Author: Sunny Jaiswal

Lost In Transition – Chapter 1

I woke up and my head was pretty heavy. I think I have slept hard. The day in my head is as beautiful as it can be. It was raining in the night.

I anticipated an earthy aroma rising from the grounds, but I guess the sun was too hard on the earth. I rose from the bed, feeling a little hazy as well; I guess last night must have been a drunken night.

The haziness in the air was surprising but soothing. This was highly unlikely as it had just rained.

The sooth-ness and stillness was very defining that made me a little wary of the situation. I had just woken up, but the adrenaline in me was pumping. It felt like those moments when everything goes great for you. I went downstairs. My mum was making something in the kitchen. I went into the hall, dad was reading a newspaper. The atmosphere suddenly started feeling grimy, as if a death has happened. Death, I realized, I was very close to death few days ago. I was riding my bike on the always busy streets of Mumbai when a public bus rammed into my bike from behind. I fell, but I remember there was no way the bus could stop before ramming into me. Now, I don’t exactly remember how I was saved, but that would always be one memory that I would try to forget, yet the hardest.

I wanted to forget it, but it was also the most vivid things my brain remembered. Being close to death does give you a different perception. When you scratch-by so close to it, everything else seems so small. Whatever you have done, whatever you have built will be dusted off after you. The fruits of life do not seem so attractive at that point. Meaning of life takes whole another turn. You don’t question the meaning of life, as it is in front of you. The whole journey, what you did, the regrets, the undoings you wish, all flashing like black demons making it one hell of a soap opera. You feel like stopping lying to yourself.

After having one of those moments, it made me feel lighter. Being the procrastinator that we are, the things that we have pushed-off of us, just because we didn’t want to admit it, are now laughing at our faces, making it impossible to get past them. 

I checked the time. It was 8 AM in the morning. I am confused whether its a weekday or a weekend. My memory didn’t ruffle up any feathers. I feel blank if I try to remember last few days. I can make a joke of ‘worst hangover ever’, but the situation will make it distasteful. Why do I have such hazy memory. Is it because of the knock in the head I got when I fell. But if I have suffered a head injury, why does my head feel so lighter. Kudos to the doctor who wrote the prescription for me.

Dad looks towards me but without acknowledging me goes back to reading the newspaper. I am hoping somebody didn’t tell him about my recent drunk adventure. I really need to sort my life together.  I remember some very stupid mistakes done by ‘drunk’ me, but most of it is lost in haziness. I make another useless resolve to care more about my health as ‘inner’ me laughs.

I come out in the open to see the world a little darker than normally accustomed to. The gloominess hangs so tight at the sky, it’s hard to ignore it. I am called by my mother. I rush inside to see what is happening. I see tears in my mother’s eyes as my dad is holding her head on his shoulders consoling of something. She says she is okay now. My father moves back from the kitchen to his newspapers. He is heading directly towards me.

It’s very confusing to see him coming directly towards me, looking at me as if I have done something grave. I cannot match his intensity, so I drop my eyes on to the floor. This reminds me of the time when he was very angry with me as I had done something horrible. Shit! I can’t remember what I had done. In fact, I am not able to remember any significant memory of my life except the accident and few hazy encounters. What is happening with me, is it because of the accident again? My mind is panicking, but my heart doesn’t have any idea about the panic. It’s the hollowest I have ever felt. The more I think about the panic, the more hollowness I feel in my stomach. Well, ‘feel’ wouldn’t be the right word. But this is becoming a more troublesome worry for me. I always used to get extra pleasure in pressure situation because of how much I enjoyed this. But today there is no rush of blood, nothing which wants me to find a quick solution to the menace I am about to face.

I was still processing my thoughts when it happened. I was so aghast, that I couldn’t move. I was terrified to the core, as I realized what had happened. 

I was dead. My dad passed through me.

Oaxaca – A travel guide

Image Credit: Sumaiya

We started our trip from Oaxaxa city. Stayed there for two days and stayed a day in Puerto Escondido. The trip was absolutely thrilling, fun as well as informative. We experienced ruins, beaches, mountains, lagoons, nightlife: in short everything a place can have. We learn new perspectives from our  trips, but there lot of trips, returning from which I can say I learnt something new. This was one of those places. So, have a read, enjoy the pics and have a good time.

