The people supporting legalization of gay marriages call themselves “pro-choice”. The argument being that each person has the right to choose their partner. In the same vein, it is important that the law makers be pro-choice to people who do not believe in gay marriages.

A service provider should be able to lawfully refuse service to some with different beliefs.

This opens up a can of worms, but it is a can that should be opened when time is on our side instead of waiting for it to explode in our faces. In a free economy, everything balances itself out. The success or failure of a service provider depends on the customers. So if a service provider, say a photographer, refuses to provide services to a gay marriage, he is basically refusing business. But he should have that choice.

You cannot give one set of people the choice to get married to a partner of their choice, but take away from another set of people their right to choice.

A person should be able to, for instance:

• Refuse services to gays
• Refuse to work in a company that includes gays
• Refuse to share an apartment with gays

The flip side being, if he does interact with gays, he should treat them equally. He cannot take up a job in a company that also hires gays and there discriminate against them.

Many people are trying to equate this issue with the issue of color-discrimination. The fact is that it is far from similar. A person does not choose his color. He is born with it and can do nothing about it. To discriminate against a person based on something he has no choice over is wrong. But a gay person chooses a lifestyle and if he has the right to choice, so does his neighbor.

The stories that live longest with us are the stories of the David defeating the Goliath. From the Odyssey, to the Ramayan and Mahabharat, the oldest and most successful stories pit a common man against a force infinitely stronger than him. Then when everything seems lost and the hero is lying defeated in the mud, the audience wills him on. Then seemingly on nothing but the collective will of his audience the hero rises. Not only does he rise, but he seems more than the sum of the parts. He can perform superhuman feats. Through all this the audience cheers him on.

From Zanjeer to Agneepath, Amitabh built on this persona of a common man taking on a system that was greater than him. And when all seemed lost, he rose and defeated the system with nothing more than the collective will of his audience. They wanted him to win. More importantly, they wanted the system to lose. Salim-Javed tapped into this and wrote story after story where they pitted Vijay against the biggest villains they could find – corrupt politicians, underworld dons, and strict fathers of beautiful girls.

To put the icing on the cake, his life mirrored this persona. As legend goes, All India Radio refused him a newsreaders position because his voice wasn’t good. THAT VOICE? WASN’T GOOD? The audience listens to Amitabh roll of one more monologue in the way only he can, and wonders how could anyone say that voice isn’t good? It seemed only right, that the AIR reject went on to become a phenomenon. Then came the near bankruptcy at the end of a career spent being India’s number 1 star. How could that happen? How could Amitabh Bachchan be broke? But like Vijay, he returned. Through hosting Kaun Banega Crorepati and doing movies like Mohabattein, the King of Bollywood was back. He reeled of hit after hit and once again showed us that the common man could win against all odds.

To his credit, Shah Rukh Khan had the credentials. He came into our homes through the television. India loved the imp in Fauji and the lonely boy trying to save a circus. His move to Bollywood continued the fairy tale. But then somewhere along the way he lost the script. He seems to have forgotten that India roots for the underdog. But he treated the country to movie after movie where he was smart and cool from scene 1, leaving his audience empty.

He is not the first person to make this mistake. Rajnikant, another star with the capability and salability to become the next Big B, fell short too. The reason, his fans wouldn’t allow him to be beaten on screen. In effect, they killed their hero who needed to be larger than life from the first frame rather than grow to that size through the movie. There was no where for the story to go.

Mohanlal faces the same problem in Kerala.

Today’s generation are so preoccupied by their image that they will not fall to the floor for a single scene in the movie. Thereby not giving the story a chance. But the few times they do, the movie is a huge hit. A good example being Wanted. A silly action film that went on to make as much money as Three Idiots.

All the audience is asking for is a good yarn.

