Broken Partnership

When the weeds grow wild and the berries are too ripe, when the grass is too dry and the deck is unstained, when the golf clubs get rusty and the cricketing boots go missing, when it is the last week in July and there is no vacation left, you know — rather I know that I have wasted (or almost) a perfectly hot and sweltering Michigan summer.

For one, I haven’t had time to put on my blogger hat. And the new iMac G5 is still waiting to be embraced – forget about all MBox -2 and the rest of the gear that are dependent on the embrace.
So I wonder as I sit on my couch withering away my last few hours left of my weekend before a grinding week starts again, what on earth has made me lose focus?

As I refresh my memory for all the fun stuff I did and didn’t write about — it includes reading a couple of books. “Holy Cow” by Sarah Macdonald was a fun trip through the spiritual geography of India from a westerner’s eyes…and it stands out. I had hopes on Upamanyu Chatterjee’s “The mammaries of the welfare state”, specially as it was touted to be a sequel to one of my college favourite reads – “English August”. Don’t think it was quite up there. Upamanyu spent way too much time trying to explain why he named the book as he did although there is no denying the satire he came up with on Indian bureaucracy. All in all, the book was a drag.

The 624 run partnership that Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara put together just beats my imagination and I still am amazed by their patience to just stay there in the crease amidst the heat, to pile up these runs.

I heard that the partnership was finally broken!!

Is there a way out?

Human lives don’t mean much to these fanatics. But to me….I can’t bear to even read about someone losing someone’s loved one. 6:30 PM – right in the middle of a monsoon season, when the linear Mumbai Western line was abuzz with the regular commuters getting back from work eagerly looking forward to taking their evening sip of ‘chai’ leaning on their familiar walls or verandahs once they got home, as the wet fields that went past their window sights and as the grim reminders of the July floods from the previous year flashed across their eyes & minds, just imagine, that some of those innocent souls who had no thoughts of terrorism or death in their minds at that moment, just died the next moment. They burst into flames or their flesh was tattered in that devastating moment making their lives mean nothing, their dreams floored, the very meaning of their existence worthless and lividly making their loved ones’ lives miserable as long as they live.

Why? Above the hoods of Radical Islam, Fanaticism, Kashmiri militancy, Pakistani separitism and anything else, Can you, me and “them” just think humanely..for we are humans?

Is there a way out of this? Throw all the blame you can at governments, militants, terrorists and religious leaders. But can anyone do anything?