Happily grazing cow in New Zealand

A very strange thing happened today. Like the last few days, I was awake since 4:30 am. Today at 5:30, I get a call from my School friend Shubhajit. He always calls in odd hours but though I will never talk in those odd hours even from my parents, I can never hang up on Shubhajit or Bhaji. The reason is that he calls from the borders of Jammu and Kashmir, where one rarely gets signals. I always feel a strange guilt attending his calls. He did something which I never had the courage to do and instead, to public and to myself I always spoke of joining army as joining a band of fools. But deep inside, I do know that it is more because I am not capable of so much sacrifice.

I asked him abut what’s happening as it was Election Day and he said that it was very hectic but he was happy that I remember. Yes, and I had just read it in rediff some 10 minutes back. There is a lot going on in that part of the country. We can just speculate, the locals can just suffer, the army people might just be the pawns but whatever is happening in the power corridors on either side of the border, we do not know, rather we may not wish to know.

Is it justified? Fighting for the country? After all, if we do believe in some sort of superpower, it might have just been a split second decision of the god to pass the next life on earth as a human being of a particular country. Next second, we could have been a cow happily grazing grass in New Zealand. Well, with my present, I am happy. I am paying back to the world in whatever form I came in. I am paying tax so that we walk on better streets, I have sent money to Indian charitable organizations also and if that is not enough, I did buy the Unicef greeting cards to have the proceedings sent to Africa. I will also buy ‘Tales of Beedle The Bard’ and the proceedings will go for betterment of the world. And so is the cow from New Zealand paying back to the society. It is making more cows, it is giving lot of milk and it is also maintaining the balance of nature.

But what is a man in military doing? Isn’t he being brainwashed to fight for SOME country on the whims of certain people? For example, India and Pakistan are fighting for ages now on may be some stupid decision of the then Viceroy and queen Victoria’s ‘Let’s have some fun, let’s split the Hindus and Muslims’.

Same with the World Wars, the present Iraq war or any other wars. It is a few people who decide the fate of so many others, who simply decide to die for the country, when if one instant late they would have been happily grazing cows in New Zealand.

I am so happy that I was born a few seconds late, so now I am a happily sitting on a couch and frantically pressing keys on the laptop keyboard, not much different from the grazing cows of New Zealand!!!

It is probably inevitable to have wars, or it might be really important to go to space when children are dying of hunger on the streets, or it is really important to spend millions of dollars to go deep down into the sea and find some stop watch in the titanic, it is just that I do not know why.

Titbits

It has been long since I wrote something. I had consciously tried to write a blog every other week. So ideally the total would have been 26. I think I will manage it, now that this is the 24^th one, and the usual annual 2008 bollywood awards will come towards the year end.

However, after being quoted in Mumbai Mirror in an abridged way which gives a wrong picture of me but on the whole carries the point, I did not know whether I should be happy or sad. When I saw that I did not receive any comments (forget angry ones) I realized that even if people would have read it, they would have done it on the newspaper, and nobody was crazy enough to type out the link on a computer and read it for themselves.

Hence, I will be talking about myself a bit, though I know not for whom. I have moved to a new apartment and the net connection hasn’t come yet. This brought 2 nice things with it. One, I started reading agan and secondly, I stopped watching bigg boss season 2. The show was very addictive. Watching a bunch of brain dead people over and over again fight over lost tomatoes and less sugar in the tea left me brain dead too. Not that I was following a lot of quality news before bigg boss started, but I was not even watching the hindi movies which I always made sure I watch. I was out of touch with the blogs I read, the google news searches that I do. Atleast now the little time I spend surfing in the office, I spend it on reading some news keeping me up-to-date with the current affairs.

However, watching any news or reading any news website had become so boring in the past few days. It was just Obama everywhere. Beaten to death. It was so difficult to get any other news other than which country head congratulated hi and how he out smarted McCain or how the fall was all due to Sarah Palin. I had had enough. However in my desperate attempt to find more news on the day after the elections, I found 4 events that I found non Obama.

• Pt. Bhimsen Joshi being awarded the Bharat Ratna. He The last Bharat Ratna was awarded was in 2002. It has been a long time. On thinking who would be the right choice for the next one, three people came to my mind. The first one surely deserving and the other two should be atleast considered. They are: Sachin Tendulkar, Narayan Murthy and Al Gore.

• Uma Bharti slapped her party worker, kissed him again, he was still angry after the kiss and then she was on a strike till he forgives. Really crazy.

• B. R. Chopra died. This news though supposedly important, it just to be read as a headline and moved on to the next.

• Abhishek Bachchan suffering from high fever in Kerala. This news did not come from any news site but from Amitabh Bachchan’s own site. And sure enough, next day it appears in the news websites. I don’t know whether I should like or hate these easy journalisms: getting news from celebrity bloggers. But then it’s absolutely legal to do so.

Anyway, the second good thing that happned with no internet is that I started reading books again. I read ‘White Tiger’ by Arvind Adiga. It is a fast and good read. Does give you a picture of how India is shining in fools gold. And then ofcourse, I am re-reading Harry Potter 7. I have re-read selective chapters but for the first time re-reading the entire book. Some parts are just amazing. The two shifting minds when Harry runs out of Bathilda’s house. The tussle between Hermione and Ron after he returns and how he keeps agreeing to everything she says for truce. And many more things here and there.

Anyways, turned out to be a long post. Will be back soon.