The first leg of the journey was from Hyderabad to Goa. The trip was close to 900 km. You first get on the Hyderabad-Pune national highway and then get disappointed. The highway is a two track undivided road. This means that you are constantly facing oncoming traffic and overtaking is perilous. The road conditions are pretty good though and thankfully you dont have to watch out for any dangerous potholes. You stay on the road till Solapur where you get off the national highway and take the state highway to Kohlapur. This is a state highway and although there are no potholes, the road isnt too well done either. So you make painful progress. Finally you get on the Pune-Bangalore highway, which is a beauty. But you stay on it for just about 30 km. You then take the turn-off for Sawantwadi. This is a potholed ghat road (hill road). From Sawantwadi you get into Goa. The Maharashtra side just outside the Goa border is terrible and can be taxing on you, your passengers and your car as there is no road there. It is little more than a mud track.

The second leg of the journey, after spending 5 wonderful days in Goa, was Goa-Panchgani – a distance of 500 km. We avoided going back to Kohlapur by taking the Mumbai highway. You stay on the Mumbai highway, which is a good road but sadly undivided again, till Poladpur. From Poladpur you take the cut-off for Mahableshwar. I am sure this is a scenic route, but due to car trouble in Goa we lost a lot of time and ended up doing the ghat roads in the night – so no scenic drive.

After 2 days at Panchgani, we headed back to Hyderabad via Pune. Again the decision was taken because we wanted to avoid the Kohlapur-Solapur road. We got to Pune in quick time. We did a 100 km in one hour. But then we got on the Pune-Solapur highway. This is effectively 250 km of city traffic. Your average speed here will be less than 40 km/our. But once you cross Solapur, things change and you can do the Solapur-Hyderabad leg much faster.

Verdict – Do not do this trip by car for a couple of years. Wait till the four-laning is done.

What the “India Against Corruption” movement was doing was to absolve the common man of any responsibility or part in the corruption that is so rampant in our society. It was as if only the people on the other side of the desk were corrupt and the common man was merely a victim or spectator.

The truth is that we can say No.

Corruption is so much a part of our lives that we hardly notice it at times. Before the age of the multiplex theatre, we would pay marked up prices for movie tickets in the black market. There was no need to do it, but we did. Today that form of corruption has been legalized where movie halls charge a premium for tickets during the first couple of weeks after a movie’s release. They do that because we showed them that we were ready to pay a premium over the marked price.

Paying a bribe is a choice, a conscious choice. We decide whether something is worth paying a bribe for.

Every day, in airports around the country, the same charade is played out. People coming into the country from abroad bring in things over the allowed limits – which are very clearly called out in the customs web page. Then they get angry that the customs official asked them for a bribe. We can refuse to pay the bribe, pay the full customs duty and ask for a receipt. They cannot deny us that. But we pay the bribe instead because it saves us money. So why complain? Did we want to bring it in free? If we did, that is against the law of the country. Why should it be different when we come into India than when we enter another country? We do not carry cooked foods to countries that don’t allow it.

A bribe is not wrong per se, it is merely the premium for a service that is illegal.

Let us ask ourselves what do we REALLY mean by asking government officials to be uncorrupt. Do we mean that they should follow the letter of the law? Or do we mean that they should let us do what we like without asking us to pay for it?

 ————

It was a Sunday morning. I walked to the railway station. It was a walk I had done a thousand times before. But on that day it was different. The backpack felt heavier than usual as I shifted it from one shoulder to the other. I stopped at the cigarette shop at the corner as usual and bought a cigarette. I wouldn’t normally smoke on this road, but this early in the morning, it was safe to assume that no one from my colony would be on the street. After lighting the cigarette, I turned back and looked at the street I had walked almost every day I could remember.

It wasn’t a long street, but it was one that that had gotten progressively shorter as I grew up. I remember how as a 5-year-old the grocery store I was standing in front of seemed like the end of the world.

It was a Sunday morning when my mother let me go alone to buy some eggs. She gave me a ten-rupee note and explained how much change I had to bring back. I remember walking out of the colony and on to this street with my chest puffed out. I also remember dragging the bag of eggs back along the ground. I couldn’t understand then why mother was so unhappy, I had brought back the right change. Then she hugged me, kissed me and told me that it was all her fault for not telling me how to carry eggs.

