May I know how many perpetrators of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 have been given death sentence and lest I be accused of selective memory, how many people who actively participated in the butchering of thousands of innocents Sikhs on the streets of New Delhi in 1984 been sent to the gallows?  The answer is, none.  And what about those animals who not only violently gangraped and killed a young girl in a moving bus, but also horribly mutilated her body beyond imagination.  Why are they enjoying the state's hospitality in a maximum security prison in the country?
But instead you chose to execute a man who naively believed in your criminal justice system.  By no means am I suggesting that Yakub Memon was not guilty of the conspiracy to commit those horrific serial bomb blasts of 1993 in Bombay that accounted for the lives of more than 300 people, or that he didn't get a fair trial in India.  My limited point is that his involvement in the actual planning and execution in that act of terror was peripheral and not central.  Let me draw an analogy; say I am seriously annoyed with a group of people so much so that I wouldn't mind them being killed, and I find out that my brother is also thinking along similar lines and in fact he is going to do something about it.  As his brother, even though I am aware all along of the conspiracy and the planning to kill those people, I decide to not only keep quite about it but also provide moral support to the whole thing.  So, you can say that I am guilty by association but since i did not directory conceived or executed the operation, I would not be bracketed in the same league as my brother.  That's how I would think anyway, and that is how more or less things transpired.
Call it a prick of conscience or whatever, but the fact remains that Yakub Memon gave up himself voluntarily to the Indian law enforcement authorities in the hope of making a bargain for lesser punishment in exchange of fully cooperating with the investigation and prosecution of that serial bomb blast.  His best hope was a life in prison with no possibility of  parole.  This  is not an unreasonable expectation in any civilized  democracy like ours.  I think because they have not been able to capture the chief executioner of the operation Tiger Memon and underworld lord of the crime syndicate Dawood Ibrahim who was the main financer for this inhuman act, they have taken out all their frustration on the one man who did not get away like those two.  How far this insatiable bloodlust can be allowed to go on just to satisfy the so called "conscience" of society?  As a democratic country keeping in line with the best practices around the world, we must move away from death penalty.  But that is a debate for another day.  If the previous government for the sake of  a vote bank hanged Afzal Guru, then this is a government led by a macho nationalist and how can it let go of a golden opportunity to display its machismo to the faithful and hence Yakub Memon had to be sent to the gallows.

Your whole life is the sum and subtotal of the kind of choices you make.  They say that destiny is the ultimate decider but I think in the larger sense, it’s how you choose determines your destiny.  I am always given to self-analysis especially when I am in a dark mood.  I’ve never opted for regrets for the kind of choices I’ve made; however I deeply regret that I was not given the opportunity to become another kind of man.  A man without baggage, light on his feet, a rolling stone that gathers all the moss but never takes root anywhere.  But here I am, presented with a fait-accomplish and asked to choose. 

  So, I chose knowledge over ignorance, being a discerning individual over being a philistine, expanding of mind over narrowness of thinking, rationality over superstition, struggle over self-pity and Devil over God.  How far have I succeeded in my endeavor is not for me to decide.  Sometimes the net result has been a lot of personal anguish, but those were my choices and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I hear a voice that says you are lucky, it could be worse.  What is luck after all, but fate’s cheating, giving you an illusion of power.  Whereas the best you can do is to get up every morning and try your best to keep disaster at bay.

I have a vision where anxiety and ambition are consuming each other; they are coalescing and diffusing, inflating and deflating.  I can see time accumulating like grains of sand and it will bury me in the end.

It's been more than 10 HRS, but I'm still reeling from such a high octane contest between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer.  The quality of tennis was absolutely intoxicating.  Federer threw everything he'd got but Novak gave everything back with interest and some more and was the deserving champion.  He now joins John Mcenroe and his current coach Boris Becker as three time Wimbledon champion.  The more I have seen of Djokovic over the years, the more I have become one of his ardent admirer.
  This guy is one of the finest specimen of human being in terms of physical fitness and almost superhuman reservoir of energy and stamina.  Last evening during the game, Federer surely must have been thinking what do I need to do to derail this man!  Some people might think that Roger just couldn't reproduce the kind of tennis that be played against Andy Murray, but it's also one of the truism of any sport that you can only play as well as your opposition allows you to and in that sense Djokovic just knew what he was doing.  Boris Becker was my earlier hero, he was the most charismatic tennis player I have ever seen and it was because of him that I fell in love with the game in the first place.  So, it was fitting that as Novak's coach, he was cheering from the sidelines.
  As an aside, I could not believe that Kate Winslet was in the house, enjoying the contest, so it was all the more incumbent upon Djokovic to come up with the goods and did he do that or what!

