This year, December 6th fell on a Saturday. So what's the big deal? There is a December every year and the 6th day of the month also comes every month. So what's the big deal on it coming on a Saturday this year? Well it fell on a Saturday even in 2009. As in most of the Decembers in Delhi that day was also mildly cloudy and crispy cold with some sunlight sneaking through. Something happened that day that I will never forget in my life; something I will forever remember in my life. I had to take my son to his paediatrician for a regular check up and I was driving my mother-in-law's old greyish-blue Maruti 800 with the number plate ending in 4245. Just as we turned left on the Delhi-NOIDA link road from our Mayur Vihar Phase 1 colony, I noticed the weather and also the bleak, expressionless faces of the other drivers on the road. They all looked sad and spiritually constipated. Nobody seemed happy. Maybe they were all focussing on their drive and the road ahead even as the...
Recently I came across a message twice that read something like this: Unless you are capable of violence you are not capable of true peace because unless there is a streak of violence in you, you are essentially harmless. I know the vocal and verbal violence I am prone to and the violence that lurks beneath the surface looking at all the injustice and unfairness in the world. It’s a violence that I manage to become aware of and try to keep under check and manage to do so, most of the time. But when it erupts, my family members and an occasional neighbour see it and hear it. From the age of 10, I have been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and what he tried to do with the lurking anger at the injustice of it all. I do not claim, by any stretch of imagination that I am anywhere close to him in terms of non-violence or his self-mastery. Maybe I have a couple of generations to go and maybe I need to be meditative at least 8 hours a day in the midst of a noisy and chaotic traffic signal; daily for...
Back in 1999-2003 I used to work in the prison reform sector while I was working in the NGO - Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. In February 2001 I undertook a trip across some of the prisons in Madhya Pradesh, namely the Jabalpur, Mandla, Satna and Rewa prisons. Before that I had been to Tihad jail in Delhi, Haldwani sub jail in the then undivided Uttar Pradesh in February 2000, the Latchmere House open prison in England in September 2000, Gwalior central jail and the Ujjain central jail in Madhya Pradesh. The main insight I got while visiting the prisons in February 2001 as well as interacting with the home and health secretaries and other government agencies in Bhopal in the same leg of the tour was that I needed to spend at least a month each in at least one of the central, district and sub jails of the state as a trained prison staff, living in the same kind of squalid accommodation as the prison staff, following the same punishing schedule that they followed. That’s when one d...
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