Sub judice or another kind of domestic violence

Often hearing about domestic violence, Tom decided to visit the subject afresh to find out whether any other act can also be called by the same name. He chose an idle afternoon to get to the bottom of the affair and wrote down a series of questions and his answers below each one of them. He wondered how he can forget Muser who is his inspirational guide. Tom liked to write with pen or pencil and this gave him the satisfaction of emulating Muser, who is a sworn longhand writer.

The first question that got on to the paper was “Which other act or acts can be considered as ‘domestic violence’?

After a little thinking, he came to the conclusion that apart from getting physical, the common form of domestic violence, strangling of free thoughts and expressions, needless comparisons and enforcing likes and dislikes on others  are the other serious forms of that violence which  goes unreported as no punishable laws exist!

The second question, he wanted to answer was, “what are the external indicators for these confrontations?”

He characterised the nature of these violent occurrences as giving raise to voluminous sound “bytes” accompanied by contorting facial muscles. This exercise invariably leaves bitter feelings burning a hole in the minds of those involved and spares neither the initiator nor the receiver.

Tom felt a sense of de ja’ vu after successfully answering his own questions. He sat thinking for few minutes to frame his next set of questions to himself. Feeling like some on appearing for an examination, he was scared to write down a tough question which may not be easy to answer. 

“Which are the potent subjects that might trigger this form of domestic violence”?, was the next question that came to his mind.

He opted for the children or grandchildren in the house as the first choice that seldom fails to deliver, when tweaked a little. Figuratively speaking, the trigger, for a verbal violence, is in the hands of a man or a woman who conveniently selects a wrong moment to point out a fault in the child or grandchild - of being untidy, naughty or unhelpful or haughty. If the discussion on the ‘faults’ stops at an early stage, the tempers will remain under control and instead of that if the man or woman attempts  to bring out behavioural similarities or anomalies within the family of the ‘other speaker’, the outcome is a series of arguments and counter arguments which will finally end in a disastrous conversation. In a similar spirit, arguments, liberally laced with spite, may start about a *–in-law and erupt in a volcano of innuendo.

As he was finishing the above answer, this question popped up: “What is so special about ‘examples’ and ‘comparisons’ and how could it lead to further flare up”?

The game of comparison can be played across a spectrum of generations. The wife may suddenly jump the rails and happily start a verbal documentary on how ‘his close friends’ shoulder responsibilities or shower affection and understanding, at the drop of a porcelain cup or go the extra mile to understand the sufferings of a homemaker. 

The husband tries in vain to bring home the point that “individuals are unique and trying to fit any individual in an equation, for comparison, using chosen set of parameters is arbitrary”. Instead, he stops short of saying, “it would have been better for you to have married in to that family or this family rather than me”.

Though the answer to this question will certainly have a repercussion in his personal life, Tom chose to go ahead by penning his thoughts. May be the mellifluous scratching noise of nib on paper urged him to sail against this domestic danger!Enlarging his list, Tom added faith and disbelief, likes and dislikes, style and disgust as other potent subjects to brew in-house trouble as they behave like North and South poles of magnets or matter and antimatter of cosmos!

The choice of god or guru or method of worship is equally important as a threat perception for the youngsters and non-conformists in the family.The devout and the rest of them in the family take turns to propose and dispose faith in god and need to regular worship. With religion occupying prime slots in the morning TV broadcasts, the devout gets ample chances to guide the errant flock to the salvation centers. Munching on their own problems along with breakfast, the members of errant flock tend to ignore the baptism on the breakfast table. This is the fuel for the fire waiting to be lit, in the devotee’s mind. In this state of high alert, a witty comment intended to be a pun turns sour.

Though these are all individual preferences, the involvement is passionate and devoid of reason. In this galvanised mêlée, passion and reason act similar to like poles; repel each other. Arguments and counter arguments collide like matter and antimatter to annihilate each other! Tom was very pleased with the examples he could come up with.

Tom asked himself, “Will there be a way out of such an argument”?

