The thing about dreaming

He served me tea every day for months, barely saying a word, arranging the papers on my untidy desk, doing everything with a smile, and staying back late when he sat in some faraway corner of the office.

Doing what, I often wondered.

What on earth could Satish Kumar, the cheerful, 26-year-old peon in the light blue shirt, be doing at 8 p.m.? Secret girlfriend on the phone? Office gossip factory?

“I am trying to learn web designing, Sir,” he said one day, sheepishly. “Will you let me make your web site?”

There he was, standing before me with the plastic cup in his hand with hot coffee, ready to throw this version of his life away, hold himself by the scruff of his neck and yank himself out of his beverage-delivering drudgery and seek a gentle foothold in white-collardom.

He is still officially a peon, but a year on, Satish uses a computer, handles complex Right to Information petitions, fights in towering red sandstone government offices with clerks who refuse to accept the applications, and recently stunned me by popping up on Google chat, where he now routinely asks me for work and is assigned tasks.

This is the face of the young Indian living out a new freedom – to dream, to aspire, armed with the reassurance that it is now OK to dream bigger in the new India – and those dreams could well come true.

With three-fourths of Indians under the age of 35, I find these dreamers at every corner when I travel across the sidestreets and village squares of this country. They are the stories of the changing India. They are India.

And age is, it seems, only a number. She was 35 quite some time ago, but Rama Dey has at 61 elbowed out a little island of existence of her own in the New Delhi suburb of Noida. Abandoned by her husband, she arrived in Delhi looking for a job in 2001 from Kolkata, with a bag that had a pair of cotton saris, a soiled bed sheet and a small pillow. And three hundred rupees. She worked hard as a nanny, accumulated a bank balance of Rs. 1.5 lakh, and has enrolled herself in a neighbourhood school to learn English and Hindi. She helps others now, buying bicycles for faraway village youth in West Bengal so that they can go to work.

Now she wants to join the government’s old age pension scheme, and buy a mobile phone and a TV.

But the world of mobile phones and TVs is what a 27-year-old young man called Karan Dalal decided to give up on when he landed in the real India this week, flying from Mumbai to the remote village of Kunaura in Uttar Pradesh. He will now live there in a village school and try to create computer engineers out of curious and stunned children who had never seen a computer in their life until NIIT donated 15 of them last month.

Not too far away from that village in the rural town of Babagunj in Uttar Pradesh, Dinesh Kumar, a 27-year-old Dalit man, grew up with mental subservience to the Brahmin priest who was his only connection with god when people died or born or got married.

Then a sudden, silent coup happened.

Armed with a small book of rules of everything from weddings to funerals, Dalits in parts of U.P. have now fired the priest.

“We don’t need him. We can do everything ourselves. If he can read the holy book, why can’t I?” Kumar had asked me.

That is India’s new mantra: Why can’t I.

Hundreds of kilometres to the southwest in Gujarat’s Sikka village, 30-year-old Praful Gami shocked me as I walked out after a series of interviews. Gami, a member of the village panchayat (council), had decided to move up in life and has set up a computer repairing shop in Mumbai using the rising income from Gujarat’s agricultural boom.

“It’s called IT Akash (sky), a software company,” Gami said optimistically as village grannies looked on, cool breeze blowing in from a small check dam. “My income was rising here, I thought I should go on a bigger scale.”

It’s raining aspiration in India.

At the history-steeped campus of Allahabad University, Syed Mohammed Zeeshan stood near some fellow students, leaning against his motorcycle.

“Along with studies, I want to be associated with a political party,” Zeeshan told me as others looked on. “We, the youth, want our own identity.”’

In Loni, a cooperative hub in Maharashtra, I found young men and women from villages give up farm labour to learn to weld and make machines, learn fashion designing, and trades that will overnight change their life. On the highway from Ahmedabad to Baroda, young men from the smallest of towns learning to be firemen at a private college, so that they can go and work at industrial hubs in India and the Gulf.

More than 1,500 kilometres to the north in a small town I shall not name because he asked me not to, former Kashmiri militant Mohammed Zameer, 36, wants to dream as well as he sits anonymously with me in a cyber café. It is part of the nuances of his low-profile existence, abandoned by both his militant group and the government.

“I do want independence, but I regret I lost at least 20 years of my life,” Zameer had told me. “I was in BSc (Bachelor of Science class) at the time. My classmates are now superintendent of police, doctors, engineers.”

Far away from Zameer’s shadowy existence, back at the office in New Delhi, a message pops up on my computer screen. “Sir can you please check the RTI applications?” shakti8040@gmail.com -- Satish Kumar’s virtual alias – asks me.

Look him up. Make him your friend. The bespectacled former peon who now takes on wily government officials in red sandstone offices.

The guy who will teach you a thing or two about dreaming.

(This article originally appeared in the Hindustan Times)

Mission Kashmir Diary-1

I am an outsider in Kashmir.

I have been travelling there for much of my career as a journalist, I am married into a Kashmiri Pandit family, and some of my closest friends are Kashmiris. I love the voices of Kashmir’s celebrated singers Rashid Hafiz and Kailash Mehra. I have written a few of my popular Bollywood songs with inspiration from the turbulent solitude of Kashmir’s roads. My next book extensively features Kashmir. I can even understand a few sentences in Kashmiri, and after an animated discussion in Kashmiri between friends, I can shock them with one of the few Kashmiri sentences I know: “Mecchu Souri Taraan Phikree (I understood everything).

And yet, I am an outsider in Kashmir.

