The New Year Prayer

These are bad times gentleman, the world seems to be to frail a place to live in. For a second it did seem that the Hollywood proclaimed Mayan prophecy was right after all, with impending social doom resonating from all cardinal directions. At times we feel bereft of all sanity, such is the hope and happiness of today, jaded and desolate. 

But every year is a new year, every beginning a new beginning and though the horizon looks bleak now we can hope and we can believe that a time of bliss will unfold. We can hope for a day the world's women can walk freely without the fear of cannibals, we can believe in a day when the children of Haiti can eat a full meal and smile their innocent smiles. We can dream of an era sans guns and bombs where all men can sleep peacefully. We can believe in a tomorrow that is worthy of humanity and is bright and colorful as the world of fairy tales  This friends is my wish and prayer for the year to come.

HAPPY NEW YEAR FRIENDS

Simple and Sensible : Once Upon the Tracks of Mumbai - Rishi Vohra

The candid caricature of a bereft man, a man in the cusp of manhood, his dreams, ambitions and his frustrations. When through purely accidental circumstances he turns out to be the super hero that the metro was craving, it means an opportunity for him to express himself for the first time in front of a society that has for so long ignored his existence. Rishi Vohra's Once upon the tracks of Mumbai is an inquiry into the mental dilemmas of such a man.

It is only true that occasionally we discover ourselves and rediscover ourselves in this master work of his. The truth being that Railman is just as identifiable to me as I am to me. Every teen who has had his heart long for justice in these troubled times has a Railman inside him who goes around kicking the ass of those villains. But when Babloo finds himself becoming Railman, he experiences an acceptance the society was unwilling to give his true self, making him believe that being Railman was the reason for his being. The fall of his ideal being causes much confusion that poor Babloo finds baffling.

The story of how Babloo deals with all the problems of his life, from love to social acceptance and the moment of clarity that he experiences teaches us more about us than about Babloo. In a way Once upon the tracks of Mumbai is more about self than anything else. A good book, simple and sensible is a book worth reading and has a small feel good factor about it. Hence Rishi Vohra's Once upon the tracks of Mumbai is an official Rupertt wind recommendation.

50 Books in 2012

I Read 50 books in 2012, Yes baby, FIFTY. And thanks to Goodreads.com, I have been able to keep track of it.

I took upon the challenge in July, so I was trailing by a big margin. actually huge is the word. But somehow I made it. I must be thanking good reads for rekindling my love for the dusty pages. :)

You must all try The good reads challenge. It would do you a ton of good.

So there goes the list of the fifty books I so voraciously consumed.

Rupertt's bookshelf: read Rupertt Wind's favorite books »

Bang Bang, Gang Bang

Okay, this is not a porn site. So all those who came here looking for a quick wack and something cheesy, just go back from where ever you have come. If you are still sticking around, then don't be disappointed at the end, if you are then I will have to go all "I told you so" on you. Though I don't hate doing it, I am sure you would. So that's brings us to the questions " what's with the cheesy title? Rupertt". I thought this would give me a few extra pageviews. Just kidding... The real reason is that's what I wanted to do when I heard of the gang rapes in Delhi, go all bang bang on the gang bangers.

I am pretty sure that most of you have heard something or the other about these gruesome incidents in the Indian capital. For those who, who hasn't, I will give a quick recap. A girl was traveling in a bus with her male friend, her boyfriend, colleague, just friend I don't know, not the point here though. So the bus also had some shady characters in it, starting with the bus driver and extending to a couple of passengers. So they starts taunting her, the male friend interjects. He gets beaten up ( awesome guts dude ) and then they go on to rape her and later dumps them some place. Sorry, I can't give a blow by blow account of what happened, principally because I don't know. But if you need to know just Google "Delhi gang rapes", it's huge news you can't miss it.

It is not actually breaking news that the Indian youth is sex starved, yes prejudiced mothers your son and daughter are too. I just exited teen age statistically, I know all the less than civil fantasies that rampage their tender minds, all because I harbor them too. I know how dangerous their intentions can be, because I know how dangerous mine is. I am not your occasional rapist, I wouldn't do that or so I believe. Even if I don't trust my intentions, I trust my upbringing and I have all faith in my rationale. But the point is this if I harbor such infidel thoughts, what would a less disciplined mind house, I can only guess with much terror.