In this state, even a small talk, on sundry things, has the potential to become another artless war of words. In such a situation, even if one of them wishes to accept the truth in the comparison or wants to bring out the untruth in the argument, a graceful exit has already been closed because of the disastrous conversation. The aggrieved person, upset with the lack of logic in comparisons, decides to walk away in silence to cool the tempers and to attend to the bruised ego.Tom started to explore the basis for these opinion clashes under the question: “what catalyses these chain reactions, which ultimately ends up as a form of domestic violence”?


The deemed infringement on freedom of choice or taste of an individual sets the ball rolling. The conservative middle class elder is often the epicenter for this domestic violence. To this elder anything chic is bad taste and waste of money and never fails to pass a comment on the choice of clothing or food. The youngster is in no mood to understand the effect of this cultural shock on the elder or worry about the dwindling personal bank balance. The youngster feels at ease with the current way of life and hates to be in the bygone era. The contentious issues about food and style leave both in bitterness.

Tom came to the important question “Why and does it suffer a generation gap?”

As people age, likes and dislikes also change but keep raising anachronistic questions like “You liked this then, but not now, why”, “You did it then and why not now?”, or “I like it and why you don’t too?”, “I don’t like it and why you do? Nobody wants to hear these stale reminders and aggressive statements, anymore now. People have become touchy.

This form of domestic violence is not restricted to the older generation in the family. The same type of situation could easily arise among the youngsters themselves. The changed script could be: friends, entertainment, casual approach to life and things or even a hairstyle. Though he wanted to delve deep into this topic, he curbed his enthusiasm fearing over statements.

Tom wondered, “What common thread runs through all these upheavals?”

In all these cases, the milder aggrieved person would be in a fix to say categorically “Yes or No”. The preference to act as an emotional sink overrides the impulse to put an end to the matter there and then.
In these careful acts of retreat, the aggrieved perceives a greater sense of purpose – to keep the pendulum of harmony or whatever is left of it swinging.  May be the aggrieved thinks that the accruing bitterness and its weight on the conscience is a small price to pay for a larger cause!

After rereading his notes, Tom felt emboldened to offer few solutions to manage the outbursts. A problem remains a problem as long as they are fed with dosages of hurt or helplessness or revenge. He chose to make his point with a simple example of garlic and onion. Only garlic leaves a heavy odour, for a long time but both are lachrymatory. These characteristics do not depend on whether they are garden fresh or off the shelf. A brief smile played on his lips, mischievously, when he wrote this comparison.

For the record he detested garlic more than the onions! Likewise, young and old in a family should try to understand and politely disagree with the other view point and become the onion people – cry a little and forget the bother.

He heard the approaching foot falls of Mrs. Tom and hastily closed the notebook on which he was writing. He will reveal the contents to her only after showing it to Muser. He considered the matter sub judice till then.

The leaked diaries or how a tiger became a cat!

Bystander was furious and as the one who shows his anger in full glare of the public, he was ready to explode like a thunderclap. His internal processing unit started working at terra flops speed to identify targets and the verbiage. He believed that the message should go down the throats of the prime mover and the secondary injection systems. It is his experience that a team work is always behind any inconvenience caused to him. However, he carefully left out the almighty for a future occasion!

As this turmoil was going on, his family members sensed a storm brewing in their midst and got ready to brave the fury. The pity was they had no clue as to the how or when or where? Because Bystander had this habit of traversing his gun through 360⁰, in ever increasing circles, to fire his anger at his clan, relatives and friends. It is rumoured that once he even contemplated to dispatch his verbal missiles over all the continents.

Bystander’s fury was on the selective leak of information from his diaries and the person responsible for it. He had taken so much care to keep them in safe custody, all these years, and yet somehow the security has been breached. Someone in the family had been smarter than him to get at those diaries.

He cursed himself for the habit of filling a diary with honest opinions, for the past 35 years. Since he started writing a diary at the age of 25, the bygone years, from childhood onward, were accommodated as a part of the new diary he began every year. He worshiped logic when not in anger!