I am someone who has no idea how Kashmir operates at its various mysterious, intriguing levels. I can never feel the pain that has seeped into the blood of hundreds of thousands of people living surrounded by death for years, for whom the first sight of the morning, when they open their windows looking for the warmth of the cosy sun, is a military bunker with an armed man.

I can never hear the growl of the army or paramilitary man when he brusquely asks me to pull over at a barricade and humiliates me in front of my family; I can never squint at the sight of the harsh torchlight that he flashes in my face in the night, I can never feel his rough hands on my body as he searches me for bombs, I can never hear the hostility in his voice as he lets me go. The militants have given Kashmir immense pain – but the crushing response of the Indian government has made that pain fade in comparison.

And I can never feel the tragedy of being treated like an outsider in my own land.

I am an outsider.

I can never imagine how it looks, watching from inside that barb wire, sand bag-protected bunker with the little light bulb. I can never be that man from a faraway Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu or Jharkhand, wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and holding a machinegun, fighting a war someone else created, and for which he must now give his life. The man watching out for his invisible enemy who comes holding a grenade under the pheran; the lonely, often terrified man who kills not so much to kill the militant or the innocent Kashmiri, but to save his own life in a strange land that was thrust upon him by the same people who thrust military occupation on the picturesque land.

I can never understand the pain of the unknown soldier and the letters he writes home. I am an outsider in Kashmir.

And I can never know what is like to be driven out like an outsider from Kashmir. I can never know what it is like to be a Kashmiri Pandit. The minority whose fault was that they were bright, prosperous, did well in life, and were nationalists at heart. The people who were threatened, killed, hounded and ridiculed and forced to leave their homeland – with their pain never understood by either India or Kashmiris.

I can never feel for their tragedy. I am an outsider.







And perhaps some day I will acquire the brains to understand why the Indian taxpayer’s money – which includes my money – goes into the Black Hole of governance where New Delhi issues blank cheques once in a while to buy peace and loyalty in Kashmir and it vanishes without trace in the rarefied air of the valley.

Perhaps someday I will acquire the brains to understand why Indian taxpayer money is used to pump favours to the same men who abuse India and the idea of India.

I am an outsider in Kashmir.

(This piece first appeared in the Hindustan Times)

Here comes the Olympic shame

The Olympic shame – oops, flame -- passed through New Delhi today like a pampered head of state, watched by more than 20,000 men-in-arms, forcing thousands of homes and offices to keep their windows closed lest they be harbouring a sharpshooter, shutting down the heart of the city and inconveniencing tens of thousands of people to prevent Tibetan protesters from lunging at the torch headed for Beijing. India had pulled its colonial finery out of the closet.

Bravo. It is a display of slavery that even the Chinese would not have expected.

Clearly, India has lost its sense of proportion. We are a democracy, of course – people can come last.
What happened in New Delhi during the passing of the Olympic torch was yet another piece of the jigsaw of India’s farce over the Tibet issue. Since 1959, India has pampered Tibetan refugees, even as it cruelly ignored its own internal displaced – everyone from Kashmiri Pandits to those displaced by infrastructure projects, and even those seeking a homeland in Kashmir and northeast just like the Tibetans. And then, India kneeled down to Chinese concerns to ensnare New Delhi with security paraphernalia that a U.S. president would be jealous of.
So here is the big picture: India will do nothing to prevent its workers from being put out of jobs by a deluge of cheap and substandard Chinese goods, leaving hundreds of thousands of its citizens – from carpenters to memento artisans to toy makers to electronics goods makers – struggling and out of jobs. India will also do nothing to prevent incursions by the Chinese into what New Delhi claims is its territory. But it will go out of the way to clamp down on its capital city to snuff out fury of the Tibetan refugees against the Chinese government.
This is what that means: due to an internal Chinese issue, Indian people cannot go to work, to job interviews, to hospitals, to pick up people at the railway station.
Ah, that brings me to the refugees. India has spent more than Rs 20 crores in recent times to help Tibetan refugees. That, of course, does not include the costs in diplomacy, or real estate -- go to any hill station in India, and you will find that authorities have provided land in the best of locations for "Tibetan refugee markets". This largesse is at the expense of the local unemployed youth, of course, but then the young jobless in Nainital or Darjeeling or Dadri don’t have a sexy cause to back them, do they?
And try finding the refugees at these markets. At most of these shops, you will find, have underpaid Indian servants of the Tibetan refugees. The new generation of the Tibetan in India is not a victim.

The Dalai Lama is a decent man. It is his opponents, the Chinese, and his followers, the Tibetan youth, that I have a problem with. And more than that, I have a problem with how India has dealt with these two protagonists in the Tibet story.
What is the contribution that Tibetan refugees have made to the Indian nation, society and people over the past fifty years? What is their level of involvement and engagement with this country? When Indian refugees or migrants go abroad they make small and big, but always important, contributions to their society. They have a sense of belonging. They drive forward economies.

At a very basic level, the Tibetan story, for me, is about losing one’s home. It is a tragedy I completely empathise with. But it is a tragedy that is resonating far more eloquently in India for Indians – and I am keen to know what India is willing to do for the Kashmiri Pandits who have become a big yawn for the government; for the Kashmiri Muslims and people in many areas in the Northeast who also have an aspiration like the Tibetans for a homeland; and for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the so-called New India.

India’s warlike exercise to prevent a little flame from being snuffed out has only highlighted the shameful and hypocritical state of denial about the other fires of discontent raging across this nation.

Photos courtsey: PTI, top, and Gautam Singh (AP)