Virtual In'k'sanity

Ideally

2012-01-30T17:04:00.000+05:30

Ideally, I wouldn't even be writing this. I would be living in a little hill-top house overlooking a tropical sea. Having already written about everything I wanted to give my opinion on, having travelled the world & having done my best to save it, having learnt (the current list) Spanish, Mandarin & playing the guitar, I would have rid myself of the restlessness that comes with having unrealized ideas and wishes jostling to come out, on paper, on screen, wherever.

My old motorcycle parked outside my door would be a worthy enough chariot whenever I felt the need for human company, taking me on an half hour ride to the nearest town, cutting through swooping roads and the sea breeze. Financially, if my writing past could pay the rent for my house and the running costs of my motorcycle, I would consider myself a success. Being as egocentric that most authors usually are, I would still want people to read and appreciate my work long after I have stopped writing but please readers, stay away from my isolated house.

Actually, I will head to work in an hour's time. Working on engineering assignments which on good days do inspire, on bad days cause despair and on most days are an interesting unpredictable mix. Don't get me wrong, I am not the "I am here for the money. If you want loyalty, get yourself a dog" kind of an office person. Quite the opposite. Nothing makes me happier than a busy day because everything in the world feels equally important. The design which I am supposed to be finishing ASAP, every article on Google News, all casual conversations at the water cooler, the temptation to take a post-lunch walk outside on a nice afternoon, the friend who calls me on my cellphone because he is having an low intensity workday - all so critical simultaneously and I have time enough for none.

The universe, I remind myself over and over again, is a cakewalk for the disciplined and organized. If only I could stop daydreaming and focus on getting my 'work' work done at the right time, my life would be so much more fulfilling. My G-Mail Inbox is filled with snippets of ideas I e-mail myself as reminders for future blog posts; my fingers and hands are possibly the most sworn at ones in the entire world as once again I fail to produce any publicly displayable tune out of my guitar and my list of must-go travel destinations continues to balloon without the addition of any check marks. Past Spanish and Mandarin efforts are very soon going to be reduced to 'Hola' and 'Ni hao' inside my fickle memory.

Here's the deal. My version of the ideal life may seem like an uninspiring one to most people but hey, it's MY PERSONALIZED VERSION so shut up! As much as I want that life, the actual life with its twists and its turns, its risks and its burns is fertile ground for wild ideas and happy accidents to sprout up, unexpectedly and irreverently. Wise men have said, very correctly, that the grass is always greener on the other side. So I stand, on this bridge between the actual to the ideal. I look left, I look right, then I look left again. I know... I know that this is from where the view is best.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/01/ideally.html ]

Nice

2012-01-22T23:03:00.000+05:30

Nice wasn't in. Nice wasn't cool. Our heroes weren't nice. They were tough talking, over-muscled, ready-to-punch-at-a-drop-of-a-hat meanies; macho men who wouldn't sit around waiting for justice. We were just old enough to begin realizing that pro-wrestling wasn't 'real' wrestling but that didn't stop us from idolizing the way Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H or The Rock of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) behaved.

The early teens were an age like that. Newly learnt swear words were like a nuclear weapon to be launched at the strategically right time during a quarrel or a fight thereby finishing your opponent into shocked submission and earning the respect of your peers. English swear words were precious but Hindi expletives were platinum. Good behaviour was good enough only for the less ambitious. If you needed to be noticed and be something significant in life, rude was the attitude.

This rebellion towards civility was apparent only outside the watchful gaze of parents and teachers though. We weren't quite man enough to be 'rebel' rebels yet and this was reflected in our quick transformation when the teacher left the classroom in between classes. A quick check at the door to ensure that the teacher was really gone and then it was WWF simulation time on the departed teacher's stage. The words, the antics, the moves - all on display, each trying to outdo the others in badness and foul-mouthery.

Prayer assemblies were times where the jokes were to be played; pranks and eating of lunches during the class was the norm to be aspired to; neatly knotted ties and pressed clothes were passe, the looser and more careless look was to be the real show of character. Teenage years were full of uncertainties and questions but there was only one thing for sure - whatever your parents, teachers or any one in authority said was good for you, that was where cool came to die.

It was in this climate of abrasiveness that one day my Mom came to me and said "I am going to the Juvenile Detention Home on Sunday to distribute some food and clothes. I would like you to go." My first reaction to that was a internal "What? Do I look like some sort of Mother Teresa to you?" which may have shown up in my expression of contempt because my Mom added "It's your Grandma's first death anniversary." Then came "You should come. This might change your life."

I rolled my eyes up in disgust. Leave it to Mom to dig up a cliched filmy dialogue. I must say that I was rather fond of my grandmother though it didn't stop me from thoughtlessly teasing her almost uptil the day she passed away. I didn't cry when my grandmother passed away but I had always carried that guilt of not behaving maturely enough during her final illness. My grandma was another one of those filmy persons, actually scolding scheming evil characters as they appeared on TV soap operas and vocally cheering when like in all 'morally' scripted storylines, they got their due punishment. I thought that the kindly old lady deserved at least this much. I decided to go along.

The Juvenile Boys' Detention Home was located in an old bungalow on the outskirts of the little town we lived in. The detainees here were handed over to the state authorities for minor offences like petty theft on trains, loitering and other things that kids raised on the street without the benefit of a permanent roof over their head found themselves embroiled in. A quick tour of their spartan and clean living quarters by the Home's caretakers later, we went out to the sizable backyard of the bungalow to meet the kids themselves who were winding up their distributed household chores.

They came trooping in to where we sat on our chairs, in orderly lines and an air of general cheerfulness about them, even if not all of them were smiling. The oldest amongst them I noticed were as old as me and were the ones in charge. The younger they were, the more thrilled they seemed to see us and at the other end of the age spectrum, we were regarded with polite interest. We were shown artwork soaked in bright and cheerful colours, poetry recited to us and devotional numbers sung out in chorus. The old clothes that we had brought along were accepted with a glee that made us re-evaluate their worth and the food we had served, a change in diet from their regular fare, couldn't possibly have found more appreciation.

One of the boys was a particularly talented singer, only about 8 years old and with the Home for about 5 years now. They had found him travelling on the Awadh Express, a 3 year old then, singing and stealing simultaneously. He said he was from Lucknow, across on the other side of the country where the train originated from and despite the authorities' best efforts his parents could not be located and he himself was too young to know which part of Lucknow his house was in. The chirpiest of the lot, his words frequently broke into cackles of genuine laughter as my Mom and a few of her colleagues engaged their group in dialogue.

Much more than the little happiness that our arrival and gifts had given to them, the perspective that they gifted me was invaluable. Not the usual "How very little of our time/money can make a huge difference to their lives" philosophy, which to me was sort of self-evident even before I had made this trip. But the fact that they were revelling in, relishing every moment of what we took for granted in our lives. Not the clothes and not the food, but the real comfort to be found in being treated with politeness.

These were kids who had seen the hard life, the tough life where the next meal was a question mark. For them, the swearing we practised with casual ease in our plush school classrooms and the physical possibility of that happening with them were harsh everyday realities. While we shoved each other in mock fights and laughed afterwards, their encounters of a similar nature did not end in laughter. At school, we teased those who were religiously inclined but here being absorbed in a simple hymn took their minds away from the horrors that they had experienced and from which we had been so well shielded all our lives.

Be nice. Be nice because not everyone in the world has the luxury to be.

[ http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/01/nice.html ]

Snow

2012-01-18T11:20:00.002+05:30

It was very hard to feel disappointed. It was hard to feel disappointed even though I was quite frankly bringing up the tail amongst the 10 competitors that had taken the stage last evening. In the basement of a building right on Harvard Square, I had had an opportunity to speak on the same stage where, frequently in the early 1960s, an up and coming musician named Bob Dylan played as a filler in between musical performances by Joan Baez to 'try' and make a name for himself.

So this was Club Passim, formerly known as Club 47 annd Passim before adopting a name reflecting both, a performance arena with only 100 odd seats and its' place in history sealed by the fact that Dylan had laboured here in his struggling artist days. A story-telling competition was on, an event whose existence was recently introduced to me, as recently as this past New Year's Eve. The tellers were intense, the room was tuned in and the real life incidents they talked about sprang to animated life in those few lighted square feet around the performer.

I thought that since I was going to present a story very close to my heart, it would all be smooth sailing but in the true nature of all taken-for-granteds, I was up-ended. By my own abrupty concluded monologue when I realized I was running short of time and by the possessed competition that was to follow. Roundly and soundly beaten, I was still shamelessly happy to be at least in that same room. A public radio legend, Tony Kahn was the stand-in story-teller and guest of honour. He seemed to have set the tone and quality of stories for the night. The others flew in that stratosphere of higher speaking talent with him that night while I stood below and clapped.

It was 10:30 by the time all the good-byes, congratulations and advice were wrapped up, and I stepped out of that underground treasury of personal experiences. Stepped out and for the second time that night, slipped, this time literally. While Club Passim had kept us engaged in the warm glow of significant incidents in some strangers' lives who would thereby cease to be strangers, Mother Nature was having a cold fit. So she gave her ol' skirt a rustle and down came the snowflakes fluttering onto the ground not to mention under my shoes.

I narrowly managed to avoid horizontal disaster and from the lack of uproarious laughter behind me, judged with relief that my impromptu circus had missed the attention it deserved. I stepped with cautious deliberation now, making sure one foot was secure before sending the other one on an adventurous game of "Does friction exist or not?" I was taking it easy, as one should when one is out walking on a city road and the snow is coming down. Or for that matter rain.

