Modi, Shah, and the Heart of Strategy

#Amit shah#Assembly elections 2017#Mohan bhagwat#Narendra modi#Politicsdecoder#Prashant kishor#Rss#Uttar pradesh

With all the turmoil in global and Indian politics, and dashed liberal aspirations, I decided to sit down to write about the actual, on the ground strategies, using which Modi and team are winning election after election. As we kept breaking it down, ideology emerged as just another factor. And a landscape of strategic moves emerged.

Here is the article:

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/assembly-elections-2017-decoding-amit-shah-prashant-kishor-and-the-art-of-playing-politics-3345688.html

Happy reading. And do let me know what you think.

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After all those years,
Do you remember,
Walking on the ridge,
Next to the marsh,
The smell of smoke
And cruelty.

I walk now,
Every evening,
On the ridge,
By the marsh.

Slow down now,
The birds play
On old branches.

Roads

                                    I like to write about roads I have walked down many times. Not just once, however striking. I must have walked many times, repeated the rhythm into a tiny version of regular life, and from that little version of a long life, extract a few words about how the road is and so on. I like this feeling of having lived a little bit of life on that road, a tiny bit of how an old man would feel who sauntered down that path every evening, meaninglessly, throughout his life. With that slight feeling of having lived a bit, I can begin to place words into sentences, and write about the road. Not that it matters. My words are fake. Leave all this. I merely walk down a road many times. 

Summer

Even if you hate summer, look in the evenings, at the leaves of the trees wilting by the dust-laden roads. The leaves glow in the fading heat, finished with the day’s lust. I am a man of the monsoons. This isn’t who I am. But I find home here. I once tried to explain it to someone. It’s the rains, I said, that fill my soul with belonging. But as always, I didn’t quite say it, I didn’t quite bend and speak. I let it stay in some recess of unexpressed longing. But then we have done it again and again. Not said it enough, not said it well.

I am beginning to doubt everything I have been and everything I have thought. It’s all summer dust. It is all that little fleeting glow of the leaves.

I am listening to Girija Devi sing. She is singing of waiting in the rains for the lover. The themes are all known. It’s all about when we discover them. And then it is all about when we realize they aren’t quite there. It’s a light game. Soon we will die.

The Hawk

On some mornings, through winter and spring, I would see a family of hawks in a nest on a tree with small red flowers which loomed over the metro line. The tree was taller than the bridge from which I would climb down in the morning and the nest sat at the center, from which the branches grew in different directions. Small red flowers dotted the branches which drooped over the buildings and offices clustered around the metro station.

One day I saw the mother hawk swoop down under the bridge, her wings gracefully arched over passing cars and fumes and dust. She wasn’t hunting, merely stretching out, and then returning to her nest. Sometimes I would see her perch silently in the soft sun, and because the sun was behind her I couldn’t see where she was looking, just sense her stillness.

As summer came, and the sun grew strong, the flowers dried, fell off, and were trampled to dust by passing cars. The leaves vanished, and the other day, I saw the nest like dry twigs at a slant at the center of the bare tree. The nest was empty and cars speeded below, the sun shone behind.

Why Write

You will often hear people speak about writing as life. That like all art, to be done well, writing must be committed to. This commitment is no ordinary commitment. Like a muse or a wife, writing is something you return to whether you like it or not, irrespective of season or pain. You invoke this dull, often morbid exercise, as the defining feature of your self. 

So one day, in pain, or bearing the burden of anxiety, you say, okay, I cannot write. Not today, today even the gods would exempt me. Does that work? No, of course not. Especially today, when the gods seem to have exempted you, or, perhaps, they mock you, today, you must write, must write badly if you may, but write, force every cell into writing, whatever comes out of this wretched mind and unwieldy fingers. That, is commitment, they say. And that, makes you a writer.

This is a noble, stoical thought, and one, I am sure, will make great authors out of many a fool. 

Just that, I do not think this has any meaning. I mean, you know, this is pure rubbish. Keep dreaming. Good writers, whoever they may be and by whatever measure, have no clue how or what works, and that is about it. These simplistic admirers of commitment, a word I am not particularly fond of, speak of the mystical and ephemeral as if it has meaning.

I mean, come on. If writing and art is truly as heaven-sent and transcendental as you make it out to be, tell me, is there anything you can really say about it. 

No. 

Something makes us write. Something there is that we write. We take essential human language and gossip and turn it into transcendence. Why?

Who knows. 

There is the wind and the sound of birds and the little pit in you tummy asking you for pleasure. What else do we know. Nothing. 

Write happily. Write well. Write again and again. But never, I beg you, never, take yourself so seriously.

You aren't a writer. You're a man. It's alright. You'll die ignominiously. It's a thankless life.

Find sorrow in dusk. 

The Colour of Flowers

You are the colour of winter
Flowers in late afternoon,
In the quiet garden of my mind.

Your burning hair,
The heart of the sky,
In the depressions
Of my soul.

You are the colour of
Touch, the lonely impression
Of music, in the desert
Moments of my way.

I seek the sun,
In the inflections of
Your laughter.

You are the colour of flowers,
In the fading dusk,
Of this day.