He would play music most of the time. I saw a big music system at his hostel room in JNU. Now he is going to get married in the coming December. His brother also lives in JNU and once I saw them discussing how they will arrange the music for the wedding. They want to have a band party for the wedding parade and music for the wedding party but Islam doesn’t allow it and his family and neighbors are very strict Islam followers. He said that nobody can even listen to the radio, not even news on the radio.

If somebody is found playing any kind of music in his village, the other people living in the village yell at him and stop the music immediately. He said that if he is found playing music then people would say that even after being educated and doing PhD, he is doing such a bad thing. Music is really a serious issue in his village. I heard him and his brother discussing about this issue for at least an hour and finally they could not find any way to have music at the wedding. I told him that change always takes place sometime in the society and maybe this is the time for him to bring a change but he said that it is kind of impossible to bring this change in his society.

I have never been to any Muslim wedding but I have seen a few from the outside and I saw music going on in those weddings so I told him about it and he said that rules are made by big people and if they break it, then nobody cares. If the same rules are broken by general people, then it always creates problems. He said that everything is allowed among the rich Muslim community, they can play music, they can have dances and they can enjoy alcohol but it is not possible for the general Muslims. I asked him what the general people think of rich Muslims enjoying music and he said that general people think that big people are out of their community.

Music has always been respected amongst most of the societies of the world. In Hinduism there is a goddess Saraswati for music and people do rituals of their music instruments. It is really hard for me to believe that there could be any wedding without music. Hindu weddings are so fun and this is what I am used to. There is always a lot of music and people dancing in the wedding. I have heard that Christian weddings are also very boring but I am sure they must have music. Music is fun and even scientific researches have shown that there are certain kinds of music which are good even for our health.

I respect people’s feeling but this issue is something which is hard for me to understand. Most of the Mughal emperors were fond of music.  Akbar is a very good example. Tansen was among the nine Jewels at his court. I have noticed that in all the religions there are certain rules and regulations that are people made; it is not written anywhere in any religious books but people still follow it and even if it is written, there is wrong interpretation and people follow the wrong idea. After listening to this issue, which is definitely not an issue for me, I still don’t understand if music is really that bad…

I don’t blame people for this problem; government has no plan for waste management. All these things are new to India and we do not know about it, so we need to be educated about it. It has been part of Indian culture to throw rubbish outside of the house, but the good thing about past rubbish was that it was made of natural resources. Cows and other animals have also been wandering here and there in India since India has been in existence and these animals used to finish all that trash because our trash was natural, but now our trash is made of plastic and other strange chemicals and definitely they can not finish it anymore.

People living in the villages have also started buying packed products and usually they throw all the waste in the open spaces or ponds or places like that. Same thing happened with the pond in front of my village house. People throw all of their waste in this pond and now half of the pond is almost gone. People do not know how it will affect their lives in the future. I talked about it with the people in the village and nobody took interest in it. They think that it is good to cover the whole pond because there is always water in it and it spawns mosquitoes.

Of course covering the ponds is not a good solution to get rid of the mosquitoes because they could clean it and keep it clean and then the pond will not spawn mosquitoes. I knew that there was a well near that pond and I was very interested in that well because once about fifteen years ago my brother had fallen in it, so I wanted to see it. However when I reached near that spot, I found that there was nothing like a well here, just nothing. There was plain ground. I was wondering how that well disappeared. I asked my cousin about it and he told me that they had covered that well completely.

It was shocking for me. It did not make any sense to me. I just did not understand why they made that decision. I have seen people facing water shortages and I know how important a well could be to recharge ground water, but the sad thing was that people in my village never thought about it because they did not know about it.  I also talked about it with people and they told me that this well was useless for them. The first reason was that my brother had fallen in it so they were scared that somebody else could fall in it again and the second reason was that the water was not drinkable anymore.

