Reversing the Rise in Battery Prices

ENERGIES Magazine featured my article on the battery supply chain, and how the Inflation Reduction Act might ease constraints and propel the US energy storage sector.

Link to article:

https://energiesmagazine.com/article/reversing-the-rise-in-battery-prices/

Battery pack prices dipped below US$500 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the first time in 2015 (in real 2021 dollars) and declined drastically to US$132 per kWh in 2021, after which prices started rising. This piece addresses the questions of what factors contributed to this dramatic price decline, what caused prices to rise, and what’s in store for the US energy storage sector going forward.

Keeping the Fire Alive

[Waxing poetic after a seven-year hiatus]

The best candles are those that burn at both ends:

Same wax, two wicks, two flames, two friends,

Each burning its way to meet in the middle;

And shedding more light than a one-sided candle.

And if ever a storm should blow out a side,

The other, still warm, could help reignite it.

Yet, a flame abandoned keeps the heart yearning -

It takes two to keep the hearth burning.

Aloha from the Afterlife

–

Emergency alert: Extreme

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

OK

–

Saturday, 13 January 2018

8:07 am Island Time. I had just woken up and was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth when my phone buzzed. I resisted the impulse to check it immediately: one of my new year resolutions was to improve my concentration and work on my tendency to get distracted by the constant barrage of phone notifications. But this was a different kind of buzz than all the regular apps. The vibration wouldn't cease and my phone nearly tap danced its way into the bathroom sink. I recognised it as an AMBER Alert, America's emergency warning broadcast system, that I was familiar with through the rare flash flood warnings during my time in Arizona and forest fire alerts in California. I picked up the phone and read the alert. I was not prepared for what it said. I spat toothpaste foam out.

'Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii.' Obviously, it was a nuclear missile. Why would it be any other? Of course, it was North Korea. Who else could it be?

'Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.' How soon is immediate? Where is shelter? I wish we had had drills for this sort of occurrence. Agreed that this event wasn't anticipated to be happening every so often. But the possibility of it was becoming more and more likely over the last couple of weeks, what with Kim Jong Un stating "...the U.S. is within range of our nuclear weapons and a nuclear button is always on the desk of my office" and Donald Trump responding "... I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

The alert message was in all caps, and its succinct sentences lent it the urgency of an order that was to be obeyed without question. It's amazing that missiles could now be launched at you from halfway around the planet, but communication had gone from terse telegram to taciturn Twitter. I guess details are unnecessary when the devil is hurtling towards you at 15,000 miles an hour. The message had an OK button below it. I tapped it, but it refused to go. I was expecting a follow-up message with instructions on where to seek shelter and how long we had to live. None arrived.

8:10 am Island Time. I finished brushing my teeth, flossing my gums, cleaning my tongue. Teeth are the longest-lasting of human remains. Might as well die with sparkling pearly whites. I went to the living room and booted my laptop. In the age of fake news and the frequent hacking of seemingly secure cyber systems, I have learnt to confirm, double-check, cross-verify every bit of information that comes my way. I googled "Hawaii missile threat". The top ten results talked about how Hawaii was on high alert ever since the President's working Nuclear Button tweet. One of them even said the U.S. Air Force had deployed three nuclear-capable, stealth B-2 Spirit bombers and 200 air force personnel to the island of Guam, closer to North Korea in the western Pacific Ocean, preparing for an attack. I filtered the search results by time to see the latest. A Daily Mail report carried news of the inbound missile threat to Hawaii. Only three minutes after I had received an alert on my phone, in the bathroom, from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, on an island, in the middle of the Pacific, and with no other U.S. media outlets having caught wind of it yet. It's commendable how fast tabloids pick up on these things. Nonetheless, I wouldn't trust what the Daily Mail report said even if the threat turned out true.

There was no other way to confirm the alert. I went out onto my balcony to see if I could sight the missile in the sky. Stupid idea. I ran back inside like a maniac, like I had actually seen it approaching. I googled "nuclear shelters Maui". A blog post came up, calculating the time people in several U.S. cities would have to seek shelter in case an intercontinental ballistic missile was headed their way from North Korea. Missile flight time from Pyongyang to Honolulu was 37 minutes. The U.S. Air Force would detect it within instants of the launch, then inform the President and Federal government, who would intimate the Hawaii Governor and state government, who would in turn notify the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, who would then initiate sending out the emergency alerts to everyone's phones, radios and television channels. Several signals would bounce off several satellites. The churning of all this machinery would take up 25 minutes. Leaving us just 12 minutes from the moment our cellphone screens flashed with the alert till the moment of the big bang. I looked at the time. 8:13. Six minutes remaining. I panicked. I would not see the sunbeams that were starting from the sun at this very second.

