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The lonely wisdom tooth in my mouth hurts a bit. On and off. Last year, my ordeal with my dentist lasted about four months. By the end of it, I had lost three teeth, gained a dental tap and long nights of suffering. The thing about your mouth is it has earned its place amongst the body parts. Maybe because it is the loudest. Maybe because it check-points the food. Could be anything but the truth is when your mouth is in pain, your entire body pays attention. If your leg is hurt, you can put it on the table and the rest of the body can carry on as if nothing happened. Not with your mouth. Particularly not with your teeth. The tiny nerves at the root of your pre/molars have a direct line with your brain. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaouch.
It’s no mere coincidence that the noblest of professions aren’t given due importance. Whenever the media describes somebody as “eminent citizens”, you can notice that they generically exclude teachers, farmers, doctors and dentists of the world. People who actually run this world. People who don’t bask in the privileged sun of idealism. I’ve written enough about teachers, farmers and doctors so I’ll focus on dentists today. The pain in the back of my jaw orders me to. Although in the past, I’ve been guilty of making fun of the exorbitant expenses associated with dental professionals, I must add that they are no less in their service when compared to doctors. The running joke is that you become a dentist when you know you don’t have it in you to become a doctor. In other words, dentists are not proper doctors. At the end of the day, when your tooth is troubling you, these are nothing but jokes. Lame jokes, precisely. A dentist is the person who is willing to go where even your dearest of dears won’t: a kingdom inhabited by billions of bacteria. In fact, there are more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in this world. Moreover, those who live near your tongue are completely distinct from those who live on the roof of your mouth. And then you have the audacity to wonder — “How can my teeth decay?” Anyway, coming back to the undercelebrated heroes of our era, they poke into your disgusting mouth, with your saliva accumulating under your tongue, and do the needful. If these dentists weren’t around, you’d have had to go ahead with what Tom Hanks’ character had to in Cast Away (2000).
Why do we do what we do? Apart from what boredom makes us? There is a logical reason for every little thing we attempt. Even when we are lost in thoughts and don’t have a clue, we make a move with a purpose. Whether we manage to succeed is another story altogether. This is why the concept of ‘accident’ is, for lack of a finer word, accidental. It happened because so many factors contributed. It didn’t happen on its own, did it? If that had been the case, we’d be calling it a phenomenon or a freak show, not an accident. All these little nuggets point us towards the most redundant of all doubts: what is my purpose in life? For the record, here’s the answer you don’t need to read anytime soon: there is no singular purpose to being alive; we are here for a short blip hoping to stay distracted and then die unremembered.
One of the many things that has kept me glued to Gurgaon is our balcony garden. That tiny area has seen several changes in a relatively short period of time. From chili plants to cherry tomatoes, from tiny lemon tree to a huge chikoo tree, from letting creepers cover the entire ledge to seeing a sweet couple of laughing doves build a nest in the thick of the vines, from noticing a tulsi grow to witnessing its decline, the saga goes on and on. New characters replace the old ones every summer and rain. It’s amazing, to be frank. The green cover provides temporary relief to the gathering pigeons, mynahs, bulbuls, treepies and sunbirds. Yes, it demands labour of some sorts but it’s worth the drill — from watering plants every morning to removing weeds to aerating soil to feeding dried compost. A joint collaboration between water, weather, birds and I. Sometimes, I wonder why we look after our plants. It’s not that the balcony can’t do without them. In fact, there will be more space to walk around. But, no, plants appeal to a sacred voice in us. They remind us that we are fully capable of caring for something that doesn’t even ask us to care for it.
Like India, Turkey’s secular credentials were always dicey. How the Turkish state mistreated the Greeks and continues to mistreat the Kurds can tell us why the word ‘secular’ doesn’t really fit in. People on social media are waking up to the latest monolithic move by Erdogan: the decision to revert — a word hijacked by Islamists in recent memory — Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Interestingly, this monument has a long history, pushing back into pagan roots. But, if you’ve been following Turkish policies over the last 15 years, you shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, I am amused that Orhan Pamuk is expressing shock. According to him, Turkish claims on secularism are diminished by such a regressive decision. The irony here is, the majority of Turks don’t care about EU approval anymore. They’ve moved on in life. If anything, we’ll be witnessing more and more examples of ‘revertism’ in the near future. And not just from a faux-secular country like Turkey.
Speaking of architectural wonders of the past, there are always myths surrounding beauty. Without a layer of mystique, there is nothing worth appreciating. For instance, since childhood, I’ve heard the story of Shah Jahan ordering the chopping off of the workers who built the marble edifice in Agra. If you do the math here, it’s quite difficult to accept this version of the myth. Taj Mahal took about 16 years to complete. That’s a long time. A young man in his early 20s started working and was touching 40 by the end of the project. If the emperor indeed ordered his hands, it makes little practical sense on both ends: the emperor can simply publish a decree that they can’t replicate another magnificent structure — they wouldn’t dare disobey him anyway — and on the same route, there were already plans of creating a similar structure but in black — making you wonder why would you chop off the hands that you’ll be needing soon. My agreement lies in a slightly different reading of the myth. Perhaps, the phrase “chopped off their hands” meant that they were so richly compensated that they never had to work again.
