Office Office

One more hour to wait.
Then will be out of the gate.

The hardest part of work,
is to pretend you’re working hard.
You can only work on so many excels,
or shuffle so many business cards.

I’m bored of Facebook,

I have nothing to tweet,

Now I need my coffee,

and something sweet to eat.

Like always, here’s a group of four,

Gossiping, backbiting,

Never enlightening,

Telling lies, but calling it “true story”.,

Just to achieve coffee time glory,

Back at my desk, I look at my watch,

Just to realize, there is still 30 minutes,

That will drive me nuts,

Just when I think that the day is over,

The client calls and asks for a favor,

Asking for another plan to be  sent,

Oh no, one more hour to be spent…

Every day, we take this jaunt,

For satisfying a basic want

When my dad asks me, aisa kyun haal hai?

I say, “Paapi pet ka sawaal hai”

*Views expressed are necessarily not mine, but general observations :)

Fear of Unknown

My eyes scan the surroundings,

Looking for the old nemesis

I cannot explain

this mysterious pain

Someone please help, make this go away,

For I cannot take this one more day

When everything around is fine,

I do not know why do I worry so much all the time

Just when I started to be happy and free,

The feeling again crept upon me

All I want to do is scream and shout

As I feel there is no way out,

I know you people won’t understand,

But this is not who I’m

As the days go by,

I feel worse and worse,

So many things have gone wrong,

It is just hard to stay strong

THE TENANT HUNT

On an average I get about 50 – 60 calls a day, of which, several are from unknown numbers. One such call from an unknown number flashed on my screen at about 5:30 pm today. I should say that the phone call left me feeling very uneasy about myself. The 4 minute conversation has left me thinking if I’m indeed the “forward thinking” guy living in a metropolitan city.

The caller was a guy called Abu who was interested in my renting my apartment in Mira road. Due to the housing society rules and fear of unknown on my part, I ended up telling him that the flat is let out only to Hindus. He promptly apologized for having “wasted my time”

What is in a name? You may ask. Well, if you are a Muslim, try getting a house on rent in Mumbai, The city that never sleeps, the financial capital of India is divided over religion and cast behind the veneer of glamour. It is a daunting task for a non-Hindu, especially a Muslim, to go about looking for a house on rent. While there are enough and more flats available, they are out of bounds for Muslims due to a multitude of reasons.

 In the forward-looking India, secularism has become a slave of religious lobbies. Religious open-mindedness is measured in economic and cultural terms. Ironically, the Muslims who are aired as examples of the ‘good’ ones are not in a position to speak on behalf of a large community  who live lives of abject poverty and fear.

They are also dehumanized by the media. The media creates the larger part of most people’s reality here and they look to it as almost the sole source of their information and reality and wait to be told what to think  The world media has portrayed minority communities as being opposed to modernity, women, and world peace. Such ideas have percolated deeply everywhere, including India, and destroyed the centuries-old bonds of friendship and tolerance. The state should make efforts through the media and educational programmes to change this scenario. Political parties should ask their cadres to propagate Hindu-Muslim unity.  Only persistent and organized effort with a considerable measure of internal order and purposeful orientation, maintaining group solidarity, a successful political activism can yield results.

Just to let whoever is reading this blog, I’m yet to find a tenant L