The Right Side of Being Left

After quite a time during the COVID-19 pandemic and lock-down, I have picked up my pen to vent out some of my innermost thoughts - thoughts that have troubled me long enough. For those who are susceptible to being triggered by the honest criticism of Leftist ideologies, all those readers are free to abandon reading this post from this point onwards. There is a high probability that many would find it a typical rant of someone, who is tagged as a "Privileged-Elite" in social media, so that a good deal of brownie points can be earned for sympathizing with the suffering masses.

Off late, we all have come across heart wrenching images of people directly or indirectly suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic. From the disease itself, where the dead get stripped off of their rights of a dignified funeral to contain infection, to the policies like lock-down, a countless number of human beings have died or have lost their livelihoods in the most tragic ways. Many of them belong to the economically poorer sections of the society. While the gut wrenching images of the dismembered body parts of migrant workers laying on railway tracks after a train ran over them is enough to make anyone feel sick, the heart wrenching images of a small child trying to wake up its dead mother can evoke tears even in stone sculpted statues, let alone human beings. However, the thing for which this blog post is intended, is the fact that, it has become a disturbing trend to slam the rich and middle class as "Privileged, Elite and/or Heartless" as a prerequisite mandatory ritual to empathize with the suffering people. Some have even compared jobs like IT (where Work From Home is becoming as the new normal) to the jobs of a Doctor/Nurse and cursing IT folks as the "Privileged ones who are minting tons of money by sipping Dalgona Coffee on their cozy sofas & doing something worthless on a company laptop".

It is true that the poor are suffering. But, the elephant in the room that everyone is scared to address is why are poor people poor even after 70+ years of independence. I am taking the liberty to take on this figurative elephant in the room by its tusks, head on. Below is a link to one of the lesser known Mahabharata stories - Story Time

Since Independence, our political class has been doing donations like Arjuna (freebie distribution for the sake of publicity and creating perpetually dependent vote-bank) rather than doing justice like Karna. The problem with the Socialist approach of donation like Arjuna, is that, the hardworking and the lazy, the entrepreneurs and the opportunists - all get equal amount of gold. This is gross miscarriage of natural justice. Just because a person's brain and heart are not equal, that doesn't guarantee that the brain is superior than the heart or vice versa. Brain needs the blood supply pumped from the heart, as much as the heart needs electrical signals from the brain to function properly. Both are equally important and a person's life exists only because of this natural inequality (precisely specialty). Besides, brain's energy requirements are vastly different from the energy requirements of the heart. So, any attempts to draw comparisons between the two is an absurd proposition.

The strange fact is that, forcing the notion of equality on people, is doing injustice to their inherent specialty. Those armchair liberals who are desperately trying to earn brownie points by demonizing the rich as a prerequisite step to sympathize with the poor are the biggest hypocrites who are wrapping up their gross incompetency and jealousy in becoming rich or doing justice with the poor. They are the ones who have got selective amnesia of the fact that the electricity and the electromagnetic phenomena that runs their computers, phones and all communication devices was discovered by a poor blacksmith's son Michael Faraday, who himself started as a book binder. These people are totally ignorant about the humble beginnings of two Presidents of India - Late Dr. A.P.J.Abdul Kalam and Dr Ram Nath Kovind. It is true that every poor person cannot become a Faraday or a Kalam, but they can certainly become one Dashrath Manjhi or a certain Haldhar Nag. These hypocrites are blisfully ignorant of the fact that being born into a poor or rich parents is a coincidence. Nobody has got the choice to be born in a particular family. Hence, being born poor is an accident. However, it is a matter of concern when the same person dies poor. This is beautifully explained by the founder of Microsoft and one time world's richest man Bill Gates - "If you are born poor, it’s not your fault. But if you die poor, it’s your mistake"