It's a city after all and shelter, should such an unlikely emergency need for it arise, is only a storefront away. When on your way home, there is nothing quite so relishing as a walk in the snow or rain. Snow hadn't been visiting these parts for quite some time, a real anomaly for cold cold Boston weather in early January. A lot of people would get around to grumbling about all the shovelling that awaited them the next morning but not right now.

It was really light snowfall and the snow was already melting as it fell, most likely to washed away by rains that would follow. A trio of Asian students made the most of this moment though, squealing in excitement as they clicked pictures of themselves in white-cloaked Harvard Square. A group of tough-looking young men hung around a street-light, looking not-so-tough as they smiled involuntarily at the previously mentioned trio's shrieks. On the Red Line back to Quincy Adams where my car is parked, I saw the whole spectrum of human expressions play out on my co-passengers' faces as they look out of the glass windows.

When the heavens open up to let down their payload of water, those bound by the restrictions of gravity do take a moment to look skyward. Satisfied or searching or somewhere in between one may be - but leave it to impartial Nature to give us, now and then, a one-size fits all.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/01/snow.html ]

Influence

2011-12-25T22:29:00.000+05:30

My family nickname I share with a dog. I really do. Satyajit Ray, the legendary film director also translated Herge's Tintin comic book series into Bengali, my native language, during his stint as a magazine editor and he named Tintin's white terrier Kutush (Snowy in English, Milou in the original French). That's what my folks call me at home. Kutush. I once met an aging white pomeranian named Kutush at someone's house. I am sure there might be a lot of Bengali household dogs named Kutush yet I feel un-insulted. Incredibly!

At this point, readers may be forgiven if they think of me as someone with some serious low self-esteem issues but I assure you that this is not the case. The name Kutush is also indicative of the youngest, which I am in my big group of first cousins, but I never feel burdened by the canine connection. If anyone ever needed proof of how much of a fan of Herge's comics I am, here's my calling card. I share my nickname with the Bengali translated name for Tintin's dog and I don't mind!

It's next to impossible to have grown up in an urban Bengali family and not know about Tintin. I didn't even grow up in Bengal, have extremely limited acquaintance with Bengali culture despite my parents' sincere efforts and have hilariously inept Bengali reading abilities. Yet the boy reporter of a Belgian comic book series, written in French, then translated into English, the version familiar to me would exert an overpowering influence on me. In fact, I would so far as to say that it would define my life, at least the life I hope to live.

Mom and Dad used to buy a beautifully drawn and coloured Tintin comic, ostensibly for my elder brother and then play sneaky hide-and-seek games with it to be the first one to finish it. My first memories of 'reading' are those of browsing through the spectacular imagery of my brother's and by default my parents' well binded Tintin collection with my sister, both of us significantly younger than our elder brother. My first knowledge of world geography, history and culture in exotic places like South America and China were through these comics. A lifelong interest in science & technology, travel, and as-yet-beyond-science phenomena like UFOs & yetis were concretized by the various adventures that Tintin and his friends found themselves in.

I have read them all many times over and at one point had all their plots memorized too. Beautiful mansions, ancient mysteries, fascinating global locations, glamourous vintage cars, ridiculously funny jokes & situations, potent social messages on racism & corruption lived side by side effortlessly on those immersive pages. Even as I go to watch the 'movie' on the big screen today, I am mentally prepared to be disappointed. The only reason I do go to watch is that Steven Spielberg is involved, the person behind the single most memorable childhood movie of my lifetime, "Jurassic Park". Something may just come of it but even if does not, as seems likely, given the impossible standards I'll put the movie up against, it may provide a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse of that adventurous world.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/influence.html ]

Denial

2011-12-20T17:55:00.003+05:30

There was the slouch and there was the swagger. The open top button of his cricket playing uniform be it Tests or ODIs, the amulet around his neck he let hang out to watch his 'supple wrists' come into play. The TV commentators' repeated use of the words 'soft hands' when he was batting and 'sharp catch' when he was on the field. The all-white helmet he wore and the routine "The boys played really well today..." nature of his post-match presentation talk irrespective of the match's outcome. My first clear memories of watching Indian cricket sometime back in the early 90s didn't feature victory too much. Yet they have staying power as if bound to my psyche with strings of silk.

Then came that dreadful night of 1996. Why? Why would anyone choose to chase under lights at the Eden Gardens, notorious for being the wrong place to chase runs under the lights? Why in the World Cup semi-final? The whispers grew louder. Psssttt... do you know what happens in the Sharjah matches? Psssttt... did you not wonder why so-and-so played in such-and-such manner? The accusations were horrifying, the crimes were unspeakable. Whether that particular match had any undue influences exerted in its sad result will remain a debate quite irresolveable, rearing its head up even recently but the fact was our way of looking at and investing real emotions in Indian cricket would change forever in the next few years to follow.

I refused to believe. No, no. Not him. I thought of the reluctant ease with which the bat was held, almost unwillingly and the casual flash it took to reach the ball. The unlikely angles created when a fullish delivery outside off stump was dispatched to any of the leg-side boundary boards. I remembered the time when, on his favourite ground of the Eden Gardens, Lance Klusener, taken for five consecutive Hyderabadi fours in the first over after lunch, looked flabbergasted. How he walked up to the youngster immediately after the over to tousle his hair, smiling and offering his commiserations to the beleagured debutant. Once when he didn't catch Curtly Ambrose cleanly in the slips, even though the batsman had walked, he called him back to the batting crease. He the ever cheerful sportsman, a gentleman cricketer, supremely and dominantly competitive in the arcs traced by his bat but never a trace of ugliness in his on-field behaviour.

Children are creatures of instinct. Swinging conditions or sharp bounce or footwork were fancy terms too much for an immature brain to process. The appreciation of those handling such conditions via technique would come as I grew older. All I understood and appreciated in the beginning was the flair. And that, he had plenty of. Our heroes, sporting and otherwise tend to be put up on high pedestals, especially the ones that drew us in our formative years, aiding the belief that they were not subject to other worldly human flaws. To the unbiased logical mind, the facts of the match-fixing enquiry were clear-cut and so was the decision. But in a place where there should be searing anger, there is only a dull pain and a lasting refusal to accept reality. No, no. Not him.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/denial.html ]

Wannabe

2011-12-11T20:44:00.001+05:30

There was tremendous excitement in the air and you didn't need to be students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Nuclear Science and Engineering (MIT-NSE) department to feel it. It was apparent from the delighted faces of those who emerged from the darkened corner of the classroom which served as a display location for their experiment. "It's working. It had never worked when we were testing it out earlier. But it's working today!" They seemed thrilled. Something was happening.

On 30th April 2011, MIT opened the hallowed doors of its classrooms and labs to the general public in celebration of 150 years of its establishment. The students were displaying their past and current projects and professors from the faculty were on hand to chat up anyone who was interested. I was there with a couple of friends, curious to investigate in further detail what makes MIT MIT. We had only just begun the campus walk-about, starting at the MIT-NSE when the commotion about the experiment began.

We entered the classroom and saw this dimly light glass enclosure filled with a light fog. The technically inclined would know it as the cloud chamber set-up filled with saturated alcohol, a sub-atomic particle detector experiment first performed 50 years ago. The three MIT students who were in charge of the set-up stood behind it beaming smiles of pride and smugness. We looked inside to see an occasional puff of smoke, a thick trail left behind some invisible object and then a random thin little line farther away in the chamber from the original trail.

Enquiries revealed that a perpendicularly charged electric field and the alcohol vapour combination were leading to the trails being formed by alpha particles (a lonely helium nucleus devoid of two electrons) and the stray electron. The students were beside themselves with joy as they explained that the thick trail was from the heavy alpha particle and the thin one from the lightweight electron. They hadn't been able to make it work before but now that they had visitors and live demonstrations, it was actually working.

I was happy for them and said "OK... that's really cool!" A friend who was accompanying me on the other hand was very quick to judgement "All right. So what is the practical use of this experiment?" It caught the happy trio of future nuclear science scientists totally off guard. They sputtered, adjusted their glasses, shifted their feet and gulped "Well... you know... it's like... well this... you know..."

I offered a solution on their behalf to my friend who was still staring them down "Well, it's exciting because this is proof that something you read about in textbooks really exist. You can't see them particles even with the most powerful microscope, yet now in this room, you have just re-proven that they are indeed there." The rescued trio joined in "Yes, that's it. Yes, that's it." The doubter seemed satisfied with this explanation and we moved on more visibly 'practical' and 'cooler' exhibits displayed around the campus like a self-driving robotic Land Rover. This, no one had any problem appreciating.

What is 'practical'? In one sense, all practical is, is knowing fruits of which tree can be eaten and knowing what it takes to make babies. How does being aware that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around help in any way? We are not leaving this planet anytime soon, are we? Why should anyone fuss over quarks, carbon polymers, gene transcription, jungle survival tactics, the depths of outer space, religion, history, art, literature, insects, sociology, elephants, sports statistics and all those other weird things that a section of humans have a passion for?

Because we can. Because we have the ability to. Without undermining the massive importance of practical knowledge and common sense in success, curiosity is an attribute that is all too frequently laughed at unless you end up being Albert Einstein. Then the world will be all of a sudden like "Wow! Genius!" before going back to Tweeting about their favourite participant on "Dancing with the stars" Yet entertainment too is a direct result of someone's curiosity about the question "What will attract the most attention and loyalty from this huge pool of human TV viewers?"

Questions need to be asked, answers need to be sought. A sense of wonder is a very useful disease to have instead of going "Duh! This town is so boring. I wish I were hanging around in Vegas instead! (Not a bad option at all, I agree, but for how long?)" A sense of wonder at what makes that little flower sprout in the midst of your grassy backyard and a sense of wonder at all the disparate centuries of research (scientific & artistic) that came together to make that smart-phone (4S or Nexus) that you now hold in your hands.