They could have used a screen so that rain water could pass through it but they decided to cover it completely. I saw each and everyone in the village using plastic somehow in their daily lives and they throw all these plastics somewhere out of the house. They just do not know anything about plastics. It is still not too late for the government to control all these bad things and they can do it by introducing environmental studies and making them compulsory for all students.

Villages are also getting huge problems now. The quality of education has decreased a lot, and actually I would say there is not education at all in the villages. Students just go to schools, pass time by massaging the feet of their teachers and finally get a degree, its true. Finally they go to cities to get jobs and find that they can not have a job because they never learnt anything. They find themselves far away from the city life. They can not socialize, can not make friends…

And when they see girls wearing short skirts it increases their sexual frustration. They also want to have sex but in fact they can not have because they can not get integrated. So finally they reach brothels and since they are not aware of the use of condoms, they contract HIV and all other kinds of dangerous sexually transmitted diseases. When they come back to their village, they pass it to someone else. Young people living in villages like chewing gutka a lot which has become the biggest cause of mouth cancer in India. I noticed that most of the young people were chewing gutka.

People say that a third world war will happen for water, and after seeing things going on in India nowadays, it seems to me that India will be the first country to start this war because we will have largest number of people in the whole world. We have killed all of our rivers, have cut down 80% of the jungles and now we have started killing our ground water. The pesticides that have been banned in Europe and America can be easily found in Indian markets and farmers use them for agricultural purposes because they do not know how harmful those pesticides are.

The Indian government seems to have no control over India, over Indian people or over anything and these things will explode in the future like a nuclear bomb. The whole world is doing research to repair the damage we have done to this planet but India seems to be the only country of the world where we have been destroying the planet for years and it doesn’t seem that it will stop soon. If the environment has anything to do in terms of setting quality of living, then Indians will have the worst quality of living in the whole world within next fifteen-twenty years. I don’t know if  the Indian government will ever wake up, but Indians will wake-up someday for sure but by that time it will be too late.

All the political parties have a list of the voters of their neighborhood and they always see the progress of people voting. What happens is that different political parties have their own booths near the voting place and they have a list of all the voters. People go to these booths and get a slip where they have their name, address and other information written which is required to vote. People cannot vote without having this slip so they go to their favorite party counter and get their slip so usually these people at these kinds of counters know who has voted and who not.

Finally one or two hours before the end of voting they find the names of the people who have not voted, make slips in those names and send their guy to vote in the names of other people. Sometimes people go to vote and find that somebody else has already voted in their name and once a vote is given, nobody can do anything because there is nothing to prove that somebody else voted for someone else. But since this new beautiful system has come up I think it will be a big relief for the people who do not want to vote. 

I would tell to everyone who does not want to vote to go to the election booth and tell them that they do not want to vote. This way their vote will be secured and will not be misused. So use this system and enjoy elections.

This city has huge number of very very smart monkeys. I think they have more monkeys than Benares. Once I was in Mathura with my mother and we were going to some temple through very narrow alleys. I was watching the people, the old houses, the color, the culture, the religion… It was awesome. At the same time someone stopped us and said that we should not carry anything in our hands and take the glasses out because sometimes monkeys can take the stuffs you are having in your hands or just take your glasses and ran away. 

I thought that maybe monkeys can catch the things from my hand but why they would like to take my glasses so never took my glasses off. My mother had a purse which she hided but she also did not take her glasses off. We started walking and again somebody told us the same story. Again we did not take it seriously. I think four-five people had told us the same story. They were concerned about our glasses but I never wanted to go blind without my glasses so I did not listen them. 

After walking for few minutes my mother shouted- Oh! My Glasses. By the time I turned back and could understand anything, a monkey had taken my mother’s glasses and now he was sitting on a tree. Both of us were laughing and watching this monkey. We had never expected something like that. There are lots of monkeys in my city city also but they never do anything like this. I went under the tree and I was telling monkey to return the glasses but he did not want to return it. He was trying to wear it. 

