It's so funny, you don't laugh...

Seriously.

Being religiously away from news channels and newspapers, takes me time to catch up on the great (non)issues of the world.

After the comedy circus of the baba doing a drag , it's the times of india starting a campaign against raising of the legal drinking age to twenty five.The first thing you think is who's sponsored the half page advertisement and the campaign? The second thought is of the billions of mumbaikers reeling under unprecedented rains, water clogged. Mumbai with its issues of housing, roads, drainage, sanitation, lack of infrastructure, increasing cases of violence and this is what is most important to the paper with highest circulation in english in mumbai.

Also on is the debate on the dance of mrs swaraj. Read somewhere an article likening it to the tandava. Well Shiva must be doing it now having read it. The reason for the party's protest is obviously lost and least important. Not the least funny is that the party is trying so desperately to find an issue to just be visible on national imagination and national television . Not to say trying to hide from public memory the yeduryappas and modis. Even worse , the lack of a strong alternative to the current government and lack of national leaders in a country of millions that's projected to surpass china's population in another decade is not so funny anymore.

There is a spate of hunger strikes on after the "success" of anna hazare's much televised, sponsored and advertised fast. They all are funny not because of the issues they take up but because you have to use "fasting", read blackmail, to make yourself heard by the government who should be doing it anyway.

Also funny are the arguments put forward by the in-power politicos, of not bowing down and not being cowered. Aah-ha. Does that mean, we aren't getting back the black money? yellow, green, red..whatever..but didn't we know that already?

The West Indies tour promises to bring up some funnier debates about money, endorsements, priorities, patriotism. I hope they get Mr Kalmadi, live from Tihar to do it.

Ms Mamata seems to have given back the disputed 400 acre singur land but the invitation to tata has also been sent.Isn't it funny? Only wandering in the tatas did set up the plant in the 600 acre would the peripheral acres be good enough for agriculture? But that's another funny debate.

That also reminds me of a certain mr ramesh for whom i had oodles of respect before he went cuckoo..or should i say, the parrot who can talk the propaganda. In Odisha, the clean government is doing its best to clean up the entire state's resources along with its forests. 

The really adarsh scam of all time may yet be the adarsh scam, but we are waiting still for the punchline. 

Funny, very funny.

But why isn't anyone laughing?

The Barefoot Dreamer

Sometimes..just sometimes my heart screams out...we bloody humans...

Human, humane, humanity.

Oxymoron, isn't it ? I sometimes fail to understand human beings. Even the wild animals live by better rules and ethics that humans. 

Every writer has once in his life said, these are strange times. I think times were never strange. It's just the humans who became stranger and stranger, a stranger to themselves and humanity. 

When people die, you rarely cry for them but more so for yourself, thinking of the pain, of the vacuum it will leave in your life. When i heard of M F Hussain's demise, i cried. I do not yet know what i was crying for. Was it the lost hope? Was it the utter senselessness of his dying in a foreign land? Or of losing a genius who always lived by his own rules?No, i do not know.

Even in his death , he is spectacular. He proved like many great people before him, that he did not live in any boundaries, so could the borders of any country keep him tied down? Even in death he unified. It's funny how the government rises to an occasion offering to bury him in india. Dear Government, you didn't deserve him. We didn't deserve a man of his greatness. Some say, he should have stayed on here and fought his critics, about his freedom of expression. Why should he have? Why? In this country where everything runs on blackmail and black money, why should he have cared? After decades of painting india internationally, he did not need to do it . Yes, we did not deserve him.

I think of his life, his journey and his end. All i feel is awe and reverence. In his death he has taught a lesson , at least to me. In life, you live only once. Live by your own rules. Sometimes, by not caring about boundaries you can create your own horizons. In life, people will always judge. In death, the judgements don't count.

The barefoot maverick , his signature long brush in hand, painted his own skies . I am sure, he is still walking barefoot on the clouds  and painting his own skies. 

[Freedom of Speech and Expression is one of the basic and fundamental right of citizens in almost every country in the world. But this hasn't stopped the fundamentalists in those countries to flourish and wield a power over governments and its people that has forced many artists, mostly writers, to live in exile. 

Tasleema Nasreen, Orhan Pamuk, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, from Bangladesh, to Turkey, to Cuba, from Germany, to Iraq , Tibet, Mongolia, China, Russia to Nigeria, people have lived away from there beloved land. A Reporter shot on the middle of the road, a painter burnt at stake, from Galileo to Da Vinci, they all have faced this at some point of their lives. From being charged with sedition to being labeled as extremists and enemies of the state , they have chosen to live in exile. These people live a life hidden from public memory, surfacing now and then, being criticised, and then remembered in death.]