Of course, the sea of knowledge is too vast for one ship to navigate. You may only ask some questions but rest assured that someone else will be asking the ones that you did not. Life is sure to intervene with its mundane chores but one should be never so busy as to not be able to pause and be amazed at everything that has been achieved thus far and what lies in the future. I do not claim to share the same levels of enthusiasm about alpha particles and electrons as those students from MIT-NSE, but the important bit was that I understood.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/wannabe.html]

It's like shopping!

2011-12-11T10:00:00.001+05:30

I have often tried to decipher the underlying reasons behind this. The stark and persistent differences between the Uncleji and the Auntyji type of questions. Back from my first ever overseas stint, I was obviously OK with talking about the experience, but only if I was asked the right questions. Unclejis asked the interesting ones like "Did you ride a Harley-Davidson?" and Auntyjis asked numerically oriented ones like "So how many months did you say you had spent there?"

I could almost hear the mental calculator going clickety-clack multiplying the number of months by the average amount of dollars an US tripper is assumed to save per month. Never mind that my savings were next to nothing, all of it salted away on travel trips but I wasn't revealing that to the Auntyjis yet. This lack of funds would be my trump card, my escape route, when the real emergencies arose.

Then in the midst of one busy afternoon at work, the lightning bolt of logic struck, of why Auntyjis should be so obsessively concerned with data collection and match making. There was such a variety of 'products' on the 'market', in all sizes and shapes, qualifications and employments. There were good deals and bad deals, steal one-off deals and fake too-good-to-be-true deals. There were shelf lives of the products involved too, priceless when high stakes bargaining was in progress. Sometimes it was with the window frame of mind, and other times it was with a serious frame of mind. But this was a urge they could never ever resist. This was shopping!

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-like-shopping.html]

Chaudhary chai

2011-12-10T22:28:00.001+05:30

"Ch... ch... ch... chai, chai garam, Chaudhary chai! Chai garam!" [Tea, hot tea, Chaudhary's tea!] comes the familiar pitch from the tea vendor strolling the passageway of the second class sleeper coach of the Ahmedabad-Howrah Express train. It is not even light out yet an occasional voice can be heard requesting "Oh chaiwallah!" Probably someone who had an early morning stop to get off at and didn't want to sleep through ending up at some station further ahead.

Who was this Chaudhary anyway that his brand-name held such sway at 4:00 AM in the morning in the dozing trains of India? The most famous Chaudhary I knew of is the comic book hero Chacha Chaudhary, his "thinks faster than a computer" brain and his proportionally-large-because-he-is-from-Jupiter sidekick Sabu.

I am awake but drowsy. There's no sleep that comes even close to the one induced by the slow rocking of an Indian Railways long distance route. And there's no better time to catch up with it in a non air-conditioned coach than the cool pre-dawn hours. This is the beginning of the school summer holidays and we were on our annual journey across the width of the country from Gujarat to our native city of Calcutta. The day was going to get hotter, sometimes unbearably so.

Even if stirred by the occasional disturbance like a chaiwallah or a passenger dragging his dozen odd pieces of luggage and his complaining family to the coach door for a 2:30 AM disembarkment, it is only a minor interlude in what may either be called a dream like wakefulness or awake-like dreamfulness. The rattling rhythm of the charging train and the gusts of wind bursting through the girdered windows will soon mollycoddle all dissent back to slumber.

After much debate and final resort tantrum throwing last evening, I have robbed the middle berth of the three tiered bunk structure from my sister, at least for this the first night of the 2 night journey. I like the link chains that suspend me in mid-air as opposed to the solid structures of the top and bottom bunk. I push against them and feel them yield under my minor weight. I feel a little bit like Alladin on his flying carpet, cruising through the fading darkness on an Indian mission far away from his homeland of Arabia.

How many towns have we passed, I wonder, and how many forests? Was there any tiger in the undergrowth watching us scream by, his terrible magnificent eyes glowing in the darkness and the long toots of the train horn carrying for miles around in the quiet of the night challenging his domain. I think ahead of the day to come. Of the many tunnels we will pass in the daytime, cut away through nature's heart, causing everyone in the train to flip the lights on. There's that comic I bought from the Wheeler's stand which I had saved up for today. And aam-panna (a unripe mango fruit concentrate) that mom will serve when the noon-time sun heats up the tin can of a coach.

All that action is quite some time away though. Right now, almost everyone in the compartment is still fast asleep. I poke my head out beyond my bunk and look at Mom and Dad in the lower berths, beneath me and in the one opposite. Dad is tuned out totally. Mom is a light sleeper, in anticipation of that mythical thief who will whisk all our luggage away or in anticipation of the smallest moan of discomfort from her kids, but even so, she is far from awake. Not a good time to reach up and yank that loose lock of hair I see dangling very temptingly over the edge of my top bunk either. It's my sister above me and a bawling "Mummyyyy!" at this odd hour would cause a whole lot of Mom's justifiably cranky anger to be directed at me.

So I think further ahead to Calcutta, my once-a-year visited birthplace which for me holds all the attractions of a holiday resort. Attention and adoration from relatives for being the rarely-seen cousin that lives 'far away' expressed in the form of sumptous food, gifts and general pampering have their unique charm. Another summer of browsing the Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys treasure trove of a book collection at Bopi's (my aunt's), at least one mandatory trip to the Alipore Zoo, the New Market toy and confectionary stores - the list of wonders was never ending.

Before I know it, the sun is up and about. The queues at the wash-basins to brush needy teeth grow long and the train floats by strange rock formations, green fields, industrial towns belching red smoke, platforms serving lip-smacking tit-bits of food and the customary troops of waving school-children. Something about a passing train causes all children to involuntarily smile and wave. They seem to know.

That this train will march on to its destination. And then march back. As it had done for decades before and will continue to do so for decades after. Bringing new people to new destinations and new lives as it once did my family and taking them on to what their indefinable future held for them. The kids may have never heard of a particular The Eagles' song I would hear later in life and indeed the Eagles would have never heard of the kids either but they share a sentiment, in equal parts comforting and cautionary.

"You may lose or you may win... but you'll never be here again"

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/chaudhary-chai.html]

Boy scout

2011-12-05T06:51:00.001+05:30

It was Diwali night and I was thinking of a dead man. To be more precise, a murdered man. A more ideal setting for the use of that favourite 90s Bollywood villain one-liner "Kyaa zaroorat thi hero banney ki?" [That's what comes of trying to be a hero!] couldn't be found than in his life story.

It really wasn't worth making such a fuss about. The Government of India was looking to expand and ramp-up at last the National Highway System of the country at the beginning of the new century and there were construction contracts being handed out. So was under-the-table money such that certain contracts went to certain private companies. Routine work. Routine corruption. No big deal.

In steps Mr. Goody Two Shoes, an engineer named Satyendra Dubey. He didn't like what he was seeing. On the face of it, you could ask him, what was so wrong? People stole money from much more important public causes like rural education, flood relief and what not. A little exchange of money to ensure that the nation got its roads albeit made by a particular organization was never a real issue, was it? Thodaa bahut toh chaltaa hai naa? [A little give-and-take is always acceptable, isn't it?]

Dubey in his immaturity reported his displeasure to concerned authorities; in fact even in a direct letter to the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee. In his letter to the PM, he also requested anonymity for the sake of his own safety and mentioned a grave threat to his life from certain groups who had their reasons to be dissatisfied with him and his "Do the right thing" boy-scoutish honesty.

His fears were not unfounded. One night in 2003, he was shot dead on his way home. Of course, there were arrests. The accused were proven to have the motive of robbing him of the suitcase he had with him and so they were duly punished. Obviously, according to the investigating agency, his murder had nothing to do with the information he was planning to reveal.

Let's face it. There is very little or absolutely no incentive for being honest. Had he known for sure that he was going to pay for his vigilance with his life leaving behind a grieving family, would Satyendra Dubey have pushed on with his mission? He wouldn't have. A honest man, no matter how scrupulously honest, is of no use when dead.

It's painfully evident that no bearded benevolent old man up there in the sky is striking down people with ill-gotten money or power. In fact, if you steal enough amounts of money and stuff the right mouths with it, you could build the world's most expensive house from scratch right in the country's commercial capital and be proclaimed a role model for the nation's youth.

It was Diwali night and I was looking at the two short rows of diyas (earthen lamps) lined up on the pathway to our door. We had done a reasonable job with their cotton wicks and filled their boat like spaces with oil but in spite of all that, their time was limited. The oil would run out, the wicks would burn away and the dark of the moonless night would swallow them as if they had never existed.

Was there any point in fighting the inevitable? Why not join them if you can't beat them? Watching a lamp quietly fulfil its duty in the face of insurmountable odds holds the key to that question. What is wrong is wrong, what is theft is theft and to call it out as so is not over-simplification, but an overbearing necessity, an imperative need of the hour. Being an honest man is neither a popular choice nor an easy one; it historically never was either. That one of them shows up every now and then is in itself some miracle of nature.

