Notes from a country on auto-pilot

 

Devendra Gautam

 

 AI-generated

Squirrels are fun to watch as they squeak and run while playing hide and seek, oblivious to vehicles that arrive and leave

At a library complex in the midst of a bustling metropolis, there still are a couple of trees, a bamboo grove and patches of Bermuda grass where a wanderer can cool his heels.

In those trees that are far less dominant than their neighbours — luxury hotels, shopping complexes, banks, bars, the headquarters of a regional bloc well past its glory days and the like — birds and squirrels have found their habitat. 

Squirrels are fun to watch as they squeak and run while playing hide and seek, oblivious to vehicles that arrive and leave. But a fountain without water is not – it’s an eyesore, not only in Rome.   

Most of the trees do not bear fruit, making even an amateur observer wonder if these living beings are running and flying on empty bellies most of the time. 

Near a parking lot, bin bags stand brimming with waste, and it is not unusual to see a curious squirrel making a hole to observe and munch something, anything. 

One need not worry, though. Under the canopy of a flowering tree stands a guard, alert as ever, making sure that every visitor enters their name in the registry. 

Just across the road, there’s a well-funded government-run policy research institute full of great minds, who are busy thinking, commissioning research on myriad topics, and planning short, medium and long-term. While its next-door neighbour, a power centre of the yore, is lost in the past with the relics, another neighbour has a keen eye on the whole world and beyond. 

Distant neighbours are also formidable, but well beyond the scope of this small piece…

Within the complex, there’s a statue of a god playing the flute in his little shrine, with scriptures quoting him that he is the be-all-and-end-all of everything. 

All you need to do is kneel down and pray, and everything will be alright…

Is it so, good lord? A man of few words, god doesn’t answer. 

How will he? He is busy playing the flute. 

But this is no Rome of Nero’s times nor a Kurukshetra, or is it more or less of both? 

 Don’t think, watch your thoughts come and go, just watch your breath, goes Osho…. 

 A squirrel comes and vanishes, just like thoughts… 

Just a couple of days ago, Douglas Smith’s Rasputin was peeking from a corner of the library along with Thomas Bell’s Kathmandu. Now, Rasputin has gone into hiding with barely half of the enigma read and so has Kathmandu, in the midst of a guerrilla war. 

 Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds…Who is it roaring like Krishna in the Kurukshetra?

 Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s biography of J Robert Oppenheimer appears quite interesting along with Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem. In the chapter that I am currently in, Oppenheimer is facing the hardest ordeal of his life – a harrowing Eisenhower administration investigation into his alleged links with Communists to establish whether he spilled the nuclear beans to the Russians, and his resolute stance against the hydrogen bomb. While in Jerusalem, a brute ruler from a ‘civilisation’ is wreaking havoc, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction...  

Apparently, you are not alone in your sorrows and sufferings, o sapiens!

Like squirrels, books constantly play hide and seek with you at the library, as if they were creatures of their own free will… But leaving them half read gives one the impression of a belly half full, so I plan to finish reading them before they fly off the shelf. 

 Immersing in books in great times in the life of this great nation? 

Well, what’s the harm? One should play their part and be content with it in the stage called the world, right ‘Wilhelm’ Shakespeare?

Above your heads, copters roar and sirens tear through crowded streets 

Outside, helicopters roar and sirens tear through crowded streets, barely a year after a massive protest left behind a trail of deaths and devastation, bringing a country to her knees (almost) before the formation of a near two-third majority government following the polls. 

 

A year on, the country is on auto-pilot. 

 Or is it? 

A year on, the country is on auto-pilot. 

Or is it? 

AI-generated