natural instincts (see, we told you they are perverts!) and die a death every single day of their lives. While we don’t even know about their existence till we grow old enough. Our teachers don’t talk about gays, while our parents pretend they do not even know who these people are (yeah it’s true, they are actually aliens!), and we grow up in ignorance when one day we hear a joke about “them”. That is how we first hear about their existence among us. We live our lives assuming no one around us might be suffering from that lifelong “sickness”, and it is no wonder the “afflicted” among us never open up to us, and live a life of mental agony like no other, being around everyone, yet always alone. Oh yeah, don’t you know, they all have AIDS! Stay away from them. Don’t you know that if given a chance, they will rob you, rape you or kill you!

The link to the pic above:

http://www.bradensummers.com/menu/all-love-is-equal

Cusp of a Change

It has been historically proven that whenever an economic system, backed by a political system of the same ilk, fails to deliver, it leads to despondency, dejection, even depression in the economy. After the nation suffers in this state of nadir for a while, there arrives an agent of change, a hope for a better tomorrow, the betterment conditioned on a major overhaul in the economic-political system being practised at that particular time. This new age of change, despite the opposition of a few who see the dark underbelly of the new system, thrives and grows big to lead the entire nation towards a completely different direction which could not have been predicted by any historian 10 years earlier. It reaches its acme, causes, atleast in the short run, irreversible disruptions in the economic structure of the country, before the degeneration sets in once more as the dark underbelly which was earlier difficult to spot, turns upwards for all to see. People lose faith in the existing system, anti-incumbency sets in and the demand for an alternative political-economic system leads to an emergence of a new leader exemplifying change, guiding by hand the hope of the citizens of the nation towards a new dawn. The cycle goes on.

Today India finds itself at the cusp of such a change. The existing system of attempts at betterment of society bottom-up has been vitiated, giving birth to corruption in all walks of life. People are looking for alternatives and this lacuna in the Indian political system has given birth to two leaders who have come to occupy this very mindshare of the Indian citizen. These two leaders may represent two different political orientations, but both offer substantially different ideologies from what the present dispensation debauched in.

As indicated by the already pent-up expectations of the corporate class in India, reflected in the unprecedented rally in the country’s share markets, they have already chosen a new leader, a messiah who will lead India out of the muck it finds itself in. There is not a doubt that if these expectations come to fruition, which seems likely today with the biggest exercise in universal adult suffrage in the world just a couple of days away, our political-economic landscape is going to see changes in policymaking that are unprecedented. The focus of the economic thrust is going to shift towards a more top-down orientation with the corporate class expected to drive the growth engines of our nations. The expectation is also there that economic growth will serve to smoothen the bumps of class and caste deviations to provide a more level playing field to people from all walks of life, irrespective of religion, race, caste or community. There are sceptics too who, on the other hand, believe this growth will be at the cost of tearing away the carefully woven fabric of this nation, which till a couple of centuries ago, exemplified a way of life rather than differentiating one from another on the basis of religion. There are other concerns too whether if India is developed enough at the lower strata of society to shift gears to a more outward-oriented market-governed economic system to deliver the goods. We just have to wait and see. But one thing is certain. The India of the next 10 years is going to be very different from the India of the last decade. Which bad points from the previous decade are discarded and which good ones are maintained, and vice versa, remains to be seen.