Some things from that evening seem faded, so faded that it takes a lot of effort now, remembering each detail.

After all it was more than half a century back – Diwali, 1965. But it’s a Diwali that still shimmers, in the haze, except that the haze – it grows denser as the years roll by and the lines, once sharply etched, now seem blurred.

Sukhoranjan, our Jeeves, lit the oil lamps and arranged them along the terrace parapet, the balcony balustrade and even on the window ledges – of employees’ quarters, Type-E, No.34, MAMC Colony, Durgapur, West Bengal, Eastern India.

The October breeze was mild, but the lamps flickered and inevitably some went off after a sudden gust, making Sukhoranjan scurry around, relighting them. “Oof! Aaj eto hawa hobar ki dorkar chilo ? **”of all the days, did it have to be so windy today?”***he fussed.

Meanwhile right after the first fire crackers went off in the neighborhood, our dog, Shepherd, took refuge under the bed – my bed, our bed, mine and my two elder bros’. Shepherd made frightened, whiny noises as he slinked in, tail well between his legs. (He didn’t emerge till it was dinnertime, the festivities were over and the neighborhood had fallen silent.)

My father had his arm round my mother’s shoulders, while they stood back and watched their three kids waving crackling fuljhari sticks wildly around. My favorite was the thubri, a firecracker crammed inside an onion-shaped clay pot with a hole on top like the caldera of a volcano, through which it kept spewing stuff out high in the air like a fountain.

The thubri was a dazzling display of colors that lasted around 30 seconds and then the pot lay spent but smoldering, with a tiny flame still licking up from within. I loved giving it a hard kick then. Who lit the first thubri – Chorda? No, perhaps Dada?

Heck, I just can’t seem to remember that clearly anymore.

What I do remember is that the war with Pakistan had just ended in a ceasefire. The single-seater Folland Gnat jet fighters from the nearby Panagarh airbase had finally stopped screeching past at treetop level, by the time Diwali came around. While the mood was upbeat on the one hand, there was also some grieving at the sudden death of the revered Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

The squeals of excitement of that Diwali, the laughter – it all comes back in snatches, like when you are turning the knob of an old radio and the music from a short wave station keeps swooshing in and out.

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Some other moments are still etched. Like the fact that the stash of firecrackers that our father could reasonably afford happened to be far smaller than those of all the other Joneses in the neighborhood. And we didn’t want to finish before the others. A dark and silent house in the midst of bursting crackers would be an embarrassment.

My father had an ingenious way to address that. He took us for a long walk round the neighborhood, ostensibly to admire the Diwali lighting on the houses and the crackers others were bursting. It killed time till it became unbearable and the three of us raced back to our individual fire cracker stashes, to begin.

Afterwards, there were heaped plates of mutton pulao for dinner. This was a big deal because we had meat on the table only once every fifteen days or so. Mutton was all we could afford, chicken being prohibitively expensive in those days. Though there had never been any discussion on it, beef was never an option, even though it was the least expensive.

As always, my mother busied herself laying the table and waiting on her four men while they ate. By the time she took her seat, all the mutton was gone and only a bit of the pulao (the rice) was left, stuck to the walls of the pan like a thick plaster. When Dada protested that she didn’t have enough, she smiled and gave him a hug,” If you kids are full, I’m full.” I can still see her scraping the bottom of the pan with her thumb and licking it appreciatively,” You missed the tastiest part, you know.”

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I remember Sukhoranjan well. How can you not remember someone you grew up with? Sukhoranjan was a 16 yr old from Orissa who had found work as a chaprasi (gopher) in my father’s office. In return for free lodging and board in the servants’ quarters attached to our house, he became our odd-job man, getting the groceries, fixing things around the house, mopping and sweeping, a job that he took as gospel.

Sukhoranjan had left his native Baleshwar with his uncle when he was 6, at the peak of the 1955 famine and the cholera out-break that had claimed both his parents and his younger sister.

After a brief stay with abusive relatives in Chakradharpur, Sukhoranjan ran away and boarded a train to Durgapur, alone, as a frightened 8 yr old. Years of toil in tea shops and grocery stores followed and it was when he was 14, working as a door-to-door fruit seller, that one day his shadow fell across our doorstep.

It had been a blisteringly hot day and Sukhoranjan struggled to lift the fruit basket back on his head, when my mother persuaded him to lay it back down on the ground and asked him to rest a while in the shade of our front porch. Soon a sumptuous lunch followed, which he wolfed down in seconds.

My mother took him in that day and he had been with us ever since. A bright and cheerfully illiterate country boy, a year older than Dada, Sukhoranjan still called him ‘Borda’ (big brother). And he was especially invaluable in my leisure-time pursuits, having taught me the intricacies of gulli-danda, marbles and how to make a gulti (sling) out of a forked wooden twig and rubber strips cut from bicycle tubes.

It was only when you tried to ask Sukhoranjan about his parents or sister that he clammed up. My mother had once seen a photo inside that tiny steel trunk of his that held all his worldly possessions. It was a picture of a couple in front of a hut. He had simply nodded and looked away when my mother had asked him if they were his parents.

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And Shepherd. He was a good looking, unusually large, dirty white mongrel pup when he found us. India is teeming with dogs without a home, that loiter around every street, scrawny and emaciated, with open sores and wounds from fights over scraps with other dogs.

But Shepherd was different. With a dark grey stripe through the middle of his forehead, from between his eyes to the tip of his nose, he was unnaturally fluffy and plump. As he grew, Shepherd got this bushy white tail and when he confronted another dog, it rolled up tight and went into a high frequency, low amplitude quiver, while his bright aggressive unwavering eyes stayed on the other guy and a low growl escaped from his slightly parted lips. Most dogs quickly figured out that the odds against having a ear torn or a shoulder gashed were very little and made a whining exit which sounded to me more like, “Fuck it, tennis anyone?”

I have a hunch that Shepherd’s father was one of those Siberian huskies that the Soviet experts brought over with them. This was 1965 – at the apex of Indo-Soviet cooperation. We were living inside a township that had technical experts from the Soviet Union helping us build coal mining machinery. The husky must have taken a shine to a local babe and one thing had lead to another. We never got acquainted with his mother. Guess she’d passed on by the time Shepherd, the pup, found us.

Shepherd truly was a Soviet dog. The KGB couldn’t have done any better, penetrating a third world country. Shepherd eased himself into our house gradually in strategically planned moves. He was first spotted sunning himself occasionally on our garden wall parapet and then we noticed he had promoted himself to the top of one of the two concrete garden gate posts. It was not long before he drew my mother’s attention,”Dakh re, kukur ta ki mishti dekhte” (look guys, isn’t that a cute pup?).

Soon Ma was flinging leftovers to him after our meals. One day, when Sukhoranjan was about to garbage an old frying pan, Ma decided to keep it and use it as Shepherd’s dinner plate. She had Sukhoranjan remove the handle and clean it out and began having one of us kids go out and leave it filled with scraps, on his favorite gate post.

As Shepherd grew however, that gate post proved to be too small and he kept inadvertently knocking the pan off it in his eager enthusiasm. Soon we started leaving the pan on our doorstep instead.

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The monsoon of 1965 was particularly severe and I remember this one late night. Ma and Baba were asleep, their bedroom door shut. I suddenly woke to see Dada and Chorda standing by our bedroom window, holding the grills and looking out, talking in a low tone. I jumped out of bed and went up behind them. My eyes were at the level of their waists and I had to push my little head through to see what was grabbing their attention. In the blinding sheets of rain, I saw Shepherd, bedraggled, on top of his gate post, trying to find a comfortable position to settle himself in.

Dada looked at Chorda, got a nod and turned to me,”Sshh. Mukh theke ekta shobdo jeno na shuni. Noito gatta khabi, bujhli?” (Ssh. One sound from you and you’ll get one of my bare knuckle raps on your head). He was obviously worried about my parents waking up.

Dada was tough and I never took his words lightly. If he said he was going to beat me up, he was going to beat me up. You couldn’t reason with him. You couldn’t placate him. You couldn’t seek refuge under the law. He was the law. He might easily have been born in the turn of the century in the Sicilian town of Corleone.

So, here we were, by the bedroom window,  me held by the ears, slowly being shaken but not stirred, by Dada. He continued, “Teen shotti bol, shatti, shatti, shatti” and I repeated after him in a hushed, awed voice, “Shatti, shatti, shatti”. Repeating ‘shatti’ thrice meant giving your word to the other guy that you wouldn’t rat out on him. This was the first time they were going to trust me not go blab to our parents the first chance I got. It was awesome. I was in! I’d suddenly grown up. I was now being taken as a man by my peers. 

My euphoria was short-lived, for Dada hit me with a gatta anyway. I started, “What the…!!%^*” and he swiftly clamped his palm on my mouth, “That was just for taste. There’s more from where that came, remember that.” Jesus Christ, they should have named this guy Joey Gallo.

The gatta was painful and unprovoked and when it became evident that I was going to burst out crying, Kissinger (Chorda) stepped in,” Now relax, take it easy, ok? You are now one of us. We gotta stick together, right?” I nodded hurriedly, gulping back my tears.

Dada took charge immediately, “All right, all right, here’s what we’ll do” he jabbed a finger painfully into my chest sending me reeling back,” you get that spare mat from the prayer nook and meet us at the front door.” With that curt command, he and Chorda swung on their heels and slinked down the stairs, while I made my way in the dark, to the prayer nook, to retrieve the spare mat, making sure I kept a safe distance from that pashbalish (round cushion) on the whatnot that scared the bejesus out of me every time I was made to enter the prayer nook alone in the dark. I grabbed hold of the mat and raced downstairs to where my elder brothers were waiting.

They already had the front door open and Shepherd was standing there, dripping and forlorn, his wet fluff now sticking to his body making him look half his size. There was this cove under the stairs next to the front door which housed the family bicycle (my father went to work on it when he didn’t manage to get a ride).

