FAAAI to invite WPI tracking body to its next meeting

This is a satirical piece which was published in  My Faking News on August 24,2015

The first FAAAI (Fat and Ageing Auntys’ Association of India) meeting ended yesterday on a very positive note. The members of the association were seen leaving the venue in upmarket South Delhi in a very happy and notably cheerful mood.

The reason for the positivity is that the two day conclave ended with the passing of the resolution that FAAAI would invite the same body to check its members weight and record their age as the one that keeps track of the WPI ( Wholesale Price Index).

The president of FAAAI told this reporter that the association was formed with the primary purpose of making middle aged women feel happy about themselves. It is par for  the course that what will keep the members really thrilled is an index that shows their weight and age going in the negative rather than inching north.

“I read in the newspapers that deflationary trends continued for the ninth month in a row in July 2015 with wholesale inflation plunging to a historic low, in fact plunging into (-) and that this may prompt RBI to cut interest rate ahead of the September 29 policy meet”, a beaming president stated. “That was my Eureka moment. I realized that if someone out there was still able to show a whole country that the WPI is going into negative then he/she would certainly be able to convince the ladies at FAAAI that their weight is going down and that they have slipped into reverse ageing”, added the president.

One of the founder members, who was lurking on the sidelines, twittered that the WPI measuring body had proved its mettle by releasing mind fuddling stats and data to fox the poor Indian consumer. The gullible and eager to be convinced ladies at FAAAI would be really easy work – almost a cake walk.

As one  prepared to leave calls were being made to all corners of the country to locate the genius who had  fudged the figures and could do so in future too.

In Support of the Death Penalty

                                  

                                                              

Almost three decades to this day sixteen year old Geeta Chopra , a 2nd year student of Jesus and Mary College, and her  fourteen year old brother, Sanjay, a 10th standard student  of  Modern School,  left home to participate in a radio programme called the Yuva Vani on the All India Radio. Two bright young  peppy cheerful loved happy youngsters with nary a care in the world. Two days later their parents were called to identify their  mutilated, bruised, vandalised, tortured , bodies.

I ask you to close your eyes and bring that moment in front of your eyes. That moment – the moment when the sheets were lifted from the bodies and the parents saw their children. The moment which witnessed the death of a family unit, the death of a mother’s joy, of a father’s pride, the death of hopes, ambitions, laughter, of life as it was that the family had shared.

In that sepia tinted frame of two murdered dead and two living dead, you now see the two  killers - the rapists, the vandalisers, the plunderers . The men who murdered not just two innocent teenagers but a whole family. And then, after having seen all this , you are asked to pronounce a judgement. For this rarest of rare case will you not say what  the hon’ble court read out on a blistery cold January day in 1981…to be hanged until dead?

The decision to include capital punishment was taken unanimously by the framers of our constitution – the same people who gave us our Preamble, the group which included legal luminaries, freedom fighters, the privileged and the scheduled caste.  When the Law Commission submits its report, which by all accounts will recommend abolition of death penalty, it will be going against the considered opinion of those who gave us our constitution.

It is important to remember that the penalty is read out in only the rarest of rare cases. It is because of this rarest of rare clause that a research done by National Law University, Delhi found that only 755 people have been executed since Independence. Wikipedia tells us that a total of 26 executions have taken place in India since 1991. Also important is that just 4 of  the 26 hanged since ’91 have been muslims.

Death penalty is not awarded arbitrarily and in a discriminatory manner. Fairness has always been an essential part of our system of justice. When the highest court of the land finally upholds the death penalty order the case has gone through many years of appeals , arguments, testimonies and travelled a complex legal maze. It is very rare, nee almost impossible, that an innocent is given the death penalty.

Amnesty International, which has been a leading advocate of abolishing the death penalty, maintains an official stance of “we  in no way seek to minimize or condone the crimes for which those sentenced to death were convicted. As an organization deeply concerned with the victims of human rights abuses, Amnesty International does not seek to belittle the suffering of the families of murder victims, for whom we have the greatest sympathy. However, the finality and cruelty inherent in the death penalty render it incompatible with norms of modern-day civilized behaviour….” 

Look at the irony inherent in this statement. The finality and cruelty inherent in the death penalty render it incompatible with norms of modern-day civilized behaviour… The irony lies in the talk of civilized behaviour towards those who have broken each and every mores of the civilized world- those men , and women, who never once paid heed to the finality and cruelty of their actions which resulted in death, who indulged in  behaviour which is incompatible with civilized societies. Hasn’t Amnesty itself given the reason why the ultimate penalty should be given to those who do not subscribe to societal norms?

Sitting in the comfort of our living rooms and weighing the pros and cons of capital punishment is akin to discussing whether anaesthesia should be administered to a patient going in for surgery or not.... Those not undergoing the surgery will never feel the pain. Besides the highest court of the land this should also   be decided by those who have gone through the trauma of losing a loved one to the act of gruesome murder, rape, mutilation . Remember, for capital punishment to be handed out the crime has to come under the category of rarest of rare.

