Skip to main content

Prakash Resigns


Fiction

This time Prakash Pande’s resignation was final. The metro train that rolled by parallel to his office on the second floor of a monstrous building in ITO was witness to it.

“Are you sure you aren’t making a mistake?” His boss, Obhijit Choudhary, asked. He had asked the same question a couple of months back when Prakash had tendered his resignation saying that he couldn’t report lie after lie anymore.

“See, Pande,” the Editor-in-Chief Choudhary advised him then, “your resignation is going to make no difference to the policies of the India Chronicle, let alone stir any fat asshole on Parliament Street to make the faintest of a fart. We are sold, man, lock, stock, and barrel.”

Obhijit da counselled Prakash to stay on and understand the system thoroughly so that later when he got the chance he could write a book about it. “You are one of the best journos we have, man,” said Obhijit.

Prakash stayed on. And he went on to foist propaganda in the name of news. Whatever favoured the ruling party found space in the news pages. Whatever went against it found place in the dustbin.

Lies became truths. Falsehood became sacred scriptures. The past was rewritten. The future looked ominous.

Forget Kashmir which can now never be saved, thanks to what we did there in the last four years. Forget demonetisation’s monsters. Forget the endless price rises. Forget the fads like renaming places or erecting statues. Now even the farmers are being sold to the corporate bigwigs. The latest is that the private insurance companies are reaping crores and crores in the name of farmers who are actually dying slow deaths. Praksh couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you going to do now?” Obhijit asked picking up Prakash’s resignation letter.

“Taking up vanvas for a year.”

“Banbas?”

“Going to do B.Ed.”

“Then?”

“The classroom is where the revolution should begin.”

Obhijit Choudhary stared at the young man, the promising journalist, before averting his eyes to look at the Delhi Metro train rolling on a few metres away on its elevated tracks.

“I hope you won’t become a Maoist,” the Editor-in-Chief muttered as if to no one.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Abhijit RayNovember 15, 2018 at 8:54 AM

    Good story. I think no Bengali, self respecting or otherwise, spells Abhijit as Obhijit. But being a noun and a name, we can argue it is my way or highway.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 15, 2018 at 10:30 AM

      We used to have much fun with certain Bengali mannerisms when I was in Shillong. This spelling came from those days. Just a touch of naughtiness.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
24 comments
Read more