Beauti-fool day

1st April 2010
I pushed myself overboard. I returned home feeling tired but convinced myself that I could so some exercise. The weight loss regime has worked beyond my imagination and I’ve turned thinner than I would’ve liked. I am desperate to put on some weight. After all “log kya kahenge (What will people say)” syndrome affects me as much as the others. How will I explain that I’m scared of growing fat at thirty for I know it’ll be very difficult to lose the flab; I must be just-right. Who decides that? The society in which I live! My legs were limp so I started to exercise my triceps lying in bed. After four sets I fell asleep and woke up with a start, confused about my position. It took a few seconds to come to terms with reality. By then, I was more tired than before, now my hands refused to move as well. I dragged myself out of bed with a great difficulty, walked to the drawing room and fell plop on the sofa. I watched a documentary by Nilanjana Bose on honour killings in our country. I wasn’t surprised watching the interviews of Khaap Panchayat members justifying honour killings from every angle of unabashed stupidity. Of course my views would incite a similar response from the Khaap were they to find out what they are. Honour killings are also happening in the West and not surprisingly in Indian and middle-eastern immigrant families. There are just so many people in our country, so many uneducated, also so many educated but unaffected by education, also so many educated high class scoundrels, all trying to avoid the “shame” that their children might bring to them. “Values” must be taught with rigour and from an early age. ‘Educating’ children to differentiate “us” from “them” is quintessential to our society. What a shame that some iconoclasts just don’t imbibe the ‘good values’, break the shackles of ‘limited freedom’ and commit sacrilege; maybe education is actually bringing about the needful change in a few. By the way, talking about education, starting yesterday, another fundamental right has been introduced in our country. Every child from the age of 6 to 14 has the Right to Education; three cheers for The Government. Hey but what about schools where teachers do not come to teach but draw their salaries, what about the dilapidated buildings, what about the broken benches and boards. Private schools will be directed to accommodate 25% students from economically weaker section. How the school will bear the burden, that’s their own headache. But this still is a good move now let us wait and see the next, and the bigger problem being solved; implementation. Is this order going to be meet the same fate as the government school in my sector; big and grand when built, almost non functional in some time for ever and ever till the term “47-Model” brings to mind an unkempt building where the locals go for casting votes during elections. Really? Is that a school? A Model-School”? Paradoxically, for us in Chandigarh, the term “Model-School” brings to mind such buildings in tatters with a fake promise of educating children. Of course there are exceptions to this as 2 or 3 Model Schools do live up to the meaning of their name but most others do not. Let us all take hold of one main-road each on which we see kids begging and count how many children go off the streets and are shifted to schools in three months time. Talk about counting, the government has started the new census that will go on to count and fingerprint the billion strong. Now that’s one counting I could never do. So we’ll all learn to read and write but when will we learn to differentiate wrong from right? How can I cerebrate on the problems of my country when I feel that I’m neither true to myself nor know how to be. Aha! Maybe there is no problem at all; it’s just a figment of my imagination. Ignorance is bliss and it’s a Fool’s Day after all so let us celebrate by not doing anything. Sigh! Why should I anyway.