To savor the leisurely pleasure of browsing in supermarket aisles or banter and bargain with your local banyan. How anachronistic is the poet lament, what is this world if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare? Besides, who want to tend beneath the bough and stare as long and moronically as sheep or cows? The insta world has so telescoped that four letter fiend, that if you step beyond your ever shortened time span, you have no right to space. Snap chat self destructs after 30 days, and now What Sapp disappearing messages after their allotted hours. Everyone getting timed out. What are we? Netbanking? And how cruel the terminology. Online is positive, happening. On is like a lights witch. Offline is its dark side, like the dark stores of Q comma which dot the city, packed with in demand items which can be speedily delivered within a two km radius. Offline isnegative, a has been. Off is like meat gone bad. Sad end to what was the warm norm of centuries. The Indian government stand on the Ukrainian conflict, advocating a cessation of hostilities without taking sides on the issue, called to mind a discussion I had with someone years ago about the Gandhi an principle of ahimsa, nonviolence, and the centrality of the Bhagwad Gita to that all embracing way of life and thought, which is often labelled with the shorthand tag of Hinduism. My interlocutor asked how India could claim a tradition of ahimsa while adhering to the teachings of the Gita in which a faltering Arjun is enjoined by Krishn, in his divine manifestation, to take up arms, without remorse, against his own kinsmen on the killing field of Kurukshetra. How can you preach nonviolence when your most sacred text enjoins you to kill without qualm or conscience? How is the Gita different from Hitler Mein Kamp that led to the Nazi Holocaust? I tried explaining that the Gita is a philosophical treatise which uses the metaphor of a battle field to liberate us from the desires and devices of the ego, to be free of the ensnarement of the self and its attachments, and achieve cosmic consciousness. My arguments sounded hollow to my own ears. How does the 700 verse Gita fit into the 2,00,000 verse Mahabharata, an epic poem ten times longer than Homer Iliad and Odyssey combined and which, in its depiction of mass slaughter, is the most damning of all anti wartestaments? There are no good guys and bad guys in the epic. Everyone, including Krishn, is shown in shades of duplicitous grey. It is the holier than thou Yudhishthir who seweakness for gambling which makes him wager away Draupadi and his brothers, after he him self has been defeated in the throw of dice and thereby lost himself brings about the catastrophic conflict.