THE death of Günter Grass on Monday, a giant German writer of the post-World-War-II era, a novelist, playwright, poet, fine draftsman and a sculptor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999, has eclipsed an enormous creative force of modern-day German world of letters which has been equally venerable as it is universal.

What exactly are we left with when our near and dear ones leave us behind as they embark on a journey of no return? We are agonizingly left to console ourselves with mere impressions of a flight, like that of a bird which flies away through the visible winds onto an invisible, unseen world, behind the covering clouds of destiny. Their flight leaves behind the lasting impressions of moments we have shared with them which have now turned into residual memories to spread around us like sunshine, or engulfing us, at times, like ambient dark.

When on the evening of 9^th November 2014 a 15 kilometres long emblematic wall created by white balloons and lights right through the reunited city of Berlin was made to dissolve symbolically by releasing the balloons in the air by a battery of people, it marked the exact moment when 25 years ago the agitating GDR-Masses had finally forced the Communist leadership to announce the travel relaxations that prompted the opening of the gates of the 155 kilometres long and 3.2 to 4.5 metres high Berlin Wall that had divides the city of Berlin and surrounded its western part then called West-Berlin.

Allow me to begin this piece of writing with a trigger warning: If you do not value free speech and stimulating political discourse, chances are bright that your day might get ruined if you carry on reading the piece beyond this point. Now that you have decided to move ahead with the perusal, the risk involved is of your own making. As the present government is approaching to complete its first 100 days of being in power, it gives us all an opportunity to reflect upon its beginning. 

Even this election has shown, yet again, that a layman in India is not only not informed of their democratic rights and duties, this fact rather makes him or her even more vulnerable to all sorts of fanaticism, on the one hand, and a manipulation by alcohol, drugs, cash, and by one time meagre awards of bicycles, laptops or televisions to get robbed of their democratic right of independently exercising their right to vote. Marx’s so true postulate as religion being opium for the people was proved yet again, rather literally, and was appended by another malice, that of votes being bought by the big money, be it paid directly to the poor voters or to the media for buying their favour.