Skip to main content

The Have-Nots & the Cowards





I was still too groggy in the morning to notice that his breath reeked of stale booze when he stopped me outside a store where I just purchase milk and showing me his calloused dirty hands said that he was an out of job mechanic and if could I help him buy some rations as he has two small daughters to feed. Frankly, I didn't like him at all, but his plea about having kids to feed struck a cord. The dislike only deepened when sensing my positive disposition he quickly added a list of stuff: flour, tea, sugar and rice. 

"Whoa, I am not getting you your  shopping list" I told him and just asked told the store clerk to give him a kilo of flour on my account. "What, you can't even buy me 5 kilos" he retorted angrily and bitterly, to which he received a string of expletives(my first in the day) and was left standing empty-handed. It was obvious that in his eyes I was a fat selfish  Bourgeoisie unwilling to help a desperate man, whereas  I saw an entitled ungrateful asshole who probably got kicked out of his job for slacking and drinking.

Later, narrating this incident to a friend, I observed that such bitter, entitled "have-nots" had always been the target audience and later foot soldiers of the communists, just like the ambitious yet cowardly, always cheer for the Fascists: The flag wavers and the shrill online warriors, not to forget those posting images of their wannabe or full-fledged Dictator or Supreme Leader daily on social-media pages and WhatsApp statuses hoping that someone would notice their dedication and reward them with a position, which they as cowardly bullies would later exploit to the hilt. 

But as they say, hope dies last, both for the bitter jobless mechanic or for the meek bigoted nationalistic accountant or programmer. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Enlightenment

  The voice on the phone delivered a phrase most men dread hearing from a woman, “Ravi, I have something important to tell you!”    In this case though, despite being completely smitten with her during that period and even entertaining the rose-tinted fantasy that she was the one who got away, I had nothing to worry about. My strict code of not getting involved with married women kept me safe.    I was, however, totally unprepared for what followed and even less how to visualise it.    “My third eye has opened,” she announced with absolute seriousness, then launched into a ramble about Shiva Lingams, visions, stream of consciousness and pre-Columbian Hinduism as evidenced by how a US state, made famous by fried chicken, was actually named after the Sanskrit word for thorns "Kanthaka". It is usually not very easy to unsettle or surprise me with things spiritual, bottled or otherwise, and her cosmic revelations too barely moved the needle. Well, except f...

SHAME

  I first tasted deep shame in 10th standard, delivered personally by a girl’s mother, who kicked me out of their house like some neighbourhood pervert. The irony - I had never touched the girl. We were just friends. Soon afterwards, my friends in her school, some gleefully to cause hurt, others as a word of caution, filled my ears about she was caught with some boy in the school toilet. They faced disciplinary action.  While, I inherited the silent disgrace.   The second blow came when I confessed to a friend’s girlfriend, who thought I was a Casanova, that I never had a girlfriend, or touched a girl, and that I was completely inexperienced. In contrast, she had been sleeping with her coach since school, followed by a relay race of men, eventually devirginized my friend, then when he left for higher studies, helped his best friend become a man. A few more years and bodies later, she married a gold digger from the back end of nowhere - that's decades before Soci...

Holy Diver

At an age when most rockers had burned out, overdosed, or taken permanent residency in rehab, the undisputed King of Heavy Metal burst in with his first solo mega-hit, “Holy Diver,” well into his mid-40s. I had been yelling along, with the starting demonic howl and all, since my teens without the faintest idea what Ronnie James Dio was singing about. Recently, I looked it up. Apparently, it’s about some transdimensional, chain swinging Batmanesque masked messianic figure taking a dive to save an ungrateful humanity. Sounds familiar. Now on a personal level, “Holy Diver” has lately come to mean something else. One, call her the manifestation of my Jungian Anima , the female archetype lurking in a man’s psyche, or simply the temptress, a Sky Dakini in the flesh luring me to take the plunge. This Diver, a Skydiver actually, is no fantasy. She is the latest YouTube demigoddess I stumbled upon. A striking, brown-haired, yet a decidedly unglamorous young woman who sits on a chai...

Happy Endings…

After more than a decade around boats, and for earlier  living in Goa, whose only relevance here is that it happens to have a seashore, I am routinely treated as a know-all repository for anything remotely connected to ships and vessels. Of all the questions I get, the one I detest most, and about which I know virtually nothing except having seen a few lined up for scrapping at Alang, concern cruise liners. To be fair, I did predict the commercial failure of India’s first homegrown cruise ship even before its maiden voyage. Like most of my negative prognoses, that too came true. But my dislike for cruise liners has nothing to do with ships. It has everything to do with the people asking the questions. The questions are never about ships, routes, costs or even seasickness. The most common one is - whether it is true that one can avail of intimate services on board, in massage parlours and saunas, the “happy ending” kind, while their families lounge on deck and pose for photos. Why g...

The Twin Plug Enfield Bullet

When Royal Enfield motorcycle’s designers in Redditch blueprinted the Bullet, their intent was to create a workhorse and so emphasis was placed on mechanical reliability and not performance. As a result, the traditional Bullet engine packs a solid construction, one that can endure colossal mechanical fatigue and stress. Thus it doesn’t take much to garner appreciably higher power output from the motorcycle and one doesn’t have to be either Fritz Egli or have a state-of-the-art workshop to do it. For starters just knock in an additional Spark Plug and you already have something worthwhile. And no, you don’t have to go for the Royal Enfield’s new unit engine, of the Thunderbird TBTS to have the Twin Spark Plug advantage. As I have been riding one for the past eight years. A second Spark stands for cleaner and faster rate of combustion translating both into higher RPMs, better power and leaner burning. In fact far leaner and Fuel efficient then the Enfield’s AVL engine. Coming...