I took a deep puff and blew the smoke out, watching the street through the haze of the cigarette smoke. I blinked to make sure that I didn’t see a 10-year-old cycling towards me.

It was a Sunday morning. I remember that day only too well. It was almost a month to the day after my tenth birthday, when I first rode my cycle on the street that led to the railway station. The gleaming red BSA cycle was the cynosure of all my friends. How can I forget my dad running behind me, his hands holding on to the seat, yelling to me to keep pedaling? I remember how my stomach sank low when I realized that on one of those runs, his voice seemed to faded away into the distance and then I was gone. It took a lot of begging, pleading and promising before they let me ride to school. What a moment it had been, as I rode into the school grounds, parked my cycle at the cycle stand and locked it.

I was getting into a flow here and I didn’t want to stop. So I took another puff and blew the smoke in front of me.

It was a Sunday morning. The young woman who stepped on out of the colony and on to the street that led to the railway station looked scared and worried. She turned back and looked to see her father join her on her walk.

“An examination is a part of life”, he said. “That is how you know that you have passed a milestone. Passing or failing an examination is an indication of whether you are ready for the next step in life. If you are, you will pass; if not, you will fail. Neither is a reflection of your personality, just a reflection of what you are and are not ready for. If you let your fear stop you, you will never cross over to the next big challenge in your life. Remember, passing an examination means there is a bigger challenge on the other side, so pray to pass only if you think you are ready to face it.”

I never ever judged myself or others by the marks they scored every again.

I bought my second cigarette and asked for a cup of tea to go with it. I blew another plume of smoke in front of me.

It was a Sunday morning. Two women were coming towards me on the street that led to the railway station. Mom and I huddled under one umbrella as we giggled to some silly story. I felt the tears well up as more memories broke through the walls I had built to contain them. If this street could talk, it could tell you the story of my life. The life of a girl who was loved by her family. One whom they kept at the center of their lives and gladly let their lives revolve around. They took equal pride when I crawled for the first time and when I rode a motorcycle for the first time. They taught me to read and to count. The taught me to walk and to run. They taught me to stay grounded while letting my thoughts fly.

It was a Sunday morning and I was on the street that led to the railway station, walking away from it all. Not giving them a chance to refuse me the person I loved but deciding for them that they would.

I felt a pat on my left shoulder and looked to my right. Ravi had done this enough times that it had become a habit now.

“Ready?” he asked.

I took one last puff from my cigarette and exhaled, “Yes. Are you?”

“Yes. Let’ go.”

I took his hand and we pulled in different directions – he towards the station and me towards home.

He stopped and looked at me.

“You were right”, I told. “I should give them the chance to refuse.”

He smiled the smile that still made my knees go weak, four years after the first time.

“Will you drop me home?” I asked him.

It wasn’t smoke that made the street hazy now. But I could clearly see two people walking hand-in-hand, confident in each other – just like my parents. I snuggled closer to Ravi.

I was glad that there would be a lot more Sunday mornings when I would walk this street to the railway station.

The images on the T.V. show very clearly that the aim of the protests was to loot, to have for themselves that which they could not afford.

We live in a world defined by advertising. Our lives are like the proverbial donkey led by the carrot. There is always another mountain to climb after the one we have just struggled over, just like in the song.  We don’t need to look beyond the shores of our own country to see the changes that have come about in just one generation.

There was a time when an entire village or street, if you happened to live in a city, was happy and got by with just one telephone connection. Today a person carries multiple mobile phones. Mobile phones in themselves are a fantastic example of how things have changed. Earlier a mobile phone allowed you to store numbers, make a phone call and send an SMS. But today a mobile phone costs as much as a computer and does almost everything one can. They have become symbols of cool and everybody wants the latest one. Apple makes a fortune out of pandering to the need of our youth to be cooler than cool.