Shepherd came in and proceeded to the cove where he shook himself dry vigorously, soaking us all in the process. I hugged him. He was cold. Chorda had brought a bowl of milk which he placed next to the mat. Shepherd curled himself up on the mat and lapped at the milk gratefully. He was done in a microsecond and lay stretched out, eyes half closed, bushy tail wagging lazily in appreciation. In another minute he breathed a deep sigh and was out like a light. The next morning we were taken aback to note that our parents didn’t mind Shepherd’s new lodgings at all.

The penetration of the household was now complete, the culmination of a totally successful ‘hearts and minds’ exercise – the only casualty being my forehead – from Dada’s gattas.

Sukhoranjan got a permanent unionised job at MAMC, married soon after and moved away in ’68.

Shepherd passed on in the summer of ’69 around the time of the first moon landing. He failed to recover from a tonsil operation. I had just turned 14.

 

It is the early 9th Century Kingdom of Wessex. A unified kingdom of England is still a century in the future.

You are a commoner, a serf, a helot, a menial. Take it easy, I’m just showing off my vocab, relax. All I’m trying ta say is that you are a nobody.

Europe is a dark and treacherous place in a dark and treacherous time. The roads are covered in horse shit and the most common sound is the squelching as folk step on it. There is no Home Depot to sell you ‘horse shit shoes’.

The history that we usually study doesn’t tell us about the world that folks like you, shit shoveling ornery dumb folk, live in. Instead, the history we read is actually the biographies of famous men, of monarchs and the battles they fought. So if your dad happens to be king, chances are good you’ll be in the history books and I’ll be reading about who you fucked and who you married and stuff.

But you’re a serf, say a cobbler or a stone mason. It is 800AD or thereabouts. You don’t know it but you live in what later historians will call the ‘Dark’ a.k.a ‘Medieval a.k.a ‘Middle’ ages. No offence, but it is a period in history that is marked by a decline in economic, intellectual and cultural order and an increase in conflict, subjugation and anarchy.

Let’s just call it the Dark Ages. I like it. Sounds dystopian (which it in fact was), but feels sexy.

Although historical ages change gradually, historians pinpoint the trigger for the beginning of the Dark ages at 476AD, when the last Roman Emperor of Roman blood, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian Goth, Odoacer. That is the date when “Ancient Classical Greco-Roman” changed to “Dark” ages. It will remain dark for a thousand years.

You were born somewhere just beyond the first quarter, three centuries into the onset of the Dark Ages, around 770AD.

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Medieval society is organized in three social orders, known as the ‘Three Estates’. Foremost are those who rule and fight – the First Estate. The Second Estate are those who claim to be God’s reps on earth, ie: the clergy. The Third Estate comprises of those who work their asses off – folks like you.

The ones who fight are supposed to protect the others from invasions, while the clergy are expected to protect everybody from committing sins. Finally you, the peasants, are there ta serve, to make the lives of the First and Second Estates comfortable through hard unrelenting labor. You and your kind constitute 95% of the population

One great leveller is literacy. You are not the only miserable idiot who can’t read and write. Almost all, including most nobles, are illiterate. Literacy is not yet a priority. Rise in literacy and enlightened debate will happen but that is still 700 years ahead, in the future. That age shall get the monicker, “The Renaissance”, the age of enlightenment.

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You, my friend, are at the very bottom of the food chain. Your ruler is King Beorhtric of Wessex. It’s a Germanic name, his ancestors having crossed the Channel from Ghent in present day Belgium.

King Beorhtric’s wife, Eadburh, is a piece of work, a promiscuous, debauched woman. In a year or two after marriage she’ll poison hubby dear accidentally in an inebriated state, while attempting to poison a dinner guest. Both, the guest and Beorhtric, will die. In panic, she will cross the Channel in flight and arrive at the court of the great Charlemagne, who will take a shine to her but she will ruin it all by choosing his son instead.

Slighted by the rejection but sagely, Charlemagne will nevertheless gift Eadburh a convent in Francia and she’ll become an abess but that won’t last too long either. She’ll be caught blowing an English refugee in exile and be permanently banished by Charlemagne. Eadburh will eventually die a pauper begging in the streets of Pavia, in Italy.

But that is all in the future. Right now, Beorhtric is king and he owns everything, the land and every damn thing on it. As the only son born into the ruling family, he has inherited all the titles, lands and income of the family. This practice, known as ‘primogeniture’ – the right of succession to the first born male child, is believed to be the only way to retain the ruling family’s legacy and power.

King Beorhtric doesn’t have any siblings but if there were any, they would be sent into the Catholic Church as monks and nuns. This step is taken to ensure that none of the siblings try ta stage a coup. But don’t fret. Those siblings, though now a part of the Second Estate, would still wield enormous power. They would be given enough assets to be able to lead luxurious lives. As members of the Second Estate, they would fuck with you psychologically while the members of the First Estate screw you physically.

The king doesn’t know you or give a fuck about you. You’re an asset to be exploited every which way. In times of peace you’ll harvest the crops and when war looms, you’ll be swept up, put inside a ‘cog’ and transported across the channel ta fight.

The king has divided up the land into “fiefs”, parcels of land that range in size from vast duchies down to tiny plots of land given to a single knight, called a knight’s ‘fee’. To manage each fief, the king has installed a “vassal” or “Duke”, who is a trusted crony, a cousin or a relative through marriage. In return, the vassal has pledged his loyalty to the king and the soldiers to fight an invasion or to participate in one.

The vassal in turn hires reeves(overseers) who supervise serfs like you while you till and harvest the land. Every thing is accomplished by hand and yours is hard, back breaking work. You keep 10% of the harvest and pass on the rest to the vassal who keeps 30% from which he pays the overseers and sends the remaining 50% to the King.

Everyone has a lord. Yours is the reeve, a large violent brute of a man that you cannot trifle with. He is a shit shovellor too like you but slightly better off since he doesn’t have to do all the actual toil. The reeve is beholden to the vassal, who has the power of life and death over not only you but your whole family. He says whom you should marry and whom you shouldn’t. If he takes a shine to your sweet, pink-cheeked wife and forcibly takes her to bed, there’s nary a thing you can do about it.

The vassal is in turn beholden to the king in exactly the same manner as you are, to him. And the king can fancy anybody’s wife, the vassal’s, the reeve’s or even your’s. This is before Magna Carta, a charter of human rights that will become law two centuries from now. Not that it will benefit you in even the remotest manner.

The Magna Carta is going to be a set of laws created by the English King John, a universally disliked asshole. It will give greater freedoms to “freemen”, a misleading term that means only the barons and dukes. Magna Carta will have provisions for serfs too, but don’t hold your breath, they will be vague and impossible to enforce.

Right now, whatever your lord says is the law.

What can I say? Had you been born in my country of birth, India, at this very time in history, you would be living in prosperity in a land of plenty, governed wisely by “philosopher kings” of the Chola Dynasty. Instead here you are, shovelling shit in England.

You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all.

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Hovering over everyone and everything is religion and that is Christianity, administered by a murderous continent-wide criminal enterprise known as the Catholic Church. The head of the Church, the Pope, is all powerful and even your king has to bow to his demands. Even though your king is the ruler, the Pope runs a parallel, equally powerful government inside the kingdom and that parallel government is headed by an archbishop, a very powerful guy indeed.

It will be another 700 years before a roly-poly overweight guy, crowned King Henry VIII, will get pissed off with the Catholic Church because it won’t allow him to divorce his current wife and marry a voluptuous lady-in-waiting he has been fucking. He will start his own brand of Christianity called the Church of England.

Jeeze, imagine founding a church just for access to fresh pussy.

Getting back to the here and now, there is a new religion going around, Islam, which is nothing but a beta version of Christianity. It uses the same basic storyline, the same prophets, the same archangels and the same lies as Christianity, but it has gone a little further. It has added to it a knockout punch, a threat, which says, “either you are with us or you are dead”.

Islam’s laws are so strict that you are scared ta even take a pee, lest you get your head chopped off for not peeing as per strict Islamic rules. I am not kidding. They even have a prayer that you have to recite before a fuck and another after a fuck, which you have ta recite in a ritualistic bath while cleansing your richard of the “filthy residue” of sex.

With all the insanity around you, the prospects of a happy, peaceful comfortable life for you are dim, see what I mean?

There are and will be great rulers in your time, who come in and steady the ship for a while and fade out – Justinian, Alfred the Great, Canute, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionheart, William the Conquerer, to name a few. But what they accomplish will not make any difference at all to your wellbeing.

Alas, you live inside a universe parallel to that of the elite who decide your fate. In your universe, invasions, sexual assault and bonded labor are the norm.

You are the medieval man.

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Stay tuned for a glimpse at your tawdry life, in Part-2.

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“Simba, being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble…” – Mufassa (The Lion King)

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You must have seen it in the news. For a week in March 2013, it merited Page-1 on most digital news sites….“Swiss female tourist, 39, gang-raped by six men in dense Indian forest while her husband was beaten and made to watch…”

Here’s how it went down. The woman and her husband were on a “cycling tour” of India somewhere in the vast wilderness of the province of Madhya Pradesh.

Let’s take a deep breath here and pinch ourselves to ensure we are actually reading about someone, a foreigner and a woman, biking through India for fun. There, I just pinched myself and felt it. So, unless I am in a Matrix-like state, this must be happening.

So there they were, the Swiss woman and her husband, all charged up, adrenalin pumping, when they must have decided, “why not just turn north and keep cycling for another 250kms and go see the Taj Mahal? Hey, these locals are just pitiful little illiterate coloured people, what harm can they possibly do to us?”

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And why the fuck not? Miss Swiss and her hubby were members of a new breed known as “adventure tourists”, brave folk who like living on the edge, whose idea of a fun vacation is attempting something potentially life-threatening, in only those places on earth from which they might not make it out alive, places they may never have been to before.

As it turned out, it was a decision that the two would live to regret.

At the end of the first day, they decided to stop and spend the night near a village that was surrounded by dense forest. Around 9:30 pm a group of men popped out of nowhere and broke into their tent. First, they beat up the husband real good and tied him to a tree. Then the men made him watch while they gang raped the woman repeatedly through the night. When they had had enough, they robbed them of everything they had and melted away into the night. The two were lucky to be alive and except for one badly bruised vulva, the woman was otherwise physically undamaged.

