Review: The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen

The Argumentative Indian

This review comes at a time when Dr. Amartya Sen’s comments on Narendra Modi – chief minister of Gujarat state of India – have caused a furore in political parties like Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Dr. Sen had said that Modi would not be his choice for Prime Ministerial candidate because of the former’s communal actions in 2002 and that his image is not such which generates enough confidence amongst the minority (principally the Muslims of India). Modi has taken refuge in the verdict of the court which still hasn’t prosecuted him. Well, it may be said that hiding behind the Indian judicial system is the refuge of the scoundrel. Modi’s PR team has been doing a very good job in spreading lies and rumours about the over-the-top efficient governance. One of them has been that Gujarat is a power surplus state and it sells power to other power-deficient states (which it actually does). Power-surplus but how? More needs to be unearthed before this is taken at face value. Electricity is generated either for single-phase instruments or three-phase instruments. Agricultural equipments need more power than the ones used in households. In the rural and agricultural areas of Gujarat, three-phase is made available only for a duration of 6-8 hours while the remaining hours are covered by single-phase. So, the ‘extra’ electricity generated and not used in those 6-8 hours is then sold to other states. There have been many protests by farmers and cultivators and even attacks on the electricity sub-stations in the past regarding this but have rarely been discussed in the media. This is again not to say that single-phase electricity is available round the clock in the rural areas – ‘Load shedding‘ is a common term and practiced generously during summer time in the rural and sometimes even in the urban areas.

I had first read about this book when I was pursuing my graduation. The title had aroused my curiosity as to how could Amartya Sen, who was already well known in India by then for his Nobel Prize in Economics (some BJP-fascinated writers have even claimed that Dr. Sen has not won a Nobel but just another prize given along with other Nobel prizes), write a book – a complete book! – on argumentative Indian culture? Those were the days when my outlook was limited and vision not so lofty. I finally managed to satiate my curiosity and could very well understand how one could write a book on the said topic.

 

First things first. The chapters are essays which have been written by the author over a period of a decade or so. The presence of the brackets “()” almost on every page is so irritating that at one point of time I stopped reading and started counting how many times they figured in the last few pages I had read. I personally just don’t like them (once in a while is fine, but not when they are plastered on every page!). Did you notice how the brackets broke the flow of the statement? They are equivalent not to the smooth curvy bumpers but to the ugly disoriented potholes. They destabilize your mental rhythms and emanate a pungent smell – strong enough for one to mouth an expletive or two.

 

Penguin Books – please don’t do this anymore!

 

There are four sections: Voice and Heterodoxy; Culture and Communication; Politics and Protest; Reason and Identity. He starts with how Hindu nationalism has been usurped as a vindictive approach by politicians in garnering votes and dividing and sub-dividing the nation. He adds how women have always played an important and leading role in the Indian society – from Sarojini Naidu to Sonia Gandhi. Then he gives examples of women from the Vedas and ancient literature. All of this, however, wasn’t very convincing to prove that Indian women had a good share. While writing on the Cārvāka system he mentions a line which caught my eye – “‘[from these material elements] alone, when transformed into the body, intelligence, is produced, just as the inebriating power is developed from the mixing of certain ingredients; and when these are destroyed, intelligence at once perishes also“. Does this mean that people (the atheists) back then were aware to a certain extent of evolution? They probably were cognizant of how life ‘materialised’ out of the elements of earth. The author writes, “the particular point of the focus on heterodoxy and loquaciousness is not so much to elevate the role of tradition in the development of India, but to seek a fuller reading of Indian traditions” and “seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplification of India’s past and present“. The first essay ends Ram Mohun Roy’s poem which stresses on the “hardship of death” as the “inability to argue“.

