Mantralay, the Maharashtra government headquarters, may be the seat of power but its common impression is that of an extremely boring place stuffed with boring people in a bleak, dank environment.
This is largely true but that is only if you are a chance visitor. To a regular, Mantralay is a veritable pit of colourful stories – scandals, affairs, intrigue, politics, and of course the quirks of sundry officers. Each visit peels forth a new character, a new experience and you go home with a richer understanding of human psychology.
Often, it’s difficult for a woman journalist to hang out with the officers. They are as wary of you as you are. But if you make the equation clear in the first few meetings, many get comfortable enough to share some of their official secrets with you.
Last year, I wrote a series of stories for a leading English daily on how the chief minister was targeting a senior IAS officer because the officer refused to help the CM’s son get a piece of land at a concessional rate. The editor egged me on to drive a virtual campaign, prompting many a disgruntled colleague to decide that it was the officer who was leaking out these investigative stories to me.
O for life to be so simple! The officer was out of the job and had no access to any files. More pertinently, wouldn’t he have leaked out these stories to other journalists he knew rather than me, who he came to know only after I wrote the big stories?
Some day, I should be able to talk about it. My calling often makes life exciting. For one sensitive story I was working on, the source was in another town. He didnt want to leave any trail. So, we created a fictitious email ID called `deepthroat’ and shared secret data through this ID. The password was funny too and made our target very clear. Each time he or I had something important to say, we would use this ID to which both of us had access.
In another instance, when a source suspected his phone line was being tapped, I changed my name—only for him. Each time I called him, I would identify myself as X, a name he was familiar with but his family wasn’t, so they would want to know who I am and what I wanted. Thankfully, he took his family into confidence soon enough.
Once a colleague heard me calling this person and got highly suspicious when she heard me identifying myself as X. She gave me curious looks for a long time after that. It is another matter that my husband, who should be more concerned, was least ruffled when he heard me announcing my new name on the home phone to the source.
Even the people we meet would make great copy if we were allowed to write about them. One senior bureaucrat, who was sidelined for all important posts, had this reflective air about him. He would speak in clipped tones, be very proper but dwell mostly in a dream world of his own making. Ask him a question and he was most likely to ponder politely and tell you very purposefully that he would not be able to answer it. The man has just retired.
I have a peculiar relationship with another one. Each meeting of ours starts with fireworks but by the time I leave, we are best pals. Till we meet again.
A serving officer, he is high strung as hell. Self-important with an air of smugness that tears out a mile to irritate you, he occupies a crucial seat of power. So meeting him is sometimes inevitable. If you are given an august audience with him at all, you are accosted first with his grim face bearing this look of if-it-wasn’t-for-me-the-world-would-collapse and you-better-look-grateful. Crisply, he arches one eyebrow and mouths, ``Yes?’’ with pursed lips and some contempt laced with exaggerated politeness.
I offer a faint smile (after fighting a kiddish impulse to stick out my tongue at him and turn heel), valiantly sit across his table and breathe (rather, exhale). The first time I met him, I told him I wanted to see for myself whether certain measures they had promised the high court were in place. That set him off. ``What do you mean, you want permission to see? Nobody is permitted to enter that place,’’ he snapped.
Each time, he dismisses any query summarily like a court of law deciding my fate. And each time, our progress report reads like a painstakingly well-set regimen. First, he embarks on a long session of media bashing, how he doesn’t care for the media and how he doesn’t need them and how he need not have entertained the media – all different ways of saying the same thing and telling me he craves attention.
Then, he informs me how he is a man of his own making and how he was once a media person himself but how things have now changed and how we are all a bunch of morons (no, he doesn’t quite say the word) -- all through which you keep your lips pursed because he gives you no room to interrupt. There’s no point looking offended because he is so taken up with his own speech he is not looking. At some point, I feel like pleading for mercy or fleeing but my professional dedication keeps me rooted.
The third stage: I face the brunt of every single media misdeed of the past 15 years (or maybe 20). At last, at weary last, when I can’t keep up the pretence any more, professional interests be damned, I tell him off too. Each time he utters a syllable, I snap at him with all the dignity I can muster, and this goes on for a merry five or ten whole minutes. At some point, I am struck by the bizarreness of the situation: Here I am, sitting across my host of the moment, with a glass of water offered by him in my hand and yelling away at him but refusing to budge.
The last stage: Providence takes pity and he gets gentler. Almost as if someone had knocked him on this head, M'lord turns Mr Hyde, decides to relent and give me my information. ``Here’s the information. You can use what you like.’’ Now, why couldn’t he have done this half an hour ago and saved us both this wear and tear?
Relieved, I smile, ask a couple of questions which he readily replies and we part grinning and beaming, putting the ugly past behind us like true sportsmen.
I naturally assume this friendship is for keeps but come the next time and he is back to his dour self. I am getting old and can’t keep up. So now, I just tip-toe my way past his chamber with a lot of reverence, and decide to miss a story rather than face one more unseasonal blast.

