Ei je, shunchho! This is a common address of endearment among Bengali couples. It literally means, “Hey, are you listening?” but is meant to be something like, Come hither, darling!

If the person wants to draw attention of the partner or spouse in a special manner, for example from a distance outside earshot, or when an important or urgent issue arises, the endearment elongates to “Aayee, shunchho!” You could mistake it for “AI, shunchho?”

I have a feeling AI is listening to me. Of course, it is. I may not be using AI for writing my stories, but when I use the search engine for background research, the damn twin-persona engine is keeping an eye on the cookies I am laying all around. I can take steps to hide my identity and my tracks; I know how to do it. But trust me, online life is such a quicksand now that there’s no escape from being followed or flashed. I meant ads.

But when I use an editing app for spell check and grammar errors, it quietely checks my copy for AI text and tells me — not so quietly — 12% or 15% of “your text has patterns that resemble AI text”!

Did you catch the spelling error? Darn, you’re better than AI! Why, isn’t AI hidden in all the apps that try to correct your writing automatically, sneaking on you and peeking out from behind pop-ups to prove you have bad English in your genes? This started with that dino-age wordsmith program (we called them so in the ancient times, now known as apps), that still tells you with blue and red wavy lines where your bad grammatical genes are on display.

From thence, we have progressed to where there is none app worth its code that doesn’t tell you how to rewrite your story, how to restructure your sentences, how to pause every few words for emphasis, how to alliterate your phrases for stress, how to draw the last drop of emotion from your reader. You see the pattern?

I write at several places. Emails, messaging apps, search engines, browsers, social media, writing apps. My words, phrases and expressions are sucked into humongous data engines that gurgle them out when my friend writer orders a ready-to-post story. It is not only my words that’s harvested thus: the engines subsume the juice of the creative efforts of all the authors, poets, essayists and pundits, including the classical ones and my ready-to-copy friend writer. It is a huge grinding machine that is constantly churning words into a muddy paste and spits it out in fits and starts when commanded.

It is no surprise then that my editing app notices patterns in my writing matching those in the muddy paste. The grinder listens to us all and tells us all to go f* yourselves, your story has text that resembles my paste.

AI, shunchho? Go f* yourself!

(The writer is a former journalist and communication professional.)

August is the month when I was reborn.

Every year this week, I receive hundreds of happy birthday wishes by email, WhatsApp and SMS messages. All from companies who have my business: banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, hotels where I stayed some time, mobile and Internet service providers, online payment services, travel booking websites, magazines and apps I subscribe to, and such. Not a single message comes from my friends or relatives.

That’s because I was not born in August. I was just reborn.

Iss janamdin ka koi aadhar nahin hai, I told myself this week. (This birthday has no basis.)

Like many Indians of my generation, I have an “official” date of birth, which is different from my “unofficial”, err… the real one. Registration of births and deaths was not mandatory until April 1970. The date of birth was typically recorded when the child was going to school for the first time.

I started my student life in a small school in the government staff quarters in the coastal Berhampur town in Orissa. I can visualise, my father carried me on his lap to the school when I was being too unruly at home, asking the headmaster to enrol me. Schools had to record the child’s date of birth at admission, as this would be needed for school-leaving documents in the future. School registration was the only source of date of birth that stood the test of time for the rest of the child’s life.

My father gave the headmaster an imaginary date of birth, making me one-and-half years younger than I was. He had done the same for his older two children.

Why did he do that, I wonder. There could be a few reasons. First, schools wanted to get younger children on their rolls: giving them a headstart in school was a matter of pride for parents. Going by my fictitious birth date, I would be younger than the rest of the children in the class. How smart would I look if I performed better than my older classmates! Although, I suspect parents of other children were not devoid of this smart idea or practice. So the advantage probably was also imaginary.

Second, completing eduction at a younger age, by that logic, would give me an edge over the others in the competition for government jobs, which was the dream of all parents in those days. A younger candidate might be preferred over the older ones.

Third, entering the government workforce at a lower age would give me a longer service period until retirement. That would mean more years of labour, poor me, but also higher pension, lucky me!

There could be a couple of other reasons, not necessarily pecuniary. If I were a girl, a lower age would increase my marketability as a potential wife. In any case, youth — for both boys and girls — enhanced the individual’s social status.

But most commonly, many people had fictitious birth dates because their parents simply did not know or remember the date. People in rural areas used to remember life events like births, weddings and deaths by the season, a historical event or a natural calamity, and rarely by the specific date. If I asked my grandmother when my father was born, she would say: “Je bochhor Dakshin Khulna-e durvikkho hoyilo, taar porer bocchor.” (The year after the famine hit southern Khulna.) That would put his birth in 1922, but his documents, which were made many decades later, used a different year. It was a common phenomenon.

So my fake birth date perpetuated in documents I procured in life after school: educational certificates, employment records, passport, government ID documents such as Aadhar card, voter card, tax payer card, and pension documents. No one ever questioned it. I secured jobs in more than 10 organisations, some of them international, so I travelled and lived in other countries as an “Indian” passport holder. I opened bank accounts, sent home money from abroad, got credit cards and loans, built homes, and received a certificate of appreciation from the government in recognition of my “contribution towards building this great Nation” by paying taxes.

But fakery has the tendency to catch you on the wrong foot. Last month, I stood in long queues of voters, many of them seniors to me so most likely with fake births like me, to prove that I had the right to be on the voter list.

It was not only a matter of my democratic right. I was worried that not being a voter could lead one day to not being counted as a citizen, although Indian law says that I am a citizen simply because I was born here before 30 June 1987. That is a risk millions of citizens shared when they went through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process in several states. The Election Commission protested that citizenship was not on the mark, but there were reports of people ousted from the voter list being refused welfare benefits on the ground that they were not citizens any more.

The worry was not baseless: none of the documents issued by the government, from the voter ID and Aadhar card to my passport, was considered to be a conclusive proof of my citizenship. The only conclusive document was a birth certificate with date and place of birth which I didn’t possess.

Worry not, my Booth Level Officer (BLO) said. She assured me that as long as I can provide details of me being on the voter list from 2006, when the last SIR took place in my state, it will not be a problem. Otherwise, I could provide evidence of my father or mother’s voter status from around that time. I could then be “mapped” to such evidence and accepted as a genuine voter.

I moved frequently in my 35-year working life, so couldn’t vote in any election until 2024. But I took care to remain in the voter list all along. I dug out my details from the 2003 voter list of Uttar Pradesh, where we lived at the time and put it in the voter enumeration form, and attached my existing identity documents.

When the draft voter list came out, I rushed to check, and found that my name was in the rolls. Voila! I was about to cheer, when the BLO came back with notices issued to most of my neighbours, and me, to supply further documents for verification. Many of them were in similar situation, without birth certificates and no proof-worthy references to their parents’ voter status.

The BLO asked me to submit a copy of my Aadhar card, the official unique identity document that were “live” (or active) for more than 95% residents in India (including foreigners) in March this year. Because foreigners residing in India were also issued Aadhar, it is not considered a proof of citizenship. Its use is limited to proving my identity: beyond that I cannot use it as a proof of my birth date, domicile, nationality, parentage or voter eligibility. That is because, the government argued, in many cases it was issued fraudulently. I was still required to submit it as a proof of my voting right. The question remained: How do I prove that it is the same Kanti living at the current address as the person mentioned in the documents? My father could help.

The BLO looked at my Aadhar, and said, “But your father’s name is not here!”

“Baap re baap!” I scratched my head. Could I submit my passport bearing his name, I asked, or any other document? “Submit your high school exam marksheet,” she advised. That was the most acceptable proof of birth next to birth certificate because it came from the school register. The only issue is, my marksheet does not bear my birth date or my father’s name.

I was sure I could not be registered 25 years ago for such a crucial identity document like Aadhar without my father’s name. So I dug open my document archives to check where I lost the link to my father. It turns out, his name appeared in my original Aadhar card, but magically disappeared in my new card when I updated my address. So I submitted a copy of my old Aadhar card, along with my passport and my father’s voter ID card from 1996.

I wait to see if I could prove the genuineness of my birth and voter right, and thereby my citizenship, or the other way around; whether I could be mapped to my father’s existence and my relationship with him. There may be many more slips on this path yet. In my entry in the 2003 voter list, my father’s name was entered wrongly due to a typo. He died in 2000, so I could not provide his entry in the 2003 voter list. He had no passport. His regular existence in the voter rolls prior to that, for five decades since he migrated from East Pakistan, made him an Indian citizen as per the laws existing then. But how do I draw an indelible line from that to my citizenship when conclusive documents from that era are almost impossible to find?

The strange existential issue for me is, I could procure so many official identity documents, including a passport, based on a simple school document, printed with the then novel dot-matrix printers whose ink has since evaporated. But all these documents have now been cast aside as no evidence of my Indianness. The passport, which is issued after physical police verification the first time and at every renewal (thrice in my case), is the most enigmatic document: the government has notified that it is only a travel document, not proof of my nationality.

I think of all the times I presented the passport to immigration officials around the world as proof of my Indian citizenship. I think of the time when I lost my passport en route Brussels, and the Indian embassy there issued me a new passport within a few hours. Did the embassy issue it to me simply because I needed a travel document to return home?

What map of India is it where I do not belong?

(The writer is a former journalist and communication professional.)

It happened when I was born. Technically, weeks earlier.

My heart was built with a minor defect. Sometimes, there was a longer-than-normal pause between its beats. Perhaps I was meant to take pauses, live life slowly.

I was slow in my student years, thanks to my “healthy” build (in today’s non-discriminatory parlance). I was fat, timid, quiet, slow. It took me years to learn how to ride a bicycle and much longer than my schoolmates to finish school. It took me longer than my colleagues to get into a journalism school and get promotions. For the most part, I didn’t wait to get promoted; I jumped job to job every couple of years, hoping to reach higher with every jump.

Living with an Unreliable Clock

My heart was jumping a beat or two at that time too. But I didn’t know that until I was in my early 30s. I had married by then, had a family, and respectable jobs for a few years to need life insurance. An LIC (Life Insurance Co. of India) agent wandered into my life, as they usually do in India, and convinced me to buy a policy. The LIC has launched well over 200 distinct insurance plans (with different riders) since 1956 and currently has about 261.5 million individual policies in force. I have bought a number of those for myself and my family over the years.

My LIC agent also became my investment advisor, as they usually do in India, along with uncles, cousins, friends and colleagues, who are not all equipped for the role. In that respect, we became friends over time. Thanks to his timely guidance and help in ways more than I can count, my wife and I managed to kickstart our financial planning and save enough to buy our first home.

A medical examination for the first insurance policy revealed the defect in my heart. But it was too insignificant to worry about. I didn’t have any symptoms that could be linked to the jumpy heart, and no medical intervention was needed. It remained little more than a footnote in my periodic medical test reports.

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Even the stress of personal and professional pressures had little impact on my heart. I worked in highly stressful environments, first in time-sensitive newsrooms and then in politically sensitive jobs in the UN. I did suffer from stress and had to be treated for depression several times during our stint in Europe. But I was known for having low blood pressure, both medically and figuratively. The heart was apparently having a good run still. After an intensive regimen of cardiological tests done in view of stress-induced symptoms, a Danish cardiologist exclaimed: “Yours is one of the best hearts I have seen!” I hoped he was not just being figurative.