When the vast majority conveniently day-dreams of some Squad of Anti-Corruption Superheroes who will come to our rescue seeing the Lokpal signal flashing across the Gothamnagar skyline, it is only an ultra-shabby excuse for inaction. For even the deepest darkness dare not cross swords with the smallest lamp. Never does its existence go in vain. Fragile yet potent, alone yet unafraid, transient yet inspiring, no one can contest the message of the little flame, lighting the only path forward to a brighter future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Dubey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yashwant_Sonawane

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanmughan_Manjunath

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/boy-scout.html]

Compliment

2011-12-02T11:56:00.001+05:30

Around about 21:00 on a workday evening in an apartment shared by three bachelors, it's a very typical scenario. The three individual rooms are occupied by three separate individuals hunched over their laptops pretending to be busy with something extremely important but very likely only passing snide comments an appropriately snide comment worthy photo posted on Facebook by a friend on the other side of the world. It's been close to 4 hours since they got back from the daily grind.
-
But their attention is not fully on the screen in front of them. Rather it is on the large central space in the apartment aside from the three rooms. They notice that a very important portion of that large central space looks particularly unattended to and empty. It's called the kitchen and as the night rolls on, the possibility of another Doritos, milk and bananas combo for dinner grows ever strong unless someone acts up.
-
There is always that hope. That a hero will answer the need of the hour. Dice the onions crying tears of hardship, toss the oil into the pan with grim determination, put together the spices as his arsenal to salvation, pop open the fridge for veggies or meat as the case may be to save the day. And there is also that fervent hope that that hero won't be him.
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Eventually one of them summons up the courage, feels the necessity of breaking through the tasteless tyranny of ready-to-eat food or fruits-for-dinner. Too much salt, too much oil, too much red chilly powder are all crimes easily overlooked for someone who signs up for THE JOB for the evening.
-
No matter what gooey, sticky, burnt end results of the experiments atop a gas cooker may be, the only sentence being said during and after dinner is a constant re-affirmation of the effort put in by that one volunteer, the culinary soldier. "Khanaa bahut badiyaa banaa hai! Khanaa bahut badiyaa banaa hai!" [The food is really good! The food is really good!] Buried not so deep beneath that heartfelt praise is the desperate wish that come the next night, the reluctant chef concerned would be all pepped up and look forward to receiving that compliment again.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/12/compliment.html]

For those

2011-11-21T09:51:00.001+05:30

For those that are soaked in grime, sweat and blood,

The cause in them does trust, as indeed it must

They are the undaunted shelters, the very bridges to deliverance

Final hopes for a rescue, through forests impassable and dense.

Here is the limelight now but they, strange men, seek not its glory

Yes, they, they must practice, practice and write a grand new story

The wise understand their greatness, the fools they look away

Men of honour, men of grit, far beyond what befits a poem to say.

[Some well-intentioned but mildly corny lines written around Rahul Dravid's retirement from ODI cricket. Batsman extraordinaire, team-man exemplary and a gentleman unlike any other, he has been a true inspiration in every sphere of life and a tour-de-force for Indian cricket.

Incidentally also my 400th blog post. Many thanks to the 50 readers still subscribed to my blog. It took a lot longer for me to get to this 400th post than I had expected. It is my laziness that robs me of the will-power to type out my thoughts but it is also my laziness that defines my thoughts. Forgive me for this paradoxical flaw. I promise to do better.]

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/for-those.html]

Will it, won't it?

2011-11-21T08:26:00.001+05:30

As a dog owner walking my dog down the streets of my hometown in India, there is one irritating question that gets thrown at me with alarming frequency. My dog is a tiny dog, a miniature dachshund, at a height of maybe 8 inches off the ground and a long tubular body. That's her in the picture above with her "Won't you please take me to the garden downstairs?" look. Many people assume her to be a puppy while she is almost 4 years old (28 in dog years) and has already long reached her full size, such are the dimensions of her breed.

Now if she were an Alsatian or a Rottweiler, a casual observer wouldn't have been tempted, but given her minute size, folks are overcome by an intense desire to pet her. With their hands waving gingerly above my little dog's head, they will ask me "Kaategaa toh nahin?" [It won't bite, will it?] BTW in case you didn't know, beware of touching the head of any dog you are unfamiliar with, as an introduction. The dog won't like it or allow it. Kids asking this is OK and understandable but when adults act so juvenile, it really gets my goat.

It is very difficult to explain to someone who hasn't been around dogs at some point in their lives that dogs are not purpose built mean biting machines and that they do not randomly sink their teeth into someone just because they feel like it. A human being is much more likely to bite without provocation than is a dog. On days when I am feeling nice, I say "No! No! Why would she?" Other times, I am tempted, really tempted to say with a smirk "Kaategaa toh kaategaa. Mujhe bolkey thodi naa kaategaa!" [If it wants to bite, it will. It won't ask me beforehand, will it?]

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/will-it-wont-it.html]

Stamped

2011-11-21T06:53:00.001+05:30

In the ultimate tribute to the importance and influence that spending 4 years in a hostel 1500 kilometres away from home while at engineering school has had on me, someone who had known me for only about half an hour at that point and also was aware of the fact that I had graduated from REC Kurukshetra asked "So you grew up in Haryana, right?"

18 years of preceding experiences and conditioning, of being born in Calcutta, being schooled in Gujarat, it seems are now all moulded beneath that permanent Kurukshetra B. Tech Mechanical outer shell. \m/ Regional Engineering College, Kurukshetra \m/... \m/ Mechanical Engineering \m/

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/stamped.html]

Susegad

2011-11-21T04:58:00.001+05:30

I remember when I was 16. Class 10 it was and seniors & well wishers were firm in their advice. This is a very important stage in your life, they said, work hard now and then you can take it easy for the rest of your life. Strangely enough, they would repeat the advice when I got to Class 12. And then again when engineering college began. By the time, they began speak in similar analogies of the necessity of an MBA degree, of it being 'that' magic pill, I bailed out. Enough's enough. I had seen through their ruse. There was never going to be such a time, the so-called golden phase when everything was a joy ride. I just wish that they had told me the bitter truth about careers, ambition and satisfaction (or the improbability of that idea) up front. I would have set my expectations from life a dozen notches lower.

I was 26 when I got to Goa. Off-season Goa. Not Goa of the night-clubs and rave parties. Goa of leisurely motorcycle cruising through bright post-monsoon greenery and half open beach shacks not fully stocked up for the crush of the upcoming 'season'. Goa of abandoned leaf overgrown forts and guitar strums surfing the sea breeze in nearly empty restaurants. Goa of cheerfully painted houses and early morning walks on the beach sand watching the fishing boats already on the horizon doing their daily quota of work before the inevitable crowds came a-calling (even if it was the off season). Goa of flickering candle light karaoke and eye pleasing co-diners that re-affirmed the fact that when it comes to beauty, what matters is quality not quantity.

It was always there, not on some remote South Pacific island, but only a few hours drive from our very own beloved Bombay. It was there, not in some degree from an elite institution, never in some mega salary job in some mega financial institution and not in that futile race of which everyone is a condemned participant. It was there as I sat in the company of friends watching the sun go down to the symphony of the Arabian Sea. It was there as I laughed partly at the conversation and partly because I had finally found it. Susegad. The Life Easy.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/susegad.html]

'Paagal' panda

2011-11-21T00:03:00.001+05:30

I have a new favourite animal. It does not possess the fearsome glory of a stalking tiger, the sheer stage presence of an elephant or the calm, powerful gaze of a resting lion. If anything, it has a stuffed toy like cuddliness but its steadfast refusal to behave in tune with that perceived image is what makes me its fan.

New York's Central Park Zoo on a cheerful mid November Sunday afternoon is awash with the colours of fall. Kids and their parents are out here in full force to make the most of this good weather. One particular enclosure is drawing a lot more attention than the others. Everyone's rushing in to catch a glimpse of Biru, the 1 year old red panda who has just moved into New York City from his Himalayan abode in Nepal.

The red panda is an animal that might be familiar to most Indian TV audiences of my age group as the furry red companion to Mowgli in the Hindi dubbed version of the animated series "Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli" which had achieved cult status back in the days when DD-1 was the only channel on air in India. Sunday mornings were dedicated to Mowgli and his life in the jungle by millions of kids around the country. And to call the real animal cartoonish. in proportions and colours, would not be too far from the truth.

The lush red fur enveloping his body, the black fur on his feet like he had socks on, the bushy red tail and the teddy bear like face made him look like those simplified friendly animals that are drawn in books for toddlers yet this was actually how nature had designed him. The female component of his human audience couldn't stop "ooh"ing and "aah"ing, going on with their "How sweet!", "How cute!", "I want one!" before saying "Got to get his picture!" and whipping out their point-and-shoots or DSLRs as the case may be.

This was where the problem lay. Biru had a female companion Amaya who was feasting on leaves in a far corner of the enclosure facing away from all the visitors. So it was left to Biru to be the sole model and ambassador for how beautiful an animal a red panda was. Except... that he wasn't much of a poser. Restless soul that he was, walking all the way around his reasonably sized enclosure clambering up a tree in front of the dozen or so cameras pointed towards him and clambering down it but the randomness of his movements made him every cameraman's nightmare. All the while, while he pranced about right in front of our noses.

Here a tail, there a leg, here a blurred face, there a really sharp picture of some green leaves - as I looked into the image review screens of the other digital cameras around me, I realized that I wasn't alone in my failure. Biru ran, Biru jumped, Biru spun, Biru looked - but never for more than half a microsecond. Every passing minute, I heard people mutter to the tune of "Come on! Hold it! Get me a good picture." but if Biru understood human talk, he was playing dumb. Every flash or camera beep, would invariably be followed by a groan. No, not this time. Nope, not this time too.

I had to return to the red panda enclosure thrice to be able to get the handful of decent pictures that I eventually captured and I watched wave after wave of grumpy disappointed shutter-bugs call this impossible task off, walking away with a slightly less rosy view of the 'cuteness' factor of the red panda. I love zoos because of my life-long reading and Discovery/NGC fuelled animal world fascination. This was one occasion where watching the humans outside the cage was even more fun than the animal itself.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/paagal-panda.html]

Over-smart?

