NIRO FIDDLES . . .

The homosapien (the humankind) has arrogated to itself the exclusive ownership of mother Earth. And this species has systematically marauded the planet bringing utter devastation everywhere.

No tiger has ever chopped down a single tree. No elephant has ever taken out a single drop of water from underneath the ground. No animal has ever polluted the rivers so thoroughly, so extensively. No  animal has  devastated the mountains.No animal has ever exterminated other species. Man has been guilty of all these things and many more.

We are very good at preaching. We keep talking about the dangers of climate change, global warming and carbon emission but, at the same time, continue with the destruction of the subterrain and devastation of Nature. Vast stretches of the Earth  under our feet, that were once filled with clean water, oil, coal and many other minerals, are now  devoid of them. We have been systematically emptying the subterrain of petrol, coal and other minerals. You do not need a geologist to tell you the long term consequences of these yawning stretches of emptiness underground. The consequences are there for all to see.Lakes have dried up (one such lake is BADKHAL lake of Faridabad near Delhi) , mighty trees have dried up and died, vast stretches of green lands have turned into desolate desert, mountains
have been having massive landslides. What Nature built in many thousand years has been destroyed by man in a few decades.

Mountains are now disintegrating because of large scale
denudation caused by rampant and ruthless cutting down of trees.
Unheard of calamities keep striking because we have interfered with Nature. We have build massive dams blocking mighty rivers in the mountains and exposed these mountains to great risk. In a couple of hundred years, since industrialisation began, we have thoroughly poisoned our rivers and skies with deadly industrial waste products. No animal has ever done this in a billion years.

And then we, masqerading as the most intelligent species on planet earth, have international conferences on rising sea levels, melting glaciers, global warming, ozone layer gaps, and Climate Change. We have also invented carbon points to bully weaker nations !!

We keep deluding ourselves but the facts speak out for themselves. Once upon a time dinosaurs ruled this planet. They are extinct now. The homosapian
could be the next species to disappear. We have so thoroughly damaged Nature that it is striking back at us now with great wrath.

Our immune system is in total dissaray. It is collapsing because we are addicted to a medicinal system which goes against Nature. We keep creating and trying new
antibiotics. But it is clearly a losing battle. T.B. has again become incurable The microbes have conquered penicillin and other antibiotics. New diseases are appearing ! In time to come Microbes can annihilate Man because of man's own folly.

The universe has an unwritten code and
that is this : "do not tamper with Nature". Man continues with the destruction of mother Nature. We even have the audacity to change the Nature's genetic codes inside our own plants and animals, in our food !!.

There is an ancient Indian saying : "Vinash kale
vipareet buddhi".? That is, when the end is near
good senses desert us. This is happenning now.Alarm bells have been
ringing for quite sometime. The 'NIRO' of this planet keeps fiddling while mother Earth burns !!

THE MAKING OF KHAL KHAL JI ( DDP gets a new name !! )

I think I was in sixth class when a lanky young man from our ancestral town came to live with us.He had travelled a good distance by  road in the hills of Himalayas and  he arrived at the railway terminus at the foot hills to catch a train to our place. There he came across a huge noisy railway steam engine for the first time in his life. There is a story that he was terribly frightened when the big black canadian engine arrived puffing and fuming at the platform !

He travelled a further long distance by train and arrived at our place one fine morning.He was looking for a job and had not passed the tenth class examination (known as High school exam.). Father got him a comfortable job and advised him to clear High School exam. for continued job security and better prospects which he eventually passed after some years. I do not remember if he was married at that time. I remember that for quite sometime he lived a bachelor's life.

I will prefer to refer to this young man here as DDP. This DDP was a very simple, sensible and honest man. He was carefree and happy. children liked him and his light hearted banter. He had a disarming radiant smile and a deep scar under his chin. He had got this scar when he fell down from a tree in his early teens.

The very day he arrived he teased my little sister thus : "  khale khale jaungi (it means "I will prefer to walk"). And then he kept repeating this whenever he saw her. This continued for a long time and DDP enjoyed the amusement he caused by saying this in his characteristic way.

Now, there is a story behind this "khale khale" banter. It so happened that sometime before DDP's arrival we had visited our ancestral town in the cool hills in the raging summers. This sister was then having massive prickly heat in her legs and hands. So one day when we were walking on our way to visit someone quite a distance away, DDP lifted up the little sister to carry her so that she would not get tired. But the prickly heat spots got rubbed and caused her pain and she cried and said, "khale khale jaungi" (that is, "I will prefer to walk").  The prickly heat persisted and during our entire stay in the ancestral hometown and she said "khale khale jaungi" whenever anyone tried  to carry her in his arms during long walks.