 

The rest of the book has writings on religion, politics, education, economics, language, poverty and science to name a few. Overall, the essays are clear, persuasive and enjoyable. An acceptable amount of overlap is present in the essays as they have been written independently of each other over a long period of time. He is definitely disappointed that Nehru‘s vision of India hasn’t been realised, even after more than half a century of Independence, in three important categories: practice of democracy; removal of social inequality and backwardness; achievement of economic progress and equity. On the first goal, more or less we surely have progressed with a good pace despite of setbacks like Indira Gandhi‘s imposition of Emergency in 1975 (to this list should be added actions by the Congress-led UPA government like becoming an overtly cautious watchdog on the social media; Shiv Sena‘s deplorable actions against two young girls from Palghar when Bal Thackeray died). One, however, may not agree with all of his views: the lure of a seat in the Security Council doesn’t hold for him.

Dr. Sen appears to be too impressed and awed by Rabindranath Tagore (Stupendranath Bregorr for GB Shaw). Tagore undoubtedly was an accomplished writer, poet and philosopher but when Dr. Sen praises him for his paintings it became a little difficult for me to digest. Recently I had visited National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai for an exhibition of Tagore’s paintings. Tagore used to paint but was never trained in it. His paintings, honestly, weren’t something to be in awe of or to be mesmerised by – some of them were thoughtful, but none, if I remember correctly, majestic. Again, this is not to say that Tagore as a painter didn’t possess any skills – only that his skills as a painter is not something one would want to praise him for when his other skills are in abundance. Also, Dr. Sen is aptly right when he writes that Tagore had suddenly become so famous and sought after in the West not so much for his writing (he did win the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali) but more so for his mystical looks and sagely appearance and the exotic image the westerners had of India and Hinduism. An account of when Tagore met Einstein left me wondering and disappointed by Tagore’s, religious and otherwise, views. Tagore said, “… the world is a human world”! Only human? “Truth is realized through man”. Again, only by us?

Each section is important in itself, however, I felt the three best chapters were: Indian Traditions and Western Imagination (for delving deeper into how the West has predominantly viewed India as an exotic region with bearded sadhus and meditating swamis); China and India (for exploring the ancient ties that existed and enhanced with the spread of Buddhism); Women and Men (for the excellent analysis of the existing situation – in terms of women’s inequality consisting of various factors: survival, natality, facilities, ownership, benefits and violence). The book starts with the importance of debates and arguments in a culture and gives examples of the same in the Indian context, but the rest is not linked to the ‘core theme’, if it can be said so because the book derives its name from it. It was amusing to read Sunil Khilnani‘s words of praise on the back cover: Dr. Sen’s views on the concept of India as a unified region in terms of culture, religion and practices differ markedly from him. It was also intriguing as to why Mahatma Gandhi has been addressed as both ‘Gandhiji‘ and ‘Gandhi‘ – in a few paragraphs the two terms appearing in immediate sentences.

 

To conclude I would say that the essays are highly readable and make a good acquaintance for anyone interested in learning more about Indian history, culture and life. Though, and it is apparent in some essays, Dr. Sen has been little too harsh on the Hindutva-themed political parties. His criticism of Indira Gandhi for Emergency is non-existent and praises the electorate for over-throwing her in the subsequent elections. His pro-Congress stance is apparent and opposition to communal agendas clearly visible. Nevertheless, a book worth buying and keeping in one’s bookshelf and referring to from time to time to broaden one’s perspective of looking at the world around us.

 

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Review: From Lineage to State by Romila Thapar

From Lineage to State

A visit to one’s hometown, just like a visit to a bookstore, leads to unexplored and pleasantly surprising treasures. The rains had put to rest all naysayers and the grounds were lush green with tiny water puddles for my pet dog to waddle through. Eight of the books which I had ordered almost two months ago were waiting to be held in my hands amongst which five of them had Romila Thapar as the author (one of the three authors in one case). She is one of the foremost historians of ancient India and has received several awards and honours including the Padma Bhushan which she did not accept. The sub-heading of the book is “Social formations in the mid-first millennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley“. The book has five chapters: Preliminaries; Lineage Society; Transition to State; Ideology and the State; and Ergo.

