APOCALYPSE

I am in Kolkata now. It is 10:20 PM. I have 4 more days left in the city. After that I am again, leaving on a jet plane.

Right now thanks to the Nov 8 declaration of demonitization of Rs500 and Rs1000 by our Hon'ble Prime Minister the entire country is in a cash strife on the verge of a cash riot. There have been 25 deaths due to this and yet most educated middle-class and upper middle-class young Indians who have access to plastic and e-money are supporting it. And the poor and the old are the ones who are as usual the collateral damage.

In the United States of America where I have to go back and spend atleast the next 1.5 years the country has elected a racist, misogynist, abusive, sexual predator as their President over the most qualified candidate of all time. Perhaps because it was a She. But right now the verdict is clear. The majority of the white population do not want anybody else to be there. Racism and hate crimes have come into the forefront of even the most liberal cities and suburbs.

And I am not even going to start talking about Brexit, Bangladesh, Myanmar, ISIS, Syria, Israel, German Nationalist Party. I guess this is what apocalypse feels like.

And I am sad. Really sad. That I have to leave my bed, my house, my parents behind. I never felt like this before. But I do now. My parents seem so much more frail and withered and with every passing day I am scared that I might not be able to see them if I am not around. The logical part of my brain knows that it has to happen. But I don't want it to happen. I don't want to have to face it or deal with it. I just feel helpless and melancholy and doomed. Yes ! I feel DOOMED. I have gone through much worse before in my life and I have encountered this feeling before. But I could always bring myself out of it. Just this time it does not feel like it will be possible and most importantly it does not feel like I want to.

And yes 2016. YOU SUCKED!! SO BAD!! SO VERY BAD!!

Does it ever get better?

আমি ঢাকা

I had gotten my visa extension about two months back and the first thoughts in my head were I have to go home. To kolkata. I had asked my manager then only but finally that Friday morning my manager came up to me and said I could look to go back home end of October if I wanted. That's all I needed. I booked my tickets within the next 5 hours. The flight is apparently on a Monday and would reach on Tuesday and I would lose two working days. That will affect my utilization and then my rating. But who cares? I am going home. That's what mattered. I decided to meet up CGNC. I had been cooped up inside the house all week.I was just in one of those moods where I did not want to meet anybody and was feeling like a hermit. But the fact that I would be going home needed to be celebrated. It was around 8 in the evening when I met CGNC. I was bursting at my seams. I just blabbered whatever happened throughout the day. Any celebration needs food and that's like a CGNC and me tradition. We meet up once a couple of weeks and go and dine out and make a day/night of it. He listened to me and said you must want Indian food today and to that I told him that what I wanted that day was good bengali food and I went on to add as to why the Bangladeshi/Bangali community here have'nt opened a true-blue Bangladeshi restaurant. And then he said " Hey ! Have you been following what's happening in Bangladesh today." I had read that a Hindu priest was hacked to death the day before and I silently nodded. "Why do you thing their commandos are taking so long to take any action? Why are they not barging into the cafe?"  I realized he was talking about something else. "Cafe? What Cafe?" He replied "A bunch of terrorist have stormed some cafe in some city in Bangladesh. I can't remember the name. The ISIS have claimed responsibility."

I was only half listening to him. I was already too busy trying to find the details on my phone. Bangladesh. I could not believe it. I know politically, geographically it is a different country but I have always felt that it's not that different. I mean, everyone in my mother's side of the family converse in fluent "bangal". How many times have I heard my pishi telling me "এহ তুই  মিষ্টি  খাস না . তুইও  বাঙ্গাল তোর  মা'র  মতন ."

All kidding apart. We speak the same language, eat the same food, share the same history, are nourished by the same river. We are the same.

And then I found out. A cafe in Dhaka. Dhaka! I had always imagined it to be like a soul-sister city to Kolkata. You know how we read about "সই " in old books. Something like that. I don't know why. But I needed more information.
More information than that there were Italians and Japanese citizens trapped inside the cafe. I needed more information than, the RAB was standing right outside waiting to take action. I needed to know who were inside. Who were those people. I needed to know how many terrorists. And yes I desperately needed to know what the RAD was still waiting outside for. I needed real-time update. Sitting in the U.S we keep getting real-time updates about a Bangladesh-India cricket match. Why not about this? Why not about what is happening in Bangladesh? If this was Paris or Brussels or Orlando, then there would be updates..that would have been the only news flooding my feed.