It was an exercise to keep alive his interest in writing, hoping to become an author one day. Simply his jottings were a nursery of ideas and incidents for replanting in paragraphs and pages of fictions he planned to finish. Based on this plan, he had taken certain liberties in describing the actual persons finding a place in his narration of events. This proved to be his undoing and the reason for his blinding anger.

His wife had collected the photographs of each of the family member, from childhood to the present age, and got them fixed in a large frame. Another frame kept pictures of animals on display, below the family photos. One day as Bystander was within earshot she nonchalantly commented, “I have aged as the others in the family have done. If I look like a bear now, others can search among the other animals to identify a look alike for themselves”. 

“Wow! These diaries contain so much information and now that we know his secrets, we can easily tackle him, word for word or deed for deed! ” his son and daughter, who have come down for a visit, continued their assessment on the worth of the information on hand. Out of respect, they held this discussion as an aside but Bystander could not help hearing it.

“Had he taken to his studies seriously, he might have earned a doctorate degree, who knows?” his grandson told his friends as he was passing by. “The one who had escaped lectures to the cooler ambience of a theater is now objecting to someone watching TV!”. He heard his granddaughter telling her grandma, ignoring the grandpa sitting nearby.

A close cousin visits them twice or thrice in a week and the arrival always coincided with the lunch time in the house. Bystander’s son and daughter, when they were growing up, and now the grandchildren bonded well with him. During the previous visit, Bystander heard him say, at the dining table, “It is not that all the crows get fed from a plate; only the special ones! Even then, it is not the crow that begs for food but the giver begs the crow to take it, if you understand what I mean”. The gathering nodded in silence leaving him fuming.

A bosom friend became so close that he started to call the shots in the matters of children’s education, career and marriage – the last two not necessarily in the same order. Secretly Bystander started getting annoyed with this free run his friend had in the house but went along with the drift. In a direct speech that friend said,” “Mountaineering guides do not shout at the climbers from the hill tops; they lead by pitching their tents alongside theirs”

These increasing incidents of family members using odd tangential references and whispered asides were the indications that his future fiction works have been proof read, that too in secret. His belief that these secrets remained within the family received a high Voltage shock when a cousin, who was close to the family, and a bosom friend threw their veiled remarks at him.

Every one of the speakers has done a verbatim hijack to fix him for good. He regretted those descriptions and sentences finding a place in the diaries. He himself felt like a caged tiger and a tongue-scalded pussy shying away from a bowl of milk. The tiger will remain caged always but the pussy might be allowed to roam freely in the house. He decided to gladly exchange his ambition of becoming a writer of fiction with that pussy! Unbidden, his eyes came to a rest at the framed picture of a cat slurping milk, contently!

 He was troubled by the nagging questions, “How, Who and When?” He was not going to rest till the answers are found. But in his mind the transition from the wild to a caged tiger and then becoming a cat did not make much of a difference at all; all belonging to the same family of felines!

Hung in there for dear life

A spider or a bat hanging upside down is merely a technique for survival. Whether they derive pleasure or fright is a matter of conjecture. Imagine a sixty-plus emulating this act, hanging feet down, from a maze of ropes and a parachute! What else it could be other than a foolhardy attempt to show off a misplaced valour? If this attempt is an invited upon adventure, then a more severe terminology has to be dug out from a bulky dictionary. 

Had I declined to go to the beach or simply dumped the encouragements on to the receding waves or weighed in my phobias before agreeing for this ghastly experiment, I could have avoided an hour of suspense, fear and uncertainty in the air and over an ominous looking sea.

For anyone who does not know swimming   or to act like a swimmer, hovering over the sea , even with all the safety gears and trained rescue team in place, it promised to  be a combo offer of thrill and nightmare waiting to be experienced and relived.

The short sand patch on the beach abruptly ended in the waters as if reluctant to get separated from the rolling waves. On this shore an expert strapped me with a flaming red jacket, which resembled more like a conjoined pillows stuffed with Styrofoam than a safety device. At this stage, there was no option but to trust this make-believe contraption or the driver who was standing by with an inflated rubber craft tethered to a wave rider. This brought to my mind the picture of a calf being attached to its mother.  It is my experience that whenever anxiety flexed its fingers, I turn to similes. 