Ironically, when I retired and we returned to India to live a relaxed retiree’s life, my blood pressure became jumpy. My racing heart and episodes of dizziness led to several rounds of tests. After ECGs and echocardiograms, I had to go for ambulatory rhythm monitoring several times, starting with 24-hour monitoring to 3-day and 5-day monitoring to catch the elusive beat.

Changing the Heart’s Rhythm

I was diagnosed with sick sinus syndrome (SSS), a condition in which the heart’s natural pacemaker doesn’t work properly.

Think of your heart as having its own built-in clock. This clock, called the sinoatrial (SA) node, sits in the upper right chamber of the heart and sends electrical signals that tell the heart when to beat. In sick sinus syndrome, this clock becomes unreliable. Because of this, my heart paused for a few extra seconds between the beats. This can happen with age, but my medical history showed that it was a manufacturing defect. Its symptoms emerged only now, causing dizziness and palpitations. But the symptoms remained mild enough and the pause was brief enough for the cardiologist to advise regular monitoring with a Holter device, without going for any intervention. I took medicine to lower my blood pressure in winter when it spiked in a regular pattern.

After three years of monitoring, the pause in my heartbeats was found to be longer than the acceptable duration. It was time to replace the heart’s unreliable clock, my cardiologist advised. Let’s put in an artificial pacemaker to restore the rhythm of your retirement, he said.

I was not keen on interfering with the original machinery of my body. But left as it is, the longer pause could increase the risk of falls from fainting and injury, the cardiologist warned. Imagine breaking a limb or two, or a head-brain injury, in old age at that!

That fear undid my determination to let nature take its course. I eventually agreed. The implant itself was remarkably smooth, although the overall experience turned into a nightmare for reasons I have previously written about.

When Cashless Care Turned Costly

Modern pacemakers do not come cheap. Their prices will send your heart racing, and you need health insurance to cover the cost of such expensive procedures.

On returning to India, we purchased health insurance policies from a leading private insurance company. I had assumed that as health insurance became more common in India, claims would become easier to settle. The opposite seemed true.

Health insurance now accounts for over 40% of the country’s non-life insurance business, and the sector continues to grow rapidly. Yet growth in premiums has not always translated into a smoother experience for policyholders.

The insurance company approved cashless payment for my hospitalisation for the pacemaker implant. Which meant I could go through the procedure and return home without having to worry about the bills; the insurance company would pay at discharge.

Only, that was not to be. On the third day of my hospitalisation, the cardiologist signed off on my discharge papers in the morning. But the final payment authorisation didn’t arrive even after 12 hours. I gathered from the nursing staff that the insurance company had queries about my glaucoma treatment. Eh?

I am using eye drops for glaucoma, another inherited condition that I have lived with for about 25 years. I carry the eye drops with me whenever I am away from home. So I took them with me to the hospital and asked the nurses to instil them in my eyes as per the prescription.

This fact, noted in my hospital records, triggered a query in the insurance company’s claim settlement system. Did I have sick sinus syndrome for 25 years and didn’t inform the insurer? The hospital’s TPA team (the third-party administrator in the medical insurance system) and my cardiac surgeon patiently explained that I had been treated for sick sinus syndrome for only two-and-a-half years; it was glaucoma that dated back 25 years.

My family was getting desperate to get me home after a 12-hour wait for the insurance company’s approval. So we decided to pay the bills from our savings and get reimbursed later. “When it’s time to pay, they take their own sweet time,” the cardiologist had commented that evening. I got home close to midnight after we had emptied our coffers.

Five Months Under Process

5 months. 15 rounds of queries. 100 uploads of documents. These are the milestones of my reimbursement claim filed with the insurance company.

First, a young gentleman visited me at home to verify the documents. All is fine, he said, and the claim should be approved in a couple of weeks. Then came the automated emails every couple of weeks, saying “a few additional documents are required”, and assuring the claim would be processed within 15 days. The process of submitting the documents was immensely frustrating: you cannot upload more than a certain number of files to their self-help portal, or those larger than the limits they set. You cannot email the documents to them because of similar attachment restrictions. The portal will freeze in the middle of an upload. Call their helpline, which can give you no more detail other than that your claim is “under process”, which their app also shows, without further clarification. If you complain about difficulties with the email, app or website, the helpline staff adopt a condescending tone, assuming the customer is illiterate about such things, especially if he is a senior citizen.

I went to the office of the insurance provider in my city: the staff were friendly, but could not give any insight into the delay. It was “under process”, they said, and they could only receive copies of all the documents I had already labouriously submitted for “further processing”. I met a man there who was also chasing his reimbursement claim several weeks later.

The insurer, widely regarded as one of India’s most reliable, could do well with more transparency in their claims resolution process. Why was my claim not being approved for 5 months? Which particular bill, prescription or test report was missing or deficient in information? A few of the emails asked for specific documents, like “all the past medical papers related to glaucoma treatment”, but most were generic, with the same template list of documents to be submitted.

Call the helpline, email the support team, send messages via WhatsApp: it all seems like hitting a wall. What bounces back are automated emails and scripted answers via AI-driven chatbots.

Is there any human out there to consider that they are dealing with human patients, I wondered often, as my blood pressure rose at the unfairness of their process and attitude.

Apparently, there are. Their sales department started calling me repeatedly as my insurance policy was nearing its renewal date. Why should I renew my policy, I asked them angrily, when you don’t pay for my hospitalisation? “Our claim settlement rate is the industry’s highest,” the sales staff informed me. “Your claim is under process. Did you provide the documents needed to process your claim?”

Escalation and Resolution

5 months into this process, I made a complaint on the company’s website. “I want an answer, whether acceptance or rejection, as soon as possible so that I can take the next steps accordingly,” I wrote.

Within a few minutes, the status of my complaint changed to “resolved”. I called customer care to ask what it meant as I had not received an answer. They did not have one, nor an explanation of what it meant.

As my grievance remained unresolved, I escalated the matter. I wrote to the company’s Grievance Officer. It was not only frustrating but also humiliating for me that my claim was being treated like a fraud case even after the cardiologist, the hospital and my opthalomolgist had given written clarifications about my treatments.

They would “provide resolution within 2 weeks from the date we have received your complaint,” came the prompt reply.

All these months, every fortnight another automated email arrived asking for “additional documents.” After the sixth or seventh such email, I stopped asking when my claim would be settled and started asking how often this happens to others.

The Numbers Behind My Story

Although my insurance provider says it has the highest claim settlement ratio in the market, there are nuances in the story. Settlement doesn’t always mean full payment of the claimed amount. The industry data for 2023–2024 shows that about 82% of claims were settled by number, but only about 71% of the total claimed amount was paid. That means nearly 30% of the medical costs are not covered by insurance providers for one reason or another.

During those five months, I began wondering whether I was unusually unlucky or whether thousands of other policyholders were going through the same ordeal. I discovered that I was far from alone. During 2024-2025, the Insurance Ombudsman received over 37,000 health insurance-related complaints. Only 13% of the complaints disposed of by the Ombudsman ended in favour of insurers, whereas 41.5% resulted in favour of policyholders.

Recent government data also shows that “claim not disposed of” has become the single largest category of insurance grievance received by regulators, ahead of outright claim rejection.

As I read more, I found that courts had repeatedly questioned insurers who rejected claims on flimsy grounds. In one recent case, a consumer commission ruled that an insurer could not allege a pre-existing illness without credible evidence. Another Supreme Court judgement emphasised that not every omission in a proposal form justifies rejecting a claim. Those decisions reassured me that persistence was not unreasonable: it was often necessary.

As it is, premiums for health insurance are much higher for older citizens. Insurers make it worse for policyholders by denying payment of legitimate treatment costs and delaying the settlement of claims.

A report by Purnima Sah in *The Indian Express* describes the experience of Dr Prasun Chatterjee, group clinical lead of Geriatric Medicine and Longevity Science, Apollo Hospitals, who “has seen that even when patients have health insurance, many families struggle with reimbursement or do not receive financial support from insurers at the time they need it most.” I am reminded of the cardiologist’s comment. And I am trying not to worry about the interest we lost on our savings in these months.

Don’t Lose Heart

While I was researching my options, the Grievance Officer’s 2-week deadline passed. I sent him a final notice of escalation: If I did not receive a final written decision within seven days, I would have no option but to pursue the matter before the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and the Insurance Ombudsman, I wrote.

Call it coincidence or the power of perseverance, I received the approval for my reimbursement claim in two days.

So if you are caught in a similar situation, don’t miss a beat and don’t lose heart. Many others have walked this path. Justice may be delayed, but persistence can make the difference.

I have now submitted a new reimbursement claim after being hospitalized a second time for treatment of typhoid. Watch this space.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

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The midnight bark

As I lay wide awake in my mother-in-law’s house, tucked into a narrow Kolkata lane and trying desperately to sleep around midnight, the skies opened up. Rain poured down in sheets, drumming on the window ledges and coaxing me into a half-daze. Just as I began to drift off, the lady next door came rushing out to persuade her son to go inside.

“Come back home, my baba, or else you’ll fall sick,” she pleaded. “Who will guard my home if you’re not there?”

But this wasn’t her human son — she was imploring a stray dog she had adopted as family. The dog remained unmoved despite her emotional appeals and gentle nudges. After a few minutes, she gave up and returned home under her orange umbrella. He continued to sleep nonchalantly in the rain, which cooled my nerves just enough to lull me back into slumber.

At around 3:00 a.m., sharp barking erupted in the lane. In this Kolkata neighbourhood, the barking of stray dogs is a familiar nighttime soundtrack — deterring not just thieves, but perhaps even our nightmares. It went on until dawn.

From sleep to scrolls

Having been shaken out of sleep, I found myself scrolling through news from the Supreme Court in the dim glow of my phone in the living room. I jumped in fright when my half-asleep wife appeared out of the shadows and asked, exasperated, why I couldn’t scare the dog away.

“Not so easy, my darling,” I said. “This dog has a family of stray siblings who’ll happily join in if you try to silence him.”

And therein lies the paradox that plagues India today. Stray dogs are everywhere — sometimes loved, increasingly feared.

The battle online and on the streets

In our housing society in the foothills, the residents’ WhatsApp group often erupts in howls of protest — some decry attacks, others defend the dogs. A recent spate of bites has made critics of strays more vocal. Senior citizens out for walks and schoolchildren heading to bus stops have become targets.

Yet the same strays protect us. They chase off foxes, leopards, and mischievous monkeys. Stories circulate of dogs saving lives. The conflict isn’t just physical — it’s deeply emotional.

Every week, tragic reports surface from across India: children mauled, joggers attacked, sanitation workers injured. Consider these recent news reports:

In Nagpur, dog bite cases hit record high, crossing 4,000 mark in 4 months of 2026.

In Ambala, a pack of dogs severely injured a 7-year-old boy. In Delhi, a man died after being attacked in a public park. In Bijnor, an elderly woman was mauled while working in her field.

At Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital, dog bite cases surged from 63,600 in 2021 to 90,000 in just the first seven months of 2025.

On the other end of the spectrum, news reports have emerged of strays being brutally killed or disappearing mysteriously in Delhi and in Maharashtra.

The legal labyrinth

Stray dogs — often referred to as community dogs — have a right to be fed and cared for, but this must happen in ways that minimise conflict in shared spaces. The Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, 2023, part of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, aim to strike a balance between compassion and order.

The ABC Rules assign resident welfare associations (RWAs) or local body representatives the task of designating feeding spots and ensuring animal welfare. They also emphasise sterilisation and vaccination as the only proven ways to control the stray population and reduce rabies in humans.