Thirty years ago an Indian would be over the top to buy a car. There were all of three models available to an Indian when it came to choosing a car. A family would save for years before they thought about buying one. Today a kid walks out of college, into a job and immediately decides to buy a car. Not just that, he has a myriad choices. Within three years he is already bored of it and begins looking around for his next set of wheels.

Clothes are an area where this is seen the most. Gone are the days when tailors abounded at every street corner. Thirty years ago cloth manufacturers ruled the roost. If you were looking for endorsements in India, they were your best bet. Vimal used Ravi Shastri, Gwalior used Suni Gavaskar and Digjam had Shekhar Suman. But today hardly anybody uses tailor-stitched shirts and trousers. Global brands like Wrangler and Levis throw the best-looking and most sexual models at you and make you yearn to look like them.

Bata ruled the roost as the only option for footwear. Today you leave your Bata behind the moment you learn to say “No”.

As we hurtle towards a world where competition doesn’t just mean how well you did in school or sports, or how safe a job you have landed, our children are expected to compete on levels we never had to. They are measured by the clothes they wear, the shoes they use and the accessories they sport. It is up to the parents to step up to the plate and bat. This is one part of their character building and education that cannot be outsourced to school, colleges or the television. We need to keep our children grounded as to what is really important in this life. If not, we will see many more Londons where children have to resort to breaking the law on a mass scale to achieve ephemeral dreams.

The news trickled out on Twitter and then flooded the news channels.

Unfortunately, the next few days will not see a renewed spark in Hussain’s paintings. We will not be treated to discussions on where he fits in the firmament on world art and more specifically Indian art. Instead, his death has reopened the discussion around intolerance in India.

Last year, persecuted by right-wing forces Mr. Hussain took up citizenship in Qatar. It was a matter of shame for every Indian that a citizen of a democratic country, who had done nothing against the laws of the country was forced to take asylum (and let us not for a moment think it was anything else) in a country that is Islamic and should supposedly not be as tolerant. Kudos to Qatar and its sultan for this magnanimous gesture.

It is sad that we are increasingly becoming a species where groups are defined by what they cannot tolerate. A far cry from the days when our textbooks proudly claimed that India was a country that absorbed outside influences and made them Indian too. Starting from the Aryan settlement to the Mughal invasion and finally the British raj, we Indianized all of them.

Make no mistake this is not India specific. This trend of moving away from our pluralism can be seen everywhere. The US, a country that was built on immigration, is tightening its laws to make it difficult for people to migrate there. Americans in the throes of an economic meltdown find it easy to blame the foreigners and are calling to their leaders to protect them by stopping the “invasion”.

What next?

English? Very soon we will find some group becoming intolerant of the “foreign” words in English and call for us to return to the roots of “true English”.

What everybody seems to forget conveniently is that people and cultures change with the times.

There was a time when eating meat was the epitome of Hinduism. It was Buddhism that made Hinduism vegetarian.

Women in Islam were hidden away because Islam was born in a region filled with wars and women were carried away as trophies. So it made sense THEN to cover them up.

The early church decided against contraceptives because the need of the hour was to increase the Christian population. But the church today still holds on to an archaic proclamation even when millions of lives hang in the balance.

But then it strikes me, maybe I have made my case only too well. People and cultures do change and we are seeing one now.

The need of the hour is hate and the ability to hate.

The need of the hour is congregation and the ability to exclude inconvenient people.

The need of the hour is to be selfish and the ability to destroy anything or anyone that may stand in the way of one’s success.

I remember watching the movie Shooting Dogs. That night I lay in bed and cried like I hadn’t cried in a long time. When my wife asked me why I was crying I answered her, “How do we teach our children to hate? Because if we don’t someone else will kill them”.

Sad, sad, sad!

Mr. Hussain practiced the art of painting. Some of us liked his work and some of us didnt. But chasing him out of the country? That is a shame this generation of Indians will have to live with.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

RIP Mr. Hussain, wherever you are, we hope it is better than where you have gone from.

I would be worried about sending my child to a school that calls an egg a sphere. It’s a bloody ovoid you nincompoops. What next the rectangle and the square are the same thing?