8:13 am Island Time. I closed the blog post. I had no time for idle reading. I went back to looking for shelters and clicked on the County of Maui's Disaster Preparedness website. I hoped there was a shelter within six miles of my apartment. That's how far I could drive within the next six minutes. Considering I would drive at twice the speed limit. But also considering that several thousand other cars would be driving to the same destination. The County's webpage had some helpful tips on what to pack for emergencies. Non-perishable foods for three days, at least three gallons of water, a flashlight, a first aid kit. I went to my fridge. I was out of groceries. Sunday was grocery shopping day, and this situation had caught me on Saturday morning. I was happy to find half a loaf of bread, four slices of cheddar cheese, ginger garlic paste, and the dregs of pineapple-peach-passion fruit kombucha. The supplies would last me a day. I contemplated if I had the time to continue a family tradition and cook myself a Saturday breakfast of Maggi noodles. But it struck me that two-minute noodles never got cooked in two minutes.

I looked around the apartment to see what I would take with me. I could probably stuff a duffel bag to the point of tearing. My eyes went to my bookshelves. My carefully curated collection of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and Moleskine journals. My Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer and my solar-powered Tyrannosaurus rex. No, they would take up too much space in the bag. I looked at my laptop. My window to the world. No, it would run out of battery. The shelter would likely be a concrete bunker, several hundred feet under the ground, with no unsecured Wi-Fi connections or charging points. I realised I had very few material possessions to pick from to begin with. Years of living like a nomad and recent Buddhist leanings had made me somewhat of a minimalist. I suddenly had a deep appreciation for my monastic lifestyle. There weren't many, if any, things that I would miss in the shelter. I dropped the thought of the duffel bag. I would go without it. I also realised I wouldn't have the chance to miss anything if I didn't make it to the shelter in time. I checked for its location again. I scrolled to the bottom of the County website where a section listed the nine most frequently asked questions for disaster preparedness. Below 2. Where can I return lava rocks to Hawaii? was the question 3. Where are the emergency shelter locations on Maui? I expanded the answer. It said, "There are hurricane and tsunami evacuation routes, but no bomb shelters in Maui County as of 10:00 am on Wednesday, August 30th, 2016."

8:16 am Island Time. Three minutes remaining. I was shocked to read that. What was the alert message going on about then? Seek immediate shelter. Was that someone's idea of a killing joke? I googled "What to do in case of a nuclear attack". One of the results suggested staying away from doors and windows. That seemed intuitive. I didn't bother clicking the link. The next search excerpt recommended keeping inside a concrete structure, preferably in the innermost room, like the bathroom. I ran to my bathroom and locked the door behind me. I was scurrying into the bathtub when I turned midway and unlocked the bathroom door. I didn't want the lock to be jammed in if I somehow survived the blast. I got into the bathtub and drew the shower curtain, as if it would provide an additional layer of security. I wondered if I should turn the shower on to battle the flames, but decided against it. What if the water kept running and flooded my bathroom, drowning me? I wondered if I should keep my clothes on. This is what they would discover my body in, if they ever did. But I figured the garments would be charred anyway, and it'd be better to not have anything burn over my body in the final moments. I stripped down to my birthday suit and rolled up in the tub in the fetal position. I would go from the world as I came into it.

I thought about the last meal that I had had. Dahi vada, paneer makhani and garlic naan at the new Indian restaurant I'd gone to check out last night. Lentil dumplings topped with a savoury yogurt sauce, a tangy tamarind chutney and garnished with cilantro, cottage cheese swimming in a creamy gravy of butter, tomatoes and cashews, and Indian garlic bread. It was good. It was still inside my system, as I couldn't go much further in my ablutions after the dental hygiene bit. I picked up my phone and thought of what song to play. I had three minutes left. I could probably squeeze in one last song. I played Honey and the Moon. Four minutes 46 seconds of the best music mankind has made. Joseph Arthur started singing, filling the sanctum sanctorum of my shower with the echoes of his soulful voice. I would die with the strains of "Freedom. Run away. Run away tonight." at the three-minute mark. I closed my eyes.

8:17 am Island Time. They say your life flashes in front of you moments before you die. I was having none of that. Did it mean I was not dying? Would I survive the blast and be horribly scarred for the rest of my life? Or perhaps, I was just a poor dier. I focussed all my energy into conjuring up life flashes. I thought about the very first memory I can remember: I was three years old and scampering through my bedroom to my balcony in Bombay. That's all I remember about it. What an inconsequential first memory. I recalled talking in my sleep until I was six years old, in what sounded like a Scandinavian language to my parents. Neither they nor I could comprehend what I was saying. We think they were memories from my previous life somewhere in Scandinavia, until I got older and formed new memories to overwrite the old ones. I recollected slashing my brother's arm with a blade I had found lying on the playground. Because he had made me bowl to him for an hour but had got me out on the very first ball when it was my turn to bat. I was nine years old and never quite forgave myself for how much blood he lost that day. I remembered feeling my first crush at twelve years old. I thought Monica from Friends was exceptionally cute, but didn't understand why I felt that way. I recalled the first time I spied a couple have sex, in the building opposite mine. I was fifteen and on my terrace, way past my curfew time. All I remember is the bright orange lamp in the bedroom and the swing in the balcony and the naked silhouettes of the couple in bed. I replayed the memory of my first kiss, at eighteen. I wasn't ready for when she kissed me. It was very awkward. I didn't know whether to feel happy it was happening or to let my disgust overwhelm me that I was sucking on someone's tongue.