A look at the craft and the name “Yamaha” on the wave rider froze my spine instantly. Literally I was dragged and unceremoniously made to sit on the rubber craft with a curt instruction to hold on to the hand-grip.

The driver vented out his impatience by accelerating the wave rider as he had to meet the mother boat standing at a distance, in the sea. The thoughts of contraband runners employing similar technique ran through my mind and that did not help to quell my fear of getting in to the open sea. Every wave that passed by chose to terrorise me further by wantonly amplifying each rise and fall of the rubber craft. After a minute or so my fingers were ready to poke through the palms and look at my rigid face.

In a feeble gesture, as if to divert my mind from building up further tension, the wave rider kept spewing a water jet majestically from its rear, unaware of the fact that I was also busy, doing the same thing, by counting the number of waves passed by to confirm a beach theory that said ‘every seventh one will be the biggest among the lot’ and assessing the probability of experiencing sea sickness before this ride came to an end. I lost on both the counts as the wave rider neared the waiting boat and stopped with a bang, almost throwing me overboard.

The mother boat had no gleaming deck to boast except for a winch mechanism and a long length of coiled manila rope. After meeting the people waiting and brave enough to go para-gliding, I understood why the driver of the rubber craft was in such a tearing hurry. He wanted to get the show going and I wanted it to end even before mine started. Though, there was no possibility of avoiding the prolonged stay in the boat, as I stood shaking at number four in the queue.

Mind in the grip of fear is a wonderful gadget to unleash frightful thoughts. Mine did exactly that with such clarity – its purpose was to make me experience the triple whammy of hydrophobia, agoraphobia and acrophobia. As a starter it let loose a shoal of sharks with the sole agenda to eat me alive. At this juncture a self doubt surfaced “Why so many at a time?” followed by a train of doubts: “How deep is the sea here and for how long I can hold my breath without taking in salt water? The very thought of salt water made me to retch a bit but somehow I managed to hide my discomfort from those brave hearts in the boat.

The show began when the first person was called up. One more life jacket, having a catch mechanism to attach it to the harness of the parachute, went over the first jacket. On signal from the trainer, the pilot of the boat revved up the engine to pick up speed. As I watched in fear induced silence, the cords slowly became taut and the parachute started to open like an umbrella. The gushing wind caused the parachute to fill and lift the person dangling from the harness.

Giving up its fight for freedom from the restraining ropes, the parachute slowly rose higher and higher, in to the sea breeze. The airborne figure and the parachute  started moving up and down buffeted by the wind. He resembled a flying kite and the rope attached to the winch on the boat looking like the tethering twine holding the kite from taking off on its own! A penny for my thought: "How the flier will react if the parachute takes off on its own?"

At this point I closed my eyes to imagine myself at that position. Dramatic scenes, in 3D, of soldiers being air dropped over enemy territory amidst whizzing bullets followed by pilots ejecting from flaming fighter planes premiered in my mind. On the sidelines of these heroic acts, some gruesome scenes where the parachutes fail to open and the jumpers die crashing to the ground, peeked in exclusively to scare the hell out of me. If fear is the key to the doors of nightmare I was tightly holding a bunch of them on that day. Even the cackle of sea birds circling above the water sounded like the creaking doors to the museum of nightmares.

This forgettable reverie was broken by the not so gentle shaking of my shoulders. The trainer was standing in front of me to get his job done. Little did I realise that in real life a queue could move up so fast or time runs out at supersonic speed when you are lost in the forest of fear. The boat was gently bobbing up and down,mirroring the movement of the waves while the co-passengers were excitedly pointing out to the far away mountains or at birds circling overhead. Speaking casually in a local dialect, the trainer finished harnessing my unwilling persona  for the adventure. I felt like a patient being readied for surgery, having no choice to lodge a protest.

