53

Dear Readers, 

                   Every town has its peculiar whiff and it cant get stronger than the one emanating out of your home-town. I went for a jog today in the evening in the sprawling campus of the University of Jodhpur right opposite my house and on my way back realised that I was caught in the tangles of my early childhood. The summer months, when we matched the wildness of the wilderness around us, brought some memories back. 

                 The two months of May and June which are witnesses to worst weather of the year, coincidentally are also the months of a long vacation at schools and other educational institutions. This was the time when our wits would be tested by the excruciating heat of summers and yet we were under the compulsion to make the best out of this time as were off from our mundane routines. We would find ourselves stuck in a perplexed situation each time when we had to make a choice between venturing out in the smoldering heat or to cave in to the pressures exerted by elders to stay indoors. Quite often but not, we chose the former rebellious option. 

                      And so we would dart out in the open caring a damn about burns or whatever! On our way back, we would be exhausted to the core but would feel something inside the bones which would make us assume that we have bolstered our immunity and strength against the odds of the clime. As the streaming sweat down our temples would evaporate by the hot loo winds blowing till late evening, a unique odor would  fill our nostrils. An odor made out of the mix of every droplet of moisture evaporating into the thin hot air as if water was being sucked out from our surroundings only to be replenished during those bountiful months of showers. An odor coming out of slabs of stone and rock overheated during the day, an odor of the suppressing waves of low air pressure as also an odor of Sun-rays at their malevolent worse..... 

52

Dear Readers, 

            One of the concurrent topics of research in the field of Social Science is Migration and demographics. It includes a vast array of subjects like diasporic studies, systems of exchange in antiquity, trade, making and unmaking of states etc. and is highly interesting because of its sheer holistic coverage. It gives ample scope for unraveling the deep connections between ecology and human evolution in the sense that it assigns optimum recognition to environmental factors as 'the most' important factor.

                     From a layman's point of view, it can be said that the appeal of this area of study lies in imagining that how interesting it would be to understand why and how we are where we are. Irrespective of what caste, creed, community or region to which we belong, we all have a story of how we arrived where we stay today. While a Rajput of Central India might narrate how his family migrated from the Thar to the Vindhyas six centuries ago, a bania family from Rajasthan might have a clear version of how they moved from Calcutta to Rangoon and then to the Carribean within a span of hundred years or yet still, a Baluch might know how just in his last generation, they moved from Karachi to London.

                           Movement of people is one of the most fascinating accounts, and also,  more correctly put, events, that have shaped human evolution since millennia. Aryans moved from the Caucasus to  the Sapt-Sindhu region and gave rise to the Vedic age and the Mughuls moved from Farghana to Kabul.                           Putting these grandiloquent meta-narratives aside, migrations of lesser communities and sometimes individuals also have had a bearing on human history. A family of Kashmiri Pandits residing near a canal or Neher had migrated to Delhi in the eighteenth century which played a prominent role in Indian politics throughout the twentieth century. A man named Mohundas had migrated to South Africa where he started his satyagraha.

                       History flows underneath the current of our movement. While we flow as sediments in a large stream of unfathomable gravity, the silt sticking to the river-bed is our story. Much of this story or history is lost to the deep oceans. We come to make attempts at knowing our past with whatever silt is left on the banks......

51

Dear Readers, 

                    My O my! what a pleasure to be back to Dilli time and again. First of all let me tell you that as I write this latest post, I am inhaling the pious and scholastic air of the Teen Murti library. After a long hiatus, I am back to this cave of knowledge and wisdom located in proximity to the palatial Teen Murti Bhawan. After a long time, I am breathing this peculiar air containing mixed odors of conditioned air, wooden stacks, new hardbound copies of latest International arrivals and seductive perfumes of ladies wearing cotton saris. 

                  A day in Dilli after long intervals of braving intense heat and solitude of Bikaner sands is generally a happy day. It is a pleasure to drive on the roads with the 95 FM station playing numbers which you would die for to listen to in your college days. What a lucky day it is for me today that as I took the right turn for the race course road, the station started playing Coldplay's 'Yellow' and later, one of my all-time favorites- Springesteen. The state of ecstasy was escalated to the level of mysticism when Dido's 'sand in my shoes' was played. 

                  There is a reason for this. When I was a student, I heard Dido for the first time on my friend's I-Pod. I did not have enough money then to buy a 40 GB wonder gadget and was so thrilled to have at my finger-tips most of the titles of world music. That night I kept on listening to her as she engulfed me in her caressing voice. Years after that fateful night, I heard the songs again (this time too on somebody else' I-Pod), but the venue was Palolem beach. A strange affinity exists between Dido and the sea-shore and I grasped this fact in the truest spirit at that time when the sounds of crashing waves in the song matched the rhythm of waves wetting my feet.  

                   Since quite some time now, I have this intense longing to travel to Goa and drench my soul in those mysterious waves. I have been there many times, all alone. This time I seek a companion. I have my own set of demands. Although I am not as demanding as you would imagine me to be but at times you have no option but to covet what exactly you want for it has been denied to you since the beginning. I want my partner (not to sound like Dido!) to possess a sense of loss like the gravity of a jump off the cliff and a desire for love like the beating of waves on the shore which always sends them back to the deep.