8:18 am Island Time. Tick tock. I tried to think happy thoughts. Only two questions came swirling into my head. Did I live enough? Did I give enough? Had I lived enough? I think I'd had a pretty full life for someone dying so prematurely. I had a very happy childhood, with no complaints, growing up with loving family and friends, a school and a city I adored until I moved out at 22. I wouldn't change a single thing about my past life. I had switched four jobs trying to find what I wanted to do in life, and was lucky to have found my calling and gotten a Master's degree in it. I was fortunate to have lived in so many cities in India: Panjim, Bombay, Pune, Jamshedpur, Lucknow, Pantnagar, Bhubaneswar, Hubli, Bangalore, and Manipal, and to have had the opportunities to travel in so many countries around the world: India, Hong Kong, Macau, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and China. I had exposed myself to the best of human creativity, in the books I'd read, the movies and TV series I'd watched, the music and podcasts I'd listened to. These had all broadened my horizon and helped me ever strive to be the best version of myself. I'd paid off my student debts and bought my first car. I now lived and would die in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I had a vast network of acquaintances and a few very close friends who would mourn my demise. I hoped.

8:19 am Island Time. It was time. Any moment now. Had I given enough? I had not. I had spent all my life just consuming and consuming, not creating enough in return. All I could be remembered for were my few tangible contributions to a tiny corner of the world. Three megawatts of solar power installed in the U.S., two papers in scientific journals that may not be useful to anyone, one chapter in an encyclopedia on solar energy for young adults that may never be read. My friends would remember me by how I made them feel. I could count on one hand the number of people whose lives I may have impacted in the smallest possible way. I had had a single, failed relationship, so I hadn't even given enough love. It made me miserable that I hadn't given more to the world. Especially since I was in a position where I certainly could have. I waited to hear the explosion. Would I see the blinding light too, cocooned in my bathtub? I would definitely feel the heat of the blast. Maybe the splinters of the door would fly at me. Maybe the ceiling would cave in? Maybe the smoke from the mushroom cloud would fill my bathroom and strangle me to death. Maybe I deserved it, for living the selfish life I had lived.

8:20 am Island Time. Nothing happened. The song changed to Hotel California. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." The epicentre was most likely Honolulu, the densely populated urban area. Maximum impact. The blast radius would probably be two miles, but the North Koreans could detonate it a thousand feet above ground to cause significantly more damage. The radioactive fumes and the fallout would be hazardous. It would take about twenty minutes for the fumes to spread to the other islands. It wasn't safe to get out yet.

8:27 am Island Time. I can hear the seconds pass by. I reckon one for every two heartbeats I feel thudding against my chest. The song changes again. Radiohead's How To Disappear Completely. "In a little while / I'll be gone / The moment's already passed / Yeah it's gone." I try remembering wind patterns in the Hawaiian Islands. The north and the east shores of each island were called the Windward coasts, because the winds usually blew in from the northeast. However, in the winter, we had the Kona winds bringing the volcanic fog or vog in from the Big Island in the southeast. In either case, the wind would blow from east to west, that is, from Maui to Honolulu away from Maui. Armed with this discovery, I decided it was safe to venture out of the bathroom. I felt like Archimedes emerging out of the bathtub, opening the door carefully. No smoke. I went to the balcony. No sirens sounding. No smoke in sight. Except for light from the nuclear explosion. Of the fusion kind.

I returned to the bathroom, to be sure. I logged on to Twitter hoping for some updates. I went to Trump's Twitter. Nothing. I went to Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's Twitter. She had tweeted, at 8:19 am Island Time: "HAWAII - THIS IS A FALSE ALARM. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH OFFICIALS THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE." Tears welled up in my eyes. I felt like I had been born again. Never had I felt so fragile, so vulnerable, yet such unbounded joy. I ran to the balcony. I looked at the lush green, fluted mountains on my left, the azure blue, calm ocean on my right, and the butterflies flitting about the red bougainvillea just below me. What a place for anyone to bomb, I thought. But what an even more incredible place to be alive.

8:45 am Island Time.

–

Emergency alert: Extreme

There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.