In fact, the beauty of this temporary life and nature is that - "Nobody is equal, rather everybody is special". But rather than appreciating the inherent specialty, our political class and intellectual juntaa (specially capable in forcing the notion of equality) created positive discrimination as a cure of retrograde negative discrimination, which created more problems in the society. Glaring examples of such lunatic ideas are caste based reservations to undo caste based discrimination (positive discrimination in the name of social justice & affirmative action), freebie distribution rather than employment generation (positive discrimination in the garb of doing economic justice), extremely biased female-centric laws which result in pseudo-feminism (As per the statistics of National Bureau of Crime, about 53.4% of rape cases were found to be fake in 2013) rather than feminism (which is essentially appreciating the uniqueness and specialty of feminine gender)

However, our Leftist Liberals don't want any poor or underprivileged person to work hard and rise above their unpromising beginnings; because if poor people become privileged, then who will give two hoots to their selfish ideology ? Hence, they believe and advocate for freebie schemes which essentially destroys the very motivation for a poor person to work hard and become rich. Also, in a civilized society, everyone's rights are taken care by everyone else's duty. My right to have a quality food is guaranteed by the farmer's duty to grow food-grains. A farmer's right to food is ensured by my duties to pay taxes honestly and the government's duty to assist the farmer in enhancing his production capabilities. The moment, a farmer is provided with free cash, food grains and essentials, he loses the motivation to grow crops because now his basic needs are fulfilled. So, that essentially translates to a violation of my rights of having a quality food. Besides, the freebies distributed to the poor and downtrodden are not essentially free, because it has been paid for by the narrow taxpayer base.Rather than empowering the poor to earn a living and contribute to widening the taxpayers base, they are purposefully kept poor by preposterous schemes like Nyay Scheme so that these people would again vote for that political party who doles out the maximum freebies in the next election. As it goes - "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.".

Now, when the economy is shattered due to the pandemic, the government along with all politically correct economists are caught with their pants down. However, armchair economists and social media warriors have pitched in to sell alcohol during lock-down like an essential commodity, and grow state revenue by heavy taxation. These armchair economists are intellectually handicapped enough to foresee that the growth in state revenue due to taxes on alcohol is heavily outnumbered by the financial & human cost of law & order and health problems due to unabated consumption of the overrated hydrocarbon.

Leftists were supposed to be the voice of the poor. Rather than focusing their energies on formulation of proper labour laws which would transform unorganized sector into the organized economy, prevent exploitation of poor while providing them avenues to collaborate with the rich and transform their lives, Indian Leftists have found it very convenient to be anti-rich. Since the beginning of time, starting from journals to movies, everything has the same cliche plot where the villain happens to be a privileged, arrogant, authoritarian, selfish, cunning, manipulative, scheming, eternal sadist, and above all one of the filthiest characters in the world whose every inch of the body reeks of elitism. The hero is a typical poor and innocent man who is consistently victimized & traumatized by the rich villain (a Lala, Baniya, Muneem, Seth, Thakur or even a business tycoon who has murdered the hero's father, raped the hero's sister and now is planning to forcibly marry the heroine) till our hero takes the law (both laws of the land as well as laws of physics) into his own hands, beats every henchman to pulp, defies laws of physics & chemistry to have an immortal biology, dodges bullets & bombs like a child's play, and finally kills the villain in some of the most gruesome ways, only to surrender before the police at the movie end. Out of the overwhelming majority of Bollywood movies of the same cliche plot, how many have shown the story of a poor person working hard & smart and ending up as a rich guy (movies similar to The Social Network which depicts the beginnings of social media giant Facebook and it's founder) ?? All of this indicates of a long and strong propaganda being continuously hammered to our heads - that the stereotypical notion of rich guys or those who are working hard to lead a comfortable life are inherently evil/selfish while all the poor people are victimized souls; when the fact is quite opposite - not every rich is a privileged elite villain, and not every poor is an underprivileged victimized soul. If Nirav Modi is rich, then so is Ratan Tata. If we have poor people like Dashrath Manjhi, then we also have poor like Nirbhaya rapists. If we have politicians like Late Vajapayee Ji, then we also have opportunists & convicted criminals like Laloo Prasad Yadav doing politics. If we have true feminists like Late Sushma Swaraj, then we also have pseudo-feminists like Jasleen Kaur & Rohtak Sisters. In other words, there are only good people and bad people in every sphere we look at. Rest all comparisons are totally absurd and out of context.

