Expense Account, Mint
Two years ago, I had a dream. It was vivid as some dreams are. A giant elephant was being taken to be chained up. I remember waking up traumatized at the anguish of the animal at being pulled, pushed and dragged back to the place from where it had so recently got free. For some reason I still feel the helplessness of the beast, who simply wanted to be free. I can’t help but see the analogy with us as an aspirational nation, being bullied, dragged, prodded and pinched into going back to the 1970s. Having grown up in a middle-class DDA colony in Delhi, one set of the memories is about the lack of everyday things. Everything was in short supply – milk, butter, ghee, eggs. The line at the Mother Dairy milk booth would stretch 50-60 people long.