A few days ago, papa had the chance of visiting a village. A village of the likes of most villages of Punjab. But like most villages of Punjab, it did have its unique features: the people, the tree-species, the professions, the specialisation of that village.

An interesting incident happened with him there, the story of which he narrated to some friends and me.

Some people there narrated to him about the tale of a village which, some centuries ago, consisted of only madmen. No one in that village – not even a single soul – was sane. People talked in gibberish,  fought with each other day in and day out, and there was no iota of logic whatsoever anywhere. People of other villages desisted passing through this infamous village.

But then one day, a spiritual master visited this village with his followers. This divine soul was touched by the predicament of the villagers and the fate of the village, and he decided to do something about it.

The master and his followers chanted spiritual hymns that day in the village, and their melodies reached the ears of all the insane villagers, and a healing effect was cast.

But it was not as rosy as it seems.

That day, centuries ago, a sort of pact was signed. The entire village but one person would be healed of the generations-long madness. It would be another sane village on earth, but one single soul out of the entire village population would always remain mentally challenged. When that one person would die, the predicament would be passed on to someone else.

But this was the part of the deed. Either the entire village would remain mad, or all of their madness would be suffered by one to keep them all prosperous.

As those people narrated the tale of this village to papa, they explained how even today, just one person in that village was mentally challenged. He belonged to a wealthy and prosperous family which made him wear expensive clothes, provided great food and things to keep him busy. But he didn’t like it all, and often ran away from his home, tore those clothes until he was in tatters, would go and get dirty in wet soil, eat by picking leftovers from ground. No, he didn’t fight with anyone, nor yelled, unless anyone messed with him. It was a popular belief that if a villager would meet him in the beginning of a day, his day would become lucky. People often came to pay their obesience to this man for he was believed to be suffering the malady of the whole village over himself as part of the pact.

It’s impossible to check the authenticity of this story today. Someone going in search of historical evidences might return empty-handed, or with folk tales that he might find difficult to believe.

But just leave the authenticity factor aside, and imagine such a village, such a world – where a few have to remain suffering for lifetime to keep others happy!

Coincidentally, a couple of days after I heard this story from my father, a professor from college narrated this similar story called “The Ones who walk away from Omelas”. You’ll find a striking resemblance between the one which I have narrated, and between the story penned by Ursula K. Le Guin. Our sources might be different, but we look at the same worldly reality.

Damn! I’ll never look at the suffering the same way ever again!

Crash!!!
A tree fell
A part broke
A long screeech
A long stroke

Blood escaped the vein
Heart skipped a beat
An eye fluttered
A tongue stuttered.

Sky bent low
Clouds stepped down
To have a closer look

Vrooom!!!
On the next lane
Something, someone,
Passed by
In perfect normalcy.

When Bhai Vir Singh went to Kashmir, he wrote a book full of poems about it. Bhai Vir Singh is a high standard; from me, you can expect at least one blogpost.

There is something about Kashmir and its people that’s truly spellbinding – from the overall surroundings there to the sweet language they have, to their slant-roofed houses.

Our stay in Kashmir was at the house of an acquaintance. We were a team of 15, including one toddler. The family who hosted us and had this massive and beautiful house with cherry trees and a farm of its own, provided us with two halls, one each for gents and ladies.

One of the most memorable times at Kashmir was the time of Rehraas Sahib, a sudden memory of which gave me the idea of this blogpost, especially its title: “rest that is not sleep”.

We reached their house around evening and it was already time for Rehraas. We perched on the carpeted floor in a circle, sort of, some of us leaning against walls, some slightly bending forwards, some with phones in hands. Some had blankets spread on laps as it was cold, though the month was of June.

And comfort pervaded all around. All the chaos in the world came to a rest as we all recited one couplet each, turn by turn. It was a kind of rest, a kind of comfort unheard of, unspoken of, unknown of.

And this rest, this comfort, unlike most rests and comforts, didn’t put me to sleep. In my room back in Ludhiana, when I am too comfortable, when there is a pillow to support my back and I have no pressing works, I start feeling sleepy, and my limbs feel a new kind of ache – while it’s still a feeling of comfort.

But here, this comfort was different – it didn’t put me to sleep. My eyes wide open, observing everything from that little speck of dust under the curtain, to that grain of biscuit someone dropped unknowingly, to that toe of the toddler that was so immature and innocent – I observed everything, being very much alive and full of sense – more sense of myself than I had ever – and I savoured this comfort for the entire 50 minute period (including the discussion on our favourite quotes from Rehraas).

A similar experience ensued in Ludhiana once, and this time again, I was doing Rehraas; with this three-years-younger friend from Anandpur Sahib, on Zoom, while the door to my room was barred with no movement outside. A harmonium lay next to me which I had just played for “Har jug jug bhagat upaaya…”. At the end of Rehraas, this friend and I (while our videos were on), pumped our fists and punched the air high above while shouting the traditional warcries, “Bole so nihaal … sat sri akaal” and “deg teg fateh, panth ki jeet”. He began to laugh in some kind of ecstasy, followed by me laughing at his laughter.

That was a different kind of comfort too.

Kashmir or Ludhiana, you can have rest that is not sleep, provided some factors are met – factors I am trying to figure out, factors that are nevertheless not in my control.

In an open group discussion today, the topic steered to the question of rituals, whether rituals are good or bad, and one of the senior members came up with this beautiful equation:

Spirit + Ritual = Spiritual

This post is a result of a burst of overjoy at the idea of both this equation and the clarity of this wooly concept.

As for myself, I have usually seen the word “ritual” in a negative light – something that always involves blind faith and ignorance, and as something that should be avoided and resisted whenever possible.

But today I am reconsidering this – are “rituals” really bad?

Or – let’s ask a completely different question: are all rituals bad?

Ritual – that’s a ceremony or an action that is done according to some prescribed order, following rules that are pre-made. These rituals might be social, cultural, religious, political – or even personal. Marriage is a social, cultural as well as a religious ritual. Celebration of a festival might be cultural or religious. An oath-taking ceremony – or the famous “halwa ceremony” in the Indian Parliament – are political rituals.

And then there are personal rituals. For a long time, I wrote a daily diary regularly without fail – that was a personal ritual. Waking up at a certain time in the morning is part of our daily ritual. Brushing your teeth, going to school or work, reading some pages of a book every night – all are personal rituals.

Call it a habit or a ritual – the spirit remains the same. Habits practiced by a larger group are rituals and rituals practiced by an individual are habits.

Flip the word and your perception of the idea suddenly changes: to me, ritual always carried this negative vibe, while habit sounds quite healthy!

Clearly, rituals also come in two varieties: there are healthy and unhealthy rituals.

A festival is a healthy ritual if it does more good than bad: if it strengthens the social fabric, it’s a healthy ritual; if it spreads pollution or encourages extravagance, it might be unhealthy.