Our day 1 started on Saturday.
The first thing in our list was to visit Hierve el agua, which was, in a nutshell, a waterfall that appears to be frozen. Frozen, because it appears whitish, but essentially these are rocks that have been calcified. The sight is beautiful from there. It also has two water pools where in swimming is also possible. The water in the pool is blue with a yellowish hue on the edges that makes it superb spot for clicking photos. 
The place has a nice stairway entry and has a lot of stalls where in you can get decent food.


Our next stop was El Tule, a tree older than 2000 years. It is around 1 hour drive away from Hierve el Agua. The tree is historic as well as the stoutest tree in the world. The tree is pretty picturesque and seems as if the whole centro area has been centred around it. As you can see from the picture below, the tree looks splendid and is still standing strong and lushy. We tried some local flavours of ice-cream there and indeed the flavors were pretty rich. The whole place has a calming aura around it which makes it a good candidate to sit around and relax.

After relaxing for a bit, we moved for the last location of our day, which was Monte Alban. We were already quite starstruck from the previous two sites, but we were in for a surprise when we visited Monte Alban.
Monte Alban is the ruins of the ancient city of Zopotec of the Mixtec era. Zapotec is said to be one of the first cities in the Americas. The people used to literally live on to the hilltops spread across a vast area. The main hill has a view of the city from all sides.The site of Monte Alban is also printed on the 20 peso denomination currency note.

After finishing the places, we returned to our hotel which was around 100 metres away from the centro. We visited a local karaoke bar and tried Mezcal, which is a local drink of Oaxaca. This wrapped up our first day.
The second day, we had a good breakfast in the centro and we started for Puerto Escondido which was a worrisome 250+ kms away from Oaxaca city. Lucky for us, conditions were overcast and we had a great drive. The weather helped us and the songs kept us going. We stopped a couple of times for lunching and snacking and we were not disappointed. The food was always delicious and always had a unique flavour, whichever food we selected. After 8 hours of approximate drive, we reached to our hotel in Puerto Escondido and after a little rest, we went to explore the nightlife. We chanced upon a club named ‘Dubai Discotheque’ which had a great space for dancing. We sat, drank and danced our tiredness away and called it a night.

The next day was special and my favorite part of the trip. We experienced unique things that are exclusive to Puerto Escondido.We got ready in our beach wears, and started for Carrizalillo beach. Its a surfing beach where you have to descend 160 steps to reach the beach. They have shacks made for you to relax and have some refreshments while admiring the beach. The closed structure of the beach allows for a good scenic view that can be captured in the camera really well. After relaxing and having a sumptuous sea food lunch, we moved to Playa Bacocho(Bacocho beach). Bacocho beach is one of the locations from where sea turtles are released in the ocean. The beach in itself is a huge one, but what makes it special is that the local organisations effort to help out in the turtle’s survival. The turtle release activity starts at 5pm, where they first huddle you up and explain what they are doing. They have made special structures where they keep the turtle eggs until they are hatched. Then they are released into the ocean. Turtles are given to tourists in a coconut shell costing 100 pesos each. These donations help the organisation to keep these efforts going. Now out of the remaining 7 species of sea turtles in the world, 4 of them come to the beaches in Oaxaca to lay their eggs. Interestingly the sea turtles have this memory, wherein they return to the same place where they were born to lay their eggs again. So, the turtle that we released will return in 10-12 years to lay their egg again and the cycle continues. The guides also told us how these species are being endangered due to climate change as well as man-made risks.We had a chance to release Oliver Ridley species of the turtles into the ocean. They are pretty abundant sea turtles species found on the world.So, after releasing the baby turtles and watching them struggle to get into the ocean, we returned to hotel to prepare ourselves for the final point in our trip.

The place is called Laguna de Manialtepec. Its a lagoon, which is famous for its bioluminescence. So, obviously you have to visit the place after sunset. The water shines really nice when stirred. We were taken a little away from the city lights into the center where it was easy to observe and since the water is warm, the guests are encouraged to have a swim to get a better experience. The water was indeed magical and observing bioluminescence firsthand really made the experience special. We spent around an hour enjoying the water and then returned back to the hotel as we had early morning plans to return to the Oaxaca city, return the rented car and take flight back to our home town.We started in the morning, had a rough ride in the mountain, ate some lovely local food again in lunch and reached Oxaca city centro to do some final shopping.