India currently has 6.2 crore (62 million) stray dogs and reported 21.95 lakh (2.2 million) dog bite cases in 2024. WHO data shows India accounts for 36% of global rabies deaths, with 18,000–20,000 such cases reported annually.

The legal battle on the issue has been festering in various courts for the past two decades, with no resolution in sight. During 2006-2010, several High Courts saw clashes between public safety groups, RWAs, municipalities, and animal welfare organisations.

An influential ruling came from the Kerala High Court (in M. R. Ajayan vs. State of Kerala) in November 2015, which stated that human life must receive higher constitutional protection than stray dogs in situations of direct conflict. This reasoning later appeared repeatedly in Supreme Court arguments. The core legal conflict emerged clearly.

The issue reached the Supreme Court during 2015-2016 with several petitions filed by both sides. But for a decade or so, no clear national consensus emerged, nor did the courts lay down any clear path to resolve the issue. Meanwhile, stray dog populations continued growing in many cities, sterilisation targets were often missed, and municipal infrastructure remained inadequate. Recurring flashpoints appeared across India, doglovers and feeders claimed protection rights, RWAs demanded removals, municipalities blamed lack of funds, and animal welfare groups accused authorities of illegal killings. The dispute became intensely polarised.

In 2023, the Central Government notified the ABC Rules, 2023, updating the existing 2001 framework. The Rules reinforced the principle of sterilisation, vaccination, and release of stray dogs; imposed obligations on local bodies; recognised community dog feeding zones; created monitoring structures; and formalised handling protocols. Supporters called the Rules more humane and scientifically aligned, but on the other hand, critics argued the Rules still made removal of aggressive dogs too difficult.

A turning point came in August 2025 when the Supreme Court made a dramatic intervention following reports of severe dog-bite incidents, and the death of a young child reportedly linked to rabies. The Supreme Court initially ordered large-scale removal of stray dogs from Delhi-NCR streets and permanent relocation to shelters.

Protests and protestation

Reflecting the polarisation on the issue, the Supreme Court order triggered nationwide protests, opposition from animal welfare groups, claims that shelters were inadequate, and fears of mass incarceration or deaths of dogs.

After backlash, the Supreme Court modified the order, ruling that sterilised and vaccinated non-aggressive dogs could be returned to their territories, but aggressive or rabid dogs should not be released into public spaces.

The Court also expanded the issue nationally, asked states to frame proper management systems, and encouraged designated feeding zones. This was seen as an attempt to balance public safety, animal welfare and administrative practicality. A few months later, the Supreme Court broadened its directions nationally and fixed the responsibility of implementation on states and municipalities.

End of the story? Not yet. Animal welfare groups challenged the Supreme Court directions.

The latest major ruling by the Supreme Court came yesterday (19 May 2026): the Court refused to modify or recall its earlier 2025 directions on managing stray dogs in public spaces. The Court held that the right to life and safety of citizens under Article 21 must take precedence where there is a conflict between public safety and animal welfare.

The Supreme Court has upheld its earlier directions that stray dogs should be removed from hospitals, schools and colleges, railway stations, bus stands, sports complexes, and other high-footfall public places. The stray dogs are to be sterilised, vaccinated, and shifted to designated shelters under the ABC Rules, 2023.

The Court also observed that states and municipalities had failed for decades to properly implement sterilisation and vaccination programmes, dog-bite incidents had reached “alarming proportions,” and human dignity includes the right to live without fear of dog attacks. The Court also permitted euthanasia of dangerously aggressive or rabid dogs where legally necessary and medically justified.

Stalemate in the streets

Still, the question of aggressive strays remains unresolved. Even if vaccinated, a violent dog can traumatise or even kill. Feeding programmes in cities like Bengaluru have been criticised as misplaced priorities when safety is at stake, yet leaving the strays hungry increases the risk of them becoming aggressive. Now that the Supreme Court has made it the responsibility of local authorities to determine when a stray dog is to be euthanised, one wonders what parameters the authorities possess to make such a decision.

Citizens seek safety. Municipalities promise action, but sterilisation is often their only recourse. Animal rights activists fight for the dignity of these animals. No one is entirely wrong. But the balance? That remains elusive.

In our housing society, the strays rule the roads. Some residents feed them lovingly. Others shoo them away. Most fear them. These animals are neither truly free nor truly domesticated. They survive on scraps and kindness, yet resist training and discipline. And we live in the middle of this uneasy truce: torn between compassion and fear, empathy and frustration.

I understand the orange-umbrella lady’s affection for her baba. I’m not a pet owner myself, but I’m comfortable around animals. At the same time, I understand my wife’s dread and my daughter’s phobia — after all, she was scratched by a pet dog during playful roughhousing. I see kids cross the street to avoid barking dogs, and I know neighbours who put out food every morning and evening.

A conversation we must have

Somewhere between these opposing instincts lies a conversation we need — not just in courtrooms, but in housing societies, municipal offices, and schools. Stray dogs aren’t just an animal control problem. They are a mirror reflecting our fractured approach to urban planning, public health, animal welfare, and community responsibility.

It’s not enough to feed them. We must also care for them when they’re sick, manage them when they’re violent, and protect the people who share the streets with them. Shelters, sterilisation, medical care, and community education must all be part of a serious, national conversation. There is something to learn from the Netherlands, which got rid of the street dog menace in a humane manner.

In fact, we may have an example to follow closer home. The Ward No. 100 of the Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation, a township in Ghaziabad’s Indirapuram, has become the first civic ward across Uttar Pradesh to achieve nearly 100% sterilisation of all its community dogs, with residents, RWAs, animal feeders and NGOs working together. Residents say that this has stabilised the dog population, reduced aggression, reduced territorial fights among the strays, and lowered the fear of stray attacks.

Last night, I tried to sleep. I listened to the endless barking of stray dogs from our housing complex. But this morning, the thought persists — louder than the howling:

Until we decide what to do about our community dogs, they will remain our shadow selves — loud, attacking, unloved, and feared.

(The writer is a former journalist and UN communication professional.)

Sunday, 26 April 2026

7:15 PM, IST, 9:45 AM EST/EDT

Topics my co-host Raj Menon and I will cover:

1. The Meenu Batra case

2. Future of journalism

3. “Ask Me Anything” segment with child psychologist Tvarita Iyer Vemuri

Join us live today!

I look out of my office window and notice a white bird flying across the water. I admire its strength: such a long stretch to cross. But then again, birds are made for distance.

What puzzles me is where it lands. Instead of settling on land, it touches down on the water at the far end of the channel. Why fly all that way only to rest there, with no companion in sight?

I return to my work and forget about it. A few minutes later, I glance outside again. The bird - now clearly a swan, not the seagull I first imagined - is drifting gently back in my direction. She floats calmly, cleaning beneath her wings and along her long neck, as if the day is winding down.

Then I notice the wind pressing against the window.

The swan had landed on the far side so the wind could carry her back across the water. Effortlessly, she drifts, letting the current of air do the work while she attends to what she needs to do. She is simply going with the flow.

Watching her, I wonder how much easier life might feel if we learned to do the same, accepting the winds that carry us forward instead of resisting every current. Of course, there are moments when we must push against the tide, to stay true to our values or stand up for what matters. But often our struggle comes from fighting what we cannot change.

Going with the flow means accepting life for what it is, a combination of good and bad times, things that are in our favour and things that are against us, accepting it all in a calm, non-partisan way, and making the most of the wind on our back.

Like the swan, calm upon the evening water, letting the wind carry her home.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

I once imagined a strange job interview.

The candidate had never applied for the job. And yet, somehow, she had been invited.

She sat in a quiet office across from the Boss, who looked through a thin folder.

“Good morning,” the Boss said. “Thank you for coming, especially since you never applied for this position.”

The candidate smiled politely. “It’s an honour to be considered.”

“Tell me,” the Boss continued, “if you had applied for this job, why would you want it?”

The candidate thought for a moment.

“Well… your Company is famous. If you look at my record, you’ll see I’ve always tried to improve myself wherever I worked. I’m dedicated, hardworking, and I believe in helping organisations achieve their goals.”

She leaned forward slightly. “If I knew your Company’s goals, I’d commit myself fully to them.”

The Boss nodded. “Interesting. But you should know something about my Company. There is no clear job description here. You must figure out your role yourself. Others may help you - or they may not.”

“That sounds exciting,” the candidate said.

“Oh?” the Boss asked.

“Yes. It means I’ll have the freedom to discover what needs to be done and do it.”

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The Boss studied her carefully. “You may also find that many people here disagree with you. Some may dislike you for who you are. Some may even attack you for your beliefs.”

The candidate didn’t hesitate. “I will respect everyone,” she said. “Even if we disagree.”

“And if someone treats you unfairly?”

“I’ll try to understand them. If that fails, I’ll seek help to resolve the conflict.”

The Boss leaned back in the chair. “And if someone powerful is doing something clearly unjust?”

“Then I will fight it.”

“Even if no one stands with you?”

The candidate’s voice became steady. “Then I will stand alone. One person is enough to stand for the truth.”

The Boss smiled faintly. “Good answer.”

There was a pause. The morning sun had faded behind a wall of drizzling clouds. The room darkened.

“Before you can begin working,” the Boss said, “you must complete our induction programme.”

“What does it involve?”

“It’s called PID. Probation in Darkness.”

The candidate raised an eyebrow.

“For nine months,” the Boss continued, “you will stay in a dark room. It will be warm and comfortable. You will be fed regularly. You will hear the sounds of the Company outside, but you cannot leave the room until the probation ends.”

The candidate considered this unusual arrangement. “Well,” she said slowly, “that’s strange… but if it’s necessary, I’m willing.”

“Excellent,” the Boss said. “There is also a dress code. When you leave the room, you will receive a colour and a mask. It will become part of your identity here.”

“A mask?” she asked.

“Yes. Some people will judge you because of it.”

The candidate shrugged lightly. “Then I’ll wear it proudly. A company full of colours sounds more interesting than one in grey.”

The Boss nodded again.

“You should also know something else,” the Boss said quietly. “At times, I will place obstacles in your path. Pain. Loss. Confusion. You may not understand why.”

“If those things happen,” the candidate said, “I’ll assume they’re meant to make me stronger.”

“And finally,” the Boss said, “you may be terminated at any moment. Without notice. Without explanation.”

The candidate blinked. “At any time?”

“At any time.”

She took a deep breath. “Understood.”

“Good,” the Boss said. “Now let’s discuss your compensation.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” the candidate replied. “As long as my basic needs are met, I’ll do my duty.”

The Boss closed the folder. “Wonderful. We have a deal.” She stood. “I will now arrange for your enrolment in PID.”

The candidate stood as well.

“Welcome to the Company.”

The strange thing is this: No one remembers attending that interview. And yet somehow, every one of us completed the nine months in darkness, stepped out wearing our colours and masks, and began working in the Company.

Still trying to figure out why we were hired. And wondering when the Boss will call us back into the office.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

At the corner of two lanes in Kolkata’s Ballygunge area, beside a defunct lamp post, Rabi Da mixes jhalmuri in a steel container, his hands moving faster than the traffic. His display of the ingredients can hardly be described as a showcase of a shop: boiled potatoes, onions, tomatoes, chillies, lemons, bhels, papris, (fried savouries) peanuts, coconut slices, spicy masalas, sauces are stacked on a small portable table that serves as his counter. The pavement corner, bound by the lamp post and a couple of plastic stools for customers, is his shop.