And finally, there are spiritual rituals. In the recent times, a surge was seen in the idea of mindfulness, and many YouTubers and writers spoke on this. Influenced, many people added in their “daily rituals” a 10- or a 15-minute slot for mindfulness. Unmistakably, it’s a healthy ritual – for it gives us time in a fast-pacing world to pause and reflect on ourselves and our world. If practiced regularly and with “spirit”, one might be spiritually awakened!

But!

But if this 10-minute period becomes a spiritless, devoid-of-purpose “ritual” – a ritual captured in inverted commas – you will become just that – captured: it will be more of an obligation than an activity to enrich you spiritually.

There seems to be a secret behind the stability in nature: sun and seasons appear to be following a ritual of returning again and again at a particular time of the day and year. Earth’s revolution around the sun and rotation around itself are rituals, pretty much. A wheel’s rotation, a body’s in-built clock, growing up and dying – all are rituals in their own right.

Nature is in order, running according to patterns - as per its own rituals.

There’s a lot of scope for exploring this subject even more, but let’s attempt to close this discussion with this: instead of asking the wrong question “Are rituals good or bad”, let’s ask the better and more thought-out question: “How much of rituals is ok?”

That, now, is a question worth a discussion!

You meet words like you meet people. Away from home, all of a sudden, sometimes accidently. Some words enter your life when you make effort – like you trying to make effort to make new friends at a new place. Some words meet you around the corners of streets, purchasing vegetables from the same vendors which you visit on weekends.

We all have our prized stories of learning certain words. Some are funny, some are painful, some are even embarrassing. But all those stories, all those funny, painful, embarrassing occurrences, earn you words as if they were friends. You treasure those words, use them with fondness, and they become your best weapons. Words – those little building blocks of language – language that is common to us, but at the same time everyone’s unique tool chest.

Here I share six words that I cherish the most among my treasury, and how they introduced themselves to me.

1. Diligence.

I first met the word “Diligence” at Punjabi University, Patiala in the summer of 2019. I was visiting the campus with someone, and we happenned to stop by a professor who knew the person I was accompanying. We sat in her office for half an hour. I was introduced to the professor as a boy who had completed a work assigned to me well in time. Her remark was a two-word sentence, but full of conviction, “Hmm, diligence!” I befriended the word there and then. It has travelled with me all these years, and if someone asks today one virtue a student must possess, I will jump up, “Hmm, diligence!”

2. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Nicknamed as P-45, I met this word at school. Schoolboys usually boast of such unique knowledge, which is otherwise not too useful in the everyday course of life, be it the longest word in the English language, or the name of the oldest religion. At one time, you were a highly respected guy in the class if you could pronounce the full word, or spell it correctly. A biology teacher once gave us an assignment of presenting a PowerPoint presentation on any virus in the world. The only rule was the time limit of 10 minutes. A friend actually took the pain to research P-45, and made a ppt with the first slide containing a string of 45 letters:

PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS

He ended up convincing us that it was actually not such a rare disease, and there were really more cases of P-45 in the world than the number of letters it had.

3. Enthusiasm.

To be honest, my first greeting to enthusiasm wasn’t too enthusiastic. At HVM Convent School, there used to be a ten-minute free period after the school ended, in which all classes were dispersed one by one. This was a highly precious time – you could get up from your seat and walk to anyone’s place and talk to anyone – all this while the teacher was still in the class. There were debates, there was shouting, and there was clamour. On occasions, teachers posted on duty in corridors, came to class to gossip with class the in-charges.

One such day, some friends and I played a game, sort of, in which we had to ask each other tricky questions. At such an age, our vocabularies were quite insufficient, so asking the meaning of a new word was a valid riddle. One friend asked the meaning of “enthusiastically”. Replying to faces who had no clue, he explained it as a mixture of “joy” and “excitement” and “interest”. I didn’t like the word, of course, because it was long – it looked so sophisticated, and had a strange, cold aura about it. But it didn’t take long to get familiar with it. It took time to build enthusiasm for enthusiasm, but there are friends who become friends because you see them too much, that you can't restrain befriending them.

4. Intuition.

I was always confused about intuition because of the “tuition” in it. I continued to associate it with schooling and education for a long time.

Once upon a time, I was preparing a presentation on “Moral Values”. I bumped into this word yet again while surfing, and finally decided to look it up in the dictionary (sometimes you are so scared of or annoyed by a word that you don’t want to look it up in a dictionary!). A bit of exploration and I reached some website which described intuition as something like this: “You have a hidden, wiser voice inside you. Sometimes it is muffled, yes, but it’s always there. Sometimes an answer comes to you from this voice – and you are surprised by how it came. That part, that familiar voice – that is intuition.”

Suddenly, I had an intuitive understanding of intuition and added it to my vocabulary. Now I happen to use it a lot.

5. Opportunity Cost.

The fifth one is a term, not a word per se. As a student of Economics throughout my high school, I have been bumping into this word quite often. But it was like that boy in your school you see quite often, also know his name, but do not understand that much. He’s quite nice, but you’re just afraid to talk to him, or be near him, as there’s some mystery about him. All seem to be rubbing well with it, except you. I always knew opportunity cost as “Value of the next best alternative foregone”, and my teacher always explained it with this example:

“A farmer chooses to plant wheat; the opportunity cost is rice plantation that he could have done with the same money.”

I couldn’t, despite explanation, figure out for a long time that if the farmer already has chosen the “most profitable” wheat to be grown, how does a calculation of the “next best alternative” come to serve any value?

And then I accidentaly - thankfully - struck into a Seth Godin blogpost with the same title. When you are sitting and spending your time on YouTube, it comes with an opportunity cost – you could have been working on some pending project. This suddenly called to mind the understanding that the “next best alternative” might actually be better than the task we are choosing to do. Maybe wheat is not still the best option, and by growing wheat what “best” thing you are crossing out – be it one rung higher or lower in value – is the opportunity cost. That little piece of knowledge, which cleared the understanding between the word and me, closed the deal. As expected, I was wreathed in smiles. Thanks, Seth Godin :)

6. Eg and ie.

Two expressions, but let’s keep them under one head. I handshaked with these much before my peers did. GK books were a part of the curriculum since junior classes, but mostly no one took them too seriously (in many cases, not even the GK teachers!). That was mostly because these books just talked about raw facts – say, ten tallest mountains in the world with their heights, ten famous sports players in the words - without any context. No doubt, despite this, they were interesting to read, but not so riveting that you sat to memorise the details.

One such book contained a chapter on abbreviations. Eg and ie sat there like two little cute twins. They sat innocently among those pages, unaware of the atrocities in the world, oblivious to the the wonders of science and technology, and looked at me with glossy eyes. I first read their Latin full forms – exampli gratia and id est. I showed it to my benchmates, but they found this tasteless. But the abbreviations stayed at the back of my mind. I had a fun time quizzing my classmates in all schools I went to (I got to study in 3 different schools in 5 years, and 5 in 12) about the full forms of these two. Eg, when I asked a group of boys about this, they were surprised that these carried actual full forms, and when I told them, they were all inops facies – clueless faces, i.e.

Obedience for the leader is one of the defining roles of a good team. A pilot sits in the cockpit of a plane and sets direction for the plane. The plane does not decide its own direction. The plane obeys the pilot, and hence a smooth flight is achieved.