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The route that the Swiss couple had chosen took them through a region that is acknowledged as one of the ten most lawless places on earth – Chambal, in Central India, an arid and underdeveloped stretch of land as large as Quebec, that is riddled with poverty, corruption and patronage. It has a regional legislature where the line between the law-makers and the law-breakers is so blurred that you’ll think you have cataract when you try to find it. Rich landowners rig elections and rule like feudal lords, as members of the ruling BJP Party.

The lawlessness has bred a certain demographic that is found in abundance at Chambal – dacoits. Bollywood has made blockbusters on them. “Dacait”(1987), “Bandit Queen”(1994) and “Paan Singh Tomar”(2012) are a few hit bandit flicks from Bollywood that you might want to sample if you are a masochist.

Should I be biking along, like tra la la la, through joints that bandit movies are made on? Chambal is as remote as Timbuktoo, in 1700AD. When Donald Trump railed about “shit-hole” joints, he had obviously not heard of Chambal. If you were a tourist, you would have to be an imbecile with an IQ less than 2 to attempt a bike trip without checking out Chambal as a route to cycle through, even if you happened to be male. There are folk over there who would bugger you just as soon.

Before I began writing this post, I googled “Chambal lawlessness”. The first article that popped up was “The curse of Chambal” – The Telegraph, April 07, 2013. There was enough material there to make the hair at the nape of my neck stand up.

If I listed all 195 countries of the world according to “bike-for-fun-security-for women” in descending order, India would be very near the bottom of it, rubbing shoulders perhaps with Mali or Chad.

The hazards that I am likely to face biking in India are very real. No one has ever heard of separate bike paths. If I am female, especially female and white, there will be creepy local males stripping me naked with their stares. The exhaust pollution from decades old ramshackle lorries overtaking me will be choking. The potholes are so deep that if my bike and I hit the bottom, a farmer on the other side in Mexico might hear the thud. 

No one in his right mind bikes long distance through India for fun.

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Mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) wrote in his “Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” began by saying…..

“The power of judgement, which is called ‘reason’ or ‘good sense’, is of all things among men, the most equally distributed, for everyone thinks he is so abundantly provided with it, that those who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already have. The diversity is in the way we utilize the reason we possess.”

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I always thought that the Swiss were really smart folks, not only possessing in abundance René Descartes’s ‘good sense’ and ‘reason’ but utilizing them to their maximum. Quietly usurping millions in cash, gold and art that had been originally confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and left abandoned in Swiss bank vaults at the end of the Second World War, that took real smarts. Pioneering the concept of a no-questions-asked repository of ill-gotten gains from around the world, stashed away in numbered accounts, man, that was brilliant. 

The Swiss are true pioneers. Switzerland is not a rogue criminal state that launders other peoples’ loots. It is just a bunch of poor white guys being resourceful.

What takes the Swiss into the realm of pure genius beyond anything that even Descartes could have imagined is the way they project themselves as a pink-cheeked, cute and cuddly nation with it’s picture-perfect hills, it’s Bollywood song and dance locales, it’s chalets, it’s cheeses, it’s pastries, it’s chocolates and all those other innocent things that we associate with only the Swiss. Man, that requires brains, oh yeah, real brains.

Everyone loves the Swiss. The Swiss believe that everyone loves the Swiss. I bet even sex-starved, illiterate, goondas from Chambal love the Swiss.

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I am wondering what Miss Swiss’s next adventure ‘project’ is going to be. Maybe she’ll want to cycle from Pakistan, across the Hindu Kush into Taliban-controlled Kunar in Afghanistan where she’ll strip down, discard her bike and streak across downtown Kunar in the nude. My eyelids promise to remain unbattable in her honour.

Am I being insensitive? Some might take my words as victim bashing. Yes, I am victim bashing and being insensitive, but only toward thrill seeking imbeciles and not to the general plight of women who are victimized in spite of trying their best to be safe. 

The gang rape of the Swiss woman was unfortunate and nothing can justify it, not even stupidity. But it was entirely avoidable and in that, this lady does not deserve my heart-bleed. After all, wasn’t it the thrill of a lifetime that she had been after? Yes it was. The sensation of getting out there into the great wide unknown and then most unfortunately having her pussy stretched was an acid trip that she had chosen to have and she got what was coming to her, period.

In the west, there are many like the Swiss woman and her husband – inexperienced, untrained thrill seekers, desperate to prove to the world they are not shit shovelling losers.

They can be any ordinary Joe…..accountants, gym instructors, librarians and ex-policemen and they throng the slopes of Mt Everest every May. They spend a few weeks trying to get in shape, then pay upwards of $60000 a head to the many summit tour conductors and set off to climb the world’s highest peak. The tour operators make them believe they are real alpinists. 

Those vacuous wannabes have one thing in common – a lack of self worth that they try to over compensate for by attempting a climb that they have no business being on. If by chance they are able to make it to the top, they die of either pulmonary edema or from being squashed under crashing seracs or simply disappearing into a crevasse, never to be found again, left behind as permanent frozen monuments to stupidity. 

Like in the case of David Sharp…….

In 2006, the 34-yr old British rock climber took it upon himself to attempt an Everest summit on his own, alone. That’s right, he wanted to get there and back without the help of Sherpa guides that even experienced alpinists like to have around when they scale Himalayan peaks. 

Nor did Sharp think it necessary to have supplemental oxygen cylinders with him. 

Sharp made it to the summit but on his way back down, his luck ran out. Exhausted, gasping for oxygen in that rarefied height, he decided to sit down for a while to catch his breath, on a small rock under an overhang, barely a few hundred feet from the summit. It was a decision that would prove fatal. No one pauses to sit down in the “death zone”, an altitude – usually above 8000 metres – where the atmospheric oxygen is insufficient for supporting human life, causing death by hypoxia. 

Multiple teams of climbers passed by Sharp and the experienced among them noted that he was doomed. They also noted that there was nothing that they could do for him. Lifting him up and carrying him down thin treacherously slippery ice gulleys and sheer drops that needed jumping across, was out of question.

His life ebbing away, David Sharp watched multitudes of climbers passing him by, pausing to nod and wave in a show of respect and moving on.

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Okay, that’s enough about dumb Swiss tourists and wannabe alpinists. Let’s go to dumb Hollywood stars.

In 2014, hackers, aware of an iCloud security issue found in the Find My iPhone app used it to access the phones of hundreds of celebrities. A Python script, posted on the net, allowed bad guys to target any iCloud account with a brute force attack – a hacker jargon for a rapid barrage of attempts at endless combinations to guess the password of an iTunes account until the right one is found.

Apple patched this security issue and now the brute force attack will stop after the fifth unsuccessful login attempt, leaving the owner of the iTunes account unharmed as long as the password isn’t discovered in the first five tries.

As to those celebs, here’s how they reacted when images of their private parts that they had willingly posted and texted were plastered all over the internet –

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“It is a sexual violation, pure and simple. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, these Web sites are responsible and should be prosecuted.” 

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“It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless.”

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“To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.”

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“This is obviously an outrageous violation of our client’s privacy. We intend to pursue anyone disseminating or duplicating these illegally obtained images to the fullest extent possible.”

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“It has come to our attention that our private moments, that were shared and deleted solely between my husband and myself, have been leaked by some vultures. I can’t help but be reminded that since the dawn of time women and children, specifically women of color, have been victimized…..”

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Sure, my heart bleeds for them. What kind of imbecile would text her nude photos through an internet that is known to leak like a sieve? We now know the kind.

Or are they really being dumb? Maybe they want those titillating pics to be discovered. Celebs thrive on discovery and sensation, no matter how shrill their complaints may be about their privacy being intruded upon. Narcissistic and insecure, they enjoy taking sexy pictures and showing themselves off.

In the entertainment industry, any publicity is good publicity. Celebs repeatedly barter their nudity on hundreds of movie screens in front of total strangers and that does not bother them even a bit since it is art and their looks and their other physical assets are commodities in a lascivious marketplace.

Before all this broke I knew not a single one of these stars, except maybe Jennifer Lawrence who was then a middling star at best. Now I’ll remember most of them. They are now guaranteed at least face recognition, if not by name. If I see a movie poster that has one of them, I am not likely to turn away. I am likely to buy the ticket and walk in. They have achieved what they all aspire for. We are the dumb-asses feeling sorry for them.

Non-celebs do the same thing but here lies the difference – they are mostly teenagers who haven’t gotten to know any better. Peer pressure, combined with some kind of brazen and rebellious innocence drives them to show themselves nude online.

And if they are not teenagers but older, invariably they bare themselves with a clear intention to titillate. Here are some of their reactions……

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“I like the feeling of knowing I’m desired, by strangers even. It’s empowering. When I post naked pictures of myself, I rather enjoy the thought of my boyfriend or fuck-friend jerking off looking at my photos. Ha! The best is when they admit to it”.

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“Wanna know why I do it? Because it gives me confidence in myself and it makes me feel good and it does not always lead to a difficult situation.”

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“I don’t know what religion you are, but if you’re Christian you should be willing to share. Asked over and over again, Jesus said that our primary objective was to “love one another”.”

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Yeah right. A celeb veers off toward racism and victimization and a non-celeb sees Jesus in all this. If I try hard enough maybe I can connect all this to Higgs Bosons.

Sometimes I am tempted to let it all hang out myself. You know, post nude pics of me on the internet. If I wasn’t 70, with a weather-beaten richard, I probably would have. No, I’m kidding actually. I’m a bit too straight-laced for that sort of thing.

“Meanwhile, Jennifer, I loved your photos though I don’t go for your kind of baobabs. They resemble pyrus communi (European pears). Melopepo are my favorite fruit. Oops that was Latin again, for melons. I break into Latin when I am turned on. Your nudity hasn’t changed the way I see you and your other celeb pals – as nothing but a bunch of “puellae stultae”.

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“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”

– Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in the first flush of his Presidency, early 2000

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If you want to be a book collector and line the walls of your den with dark mahogany shelves filled with a thousand books like I do, you gotta plan the whole thing out so every book is neatly arranged and you can find any particular book in a hurry. I can’t stand messed up libraries with crammed shelves, piles of books on the floor, on coffee tables and couches that intellectuals have. Thank the sweet lord I am not an intellectual.

