Real staff
The church bells will ring a merry peal at the stroke of midnight on December 31 to welcome the New Year. Many will dance to the tune of Bollywood numbers and consume a peg or two of firewater. Many others will drain the dregs of their glass. This is how the New Year’s Eve is generally celebrated. The ups and downs usually happen every year and, at the end of it, when people look back on what they did last year and what went wrong they feel the coming year will be better than the last year. As 2021 is set to bid adieu, the people in the city have planned to drink life to the lees to welcome 2022, as the year did not begin well. The year saw thousands of people dying because of covid-19 which also shattered the economy of many countries across the world. The cloud of Omicron, a vicious variant of the virus covid-19, is hovering over the city. Yet, that should not come in the way of hoping for the best in the coming year. The other day, a retired bureaucrat quoted William Shakespeare to speak about the coming year: “Hope is a lover's staff; walk hence with that. And, manage it against despairing thoughts.”
Stone speaks!
The home guard line on the Jail Road in the city was festooned with a cloud of white dust. A group of people was working under that dust cover. Their clothes were almost white with the powder emanating from pieces of sandstone. A cursory look, however, revealed the story of the cloud of dust. They were making sculptures, chiseling stones. A world-class sculptor in the state capital, Robin David, with other sculptors from different parts of the country, was there. They were preparing for an exhibition, ‘Anavrit’. Books, homes, Kamdhenu (sphinx or half-cow-half-woman form), were being carved out of sandstones from Gwalior. The site, with those stone carvings, looked like an ancient Roman city. A sculptor makes a piece of stone speak, as his magical hands breathe emotions into it. A man, standing on the ground and looking at the carvings, commented: It seemed all those carvings had suddenly begun to express themselves.
Hasan Zaidi |
Giving warmth
The people in the state capital have long waited for winter rain. And it happened on Tuesday. A thick fog has covered the city. Ergo it is expected to be a chilly year-end. There are many people, dwelling in the pavements. Most of them even do not have proper clothes to chill the biting cold. The number of shelters or that of ‘Rain Baseras’ available in the city is not enough to house all those people. To provide some relief to those people, a group of students from Gautam Nagar area in the city have recently collected rugs and woolens to distribute them among the pavement dwellers. One of the students has said that every winter they distribute woolens and rugs among the poor. Most of these students are outsiders. So, when a group completes their education and leaves the city, their juniors take it upon themselves to hand out clothes. This practice has been going on for several years, but those students never speak about it to anyone. The other day, an elderly person said, “People should learn a lesson from these children and help them by contributing woolens for distribution among the roofless.”
Tailpiece
A man enters a library in Bhopal. He finds an elderly person sitting in front of many cupboards containing books.
The man asks him: Sir, for how many years have you been keeping books? Did you learn bookkeeping in school?
The elderly person replied: I have always been a student of science, and never learnt bookkeeping, which is a commerce subject.
