RCT's musings

My take on “Lives of others” and “The house without windows”. It gave me a great sense of accomplishment when I finished “The Silk Roads”. A 600 page Magnus Opus by Peter Frankopan, it was a crash course on the major threads running through history of the world in the last 3000 years. I felt that I was sitting in a time machine seeing the characters who had shaped their times very closely. The author had shown me the picture, telling me all about it without letting me know what he felt about it. He had told the story. The good and the bad were for me to decide. I had been entertained by the book. Yet, upon completion I felt tired. Every page of the book, though lucidly written, had so much trivia that often one had to literally keep the book down and absorb as much of it as possible. I am not that good a sponge, anyway. I needed a break. A break to recuperate and rekindle the fire I have had for historical, non-fiction literature.   In other words, I needed fiction. ...

In the quest for hope - 'Seva' with duty When I was told that I had been posted to Bilaspur as SDM, it was only the impressions I had developed through hearsay that came to my mind. The place was full of aggressive litigation happy people, who were otherwise, I was told quite dry. The weather was bad – too hot for the summers and too cold for the winters. There were massive law and order related problems due to the clashes between management of the newly arrived cement plants and their rowdy truck  unions. However, these were not the issues on which I spent much mind space. The one dominant theme which I was reminded time and again by people around me ( from the boss to my driver) was that in the capacity of the post I has been assigned I was to organise the ShravanAsthmi Fair at Naina Devi Temple.  The temple has a history of tragedies during the Mela. At least twice in the last thirty years there have been massive stampedes in which hundreds had died. Why Naina Dev...

The Perfect Pass One day when I was in office with a Doctor friend, one of the local politicians (LP from now on) belonging to the ruling party came to my office. He was not an MLA, but one who held a party position and also a post in one of the umpteen positions created to place ‘prominent’ and ‘loyal’ party workers. After the customary salutations, as he sat down I could sense in his body language that today he was a man on a mission. There was a distinct lack of warmth in his smile. My mind rewinded to the last encounter  I had had with him in which I had categorically told him my inability to issue a gun license to one of his many sychophants.  “Gun license?”, I asked in an inquisitive tone. He shook his head and told me that he had brought along with him a delegation to discuss a very serious matter. The ‘delegation’ was waiting outside and I would have to resolve their problem “positively”. Now ‘delegation’ and ‘positively’ are two terms which need to expla...