Work from Home

 

‘Attend C’ or ‘Sick in Quarter’ were the most sought after categories sought from the Doctors on duty, during our Academy days or even as a youngster whenever there was an event which was to be skipped for some reason. What heavenly bliss it was, everyone dressing up and getting on with their daily drudgery, while the supposedly sick was cooling his heels in the bed, relaxing with a thermos full of tea and a couple of buns, listening to music on his transistor or walk-man. Alas, even that pleasure stands withdrawn now, Covid has brought upon untold miseries but the worst part is the ‘work from home’, with ubiquitous connectivity and availability of unlimited data… the last refuge too stands exposed and one is suddenly naked. After all home had privacy and no work; barring of course the files which the inefficient carried home after office hours(!)

Work from home sounded too good to be true, everyone presumed that their performance would get a fillip with this lockdown, as they could deliver more from the relaxed environs of home sweet home. There would be Tea/Coffee snacks available always, one could take a break as per convenience and the best part was there was no overbearing boss breathing down our neck with the unattainable deadlines. It started off alright, everyone was relaxed, the spouse too was happy to have help at hand for daily chores, especially after the maids too were working from their homes and they couldn’t do it virtually. Man of the house was happy to help, being chivalrous and the Gen X person, who was not overly concerned about the gender bender issues. So while the dishes were handled post meals in perfect harmony with almost clockwork efficiency. The mopping was a chore but had to be endured and could be managed even with alternate day effort, Jhadoo or the broomstick did become the personal weapon or accessory in days to come and no wonder, this tool was assigned as the ride of the witches, after all if you keep at it for too long, anyone would become one….Laundry was relatively easy, what with fully automatic machines ensuring even most of the drying effort too, not to forget ironing. As though this was not enough the battle with the groceries, milk, vegetables, eggs, bakery, although home delivered had to be waged and waged with the purifiers...each item had to be cleaned and sterilised…… most of us were already ready to get back to the regular office.

Well, the trouble had just started, now it was the turn of the office to ping for the video conference, which were now a daily affair which would just go on and on…..presentations, discussions, brain storming, virtual workshops dressed in our jockeys with just the upper torso visible, some wardrobe malfunctions when the camera played truant left some of us quite naked and embarrassed. At the end of the day, there was no brain left to be stormed, with no output…… as they say in Hindi, “Nau din chale aur dhai kos…”  having walked for nine days one moved just 2.5 kos which is approx. 7.5 kms, some speed and efficiency.

Even the poor students were not spared with on line classes and tests galore, the boundaries had blurred, home was school with the teachers on the screen and Moms hovering around, they were literally caught between the devil and the deep sea…..as to who was the devil, I will let the readers decide. We in the Armed forces, were spared this agony, for once we had the last laugh. With our age old procedures, there was no way we could work virtually, so we had to be there physically, even if in reduced strength or alternate days. We would proceed to our respective workplaces all decked up with the masks on observing social distancing….but thankfully not working from home!

Vaccination

Vaccination is the new buzz word, with the onset of the pandemic the race for vaccine had commenced, Russia was the first off the blocks to announce its Sputnik, but the most promising one appears to be AstraZeneca. This race is akin to a derby, where the punters are betting on their respective products, at stake is the multi-billion dollar earnings expected from the global vaccination of almost 7.8 billion plus. Adar Poonawala and his Serum Institute of India is at the forefront of this drive having tied up with Astra Zeneca. Bharat Biotech's indigenous Covaxin is not far behind.

Vaccination is the panacea against Corona that we all have waited for not so patiently, although the efficacy of these vials is yet to win the confidence of the general populace. We don't have a choice, no dilemma really.......but come to think of it, we never had any choice in the earlier vaccines too. Right from the time of our birth or should I say even before that, when the expectant mothers received their share of jabs to keep us safe even while we were supposedly safely ensconced in the uterus. The saga of vaccines actually commences with TT or Tetanus Toxoid, which is our first introduction to the vaccines through our mothers, of course. However, it is post our arrival that we are subjected to this inhuman torture, where our tiny little upper arms are pricked repeatedly at short intervals by the doctor or the nurses' needles for BCG, Hepatitis, DPT and MMR. This prick manifests itself later in life with the mortal scare of this medical fraternity, where many tigers are at their mercy. More often than not, it is the mothers who shed more tears than the new born infant on these occasions. The poor unsuspecting bloke is brought here, innocently and curiously gaping at everything, till the prick is delivered, shell shocked at this rather painful turn of events he can't reconcile nor forgive anyone associated with this crime. The worst part is, it is not a one off event, it just keeps recurring and doesn't let go even in our adulthood. Some of us have also been the recipient of the anti-rabies vaccine having annoyed the canines into digging into our flesh sometime or the other in our lives. It is all the more painful when it is your own pet, which is responsible. Pet parents are used to the yearly vaccinations for their dogs or cats. While most pets are trained and accept this ritual as one of those irritants which has to be endured, it wasn't so for Buddy, our Lab who would ensure that the Vets had to be changed every year with his antics, as once bitten the vets were not twice but always shy.