Merry Christmas became Happy Holidays. Easter is now Spring. What next? The Cross will become a tree. The image of Jesus hanging on the cross will be replaced with an orange hanging of the branch of the tree.

Diwali can become Zippo lighter day.

Id-ul-Fitr will be called Breakfast.

Whom are we fooling? Whom are we pandering? For the life of me, I cannot understand who would feel bad if I celebrate a religious festival.

I grew up in the Middle East. During the month of Ramadan, you are not allowed to eat or drink in public, irrespective of your religion. I was still in school then and I picked up a can of Mirinda before getting into a cab. The Muslim cab driver gently reminded me it was Ramadan and asked me to sit lower in the seat and finish my drink. It was such a sweet gesture.

Another wonderful image that sticks in my mind is from the same time. School started at 1 pm for us. So while we waited we usually played a game of cricket or football. After the game, we would rush to the water coolers to drink water. The Muslim boys who were keeping Ramadan, would just wash their mouth and spit the water out. Amazing! It didn’t matter to them that the rest of the kids around them were drinking water by the mouthful.

It doesn’t matter to me that goats are sacrificed on Id or that the air is polluted on Diwali and the water on Holi. It is one day. A day when we leave behind the weights on our shoulders and let our hair down. Are we going to rob ourselves of all our joys?

How small a brain should someone have to think that Easter Eggs will hurt someone’s sentiments?

Then I saw Barkha Dutt’s tweet and pulled up short. It said “The govt accepts the demand for 5o-50 representation of civil society on panel that will draft lokpal bill: sources”.

“Hold on”, I told myself. “Something isn’t right here.”

The Lokpal bill seeks to set up an independent body that will police the politicians. Anna Hazare is protesting the fact that the Lokpal bill being introduced is a watered down version of the original one, and it does not give the Lokpal any teeth. The kind of teeth they are looking for is the ability to register First Instance Reports (FIR), the power to investigate sitting members of Parliament and a police force that does not report into the regular police force.

While I can understand Anna Hazare’s protest against the watering down of the bill, I cannot understand the demand for 50% of the committee to be nominated members. Why?

By constitution our society is made up of three arms – the Government (elected by the people), the courts (elected by the representatives of the people) and the armed force (unelected). The courts and the armed forces report into the elected representatives, this ensures that the people are always the ones in control.

However, over the years, we the people have lost control of our politicians, which in turn means that we have lost control of all three arms of our society. It is akin to travelling in a bus where we have no control over the destination or on how we are going to get there.

How, we may ask, did a people who fought for their independence sit around idly as their freedom was taken away from them? The answer is sheer apathy.

The key to understanding why this happened lies in understanding that the average Indian did not understand the meaning of the word Freedom. A handful of educated, liberated people spoke to the common, illiterate man and told him that he needed to be free from the British beast. It made sense, to the common man, because the British seemed to be taking away everything from him. But I doubt if the people really understood that freedom meant responsibility. After the British left, the people went back to their lives, leaving a handful of people with the power to govern.

The apathy began there and never improved. Even though the number of educated went up, our participation in civic life remained minimal. Collecting the garbage, providing water, providing electricity, participating in general elections – none of these were considered a duty of the people, but the responsibility of the elected. Even in school, the Civics or Moral Science class hardly gets pride of place in the curriculum.

As the population grew to unmanageable proportions, we were all involved in the race to create doctors, engineers, software programmers and civil servants. The creation of human beings with a commitment to their society lagged far behind.

The result is that we are protesting the fact that the GoM discussing the Lokpal does not contain 50% members from the public to represent the common person. However, logically speaking it contains 100% representation of the common person because every member of the GoM is an elected member of Parliament.

We are going about this the wrong way. I urge the youth icons of the day – Chetan Bhagat and troupe – to visit schools, colleges and villages and create an awareness of duty. Freedom is a very misleading word because it tends to let you think of yourself as free from everything. It is in fact the opposite, freedom binds you to duty and unless you do your duty, you do not deserve your freedom.