OK

–

A full 38 minutes after the first alert was sent out, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (EMA) sent out this second alert to cellphones saying the first was a false alarm. I hoped they wouldn't retract this second alert. You tend to start not trusting the boy who cried wolf. The story, I now know, is that the EMA conducts drills for its employees thrice a day at changes of shifts, to be prepared to send out such alerts. During a drill that morning, an employee had inadvertently pressed the correct button and followed through on a dialog box asking if he was sure he wanted to send out the alert. By the time he realised his mistake, the message had appeared on a million cellphones. It turns out the EMA had template alerts set for missiles, hurricanes, tsunamis, but no template set for a false alarm. The EMA had to jump through a number of hoops in the state machinery in order to receive approval to create a custom message about the false alarm. And all this took a full 38 minutes.

Having spoken to many people about the incident and having read multiple accounts online, I now know that chaos had ensued in the state in those 38 minutes. People had jumped in their cars and gone to Walmart and Costco to stock up on food and water. Cars lined up outside gas stations to fill up their tanks. Where they were planning to drive to, I can only wonder. It’s an island: you can’t drive off it. Several people had called their families to tell them one last time how much they loved them. Many couples got engaged. Some people, like me, had crawled up in their bathtubs. Honeymooners in hotels across Hawaii lamented choosing this week to come out here. One of the big resorts opened up their bar. The bartender is said to have shouted, “Last orders.” Children cried. Businesses shut shop and sent their employees home to their loved ones. A friend and her colleagues piled into a shipping container in the backyard of their office and nearly died of suffocation. Pornhub saw a steep drop in traffic to their website when the first alert went out, but saw a sharp rise back up when the second alert was sent out. President Trump was obviously golfing at his Mar-a-Lago estate Saturday morning and only heard about the whole fiasco after the second alert. Which is for the best, people say. Who knows what he would have done in retaliation if he had heard about it after the first alert.

Hawaii's Governor has promised to fix the EMA's alert management system so this never happens again. They are speaking of changing the Internet Explorer-based system, with alert hyperlinks placed one below the other, to a more graphical user interface. They have already added a template alert for a false alarm. The Governor also said the EMA would now require two people to confirm the alert before it is sent out, reducing the likelihood of an error. As for me, I have realised that life is short. Death is imminent, whether by nuclear apocalypse or some other means. Death is certain. It is just not certain when it will arrive. Whether in 12 minutes, or 12 hours, or 12 months, or 60 years. But it will come for sure. And I want to be ready for it when it does. I will ask myself if I have lived enough and given enough, and I want to be able to say yes and yes when it does.

Every day I wake up after Saturday, the 13th January 2018, I have the same feeling of urgency and dread. It is not an alert on my phone, but an alert in my head. Life is precious. Time is ticking. You will not be here, this free, forever. You are already past the age where you should have been giving back, creating more than you are consuming. Is what you are doing right now the best use of your time? Of your life? So I have made these new year resolutions: I will waste no time. I will continue to read, consume, devour the beauty the world has to offer, but I will write more, create more to add value to this world. I will continue to travel as much as I can to explore and understand the world around us, but I will try to touch in a positive way the lives that intersect with mine. For I do not want to feel, when death arrives, as surely it will, that I have lived a selfish life.

Pro bono consulting gig for Hermosa Beach, CA

Hermosa Beach, a beach town not far from Los Angeles airport, is one of the first U.S. cities to have established the goal of being renewable energy-powered by 2020. Over the last year and a half, I had the good fortune of being able to contribute to the cause by consulting for the City as the inaugural Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) Fellow.

TEX is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit program that brings together scientists and community leaders to use science to tackle community issues related to natural resources and climate change. Here is a blog post I wrote about my experience as a TEX Fellow, working with Hermosa Beach on their carbon reduction goals:

https://thrivingearthexchange.org/reflections-of-a-tex-fellow/

Being a TEX Fellow was an extremely enjoyable and enriching experience. I can sense that this is the start of a lifelong love affair with pro bono consulting. If I ever convince myself to get a PhD, my problem statement would most definitely be a TEX-style community science issue. There is a certain fulfillment to see your work have a tangible impact on the people and communities around you.

ISBN listing #1

I contributed a chapter to Solar Energy - an encyclopedia meant for young adults and anyone interested in the historical development of solar energy, the science and technology behind it, current challenges in the field and possible solutions to them.

My essay approaches the utility of solar energy for remote and rural areas - a pet topic of mine. It feels warm to have my first ISBN listing, albeit only a chapter!

I received my contributor's copy today. Having thumbed through the rest of the book, I think it has been fabulously put together by Dr. David Newton, the editor. The language is simple yet the content sophisticated enough for everyone from laymen to lawyers to appreciate it.