Given that the pilot is a right person and knows how to fly a plane, and that the plane follows his directions, they are destined to reach the destination together.

The farm unions and the farmers play the role of a pilot and a plane respectively. If farm unions and their leaders began paying heed to the tongue of every individual, there would be chaos and no strategic direction would be set. And if all individual protestors began to make their own decisions, there would be many but minuscule sparks instead of big, planned fireworks.

Singhu, it seemed, was already conversant with this model. I myself was fortunate to hear first-hand a real example of this.

On the second day of our visit, a big event followed: the Karnal cane charge. Farmers were allegedly beaten by armed policemen, and fatalities and injuries were reported. Despite this brutal attack, numbers and numbers of farmers kept sitting at the blocked toll plaza.

I eavesdropped on two farmers conversing with each other about this. An interesting detail I caught from this discussion was that the farmers were still there, the reason being that they had received no official statement asking them to leave the site, from farm leaders. They said they would get up only when some leader would tell them to do so, no matter the medium: Facebook, some messenger, some written order, or some appeal from a stage. Unless that came, they would continue the protest where they had been told to do.

This spirit of order and obedience is one of the key factors of the success of this agitation so far.

I remember waking up twice during the night. Though there were mosquitoes too, but I was feeling cold, thanks to the fans combined with the cooler combined with the cold weather that night. I was too lazy in my sleep to go and get something to cover myself with, and hence spent a part of the night shivering.

But apart from that, it was an easy night. I woke up next morning, fresh and satisfied, around 4.30 am. My other two companions were still sleeping, and I had woken up just like that, without an alarm. Sometimes your excitement is the alarm enough to get you up. Later I would learn that when the first alarm had gone off, one of us had turned off all the subsequent alarms.

Woken up alone in that big hall, I felt slightly weird. I could not make too much noise, lest I should disturb many sleeps, and so I decided to take a stroll and see if there were any toilets nearby.

Outside the hall-like massive tent, I found a different scene: I was not the first one to wake up on Singhu. People were going here and people were going there, some with towels on their arms, others with toothbrushes in their mouths, some of them talking quietly, others reciting their morning prayers. Some Hindu hymns were playing on the main stage – I recognised them as I had learned one in my primary school.

Two random old men passed by me – I stopped them and asked if they knew of any bathrooms nearby. They said they were already going that way, and I could accompany them.

Along a makeshift gurdwara, there was a little path heading towards a street parallel to the highway. There was a factory, sort of, which had been converted to a bathroom by installing a tall cuboidal box, and placing some tubs. A few men were taking bath in open.

After this memorable bathroom visit in that converted factory, I embarked again upon the highway and started heading not towards the hall-like tent but the other way. I wanted to have a glimpse of how Singhu functioned in a morning, from the waking up of man to waking up of the sun.

I reached till the KFC (where the first two incidents mentioned in this series took place), and took a return journey from there.

Another interesting thing ensued on this return journey. As I was on way, I spotted from some distance a hose supported into a massive tub to fill water in it. Water was filled to the brim, and had started spilling out. The man who had put up the hose had maybe forgotten about it. I wondered if I should do something to save water. I could spot, at least from there, no tap to which the hose was attached, or anything else that could stop the flow.

I was still wondering when a man passing by, just like me, stopped and stooped near that tub. He was a passerby, I was sure, as he seemed to be as confused as me, and was checking how he could turn off the flow of water.

I smiled ear to ear and learnt another secret of the success of this protest: care for a stranger as much as for an acquaintance.

There were three of us returning from a Langar (free community kitchen). Our afternoon meal had been delayed to around 5 pm, but now we were all satiated.

As the sun also began setting, coolness was presiding and it was altogether very pleasant. Shoulder to shoulder, we three walked through the thin crowd, heading towards the tent in which we had to stay for the night. Simultaneously we looked around at the other tents. People had started coming out, some were sitting outside their little huts and tents on chairs or manjas (charpoys).

On to our left was such a group of old men, perched on chairs and a charpoy, talking to each other and looking at the passersby. We were quite conspicuous due to our pant-shirts and that urban look you can’t avoid having easily. Those men called us and offered us to sit and talk. Kudos – that was why we were there, to talk and know more about the protest!

They told us to bring three chairs from inside of their hut, and we did that and then we were listening to them, and questioning them.

“How long have you been here?” was the first natural question.

“Nine months,” was the doubtless reply. “We need to visit our village and homes time to time, but then we are mostly here, at the protest.”

They were three people – one slightly less than the age my grandfather would have been, and two others at least twenty years elder to my father. Two of them had long, flowing milk-white beards.

Before long, a fourth old man appeared from behind the hut. He was introduced to us as a man who had never even once gone back home ever since the protest had started. “He has declared that he will either win or die, but not return home like this, ignored and defeated,” said one of them.

And this man’s face told a similar story too. He had the most wrinkles out of all of them. It had a different kind of gravity, some form of sadness but audacity. Sadness would be a wrong word – it was something different, some emotion that had no name.

One of us asked the main man, “What’s the secret of your undemolished spirits?”

There wasn’t one secret answer to this question: such things are a culmination of myriad factors. But an unrelated question fetched a nearby answer.

The question was, “How do you spend your free time?”

They replied, “Oh, we either do some sewa (voluntary service) at a langar, or we recite paath (religious recitation). At other times, we talk and discuss about new developments related to the protest.”

They – three old men, and we – three young boys – completely different from each other. But sooner or later, we would have to realize that they were on a lookout for us: old trees were in wait of seeds who would carry the gene forward, and keep the fruit alive.

As I was brushing my teeth, I took note of some interesting things, which gave me idea about how one could manage to stay on a road outside the protective walls of his house for nine months: minimalism.

To take a bath, a regular farmer needed only the bare-minimum items: a soap, some water, and clothes to change into, and that was it. If bucket and mug were not available, a man could bath by stooping under a tap or watering himself using a hose. A rope was all one needed to hang the wet clothes. Minimalism: that sounds quite like a modern term, but it is an essential part of the lives of these people who are not yet fully conversant to the dialing pad of an android phone!

Farmers' Protest taught me the’s the simplest take to life. As you are not obsessed with physical beauty, you do not require a mirror. An old man standing there, capturing everything with his eyes like me, waiting for his turn to bathe, randomly untied his turban from his head, used the wooden comb (kangha) tucked in his hair to comb them, and just like that, without needing anything, tied it again – all of this standing here, waiting subconsciously for his turn.

This lesson was really important. As aforementioned, I had come for one day but had decided to spend night here on a hunch. I didn’t have any pajamas to change into, nor a toothbrush, nor another set of clothes. The protest taught me to survive with all I had – and to be honest, it wasn’t even a tad difficult!

Minimalism is really fun, it makes life simple, but when it comes to you naturally, instinctively, it works wonders!

