The Dare : Part I

The Dare : Part I

(Note: Some of this actually happened. The building exists)

Of all the qualities that that building possesses, nothing scares me more than the nonchalant attitude of the people towards it. I mean, whenever you imagine a haunted site, you expect the people living around it to be scared of it. Not here, though.

Every single person that I talked to told me the same exact thing – nothing goes wrong if you don’t cross the fence. Unless you cross the fence, you are not in any danger.

I mean, there are people practically sharing a fence with a structure that has seen more deaths than most Tarantino films. And are they bothered by it? Nah.

More than the gory details of the building’s past, it is the nonchalance with which people speak about it that really creeps me out.

“Yeah, we just don’t go there.”

The level of acceptance in their tones gets me every time. They may have been warning me about touching a bad electrical socket, such was the level of certainty they felt of the danger within. You touch a bad electrical socket, you die.  You wander inside this particular piece of property, you die. As simple as that.

I remember reading ‘The Exorcist’ before watching the film based on it. The book had scared me more than the film ever did, and I am talking about literally the most famous horror film of all times.

It was this strange nonchalance that scared me. The makers of the film designed the film to scare the audience. But it was indeed more scary in the book, because you got the sense that the author really did believe every single word that he was writing.

You expect people to be either cynical or dramatic, when it comes to all things supernatural. What you don’t expect is for them to accept it and carry on with their lives.

Let me tell you a little bit about the building, itself. First of all, it is not built on some old burial ground (I’ve seen the papers in the old municipality office). It was never the base for satanic cults (there had been a house on the same area before – and no, the house wasn’t haunted). There had been no murders or suicides for there to be vengeful spirits around (all the recorded deaths had been genuine accidents, or due to natural causes). In fact, there was nothing that could have triggered these occurrences that I could find in the history.

So these are the details that I have gathered – and I will try to stick to the bare facts, so you can draw your own inferences and conclusions.

A Mr. Kshirsagar owned the land from the late 1930s till his death in 1963. He built a bungalow on the land, which he used infrequently (his business having been in Coimbatore). After his death in Coimbatore, the house passed along to his daughter and son-in-law. It remained empty till July 1973 when they put it up for sale. In February 1980, it was sold to a private builder, Mr. J.S. Naik. Naik demolished the house and started constructing the base for what he thought would be a five storied building. However, since construction began in September 1980 till when I came across it in the March of 2003, it had passed through the hands of no less than six separate builders and it was still incomplete.

The reason, of course, being the sudden deaths of all six of the owners. Two accidents, three heart attacks and one prolonged cancer later, it now lay unfinished.

These six deaths of the owners would seem like a big coincidence, were it not for the fact that each of these deaths were preceded by a number of deaths in each household. And that is not counting fatal accidents on the construction site, itself.

The total death toll from 1980 to 2003 was 63. 63 people associated with the building had died. Most of them from natural causes. Some of them from accidents.

And this was the building that I had decided to break into to have a bit of an adventure.

This was the building. This was my dare.

The Dream

The Dream

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Thus thundered a man at the Lincoln Memorial, many years ago. He was, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. and he was talking in reference to the racial discrimination that was prevalent. He was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, a beacon of hope for his people and one of the most strong willed men of the era.

Five years after his famous speech, while he was standing on the motel's second-floor balcony, King was struck by a single bullet. The bullet ‘entered through King's right cheek, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing his jugular vein and major arteries in the process before lodging in his shoulder. The force of the shot ripped off King's necktie.

Unconscious, he fell violently backwards onto the balcony. He was dead, killed not by that bullet, but the collective hate of a huge mass of intolerance that gave the bullet its power.

This is the only thing that I remember about King. He was nothing more than a byline in my history textbook. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the front-runners of the African-American Civil Rights movement, and he was assassinated at the age of forty.

That line always stayed with me – assassinated at the age of forty. I guess it stayed with me because my father was, at that time, forty years old.

But, of course, we live in a different world today. Of course, there are remnants of that hate which felled King – but that’s what they are... remnants.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’"

This is where, I think, the fault lies. I don’t believe anyone really thinks that all men are created equal.

We hear words thrown about – equality of gender, equality of races, equality of religions.

The word equal is defined as being the same in quantity, size, degree, or value.

An equal is a person or thing that is the same as another in status or quality.

This is simply not true, and a very dangerous notion to base all our theories on. Nothing in this world is EXACTLY like anything else. The genders are not equal, races are not equal.... opportunities are certainly not equal.

There must come a time, and fast, where we start to accept that things are going to be different. Dan Brown wrote a line in his book, The Lost Symbol – “Man fears that which he doesn’t understand.”

I remember a feeling of dread when I had to walk past a Muslim slum when I was a kid. Now that I have grown up, and have Muslim friends, I laugh at this memory. Why did I feel that fear?

I had not seen any of the legendary Hindu-Muslim tiffs at that point in my young age, and yet I felt a dread when I saw these people – sitting outside their homes, dressed like they were, with their beards.

It is because I did not have anything in the system around me that would have helped me come to terms with them being different.

When the Western civilization started colonizing Africa and Asia, they thought we were heathens. They thought our customs were barbaric and unfounded.

Every time a foreigner comes to India and is freaked out when he sees that we worship a Goddess who wears a garland of skulls and sticks her tongue out, or when a group of Indians abroad with Kesari Tours (or other tour company) are surprised to know that Christians eat and drink Jesus Christ’s ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ – every time the western civilization views the Middle East as a backward area where women are exploited and the Afghanistanis view the West as a symbol of moral degradation – every time this happens, that bullet that killed Martin Luther King does more damage.

Skim through the headlines – a famous comedy team crosses some lines with humour, enraging prudish citizens and their sensibilities. This happens everywhere. However, the moment this ceases to be a battle of sensibilities and becomes a battle of religions or cultures, that is when the trouble starts.

Once we bring religion and culture into the fray, that’s when it ceases to be a question of morality and becomes a question of politics.

Did most of us think that AIB might have crossed the line between humour and crass? Yeah. Was it still funny? Of course. Can you see why this type of humour can be hard to swallow for people who have not been exposed to it? Yes, you can. Should this be considered an attack oh Hindu culture? This is where it starts to get out of hand.

Religion was invented to make sure that people did what was right and did not do what was wrong. It is as simple as that. The day it started to be used as a weapon to justify your actions or as a tool to degrade something that is different – that is when Martin Luther King’s dream starts to become a nightmare.

The scariest part is that there seems to be no end to this, except the end, itself. All systems seem like good ideas until they are not. Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and all other isms that you can think of – they all became successful because they seemed to work for a while.

And then times changed. All these systems came crashing down. Maybe this will happen to the Religious system, as well. Maybe one day, religion will cease to exist. Or maybe, all religions will merge.

More possibly, there will come a day when people just stop giving a shit.

It all comes down to this – understanding. Understanding that people are different. Understanding that what is applicable to you might not be applicable to everyone else. Understanding that religion and culture is about living your own life, and not about whose stick is the biggest. Understanding, that half the problems in our life will go away if you just don’t care about these differences.

In the wise words of J.K. Rowling - Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Not a bad dream to have, right?