I can’t afford mahogany, so my shelves are Ikea, dirt cheap, easy ta assemble, durable and light weight. I don’t give a fuck about mahogany.

I have arranged my library in genres.

Rack-A is Crime, everything on crime – crime fiction whodunnits, true crime, serial murder, murder suicides, schizos and their tools of murder – guns, knives, poisons, etc. Trust me, if I wanted ta kill you, I easily could. But I need you alive, you’re the reader.

Did I mention I have an extensive porn collection? Besides crime, Rack-A also devotes significant shelf space to it. Squishy fantasy porn, like Nancy Friday and Anonymous, How-to books like ‘The Illustrated Kama Sutra’, ‘The ultimate guide to cunnilingus’ , ‘Sex after 60’, that kinda stuff. Then there are other visual aids such as old issues of Hustler and Oui. (Playboy and Penthouse are too staid for guys like me).

Rack-B has classics. Y’know, like Jane Austen, Dickens, Thomas Hardy and stuff. I haven’t read any and don’t intend ta. They are there for show, to make me look profound, but they’ll be leaving soon. I’ve been thinking it’s time to end the pretence and donate them all to Nova, the 2nd hand bookstore by the riverside. That way, I’ll have more shelf space for porn. I can’t wait ta have the 20-volume ‘Encyclopedia of Sex’ by Marquis de Sade which will go on half-price sale next Sunday and I can have the whole lot for twennie smackeroos. Gave them an advance too, I did. You won’t believe what this de Sade guy had been up to. I am just wondering how he got the time ta try out all that weird stuff if he was busy writing 5000 pages of weird stuff.

Rack-C has modern conflict – mainly World War-2, the Korean and Vietnam wars. And religion – translated texts of all the major religions. I like ta have a good guffaw once in a while and religion always does that to me. To have both, conflict and religion, on the same rack is appropriate.

Rack-D is a melange of bestsellers and my pet area of interest – Space.

Rack-E is going ta make me a millionaire. It has some painstakingly collected First Editions and antique books. I just found an O’Henry printed in 1905 in an ornate hard cover, it’s paper so fine that it crinkles when you touch it. I got that for 50¢. I’ll read it and when the time comes, I’ll sell it for five grand.

Of course, I have arranged security against any pilferage from Rack-E : my Peacemaker Colt, which can drill a hole into any thief and his twin brother. That is, if he indeed had a twin brother and they were standing in line, one after the other. I got the twin brother thing from the starting page of Alistair Maclean’s “When eight bells toll”. (I am anything but original).

Then there is a smaller rack that has encyclopedias, Nat Geo issues and compilations. One shelf on that rack is reserved for my reading knick knacks – pencil, sharpees, stickies and page markers, highlighters, Iphone/Ipad charging outlets and of course, the case for the Peacemaker Colt.

And a bowl of peanuts, just in case I am having a beer or a glass of wine and it needs cumpunee. And a tiny pocket flashlight, in case a peanut falls on the carpet and rolls in underneath a rack.

I am an organized son of a bitch.

Oh, I forgot the one pictured above – my Soyúz Sovétskikh shelf, Rack-C. It has books on the Soviet Union. You have of course known the authors well – Le Carre : the genius of ‘understated, laid back’ spy fiction. Tom Clancy : the Republican wet dream gung-ho guy. Len Deighton, Brain Garfield and Fredrick Forsyth : ruthless evil. Solzenitsyn : fatigued suffering pooches. And Ian Fleming : the tongue-in-cheek – varying depictions of Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик – Russian for USSR, a land that could have have attained genuine utopia, if basic human nature had not got in the way.

There are a couple of non-fiction reads too. “KGB Today”, an in-your-face piece of American Cold War propaganda by John Barron, who used to be a regular contributor to The Readers’ Digest, which was widely believed to be a propaganda publication of the US Government. If RT.com had been a print publication, it would be the Russian Federation’s Readers’ Digest. And there is “Autopsy of an Empire”, a blow-by-blow account of the fall of the Soviet Empire, by a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Lumbering up menacingly over the ensemble, you discern an Illushyn IL-76 military transport aircraft. It looks as if it will be able to clear Deighton and Clancy by a hair’s breadth.

Actually I’m not sure if that is an IL-76. But then, DILLIGAS? (Do I Look Like I Give A Shit). I prefer DILLIGAF, though.

I have Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” but since it was pre-revolution, it is in the Classics shelf on Rack-A. Didn’t I mention I was organized? And I have watched Dr Zhivago too many times to want to read the book, so Boris, I can’t waste shelf space here for ya. Go ебать yourself, dasvidaniya.

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I am one of the lucky ones. I grew up in the early 1960s at a time when the Soviet Union was at it’s zenith. We lived in a tiny industrial town in India where the government was building an engineering behemoth that would manufacture heavy machinery for mining coal. It was a joint Indo-Soviet venture – the Soviets had thrown in financing and technical know-how and Indians had contributed the labor and the corrupt bureaucrats.

The place was crawling with Soviet experts in those days and they lived together in this massive compound of apartment blocks, known as the “Soviet Experts’ Hostels”. The compound had volleyball courts and a swimming pool that my brothers and I frequented. Often some matronly Russian woman sitting on a deck chair by the pool would beckon to us, give us a hug and hand us Russian-made cookies, with a grin through teeth that could never pass even the most primitive metal detector.

Through the prism of my 11-year old eyes, the Soviets seemed very friendly, often urging us to sit and watch their newsreels and TV with them. I watched Alexei Leonov live, painstakingly clamber out of the Voskhod-2 and float around and wave at the camera, his visor reflecting the white wisps of the earth’s upper atmosphere.

The Russians would welcome us into the movie theatre they had in the campus that was constantly running shoddily made Russian films made by SovExport, a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union. If you were a kid on his summer break and had run out of games to play, you went to a Soviet movie at the Experts’ Hostel.

All SovExport films was excruciatingly boring, besides being very amateurish. One that I remember watching had an old man pushing a wooden sled with a sick old woman in it, from the left side of the screen to the right, with the accompaniment of a 200-piece orchestra and a baritone chorus. He started on the left when the movie credits came on and we were hoping something would happen – like maybe a German Stuka would suddenly dive in and bomb the shit outa them or something. (That was the only time I remember hoping for the arrival of the Nazis).

But the man on the screen just kept plodding on, until he disappeared with the sled, beyond the right-hand edge of the screen, just prior to the intermission. There were actual Soviet off-duty personnel and family watching, their eyes glued to the screen. When I quizzed my Dad about it, he said watching those films was mandatory for the Soviet personnel (unless they wished to have cabbage soup, morning noon and night, in a Siberian gulag).

I watched a movie that had been based upon Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. In the middle of a battle scene, all of a sudden a Lada drove by near the bottom right corner of the screen, right next to a van that was unloading klieg lights for the shooting. Not a single Russian eyelid batted at that. There were no groans, catcalls, derisive whistles, nothing. This was at a moment in our lives when we regularly went to watch finely crafted American blockbusters such as Sound of music, Battle of the Bulge and Von Ryan’s Express. Even my child’s brain could not help but laugh afterward at the Soviet movie making skills.

But heck, it was fun. It was a time when hegemony and building spheres of influence were paramount. The Soviet team of engineers and their families might have been ordered to ‘mingle with the natives’, but I did not see anything but spontaneity in their warmth. It was the Soviet Union’s “hearts and minds” exercise and as far as I was concerned, they were roaringly successful at it. While the Americans were busy mocking our politicians and laughing at our accent derisively, the Soviets were building bridges that are still standing today.

I don’t have any Soviet porn. I could spare some space for it in my porn shelf on Rack-B, in case you can lend me some. Maybe they did have a Thongus Kutyokokoff. I have to look into that.

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Personally, I think being buried sucks. You occupy unnecessary space that could have been used more fruitfully, like maybe for a bistro or a bar. That’s where mourners gravitate to after a funeral anyway.

The Population Reference Bureau estimates that ever since our species began, 108 billion people have roamed the earth. If you exclude the 8 billion sods like you and me that are still alive, we have 100 billion dead. Of these, around 80 billion are estimated to have been buried through ritualistic funerals.

Now, I’m sure you won’t sue me if I said that an average corpse occupies an area of 6 sq.ft. That would make the area covered by corpses all over the world as on date to be a total of around 29000 sq.kms. Considering extra amenities, spacing, pathways, etc, the final figure could well be 112000 sq.kms.

Imagine 112000 sq.kms of prime real estate, usually at the heart of town, blocked by a bunch of skeletal remains. If you’re already dead, would you give a flying fuck what happened to your body, your tits, your dicky, the end of your alimentary canal? Nope, you wouldn’t. How would you? You’re dead, remember? And if you had MAGA cousins and uncles sharing the crypt, forget it, you’d want outa there.

If we carry on burying our dead, pretty soon there won’t be any place left to live in. You might have an address like, “Next to Plot:21, Row:16, St TiddlyTwat Cemetery”.

I believe the best thing is cremation. Your next of kin are left with just a tiny tiny urn of ashes. If they didn’t care much about you, they can leave you in the attic or if they did, they can tip it over, sprinkle it in their vegetable garden and grow mommy peppers. They could then put the urn ta use, like a flower pot or sumpn. Personally, I would contract with a Hollywood masseur ta massage me into Scarlett Johanssen’s jiggledipoos.

Then there is the pathos. I was in a cemetery in Pointe Claire that had neatly laid headstones, all of the exact same style and size. All around were exquisitely manicured lawns. I realized it was a Military cemetery.

I was ambling down the rows, looking for an angle to take photos from, when I came upon a middle-aged woman lying prostrate on her stomach, her head resting on a step in front of the headstone. Baskets of flowers, a bit wilted, were all around. She was alone and at that time of the day, the cemetery was deserted.

I figured it must be a week after the funeral, the visitations, the suppers and lunches spent with consoling friends and relatives and now at last she was by herself, to be with that one human being that had always mattered the most.