Find your copy here:
http://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOGreenwood/product.aspx?pc=A4355C

or if you fancy an e-version, here:
http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Energy-Reference-Handbook-Contemporary/dp/1610696956

I remember spending entire afternoons gobbling up encyclopedias through my early teens. Series like Tell Me Why and Childcraft are the reasons I became engrossed in acquiring knowledge of any kind. They made me aware of the world beyond my walls before Wikipedia, they got me interested in a life in science and technology, and they helped me qualify for several quiz competitions in school.

In an age where the internet is chock-a-block with incessant information, I'm hoping Solar Energy serves as a good collation of reading on a particularly relevant topic today. There are even some futuristic, sci-fi-ish chapters before mine about solar roads and artificial photosynthesis. I would have loved this book as a teenager. I hope teens today love it too, and that some of them are inspired to take up solar energy as a career.

Solar Spring Break

GRID Alternatives featured my article on Arizona State's spring break installing solar panels on low-income houses in California this March.

Link to article:
http://www.gridalternatives.org/regions/centralcoast/news/solar-spring-break-best-week-my-life

GRID Alternatives is an organisation that makes renewable energy technology and training accessible to underserved communities in the U.S. More power to you and your wonderful work, GRID, and to the way you have shown to the world!

Here Comes The Sun

Earlier this year, I wrote about how solar energy is the next "small, big thing", and how it has the potential to power developing countries out of poverty.

I'm glad to say the essay was adjudged among the top contributions to the 45th St. Gallen Symposium, an annual event in Switzerland that brings together Leaders of Today - policymakers and politicians, and students - Leaders of Tomorrow, for Chatham House-style debates and discussions on international development issues. What better way to end the semester and school year!

Totally looking forward to this new phase of life and the foray into problem-solving and policymaking, and of course, the beautiful land of FedEx, Rolex, chocolates and cheese!

Read my essay here: Here Comes The Sun.

Thought Coitus

[This is my entry for the Poetry with Prakriti contest 2014 presented by The Hindu Lit for Life 2015 literary festival.]

She shut the elevator door

and looked at me

her thought cloud: deep,

dense, laden, tugged at mine

our clouds clashed, collided,

colluded and sparks flew

in the charged air of the silence

between us

our ideas lost no time undressing -

at lightning pace

they tumbled out as words

in a downpour, dripping

from our mouths, gushing,

tripping over each other

and they engaged in violent wordplay

that made her ears hot

and her jaw drop

and her eyes pop

and my knees shake

and our stomachs ache

and our brains burst into

a billion smithereens

that swarmed around us

like a storm of locusts

leaving us breathless

and speechless

they hit against the walls

of the five-by-five car

no longer contained,

no longer constrained, they rose

up, breaking through the ceiling,

yanking at the cables

up over the pulley drum

and into the sky

we saw our thought-coitus

clouds floating in love

my Kafka sated hers

my Kundera mated hers

our Kerouacs copulated

and made babies

that we called Rushdie

and Roy and Rumi

and Tagore and Tolstoy

and Henry Charles Bukowski

that rained on us like bombs

dropped by storks in the sky

our thoughts exploded overhead

in a flurry of fireworks

and we were left in the lift, wondering

what to do with our bodies

when her voice rang down

from the heavens: what floor?

and I heard mine thunder back:

I think, same as yours.

Long-listed for the Toto!

Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) is a Bangalore-based non-profit set up in 2004 in memory of Angirus 'Toto' Vellani, a twenty-something boy who was intensely passionate about music, literature and film, but who passed away in a tragic drowning incident. His parents, Sarita and Anmol Vellani (brilliant, kindly souls, bless them!) started TFA to encourage and nurture young talent in India through awards, workshops and other events. In my two years in Bangalore, I attended two workshops, numerous book launches, and poetry and theatre events organised by TFA.

The annual TFA Toto Award for Creative Writing is probably the most prestigious recognition for young writers in India. It has been won previously by a series of illustrious writers that includes the likes of Nisha Susan, Anindita Sengupta, Aditi Machado and Abhishek Majumdar. I have been applying for it since I was 19. I vividly remember each year collating my ten best recent works from this very blog, printing them out, and sending the package to the Vellanis' in Jayanagar. This year was my fifth time submitting work for the Toto. (I sent in two short stories.)

I was delighted to receive a mail today from TFA saying I had been long-listed for this year's award! Here is the announcement of the long-list on their blog.

I consider it a huge achievement to have made even the long-list. Fingers crossed for the short-list. :-)

_

[10 Dec - The shortlist was announced today. I didn't make it. I will be back next year, with my strongest entry ever. Meanwhile, congratulations to the finalists! Their names can be found here.]

Instant Karma

[This was my entry for the Sunday Herald short story competition 2014. A big thank you goes out to Pallavi Prasad for staying up the night before the deadline to help with editing the piece.]

