English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 66 – The Sound of Silence, Sold for the Loudest Lie… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

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

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Sound of Silence, Sold for the Loudest Lie 

☆ Witful Warmth# 66  ☆

☆ The Sound of Silence, Sold for the Loudest Lie… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

The idea, when it first surfaced in the hallowed halls of the Ministry of Quiet Revenue (a truly Parsai-esque bureaucratic monstrosity), was hailed as an economic masterstroke. Why allow classroom silence—that vast, unmonetized void between the chalk-dust scattering and the bell’s tyranny—to lie fallow? This ‘Silent Inventory,’ as the consultants termed it, was prime real estate, moments of pure, captive concentration ready for colonization. The official circular, penned in the verbose, self-congratulatory jargon of modern efficiency, spoke of “optimizing scholastic bandwidth” and “extracting efficiency dividends from temporal assets.” It ignored the fact that silence was not an asset, but the medium in which all valuable assets—thought, doubt, and original curiosity—were forged. It was announced: the two-minute ‘Contemplation Slots’ and the crucial five-minute ‘Post-Theorem Introspection Periods’ would be bundled and auctioned off to the highest political bidders. And thus, the deepest recess of the learning mind was assigned a price tag, marking the day the soul of education was officially declared redundant and commercially available. The gavel struck, not with a simple thud, but with the sound of a thousand fragile glass dreams shattering in unison.

The first successful bid, naturally, went to the ruling party, the Party of Perpetual Promise, a group whose entire existence was predicated on replacing substance with high-decibel assurance. The amount was astronomical, a record-setting price that immediately raised teacher salaries by a symbolic 0.1%—just enough to ensure the educators’ complicity without actually relieving their financial misery. The silence of the eighth-grade math class, the sacred pause after grappling with the quadratic formula, was violently usurped. Instead of the quiet, beautiful hum of gears turning in young minds, there was a deafening, aggressively cheerful jingle praising the Leader’s visionary policies regarding water buffalo and fiber optics. It was a clash of frequencies: the subtle wave of pure logic, seeking connection in the quiet, against the blunt, jackhammer pulse of propaganda, demanding acceptance in the noise. The teacher, Mr. Shrivastava, a man who once believed in the purity of pedagogy, merely adjusted the volume knob on the ceiling-mounted speaker. His face held the quiet, defeated shame of a man who had not just sold a commodity, but had personally handed over his students’ capacity for independent thought to the highest, most vulgar bidder.

In the third row, young Leela, a sensitive girl whose universe revolved around the silent, internal drama of solving impossible problems, felt a physical sickness rise in her throat. The two minutes of enforced advertisement, once her haven for processing complex concepts and simply being, had become a sonic assault. She had been on the cusp of understanding why the hypotenuse behaves as it does, a beautiful moment of cosmic recognition that demands absolute quiet, when the jingle erupted: “Vote for Progress! Our Leader Delivers Dawn!” Leela watched her nascent understanding—that fragile, newly-formed thought—flicker and die under the noise. It was not just an interruption; it was a conceptual vajra-prahār (thunder-strike) against her inner world. She realized, with the crushing clarity of youth, that the world was now afraid of silence because silence allows people to think, and people who think are bad for business and terrible for unquestioned political power. A single, hot tear rolled down her cheek, a tribute to the death of her own mind, a silent protest drowned out by the promises of a brighter, louder tomorrow she instinctively knew would never arrive.

Mrs. Sharma, the veteran history teacher whose class was famed for its profound, pin-drop silences during discussions of ancient tragedies, looked out the window at the school garden. She remembered a time when silence was a learning tool, a positive pressure that forced students to internalize, structure, and articulate complex ideas. Now, her silence slots were sponsored by the ‘Coalition of Contentment,’ who used the time to play testimonials from suspiciously satisfied citizens praising the subsidized prices of stale bread. Mrs. Sharma’s idealism, once a roaring fire, had dwindled to a cold ember, surviving only on the meager salary supplement derived from the ad revenue. She couldn’t quit; the mortgage on her tiny government flat was too real. But she had quit, internally, the day she realized her true job was no longer to teach history, but to manage the acoustics for political messaging. Her blackboard stood untouched, chalk in hand, while the voice of the state replaced the voice of Socrates. Her silence was louder than any advertisement, a profound, internal scream that nobody, least of all the government auditors, could hear or monetize.

The content of the advertisements themselves was a masterclass in absurdist tragedy. The political parties, knowing they had a captive audience of young, developing minds, didn’t bother with logic or policy. One party ran a continuous loop of their leader staring intensely into the camera, merely repeating the word “Development” 120 times in two minutes, occasionally punctuated by a CGI explosion. Another, more subtle ad from the opposition, promised a 10% reduction in all taxes and an exclusive, government-funded pony for every child under ten. The hypocrisy was paralyzing. These were the moments when students were meant to be applying geometric theorems, understanding the gravity of the French Revolution, or analyzing the poetry of Ghalib. Instead, their young minds were force-fed cognitive junk food—a thick, gooey paste of meaningless superlatives and contradictory promises. The children, quick to adapt, learned not to think during the ‘Contemplation Slot.’ They learned to perform a mental evacuation, a necessary survival mechanism, ensuring that the critical thinking faculties remained unmarred by the political debris.

This grand auction was, at its heart, a philosophical theft—a demisical attempt to sell the un-sellable. What is true silence, after all? It is not merely the absence of sound; it is the presence of potential, the canvas upon which the nascent intellect draws its first independent thoughts. It is the only space where one can truly hear the faintest whispers of the self, the voice of the soul trying to distinguish truth from the collective clamor. By selling this space, the state had essentially auctioned off the child’s right to an epiphany, their right to doubt, and their fundamental right to introspection. They had declared war on the inner life, ensuring that every waking moment, even the brief interregnum between breaths, was colonized by the market or the state. The ultimate realization for the satirist is that this system doesn’t just want the children’s votes tomorrow; it wants their minds today. It needs a populace that is incapable of sitting quietly enough to realize the absurdity of the advertisements.

The absurdity, as is always the case in this tragicomedy of existence, continued to escalate. Soon, the two-minute slot was deemed inefficient, and parties began bidding on the mandatory one-minute ‘Transition Period’ between classes, transforming school hallways into deafening political carnivals. The final, mind-blowing twist came when a dissident, reform-minded political rival, realizing the futility of fighting noise with more noise, made the highest bid of all. They did not buy the slot to run an advertisement. They bought the five most expensive minutes of silence in the city’s most prestigious school, purely to run nothing. They paid millions simply for the children to experience actual quiet once again, a single, pure, unmolested moment. This was the pinnacle of satire: the greatest political statement they could make was the profound, beautiful declaration of nothing at all. Yet, the children, so conditioned to the noise, only grew anxious in the unfamiliar vacuum, looking up, confused, waiting for the jingle to begin.

And so, the auction continues, not just in classrooms, but in every public park, every hospital waiting room, and soon, one suspects, in the brief, agonizing pause between a sigh and a tear. The system won, not by proving its ideas were superior, but by colonizing the very faculty required to evaluate those ideas. The true tragedy is not the sale of the silence, but the total adaptation of the recipients. The students grew up hearing the promise of ponies and perpetual progress, and they never learned to question, because they never had the quiet time required to formulate a decent question. The only true, profound silence left in the land is the silence of the electorate, who no longer care, and the final, ultimate silence of the children, whose inner voices have been drowned out so thoroughly, so profitably, that they have forgotten they ever had anything original to say. The only thing left to sell is the air itself, which, one hears, is being bundled into premium ‘Oxygen Vouchers’ for the next quarterly auction.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Poetry ☆ Life Never Stops… ☆ Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ☆

Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM

(Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi —an ex Naval Officer, possesses a multifaceted personality. He served as a Senior Advisor in prestigious Supercomputer organisation C-DAC, Pune. He was involved in various Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing projects of national and international repute. He has got a long experience in the field of ‘Natural Language Processing’, especially, in the domain of Machine Translation. He has taken the mantle of translating the timeless beauties of Indian literature upon himself so that it reaches across the globe. He has also undertaken translation work for Shri Narendra Modi, the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, which was highly appreciated by him. He is also a member of ‘Bombay Film Writer Association’.