Rabi Da has been selling his snacks at the same spot since 1978. There is no shutter to pull down, no rent to pay. His business is open as long as the pavement is there and as long as he wants to work. In his younger days, he sold from morning to evening. Boys and girls from the nearby school and college queued up for his jhalmuri, which he sold for two rupees then. For many workers from the shops and offices in the area, that was lunch. My wife has been his customer since that time, when she was in school.

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In five decades, Rabi Da married and raised a family of three sons with the income from his snacks business. Ask him about his sons, and his eyes light up brighter than the neon bulbs in the mobile phone showroom across the lane. The eldest is a professor in a college; Rabi Da emphasises this with a nod. The second one works in a shopping mall and has skipped Holi celebrations for work. The youngest son is about to finish his college studies. All three live with him and his wife, the older two sons with their wives and children, Rabi Da tells us with pride in his voice.

Approaching 70, our jhalmuriwala is now happy to serve his regular customers for a few evening hours. His three sons are now well established, so he spends the evenings at his make-shift stand more for the pleasure of catching up with his customers than for money.

We have been his regular customers since our marriage, as regular as we can be, visiting the city once every few years. But whenever we are in town, we have to have Rabi Da’s jhalmuri at least once, rarely getting a chance to occupy one of his stools, more often waiting in a queue and enjoying the jhalmuri out of paper cones standing by his counter.

This evening, he is preparing jhalmuri for a couple and their small girl. Three portions with different amounts of chilli and spice, he is instructed. I hurry to place our order so he can make our cones of jhalmuri with theirs in the same mix. Very little chilli for me, lots for my wife. He nods at me, but ignores my haste.

After a second round of mixing and shaking, he hands us our jhalmuri, his fingers tapping the cones to settle the mixture. The crunchy puffed rice melts in the mouth, leaving the taste of mustard oil and tamarind sauce fighting with onion, coriander and chilli to overwhelm the tongue.

Rabi Da’s wares and his commitment to quality remain unchanged, even though his customers have dwindled in these five decades. The taste for quintessential Bengali jhalmuri and the Bombayiya bhelpuri have now been overtaken by the craze for momos, noodles, and grilled finger food. The neighbourhood is now crowded with shops, big and small, selling a new variety of snacks, eating into his clientele. There are other changes in the neighbourhood. The legendary sweets shop across the corner has closed. So have a couple of other shops nearby. A tall wall of blue metal sheets covers the ongoing construction in their space. A new shopping mall is rising behind that wall.

Rabi Da doesn’t grudge the changes. “It’s alright. Let there be more food choices, be it momo or noodles. Let them use any oil, any maida, any other ingredient; I don’t mind. What they shouldn’t use is Ajinomoto: it is addictive and harmful for the customer. I don’t ever use any artificial stuff, colour or flavour. Even my grandchildren eat this, and my sons are very particular.”

He narrates a recent incident. During Durga Puja last year, he was surprised to notice shaal leaf plates from his stall in the waste bin at home. When he enquired, he found that his eldest son had sent a friend to buy some items from him, posing as a customer. The son wanted to check if his father was compromising the quality of ingredients, taking advantage of the heavy demand during the Puja festivities.

At the end of the day, Rabi Da carries home all of his business: the folding table, the boxes and jars of ingredients, the plastic stools, even the waste bin. By night, the corner returns to being just a pavement again — no shop, no counter, no customers — only the defunct lamp post standing guard until the evening brings him back.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

“This is the best spot for committing suicide,” a man shouts in Bengali. “Onno khane dhora pore jabe!” (You will get caught at other places.)

The remark hangs oddly in the air, cutting through what is otherwise a postcard-perfect evening at Khairabera Dam. We have come for the sunset, after a long, winding drive through tribal villages and narrow, serpentine roads. The place earns its reputation easily: an artificial lake spread wide among undulating hills, its surface holding the sky like a patient mirror. Trees along the slopes are turning — yellow, orange, rust — before they shed their leaves in preparation for spring. A soft mist drifts across the landscape, blurring its edges into something almost painterly.

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For a long moment, the sun lingers like a ripe orange, suspended between sky and water, before slipping quietly into its own reflection in one of the water channels.

It is toward one of the many canals heading out from the reservoir that the man’s family has wandered, prompting his warning. The line, jarring at first, settles into the scene with a strange logic. Beauty here is edged with risk; admiration requires distance.

As the sun disappears, the air cools quickly. Tourists gather around a makeshift tabletop stall where three men pour tea sweetened with nolen gur, the liquid jaggery made from date palm sap. The tea carries a smoky, caramel warmth that lingers on the tongue, inviting slow sipping. We order a second round in small earthen bowls, each costing twenty rupees.

One man protests loudly in Bengali, “Oi bhand kuri takar hotei pare na!” (That cup of tea cannot cost twenty rupees!)

His complaint, half-serious and half-performative, draws amused glances. The rhythm of indignation and humour feels as much a part of the landscape as the hills themselves.

Nearby, a signboard advises, “Don’t wrap your life in plastic.” It stands planted in a heap of discarded plastic bottles. Not far away, the stream at Bamni Fall carries plastic wrappers and bottles along with its water. The message survives; the meaning seems to have slipped downstream. I find myself wondering, not for the first time, who exactly the joke is on.

The roads that brought us here had their own commentary. Painted signs appeared at intervals, offering wisdom with a peculiar earnestness:

“Friends don’t encourage friends to drink and drive.”
“Better to be Mister Late than to be Late Mister.”
“Safety on the road, safe tea at home.”

They read like fragments of advice addressed to no one in particular, yet meant for everyone passing through. At regular intervals, we are reminded that the road is maintained by the state public works department. No such signs are visible where the roads need maintenance.

Earlier that morning, we had driven to Pardi Lake, another quiet stretch of water reached only by negotiating barely motorable roads threading through clusters of tribal huts. The journey promises solitude, and for a while, it delivers. The forest shifts in colour as you move through it, offering small, patient rewards for the effort.

But quiet, here, is rarely absolute. On the lakeside, a middle-aged couple breaks into a loud quarrel. The wife accuses the husband of bluster at home and timidity elsewhere; the husband, in a green T-shirt and a faintly incongruous crown of hair, smokes a beedi in embarrassed silence. Minutes later, he is on the phone, negotiating urgently over money, insisting he is not bluffing. The private spills easily into the public, as if the landscape itself refuses to hold secrets for long.

By evening, we are back on the road, leaving Khairabera behind. The dust rises as vehicles hurry toward the highway connecting Jhalda to Baghmundi. The stillness of the afternoon gives way to motion and noise. Today, that movement carries a purpose: trucks and jeeps filled with BJP workers and supporters stream toward a rally.

On the way, we stop at Chorida, the Mukhosh Gram — the village of masks. In a small roadside home, Chanchala Sutradhar manages her shop while her sons are away exhibiting their work. Masks crowd the walls: Ganesha, Durga, Krishna, Shiva, alongside figures drawn from local tribal life. Their colours are bright, almost defiant. She speaks with easy pride about their craft, about orders from fairs across the country, about supplying full sets of masks to Chhau troupes who perform the epic stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. There is no suggestion here of a dying tradition, only the steady rhythm of work and adaptation.

When we reach Baghmundi, the road slows to a halt. A large crowd gathers before a brightly lit stage. Nearby, a group of Chhau performers waits in costume, their colourful masks catching the artificial light. A slogan blares through loudspeakers: “Paltano darkar, chai BJP sarkar.” (Change is needed; we want a BJP government.) Will this wish remain only a wish? The voters will decide in a few weeks.

As we round up our time in Purulia, what the days reveal is not contradiction but consistency. We do not enter landscapes; we overwrite them. With waste, with noise, with politics, with ourselves, with our anxiety and frustrations. The dam, the lake, the village, the road, they hold their shape, but cannot maintain their silence. And perhaps that is the real discomfort: not that beauty is fragile, but that we are so reliably careless with it.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

Don’t take it to heart,
my friends said.
It’s just a machine.

We will slide the needle in
and draw out blood.
We will set the rigs there
and draw out what we need.
Don’t take it to heart.

We will only cut it here
and take out what we must.
We will bomb there
and take out whom we must.
No need to take it to heart.

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We will just place it in
and make your heart tick.
We will roll in the machines
and crush out lives.
No need to take it to heart.

We will stitch you up
and you will heal soon.
We will wipe them out
and say it was needed.
You mustn’t take it to heart.

You will get well;
the pacemaker will keep time.
We will get rich and monstrous;
no one will keep count.
You mustn’t take it to heart.

A machine in my chest,
a war I never wanted.
I take both to heart.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

It turns out we have landed too early in Ajodhya Hills, before the Palash flowers could bloom. Local resorts, tourist guides, and past visitors had created the impression on Facebook that the hills turn into a glorious orange-red forest around Holi, like European autumn woods. We missed a crucial detail: Holi arrived almost three weeks early this year.

Read about our search for Palash in Ajodhya Hills

But the forest is dressing for the occasion, assembling a slow-burning canvas of colour. Trees are shedding leaves in the springtime patjhad; the edges of the forest roads glow with a golden carpet of fallen leaves. Kusum (Ceylon Oak) trees wear new leaves in shades from pink to deep red. Sal (Shorea robusta) trees flush red, a sign of life’s revival after winter. Peepal (Sacred Fig) trees unfurl tender leaves tinged with reddish bronze. Palash leaves are turning brown. Bougainvillaea along the roadside burst into reds, pinks, and fuchsia. Shimul, or the Silk Cotton Tree, tries to set the forest on fire with its blood-red flowers, often fooling travellers like us into mistaking it for Palash. The crown of the season, of course, will be Palash — the Flame of the Forest — which will outflame them all.

On the way from Asansol, after we leave the national highway for a slower state road to Ajodhya Hills, we spot a splash of orange in the distance, a few kilometres ahead. Even our driver, Yadav Ji, usually a quiet conversationalist, leans forward and urges the car faster.

As we draw closer, the colour resolves into BJP flags tied to tree trunks along the highway. The party’s Parivartan Yatra, a statewide campaign ahead of the Assembly elections, is due to pass through the Purulia region around this time. The flags grow larger and denser near Baghmundi, where a rally is taking shape. But the incumbent TMC (Trinamool Congress) is not to be outdone; its workers have inserted their own flags, also streaked with orange, into the same rows. From a distance, it resembles a contest of colour, not unlike the rivalry between Shimul and Palash.

Even the railings of bridges are lined with BJP flags. I find myself wondering: if the party’s fortunes do change, will the state’s bridges, offices, and factories shift from blue and white to saffron? The current palette bears the imprint of the chief minister’s signature clothing style as much as it does the state’s administrative identity. Whether that changes may depend on if the Bengali bhadralok trusts her rule has reached the grassroots, as her party’s name promises.

Trust travels easily in rural India. At Dulalpur, near Nadhutati bus stand, we stop at a corner shop for tea. The young shopkeeper serves milky, sweet tea with salty, puffy biscuits. A frail old woman, easily in her seventies, gets down from a bus carrying two bags of paddy. She asks the shopkeeper, in Manbhumi Bengali laced with Hindi, if he will keep them for the day; she cannot reach her grandson on the mobile phone to collect her.

I ask where she is headed. “To the village,” she says, pointing toward the road to Unanshila.

The shopkeeper asks which family she belongs to, then agrees without hesitation. No documents, no proof, just recognition and trust. She leaves the bags and walks on.