TARIKA SHUFFLED IN her seat at the breakfast table to hide the newspaper from her father as he walked in. His drooping visage made him look under the weather and he had not shaved or showered for the day. He was not wearing his usual black coat over a crisp white shirt with the cuffs out, but took his place next to Tarika in his vest and lungi from last night. His hands did not join palms before they picked up the knife and fork to cut his omelette with, nor did his moustache bristle to ask Tarika to pass him the pepper shaker. Justice Kumar did not notice that his ten-year-old daughter was still in her pyjamas at seven in the morning and not in her pinafore, ready for school. Maybe today, thought Tarika, he would not ask for the paper either.

This was one of those days she felt a little mischievous and felt like she could do whatever she pleased in the world, for Mama had a minute ago declared an unexpected off from school. Reading the newspaper now, she couldn’t contain her excitement on seeing her Papa’s name in big, bold letters on the front page. Her Papa was famous! She wanted to be the one to announce it to him when he came in for breakfast. But she wanted to know what the words meant before she read them out. She spread her thighs to peek at the headline as he entered. It screamed:

MANGALA RAPE ACCUSED ACQUITTED BY JUSTICE KUMAR

“Papa, what does acquit mean?” Tarika asked, worried if she had pronounced it correct. Justice Kumar looked up from his plate at once and trained his eyes on his daughter.

“Where did you learn that word, beta?”

“I think I heard it on the news yesterday. I saw you on the TV, Papa! Mama also saw!” she exclaimed in glee, hoping she would not have to reveal the real source of her newfound vocabulary so soon. Justice Kumar gave no reaction to his TV appearance but resumed eating. Someone must have told him already that he was famous, Tarika figured.

Justice Kumar ate his omelette in silence and drew in a long breath as he drank his milk. He had known the day would come for Tarika’s mother and him to talk to the girl about good touch and bad touch. They had discussed when to broach the topic with her and how to approach the questions she might have. But for a day he couldn’t convict rapists for a lack of evidence, much less explain to his ten year old why he had acquitted a bunch of men who had touched another person in the worst way imaginable, he certainly wasn’t prepared. He wasn’t equipped for the day he would fail to achieve a conviction in spite of the eyes of the accused bearing irrefutable testimony to their crime. Was this failure his, of Metropolitan Magistrate Kumar’s? Or a failure of the public prosecutor who did not present his case well enough, or a failure of the police who bungled up the investigation from the very beginning? Or the failure of an entire system that hopelessly, repeatedly faltered in its duty to sift truth from lies and bad from good? Was this a failure at all, and not karma’s way of freeing criminals for a fate worse than prison?

“What does acquit mean, Papa?” Tarika punctured his rumination.

“Tell me, Tarika: what does your teacher do when she catches girls talking in class?”

“She makes them kneel in one corner of the classroom.”

“And what does your teacher do when she can’t catch them talking?”

“Nothing,” Tarika said, matter-of-factly.

“That means your teacher acquits them. She can’t punish them because she can’t be sure that they are bad girls who have done something wrong.” Justice Kumar hoped the logic in his simplistic analogy wasn’t too bad. Had he lost his sense of good and bad last evening?

“If the girls talked but Teacher didn’t catch them,” said Tarika, “They are still bad girls.”

“Yes, Tarika. You’re right,” he chuckled. “Bad people who are not punished for their wrong actions are still bad people. But even if the good people responsible for punishing them can’t punish them, karma will catch up with them in the end. Nobody can escape their karma.”

“What’s karma?” asked Tarika, hearing another word she could add to her vocabulary, completely forgetting about the headline she was sitting on.

“Karma,” Justice Kumar said wistfully, “is what you deserve for what you do. If you do good deeds, you get good karma, and only good things will happen to you.” Justice Kumar paused; Tarika nodded to indicate that she was following him. “If you do bad deeds, you will have bad karma, and bad things will happen to you, sometime later in life or in your next life.”

Tarika opened her eyes wide and rolled them up as if trying to fully absorb the philosophy of this new concept called karma. She twirled her father’s words around in her head for a while and then said, “Good people should get good things immediately and bad things should happen to bad people instantly. Karma should be instant!” Justice Kumar laughed heartily at this idea, so innocently wished for by his daughter, when he heard multiple voices drawing towards the door. The next second, there were harsh knocks on the timber. He hurried to bolt all the latches as Mrs. Kumar came running out to the dining area. Justice Kumar motioned her to take Tarika away into the bedroom and stay put there.

Through the peephole, he could see two burly moustachioed men banging and rasping at the door with hockey sticks in their hands. The spark that had set off at the Sessions Court after yesterday’s verdict spread as wild fire across the city, fuelled through the night by the media and ended up a conflagration at his door. He rushed to the window across the hall and saw dozens of frenzied people on the street, calling him a villain and summoning him outside. As he quickly drew his windows shut, he heard a scream and a simultaneous sound of his car’s windshield shattering on the porch.

