Window to the Past

There are only two kinds of people in this world,
1. Those who tell you "Forget it, it was'nt meant to be" and
2. Those who tell you "You didnt try hard enough".

I wonder what is right and then again I wish I did'nt think so much.

Aah! I am feeling terrible, I can’t have the one thing I love the most...Pani puri. Yes! I can’t begin to tell you how much I love it and especially the ones on the thelas, sold by the road side. Dad strongly disapproves, but I just can’t get myself to stop. Every time I see the Bhaiya's cart on Park Lane, I am drawn towards it by some unseen divine force. But like always, I have been terribly disappointed with this affair too.
I have a terrible stomach upset and have been on khichdi and curd rice for the past two days. Aargh. I have been advised to be abstinent and avoid eating unless I am terribly hungry, and if and when I do eat, it better be in small dozes. Now this is something I don’t like, I am a die hard foodie and restricting myself to limited quantities of khichdi is terrible, and whats more I can’t even think about having Maggi! I don’t know how many of you have ever experienced this, but there are times when you are so damn hungry that even water hurts the bottom of your stomach.

It was my usual Sunday, I generally spend the entire morning cleaning and scrubbing the place. It's insane; I forget all about food and everything else until I am done. It’s this crazy obsession about having the place speckless. Ya, it’s exactly like Monica in FRIENDS. Anyway, while I was on my usual binge, I sat down for a while quenching my thirst when, it happened again and I was transported back in time, a long time back.
When we were kids, the only two places that would feature on our itinerary for the summer break were my Nani's and Dadi's place. We went no where else. While Nani lived in Calcutta, Dada and Dadi lived and still do in a village in Bihar, Kharenda. Now it's not like the villages in South India where you have proper roads, electricity, schools et al. In fact it’s exactly like the one portrayed in Swades. Kharenda definitely merits another post and it will feature on the blog soon. Anyway, I love that place and have had some wonderful moments there with cousins and family.

What I love most about country life is its serenity and purity, be it the food or the wind or the water, there is something that is beyond words, and so, I indulge, every time I go there I go crazy, all the rabri and mithai and what not. It was a time like this, I guess I must have been 8 and I can’t seem to remember what it was that time but I had my stomach all upset again, and had been on a diet control for some time. The memory has still not faded and I still can recapture it as vividly as ever.

It was pouring and we were all huddled up on the khatiya (cot) in the aangan(Veranda) and Dadi had just asked someone to get me a glass of lemon juice when I said, ‘No, pani se pet dukhta hai’, she looked at me as if I had lost it completely. And then suddenly the boy sitting next to us on the bench, the cook’s son, says “Humko pata hai, aisa hota hai, jab bahut der tak khana nai mile to aisa hota hai ki pani bhi pet me lagta hai” (I know, it happens when one has’nt had anything to eat for a long time, even water hurts).

I was taken aback, I remember looking at the boy for a long time, he was lean, must have been 11 or 12 and had curious big eyes.

I remember thinking about him for a long time, thinking about what must have made him say that, how many times must he have felt like that. At 8, I looked healthier than him, although he was stronger because of the physical exercises, or so I believed then. I felt sad and suddenly the difference between us was too obvious.

As I look back now, I realize the difference. The difference didn’t lie in our life styles but in the way we lived them. As I recollect, he had said it with a smile, his innocence reflected in it and the smile remains etched in my memory, the naivety in it stays with me as a symbol of an innocent and pure childhood.

There is a lot of unpleasantness that life inflicts upon us and we continuously try to look for ways to escape it. What if we just took a lesson from ourselves, a leaf out of our own childhood and learn to deal with it as it is, simply and naturally. Why curse and blame, why try to run and escape, when all you need to do is, face it, and accept the reality not as a deviation from normalcy but as natural as life can get.

The curious big eyes and guileless smile still remain, deep in the crevices of my memory and do seem to find their way to the top whenever I get bogged down by the ‘life sucks’ syndrome and need a reminding of how beautiful the experience of life can get.