And then I went to Bengali daily news sites. And then I got what I was looking for. I don't even know what I was looking for anymore. I learnt about Arushi. And Arushi's friend. Farhaaz Hossain. The boy who could have left and saved his own life. But chose to stay back because of his friends and was hacked to death. The boy who was just 20 and far wiser and braver and noble than any one of us could ever be. But then the boy who hacked Farhaaz to his death was like Farhaaz and yet so unlike him. Nibras Islam, Rohan Imtiaz and Meer Saameh Mubasheer. They were not older than 23 themselves. They have studied in the best schools, travelled, and have been exposed to the world. Yet, they were completely okay with dying, because they believed they would go to heaven. More scarily, they were completely okay with hacking someone who was exactly like them. to death, not shoot them, but hack them with a machete, in the name of religion. Someone they might have had common friends with. Someone they could have easily had a conversation with, or shared a cuppa joe with, in some cafe.

But instead all of them lie dead. All of their lives cut short by machetes or bullets, brutally. And all, directly or indirectly because of this arbitarary "thing" called religion.

And that brings me to the point I have found hard to shake off my system. A point which would offend a lot of people. Everyone I know, have strongly condemned and been shaken by what happened in Bangladesh. But then there are many among them who are also strongly religious. Devout Hindus, Muslims, Christians and/or Sikhs. And to them I want to ask and this is a genuine question. Not an abstract condescending one. What is the point? What is the point about having a religion?

I really don't know the answer. All I know is that it could have been me. I am just like any of them. It could have been me sitting in a cafe with my friends, when a bunch of religious fanatics might decide to storm in and hack people to death. I don't know if they would have decided to spare me if I identified as Hindu or a Bengali or not. All I know is that I would bleed too. I already am. Because at some level I might not be as brave as Farhaaz Hossain or as cruel and clueless as Nibras Islam, but I am still them. Maybe not exactly. But still. A lot like them.

Ladies Last

CM is a very simple girl or perhaps a woman who happens to be a consultant. CM has worked 5.5 years in the same project 4 years in India and 1.5 years from the client location. CM has worked very hard and shown her merit and has gotten good reviews and ratings 4 out of those 5.5 years including her very last appraisal.

Incidentally CM is the only one belonging to the XX chromosomes gene pool and works with 12 other people who are XY chromosomes.

This incident is one particular incident that happened one particular day but is quite indicative of the kind of behaviour CM, and I am sure most other women have to constantly face at work.


So on this day a very senior lead from CM's India office visits CM's client location. A meeting is obviously arranged. Most meetings like this are CM's nightmare. So the senior lead walks in to the meeting room. Let us call him GD. He sits down and he says, "This is the third team I am meeting and this is the thing with every team. 1 ' LADIES' and rest 'GENTLEMEN'. Is this your plan? But there is no gender bias here and so no Ladies First Business here. "

Everyone around the table laughs a little. CM forces resemblance of a smile.

The meeting continues with expression of gratitude but also the dire times ahead. How the (human)resources have worked hard but ofcourse need to work harder. How they should expand their horizon and no not go travelling, but find new problems in the client architecture so that they can make the clients realize how inadequate they are and then give the client the solutions themselves like the great Houdini and let them know how indispensable CM's team specifically and her company in general are. Ofcourse it ends with the future prospects of CM's company and the new projects that they have acquired. The two recent large projects acquired by CM's company are two luxury brands. One related to Women's beauty product and the other is a well know designer brand for handbags. And GD concludes with "We should find this exciting specially the Ladies right?" He looks at CM and smiles. Now CM has learnt to keep her mouth shut in situations like this. Except CM's expressions gets the better of her sometimes. To CM it obviously does not matter if her company has acquired the project of a client who sells overpriced (and overhyped) handbags or a client who sells toilet cleaners as long as it means that her company gets revenues and profits which percolates down to her. Just one sentence escapes CM's lips. "Ofcourse. Since they will be giving us LADIES free stuff."

Everyone in the room starts laughing. CM wonders if they are laughing at the sarcasm or they think that is actually funny.

Kalki - Salute

No one says it better than her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF0_dGYeSEk

Belated Happy New Year 2016

It is another new year. People all over the globe have celebrated absolutely nothing changing. It is not like the refugee crisis will  eradicate, or the giant chemical/automobile/oil corporations of the world will start investing more money in solving global warming. Last year it was Lahore,Paris, Baghdad, and this year it was Pathankot,Turkey, Kenya. The ISIS-s and the Boka Harems and the Pakistan militants. and the Maobadis they will all exist just like the head of nations and all of us, the normal regular people, be sacrificed as collateral damage.

A world where children are slaughtered in the name of religion, women are raped, mutilated, burned without any hesitation for sport, where men are killed because of what he eats, needs to change. There needs to be an upheaval. Every single one of us, the normal collateral expendables, need to stand against injustice and speak up, for each other and for ourselves. We cannot keep on hiding anymore behind fear, behind societal diktats. And when that change happens, when we can truly identify ourselves as decent human beings that is when we should celebrate.