In the vernacular, vaccination is referred to as 'Tikakaran', which is similar to the tika applied on the forehead by the Pandit as a blessing on the forehead to arm you against evil eyes and bless you to be victorious. So tika actually is a life saver, as goes the punch line in the Oral Polio vaccine drive "Do boond zindagi ki". The most successful vaccination drive in the world which has eradicated Polio from our country. The success stories also include Small pox, which incidentally traces its origin to Cow pox, as Edward Jenner the pioneer of vaccines discovered and took fluid from the Cow pox blister to immunise the first kid against Small pox in 1798. In fact, the word vaccine itself owes its origin to 'Variole vaccinae' the term used for Cow pox... (Holy cow!)

In India vaccination is too huge an affair not to be politicised and so we have the BJP vaccine being derided and an SP vaccine promised to deliver. During the Emergency a drive for forced sterilisation was undertaken, referred to as 'Nasbandi', rendering the rural population especially vulnerable to these babus who had individual targets of sterilisation to achieve and for them every male young, adult or old was fair game. Sure enough rumour mongering against the supposed side effects of Covid vaccine resulting in impotence have started doing the rounds. The challenges thus are huge.

We in the armed forces have no option but to undergo this pin prick at regular intervals, the TAB, TT were administered whenever we ended up sustaining bruises or yearly during the Annual Medical Examination. The UN tenure is preceded by hosts of vaccines, as Africa is home to many ailments such as Yellow Fever apart from the usual TAB, TT, DPT etc.

The vaccination drive rolled out from 16th Jan. I was wondering as to why should it roll as rolls for we in the Army signifies the commencement of yet another session of 'ragda'. It always started with innocuous "get rolling"; as a reflex action even today after almost four decades, hearing the word 'roll' immediately beckons us to get rolling...wonder why vaccines have to roll out, why can't they just walk, run, jump, dive or crawl. Unlike the academy where one could front roll and back roll or dive roll, here it is just roll out, i.e. there is no turning the clock back, once the deed is done you are on a roll.... hurrah no more masks, social distancing or any other restrictions, the world is desperately hoping to restore the status quo ante!

 

LOVE JIHAD

 'Love jihad' is an oxymoron like the 'wise fool', although "All is fair in love and war"; obviously this 'love yudh' or 'ishq jihad' is highly unfair, as decreed by the powers that be. We shall soon criminalise these cupid struck wannabe 'Love jihadis'. So will this then be a dharm yudh against jihad.....Holy crusades(!). 

Apparently this term was coined after a few cases of forced conversions  post inter religion marriages were reported, although nobody has been convicted so far. It has suddenly started raining Laws and Ordinances criminalising this crime of passion. I wonder whether the lovelorn damsels will gather the courage to hum "Pyar kiya to darna kya...." as crooned  by Madhubala in Mughal-e Azam challenging the might of  Akbar in the Diwan-e-Aam. The powers that be would like to believe, "What's love got to do with it.....after all it is just a second hand emotion", with due apologies to Tina Turner.

As wise men have correctly ordained that "Marriage is the only war where you get to sleep with the enemy". I am sure the idea of Love jihad has been conceived by bachelors who are blissfully ignorant that marriage itself is a jihad and it makes no exceptions. It does not discriminate between Love jihadis or loveless jihadis (obviously the rest of us belong to the latter). After all what exactly is jihad? It is supposed to be one's struggle with oneself with a praiseworthy aim i.e. we must vanquish the evil that is within us for our spiritual salvation. Marriage invariably acts as a motivating factor towards our quest for Moksha.

Currently such inter religion marriages are solemnised  under the Special marriage act, the act which makes the elders in the family react rather violently, at times ending up in what is normally referred to as honour killings. The word "honour" though is left squirming in the dictionaries for such blatant misuse of its noble intent , after all any such killing is the most heinous and dishonourable act.

Maradona, God bless his soul, decreed "All is fair in love, war and football" with his infamous 'Hand of God' goal against England in 1986 Soccer World Cup. In India Football would have be substituted by Cricket. But this jihad business is definitely not cricket. 

Love is sacred, let us not ruin it... As the lyrics in "Khamoshi" old Hindi movie go..."सिर्फ़ एहसास है ये रूह से महसूस करो, प्यार को प्यार ही रहने दो कोई नाम न दो"

Confused Chanakya(!)