Dear America,
Let me wish you a very happy 4th of July, the day you declared yourself independent from your colonial masters, Great Britain in 1776.  Now you and I have shared a very special relationship over the years.  I have no hesitation in saying that you have contributed immensely to my intellectual growth as a person.  Even though I discovered you a bit late in my life, but through my tireless efforts I have made up to a large extent for the lost time.  Some years ago, when India was a dull place for ideas and inspiration, I found solace in your literature and popular culture.  In not more than 600 years of your history, the way you have attracted the best and the brightest of the whole world at your shores is without parallel.  The dynamism of your people underpinned by the puritan code of delayed gratification and a sense of protestant work ethic have generated unprecedented wealth for your people and quality of life that is the envy of most other nations on the planet.  If the 19th century belonged to your erstwhile colonizer Great Britain, then it can be said without a shadow of doubt that the 20th century has been well and truly yours.

  Whenever the quirks of history have thrown a crisis your way, from civil war to the civil rights movement, from great depression of the 30s to the financial mess of the wall street a few years back, not to mention the ghastly tragedy of 9/11; the intellectual robustness of your people and the technological resources at your disposal have made sure that you have always ended up on the right side of history.

 Of course your society also has its cruel aspect, its dark underbelly, and I'm not blind or impervious to that, but then what society doesn't?  But on balance, you've done well for yourself.  And today is not the occasion to go into all that anyway.  Today is the day to celebrate and cherish the fearless spirit your adventurous people.  Happy Independence day.  

Reading and discovering Naipaul is an exploration into your own self.  Whenever you follow the works of certain authors, you look for some aspect of your inner feelings that will be reflected on the pages.  But somehow Naipaul cuts too close to the bone; and the hurt is a kind of illumination.  I feel a deep empathy when he talks about growing up on a small tropical island in the Caribbean, his manic obsession to get away from all that mediocrity surrounding him, a place that has stopped producing great people, and a place that was exhausted of life itself.

  The anxiety and the ambition.  The former about your place in the larger scheme of things, and the latter about a certain kind of person you want to be.  I get the impression that all my life I’ve been preparing for something, you think that the abstract nature of your education is a kind of freedom, but it can also shackle you into pretending and knowing when you don’t know.  You haven’t anything to go by; the memory does the selection when it comes to examining your own experiences.  The world is what it is.  When your time comes, your time comes.  In that respect, I owe a debt of gratitude to Naipaul for making me gain a better footing on this slippery slope of decay and renewal.

I know for a fact that in India, people make too much fuss about your capacity to be an emotionally balanced human being if you have been raised by a single mother or if you have endured a broken marriage.  These days, I am so much into the young and supremely gifted Aatish Taseer’s, writing, that it really buries this line of thinking.  For someone, who’s a couple of years younger than me, to have come up with three works of fiction and one work of non-fiction in the last five years is a remarkable achievement by any standards.  And yes, he’s been brought up a single mother, the well-known journalist Tavleen Singh.

Back in the 80s when she was making a name for herself as a journalists, she met one of the prominent Pakistani politician and the time, the late Salman Taseer, who was in India to promote his book on his political godfather and former prime minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.  As they say, the cupid struck and both of them disappeared for a week in the mountains north of the country.  People in those days were pretty casual about any form of protection, and those were kind of hit and miss affair anyway.  Aatish Taseer was the result of that summer of love.  But because of the history bad blood between the two countries and the excess baggage that people from different religion sometime carry made it impossible for them to continue.  Salman knew that if the word got out that he was not only romantically involved with a non-Muslim and that too and Indian, and he had also sired a child with her, would sound death knell for his political career.  So, when it came to making a final choice between his political ambitions and commitments to the woman with whom he produced a son, and because he got so spooked by the barrage of negative publicity that was bound to come his way, that he chose the former and broke all ties and went back to Pakistan married and settled down, leaving the eighteen months old Aatish to be brought up by the feisty Tavleen on her own.