The woman’s head was tilted to one side, eyes unblinking, staring at me approaching. Staring but not noticing my presence. Her arms were wrapped around the headstone in an attempt at an embrace. A large butterfly fluttered in and landed on her hair but she didn’t seem to notice.

The epitaph was succinct, just like all the others there. It read….

B60 926 153

Cpl René G Fournier

Royal Canadian Armoured Corps

11 March 1997 – 20 September 2021

When the woman sensed that I was about to kneel, sit next to her, offer my condolences, her eyes blinked for the first time. With considerable effort, her lips formed a smile and she said in a whisper, “Mèrci, tout va bien” (Thank you, I’m fine)

It was an overwhelming sight, the grief all-pervading, unimaginable. I had taken a photo her prostrate body clutching the headstone while I was approaching, still at a distance from her, but I cannot bring myself to upload it here. It is just too personal. I would be betraying her. In fact I didn’t take any more photos that day, so touched was I. I have uploaded pics from other cemeteries instead.

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The question is whether a graveyard is a place of solace, whether it is a place where one can feel connected and find closure, the way the woman thought it would bring her inner tranquility.

Is that the only way? Wouldn’t the dark and desolate environs of a cemetery be a grim reminder of tragedy and deter her from moving forward?

And what about the other elephant in the room, the environmental concerns with the chemicals used in preparation of the corpses. More than a million gallons of formaldehyde get into the soil every year, besides the menthol, the phenol and the glycerin. What would that do to the ground water?

And then there are traditions around the world, cultures that actually celebrate a death with wine, feasting and dance, like in New Orleans which has “Jazz funerals”. Before the funeral, the jazz band plays sombre music and after, it ramps up into rollicking dance music and has mourners having the time of their lives. You might have watched one in the start of the James Bond film, “Live and Let Die”.

I understand that for some, the idea of breaking into dance at a funeral might look repugnant but either way, we have to move on with our lives and let just the memories continue to console us and the best way is to not leave a physical trace and that can only be by cremation. A small urn of ashes does not reopen wounds.

People who cremate are happier than people who bury. How’s that for a slogan?

The only thing going for burials is the pristine beauty of cemeteries in Quebec – the lush green, the headstones and the epitaphs. And that’s why I have the urge to take graveyard photos.

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Take a look at this excerpt of a sura from the Quran, Book of Muhammad, Verse 4 (47:4)…..

“…..Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads. Then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives and render either generosity or demand ransom, until the war lays down its burdens…..”

Don’t challenge me on the accuracy of this translation. I have not read the Quran (and I don’t intend to). Like this one, there are reported to be numerous other places in the Quran where graphic exhortations of extreme violence against ‘non-believers’ are depicted.

It is said that a little knowledge about anything can be dangerous. Maybe so. I do have little knowledge of any organized religion, but the above excerpt does appear pretty graphic. It presents a picture of God urging men to kill in his name, exhorting the faithful to ‘strike off’ the heads of infidels on the battlefield.

The oft-repeated Islamic intonation, Bismillah ir rehman ir Rahim, means ‘In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful’. Mercy is an act of forgiveness, shown to the wrong-doer.

I suppose that God likes to be picky about whom to shower his mercy on.

Then there is the ‘tie up the remaining captives’ bit, where you are left with a choice of either setting them free (‘render generosity’) or demanding a ransom for their release. In Islam’s eyes, both alternatives appear equally reasonable. Two very disparate choices – show mercy or cash in.

The practice of literally paying for a crime is Islamic law. If you are well-heeled and you kill a guy, you can get off the hook by simply paying his next-of-kin a court-mediated sum of money. It is considered as payment of damages.

On the other hand, if you happen to be an infidel who is broke and living inside a system that practices Islamic Shariah, you are history. You would be looking at parts of you being chopped off at best. Similarly, extracting a ransom for a captive infidel is also very legal.

Now let’s turn to the word ‘battlefield’. That could mean anything, not just those pre-arranged open grassy meadows ringed by tall trees, where battles were fought in ancient times. In ideological terms, an Islamist sees the whole world as a battlefield, where every human is involved, in a clear-cut for-us-or-against-us format, either a believer or an infidel.

And then there is the term ‘strike off their heads’. The tone implies doing something that will detach the head from the rest of the body. The human head being attached to the torso with bone, tissue and ligaments, the only way it can be struck off is by chopping it off at the neck, with an extremely sharp blade.

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Beheading is mandated by other religions – Christianity, for one. Take a look at this beauty from the pages of the ‘holy’ Bible, where God commands King Saul to slay the Amelekites –

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death their men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys….” – The Old Testament, Book of Samuel 15:3

Children and infants? Camels and donkeys? God sounds like an out-of-control Grand Knight of the KKK.

I did some digging and found that the Amalekites had attacked the Israelites in the wilderness where they had followed Moses right after he parted the Red Sea and escaped Egypt with his hordes. I did some more digging and found that the land Moses and his people were traversing had for centuries been the Amalekites’ land and quiet understandably they took the Israelites as invaders.

But they had to be annihilated all the same. We have all read right through primary school how the Israelites were God’s ‘chosen’ ones, remember? Though, chosen for what remains the question, given that Jews have had their shit kicked out of them all through history at some very exotic places, like Bergen Belsen.

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Sure, in both cases, in Islam as well as Christianity, those exhortations from God to slaughter must have been in context with specific situations or aggravating circumstances. But those passages set a precedent.

Indeed, holy scriptures are nothing but that – thousands of pages of set precedents to follow. Holy scriptures urge us (or at least imply) to do those exact same violent acts if we find ourselves in what we perceive to be similar circumstances. They show the way and the method.

There is however a subtle difference between the two religious practices. To Christians, the term ‘beheading’ is a metaphor. Christians organize themselves far better, having technology on their side. Christians are the Elon Musks of religion. To them, slitting a throat here and decapitating a head there, is not cost-effective. Everything has to happen in a grand scale. A thousand years back they did pretty much the same thing, sitting on a thousand galloping horses and calling it a Crusade. Today they stand on aircraft carrier decks and sing ‘God bless America’ and call it a liberation.

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Then we had this prick who got himself the nickname Jihadi John. JJ was blown apart by a Hellfire missile fired from an MQ9 Reaper drone, in 2015. His got moniker, Jihadi, since he was an ISIS looney and John, since he was originally British.

From the tone of Jihadi John’s voice in those beheading videos that the ISIS released, he appeared to be relishing what he was doing. He had pedigree. I read somewhere that his Dad had been chums with Bin Laden and had had an active hand in the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya. Junior was a rap artist before he was ‘born again’ and joined the ISIS.

And that makes me dislike Jihadi John even more. I hate rap music.

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During the dark and middle ages, decapitation as a form of punishment was the rule rather than an exception. King Hank the 8th had particularly itchy fingers. He had two of his six wives beheaded, not because of any sense of jihad. He was sex addicted and wanted fresh p—sy all the time, that’s all.

If you are keen to learn more about King Henry VIII and his wives, just hit the link below:-

Just imagine you’re Hank the 8th

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Decapitation has been a favored method of killing even in Hinduism, which Hindus hasten to assure us, is a pacifist religion. It even goes a step further – unlike Christianity and Islam where God only exhorts and then stands back, Hindu Gods are hands-on.

The James Bond of Hinduism, Lord Krishna, the most revered of all Hindu Gods, has his own version of the Walther PPK. It is a sparkling, spinning disc with 108 sharp teeth on its periphery.

Lord Krishna has the disc spinning on his index finger, locating it through a hole in the middle. Being an engineer, I’m guessing that the hole has a 3/8 inch countersink so it won’t just slide down his finger and lop off his other four fingers.

Lord K calls the disc the Sudershan Chakra and in the epic, Mahabharata, he is very liberal when using it on Hinduism’s version of the Amalekite infidels – the non-Vaishnavites. All he has ta do is swing his arm at the ‘bad’ guy and the Chakra whirs off in a wide arc, connecting with the poor sod’s neck and slicing it clean off.

Through all the mayhem that he causes, Lord Krishna never ever drops that beatific smile of his. In the above likeness, he appears to be saying, “I may be slicing and slashing but I’m really a nice guy”.

I suspect that the Chakra behaves like a boomerang, slices the bad guy’s head off and zips back to his finger, that is unless he has a secretary who is ready with a pouch of refills. Also since I have never seen amputated fingers on Lord Krishna, I must assume that the Chakra has a docking radar, like the one that the SpaceX Dragon uses, to dock at the ISS.

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Beheading and letting the severed head fly off on a parabolic trajectory until gravity makes it hit the dirt and roll away ignominiously (and then picking it up and sticking it on top of a spike) is the ultimate symbol of triumph over an adversary.

Navy Nagar Parade Ground Sea Wall

Colaba, Mumbai, India 

Present Day

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Sunsets are beautiful, long drawn out affairs in India. The Almighty may have overlooked giving us mineral wealth, but sunsets over the sea? Boy, has he been more than generous with them. This evening outdid other evenings in sheer splendour. A red and orange glow set the western horizon on fire.

The Japanese container ship I had been following was barely visible now against the afterglow of the sunset. The Amaretsu Maru. I had read the name off the hull with my Oberwerk Ultra. The Oberwerk is mid-range stuff, still way above anything you might find off the shelf at Walmart. It is crystal clear at 5000 meters and the Back Bay is only 3.5 kms wide. The night vision is a bit grainy but still good if you know what you are looking for.

I couldn’t afford a Kowa. I used to pack one though, when I was Lt Commander on the Sindhudhanush. The Kowa could grab star light and enhance the image resolution, making the it seem like you were viewing something that was sitting right next to you in broad daylight. For my current hobby though, which happens to be ship gazing, the Oberwerk was doing just fine.

Twenty minutes prior, the Amaretsu had passed within ten cables of the sea wall on which I was perched (a cable is a nautical unit of distance and roughly equivalent to 185 meters). As I zoomed in on the vessel, I discerned around five or six tiny figures, crew members, leaning against the rail, amidships, dwarfed by the mountain of neatly stacked, multi-colored containers behind them. P&O NedLloyd, Hapag Lloyd, Maersk, COSCO; the containers were a jumble of brand names garishly painted over their rust-colored bases.