We spend a couple of quiet days in a new resort in Matha Pahar. Other resorts nearby are full of tourists who fell into the same Facebook trap as we did, so we have this three-month-old place, with its basic facilities and unhurried service, mostly to ourselves.

We wake to the melodious racket of parakeets, koels, bulbuls, and mynas crowding the treetops. Morning tea promised at seven arrives at eight. Breakfast of luchi-tarkari feels heavenly after the wait. Peacocks keep us company, loud and insistent, as we wait again for evening tea after an afternoon nap. Meals arrive slowly, sometimes cold, even when already cooked; but where else would we find the taste of home-cooked macch-bhat or murgir jhol, finished with cotton-soft rosogollas? We accept the pace for the sake of the palate.

The young cook-cum-manager, Bishwambhar, falls ill but continues to cook and manage for us and for guests at their other property. His lieutenant, Anima, a young Adivasi woman, handles housekeeping and helps in the kitchen. They are joined by Munna, a boy who waters the plants and assists where needed. Beyond brief exchanges with them when they come to serve or clean, the resort settles into the forest’s quiet.

Quiet places have quiet dogs. Bishwambhar cares for three strays that have made the resort their home. They lie in the shade near the half-built dining area, moving little, unbothered, asking for nothing, as if they have always known what we were only beginning to understand — that not every journey rewards you with spectacle. Sometimes you arrive too early for the story you came looking for, and just in time for the one you didn’t know how to read.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

Purulia Journal, Part 1: If Wishes Had Wings

A little girl leans into Nandi’s ear, whispering a secret. She is in a white-and-red striped frock with a blue belt tied around her waist, and her hair parted into two pigtails, each tied with a red band. Her mother is standing by. Nandi, the bull vahana (mount) of Lord Shiva, is all attentive, his head tilted up and eyes large with intent, and ears perked up.

Perhaps she is asking for an iPhone for her birthday. Or maybe she wishes for Lord Shiva’s blessings to achieve her academic goals. Her wish is a secret shared with only Nandi, who is trusted to carry the devotees’ wishes to his master with a definite outcome.

Wishes. If wishes had the magic power, my wife and I would not be standing here disappointed.

We are at the Lahariya Shiva Mandir on the banks of a serene lake. This is in the Ajodhya Hills of Purulia, in West Bengal. They say this temple is more than 1,000 years old, though its current structure wears a new face, built over the older ones. There are smaller temples for other deities around the premises. Cemented platforms around tree trunks embrace devotees, old and young, into restful repose. Goats are munching leaves scattered on the ground. A bespectacled man wearing a white T-shirt with blue stripes and a blue baseball cap is bending forward to feed a goat.

A group of devotees, some of them visiting like us, is crowding the small sanctum sanctorum, where the black Shiv Lingam is covered with a golden cage-like ornament. A priest is reciting Sanskrit shlokas to help devotees present their offerings to Lord Shiva and seek his blessings. Dong… The large bell at the entrance shudders the air, while smaller bells answer in a scatter of ting-ting-ting, as devotees ring them to mark their entry to the god’s residence.

We take a quick darshan and walk around the small perimeter thrice. I didn’t want to visit the temple as such. What’s the point when the main purpose of our visit is not achieved, I argued in a frustrated mood. This is our second day in Ajodhya Hills, whose forests are supposed to be flaming red and orange at this time of spring, with orange Palash (Flame of the Forest) flowers and red Shimul (Silk Cotton Tree) in full bloom. We have travelled eight hours from Kolkata to experience and photograph this visual extravaganza. Our car has criss-crossed all the hills and forests of the region in search of what cannot be seen: Baghmundi, Mathaburu, Sonkupi, places that now blur into one long, fruitless search. We have touched all the tourist spots: Lower Dam, Upper Dam, and Marble Lake. Our odometer shows that we have covered more distance in the forests than the 300 kilometres from Kolkata. We have seen no Palash in bloom, though.

My memories of wishes unfulfilled on other occasions flare up. We have been to the Jim Corbett National Park thrice chasing the camouflaged tiger. The mahouts of the safari elephants have pointed out their footprints and sometimes other signs, told us stories of close encounters, but the tiger never showed up to prove it exists. The same happened in the Rajaji National Park, where we spent hours in a safari jeep in a futile effort to be terrified by a wild elephant charging at us. Our wishes were not fulfilled by Bon Bibi (Lady of the Forest) in the Sundarbans either. At the edge of the mangroves, we bowed to Bon Bibi, the unseen mistress of the tides, trees and tigers, and rowed narrow water channels through mangrove roots, but the tiger was not to be found.

When I don’t get what I wish for, I get agitated. I fume at the unfairness of life. All my planning and expenditures have been in vain. So many others have seen it and shared it on Facebook, so why can’t I? Why doesn’t God approve my wishes but approve those of others?

In this agitated mood, I turn my camera towards the people around the premises. On one of the platforms around a tree trunk, local boys are selling their handcrafted goods: small purses, toys, and memorabilia such as magnets. A couple of ragtag stalls are selling similar items alongside Chinese toys and gifts. A boy is making and selling garlands of… Palash.

I pause. My camera zooms in. The orange looks too alive, too soft to be plastic. On the way here, I had spotted a similar garland at a roadside shop as our car zipped past and dismissed it as a cheap imitation from China. But these, these are different. Real.

I step closer. The petals are tender, almost velvety, their bright orange curling like parrot beaks, held together by dark green sepals in a cascading fold. They don’t just look real, they feel it.

“Ei phool kothai pele, baba?” I ask, unable to hide the surprise in my voice. (Where did you get this flower, son?)

“Gacch theke!” he replies, a flicker of amusement crossing his face. From the tree. Of course.

I tell him we have searched for two days and found none. He looks at me, puzzled, then lifts his hand and points.

I turn. And there it is. Just outside the temple boundary wall stands a tall Palash tree, ablaze in orange. A cuckoo sits on a bare branch, cleaning its beak, as if indifferent to the quiet miracle unfolding below.

After all the miles we had covered, all the hills we had crossed, it had been here—within reach, waiting without announcement.

Almost as an afterthought, I lift my camera and take the picture, as if proof will make the moment real.

For a few moments, I stand there, looking at the tree, like it might disappear if I look away. After two days of searching, of scanning hillsides and forests in quiet frustration, it feels almost absurd — this easy, unannounced presence. It is not the same as seeing the entire forest in flames, but the search itself is more insightful than what I found. Not all wishes are to come true, not in the form we wish anyway.

Perhaps this is how it happens. We find the destination not in the places we exhaust ourselves looking, but in the ones we almost overlook.

My gaze drifts, unhurried now, to the far end of the temple grounds. A wave of orange and red hangs mid-air.

An ancient banyan tree stands there, its aerial roots heavy with the burden of devotees’ wishes—strips of cloth tied in quiet hope, each knot holding a desire, a plea, a promise deferred. When their wishes are fulfilled, the offerings are taken down, relieving the tree of the weight.

I wonder how long some of them have been waiting.

If wishes had wings, they would not hang here so patiently, learning the weight of waiting.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

It is a dream sequence. I open my eyes, still in bed, and there rise before my eyes waves of mountains, draped in parrot green silky blankets of foliage, dotted with thick deodar groves in darker greens. Misty clouds float up from the valley, mystifying the rising sun into an artist’s incomplete brush strokes. Birds small and big, restless and quiet, noisy and less noisy, flit around the shrubs and trees, tweeting non-stop to draw attention of their own kin and the other kind, like us.

Life is on a slow roll for us here in the mountains of Chakrata in Uttarakhand where we are in retreat for a couple of weeks. The quiet, peaceful environs of the boutique homestay Harul lends itself the mystic air worthy of an artist’s indulgence: the monsoon clouds, as restless as the birds and butterflies, hover around the cottages, hiding the mountains, before rising up in preparation for coming down later in downpours when the mood is right.

Free from daily household hustles, Maitreyee (my wife) is busy bringing her canvases alive with the colourful sights in front of her. It is not difficult to see why many artists and writers choose to live close to nature for inspiration and creativity. Think of Henry David Thoreau, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Ruskin Bond.

Nature is slow by design for a reason. It allows things to seed, sprout and grow to full potential in time. It asks to live in the instant, here and now. The modern human longing for instant gratification doesn’t allow for cherishing the moment, leave alone creating something long-lasting.

Everything from housekeeping to food at the homestay is taken care of by the efficient staff of Harul, run by its friendly and ever cheerful owner Neelam Ji. She has built the place mixing Wabi Sabi and Boho styles, using local timber, stone, and mud. Her discerning eye for the beauty in the unpolished and raw is visible in the materials and artifacts from nature used all around, like a huge fossilized mushroom in the dining hall display.

Neelam Ji treats her guests with home-made organic food of the local Jaunsari cuisine: mandua ki roti, mash aur lal chawal ki khichri, hara saag, cholai ke lobre, hemp seed chutney. Served alongside are stories sombre and sunny: about the local village culture and politics, her deep insights into behaviour and relationships, and from living and working in Dehradun, Lucknow and Mumbai. The chats over shared meals often turn boisterous, rendering the freshly built dining hall a familial ambience.

Except the weekends when guests from Delhi and nearby cities fill the remaining rooms, we have enough solitude to indulge in daydreaming and nature gazing. The quiet is pleasantly paused by the lilting laughter of two girls on the swing — Shreya and Shruti, daughters of housekeeper Sapna.

In the afternoon, we wander around the mountain roads, led by Minty, Harul’s resident mountain dog, who otherwise spends the day resting in the lazy sun or hunting mice, birds or shoes, not for food but as practice of her natural instinct.

On some days, Neelam Ji and her American Bully named Moscow join us on the walk, the dog as friendly as his parent despite his breed name. The third member of this canine gang, a chihuahua named Mia, is away with her other parent, Neelam Ji’s husband Rahul Ji.

Neelam Ji takes us on an exploration of local herbs, berries and fruits, all covering the mountain sides without a care from or for humans. The walk turns out to be an exploration of our taste buds, as much as the meals themselves.

We meet other familiar faces on the road, people from the village who we have met earlier, going about their daily life. Soniya Ji, a mother of four, carries a bundle of wet fuelwood home. She rests the load on an elevation on the hillside to allow us to take a photo with her and hoists the load up her back to resume the strained walk.

Hukam Singh Ji from the village walks home with a pile of foliage for his goats. A herd of goats trails him at a distance, watched casually by their minders.

Elderly Budhiram Ji guides his cattle down a slope to a shed in his field, where he lives, away from his family in the village. Struggling with a hunchback, he walks slowly with his stick and stops to request some change for a beedi. He nods when reminded that smoking is harmful but his face crinkles into a smile when his wish is fulfilled.

Other than the bird tweets and dog barks when a fox or jackal appears in the foliage around here, the peace is only occasionally pierced by a local bus plying from the villages to the towns downhill — loudly honking to call attention of the villagers — or a bright red pick-up truck jerking more loudly over the monsoon potholes than a jarring band of bad musicians. Vehicles, far and in between as they are, all appear and disappear around the multitude of hair-pin bends in the serpentine roads that look like ropes holding the green blankets of foliage together around the mountains.

The western sky turns golden as the cotton-white clouds start rolling down the mountain tops to find home in the valleys for the night. The setting sun casts long shadows across the mountain range, and along Harul’s long balcony corridors.