We present Capt. Pravin Raghuvanshi ji’s amazing poem “~ Life Never Stops ~.  We extend our heartiest thanks to the learned author Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi Ji (who is very well conversant with Hindi, Sanskrit, English and Urdu languages) and his artwork.) 

? ~ Life Never Stops… ??

Though a withered leaf may fall apart

and drift in the oblivion far away

Yet autumn never ushers its arrival

for a leaf that chooses to go astray

*

The fairest bloom may fade with time

their fragrance lost to the breezy air

Yet gardens hum a heavenly rhyme

their beauty shines beyond aura rare

*

A star may slip from the night’s embrace

yet the sky still shines with divine glow

For the life moves on with ageless grace

though tears may veil its tranquil flow..!

~Pravin Raghuvanshi

 © Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM

Pune

≈ Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 65 – When LOL Became the Epitaph of Education… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

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

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire When LOL Became the Epitaph of Education 

☆ Witful Warmth# 65 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ When LOL Became the Epitaph of Education… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

The farman, the decree, arrived not with the majestic roll of royal drums, nor the grave rustle of parchment, but with a cheerful little ping and a blue tick. The esteemed Education Board, in its infinite wisdom, declared the Maha-Kranti of Brevity: henceforth, students were to submit their weighty dissertations and philosophical essays not in the dusty, dilapidated language of their forefathers, but in the vibrant, abbreviated vernacular of the instant messenger—the language of WhatsApp. It was a moment of tear-rolling, mind-blowing revelation, a demisical tragedy dressed up as progressive reform. The order was simple: ditch the commas, execute the semicolons, exile the full stop, and welcome the reign of ‘k,’ ‘gr8,’ and the omnipresent LOL. The traditional Gurus, the keepers of the sacred texts of grammar, felt their life’s blood drain away, their souls replaced by a blinking cursor. The essay on existential despair had been reduced to three lines and an emoji of a crying face. This was not merely a change in medium; it was the ceremonial cremation of depth, where profound thought was deemed an unnecessary attachment, and the length of a sentence became directly proportional to the shortness of the collective attention span. The heart wept, but the finger—that modern deity—kept typing, fast and furious, because who has time for sadness when there are status updates to check?

The instant the decree landed, the libraries of the mind went bankrupt. Centuries of literary inheritance—the grand architecture of the sentence, the nuanced vocabulary that could describe a single shade of human misery, the dard (pain) of a well-placed metaphor—were instantly reduced to rubble. Why bother with “The inherent socio-economic inequalities perpetuated by colonial legacies” when you could just type “Colonial legacy bad, LOL.” The poor, persecuted adjective, the elegant adverb, and the complex relative clause found themselves jobless, replaced by the sheer, unadulterated efficiency of the acronym. Teachers who had spent decades teaching the delicate dance between subject and verb were now forced to learn the brutal shorthand of the street: Subject + Verb = K. This wasn’t communication; it was conceptual teleportation, jumping from idea to idea without the burdensome bridge of logic or explanation. The language, once a flowing river nurturing the fields of thought, was now a dried-up tap dripping out monosyllabic contempt. Where could the soul hide when even the word for soul was probably reduced to ‘SL’? The tragedy was that the students, the supposed beneficiaries, didn’t feel liberated; they simply felt emptier, writing a language that required no engagement from the dil (heart).

The student body reacted with a strange, cynical relief. For years, they had been tormented by the archaic demands of coherence, structure, and evidence. The formal essay was a fortress they were forced to storm, armed only with a weak dictionary and a weaker will. Now, the fortress walls had crumbled, not to be replaced by a park, but by a sprawling, chaotic bazaar of signs and symbols. The pressure to articulate a complex thought, to marshal facts into a persuasive battalion, was gone. Why research when you can summarize a historical event with a series of dramatic emojis? The very act of contemplation—that slow, difficult process of intellectual gestation—was rendered obsolete. The essay was no longer a journey of discovery but a hastily snapped selfie of a thought: quick, filtered, and instantly forgettable. The tears we shed were not for the language lost, but for the minds that would never learn how to fight for a complex idea, how to wrestle with ambiguity, or how to experience the heart-touching triumph of clarity. They were taught to summarize life, not to live it; to react instantly, not to reflect deeply. The essay became a series of punchlines, and the punchline, sadly, was the education system itself.

And what of the teachers, the poor, heartbroken Gurus? Their plight was the most demisical of all. They sat hunched over glowing screens, grading essays written entirely in phonetic soup and emoji hieroglyphics. Imagine the English professor, whose life was Jane Austen and T.S. Eliot, trying to decipher a thesis on The Wasteland that read: “April cruelest month. Plants dead. So sad. WTF.” Their red pens, once instruments of surgical precision, were now blunt axes, incapable of marking anything but a faint, existential despair. The most painful irony was the attempt to apply academic rigor to the inherently careless. “This is a weak ROFL, student,” the history teacher might sigh. “It lacks the nuanced emotional depth of a full LMAO.” Their tear-rolling agony was silent, internal—a private shok (mourning) for the generation they were sworn to protect from intellectual atrophy. Their paychecks were the only thing that kept them tethered to this floating island of digital insanity, but their souls were already packed, ready for the next life where a metaphor was still a metaphor, and a full stop actually meant something had ended, rather than just an opportunity for the next text bubble to begin.

This academic decay is but a microcosm of the larger societal drainage, the great digital siphon sucking the depth out of every human interaction. We have entered the era of the Digital Narcotic, where only the instant, the summarized, and the highly filtered can survive. Our political debates are now conducted via 280 characters, our spiritual crises are solved by inspirational quotes overlaid on scenic backgrounds, and our deep, complex relationships are defined by reaction GIFs. The demand for the WhatsApp essay is merely the institutional acknowledgment that society has lost its patience for the long view, for the slow burn of wisdom, and for anything that takes more than three seconds to process. The educational system, which should have been the fortress against this wave of intellectual surrender, instead threw open its gates and served chai to the invaders. The resulting wisdom is thin, weak, and instantly soluble, designed to pass through the mind without leaving any residue of thought or heart-touching reflection. It is the language of efficiency, and efficiency, as the old philosophers knew, is the enemy of the soul.

Language is not merely a tool for exchanging information; it is the sacred vessel that contains the soul of a culture, the intricate map of human emotion. The words we use, their arrangement, the cadence of a sentence—these are the vibrations that allow us to feel the dil ka dard (the heart’s pain) of a character 200 years dead. When we reduce language to a string of abbreviated sounds and hastily chosen icons, we are not just saving keystrokes; we are sealing off the deepest chambers of our communal heart. How do you describe the sublime dread of mortality with a :O? How do you capture the profound love of a parent with a <3? The WhatsApp essay, therefore, is a philosophical void. It is the official endorsement of emotional illiteracy, teaching children that anything too complex to be abbreviated is probably not worth feeling or thinking about in the first place. The mind-blowing realization is that we are willingly constructing a shallow future, a future where the ability to convey nuance is considered a waste of bandwidth, and where the silence between words, where true meaning often resides, is replaced by the deafening chime of a new notification.