I wondered what the seamen were doing, standing there idly. In the Navy where I had been, there was no such thing as an idle seaman. Perhaps they were just taking a breather, after the extreme exhaustion of setting sail. Or perhaps they were catching the last sight of land for the next several months.

I know how that feels, the melancholy that sweeps through you when you watch people scurrying like tiny ants, around the wharf. You cling on till the very last minute, before the coastline disappears completely.

The Dhanush’s range had been virtually infinite. A nuclear powered sub is limited only by the periodic need for provisioning (food supplies, etc). Leaving shore in a sub is like severing an umbilical cord.

Maybe the guys at the rail were watching me and saying to each other,’ Will you just look at that lucky bastard now?’ But then, maybe they were just standing there and taking a long pee. I used to do that when I was on watch as a sub-lieutenant on the Nilgiri. Standing precariously over the raised parapet on which the stern rail was mounted, I would let loose and watch the stream disappear into the churning wake, turning the sea infinitesimally more acidic. Leonardo di Caprio would have done the pretty much the same thing at the bow rail, had Kate Winslet jumped before he arrived, I thought with a chuckle.

Amaretsu literally means ‘of the heavens’, an interesting name for an ocean-going vessel to have, I thought to myself, as I leaned back on my splayed palms on the concrete seawall. I was sitting facing the surf, my legs dangling over those oddly bulging star-shaped concrete blocks that were haphazardly placed in the sand, to break up the waves. The Colaba seawall was where I came and sat after I had my jog. I would sit there catching my breath, dripping sweat all over the concrete, letting the cool sea breeze hit me like a shock wave. Till six months back, I had company. Shanta. She came along most days, when she felt a bit better.

I ran while Shanta walked. Reaching way ahead of her, I would be sitting on the sea wall parapet long before she came trudging slowly up. We would sit on the concrete parapet and pass the Oberwerk back and forth between us. When it was my turn, I watched the ships and when she had the binoculars, she followed the gulls and the fishing skiffs. When we got bored looking, Shanta would take out some chutney sandwiches and we munched quietly, our arms round each other, like lovers on Marine Drive.

Sometimes, Shanta wanted to play ‘what’s the good word’. We would sit there thinking up words that only we recognized. We played the final game two days before Shanta went into Jaslok for the last time. It had been her turn to think of a word and she thought of ‘heaven’. I lost that turn, even after she kept bombarding me with a rush of clues, over and beyond the maximum three permitted. The last one  had been an exasperated, ” Okay, you old mutt, it’s a place we’ll both go live in and have a ball, at some point in time. “

The Amaretsu Maru was a very large vessel. I figured it probably shoved aside a hundred thousand tons of the Arabian Sea as it battered and bludgeoned its way forward. And now it was gone, blended in with the dusk, swallowed up like Shanta, over the edge.

Off to the south-east, across the Back Bay, the Nhava Sheva Terminal of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, was ablaze with lights now, looking like some alien space port from a Ridley Scott sci-fi picture.

There used to be a time when lights were an ominous sight………..

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Navy Nagar Parade Ground Sea Wall

Wednesday 26th November, 2008 (19.00hrs)

As the tide sneaks in, I note that the sea has suddenly grown calmer. The waves that had been crashing on those star-shaped blocks below, are now jostling each other playfully. The horizon has darkened.

As if on cue, the vendors, their pushcarts, the pony rides and the balloons, have melted away into the lights of the city. It’s almost a sudden transformation. One minute the tiny beach is teeming and the next, it is desolate, ceding territory to the tide, if only for a short while. 

Phosphorescent foam begins washing over the rocks, making them glitter. The sky had been overcast all evening and now suddenly even the winds are still. Had Wagner been here he would be writing a crescendo for the scene. The world seems to stand still. I usually don’t stay this late but today is special.

A light catches my eye. It had blinked on briefly some way beyond the surf, making me bring up the Oberwerk and train it in the general direction of the flash. Immediately the two speeding zodiacs fill my eyepiece. There are five of them in each, huddled forms, outlined in an eerie red glow by the night vision of the Oberwerk. Each man seems to be toting a bulky backpack. The two inflatables pitch and bounce on the waves, releasing bursts of spray as they hit the troughs and the crests, racing toward the little strip of sand that borders the jumble of the star-shaped blocks by the seawall. On their heading they’ll be beaching right about a hundred meters from where I am perched.

My conversation with Jimmy at the Navy Club last evening flashed back instantly. Commodore Jimmy Taraporewala, NDA roommate. Jimmy had on an overall that the members of his corps wear, with those shoulder patches depicting in graphic red and black, a crocodile lashing out with its tail. It was an insignia I was intimately familiar with, having worn it myself for six eventful years at MARCOS.

We were both nursing sodas, except that mine had a couple of fingers of McDovell Premium in it. Not needing much coaxing, Jimmy whispered, “We have a red alert, Krish. Something is about to happen.”

I looked up sharply, “Another landing?”

Jimmy nodded and then grimaced. “Those assholes at the IB have no clue. No news from our assets at the ISI. JCB and DNI are working on it non-stop. All Coast Guard vessels, as well as the Sindhukirti and Sindhuratna, have slipped their moorings. The Talwar and Trishul are on their way from the Maldives. We ourselves are at 5 minute readiness. But how can anyone patrol a two thousand mile coastline?”

I leaned forward, “Where did the tip-off originate?”

“The British GCHQ.” Jimmy stared at me and nodded, “ Of late, there has been more exchanges between us than you had in your time, Krish.”

“What about those Neptunes you just acquired? We have two now, don’t we? Put them on a permanent orbit over the west coast till this thing is over.” I was referring to the new Boeing P-8I Neptune reconnaissance aircraft that have just been inducted into the Navy.

“Boeing technicians are still sorting out some glitches with the Magnetic Anomaly Detectors in them,” Jimmy made a disgusted face and the conversation veered away to his son, Ronnie, who was passing out of the NDA in a week.

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Back at the seawall, premonition made the hair at the nape of my neck stand rigid. I peered through the Oberwerk, at the huddled shapes on the zodiacs. Fishermen aren’t out so late and besides, they don’t gallivant around the Arabian Sea in zodiacs, I said to myself. They might have seen me, silhouetted against the street lights behind. I crossed my legs over the parapet, stowed the Oberwerk into my windcheater and quickly dropped down to the ground on all fours and began picking my way through the rubble on the side of the road in a crouching gait, in order to remain below the level of the parapet.

10 yards of knee-lacerating crawl brought me to a crack in the seawall where the cement had crumbled, forming a gap large enough to let a man through. It had probably been deliberately created just to have a short-cut to the asphalt, by those street urchins who beg around the beach during the day. I slid through the gap and started slithering down toward the sand, gingerly stepping over the star-shaped blocks, knowing they would be coated with moss and slippery as hell.

As I placed my foot in the squishy sand, I saw the silhouettes. The men had by now, run the boats onto the sand and begun getting out of their polyurethane suits. They seemed to be speaking and gesturing with each other but the steady shush of the waves drowned all sounds around. The one who was already out of his wetsuit and still bare-chested, was the first to sense my presence. In a single fluid motion, his right hand came up holding a handgun while he dropped to a crouch.

I had expected that. I raised my hand, palm outward and whispered,” Salaam, Bhaijan.” (Greetings to you, brother). He peeled off from the rest and came forward. The gun in his hand was a 9mm Luger and he brought it down, holding it loosely in his right hand, as he came to a halt a few feet from me. He was clean-shaven, diminutive and wiry and had piercing bright eyes that had no fear in them. A pro.

“Salaam,” said the man,” Do you have our stuff, janab?”

I nodded,” Its all in there.” I gestured toward the star-shaped blocks by the seawall.

“Aapki tareef?” (Who are you?), he looked up at me.

“Aftab”, I said, to which he nodded.

“Aur aap hain, janab…?” (And you?)

He turned his piercing gaze at me and said, “Babar”.

“Leh, usko samhal, Ajmal, “ the man named Babar barked and a wild-eyed guy who looked young enough to be a teenager, dropped what he was doing and made his way toward the blocks. I braced myself. The star shaped blocks were about 100 meters from where we were standing. The boy, Ajmal, would be gone maybe five minutes max. They had five minutes to realize I was lying. There was nothing there.

We waited, my hands on my waist, my right palm just inches away from the Glock34 that I always carried with me these days. Ex-special forces members are licensed to carry a hidden automatic weapon. The Glock had become a part of me, nestled in the small of my back, now hidden by the windcheater.

As the seconds ticked away, the man called Babar said,” Rana ne wapsi ki koi zikar kiya? (Did Rana mention the extraction plans?)”

“Rana?” I stared at the man, “Nahin, hamein Rana ne nahin bheja.” (Rana? I have no idea. Rana didn’t send me)

“To phir?” I could see the first flush of puzzlement in the man’s eyes, as the man called Babar straightened up and stared, “Kisney bheja?” (Then who sent you?)

“MARCOS,” the acronym, pronounced clearly, hung in the air for a split second. I had whispered it so softly that only Babar heard me.

Maybe it was fatigue brought on by the 50km ride on the zodiacs or the stress that any clandestine operation can bring on, I don’t know. But a split second can be a very long time in our business. Time enough to die.

The man called Babar was bringing his firing arm up when the Glock appeared almost by magic in my hand. It took another half millisecond for Babar to grow a third nipple, right between the other two. He collapsed in a heap and rolled over, staring up, squinting, his eyes trying to focus. Perhaps he had noticed a new star on the belt of Orion. A trickle of blood began seeping out of the corner of his lips and his nostrils, pulsating in step with the frantic thrashing of his dying heart.

Instantly the confined space in the beach was filled with the klicks and coughs of silenced automatic weapons erupting lethal fire. My forever faithful Glock did a lot of talking tonight. One of my rounds opened up the kid, Ajmal’s head like a melon. He kept walking a while, his body still believing it had a head, before it realized it didn’t and collapsed.

