That minister sahab talking about betting being a 'scourge on our youth' — I keep thinking of the nineteen-year-old boy in Bilaspur who pawned his mother's mangalsutra for one online cricket satta and lost. The radio said all that fine-sounding policy, but my neighbour's son still walks home past ten illegal betting shops every evening. When the law only chases the poorest punter and leaves the big apps running ads on every channel, then yaar, whose youth are they really protecting?

Yaar, when I saw Umar Khalid ka naam, I remembered that morning near Raipur — I was patching a puncture under a neem tree, and a college boy was reading out from his phone to his friend, something about ‘sedition’ and ‘Delhi’. I just wiped my hands and thought: in my village, if a young man speaks loud against the government, the elders either call him a hero or a nuisance, but nobody asks if his family has eaten that day. My son wants to study political science, but first I have to afford the fees, bas. For a packet-wala uncle like me, these big-city names feel like clouds far away — you see them, you wonder if they’ll rain on your field or just pass.