Chai Chalk Chatter

The young man asks me - “Bhaiya, I understand Irom Sharmila did a lot of great things but didn’t you see how the people reciprocated?” “What was the result of her long protest, which was so selfless and all for the people?” “Did she manage to get the AFSPA removed?” I had no words to respond to that. I was rather perplexed in sheer amazement at the display of such nihilism on the part of such a young man and it took me some time to gather my thoughts but nonetheless, to defend my argument, I replied. I replied by saying - “See, it doesn’t matter what the protest achieved, the very fact that people across the country knew that someone was going to such extremes to protest against a repressive state apparatus serves the purpose of such a protest”. After all, it was an act comparable to what Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt had done by throwing that puny bomb at the Central Assembly in Delhi, in order to make the British realise that “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear”. Th...

I was reading an article on scroll.in, shared by a friend on Facebook. This small piece of writing was initially meant to be a comment on her post but when I started putting my thoughts to words, it became too long for a Facebook comment and in fact became a culmination of the thoughts that the respective article managed to congregate, in my mind. For the original article, please follow: http://bit.ly/2uaC8xp I grew up in the traumatic 90's and the early 2000's. Even as a kid, more importantly a non-tribal kid, being called a 'Dkhar' (an outsider) was a very normal thing in the beautiful Scotland of the East. Children tend to have their own quarrels but them being of the racist nature, at such a tender age speaks about a cultural conditioning drowned in hate. I remember the incident discussed in the article and I also remember the shattered glasses. It was like the Scotland of the East's very own 'kristallnacht', except that it was in broad da...