6

Dear Readers,

                     A few days ago, the newspapers read that scientists have proved Einstein's theory of Relative Temporality true. Two highly accurate atomic clocks measured times at different levels and arrived at the conclusion that time clicked faster at the higher level. A corollary to this theory is that we live surrounded by multiple time and space dimensions. So, I set out researching with my own experiments. It is so heart-touching some times to feel a strong sense of bonding with a town or city. One revises his acquaintances with streets, buildings, landmarks and most importantly a few people who appear to be as permanent a fixture of that town as its very essence. You identify a purpose and a rhythm in every motion of that locus. Moreover, a few of those rhythmic patterns appear to be repetitive or oft sighted. 

                      I was loitering around in the city of Jodhpur the whole day today. Quite unlike the routine, the weather was soothingly pleasant throughout so much so that at 2 30 pm me and my friends could afford a stroll in one of the city parks ( a rarest of the most rare things possible in a desert city). We laughed, giggled, discussed our futures pensively and lay down on the grass. We felt the saawan breeze on our faces and could audaciously stare at the sky which had no Sun. I felt as if we were back to our adolescence. By leisurely whiling away time with closest buddies I could manage to transcend my present and reach a stage of blissful innocence and relaxation where future worries held no mass.  

                    A little later, it so happened that I coincidentally went past a few spots which were frequented by me regularly as a child. Like it dawns upon many of us when we are caught in similar situations, I was surprised to gauge that those very places seemed to be have shrunk in size. The streets which looked like roads running till the horizon now look like 'just-another-street' and as accommodating far greater number of people. I was transfixed to find myself sprinting back and forth between different points on my time-scale. This is how I came to appreciate the notion of multiple temporality. Maybe, one day I will manage to live all my ages at one spot together in one go.....

5

Dear Readers,

                     A writer's task is to replicate his experiences in the minds of his readers. I wish that I am able to show you a picture which I witness everyday or rather every moment of my stay here.

                 It gives me a little pain to pen down my thoughts tonight because the choice of topic is such: Monsoons. As for any average Indian, it is one subject which evokes strong sentiments inside me from within. Every year, a heated and pent-up sub-continent eagerly awaits moisture laden clouds fom both the sides of its long coast. This year the dispersal of rains has been abysmally dismal. No other part of India can claim to be drier than the one where I am residing at. It is an area that receives scanty rainfall even in times of a bountiful monsoon all across India. So, you can very well imagine its condition when a drought strikes with full force. The month of Saawan is all but over and not even a drop of water has showered over this tract.

                With each passing day, the heat of the desert seems to be taking a toll on our lives and our dreams. The unseemly extension of the summer wrath has dashed all hopes of a joyous reward to the people for braving intense temperatures for well more than two months. Each day, when piercing beams of light from the scorching Sun break through every conceivable glaze, thousands of pairs of eyes rise up in defiance to scan the sky hoping to sight an army of black clouds dispatched in aid. Men and beasts, soil and shrub, all are haggardly awaiting 'the arrival'.

                  For me, the brunt of this famine is more severe than that for the general lot here. I was hell-bent on drenching my soul in incessant monsoonal showers this year at any cost. I devised a careful plan. In the month of June, I traveled to Kerala in order to greet the advancing outbursts. I was lucky to get caught in frightening downpurs, deafening thunderstorms and an air so moist that you could feel watery while breathing.  However, all this lasted for a few days only as I had to pack my bags and leave picture-perfect locales to return to my desert home. Now, here I am engulfed in a hot wont. My longing for rains is like the pangs for emotional anchorage suffered by a person who has come a long way past his first consummation. It is like the cravings of a woman tormented by unrequited love .

                      Nothing short of a wet explosion can satiate such thirsts.......

4 : A Beauteous Bastion

Dear Readers,

                     Travelling solo is great fun. One is at his own will to go wherever he pleases, change itineraries of the plan, extend or shorten the duration of stay at each destination etc. This summer, I had the rare privilege to be on one such trip down south. I was in Bangalore at IISc ( Indian Institute of Science) for an academic visit, from where I scooted off to Ooty. After covering a few destinations in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, I was all set to hit southern Kerala just when I met an interesting lady who changed the course of my future travel.  