2011-11-20T01:02:00.001+05:30

I have a smart phone, an Android one. For the past two times that I have charged it, when it reaches its fully charged state, it emits a polyphonic strum sound and then it activates the in-built music player. The song it's playing? A number from a Bollywood movie "Break Ke Baad" named... "Dooriyan bhi hai zaroori" [A song essentially about the importance of personal spaces and time away from each other in any relationship]. Now I am for all the use of Artificial Intelligence in the right avenues but a phone telling me that it needs to get away from its charger in so artistic a manner... what do you call that?
-
[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/over-smart.html]

The Doors

2011-11-20T00:30:00.001+05:30

Of life and love and lust they spoke,

In mystic music 'n' poetic streams,

Fear and hurt found their niche,

Framing magic melodic dreams

The question still stands open then

What to make of fate's crazy mores?

No answer for that one yet,

No one knows for sure

Me? I am just happy...

I got to see The Doors!

(Wednesday, 2nd November 2011, Lupos Heartbreak Hotel, Providence RI:

It'd be a joke to say that I had always wanted to experience this. I loved the music of The Doors but heck, Jim Morrison was already dead by 1971, 13 years before I was even born. The 1960s and 1970s may have been a great time to be around but I personally am extremely happy to have been born in the 1980s, to have appreciated the world before the advent of Internet & Facebook and also be young enough to appreciate the world after. One hell of a lucky generation we are to have been born on the cusp of such a revolutionary technological leap. So this was out of the blue, an accidentally heard old-school radio advert of the surviving Doors men getting together to work their spell in a small but completely packed B-status performance arena, notably below par as compared to their glory days, and only 20 miles from where I was. It was, to use that nauseatingly overused but in this case perfectly applicable word, 'surreal'! This was a dream that I hadn't even dreamed of!)

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/doors.html]

11.11.11

2011-11-12T10:32:00.001+05:30

What a curious way for a day with a curiously symmetrical date to start! Pulling into the office parking lot, it was easy to tell that it was one of those days, already blessed with the effervescence that comes out of being a Friday, a day where it feels perfect to let your mind saunter off into casual half-remembered reveries despite knowing fully well that at least 8 hours of time critical work lie ahead.

We all don't need that kind of a day, don't we? When the air is crisp and cold and just a lil' cruel, and the forgotten leaves of fall race each other in 3 dimensional race tracks around your feet. When the morning light from the cloud covered sky is subdued but not gloomy, if anything, adding to the splendor of the last bright orange, red and yellow leaves that gamely cling on to their respective trees before winter takes them away in her snowy embrace. It's no use feeling sad for them, 'cause at the back of the mind, you know and they know that they'll be back.

The walk to the glass door of the building from the car is only a short one but one can only be amazed at the speed and quantity of thoughts that can pass through a head in that brief a time period. Thoughts not only of misunderstandings and mistakes but also of happy accidents. Beginnings ground to dust, dust moulded to beginnings. Moments of unbearable doubtfulness and moments of eternal surety. On days like today you can't help but acknowledge how beautiful a shade is grey and that there is real joy to be found in accepting the unpredictability of the future. By the time I swipe my ID card, I am smiling an internal inner peace smile. After all, what is life, if not an adventure?

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/111111.html]

Waiting...

2011-11-02T09:17:00.000+05:30

Tuesday, 01-Nov-2011

"At first flash of Eden, we race down to the sea.

Standing there on Freedom's Shore.

Waiting for the Sun (3x)

Can you feel it now that spring has come.

And it's time to live in the scattered sun.

Waiting for the Sun (3x, pause, again slower)

Waiting.... Waiting.... Waiting.... Waiting.... (2x)

Waiting for you to - come along

Waiting for you to - hear my song

Waiting for you to - come along

Waiting for you to - tell me what went wrong."

You may think that I have completely lost it but it's just that I spent an entire weekend at home listening to The Doors on my laptop in preparation for the real deal tomorrow evening. Robbie Krieger & his guitar are 65 years old and Ray Manzarek with his meandering keyboards is at a doddering 72. Morrison is on a never-ending vacation away from earth since 1971 and John Densmore has given up drumming due to hearing problems. Maybe I need to do a reality check and tone down my psychotic levels of excitement...

Going by setlists at their previous venues on this tour, they'll be skipping my personal favourites like "Hello, I love you" or "People are strange" or even the above mentioned "Waiting for the sun". Maybe they'll fall asleep on the stage. Maybe Jim Morrison's stand-in would such an eye-sore that I'll have to march out mid-concert. Maybe a drugged out hippie from their golden age would burn the Lupos Heartbreak Hotel in Providence down to the ground before the show even begins. I don't know! All I know is that I'll be there to watch it happen. Live. In person. Sakshaat. THE DOORS.

There are classic rock bands and there is THE classic rock band. There are great lyricists and then there is THE American poet. There is beautiful music and there is HAUNTINGLY beautiful music. Creative inspiration unparalleled this band and their songs have been to me over the years. I hope this night to be, I pray it to be, I will it to be... of significant and everlasting impact.

As time swims by, we all will learn,

Surely someday, all leaves must turn,

Shadows flit past, chase and run

Live their life, waiting for the sun...

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/11/waiting.html]

Jim's song

2011-10-11T17:07:00.002+05:30

This is the one occasion in my life where I can justify screaming in excitement like a teenage girl. On November 2nd 2011, on what would otherwise have been a very ordinary Wednesday, I will go to watch the two of the three surviving members of The Doors, Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek perform live at the Lupos Heartbreak Hotel in Providence. Yes, THE DOORS.

For most, Jim Morrison was The Doors and The Doors was Jim Morrison, and I agree with that to a certain extent. But without Manzarek's trippy keyboards, Krieger's catchy guitar loops and John Densmore's perfectly timed drum rolls to flow into spaces left by Jim's spoken poetry marathons, there would have been no defining sound that draws in fans (like yours truly) decades after the group ceased performing.

With Morrison's infamous 1971 death by ODing in Paris at the age of 27, the Doors were a closed chapter in rock history but beautiful enough for music enthusiasts to keep flipping back to those pages and reading them over and over again. In an appropriate tribute to their uber charismatic lead singer, Robbie and Ray despite it having been 30 years now (since Morrison's death) playing the Doors' songs around the world refuse to play "The End" at any of their concerts. The reason they give is simple. "The End" was Jim's song. He owns it.

Who was Jim Morrison then? Rockstar with a voice inestimably addictive. Poet and philosopher of seemingly infinite genius. The only guy who could walk up to a woman, say "Hello... I love you... won't you tell me your name?" and actually pull it off...

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/10/jims-song.html]

Nomad soul feed

2011-09-23T17:23:00.001+05:30

I know it's just another ad for another commercial product and it's foolish to so enamoured by it. But come on, it's a car after all and sometimes you feel that an ad has been tapped right out of your nomad soul. So without much further ado, here's the transcript from an ad I saw and was simply blown away.

"People don't make a list of websites they wanna see before they die...

They don't fill photo albums with pictures from an online search...

'Like being there' is not like 'being there'...

It's OK... the Internet will be just fine without you...

That's why we built the Dodge Journey...

Your search engine for the World Wide World."

PS: Not the exact same ad that I saw on the sportsgoods store's TV but almost the same till about 0:45 into the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESc8V1-OTGo

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/09/nomad-soul-feed.html]

Guarantee

2011-09-22T17:26:00.000+05:30

Wonderful job, NASA! So you send this 6.5 ton satellite up into the sky, let it hang around in the atmosphere for 20 odd years and then just let it drop back onto the earth but can't say exactly where? Then to calm our nerves they say that a satellite of this size crashes onto earth at least once a year so it is really no big deal.

No big deal indeed that even after burning up most of its bulk, the largest piece of the debris might still weigh 155 kilograms. 155 kilograms! Of flaming hot metal at a blazing speed with a 1 in 3200 chance of hitting a human!

So much for planning life out. Plan your studies, plan your career, plan your savings, plan your future and then one random day a man made piece of junk from the depths of space might reduce all that planning to zilch or at least 160 pounds of human barbecue.

No, this is not a call to abandon all focus in life on realizing that at the end of the day it is so spectacularly random. This is only a reminder that there is never a guarantee on how things will turn out. All we need to do is hang on for the ride, as long as it may last.

Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/us-space-debris-nasa-idUSTRE78I5GE20110919

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/09/guarantee.html]

Not so dumbo jumbo

2011-08-22T09:23:00.000+05:30

If you have ever been a regular visitor to zoos, you would always find a lot of people from ages 8 to 80 pulling funny faces and making jeering sounds to make the caged animals like monkeys, lions and tigers 'come alive'. Also there is always this one guy who keeps telling the children "Kids! Don't do that. Animals don't like it." even if their indulgent parents wouldn't. That guy would be me.

So naturally when I saw a baby elephant roaming around the Nandankanan Zoo in Bhubaneshwar with his mahout in tow collecting donations for tourists, I was a little concerned. A baby (that was almost my height at the shoulders) walking through crowds of insensitive face makers who come to zoos not to appreciate the animals but to tease them would definitely not enjoy the experience.

But being outside the enclosure seemed to have an appropriate effect on the misbehaving crowds. They looked on in wonder at the spiky haired creature roaming amidst them, its dextrous trunk collecting the notes and coins that were offered to them. No one seemed to want to mess with it, baby though it was.

I fished out of my wallet a Rs. 5 coin, the small heavy coin and was considering my other options when the elephant spotted the coin in my hand and headed towards me. It was my turn to be enamoured by the cute creature but a strange irrational fear gripped me.

The trunk that was waving in front of my hand then seemed too huge to hold on to the little coin. I really thought that if I dropped it, the coin would fall right into his trunk and cause great discomfort to him as all animal lovers know that an elephant's nose is his trunk. Imagine someone dropping a 5 Rupee coin down your nose! So everytime the damp little trunk headed towards the coin in my hand, I just couldn't let it go out of my hand.