The intent of the book has been of demystifying the coming of the State in the Indian context. The first two chapters cover the mixing up of religious texts, archaeology, myth and history. The pastoral way of life, the coming of agriculture and the forming of the ‘society’ in this part of the sub-continent. The focus though is on the Ganga Valley and she gives her reasons for it. The way of life as it would have been is described including practices and beliefs. But the most important contribution of the first two chapters is, first,  the etymological coverage of various words and phrases which are mentioned in various ancient literature. Some of the ones covered are: raja, dana, bhagya, vis, rajanya, grhpati. The second being of presenting the true picture of the varnas and the jatis as they must have been. The argument held by a lot of ‘educated’ people that the Brahmana were responsible for the subjugation of the other four varnas can not only be shred to pieces but burnt to ashes after a careful reading. The Brahamana and the Ksatriya were more in conjunction in their dominant role (sample this: “the distance between the ksatriya and the vis brought about a certain tension and ultimately took the form of the ksatriya claiming more rights of appropriation and the vis being reduced to subordination”).  The evolution of land holding rights resulting in the withering away of pastoralism and the coming of agriculturalism is well explained interspersed with the corresponding interpretation from the writings of the texts.

A book which demolishes a lot of prejudiced myths and rises above the uninformed commentary. But it is to be read only by the serious history reader and not the casual one and should ideally be read after a more generic state-formation book (like The Origins of Political Order by Fukuyama), because most probably the author hasn’t written this for the general reader but for the already well informed one.

The importance of this book can’t be overstated.

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Reflections: Zerkalo (The Mirror) by Andrei Tarkovsky

Zerkalo (Image source: Wikipedia)

Zerkalo has been hailed as of one of the top ten or so of art movies of all time. The film is autobiographical in large parts and Tarkovsky’s father’s poetry is over laid onto the film. It deals with different phases of Tarkovsky’s life: childhood, youth, his mother, the children, war, communism and the Russian countryside. The shots are the standard Tarkovsky slow panning ones. The use of the effect of strong winds on grass and plants is used strikingly well. The scene where the disappearance of the mist from a window glass is shown makes one reflect upon the temporal existence of life.

The film is complex and very difficult to understand as the same actors portray multiple roles over different periods of time. This has described on a forum on IMDB as the director’s way of narrating the continuity of the past into the present and together into the future. The film had generated enough controversies as it was construed as depicting the Russian state of affairs negatively.

Arseny Tarkovsky’s poetry transcends the beauty of words. The complete poem can be read on All Poetry. 

“  We celebrated every moment
Of our meetings as epiphanies,
Just we two in all the world.
Bolder, lighter than a bird’s wing,
You hurtled like vertigo
Down the stairs, leading
Through moist lilac to your realm
Beyond the mirror  “

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Sinews of Hope

The Left, The Centre, The Right

In a city where broken hearts are trod upon and tears disappear under the humid sun, sights which uplift the melancholia must be rejoiced.

In trains where aspirations fall over the tracks and victories are made to adjust with defeats on its seats, little triumphs must be celebrated.

From homes where brash has become a dialect and howls camouflaged as greetings, the silence of the winds must be listened to.

On the roads where helter-skelter is a pattern and defiance the rule, the long-standing archaic must be appreciated.

Amidst the class that has made running-to-live its first habit and ineptitude the second, the slow and the dead must be remembered.

In a city where broken hearts are trod upon and tears disappear under the humid sun, sights which uplift the melancholia must be rejoiced.

Sights which uplift the melancholia must be rejoiced…

**********************************************

The Left: The Christian man who is proud to wear his religion around his neck and unafraid of making people happy by playing beautiful music on his mouthorgan in the local trains. Photo taken at Churchgate station, Mumbai.

The Centre: The relic from the past which has stood the test of time and is history in itself: CST station.

