The Bored Engineer

As I wander through the ruins that I once called home I can’t help but feel the apparent despair and hopelessness. Everything that I once called home is lost. The home has lost its warmth. For me the mention of home always brought to my mind the images of me entering the home. It’s an old house, really old something like 150 years old. Many heritage enthusiastic organisations have declared it as a heritage site and offered to renovate the parts of it. And of course my parents declined the offer, their argument: “It’s our home and if we feel need to renovate something we will renovate it on our own.” I always liked this pride of theirs because it made me think of them as the strong people who will never bend whatever be the circumstances. I mean these are the people who survived the ethnic cleansing and target killings of the 1990s. As I keep walking I look around the elegant but deserted buildings that are all around my home. These were all inhabited by people before they left to ...

‘Kashmir’ - an issue so volatile it can polarize the sanest of the minds into mind numbing extremism. Whenever Kashmir is on the boil or in the headline for any reason even the most liberal sounding people on my Facebook friend-list suddenly tear apart all their identities and fall into two categories: Kashmiris (mostly living outside the state and in other parts of India) who suddenly feel the need to highlight the ‘human right abuses’ which may or may not have been happening and people from rest of India who feel the need to thump their chest and abuse Kashmiris. While the silent majority looks on, occasionally expressing its dismay over the human right abuses and occasionally supporting the anti-terror operations of our armed forces (anti –terror not anti-protestors). I have been a part of the silent majority as well, looking around at people from both sides calling each other names and ‘highlighting’ facts which in their view are suppressed by ‘vested interests’. I do not ...

India is often referred to as the nation of contrasting nature, assimilating various hues and shades that seem to defy the very presence of the other. Our vibrant democracy has also in certain cases led to situations that may surprise the novice observer. For example while four states in India share two capitals each (Haryana - Punjab = Chandigarh & Telangana - Andhra Pradesh = Hyderabad) we also have a state that has two capitals, Jammu and Kashmir having Jammu and Srinagar as its winter and summer capitals respectively. While Chandigarh & Hyderabad are examples where the states involved have shown inability to create/maintain capitals of their own (although Andhra Pradesh is working on its separate capital), Jammu and Kashmir boasts of two functional capitals for a single state. While many feel that maintaining two capitals leads to wastage of precious public funds and time, an equally compelling argument in its favor is that it maintains regional stability. The...