At The Edge

Years ago I woke up one late night to the blue light coming from the black & white television tube. That’s when I saw it. For years I remembered the images of a tense looking man finding a pistol behind a Chainwalla flush and then walking out of the toilet, looking at two men talking to him sitting on the chairs around a dining table in some restaurant, he winces and then shoots the two men. One of the men after being shot manages to choke on the food that he was eating. Gargling and a loud sound of a passing train fades out. I had heard a lot about Godfather and managed to see the movie only years later on Star Movies with a hundred commercial breaks thrown in. After fifty-ninth commercial breaks got over, Michael entered the toilet to look for the pistol and I knew where the damn pistol was. It was just behind the Chainwalla flush and a train was fast approaching. Bless Doordarshan! Bloody Cable killed the Able Foresight!

Hate takes a long time To grow in, and mine Has increased from birth; Not for the brute earth... ...I find This hate's for my own kind... ~ Found this in an essay titled ‘Notes on Writing and the Nation (For Index on Censorship)’, written by Salman Rushdie. The essay can be found in his book, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Ahm …Anybody interested in seeing what Lata Mangeshkar would have looked like, had see been born around Hindukush region. A beautiful Afgani singer with a beautiful voice, singing a Lata ka geet .

Don’t be scared, my little man- Think I’m going to bite you? Silly notion! Don’t you know I have no strength to fight you? I know the horns upon my head Must seem a trifle shocking. But butting pains my head, and so They’re seldom used for knocking. ‘Well, well-I see you’re not convinced By all that I’ve said, It’s time I grabbed you by your legs And knocked you on the head. My wife and dozen kids and I Believe it’s downright silly To let escape a stupid man Who’s scared, willy nilly’ Sukumar Ray’s poem translated from Bengali by his son, filmmaker Satyajit Ray. In this poem, an enormous devilish looking creature emerges from a rock to have this playful conversation with a Bengali babu. An illustration of the whole scene drawn by Sukumar Ray accompanies the poem. Can be found in the book Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray -0- ‘Pursuing feeing girls with a lifted stick, The naughty little boy Battering a toy violin to pieces To find whence the tunes came; Throw

I say let the women in their twenties take over the world. Of course, that would mean the end of the world after 25-30 years because its around this time that they would hit the menopause. With all the world leadership ‘hot’ and experiencing psychological conditions like mood disturbance, irritability, fatigue, memory loss and depression, the possibility of nuclear holocaust is very high. At least we would have 25-30 years of peace. We men, we don’t need psychological conditions like these to nuke someone. No way. We would nuke someone just because “the other guy guzzled two more beers than I could. Teri toh …How dare you!"Tie the A-bomb around the guzzler guy’s waist and air drop him on the brewery. That would bring peace to the world and more importantly to the pub” (Really got in trouble with some women after wrting it. Still don't know what the fuss was about!)

It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like. This or That Number, This or That Street, This or That Conurbation, This or That Country, This or That Continent, This or That Hemisphere, The Earth, The Superior Planets, The Solar System, Nr. Alpha Centauri, The Orion Spur, The Milky Way, The Local Cluster, The Local Supercluster, The Universe, T his Universe. The One Containing: The Local Supercluster, The Local Cluster, And So On. All the Way Back To: This or That Street, And This or That Number. It might help if we knew where we were going and how fast. The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second. He Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per seconds. The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second. Astronomically, everything is always get