Sorry if I sound a bit jumbled and jaded. I am. Three weeks into a delirious detour, owing to a diabolic conspiracy of disease, doctors and drugs, does that to you, even if you are not a self-obsessed slouch. Imagine the plight of all-important writers out to change the world but slung up like a raincoat in summer while so much is happening all around! A safe distance from the readers for a few weeks was what the doctor ordered (safe for readers too, according to some sly comments). But that forbidden act, at the risk of mixing the events in the medicine-induced and the waking states, seemed the best therapy to break the mould of terminal boredom and also to keep at bay the gathering armies of mental ‘pests’. I mean, for instance, how can I sit idle when Raja is taking the stand?
Praise the wise bird that described the idle mind as a devil’s workshop. Must have been a master idler himself with the devil as a busy tenant. Also surely a literary genius, a philosopher or a lofty thinker from the endless list of useless, er, usual suspects like Socrates, Shakespeare, Confucius, Bernard Shah or B. Russel. You can put it to my name if you can’t google out the anonymous author. I mean, it feels quite nice to tag yourself to a gem like that. But the point is, what tricks the mind can play when you are bound up just for a few days! Now match that with Raja who has been idling in Tihar for well over eight months and you can figure out the fertile flow of facts and fiction. Every Raja must have his day and the courtroom tales from this Raja make for some interesting listening. After all, Tihar’s richest idler was ferociously busy in his ministerial days selling spectrum and the nation is itching to know his co-sellers and the profit sharing ratios officially. Forget Raja’s claim that he could not have done such a mega deal without ‘bigger’ blessings. It was obvious right from even before the scam was enacted that the Hon, honest PM and super-smart FM were quite update on Raja’s every move and could have easily called a halt but strangely did not! Now, with the chief conspirator himself crying foul and willing to howl, if still the PM and former FM are kept off the courts, then it is justice that is idling. So that the ruling devils can destroy the remains of the national workshop. Ouch, that really hurts!
It was July 13. Jihadis were having a blast bombing Bombay and media barons from Marans to Murdoch were in the dock. The week was turning out to be quite juicy for a starved columnist. The verbal adrenaline probably then hit a tipping point and I went blank only to wake up a few hours later amidst a maze of wires and white sheets! The article for the week was indeed ready in the mind. But a paralysed jaw put paid to my plans of being a ‘dictator’. A fractured right arm cut off access to the modern body’s most natural extension, laptop! The impotence hurt even more. Sensing my mental turmoil, the kindly doctor, with the clinical clarity and practised perfection of a professional, used to winding and unwinding mortal coils like the one now eyeing him suspiciously, said: ‘Don’t think you are indispensable. Better still, don’t think at all’! And saying so, he knocked me off with a tiny tablet. He probably never read anything beyond medical journals. Twelve hours later, not only had the world managed to survive without me, but there was the latest issue of this monstrous Talk staring at me, minus me! Aah, how we tickle our egos, become convinced of our own worth and then surreptitiously wipe that tell-tale mud off our moustaches when fate puts us in place. There’s a K in each one of us. Indeed, the next week, my dispensability and impotence were easier to swallow!
I survived July 13. While many unlucky ones did not in Mumbai, there was however another survivor of that fateful day: Home Minister PC. While his FM days came back to haunt, courtesy Raja, the blasts made nary a dent on his ministerial credentials. On the contrary, even before the blood of Mumbai victims had dried, this man nonchalantly went about diluting the nation’s cause and case against those blood-spilling jihadis by talking of right-wing terror just to defend himself against charges levelled, not by the ‘right wing’ opposition, but by an all knowing former colleague eager to spill the beans. For that matter, in less than a week the Mumbai attack was already distant history with none in the political spectrum tuned in. The impotence of UPA 2 is glaring and its obvious dispensability a matter of urgent action. Indeed, voters must turn Docs and serve the bitter pill to pack off this pack of parasites for the unpardonable sin of putting the nation permanently in ICU in just seven years flat. Only Yeddy of BJP is anywhere close to breaking that record.
Like a UPA minister, I too have poached public space for private purposes. But I warned that I would be shuffling dreamily between the personal and public realms. Modern medicine doze your senses. Medical bills daze you even more. Pardon me for digressing but I was making the point that a touch of personal cannot be avoided in any public discourse. The two worlds are seamless. From a philosophical angle, no individual’s experience is new to humanity as a whole and every misery has a precedent. On the phenomenal plane of worldly power and pelf the personal is the prism through which we perceive the public happenings and develop perspectives. At some stage these personal viewpoints converge to become public opinion, however abstract it might seem. Man is always a political animal and all political animals make up this public space. Still, in India, in the socialist milieu till eighties, there was an insular wall between ruler and ruled, intended to make policy-making opaque but which also made corruption an accepted privilege of the governing elite. Bofors was more about corruption in ‘high places’ and Italian connections. The new zenith of Rs 64 cr was deemed a national loss, not a personal one.
Post liberalisation, those walls have crumbled. Policy is now the preserve of all thanks to market economy and media. So a national corruption scandal like 2G makes every citizen feel his own pocket has been picked. The pique is even more pronounced when a suit-clad snob from the RBI tells you that from tomorrow you will have to shell out a few more thousands on all those housing, vehicle and consumer loans that were thrust on you so that 9% growth can be ‘shown’. Only those well-paid statistical monsters can explain how growth has overnight gone out of fashion! Now, can we, who toil for our every rupee, be blamed for bemoaning that the lost 2G billions could have averted these big holes in our pockets?
Now, where am I? Into another of those passing-out charades? Things looked crazy and nasty even without those mind-numbing drugs that the doctor dumped into me. Or may be, they are actually a good albeit temporary escape. But there was something else he prescribed, that seems to make more sense: Nil thought! For, what happens happens, come what. One is powerless. Now, such abjection is a tad sad. But brooding over the bad only makes you mad!
e-mail the writer at [email protected]