So now DDP mimicked a  replay of that "khale khale" and this continued for such a long time that eventually DDP came to be associated with these words. So one day when Katwaroo, our cook, was conveying a message from DDP to my father, who had just come back from office, the dialogues were somewhat like this :

katwaroo, " that new gentleman has left  a message for you"

father, " which new gentleman?"

Katwaroo,"That khale khale ji "

The nick name stuck ! As time roll on people started calling him khal khal ji ! In due course every one called him thus and never by his real name. Some people never even knew his real name ! And he also started identifying himself with this name ! DDP was transformed into KHAL KHAL JI !

Khal khal ji was a simple manof a friendly, helping nature. He loved eating lots of green chillies with each meal.He loved the company of good natured people.He loved to eat potato cutlets at the sher-e-punjab dhaba (food joint) adjascent to the new Venus cinema complex.He loved long walks in the evening with his friends and I sometimes accompanied him. He loved to wear trousers in Devanand style (Devanand was then a big filmstar of Bombay-Mumbai). And he  loved Suraiya, the famous film actress of his time ! He loved to see all her films ! I remember a friend of my father once suggesting in my presence that money should be contributed by all of them to finance his trip to Bombay to meet Suraiya ! ofcourse it was never done!

How time flies !! That was a long time back . It is quite some time since khal khal ji left this world but I still remember him fondly. He was an essential, happy part of my carefree childhood. In a way he was a friend, philosopher and guide.

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CHITTORGARH MEMORIES

It was a huge super-deluxe tourist bus. It surprisingly managed to negotiate the narrow entrance point at the foothill, on the road that took you up through sharp hairpin bends to the top.

The driver was a well built
young man who was an excellent driver. An ordinary driver could not have taken such a huge bus through those sharp hairpin bends.

When the bus arrived 'up above' at the chittogarh fort grounds we heaved a sigh of relief and had a birds eye view of Chittor town below and the chittor railway station.
( Buses were not allowed to go up on my subsequent visit two years later. Auto rikshaws had then been introduced to ferry the tourists up and down for a reasonable payment. A wise step ! ).

I had seen so many forts earlier - the red fort of Delhi and the Allahabad fort for
example. These are noted for their grandeur-in-stone. These forts are essentially massive strong fotified
areas into which army and people retreated when under attack by a much more powerful enemy batallion, in order to protect themselves while reassessing their strategy.

Chittorgarh was a different cup of tea altogether. It is not just a massive fortified structure, it is a small  township atop a  hillock and the hillock itself has been fortified. In a way, thus, it entitles itself to be one of
the largest forts in the world. It is a vast flat land up there. There are
roads, trees, vast water catchment areas and grass lands. There are temples , magnificent buildings and
ofcourse the famous VIJAY STAMBH,

a breathtaking tower that takes you up
through a winding staircase for a good view of the whole area around
and the lands yonder! Vijay stambh was, as the name suggests, constructed to commemorate a victory.

And at Chittorgarh there is the LEGEND of the valiant Rajputs, of Rani Padmini ; of the 'Jauhar' (self
immolation) of hundreds of women when Allauddin Khilji broke through the resistance of the valiant rajputs to get what he had come for - the stunningly beautiful Rani Padmini, the Queen of Chittorgarh.

( Poet Malik Mohammad Jayasi subsequently immortalised the event in his famous PADMAVAT  in 1540 CE).

In the company of a good guide you can 'live through' a period now buried deep in history. The guide takes you to the room where Allauddin khilji saw Rani Padmini's reflection in a huge mirror while she stood in the adjascent room.

The guide takes you to the ground where, in the year 1303 CE the rajput women consigned themselves to fire, to save their honour, in the ceremony called Jauhar. The very ground on which I stood was the theatre of one of the
bloodiest pages of Indian history and the thought sent a shiver down my spine. It was a very spiritual moment for me. I felt that I was myself actually witnessing those events unfolding before me - events of centuries far back in time, the war cries, the battles, the jauhars, the mystic singing of Meera bai and the courage of queen
Karnawati as Bahadur Shah laid a seige of Chittorgarh !

Chittorgarh is where Meera Bai the most famous female Hindu spiritual poetess
lived.

