As I Write It

Ticketless It’s been over two decades since I completed my masters. The turn of the millennium was a time when students were still submitting handwritten assignments, reference work was carried out on gloomy afternoons after class in the musty library of the university, and the internet and desktops had just about started to mark their arrival in the now-redundant cyber cafes and at homes of the privileged few. I wasn’t in it for the love of academics but because, after graduation, I did not know where else to be and what more to do. The two years of masters was a borrowed time to push back expedient decisions on career and deflect the incipient murmurs of “what about marriage” at home.   It was distractions I was after, and in those days, you sought them through the physical enterprise of checking newspaper listings and going to the box office of the cinema or theatre in “advance” or minutes before the show hoping the tickets hadn’t been sold out. There were distractions galo...

Money money in the vault, Who's the safest of us all? You are very safe mi-customer, But the defaulting corporate is the safest borrower in the banking-dom 

To Rs. 20,000 crore it swelled, The hoard of foul black wealth. Seven years the nation sighed, The master never made his strike.

Camera is near Selfie-mode is clear Must strike a healthy pose One day of the year

The Big Snoop I tap you if you write, I tap you if you speak, I tap you if you put up a fight. I am the double-agent of democracy.   I spare not my own, Nor a gardener or cook, In costly secrecy, I take many a look.   I am the double-agent of democracy. When leaks rain havoc, I cry foul. I am the soul of democracy, I declare, None more devout.   I am the double-agent of democracy.    

  Mad Man in the Street   Some thought he said, ‘hut!’ to shoo off pesky children who giggled endlessly as they passed him on their walks to school. Some thought he said, ‘phut!’ to reproach any passerby, who, in an act of spontaneous generosity, handed him anything less than a rupee. And most of the time, when he seemed to confer with the air around him, the only word they could catch from him was ‘dhut’, as if he were dismissing an inane idea. But no one could say for certain what the mad man in the street – for that is what they called him – actually said, as his utterances seemed to sound all the same. He lived between a lamppost and large bin, on a jute mat nailed to the pavement by the weight of a dented aluminum canister that clanked every time a coin was dropped in it; a plastic tumbler, pair of worn out hawai chappals, bedroll of discarded clothes, broken umbrella and a few roadside rocks. No one knew where he came from and when and how he got there. One day the...

 Circumvention   Vinod Wasnik had moved his lips closer to the cup to take his first sip of morning tea, when a shrill cry of the landline telephone induced a sharp twitch in his hand destabilizing the teacup and momentarily disorienting his senses. It was three-trill set indicating an outstation call. The year was 1995; the mobile phone had not yet made its debut in India. A few feet away from the device, Vinod was standing on the balcony, cup in hand, watching his son Rohit walk to school. The steaming beverage spurted out of the tilted ceramic cup, scalded his fingertips and blotched the front of his sky-blue full-sleeved shirt ─ its stiff cotton fabric softening under heat and moisture. The curve of his paunch had grown rounder since he turned 40 two years ago and pushed the buttons out ever so slightly, but short of exposing the vest at the seams. Below his waist he was wrapped in a towel with which he had just dried himself after a bath while a pair of beige cotton...

  The farmer is here! On a comfortable winter morning – if you are not too snobbish about the winter in Mumbai - the farmer parked his truck on the camber of the street. He was turned out for business in loose white trousers, a full-sleeved white shirt and topi – a monochrome bright figure against the gray backdrop of paver blocks. He was from Nashik; as the large vehicle very proudly declared. A woman, his co-farmer and perhaps his wife sat in the truck’s bed surrounded by bright blue crates. A young lad dressed in overused jeans and checked shirt stood next to the farmer and was likely his son. He discernably felt out of place amid the milling urbane crowd as he looked uncertainly about him.             ‘The farmer is here!’ Over the ambient buzz of grocery shoppers in that restful locked down street, the farmer’s voice rang loud and clear.       ‘Get yourself the sweetest grapes from Nashik.’ The Nashik grape-grower hollered onc...