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 Rusted Iron Cage.
☆ Witful Warmth# 127 ☆
☆ Satire ☆ The Rusted Iron Cage… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆
Hanging from a hefty wooden peg against the barbed-wire perimeter of the town’s oldest national wildlife sanctuary checkpost was a battered, iron-barred cage. It had dangled there for twenty years, its small door perpetually swung wide open. The flaking, corroded bars had once symbolized the frontline rescue of wounded wilderness; now, weathered by two decades of sun and downpours, they merely looked like a tetanus trap blackened by grime.
Directly below the checkpost, perched on a cracked masonry ledge, sat old Dharampal every morning at seven sharp, anchored to the pavement by an ancient rosewood staff. Clad in a frayed white khadi kurta with a grimy towel slung over his shoulder, Dharampal spent whole days locked in an unblinking staring contest with the empty iron cage.
Out by the main sanctuary gates, an endless parade of safari gypsies, air-conditioned luxury sedans, and high-ranking forestry brass clogged the driveway. From the decorated stage, massive loudspeakers rattled the trees with grandiloquent homilies on compassion for dumb beasts and the sacred duty of forest conservation. Naturally, neither the fresh crop of slick wildlife consultants nor the bespoke-suited directors had the slightest interest in a heap of scrap metal dangling on a fence.
Whenever Manglu, the veteran forest guard, hurried past with a steaming kettle of sweet tea, the old man’s motionless vigil would give him the chills. Dharampal would invariably ask in a raspy, feeble croak: “Tell me, Manglu, on this grand circus of Wildlife Week, has any government circular arrived commanding someone to comfort a dying creature through this open door? Or are we strictly rationing out recycled podium rhetoric to pasture the crowds today?”
Manglu would only lower his gaze, exhale an administrative sigh, and shuffle quietly into the underbrush.
The sanctuary had recently acquired a brand-new Regional Chief Conservator of Forests straight from the central ministry in the capital: Dr. Animesh Agnihotri, a notoriously stern martinet, an evangelist of drone monitoring and GPS analytics, and a worshiper of bureaucratic spit-and-polish. Whenever Agnihotri stepped out of his gleaming state sedan to inspect the new digital surveillance command center, his eyes unfailingly snagged on old Dharampal parked on the broken bricks, staring devoutly at a piece of discarded fencing.
To a modern conservationist celebrating Wildlife Week amidst geo-tagging seminars and luxury eco-tourism panels, a tattered geriatric folding his hands before a lump of antique junk looked less like reverence and more like unauthorized architectural squatting.
When the morning’s ribbon-cutting ceremonies wrapped up and the luminaries retired to the air-conditioned VIP lounge to graze on salted cashews and exchange performative pleasantries, Agnihotri dismissed his security detail and marched straight up to Dharampal.
“Look here, old man,” the Chief Conservator barked in his best administrative bass. “Why choke the main checkpoint day in and day out? If you need a forest-dweller pension or a firewood gathering permit, go see the clerk inside. Staring a hole through a derelict iron box isn’t going to save the endangered fauna of this republic.”
Dharampal joined his weathered palms with infuriating calm. “Conservator Sahib, I am not here to hustle for welfare crumbs or deadwood scraps. I am merely keeping vigil for the day when that cage recovers the trust that was stolen from this very threshold years ago.”
Agnihotri scoffed at the riddle. “What trust? The ministry burns through millions every Wildlife Week carving out high-tech ecological corridors. What grand cosmic mystery could possibly cling to this junkyard relic?”
Pandit Someshwar, a retired ranger who had spent forty years cataloging every limping leopard, poached tusker, and administrative cover-up in the reserve, stepped forward. “Do not dismiss him as a lunatic, Conservator. Twenty years ago, when poachers and timber cartels were gutting this entire valley, Dharampal’s only son, Samaresh, stood right on this veranda and lit the fiercest torch for forest defense this province had ever seen.”
Agnihotri raised an eyebrow. “And what did this prodigy pull off that supposedly ties him to a rusted birdcage?”
“He was the state’s most brilliant, incorruptible young zoologist,” Someshwar recalled with a heavy sigh. “When commercial syndicates were skinning leopards and running velvet antlers out the back door, Samaresh spent nights stalking the deep scrub, hauling mangled predators into this very cage to nurse them back to health. He kept that door unlatched and took an oath: until the last wild beast in this forest could breathe free of fear, he would never surrender to the commercial safari lobby.”
Dharampal reached out, his trembling fingertips lightly grazing an oxidized bar. “Yes, Sahib. My Samaresh stood on these bricks and told me: ‘Bapu, this isn’t just an iron box; it is a doorway safeguarding the border between captivity and freedom.’ He swore that the day he returned from Delhi with the National Wildlife Board’s definitive sanctuary declaration, he would carry this cage to a museum with his own hands and seat me as the guest of honor on the nation’s grandest ecological stage.”
Pricked by bureaucratic curiosity, Agnihotri marched into the dusty archives to unearth the twenty-year-old project dossier. Flipping through the brittle, classified pages, the ground vanished beneath his polished oxfords.
The archival trail laid bare a classic corporate buyout: twenty years ago, just as Samaresh’s crusade threatened to shut down illegal concessions, a global syndicate of luxury safari chains and exotic private menageries stepped in with a standard corporate solution. Rather than break his movement, they bought the crusader: an appointment as Managing Director of their international wildlife tourism firm, sweetened with a discreet twenty-five percent equity stake.
Samaresh promptly tossed his principles, forgot the open cage, signed the confidential clearances, and reinvented himself into the country’s premier billionaire safari-resort tycoon. Today, his high-end compounds held the jungle’s finest predators behind discreet electrified fences, charging foreign oligarchs exorbitant fortunes for private glamping and bespoke big-game photo ops.
Agnihotri walked back out into the sun with hollow eyes and wobbly knees, his administrative swagger completely liquidated. “Old man…” he stammered, his throat dry, “your savior of the jungle didn’t free the beasts. He built the private zoo.”
Tears carved silent tracks down the old man’s face, though his gaze remained anchored to the iron latch.
“I have known he was bought for a very long time, Sahib,” Dharampal whispered softly. “I only sit here every day to check one simple thing: when our decorated grandees gather on stage to perform their tearful tributes to mother nature, after having traded their own roots and their own father’s open cage to turn the king of the forest into a parlor trinket—does this deaf society catch even the faintest whiff of rot rising from the shroud of monetized conservation? Or are the cashews in the VIP lounge simply too savory to notice?”
Agnihotri stood completely frozen, staring at the empty, gaping cage, as the entire high-tech sanctuary 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 ≈