Ask me what I want to be and you would have the answer even before you finish the sentence. I want to be a five year old. Yes you heard it right, I want to be a reckless, thoughtless and carefree five year old all my life. Although some of my friends would laugh and say "So typical of Meghna to say that, afterall all three year olds want to grow up!” But seriously wasn’t childhood the best thing that happened to all of us? (Well, almost all and I deeply sympathise with the unfortunate few who were denied it), I remember feeling happy on seeing a heap of sand and running towards it to reach there first and sit right at the top, I remember playing stupid games, I remember having lots of friends to play with all the time but what I don’t remember is where they came from. I never tried to find out whether they were Muslims or Hindus or Kashmiris or Tamilians or Dalits or Brahmans or poor or rich, nothing. The thought didn’t ever occur to me. During my formative years I lived at various places, in fact I have a record of changing my school every two years. In spite of this I never thought we could be called anything else apart from being called Indians. And I am not exaggerating when I say this.
In fact it was not until First grade that I was enlightened with the knowledge of being a Bihari, or so I am called. And this also was told to me only after I told my class teacher that I was a Marathi! Well what exactly happened was that we had a function in school and all of us were supposed to be dressed as brides and grooms from our respective states, the theme was to show the cultural diversity in India or something like that. So our teacher called us all and we were asked about our native place. When it was my turn I was totally zapped and told the teacher I didn’t know where I was from!! I remember her laugh and pinch my cheek gently (She thought I was a really cute dumb kid!). So she asked me where I lived before I came to Bangalore and I promptly and happily told her Aurangabad, Maharashtra (I was happy that I was at least able to answer that) and then she looked at my last name which was Pandey and she took it to be the 'Pande' or 'Des Pande' from Maharashtra and asked me to dress up as a Marathi bride for the show. I was happy to be chosen for a part in the play and went home to tell my mom. I then remember my mom laugh and pinch my cheek (apparently she and the teacher held the same opinion of me, my mom being a little sad about the dumb part though) and that’s when she told me I was a Bihari. I wonder what Raj Thackeray has to say that.
The recent events in Mumbai make me think as to where I belong. I always thought there is no place like India and I knew for sure that no matter where I go, I would never feel out of place throughout the peninsula, be it Ladakh or Guwahati. I always thought that nothing could ever replace the warmth and love that I find in my country, not money and not the standard of living that people talk about, nothing. But I was wrong, I was terribly wrong. Throughout my life I have seen my country fight over religion, over ethnic differences, over languages, over rivers, over caste disparities within religions and now over cities. Where does all this lead to? Do the so called leaders know what they are doing when they continuously come up with new ways of ramifying the society? I do not see a nation grow while its states operate as individual entities in isolation, what is the purpose of being called a nation after all? Anyway even if that’s the case where do people like me go, which state do we call our own? I don’t even know how to find my way back home from the railway station in Bihar, how then do I call it home.

As far as the criticism against Amitabh Bachchan, about not giving back to Mumbai is concerned, well I didn’t complain when Nagma's bhojpuri movies topped the charts and she went around with Sourav Ganguly( a Bengali) instead of Manoj Tiwari, now come'on she should give back to the bhojpuri community by marrying into it only and thus look for prospective grooms only within the community, or when Madhavan migrated down south to do Tamil cinema instead of giving back to Jharkhand, which was outrageous as he did his schooling there while depriving the native Jharkhandi children of their right to education. As per the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Madhavan should have definitely done Bhojpuri cinema and entertained the Biharis, what say Raj? But if Raj Thackeray knows what he is doing and if he thinks all this will solve the problem of unemployment in his state and thus make India more self sufficient then I believe he should be given an opportunity to prove his point. Let him come out with his strategy, the facts and the figures, let him explain how the native Maharashtrians are deprived of their livelihood while the bhaiyas peacefully drive their taxis and how many of these deprived will actually have the resources to buy a taxi when there aren’t any more migrants in the state, or does Raj plan to do some charity here to provide employment to his people? The other issue that was raised in Mumbai to support their claim was that the Bhaiyas are not well behaved....Ahem Ahem.....well I dont think I should even start on that, its one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard and that’s all I'll say about that.
Well I guess the problem is not just in Maharashtra. The recent events in Mumbai do remind us of the incidents that took place in the North East. So much for India talking about globalization, global integration and inter dependence while its leaders talk about internal isolation and disintegration. The people in Andhra also talk about a new state. Looks like throughout our 60 years of independence we spoke so much and for so long about the 'Diversity and Variety in India' that now we always fail to see a common ground. As CNN IBN rightly puts it, “Whose city is it anyway”?