If an year were to be a day, then today marks a week since I lost Baba, my father.

Let me rephrase that. Baba got reabsorbed, scattered, into the elements whence he had been made. Molecules, which once comprised him, are now in the air, water and soil. Baba is in the Arabian Sea and the water which evaporates from it and travels as the monsoon cloud across the continent. Baba is in the rain which brings nourishment and revival to parched land and sweaty brow. Baba is in the air which sustains all things. Baba is in a molecule of iron which will fortify a carrot, a carbon atom in the sweet sugars of an alphonso mango, a mote of nitrogen in a protein strand called DNA which is the stuff of life. Baba is here and there, in you, and in me, in passing into eternity, he has returned to the immortality which we are all guaranteed.

This, in essence, was how Baba understood rebirth and continuity, objective enough to survive the most rigorous scientific scrutiny, subtle enough to invoke wonderment in the most jaded of cynics.

Baba valued one virtue above all others: Scepticism. Everything had to be questioned. Why was it the way it was? Could it have been another way? What caused it to happen? What is likely to happen next? This critical lens was often turned upon himself. However, the questions were always unexceptionably kind. The idea was to understand, not assign blame.

His exploring eye took in every possible field of endeavour. He loved art, representational or abstract, in all its still and plastic forms. With him, I learned the right way of looking at Hussain and Pyne, with him I pondered Rodin's Thinker. He laughed with me as we read long passages from "Meet Mr. Mulliner" or "Jabberwocky" together. He led me to George Gamow's 1, 2, 3, Infinity. And to Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, bringing alive the wonders of Mathematics and Physics and the wonderment he felt as a part of the Universe which turns upon and observes itself. He could compare the Shukla and Krushna Yajurved one moment and Kukubh Bilawal and Bilaskhani Todi in the next. He was a baby when he was with the little ones; they took to him instantly, perhaps because they saw his guilelessness and innocence. But when he spoke to Jayant Naralikar about the Chandrasekhar Limit, the physicist was left wondering how a lay person could speak about it with such authority.

His prowess with the Times of India crossword (later inherited by Economic Times) was such that he would solve it all in his mind, then, picking up a pencil, fill in all the squares at the intersections of Across and Down, because he hoped, fruitlessly, that some day I too would pick the paper, and find my path to loving the puzzle through cracking clues using the hints and tips the filled squares gave me. His preternatural skills with Mental Mathematics would stun even the keenest Vedic Maths aficionados: he could cube three digit numbers in his head!

His otherworldliness ensured that his gigantic mind was never intimidating and never ever used to humiliate anyone, no matter the provocation.

His name was Ratnakar, the Ocean of Priceless Jewels. I am what I am because some of the lustre and coruscation rubbed off.

It is 16.15 now and I must stop, because it is exactly 7 years since his spirit wafted away.

Purity is piffle (and racial purity is a nazi's most obvious 'tell')

It appears that scientific scepticism, emphasis on dialogue over hostility, openness to new ideas, assimilation of diverse cultural strands- no matter where they originated- a 'liberal' (don't miss the quotes) mind, is now emblematic of a Nehruvian conspiracy to drown out alternative theses that represented the 'real' India. These alternatives, I believe, involve much more धर्म and परंपरा and diverge sharply from the fake consensus that was really in the nature of leftist propaganda. We have been duped and our minds are contaminated. An epic 'cleansing' or 'purification' of our minds, and nothing less, is imperative. And imminent. 

I have two issues with the argument:

1. India has a liberal tradition that predates Western Colonisation by centuries, perhaps millenia. Remember that Vedanta allows or even encourages multiple interpretations. From Nyaya, Vaisheshik, Mimamsa (of two variants) to Lokayat or Charvak, they coexist and none has claim on immutable truth. We don't need the West. We can show them a thing or two about the liberal temperament. Like Khajuraho and Konark. 

2. An epidemic called globalisation has infected the planet probably from back to the earliest years of the Silk or Spice Routes. People and ideas have been travelling back and forth across continents and oceans. As this mighty churn turns, everyone is touched by its centrifugal and centripetal forces. In recent years, the Human Genome project has been revealing how everyone is now of mixed ethnicity: we are not Asian or Caucasian, not Native American or Nubian or Pacific Islander but a little bit of everything. Ideas have been cohabiting and people have been procreating without inhibition about provenance. We began as a timorous homo sapien tribe in the Rift Valley. A million years on, having branched away to inhabit and adapt to every terrain and climate, we have spent the last few thousand mixing it all up. To speak now of a pure race is an unattainable goal. Then again, we may be closer now than ever before to recreating the original, undifferentiated stock that came out of Africa. Entropy was replaced by enthalpy and we are children of the confluence.

We can work up a froth about a pristine, uncontaminated state but our planet's civilisational history conspires against it. We can no more bring back this ethnic or religious or cultural purity than we can put humpty dumpty together again. 

The food we eat is not our own. Chillies, potatoes and tomatoes came from the Americas. Our customs aren't our own. The demure घूंघट is a modified hijab. Our language isn't our own either. My mother tongue, Marathi, is shot through with Arabic and Persian, Portuguese and English. Would you strip away these variegated, many splendoured colours? And what do you think you'd be left with, at the end? 

Let me break this to you gently. Your utopia of the unsullied state is only ever going to exist in your febrile dreams. Deal with it.