Of course, I have given this brief background only to illustrate the point that things don’t have to go to pieces if you didn’t have a ‘’wholesome’’ childhood and that you don’t have to act like being “damaged goods”, if your parents first drifted apart and then parted company in acrimonious circumstances.  I am a firm believer that what you grow up to become, depends less on what values were inculcated in you by your parents, and more on your innate and intuitive grasp of the environment around you and how you interpret and make sense of the world.  And what a finest specimen of a man Aatish Taseer has turned out to be.  From a boarding school in South India to one of the finest of liberal arts college in the U.S.  From working with Time magazine and also many freelance work for the leading publications around the world, he’s settled down now to writing fulltime, something he always wanted to do ever since he was a teenager.  But it took some time to find the right kind of voice, his own voice.  And the voice he has found as a writer is one of the most authentic voices in the subcontinent.  The power of raw prose and the astuteness of his observations have a starkly searing feel about it.  The rootlessness of the elite, the resentment of the underclass, old money clashing with the new, sometimes it’s hard to believe a thirty four years old man can be a Naipaul like chronicler of this half made society.  Whenever I read him, there is this intense desire to be like him.

But like he said about his father once, that the presence of him in his life can only be marked by his absence.  My feeling about Aatish Taseer is not too dissimilar.  

It was so refreshing to see the other day that popular Indian movie star Deepika Padukone talking openly about her battle with clinical depression and how with the help and support of the loved ones, not to mention some medicines and effective counseling helped her in her recovery.  Now only the horribly cynical would say that it was a publicity stunt.  I mean people would think what’s she got to be depressed about?  She has got everything going for her.  Her movies are always blockbuster, she has fans eating out of her hand.  That’s precisely the point I wish to make.

  According to the World Health Organization, India holds the dubious distinction of having the most number of depressed people in the world.  As if that isn’t damning enough, it also registers the highest number of suicides especially among the 18-25 age group in the world.  People often confuse being sad to being depressed.  They are not the same thing.  If you are sad, there is tangible reason for it.  Something you can put your finger on.  But depression is a kind of elephant in the room, and we are blind men who have tactile awareness of it, but can’t make out what it is.  Arundhati Roy described memorably this sense of depression in her seminal novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, where she likened it to an ice cold spider landing on your heart and would not go away. 

  I consider myself a bit of a manic depressive; I mean, the cold spider is not there all the time, there would be periods of intense energy, enthusiasm even optimism, followed by a period of dejection, depression and the futility of everything.  My mind would be consumed by all kinds of morbid thoughts.  I would start thinking is it any better for those who are long dead and gone?  Or do we, the living have some kind of an obligation to go on living, to those who are no longer among us?  You see, I am aware of the nature of the beast, so I know how to deal with it.  But for those who are chronically and clinically depressed, the situation is indeed very depressing (no pun intended).

I am no expert, but those who are, maintain that any chronic depression with clinical symptoms can be overcome by a good mix that involves counseling and some medication.  But here in India, there is so much stigma attached to any form of mental illness, that it becomes a festering sore in the family.  A malaise that dare not speak thy name.  When I see so much rage among the ordinary people, both inside their homes and out on the streets, I see in them the rage of a child but this rage is fertilized with an adult imagination, and it doesn’t know its direction.  In India, to accept any kind of mental issue is to admit failure in life.  It is like somehow you have let people down around you and that’s not an option for you.  On another somewhat lighter note, many renowned experts think that those parts of our brain which produce depressing emotions, are also responsible for some of the most creative impulses in human beings.  Some of the most celebrated works of art, literature and music produced by men like Picasso, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf and also Beethoven and Mozart, they thought themselves to be at their creative best when going through a mental turmoil. 

But we ordinary people don’t belong to that category, and I hardly have any answers much less the remedy.  My job is to keep asking questions, and I suspect not enough people are doing even that.