Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’
Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra, widely known in the world of satire by his pen name ‘Uratipt’, expresses his emotions and thoughts with profound honesty and depth. His multifaceted talent is evident in his contributions across various literary genres. He is not only a renowned satirist but also a poet and a children’s author.
His satirical writings have earned him a special place in the literary world. His satire, ‘Shikshak Ki Mout’, went massively viral on the Sahitya Aajtak channel, garnering over a million views and reads—a monumental achievement in the history of Hindi satire. His collection of satires, ‘Ek Tinka Ikyavan Aankhen’ (A Straw and Fifty-One Eyes), is also highly acclaimed and includes his timeless work, ‘Kitabon Ki Antim Yatra’ (The Last Journey of Books). Other celebrated collections include ‘Mayaan Ek, Talwar Anek’ (One Sheath, Many Swords), ‘Gapodi Adda’ (The Gossiper’s Den), and ‘Sab Rang Mein Mere Rang’ (My Colors in Every Hue). His satirical novel, ‘Idhar-Udhar Ke Beech Mein’ (In Between Here and There), is a unique and groundbreaking work focused on the third world.
His significant contributions to literature have been widely recognized. He was honored with the Best Young Creator Award, 2021 by the Telangana Hindi Academy and the Government of Telangana, an award presented by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. The Rajasthan Children’s Literature Academy also honored him for his children’s book, ‘Nanhon Ka Srijan Aasmaan’ (The Creative Sky of Little Ones). Additionally, he has received the Vyanga Yatra Ravindranath Tyagi Sopaan Samman and the Sahitya Srijan Samman from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Dr. Uratript has also played a pivotal role in writing, editing, and coordinating a total of 55 books for the Government of Telangana for primary school, college, and university levels. His work is included in university textbooks in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana, where his satirical creations are part of the curriculum. This recognition underscores that young readers can identify and appreciate quality and impactful writing.
Key Accolades and Works
- Viral Satire: ‘Teacher’s Death’ (over 1 million views)
- Satire Collections: ‘Ek Tinka Ikyavan Aankhen’, ‘Mayaan Ek, Talwar Anek’, ‘Gapodi Adda’
- Unique Satirical Novel: ‘Idhar-Udar Ke Beech Mein’
- Awards: Shreshtha Navyuva Samman (Telangana), Sahitya Srijan Samman (PM Modi), and more.
- Educational Contribution: Authored and edited 55 books for the Telangana government.
Some precious moments of life
- Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
- Honoured with Oscar, Grammy, Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, Dadasaheb Phalke, Padma Bhushan and many other awards by the most revered Gulzar sahab (Sampurn Singh Kalra), the lighthouse of the world of literature and cinema, during the Sahitya Suman Samman held in Mumbai.
- Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
- Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
- Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.
Today we present his satire The Relic on the Doorpost.
☆ Witful Warmth# 126 ☆
☆ Satire ☆ The Relic on the Doorpost… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆
Near the doorway of the main veranda at the town’s oldest state veterinary hospital, a weathered leather strap fitted with an iron horseshoe had hung from a rusty nail for twenty solid years. Its hand-stitched seams had long unraveled under decades of damp winds and relentless sun. Once upon a time, that coarse horseshoe had carried the tender devotion of someone determined to shield the cracked hooves of abandoned bullocks and draft horses; now, it was simply an antique dust-trap buried under flaking lime.
Directly below the doorway, perched on a cracked brick plinth, sat old Hardev every morning at seven sharp, anchored to the pavement by an ancient bamboo staff. Clad in a frayed white khadi kurta and sporting a grubby towel over his shoulder, Hardev spent entire days staring down that rusty horseshoe with hollow, petrified eyes.
Meanwhile, just past the veranda steps, the hospital grounds were choked with a gleaming fleet of modern livestock ambulances, glossy brochures for imported pedigree dog spa products, and chauffeur-driven sedans carrying the high-ranking mandarins of the Animal Welfare Board. From the raised pavilion, blaring PA horns sprayed the crowd with interminable, honey-glazed sermons on compassion for our mute, four-legged brethren. Naturally, neither the fresh crop of clinical interns nor the bespoke-suited directors had any intention of acknowledging a moldering leather strip in the corner.
Whenever Sukhram, the aging herdsman, shuffled past clutching a bale of green fodder, the old man’s motionless vigil would give him the chills. Hardev would invariably ask in a raspy, feeble croak: “Tell me, Sukhram, on this glorious World Animal Day, has any grand decree arrived to measure the agony in an old bullock’s split hoof using this horseshoe? Or are the delegates strictly being fed recycled podium rhetoric for pasture today?”
Sukhram would drop his gaze, let out a well-rehearsed administrative sigh, and shuffle quietly into the haze.