After few minutes a guy came to us and asked if we would like to get the glasses back and obviously we said yes. He said that if we pay him Rs. 100 then he would get the glasses back from the monkey. We asked how would he get the glasses back but he did not want to leak the secret. He said- you just give me money and I will get your glasses back. I bargained with him, as we usually do in Indian market, and agreed with a amount of Rs. 25. I gave him Rs. 25 and he went to a nearby shop and bought garbanzo worth Rs. 2. 

I had noticed that monkey was kept watching him. It looked like everything was already planned. He brought the garbanzo and threw it on the tree. The monkey was so smart. He put the glasses safely on a branch of the tree and then caught the garbanzo packet. After getting the garbanzo packet, the monkey threw the glasses to this guy but unfortunately he could not catch it and the glasses fell down on the ground and broke. This guy said sorry to us. He said that he tried his best but it did not work. We started walking again towards the temple but now I had taken my glasses off. 

We thought to get the glasses repaired and started asking the locals about a glasses shop. When we asked a person he immediately asked us if the monkey had broke our glasses and I said yes. I asked him how did he know about it and he said that there were lots of people who had trained monkeys to do it. I was shocked to hear it. He said that their monkeys always look for people carrying something and then take their stuffs and run away and the owner comes and make deal with the person who lost his stuffs. 

We could not get the glasses repaired and my mother had to watch Mathura without her glasses which was very important to her, maybe I can say that her glasses are her eyes. Monkeys are given respect in Hindu society because they belong to the God Hanuman. Baby Hanuman was very naughty. Once Hanuman had swallowed the sun thinking that it was a red fruit. He would also disturb people for fun so maybe these naughty activities are impact of Hanuman:) Anyway whatever it is but I enjoyed whatever happened with us. There was some problem to my mother but its okay, she also enjoyed it. We still talk about it and laugh. HAPPY RABBIT HOLE DAY.

I also went to Heritage to ask about their services and charges. They charge Rs. 2500 for the first dialysis and Rs. 1000 for blood check up which is charged only once. Next three dialysis is Rs. 1700 and then 2500 again for the fifth one. So they charge Rs. 2500 for every fifth and Rs. 1700 for the rest of three. It was quiet cheap than Appolo and definitely Benares is less noisy and pollution free than Delhi. Then they asked me to rent my apartment for six months. But I don’t think I was ready to host a sick person who doesn’t know any English, only speaks Russian.I told them about the language problem but they said that they will bring a translator for one week. But I was still worried about the time after first week.

I asked them about present health of Rinat and came to know that he has only one kidney and his hemoglobin was very low, one third of the normal level. It made me a little bit worried about the situation because he was seriously sick. I think Rinat’s condition is very critical and anything could happen with him. They wanted me to contact Indian embassy in Tashkent and tell them that I will be hosting Rinat in India. I was not comfortable writing a invitation letter because if anything goes wrong with Rinat, I will be responsible for it.

I contacted my few friends in the US and Canada about the situation because his condition seems like a very western condition, I don’t know anyone in India who has one kidney. I knew people who died because of kidney failure but I didn’t know anyone who had only one kidney and hemoglobin was one third than the normal level.  All of my friends told that they know a lot of people who have one kidney but they were also little worried about the hemoglobin part. Finally I decided, with help of my friends and family, that I will not host Rinat.

But I still wanted to help Rinat and Andrew. I told them that I would like to help them any way but be their host. I told them that I could find a guest house for Rinat, go to hospital, talk to doctors, show them around, hire someone to buy them food and other stuffs etc…. And they all got agreed with it. I have told them to fax me all the medical reports of Rinat so that I could discuss the treatment with doctors.

They want to hire me to assist Rinat for his whole stay. They want me to receive Rinat in Delhi and bring them to Benares, I think I will do it. I have contacted few students in BHU to find one Russian speaking student to work as Rinat’s translator in future. Andrew wants Rinat to learn Hindi also while staying in Benares. So I wrote Bhasha Bharti asking about any Russian speaking Hindi teacher and still waiting for their reply, I think it will be a hard thing.