The quiet deepens when occasionally the region suffers power failure after a heavy downpour, making us more meditative in the darkness and solitude. As the early monsoon clouds cover the mountain tops around the valleys, they trap the heat and the growing humidity often results in nightly downpours, some of them thick and long enough to panic us into alertness for the night.

I rise up in my bed in the darkness, lit up only by sharp but silent lightning and wonder: Is it nature wildly beautiful or beautifully wild?

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

It was a mid-winter afternoon in early 1994 when I met Shree. We sat across a low coffee table on the sprawling green lawn of the India International Centre in Delhi. The long shadows of the trees nearby played nudge-nudge over our faces.

Over coffee and a sandwich, she asked me about my background, my job, my family and why I had advertised looking for a bride. This was my first life interview; call it a date if you wish. She was dressed in a dazzling black saree, Ray-Ban sunglasses perched on her shiny black hair, and a large Hidesign handbag resting on her lap.

I was in typical journalist clothes: jeans with a mismatched shirt of a non-memorable colour, a half-sleeve khadi jacket thrown over it. Two ballpoint pens peeked from the chest pocket, the hallmark of a journalist. I had taken care to trim my beard so that my large and leaning glasses would not scrape it on my cheeks. The jhola rested on my lap, and the black helmet was on the coffee table. A warm breeze drifted through the trees, softening the afternoon chill, but I was too quivery to order a sandwich for myself. Any haywire breadcrumb or tomato piece could crumble my prospects. The coffee cup was heavy enough to lift.

“I will let you know,” Shree said after our polite conversation. She asked for my phone number and for the bill in the same breath. When the waiter came with the bill, I grabbed at the chance to redeem myself.

“Are you sure?” She asked with a curious glance.

“Of course!” I gave no chance to second-guess myself. I didn’t want to be billed as a leech.

A couple of days later, the phone at my newspaper desk rang. “When can you come home to meet us, Kanti?” Shree asked.

Shubhasya sheeghram, goes a Sanskrit phrase: do auspicious deeds immediately. I lost no moment in agreeing to visit the same evening.

Looking for a bride

The walk from the pavement of Shree’s house, where I parked my scooter, to the door was the jumpiest of my life. What is she like? What would we talk about? What if all that I was going to get was a No? She could have told me over the phone or written another letter: that would be less of an embarrassment.

Shree had written to me in response to my matrimonial ad in the newspaper. I had just been hired by the country’s top newspaper to head its desk for a satellite edition. The salary package was handsome, so my two flatmates suggested that I was now fit for marital bliss.

“Find me a girl, and I will marry!” I challenged as a filibuster.

They jumped onto the idea instead. “We’ll place a matrimonial ad in our paper,” pat came the reply. The three of us bachelors worked in the same media house. “Just tell us what you want.”

A girl with rich parents? A large house that she would inherit? A Maruti Esteem car, a new one? Enough wealth to have a grand wedding and some more?

My friends stumbled on their track. I was not beating the same tune. All I wanted was someone simple and sensitive, smart enough to be in a partnership for life. No complexion, caste or cash credentials needed. It took us three copy editors a few hours to polish the specs into an ad of size and shape that I could afford to place in the newspaper, despite my handsome salary.

Some 40 letters arrived in the next few days from all over India. The nearest correspondent was in Delhi, where I lived. She was looking for a bridegroom for her younger cousin, who was highly sensitive, talented, creative and worked in a magazine as a copy editor. Could I call her if I wished to take it forward?

Why not, the nearest could be the dearest, I reasoned. So I called, and we had the date at the IIC.

A doe in the library

The calling bell at Shree’s door in a posh Delhi neighbourhood was shrill. My heart jumped.

Shree welcomed me and led me to her father’s library. “This is Tilottama, my cousin. Tilo, in short,” she directed my gaze to the slim and dark, doe-eyed beauty leaning against a shelf of books. “You guys talk, I’ll get some tea for you,” Shree left us to our pounding hearts.

Tilo looked like she was about to bolt, but didn’t know where to look. To use a cliché, a doe caught in the headlights. But the late afternoon sun was behind the tree by the window, so the shadows darkened the room. I slid my glasses up my nose to get a clear view. She was in a deep purple silk saree with a colourful pattern in the border, matched with a pink blouse, covering her delicate frame gracefully in neat folds. Her midnight-dark tresses, lightly parted in the middle, fell to her back, spreading a mist of jasmine scent. A pair of multi-coloured kundans glittered in the drops of sunlight that filtered into the room through the leaves. A room heater hummed warmth in the air.

“Ah, namaskar,” she replied to my greeting, a small smile appearing, as if bracing for rejection, her eyes lowering to the mosaic floor, her fingers knotting in the hem of her saree’s pallu. I studied her intense vibe that seemed to be painted in the colours and style of a Raja Ravi Varma.

“I met your Didi the other day, and she is so nice,” I ventured to loosen my tongue, referring to her elder cousin.

To break through the awkward silence, I used my reporting playbook: how did she land in Delhi from her hometown, Kolkata? What do her parents do? What is her current job like? What does she like to do in her leisure?

The conversation meandered and halted at times. She did not hold my gaze for long. Each time our eyes met, hers darted away as if eye contact were a flame and she feared being burned. And yet — she kept looking back. No one had ever seemed so gentle, so careful. I was not sure: maybe the world had not yet hardened her, or maybe she had been hurt many a time.

Tittering twins, jittery hearts

The uneasy silences were luckily filled with the giggles of two 8-year-olds, Shree’s twin boys — Robin and Roshan. Their thin bodies, topped with closely cropped hair, were tittering between us like fawns. I tried to get their attention and strike up a chat with them, but they were too excited. “Masi (aunt) is getting married, Masi is getting married,” they rhymed in a sing-song tone. I was thankful the warmth rising from my neck merged with the rosy rays of the setting sun.

Someone flipped the lights on. Chai and samosas were placed on the coffee table between us. The wafting tendrils of their steam warmed our mood and chilled our nerves somewhat. I bit into a samosa, and a tiny slice of chilli caught my tongue unawares. “Can I… can I… can I please have some water?” I hiccuped. The twins tittered again.

A slender hand covered with colourful glass bangles opened a water bottle and poured a glass. The bangles moved in a faint jingle: something tinkled in my heart. I gulped the water in one motion: it satiated the heat of the chilli as well as my unease.

Things seen and unseen

The bottle on the table was left open. The cap had slipped out of Tilo’s hand and rolled away. She bent down to pick it up, but didn’t come up with it. I looked down and saw that she was on her knees, feeling with her hands only inches away from the cap. Her saree’s pallu had slipped from her shoulder. The quick rise and fall of breath was obvious. I was stunned. It was right there, and she couldn’t see it.

“It is right here, and you can’t see it?” I stammered.

“Masi can’t see without her glasses, Masi can’t see without her glasses!” The twins sang in unison.

“What, you have glasses? Why aren’t you wearing them then?” I wondered aloud.

Her face fell. The doe’s eyes almost swelled in horror. Tears welled up. She pulled her pallu back in place to save herself from the double horror and straightened her frame.

“Tilo has been rejected by many men because of her thick lenses. They spoil her beauty and might spoil her kids’ eyes, people think. She was afraid you’ll do the same,” said Shree, walking in.

“That means you haven’t even laid eyes on me all this time! Go get your glasses,” is all I could say.

The boys flew like sparrows. The glasses arrived in a moment. Tilo put them on her fragile face; the high-power lenses made her eyes expansive and her gaze more intense. The tinkle deepened into a flutter. It felt like I was caught in the headlights. I looked away first.

In that moment, something unravelled and settled in me at the same time. A few minutes of chai-samosa conversation told me nothing about what Tilo wanted, what made her laugh, what lay behind in her life, what dreams she had. But I could see clearly that I wanted to be someone she would not look away from. Especially with her thick glasses.

Sandstone ruins and old wounds

I broke Tilo’s lonely heart on our first outing to Qutub Minar. Sitting on the red sandstone steps in the ruins, I told her that before she made any firm commitments, I ought to tell her about my past misadventures. Then I went ahead with my sob story.

In my student days, I was a loner like a cuckoo. I spoke little and not to the girls. But I made a lot of friends writing letters to strangers across India and abroad. One girl and I became particularly intimate, sharing the happy and sad moments of our lives, seeking support and solace from each other. After several years of exchanging long, hand-scribed letters, we had become soulmates. When her family started looking for a match, it seemed natural to us to be together for life. A job interview in her city gave me the excuse to meet her and confirm our desires. But her family caught on to our plot and barred her from being in a relationship with a boy from another community. A goodbye letter from her, written on a beautiful letter pad, was all I was left with.

Tilo listened quietly, her sight set on a distant minaret. Tear drops smudged her pink saree into purple spots. The silence lay heavy in my chest, filling the emptiness I had been carrying for about five years. Did I burn my chances? Did she think of me as a sham? Or did my story ignite hurtful memories of her own? I couldn’t tell if her tears were of regret, sadness or relief.

When I dropped her off at home, my back was drenched in jasmine tears. But she clutched onto me through the ride.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)

The issue of trust has been in the air quite a lot recently. A friend was holding an online session on building trust and said, you need to trust yourself first to be able to trust others. I agree, yet find it difficult to put it into practice. Like when a stranger offers me an expensive watch for free on the street.

I am walking home from an errand this balmy early autumn afternoon when a car slows to a halt next to me. The glass of the front passenger window rolls down and the friendly driver greets me with a chirpy hi. Recognising my inability to recognise the spouses of my colleagues and friends unless seen together, I try to compensate for my memory lapse with an overly friendly “Hi, how are you?”

“You speak English? Thank God, for I’ve been lost here for quite some time… Where are you from?”

Hearing my answer, he names the Indian places he has travelled to: Delhi, Mumbai, and Goa. He is from Italy and mentions Sonia Gandhi. Still smiling, I ask him if he was there on holiday.

He says, oh no, he is here on business. He is the general manager of a watch company, travelling to exhibitions to showcase its products. Here’s his business card. I take a look and recognise the name of this famous brand, and I let out an impressed “Ooh.” His company has had an exhibition in Copenhagen, and he’s on his way back. He only wants to find the way to the airport.

I don’t own a car, nor do I drive, so it takes me a while to map out the direction for him. I direct him to the longer route, asking him to trust me that it’d be faster than going through the city at this hour. That’s what the Danish taxi drivers tell me, and I trust them. I repeat the direction for him; I'm not sure I was clear the first time.

After the practicalities, we return to the pleasantries. He thanks me profusely and tells me I must meet him when I go to Italy. And he’ll let me know when he is in India again. We will keep in touch and remain friends. In fact, I’ve been such a great help, he wants to gift me something in return. What is it he wants to give me, I am curious. He takes out a couple of boxes, opens one, and offers it to me, containing a really expensive watch.

I refuse the gift. He insists. It is just one sample of his products. It doesn’t matter to him or his company who gets the samples. He knows good watches are expensive in Denmark because of the taxes. I insist I cannot take such a gift for a little help. We play back and forth a few times in the insistence match. Finally, I win. I say in jest that the gift can wait until I visit him in Italy. Disappointed but still smiling, he turns his car and leaves.

I am pleased to have helped someone today and wonder how generous strangers can be. MM wonders if the stranger was really friendly or a fraud. Did he mistake me for a tourist because of my backpack and camera? Maybe he was trying to scam me? I quickly check my backpack: no, everything is in order, as is the camera. He must be a genuine general manager. I hope my direction based on taxi rides is accurate and helpful to him.