The hospital had recently acquired a brand-new Chief Veterinary Officer straight from the capital’s animal husbandry secretariat: Dr. Animesh Agnihotri, a notoriously stiff martinet, an authority on laparoscopic veterinary surgery, and a worshiper of antiseptic protocol. Whenever Dr. Agnihotri stepped out of his state-issued sedan to inspect the newly air-conditioned operation theaters, his eyes unfailingly collided with old Hardev stationed on the bricks, locked in silent communion with the junk on the doorframe.
To a modern bureaucrat celebrating World Animal Day amidst boutique pet clinics and pedigree grooming vans, a tattered geriatric folding his hands before a scrap of corroded iron looked less like devotion and more like unauthorized architectural squatting.
When the inaugural speeches finally wrapped and the dignitaries filed into the air-conditioned VIP pavilion to graze on salted cashews and government-funded buffets, Agnihotri left his security detail behind and marched straight up to Hardev.
“Look here, old man,” the Chief Officer barked, deploying his best administrative bass. “Why block the main thoroughfare day in and day out? If you need a rural livestock pension or a complimentary vaccine voucher, join the queue at the OPD counter inside. Staring a hole through a piece of rusty scrap won’t fill the stomachs of the stray cattle roaming this country’s highways.”
Hardev joined his palms with maddening composure. “Officer Sahib, I am not here to hustle for free vaccines or pension doles. I am merely keeping watch for the day when that horseshoe recovers the compassion that was stolen from this very threshold years ago.”
Agnihotri scoffed at the riddle. “What stolen compassion? The ministry burns through millions every World Animal Day erecting state-of-the-art shelters. What grand mystery could possibly cling to this flea-market horseshoe?”
Pandit Someshwar, a retired livestock extension officer who had spent forty years examining every limping hoof and infected laceration in the district, stepped forward. “Do not dismiss him as a lunatic, Director. Twenty years ago, when the local trade was routinely shipping sick, worn-out bullocks directly to the abattoirs, Hardev’s only son, Manas, stood right on this veranda and lit the fiercest torch for animal rights this state had ever seen.”
Agnihotri raised an eyebrow. “And what did this prodigy accomplish that ties him to a strip of rotting leather?”
“He was the state’s brightest, most empathetic young veterinary surgeon,” Someshwar recalled with a heavy sigh. “When commercial traders abandoned broken workhorses to starve in the gutters, Manas spent sleepless nights cleaning their bleeding hooves and binding them with that very shoe. He nailed it to this doorway and took an oath: until the last voiceless beast in this town was granted the right to live, he would never surrender to the corporate lobbies.”
Hardev reached out, his trembling fingertips lightly grazing the dry, cracked hide. “Yes, Sahib. My Manas stood on these bricks and told me: ‘Bapu, this isn’t just a lump of iron; it is a shield for the tears of the defenseless.’ He swore that the day he returned from the capital with a sanctioned sanctuary charter from the National Animal Board, he would rub mustard oil into this strap with his own hands and seat me as the guest of honor on the nation’s grandest stage.”
Pricked by bureaucratic curiosity, Agnihotri retreated into the records room to exhume the twenty-year-old case file. Flipping through the brittle, classified pages, the ground vanished beneath his polished leather oxfords.
The archival trail laid bare a classic corporate buyout. Twenty years ago, just as Manas’s grassroots campaign threatened to choke the illicit livestock pipelines, a multinational syndicate of pet-food conglomerates and leather exporters stepped in with a standard corporate solution. Rather than break his movement, they bought the crusader: an appointment as Managing Director of their international pet-nutrition subsidiary, sweetened with a discreet twenty-five percent equity stake.
Manas promptly junked his vows, forgot the horseshoe, signed on the dotted line, and reinvented himself into the country’s premier billionaire meat-processing tycoon. Today, his automated slaughterhouses consumed the town’s spent bullocks by the thousands, tinning their flesh into gourmet pâté for high-pedigree foreign house pets.
Agnihotri walked back out into the sun with wobbly knees, his clinical swagger completely drained. “Old man…” he stammered, his throat dry, “your savior of the voiceless didn’t liberate the cattle. He built the slaughterhouse.”
Tears carved silent tracks down the old man’s face, though his gaze remained anchored to the iron shoe.
“I have known he was bought for a very long time, Sahib,” Hardev whispered quietly. “I only sit here every day to check one simple thing: when our decorated grandees gather on stage to perform their tearful tributes to dumb beasts, after having traded their own heritage and their own herdsman father’s work for an export quota—does this deaf society catch even the faintest whiff of rot rising from the shroud of monetized compassion? Or are the snacks in the VIP lounge simply too savory to notice?”
Agnihotri stood entirely paralyzed, staring up at the rusted horseshoe, as the grand veterinary pavilion choked on the suffocating, shameful silence of an old father’s quiet grief.
****
© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’
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≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈
