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An octogenarian with extraordinary levels of energy, imbued with a resolute sense of purpose, forever present to encourage all his pupils, Late Master Satya Narayan Bahadur Shrestha also known as SNB, was a personality who was unmissable.

Reaching the school gate of our alma mater each morning, Adarsha Vidya Mandir, there stood a man, immaculately dressed in a colored tie, shaking hands with all those thousands walking in, to learn more for the day, meant for life. He had a firm handshake, some thing one would remember for life, having had the experience once.

I remember him visiting our classrooms when we were new to our school, all Grade I children. He had the quality to make people laugh. Back then, Birendra English Reader was a book written by him, meant for us – a foundation to build on our grammar and vocabulary that would shape the way we spoke and wrote, for the rest of our lives.

As a Grade IV student, I remember one particular afternoon, when one of our friends entered the class shouting in ecstasy. He had just learnt that SNB would be teaching us from then onwards. In a school with about 47 classes in total, from class one to ten, if one taught one period a week to each one of the classes, it would still be a round-the-clock work for an 80-odd year old man. People would get tired of asking how he did it, he never showed fatigue doing it week in and week out.

Forever a presence to give a pat on the back to his pupils, we seldom saw him angry. And when he was angry, it would be for a cause, many a time his wrath befalling on one or the other. All of us have taken them as lessons in learning, a hard rock of student life.
Of the many other things, he remained very fond of arts and he vociferously encouraged the artists amongst his pupils. His stance has created many formidable artists from our ranks, a plethora of successful professionals across all walks of life and several blooming writers who have taken to him in the particular paradigm.

The Walkathon organized in his honor, in his memoriam, is an apt tribute to a man, who engineered our walks for the rest of our lives. His pupils, spread across the globe, owe their walks to his mentoring and vision.

In a forest so dense,

Traversing the trail in the wild,

Trudging where the the erasing path takes me to,

I reach a place and take a breath for a while !

 

Aghast, I open, my eyes to the scene,

Yellow and black stripes, a canine of dream,

A tiger it was in all its glory,

The eyes of intent, narrating a story 

 

Comes near to me and I freeze there,

The mouth goes dry and eyes are fixed,

The tiger makes a roar,

Smiles and laughs with a groan

 

The smell of the beast in its purity and zeal,

A helpless creature that I am, stung in the wild,

Begging for mercy to the king of the jungle,

Its tongue licking large all around the cheeks

 

Then the master speaks with it’s eyes alone,

Groans I do not surmise, the meaning galore,

Shies away from me , twisting it’s neck in a whiff,

Life I give to you and humans, go away from here all so quick

 

I run forth to the river nearby,

Rapti it is, the serene one of good times,

I hop into a boat and then row fast to the shore,

Where people wait for a coward, survivor and more

 

En route I speak to the boat man,

Smiles with wry, he keeps mum,

His silence speaks volumes so large,

Writ large on his face, apathy so vast

 

On the sandy shore, I hop,

And run to the village,

Where people wait with abated breath,

Then I land in front of them, to tell a tale all of shame

 

I spoke to them of the message I brought,

The jungle king’s groan and the boat man’s moan,

They conveyed mockery to the men of the nation,

Of what we have done to our land impression !

 

An unwritten letter reaches them,

And my eyes speak to all,

A tiger lets me go and the boat man smiles in mock,

Apathy they had for me, you know folks 🙂

 

Taken the pristine land to the ruins,

We have dealt blows to all in a whim,

The tiger leaves me alive to tell the world,

A wild beast’s advice of stories untold

 

And hence I stand, with a new year message to you,

Save your country, save the land,

Merely wishing happy new year seems very bland,

If animals know, why don’t human’s so grand?

 

The eyes of the canine wishes us new year,

He leaves the killer in an act so kind,

The maajhi sails me to safety, with the mock of a smile,

And says go and give the message many a mile

 

The new year message to all who care,

Give the space to the wild,

Make the country a liveable land,

All that would make, a Happy New Year so grand !

 

Composed by Salil Pradhan, April, 13, 2011

On any given day, the citizens of the hi-fi generation spend a significant amount of time availing of the things that mobile internet and wi-fi provides. Logging into one or more forms of social media is an outcome of ready accessibility to the information highway. 

I sympathize with myself when I analyze a typical day of unsocial things that I do on the so called social media. I use facebook and twitter to be uptodate with the demands of becoming a socially adequate citizen.

The first stroke of the day starts with me rolling my fingers across the smart phone in a certain pattern to unlock the phone that also symbolizes the fastidiousness with which I, like multiple millions across the world are enslaved by the social phenomenon. My eyes pry for the updates that have happened overnight, a quick glance at the electronic mails, odd short message service and the frequent updates on facebook in the form of notifications, messages and at times, tweets.