                   Her name was Shameena and she belonged to Wayanad, a district in Northern Kerala. Over the brief tete a tete that we had, she advised me that I should visit Wayanad instead of southern Kerala which is  although more famous but over-commercialised. I listened to her and thank my stars for having done so. I was fortunate to have laid my eyes on a few of the finest specimen of Indian Tourism.

                I chanced upon a beautiful fortress located at a town called Bekal lying on the northern tip of Kerala in the Kasaragod district. This fort was built in around AD 1650 by the Nayakas who were an ascendant force during the decline of the Vijaynagara Empire after the battle of Talikota in AD 1565. The Nayakas fortified this port town to control its lucerative trade and to use it as a base for their future expansion in Malabar region. The Nayaka hold was liquidated by Haider Ali following which the fort came under the rule of Mysore Sultans. Tipu used this fort successfully during his ambitious Malabar campaigns. After the fourth Anglo-Mysore war, the fort slipped into the hands of the British East India Company.

                   The place is so gorgeous. It is flanked by two white sand beaches on either sides. The southern beach is too long, may be around 4-5 kms. The contrast of lush green and blackened laterite stone is very picturesque. If you recollect, a famous song from the movie Bombay, "tu hi re" was shot here. The serendipity of this mysterious fort built on a cliff is highlighted by the low tourist turn-out. It is one of the few places in a hustly-bustly India which will leave you in your own quiet company with the sound of  waves crashing against unyielding rocks...

3

Dear readers,

                     The advantage of being in company of gifted scholars is that even routine discussions invariably impart stimulating knowledge and awareness to the participants. One such knowledgeable colleague of mine is Dr. Anil K. Changani, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Science, MGS University, Bikaner. I always fish for excuses to slip away from the first floor of our academic block( that houses the Department of History) to visit the Environmental Science faculty stationed below. In order to err on the side of caution(lest somebody complains to my HOD), let me inform you that my area of research interest lies in the interface between ecology and history.

                    Over the discussion that ensued, Dac-saab told me that penetration of the Indira Gandhi Canal into the Thar desert has had a transforming impact on desert ecology. He mentioned that over the past one year, he noticed a few species of birds which are not native to the desert, yet are found now in the patches of green alongside the gigantic man-made river. The important among them are Indian Grey Hornbill, Fan-Tail Flycatcher and the Roufus Treepie. The wiki says that of these, the first is found to be distributed in the foothills of Himalayas and along the Indus and Gangetic river systems. Thus, it seems interesting to find these birds along the course of the canal. I myself had spotted a colorful Kingfisher on the banks of one of the distributaries  of the main channel while I was on an inspection to Gharsana.

                    Further, he mentioned another startling observation. On an inspection tour to Suratgarh in this March, he saw a lake located just outside the town which was playing host to a few very important species of migratory birds. These were the Spot-billed Pelicans and the Painted Storks, both of which are famous visitors at the Keoladeo Ghana National Park, Bharatpur. The Forest Department of the Government of Rajasthan should take note of these developments and adequate measures should be taken for their conservation.

                As for me, I am now left with no excuses to sulk the drudgery of life at Bikaner. This sleepy town also has an immense scope for bird-watching in its environs!

               

Anand Babu

Dear Readers,

                   Rajesh Khanna's demise has touched all of us and has brought back the memories of his golden years with a new fervor. All the TV news channels have been running special programs commemorating his life time achievements. The famous scene from the movie Anand in which Anand Sehgal breathes his last leaves our eyes moist despite the fact that it is shown repetitively. 

                  Whenever a big star of the tinsel town gets lost from our sight, his/her impressions form the past flash across our minds. As a first reaction, we feel the same sense of joy and being entertained which we usually experience whenever we watch those scenes or listen to those songs. However, on a second thought we realise that the protagonist of all this paraphernalia has departed from this world. We lament this loss in various capacities. We think that this entertainer is no more present amidst us. We speculate what his loss would mean to his loved ones. There is a strong emotional outburst in cases where we happen to be not just fans of that entertainer but associate a very important component of our persona with that actor. We come to acknowledge that that very part of us has died. This leaves us with a strong sense of pain and bereavement.

