It is not about the BJP or the Congress, about Amarinder or Khattar, about wisdom or ignorance. Neither is it about cult or agnosticism. No, it isn’t. It just can’t be!

For god’s sake, it is about us, the 1.30 billion souls and bodies which inhabit this land, and will continue to inhabit it despite the perpetual erosion of the ground underneath our bare feet; a deep sink hole in the making which each one of us has cleverly learnt to negotiate and get to the other side of the dig, till we can, till we are allowed to.

The last couple of weeks have literally taken us from modern to ancient to modern, and back to the ancient times if I may. It must be something extraordinary to define this nation from here on. A nation, which in the last two weeks, had felt the shudders of 70 innocent deaths, the joy of justice and the hullabaloo of ochlocracy. The enormity of each event left us star-struck (I am not completely sure if they can be called an event, for some it was cessation of life). We were dazed. Like a child watching a shooting star for the first time. We cried and we celebrated, we danced and we lamented, the clandestine schizophrenia struck us like lightening. Each event reminded us of articles of daily use packed in the tomb of the (Egyptian) child Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. The good and the bad stuff, in the same shelf, in a holy concoction for use by the little Pharaoh in his afterlife. We cloned into Tutankhamen. A nation of 1.30 billion Tutankhamens! Each dead but with the joy of afterlife taken care of or at least, promised if not by the state then by a court or even by a brute godman who rapes the hapless of his own tribe.

With each suffering unequally divided and with each betrayal unequally bestowed, we celebrated our 71^st Independence Day.  Seventy-one years of hope tested by the destiny of 1.30 billion hopeless, some of course more hopeless than the others! The hopeless Tutankhamens of an equally hopeless kingdom, where the children of the poor are asphyxiated blue and the biceps of the strong halt life on the road. A truly glorious seventy-one years of a cycle of anger and frustration followed by depression and more frustration and more anger.

But life goes on. It must go on. In the words of Tabban,

Bahut sakt jaan hai umeed

Yaqeen ho na ho, intezaar rehta hai.