MM asks how come the Italian didn’t have a GPS in such a big modern car? Who gives out an expensive watch for a little mapping help? How will he get in touch with his new friend if he didn’t ask for my contact details? Does even this company exist? Did you look at the fine print?

I look at his business card; it looks a bit homemade for an expensive watch brand. There is a website address and a couple of phone numbers with the general manager’s name and title. There is no email address. Yes, there’s a fine print: under the brand name, there’s a second name of the brand, to indicate in a fine, subtle way that all that glitters may not be an expensive brand.

MM asks, did you really trust him, and rolls in laughter. I remind myself of what my friend said: did I trust myself to trust a stranger? As my therapist later asked: Did I trust myself enough to stay with the uncertainty of whether the stranger was a fraud or a friend?

Trust me, I did. During the interaction itself, I didn’t watch my back. MM’s suspicions notwithstanding, I trusted myself enough to stay with the moment and help the stranger. I trusted my instinct to refuse the gift, not because I suspected a scam, but because I was determined that a gift, expensive or not, in return for a helpful gesture renders the gesture valueless. I trust my values and heart enough to trust a stranger.

But can I really trust this stranger? Is he a real general manager or a general scamster? I can check the website or call the numbers to find out. I dare not, though. I don’t trust my ability to bear the shock if MM’s mistrust scores a bull’s eye.

(Until recently stationed in Copenhagen, Denmark, the writer is a former journalist and UN communications professional. MM is his friendly Monkey Mind, always monkeying around in his life.)

I am in the forest this early spring morning. It is some time till dawn, so everything is still dark and hazy in the last forest mist of the short winter. Birds are building up an orchestra around me.

rrrrRAP-RAP-RAP-RAP! rrrrRAP-RAP-RAP-RAP! knocks the woodpecker.

Tik-tik-tik-tik! says the fantail.

Tuk… tuk… tuk… tuk… joins in the barbet.

Chee-chee-chee-chee! scolds the tailor bird.

rrrrRAP-RAP-RAP-RAP! rrrrRAP-RAP-RAP-RAP! tik-tik-tik-tik! tuk… tuk… tuk… tuk… chee-chee-chee-chee! Then comes the denouement: fssst! tsee! fssst! signals the fantail.

And then it repeats. In a continuing staccato.

The cacophony grows loud, overwhelming, so I run. But my green overalls restrict my limbs, and my feet are entangled in the web of creepers on the forest floor. My hair is thick and matted tightly. I stumble. My hands cannot rise and stop my fall. The ground is soaked in sanitiser liquid. I feel cold in my heart.

From darkness to light

“Uncle! Time to freshen up!” Fatima calls out in my nightmare. I wake up. I am in the cardiac care unit of a hospital, sleeping in a straitjacket after a procedure. The beeps from six heart monitors and the hisses and clinks from other equipment are creating the ominous musical background for my nightmare. Vague snippets of the experience on the surgery table the day before yesterday linger in my mind. It is 5 am on the wall clock.

Nurse Fatima, a woman in mid-twenties, bears the quiet, slight, and fair features of the local people from the hills. She helps me up to a sitting position. “Keep your left hand like this, Uncle,” she positions it on my stomach gently, and helps me down to a standing position. She brings a pair of sandals for me. “Ajay! Take Uncle to the washroom and change his clothes.”

General Duty Assistant (GDA) Ajay leads me by hand and cheers me with a smile: “Let’s go for a walk, Uncle!” After the washroom visit, he brings me back to the bed, pulls the curtains around me, and helps me to change into a fresh pair of white-and-blue robe and pyjamas, and a blue cap. Fatima hangs new medicine and fluid bottles on the bedside drip stand and re-fixes the intravenous tubes onto my right arm.

All six patients are freshened up. Fatima takes turns with nurse Deepika to help the patients get up and ready, and reload them with medicines. Ajay and his female GDA colleague Pinky assist in cleaning up and getting into fresh hospital clothes. The patients are under constant watch, some having gone through procedures, and the others being prepared for some.

The palette of patients

My next-bed neighbour, Ved Prakash Ji, was brought in to the emergency ward the previous night in severe pain. With a heavy build and a thick moustache, he may have celebrated his 50th birthday recently. After medication, his pain has subsided. He’s desperate to go to the washroom.

“Do you have pressure for motion?” Fatima checks.

“No, but I have to pass urine!”

“Uncle, you need not worry about that. You have a catheter in place.”

Slender and golden-haired Dadi Ma (Grandma), on the opposite side of my bed, dithers on whether she can walk to the washroom or needs assistance at the bedside. Deepika and Pinky eventually persuade her to walk to the washroom as per the cardiologist’s advice to mobilise her.

Sugarless tea arrives as the nurses and care assistants help us settle into the morning beat. With healthy brown sugar pouches on the side. Breakfast will follow soon. Each patient has her customised breakfast as prescribed by the dietician who visits us twice a day. I have now graduated to a normal diet, so I get to enjoy a bowl of healthy noodles. Ajay feeds me with a spoon despite my protests that I can manage it myself.

Dadi Ma refuses to eat. She says Doctor Sahab has asked her to avoid food so she doesn’t soil the bed or have to leave the bed for managing her motion. Deepika stresses that the doctor didn’t say so, that it’s okay either way, they will take care of things, and she doesn’t need to worry. Dadi Ma still keeps her breakfast bowl away.

Mornings measured in beeps

After breakfast, I am sleepy and supine, depleted from Ved Prakash Ji’s loud cries of pain last night and then my own pain and nightmares. But my daytime daze is broken by the mobile X-ray team, which has to take a snapshot of my chest cavity.

The young X-ray technician with a studious look through her round glasses covers herself in a protective vest and announces “Expose!” so the rest of the staff move out of the exposure range. This is repeated for Dadi Ma too. “Hilo mat, Dadi Ma!” (Don’t move, Grandma!) The technician and Deepika instruct the septuagenarian lady sternly. It emerges that her involuntary motions spoiled the X-ray shot they had taken earlier.

A young, bearded Dr. Joseph, the resident cardiologist, makes a round of the patients with a junior Dr. Varsha, checking their latest test reports and vital readings, and asking them how they are feeling.

Dr. Hruday Samrat, the cardiac surgeon, arrives at 9:30 to check on his patients. He is well-known for being soft-spoken and the one who still examining each patient with a stethoscope. But when it comes to discipline, he is hard-hearted. All medical staff hide their already discreet mobile phones like spyware before his arrival. I heard the previous morning in the emergency ward, during my admission process, how he would pull staff up for being even slightly negligent, so they were all extra careful in preparing me for the procedure. Yet, the nurses and GDAs were not prepared for his outburst when he found that I was not ready to be rolled out to the cath lab for the procedure at the appointed time. The emergency ward staff had messed up.

When scolding becomes care

This morning, briefings and updates by Dr. Joseph and Dr. Varsha are all routine until Dr. Samrat approaches the bed of Ved Prakash Ji, whose penchant for medical misdemeanour unravels. The soft-spoken cardiologist takes a look at his file and bursts out: “You have had two heart attacks in two years. And yet you’re not taking the medicines! You are not treating the treatment seriously! Why do you come to the hospital at all? Why?” The room and the corridor fall silent. The loud, staccato monitor music is the only indication that the hearts are beating. Fast. The tall cardiologist’s nervous tic of shaking his right leg while talking only stops for a moment.

In the course of the morning, a new team of nurses and GDAs takes charge. After lunch, nurses Ankita and Maria prepare Dadi Ma and the other female patient in the room, Prem Lata Ji, for their procedures. After having two stents installed in her heart by two of the newest private hospitals in the city, Prem Lata Ji has decided to surrender herself to Dr. Samrat’s capable scalpels in this older hospital. Younger than Dadi Ma at least by a decade, she is all stoic and brave, but develops jitters when the time comes for her to be wheeled into the cath lab. It takes some cajoling by the nurses to convince her to continue to be brave.

When the rest of the four patients are quieter, the beeping monitors only sound louder. Ankita complains to her colleague Mukesh, who has replaced Maria, about the nurse-in-charge in a whisper near my bed: “How can she send you to the Recovery and post Maria here? There is only one patient there, and Maria can take care of him. If needed, we can always go and check on her!”

Between shifts, between lives

Maria is a newbie nurse, one week fresh in this hospital. She was on duty when I was in the Recovery room yesterday, before a bed became available in the CCU for me. The Recovery room also functions as a break room for nursing staff and assistants, so there is a more relaxed feel to it. They chat, share notes on life, family, and career, and at times, have small bites with tea, and they rest in turns.

Hailing from Amritsar, Maria moved to Dehradun recently after marrying a senior supervisor in a biochemical company. A single child of her parents, she worked in a local hospital in Amritsar. She got an offer from a new private hospital with a higher salary, but without health insurance benefits, so she chose to join this hospital.

Maria now lives in her husband’s large joint family, with three brothers and their families, and parents living in the same house, though using separate kitchens. Within her first week in this hospital, she had a brush with a senior colleague, after which she was moved to the CCU team.

Nurse Mukesh commiserated with her, saying that the colleague was known to be difficult: “Don’t worry, he is like that, don’t take it to heart. The best strategy here is to do your job and leave at the end of your shift; don’t be a hurdle in others’ work. That way you’ll not step onto anyone’s toes.”

Maria spent her shift at my bedside watching my heart monitor, on her toes all through. I sensed her paces were shaky in her eagerness to prove herself.

“Have you had tea?” asked Mukesh, who had come in drenched in an untimely shower. He was sipping a cup of tea while drying his jacket in the golden glow of the room heater under their desk. The warm corner was a refuge for the staff at night, especially one female GDA who rarely left the spot.

No, Maria replied.

“Have a cup, and sit down,” he tried to calm her down. “You already worked in a hospital and will get the hang of the CCU soon enough.”

Back in the CCU, Ved Prakash Ji has been repeatedly requesting washroom breaks. The nurses allow him to go a few times, but he reports no success with his motion or urine. “I can’t even pass urine!” he keeps pleading, despite his urine bag filling up.

“You just went to the washroom, Uncle. If you don’t pass stool after so many trips, why do you want to go again? What’s the matter?” wonders Ankita aloud.

I have my suspicions. I noticed traces of ash in the washroom when I went one time after Ved Prakash Ji. Not that it matters much, given the washroom’s cleanliness had already gone down the toilet.

Silent type, waiting type

On the third day, Dr. Samrat changed my dressing and approved my discharge. A heavy pile of reports, internal notes, and prescriptions is sent downstairs for processing and approval from the insurance company. My day passes in waiting.

I recognise nurse Paramjit, whom I had met on arrival in the Recovery room the first day. She is back after a day’s break. I say hello, and her pimpled face beams wide. “You recognise me! Of course you do: I bombarded you with questions!”

Her questions were a way to calm my nerves before the procedure, I had assumed. “What is your name?” she had asked, looking at my records. “Who gave you that name? What does it mean? That’s lovely! And your wife’s name?”

She is from Batala in Punjab, famous for its cast iron machinery and weapons manufacturing. As she puts prescription drops in my eyes, she whispers to me in a conspiratorial tone, “He is very irritating, isn’t he?” referring to Ved Prakash Ji. I nod, eager to be discharged.

“Kya, main kam bolne wala hoon?” she questions. (What, you are a silent type?) I nod again.

“Don’t worry, Kanti Ji! We will discharge you as soon as the file is back!” She is the only staff member who calls me by name.

“I’m not leaving you guys so soon. Will have dinner here before going home!” I joke.