The pilot slowly picked up speed and the boat started to buck like a horse in a rodeo show. I felt a gentle tug at the harness and began to ski backwards, scraping my feet, over the deck surface. As my feet were airborne, I felt like a steer hanging down from a meat hook, courtesy, once again, from movie scenes. The parachute started talking to me with cracking sound, which I initially mistook for gun shots, from overhead. The lone, mean looking bird began to circle around my airborne frame. My frightened mind surprised me by throwing up these teasers: if I am the meat hanging from the hook, then will this bird be the buyer? Whether the purchase is for the whole family or for its own meal?

At this stage, my heart felt like a ball of cotton and started to pump ‘frightened’ fear along with the blood from toes to head. Unable to bear the burden, it suddenly took a fancy for the fresh saltish air and started inching towards my mouth. We are made for each other and are agoraphobic. This fear for heights and my gridlocked teeth effectively prevented it from happily walking out on me.

Slowly, ever slowly the parachute rose up in air and through the slit of an eye I saw the whole sea shore, building structures and people receding from my view to become indistinct details. Bursting at the seam, the surging fear managed to open my sealed lips to let out a plaintive cry. Then I began to talk to myself, in a loud monotone, expelling few vehement shouts, at the waves.

By this time, my dangling arms and legs got busy in punching the air and the relative, riding in the boat , especially to photograph this event, kept himself busy shooting this comic scene frame after frame. Poor soul, he might have misunderstood the flailing legs and punching arms as a mark of my exemplary courage.

The humming of the diesel engine started to sound weak and the parachute began to steadily lose altitude, giving a false hope that my ordeal would end soon. Before I could realise it, my feet landed on the surface of water pulling me down up to hip level. The boatman’s intention was to give me the feel of getting a ‘dip’ in the sea while curly waves tried to lift and lower me like an abandoned piece of drift wood.

A sharp burning sensation, on the left leg just below the kneecap, now joined the list of my miseries. An accidental scraping against a boulder had left a deep cut and now that was protesting the salt water bath it was getting. Who knows, the gash might have opened up and bleeding? Another imaginary worry crept in : If it is true that sharks could smell a drop of blood from a mile , have I not just sent it an invitation for a bite?

The interminable waiting, for the shark to bite and the game of ‘dip , lift and dip’ being played on my nerves by the boatman using me as the lure for the shark, mercifully ended when he decided to land me on the deck.

Thinking that the sea of emotions I exhibited, during the entire exercise, would look ‘telling’ in the family album, tight close up pictures were continuously being shot by one of the conspirators. Obviously he wanted to impress the other one, his wife, waiting for us on the beach.

Fresh from this agony, I resolved not to give in to any temptation for walking that extra nautical mile even to visit a sea shore - in future!

Quid pro quo – a divine deal

The binding cold, ever pervading darkness and heavy silence started acting upon the nerves of Chitragupta. He had already started seeing ghosts, some burning like the fire at Yam Lok, whizzing past at supersonic speeds but without the attending sonic booms. In this respect, Yama was well informed and convinced Chitragupta that in deep space there will only be bangs without sound.

This information added one more worry to Chitragupta’s  mind already overflowing with questions “why so many ghosts? Where from do they come? Where they are all going? What he did not know was that these ghosts are nothing but asteroids and an occasional comet.  He detested the hierarchical tradition of Yam Lok which forbids him from such universal truth.

Most of the times during the voyage, Yama remained uncommunicative by  simply shutting down transmission of thought waves so that Chitragupta could not read what was going on in his mind. This odd behaviour perplexed Chitragupta, making him to go on guessing about what could be going on in Yama’s  mind. He felt angry at the system of paranormal skill development as per hierarchical curriculum. Only this norm had prevented him from becoming the leader of Yam Lok and placed him in the second place, always. He had so many axes to grind against Yama and one of them was the bad luck which made him to be a student in the same class.

Though he heard all these thoughts, as they were being formed in Chitragupta’s  mind, the eon long friendship prevented Yama from hurting him at this stage of travel in deep space. Yama had a secret purpose in continuing this journey in to the unknown. He was prospecting for a new job, becoming sick with duties dealing with death. He could not remember when he took a holiday in all these eons! If he told Chitragupta about that, his friend would have surely ditched him and gone back to Yam Lok.