The most insidious, mind-blowing truth behind the WhatsApp essay mandate lies not in pedagogical theory, but in the cold, hard logic of the market. Education has ceased to be an act of enlightenment and has become a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) factory. The goal is not deep learning, but fast output; the measure of success is not wisdom gained, but degrees obtained. The formal, well-structured essay was an impediment to this efficiency. It took time to write, time to read, and time to grade. The WhatsApp essay, however, is quick, quantifiable, and instantly assessable. It aligns perfectly with the capitalist dogma of optimization and engagement. The institutions surrendered because they feared being labeled ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘inefficient’ in the digital marketplace. They chose the path of least resistance, mistaking instant gratification for innovation. This heart-touching tragedy is the ultimate act of institutional surrender, where the pursuit of truth is sacrificed on the altar of technological trendiness. The modern Gurus now serve the god of speed, and the students are simply the fast-food consumers of this new, diminished educational meal.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 64 – The Funeral of the Blue Light… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

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

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Funeral of the Blue Light 

☆ Witful Warmth# 64 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ The Funeral of the Blue Light… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

The great fast began not with a government decree, nor a terrorist’s plot, but with a universal, existential shudder—the light on the router simply turned blue, then stopped. It was a digital sannyas, a sudden retreat from the world of incessant pings and instant validation. The Internet, that ubiquitous, invisible deity to whom we had outsourced our memory, our opinions, and our very breath, simply decided it was tired. The nation, having outsourced its consciousness to this shimmering glass, found itself staring blankly at its own reflection. The shock was clinical, profound, and deeply ridiculous. People gathered on the streets, holding their dead smartphones aloft like sacrificial offerings, their thumbs mechanically swiping at thin air, a nervous tic of the modern age. The profound sadness was not due to the loss of connectivity, but the horrifying realization that without the Internet, they had no alibi for their existence. Who were they, if not a curated feed of opinions and filtered selfies? The collective depression that followed was not the noble melancholy of philosophy, but the panic of a clerk who has lost the only key to his filing cabinet. We had become a society of sophisticated puppets, and the strings were now slack, leaving us in a heap of technological debris and existential angst. The mind, trained only for immediate notification, found the silence a cruel and deafening judgment.

The ensuing depression was not the poetic, melancholic kind that inspires great art; it was a practical, bureaucratic, and deeply humiliating despair. The first great institution to crumble was the nuclear family, which suddenly found itself staring across the dinner table at its cohabitants. Husbands and wives, previously connected by 4G, were now confronted by the terrifying analog reality of shared silence. “What do you think about…?” one would start, only to realize the other had no instant, shareable, politically correct opinion downloaded from a reputable source. The children, those tiny, digital natives, began weeping, not from hunger, but from the inability to confirm their existence via a stream of “likes.” Their self-worth, calculated in engagement metrics, plummeted to zero. They were statues awaiting their dedication plaque. Without the Internet to maintain their carefully constructed online personalities, the nation’s citizens shed their curated skins like old snakes, revealing the frightened, insecure animal beneath. The true tragedy was not the economic ruin, but the fact that nobody had practiced being a person in real life for over a decade. The mind, deprived of its daily dose of external affirmation, turned inward, only to find the interior decorated with cobwebs and the faint, unsettling echo of their original, unedited self.

Bureaucracy, that ancient, mold-covered deity of the Indian landscape, staged a magnificent, vengeful comeback. With email defunct and video conferencing a mythical memory, the government was forced to communicate using the methods of its ancestors: handwritten chits, slow-moving peons, and the devastating power of the unverified rumor. The neighborhood gossip broker, long relegated to the status of a social pariah, suddenly became the most powerful source of information, a human news aggregator. Facts, starved of the oxygen of instant verification, mutated into spectacular fictions. A local power outage became an alien invasion, and a minister’s slight cough became a national health emergency. This proved a profound truth: we crave information not for its veracity, but for its transmission. The inefficiency was glorious to behold. Transactions were done with shaky hands and doubtful ledgers. The stock market devolved into men shouting numbers at each other, their faces contorted by the effort of genuine calculation. We discovered that our great, streamlined system was merely a complex house of cards, held together by nothing more than the constant availability of Wi-Fi. The national sorrow was amplified by the sheer, staggering ineptitude of having to operate machinery with one’s own untrained hands.

The Agony of Memory inflicted a unique form of torment upon the population. People found they could not recall the simplest detail—a recipe, a phone number, the name of a distant relative—without the umbilical cord of the search engine. Our brains, like retired civil servants, had forgotten how to perform their basic duties, having delegated all functions to the cloud. Creativity, too, suffered a debilitating stroke. The modern artist, accustomed to generating ideas by endlessly scrolling through a visual database of existing art, suddenly found their well dry. They were left only with their own, meager, un-collated thoughts. The writers, deprived of their plagiarism checkers and instant synonym finders, struggled to string together two original sentences, their hands trembling over the blank paper. This demonstrated a cruel irony: we had created a device that promised infinite knowledge, yet it had rendered us collectively illiterate and forgetful. The sadness here was the realization that our intelligence was merely a function of our broadband speed. To be forced to think, truly think, without the aid of an external prompt, was a humiliation the modern mind was simply not equipped to bear. We cried genuine tears for the loss of our digital crutches.

Perhaps the most “tear-rolling” aspect of the Digital Fast was the forced confrontation with self-reliance, a concept as terrifying as eternal darkness to the modern urban dweller. People were suddenly faced with the necessity of solving problems that had once been trivial: reading a physical map, talking to a stranger for directions, or, God forbid, having a hobby that did not require a subscription or a rechargeable battery. The simple act of waiting became an ordeal. Queues formed not for resources, but for the comforting sensation of being told what to do next. When the traffic signals failed, the chaos was not due to mechanical error, but to the drivers’ inability to proceed without a turn-by-turn navigation voice dictating their movement. We had become so dependent on the external script that our internal navigational systems had atrophied entirely. This vulnerability, this profound helplessness in the face of simple reality, was truly “mindblowing.” It was a collective admission of failure, proving that we were not masters of technology, but its pathetic, utterly dependent pets, mewling for our digital milk. The true tragedy was the discovery that the simplest elements of human autonomy had been sold off for the price of convenience.

The economic collapse was aesthetically pleasing in its swiftness. Money, which had long existed as a purely digital hallucination, evaporated instantly. The great, gleaming towers of finance became mausoleums of useless hardware. The only thing of value was what one could physically hold: water, rice, and the grudging patience of one’s neighbor. The nation briefly regressed to a system of localized, emotionally charged barter, trading a slightly dented transistor radio for a week’s supply of lentils. The rich, whose wealth was merely a massive, unattainable number in a distant, unreachable server, found themselves as penniless as the peasant, proving that true poverty is the loss of function, not the lack of zeros. The profound sadness here was the recognition that the entire structure of the modern world was an elaborate shared fantasy, a communal agreement sustained only by electricity and fiber optic cable. When the light went out, the fantasy died, leaving everyone shivering in the cold, hard realism of immediate, manual survival. The tears were for the lost convenience, the vanished ease of purchasing instant comfort with a tap; a heartbreaking discovery that nothing was real.

The government, in its infinite and predictable wisdom, decided the national depression was not a result of technological withdrawal, but a “failure of patriotic spirit.” They launched a massive, analog propaganda campaign urging citizens to “Connect with Your Soil, Not Your Screen!” The messages, delivered by actors wearing historically inaccurate national dress, were broadcast over antique radio frequencies and physically painted onto large, wooden billboards—a monumental feat of manual labor. The irony, of course, was spectacular: the government was using the most archaic, inefficient methods to scold the populace for relying on efficiency. The political class, however, thrived magnificently. With no social media to fact-check their every utterance or record their blatant hypocrisy, they became majestic, unassailable orators once more. Their lies, broadcast unchallenged, took on the gravity of divine scripture. The Digital Fast had, accidentally, created the perfect environment for political regression, proving that the tools of liberation, when removed, leave behind only the familiar, sturdy infrastructure of control and self-serving falsehood, dusted off and used with renewed vigor. The people, in their despair, had no platform to complain.

