The Power of Prayer
About three weeks into my incarceration in Udaipur Jail, in the biting cold of January, I woke up one night in Barrack No. 10 shaking uncontrollably with fever. Even under four blankets I was shivering like I had no clothes on. The men sleeping beside me, found extra blankets for me. I took a paracetamol and hoped it would pass.
It didn’t.
The next morning I went to the prison hospital. They had no thermometer. They checked my oxygen and said I was fine. I told them they must be joking. I suffer from axial spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune condition, and high fever can be dangerous for me. The doctor finally wrote a note allowing me to be taken to a hospital.
But no one came.
First the police were busy protecting a VIP. Then they were busy managing a tribal fair. Day after day I waited in the barrack. My days were filled with pain. My nights with fever.
After a point I realised I wasn’t going anywhere.
So I did the only thing I could. I stopped eating oil and salt, drank as much water as I could, and sat before a large painting of the Devi in the barrack.
And I prayed.
I said, “If you exist… if my prayers to you have ever meant anything… show me a miracle. I don’t want to die here. My children need me. My wife needs me. My 90-year-old father needs me.”
Every day I prayed.
And slowly… something changed.
The fever began to reduce. The pain slowly eased. Day by day I began to recover.
One morning I looked at the Devi and simply said, “Thank you for giving me my life.”
Fifteen days later a few policemen finally arrived to take me to the hospital.
I laughed.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “you are about fifteen days too late. You are probably looking at my ghost.”
Later I asked an officer what they would have done if it had been an emergency.
He said casually, “Oh, then we would have sent you with the prison guards.”
So they could have sent me all along.
Maybe they chose not to.
Or maybe God wanted me to learn something first.
So when people say there is no God, I don’t argue.
I simply smile.
Because some miracles are only visible to the person who needed them.
(Longer version on Facebook)
The Genesis of Loneliness
Loneliness does not begin when people leave you.
It begins when you leave yourself.
We are all born as one person.
A child does not pretend.
He laughs when he feels like laughing.
He cries when he is hurt.
He says what he feels.
Then the world teaches you how to live.
Be strong.
Be polite.
Don’t cry.
Don’t react.
Don’t show too much.
Don’t be weak.
Slowly, another person is born.
The one the world can accept.
You learn to smile when you are angry.
You learn to stay quiet when you want to scream.
You learn to say “I’m fine” when something inside you is breaking.
And the more you do this,
the further you move away from yourself.
Then comes the life we show everyone.
Pictures.
Success.
Celebrations.
Perfect moments.
The outside becomes louder.
The inside becomes silent.
Until one day, the real you is no longer living outside at all.
He is somewhere inside… locked away.
But he never disappears.
He waits.
And he has a habit of calling out at the worst possible time.
In the middle of laughter.
In the middle of success.
In the middle of people who think they know you.
He says,
“Look at me.
This is you.
Not that.
This.”
And when you hear that voice, even for a moment,
everything you built to survive starts to feel like a prison.
Maybe loneliness is not about being alone.
Maybe loneliness is when you can no longer live as the person you truly are.
There has been a great deal of noise about the personal lives of Vijay and Trisha Krishnan. I do not know whether the rumours online are true or not. But if they are, then I feel compelled to say a few things.
My recent incarceration has made me understand the value of freedom. What it is to crave a cup of tea that is not going to come. What it is to hunt for a tube of toothpaste. What it is to wait for seven in the evening, when the bail applications come in.
But there is a worse incarceration. It is the incarceration of the human soul. The incarceration of happiness. When two people remain trapped in a relationship that has run its course, but society insists that the relationship must continue; that too is a prison.
I have been on both sides of that equation. I have been somebody’s fool, and I have been fooled. In other words, I have been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. The human heart is fallible. It goes where it finds happiness. It came together to find happiness and its going away to find happniness
Speaking for myself, I would walk out of a loveless relationship. I might walk out with money. I might walk out with property. But most importantly, I would walk out with my honour and my dignity.
I find something admirable in Vijay and Trisha. There is dignity in not pretending that something does not exist. There is dignity in not hiding love as though it were something sinful.
We all know the other kind of life that people live.Men who run anonymous profiles on dating sites. Men who delete their messages before they get home.
Men who spend afternoons with women they will never respect enough to acknowledge publicly. And yet it is often these very people who sit in judgment over others.
Individually, most of us are compassionate people. We understand weakness. We understand heartbreak. We understand the complicated nature of love. But something changes when we become a collective. In a crowd, we suddenly become sinless. We become righteous. We become judges. And that is when empathy disappears.
Their films belong to us. Their personal lives do not. I will always stand for the freedom of the human heart.
They have a right to live and to love.
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When Sushant passed away, the first thing that went viral wasn’t condolences.
It was a picture of his body.
Then came images of Vinod Khanna in hospital. Rishi Kapoor in hospital. Private, vulnerable moments turned into public spectacle
I thought it was shocking.
I thought it was insensitive.
But I still didn’t understand the cruelty of it.
Not until my mother was in the ICU.
When the doctor told me she had sepsis…
When he told me she was “running a marathon while sitting still”…
When he asked me to meet her “one last time” before the ventilator…
I realised what true vulnerability looks like.
Her last look.
Her helpless eyes.
Her hand in mine.
That moment is sacred to me.
And when I saw the leaked ICU video of Dharam ji, something in me broke.
I was back in that room with my mother…
And I felt violated.
The worst kind of human is the one who turns someone else’s tragedy into entertainment.
The one who films a dying person.
The one who forwards that video.
The one who watches it out of curiosity.
The market for such cruelty exists because we feed it.
Every time we watch, we encourage the next person to record.
Every time we forward, we participate in the violation.
Every time we consume tragedy as content, we lose a part of our humanity.
If we allow ourselves to become voyeurs of pain, we lose the ability to feel compassion. We lose the instinct to protect the vulnerable. We lose our soul.
It has to stop.
The power is in our hands.
All we need is the courage to stop watching.
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