Far away from the duo in flight, different kind of trouble was brewing. Siva was angry with them for absconding from Yam Lok and taking off without his knowledge. This hardened his resolve to find a way to replace both of them. Incensed at the dereliction of duties, he began to dance – the cosmic dance of its kind never before witnessed by Brahma or Vishnu. Both quietly melted into their abodes, after glimpsing at the ferocity in Siva’s face.

Refreshed from this dance, Siva began to plan for the mega event to bring the Cellwalahs and TV empires to their collective, shaking knees. He decided to empower all humanoids with the power of third eye. As an afterthought, he decided to limit its application only to thought communication with an inbuilt go-no-go mechanism to stop subversive and unhealthy thoughts. He wished to include a counter which would automatically reduce the power of the third eye, as and when these thoughts arose in a person’s mind. The endgame would be complete loss of this sight forever; without recourse to a remedial penance even if Brahma or Vishnu intervened for mercy.

Brahma on his part decided to throw open the universal knowledge bank. His solution was simple – whoever wants to know anything about anything in the universe. it would just flash in to the memory of that person. He added an automatic catch – the moment that particular information sought has been utilised, it will be permanently erased from the mind, till such a time another requirement for the same information arises.Being the creator of all living things in the universe, He wanted to take care of the ones with forgetfulness too, by giving them another chance! In the case of pranks, the ‘net’ result will be a ‘whirlpool-worm’ suctioning out all the knowledge from the mind!

So far all the critical decisions concerning the universe and the living beings were taken after due consultation as it involved birth, growth and death. Forgetting the importance of the role played by him, how they could take unilateral decisions like these? This unhealthy trend annoyed Vishnu.

A pensive Vishnu decided it was time to act quickly and decisively, timing it in such a way that both Siva and Brahma are forced to retract. Another thought that irked His mind was the mankind’s relentless efforts to inch closer to unravel the mystery shrouding “Who” really created the Universe.  and have advanced to a state where they could actually “see” black holes merging in to each other, by detecting the changes due to the ‘event’ that took place millions of earth-years ago! At this rate perhaps it might take them, a few more thousand years, to know what happened at that very long time ago??

He willingly let the ‘leak’, about His plan to create another new Universe in a short period of time, to reach the ears of Brahma and Siva. Though Brahma had toyed with a similar idea, a long time ago, this breaking news shook His Lotus bed violently.  He somehow managed to stay on to it with the power of all His ‘tapas’.

On hearing the news, Siva froze in mid air as he was performing a complicated ‘death dance’. Gathering all His anger, He marched to the abode of Vishnu to confront Him.

This imminent showdown let loose the basic instincts of glee on the upcoming fight as well as fear about the outcome in the hearts of Devas and deva ganas. They gathered in en mass, knowing not what to do to avert the celestial catastrophe. Unless someone is able to broker a peace deal, death of the Universe is a certainty. Expecting a leadership crisis, the Natural order began to breakdown threatening the birth of a chaos.

Surreptitiously, sage Naradha approached Vishnu and whispered in to His ears about certain options that Vishnu could exercise to avoid a cosmic turmoil. Vishnu thought over the stated options and chose one of them. An appreciative smile graced Naradha and a secondary glance swept over conveying ‘readiness to face the challenge’ fell on Brahma and Siva.

The first change occurred in Brahma – the four heads fused in to a single head with eight ears and eyes and four noses, mouths and supported by four necks. The confusion and the ensuing identity crisis was writ large on Brahma’s faces. This did little to cool the anger of Siva and He defiantly stood facing Vishnu as if challenging Him for the fight.

The assembled Devas and deva  ganas suppressed their giggles with great difficulty, wondering what will happen to Siva’s face. The third eye on Siva’s forehead disappeared only to reappear on the nape of His neck. Siva’s anger was now replaced with an anatomical confusion and this did not stop Him from wondering how Brahma will be feeling with four brains crammed in to a single head; will it be a crowded confusion?

