Green Magic, Crow Heaven etc.

My son, though only ten months old, is an outdoorsman. In fact, he was one even before his birth, considering the urgency with which he came into this world. When my wife went into labour, the midwife at the hospital said it's going to take 10 to 12 hours. He was out in seven. And ever since he began moving his hands he always points to the door to tell me that he wants to go out. So, everyday morning I take him out on the terrace to see the birds, mostly crows and then we go see the neighbour's dogs and cats and generally spent a lot of time standing outside.

Then, recently I saw a dead crow on the street near a garbage dump and I realized that in all these years I have probably seen only 4 dead crows. OK, five. Tops. That's about it. Honest. Hundreds of thousands of crows and just 5 dead crows in thirty-odd years. Why is that? There must be something to it. I personally believe that the crows go to some special place (e.g. a garbage dump) to kick the bucket like guys going to Kashi (don't know if Kashi is a garbage dump) to spend their last days. This however will change soon, if things progress at this rate. Pretty soon they won't have to go anywhere as the whole city is going to be one big garbage dump. This is not a bad thing as such. As G. Carlin says, plastic is the answer to our age-old philosophical question of "why are we here?" "Plastic". The earth didn't know how to make plastic and needed us.

Some people, after living in clean first world places, find it difficult to adjust back to this land and its peculiarities. Not me (though I do have a problem in getting my wife understand my convoluted theories). Again, as G. Carlin says, it's just a question of accepting our inner scumbags. This also shows our innate revulsion to any kind of authority. Our motto should be, to quote from a Gen. G. Patton (originally by some French guy) motivational speech to his soldiers, "l'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace", or "audacious, audacious, always audacious". In our case the meaning of audacious would be insolence or casual disrespect. I'm using a picture for the first time in this article. The picture shown here is of a small garbage dump. There are a couple of bigger ones less than 100 metres away on either side, but this is the one I like. It's right below a board that says disposing garbage here is punishable. Yeah, right!

I don't have a problem with this, unless of course it personally inconveniences me. I don't want to go out of my front gate and step on a diaper filled with somebody else's ugly kid's doo-doo. So, I've made clear with a small notice to the guy who throws stuff in my street that I'll one day catch him and ... Seems to have worked, he's putting it a 50 metres away from my house. L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace. We should get Amitabh Kant, the guy who dreamt up the God's own country propaganda, to come and somehow incorporate this into our tourism brochures. A new paradigm. Green magic plus garbage pile.

Politics: It's going to be election time soon and all political parties worth their a/c cars are into conducting marches. The most conceited one was by the RSS. To protect the country. Hmm, from what? And, the big daddy of all the marches was the one by the Marxist party. Objective: A development agenda for their party. There was a striking picture of their leader wearing a floral crown at a meeting in Kottayam, which reminded me of the BJP's candidate in the Trivandrum election who was also seen with a crown and sceptre. A crown is a symbol of royalty. It's all right for the BJP, which believes in Ram Rajya to have someone clowning around with a crown, or even the Congress, which believes in a semi-royal dynasty. The Marxist party, however, is supposedly a party of the common man. So, there is some disconnect at first sight, but if you search deeper it kind of adds up. They have expressed their desire to make Kerala like Bengal, where they have been ruling for many decades now. This would imply that Bengal has achieved immense progress and is now like Switzerland. Not!! In fact, there are many things Bengal can and should do to look like Kerala, whether it is education or healthcare. So, the idea here, it seems, is just to cling on to power. Don't hold your breath waiting for "dictatorship of the proletariat". More likely it's going to be just an "autocracy of the Polit Bureau member".

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