Looking for healthy updates on life, I plunge myself into the bare unnecessities of life. As I scroll down my page, I find it hard to see a familiar face. I wonder if it occurs only with me or is it the case with others as well. Courtesy to people posting their pictures as fit for public viewing, my early morning staple starts with a view of the updates and pictures of the Friends of Friends, some thing one of my friends would have liked which would in no way be connected to me. Having been served this pre-breakfast of unfamiliar faces, their lives, their view points, their celebrations and frustrations, I wonder what about the host of people whom I really know in my life. Why is it difficult to hear about them and why do I have to be subjected to updates about people whom I do not know.

At times, I delve deep into thoughts if a certain person has been known to me in any stage of my life from being a Nursery kid to a professional of this age, my fertile mind endowed with a good memory is not able to figure out how.

There, my mind sighs and contemplates on how to rectify this seemingly unwanted barrage of messages and updates about people whom I do not know, as I open my eyes and I frantically tighten my privacy settings on facebook so that nothing unwanted gets space on my wall. Due to the largesse of the ‘public’ nature of the posts of the Friends of Friends, they can not be denied space on my wall. The only way would be to stop receiving updates from my very true friends and that I think defeats the very purpose of me being on social media i.e. to get updates about the people who matter, without asking and poking my nose into their lives.

I manage to have a cursory glance on the list of my friends and the way I have interacted with them on social media. With about half of them, that runs into hundreds, I have never exchanged a hello in the chat box. Despite them having a green round button signalling that they are online, we never get to the point of speaking or telling a customary hello and we exclaim that we are on ‘social’ media. I guess it can not get any more ‘unsocial’ than that, failing to acknowledge the people whom we meet in our lives.

I decide to forgive myself (and others if I have to) about being complacent on wishing people who are tagged with a green button telling that they are available online. Then I revisit the friends list to evaluate if these friends have been in touch with me via ‘likes’, ‘comments’ or ‘shares’. While many pass the test because of the ‘like’ button, a few fail that one as well. A certain proportion of people in the list do not talk on chat boxes, do not actually acknowledge with a simple ‘like’ maybe even once a year and they still adorn our friend lists. Forgive those who are not the users, who only own an account, but I know of people who are online 24/7 and still do bare minimum to maintain the social courtesy, thereby fuelling fodder to the whole system being an unsocial media.

I suddenly come across people on twitter who amass thousands of followers, not that they would have done any thing to command the same. Their ways are impeccable, they know how to ‘follow’ people and quickly ‘unfollow’ once they get a follow back thereby building a formidable spectrum of followers. It is easy to become a twitter celebrity and the aftermath of it is even more sordid, the person starts to believe he or she is a leader of sorts, amassing these so-called followers who are themselves not even distantly aware of the agenda of the people whom they follow.

I am in the process of rapidly exploring the ways of as to how I can keep the harm to a minimum if and when I leave social media for good. If it were about the people whom I have known or the people who interact with me, I would have kept the tie with the social media intact. However, with the evidence suggesting just the contrary, I feel giving a thought about unfriending the unsocial social media is a thought that may have passed across the minds of many, if not all.

 

 

 

 

On a lonesome path, That I tread everyday,

Seeking company, looking for solace, 

Those lost friends, the departing hands,
A smile holds me back…

I remember the day,
When both of us smiled,
Felt so gay, the hue was the prize,
And now when the pal is gone,
That very smile acts as my beloved song…

Across the stream,
Looking at my my own image in the water,
I ponder at the algae that is layered,
Weren’t those the same,
Upon which we slipped and smiled…

The bridge that we crossed…
over the stream, has now been broken,
the present and the past has been separated
Can’t go back in time,
Can’t reach the past to be with you, can I?

I ask, oh my dear friend,
Will you please build the bridge,
So that we survive as friends,
Will you please give me a gift…
A gift of a bridge, nothing more

For on the bridge,
I shall come,
We shall remember the songs
and sing them together,
Then enliven our friendship forever and ever…

When I was a boy,

I used to peek outside the bus,

And find you there, thought it were a big toy

The symbol of the capital, tall and robust

I look upon it – a wrinkled piece of paper, six by six inches, curled up at its edges, tinged yellow with the passage of time, with pin holes as a result of being fed by some paper-loving insect, very rough to touch as if it would tear if I held it firmly and smelled of ancient paper. A piece of paper indeed that certifies my birth, a valuable proof to the rest of the world that I was born on 15th December, 1970. Forty years ago in a state hospital as has been verified by Dr S Sharma in a scribbled hand writing that looks like a carelessly jotted approval.

Indeed, approval it was of my being, of my breathing and of my crying as a mark of my arrival into this world full of papery formalities. It was a paper of significance to me, my birth certificate.

The summer of 1975, I was trudging back home from school with a green, thickish, smooth and neat piece of paper that our class teacher gave to each one of us during our last period instructing us to escort it safely home. The touch of crispiness and the smell of the new paper made me joyous for a while.

I set off for my home, a walk twenty minutes away in a childish dabbling manner. Dusty it was with no signs of rain, the road was dirty and it was not properly kept. The paper kept dangling in my left hand while my right hand stroked the muddy side wall making a long line as my fingers pressed on the thick layer of dirt that enveloped the wall. I changed my hand and now could see the clean, green, thickish piece of paper had new land marks – a few blots and blemishes courtesy my hand that had lovingly stroked the dirty wall.

I loved the creaky sound as I pressed the paper on to the cemented wall and walked. Smooth, it was in the past, now the green paper had bruises and scars, tears and wounds if you could call them so. The paper given to me by the teacher an hour ago in a brand new face was then a rugged, detestable piece of object looking years older than its real age of an hour.

It started raining. I hurried into a shelter while my hand ventured out in anticipation for the rain that kept pouring. My palm was cusped and it acted as a reservoir for water. After a while it was the turn of another hand and with it the green, thickish paper kept changing the two wet hands adding wrinkles to it and the sign-penned hand writing was now smeared, perhaps purified in rain water – I was pleased.

The door was barged open and I got into my house. Mother came out and asked me, ‘Babu, what is that green paper in your hand?’ I handed the paper to her. She looked at it for a while. I could see through the holes I had made in the paper, the signs of exasperation on her face. Her eyes turned bigger in rage till one of her hands made an impact on my cheeks with a thud. I saw stars. I could not comprehend the reason behind her anger for a while and came to know of the cause only later when she complained to dad about what I had done to my green, thickish report card of the exam during my twenty-minute sojourn to home. Father gave a look of confusion, not knowing whether to laugh or to add a few thuds on my cheeks. For me it was no more than a piece of paper. A lesson learnt – report cards need to be escorted safely back home, at least the slap reminds me so.

August 1980, after having a youthful game of football I came back to home. The radio was on and it talked of some Ronald Reagan visiting some where in the world. Why would I care? I cared for the tasty mutton being cooked in the kitchen and the smell was one of invitation, perhaps rice would go in short supply or maybe not. After all, we were reasonably well-fed. As I guided my play car through the rough terrains of the carpet on the floor, I came across a thin paper, about 3 inches by 1.5 inches, slightly yellowish and was folded twice.

‘What is this Maa?’ I enquired.

‘Keep it safely babu. It is the receipt of your school bill that I paid this afternoon,’ mom replied.

Before mom could react, I had torn the so-called receipt into two and had started exclaiming what use this bloody piece of paper would be when I felt my long hair being pulled in a fist of fury of my mom, carefully picking the torn receipt out of my hand.

Having been the recipient of two smacks on my well-trained back, I thought I would bang the door, lock from inside and skip supper altogether. Albeit the smell of mutton coming from the kitchen made me swallow my ego and sat on the floor remorselessly gazing at the torn receipt.

Dinner was ready and I acted as if I would not join for a while before greed got the better of me and joined every one on the table only to discover that mom, in the episode of fury, had made a perfect mutton curry. Only the salt was missing. I felt it would have been better had I banged the door instead.

The next month, the school fees came in again. The bill claimed that the earlier dues had not been cleared either. Mom searched into the cupboard and took the torn receipt out, glued it in transparent tape and produced it as a proof to the accountant. Bemused, upon being shown a receipt as a proof of paid bills, that too taped and mended like a plastered man with fractured limbs, the accountant reluctantly accepted it and kept it for evidence. I learnt another lesson that day – the receipts are to be kept safely. My well-trained back agreed.

January 1987, it was indeed a harsh winter. My cheeks had cracked at the harshness of this cold onslaught. I went to a photo studio for a photograph to be taken, donning a Nepali cap. It was for my citizenship card. I ventured into the District Administration Office. I was scared when I saw the old, badly-kept building. It looked as if a strong gush of wind would make it fall. I risked my life and promised myself I would run out as soon as the work was done. Deep inside I prayed to the lord to make the so-called building stand erect till I was in there.

I made the application. The officer-in-charge, who was more accustomed to collecting hundred rupee notes than signing the applications complained that the tickets that I had pasted in the form should have been pasted a little lower. He mocked me. Sensing some calamitous gloom, my uncle who was accompanying me made an offer of 50 rupees and the officer found no more faults on the application. He suddenly became polite and asked us to come back in 3 days time for collection.

Three days later, after having queued and risked my life again, I was made a proud owner of another piece of paper, sized about 1.5 inches by 2 inches, with my Nepali cap-clad picture on it as a proof of my being the citizen of the nation. This tiny piece of paper would entail my destiny. It was the citizenship certificate, a piece of paper indeed. Another valuable lesson learnt – a piece of paper certifies your nationality.

February 14, 2001 – the first Valentine’s Day after I got married. At office I kept thinking of returning home to my wife to a warm, lovely, sensuous reception. During shifts of work I imagined how we would indulge in various things and whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. On my way back home, I dropped into a florist’s shop to pick an array of flowers of her choice. I topped that up with some rich brand of chocolates and smiled at the florist thinking of how my wife of 3 months would have decorated the room for us to have a romantic rendezvous. Later in the evening we had planned for some dining out in a romantic restaurant that played the best love ghazals. On my way home I sang ‘Into your lovely arms’ as my heart went aflutter with thoughts of the sweet romance that awaited me. I opened the door and was quite surprised at not finding her at the door to welcome the evening of romances. The lobby where we had planned to dance was not decorated either.

As I turned to the room, I saw her. She looked glum and my avid eyes sensed anger in her eyes. I glanced at the watch to see if I was late. I was ten minutes ahead of the promised time.

‘Here I come for you dear,’ I had just started exclaiming when she picked up a plastic vase with flowers. No, it was not with the sensuousness that I had desired but with a grip that was seemingly searching for its target. Before I could do any thing, thud came the sound as the vase hit my forehead with a swerve that made me see stars yet again.

‘What the hell is this?’ I shouted, about to push her back. Her hand picked up a card and thrust it into my arm, her deadly silence and flared nasal apertures directing me to see that.

‘Dear S,

Dedicated to the beautiful times we had at college. Missing you and your hugs. Happy Valentine’s Day.’

Guess Who?

The hand writing was all too familiar to me. It was sent by Maria, the girl with whom I had years of glorious romance before she chose another guy over me.

I could not comprehend why she chose to wish me on this Valentine’s Day with a message that fetched doom on my enviably perfect on-going honey moon days. Before I could utter any thing she banged the door at me and locked herself into the room.

I was left ruing the fact that pieces of paper continued to spell disaster on my life. My phobia to papers of unique appearances got a boost that day. My Valentine’s Day went diving into the sea and I cursed the piece of paper, indeed the piece of paper. Another lesson learnt that night – past romantic partners need to be notified during one’s marriage, lest doom falls like the one that I experienced on the first Valentine’s Day post marriage.

October 15, 2009 – I received my elderly uncle at the bus station. He must have been around seventy. Normally a friendly soul, he retreats into reclusive status when attacked by two of his known nemesis – piles and an enlarged prostate. Fond of narrating tales during other times, he keeps tabs on the whereabouts of all his relatives.

At home, Ramesh paid a visit during evening. We started catching up with our missed days. Uncle lent an ear to our talks pretending he was busy looking at the picture albums.

‘It has been a long time man. All thanks to facebook we have met again and here we talk!’

‘Oh yeah! In fact, I have met so many of my old friends in it. Did you see Satya’s pictures with his kids?’

‘Really? Satya is on facebook too! Would love to put him in mine’

‘Go ahead, add him man. He is a really bundle of fun.’

‘Yes, man. I remember how madly he was in love during those days with a girl who could not care any lesser about him.’

‘Life is like that man! ’

The evening was fine. We sipped some whiskey with munches. Dinner was good too. Uncle wore a curious look through out. He seemed to be lost in thoughts or perhaps he wanted to ask some thing. I sensed an inquisitive look in his eyes. Night fell on and we slept. The next morning we did some puja. After all, it was festival time.

I could still sense that uncle was deep in thoughts. Before I could ask any thing, I overheard him talking to his accomplice who had come along to help him on the way, just in case.

He was planning to buy some thing. And as I gathered what he wanted to acquire, my eyes remained open and the lips went dry for I knew it was not possible to buy that thing.

He murmured, ‘It seems to be a handy tool. I heard the boys talking about it yesterday. It is a book that has the information and pictures of your friends. On top of that you can keep adding more people info on it.’

‘Is that so?’ an incredulous voice whispered.

‘I shall ask him from where we could get one for ourselves. And we shall see every thing my son,’ the old man quipped.

‘And what is the name of the book grand pa?’

‘It is called the facebook!’ said the old fellow.

The funny bone inside me had been woken alive. I wanted to laugh. But for the fear of mocking him, I controlled myself. For the first time in my life, I would be confronting and answering questions that were not cropped up by some thing papery. In fact, this one came charging upon me for the lack of any paper. How would a village oldie know that the facebook is any thing but a book? I was thinking of all ways that are civil to explain him in layman terms when the inevitable call came.

‘Babu, I need to discuss some thing with you.’

I gulped my own saliva and muttered, ‘Yes uncle! ’ and submitted myself to some thing humorous, sensitive and perhaps uncalled for. I resigned to the fact that there was no piece of paper to save me this time around. I learnt a new lesson – names can be deceiving.