Every morning I open the newspaper fearing to see another report of violence of the state machinery on the individual citizen (or are we citizens?!), deaths in the police custody is an extreme (and quite common) phenomenon. But what somehow makes me more terrified is the report of the police playing moral guide, with schoolteacher-like claim of authority. Just the other day, there were reports of police punishing people on the spot, age no bar, for flouting traffic rules. As if we don’t live in a democratic structure, there is no judiciary, no process… nothing! Have you married a girl of your choice? The police can call and rough you up (how much? That’ll depend on the social stature of the parents of the girl). Are you trying to stand up against local petty goons? The police will tell you to ‘settle’ matters  or… Are you so incredulous to have an argument about something with the police on the street, he has every right to slap you, drag you to the proverbial 'lock-up' and you end up living with a trauma all your life…

But the police is only a part of the great disciplinary apparatus that try to make us, poor citizens better, uplift our lives and souls….
There are other great bodies who rule over our bodies…

[…]

My meagre existence in Germany, after she left me, why write about it. Or wait, it was not so scanty after all, there were moments of real high, and real low (and the real lows are kind of highs, aren’t they?). None other than Saint Marx said it (Paris Manuscripts)

But I should cut this ambiguous babbling short and start in the beginning! But this wont be detailed character analysis of others, and me nor it would be a psychological novel type confused jumble. Its gonna be like an collection of headings, one liners, dramatic, on your face screaming observations. Sweeping, critical to the point of drama, merciless to the extent of funny! Illuminationen!

 

I.

I started my academic career as an amusing radical, a strange and irritating little scholar from India who made quite a stir in the little insignificant pond that was our beloved Graduate school. She was gone, and my bitterness was endless, but that ironically made me addicted to words, speech, and people. I kept on making too many friend, and wrong ones at that…

The world is insane, its cure is the world, oh when can we really be at home here!

Rudeness has become such an addiction, I am positively disgusted by the machismo of the place I live in...

I do have such strange dreams sometimes…

Some of them are so vivid and what I call very 'impressive', they hurt me, leave a wound as if… because of the lucid leap with which they merge with my 'real'. The dreams end and reality rushes in without much ado, like a jolt, a fatal break, an ingenuous jump-cut fresh from an avant-garde French movie. Like the one I had in Delhi the very first night.

I 'woke up' in my bed muttering something to myself in great agony. It must have been loud, and R came running from the next room, he looked at me and seemed terrified.
I touched my face and felt it.
It was slashed end to end, like a cross marked in blood and slit skin. I went to the mirror and looked at myself and looked at an unfamiliar face, a face brutalized, a face under erasure. I sprinkled water on that foreign façade, I covered it with my two palms and concentrated hard. 
No, this is a dream, I told myself, and I don't want to live with that face, the face of another …
And I wished to be transferred to another time and space, delivered from that present…

"This is a dream" I told myself and pulled myself through…

I woke up again. This time for real (?)

I feel so frustrated when I see that to talk to most of the world, I need to compromise the complexity of my thoughts...