Consequence of all this - We are a bunch of people who slam Salman Khan for driving on the footpath and killing people, while we find it convenient to overlook irresponsible bikers driving on the footpath to avoid traffic signal. We see a terrorist inside Sanjay Dutt, but find romanticism in seeing a misguided son of a school teacher in a slain terrorist Burhan Wani. If our anger is against the flawed system which acquitted Salman Khan in the infamous hit-and-run case because of lack of evidence, then where does this justified anger & rage vaporize when irresponsible bikers ride on the footpath to save a few nanoseconds in front of the red signal?? However, if our anger is based on the fact that Salman Khan was able to buy justice out of the money power, while a common man driving on footpath is unable to get away and ends up paying huge fines, then that anger is totally unjustified and is simply a manifestation of our gross incompetence and jealousy that we are not privileged like SK to buy courtroom justice.

Enough of rant for a single blog post. From the perspective of someone who wants to work hard as well as smart to become rich, here is something worthy to watch:

Guru - Ending Speech

Hence, in times of a Chinese virus, ending the post with the words of a famous Chinese philosopher to keep things in perspective - 

"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of" - Confucius

Dear Kids

Dear Kids,

It is the first time your father is considering an option to write an open letter to you guys. Probably, because I want everyone else to know what I think of you, before even you start appreciating it.

I don't want to start with the usual parental rhetoric - "You kids are my life..." and so on. For me, you two kids signify the eternal victory of the beauty of life over the inevitable oblivion of death. A year and half before you both were born, I lost my father. I have seen how the inevitable necessity, yet a personal evil, known as Death, ripped a piece of my life I used to celebrate as a father-child relationship. Till the day you were born, there was a definite vacuum in my life. But you kids filled up that vacuum so completely, as if it never existed in the first place. I got back my coveted father-child relationship, but with inverted set of equations.

With each passing day, I am preserving more of the soul of my father - his beliefs, his ideologies, his way of doing things, his laughter, everything that is precious to me. The physical body which I called as 'Baba', was a mere arrangement of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and other elements, that was predestined to disintegrate one fine day. By lighting his funeral pyre, I did my last duty towards that physical body, in assisting towards its ultimate disintegration to native chemical elements. But, the abstract memories and the qualities that defined him are something that cannot be destroyed or disintegrated. As you kids grow up, it is my pleasure to instill those values in you, so that you become competent enough to play your part in this divine cycle of birth-death-creation-annhilation.

Like every father, I too have a small expectation from my kids. As they say - "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", my expectation from both of you is quite sophisticated, considering the way, the world believes in simplicity of thoughts.

I want you to enjoy this temporary, yet beautiful life, exactly the same way you enjoy playing with me. Yes, you push my hand with all the might exerted by your tiny hands, get tired in the process, start crying and then try again & again. This is exactly how life is. It is perfectly okay to fail, even after giving your best. It is perfectly acceptable to cry hard after a failure. The real charm lies in not giving up the fight and trying once again. By playing these rudimentary infant level games with both of you, nowadays I am also learning the art of resilience & persistence. Even though the world might see you as powerless tiny infants, but for me, you both signify the victory of that resilient feeling of being alive, even as life and death run parallel to each other, every single moment. The little secret of enjoying this life is keeping that infant alive in you, without letting it bogged down by the quagmire of success & failure. As your grandfather used to say - "Regardless of success or failure, you are still my kid." Today, I am in that position to say the same words to you kids as well. You would always be my kids irrespective of how the world evaluates and judges both of you, based on its own set of standards & protocols.

That all being said, I hereby welcome both of you to this beautiful life, as we start creating beautiful memories together. As I have indicated in the very beginning of this open letter, that both of you signify the victory of life over the morbidity of death; let's live this life together in such a way that, we enjoy every moment it has to offer, and truly make this temporary existence larger than life.

With tons of love & blessings,
Your Beloved Baba

Dear Baba...

Dear Baba,

After all these days, today I am taking a conscious effort to write an open letter to you on your birthday. When I say "conscious effort", I mean, I am well aware of the fact that, even though I send this entire conversation to your email, I would be waiting forever for your reply.