During my second morning at the Farmers’ protest site, I was there in a open ground near a KFC restaurant which had been transformed into a sort of massive public bathroom. Portable containers had been put up for use as toilets and urinals, and one particular nook was being used for bathing and washing purposes. At any given time during a regular morning, five to ten people were always taking bath at this place.

I needed a toothbrush. We had come to the protest thinking of a brief one-day visit, but the spirit of those who had been staying there since last nine months motivated us to stay at least one night there and witness a night at Singhu.

Therefore, I didn’t have any clothes to change, neither a toothbrush, nor toothpaste, nor a soap – nothing one might need were he to spend a night outside his home.

Someone suggested I should visit a langar and ask for either a toothpaste or daatan. A daatan is a plant product, usually a neem or kikkar, that one chews. Traditionally, when there were no toothpastes or brushes, people used daatans. Last year I got to meet a farmer, whose age was around 75, and his teeth were perhaps stronger than mine! He never used a Colgate. He just chewed a daatan every morning.

I visited the nearest langar. Early morning as it was, there was no one to be served anything, but a few sewadaars were preparing the first meal of the day. A man with a full black beard, towering height and glowing cheeks, was churning a ladle in a big utensil. Apart from him, an old man sat in a corner, skimming through the headlines of the day.

I asked him if he had daatan. He didn’t have any. It was then I noticed that I was in complete contrast to him. He was a pure rural, and I a born urban. His clothes and my clothes were metaphors of our opposite personalities. But we had a few things in common too: we were here for one purpose. And we both didn’t have a daatan.

Just when I was about to take a turn, he stopped me and said he did have toothpaste, and asked if it would do. I nodded my head and mumbled a “yes”. He paused his work and went behind the tent. During the two minutes he took there, I had a brief conversation with the old man reading newspaper. He queried about my place of residence, and what I wanted. The first man returned with a new toothpaste, and handed it to me.

As I took it from him, I told him that I would return the toothpaste in no more than two minutes.

His reply was in a perfectly natural tone, “No, no need to return. Use it and keep it there where you brush. It will help someone else.”

The reply astounded me, but I smiled and returned to my companions. They were amazed at how I had got a brand new pack of toothpaste for free. Since I didn’t have a brush, I applied some amount to my index finger and brushed my teeth.

The farmers’ protest hence taught me an important lesson about how an agitation could not be maintained without a spirit of commonwealth and sharing. Things were not to be hoarded and profited from, but to be used and passed on: and that’s exactly what I did with the toothpaste. I let it remain there on the wall near the taps. As I started walking away, I did notice some random baba ji picking it up and using it.

Glossary
Daatan – tooth-cleaning twig
Langar - a free communal kitchen
Sewadaars - voluntary workers
Baba ji – a respectful term for an old man

The clouds, the sun, the two I thought
Third a sky, knew I not.
Heat, and cold, two my choices,
Between, beyond, no other voices.
Above, below, two brief realms,
Idea a third, just overwhelms.
A spectrum but wide, the sky maintained,
Brain a binary's, ego was pained;
Looking out of the window, the sense I gained,
When the fog was swept, it rained and rained.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

It is with this clause that Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities starts. It’s an iconic sentence, and the paragraph to which it belongs, is no less iconic.

Though The Tale belongs to the time of French Revolution, as back as 1789, there is something about this sentence and paragraph which holds true even today, and will continue to hold true for a long time to come. The surprising thing about the world is that two extremes often exist in the same Overton Window, and one is often aware of only one at a time. Like a wavelength existing half the time above the axis and half the time below it, our observations also move in waves. But those waves are not always so regular – for some of us, we keep looking at things below the axis for most of the time, and for others, vice versa, and for still others, perspectives keep changing.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Black and White, both colours exist simultaneously. The Universe is still expanding, and that is splendid. But the Universe might “crunch” one day, and that is frightening. But the Universe might come into existence again and expand, and that is splendid.

One moment you feel humanity is shifting to spirituality, having realised that a life of atheism lacks the most essential purpose, and that will make it more virtuous; but at the same time, you feel that new wars and crises still arise on daily basis, and force in the world still continues to exist despite centuries of destruction. One world, two extremes, existing in harmony, as if.

On one hand, you see Elon Musk and his great ideas of settling on Mars, and you get goosebumps at the imagination of a future that looks like “Future”. On the other hand, you see things like America’s decisions being affected by businessmen, prolonging wars to earn economic gains, and you are caused to bite your lip.

While this binary classification has a bit of fallacy, the general idea is that it is possible for two extremes, two superlatives to be on one wall together.

But this has been forever and will be forever. It seems to be the way of the world. The “best of times” and the “worst of time” will exist alongside.

This is going to be a short writeup.

For a lot of time now, I was worried about one thing: my age. I always wanted to remain a child forever. The carefree-ness, the absence from big responsibilities, the unconditional happiness, the sense of accomplishment in little things … I was always afraid of losing it all. Even though legally an adult from last seven months, I had been trying to deny the fact that I have grown up, and a child no more I was.

Even if I accepted the fact on rare occasions, I felt there was a latent sadness in the acceptance. Losing childhood … argh! It was a tough choice, a tough realization.

But yesterday, a brainwave changed this all. I had a new, revolutionary thought.

Let me establish the background first – that is important.

So it was a rainy weather. All these thoughts about happiness and age were running at the back of my mind. Nevertheless, it was a fun journey going to buy some milk from a nearby store. The street had puddles of water, and you had to navigate your way at every step.

To take a shortcut, you divert from the street and embark on the empty two-sided ground which joins the store (with the gap of a little road). Two or three dogs are usually lying here and there on this ground like some mops.

It was here in this ground I had this brainwave I talk of.

All before that, I had been imagining the graph of happiness as something like this:

Or something resembling this:

Or to be more visual, I will say that the mountain of childhood is the highest among all other mountains – mountain of adulthood and mountain of age etc.

But all of a sudden, I had a new realisation. I revisited my problem: my problem was that I had lost my ability to enjoy life as a child can.

This picture of tall and short mountains perplexed me.

And then came another picture, another viewpoint: what if instead of increased and decreased happiness, it was just “different kinds of happiness”? Maybe a child could be happy and an adult too could be happy, but they both were happy in different fashions? If that was the case, my attempt at pretending to be a child so that I could be happy in the same way a child is happy, will be futile, because happiness made for my age is just a different kind of happiness!

The only difference is that the mountain of childhood is different than the mountain of adulthood. They may have different kinds of grass or trees or environments, but they tower the same.

So even a sick, helpless old man can enjoy life to the fullest, only if he cares to identify what kind of happiness is life ready to offer him!

There are moments in life that can’t be recreated. Moments that just happen. Moments that delight you and make you feel that life, after all, does carry some meaning. When you smell the trees and get strokes of cool, comely wind on your face and cheeks.

As monsoon season commences every year, the first few showers are nothing less than bliss. They are relief from scorching heat, and the weather in which clouds keep the sky closed for hours on end, and sunlight comes sporadically in evenings and mornings, is just awesome and something worth living for.