We should ask the survivors of 26/11 if they are able to sleep at night without hearing the staccato of gunshots; we should ask the families who lost their loved ones to Ajmal Kasab’s madness, we should ask the mother of Nirbhaya if she will ever be able to forgive the ‘juvenile’ who rammed an iron rod inside her daughter.

And we should ask ourselves: how cruel is it of us to even think about the possibility of letting people like Billa Ranga, Ajmal Kasab and their ilk to live on? What if they repeat –in jail or outside- what they have shown they are capable of doing?

Of Emily Dickenson, her Poetry and Death.....

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility…….

Since then ’t is centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity.

So wrote Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest female poets.  I had first stumbled upon her poetry about five years back (There’s a certain slant of light/On winter afternoons/That oppresses/ like the weight/of cathedral tunes. These were the first lines I read and was hooked for life). But the more I read of her poetry the more it emerged that death was a leitmotif - a regular feature.

IT was not death, for I stood up,

And all the dead lie down;

It was not night, for all the bells

Put out their tongues, for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh

I felt siroccos crawl,—

Nor fire, for just my marble feet

Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all;

The figures I have seen

Set orderly, for burial,

Reminded me of mine………

Wikipedia informs that ‘Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill and died in April 1844, Emily was traumatized. She became so melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover’.

SO proud she was to die

It made us all ashamed

That what we cherished, so unknown

To her desire seemed.

So satisfied to go

Where none of us should be,

Immediately, that anguish stooped

Almost to jealousy.

At another place she writes

I ’VE seen a dying eye

Run round and round a room

In search of something, as it seemed,

Then cloudier become;

And then, obscure with fog,

And then be soldered down,

Without disclosing what it be,

’T were blessed to have seen.

Emily seems to be not a wee bit scared of death. Isn’t this why she wrote

A LONG, long sleep, a famous sleep

That makes no show for dawn

By stretch of limb or stir of lid,—

An independent one.

Was ever idleness like this?

Within a hut of stone

To bask the centuries away

Nor once look up for noon?

Withdrawing more and more from the outside world by the summer of 1858 she spent her time in writing and reviewing the poems she had written. The forty fascicles she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems. This treasure house of poetry was discovered only after her death.

I HEARD a fly buzz when I died;

The stillness round my form

Was like the stillness in the air

Between the heaves of storm……..

At another place she wrote

IF I shouldn’t be alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.
If I could n’t thank you,	5
Being just asleep,
You will know I ’m trying
With my granite lip!

However, death assumes an unfriendly color at another place…

DEATH is like the insect

Menacing the tree,

Competent to kill it,

But decoyed may be…..

An article in the American Journal of Psychiatry (May 2001) shows that she suffered from a type of manic depression called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I CAN wade grief,

Whole pools of it,—

I ’m used to that.

But the least push of joy

Breaks up my feet,

And I tip—drunken.

 People  with manic depression go through periods of depression where they can do nothing and periods of mania in which they can do everything.

HEAVEN is what I cannot reach!

The apple on the tree,

Provided it do hopeless hang,

That “heaven” is, to me.

The color on the cruising cloud,

The interdicted ground

Behind the hill, the house behind,—

There Paradise is found!

 Emily Dickinson wrote more than half of her 1800 poems in the three years between 1862 and 1865 when she was manic. She had long periods when she couldn’t write because she was depressed. She wrote almost all of her works in the spring and summer months when sunlight made her feel good, and was unable to write in the winter when lack of sunlight sent her into depression.
Her lasting legacy is that what she wrote in the 1800’s will forever stand the test of time. Can anyone negate these lines?

Death is a lasting argument between

The spirit and the dust.

“Dissolve,” says Death. The Spirit, “Sir,

I have another trust…..”

Or these ?

DEATH sets a thing significant The eye had hurried by…….

A book I have, a friend gave,

Whose pencil, here and there,

Had notched the place that pleased him,—

At rest his fingers are.

Now, when I read, I read not,

For interrupting tears

Obliterate the etchings

Too costly for repairs.

And these lines……

THE DYING need but little, dear,—

A glass of water’s all,

A flower’s unobtrusive face

To punctuate the wall,

A fan, perhaps, a friend’s regret,

And certainly that one

No color in the rainbow Perceives when you are gone

And then these…..

THE DISTANCE that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
And then, that we have followed them	5
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.

And….

IF I should die,

And you should live,

And time should gurgle on,

And morn should beam,

And noon should burn,

As it has usual done;

If birds should build as early,

And bees as bustling go,—

One might depart at option

From enterprise below!

’T is sweet to know that stocks will stand

When we with daisies lie,

That commerce will continue,

And trades as briskly fly.

It makes the parting tranquil

And keeps the soul serene…….

If there was a touch of madness in her sublime genius can one stop oneself from wishing more of us were truly absolutely mad? To get more of such lines….

THERE’S been a death in the opposite house
As lately as to-day.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have always.
The neighbors rustle in and out,	5
The doctor drives away…..
Somebody flings a mattress out,—
The children hurry by;	10
They wonder if It died on that,—
I used to when a boy…..
The minister goes stiffly in
As if the house were his,
And he owned all the mourners now,	15
And little boys besides……