Vasudha Pande

(This was never meant to be a post. But when you sit at your desk with half-formed sentences dancing inside you, you need to tell someone about it all.

Here goes. Writing the lines as they come to me.)

Have you ever felt that you’ve reached this point in your life where you felt like a spineless thing? You watch a bunch of men in their early 20s killing people for some stupid cause, and you feel scared before being concerned about the victims? You watch bastards wreaking havoc in a city you love and you spend the next few days discussing your opinions and theories with friends, while brave young men give up their lives for the country? I’ve been feeling like this for the past few days, like a useless coward. I’ve been glued to the TV all these days, watching live coverage of the Mumbai siege, funeral processions of the martyrs, interviews of survivors and hotshots, and other snippets that the Indian media threw our way. I lapped it all up. I bunked college, didn’t do my assignments, and stayed in front of the TV all day.

I was scared. More than a thousand kilometers away from the site of terror attack, in the comfort of an unharmed city, I was bloody scared. I disappoint myself sometimes. Seriously.

Young men died for their country, when they needn’t have. A bunch of retards killed others and died for some freaking cause. Innocent people lost their lives. The entire nation was rattled. Leading newspapers shamelessly featured political advertisements. News channels interviewed stupid celebrities, broadcasting their borrowed opinions. People blamed the security services, moaning about India’s porous coastline. [...]

It was an uncomfortably hot night. Delhi was an island in a sea of humid air, barking dogs, impatient feet, bright street lights and faint recollections of boring TV commercials.
The burning stars, some of them hidden behind wispy clouds, seemed to be vaporising slowly in the heat. The moon had disappeared; a warm breeze seemed [...]

[...] The Divine Song that fills the air of Heaven, and to which God dances, would be discordant if the melody of the mellow music played by the stars was not strung into it, and etched into it, fusing it with the very essence of Life itself. [...]

The night sky has a lot to teach to anyone who would take time to look up at it. It is full of stars: bright giant stars, dim dwarfs, young stars, and old dying stars. Each star is unique; yet, all share a common history with us: we, humans, and the stars that now shine in the night sky were all born from the ashes of the earliest stars in the Universe. [...]