And then, with the gentle flicker of a green light, the fast ended. The Internet returned, not with a fanfare, but with the quiet, addictive hum of a constant need being fulfilled. The national depression lifted instantly, replaced by a frenzied, desperate rush back to the screens. No one rushed to rebuild the financial system; they rushed to check their missed notifications and compare the tragic events of the last week with the perfectly curated tragedy posts of their friends. The brief, terrifying glimpse of an analog life—the awkward conversations, the rediscovered books, the profound silence—was instantly scrubbed from the collective memory. The great lesson had been offered and immediately rejected. We had proved that we were not merely addicted to the Internet; we were fundamentally defined by it, and without it, we were nothing. The nation’s tears had dried the moment the blue light returned, revealing the true, heartbreaking emptiness beneath. We did not cry for the world we lost; we cried for the feeds we missed. The funeral of the blue light was immediately canceled, replaced by the eternal, unthinking worship of its glow. We are empty, and the screen is our perfect container, sealing our fate.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 64 – The Wedding That Lagged Out: When Love Timed Out On Wi‑Fi… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

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

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Wedding That Lagged Out: When Love Timed Out On Wi‑Fit 

☆ Witful Warmth# 64 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ The Wedding That Lagged Out: When Love Timed Out On Wi‑Fi… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

At the very first hearing, the whole city sobbed—on the court’s streaming screen, the judge’s face froze into polite squares, and the bride and groom’s love jammed at “Reconnecting… Retrying…,” like a dying harmonium wheezing for breath. The boy pleaded, “My Lord, we upgraded the data plan,” the girl confessed, “I placed the router near the basil plant and waved incense,” and yet the seven firewalls of matrimony vanished into packet loss. The priest had sent mantras as voice notes; rice emojis showered like confetti; the garland fell, not on necks, but into a server’s hungry cache. Witnesses lived inside a WhatsApp group; someone typed “Jai!” a hundred and eight times, someone pasted “Om” like cheap wallpaper, but the priest’s last “Sampannam” burned to ash in buffering. Love these days is like signal strength—five bars displayed, call still drops. The court ruled: “Where seven steps were promised, seven kilobytes did not move—marriage annulled.” The attempt of affection rides a hotspot; the sacrament sulks in airplane mode. The clerks stamped a PDF, the registry hiccupped, and two families learned that romance has a progress bar now, and it spins longest when hearts are most afraid to look at each other.

Mourning happened through memes. Grandma sighed, “In our time, the hearth lit the rounds; now even the hearth is smart—ask Alexa to blow and it learns your sorrow.” The groom’s uncle lifted a jalebi like a philosophical question: “When the net fails, bonds fail; when it works, relations jump the railing and land in the DM.” The lights twitched on the shamiana, the DJ pounded drums like a debt collector, and the beat broke exactly where the bride’s netted sari snagged on a button of fate. This is the new society: mangalsutras weighed in cloud storage, vermillion calibrated by user interface, tenderness filtered to match the venue lighting. Autocorrect turns “in‑laws” into “in‑lows.” An old villager said, “Good it ended; at least no loans piled up.” A city boy whispered, “Bad Wi‑Fi bricked my heart.” Hearts, ah—upgraded to devices, never catching the route, only stuck in routing. Children asked, “Grandma, what is love?” She shut the phone and said, “That which connects even without signal. That.” Outside, a florist tied petals into silence. Inside, two mothers waited for the next notification: grief.

Government studied the crisis systematically; a committee rose like a damp monsoon: The National Commission for Marital Connectivity. Conclusions were visionary: replace seven circumambulations with seven backup networks—two telecoms, two wifis, a neighbor’s password, a brother‑in‑law’s hotspot, and the temple’s free bandwidth as holy prasad. New curriculum for priests: Chanting With Latency, Blessings Under Low Bandwidth, and Handshake Protocols For Shy Routers. Dowry modernized: mesh routers, signal boosters, surge protectors for in‑law tempers. A muhurat app blinked: “Your karma is 5G; your Mars affliction reduced to 2.4 GHz.” Behold the reconsecration: relationships tested by ping; lifelong commitment rebranded as speed test. Will the first night be Netflix And Marriage? Or will bandwidth, like virtue, return to buffering at the decisive moment? The aunties formed a focus group: what’s the right incense for packet loss? The uncles formed a panel: whose terrace gets the external antenna? Reform marches on: priests get boom mics, brides get ring lights, and grooms get tutorials on holding eye contact without checking the chat. The great question of civilization is now a small cogwheel: will it ever stop spinning?

Harishankar Parsai would have chuckled and stabbed: “We modernized marriage so thoroughly that the human inside it went obsolete.” Now, the temperature of love is printed on the router’s heat sink. The shoulders that carried society have been replaced by a plastic pillar with a blinking green confession light; in that soft pulse, we hung our trust. The dharma of bonding lives inside the terms and conditions—all scroll, all accept, none read—like a groom nodding yes without hearing the vow’s grammar. This era does not want truth; it wants signal. Not even honest signal—just the illusion, those proud, lying bars. A good day is when all bars glow, and a bad day is when the soul realizes a full‑bar lie still drops when the room goes quiet. The tragedy is basic: where conversation breaks, the first death is not Wi‑Fi but truth. After truth, humor. After humor, patience. Then, in the rubble, a toy—plastic, blinking—pretends to be hope. And the city buys three of them, one for each floor, so that disappointment can sync.

A counselor appeared with the tone of a rainstorm promising a harvest. “Virtual marriages do not fail because of technology,” he claimed, “but because the social design forgot the spinal cord of intimacy.” Quite right. We extracted the marrow of selfhood and turned union into content. Rounds became “status,” henna a “story,” vermillion a filter that stains nothing but the memory card. The sin was never a dropped line; the failing was that two minds had been offline for months—performing together, speaking alone. Seven vows turned into seven slides—Our Journey, Our Pets, Our Sunset, Our Sponsors. The QR code trembled under the weight of laddus. In a one‑second lag, a thousand days of planning folded like a cheap canopy. The bride didn’t lose kohl; the cloud drive leaked. The groom did not change conviction; he changed passwords. Parsai’s question stings: “After slicing love into pixels, how dare we file a complaint that the image came out blurry?” If a vow echoes only into a microphone, the god of acoustics, not conscience, officiates.

The judgment was both historic and clownish. “Unstable net, unstable knot,” wrote the law, tucking morality into a side drawer and spooning the warm body of technology for comfort. Courts go live; life is recorded. The bench inquired, “Did you try alternate connections?” The counsel argued, “My Lord, we had premium romance subscription.” Observe the cartography: love once spent centuries mapping a garden; now it is confused with tariff slabs. The champa of memory has been replaced by the blue of “connecting,” not tears but a screen that refuses to learn the taste of salt. Still, in this absurdity glints a splinter of sense: when a bond is perched on a signal alone, justice turns into a traffic light for data packets. The human stands at red until the joint venture of telecom and fate flips to green. That wait is not justice; it is queueing theory performed on a heart. And in the queue, every polite citizen grows old, then civilized, then slightly cruel.

Families, veteran improvisers, kneaded sorrow into discounts. Relatives sought a refund under the “Net‑Fellowship Package.” The caterer offered sweet diplomacy: “Hot milk jalebi—your sadness will caramelize.” The photographer smiled without mercy: “No classic candids, sir, but many candid errors—memes guaranteed.” Bridesmaids formed a parliament; verdict: “Men who live in airplane mode will one day actually take off.” A mother wiped her daughter’s face with the end of a future and said, “Find the Wi‑Fi of the mind, child—the one that crosses rooms without a router.” That sentence was a loaf of compassion and a pinch of satire, baked for a hungry generation that mistakes speed for promise. Society, measuring its most private ritual with bandwidth, will suffocate its vows like lungs learning to be modest in a polluted city. We will hunt for chargers during ceremonies where ancestors hunted for courage. And every socket will be already occupied by the decorations.

Solutions? Parsai’s needle pricks where it heals: don’t replace devices; replace habits. Two lessons for the couple: first, thirty minutes of talking without screens; second, lift a complaint only after looking directly into the other’s eyes. Let the rounds happen, but in the temple of the chest: seven offline vows—listen, speak, pause, hold, yield, change, keep. Priests should lace mantras with four pockets of silence—where the soul, not the signal, answers. Build a “slow lane” into the celebration where cameras are blind and memory has the room to grow tall. Even the state can legislate poetry: “Where laughter resonates, keep the speakers fewer; where conversation is true, microphones are redundant.” Bake patience into the menu; print humility on the invite. Make one friend the keeper of gossip, whose only duty is to let it starve. And plant basil next to the router if it pleases the elders—but water the basil more.

