You may have forgotten

All the words I have spoken

All the prayers that I once said

May have been destined to be waste.

I have protests to make

Tears to shed

Blood to bleed.

But I swallow my words

Dry my eyes and pause my heart…

All with a hope that you are free from all my grumbles and all my rumbles.

But some fine day,

A few forgotten emotions comes knocking at my doors

My resolve breaks and my walls crumble..

And I ask myself why do I wish to swim like a fish and fly like a bird

When all I can do it walk like a man and cry like a woman…

My parents say I was born on 15^th of May 1986 . Having no memories of the day in question or for that matter any day in the eighties, I can do little but trust the people who are the reason I have grown up to be a person who can, among other things, put thoughts onto paper or into network, the choice of words being left to fight between the literary and figurative thoughts of our brain. Inexplicably, in some ways the clarity and shape of my very first memories of human life have been far consigned to some remote corner of my brain from where they refuse to create any decipherable sights and sounds. For a child born in the eighties, my most distant memories are from the nineties that followed the eighties. Maybe this is the connection that I share with all the children born on that hot day. A connection not as mystical as the connection between Salim Sinai and the rest of midnight’s children but a connection, nonetheless, that has no traceable outlines or any touchable edges.

Among other things, I did not have any say in was the name,the place and mother-tongue I was to be identified with for my life. For some, still mysterious and unknown reason, there was a sense of pride in all the three aspects of my life that was thrust-ed down my metaphorical throat. Now that my emotional and intellectual self was moulded .beyond repair by the time I started storing my first longterm memories , it was all but natural for me to create the portrait of the people I shall idolize for my life. An Assamese as I was, there was no dearth of Assamese heroes but from Sankardev to Lachit to Bishnu Rabha, they chose to exist only in the pages of history. No living person seemed great enough to compete with the long dead heroes for a piece of my awe. However there was an exception, the solitary link between my motherland and the world. No mosaic of India seemed complete without the presence of this black cap adorned old man. The fact that he answered to same surname as mine did no harm to the stability of the tall monument of this man who had started rising in my mind.

In my earliest remembered days, I used to jump up and down when the sole Assamese man could be seen on television sets, I used to jump up and down saying that koka (Assamese for grandfather) was on TV. In those days, I didn’t know what Filmfare or Oscars were but I knew what Dada Saheb Phalke and Asia-Pacific International Music prize was. By class five, I had shifted to Don Bosco Dibrugarh and I participated in my first singing competition. Due to lack of any formal training and dedication, me forays into the singing lane was limited but I did win my fair share of prizes. Needless to say, the great mans song got me quite a few of those prizes. For a ten-year old, appearing on local television is a big deal, my earlier exploits in songs got me to the team that sang in the school on formal occasions and there I was on TV, humming another of his song. That memory is still strong that even today I remember the tune of the song and the first few lines. A song that I have not hard for the last fifteen years through my physical ears.

The closest I came to Dr. Hazarika in person was on a flight to my home from Calcutta. He seemed happy to know that even I was a Hazarika and gave nice message on my boarding pass. Unfortunately as fate would have it, he wrote it on the place of the security seal and the only proof of our solitary existence was snatched away by security. It was also in my college days that I used Dr. Bhupen Hazarika’s creation for sinister pleasures. We had an annual NCC camp which was very physically demanding, the air force station where we had our camp was headed by an Assamese, so there was a need of and Assamese song on the cultural show. I jumped into the opportunity to laze through the day and rendered one of his creation. All day was spent sleeping while my friends were marching.

All good things come to an end. The great man was a human after all and had to breathe his last. On the day he died, I was relieved. Relieved – this is not a typo – I was pained to see the greatest musician and lyricist of Assam being unable to sing his own songs for last few years. His death had rolled back the years and he was restored to his prime in my memories. The person who towered over all of Assam was no longer present in the body that once represented everything that was great about Assam. But today I feel a sense of pride and sadness and emptiness. Pride to see how his death united all of Assam drowning all divisions of caste,creed or religion. Sadness to know that never again a tune that can outlast a generation be created in Assam,to know that now we have a count on the number of great odes to Brahmaputra. Emptiness to know that next time a portrait of India is painted, not only the tile that was common for my entire life would be absent but probably there wont be any tile for my motherland and mother-tongue.

Now that I have unveiled what made me write.It is perhaps time to mention why does some random comment of probably one of the few parts of India I have never visited bother me, a person born in Assam, lived in Assam, Delhi, Bengal, Andhra(/Telangana), Tamil Nadu (?). For the sake of self-satisfaction, I left the question inside the quote for it gives me immense pleasure to phrase the sentence “I chose to take liberty in my punctuation for my answer lies in the question.”

