Radcliffe's box of crayons has fallen into even more mischievous hands. Ever since the first reorganisation of states in 1956, everybody has wanted a stab at redrawing the boundaries. At this rate, the map of India may end up looking like a jigsaw puzzle with bad social skills, no part able to fit into the whole.

It was comparatively simpler in the case of parties. When the communists first split in 1964, it really inconvenienced only KR Gouri Amma and her husband TV Thomas since they found themselves on opposite sides. But they continued to share their breakfast appams if not their ideology. In later decades, when every sidelined leader sulked off to form a whole new political entity, it created no problem for the aam janata other than having to remember what all the initials stood for in an entire alphabet soup of party names. But when states are carved up like a Christmas turkey, it leads to more complications than an outbreak of bird flu.

The ramifications are as widespread as agitations. Even textbooks have to go back to school. Civics primers were clich'ed with 'unity in diversity', but now the former has become as elusive as affordable tur dal , while the latter is as ubiquitous as Chinese substitutes. Grammar used to caution us against the split infinitive, but political syntax has turned this into the infinite split. And physics textbooks must now redefine 'artificial disintegration' and 'particle acceleration' which were once used only in the nuclear context.

In fact, particles have been parting from their original states at increasingly accelerated speed. Barely had the agitation for a separate Telengana gone into 'fast forward' when Darjeeling once again reverberated with slogans for Gorkhaland. Despite the fact that Bodoland, Delhi, Pondicherry, Tulu Nadu, Purvanchal, Vidarbha, Kodagu and at least 13 others were already waiting in the restless line for statehood, Mayawati, as is her wont (and will) jumped the queue, and dashed off her own demand to New Delhi.

With typical perversity, the lady did not want to unify UP under her, but to trifurcate it - also under her. If this will put her in the awkward predicament of being in three state capitals at the same time, it's no problem for Superbehenji. Why do you think she's keeping all those statues handy?

What does this endemic urge to keep splitting tell us about ourselves as a nation? That's if this entity can still exist in such a fissiparous cauldron? Are we an amoeba, an atom, an AC, an Adnan-Sabah? A banana? A c string in a programming code? All of which have by now established their right to be split or 'a split'.

Or does this surge suggest that we are more akin to the MTV India reality show? As in Splitsvilla so in the movement for Telengana (and all its predecessors and successors) the quest to attain the objective is replete with 'stress, exhaustion, fear, bitchiness, politics and bad TV'. But there is also a major difference. Unlike in each episode of the show, when a state separates, there is no clear loser. And even the winner may find, but never admit, that his is a spurious victory.