What a stroke of luck, by God! Hai na? Isn’t it? I mean, chalo, just let it be. You won’t understand. You never ever saw an opportunity when there was a challenge. You only saw a challenge and let that challenge you. Some people see opportunity, they are the rare ones. They see a challenge and then... you know. But you would not know. You would have to be a certain kind. You would have to be the kind that, let me think, the kind that can say I have commerce in my bloodstream. Profits. Then whether you are in Verona (that famous balcony place, the same, or similar, balcony that we have been asked to go to and do this thing and that thing) or in Bharona (you know Bharona, don’t you, although it is best not to know it, Bharona being what it is, Bharona being something you cannot know for too long because before too long, Bharona gets to know you and then, khalllaaas). Bharona, it is so named because it makes you pay its dues. Millennial dues for millennial excesses. But were you a certain kind, you could make Bharona pay and make it a thing of advantage rather than a thing of deficit; you just have to know how.

Like you can swing the whole thing around and make it a thing of profit. Not in the shoddy way some folks are going about it. No, of course not. Not these five-minute, nine-minute things. They don’t last. Not these ransacking, profiteering things. Give me this fund, bring out the family silver — those that have families with silver to give — bring me your gold, or just plain cash, that’ll do. Not that sort of thing. You know any of that does not last either. Remember all the golden birds of the past that have become no more than things of the past and disputed remembrance, buried under their withered wings. Coffers don’t last; they get looted. Or spent. Or misused. Folks fill coffers believing they are merely filling them, never believing one day coffers will be emptied. That is in the nature of coffers. Coffers aren’t how you profit from Bharona. You profit from Bharona merely living in the time of Bharona. You profit only from surviving it so you can tell the tale. Or leaving a tale behind for others to tell. Realising that this is not an ordinary time. This does not happen even rarely. Such a thing as Bharona may, in fact, never have happened, the sheer scope and scale and scare of it. When was the last time the entire planet was similarly afflicted at the same time? Perhaps when the first of our ancestors stood up, straight on his or her spine, and began to walk and then walked all over. It took time, but our kind did come to inflict the world, all of it. So that makes two afflictions parading far and various corners of this planet — one when we began to walk and then when Bharona began to fly. And so you do understand what an extraordinary and epic time it is, and we are part of it. Tales will be told about us, if there are still those around to tell tales. But for that the tales must lie somewhere, told and protected. And that will take some doing because doing that is what Bharona restricts most. It has a prohibitory ring to it, the end of it echoes like a pronouncement of resounding prohibition: NA. No. Nothing doing. Which is why we have begun not to do most of which we are used to doing. Most things are. NAA. No. But they will have to be defied, those prohibitions; one after another. Else Bharona will subjugate and there will be nobody to tell the tale. This is an opportunity like no other opportunity, to challenge what challenges us. It won’t happen from the balconies because that is where Bharona put us, that is where it would keep us locked. We have our stories, why must we become somebody else’s?

When we later write
About all we did or did not fight
God knows what they’ll say
If there’s still a God around, pray.