Assam is one of the states that still has the AFSPA enforced although arguably it is today one of the most peaceful states in India in terms of people killed in terrorist violence. As I grew up, my brain and living memory had been permanently scared by the memories of “Secret Killings”. The killings which were according to a judicial commission by Justice Saikia were perpetuated by ex C.M. Prafulla Kumar Mahanta.Whenever I think of AFSPA, I remember my solitary bicycle ride on the streets of Dibrugarh, after people protesting some recent deaths of two individuals one of them being my ex classmate at school. People say they saw who killed the protesters. But till today nothing has happened.

Funny, may be a very incongruous word, but death does alter the memories towards a person for whom you never had a very positive emotion. Dheeraj was never a great friend of mine at school, it would not be wrong to say we were acquaintance rather than friends but then hearing about his death when I was in class 9 was shocking. For a sheltered teenager, death only strikes old people. While I was in the same house another day altered my subconscious. These were the screams of my neighbor. Assam is very unlike rest of India and we follow a different version of Hinduism and Islam. We were Hindu and our neighbor was Muslim.This neighbor was also a distant relative. It was a love marriage between one of my hindu uncle and an aunt in this family. I would not say we were very distant but we were not very close either. One day, the small kids in the house were crying. Did I say crying? Maybe I am wrong,they were wailing, somehow some of those screams still ring in my ear. They say Army had picked up their father and their uncle. A few days later their mutilated corpse was found. They say they belonged to MULFA (a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist organization). Maybe, they were terrorist, but till date I can’t convince myself of that.

AFSPA and disturbed areas act have no place in a country where citizens are free. It seems more farcical today when terrorism can strike anywhere. Citizens living under the shadow of terrorism are anyways victimized why should be victimized more. Somehow, if a terrorist kills a person I love, I know I can fight back against the enemy by hopefully voting for a candidate who will go after them. If I have enough determination,may be I can join the system and fight the evil. But if some organ of government kills or does not do enough to remove false doubts, it is kind of helpless situation.

Now where do I tie all that I have written together. I will diverge from the common thread tying all my posts. I am not going to end with an open-ended question. I am going to just preach something that I can’t argue for logically: AFSPA is just the fertilizer terrorism needs to breed more terrorist. I shall give no research, no logical arguments just naked emotional memories.

The stream that kept my thirst at bay seemed to have run away
There was no garden to gratify my hunger
There was no jester to give me laughter
All I could I could see was snow and ice
But I felt like I was burning in some hot fire.

But my mind refused to surrender
It made me hear sound of some piper
Tricked that bliss lay in the lap of the musical whispers
I walked the road told by an ancient dreamer.

But ‘t was not a lie that I was engulfed fire
‘T was true that the lake was all snowy and people were walking on water
But the warmth of my body melted my road into water
The fire that was roasting me gave way to frost bites.

I grasped for breath
I prayed for air
But I  was no fish with gills
In a dreamy state I made my way to a distant paradise
And today I wait for a kiss of life to wake me from my slumber.

The thing about school and blog is that language classes are much more easier to ponder over and ruminate then the numerical theories which I now believe to be the only absolute truth. Scientific theories come and go, Religions are born and buried but if one bird on a tree is joined by another bird, we have only two birds on the tree.The thing about language lessons is that we learn “Twinkle Twinkle little star” and “A for Apple” from beyond the time hidden in my subconscious by the mist of time.  This was my initiation to the world of prose and poetry.

As the years went by, poems changed from small songs to sonnets to blank verse. My English papers periodically had exotic sounding words like “iambic pentameter“. But the thing with poems which I have referred to as verse and blank verse is that I was never really sure if I had diverged from what the writer actually wanted to say. Most of the times , the safe approach was the approach of your teacher.  Even the neurons of time have failed to remove the veil of ignorance that envelops my understanding of words that I had once read.

Even today,some questions remain unanswered. Even today , I can’t help wondering if there is more to the poems than that meets the eye. Even today , I want to wax lyrical but indulge in mundane and intrinsic science called prose writing.

In those days we were more scared of military than the militants. Militants used to usually kill politicians usually giving us a reason to celebrate. A death of a militant was deeply mourned as that of a family member. One of our neighbours son was killed in an encounter. I was simple overwhelmed by the public outpour of grief on the streets. I was eleven years old. Gradually things began to change or at least my perspective of things changed. Having seen many militants surrender and make millions looting and killing the common man-made me realise there is no difference between the politicians I deride. It was also the time the hypocrisy in me was maturing. I found myself with a brain with better than average processing power and soon made my way out of my birthplace . Now I am a visitor to the place where I learnt to walk, speak and talk. On an average day,, the language I am most likely to speak is my mother-tongue.