It was one such evening, a few days ago, while I stood near a parapet grill. We live on the second floor, and when you stand near this balcony grill, you feel as if you are a lot closer to the clouds and the sky. Just twenty or thirty feet above the ground, and you are already almost touching the sky!

Now let me describe the scene I was witnessing. Just as a side note, I had seen some clip from the movie Jurassic Park that morning, and the scenes had been replaying on the back of my mind. I wasn’t hence surprised when I saw a certain group of clouds forming a perfect, roaring T-Rex at one corner of the sky. Clouds and stars – these are two things that can give you almost any shape in the world. Some see in the same group of stars a simple, commonplace dipper, and some, amazingly, see a fierce, stood-up-on-hind-legs bear!

Anyhow, it was a T-Rex that I saw. The clouds were quite stationary that evening hence I could expect it to stay in sight for quite some time. There was a yellowish tint to all of them, as Sun was behind one of those groups. From yellow it slowly turned to orange and soon to pinkish. The change was spectacular.

As extra frosting, there was that cool wind which comes with such weather. Now wind comes in different flavours too. Sometimes it carries some heavy, unbearable smell and moisture which brings lethargy. But today it carried some scent brought from some rose-fields. No air conditioner in the world could rival its soothing coolness. The same wind rustled through the leaves of a tree at a distance, just as it combed through my sideburns. Maybe that tree was where from where it was issuing. For a split second, I felt as if I was out of my body and some beautiful cycle was in progress. My nose exhaled air that danced across to the tree the underside of whose leaves breathed it. As a return, they gave out air that was pleasant to me and was balmy and sweet. It was perfect cycle, as if we were complete in ourselves and needed no third thing in the world.

At this point, I felt as if the T-Rex smiled at the thought that in the bilateral exchange, I was forgetting the power, the medium, the expanse, space and openness, which was making the magic happen.

You will be stunned when I will tell you that the street in which we presently stand, is being seen by us for the last time. You and I are seeing it for the last time in our lives! Do you look at that old man with rough beard over there? Yes, very near to that pole. That one with the wooden cart. You did not notice him before, did you?

What if I tell you that you are looking at this man for the last time in your life? In your long life that is going to follow, you will never see him again! Doesn’t that surprise you? Yes, when I first learned that most of the people we see in our lives and can’t care less to notice, are those that we get to see only once. Isn’t it spellbinding to think that you and that rough-bearded man will continue to live on the same earth, on the same planet, for years and years to come, and your paths will never cross again!

And this street too.

There is going to come a time when you will not even remember that you were ever in this street, a street that had a pole and a faulty streetlight, gazing stunningly standing beside me. When I will come and remind you, you will wrinkle your forehead, scratch your head, suck your lip, but you won’t be able to recall. You will say you don’t know, that maybe you were, maybe you were not. It will be a history lost in the past, and no one – not even a single soul on earth – will know you were here, on these pieces of gravel, on this wearing down road, under this faulty streetlight.

In your short life that happens to have passed, you must have stood like this in many streets, looked at many people, said and heard and read countless things; but try whatever you can, you will not remember many of them.

Ah, so I seem to have made you wonder what life is about, then? As you walk with it, just like you walk with me today, you pick tonnes of sand in your hand, which unfortunately slips by, leaving behind little grains that you are able to recall as memories. What happens to what all has slipped by, from life and memory both? Is it like it never happened, because no living soul remembers it, not even you whom it was about? And even if you try and are careful from the very start, how much can you really hold in your little, frugal hands, while your fingers have spaces between them?

And what about the memories of those millions and billions of humans that have been? One day, the beautiful and prized picture of this street and that rough-bearded old man will be completely forgotten. There must have been streets in the past, and there must have been numerous old men who owned carts; but how many of them can you recall?

So let us sit down here in this street for some time. I know a shop nearby which can offer us a place to sit and a nice view of this street. We can together sit down and watch this singular picture for a while, enjoying it, savoring it, making a memory of it.

That night I realized that even one little closed room can become your whole universe and mean everything to you.

Like in the previous anecdote I wrote about, electricity was again gone. But this time I was not on the rooftop, simply because winters were picking up and it would be chilly up there.

My parents were in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and my sister somewhere near the main gate.

I lay on the bed, in a dark room. So dark, so black, that if you could see one thing, it was a shade of the door to the room, luminated slightly by the candle burning in the kitchen at some distance. Except that little glow, it was pure darkness.

For some reason, this darkness provided some warmth, as if more than simple absence of light, it was some sort of blanket. There is something about these colours: white colour seems to represent coolness, winters, and black seems to stand for warmth, heat and summers.

In such circumstances where you are enclosed in darkness, it makes really no difference whether you keep your eyes closed or open: either way, it is a black colour which you see. But even then, it is a different kind of pleasure to keep your eyes wide open and stare at the ceiling you cannot see.

And suddenly something starts to happen. All your senses seem to be thinking one same thing, which you are yet to figure out, and in this concentration, you are no longer in the room in which you lay on the bed. The ceiling is suddenly like the open arenas of outer space and you start to see planets, asteroids, black holes and galaxies hanging at little distance from you. So this is that big picture which God sees, you can’t help wondering. Looking at this like that should be boring, or that is what your mind thinks, but instead it’s calming and a pleasure of its own sort.

You want to enjoy this forever. You want to leave your body and become a silent part in this, like a little piece fits nicely in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s an ocean and you are a drop, enchanted by this all. It’s a magical experience, and you want to learn this magic too. For a split second, you want to become God who must be living somewhere around here, in a colony where you are but a visitor. Out of the blue, some word drops into your mouth and you start repeating it in a cycle. It’s akin to chewing something extraordinarily delicious.

Someone calls your name and you return back to your dark room. All the lights that the suns and moons had been giving, are out now and it’s complete darkness again, and it’s slightly haunting.

But you pledge to yourself that from tomorrow, you will not sleep. When every day all the family members would have slept, you would stay awake and wait for this experience to happen again. You would do this every night, and even in future, would prefer a dark room. This would be your nice little secret: that you didn’t sleep at night but instead went somewhere to a different realm. That would be something you would live your rest of life for!

But rare such experiences are, you do not take long to realise. But increasing frequency of such ecstatic, mystic experiences must be a sign of spirituality, experiences that fill every cell of your body with wonder.

One night – one night that was just, but I was mystified one night!

Electricity is out. It is nighttime, almost bedtime. Dinner is due to arrive. I am alone on rooftop, flat against its floor, searching into the space.

Stars are after all not as many as I used to think I would find upon looking at the sky. Do I see Milky Way when I look up? Nah, not a full glass of milk but just little dabbles here and there.

Moon is the center of attraction. Clouds dare not touch it – it stands alone, steadfast, taciturn, like some ruler of the night. Little stars twinkle at times, only sporadically, but when they do it is pleasant.

What is surprising is that even if it is night and even if I lie spreadeagled on the roof covered by cool night zephyr touching and tickling me, I am not likely to fall asleep anytime soon. If this is what spiritual experiences are like, I will choose more. I will wish that electricity goes out every night and owing to the absence of fans, I am caused to climb the stairs, pat the one-leafed plant lying in the mid of the stairs, and lie down here like now. I will not ask for any blanket to spread, won’t need any pillow, my bony hands are enough for me.