This kind of wrapped our joyous trip of Oaxaca. 

Menace of an Indian Netizen

Image Credit: Sumaiya

So lately if you have been online lately, you must have seen such a big influx of Indians on the comment sections of literally everywhere, be it Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, Forums. Isnt that supposed to be a good thing that we are representing India everywhere. My answer would ideally be yes, until it comes down to reality. Internet is too good for us. While Internet has given us a good channel for us to express, the usage that we had pre-Jio era was still pleasant. People used to do their things as per their priorities. They were searching for pieces of code, chatting with their friends and crushes, visiting cyber cafes for filling up forms or to check the results. That was a sweet era of the internet in India. After the Jio boom, everybody has internet, data that needs to be consumed and an opportunity to make our lives better. And what do we do with that?


Some improved their lives further, some played online mobile games, some started reading online articles, while some recieved the articles in their FB, Insta, Reddit feed. We are a pretty vocal lot. We started giving our opinions on stuffs. That is where this story starts. Now, I am not saying that people from other countries are not vocal. They are. But can you match the numbers that we have, do you have that active internet users that we have. India has an internet penetration of approximately 40%, which can overwhelm a discussion forum with the numbers. Now those numbers have a huge potential to do some real good: standing up for something, taking a stand, holding up an opinion. But sadly it has actually become a hornet’s nest.
You can’t criticize and/or have discussion about something negative happening in India being an outsider. The crowd of online immature users will run you over. And that is not cool. Even Indians who criticize something are labelled left wing or right wingers. We have to understand not everyone who is criticizing has an agenda. Sure, most media houses are serving biased content these days, but being on the internet, we don’t have to subscribe to everything that they are serving. There used to be a time, the media houses and their editorials used to be a great source of gaining perspective. But these days since most of the news publications are being powered by one of the parties, they are not an apt source to gain information. Our best hope is to take the facts from their content and keep their biased opinions aside. Avoiding sharing content which is not verified.

Positives

Sure we had some wins given the united stands of our netizens. The most profilic of them being net-neutrality. When the news broke out that free internet might be in danger , we all took our stands and made sure nothing of that sort could endanger our freedom. That has been the most potent use of our powers as netizens. But aside from that, in most other cases, our power has been borderline annoying. Be it the case of T-Series against PewDiePie. It was never about India vs The World, but we made it seem like in our eyes and then eventually in front of the world. It was about an individual vs a corporation. But lets not get into the details. My point here is we took the diss track personally and launched online attacks on anyone who stood against the motion. In our mind, we were defending India, but in reality we were adding to that annoying factor.
Another highlighted case was of a confusion in names of current PM and a former PM of Bhutan. Use the link to see the story.
Now, when Sharapova(an individual) said that she doesn’t know Sachin, she was trolled massively. While here a media house, the people who are supposed to have the most researched stuffs, made this massive blunder. My point here is: first, Mr Lotay TShering, we are sorry on behalf  of our news agencies and secondly, its okay if someone doesn’t comply to our views or opinions, just agree to disagree and carry on with your lives instead of thrusting your own opinion onto others.

What can we do?

So, that was the problem. What is the way ahead? My advice would be to just be calm and think before we outrage or just think if we would say the same thing if the person was infront of us. In most of the cases, we would probably retract our outrage. In this digital era of anonymity(well proxy-anonymity), it is so easy to get polarised in your views. I am pretty sure if I want you to agree with me on, lets say, on how Facebook is an evil organisation and your privacy means nothing to them, I would share few emotional articles which will touch a nerve and bam, the seeds are sown, which will bear the fruits eventually. Now, Facebook sure is turning to the dark side and that’s no propaganda(I will talk about it some other time, maybe next). 
News is not news these days, everything has become an editorial, with the presentor forcing their thoughts onto their readers/viewers. And I am not saying that other countries dont have this problem, they sure do, but its not as magnified as us, because of our huge internet user base.
Now, talking to people who already subsribe to above views, I recently did an experiment with positive results and wish to propagate the same.
The experiment is to talk to people outraging and calm them down. During the recent Zomato controversy, where a guy refused to take an order from a Muslim delivery boy. I went to Instagram and tried talking to a person outraging in some comment section. Ofcourse I was abused pretty colorfully initially, but after a round of one-to-one logical talk, I was able to pacify him. Now, he may or may not outrage again, but I would like to believe that he will let logic be his driver rather than  anger in his conversations ahead. We really need tolerance in our online opinions these days.
So, my advice again, would be to talk to people spreading hate or colorful opinions over the internet and we might be able to change the tone into a more positive one, one person at a time.

