Onion Uttapam : India's Leading Satire Daily

Just back from Mount Road aka Anna Salai after visiting a friend who is head honcho of a leading newspaper's comm division, the lifeline that pours the feed of raw news from all over the world. We go back a long way. From face-to-face, migrating to sporadic landline and then dwindling mobile, to an occasional e-mail now. I wanted news about Tibet and Iran, first-hand, pure and unadulterated. This pal delivered in spades. Over some crispy dosas and filter kapee we joked about the editorial policy that this paper is compelled to follow, despite the editor's personal belief's. Aah, Mammon how vilely doest thee cast your spell.

After the crunchy-munchy, we strolled to Adam's Road, under the metro's clickety-clack groan carrying avid yet rabid cricket fans' clamour and then onto the odours of the Cooum and to the tower of Doordarshan. It was somewhere here I had met a love from a bygone time. He knew it and gently ribbed me about it. I informed him about my new one. He indulged me with a smile and a light hug as only pals can do who have shared time, a large slice of it, and then gone on on the rails of life that ceaselessly pass through bookmarks of humdrum lives. I pestered him with asks about Tibet and Iraq.

Why Iraq?, you may rightfully ask. I had read this in that aseptic room, where the gore, the scream, the laughter, the cry, the coy smile of a flock of birds that rose into the sky on hearing the squelchy rent of a hymen in a field littered with slit throats, the agonised silent-cry of a mother, the wail of a hungry baby, the chuckle of another upon discovering the mysteries of Pi, the ....shucks, forget it. For, the tears come no more, the tears of guilt, the sadness, and the twitching niggle of guilt again at my life where I celebrate Life in all its glory of a new romance.

And whats media got to do with the title of this article? Fuck.. they are it, na. They lead us through the reams of columns of fresh-smelling newsprint on perhaps recycled paper and mostly not recycled and feed us the truths that become lies to a questioning mind that searches through the strands of the web on the altar of their sold consciences. By media, I mean the entire gamut of choices that we have in a wired world that provides us with information of mostly a jaundiced kind and sometimes not. One has to develop the gut instinct akin to a mollusc that uses its snorts to jet away from the predatory tentacle which would devour it otherwise. The media feeds us what is in the best interest of the providers of their daily roti and not ours.

In my inhaled-exhaled breaths through life, I can hear the great Mother's sound in the silence of my soul. That and that alone is the truth. Silence. Listen to its murmur as you steal a few precious breaths for your self and for your's too. As complex as we appear, the more simple we become as we plod on through the drudgery, apparently, intertwined through the wormholes that connect all of us to the umbilical cord of a Momma that we see at dawn as she hurtles on her way to meet the Big Momma of all in the quake of our poor souls that shiver at imagined sins and damnation, at disease and death, at ignoramuses that thrust their ignorances on our faces, at the blind grasps at straws in the ocean that speaks to us through media known and unknown to our benumbed senses. Tibet is just a Shangri-La of some pens' sputtered spout. Unassociated thoughts. Or are they? Ha!!

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