The Devas and deva  ganas watched the unfolding spectacle in awe. Little they could comprehend the likely endgame. Vishnu closed His eyes for a brief awhile and then the unexpected happened. He simply vanished leaving everyone, including Brahma and Siva, in darkness.

Brahma offered the first peace initiative. He agreed to scrap His earlier plan to create a new universe on His own. As a bonus, volunteered to drop the idea of implementing His brainchild ‘information on demand’.

Siva had no choice now. He clearly understood that the Creator intended THEM to preside over the cosmos as a team, sharing equal burden, and specific that NONE shall try to undermine the OTHER. Following suit, HE dropped HIS plan on opening third eye for all.

When THEY realised that the benefits of maintaining status quo, in the cosmos, outweighed the meager cost of quid pro quo paid, Brahma and Siva regained their former glory. Vishnu materialised smiling and resplendent to the collective sighs of Devas and deva ganas. With the natural order beginning to repair the breakdown it had experienced, sage Naradha left the scene in search of the recalcitrant Yama and Chitragupta.

Yama and Chitragupta returned to resume their ordained duties as they were granted pardon for deserting their posts.  The Cell phone and internet conglomerates redoubled their efforts in far reaching researches. The academic institutions bought many ‘chairs’ benefiting from the industrial rush to burst myths with modern technologies.

Child psychology for a baby sitter

Tom was annoyed with himself for failing to counter Bystander on that fateful day in the park. The simmering anger in him brought up memories of all the past forgettable encounters with Bystander, though a wave of appreciation , for Bystander’s temerity, tried to surfaced above it.

 

Firm in his resolve to stand up to Bystander, he started an elaborate preparation to teach  a lesson or two. Having decided to take the fight to a finish , he chose Bystander's pet subject – baby sitting, as the weapon.
Tom knew how much Bystander loved to be with kids and the mere thought that he could now take him on made him feel like a person walking an inch above the ground. The much awaited opportunity came during a birthday function.  Tom watched with glee as Bystander was holding forth on his prowess as a babysitter. He waited for the right moment to upset the apple cart of his off and on friend.

On hearing a baby’s non-stop cry, Bystander approached the parent and advised him to pacify the child with a candy or a short walk or a cool drink. Tom seizing that chance said, “Let the child cry for some time and stop on its own. Intervening at any stage of this vocal exercise will only help it to become insistent ,push up the limits of its bargaining power”.

Both the parent and Bystander were taken aback by this loud statement. Ignoring their presence,Tom moved on to his next point,“It is a common mistake of a baby sitter to keep on chattering and pointing out at various interesting objects without allowing the child to develop its own likes and dislikes”. With an I-got-you-now look, Tom took a gentle swipe at Bystander’s habit of talking to the child while taking it out for a walk.

"Being proud of one's protégé, the baby sitter tries to impress visitors by asking the child to perform this or that activity like a trained circus animal? The child deserves a better treatment”.

“It is a wrong practice, for the baby sitter, to set goals for the ward as this will only ruin the child’s pleasure of doing things independently and at its own pace. Will anyone caring for the psyche of the child do such a thing?”

“Every child is unique. Comparing one child with another only reflects an adult's perception of the other child, indicating immaturity in thoughts. Who knows that the child will not pick up the same bias?”

These statements of Tom shook the very foundation of Bystander’s avowed expertise in child psychology. Quick to react to anything insinuating, Tom expected an outburst from Bystander but felt cheated when nothing happened.In the meanwhile, few interested parents who did not want to miss any further points from the speaker, occupied the vacant chairs lying next to Tom and Bystander.

“Any baby sitter would do well to remember the fact that excessive pampering of a child leads to large expectations and consequent disappointments. The time a baby sitter is likely to devote to the child is a fraction of what the child would spend with others during its full life. Better not to inculcate prejudices, notions and traits at this formative age of the child. It will hamper the all round development of the very same child you dote upon now".

“It will only interferes with the child's adaptability, if the baby sitter obliges willingly to be the child’s assistant in play or other activities . Do not waver for a moment to instill discipline and do not encourage or condone an activity which may expose the child to physical injury”.