There have been many ups and downs in my life since the day you left your physical body. The have been so much changes within such a short span of time that, it feels like yesterday when I celebrated your birthday with a covert cake cutting ceremony, especially when the calendar says that exactly two years has elapsed since that particular event. Today when I am writing this post, I am satisfied that we, as your family, created beautiful memories that were never there. As I write this post, I feel, we made the most out of the huge, yet finite number of precious breaths you shared with us. In my case, my relationship with you evolved from being typical father-son relationship to the best of friends to that of a mentor-protegee. Though there were many things that I learnt from you, yet there remain infinitely more things that I could have learnt from you. There have been moments where I have felt that a big chunk of knowledge was lost with your physical body, and, I have to reinvent the wheel to get back on track again. But, every time I go through this phase of hopelessness, the very next moment, I imagine you standing beside me, and guiding the way to rediscover the knowledge, that I thought I had lost along with you.

Perhaps, it was not in our individual destinies to have a father-son open-ended conversations with me learning the responsibilities, challenges and adventures of a married life. Perhaps, I never had the privilege to ask you about evolving & taking responsibility of being the boss of the house, that you were. In this context, I vividly remember how you were holding my bicycle and running alongside me to provide that critical balance when I was learning to ride a bicycle. But one fine day, you let off your hands and allowed me to move on. I kept on pedaling away, with a faith that your hand was still providing me that balance. Only when I looked back to see you standing and smiling, I fell down. My physical pain of falling down vanished the very moment when I saw that satisfied smile on your face; that I have learnt to ride the bicycle without your support. Today, I am again getting that same feeling, only with a hope that, somewhere up in the heavens you might be smiling seeing your kid learning to balance the bicycle of life.

With Tons of Love,
Your 'Thomas Edison'

An Ode to A Black Hole

With no apparent light pollution near Pawna Lakeside Camping, the dark sky looked heavily star studded. As we stopped for a stargazing moment during our nocturnal walk, Kedar was showing us the various constellations in the night sky. A question that was troubling me for a long time instantly popped up. I asked Kedar - "Is the constellation Sagittarius visible in the night sky that we are seeing right now ?". I barely remember the answer to the question, but why did I ask about it in the first place, is something, upon which this entire writing is based.

Some 26,000 light years away in the central regions of our own Milky Way galaxy, lies this constellation Sagittarius. Symbolically, it is represented by a Centaur (A mythical half-man half-horse archer shooting arrows). One of the stars in this constellation is invisible, and it does not twinkle in the night sky. This particular entity is so massive that it weighs in around 4.3 million times more massive than our powerful Sun. It is this invisible star of the show, which holds our beautiful and magnificent spiral Milky Way galaxy in one piece. The name of this enigmatic entity is Sagittarius A* (pronounced as 'Sag A star' or represented as Sgr A*), and it is a supermassive Black Hole.

It is amazing & fascinating to wrap our brain around the fact, that while our entire observable universe is estimated to be 93 billion light years across, there exists a special place just 26,000 light years away from us, where the universe as we know of, ceases to exist. It is kind of a very tiny hole on a big sheet of paper, with everything lying on the other side of the hole still a big mystery. A black hole is the ultimate end point of space, time, matter, energy, and our knowledge. It has an insatiable hunger, and it keeps feeding upon objects within its reach, tirelessly. Its gravity is absolute and infinite. The hot gases (much hotter than our typical camp-fire flame) are accelerated to nearly light speed, as they swirl around the black-hole. So, in one sense, the black-hole makes fire a billion billion billion times hotter before devouring it, which in turn, makes it more powerful. Its huge gravity rips apart everything to the level of atoms before consuming it. It is the same gravity that causes the entire galaxy to rotate around it, along with the Sun & the solar system. Since black-holes have infinite gravity, they can consume light itself, thereby rendering themselves invisible to all our optical instruments & eyes. Sitting alone, aloof, invisible, conspicuous, yet full of energy, the black-hole is the unsung hero of our galaxy, who never likes to take credit for the existence & sustenance of over 200 billion stars & a trillion plus planets.

