Playing with electrons

 As India is battling a brutal humanitarian crisis, any adjective such as 'pathetic', 'abysmal', 'horrible', 'awful', 'catastrophic' or any such word, falls short to describe the misery that has befallen upon our society. Each moment is filled with uncertainty, with fear. Fear of us being that person in the newspaper or TV who's sobbing beside a dead body of their loved one, or of someone in a PPE kit lighting the funeral pyre in a crowded crematorium. Or worse, the fear of waiting for a loved one (struggling for oxygen) to die. This fear is amplified when your loved ones aren't with you, but thousands of kilometers apart.  The front page of the Hindu  (to which I subscribe, in print) is filled with only  covid-related news. Every day. The forwards in Whatsapp, the video clips in Twitter, the photos in the news - they only reinforce my belief that the God of Death is himself roaming on the streets. His soldiers are everywhere in India, mo

(I wrote parts of it in February, parts of it in March, and the last part in April. So, when I say 'last month', it may mean Jan/Feb/March! As usual, grammatical bugs & typos may please be excused.) Moran is a small town in Assam, split between Sibsagar and Dibrugarh districts. It lies on the primary national highway NH-37 that runs through the state of Assam like its spinal cord.  About a month back, in the soft sunshine of a late February morning at Moran, as I was inclining against a white Toyota Innova decorated with flowers, an elderly person in his 60s approached me in his rather simple attire. I was part of a bride's envoy that was cruising between two districts separated by 7 hours' of road trip on either side of the mighty Brahmaputra, the bride in this case being my (cousin) sister. She was going to be dropped off at her in-law's place, a classic 'bride adieu' trip in our culture. The envoy had stopped at Moran to get tea and snacks, and our cu