The Right: The old Hindu man with a sitar-like musical instrument with three strings, near Churchgate station. His voice was barely audible and music nonexistent but his expectant face shone out of the crowd.

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A Paranoid Perception

(Please click on the orange coloured Play button above before you start reading)

Gorghy was lying down on the muddy floor of his hut; he always did so diagonally: feet towards the entrance and head near to the opposite corner. His black coloured tape recorder was lying on the woebegone short table on his left side. The handle of recorder was tied in the center with a dirty white colored cloth. It had been hours since he was playing the cassette in an endless loop; it was the only cassette he had. His hut was at the corner of a road passing by and right next to a puddle large enough to be treated as a farm by Gorghy.

 

 

Not far away from the hut were the quarters of the nuns associated with the church of the town. And in those quarters lived two of the nuns who had raised Gorghy after he was found abandoned four-weeks old near a dump yard. Despite of their best efforts nothing much had come out of him. He somehow managed to study only till the first seven years of his life leaving him almost illiterate and unable to express himself in front of others. Anyhow in the sleepy town there weren’t many jobs to be had and he managed by cleaning the dishes and other menial jobs.

Gorghy’s right hand was bloodied and moving in random incomprehensible movements on the ground. The blood was rather all around him. The deep reverberating sound of the waves was making him feel as if the world was rotating in front of him in clockwise direction and so fast that every turn left a trail behind to merge with the next rotation’s images. It was all too blurred for him to make sense of it. It was a kaleidoscope of the howling seas and the fearful splattered blood. Gorghy’s was a tough physique with large coarse hands and a face speckled with deep marks. He, of course, couldn’t remember who his parents were. Nor could he in his mind recall being fed by a woman’s naked breast and sucking it so hard that the nipples bled. Nor has he registered any event of biting a feeding hand to cause a vein to burst.

Gorghy was brought up as a Christian by the nuns but it had never mattered to him – he could never understand who god was and why he had to go to the church on Sundays. And he never did. However the cross given to him by the nuns was still around his neck. It had become old and worn out. Only two weeks ago he killed a seven-year old boy in his hut. It was evening time and the young one had lost his way back home. While passing through Gorghy’s farm his left foot got stuck in the shoots and his wailing led Gorghy to him. He helped him out and took him to his hut with one hand of his tightly gripping the boy’s shoulder; in fact so tight that it hurt more than getting stuck in the thorny bush. Darkness was a characteristic the people in the sleepy town were used to with the nearest major city being more than eighteen hours away. Nobody saw anything.

 

Inside the hut, Gorghy soon muffled the boy’s mouth with his left hand and lifted him by his neck with his right one gripping the slender neck so hard that it collapsed like heated butter. The nail of his right hand thumb had dug deep enough into the skin on the front side of the neck to cause bleeding. The suppressed screams never made their way to Gorghy’s ears and with few last frantic kicks life took another form. He then threw the body in the middle of his one-room hut and proceeded to collect his knife kept at the window. He stabbed the body endlessly till the blood spurts from the neck, thighs and ankles had painted his hut in a ephemeral dark red colour. There was a deep gash in the front side of the neck. Gorghy lay on top of the body and chewed on the lower lip and then with one sudden jerk of his jaw tore it off. His cross was embedded in the gash of the neck – half inside. The sound of the waves had drained his emotions. Nobody ever came to Gorghy’s hut as he was a recluse with apparently no sense of humour, suffering or joy. The boy’s body disappeared never to be found again.

