three uplifting experiences

Today is a perfectly cold day here in Delhi. The kind of day that forces you to stay indoors and go out only for works you can no longer put off. As is my wont, I finished some paperworks for which today was the last possible day. Mercifully, people at my center and school know my nerdy ways well enough to tolerate my tantrums, so much so that they now laugh at it, more than I do myself. It is for these compassionate men and women that I still survive in this perfectly systematic world with my systematically unsystematized character and conducts, and I cannot thank them enough. You must meet the staff at my perfectly filmi center and you'll wonder how these people can be so efficient and still smile so much, and why they have not yet kicked me out for good.

We are made to stand in a queue only once in six months. A pity because it is in the queue today that I met Mr. Sujit Bose. Mr. Bose has a spine disorder of some kind, making him unable to keep standing for long. Surprisingly, nobody noticed his difficulty and he kept fidgeting but not even once asked or tried to break the queue. Gallery player that I am, I decided to hold his hand and take him right up to the fees counter, asking the prettily dressed girls to make way for him to clear his dues, which to their credit, they did. The clerks, too, cooperated, and Mr. Bose's job was done in a minute and he was free to go. On his way back, Mr. Bose pressed my hand warmly and thanked, but I forgot to ask him for his phone number. In the bargain, I almost missed a chance to make a new friend and demand to be called over for lunch, for I love my food more than anything else. Mercifully though, I have seen, in his papers, the address of his home and rest assured I am going to drop uninvited one of these days. You see I have no other option to tap him anyway, and I don't much care for manners. This self trumpeting is not so much to advertise my public spiritedness, but to ask everyone else to call me over for lunch. Now what is so wrong with that? I can't cook well, so I beg to be treated with good food, and am even ready to pay for it. By the time you all become disgusted with my relentless requests, I'll have learnt to cook, I promise.

Two more such incidents followed, one after another. I had a look at Times of India, and came across a most heartwarming piece of news. The residents of a village called Tajnagar near Gurgaon has bulit, entirely at their own expense, a whole railway station. They failed to persuade the railways authorities to install a station and had to walk or cycle six long miles to reach the nearest railway station. Two years ago they decided enough is enough and these humble agriculturists pulled in as much as 21 lakhs of Rupess and it took two years to build this new monument of love for themselves. The railways most readily agreed to halt seven trains to and fro at this new station with effect from next week.

I was deeply moved by the story, and am glad that Times of India is highlighting these achievements of ordinary men and women. We in India have a tendency to blame everything that is wrong with us to the government and politicians and do nothing for ourselves. The welfare state is a great idea and it must deliver. However, we just cannot wait for the state to do everything for those who can jolly well do it themselves. There is a word for it-entrepreneurship as also enterprise. This model does not pick a fight with the state, nor does it spare it relevant criticism. However, it is also ready to share the state's burden, and it is high time the more enlightened and enterprising among us start emulating the example of these humble farmers. They have much more to teach us in humility and enterprise than our schools and colleges and friends and so on. They teach us common sense and doabilty. They teach us to have faith in ourselves. I plan to visit Tajnagar shortly and those of you who are interested please join me. We owe these men and women a warm tribute.

Finally, in the evening I discovered a wonderfully calm and exciting song from the 1971 Hindi movie Anubhav-Koi Chup ke aake sapna shulake mujhko jaagaake bole main aa raha hoon. Geeta Dutt, Gulzaar, Kanu Ray-a combination that most of us have not heard much about but then it is never too late to get to know good things, isn't it? The song captures-let me borrow from Naipaul-an enigma of arrival, in a very different sense of course. It is melodious, soft, silken, exceedingly nostalgic and yet full of anticipation, promise yet somewhere very firmly controlled and regulated according to a rhyme and rhythm that I cannot fully comprehend but only sense from a distance, transfixed. The tune is relaxed, slow but but not sloth, and intensely sensual, and I have only rarely come across such self assured, relaxed sensuality, something that openly avows desire yet knows that desire for its own sake can also be a lovely desire, without its necessary culmination into the possession of the desired objective. It's this celebration of the desire of the moment, this unbridled longing for the lost and the promised at the same time, that I find nobody voices better than Geeta Dutt. With Asha Bhosle it is unabashed joy, and with Lata Mangeshkar it is pure serenity, but neither gives me the complexity that Geeta Dutt's voice does. I wonder why Guru and Geeta Dutt could not pull together. To me they look like a match made in heaven!

I'll now tell you why. Heaven only makes matches, we make them work here on earth. Be that as it may, I wonder what links up these three sublime experiences of mine today. One, they gave me joy and taught me that we can do many things that we never thought we are capable of, if and when the situation so demands. We are all essentially extraordinary people, we can build railway stations and sing into being experiences and emotions that sometimes the best and the most famous in the business cannot. They teach me to celebrate being myself. I say they made it such a warm day today.