~~

BEAT CONSTABLE JADHAV was on his early morning round of the area. He stopped his motorcycle beside a dump truck and thrust his hand at the driver’s window, collecting his daily toll of fifty rupees. This was a convenient sum agreed upon by the constable and the truck driver for overlooking the disposal of garbage on this street corner, instead of having to drive to the landfill site thirty kilometres from the city each day.

The driver spat out his paan as he pressed the dumping lever and offloaded the day’s garbage over the months’ mounting heap. Some of the paan spittle splashed on Jadhav’s khaki trousers, but he did not mind and readied to resume his round. He had to hurry before it turned seven, to the water and milk tankers and collect his tolls for overlooking the pilfering of water and adulteration of milk. These would contribute the majority of his morning’s earnings before the actionable fruit and vegetable vendors set up their carts. His was a thankless job if not for these morning customs and duties.

He turned away as he spotted a man peeing on the garbage pile and revved his engine, when his walkie-talkie crackled to life: 'All units proceed to Thanapur Jail immediately.' A call to the Jail at this early an hour? What could it possibly be? thought Jadhav, starting for Thanapur. He caught up with a Police jeep shortly on the way and asked the officers what it was about.

“Don’t you know?” one of the officers in the jeep said, “There’s been some ruckus in the Jail. Bloody prisoners must have fought at the prayer assembly. The two death row inmates in there have died and many others have been injured. They need more manpower at the Jail to keep the situation from blowing up. Hey, what’s that?” The jeep and Jadhav slowed down as the officer pointed to a congregation near the judicial colony. A large crowd appeared to be bellowing war cries against the Metropolitan Magistrate in relation to the Mangala rape verdict. “Go see what is happening there,” the officer instructed Jadhav, “We’ll continue to Thanapur.”

There were close to a hundred men and women trampling Justice Kumar’s lawns. Some of them brandished hockey sticks; others held stones and were hurling choice expletives. A few stray dogs had come bounding from their alleys and were barking hysterically around the mob. The crowd tried to drive them away and presently, a couple of men began to flay them with their hockey sticks. Suddenly, out of the throng, a man broke loose followed by a woman on his heel. They came sprinting, one after another, till they halted by the uniformed Jadhav.

“He stole my mangalsutra off my neck!” yelled the woman pointing at the man’s hand. Jadhav looked at the man: he was visibly in agonising pain. Sure enough he was caught red-handed, for the necklace had tied itself tight as a tourniquet on his right wrist, which had been severely cut by it and was oozing blood from the gash. Jadhav couldn’t help but gape at the man, confounded as to why he had done this to himself. He would bleed to death in minutes.

“Help me! Please. This woman wants to kill me!” bawled the man. But before Jadhav knew it, the woman was flogging the man silly while the man flailed his arms at the woman. A few feet away, the mongrels now held the hockey sticks in their jaws and were mauling their assailants who lay on the ground helplessly covering their heads. The outer circles of the crowd had turned their attention to the bizarre battles in progress behind them when the sound of glass shattering issued from near the house. The crowd on the porch parted to let the man who had broken Justice Kumar’s windshield fly up into the air. There the man floated five feet above the ground with the hockey stick still in his hand when the shards of the smashed screen rose up collectively, swarming around him like angry bees whose honeycomb had been destroyed, and attacked him - stinging and cutting him in midair. Jadhav could not believe what he saw.

The other protesters viewing this, dropped their jaws and the stones they had held, not out of fear or disbelief, but out of an involuntary compulsion that also made the abuse hurlers cough and gag on their words and break into convulsions. Meanwhile, the garbage on the street corner had taken flight as if on the wing of a giant wind and was quickly joined in the air by the copious amounts of pee and paan spittle that had trickled down the rubbish over the years. The packets of adulterated milk sealed just this morning tore themselves open and the pilfered water, separating itself from the milk, traversed its way back into the water tanker.

The garbage gale had now collected tickets, cigarette butts, wrappers, a variety of plastics and was whirling in a hurricane that grew faster, bigger, denser as it picked up more and more man-made waste. Several similar trash tornadoes had started in different parts of the city and merged with bigger typhoons they met on their paths. Within the hour, all the unattended debris, garbage and sewage in the city had converged into a single black, menacing mass. The people still on Justice Kumar’s lawns could smell the foul stench as it advanced toward the judicial colony.

Constable Jadhav felt his pockets wriggle and then the bribes he had collected during his dawn patrol tumbled out of his pants, circled his face jeeringly for a while and flew up and away to join the Great Badness that turned darker and more ferocious with the addition of illicit funds to its campaign and assumed the shape of a mushroom cloud looming over the city’s sky.