Perhaps, in my quest to see the region of sky which houses the supermassive black hole of our Milky Way galaxy Sgr A*, I was able to see an excellent teacher in that impenetrable blackness. The insatiable hunger of black hole motivates me to cultivate the same hunger for knowledge. The extreme gravity that rips everything to the level of atoms teaches to accept unadulterated knowledge & facts after ripping apart every form of bias, prejudice, jibe, political correctness & sugarcoating. The act of black holes devouring everything within their reach and enhancing their gravitational energy is an important lesson in accepting love, appreciations, magnanimity, charity along with negativity like hatred, anger, jealousy, insecurity and using all of it to enhance our mental strength. For an introvert like me, who loves to work behind the stage without any care for the credits, a black hole is the ultimate role model - invisible & conspicuous, yet supremely confident of it's sheer power, without which, everything we see, would not have existed in the first place. A black hole is more or less a fundamental entity, like an atom i.e. a black hole made out of peanut butter has the exact same properties with the one made out of iron nails of same mass. While scientists have discovered the secrets of the atom, they are still struggling to unravel the secrets, black holes hide deep within their singularities. In this regard, a black hole give us an important lesson that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. So, as simple as it may sound, and as sophisticated as it may seem to imagine, the below quote wraps it all up - 

"If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That's the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there's a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together." - Michio Kaku

Meritocracy - The Innate Nature of Nature

15th Dec 2017, Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve: The first safari of our expedition ended with a bit of disappointment for us, for we missed the beautiful sighting of tigress Maya, relocating her cubs to safety, only by a few minutes. Nevertheless, the evening camp fire was strong enough to burn our disappointments to ashes, and provide us with fresh hopes of sighting the majestic tigers, in the upcoming couple of days. It was inside these flames and campfire discussions that the idea of meritocracy as an innate part of nature, got into my head. Out of curiosity, I asked our chief organizer Kedar, that how come this sighting which we missed, was a lifetime shot. If the cubs were not strong enough for walking, then the tigress might again relocate them the next day, giving us ample opportunity to witness the motherly love of the huge feline. Being experienced with multiple wildlife expeditions, Kedar replied me that the only reason why the tigress chose to relocate her cubs, was that she sensed clear and present danger haunting the cubs. In fact, even in absence of other intruding male tigers, the cubs face immediate threat and stiff competition from other mean predators like wild dogs, hyenas and even jackals, right from the day they are born. The only thing that ensured the survival of these wild creatures was pure animal instinct - something which we humans have discarded to become civilized beings. As our topic of discussion was going towards instincts, the pet dog inside our resort also joined the campfire. Pointing to the dog, Kedar remarked that this German Shepherd breed, was actually a wolf by bodily features, whose wild instincts were manipulated and altered by humans over ages. Hence, rather than hunting in packs, it is dependent on humans for its survival. The idea of threats and instincts set off a chain of thoughts in my mind about how nature ensures mertiocracy, and where in the quest to become civilized, we drifted away from the ways of nature.