The audience was becoming attentive and Bystander began to feel the heat of being gradually upstaged by Tom. He was at a loss to understand why Tom was doing this well thought out expose?

Excitement creeping in to his voice, Tom added, “Avoid excessive entertainment or moralising without thinking about the state in which the child will find itself after a period of time. Please bear in mind that a baby sitter’s time is now and will be gone; the child may not need you as a backseat driver, in its future!”

“Finally, beware, the precocious child might be taking you for granted and use you as a means to get things done which are proscribed by the parents. It is worth remembering the role of a baby sitter is only of a secondary importance and a stop gap arrangement that too if the parents are willing”.

Bystander was left speechless as all the points raised by Tom found their targets – his ego. In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Bystander thought deeply as to what could have made Tom to carry out this sting operation on him?

Slowly making his way to the dining hall , Tom siad," The relationship between the child and the baby sitter is like a dose of bitter medicine;  the child hates it, when given ,and the baby sitter hates to give it.There is no escape for both but to give in".

It was during lunch at the function hall, Bystander understood why – It is the payback for his park bench lectures on faith and philosophy. He mentally saluted Tom for the finesse with which he has settled a  score!

The environment protests

A window seat and a moving train can bring pleasure and pain, to a traveller, if sensitive to the surroundings: the panoramic scenery, rushing by, of wild flowers, native trees, green fields, parched lands and occasional chain of mountains or at least hillocks dotting the plains, here and there.

The wild flowers and native trees standing at a distance from the track resemble friends and relatives who have come to see off the passengers, at the platform. These plants are like those people, who even under personal hardship, never fail to turn up to wish a happy journey. The difference is , relatives go home but  not these enthusiasts!

The distant mountain chain presents a sleepy appearance not allowing its finer details to escape and come to the viewer. Occasionally a column of smoke rising from one of the link (mountain) in the chain kindles a little interest, because a bush fire has unilaterally decided to catch an eye or attention. If fortunate, the traveller might get a glimpse of sparkling stream of a waterfall, like a shawl draped over the mountain’s shoulder.

The hillocks are the bare-all type; exhibit gleefully their green cover or boulder strewn bared-it-all physique. Though not even a cloud passes over it, the hillock makes it up by displaying boulders shaped like an elephant, a bear or even a lion, keeping them on permanent display. Theses precariously perched boulders resemble the banks of summer clouds changing in to different shapes as they float away to disappear from view.

Unlike the rock paintings of early man, these boulders silently bear the scars of modern day art-on-rock-face to greet and inform the traveller of the territorial claims being proclaimed, with symbols of diverse groups, to usurp the reign of nature!

All of a sudden, a dead tree comes in to view. The train slowing down for signal or a winding curve on the track presents this sad picture. The branches, sans leaves, frozen in a gesture of helplessness, the hollow trunk, resembling a cave upright on its feet, the tree stood looking forlorn. Revisiting its nostalgic heydays only brought angst and these unanswered questions: Where are those flocks of birds that used to rest, nest and play? Why the birds are not visiting me anymore, they can still play hide and seek inside my hollow trunk? What happened to those insects that used to scurry along the trunk and branches? 

The birds and insects, busy in their day to day life, had neither time nor inclination to post an answer. Moreover, who knows how many generations of them have come and gone?

The window seat traveller was left wondering at the tenacity of the tree to still hold on to its ground through unseen roots. May be it has immunized itself against the heart wrenching feelings of loneliness and wasted life. The barren hillocks, in the background and barren land surrounding the lifeless tree were a plateful of sorrow for the traveller. This question that echoed in his mind: Why is it still standing?

Tear drops rolled out of his eyes as the train started to move. He could guess the answer as to why the dead tree was still standing – to protest against the insensitive humanity in not attempting to give the life back to the fallow land at its feet! Or was it crying for an act of euthanasia? Or standing in the role of a sentinel to warn any flora to put roots there?

With a screeching noise the train started moving and as it passed by the signal pole, the traveller wished that the train had not stopped at that spot. The withered tree left him feeling sad for the rest of the journey.