References:
1. https://mobile.twitter.com/tsheringtobgay/status/1134051796564025344                           

2019 is here!

From pappu to PUBG, every one made a mark in this year. Whereas pappu wanted to bring down the government with a fighter plane issue, PUBG players used passenger planes to gather chicken dinners.

2019
Image Credits: Google Images

It was a great year for changes, while a lot of important infrastructure improvements were done, there were some unnecessary changes done by the UP CM. The name changes don’t bring the glory of cities, the actual projects being executed in the cities do. But only if someone could understand.
Emphasis on cows and women have been a major topic this year. Whereas emphasis on women empowerment makes total sense, mob lynching in the name of cow protection is something that goes over my head. This is like taking pet love to whole another level. Gundaraj in UP reminds me of the movies that we used to see in the 90s. Whereas they used to end on a happy note, in reality it seems highly unlikely.
But the most affecting thing this year to me were the mindless spreading of fake news. It sends shiver down my spine, even thinking the huge impacts that these can have on families, society, cities and even countries. The social media has become a propaganda creating machine which can become a cause for worry and can be used as a weapon to form opinions. Every page that I see on Facebook these days is coloured with one of the party’s colors. You read one article from them and you can understand their affiliations. By following these pages, I now know which pages are affiliated with which political mindset and will spew venom on which mindset. A propagandist had never had such a great weapon at their disposal. We have all seen the impacts of it multiple times in the past few months.
So there is a strong need of fact-checking of every news that we talk about. Its time to take this initiative of fact-checking in our hands and not rely on anyone for it. There are only a few sources I rely these days to get an unbiased opinion and I also resolve to fact-check news before sharing to my friends and family in this new year of 2019.

Intolerance

I was watching a video podcast by Kunal Kamra about intolerance and the topics discussed were really eye-opening and made me think about some problems I have witnessed personally. So here it goes:

For a very long time, I have been apolitical. But no more.

We Indians have been proud for generations about being tolerant. But no more.

Its time to end the intolerancy being practiced by certain factions.

Its time to end the passivity about how we consume news.

This is yet another calm minded person losing it because he has seen enough.

The problem

Although there are various things that are wrong and can be made tolerable by slightest actions, I am going to talk about one.

The mob mentality that is taking us back to decades in terms of development and education levels.

mob intolerance
Image Credit: Sumaiya

It is no less dangerous as a person shouting against our country. A mob could be a cause and effect of it.

A mob has no mind, they work as a zombie that wants to break anything that comes infront of it. You & I are not safe when a mob breaks out. I need to go no farther than the person who got lynched by a mob, hired to raise awareness against the same mob mentality.

Why you should care?

There have been countless cases where mobs have lynched a wrong person that I don’t even need to go there.

Consider for a moment, you are standing in a big crowd in a state fair. You want to cross the road, but it is so overwhelming that you need to cut across of them if you want to reach to the other side. You wait for some time to find an opening to go through, but you find none, since it’s not a disciplined car stack. So, you decide to randomly cut across the crowd as you are out of patience. You put your hands ahead to cut the crowd and make your way forward. Suddenly, a man, who presumes that you are a molestor trying to get a feel of his wife, stops you. He gets hold of you and starts creating a scene and shouting about you being a sexual predator. You are alone and you do not have any defense, since it’s a gray area and balance can shift any way.