In jungle, all animals are uniquely gifted and equally cursed as well. Though herbivores like deer, antelopes, wild buffaloes, and sometimes monkeys, are hounded & hunted by predators like tigers, lions, hyenas and wild dogs, they have developed excellent communication skills and strong limbs to outrun the predators. A herbivore sensing danger, calls out its own kind with a typical alert message. Monkeys and peacocks, being the circumstantial victims of hungry predators failing in their attempts to get large size preys, decipher the alerts of these herbivores, either hide or get to the highest reaches of trees. The strength of collaboration and an effective danger alert system of these herbivores, is not only their merit, but a huge challenge for a predator to get its prey. In addition, some herbivores like wild buffaloes and antelopes, can even gore a predator to its death by a single super strong blow from their horns. For a tiger, stealth coupled with brute muscle power is its only merit to counter the strong defence of herbivores. However, hunting is not the end of the show for a tiger. It needs to ensure that the prey is consumed by itself and its cubs. Opportunists like wild dogs and hyenas jump into the fray for their pound of flesh. Their strength is in their numbers as a group. There are many instances where a group of hyenas, outnumber a pride of lions, and steal their prey. To eliminate competition for food, these small predators usually kill young tiger and lion cubs, before the latter even get the opportunity to grow as full grown adults, and in turn, be a threat to the former's existence. Scavengers like vultures and eagles do the cleanup job of whatever is left of the prey. Armed with strong beaks and powerful talons, these scavengers are also powerful enough to drive away opportunists like a pack of wild dogs. For a tiger to hunt a deer, it is not only the failure of the deer, but also the skills of the tiger that matter. In a nutshell, in jungle, everyday everyone is a threat to every other one, and the ones with merit are the ones who survive to see the next day. This is precisely where we humans have gone off-track from the meritocracy of nature. Apart from having a powerful brain to analyze stuff, we have lost a vast part of our survival instincts. We created societies, civilizations and nations, with rules and constitutions to govern ourselves. Political ideologies like capitalism, socialism, and communism are creations of our own brain, with an idea of one size fits all kind of a theory, quite contrary to the natural way of meritocracy. Our governments tax the rich for their earning ability, while politicians distribute freebies to the poor, in the garb of affirmative action, thereby altering their survival instincts, the same way we humans have tweaked the instincts of a wolf and made it into a fully dependent pet dog. Our animal instincts have drifted so far from nature that, after a tsunami sweeps of millions of our fellow human beings, we realize that a receding ocean is a tell-tale sign of an approaching tsunami. It is ironical that, we humans are re-learning the art of teamwork and collaboration inside elite business schools and corporate houses, when our friends deep inside jungles are masters of the same.

By this time our campfire started to reduce in its intensity, and perhaps our fruitful discussion was also coming to an end along with my chain of thoughts. As Kedar rightly said - "Within our own intelligence and creativity, lies our own seeds of destruction"; and I believe it to be true, for we have discarded meritocracy, drifted away from the ways of nature and created terrible things like nuclear bombs thereby ensuring our own destruction along with the beautiful planet itself. As, the eminent Canadian journalist, author & speaker Malcolm Gladwell has aptly put - 

"The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend it is. And we have a long way to go before we reward people based on their merit."

Sands of Time

27th Feb 2018: The neighborhood seemed totally different from what it was two decades back, yet there seemed an invisible force, that guided my bicycle to those familiar, yet forgotten routes. Armed with my camera, I was on a solitary mission to travel back in time to almost 24 years.
The time portal that sent me traveling across time, back to my childhood was the Jhirpani Bridge. Without even an iota of fatigue, my legs ceaselessly worked on the pedals, while the bicycle handle automatically turned in the direction that lead to my childhood days, as if some invisible force had hardwired my sub-conscious brain to ride through those nostalgic roads. As I approached the river, I parked my bicycle besides a tree and started to descend into the river.

Two kids were playing flying discus with their parents on the sands of the river bank. The girl who was elder than the boy, was playfully teaching her brother how to dig sand tunnels and make a temple out of the excavated earth. The brother, on the other hand, was clawing out small lumps of sand with his tiny hands and was giving it to his sister to make the temple. The parents were sitting on a small blanket on the sands and were enjoying the sight of their kids playing with the river sand. Sometimes, the father and son would play by throwing small stones and pebbles into the river at oblique angles, while the mother and sister would count how many times the pebble bounced on the water surface before going down the river bed.

As I shifted my focus to the flowing river momentarily and looked again, the family had disappeared into oblivion. I searched for pebbles, with a vague hope, that throwing it into the river would bring back the playful father and son before my eyes, but the pebbles were nowhere to be found. Knowing where they would have gone after disappearing from the river bank, I returned to my cycle and started pedaling again.

I was standing in front of  Mar Thoma Church. There was a small house in front of the church. A Yamaha RX100 bike was parked and an Alsatian dog ferociously guarded the gates. As I opened the gates and went inside, I found the family once again. This time, the father and kids were playing crossword in a dimly lit house plagued with severe under-voltage, while the mother was cooking dinner for the entire family. The dog was doing rounds of the kitchen and backyard, eagerly awaiting its dinner as the mother was preparing rotis. In the afternoon, the kids often ran to the terrace and spent the entire noon plucking mulberries from the adjacent tree, till their hands and mouth tinged red with the mulberry juice.

