Mental Excursions

  Confusion has wings These past six weeks have brought for me several reasons for travelling within the country and armed with 15 kg + 5 kg, I have happily embarked on these trips. Still not brave enough to travel by bus or train in view of Covid, I have felt fortunate that the cities I had to travel to had direct flights from Lucknow. But every time I flew out of the city, the cells inside my cranial cavity went into a tizzy and I came back wondering, sometimes even worried, about the mental health of the world outside the brick and mortar safety I call home. This is not going to be another description of ‘travel during Corona times’, although Covid-19 has impacted our way of living so much that some concerns might just creep into my narrative naturally. So let me share my misgivings/thoughts with you in the hope that some intelligent mind will help me and my readers find the solutions. Domestic air travel looks like a whole new chapter of economics altogether. The air far

  Through a Simi’s lens For several decades before people started celebrating the 14 th of February as a day for expressing love, students from a small engineering institution in a little-known town of India had already been celebrating it as a day of brotherhood and belonging. They still do that, and without the chocolates, roses, balloons, jewellery or other gifts which St Valentine’s followers must spend lavish amounts on, if they want their love to not languish as unrequited. But what is the difference between the two? These men, and later I am happy to add, women too, having the party of the non-Valentine kind, are the alumni of what is known as the Indian Railway Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineers in Jamalpur, a small nondescript town in  Munger  district in Bihar . For fact-lovers, Munger was the capital of Anga Pradesh and Karna , a complex character known for his munificence, ruled it during the Mahabharata times. Belonging to the elite class of   SCRA

  No mishtekk this ! I do not know about people from other non-English-speaking countries, but I am very certain that in India, speaking English is considered hip and smart and is  proof that one is educated. The uneducated or the semi-literate, however, use English words without even realizing they are not words of Indian languages. They say it with an accent borrowed from their native language, giving the words a new identity which gets so deeply entrenched in their lingo that you cannot change the pronunciation or understanding. If compelled by your urge to correct/inform/educate/preach you ever point it out, they look at you, their glance clearly asking if you have gone off the wall.    So it is many times in a day that I hear a buzz in my ears that there is something wrong with the word which trespassed into my auditory canal, but I might not even be able to point out the wrongness of it. These are the English words absorbed into Hindi of regular use. Whether one says istesa

  This and that A Garuda Indonesia  plane wears a protective mask to convey the importance of wearing masks, at the Soekarno-Hatta airport in Tangerang, Indonesia. This week was the time for travelling. Forced out of my bubble of security, I mingled with crowds, peered through plastic shields, touched thousands of oft-touched surfaces, fed the skin of hands copious amounts of alcohol bottled as sanitiser, filled my lungs with disinfectant vapours. Still, looking at the world outside, it felt as if Covid had gone. Seeing people merrily lugging and hauling giant bags around, playing loud videos on their mobile phones,  eating out, friends slapping one another’s back, mask-less faces breathing carbon dioxide on the others’ faces, men stringing belts back in the loops of the trousers after security checks or women emptying the countless contents of their handbags for the CISF men to find the objectionable material marked in the X-ray, hundreds of questions shot up like snakeheads in my min