Back then even though I hated the government of India, it was kind of perplexing I always supported the Indian team on the field. Maybe my childhood is a perfect example of the fact that you may love your country and hate the government. Since I am writing this post in 2010, its time for me to jump back to the present and write a few words bashing Armed Forces Special Powers Act. I know this generational jump is quite of sync with the title of the post and rather abrupt. But I feel too strongly about this issue to care for anything else. It is not so easy living under the shadow of the gun. It is even more difficult when the people who are there to protect you is the biggest threat to your lives.

Whenever sensible people talk about removing AFSPA, the top brass of army raise a hue and cry, the very same top brass whose corruption is a bigger threat to the jawans than the repeal of this act. I am told today there are twenty security personals for every civilian in Kashmir. They are immune to any criminal proceedings for human rights violation. Some might argue that there is a provision under some act or other but for heavens sake is it really practical. Some argue that our soldiers are already under lots of stress and adding the stress of criminal proceedings is not done. I am too biased and emotionally and psychologically scarred to say something impartial on the matter but I do try to give myself a high moral ground supporting higher wages and better facilities for the soldiers of the nation. I believe RR Patil should be hanged before Kasab for the death of Hemant Karkare. But then I have a lot of beliefs some rational.some nonsensical and some utterly comical.

In the end what I want to say is that we have lost over fifty young man in Kashmir due to stone pelting if at all they were allowed to pelt stones maybe we would have lost a few buildings, a few buses a few cars but it would have been far more preferable.

On footnote : after I have left Assam, the militants started colliding with ministers and killing innocents. I was aghast at the happenings but somehow it was easier to hate them and want them to die than the feeling of despair on being vulnerable at the hands of your supposed protectors.

Fuck and sex. No matter in which language you speak, the verbal interpretation of sexual intercourse lends its vocal syllables to swear words. Although, I do not need any certificate from any censor board, and I am  a fan of the writers of GodFellas, I guess it will serve my post no purpose if I elaborate on my exhaustible knowledge of derivatives of fuck in different human languages. In short fuck and sex in human vocabulary  is ubiquitous. I hope I have put my point across.

Now comes the part of the post wherein I dwell on the conflicting emotions that drove me to write this post. Although sex and Fornification under consent of king  essentially mean the same thing to a laymen, when he swear he means entirely different context in both the use cases. I used the term laymen for the overwhelmingly large percentage of my rationalist and hyper intelligent friends can go to any lengths to research all the garbage under the sun and create a ten thousand word long essay on the difference in meaning of fuck and sex. Having shut down the critics with the most infallible argument -”Please suppress your rationality“ , it’s now time to come back to the topic. I can’t help wondering how many of our conversations would read like if we had interchanged the words. To drive the point home, I shall first give a brief background of the situation.

So here are a few of imaginary conversations

• One of your friends of opposite sex (I know they are rare if you are a male iitian), looks full of energy for a competition.I hope you get the idea and fill the dots and blanks. You cheer her up saying you look all sexed up for the occasion. I am sure you will still be friends after that. Imagine trying to encourage saying you look fucked up for the occasion.
• Your friends girlfriend is looking real hot and you are with your girlfriend. (yeah yeah Utopia, what the hell!! lemme create a world I please in my blog ), You compliment her saying that she looks sexy. I guess she would be happy.I think saying that she looks like fuck wont qualify as a complement besides the other side effects that might occur.
• To end it all from where it all started, I was thinking of a few mods to my bike and exclaiming in my mind that it will look like sex, if every some one uses fuck in relation to my bike I would really start pitying the intelligence of the person.

I guess that is enough in this interesting observation which I find quite humorous.

So here is my current musical infatuation

May be, we human beings are unlike any other animal or maybe in essence we are still beasts for we go to great lengths to be entertained . We pay magicians to belittle our intelligence, gladiators to kill, and Russell Peters to tell us that we are dick-heads. As times have changed, some forms of entertainment have been condemned to the dark alleys of secrecy under the garb of changing moral values while new forms have crept up to play with the same old neurons.What stays rooted in the midst of this tempest of change is our need to be entertained.