The pantomime continued for nearly a minute with the baby elephant curling his trunk towards my hand, touching it but me clutching tight onto the coin. The mahout kept telling me "Koi baat nahin. Chhod do sikka. [Don't worry. Let the coin go]" but I kept ignoring his advice.

The baby jumbo had by now decided that I was teasing him. The next time his trunk came near my hand, it gave my hand a real quick smack and before I realized it the coin was out of my hands. Not just out of my hands but neatly pinched by the baby's trunk. Handing it over to the mahout, he gave a long elaborate salute with his trunk as he had been trained to but I am pretty sure that his actions preceding that were out of sheer natural exasperation at my over cautiousness.

"Leave this to the jumbo, dumbo."

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/not-so-dumbo-jumbo.html]

Headshot

2011-08-22T07:01:00.001+05:30

"Craaaaaaaackkkkkk"

When I first heard that sound loud and clear, I asked myself "That cannot be the sound of the ball smacking my head, can it? It just cannot be..." The wild spinning of my head and the stars I was seeing at 5:00 on a summer evening as I went down on my knees replied "Yes, it was your head, dummy! Concussion. Concussion. Concussion. Man down!" The sport is called softball [in most ways similar to baseball] but I can tell you from personal experience that there was nothing soft about that ball.

I should've seen this in my future, taking into account my overconfident demeanour about fielding on a softball game. Given a chance, I would tell everyone how easy it was to stop a shot in softball with those huge gloves that the fielders use. "We don't need gloves in cricket", I'd say. After all, if there was anything in cricket I was good at, it was fielding at close in positions. So on that sunny Wednesday evening as the batter clubbed the ball in a flat long trajectory towards me situated in the left field [a sort of deep mid-off], I was relaxed and ready with my glove in "Come to Daddy" mode. Only to find the ball magically evade the more-than-ample glove webbing in front and smack down flush on Daddy's head.

I was the star of the team now... in all the wrong ways. Team members rallied around me, "Look at my eyes", "Follow my fingers with your eyes without moving your head", "Stay on your knees", "It's going to be OK" and all those things you say to people who don't have too long left. The batter on the opposing team looked like he had just murdered a man and to be honest from the crunching sound that the ball made with my knucklehead of a head, I wouldn't have counted on myself to get back to the team enclosure.

Ice pack to my head and still surprised at my being able to walk unaided, I went back to the benches and popped a couple of painkillers a helping hand had offered. This was going to hurt real bad in the night, I already knew, but an even bigger bruise was from the blow to my ego. A lifetime of above average cricket fielding laid to waste, in that single moment of idiocy. Now that I seemed OK, the jokes were already doing the rounds. "You thought you were playing soccer, huh?" and "We take two extra runs for that accurate hit!" are only two which come to mind.

I took the field again after a couple of innings and on getting back home the rest of the evening was spent Googling 'concussion' to check if there were any warning signs to watch out for. Thankfully I had none but it was a timely reminder for people of my abysmal physical abilities not to get cocky about anything, even catching a flat long hit ball. On the positive side, my concentration levels out in the field for subsequent games have improved ten-fold. Unfortunately I have also earned a tag, a tag of dubious distinction, as the guy who took a headshot.

-
[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/headshot.html]

Walmart uncle

2011-08-22T04:19:00.000+05:30

"Excuse me, buddy, which is the aisle for comforters?"

One of the primary difficulties of dealing with an Indian looking person in the USA is to figure out whether he/she is an Indian Indian whom you can initiate conversation with a plain and simple "Acchaa..." or will you be greeted with the nasal twang of "What's that?" indicating that you have crossed paths with an Indian American, born and raised in the States. Or worse still, he/she might turn out to be a Latino making you feel all the more awkward. It's a problem I haven't figured out a solution for even today, and this tale is from my first few weeks back in July 2008 when I found myself drawn into this confrontation.

So when I saw this south Indian looking 60 plus Walmart employee, I figured the best way to deal with these doubts was to assume that all of them Indian lookers were Americanized whole and soul. I don't know what had led to me making this simplification but I had already tuned my mind to that frequency. If I had known what was coming, I would most definitely have called him 'Uncle'.

A piercingly cold stare later came "FIRST OF ALL, I am not your BUDDY! You trying to be American with me?"

I was caught totally off-guard by the vehemence of his reply. I managed to muster "Uhh! I mean..." before the onslaught continued.

"I know you are from Kerala. All people from Kerala talk like this!"

For a brief moment there, I was really tempted to let God's Own Country take the blame for this etiquette transgression on my behalf but the pesky little thing called a conscience pricked me to blurt "Actually I am from Calcutta..." [which was only part of my story but this wasn't the right place and time to drag the names of those other places in the mud too]

"Oh, Calcutta? I once went there in 1972. Dying city, dying city..." said Uncle Fierce.

Uncle was getting on my nerves a little bit now. I noticed that his Walmart name tag said "CHAN" probably a corruption of Chandran or Chandrashekharan and I was tempted to point this out to Mr. "I love my India" Uncle. But picking on a guy at least 40 years my senior wasn't really my style especially since I had already stepped on his reactive toes with the introductory "buddy".

All thoughts of comforters were blown out of my head for then. I walked away dazed and tail in between my legs. As if adjusting to the million new ways of living life in a foreign country weren't enough, now I had to be on the lookout for 'speech Nazi' Indian looking uncles.

-
[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/walmart-uncle.html]

Those three magic words

2011-08-22T01:42:00.000+05:30

I like working Mondays. I really do. They come with their own set of true pre-conceived notions. So if things go awry and I get swamped with work, I say "Hey! It's Monday. What else do I expect?". And if the day gets to an un-eventful end, I am like "Wow! What a cool Monday!" Good or bad, Mondays are very upfront about themselves.

The same however cannot be said of undercover Mondays. Undercover Mondays can be any other day of the work-week except Monday when deadlines seem destined to slip, issues crop up over long completed tasks, the boss catches you on G-Mail the only second you had in all day to open it up, defensive/offensive e-mails with you in the centre are flying around, the world seems to be headed to a depressing end and such like. It's the Monday like feeling on a day which is not a Monday hence a terrible, terrible situation to find oneself in.

In steps the 'frenemy'. What do you suppose that means? The 'frenemy' is in all of us, sadistic cubicle bound prisoners. The kind of person who is a friend for all practical purposes, most probably a peer but also someone who takes secret/not-so-secret glee in the predicaments of other colleagues. After all, it all seems funny when someone else messes up or is perceived to mess up. So here comes the 'frenemy' prancing into my cubicle wearing the ghost of a smile, fully aware of my undercover Monday in progress through overheard conversations, CCed e-mails etc and asks THE question of the day "So... how's things?"

There remains only one way to salvage the situation then without exploding into a tirade about how life tied my hands behind my back and then asked me to help signal a fighter plane take-off on the runway; without throttling my 'frenemy' with my bare hands and then throwing him off the highest point on the land within a few miles. I know because I have seen days like this before... almost everyone has. This too shall pass and in the meantime I need a polite way to say "B@#$%^d, remember that time when it happened to you." without bringing things to a boil, either on his end or mine.

So I look up, away from all that on-screen activity which remotely resembles the ruined land of Mordor just after Sauron took over it, stitching a smile onto my face and going face-to-face with the 'frenemy'. "You know..." and after taking a long, meaningful, appropriate pause "Fun! Fun! Fun!"

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/those-three-magic-words.html]

Spider-sense

2011-08-21T18:26:00.000+05:30

"Don't hang around with your buddies after work today. Try to come home early."

A reasonably innocuous statement at breakfast time on a workday but I don't know why spider-sense is tingling, warning me of imminent unseen danger.

"Why?" I ask Mom "What's the deal?"

"Mr and Mrs. XYZ are visiting. Our very good friends from our days in Mysore. They've recently moved back to Kolkata."

My parents' 1 year in Mysore was just before I was born so at least I'll be spared the regular "Oooh! The last time I saw you was when you were wearing nappies. Look at you now!" routine... I think. "No, you did not see me in my nappies. I wasn't born the last time you met my parents."

"Will try to." I say and grab my motorcycle keys heading out to fulfil my quota of work owed to the world, a debt I shall have to keep paying up on till I reach retirement age.

It's a routine day at work by most definitions - chit-chatting, work, lunch at the canteen while simultaneously cursing the food as we eat it, deadly post-lunch drowsiness, attempts at work, "EOD is here and I haven't got half as far as I was supposed to..." tensions etc but I still have to get to the bottom of the spider-sense warning. So I decide to dilly-dally a little bit more at office than head back home.

I don't have to wait for too long after my regular departure time before my cell phone starts ringing. It's Mom.

"When are you going to get home? These folks are eager to see you."

"I'll be heading out soon." I reply while waiting for more obvious clues to their enthusiasm.

"Their daughter is here too. She's getting bored"

Aha! Spider-sense gets stronger.

"We wanted to give her something since this is the first time we are seeing her. Ummm... let's see. Why don't you get some chocolate for her ***on our behalf*** on the way back?" she continues.

"What?!! Chocolate? How old is she?" I enquire.

"About 23-24, I guess..."

Smooth.

"[Cough! Cough!] Oh no! Something came up at work. Probably won't be able to take off right now. Will call you later. Bye!" I say before hanging up and dedicating the next 2 hours to reading random articles on Google News via my office desktop.

Its 10:30 at night by the time I feel safe again to get set for the return journey. Any 'eager' parties should have taken the hint by now.

For all the traps and set-ups in the world, I've only got one message. Spider-sense never fails.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man's_powers_and_equipment]

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/spider-sense.html]

Pride

2011-08-13T20:28:00.003+05:30

It may have had something to do with the fact that at every Republic Day parade, every single year in school, I'd be the first to be thrown out in the screening process with my woefully un-coordinated marching while my sister would be chosen to lead the contingent for the parade resulting in intense sibling jealousy. That I assume would be the primary reason why I had very little regard (at least superficially) for formal ceremonies like hoisting the national flag and marching.

