Idhar Udhar Ki Baat

  IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 55 – BIAS AGAINST CHIKNI ANGREJI Brig PS Gothra (Retd) As our neighbour was relishing the breakfast, my grandmother asked the lady if she should prepare the breakfast for her husband and child also.  "No thanks Beji. My maid prepared bread omelette for them before they went to school and the office," said the lady. Mrs Jassi had shifted in our neighbourhood a month ago. I held her in very high esteem because of her flawless, fluent and smooth spoken English ( chikni angreji). "So, you could have also had breakfast prepared by your maid, rather than making me prepare the same bread and omelette for you?" Asked Beji. "Beji, to tell you frankly my maid is suffering from a severe cold."   And then the lady went on to add the details regarding misuse of dish towel by the maid. Beji gave her a nice dressing down for being so lethargic. It didn’t have any effect on her for she was requesting Beji for lunch also. That day I chan

IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 54 – EXUBERANCE OR RASHNESS OR STUPIDITY "I haven't had sex yet. God don't let me die. I am just 22 plus," I whispered my prayers to the God. I was in a 'stay behind party' where I was taking stock of the blunders I committed. In exuberance I had decided to keep myself with three other jawans hiding under the bushes in the abandoned LTTE camp in the jungles of Sri Lanka.  The first thing which went wrong was the radio communication with my two jawans hiding fifteen meters away. The batteries of their VM Mk 2A radio set had gone dead. During day we could communicate with hand signals but with the nightfall everything was left to chance. There was no worthwhile night vision device with us and we had to rely on our ears only. Sitting in the dark I was wondering that the man who wrote   procedure of attack across the ditch cum bund must have never   operated in the dark. Otherwise he wouldn’t have expected a breakout before first light. I r

  RAPE - HOW DO WE STOP IT ? A SUGGESTION “ Kutta, Haramzada where is Surjit? He assured me there was no need to use protection. Call him. I want to kill him,” shouted Rani in extreme pain in the next room as I had just gone to sleep. I thought it might be another of those theatrics of 'Lahorian da Mohalla ' similar to Balraj Singh, who shouted at the top of his voice for a major part of the evening. After half a bottle down his throat, he was shouting, " Kutteo Logo Ram Japo (dirty people, pray to God).” I was cursing my father for asking me to fetch something from my pind wala ghar , where I got stuck as the buses stopped plying after six during that time of disturbance in Punjab in the early eighties. Rani and her husband Surjit were living in one of the rooms of our house as tenants after they had eloped two years ago. The noise subsided and I slipped into my sleep. Half an hour later, I heard Rani scream. It was so shrill that it pierced through my heart. I ru

  IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 53 – LONELINESS Brig PS Gothra (Retd)  "I know you through WhatsApp only. Whenever, I post a photo with my caption to you and all my family members. It is only you who appreciates and sometimes intimate corrections. But today you have not given any comments, I have been waiting for ten hours now," said Mr Singh who lives alone because all members of his family are abroad.  "No sir I had placed a thumbs up sign on your post. I always see a tremendous effort and thoughtfulness in the pictures and captions you send," I said while thinking that the pictures are always a little blurred as they are clicked with a shaky hand or there is always an autocorrect error in the caption. "I am eighty years old but when you post 'good' or 'great' on the pictures, I feel the thrill of a kindergartner getting a 'good' remark on his notebook from his/her teacher.' "I am happy sir it means so much to you." &qu

IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 52 (SPARSH)     There is an old joke. A lovey dovey couple was traveling in Punjab Roadways Bus. Public display of affection was a big taboo those days. So as per plan the girl said, “I have a headache.” The boy said let me treat you and he leaned to kiss her on the forehead. She said, “I am fine.” So every five minutes the girl would come with a pain in some part of her body and the boy would make it vanish. At a point a man sitting in the rear seat taps the shoulder of the boy and asks, “Kaka tere kol bawasir da vi ilaj hai? (Son, can you treat piles also)      I don’t know why but every time I attempt doing something with SPARSH I am reminded of this old joke. Though the only and far off similarity I can see is that the Hindi meaning of SPARSH is touch. Or maybe in the back of my mind somewhere I feel that SPARSH was a treatment to the non-existent piles in the erstwhile system of pension disbursement.      I was among the first batch to move on to SPARSH in

 IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 51 (CULTURAL AWARENESS) “ Khalse, your religion doesn't believe in co- existence," said a senior from South India. "What makes you feel so, sir?" I inquired. "Your people chant in Gurudwara, Raj karega khalsa baki rahe na koi ." I smiled and said, "In this it is not Baki but Aki which means impure. So, the sentence means that the pure (can be from any religion) will rule and the impure will cease to exist. " He didn't speak for a few seconds and then said, "I feel bad because I ill-treated some of the Sikhs when I was deployed in Punjab post 1984. I was carrying that bias in my head." "Don't worry sir. "   I could still see regrets on his face so I said, "In 1994 I was deployed in South Kashmir. On a cold morning I asked a man moving on foot with his daughter, " Khidhar ja rahe ho (Where are you going?)"  I was on road sensitization duty 2 kilometers South of Anantnag town.

"Take out a suchha note from your wallet after your morning prayers and send it to me. I will donate it to Mata ji ," said my friend who was going for a pilgrimage. I had requested him to donate a hundred rupees on my behalf. I asked, "What is a suchha note? " "The one which is from your hard-earned money." "I told him I don't have any other source of income." I was wondering if the deity knows the difference between a suchha note and non suchha note . She is rightly averse to non suchha notes as such a wealth will make her abode stink. And what will be the punishment of the people who built those nine bridges which collapsed in Bihar recently.   I feel that nowadays the  talk about honesty no longer appeals the normal man. People are in a race to amass wealth through unfair means and show it off through gizmos and brands.  In this crowd I recently encountered some honest men so I thought of citing their examples. Their methods may show our

In my childhood I loved to go to my maternal grandparent’s village. Riding tractors, watching thresher separating grain from chaff, feeding green fodder into the chaff cutter and bathing on the tube well were sources of adventure and enjoyment.   It all ended the year I got spectacles for myopia.   The first day itself when I was moving towards the fields, I could see a group of girls giggling and saying   Dekh padhaku nun, bahar vi ainak laa ke ja reha hai (look at this studious guy, he is going with spectacles to relieve himself.) The next day was another fiasco.  My Nani (maternal grandmother) asked me to write in the account book the grains being brought in at her atta chakki (flour mill), while she was weighing it. In one case Nani told me to write unanja kilo (49). I had not formally learnt  Punjabi counting but my mother tongue being Punjabi, I guessed it was 59 Kg since it rhymed with ekvinja (51), bavinja (52) etc. The lady who deposited the sack of grain had a look at w