                   When Dev Anand sahab died I felt sad too. I got reminded of that masterpiece called Guide. The movie has many shots of Udaipur, my dream city. Besides that, the pathos of an impoverished young soul who has lost all that he had for the love of his life, to the extent that he is reluctant to re-enter his hometown, is brilliantly depicted in the opening song. "Musafir, jayega kahan". Tears rolled down my cheeks visualising my state of mind when I would be standing at the threshold of Jodhpur, my hometown, as a man who has failed in his life.

                  Rajesh Khanna's life makes me sad because of what I just mentioned above. We feel sad at the death of a famous actor when we relate to him in one way or the other. In this case, the loss aggravates my fears regarding a lonely death. Fears related to the cessation of a life which reached pinnacles of fame but then became ruthlessly lonesome buried under the burden of professional incapacity. Fears of losing all that I fancy and all that I might also achieve but eventually lose because of an innate self-obsession and self-conceit. May his soul rest in peace but today I cannot find that smiling lover inside me who can charm a damsel with a slight tilt of the neck.  

1

  Dear Readers,

          Another terribly hot day in Bikaner. While the entire sub-continent is gifted with bountiful monsoonal showers, the hot desert of north-western Rajasthan is boiling under an intense Sun. Today after winding up work at the University, I stopped at a point on my way back to home. It is located within the University campus but is located at the farther end and is in the middle of expansive sand dunes. I share a picture of this place. It was excruciatingly hot there. As I stooped down to strike a pose, I felt the same sensation which one feels when he overlooks a tandoor.

            In the evening, I had to visit Surnana House to mourn the loss of Thakur Laxman Singh Rathore, the earstwhile Thakur of Surnana and my very dear friend Praduman Singh Baroo's grandfather(nanosa). The most beautiful thing about Bikaner is that here you can feel the past around you. On this occasion, the picturesque Surnana House made me feel that I am back to the 1910's. The house is still preserved in its former glory. It is a huge mansion built in a proportionally huge compound located right behind the Junagarh fort. A spacious verandah greeted me as I walked my up to the baithak. To the left was the jenana dyodhi marked by its smaller entrance. 

           The baithak was a scene from the past except for the split AC. Its walls were covered in a soothing white-wash. White mattresses covered with white bed-sheets adorned the floor. All along the three sides of the room, white masanads made reclining comfortable. The arched bays with their typical view of the verandah outside sent one's imagination soaring up in the sky visualising long forgotten etiquette and gestures of medieval gentry. 

         Like I said earlier, Bikaner's speciality lies in the fact that it gives you an opportunity to look at it with a prism of the past. I wonder how long will it take for the waves of modernity to erase and reform every grain of this sandy stretch. Untill then, scores of people like me will relish the treat to their 'sense of history' within the forts, palaces, museums and bazars of this other-wordly town.

For the love of histoire

       Professor Shahid Amin's emphatic piece, "Hardly Unanimous, Mr. Thorat", The Hindu, July 13, 2012, hints at profound paradoxes in the society of our nation which in the times to come will pose a serious challenge. He beautifully points out the contradictions between "the celebration of the enabling learning curve of the 'average' schoolchild" and "the violence inflicted by precisely such homogenisations on the radically different life experiences of children from disadvantaged groups".

       To lighten the burden of jargon on my beloved readers, all I want to highlight is that the education system of our country and the ones who profess to ‘streamline’ it are intentionally sweeping things under the carpet. As a faculty in a State University located in the middle of the sand dunes far away from the posh intelligentsia salons of Delhi and Kolkata, I grapple with ‘field challenges’ almost on a routine basis. I consider myself fortunate to have experienced these things at close quarters.

        Most of my dear students in the M.A. previous class are Dalits. They are one of the most laborious lots I have come across (more so than the Mick Jagger fans whom I taught at my alma mater a year ago). They lack in nothing but confidence. I work hard daily to instill that fluency in them. They were unfortunate to have never attended regular schools. Moreover, some of them found the syllabus irrelevant and atrocious.

       The remedy lies in a simple fact: lets be honest. In a democratic set up like ours, the least we can do is to be genuinely unanimous by raking in all the diverse and\or divergent views and opinions. This cannot be more relevant than to the field of education. In a nation that has dissimilarities ensconced in its warp and weft, it would be unjust to impose a mainstream homogenised education upon vast multitudes of children and adolescents hailing from various cultural hues and more importantly, from discriminatory pasts. The system and our awareness needs to be educated in their history.