And if, in spite of goodwill, the net falls again and the courts chant that old chorus—annulled—remember this: love is not the court’s clerk. It does not stamp, staple, and file; it reads pulses like a musician listens to rain. Bonds that collapse when a router sneezes were never engineered to withstand weather. Bonds that sit together after the outage keep a quiet backup on the threshold of the mind. Let tears go where they must—they mourn not the loss of network but the loss of nerve. One day, when the sun sketches a gentle geometry on a sari’s edge, a knock will happen—no OTP, no login—and someone will ask, “Sit?” That is where the real marriage begins, with a blue circle that says “understanding,” not “connecting,” and with signals that come from chairs pulled closer, not towers pushed higher.

A last small note to society: stop turning weddings into tech support. The priest is not an IT helpdesk; the bride and groom are not customers; the family is not a call center. And love is not a data plan. Love is either unlimited, or it is counterfeit. Today’s annulments “due to poor Wi‑Fi” are case studies of our inner low coverage—where the towers of trust, restraint, and dialogue have collapsed. Raise them again—not brick by brick, but shoulder by shoulder. Then watch the weakest signal work wonders, because sitting near and speaking softly still performs the miracle that seven rounds once promised. If someone asks, “Got net?” smile and say, “Got heart.” That is the only password worth remembering, the only prasad that doesn’t expire, the only plan that never throttles at midnight when the house grows honest.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 63 – The Felicitation Ceremony of Sixty-Year-Old Mischief… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra, known for his wit and wisdom, is a prolific writer, renowned satirist, children’s literature author, and poet. He has undertaken the monumental task of writing, editing, and coordinating a total of 55 books for the Telangana government at the primary school, college, and university levels. His editorial endeavors also include online editions of works by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla.

As a celebrated satirist, Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra has carved a niche for himself, with over eight million viewers, readers, and listeners tuning in to his literary musings on the demise of a teacher on the Sahitya AajTak channel. His contributions have earned him prestigious accolades such as the Telangana Hindi Academy’s Shreshtha Navyuva Rachnakaar Samman in 2021, presented by the honorable Chief Minister of Telangana, Mr. Chandrashekhar Rao. He has also been honored with the Vyangya Yatra Ravindranath Tyagi Stairway Award and the Sahitya Srijan Samman, alongside recognition from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and various other esteemed institutions.

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra’s journey is not merely one of literary accomplishments but also a testament to his unwavering dedication, creativity, and profound impact on society. His story inspires us to strive for excellence, to use our talents for the betterment of others, and to leave an indelible mark on the world.

Some precious moments of life

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Felicitation Ceremony of Sixty-Year-Old Mischief 

☆ Witful Warmth# 63 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ The Felicitation Ceremony of Sixty-Year-Old Mischief… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

From dusty villages to the capital itself, there was a buzz: the Sahitya Akademi was about to host a “historic” program. The declared theme—“The Transitional Phase of Hindi Satire.” But the real spice lay elsewhere: the welcome speech was to be delivered by none other than the Secretary himself, whose mischief had turned a glorious sixty this year. Now you may ask—how can mischief ever grow old? Dear sir, in this land everything is cause for celebration. Some pour ghee in temples, some blow out candles on birthdays, and some—having made people’s lives hell for a good sixty years—get their mischief felicitated. The Akademi was all set to print invitations saying—“Diamond Jubilee of the Secretary’s Mischief.” But then they feared a cart of rotten tomatoes might decorate the hall’s entrance, so they softened it to the safer title of “Transitional Phase.”

On the day of the grand function, the hall looked like a theatre of absurdity. Outside, giant hoardings screamed—“Welcome the Transitional Phase!” Inside, a velvet-red table gleamed with flowers arranged into the number “60.” The Secretary waddled in, belly leading the way, and collapsed into the chair like a crowned king of Mischief on the day of coronation. On the wall, Parsai’s portrait hung, his eyes seemingly whispering, “Look at this—the offspring of my satire adorning with garlands the very man throttling its neck!” The litterateurs seated in the audience muffled their laughter, but not because the joke was funny—because they feared shoes might really start flying. The anchor on the mic boomed, “Today, present among us is a personality of great experience, our venerable Secretary!” I bit my tongue. Oh, to shout aloud—“Experience in what? Theft? Hypocrisy? Or simply decades of mischief?”

When the Secretary rose to speak, even the tube-lights on stage flickered nervously. Behind those thick glasses, his eyes glistened with the polished shamelessness of a thief declaring, “I’m here to dispense justice.” He began, “Friends, satire is going through a difficult transitional phase. We must preserve it.” The hall burst into applause. Just imagine: the man whose antics stick to every street corner like unpaid electricity bills, now sermonizing about saving satire! This is the real infection—when scoundrels start preaching piety. Each word from his mouth felt tugged by some invisible hand of falsehood, and the audience swallowed it whole as if it were divine truth.

The real comedy, however, was the row of writers nodding on stage. One bobbed his head mechanically—as though agreeing was a childhood habit. Another bowed so incessantly it felt like he was attending a villain’s wedding, willy-nilly playing the role of a dancing guest. One writer whispered over his teacup, “Friend, sharing the stage is mere compulsion.” Another muttered, “We’re here for literature, not the man.” It sounded as though they’d equated man with a sewer and literature with the Ganges, and happily stirred both into the same pot. This “transition” was not illness of language—it was a cold in the very soul. Satire, strong as steel in Parsai’s hands, was now wrapped and suffocated in the coffin of silence, while the Secretary sat beaming—his sixty years of mischief officially academic.

The richest satire, though, festered outside in the crowd. People came armed with baskets of rotten eggs, dead tomatoes, and ancient slippers. “This is the true way to welcome him,” someone chuckled. Another whispered, “Wait and watch—the speech will soon be decorated with red eggs.” But the guards were vigilant, standing stiff as if they were democracy’s gatekeepers, confiscating shoes like contraband and tossing them into a lockup. Inside, the Secretary smoothed out the creases in his pristine white kurta, while outside, democracy’s voice was stripped barefoot. Such is the state of satire today: when shoes on your feet are blessed for temple darshan, but the moment the same shoes arc majestically toward a rogue’s forehead, the hall calls it an outrage. The air inside smelled like rotten potatoes hidden under roses.

The Secretary’s speech dragged on and on. Louder even than his words was his laughter—that laughter bought with contractors’ cash, that laughter that salts the wounds of the wronged, that laughter awarded for six decades of perfected deceit. The writers sat listening as though the laughter itself were a bitter medicine they were compelled to swallow. Behind their frozen faces lurked fear. They knew too well—oppose him, and the foreword to their next book will be penned by someone else entirely. Better keep the pen locked in the pocket. Satire was no longer literature; it had withered into the stench of this hall. Each of his sentences crackled like an electric shock—writers clapped, not out of agreement, but as living insulators protecting themselves from electrocution.

If one calls this a “transition,” then this it is: the court silent, the stage dumb, the victim abandoned. Her cries clung mute to the peeling walls like forgotten posters. Each clap in the hall dropped another tear from her eyes. In those tears drowned pages of literature, while floating upon them was the mocking silhouette of his laughter. Shoes waited outside for justice, but inside, satire was lynched. This was no academic ceremony—it was satire’s funeral procession. Only difference—here the mourners showered not flowers but empty words, and the corpse was the pen itself, once sharpened by Parsai, now rusted into a party spoon tucked in the Secretary’s pocket.

