The Young India

Kartikey Sehgal

Many people pursue higher (master’s) education without thought

We often study to stay away from our passions*. Studying is comfortable and acceptable for parents as it lives up to their ideal of coping-with-the-west. Pursuing activities other than the hobby of studying makes them terrified and often violent. They are not proper parents in the sense that they will not encourage the child to do what his heart desires. Any extra-curricular activity must be an appendage to the ultimate goal of…

Kartikey Sehgal

A conversation on the decision to die.
C and J.

“Want to inform you that I’ll commit suicide”, said C.
“Commit suicide…hmmm…” J muttered to himself, bit his upper lip and then relaxed.

A moment later, C put himself in the chair. Their black coats were the only colour in vicinity.

“Ok, let’s get over it. Reasons”
“Reason. My will has been amputated. I am not my person”, said C.

“So you know the reason. Extend…

Samata Agrawal

A Red-vented Bulbul has built a petit nest on the sleeping fig ficus bush that grows from a pot in the balcony. There are three or may be four babies of that bulbul lying like some chunks of meat in the nest. They vigilantly guard their home day and night long and feed the new-born from their beaks – which is all they pretty much do. Hard, soiled and pointed beak; it traps minute bugs which it transfers…

Kartikey Sehgal

[Fiction]

I dance to Tango. Only, I don’t know what it is. I had seen it once, in some movie. They raise their skirts, maybe they do. But that’s not the reason I liked Tango. The song had a bitter-sweet quality; like you celebrate the birth of a baby while reminiscing about your lover’s death. While the heart sings for the baby, the mind wishes the olden moments of love.

The dance watchers—who don’t dance—clap for the dancers. Then they…

Kartikey Sehgal
“I held his hand for a few seconds but the waves pulled him inside”, says Siddharth Patil, a lifeguard at Mumbai’s Aksa Beach at Mudh Island, where a man lost his life while swimming in high tide waves at around 1 p.m. on Sunday, April 26.

Siddharth was tired and angry after his attempt. “I had warned them twice to not go into the water but they are like animals; they don’t pay any heed to safety.” Siddharth claims that this is the first drowning in six months at the beach that is known for death by drowning.

Kartikey Sehgal
I cannot accept the mirth of trivialities. Of a living below life. I’d rather joke with the honest labourer whose design on the wet brick is hardened by the sun; harmony between nature and men.

But I am given, and society has ordained, the acceptance of rooms without sunlight, precision defined within dark windows and glass doors.