Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB Bhola ke dekhe la Bekal bhel jiyara… Sense behind the devotional non-sense By Dev N Pathak The month of sawan (Shravana) is approaching fast. Onset has been signalled by the monsoon. Cool gusts of wind caress novice foliage and intermittently wandering clouds dot the skylines. Humidity has replaced the extreme sun-heat. Also varieties of insects have begun to germinate leaps and bounds. The life threatening mosquitoes pose the same menace as that of yesteryears. Failure of gutter and drain management is consistent refrain for the citizens in their... 

Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB Mahatma, Media and Majboori: Political Sociology of Contemporary India By Dev N Pathak Somewhere in the middle of last decade, the state of Bihar announced that Baba Ramdev is official health ambassador of Bihar. He was already popular with masses. The windmill of mythologization and folklorization was on. Villagers and small-town dwellers began to dub him a saviour. Ordinary illiterate women in villages chanted his name along with the names of deities from Hindu pantheon. Semi-literate women sat in Sukhasana (an easier sitting posture in Yoga)... 

Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB Bicycle Dairy of an unsung revolutionary Bilat Bandhu By Dev N Pathak He is a regressive iconoclast of the highest order, from a modernist perspective. And a lot of him reminds us of folk-peasant nuisance. With an irritating grin he reformulates age old sacred adage into a ‘jack of all trades, can be master of at least one’. The explanation for this is owed to the peasants’ logic- if you sow various seeds in one field, at least one crop would be successful if not all. To our rational mind this mathematics pinches, to our sophisticated sense this... 

Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB Balatkaar- rape of conscience in Bhatta Parsaul in UP: New Middle Class and its nonsense! By Dev N Pathak Kya yaha koi Balatkar hua hai (has here somebody been raped)- asked that pretty young thing (PYT). She was a special correspondent packed off to Bhatta Parsaul in UP to examine the validity of Rahul Gandhi’s sensational act/announcement. I take the liberty and invite you to indulge in a little conjectural gossip: that evening, the newsrooms in Delhi were abuzz with a singular-universal anxiety- how could Rahul Gandhi know what we in the media... 

Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB Roots of Nostalgia in Bihar: what makes patriarchy a successful institution? By Dev N Pathak I wish Sigmund Freud had an Indian mother. Just imagine him as an infant, frolicking around his motherly woman, who often happened to be a muse for Raja Ravi Verma’s portrayal. Nagging her and being slammed here and there, he would have grown into a different kind of psychoanalyst. His theory/thesis would have been qualitatively different. The bliss of hiding behind that woman’s body, clutching on the end of the border of her cotton Saari, peeping out to... 

Dev N Pathak Dear home: Letters from an NRB ‘Than-than Gopal’ in Switzerland: In a Prejudiced Perspective By Dev N Pathak Than-than Gopal, as a vernacular proverb, refers to humorous state of penury; deprived of very many fundamentals and yet proclaiming to be in the heaven; ill at ease with the cost of living in the paradise and yet celebrating the same; and so on so forth. To begin with, here are a couple of brief biographical stories, followed by a slice of University life, and interspersed with questionable Indian adulation of everything that belongs to Europe. There is no guarantee... 

Dev N Pathak Dear Home:letters from an NRB Roots of the Uprooted: dilemma of Grierson’s Bihari By Dev N Pathak To confess at the outset about my disloyalty to the modern mode of reckoning, I must relate the fogginess about my origin. As it is with many of the old-timer parents in small towns, my birth was not subject to the bureaucratic recording. Hence, I don’t know the exact date and time when I was born. However, Maa always satisfied my ‘biographical curiosity’, not useful even for a negligible footnote in history, by putting it in the frame of folklore- in the sadar hospital of...