Unable to bear the nostalgia, I resumed pedaling, only to find the kid holding his mother's hand and the mother-son duo having their usual morning walk near the radio station. As I continued further, I saw the father, patiently teaching the kid, the art of riding a bicycle. For a moment, I looked back, hoping the father has placed his hands on my bicycle and running alongside me, for he knew, his son was afraid of falling down.

When I returned to my house, I saw the family again. But times have changed. The father was sitting on his study table, while the mother was watching TV. The small kids were all grown up now. The elder sister got married a few years ago. The Alsatian dog was not the first, but perhaps the last dog the family ever had, for its death was a huge emotional setback. The younger brother has now returned from his trip down the memory lane, and has just completed the narration of his amazing childhood.

Ferroequinologist Diaries - The Autobiography of an Electric Locomotive

Hello Friends,

I am an electric locomotive, and today, after much introspection, I am here to share some of my innermost thoughts about myself, and my creators - The Human Beings.

I have started my journey from a railway terminal, and currently I am sprinting at full throttle towards my final destination - another railway terminal, thousands of miles away. Throughout the length of my journey, my job and mission is to haul a long train of bogies from one station to another. I am supposed to be powered by the overhead electric cables. It is only when I make conscious efforts and raise my pantographs, I become truly empowered. In the course of my amazing journey, so far, I have crossed numerous beautiful stations, awesomely strong bridges, extremely dark tunnels, lush green fields and much more. I have witnessed the almighty sun traveling its own journey, radiating energy from one horizon of the sky to the diametrically opposite horizon. I have enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine as well as the coolness of the raindrops as they drench the earth below.

  

Each time as I crossed junction after junction, I did make choices to take the lesser known tracks that led to many unknown, yet beautiful destinations. At some major junctions, I was detached from the train I was hauling, and was reassigned to haul some other train. Even though it felt painful to let go of the train and it's passengers, whom I hauled so far and became an integral part responsible for their journey, still then I am not supposed to get emotionally attached. My idea professionalism lies in my job of hauling trains to the best of my capabilities; be it the coaches of an express train or a superfast train or even heavy wagons of a freight train.

So much about me, but a lot needs to be said about my God gifted creators; the humans. Sometimes I wonder, despite having striking similarities in our daily lives, how come the humans get affected by negative emotions like unhappiness, jealousy, disappointments and frustrations. It makes me sad when I see human beings fight with each other in the name of God, without realizing the true nature of the almighty. The electricity which powers me and gives me life to do my job is also a form of God. The way I make conscious efforts to raise my pantographs and connect with my God, humans also have the same capability to connect with their God via their brains. It is only, the conscious effort to connect with the almighty that is required. Similar to my life, humans have also started their journey on this planet from their birth to the ultimate death. In between these two terminals, they also witness various day to day events, similar to the way I cross fields, rivers, roads, canals, tunnels and stations. Like me, my creators also haul tons of responsibilities from one stage of their life to another. Where my life is simple, because my sense of professionalism does not allow me to get emotionally attached with anything - neither the path of my journey, nor my responsibilities; my creators get trapped in the bonds of emotional attachments and face disappointments when those attachments snap. While I make choices to tread upon lesser known tracks, and consequently enjoy the adventure of discovering unknown & unchartered, yet beautiful destinations; the humans beings tend to follow a set path in the name of traditions. They lose out many opportunities to do things differently in their day to day lives, and ultimately gain nothing, except tons of regret for all those things they did not do in their life. In contrast to my journey, where I have to haul heavy trains to the best of my abilities, humans encounter unnecessary frustration and jealousy by focusing on other's capabilities & responsibilities.

Sometimes, I wish my creators, could understand my unspoken words, and live a peaceful life like me.

As I speak, we have reached my final destination. I must bid farewell to you all, disconnect myself from the overhead wires and shut down; till next time, another lifetime journey with another set of coaches and a new destination to conquer.

Adieu.