If our lifetimes is any yardstick, competitive sports as a form of entertainment is ancient so is the art form defined by people faking emotions and actions as envisioned by people we call writers. Another fact that binds these interracial twins is that the economics that sometimes shadows and beacons them have been great advances in media. I doubt if any person reading this post has not been to a movie or has not watched the live/deferred live telecast of ones favourite sport.

Having applied the base paint, it is now time for me to reflect on another of mans innovation. We like to classify things, rather we need to classify things. We like to create order in the midst of chaos. Perhaps this carnal need to classify things is what makes us classify movies into genres. We have action movies, romantic ones, fiction, horror and the likes and the unlikes.

This post of mine is largely inspired by the common thread that runs through all great sport movies. We love the underdogs to win against the odds Bhuvan, chak de, rocky or the mixed pro football team of the movie I consider the best sports picture “Remember the titans”. A further rumination on the matter leads me to realise that our fascination and adoration for the underdog violates the very foundation of the fourth wall. We rejoice when Bangladesh beat Australia, some unknown player wins the Wimbledon and what not. This is more true for sports where we are more than literally neutral.Usain Bolt stealing the thunder of Americans and making underdogs out of the Americans or a brawn GP winning F1 in its  first attempt do have its kicks.

Having meandered a lot in the course of this post,it is now time for me to economize on words . With the increase in eyeballs that follow soccer, it has become much more than a game for some poor goal keeper it can actually be a matter of life and death . I apologise to his departed soul for making him a common noun, and in keeping with  my vow to blog only from memory, I shall delve no deeper into the matter.  In this years finals Dutch were the obvious underdogs. Yet, somehow i would have hated if they had won for they did not play beautiful. In the finals, the conduct of the dutch can be best explained as a players who had an inception that football is nothing but playing kick boxing outside the ring. All over the world, the pundits and the laggards(me included) blasted the Dutch. But there lies the paradox that haunts me, it was probably the only shot at immortality the dutch guys had. They needed to do something to sweeten the sad memories of a nation twice rejected at the altar. They chose to embrace the wrath of zillions of people glued to their TV screens. They risked it all. They were playing a loose-loose game. If they won they would be vilified, if they lost, their defeat would be celebrated rather than consoled. At some points, I think they deserved to get the support any underdog gets and then I just fail to support them for any second, the only emotion I have for them is hatred.

It would be somewhat unjust for me to click on publish without a contradicting feeling I have been having. Maybe in some fictional finals of an awesome movie I would root for the same kind of football played by the dutch. Bringing in more money to the formula that binds all sports movies

I have also been a diabetic for the last two years  and my parents have been diabetic for as long as I can remember.I spent over a hundred rupees per day on my medicines and tests. Having blessed with an above average IQ, a middle class upbringing and some fate, I can afford to pay my bills without battling an eyelid. But the over a sixth of India are said to be diabetic and statistically, I doubt even half of them can afford the facilities,I take for granted.This brings me to the question as to whether the drugs that can help billions really need to be so costly. From an economic standpoint, the variable cost of producing extra drugs seems to be negligible this explains why 50 mg of januvia costs the same as 100 mg of the same drug. Besides this obvious lack of ethics on the part of pharmaceutical companies, there is another thought that bothers me. This is about side effects. I may be diabetic, but I hope to live a thousand years, with this end in mine, I watch all my biological parameters by spending more of my blood and sweat. If I am to lie long enough, I have to depend on drugs for a lions share of my heart beats.

For the ignorant, the best example of post of peril will be the location of kidney in a diabetic. Every day of uncontrolled diabetes deals a thousand death nails on the coffin of the kidneys. To make matters worse the toxic parts of medicines have to be filtered by diabetes and each of those molecules takes a test of the kidneys in a way that is definitely not a walk in the park.In some ways the medicines I take are a double-edged sword, it prevents diabetes from harming my kidneys but might be silently killing it.

This paradox drives me to the reason why I am writing this post. Clinical trials and India.  On any other day when the Sun rises from the east, the only reason I envy Pakistan is for their media. Today, I was pleasantly surprised when page 1 of ibnlive did not resemble page 3 of less reputed tabloids which are no more than bread,butter and oxygen of paparazzi. It carried a report on ratification of Indian population.  For the vast majority of you who know what ratification means, I am in no way referring to the literal meaning of the word but only phonetics. For pharmaceutical companies we Indians are nothing but rats whose life can be dispensed off. They have no fear of multi million dollar settlement claims. The answer to whether my kidneys can hold up to the onslaught of years of medicines probably lies in some unethical trials.

Till then in the midst of some inexplicable emotions, I hope the left keeps on fighting the MNCs, the very same MNCs without whom I can’t live.