SULTANPURNAMA

Sultanpur is to India what Piccadilly is to England

Sultanpur is a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, situated some 140 kms east of the state capital, Lucknow on the holy banks of river ‘Gomti’. It is a place of restless humans and resting humanity. It is a town of great historical value whose antiquated historicity is yet to be discovered. Readers shall be apprised of it, no sooner than it happens.

Sultanpur does not believe in opulence, in outlandish structures of “Fountainhead” fame and hitherto, has not ratified any malls, starred hotels or motels, magniloquent parks, beer-bars, no-jantar-no-mantar or schools of un-affordable fee structures, minarets or amphitheatres. It has accepteda way of life, the pace at which ‘Gomti’ flows: adrift and afloat!

It is cosy with its ‘Stella Maris Convent’, adorable ‘Ramkali Kanya Vidyalaya’, and impassable ‘Kesh Kumari Girls’ college’, not to omit, ‘Thekas-desi-saraab! The highly ordained Sultanpuris do not believe in a diagenesis of information from highly decorable ‘phoren’ degrees or diplomas of erstwhile Bactrian, Greco-Roman Universities but believes in its own ‘Nalanda’ of ‘Ganpat Sahai Post Graduate College’, ‘Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology’, ‘Kamla Nehru Institute of Physical Sciences’ and ‘Maharana Pratap Degree College’, “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high… Where Knowledge is free”, and the same is transmitted and exchanged in all its cordiality on a mutually agreeable terms between tutor and taught. Such is the pace of life that the river ‘Gomti’ stops, taking its own time to flow past, saluting the town in the process.

To the ones born in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s of the previous circa, this narration, SULTANPURNAMA, should be a delectable precipice of re-visiting those decades of unchartered, childlike mischiefs, committed or omitted, as playful students of gainful screenplays. The meanderings of un-aspiring youth, snoozing clairvoyantly, with least of mundane desires, procrastinating in finding better ways to avoid excess of any human proclivities, dovetailed with a neighbourhood where parents and the neighbours alike, exercised their franchise of paternalistic hegemony to any extent of verbal or physical rhetoric in moralising, culturing, nourishing and flourishing of their progenies and those of their neighbours’ with gay abandon.

Sultanpuri youth of the said decades, which believed that ‘every profession is a conspiracy to their laity’ express their gratitude through ‘SULTANPURNAMA’, to ones who provided the right palliatives at right time.

Sultanpuri youth are sincerely obliged to their neighbourhood as much as they are to their respective parents in sculpturing the imbecility of their youth to minarets of suavity and responsibility of Indian citizenry!