Consequent to the latest round of Sino Indian LAC standoff, I am contemplating changing my profile,  I can no longer  be a "Confused Confucious", that is obviously anti-national, I could be a Confused Chanakya or  Cunning Chanakya, or may be even Keen Kautilya even at the cost of being labelled as a "Keen kumar", a title reserved for the jumping jacks in their professional lives, who are the initiative types, the guys who suck up to the bosses(!)  But Confucious oh No; God save me from the wrath of the troll army, who have earned notoriety of an exceptionally high order in such a short time frame, you see, short time again, with such short fuses too, they can take an offence to anything at all. No one is safe from the wrath of the Troll brigades which are unleashed on the PM, RaGa  to Big B and just about anybody else. The other day the Big B himself was at the receiving end with his set of questions in the KBC. 

 Confused Confucious at least added to the confusion, with Chanakya it could be chants, as Chanakya could never ever be confused(!), but unfortunately Ashwin Sanghi has already usurped that title for his novel Chanakya's Chant. That would be blatant plagiarism, moreover state of confusion is bliss and I wouldn't like to clear it either. We honed the skill of "doping" in NDA (nothing political about this NDA, I am referring to the original National Defence Academy Khadakwasla). No not the narco variety of doping, else the NCB would be on my heels before I can finish this "dope act" of mine, nor the sportsmen type  usage of performance enhancing drugs, nor does it have anything to do with the Chemical bonding by doping as done in the silicon chips. Doping when used as a slang, it could mean a "fool". The dope acts in our second term in NDA were a deliberate put on act to fool the seniors into believing that we had goofed up owing to our ignorance, in the most innocent  'bechara' type facial expression. More often than not, it worked, we did get away with murder literally.

The trouble with these Chinese are that they have a long term vision and they have no concern for the short term whatsoever, whereas we have traditionally been myopic, surviving from one day to the next, "living in the moment", already in a state of Nirvana since times immemorial. Naturally we are at a loss as to why are these guys afflicted with this "Long term" malaise, why can't everyone be like us, you see the Pakis, they only think of today and may be dream of the morrow when they have their rendezvous with the 72 virgins but nothing beyond that. In any case all these grandiose plans actually come to a nought. See all those Five year plans, where have they landed us. Had the Planning Commission been scrapped ab initio do you think we would have been any worse, so why this charade..... as it is we have been blundering along from one crisis to another. But with the Chinese, we have really developed it into an art form, whether it was the 'Annexation of Tibet' or the 'permanent seat in Security Council', "Hindi Chini bhai bhai"  leading to the 62 debacle  to the 'Wuhan spirit' ending up without any fizz in Doklam - Galwan. It is obvious we don't have a clue ......

Anyway getting back to the 'Long and Short' of this vision business, my hunch is that it has something to do with their short physical stature, being rather short in height they make up for it by strategising over the long term or may be it is their eyes being small , which empower them with this unique quality. Not that we are Goliaths by any standards, but compared to our Northern neighbours, we are definitely endowed with a couple of inches more in the  vertical domain. Confucious has to be jettisoned for sure. Any suggestions.....

RaGa

 

RaGa is miffed, or at least his coterie are; how dare Barack Obama call him names. After all it is ok for Indians to refer to him as Pappu, but a rank foreigner, he has no business to refer to him in such a derogatory manner. Indian classical music is pretty rich with its scales, notes, moods, parentage ……the aaroh, avaroh, taal, shudhh-komal-teevra…. a deeply spiritual experience actually. I have run out of musical vocabulary here(!) In simple words RaGa may be referred to as a musical theme, which should have an ascending and descending pattern and vary with moods, seasons or even with the time of the day. One can’t blame poor Obama at not having comprehended the nuances of our RaGa, after all he is yet to discover himself.  So far our Raga has been uniformly steady in his ‘descent only’ pattern nor has he made any ‘variation’ irrespective of the time of the day or season. But then “One man’s music may be noise for the other”, unfortunately for Mamma dear the fusion which a Rossini, Bellini or Verdi could have delivered with our own Ravi Shankar, Pandit Jasraj or Amjad Ali Khan has not fructified. In fact, not just noise but may be cacophony, which obviously is unbearable cruelty for the human auditory system.

We Indians are a sensitive lot, we can take umbrage over just about anything, so calling RaGa names is sacrilege to some but that itself may be music to the others, singing a different ‘Raga’ just confirming their own hypothesis. While Obama may not have sung any paeans to their star per se but that doesn’t matter, or for that matter Manmohan Singh has been praised is conveniently overlooked.