~~

JUSTICE KUMAR HAD locked himself in his bedroom with his wife and Tarika, and shuttered down all his windows. He rued the thought of his car being battered beyond repair on the porch for no fault of his own, but was relieved to have kept his family and himself sheltered from the wrath of the masses outside. He was blissfully unaware of the fantastic goings-on beyond the threshold of his house. He hoped that by now, the police had arrived to clear the crowds and knew also that the press would have arrived before the police, to cover the fracas.

He switched on the television to watch the news, half expecting to be treated to the scenes outside of his house. Instead, he heard accounts of unusual happenings in various parts of the country. Correspondents from Mumbai reported on the weird theft at the Reserve Bank wherein the cash from the State’s coffers had miraculously flown out of Headquarters and had rained on the city’s population. But when people tried to grab these notes, they flew off again. Journalists in Delhi claimed that in an unprecedented attack on Parliament, several MPs had suffered sudden seizures and a couple of ministers had succumbed to death in the midst of a session. It was not yet clear what had leaked into the Lower House to trigger this mysterious occurrence and if this was a deliberate attack on the legislators.

Justice Kumar changed channels and saw that the bytes in from Bihar were even more incredible. Eye witnesses swore they’d beheld known offenders becoming victims of the self-same crimes that they had escaped being convicted for. Rapists had been raped, kidnappers had been duct-taped, and killers had had their necks sliced open. Mrs. Kumar grabbed the remote and switched to a local news channel. It was carrying a story of how butchers’ knives and farmers’ sickles had somehow turned against their erstwhile employers, sparing the lives of poultry, crops and most food sources.

Tarika snatched the remote from her mother’s hand and flicked to TV India, her favourite channel that always featured the most uncommon news incidents. It was talking about a widespread phenomenon called ‘Instant Karma’. Bad actions and sins were being punished instantly, whereas good actions and favours were being rewarded immediately. It was all an extremely bizarre business, but people were happy: the crime and filth in the country were being washed away, while humankind had finally found reason to be kind to each other. Supermarkets had extended a take-all-you-can open sale, since they discerned that if customers didn’t pay for what they took away, their inventories were magically replenished. Small-time grocers followed suit to stay in competition and offered all their wares for free; they too observed their storerooms overflowing with goods more than those that they had given away.

Vehicle owners had taken to coercing pedestrians into allowing themselves to be dropped to their destinations, for the motorists had noticed their fuel tanks to be fortuitously full after each such favour. Nobody felt the need to visit petrol pumps any more, and so oil companies started giving discounts for people to get their vehicles filled from their stations, to the very point of bankruptcy. But financial solvency had no meaning in a world where money had lost its value. In fact, by late afternoon, when everyone had realised how Instant Karma worked, money was no longer recognised as tradable currency. Karma had replaced it as the mode of exchange. Faced with a shortage of food, neighbours force fed people with whatever edibles they had left, hoping the good karma they won through this goodwill gesture would stock up their larders. Human beings went to doing good to others with the ulterior motive of benefitting themselves.

Darkness descended early that day because of the Great Badness that hung over the sky. Human activity however, had intensified as people scrambled to perform good deeds upon others in a selfish bid to earn some commodified karma. The government had been quick to pass a law classifying good karma and bad karma, and economists had devised a method to quantify it. With such models, one could calculate precisely how much karma one would gain or lose with every action. Armed with these studies, humans converted their salaries and shares into karma terms and started trading it on a newly established Karma Stock Exchange.

~~

AT ELEVEN PM of what had been the single weirdest day of his life, Justice Kumar turned off the television and went to tuck Tarika in her bed.

“This Instant Karma doesn’t bode well,” he said to Tarika. “I may lose my job tomorrow. They won’t need a Judge to tell right from wrong or good from bad when karma takes care of everything! Anyway, this whole system of karma is flawed. Because the truth is, Tarika, nothing is absolutely good or bad. Evil exists in this world because good does, and without absolute evil, even good karma turns rotten...” With this, Tarika’s holiday ended as she drifted off to sleep.

She woke up at dawn and read in the papers what her wishful thinking had set off in the world the previous day. But when she set out for school at seven, the world was back to normal. Humans had been restored to being punished with instantaneous guilt for bad actions and to getting rewarded with immediate happiness for unconditional favours. The Instant Karma of yesterday seemed like a distant dream today as Tarika was led by her father to the corner of the street, where she would board her bus to school. Beat Constable Jadhav turned around the corner at the same moment her school bus arrived. She saw Constable Jadhav, the bad goodman smile at Justice Kumar, the good badman as the bus sped away.

■

[27 Jul - The results for the competition were announced in the Sunday Herald today. I read the winning entry and was not particularly impressed. Perhaps I should choose the competitions I enter into more wisely. In any case, deadlines get me to put pen to paper. So it's all good.]