Festival of lights and labor!

It’s the festival of lights here in our beloved country of ours called India; fire crackers bursting everywhere, scaring off the poor dogs on the street. Although I love fireworks displays, they all look grand and all awe inspiring to me; but we shun our self from realizing that there are children in India who toiled day and night in the hundreds of these firework industry just to earn their whatever daily means they can. It is estimated that 135,000 children work in the Indian fireworks Industry and the town of Sivakasi in South India is suppose to be the capital of child labor in fireworks manufacturing sector.

Most of us won’t see a stop on child labor, not at least in the near future. With inflation in every sector of the market and fuel price surging, we can only see small scale industries like the fire work industry which comprises of mostly medium size and cottage industry sorting out for cheap labor and sadly children are the victims of this vicious cycle.

Unless the consumers in India stop buying these crackers etc. we can only hope and pray that these poor children are at least provided safe and healthy conditions to work, which is not the case when it comes to the firework industry; the harmful effects of the various type of chemicals which are used in these fireworks have only been debated in various forums and media but not really looked into or even educate these children on the seriousness of their effects.

India as a nation in its 64th year of Independence has only seen issues such as child labor spiraling backwards and eradicating this problem now is not only a government matter but an issue that each and every individual should look into and think seriously of how we can eradicate this problem. It would require a huge consensus between various levels of society and a co-operation from each one of us; if we want to see the fruit of our labor trickle down to the very bottom end of the society we need to remain corrupt free, we need to suppress oppression whenever it tries to show its ugly head and not let greed and mere believes that loud noises can chase off the evil that men do.

2002 RIOTS and present day Saints.

We are at the 9th and a half years post the riots of 2002 and the resulting communal differences in Gujarat which left indelible scars in the minds and hearts of a majority of the Muslim community; few would want to re-collect the horror they witness and the pain they had gone through. Like a bad medicine, one has to swallow it all up and hope that such atrocities should never ever happen again and not even in their wildest dreams ever want to go through such horror.

Death came on swift wings for a whole lot of unfortunate souls; the tyranny of a system which failed to embrace it’s people when they needed it the most; the sheer audacity of man himself to brutally butcher, hack and murder innocent men, women and children. One would say, we should leave these memories behind and move on; it might be easier for an outsider like me who never witness the atrocities which happened in those fateful couple of months and to just let go and carry on with my life; however this is not the same with the so many who have actually lost their near and dear ones and in some cases a whole generation has been wiped out. These evil men had no second thoughts and without any remorse headed out to seek and spill blood and spilled blood they did. A system that propagated hatred among deferent level of society, leaders who gave a blind eye to the wrong doers and at times even being forerunners of the campaign itself.

History can only outline these facts but the real truth is still yet to be unearthed. A few men are supposedly being hailed as great men and being dubbed saints and men who are bringing changes and development to the country and Gujarat as a whole; these men presently are going on “yatras” and the so called “sadbhavana” (Goodwill Fast) are also the very men who where the holder of law during the riots .

We can only speak so much about the consequences that innocent people faced after those dreaded days. Man can only question why it happened but the ultimate judgment will surely come; if not by this world but surely by God.

Footsteps in the Sand.

Once I and a friend were all high in hippy country Goa, I had lost all my bearings and was almost freaking out; it was in the wee hours of the morning and the chilling sea breeze was penetrating my bones; all I knew was I wanted to get back to the place I was staying for the night. I can recollect that we had a crazy night laying on that hard beach bench until the fire died, accompanying another lost soul who was in search of a place to stay for the night since he was turned down by his employer. Unable to take the cold no more I asked my friend that we need to leave; it was dark, a moonless sky, cold breeze, a roaring sea, I felt haunted and lost. I experience this feeling for the first time; as we started treading back along the sea shore; I realize that it’s taking a much longer time to get to the point where we had to trespass a few beach restaurant in order to get into a path which would lead us to our place. I stopped and told my friend that we were lost. Now my friend is relying solely on me to lead the way back to the place where we were staying. The only thing I could think of was to track back to the direction where we came from and try to retrace my route. So we walked back until I was stopped by these footsteps in the sand. They were freshly imprinted; I don’t remember seeing these footsteps while coming the same way a few minutes back and they were heading the opposite directions. These foot steps were almost the size of a young female or maybe tennage boy feet. I told my friend that we are heading in the wrong direction and lets follow these foot steps; so we followed the footsteps tracing them feet by feet until they just stop dead on track and I could not see any more foot print beyond that; I stop and looked around and was unsure of what to do, so I just told my friend that we are on the right path and asked to follow me; I couldn’t turn left cause that’s the sea, so the only thing is to turn right and head into the beach restaurant; however to my surprise, the moment I was inside the canopy of one of the dimly lit beach shacks, I immediately spotted the way back to our place which was just parallel to this particular restaurant.

Now, I’m not sure how to explain about these footsteps; maybe they were already there and I just didn’t noticed or maybe they were meant to show us the way, which they surely did; I don’t know, but I can only say that those foot steps in the sand that night saved me from a lot of frustration.

Writers block!!

Hello again,

I was watching this standup comedian the other day on YouTube and she was talking about how a writer can go through these period of what they call a "writer's block" and really it's not a new topic but the interesting thing about what she was saying is that how the mind purposely imposes or block out flowing thoughts by introducing contradicting argument to the whole scheme of things and thus leaving the person incapable of moving forward. For e.g. I can imagine that the girl I really like would somehow just give me a call and say hey how you doing and it’s been a while and would you like to come for a coffee and we would spend an evening that would last till the end; that’s when my mind again say’s wtf! That’s not going to happen, that girl is way ahead of the curve and you still hear dreaming about her; ultimately I give up and I doze off to sleep. Many a time this has happened to me and though I’m not an ardent blogger or writer, in those moments of a mental block where you just can’t seem to even ejaculate a single interesting thought out of your mind, I just tend to give up and shut down my system and just retire to my own cell of thoughts.