I think this incident was before I turned a teen, a point in life upto which you take everything that your Parents (Notice the capitalization) teach you as the equivalent of the word of God without questioning it or arguing over it. So one day my dad read out to me a newspaper article about a guy who ran up to the roof of his burning office building and brought out the national flag hoisted up there before escaping the building. "Ha! What a donkey!" I guffawed out cheerfully.

Wrong answer, it seemed, a very wrong answer. I knew instantly because my Mom and Dad rarely agree on anything, back then or even today, yet in sync with a surprised stare at me from my old man, I heard Mom's voice address me from the adjoining kitchen "What? What did you say?" I went "Uh! I mean... you know... like I thought..." and trailed off. Dad isn't the lecturing type so he came up with a short "It's OUR national flag, after all. He's a great guy for doing what he did." and promptly went back to scanning his newspaper. That's all the conversation we had over this topic and I was left pondering.

I know that our flag is grossly misused, by those criminal politicians who mock salute it at every parade; by fundamentalist pseudo-patriotic, religious and regional forces to spread hatred amongst brothers and by those thieving businessmen who build the world's most expensive home out of stolen taxpayer's money, then sell products which harp on the patriotic strings of their customers. But I refuse to link it with them despite their desperate urge to somehow project themselves as extensions of that inspiring image of a tri-coloured cloth fluttering in the wind.

Would I run into a burning building to 'rescue' our national flag? I probably would not find the courage to. Would I stand still at the side of the road if I were running a very important errand and the national anthem starts playing? I would not. That would feel ridiculous as I am an incurable cynic. Yet what I would also not do is laugh at people who do those things. For the flag and the anthem are potent symbols, of glorious ideals that may be never be fully met yet must always be aspired to.

We owe the respect to the hundreds of millions of peaceful, self-respecting, hard working, honest men and women out there who end the day with a happy conscience and of whose ranks we are hopefully part of. We owe the respect to a land which has shared its beauty, its craziness, its people, its memories, its knowledge, its resources, its history, its cultures and its influences to bring us to where we stand in life today no matter how much we choose to refute it. We owe it to ourselves if we have the slightest bit of pride in who we are and what defines us as the flag is the common representative of all of us and each individual at the same time.

There was this ill-fated field hockey league which ran for about two years before shutting shop, India being the unhealthily cricket-obsessed nation that it is, called the PHL [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Hockey_League]. The League may be gone but their TV promotional slogan stuck like glue in my head and I tend it to overuse it on every appropriate and inappropriate occasion because I feel that it is always so relevant in life. "Garv nahin toh kuchh nahin..." (roughly translates to "What's worth living for but pride...")

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/pride.html]

It's complicated

2011-08-07T21:32:00.007+05:30

I have a good friend but she just won't talk to me. That's almost sad. Because we understand each other perfectly, communicate with a fairly high level of accuracy, agree on certain matters of importance yet her steadfast refusal to speak in English, Hindi, Bengali or Gujarati disappoints. As for me, I don't speak Dog.

Yes, Chloe is my landlord's pet she-dog (See how I smoothly avoided stepping on those ultra sensitive feminist toes by avoiding the B-word) and we frequently spend quality time together. Mainly because she spends a lot of time flouncing around in the garden of the house I am a renter in and I happen to cross her path many times a day. A Basset hound can bark real loud and she does a great job of waking up the entire neighbourhood if by freak chance, I forget to stop by and say "Hello", ignoring her initial whines for attention.

Not that I mind. Dogs are very simplistic and straightforward creatures. If they like you, they'll respond by an enthusiastic wagging of the tail & happiness writ on their faces and if they don't, beware the ultra slow tail wag & deep seated growl. They are pretty clear about their 'Likes' and 'Dislikes', which makes them the kind of folk I prefer hanging around with. And they are quite simply the best companions for quiet introspection.

So I hop over to the garden, pat her on the back with the usual "Good girl [It'd be 'boy' if it were a he-dog]" compliments that every dog takes to be his/her birthright. Then I watch for a few minutes as she chomps on the occasional blade of grass, sniffs around the area as if it is her first day out [it is not, she knows this garden for more than 8 years now], barks after strangers in the neighbourhood, tries to chase a hare or pick a fight with another dog till the limits of her extra long leash allow her to and then look at me with me with those deep, brown soulful eyes. Generally speaking, be a dog and do dog things.

Then when it's time for me to leave, the downcast eyes clearly say "It was nice to have your company. Hope to see you again." without speaking the words. That's how it is between friends. That you don't have to jabber all the time to enjoy each other's company, becomes even more apparent in a friendship where talking isn't even a possibility. I know what some of you are thinking. "Come on! It's just a dog. Quit the over-analysis."

But the most human of human qualities is to seek a satisfactory answer. And there is none. What keeps a friend a friend or a makes a non-friend a friend or chucks a friend into a non-friend category are irresoluble questions. No one can define for sure what that intangible connection is which defines a friendship or the where, when and how of it. Revel in it like soaking in a cool breeze on a summer day or the luxury a warm blanket affords on a winter morning and appreciate it for its presence. As for the reasons, rest easy in this one theory. It's complicated.

P.S: Happy Friendship day to all readers/non-readers, dog-lovers/dog-haters alike.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/its-complicated.html]

Anniversary

2011-08-07T02:14:00.004+05:30

A very long running association came to a somewhat less than glamorous end in August 2006. I was 22 then and after 18 odd years finally done with the circus of formal studies. A graduate engineer to boot I thought to myself, "Never again!" No more dreadfully drowsy afternoon classes, no more "Oh, I should've started this one month ago... Now I am doomed!" pre-examination night terror and most importantly no more calling up home (or my elder brother in the case of 'secret' expenses) for financial resources. I was ready for a bigger commitment now, something that would keep me engaged from age 22 to 64, or possibly longer.

It was the beginning of my first (and till date only) full time job and I was loving it. It's been 5 eventful years since then and it's time for a re-evaluation. Am I still loving it? The fact that any kind of compulsory work chafes at the most pain sensitive regions of my lazy soul and that I was never going to be much of a career man given that my interests always pursue the opposite direction of what might even be remotely important leaves me rather surprised at my resilience. Not that everything is picture perfect but hey, I am still here; standing on the edge, admiring the view; not hanging on for dear life as I would have imagined myself to be 5 years ago.

My arrangement with work was plain and simple for all to see. I told work "Look. I pay attention to you for about 55 hours a week (adding hours taken up by stress and to-and-fro travel). Then you quietly pay the bills and stay out of the way." This was something that work took some while to understand, through about the first 2 years of my relationship I'd say and now it has settled down to its assigned role in the arrangement. True, it once laughed cruelly in my face when I was checking out the price of Porsches on a website but apart from that it has behaved pretty nicely.

The world of media all around me is flooded with the "Do what you love. Love what you do." philosophy. If you are not totally in passionate love with what brings the bacon home, you need to get a life, they say. I am happy, freakin' elated for those who make their living from working on what they love most. Good for them, because I couldn't.

At the very moment, a price-tag and a deadline is plugged onto a project I am doing out of interest, it loses its sheen. The inherent criminal thrill of "I should not be doing this. I should be doing my taxes instead." disappears. In the wise words of a 6 year old who lives somewhere in Ohio with his parents and pet tiger "It's only work when someone makes you do it." For me, my regular bring-in-the-dough work is like the sober shade of blue paint on the walls of this room I am writing from. I don't love it, I don't hate it but I sure as hell can't contest the importance of it being there and for it not being a bright shade of pink.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/08/anniversary.html]

Jungle in the Bronx

2011-07-22T16:21:00.005+05:30

I blame the Discovery Channel. And National Geographic. For the thoroughly successful brainwashing racket that they jointly run. Leading their viewers to believe that animals are cool. After hours of systemically targeted programming through my formative years, I am a convert and a slave to the concept of 'animal coolness'.

The reason why I find myself driving back down to the city of cities, the metropolis of metropolises, to check out... not the Empire State building, the flocking of human tribes from around the world and Manhattan's touristy madness... but the Bronx zoo. "The zoo?" the question arises "What are you? A kid?" No. But my childhood influences have ruined me. I have seen that New York is amongst the greatest cities in the world through multiple personal experiences and outings but the first thing I still think of when I visualize it is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bursting out of a sewer in midtown closest to a pizza place saying "Cowabunga!!!".

How is a chimpanzee cooler than an I-Pad? I don't know but I have been led to believe so by a certain Miss Jane Goodall [http://www.janegoodall.org/]. The African lion might be the king of the Serengeti and may have a tough sounding roar but does he exercise as much influence as the richest man in India? That's not even a logical question. Giant crocodiles lurking in the swampy waters more interesting than the latest Harry Potter movie? Sounds like something which should interest Steve Irwin (God bless his hyperactive soul. The crocs in heaven's rivers must be having a tough time now.) more than me. I seem to have my priorities of importance all messed up.

So I will battle this weekend, against hundreds of pesky excited children to sneak a peek of the above mentioned celebrities. Not to mention the chest thumping mountain gorillas, lumbering grizzlies, the ultra elusive snow leopard, the stalking tigers, the psychedelically coloured birds (I tell you, God for sure must be trying some weird stuff once in a while), the crazy monkeys and everything else that our urban existence keeps us safely/unfortunately isolated from. I daresay every animal 'spotting' would be inducing a mental revision of that Discovery/NGC documentary on it that I had watched a very very long time ago but this would indeed be the kind of studies I like, 'cause it's voluntary.