 

 

Gorghy’s hands were bloody today as well and their incessant random movements had created beautiful patterns with the blood of the four puppies who lay slain in a dump in the hut’s corner. He had spotted them at the local vegetable market and had lured them by his innocent “chsk, chsk” calls. With these four it wasn’t difficult at all – they were all too young. He put them to sleep in the same way: his left hand closing the mouths lest they bark and his right closing in on their tender furry necks. He laid all of them for forming a rough circle. He had sliced their tails off with the knife and burnt them over the kerosene flame. Then he cut the tongues out of each of them. One by one he took them inside his mouth and over his tongue – feeling the softness, the texture and tasting the dripping blood. And a few bites later he was done. The sound of the waves still drowning him in his collapsible dreamy trance. After a while he lit the kerosene flame again and put his left forearm over it – reducing the distance every few minutes. His skin was red and then turned into blue and finally black It started peeling off and the scalding continued till it engulfed his forearm completely. The skin had lumped together in places and appeared frothy and slimy with a red underneath. He held the knife in his right hand and started sliding it against his right ear. Blood oozed out, trickling over to his cheek and neck and then his shoulder and chest. The cutting off doesn’t take long with the final requiem in the form of the sound of the knife rubbing against his Incus and Ossicle. He put his ear in between the four dead puppies and bathed in his own blood.

 

Next day he went to the nearby nursery covered in heaps of clothes and bought a dozen lilies and planted them in the farm. He takes care of them – watering them everyday, putting them under the shade during hot afternoons and protecting them from dogs, cows and buffaloes. The only equation Gorghy has ever known is of love. And he does bring the lilies in his hut sometimes … sometimes …

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Reflections: The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson

The Darjeeling Limited (Image source: IMDB)

The only reason why I watched this one was that the title had Darjeeling in it; the movie on the contrary had none of it. This is a story of three brothers uniting in India for a spiritual journey after they have lost their dad and their mother has started behaving like an ascetic – away from the world in the hills of the Himalayas. Francis (Owen Wilson) is the eldest and takes the lead in uniting them and has planned out an itinerary with the help of his assistant who suffers from a disease which has made him bald.

The trip starts with an old man alighting from a taxi and running to catch his train while Peter (Andrien Brody) is also trying to do the same; Peter succeeds; the old man not so much. Peter joins his two brothers in Darjeeling Limited as they set off for a re-invigoration. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) falls for the stewardess Rita (Amara Karan), and has sex with her in the bath of the train. A series of Indian follies happen ultimately leading to them being thrown off the train and as they continue their journey they happen to save two drowning kids while couldn’t save the third one. The father of the third child (Irfan Khan – I refuse to put that extra ‘r’) performs the last rites and the brothers finally attend a funeral which takes them back to their father’s funeral experience. Their mother hadn’t attended his funeral. All of the brothers are disappointed that none of their plans are working out but more so Francis. They finally do meet their mother and head to the airport to board a flight back into their lives but something still haunts them and they tear off their boarding passes at the stairs of the flight and embark on their unfinished spiritual pilgrimage to rediscover themselves.

The concept was interesting and could have been woven into a much better story than it was – honestly it was a disappointment. However, however, it wasn’t a complete letdown either. Lot of the scenes are breathtaking – a particular sequence which shows the panning out from the village where the brothers are during the funeral to Rita in the train to Jack’s girlfriend to Peter’s wife and finally to a tiger who was said to be killing people in areas nearby to their mother’s place of stay. But above all, the charm of the movie was its music (even though lot of it was borrowed). By music I mean the Indian one; the western one didn’t even register. In the order of the most mesmerizing one: “Arrival in Benares” from The Guru (music by Ustad Vilayat Khan), “Title Music” from Satyajit Ray‘s Teen Kanya, “Charu’s Theme” from Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata and “Title Music” from the film Bombay Talkie (music by Shankar Jaikishan). When the aforementioned titles are heard in a never ending loop the state of trance can’t be far away.

Most of the film was shot in Rajasthan as evident from the locales and from the iconic blue colored homes in Jodhpur. By the way, there isn’t any train by the name of Darjeeling Limited in India.

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Review: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

.,;’!?-¿‽

      The above nine punctuations summarize this witty and enjoyable book.

  

   THISSTYLEOFWRITINGWASPREVALENTBEFORETHEMODERNFORMTOOKOVER. It is called Scriptio continua. Does that interest you? Read on.