May be this abbreviated name business is to blame after all it has actually aided the enemy camp, with NaMo being associated with paying obeisance to the Almighty being the cryptic version of ‘Namaskaram O Lord’, the odds were obviously heavily against RaGa.

This obsession with abbreviating the names to ‘Brangelina’ “Saifina’ or ‘Virushka’ for celebrity couples took on a different angle when resorted to for the singletons…. so the advent of RaGa or NaMo…..they are self-sufficient, ‘apna haath jagannath’ types, nothing to tie them down literally. So we need to look for an alternative, oh no, not for Rahul Baba, heaven forbid, just for a different narrative….. How about GaRa……no that won’t do either as Gara in the vernacular means ‘mud’. But then mud is earthy and rural and can be moulded into pottery…. So any takers?? Or get him to tie the nupital knot which will automatically get rid of this RaGa business at least.....

The Trump Card

 The Trump(ets) of the world have heaved a sigh of relief after four years of having been blown non-stop, no wonder all that they produced these days was " Vivekamunandan..." When they were queried on their misery, they responded tongue in cheek that "They were 'biden' their time". The other instruments in the repertoire of the conductors were feeling left out, the violins, flutes, percussion, trombones and even the piano had been reduced to just accompaniments from their leadership days. In a secret conclave the instrument world had already decided  to disown the Trumpets for their misdemeanour. Trumpets in their defence said the charges were 'trumped up'.

 The inanimate world as also the one we inhabit has suddenly come alive....."No Trumps" seems to be the favourite winning call for the Bridge players. In fact playing cards have unanimously adopted a motion of banishing the 'trump' suit forever from all forms of card games. Alternately they have applied for a change in the nomenclature from its Latin origin "Triumph" to "Vijay", the Indian equivalent of victory in keeping with the flavour of the season. So no more trump cards, there will be "Vijay" or "No Vijay". Vijay after all was the nom de guerre of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachhan in most of his early 'angry young man' films. It obviously will be victorious in any popularity contest with world's oldest and the largest democracies colluding.

The celluloid world of the Disney's have suddenly rediscovered their mojo, Donald the original Duck had gone into hiding since Nov 16 itself. Ever since his duckling days, he was ruling the roost, the last four years have been crazy, he confided. He has been welcomed with great quack..quackery and goofing around.  Uncle Scrooge's stock too seems to have gone up these days, as even he seems like a nice guy in comparison. Goofy has stopped goofing around; after all the goof ups in the last couple of years, he feels, the world needs a break. The mice fraternity too have finally admitted to have 'Moved their cheese!"

 The toon festive spirit seems to have rubbed off on the global climate too, having been in the ICU last couple of years, with all the hurricanes, wild fires, extreme heat, floods, glacial melting and to top it all the 'Pandemic'. Mother nature may again bestow its bounty on us and the world will hopefully be more alive now that climate change may again acquire centre stage. Lotus shall bloom again!  Kamla "pasand" has suddenly acquired a new meaning and the hard core gutka chewing UP wallah is now looked at with a deference, after all they were 'Bidding' on the winning horse all along.

Zen Brouhaha

It was such a deflating moment, 10000 Indians were being targeted by Chinese Data Mining Agency, it had the Who's who of India, the politicians, entertainers (Cricketers are no longer sportsmen, they are simply entertainers, after all they have mingled with the Hindi Films and Advertising agencies in such a seamless manner that they have outgrown their sporting links altogether), scientists, bankers, bureaucrats, businessmen, defence and security establishments, think- tanks, media personnel and almost everyone whom you can think about.  

This has caused an earthquake like tremor on the terra firma in India, the politician who always considered himself to be close to the power centres realised that they were living in a fool's paradise. They were just typical 'Aam Aadmi', no not the Aam Aadmi Party type just plain "Mango people". To rub salt into the wounds, the two bit opposition Pappu types finds a mention there but despite having been there and done that...oh no(!!) This moment was similar to the one related to the Swiss Bank account holders list, which also caused lot of heartburn, after all every Tom,Dick and Harry.....oh no every Sharma, Singh and Gupta figured in the list but we could not make the cut. We even got in touch with the Swiss bank authorities to include our names as an addendum, it was a matter of prestige and our reputation was at stake. They are a hard nut to crack...so the exercise was in vain.

It was quite a knock out blow but we survived, but this time we are not going to take it lying down. I am told the Chinese won't mind obliging, they may just add our names at a cost, what is a couple of thousand dollars when the family honour is at stake.... we can't be second to any pipsqueak Ambani come lately. So the parleys have already commenced, the Chinese have promised to help, negotiations are on, an addendum is expected soon.... "apna time ayega"......