What we must investigate is the root cause of all this evil, okay proprietors of child marriage, wait! You are not helping. We must try to understand the sexual need of today, I can tell you that it does not one bit good to look upon today's sexuality with the conservative eyes of yesterday. Today's youth knows more of sexuality than you would know in a lifetime. The progressive Indian teen who is exposed to the freedom of sexual expressionism prevalent in the western way of life cultivates in him a desire for such freedom. Freedom once tasted leaves a hangover spanning a lifetime and inculcates a strong desire to achieve it. This desire when suppressed by the Indian way of life and it's taboos does what a pressure cooker does to its contents. Some become submissive others rebel.

But even when that underlines the injudicious way the teenage India's mind works, it still does not justify its misdemeanors. It is not supposed. What I stated is not a justification but a problem and its anatomy. What we need to do to counter such onslaught of civil and cultural unrest is what we have to look into. One may argue for more stringent punishment for these vile creatures. It sure will serve as a better deterrent but doesn't really solve the problem does it? Even with the surety of death penalty men will continue to rape women, because they don't think when they rape they just do.


What we should do is not for me to offer with my limited intelligence on bureaucratic red-tap-ism in India. but what I tend to offer as a possibility is what I feel is necessary for the next generation of citizens to know what they hold in terms of civil and civilian responsibilities. I believe a strong and compulsory session must be there in the upper school years when the children are at the most vulnerable from their own sexuality. It is a matter of utmost importance that a teenager be made to understand his sexuality and realize that it is not a taboo. The banner of taboo-ism must at all cost be eliminated from the society so that they wont end up doing shady things in their pursuit of sexual liberty. 


I know I don't have much to offer in curbing the criminality in today's men, but I think a safer world for women can be created by tendering to the children who would soon take over this world from us. We have to make them understand that the other gender is to be respected and acknowledged and not to be looked down upon. This must go either way to ensure that we have a new India when gender equality is predominant and is an underlining principle of its existence.

The art of letting go

I have heard people mention several a times that the whole point of life was to let go of it, piece by piece and person by person. To gain many a things through hard labour and then silently watch it being squandered away. The withering away is to life what ever birth and growth will ever be, in fact it is more to life than birth would be. It is what completes and fulfils life. It is the final act of redemption, the last nuance of liberation.

A wise man had once said that a man starts to die the moment he is born, that his life is but a eventful journey to his grave. But life is more than the slow withering away, isn't it? Life is not the indeterminate decaying of self, it is not a subtle dance to death.

During the short tenancy upon this earth it is true that we must at many times learn to let go. Every time something dear and near to us dematerializes, one has to cope survive the vast vacuum it leaves behind. But always the real challenge is to acknowledge it's transiency, even when one knows what that is lost is lost and no longer ones to cry over. The real challenge is to accept that something's no more and no longer worth saddening over.

Hence the art of letting go remains the final art to master. Why we find it so difficult to grasp, must come from the fact that we had all our lives tried to for go the truth and establish its permanence. We always believe that what we have will remain, we always believe that our grandfather who is 95 now and sick over a decade will never die. Thus with futile belief we make a facet and wear it so often that it becomes an integral part of us. It is with attachment that we wield our life and this is the cause of all our great fears.

To learn to let go one must understand that life is more than these bonds. I make no claim of afterlife and nor of some superior understanding of the spiritual realm, all I know is this one life and all my assumptions stems from a need to understand it. When all you have is just one life, it seems inexplicably expensive to waste it in any way. The truth about letting go is hence very selfish in natural. To let go is to take upon one's life a responsibility of one's life, to live it with a greed beyond compare.

The guru granth sahib asks us to celebrate the mystic reunion and not to be sad in the final absolution of a dear one's existence. But to let go is not always about death, more dreadful is it when we have to let go of someone on our own and is not forced upon us. They are by all means necessary and though not as imposing as death may be are still very much necessary. The act of some one leaving for good, not so much as bothering to say farewell is deafening to the soul. Yet you know very well that it is just as necessary.

I pretend not to preach but yet the alien perfection betrays my pretensions  What ever it may be and however I say it, the truth about letting go is simple, you simply have to. The art of letting go is hence simple as well,  at least in principle. The art of letting go is to refrain from clutching on, it is to let go with entirety and not to force upon one's self the separation. To Let the tide of time unite and dissociate at will. That is the art of letting go.