I dispatched the rest quite easily. These were dumb kids, just a bunch of miserable suckers, out for twisted glory. The last two dropped their weapons and tried to run into the waters. Maybe they wanted to swim all the way back to Karachi. They never had a chance. When you are up against the MARCOS, you never have a chance. We are trained to shoot by sense alone, in the dark. I picked them off pretty easily. Looking around at the carnage, I speed-dialed Jimmy.

As I proceeded to pick my way back up those rocks, I heard a groan. I turned to see the man named Babar and I walked over to him. The spit of sand around me had turned into a slaughterhouse. Babar’s chest heaved as he made an effort to speak and I brought my face closer. If he had any last words, I was curious to find out what they were.

Alas, the man named Babar disappointed me. He just uttered one word,” Gaddar” (traitor). His eyes gradually began taking on the glazed sightlessness of the dead and I decided to hurry him along. I brought my Glock up and pressed it against his forehead.

Before pressing up on the trigger I grinned. I wanted him to see me grin. And then I spoke clearly so the words would register in his dimming brain,” Here’s one for your janab Hafeez Sayeed, asshole.”

I had climbed back up onto the asphalt and was leaning against the parapet of the seawall when I heard the first wails of the sirens and the lights charging up Pilot Bundar Road.

“Twenty years after the opening shots of the Bosnian War were fired, former Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic, is finally being tried by a United Nations War Crimes tribunal in the Hague, on 11 charges of crimes against humanity”        

The 8pm CBS Evening news anchor, Scott Pelley’s words seemed to fade out, while another voice dovetailed in, his voice. His. Arjun Das’s. It said…“……I have this insane urge to hold you in my arms…”

Just a few meters away, in the hall, Sukumar sat sprawled in front of the TV as a 1995 video of Mladic flashed on, showing him inspecting a crack unit of the Serbian Army Special Forces, ‘the Scorpions’, on a rain-swept hillside just outside the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, on the eve of the massacre.

Sukumar had his laptop open as usual, his fingers paused, to take in the news video. He turned and looked at Nandini who’d just dropped the soup spoon in the plate of pasta she’d prepared for Dharam. Her son was already seated, waiting.

“Mom! There’s soup all over my pasta!”

Damn! The tremor in her hands passed. She took a deep breath, steadied herself and started preparing a fresh helping.

As she ladled the pasta, Nandini raced back again, to the first time Arjun had unfriended her, on Facebook. Their first interaction, two months prior. He’d unfriended her just an hour after she’d accepted his invite. She was baffled and messaged him,” Hi, it’s your business of course but it’ll be nice to know why you unfriended me…”

“Hello”, came the reply, in measured tones,”I unfriended you because there’s just nothing on your page. No info, no wall, no photos, no friends list. You have friended me but denied me access to virtually everything. It’s demeaning and frankly, I don’t have time for this. This won’t work, thank you and good bye”.

Nonetheless, Nandini realized that her FB settings needed to be tweaked. She decided to reach out once again, a trait he later came to adore in her. She hurriedly replied,”So sorry about that. I didn’t know my settings were that way. Have fixed it now.” She sent him back an invitation without ado.

He accepted.

In the beginning she’d been reserved, hesitant about talking of herself. He was just an unknown strange man who wrote outrageously funny notes that made her burst into laughter. As the days went by though, the levee she’d hurriedly constructed, seemed to look like it was made with cotton candy. It soon started to dissolve. She began to be excited every time she saw his message waiting when she logged in. Oh, he had this wonderful old-world graciousness and oodles of charm and he made her feel so so good.

“Mom!…do you mind not staring into space with a spoonful of pasta, also in space? How about dropping it back to earth and my plate?”

Sukumar looked up..“If Mladic is actually pronounced Mladich, why can’t they just step up and add the ‘h’ to their names, for Christ’s sakes?” A top-knotch software brain, Sukumar couldn’t stand anything with hidden tones. Everything had to be either black or white for Sukumar Vittal Shyamrao. Zeros and ones. “Life, simplified,” would be the title of his book if he ever chose to write it. Painfully shy, perpetually immersed in solving knotty software issues, Nandini felt lucky if he said more than two words at the dinner table. Sometimes, when he suddenly broke into Telugu, that was a sign he was moved by something and maybe wanted to talk.

“What did he do?” Nandini was referring to Mladic in a desperate bid to stop her mind from sliding back into that crevasse which had suffocated her a minute ago and caused the soup spoon to slip from her fingers. Please, Sukumar, keep talking. Don’t stop. I don’t want to be alone with him anymore.

“What did he do?” Sukumar again, “He slaughtered eight thousand men, women and children in one night in a small picturesque mountain town in Bosnia. Right after he’d given the UN peacekeepers his word the day before that he wouldn’t go in. Mladic is the originator of the term, ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

“1995…hmmm…let’s see now, where was I then…” Dharam began, trying to establish his whereabouts at the time, almost 18 years ago, while shovelling pasta into his mouth. He was going to be 8 next March.

“You were a doddering old Mongolian sheperd with two billy goats and a horse, who’d just been to see his married daughter in Ulan Bator, darling,” Nandini wanted to play along. She smiled, rose, went over and engulfed him in one of those comprehensive all-season squeezes that only mothers can impart.

“Ugh,” Nandini made a mock grimace as she held her son tight, “Correction, you can’t be the sheperd, you must be one of the goats. You smell like them. To the showers right after supper, billy goat, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Later, as she rinsed the dishes, Dharam and his Ipod having retired for the night, she heard the TV being turned off and felt the armchair in the hall creak. Slippered footsteps flopped up to her and stopped right next.

“Here, let me dry them”. Sukumar took a dish towel and reached for a plate. Nandini turned. The man standing next to her was tall, crew-cut, clean. A mild shadow of a beard covered his lower jaw. He looked solid, simple, honest, wholesome. Just as he’d been, the first time they’d met. She reached up and laid her head on his chest, the sobs breaking out, shaking her whole being. He dropped the cloth on the counter and just as her body went limp, he drew her up to him fiercely, till she was on the tips of her toes, her breath gasping upon his cheeks.

She tried to open her mouth, to speak through her sobs. To tell him. Everything. But he laid a finger gently on her lips with a ‘ssshhh’. Holding her close, by her shoulders, he placed one arm just below the round of her buttocks, lifting her off the floor effortlessly, while at the same time he advanced purposefully toward the stairs.

“Welcome back, darling,” he whispered.

The First Editions rack in the library in my den downstairs. Oops, shouldn’ta disclosed the location. There are folks who could kill for my collection.

And those two fine ladies are Thelma and Louise on the middle shelf, with their beloved Chevy.

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First, set yourself up……

Prepare a private space in your home, a quiet little nook where you can be by yourself, preferably in the basement, away from pesky wimin who want you to mow the lawn or clean the laundry room.

Line the walls with book racks, just like you see ‘em in libraries. Categorize the shelves and maintain an Excel spreadsheet of all titles that you own, with columns showing the rack number and shelf number of each title. You must be able to tell if you actually own a title and if yes, what shelf/rack number its on.

Position an arm chair with deep cushions and a foot rest next to the shelves. And a coffee table with ‘dingar -dangar’ [roasted peanuts, dill-soaked cashew nuts and chocolate wafers]. And a bowl of bananas and apples, if you insist. A body can get hungry with all the reading, know what I mean?

Don’t forget the shelf within easy reach for stationery – pens, pencils, scissors, scotch tape, stickies, highlighters, erasers, notepads and cardboard page markers. Have an electric socket bar close by, to connect all your electronics. On a separate stand, leave enough space for your IPad, Iphone and Kleenex.

Have a set of high-quality wi-fi speakers. I recommend Sonos or Bose. Sometimes, one wishes to sweep aside his book, lay back, close his eyes and listen to ‘Addagio for Strings’. Or stock tips from ‘The Dividend Guy’ podcast. Or true crime, like “Cold Case Files”.

I woulda thrown in a well-stocked liquor cabinet but I stopped drinking. (I didn’t know when ta stop, couldn’t hold my liquor and I turned into a jerk when I drank). But you can have alcohol at hand, even a big-chested blonde from Jiggle City on your lap if you like. But listen, drinking and canoodling don’t go too well with serious reading, capische?

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Now that you’re all set up, its time to collect First Editions, a hobby that is enriching in more ways than one. First, financially – I swear all those books are going to be worth a pila cash if I let them hibernate a while and sell ‘em in maybe 2050.

What? Of course I’ll be alive in twennie fifty. I’ll only be ninnie-fye by then and these days, that’s young-middle aged. I’m only concerned if the world is going ta still be around by then.

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I have a JK Rowling that can easily go for a grand, right now if I sell it. I got her in pristine condition at Nova, the second hand book store by the river, for 25¢. Touching it is like running my fingers over Rowling herself. Selling it for a grand will be a 4000-fold return on investment if you know yore math. I got a Herman Wouk, some John Grishams, an RK Narayan, a few Walter Isaacsons , couple O’Henrys, a John Irving. Even a Sidney Sheldon, signed by Sid himself. All in mint condition.

I am looking for a Paul Gallico or maybe a Faulkner or a Wodehouse – early 20th century first printings. If anyone can meet me up with the owner of a hard cover ‘To kill a Mockingbird’ or ‘Screw it, Jeeves’, I’ll be eternally grateful.

Take it easy, there’s no ‘Screw it, Jeeves’. I made it up ta make you laf.

First editions are worthless if you don’t keep ‘em in good condition. To protect my stash, I have a climate controlled basement. Temp 10°C, humidity 35% and Gretchen Wilson. Yes, books love music, I swear they do. I reckoned first editions would go for country rock. Since Thelma and Louise are rednecks, I have ta play Gretchen Wilson’s Redneck woman in a continuous loop for them.

And I don’t collect paperback first editions. They aren’t majestic like hard covers. Besides, the two aforementioned wimin don’t like paperbacks.

Listen, everything in the previous two paragraphs was a lie actually. I just have First Editions on one book rack, that’s it. Thelma and Louise are finely crafted figurines I picked up at Nova, where I get my books.

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If you are interested to start collecting First Editions as a hobby, the first thing you got ta acquaint yourself with is the definition of ‘First Edition’ – it is the first printing of a title by a specific publisher. However, a popular title (a Rowling or a Grisham) may have multiple publishers – all of whom will naturally have their own first editions. In that case, the one that came out first is the official First Edition, a.k.a the ‘true first edition’.