There could be a sensible person who may turn the tide in your favour, but there is this other horrendous possibility that there could be a person strong enough to incite a mob against you and get you beaten up. Your heart is racing, since it could go either way and put a huge dent on your personality forever. You say a few things in your defense but that doesn’t budge anything in your favour. The people watching have a choice to make now. They can get all the frustration collected inside of them and pour it on you, or they can let you go. You are totally on their mercy. You could be labelled all sorts of things that can stay with you for your whole life. Do you feel me? Isn’t that a situation that you wouldn’t never want to have a first hand experience.

I was in such a situation years back and it still is most haunting situation I have ever been in. I was lucky and I am really thankful to that crowd who gave me a chance and left me unscathed. But really I had no control over the situation.

If you felt the situation, you should also fear the on-growing count of such cases in the last few months, be it in the name of cow-killing, or child-trafficking, or rape-accusations. The trend is dangerous and deserves the same levels of sympathy as one would give to a rape victim.

Its really frightening to know one maniac person has the capability to incite a mob, using morphing these days and that should make us shudder since any of us can become a victim quite easily.

The other side

And this doesn’t go only for physical mobs, an online mob, a mob of haters can have a devastating effect as well. Take for example the cases of Kanhaiya Kumar and Sunil Kumar, a BJP MLA(just search Google with the term ‘sunil kumar bjp god’). Kanhaiya Kumar was hounded after the news broke out. But what happened with Sunil Kumar. There are two things that I found wrong:

  1. The obvious one, the contrast between actions taken against their quite seemingly similar impacting words.
  2. While researching about it, there was no news about what happened after the FIR was lodged against Sunil Kumar. I couldn’t find any news regarding this after it was reported about an FIR against him on Jan 24, 2018. Probably getting justice was too boring in the view of our vibrant media to report.

Now, Kanhaiya and Umar Khalid still are recipients of hate speech(online and offline) and the mob mentality that has already colored them as anti-nationals. They didn’t get a proper platform to discuss and remedy this, and might not lead a normal life now. I would include a link to the video where they do get to voice their opinions and you would realize how quickly there were judged by our online mob. Even if they were wrong, we judged them so quickly that chances of getting rid of that blot is seemingly impossible now.

The impact of online mob is as dangerous as a physical mob. The mob shielded behind social networking layers do penetrate the moral shell and can make or break society as well.

Aftermath

I really respect our Prime Minister for the positive policies that have been introduced in his term, but dear Prime Minister, we don’t need a mandir, when mandirs are nothing but a business place these days.

We don’t need a mandir, when our mann is not in our control and being controlled by whatsapp forwards.

We need a system that can incite fear in people so that they don’t join a mob just for fun.

A system where their actions being part of crowd are not condoned. The gau-rakshak team mostly made up of RSS factions, have no part in society and their fatal actions have resulted in a lot of fear. Government need to curb such self-righteous groups.

From our end, as citizens and netizens, we should be really discrete and mindful of what we are sharing online. Now that we have proof that social networks can be used to influence people’s behaviours, the height of which is individuals/parties winning elections.

Educating the person serving such forwards about what possible impact that news can have if its a fake one. People need to understand the fear of being on the receiving end of a mob. Then only we can expect a change for the better.

References:

 Interview with Kanhaiya and Umar Khalid.

 

Dreams Shattered – 3

Click Here to read the previous part.

Akarsh heard people shouting in the news discussion bulletin on TV. They were arguing about something about Kathua. He overheard his father slowly talking to her mother, meanwhile keeping a check that nobody else can listen to him. He understood the case while his father explained everything to his mother in hushed tone.

Image Courtesy: Google Images

Akarsh felt disgusted, hoping that is just fiction that he had just heard. He felt disturbed. The voices which he can hear on a daily basis were making more noise than ever today. He felt like the tipping point seemed to be closing. He thought of focusing on the voice that gave him direction. He couldn’t hear the voice today. He focused and tried harder. Finally the voice answered. He felt a disappointment in the voice today.

“You sensed what I wanted to talk about.” he asked the voice.

“Everybody is talking about that only. You are too small to be handling that topic.”, the voice answered.

“Maybe that is the mistake we have been making.”

The voice thought for a moment. It could come up with no answer. It shrugged.

After a long silence, it spoke:

“There is no way back from this. The epidemic that is rape, has affected India these days, goes beyond my comprehension. Is it religion, is it stupidity, or is it such hard placed belief that a cry for help doesn’t shake a person anymore? It was just to prove a point, I heard.

