Zapak!

The hunt is not for everyone. Patience, grit, perseverance...the hunt exacts a heavy toll, a price that must be paid, paid in blood.


The hunt is not for everyone. It curdles the blood, turns the heart to stone. Life and death in the balance, existence a matter of poise, of accuracy and skill: hit, and so ends life in a flash of smoke and putrid blood; miss, and pay the price of blood.


The hunt is not for everyone. Patience becomes pain, eyes strained for the slightest movement, ears geared for the tiniest buzz. The sands of time flow by, time itself ceases to exist, but not the hunter: ever aware, ever alive, poised between life and death, the hunt goes on till the lust be satiated, the lust for blood.


The hunt is not for everyone. Bait, bait becomes blood. Blood turns blood, blood flows, flows from being to being, hunt to hunt, till hunter and hunted are as one, are one...the bait, the baited: blood.


The hunt is not for everyone. Through the dark, dense deep, each step wary of the next, each shadow a lurking danger, softly on to danger, death, blood.

The hunt is not for everyone...zaak! zrr! puff...psss...zapak!

A Modest Appeal

To

The Prime Minister,

the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,

the Ministers of Home, Law and Minority Affairs,

the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Parliament

and

other relevant Powers of this Mighty Potentate:

A Modest Appeal

for

the Preservation of the Rights

and

the Continuance of the Welfare

of

the Most Noble, Most Ancient, Most Remarkably Genteel

Kayasth Community.

It been established that reservation in public life is the only medium to ensure the free and fair existence of any tribe, sect, group or community in this free and fair land of ours; and it been further irrefutably proved by a series of demagogues, statesmen, their cronies and sundry other types of noble hanger-ons that all minority communities needs must be protected from victimisation, marginalisation and politicisation by unscrupulous elements within the overall not-so-scrupulous majority, allow me, most humbly, to present the most befitting and tragic case of the most deserving and wronged community in this community that we communally call India: the Kayasths.

The Kayasths, sirs, are no ordinary people: for long victim to the scorn and apathy of their fellow countrymen, the Kayasths’ story is one of alienation and grief. Like other castes and communities, we too were discriminated against on the basis of our occupation so that with time as we got more and more proficient in our hereditary employments, the cumulated scorn and jealousy of the masses ossified into a systematic, malicious, programmatic bias against our people and the offices they performed. Generation after generation was inculcated with certain prejudices adverse to our welfare as a social and sociable community and thus, in spite of all our efforts, we became victims to communal discrimination.

It is this bias, noble sirs, that I seek to redress through the powers vested in your august offices by the commonwealth at large. You hold with you the power to make or mar and in presenting the historical woes of this most victimised and most tragically ostracised community, I cannot but hope that your hearts and souls will be moved to pity and compassion and that you will at once set the wheels in motion towards granting our people reservation in public life – in government jobs, in the armed forces, in schools and colleges as both staff and students and in all other state sponsored enterprises. While doing so, missives to the private sector, to the captains of our shinning industry, on keeping the plight of our people in mind will be highly laudable.

I must, most highly revered sirs, iterate once more the urgency of this task. We suffer under the weight of long standing historical prejudice and require immediate remedial measures to alleviate somewhat the strain of our great sorrow. As democratically appointed representatives of a secular welfare state, it is your sacred duty to administer justice to the wronged and so, in such cases where the wrong stretch past millennia, it becomes all the more necessary to let no moment pass in idleness when the mute cries of a long oppressed and victimised people call out for equity and freedom. Be rest assured, noble sirs, that we shall not hesitate in breaking the bonds of restraint and joining all our other victimised compatriots in cathartically vandalising state and private property and in general making life hell should our just and reasonable demands not be redressed with a suitable and befitting scheme.

Hoping that all I have said here will find favour with your noble eminences and that the most befitting case of our most unjustly wronged community find the redressal it seeks so deservedly,

Your most faithful servant,

A Conscientious Kayasth.