Dheeraj Kalgutkar

Photo by Artem Bali on Unsplash I forgot my red water bottle. Wait, what? You want us to read about you losing your water bottle? No, no, not any bottle but red water bottle with white cap. It’s no ordinary bottle. It’s the one that I take with me to the gym. The one in which I fill water from a water purifier attached there with those weird beads in that machine. I have a theory that that machine just doesn’t work and I’ve been drinking tap water for long now. Thanks to placebo for not letting me fall sick. Anyway, coming back to my water bottle. I remember taking it to the gym, drinking water from it. Sweating working my legs out. Oh yes, it was a leg day. But don’t worry. Somehow for some reasons that I’m unaware of, my legs aren’t hurting today. It’s 11:30PM, full 3 hours since I reached my room and found out, actually, I did not, I have not been able to find my bottle. The red one with the white cap. I had to drink water from another stupid bottle from which my flatmate u

  Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash I have a wish, a dream that someday Tomorrow or a day in future Let’s have two days Where we do nothing Absolutely nothing Let’s just sit outside Under the night sky With nothing but starts and moon above us With nothing around but trees in the dark With no light but that of the moon All together or just alone Let’s sit, stand or lay down On the damp ground or lush grass Black, white, brown Younger, older American, Indian, Chinese, Tasmanian Sick, lean, fat, rich, poor, short, grumpy, happy All Together For once breathing together the air that had passed through countless lungs For once let’s ponder over our past Think from where we arrived How we all began Wonder over why Look at your neighbors face, her cheeks, his jaws Did we really come from apes? How long did it take us to change into us? When did we start to think? When did we first communicate? What was it really? And why? When did we first started love? How did we start to hate?

Across the world, democracy is seeing a fast decline. Now one may deny, dismiss or raise unwarranted doubt over this at one’s own risk but it is an observable fact across the globe. "In Turkey and Egypt, Hungary and Poland, the Philippines and Venezuela, we are witnessing pseudo-democracies taking hold. Meanwhile, democracies that once inspired - South Africa, Brazil - are now marred by depressing stories of corruption. For the 12th consecutive year, Freedom House released its annual survey of democracy being pushed back: between 2000 and 2015, democracy broke down in 27 countries; 71 countries suffered 'net declines in civil and political liberties'", said former director of BBC news, James Harding in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture. Propaganda is fast becoming the chosen tool of politicians and what more, we are seeing that it is working, authoritarianism is on rise everywhere, people especially the young are losing their belief in institutions, citizens n

People including Modi who are saying Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his ideals would be remembered for ages to come are lying. No, they will not. For a decade or more now Vajpayee was inactive in politics but he was alive yet his ideals weren’t. Forget ideals, even his picture slowly disappeared from BJP’s billboards and made way for Modi and Amit Shah’s. His close confidant Advani was sidelined so much so that he is hardly ever given chance to speak in parliament now which he regularly attends, unlike our PM. All these people who day in and day out spew hate against Nehru forget that although Vajpayee was Nehru’s opponent he wasn’t a bitter man. When he had become Foreign Minister, he noticed how Nehru’s portrait that was always visible in South Block was missing. He immediately inquired and had it restored. He opposed Nehru on his policies bitterly but not the man. Upon Nehru’s demise, speaking in parliament, Vajpayee rendered heartwarming elegy “a dream has remained half-fulfille

That’s just a random picture of crowded Delhi. Photo by Fancycrave on  Unsplash         Bus rides are joyful experiences. To travel peacefully on a window seat staring quietly at the passerby's, looking at people on bikes and cars hurrying themselves to reach someplace quicker, buildings by buildings of varying sizes passing like a film via the window glass. And then if you are lucky you meet a nice fellow passenger, you both talk and somehow in its own small and strange ways, you become part of someone’s life who was stranger a while ago. Aha. That is if you are lucky. But I was with no luck in my pockets. I did not get a fellow passenger to talk to. I did not even get a seat to sit forget the window one. I was standing in a crowded bus near the back door of this public transport vehicle with my travel bag. Not big but not too small either. The bus had moved few stops from where I had boarded and had just stopped at another stop. Of the many people who came in, men and wo

