Life and Lies of M R Maiti

   Normally, I abstain from political talks but it has become harder to do so these days. Whenever I log in to my Facebook account, my news feed is filled with what’s going on in the country these days and more often than not, those posts seem ludicrous to me; mostly about the ones that the people, these days, have come to call ‘intolerance’. One party says that the country is intolerant; in reply, the other party says it isn’t. Some return awards while a few notable ones are asked to leave the country. The talks of ‘intolerance’ have unbelievably left the talks about Cricket behind.    A widow returns her husband’s medal ‘coz a terrorist goes unpunished, that I can understand. I can empathise with her rage and disappointment. But this I don’t understand; so many learned people returning their own awards. It’s no less than an insult to return the honour they have been given.    People ask: why our PM is silent? The answer would be: ‘coz he’s busy working. I find people jok

       A moonless night it was, although one could hardly sense the lunar absence. All around shimmered lights of different colours. Now and then, the sky erupted with bursts of various hues. Also, the night was noisy. Sudden blasts of sound, a boom here and a boom there echoed the surroundings. Each boom accompanied a puff of smoke which rose higher and higher and then melted into nothingness. For night gazers across the country, apparently, the night sky was overwhelmingly full of meteor showers; some of these just raced across the sky and exploded while the others broke into streaks of light that pattered the sky and faded away. These, however, differed from the usual ones in one regard; these meteors originated from the ground, not the sky. And not so surprisingly, a few gave away miniature parachutes after exploding.    The night lengthened. The lady was on a tight schedule; visiting millions of houses across the country in a single night was a big deal for one person, n