But nights are there to pass. Moon is visible only half of a day, and even less if you bring in no-moon, half-moon, and crescent-moon nights – and we still notice it so less. If it were up there all the time, never going, never fidgeting from its place, we wouldn’t even care to notice it! It would be as common as the blue colour of the sky, and we would lose any sense of wonder in it. It has some respect because it is ephemeral.

A stroke of wind gently passes by, caresses my cheeks, my eyes get closed mildly, and my lips part. It really must be a spiritual experience, looking like that at the universe.

I savor the flavor of this delight for a few more moments, until the wind suddenly stops and I open my eyes and join my lips again.

As if an algorithm is running, one second after the wind stops, some bright glow spreads all around. It takes me another second to realise what has happened.

I put my hands on the cemented roof, push myself up, get seated and look all around. My name is called, stating that dinner is ready.

Electricity is back.

Sometimes it is silence and sometimes you can listen to a soulful music playing at a distance. I stand just at a door, waiting for my father to come. He has taken the scooter and gone to buy milk and stuff. It is almost bedtime and we are at a new place. I calculate he might take about ten more minutes to bring the necessities.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself, with nothing much to do but wait. My books, my phone, everything is upstairs, where I will go once my father arrives.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself.

The soulful music sounds again. I spread my ears and crane my neck to find its source. I do not see it, but get an idea that perhaps on the other side of the highway that extends along our building, there is some sort of wedding. Perhaps it is flute. Or it is keyboard. One thing is sure: it is beautiful, soul-stirring. It makes me nostalgic. It is the sort of thing that takes you so much back that everything you have seen, heard, learned, witnessed, experienced, lost, found, achieved – everything falls into one complete picture. Life is no more a shattered mirror. It is a complete photograph, and the music that is playing is the frame, for it binds the whole thing, makes it one like string does to beads.

I feel like standing here for the rest of my life. May my father take a bit more long and may I get to listen to more of this music! So soft, such a pleasure to listen to, such a blessing to hear … I wish it continues to play on for eternity. That it never should come to an end.

By this time, five minutes have passed and I painfully know this experience should come to a close. Now my father will arrive and now we will together head upstairs, now have our dinner, now recite our unique prayers and now go to sleep.

But until then, I have few more drops to enjoy of this music. As it grows slowly intense, yet retaining its inherent softness and soul-stirring-ness, I enjoy it even more. Music is like that: some points in music tickle you, and others are but orgasmic. They take you to another state, some other form of existence that only you alone can savor.

Wish I had a recorder with me!

Wish I had my mobile phone, and I could have recorded this. It would have been a miracle to be able to listen to this and achieve this state at any time I wanted.

But this is only partly true: miracles in labs are rare occurrences. By no means could I have recorded the atmosphere that is built around me. By no means whatever could I have recorded my solitude. It would have been like capturing just the audio of a cinematic movie, and listening to that sometime would have been a lot less enjoyable.

For now, I am alone and can enjoy this. My head starts dancing to the gentleness of the music and it instinctively faces up. The night is just perfect as well, I see. Clouds have surrounded the moon but are letting it sprinkle its balmy light onto the earth where music plays and I listen.

From a distance, I see some headlights, hear the sound of an engine. My father has arrived. He kills the engine once at the door, takes out the milk and stuff, and together we head upstairs. He is silent too, as if he has listened to some other music.

We all have our own music. But even then it takes us to the same realm.

My Mathematics tuition teacher is an excellent man. Not only does he encourage creative and extra-curricular thinking, but also when you present to him a doubt, he first himself understands it to the depth and then tries to find a multitude of examples to explain it away. Even when he has explained something, he keeps thinking about it for days to come, challenging his theory in various ways, searching for easier ways to explain.

So those days, we were doing Integrals. To be honest, I was getting slightly bored because I had been doing this for a long time. As you might have read in this article in Lockdown Mine, my exams had been postponed and I had got months of extra time, which was slightly painful because I had to go through everything once again now.

To combat the boredom, I began thinking of a problem I had got a glimpse of but vaguely remembered, from a YouTube video. There is this excellent Mathematics teacher from Australia, Eddie Woo, who also has a successful YouTube channel. The video I am talking about was this:

I will try to explain the problem in a simple manner. Say, you have got with you this shape of a boa constrictor eating an elephant:

With some knowledge of Integrals, you can find the exact area of this shape between the orange line and the x-axis. If the shape were a circle, the area would have been easier to find; were it an ellipse, it would have been almost as easy. With this kind of shapes, the process is a bit tricky, nevertheless it is possible. Enough talk to give an idea about what integration can do.

Coming to the problem I encountered, let’s take an example. Say you have this shape:

Suppose the area you have got to find is this mango-color region:

Say the equation of this weird-looking shape is w(x), w for weird. While sitting at the home of my tuition teacher, I tried finding the area of this shape through two different ways. Say the two end points of this shape are 0 and 17, and the two zeroes (a zero is a point where the curve cuts the x-axis) are, say, 8 and 11.

The first method I tried the find the area A using was this:

And the second method was:

Even if you do not understand this strange Newtonian language, and seem to get afraid by these overstretched S’es, you might have got the idea that in the first method, we are trying to put in the equation in some S-shaped machine and finding area in one go right from 0 to 17. In the second method, we are finding area by breaking the shape into three parts, because that seems more natural to do.

Surprisingly, the resultant answers that came from the two methods didn’t match. I was in a crisis: had I missed some important concept in my learning of integrals that I ought to know?

When I discussed my question with my teacher, he seemed to be confused too for a while. It seemed he had either never encountered such a problem, or that he had not at least seen it in a long while.

On the first day of our quest, he tried to explain it away, but he couldn’t verify which answer was correct and why both methods were showing different answers.

The next day when I went to him, he was ready with a notebook and a pen. He asked me, when I was finished with my curricular revision, to explain the problem once again in clear words and with clear diagrams.

The third day when I went to his house, I discovered a smiling face waiting for me already, eager to explain the solution finally. My teacher had done his homework!

He had discovered that in all such cases, one could find two sorts of areas: a Net signed area, and a Total area.

When you count the area lying in the negative y-axis, or below the x-axis, as something negative, something that cancels the positive, then what you are trying to find is the net signed area. A car started on its journey. The distance it is covering is a positive number. At some point in the journey, it is running out of gas, and the nearest gas station is behind it and not ahead. It takes a U-turn. Now the distance it travels is in the negative direction, if the end-thing you are trying to find is displacement of the car. If you are interested in the total distance travelled by the car, then there is no room for negatives. Negatives are non-existent, and distance in any direction is positive distance.

Similarly, if you want to see area under x-axis as something negative, you arrive at net-signed area. If any axis means nothing to you and all you are interested in is the shape and the area covered by it, then, my buddy, you are trying to find the Total Area.

That was the difference that had been perplexing me. It might have perplexed many scholars before my teacher and me, and some wise one must have come up with the two sweet terms.