One look at the political mess in our country and it’s easy to misunderstand its religious nature. The reason why false WhatsApp forwards spread so quickly is because they play with the recipient’s deep-rooted fears. A sense of insecurity that results from either abundance of fake history or lack of real future. When an ancient civilization like ours is in question, the recorded timeline falls short. What we know as our past is a hand-me-down from our colonizers. Unlike other countries with established identity, ours is a series of bastardized versions. We neither have the patience nor the wherewithal to study where we truly belong. As a result, we appear lost in the world of collective identities. Our principles are foreign and our values too. In a lot of ways, India’s existence is both a victory as well as a defeat. Success because in spite of testing circumstances, we are yet to disintegrate the way large lands like Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Pakistan did. Defeat because we are one on paper but continue to harbour the feeling of ‘otherness’ for those we don’t even try to acknowledge.
It’s 2020 and our generation calls out many societal ills — and rightly so — like patriarchy, casteism, nepotism, racism, etc. but we are far from calling out the hypocritical rat race between the two Abrahamic behemoths. The fact that Christianity and Islam perceive the non-adherents as target guinea pigs seems to be lost on the modern crusaders. If they were tiny cults, things would have been very different. But no, we are talking about organizations who pump in billions of dollars to reel in the most vulnerable sections of society. The agents of “change” here are under the impression that they are abiding by the law of the land — which allows freedom of practice and propagation of religion — but they overlook a bigger element at play: it’s not a religious game anymore. It stopped being one long before WW1 started, leading to decline of Ottoman empire. It’s a cultural sport now. The 20th century proved that, with exposure to varied customs and rituals, proselytism is more about culture than about faith. To grasp this development, we’ll require data on the rate of conversions in the country. If we can have data on which community is faring how in what field, then what’s stopping us from detailed reports on how the demography is changing in different parts of the country? It’s no mere coincidence that today, above 98% of Nagas — this figure was at 17% in 1941 — identify themselves as Christian first, not the tribe they belong to. The same is the case with the indigenous tribes in fellow northeastern states as well as in mainland India. This desertion of age-old culture for a so-called modern faith is a curio at best and a hoax at worst. A similar monocultural trend is visible amongst the hardcore practitioners of Da’wah. I grew up in a Bombay chawl where it was common to see conversions sans the violence. In my entire childhood, I hardly ever noticed a follower of Abrahamic religion giving up their faith and identity. It was always the other way around. And what’s interesting was the strange dilemma that a recent convert had to deal with: s/he had to justify doubly hard on both sides. To the Abrahamic folks, s/he had to show that s/he is totally one of them now and to the non-Abrahamic folks, s/he had to show that they were defective in the first place.
Last week, a crime lord was killed in an ‘encounter’. We all are aware by now that that quoted word is a hollow excuse for extrajudicial murder. His gang killed eight of the cops recently and there was no way the UP Police — and we are talking about the world’s largest police force here — would let a gangster get away with such a massacre. For them, it’s a matter of fraternity. They won’t wait for the slow wheels of justice to grind. They’ve got team morale to take care of. So, no surprises there. I remember the encounter days of Mumbai when it used to be Bombay. Just that the other parts of the country are still stuck in the vengeful desi cowboy mode. As for us, the lesser mortals, the commoners, the funniest tragedy about such events is nobody cares. We are seeking cheap real-life entertainment in the name of breaking news. That’s all. We neither know who the gangster was nor care to know how he freely operated for over a decade. To us, a murderous drama is on with a degree of hanging suspense. One show ends and another begins.
You and I dream of a lot of stuff in our life. Big, small, relevant, irrelevant, stupid, smart, everything and that gorgeous beaut named nothing. With our eyes open as we keep them shut, we see a lot and hope for a lot more. But then, those who write our destiny have better things to do. As a consequence, a major chunk of our dreams remain unfulfilled. I like to believe that the reason some of our dreams haven’t come true is because we aren’t fully prepared for them yet. A matter of time. Nonetheless, the pressing stress of our days and the sleepless state of our nights ensure that we are stuck somewhere in the middle of our realities and our nightmares. If you truly watch lovely dreams, you are the lucky one. At least you get to experience, even if it’s for a few seconds, something that you couldn’t possibly attain with your eyes open. Without any semblance of uncertainty, I can suggest that our dreams are soldiers deployed by our mind to fuck with us. But then, that’s a tiny price we pay for being in a blissful state. After all, our dreams reveal us.