Nothing remains of her. The only daughter of the family rested in the ground for good. It seems we are obsessed with burying women to the ground one at a time. How do you even determine what she did to deserve such fate. Probably temple was not the safest place for her. Probably, God doesn’t exists everywhere.

We promised after Nirbhaya that we wouldn’t let anything of that sort happen. But look at us now. Making the same mistake, hiking the same path, placing blame on other’s, while failing to realize the fault in us. Our education system, our political inclination, our blind faith in our religion, while making sure that we keep on increasing the population frantically. This ends nowhere, but more pain and more outrage, increasing every single time such an incident happens.

From 1947 to now, we are still a slave to our age-old beliefs that doesn’t let us see that we can be more than aimless followers and backers of our stupid religions, caste, gender, sect or country.”

Akarsh clearly overwhelmed tried to sleep, losing all hope, hoping this was all a dream and wishing he could wake up to a better and hopeful Earth.

The voice called him, he felt a sudden optimism in the voice. He called out to it, “Go away! There is no coming back from this. There is no hope.”

“Hope is you!”, the voice said and transpired through the air.

Akarsh, after scratching his head for some time, realized what the voice meant. The hope are the people who call things out as they see them. The people who fight for injustice, who respect women, the people who get equally disgusted with such news. We need more of them. We need them in this fight, against the ones with no moral values.

Lets Fight!

 

 

 

Dreams Matter – 2

Click Here to read the prequel.

 

Saloni was on a trip with her parents and their friends in Chicago, USA. The weather was a perfect 21°C to roam around the streets. The place attracted a lot of crowd at this time of the year. She observed the crowd. It was a great diverse mixture. Everyone could be seen happily enjoying in their respective groups. The smiles making the environment even more pleasant. But the curious Saloni found something odd about the group dynamics. She observed that females were playing with different different toddlers in the garden. But she couldn’t spot any male playing with any other toddler but their own. The different ethnic group were grouped together, their were hardly any exception to it. The adults were not even glancing towards differentially racial groups, but their children hardly cared about that. The toddlers would look at each other, reached out their hands to touch each other from the distance. Their eyes seems tp say: ‘Come play with me, I am bored playing with my parents alone’. Although the adults would politely acknowledge each other in certain situations, but there was no warmth expressed.
 
Saloni then observed her parents also moving towards what seemed to be an Indian group. She wanted to play with everyone, as she used to play in her home. To run for one ball, or to catch one person by chaining their hands together. She asked her mom, ‘Can I play with that guy over there?’ . Her mum politely said, ‘Lets play with those Indian people there. We don’t know these people.’
‘But we don’t know those Indian people as well.’, replied Saloni.
Her mum thought about it a moment and then gave her hand to his father.
She didn’t like that nobody addressed her query. She thought that Akarsh would maybe understand her. She asked for his father’s cell to call Akarsh.
She knew her neighbour Akarsh was a curious soul and might help her out.
She narrated the whole incident to Akarsh. Akarsh had never experienced such a scenario.
He thought for a bit and he knew from his past experience that he needed to go to sleep. As soon as he dozed off, the voice called out to him.
“What is it this time?”, the voice asked.
“Why is there a differential treatment given to people of different complexion.”, Akarsh asked.
“We didn’t design it this way. Different complexion was supposed to provide diversity to the earth, as opposed to the diversity we seek in the name of religion, caste and creed nowadays.”
“Then why only so few complexion, why couldn’t we have  more so that nobody can judge any other color.”
“Lets try that out.”, the shadow said playfully.
 
The next day Saloni came into the park. She saw people with plethora of colors on and around them. Everybody’s faces were so colorful, that you could hardly recognise what complexion they possessed before. She saw her parents confused as to which group to join now. Seeing her mom so confused, she reached out to her, hugged her and placed her palm over her mum’s cheeks. Her mother’s face started taking a purplish color, as her confusion started reducing. Smile returned to both’s faces: the mother understanding what had transpired, Saloni observing that she had so many people to play with. The colors added what the complexion couldn’t in years.
 
At a distance, a smiling shadow saw the colorful people playing, appreciating the unbiased and colourful mind of the kids.