I have been pondering over life (and death consequently) the past few months. Though I nurse a tendency to plunge into such deliberations often, my chaotic life largely keeps me away from any serious ascetic pursuit.
A recent illness and an enforced two-month home stay, with some help from those awful drugs, got me into researching the meaning of life. And inevitably, as it always happens, my mental gymnastics-- extrapolating the theory of relativity to the theory of life and so on -- dragged me into the forbidden territory of the philosophy of karma.
During my graduation, I had done a paper on Bhagvad Gita which has karma -- specifically nishkaamkarma -- as its central theme. Right from those days, I have had a healthy disbelief for karma as we are taught today.
While I never cease to wonder at nature and its laws, karma escapes me completely. My sisters, steeped into spirituality, try to convince me it is as scientific as everything else. But somehow, karma fails to impress me when I look around and think. I know I am not qualified but let me still present my agony.
If karma is taken as the simplistic theory of `as you sow, so shall you reap', why are the baddies of the world so happy in life? I know very few people who are good and have not suffered immeasurably. One sterling example would be a Gandhian who virtually ran the Mahavir International Centre near Dahanu. I got to know Manibhai Patel thanks to my social worker mother. The man was a gem of a person and epitomised nishkaamkarma in every way. All his life, he toiled for the tribals, took care of the ashram and radiated a peace and calm that I have yet to sense in anybody else. Having left his home at a tender age to work for society, he had the ashram as his family.
Blessed with a robust, hard-working body and an equanimous mind, he enjoyed good health till his late eighties. When Manidada fell sick, my faith in humanity, and later nature, was shattered beyond redemption. The man who held the place together for 50-60 years suddenly became an outcaste. He couldnt move nor talk clearly. This made it impossible for him to communicate. Each time he attempted to express himself, he would weep tears of frustration. For the next two years, I watched him shrink into a shadow of his former self. My heart sank each time I saw him. But he suffered silently and offered a smile whenever he was asked about his health. ``Saaru chhe,'' he would mumble valiantly.
The ashram took care of him as they would an inmate at a hospital. I could see he was aching for homely care and warmth as there was little else one could do for him. When he died five years ago, I received the news with tears and a sense of relief that he was now past the torture of living.
I want to know why should someone who has never hurt a fly suffer so much? I have seen my maternal grandparents, who were literally worshipped in their erstwhile village and were known for their angelic nature and austere lifestyle, face a similar fate. Both of them suffered the agony of ill-health for over a decade before giving in. These are but a few examples.
The believers tell me the good suffer so that they can achieve moksha -- or salvation. No more rebirths for them. They say they exhaust all their leftover karma in this birth.
But, salvation at what cost? What about the others who don't live so pure a life. Why do they get easy lives and easier deaths? So that they pay for ALL their karma in the next life? Why won't they suffer their karma, at least some, in this birth?
Each time I wrong someone, am I paying him back for what he did to me in one of my previous births or am I creating fresh karma?
If karma is as simplistic as this, how do you explain the positive and negative energies that charge the universe? You may have noticed sometimes you curse someone, the curse actually lands. Or, when someone wishes you ill, you do suffer. I have experienced the latter several times (though sadly, not the former!)
How come all the good people are paying for their sins of past births and the bad people are usually an arm's length away even from bad breath?
You may have seen people who pray to gods and godmen, people who wear healing stones, do pujas and yagnas, benefit. So, what happens to their retribution? Where do their bad karmas vanish? If gods get appeased and forgive you so easily, karma loses its sanctity. If bad karma can be absorbed by incense sticks and pujas, why bother to be good?
I have no answers but lots more questions. For some other time.

PS: Posting a comment by a friend, Durgesh Kasbekar from Canada, through my login as he couldnt get through. Some others too have written saying they dont have a blog but do have a comment. As Durgesh's comment seemed to add value, thought it needs to be posted.

For a country known for its seamless acceptance and tolerance (in these stressful times) of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-dimensional societal fabric, the burning of Deccan Queen by Dalit `protestors' bodes ill.
The systematic protests all over Maharashtra over the Khairlanji episode (in which Dalit women belonging to one family were allegedly gangraped by some casteist villagers) are a big mystery. Intelligence agencies are trying to figure out the whodunit but have no answers yet. They point out wisely that no Dalit leader commands that kind of a following which will wreak havoc on notice.. and adequate notice was clearly given. The incidents spelt the antithesis of spontaneity and of course, came a bit late in the day.
The bigger surprise, to me, was the media. I am told the local media in Nagpur played up images of the dead women's naked bodies (yes, actually!) for days on end, playing on public sentiment and effectively stoking the fire of casteist resentment. The English media, forever haughty, lost little time in tut-tuting and condemning the incident but refused to probe any further. For God's sake, the incident was in a back-of-the-beyond place which no Mumbaikar could possibly care about, could they? Why waste too much newsprint and newsgathering effort on such matters?

There cannot be two opinions about the fact that the crime was gross beyond words but I have a different worry. The media has been less than accurate on some aspects of its reporting. And that makes it guilty of having fuelled a partly non-existent fire.
I'm trying to get documentary evidence of how we could have been misled about one brutal part of the Khairlanji incident. If I don't get the evidence, I promise to hint about it here. If do, I'll write about it here too but only after my paper publishes it. So, watch this space..