I belong to a place...

Where people actively try to brain others if those unfortunate others display the slightest hint of homophobia. They go after them with verbal pitchforks and try to kill them for being 'unnatural', blackball them for having the thoughts of an average human being not really exposed to the core of same-sex relationship.

And I personally detest those people for deliberately terrorizing in order to suppress their own dubious feeling about the matter, thanks to which they scream for legalizing same-sex relationships; while at the other hand, if someone who is allegedly homosexual communicates with another member of his/her own sex, then immediately he/she is accused of hitting on someone.

I somehow detest the attitude of apparent free-spiritedness, which underlies a mean-minded, narrow, vicious attitude which I find insincere and confused, to use polite terms.

Bigotry seems to be set everywhere.

I used to love running when I was a kid.

It was one of the things I was good at.

Then came asthma, rattling coughs and wheezes, and those moments of the wind tearing through my hair stopped.

I love car rides. I can put my head out of the window and watch the world rush by.

I wanted to run. Once. Away away away.

But then, there was that asthma again.

Sometimes I wonder if I hide behind it or not.

Sometimes I know I do. Not sure of the certainties of it all.

And there's this part, and I know I would love to run again. But what to do when my will to run is lost? What to do when I realize that this whole time I was wishing to run, I was trying to talk myself in circles and coming back to where I came from?

Something is wrong here. Something is wrong.

This road wasn't supposed to circle. It was supposed to open out. Where did I go wrong?

Righteous Outrage

The state has finally lost it. I mean this as a small post where I lament the fact that our intellectual heads are somehow deep in the murky depth of dense misunderstanding which hinders us from moving forward.

I think I have to say it because I see thousands of people poring over their TV channels, trying to explain how the BUDDHIJIBI people of West Bengal are telling the whole world that "people from the location" say that the Police is brutal and are attacking us", completely overlooking the point that these so-called people are all part of those who are fighting the forces, the perpetrator of the cruelties that has not only been the part and parcel of the place over the last eight months, but for the last four years.

And the worst bit is, what these idiots do not understand is that any moment one of those people of the village can come and take one of them (or all of them) hostage and demand safe passage.

Not that the world would mind the loss of some of those.

When I was Ten

I had a cousin who'd follow me around like a little lost lamb saying "Fun-di" because he could not pronounce my name. I used to spend summer vacations with my kid cousin trying to teach him to catch flies and burp. Not elegant, certainly... but I was never very elegant in the first place. We would go up to the roof with a handful of stolen pickles and sit together with other cousins of mine, all older, and play fierce games of hide-and-seek (I ended up with a bloody nose once... so there!) and Ludo. He was too young to play Ludo so he was always on my side.

When I was Fourteen we realized my cousin was not like other kids. He was different. Because at Six, he could not do things which boys of Three could do. Slowly we discovered that he had Ataxia, a form of Cerebral Palsy, and he was, what can be commonly called, Spastic.

He never gave up. He had a problem with balance and eye movement but he was smart and studied privately and we were teaching him things to do. He had worked and studied, and began to listen to books being read out to him.

He almost made it.

But well, life was not really very sympathetic. Five months after his 18th birthday, his kidneys gave way, and he went into a coma. The doctor discreetly told us that it was very difficult to find a kidney donor for an abnormal boy.

Last night he died. His heart could not take it.

Everyone was saying what a relief it was. For him and his parents. The burden finally released.

Through the blind haze of pain, I just walked out of my filthy house.