Horseman Of The New Millenium

The uncut and unplugged nightmare that plagues the watches of the night. The rusty needle that contains the codes of anger. The blood of ancient sacrifice. The babbled cliches of a million unmemorable speeches, ignored by those who are deliberately too blind to see.

Come, open your hearts and eyes to the new India of the millennium. Where the mind is without fear and the blood is riddled with HIV. Where nine million people are so close to death, they have actually been diagnosed as HIV-positive. Where Bihar is officially clean since its too much bother to complie stats. Where death comes as cheap as a one-night stand or a tetanus toxide injection.

It's amazing that so many have been officially diagnosed. A friend with a promiscuous past, awoke in a cold sweat the day after the March AIDS Rally and decided he had to know. He wandered the streets of Delhi for days plaintively demanding an Elisa test from clinics still awaiting MoH clearance. Alternately, you can stand in a queue at AIIMS and stand in a queue at AIIMS. And stand in a queue at AIIMS. And forget about a Western Blot Confirmatory, unless you have a lot of money and connections.

If you live in the North-East, travel to Calcutta for a test, then come to Delhi and grovel in many ministries for the import licence to buy drugs to prolong your life. And visit Delhi for every prescription refill.

It's better not to know, really. It would ruin your wedding prospects. Even worse, it would ruin your siblings' prospects. When they get around to testing candidates at the UPSC, it would probably put paid to your chances of being a civil servant. Your life insurance premium would go up.

Because only naughty people get AIDS. People who indulge in sex and drugs and are NOT faithful to their life partners. So we learn from the backs of buses. Drugs remain freely available. Divorce rates have tripled in the last decade. The sex-rate remains high if the population growth rate is anything to go by.

But you can't tell children about HIV and its avoidance _- Sex Education in schools is so uncivilised, so un-Indian. They'd lose all respect for their parents and teachers. Never mind that 37 per cent of the precocious little brats do it before they leave school. Better that they should die ignorant.

As for adults, handing out condoms in jails would condone homosexuality _- a practice, which is also a crime. Needles and condoms are often recycled in this frugal land of ours, anyway. And AIDS also equates apartheid. The wannabes who cheerfully raise money for AIDS victims jib at meeting them. The prostitutes who walk at the rallies are segregated from the school children.

There are five lakh prostitutes in Mumbai, a similar number in Calcutta. In a hicktown like Delhi, there are fewer fulltimers and more part-timers. All fodder for the retrovirus. The heartland has fewer prostitutes and no diagnostics at all.

Ignore the zillions of urban workers who migrate back to their gaons once a year from the big cities. They will miss being diagnosed, unlike in a decadent First World nation. They will merely add to fatal pneumonia and TB statistics. Millions will die in the annual cold wave rather than merely hundreds.

All for the best, really. The naughty and the neurotic will go in good Darwinian fashion. The survivors will be educated, they will use condoms. AIDS and its aftermath will cut population growth rates without resort to politically explosive nasbandhi. The India of the new Millenium will be a land fit for those who are faithful to their life-partners. Until one of them needs a blood transfusion, that is.