     Just around two weeks ago somebody had sent me a joke about a panda that walked into a bar and “ate, shot and left”. And though, I found it later, it had been quite an old joke but it did amuse me. Yesterday I walked into a library and spotted a tiny hardbound (or should it be hard-bound?) yellow book with the title: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. My synapse did register a flurry of activity and I was left with no option but to immediately issue it and read it in two sittings. Though I would love to be a stickler (not ‘stickler’) like Lynne Truss but my own not-so-intentional ignorance of grammatical aptitude and shabbiness towards language solecism have led me down a worm-hole of mistakes.

     This book isn’t your regular Wren & Martin English Grammar book which would go on and on about seventeen rules of comma – yes, that is true! – with drab uncles-and-aunts examples. At the same time it isn’t a replacement for the former either. Lynne starts with how punctuation standards are falling sentence by sentence and making people like her fall over. How many of you knew that Two Weeks Notice is wrong? It’s Two Weeks’ Notice. And do you sometimes wonder whether “its” or “it’s” should be used? If yes then you should read this and if not then you must read this. It’s a journey not only about the origins of the dot, comma, colon, semi-colon, question mark, and the exclamation mark but also about the funnier stories involving Shaw, Bard of Avon and Hemingway and the never ending fights between authors and editors. (Did you notice the comma after ‘question mark’? That’s the Oxfordstyle. And the indented paragraphs of this blog? Ah! Yes – it’s only because of her 🙂 . She would kill me for that smiley; happily)

(L) Lynne – the stickler – on a mission; (R) The Panda: Eats Shoots & Shoots

     She explains the reasons for which each one was invented and how over the centuries the usage has changed and what the future might hold for them (no punctuations she surmises!). Her writing style is humorous and engaging and made me laugh out loud. Believe me on that! Sample the following sentence by her when writing about colons and semicolons: They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop. Only Paul Johnson apart from her has given such literary pleasures to me in recent times.

     Writers who aspire to write not just correctly but in a style which catches hold of the reader’s attention should grab a copy. In only two-hundred-four pages Lynne has brought out the travesty of today’s communication standards in the wake of mails, text messages and smileys (Microsoft Word is suggesting smiley’s to me here). If Lynne were to read this review she surely would fall over and roll over couple of times for the punctilious blasphemies I must have committed in writing it.

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Autobiography of a dead Squirrel

Squeak. Squeak.

Ah! Don’t be so surprised to hear this sound. It’s only me, the squirrel. Yes, a little down here, right in front of you. Don’t move too fast lest you want to scare me. But even if you want to, it is tough to run away as I have become old. My home is right up there, up in this large trunk tree behind me. It is winter time and gets quite lonely without any company. I just came down to search for some food which is hard to come by nowadays. The family that used to stay in this home right besides the tree has left – left for bad, yeah bad because since then I have never been stomach full of nuts, bread and biscuits. An old lady was the last of the family who…wait…haven’t seen you earlier here. What brought you here? Are you from around? Please tell me you are going to stay in this home now on and will feed me! Do you have any stuff in your pockets for me? Maybe you can’t understand a thing of what I am saying.

Yes, so I was saying that an old lady was the last of the family members who lived here. They took her away couple of months ago in a white colored bus with a red colored cross on it. It made a strange whistling sound. Don’t know why she was taken away. She was the one who used to feed me three times a day – regularly! In the morning it was always milk and biscuits in the white colored saucepan there..there…right besides the window…oh! Can’t you see it? Your eyesight seems to be weak…unlike that of my old white-haired friend who fed me. She could spot me from quite a distance when I used to fly around the branches to get my daily dose of exercise. You know how important it is to exercise daily, right? You’ve got to do something about that paunch coming out of your pullover. So yes, where was I? Yeah, my afternoon food. Afternoons were for soaked bread. And sometimes she used to keep the ones having grains in them – oh I used to devour them! I miss her. I wonder how she must be keeping without me. Yes, without me. For I was one who used to make her walk around the garden…always in front of her and making sure that no other insects or squirrels distract her. And the evenings were filled with nuts of all varieties and sizes. See, she really understood me well and my needs. Rather, we understood each other quite well.