I’m a slow reader and a human, there are times when I miss reading something and there are times when I choose to not react if I feel I know not enough, West Bengal’s Panchayat elections were one of them. This one is on West Bengal and the elections that were concluded some time back, but do not fret, what happened in Bengal wasn’t a stray incident that loses its relevance after a day or week, the Bengal election will come to haunt us in future if we do not pay attention to it. In West Bengal, Of the 58,792 seats in total, one-third is where opposition (left front and BJP) didn’t field their candidates. Mamata Banerjee’s TMC won them uncontested. Across the country we see these uncontested seats where candidates win without a fight and people (or supporters of that candidate) celebrate this as some macho victory but they forget that this is anathema to the practice of democracy. What do you think? All the people in a constituency love their one leader, so much so that not one

Photo by Erwan Hesry on  Unsplash You try and try and try To forget that one person Get busy with work Start running, go gymming Learn that new thing, meet strangers Sleep with people your heart would not Do all things to take your mind away Away from all the memories of a past Of a life you thought you had left behind Moments you thought you had buried deep inside Everything you thought was all over But One day like a river storming through floodgates You open up Open up with old wounds That you long thought were healed and dried What did you do oh sweet child of summer? What did you do to me?

Recently I received a joining letter from a reputed IT company of India which has its headquarters in Bengaluru (or Bangalore). There wasn't much to the joining letter except mentioning Aadhaar card as the mandatory document for onboarding. Now for people living under rocks, Aadhaar card is a new identity card issued by the government of India that captures not just your name, address, and photograph but also biometric information like fingerprints and iris scanning. Every Indian already owns one or the other existing identity cards that up to this time were all that was required, but for some reasons all-of-a-sudden they have all been pushed to corners in a new world where Aadhaar has taken center stage. I have never understood the purpose of Aadhaar or the problem that it resolves or what was it that existing identity cards didn't solve which Aadhaar can; except of course the behemoth of a tool called surveillance that Aadhaar can so easily accomplish for corporates and g

  India is a strange country but more stranger are its people. The old towns and villages have their own gods and those gods have their own homes aka temples in this country. It’s an established order. The temples have their annual anniversaries, gods go to jungle tours, river bathing, to meet other gods in other temples; all on the decorated vehicles pulled by the ever-growing tribe of humans. But that’s in old towns and villages. What happens in newly built cities? The old temples I have visited have their own stories, how they came into being. The stories with myths and magic. If the building isn’t very old then there would be someone with a mystic dream in which certain god comes into their dream and throws in his/her wish (or rather a command) to have an abode of his own in that village. And in most cases, these stories are highly unverifiable (of course, what did you expect? — peer-reviewed theories?). It’s not my desire to find the god himself (or herself!) but how does

Strange how a hi turns to casual flirting and that flirting turns to being sweet and being sweet turns to wishing we were together, together at this very moment. Strange how people who are far far away from us say hi on social media, dating sites, and things go up. We know there are scarce chances of our meeting, we know distance is a killer but sometimes with some people, these barriers just don’t make sense. It feels like something is better than nothing at all. We may not meet in future or maybe someday our paths will cross but right now, the way our hearts feel reading each other’s texts; that’s special. That’s strangely special. The happy-smiling-curl our lips draw when reading those texts is more special than the ones we have in the midst of a crowd of friends in any room. For some time now, I have tried to understand it, deduct answers to why, but so far, there are no specific answers I can come up with. We know, long distance hardly works, especially if you have never m

Photo by  Ron Hansen  on  Unsplash While we display missiles and what not on Republic Day celebrations in Delhi, remember we as a nation with so much apparent greatness couldn’t protect filmmakers from releasing a movie passed by censor board and cleared by Supreme Court, the highest court of land. We also couldn’t stop goons from terrorizing school children. I don’t see anything to take pride in here. But anyway, since when have we cared for nuances. The states notorious for rapes and worst sex ratio, states that glorify women in  ghoonghat  (veil) are letting cultural terrorists roam on streets and burn everything in the name of protecting a fictional queen’s honour. Long live hypocrisy! And to you, the insignificant voter and my dear fellow countrymen who can’t differentiate a failed state that can’t protect its citizens rights for which it is elected in first place and who takes pride in everything that he/she shouldn’t, who constantly let’s himself/herself diverted by non