When the event concluded, the writers eagerly posed for photographs. The Secretary smiled, flowers rained, and shoes languished in their lock-up prison, denied their rightful protest. Off to the side stood a woman, silent. Swollen eyes, cracked lips, broken heart—she was the one branded guilty. Her tears alone scripted the real text of this ceremony. On stage claps thundered, but within her chest roared endless screams. It was in that scream that satire’s final word was etched: “The Secretary’s mischief may have completed sixty years, but justice remains an orphan.” And as we exited the hall, it seemed Parsai himself whispered from the walls—“Satire is dead, my friends. Not even shoes were granted to perform its last rites.” The echo of that slap still lingered in the air

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Poetry ☆ Cosmic Puppeteer… ☆ Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ☆

Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM

(Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi —an ex Naval Officer, possesses a multifaceted personality. He served as a Senior Advisor in prestigious Supercomputer organisation C-DAC, Pune. He was involved in various Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing projects of national and international repute. He has got a long experience in the field of ‘Natural Language Processing’, especially, in the domain of Machine Translation. He has taken the mantle of translating the timeless beauties of Indian literature upon himself so that it reaches across the globe. He has also undertaken translation work for Shri Narendra Modi, the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, which was highly appreciated by him. He is also a member of ‘Bombay Film Writer Association’.

We present Capt. Pravin Raghuvanshi ji’s amazing poem “~ Cosmic Puppeteer ~.  We extend our heartiest thanks to the learned author Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi Ji (who is very well conversant with Hindi, Sanskrit, English and Urdu languages) and his artwork.) 

? ~ Cosmic Puppeteer??

In the divine cosmic hands,

a conch shell’s gentle sway

Echoes the ocean’s heartbeat,

in  a  mystic  primal  way

I too, yearned to dive into

the dark, ever fertile sea

Where existence’s mysteries

whispered secrets to me

 *

But Time’s Master Puppeteer

wove a discrete fate’s might

Rolling the dice of destiny, to

guide through endless night

 * 

Like autumn leaves, our desires

scattered far and wide

Cacti bloomed where mangroves

once stood, side by side

 *

The river’s flow, a soft melody

that we could never become

The ocean’s vast endless expanse

an  unachievable  freedom

 *

Our castles in the air, shattered,

lost  to  the  stormy  wind

A testament to fate’s whispers,

for hearts to mind and grind

 *

Our castles in the air, shattered,

lost to the gale’s war cry

A testament to fate’s whispers,

for hearts to ponder & imply

~Pravin Raghuvanshi

 © Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM

Pune

≈ Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 62 – The Demise of a Merit-Less Soul… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra, known for his wit and wisdom, is a prolific writer, renowned satirist, children’s literature author, and poet. He has undertaken the monumental task of writing, editing, and coordinating a total of 55 books for the Telangana government at the primary school, college, and university levels. His editorial endeavors also include online editions of works by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla.

As a celebrated satirist, Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra has carved a niche for himself, with over eight million viewers, readers, and listeners tuning in to his literary musings on the demise of a teacher on the Sahitya AajTak channel. His contributions have earned him prestigious accolades such as the Telangana Hindi Academy’s Shreshtha Navyuva Rachnakaar Samman in 2021, presented by the honorable Chief Minister of Telangana, Mr. Chandrashekhar Rao. He has also been honored with the Vyangya Yatra Ravindranath Tyagi Stairway Award and the Sahitya Srijan Samman, alongside recognition from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and various other esteemed institutions.

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra’s journey is not merely one of literary accomplishments but also a testament to his unwavering dedication, creativity, and profound impact on society. His story inspires us to strive for excellence, to use our talents for the betterment of others, and to leave an indelible mark on the world.

Some precious moments of life

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Demise of a Merit-Less Soul 

☆ Witful Warmth# 62 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ The Demise of a Merit-Less Soul… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

The news arrived not as a tragedy, but as a statistical anomaly. It was a Tuesday morning when the principal’s office received the official report on the demise of Student Number 16, a fact conveyed in a tone befitting a clerical error. The student, it was noted, had simply ceased to be. His final moments were not of despair, but of a quiet, meticulous calculation of failure. His mind, having processed the impossibility of achieving a 99.8% average, had logically concluded that a successful life was no longer a viable option. It was a pragmatic decision, devoid of melodrama or romanticism. The school, in its infinite wisdom, immediately formed an Ad Hoc Committee for the Management of Unforeseen Demises. The committee’s primary task was not to mourn or to understand, but to ensure that the student’s failure did not tarnish the school’s pristine record. The chairman, a man with a mind as sharp and as cold as a freshly honed pencil, instructed the clerk to remove the student’s file from the “Exemplary” category and place it directly into the “Statistical Anomaly” box. The whole affair was handled with the same cold efficiency as a bank processing a loan rejection.

The student’s parents, upon hearing the news, did not shed a single tear. Tears, they reasoned, were a useless expenditure of valuable bodily fluids. Their initial reaction was a financial one. “All that money,” the father lamented, “spent on coaching classes, on tutors for mathematics and physics, on the late-night snacks to fuel his futile efforts. It’s a complete loss of investment. The ROI is zero, perhaps even negative.” The mother, ever the pragmatist, immediately called the tuition center to demand a refund. “My son’s demise,” she explained to the bewildered receptionist, “is a clear indication of your teaching’s ineffectiveness. The guarantee was for success, not for a permanent withdrawal from the rat race.” They held a small, formal gathering where relatives offered condolences not on the loss of life, but on the loss of a future doctor or engineer. “Such a pity,” an aunt sighed, “all that potential, all those perfectly good notebooks, now wasted.” The entire conversation revolved around the monetary value of a life that had, in their eyes, become an economic liability.

The neighbors, who had previously praised the student as a diligent boy with a promising future, now spoke of him in hushed, judgmental tones. He was no longer a symbol of hope but a cautionary tale, a social scarecrow erected to frighten their own children into submission. “You see what happens,” a father whispered to his son, his voice thick with implied threat, “when you don’t score well? The pressure becomes too much. It’s better to just study hard now and avoid such an outcome.” The story of Student Number 16 was added to the national curriculum of parental warnings, alongside anecdotes of children who had run away from home for daring to express an interest in art or music. His demise, in a strange, bureaucratic twist of fate, had finally given his life a purpose: to serve as a negative example. He was now more useful to society as a statistic of failure than he ever was as a living, breathing human being. His existence, a brief and frantic sprint toward a finish line he could never reach, had culminated in a final, impactful act of non-existence that served the very system that had consumed him.

The local government, ever eager to be seen as proactive, swiftly announced the formation of the “Bureaucracy of Student Well-being and Protocol for Terminal Academic Exhaustion.” The new department was a shining example of officialdom at its finest: an elaborate building, a dedicated staff, and a mountain of paperwork. The first order of business was to draft a 500-page report on the incident, a document that would contain not a single word about the human cost. The report would instead focus on procedural failures, such as the student’s failure to submit a “Pre-Demise Intention Form” and the school’s neglect in providing a “Certified Stress Mitigation Counselor” with a valid license to counsel. The report’s conclusion was not to recommend a change in the education system, but to suggest a new, mandatory module on “Emotional Resilience and the Proper Filing of Grievances” for all students. The student’s demise was thus transformed from a tragedy into a job-creation scheme, an administrative triumph of form over substance.

The media, sensing a juicy story, descended like vultures on the school. A television news anchor, his face a perfect mask of manufactured concern, delivered a dramatic monologue. “Today,” he declared, “we mourn the loss of a young life, a victim of our cutthroat education system.” The segment then seamlessly cut to a commercial break for a new, “stress-free” online tutoring service. The debate on the news channels was not about the pressures on students, but about whether the student’s demise was a political conspiracy or a case of poor parenting. Experts with impressive-sounding degrees were brought in to pontificate on the psychology of failure, while the student’s actual humanity was completely lost in the noise. His life story was edited, polished, and packaged for maximum viewership, stripped of all its complexity and emotional truth. He was no longer a person who had suffered, but a media product to be consumed and discussed for a week before the next sensational story replaced him. The public, for its part, absorbed the drama and moved on, their collective conscience soothed by the brief, performative act of “caring.”