Time, pending clearance

Although I say that in jest, Paramjit still books dinner for me when the dietician visits. “You never know. One patient got discharged late last night, after 12 hours’ waiting for insurance approval. He went home hungry,” she explains. I nod.

Next, she is counselling the bearded young patient who has to do exercises for breathing problems and seems depressed. He has recently lost his engineering job in a large tyre company. “Please don’t worry so much, Anil Ji. You have so much to live for: this health issue and job problem are both short-term. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Dr. Samrat has taken his evening round. He is surprised to see me hunched over on the bed. Waiting for the insurance engine to run, I explain. “I have signed the papers; when it’s time to pay, they take their own sweet time,” he comments, uncharacteristically. I nod. He asks Paramjit to give me another antibiotic dose for the night.

Blood is thicker than saline

Attendants of the patients walk in during the evening visiting time. Dadi Ma is exhausted after her procedure, and her monitor beeps in a sedentary tone. Her granddaughter caresses her hands for warmth. Her monitor graph jumps, and the beeps come alive. She wants milk instead of the pre-dinner soup. Milk will be some time coming, so she is offered soup to revive her energy. But she is already sitting up and smiling. She motions to assistant Vinod, who has been cleaning and helping through the day, and passes a few notes to him. “This is not allowed, here, Dadi Ma! We will lose our jobs if found out,” he exclaims.

Ved Prakash Ji complains to his wife about not being allowed to go for his motion. “Aap to kisi ki shunte nahin ho. Ab to yeh buri adat chhod do, dil ke wastey!” (You don’t listen to anyone. Stop this bad habit now, at least, for your heart’s sake!) she pleads to him in hushed tones.

My daughter has been coming to see me and to update me on the insurance claim process. I have to deal with their many queries about past medical history and records. My frustration probably shows. Paramjit comes over and assures me, “Koi nahin (no worry), we will serve you morning tea and breakfast too if needed.” I nod with a smile.

My wife outside is worried as she hasn’t seen me since yesterday. But they don’t allow her in: only one attendant is allowed to use the visitor pass for the CCU. She requests Imran Bhai, the genteel and calm man at the OPD reception, to find a way. He says, “You called me your bhai (brother), right? Then I must do it for my sister.” He calls someone upstairs, and my wife comes to see me, face creased with worry and exhaustion. “No matter what, we will take you home today. You will sleep in your bed tonight,” she declares with teary eyes.

There is no green light yet when dinner is served. I regret my joke earlier today.

Laughter, despite everything

Hasika, a lean and chirpy young nurse, is entertaining her colleagues by mimicking a doctor.

“I can explain: see, we did this procedure without any cutting, splitting, or plotting.” I can’t see if her leg is shaking, but her colleagues spill into muffled laughter.

Another nurse pretends to be an intern: “Sir, why is this patient having difficulty breathing?”

“I can explain: see…”, Hasika fakes an explanation in a low whisper so the patients cannot hear. The team erupts in laughter and disperses.

As Hasika heads to the door, I waylay her: “Doctor Ma’am, please explain, why is insurance claiming my time so much?”

“I can explain: see, when it comes to cash, it can’t be cashless. So they have to be heartless, which takes its own sweet time.”

The whole room laughs this time.

The titter of the laughter fills my heart when I leave the hospital after the 12-hour wait, pooling from family savings to pay the bills. The orchestra of the monitors’ beeps fades away as I am rolled out into fresh air in a wheelchair.

It was a young woman who had just overtaken us from the side. We were walking along a narrow lane in Kolkata, hand-in-hand, for an evening stroll. She came from behind, about 30 years in age, clad in an elegant modern trousseau of black palazzo trousers matched with a black-and-white shirt, topped with a grey scarf at the neck. Her steps strident in formal shoes, she turned towards us, peering through her glasses sincerely.

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“You are pretty, both of you!” she said again, as if we might not have heard her the first time. “I really appreciate it.”

We thanked her, more embarrassed than amused, and watched her walk ahead.

The scenario was quite the opposite earlier in the day. We were walking to our flight departure gate, hand-in-hand. A couple of teenage girls walked by, whispering to each other and giggling. Their looks said it: “Ew, why are these two acting so strange!”

We understood both reactions.

When we were dating three decades ago in Delhi, my girlfriend and I spent our afternoons searching for secluded corners — public parks, quiet stretches of road, anywhere we could sit undisturbed. Public displays of affection were rare then. Our lower-middle-class inhibitions were even stronger. Holding hands felt daring; being seen hand-in-hand felt dangerous.

On a joy ride to Suraj Kund in Haryana, we were stopped at the border by a Haryanvi cop. “Kya lagti hai yeh teri?” he asked, pointing his shining danda (baton) towards my girlfriend. (What is your relationship with her?) My girlfriend moved her hand away from my waist.

Sis... I was about to blurt when his danda landed on the headlight, with a light thud, just above the front panel where a PRESS sticker announced my profession. “She is a colleague. We work in the press,” I exhaled in relief. The danda moved aside, and we moved ahead.

Marriage did not make us braver. We had married against the wishes of our families — rebellion enough for one lifetime. In our middle-class neighbourhood, expectations pressed heavily on my bride. Newlyweds were meant to behave with restraint. The only hands we held freely were those of our daughter, teaching her to walk, to write, to cross the street.

Our residence in Europe was more illuminating. In fact, in the early phase, we tried to distract our daughter’s attention away from the explicit public display of intimacy to prevent culture shock. Gradually, she knew better, and so did we. Holding hands was no longer an embarrassment. Indeed, it became necessary.

On our first journey abroad, at Frankfurt airport, we stood before a towering escalator leading to the train station above. Our suitcases were enormous — stuffed with clothes, spices, a pressure cooker, fragments of an Indian life we were unwilling to abandon.

Staring up the massive moving staircase, I froze. How do I carry our humongous suitcases, overloaded with our Indian lives, up the folding and interlocking metal stairs? How does one carry such weight up moving stairs?f

A stranger, without ceremony, lifted one suitcase onto the escalator and rode it up. He returned for the second. I reached instinctively for my wife’s hand as she stepped onto the escalator for the first time in her life. By the time we reached the top, something had changed. The handhold felt less like romance and more like alignment.

In London, on a Tube train, I was once flung into the lap of a grandmotherly woman when the carriage lurched violently between stations. I had been studying the Underground map, too engrossed to notice the curve. The overhead rails were just out of comfortable reach. So when the train screeched to a stop on the left, I flew right into the arms of Grandma Dame. Since then, holding hands has become less optional.

I developed a habit of straying — even with a digital map guiding me. A few distracted steps ahead, and I would drift off course. Family legend says I once got blindsided by the size and signboard of an IKEA store we were headed for, right in front of us, and took a sharp left for the Coventry Market, famous for its old-school charm. The gentle pull of my wife’s hand would save me from wandering, without comment. A silent, private navigation system.

We could not explain all this to the Young Lady in Kolkata. Holding hands has now become as essential as the pacemaker newly fitted inside my chest — a quiet mechanism that keeps rhythm when the body hesitates.

Kolkata does not make walking easy. Pavements rise abruptly or vanish altogether. Hawker stalls claim their share of space. Manhole covers — stamped solemnly with municipal initials CMDA — threaten betrayal during the rains. Cars edge too close. Rickshaws weave unpredictably. A sudden vehicle slices through the narrow corridor of traffic as though urgency were hereditary. “Tor baper rasta na ki re?” is the common verbal rebuke by the less privileged. (Is it your father’s road?)

The safest course is to avoid the sidewalk and walk on the street, waving your way around parked cars, rickshaws, hawker carts, garbage, construction materials, and homeless people. We keep ourselves ready to pull the other away when a haywire speeding car suddenly curves in your slow, serpentine lane, Young Lady!

Young Lady, it is not a performance. It is logistics. It is insurance against potholes and sudden curves.

It is a pact made quietly somewhere between the two continents. If it looks like romance, we’ll take the compliment.

Like we did at the departure lounge in the morning. A little girl of 4 or 5 came, freeing herself from her mother’s grasp, ran towards us, and greeted my wife with folded hands: “Namaste!” Just like that.

“Namaste, Beta. God bless you,” is all we could say, hand-in-hand, smiles on our faces.

(The writer is a former journalist and a communications professional.)

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Life is in fast-forward mode. And I am enjoying it.

Fast food. Fast food delivery. Fast grocery. Fast fashion. Blink. It arrives before your eyelids reopen. Get it in a blink, almost. What is 10 minutes in the lifetime of this universe, which is 13.8 billion years, but less than a blink?

Fast food is a winner: prepared, delivered and eaten quickly. What could be better? I am in no mood for the quiet time to cook something with my wife. We can kick up a fuss about something over fast food.

I don’t need to remember anything. If I forgot to buy bread when I was in the grocery store — when was the last time I went there? I find it difficult to remember — no problem. I don’t blink. I take out the phone and place an order in the grocery app for a 10-minute delivery.

I don’t need to think hard about gifts either. Forgot to buy an anniversary gift for my wife? No worry. Order it through the instant marketplace app, and it arrives in 10 minutes. Or, at the most, in 24 hours delivered from the nearby amazing mega warehouse, just in time before my wife surprises me with a well-crafted gift.

Indeed, the fastest way to give gifts is cash if I don’t worry about the amount and how it would be assessed against my wealth. Cash removes the need to strain my mind about a suitable gift for the recipient, shop for it and gift-wrap it myself. Where do I have the time now to spend on such thoughtful gestures? Easier to cash it.

Fast gyaan (advice). Fast forward gyaan. Fast forward gyaan many times. I wake up in the morning to a stream of advice on my phone: messages in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Health tips, historical tidbits, political snides, cooking recipes, relationship recipes, unsociable commentaries. I feel obligated to forward them instantly to my other friends and continue the fast-forward circle. Forward one. Receive ten. Don’t have the time to check, read, or ponder. Or to sit in silence without checking the phone.

Quick to comment. Quick to judge. I have the quickest mind when a message with a view pops up. I have to contradict it or agree with it instantly. How many viewed and liked my comment means more than whether the view actually meant anything to me. I don’t have to wait for the postman to deliver the handwritten letters and reply to them in my best script over days.

Fast writing. Fast to the market. I don’t need to prompt even ideas for my next story or novel. AI can generate the ideas and the stories with characters, plots, scenarios, and climax most implausible in no time. It also takes no effort to get it to the market. I write. I publish. No one reads.

Not only stories. AI also writes emails, tweets, and messages. It replies promptly, without my prompting. I don’t have to spend time over courtesy or context of the conversation.

Soon, AI will also maintain my BFFs, best fast friendships. It will send timely messages and make timely calls to my family and friends, in my voice and tone, updating them about my life and status. No one will miss me. Even when I am gone for a long time. Or, forever.

I catch on quickly. Instant pleasure. Instant fame. Instant love. Fast values. Quick money. Fast wealth. Fast success. Fast heart. Fast temper. Fast bike. Fast car. Fast crash. Fast death.

Here is a theory for those who want everything fast, good and cheap. The Triple Constraint theory is: You can get any two, but never all three. You can have it fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. You can have it cheap and fast, but it won’t be good. Fast food is the ultimate example of the fast-and-cheap combo. To make it work, the “good” (nutritional quality and fresh ingredients) is usually what gets sacrificed.

It’s up to you what you choose your life to be. Choose slow. Choose good. Blink — and this moment is gone.

(The writer is a former journalist and communications professional.)