A Letter to Anna Hazare

PRELUDE:  This open letter was sent to me for review yesterday late at night by my student, Ajay, a team member of  a group that we had — the ‘Creatineers’ . The letter intrigued me. I thought of sharing it with the readers of Iris and he immediately agreed. The letter, its views, its authorship and copyright belongs to Ajay. This weekend post that we have is a guest post from a member of the student community.

Hello Mr. Hazare,

I am another Indian who never saw you face to face.  I got to know about you from newspapers, then I saw you on television and suddenly you just exploded. Everywhere there is Anna ado, people talking about you, claiming you as the next Gandhi, the only ideal Indian left in the nation …..blah blah…..You know even my mobile Inbox is flooded with messages to support you.  My mother is not able to watch her daily soaps because my father keeps on swapping different news channels just to know what your next action would be.

I am a guy who has a girlfriend who keeps on annoying , who has sucking friends, who does Facebook for more than 5 hours a day, sms, chat, movies, partying, studies etc. Amid all this, do you really expect that I have time for politics and corruption kindaa stuff…I am 21 and I never voted and seriously I don’t have any faith in democracy. Yaar, I know not if everyone of them is corrupt but we all know that most of them are, then what’s the point voting. Leave it.

Anna but to me you are a potent guy, potent of changing things, I mean whole nation is with you, seriously there has to be something in you. You wear Gandhi topi and appear Ideal, to me you are a beacon of hope and triumph of change. Parties are accusing that you are corrupt …ooh my god they have a habit of saying it about every person who stands against them and they think people of India will believe them. I know you can never be corrupt…aah you heard that rhetoric “supremacy of parliament”. Parliament can never be above people, see people are there to support you, they are on roads, they have jammed traffic for you, whole Delhi is on march. Huhhh!!! and they still think that Parliament is superior, what do they think of themselves?? Do they think we are this dumb???

I need to calm down.  It’s everywhere,it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google +,you name it and we have it there. Even my status says “Anna tu hai aaj ka gandhi,tuney laayi jag me aandhi”..cool na??? hope you like this, it got more than 50 likes on facebook. Huhhh !! let’s end it all here, you are a leader, now one who is nationally renowned. This is the time when I should step out of my home to support you but look I’ve something important on Friday so I can’t. I am constantly supporting you online by sharing articles and info about you. It’s time that you sway in our lives like a paragon and wipe out all the woes.

Anna now you are India and India is Anna. I support you, country supports you, media is with us leaving everything else. It’s been 11 days since you are fasting,I  believe that there is something divine in you that is holding you. Indians are crazy about messiahs — we are not confident of our capacities. We die in the hands of terrorists, we party, we earn Rs.80 per day — but who says we can fight our own conscience and the corruption within us and become heroes ourselves. We need gods and heroes to save us.  We have waited enough for messiahs — we can’t fast ourselves, so we need you to fast for us. The real Mr. India, in this battle of right against might ,we rely on you .Go on, Go Anna.

Anna, please break your fast because I can’t fast with you — feel hungry often and need ‘breakfast’.

Jai Hind, Jai bharat
shacky

P.S:I hope you will reply back to me at “shackythechillguy@gmail.com”

On A Postcard

No I am not going to write the history of Indian Postal Service! Neither do I want to trace the history of a postcard. You can go and look that up in an Encyclopedia. Wikipedia says that postal service as a public mode of communication in India started with Warren Hastings bringing the reform to make the postal department public. Since then postal services started acquiring the importance which in earlier days pigeons had. Well, in Cuttack there are still trained pigeons who carry highly confidential messages for the Orissa Police. It is perhaps the only place in India which has pigeons to carry messages. Oh wow! Maine Pyar Kiya ...

Ahem…no romantic musings . My purpose here is to dwell on the little emotive values associated with the postcard. Actually, I was dusting my old cupboard and found hoards of postcards, some of them scribbled to God. As a child, Mom used to tell me that He read all postcards, so I made it a point to complain about family, friends and life in general specifically in postcards . The postoffice used to be right across the road and I borrowed five rupees everyday from dad for a stack of postcards. They were 15paise at that time…I don’t know how much they cost these days.

I remember one specific postcard which I had posted to Mr. Rajiv Gandhi while in Std-V. I wrote to him requesting him to arrange for my visit to New Delhi and a stay in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. I wrote something as follows (paraphrased here):

Respected Sir,

I am studying in Std-V. I want to meet you. Please invite me to New Delhi to your house. I want to see New Delhi at least once in my life. But no one takes me there. I want to stay in the Rashtrapati Bhavan .Please sir, I will bring my poems if you call me.

Regards,

——-

I wish I can rephrase the words exactly as I had written then. Waited for a reply for days to that postcard (may be secretly until the death of Mr. Gandhi). You cannot imagine my enthusiasm when I posted the card. I didn’t even tell about it to parents and after many months disclosed about it to my younger brother. He was so happy that we will go to Delhi that he used to even dream Apu Ghar .

I remember writing a lot of such postcards to the tele series Surabhi for Siddharth Kak and Renuka Sahani when a little older. Everytime they would shuffle the postcards to declare the winners, my heart went pounding. But I never won! The address: Andheri, Mumbai Po Box No: “x” still remains engraved in mind. It seemed Andheri was a fairytale place in a “film” like city far-far away from my imagination. I could only imagine Govinda and Mithun Chakraborty (they ruled then) when I thought of Mumbai and could never think that there were any other human souls except the film stars who inhabited Mumbai.

The touch of those yellow coloured postcards, with a restricted space cannot be equalled by any great email service of the present. The joy when one recived such a card is also not to be expressed in words. But postcards, did not merely have an emotive value. Dad tells me that one can file a PIL (Public Litigation) on any postcard and the courts have to accept them. He tells that the postcard shows the power of the average citizen in this country.

But for me, the smell of the fresh postcard and writing on them with awkward childish letters bears more meaning than great literary texts. In fact, in literature there is a specific genre of novel writing which is called the Epistolary novels which were written in the form of letters. The famous English writer Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740s) and Clarissa (1740s) are notable novels of this kind.

I am writing this piece also as a tribute to letter writing and to snail-mail, which these days they call an extinct art…Wish our kids could actually learn the beauty of words in letters…but it is the generation of “hypers”/”speed” with which postcards/letters can hardly compete…