In a final act of grotesque absurdity, the school decided to posthumously award Student Number 16 with the “Pinnacle of Academic Dedication” medal. The principal, addressing a solemn assembly, praised the student’s “unwavering commitment to the pursuit of excellence, a commitment so profound that he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sanctity of the academic system.” The medal, a shiny, circular piece of metal, was accepted by his parents who, for the first time, smiled. Their son had finally brought them something of value—a shiny token and a fleeting moment of social prestige. The school also announced the establishment of a new “Student Demise Prevention Cell,” but the official notice for the cell’s inauguration was printed on the same page as a full-page advertisement for the school’s new, advanced robotics lab. The cell’s first act was to issue a new, comprehensive set of forms for students to fill out regarding their mental state, a bureaucratic solution to a human problem.

The demise of Student Number 16, in the end, was not a sad event. It was, instead, a logistical success. The school’s reputation was saved, the government had created a new department, the parents had received a consolation prize, and the media had a week’s worth of content. His story became a footnote in the grand, unfeeling ledger of the education system, a small, inconsequential line item in the column marked “Failed Experiments.” His memory was preserved not as a person who had dreamed, struggled, and fallen, but as a statistical object lesson for the next generation of students. He was a martyr to a cause that didn’t care about him, a sacrifice offered on the altar of a system that demanded perfection but offered no grace. The system had won. The demise of the student was a small price to pay for the smooth, uninterrupted functioning of the machine.

And so, life went on. The school bell rang, the students crammed for their exams, and the parents continued to invest in a future of predictable returns. The story of Student Number 16 was filed away in a drawer, alongside other irrelevant documents. The irony of it all was that his demise, which should have served as a wake-up call, had instead been absorbed by the very system it was a symptom of. His quiet exit had become just another part of the noise. And somewhere, another student, with tired eyes and a mind full of impossible expectations, was calculating their own odds of survival. The cycle had been completed, the lesson had been taught, and the machine, well-oiled by apathy and ambition, was ready for its next meal.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Memoir ☆ दस्तावेज़ # 38 ☆ 50 Years Later: A Walk Down My College’s Memory Lane  ☆ Shri Hemant Tarey ☆ 

Shri Hemant Tarey

(This is an effort to preserve old invaluable and historical memories through e-abhivyakti’s “दस्तावेज़” series. In the words of Shri Jagat Singh Bisht Ji – “The present is being recorded on the Internet in some form or the other. But some earlier memories related to parents, grandparents, their lifetime achievements are slowly fading and getting forgotten. It is our responsibility to document them in time. Our generation can do this else nobody will know the history and everything will be forgotten.”

In the next part of this series, we present a memoir by Shri Hemant Tarey Ji 50 Years Later: A Walk Down My College’s Memory Lane .“)

☆ दस्तावेज़ # 27 – 50 Years Later: A Walk Down My College’s Memory Lane ☆ Shri Hemant Tarey ☆

Last week, I was at my home town, Ratlam in connection with Mahalaxmi Pujan.

It so happened that on the way to Ratlam, while talking to my wife, about my childhoid, School, & College days in Ratlam, it suddenly occurred to me that I passed out with my M.Sc. degree from Ratlam college in 1975 and today we are in 2025. Hollyshit, that means it translates to 50 years when I attended the Ratlam college last. With this new found thought, I resolved to myself that I am going to visit my college by stealing few hours out of my short stay at Ratlam. I was thrilled at the idea that I would be seeing for myself as to how the college building looks like after 50 years of my last day in the college.

My younger brother, who also graduated from the very same college, accompanied me on my sojourn to the College and no sooner we stepped into the College campus, memories started to unfold, one after another. On my right was Two wheeler stand where good number of Scooters, Motor cycles etc were lined up as contrast to those good old days, when right at the same spot we used to park our Cycles. This area those days was designated as Cycle stand (as opposed to Two Wheeler Stand) for the simple reason that the area used to be cramped with cycles only those days 😁.

We walked few steps further and soon we were walking along the college main building. With an intent to savour beauty of my college as I glanced at the building I was saddened to see many- many flex posters pasted on the walls, all of which read “ABANDONED”. I almost fainted to see these posters, as I had never imagined that my eyes would meet any such writing on the college walls which would make me almost cry. I continued walking with my brother towards Science Block which used to house Deptt of Physics and Chemistry in our days of yore. I was really praying and saying to myself that I am not going to see any more such ugly posters on the walls of Science Block of the college. My heart was pouncing as we reached the block, my frightened eyes scanning the walls of the science block and hopping that eyes don’t meet the poster which I hated most to look at. I was lucky, though the walls of the Science Block showed signs of wear and tear and having suffered vagaries of weather, fortunately, there were no ugly posters which I had seen few minutes ago on the walls of the Arts and Commerce Block of the College. I entered the Departmed of Chemistry which hosted my two years of M Sc. i.e. 1974- 75 and 1975-76. While strolling the alley ways of the Department, I relived two years of my M.Sc., my days with classmates, the Professors, the Laboratory, the girls 😜 and visits to Samosa shop of Sahu. We also took a stroll of the Department of Physics where we met 2- 3 faculty and HOD of Physics. All of them welcomed us and were surprised to see a student of the Department of Chemistry who passed out in 1975. When we talked about the frightening and ugly “ABONDENED” Posters on the walls of the Arts and Commerece wing of the college, they could feel the emotions we were passing through and consoled us by saying that just 800 meters away new building for Arts and Commerce faculty has since been erected and from this academic session itself, this building will start housing classes for Arts and Commerce students.

After taking tour of the Alma mater and reliving the nostalgia to the hilt, we left the premises and started our journey back home.

♥♥♥♥

© Hemant Tarey

मो.  8989792935

≈ Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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English Literature – Weekly Column ☆ Witful Warmth # 61 – The Dog: A Citizen of the Republic of Irony… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra, known for his wit and wisdom, is a prolific writer, renowned satirist, children’s literature author, and poet. He has undertaken the monumental task of writing, editing, and coordinating a total of 55 books for the Telangana government at the primary school, college, and university levels. His editorial endeavors also include online editions of works by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla.

As a celebrated satirist, Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra has carved a niche for himself, with over eight million viewers, readers, and listeners tuning in to his literary musings on the demise of a teacher on the Sahitya AajTak channel. His contributions have earned him prestigious accolades such as the Telangana Hindi Academy’s Shreshtha Navyuva Rachnakaar Samman in 2021, presented by the honorable Chief Minister of Telangana, Mr. Chandrashekhar Rao. He has also been honored with the Vyangya Yatra Ravindranath Tyagi Stairway Award and the Sahitya Srijan Samman, alongside recognition from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and various other esteemed institutions.

Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra’s journey is not merely one of literary accomplishments but also a testament to his unwavering dedication, creativity, and profound impact on society. His story inspires us to strive for excellence, to use our talents for the betterment of others, and to leave an indelible mark on the world.

Some precious moments of life

  1. Honoured with ‘Shrestha Navayuvva Rachnakar Samman’ by former Chief Minister of Telangana Government, Shri K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
  2. 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.
  3. Meeting the famous litterateur Shri Vinod Kumar Shukla Ji, honoured with Jnanpith Award.
  4. Got the privilege of meeting Mr. Perfectionist of Bollywood, actor Aamir Khan.
  5. Meeting the powerful actor Vicky Kaushal on the occasion of being honoured by Vishva Katha Rangmanch.

Today we present his satire The Dog: A Citizen of the Republic of Irony 

☆ Witful Warmth# 61 ☆

☆ Satire ☆ The Dog: A Citizen of the Republic of Irony… ☆ Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’ ☆

The dog is not merely an animal. He is a metaphor, a social commentary, a walking editorial. He is the only creature who can wag his tail and still be taken seriously. In our society, the dog has transcended biology and entered politics, bureaucracy, and even philosophy. He is the mascot of loyalty, the symbol of servitude, and the ambassador of absurdity. When a dog barks, it is not just noise—it is a protest, a press conference, a parliamentary debate. And when he bites, it is not violence—it is policy implementation. The dog is the only citizen who can roam freely, bark at authority, and still be fed by the very system he disrupts. In this republic of irony, the dog is not beneath us. He is among us. Sometimes, he is above us. He is the minister’s pet, the bureaucrat’s companion, the influencer’s accessory, and the common man’s mirror. If Harishankar Parsai were alive today, he would not write about the dog. He would interview him. Because the dog knows everything. He has seen everything. He has sniffed every scandal, marked every boundary, and slept through every revolution. He is not just a creature. He is a commentary.