Her compositions are still popular throughout
North India ("mero ♡ to ♡ gridhar ♡ gopal ♡ doosaro ♡ na ♡ koi"). Her poems follow the Bhakti tradition and she was devoted to love of Bhagwan (God incarnate) Sri Krishna. Here is what wikipedia says about her :

" Folklore says that her
love for Krishna was
epitomized by her final
disappearance in the temple of Krishna in Dwarka. She is believed to have entered the sanctum of the temple in a state of singing ecstasy after which the sanctum doors are believed to have closed on their own and when later opened, the sari of Mirabai was seen enwrapped around the idol of Lord Krishna symbolizing the culmination of her union with her Lord."

There is also the folklore that she was made to drink poison for her love for God (in his incarnation as lord krishna) but poison turned into nector when she drank it.

Chittorgarh is remembered for its legendary queen Karnavati, the grandmother of the great Maharana Pratap. There is a legend of Karnavati sending a Rakhi (the sacred thread that a girl ties on the wrist of her
brother during the hindu festival of Raksha bandhan) to moghul emperor Humayun when chittorgarh was under seige by Bahadur shah,
asking for help. Humayun abandoned an ongoing military campaign to ride to her rescue, thus her name became irrevocably linked to the festival of
Raksha Bandhan . .
. . . Humayun failed to reach there in time.
Before his arrival Bahadur Shah had entered Chittorgarh and ransacked it for the second time. Realising that defeat was imminent, Karnavati and
the other noble ladies of the court immolated themselves in a mass
suicide by fire, while all the men donned saffron clothes and went out
to fight to the death. Humayun did defeat Bahadur Shah and then reinstated Karnavati's son Vikramaditya Singh as
the ruler of Mewar ."

I will be remiss in these reminiscences if do not mention the great son of
Rajputana, Maharana Pratap (1540-1597) who dedicated his entire life fighting the greatest of the moghul emperor, Akbar. While he could not
recapture Chittorgarh , he recaptured vast areas of Rajputana. His last epic
battle against Akbar at Haldighati (june 1576) has been immortalised by the hindi poet Shyam Narain Pandey in his epic poem HALDIGHATI.

The journey back into TIME being over now , our bus left the fort on its
long journey back to Delhi. As the bus travelled downwards I had the strange feeling of stepping out of the pages of
history into the material world of the day. Somewhere inside me was the feeling that a long time back, in another life, I belonged to this place,
Chittorgarh, which will always be remembered for the valour of the
Rajputs men and women.

Legends never die. As Tennyson puts it, "men may come and men may
go but I shall go on for ever".

Chittorgarh will always be there . . .
far into the future , in timelessness !!

LOVERS LABOUR LOST !!

He heard her stern chilling voice,
above the office typewriters noise.

he was in her office  in the top floor hall.
to propose to her he had made this call.

she was a typist, a fashionable dame
with him she was playing cat and mouse game

for many years she had given him a bait
and brought him to this desperate state

'will never marry you' she said without grace ,
'you had better get lost from this place'.

the agony caused by her venom and ire,
seered him totally like a raging fire.

his soul was now in terrible pain,
and he felt his blood quickly drain.

in her love he had for years toiled
and now he found his dreams foiled

"If she cannot ever be  my wife
what is now left to live in my life?"

that was now his aweful thought,
his own despair he vainly faught.

"I will jump down from a very great height
you should not take this matter light".

he said this to her in a quivering voice,
above the din and typewriters noise.

he also gave out a violent sigh,
but she thought he was telling a lie.

"you can go and jump down to  death"
she declared this coldly under her breath.

"I have heard men giving such  empty call
just go to the roof and have a  fall".

in utter disbelief and a mighty shock,
he listened to her cold disdainful talk.

and dashed resolutely out of the room,
and madly climbed up for his doom.

across the vast roof  like a horse he ran,
maddening fast as anyone ever can.

he dived down from the crumbling ledge,
and landed flat on a very  thick hedge.

life was saved but his ankle sprained,
he got up, and limped with a great strain.

up the staircase he crawled  to her ,
she heard his rant but did not stir.

"forty feet down the roof's slippery ledge,
and saved by some blessed garden hedge !

"you are no doubt  a lousy liar"
she said this with a mounting ire.

"failed you have  to keep your word
why should I marry  such  a nerd."

"get out of here and save your face
before I make this a police case".

on hearing this he beat a  hasty retreat ,
and  was soon lost  in the crowded street.

'no use giving away your life from a height
for a dame who  cares not for your plight.'

this was what he finally thought
and took a decision on the spot

his romance went up in a smoking curl.
he went home and married a fat old girl.

she is a good girl in all respect
with a golden heart and great tact

she cares for him and cooks his meal
and he finds this as his life's best deal.

falling in love was a stupid state
it led him to a very uncertain fate.
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