If the initial print run of the first edition sells out and the publisher decides to produce another printing with the same typeset, no changes, the book is described as a first edition – second printing. On the other hand, if changes have been made by the author or the publisher (like updating the latest status of an event described in the first edition or adding a new chapter or a foreword), the book is then described as the second edition.

If you are a collector like me, you’ll go for the true first edition – ie: the very first printing of a title, the one that precedes all other first editions chronologically. So, open the copyright page and it will tell you the printing history. Assuming you have an average level of intellect (which you have, since you’re reading my blog), you’ll be able ta decipher the gobbledegook on the page.

So, a recap – just because you got a book brand new at your local Indigo outlet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a First Edition. You will have ta learn to recognize a First Edition and here’s how….

First of all, if you’re lucky the copyright page will mention the words ‘First edition’, like the Naomi Klein hard cover on her seminal work on ‘Disaster Capitalism’, a form of capitalism that takes advantage of natural or man-made disasters. An example that readily comes to mind is the free-for-all cash grab that followed Hurricane Katrina in the southern US in 2005 during the “reign of error” of George (Dubya) Bush.…

If you see ‘First printing’, instead of ‘First edition”, it’s the same thing.

Sometimes, you won’t find any of these terms on the copyright page. No problem, look for the ‘number line’. It is a series of numbers that usually appears at the bottom of the page. If the line begins or ends with a ‘1’, it’s a first edition.

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Other times the number line is preceded by the term ‘First edition’, but be careful because some publishers leave on the words ‘first edition’ even when the book is in its third printing and that fact is reflected in the ‘3’ in this number line….

First edition

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The following sequence is supposed to be on a book that is in it’s 2nd printing (the ‘2’ at the end) and has come out in 1975 (the ‘75’ in front) …..

75 76 77 78 79 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

What do you do if neither the ‘First edition’ nor the number line appears on the copyright page? Relax, read on….

In many cases, you may not see either the number line, or the ‘First edition’ mentioned on the copyright page. Not a problem, just check if the copyright date and the printing date match up, like it does above, in the copyright page for astronaut, Scott Kelly’s ‘Endurance’, about his 340-day saga aboard the International Space Station.

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The second most important thing to remember about first editions is that they have got to be looked after, since their value is directly dependent on their condition, unless you happen to have an ancient original…..

Certain first editions can’t be found in mint condition. In those cases, their archaeological value trumps everything. Like the 2700-year old Dead Sea Scrolls that the ancient Jewish sect, the Essenes, produced and secreted for posterity inside earthenware jars in caves around the Dead Sea. Since they didn’t have printing presses or xerox back then, they must be first editions.

The most valuable part of a first edition hard cover is it’s dust jacket. A dust jacket is 90% of the value of a first edition. So, don’t be a shmuck and fuck it up, like dropping coffee on it or jotting down your grocery list or something. Make sure there are no stickers or handwritten markings on it either.

Libraries usually use mylar dust jacket covers to protect dust jackets. I use Brodart™ dust jacket covers for all my first editions and other hard covers that I specially treasure.

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Unfortunately I don’t own any signed first editions. That Sydney Sheldon I spoke about earlier is a signed first edition but the signature is a print, not an original signature by the author’s own hand.

Original hand signed first editions are serious cash – maybe 10, 20 times the value of an unsigned first edition. I have decided to begin frequenting book signings. To that end, I have created an account on Chapters.com. If you are a collector, make sure you get a photo taken with the author signing your copy. It’s not incontrovertible proof but it is still valuable circumstantial evidence that the signature on the book is authentic.

In case you think it’s crazy to collect books, even first editions, remember vinyl records? They are back with a bang. I was such a schmuck to throw away my LPs and my Garrard record changer. We humans are nuts – we don’t care about stuff when we buy them new, but we go ape shit for them when they are vintage.

I could kill myself for chucking out my illustrated hard cover of Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra after its pages got sorta kinda crinkly and brittle with all the dried DNA I had inadvertently splashed on it. Imagine how priceless that Kama Sutra could have been by maybe 2850AD. Forensic archaeologists would be creaming over the ancient life form they detected on it.

Who says you can’t be creamed over, huh?

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is an unabashed schloop-me-tight-goober. Here he is seen schlooping assorted bigshots.

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What? Haven’t you heard of schlooping? It is a close, squishy, cheek-rubbing embrace, so tight and so close that it can get a bit embarrassing if you are at receiving end of it.

By the way, “Schloop-me-tight Goober” is an authentic copyrighted Spunkybong term. I’ll sue you if you use it without my permission.

The Indian Prime minister, Narendra Modi, holds a PhD in schlooping, he is such a hell of a touchy schloopy guy. Give him half a chance and he’ll schloop you. If you happen to be a head of state, film star, CEO or celebrity and you see Modi bearing down on you from across the room, you’re going ta get schlooped whether you like it or not.

Admittedly, one human hugging another is a heartwarming sight. What with the rise of hate everywhere, the world does face a love-deficit at the moment. So, here’s a disclaimer – there is nothing wrong with the gesture as far as I am concerned.

Politicians schlooping each other in India is du jour. But what is striking about Modi’s schlooping is the look of bliss on his face when he schloops someone. He doesn’t let go – he keeps on schlooping you with an Alfred E. Newman grin. Just google Narendra Modi and you’ll see a zillion photos of him schlooping, looking slightly off to the side, the look on his face seeming to say,” What? Me worry?”

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After two decades in the west, being near white folk, I have realized that schlooping is not a very appropriate gesture in the western world. The warmth that a schloop tries to convey, is lost on most white folks in affluent nations. Take a look at Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Scott in the collage above. Can you just sense them cringing from the intimacy?

Rule1 : Read my lips…….White western men do not understand how to react to schlooping, so don’t even bother to try. Would you find a Boris Johnson schlooping an Emanuel Macron? Or an Olaf Schulz getting schlooped by a Matteo Salvini? Modi thought nothing of schlooping his erstwhile arch-rival, Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif. Would you have dreamed of seeing Barack Obama schlooping Vladimir Putin? Donald Trump professed undying love for Kim Jong Un, but did you ever see him schloop the guy? During his last meeting with Obama, Modi schlooped him no less than six times in the space of 24 hours.

Why does it become so necessary for an Indian Prime Minister to slobber all over another dignitary?

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In the west, physical space is an important concept. Usually it is a two-foot envelope all around a person. Western men take breaching that envelope as an annoyance, even as an act of aggression. Between straight men in the west, the only acceptable way to breach the envelope is through a handshake or a high five. Schlooping is frowned upon in general.

Schloops are quite normal in India and like schloops, holding hands is common between two straight male friends in India. Just walk out into the street and you’ll see at least one pair of males walking, holding hands. But if you try to hold another man’s hand here in the west, he’ll inadvertantly recoil from you.

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There could be a number of  reasons for this aversion to touching between men in the west – one is a perception that any overt show of warmth is by default a sign of a lack of manliness. The Caucasian male is essentially a war-like sub-species of human beings, immensely proud of his masculinity.

Another reason could be the way that a western individual is taught to practice his faith. Take a look at pictures of Christian, Jewish or Islamic prophets and even artistic depictions of God – invariably he is shown as bearded, stern, humorless, austere, and martial. His image is deliberately meant to inspire fear and respect. If you looked at a picture of Moses, would it make you feel like giving him a hug?

All three Abrahamic religions teach believers to ‘fear’ God. Or else. The term “an honest god-fearing man” is an oft-repeated one in the west, meant to describe a devout person. Being God-fearing is like a badge, a qualification here. Brutal retribution is just one tiny sin away, if one doesn’t fear God. It may be this either my way or the highway implicit ultimatum in these three religions that somehow makes a majority of believers cold and impersonal.

This is not to say that I haven’t met warm Christians or Muslims. The lack of warmth that I am referring to is just alluded to the physical space concerns and therefore the aversion to schlooping. Besides, I am not expressing an opinion on whether that is desirable or undesirable.

In comparison, look at Hinduism and its many gods and goddesses (we Hindus don’t believe in prophets or any other divine sales reps). All Hindu deities have one thing invariably in common – our Gods have this beatific, mushy, serene smile. They look like they’ll love a schloop. Fearing god is not a requirement at all in Hinduism, not in the way that the Abrahamic religions make it mandatory.

There is no threat of hell fire, no heaven or hell, in Hinduism. The explanation is simple and profound – how can you love someone you are told you should fear?

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Howdi Modi, how you bin?

Take it easy. Volodya may be watchin’ and if he gets pissed, he’ll release the golden shower video.

Now cut it out, dumbass. I told you no schlooping and no begging!!!

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Schlooping, like any other pursuit, has it’s variations. Let me show you a few………..

‘Schleep’ is when a schloop ends in a kiss on the cheek. You could go further – like you could think of doing a schloopa-doo-dee. For that, you might have to check into a motel room in a remote part of town, under a false name, with a blonde.

There are goobers other than the schloop-me-tight-goobers of course. Let me introduce you to another kind of goober that inhabits the world – suck-my-face goober – another Spunkybong copyrighted term. Suck-my-face-Goobers are annoying folks who like to kiss wet slobbering open-mouthed kisses that most women think are disgusting. Their kisses have a ridiculous slurpy sound, leaving half the woman’s face wet and sloppy. Their tongues slurp around the woman’s palate like eels. Yechh!

Suck-my-face-goobers are usually men but once in a while one gets a female – like this married landlady twice my age in India, when I was twennie-two. She just couldn’t get enough of me and would slobber all over my face. I suggested to her that she might find schleeping my richard more fulfilling and I am happy ta report that she acted on my suggestion with zest.

But let’s stick to just schlooping, okay? I am too straight-laced to write about the others, though there was a time I even went schlapee-doo-shaa. Please, don’t make me tell you what that is.

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Getting back to Narendra Modi, if I were the Indian PM, I would stop being a schloop-me-tight-goober forthwith and maintain a certain distance. In international politics, it is more prudent to command respect than to look for some facile affection.