My morning coffee no longer tastes the same. All the pleasure is being taken out of my cup of joy by war headlines and black & white photos of twisted and shattered bodies. War is raging around the world. Just count how many places are in conflict and you will be surprised. Serbs and Croats are killing each other; decades after George Bernard Shaw based a play on their conflict. The Albanians are indulging in slaughter, Iran and Iraq are in a state of hostility, Israel versus the Arab states is an old story, Saddam Hussein waits for his comeback, Sri Lanka has been mauled by the wrath of the Tigers ... Count the battlefields a little closer home -- guns still sound in Punjab, in the North East trouble is brewing, Kashmir takes a toll and a headline every day, Jharkhand is being agitated for, the Naxalites have not been completely wiped out, and landowners and the landless do savage things to each other in Bihar. Whew!

The war actually rages much closer home than that. Right now,right here in Bombay myriad battle lines have been drawn. Town versus the Suburbs is the very least of the divisions. The riots showed us that Hindu versus Muslim could happen right here in our cosmopolitan city. Crime versus Police has split onto the streets with encounters and shooting in broad daylight. Haves versus the have nots is around us at all times. You can see it in the barrage of stones that shower on train commuters. In the bitter battle over slum land. In the bulldozers and the shanties, and the photographs of women breastfeeding children in the midst of ruins. The armies of the unemployed descend every day on the city. The city closes ranks to repel them. Every citizen has learnt to wield on his own brand of armour -- indifference, insensitivity, glazed eyes. An acre of no-man's-land, fenced and mined, between him and the man jammed next to him in the local train.

Down in the political arenas the fight descends to slipper throwing, physical violence and bullets. It would be interesting totake a head count of just how many of our elected representatives have murder charges against them. Make no mistake. The battles here are to the death.

The battle with the bureaucracy is one that every Indian is familiar with. Wresting a telephone connection from MTNL takes strategy, patience and days of hard work. Getting a passport renewed is worthy of an epic poem or two. A successful gas connection should get a medal.

And then there are the daily battles. For water at the only working municipal tap. For a foothold of space in the bus. For a handful of silver. For one square meal. For four feet of pavement to sleep on.

Then come the personal battles that take highest toll, corroding your soul inch by inch. Whichever field you work in, the issues are the same. Competence versus incompetence. Professionalism versus brown nosing. Principles versus getting ahead in life. These filter into such tiny skirmishes that sometimes it is difficult to realise that you are fighting the good fight. Let them sendout the damn edit with the bad cut, no viewer is going to notice. Let the director have his way with the appalling script. Fixing it means running the gauntlet of egos, from the director to the writer to the EP. Let the man in charge cast his current fancy in the lead role. Stopping him means bad attitude for the next six days. Let the idiot in charge play `TV TV' and down the damn programme. Tired from the grind, it is so tempting to let it go by. It would be so easy to join the army of mediocrity that surges around you. To adopt their rallying cry of `Let it be'. These are indeed times that try men's souls -- but in small ordinary ways. As Kipling says, the test is to keep going when nothing except a small voice inside of you says `hold on!'

So -- Hold on! Hold on to your soul while picking through the minefield of office politics. Hold on to your humanity as day by day the city batters you numb. Hold on to the dreams that cling to you despite the barrage of ugly reality. Hold on to joy. Hold on to hope.Hold fast to yourself and what you believe in.

To each of you I say -- Courage soldier! Once more into the breach!

I finish my coffee. I gird for battle. The motto of us Coelho's is `Give no quarter! Demand it all!' Chaaaaaarge!

Venita Coelho is a television script writer.