My teacher remembered that he had studied the concept before but had never heard about the two terms.

Let’s take one easy example, neither a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, nor w(x). It’s a simple, gullible, smooth and baldly sine curve.

Between 0 and 2π, the Net Signed Area is zero, but Total area is 4 square units.

This was a wonderful discovery, that will go with me very far, and will work as an interesting riddle I’ll ask many people with utmost curiosity.

Without exception, everyone must have wondered one day or other, in one way or else, in secret or out loud to someone, that since currency (money) is made from paper, and since paper is nearly unlimited and renewable, and enough for all the human beings out there – then why on earth do all the governments not print enough money and solve the problem of poverty once and for all?

This question dawned upon me slightly late, but when it did, I was in a tremendous combination of discovery and crisis. It was as though I, a little kid, had ascertained the ultimate secret to ending all the problems in the world – be it poverty, malnutrition, health, corruption, or unemployment. I couldn’t wait to unveil my intuitive finding to the rest of the world.

That didn’t happen, alas. One of the things I have learned living here on earth is that ideas that occur to us are not always novel. Some ideas are really original: for example, the idea of making a plane in such and such way, that occurred to the Wright Brothers, might have been very original, or the idea of Theory of Relativity and the equation might have been really unique in every respect – but except for a few exceptions, most ideas are those that have already occurred to and have been considered already by fellow human beings. The idea of a Communist society must have occurred to many people before Marx, but he must have been the first one to be an influential writer in that regard.

Anyway, coming back to my story, this idea that had occurred to be was not, hence, “original”. It took some time to understand but I figured out that just printing more money wasn’t going to solve all the problems so easily.

If you haven’t already figured it out, this is what the explanation usually goes like: assume that governments really decide to do this, to print more money. Imagine this: all central banks print unlimited money and the government sends truckfuls of money to all cities and villages. Some money out of these garbage-truck-like trucks slips and falls on the roads, but people can’t care less since these trucks are distributing all this money to people as if money is water and has really started growing on trees. Let’s say governments have decided to 100x everyone’s money. Everyone alive is a millionaire, and all bank accounts have multi-digit balances.

What happens next? The initial guess is that now that all people have the required purchasing power, the problem of poverty should be solved in a matter of time. But that is not what happens.

To go further, we have to go to the fundamental concept: what is money? What is the purpose of money? Although four to five purposes of money are usually talked of, the basic purpose of money is to act as a medium of exchange or a store of value. This means that the number on the note is relative: it’s not absolute. It is always measured with respect to what is being exchanged.

Going back to our dream world, we find that since people are suddenly so rich, and everyone turns up to buy the thing, the supply falls short and suppliers in turn have to shoot up the price. The process is repeated many times and at last find that people eventually arrive at the position from where they began: now millionaires are considered poor, billionaires form the middle class, trillionaires are mildly rich and quadrillion-aires are those who are the ones to be rich. Things are just the same, with two little differences: one, that prices of all the commodities are also now 100x, and two, that all trees are gone.

So what is the secret, then, if not increasing the money supply? We return to the definition we early discussed: money is just a store of value, a medium of exchange. It is no value if independent.

The secret, I have figured out, at last, today in the morning, while dressing up, that the secret to ending poverty is to increase the supply of every commodity instead. We get oxygen for free – no one in the world is oxygen-poor, isn’t it? Why – because the supply of oxygen never falls short! It’s easily accessible, available to everyone, and almost unlimited with all the trees around.

Water was mostly free until recently, but even when it comes at a cost, it is very mild. Why – because water is also available in most of the parts where humans live, in abundance. When its supply starts falling short of its demand, some cost is tagged to it. The solution then will not be to give everyone money thinking it will solve the problem – but to somehow increase its supply.

If the supply of Gold were to shoot up today – say Elon Musk discovers a mine full of gold on Mars and brings all the gold back to earth – then gold would become abundant, easily accessible, and it will lose its value – more so because people will realize that it’s not too useful – a unit of banana will be more valuable than a brick of gold if you are not some extreme form of King Midas!

Therefore, the answer is not more money: the answer is more supply. Availability and accessibility, that is the answer.

The Secret is simple: Supply is the Secret!

The first time I found out the real meaning of a mathematical equation, I was completely blown.

Everything I had learned about a graph, the x- and the y-axes, a shape, a line, a curve, a point, a slope – everything in my knowledge suddenly gained a new meaning. It was like my world upturned in a matter of a few video lectures. It might sound a little exaggerated, but it actually was such a shift as I make it appear.

Prior to the discovery I made accidentally and unintentionally, an equation meant just a combination of some nonsense variables with constants and something called degrees (which is the highest power of a variable in an expression). Something unconnected I knew was that based on an equation, you could draw something on the graph. If it was a linear equation (with degree one), it meant that the line on the graph would be straight.

It was a useful thing, in fact: you had a sort of relation to find out a variable if a second variable was given. You can buy x pens for y rupees. And you can buy m pens for n rupees. This is all the information you require, given that the relation is linear. Have this much information, and you could effortlessly find out any number of pens for any amount of rupees. How many pens for rupees twenty? Easy to find, just plug ‘20’ in place of ‘y’ and solve for ‘x’. That’s the answer. How much money will you require to buy ten pens? – that’s a piece of cake, nothing more. This time, plug the value in place of ‘x’ and solve for ‘y’. You have the answer.

(1 pen for ₹10. That's all we need.)

This was my knowledge of equations, graphs, and variables and the relations between them until I took Maths in high school. This knowledge was enough, it would do the work, I would be able to solve examination questions – but it was not yet fundamental. It was not as intuitive as it should be. Simply put, it didn’t make my smile go wider at the beauty of the concept.

Things changed when in my class 11, first year in high school, around the middle of the term, we picked up a chapter called Straight Lines. My study at school did not seem enough and so I started to take regular help from YouTube. Around this time, I miraculously stumbled into the channel of this beautiful guy, Ashish Kumar, called “Ashish Kumar – Let’s Learn”.

(listen to him at 1.25x speed, and you will come to love the guy)

The way he defined an equation blew my mind off. He didn’t say that an equation was a collection of variables and constants with an equals-to sign in between somewhere. He didn’t even say that an equation gave the relation between two or more variables. What he said was something novel, something revolutionary.

He said that equation was a way in which you drew a shape in the language of Mathematics.

x² + y² = 4 didn’t just give you a value of x for a value of y: it drew the shape of a circle.

|x| + |y| = 1 was not just a set of random moduli and x and y, it was the way you drew a quadrilateral around the origin in Maths.

The fundamental became clearer when I learned that the x and y in an equation are no different than the x and y on the two axes. A point – a coordinate – meant that for x amount of movement on the horizontal axis, you had to travel a y amount of movement on the vertical axis. It was basic Cartesian geometry, I knew, but now it was one more thing: intuitive.