The dog’s loyalty is legendary. But loyalty to whom? To the master, of course. The master may be corrupt, cruel, or criminal—but the dog remains loyal. This is not loyalty. This is conditioning. And this conditioning is not limited to dogs. Citizens too are conditioned. They vote loyally, cheer loyally, and suffer loyally. The dog licks the master’s boots. The citizen licks the master’s slogans. The dog wags his tail. The citizen waves his flag. Both are symbols of submission. The dog does not question authority. Neither does the voter. The dog is trained to sit, stay, and roll over. The citizen is trained to obey, pay, and rollover EMIs. The dog’s loyalty is rewarded with biscuits. The citizen’s loyalty is rewarded with promises. Both are edible, but only one is digestible. The dog is loyal because he knows no better. The citizen is loyal because he fears worse. In this democracy, loyalty is not a virtue—it is a survival tactic. And the dog is its most honest practitioner. He does not pretend to be free. He knows he is owned. The citizen, however, lives in the illusion of freedom, wagging his rights like a tail, unaware that the leash is constitutional.

The dog barks. It is his right. It is also his duty. He barks at strangers, at shadows, at silence. He barks to assert territory, to express anxiety, to demand attention. The citizen too barks—on social media, in drawing rooms, at news anchors. But his bark is hollow. It lacks teeth. The dog’s bark may not bite, but it warns. The citizen’s bark is often just noise. The dog barks at injustice instinctively. The citizen barks at injustice selectively. The dog does not need a trending hashtag to protest. He needs a reason. The citizen needs a camera. The dog’s bark is raw, unfiltered, and honest. The citizen’s bark is rehearsed, edited, and monetized. The dog barks even when no one listens. The citizen barks only when someone retweets. In this age of performative outrage, the dog remains authentic. He does not bark for likes. He barks for survival. And when he stops barking, it is not peace—it is resignation. The dog teaches us that silence is not always golden. Sometimes, it is dangerous. Because when the dog stops barking, the thief enters. And when the citizen stops barking, the tyrant wins.

The dog bites. Not always. But when he does, it is decisive. He does not issue warnings. He does not file petitions. He bites. And then he moves on. The citizen, however, does not bite. He debates. He discusses. He defers. The dog bites when provoked. The citizen tolerates when provoked. The dog’s bite is a reaction. The citizen’s inaction is a tradition. The dog bites the hand that hits him. The citizen kisses the hand that robs him. The dog is not diplomatic. He is direct. The citizen is not direct. He is domesticated. The dog bites and faces consequences. The citizen suffers and writes poetry. In this society, biting is rebellion. And rebellion is discouraged. The dog is punished for biting. The citizen is rewarded for bleeding quietly. The dog’s bite is a statement. The citizen’s silence is a compromise. The dog teaches us that sometimes, resistance must be physical. That sometimes, the only way to be heard is to bite. But we have forgotten how to bite. We have become toothless patriots, wagging our tongues instead of our tails, barking at each other instead of the system. The dog remains the last revolutionary.

The dog sleeps. Anywhere. Everywhere. He sleeps on footpaths, under cars, beside garbage bins. He sleeps without guilt, without shame, without apology. The citizen too sleeps—through elections, through scams, through speeches. But his sleep is not restful. It is strategic. The dog sleeps because he is tired. The citizen sleeps because he is indifferent. The dog wakes up when danger approaches. The citizen wakes up when Netflix buffers. The dog’s sleep is innocent. The citizen’s sleep is complicit. The dog does not dream of democracy. He dreams of bones. The citizen dreams of democracy but settles for discounts. The dog sleeps in the open, vulnerable yet free. The citizen sleeps in gated colonies, secure yet caged. The dog’s sleep is a pause. The citizen’s sleep is an escape. In this nation of sleepers, the dog is the only one who wakes up for a reason. He wakes up to bark, to bite, to chase. The citizen wakes up to complain, to consume, to conform. The dog teaches us that sleep is necessary, but awakening is urgent. That rest is not resignation. That dreams must be chased, not just dreamt. But we continue to sleep—through injustice, through inequality, through incompetence—hoping someone else will bark.

The dog runs. Behind cars, cycles, cats, and sometimes, his own tail. He runs without purpose, without destination, without GPS. The citizen too runs—behind jobs, behind leaders, behind trends. But his run is not free. It is forced. The dog runs because he can. The citizen runs because he must. The dog’s run is chaotic but joyful. The citizen’s run is structured but stressful. The dog does not run for medals. He runs for movement. The citizen runs for validation. The dog runs even when he knows he won’t catch the car. The citizen runs even when he knows he won’t catch a break. The dog’s run is a metaphor for freedom. The citizen’s run is a metaphor for fatigue. In this race of rats, the dog remains a stray. He does not follow lanes. He does not obey signals. He runs because the road is his. The citizen runs because the system demands it. The dog teaches us that running is not always progress. That speed is not always success. That chasing is not always achieving. But we continue to run—on treadmills of ambition, on highways of illusion—forgetting that sometimes, the joy is in the run, not the result.

The dog is homeless. Technically. But he is not rootless. He belongs to every street, every corner, every chai stall. The citizen has homes, but no belonging. He lives in apartments, but not in communities. The dog is greeted by name—Sheru, Tommy, Moti. The citizen is greeted by designation—Sir, Ma’am, Boss. The dog is remembered for his bark. The citizen is remembered for his LinkedIn. The dog is fed by strangers. The citizen is ignored by neighbors. The dog finds warmth in winter, shade in summer, and food in festivals. The citizen finds EMI in winter, bills in summer, and stress in festivals. The dog is poor, but not pitiful. The citizen is rich, but not restful. In this urban jungle, the dog survives. The citizen struggles. The dog teaches us that home is not a building. It is a feeling. That belonging is not ownership. It is acceptance. That community is not WhatsApp groups. It is shared silence, shared space, shared stories. But we continue to build walls, install cameras, and forget names. The dog remains the only one who knows everyone, greets everyone, and trusts everyone. He is homeless, but never alone.

The dog dies. Quietly. On roads, in drains, under wheels. No obituary. No condolence. No trending hashtag. The citizen too dies—sometimes loudly, sometimes invisibly. But his death is documented. The dog’s death is deleted. The citizen’s death is debated. The dog dies without insurance. The citizen dies with policies. The dog dies because he lived freely. The citizen dies because he lived fearfully. The dog’s death is a statistic. The citizen’s death is a story. But both are forgotten. The dog teaches us that death is not the end. It is the punctuation. That life must be barked, bitten, and run. That silence is not peace—it is absence. That freedom is not safety—it is risk. But we do not learn. We mourn selectively. We remember conveniently. We live cautiously. So let us not dismiss the dog as a mere street nuisance or a loyal pet. He is our reflection—raw, unfiltered, and inconvenient. He barks when we whisper, bites when we beg, and sleeps when we pretend to be awake. In his wagging tail lies our conditioned obedience, in his bark our suppressed dissent, and in his bite our forgotten courage. The dog does not wear masks of civility; he exposes the farce of our own. He does not seek approval; he demands attention. And in doing so, he becomes the most honest citizen of this republic—unregistered, uncelebrated, but unforgettable. If we truly wish to evolve as a society, perhaps we must stop taming the dog and start learning from him. Because in a world where silence is rewarded and obedience is sold as virtue, the dog reminds us—sometimes, to be truly human, one must dare to bark.

****

© Dr. Suresh Kumar Mishra ‘Uratript’

Contact : Mo. +91 73 8657 8657, Email : drskm786@gmail.com

≈ Blog Editor – Shri Hemant Bawankar/Editor (English) – Captain Pravin Raghuvanshi, NM ≈

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