PEN AND THE SWORD

(Extracts from a school boy's summer holiday diary) The school teachers keep reverberating the same questions every alternate year without knowing how tiring and uninteresting it is to appear in the examinations.'Pen and the sword', 'A village fair', 'A railway journey' keep repeating like poor report cards intentionally published by schools every December. Don't they upgrade themselves like my friend upgrades his cell-phone every winter? A pen is no more made of steel or such durable material. It's made from plastic these days and cracks even when it falls over a bale of stacked cotton. I love my class teacher so much that my heart refuses to use even a single dirty word against him. Otherwise I would have met Mr.Stuartson, the Principal and told him that he holes up a pair of dinosaur's testicles in his skull vault. He still believes that his pen is mightier than the sword. It's not just bull-shit, it's the dirty smelling shit my nearby slum dwellers evacuate at the pavement edges. My father is another such empty vaulted dinosaur like my class teacher. Last year when the dipsomaniacs from my nearby slum came for a festival bonus without earning it, my goddam father refused. They slapped him twice on the face believing that a professor might need two slaps for the memory engram to work. But it did not. He straight went to Mr.Dobson the chief law-keeper. The law keeper was having a vertigo he suffers every saturday night from the medicine he takes, prescribed by his doctor friend, an honour'ble member of the supreme bureau belonging to my honour'ble country. My father didn't know that Dobson was a left handed strong bull. Dobson gifted him one slap on right side of his face and angrily snatched the pen my father kept in his pocket. 'Writing a complaint?.....' uttering, he tore the letter my father carried to his office. With a sixty kilometers an hour blow to the pen, Dobson broke open the cap and pushed it's nib into the wooden table. 'See what I have done to your pen, it now looks like a silver beaked kingfisher', he said and left the room.

(from wikimedia commons)

He came back the next moment, still smelling. 'Do you know this?' ,he asked, pointing at his holster. 'This is a sword, a modern day sword. Its getting smaller and smaller, like your laptop', he uttered, 'Its my pen too, it doesn't write I know but it can make holes. 'You can write with holes too' he laughed.

NOBEL AND NOBILITY

Once a cricket frenzy friend of mine asked me, "Do you know who the best judge is to decide when a batsman should be discharged leg-before-wicket?" It was a difficult question indeed knowing well that half of such decisions invited controversies. Not much aware of the game, I used my intelligence and replied with confidence, "The wicket-keeper", believing he is the only man looking staright into the ball and positioned exactly behind the batsman. "No" was the bold reply from my honour'ble friend. His lightning, disgruntled behaviour just floored me. Sharp came the right answer which I haven't even dreamt of. "It's the batsman himself", he said. But the irony is, how many such batsmen we know have walked away before the umpire had raised his finger? I know of one such living person who has the courage but had never dared to express. But courage without it being delivered is of little value. It's Barrak Obama, the American President. He knows that he is not worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize but he lacks the strength to express. He is an intelligent man who ought to know whether he is treading the right path or not. The road; one less travelled by, he took, only a few months back is no more with him. He may be remembered in the history books to be the first black President of "guardians" of this unholy world but the book likely is to be a "cartoon book". Its October of 2009 and its high time before the bells ring in second week of December. Let the man rise from his humble chair and show the world, the astonishing strength of the color of his skin and genuflect before the world saying, " Let me be the first to refuse the prize which I know am not worthy of". He may then find the whole world genuflecting before him with tears in their eyes.