Squeak. Squeak. Are you there? You don’t seem to react at all. Maybe you don’t understand me. Do you?

There is nobody to understand me in this ocean of emptiness and makes me wonder whether God is even aware of my existence! Though He has been very grateful to provide me the pleasures of this garden and my dear old friend, but of lately he seems to be doing nothing. Is He too busy for me? Or is it because I have grown older? And unattractive? That younger one across the road is always munching on something or the other. Maybe she is attracting Him with her youth.

As the green gives way to brown all around,
My penance – is it not enough to smother my life lovelorn?
Thoughts and winter is all that surround,
Nuts and milk are gone with my feet roughly worn

 

 

Life is lonely up there. But it wasn’t always like this. I was born deaf and mute. Yes, deaf and mute. Just like you are right now. What’s so surprising – that is how we squirrels are born. We were a lot of them, me, my brothers and sisters. All of them went away in the nearby areas. They do however come sometimes to visit me, but not as often as I would want them to. It was my old friend who tended to both of us here. And she even used to take us in her home during heavy rains. Her home used to be very cozy and warm. Now it is all cold and dusty. How do I know? Oh, please don’t think wrongly of me. There is a tiny hole I have made in the exhaust grill. However that home suffocates me with nothing inside it but little furniture strewn here and there. Few years ago my mother had crossed the road to meet a friend of hers and on her way back through that treacherous road and Buzo, that heartless godforsaken wild cat, caught hold of her and ate her. I saw it all from my nest. He took her in his mouth and ran towards the bushes and disappeared. After that I never saw her. I wish I could somehow take my revenge on Buzo but don’t know how to – he is so big!

There is no point now of conspiring and evil deeds. I have grown old now. I have forgiven my enemies and forgotten my friends. Squeak! Squeak! Let’s not get too emotional here. Talking of good times – my old friend used to take me inside her home and I used to watch this colorful lively box in her drawing room. I remember seeing my own kind in that box. However, they were happy and frolicking inside that box – were they never suffocated? When I saw them for the first time I thought for a moment she was going to put me in the box as well. But she never did. You see, she loved me the most.

But where is love to be found in this winter? The trees have become so dry and lifeless. Grass has withered away and the tap hardly leaks now leaving me with little water for the day. In fact last week on a particular day I was so thirsty that I had to cross the road and go over in the territory of that younger squirrel. Oh, I hate her so much. She thinks she owns the place. Nevertheless, I sneaked into the backyard of that house and quenched my thirst. She was nowhere to be seen. And on my way back, I saw that same mean Buzo – sprawled across the garden and basking in the sunlight. Though I had little time on my hands, I stopped for a moment to give him a good stare. On way back, across that maddening road I almost got run over. Yeah, the incessant rush of the cars is too difficult and too random to predict.

So apart from standing and staring at me are you going to do anything? I won’t mind at all if you are kind enough to give me food for the next few weeks. But only for the next few weeks as winter would have ended by then. My old friend used to hate winters – she could be heard shouting and crying a lot of times. Maybe her aged joints hurt. When they were taking away she was crying like a baby – had to be held and supported till she entered that white bus. She never returned back. Why have people whom I have loved the most never returned back after crossing that road? I myself haven’t crossed that road too often fearing for my own life. Who knows what bad omens haunt life across that road.

The sun has set and it’s getting darker now. Will you be staying back with me for some time? Till the morning? Don’t know how to convince you to come here more often. I can strangely feel myself becoming weaker not just with everyday but right now with every word I speak. Anyways, it’s been long since I have been talking to you and you haven’t really responded much. Guess, life is lonely down…down..ahh….oh…squeak…sque…ch..psch…