When you conduct an experiment or collect some data, you usually find a relation between two things: how much distance and how much petrol consumed? How much time and how much distance run? How much investment and how much profit? How much production and how much pollution? When you collect such data and plot it on a graph, you get a set of points. Sometimes when you join them, what you get are irregular shapes that do not make much sense. But at other times, you get special shapes. For example, the relation between distance traveled and petrol consumption might be linear. Some other data might give you a circle. The data of Covid-19 cases might rise exponentially – and might make part of a parabola. The curve might flatten to become a straight line.

Once you knew what the shape was, you required little guesstimation to know how the equation should look. When the YouTuber-teacher Ashish Kumar first mentioned that he could predict how a shape would look just by looking at its equation (although we would study it in the coming chapters) – whether a circle, a parabola, an ellipse, or just a straight line – and he could even be so precise so as to tell if the straight line or the circle would intercept y-axis at (0,2) or (0,5) or both, it was a further double-dyed surprise.

Now, all this is not to say that these things were not what I knew already, or was some theory-of-relativity-ish discovery for humankind – perhaps people before me might have studied and said ‘Ah!’ at it equally: instead what made this a new thing for me was the way everything acquired new meaning after a few lectures of this teacher. It was such a strong knowledge that never again in my life I would be entangled about the fundamentals and the concepts behind a graph, an equation, a shape, a slope. Life would be a much beautiful thing after that little conceptual understanding.

My heartfelt thanks to sir Ashish Kumar, and my friends Larry and Sergey for birthing this YouTube thing. And of course, thanks to René Descartes and fellow men who knew Maths would be too boring if it just had numbers.

 

       I Have a Dream is a wonderful book by Rashmi Bansal. It contains real stories of twenty social-enterpreneurs who created successful socially-favorable models mostly with configuration for profits. I read I Have a Dream in 2020 during one of the first lockdowns.

       Anshu Gupta, who founded Goonj (which stands for “echo”), an NGO that provided used clothes to the needy free of cost, finds a mention in the book.

       The book narrates an interesting anecdote that happened with Anshu, which I give here as I read it:

       …an elderly woman rummaging through the clothes Goonj had to offer. She put aside many pieces in good condition.

       Anshu asked, “Mataji[Mother], what exactly are you looking for?”

       She said, “I am looking for a black shawl.”

       It is midnight, freezing, why black?

       She said, “Beta[Son], I have a red saree and black colour will match well with that.”

       That day Anshu realised that even the poorest of the poor have dreams. They have preferences. And they have needs.

       Why am I talking of this story here, when you could have yourself found it somewhere?

       That is because a few weeks ago, I saw something similar myself. It was the occasion of Vaisakhi, on 13 April, and I was posted as a volunteer at a books stall in a Gurdwara. There was a langar of coffee with biscuits.

       As I was standing there just like that, I spotted a boy half my current age, taking a paper-cup of coffee from the stall, with two biscuits in his hands, ambling to a quiet edge and perching there. He wanted to enjoy his coffee in peace. There was with him, additionally, a little dog, more of a puppy – not of some renowned breed, just a simple stray puppy, but it looked like a pet of his.

       I watched closely as he gave one biscuit to the puppy, then for himself, he dipped the other into the coffee, and when it was soft and dripping, he took a bite from it. He dropped a few drops on his clothes, some trickled down his cheek, but he bothered the least, and was soon taking sips from his hot coffee, as he watched how other people in their hurry were going inside the Gurdwara and rushing out. He enjoyed it, and I him and his dog. It was a peaceful sight.

      I was just back from school after an exam. Due to Covid-related restrictions, school these days calls students less frequently to school, and even if there are any exams, even when mine is the highest class in the school – you cannot expect going to school for anywhere more than six or seven days in a whole month – that’s the peak.

      In other words, I have to go to school very sporadically. Since my school is about 5 kilometers from where we live, I have to take some means of transport other than my own legs. I have made one little rule for the sake of simplicity and to save myself the effort of deciding which means to take every time I’ve to go: if it’s cool weather, or if there’s no direct sunshine, I will take the bicycle; if otherwise, I’ll hire an Uber bike. Sometimes I go by public transport when there is no bike to hire nearby, but both cost nearly the same – give or take a few rupees – and so I prefer the former. Since I am eighteen now, I tend to urge my parents to let me go by the scooter we have, but they simply shake their heads – I do not yet have a driving license. Too busy or lazy, whichever you think I am, I never find the time to go and get one made. Now with these Covid-related restrictions, it has got further delayed.

      Coming back to the story.

      That day, I had gone to school by Uber bike, because a sweltering day it was. I got free from school by 12.30 pm and came out from the back gate of the school (these days, the front gate is closed due to some public construction work going on the road facing it). The back gate of my school looks at a public park – I’ve never been there, but from outside, it looks beautiful. The road is usually clean because it is a high-income group area. On the right is some sort of contraption, I don’t know what it’s called but I can describe it: it has a metallic roof, a space that should have chairs to sit, and a space for a massive hoarding. It’s mostly shiny grey. It looks pretty much like a bus stop, but I know it isn’t. There is a railway line that passes nearby, but no route for buses. You get the idea.

      Coming back to the story.

      As I came into its shade to take out the mobile phone from my bag to book an Uber bike taxi back home, I spotted a dog.

      Black fur, ruffian look, short height, a little timid – take the fiercest dog you’ve ever seen and blend it with the most cowardly one, and you have the creature that was there. He looked at me, I at him, and then both of us ignored each other. I got lost into the phone, trying to find a ride nearby. He, the dog, was just lazy, he wanted a place to lie down at and rest. He was the most broken-from-the-world, indifferent-to-everything being I had seen in a long time.

      A car appeared out of nowhere and almost crushed him – most drivers have now known that these dog-folks have figured out when to get out of the way, just as this one did. He gave a little irritated bark, trucked away and after circling me (I gulped – it was a stupid little dog, but it looked fierce), it went back to its original position. Then a motorbike came and the same scene was replayed.

      Just like that dog, I was annoyed – for my own reasons. Within some time of having taken post there, my ride had been booked, but since last ten minutes, the bike on the map – representing the driver’s location – was not moving anywhere, it was still as if pegged to that spot, like a lazy little moth.

      When I cancelled the ride, the cab company imposed on me a cancellation charge. I was double-annoyed.

      Then I had tried booking a second one. The second driver was similar too: stationary and unmoving. If I canceled this one, my cancellation charge would exceed the amount within which I would have otherwise reached home.

      At this point, the dog looked at me, I at him, and we ignored each other again. This time both of us were annoyed.

     A black cat brings bad luck, they say, I wondered, does a black dog too?

      Finally, my call got connected to the driver being badly awaited by me, and he assured me he was coming in five minutes. Immediately, the moth-like bike representing him on the map began to slide and in no time, he was physically, really, visibly on the real road that extended in front of me.

      He stopped in front of me, I checked the number plate, then hopped on to the back seat.

      As the bike started to drive away, I looked back to see if the dog was still there. I saw him getting up, walking to the place I had been standing at, and sat down there like a mop. I wondered if I had been standing, all the time, without knowing it, at the poor creature’s sleeping place.