There are those who say, quite rightly, that a zoo is not the best place for a wild animal. I agree, wholeheartedly. But what a zoo does, and does really well is to keep the wonder of being on this planet alive. That we do not own the earth even though we may be the primary lease holder by now. There are things of beauty, power, grace and terror that are not of our doing. Despite our best efforts to match up, they will always make our most complicated creations look like a 6 year old's science project. We may have taken the men out of the jungle but the way our heartbeat rates jump when we hear a tiger's growl even from inside a cage show that you can never take the jungle out of the men. It's a humbling experience. Given how easily stuff goes to our head, that's pretty freakin' important.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/07/jungle-in-bronx.html]

It's true

2011-04-06T17:03:00.006+05:30

April 2nd 2011, 13:30 hours local time, Lynn, Massachusetts

A little Indian flag, brought to the living room from my brother's office desk for the special occasion sits unnoticed on the drawing room table of a house. It may be feeling a little lost out here so far away from home but boy, it must feel proud! Four guys who had been dedicatedly watchng a somewhat important cricket match live since 5:00 AM local time (one of them opting to stand for about 4 hours in the end to 'ensure' the victory) are going ballistic with joy all around it and why not! We were finally World Champions again after 28 long years, admittedly in a sport which may not be the most popular in the world but is at the centre of a lot of Indians' very existence.

We pause for a second and look outside the window to see if any of the neighbours has reported a group of four runaway madmen to 911 yet. Nope! The area is of course insanely quiet. Duh! Just another day in the couldn't-care-less-about-cricket country of America. Out on the streets of every town and city in India, thousands were already doing somersaults of elation and running around in crazy circles and so were we, like so many Indians separated and distributed across time zones and countries, tapping directly in the incomparable happiness feed that was beaming out of the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai.

After the first couple of minutes of euphoria following Dhoni's winning shot, the magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. The unabashed crying of Yuvraj Singh & Harbhajan; Sehwag's quick tear wipe; Sachin's lap of honour on the shoulders of his teammates flag in his hand; Mahendra Singh Dhoni with his ever cool smile, the weight of the tricolour draped on his shoulders which he had carried with such grace - were emotionally draining moments, leading to a somewhat embarassing sting in my eyes and a quiver in my voice. As I guess would have happened to all those Indian cricket fans who had stood by their team through thick and thin - not the ones who conveniently kicked them when they were down and would now rush to the forefront of the party to claim the victory as theirs. For those few patient souls, this was a moment of quiet vindication.

We are trained as kids to believe that the world is a simple place with a simple equation: do what is right, give it your best shot, stay happy. The realities of life frequently drive us to significantly darker conclusions. On the day of India's victory though, it was difficult to fight back this feeling of foolishness. In "In the end, everything that happens, happens for good". In "Good things come to those who wait". In "There is no substitute for hard work". In a country whose unfulfilled potential is first written off by its own cynical people. In corny self-help books and moral science classes. In Santa Claus and in the tooth fairy. Believe.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/04/its-true.html]

Anew

2011-04-05T06:50:00.002+05:30

Image by ViaMoi via Flickr

"A new beginning is due!" says the wise radio weatherman,

Yet for all I can see, the gloom of winter still does stand;

The wind is cold and breathless, each tree bare and wan

The sun for sure is not smiling, or helping anyone's tan.

Dark clouds on the prowl I watch as the rain comes dripping down,

It's that kind of grey evening, that they write sad songs around;

If I were the worrying type, my face sure would wear a frown

A thousand morose thoughts would spring, at thunder's rumbling sound.

What then is, you may ask, my way to beat the blues?

One of these days, I say, the old man's words will ring true;

Melancholy doesn't last forever, even the deepest possible hues

Wake up to brilliant green you will, no telling where winter flew.

The season of hope, the season of promise, may be biding its time,

Once spring's here you'll see, sadness ain't worth a dime.

Dream

2011-04-01T16:08:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

"That's it. I am done. Why should I care? This is just not worth the pain."

On the evening of 13th March, 1996, that was exactly how I felt. I was a broken man (No... wait, I was only 11 then, so broken kid). I had bunked school afflicted by that mysterious fever that goes undetected on thermometers ("It's how I feel inside!!"); the Indian cricket team had been smothered by the Sri Lankans in the World Cup semi-final and the Eden Gardens was up in flames. I had watched the match first ball onwards on TV and was now in the process of making a vow.

No more following Indian cricket. Not a chance. Cricket was still major fun to play so the long summer evening sessions with friends were very much on but the hours wasted on watching a heart-breaking defeat were a strict no-no. Was Azhar going to fly in and complete my assignments for tomorrow? Was Sachin going to sign my sick leave application now that my folks were convinced of my 'fever' being not so real?

It was perfectly logical. Why should 11 woefully fluctuating performers on a cricket field far far away dictate my state of mind? On the rare day, they did make it float up in a beautiful blue sky, across spectacular scenery; but on most days, they put my mood through the mental equivalent of a paper shredder. I was and still am a person who strives to keep things in balance, not investing too much of my emotions into someone or something. And then came those moments when all balance and caution were thrown to the winds! Indian cricket ranked high on this list of balance destroyers and I wished to cut myself free.

Today happens to be April 1st, 2011. How did I do on my escape? Failed. Spectacularly. Many times over. 'Like' is something which is quite difficult to quantify or justify. Either you like it or you don't. Facebook had that bit well figured out and hence that magic button. I resent watching India mess up on the cricket field, but I like watching India soar; it's only the mix of pleasure and pain that makes me irresistibly want more. Indian cricket is so much like India, and India is so much like the Indian cricket team.

I don't buy into the hype around the importance of winning the World Cup for India though. "The dream of a billion plus people?" - Really??? True, nothing brings us together as a country like cricket but nearly a billion of our 'billion plus' are dreaming of more important things like better education & careers, good roads, a plate full of food, functional hospitals, faster justice, even debating if they want to be called an Indian or not and such like, not M.S. Dhoni lifting the trophy. It's a hard fact but if cricketing glory is at the top of your mind, you are having it really good as compared to most of your countrymen.

Inspite of everything that I said in the paragraph above, for me, at a personal level, this Saturday, the 2nd of April has the potential to be the most important Saturday of my life. Yes, the proverbial elephant in the room, quietly swishing its tail, that is the question of whether India will overcome Sri Lanka in the World Cup final, will leave only after the presentation ceremony is done. It may leave ears drooping and eyes downcast, or it may run out trumpeting joining me as I shout out and jump with joy in a place and country half the world away from where I wanted to be just for this day. For reasons beyond my control, Dhoni and his boys have a major stake in my happiness tomorrow & for a long time to come, and a flood of happiness like this may just be a once-in-a-lifetime event. So please please please...

'Ghar gatta'

2011-03-28T06:37:00.005+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Remember that irritating game which I am sure anyone who has had a close in age sister in the house knows about. The whole mini house-hold set-up thing with tiny pots and pans, gas cookers and plastic vegetables where your sister could pretend at running a house for her dolls was called "Ghar gatta" or "House" in its international avatar. To top it all, your sister would have the nerve to invite you to join in and you would run away to stand in the verandah with a foul expression on your face wishing that you had a brother instead with whom you could play "Chor police" with your toy guns. This behaviour unfortunately gets back to you one day as you will find out, an unavoidable reality in a time bound assignment based job like mine.

The greatest thing about being a working tourist like me is that you have all the weekends to yourself; to look forward to, to travel, to explore your surroundings and be footloose in general free from the chores & maintenance planning that a permanent resident of the area is subject to. The worst part of being a working tourist is that you are still bound by social conventions to plan for your rented accomodation such that you can survive there for the 5 days of work which finance your wanton weekend wanderings.

So once again I found myself in an empty, newly refurbished apartment enjoying the feeling of huge unutilized spaces. The carpeting is brand new and the rooms still smell of fresh paint. There is a sense of a new beginning in here. So far so good. Then I discovered that the house is infested with cupboards and shelves which I knew somehow need to be utilized, and that is where the stress starts to build up. I realized that I need cooking utensils, crockery, a table and some chairs, a table lamp, an Internet connection, a mattress etc etc - the list grew beyond the line of my eyesight within a few brief seconds. Sadly it seemed that I needed to make notes now and sat down to put down my requirements on paper. The monetary part of the new settlement was only a minor issue, the major pain was that to fulfill my needs, it was time to go - horror of horrors - shopping!

Our neighbourhood Super Walmart is an intimidating place with massively long aisles packed with an infinite variety of goods in a mind boggling combination of prices. My method of shopping involves looking at my list and then grabbing the first brand I see of that category. Admittedly a very flawed technique but there's only so much patience I can show when it comes to hanging around in a shopping mall wasting precious weekend travel hours. Fortunately there was expert help at hand in the form of a female colleague who marches through the super-market like she owns the place. Her husband and me trail along dazed and disinterested as she darts about from one corner of the huge product filled spaces from here to there. She was truly in her element. "You need salt, right?" she asks all of a sudden. I look at my super well planned shopping list to find it missing and answer with a sheepish "Oh yes, salt!" Then she enquires "Sugar?" Yes, that's not there on my list too, so another "Oh! Sugar!" is due. "Coffee, surely?" she goes and a quick check to find it absent means that I am on the verge of tearing my hopeless list up and handing my wallet over to her to buy what is called for. I somehow restrain my impulses and smile.

But it's hardly over yet. There is stuff that I pick up from an aisle or two and the relevant advice from the expert turns out to be "Don't buy vegetables from here. We'll go to Trucchi's next. It's better quality there." or "Why buy this? You can get this stuff from the Dollar Store!" and such like. What, so there's Trucchi's and the Dollar Store to go to after all this??? You can almost see the rising shopping fever in her eyes! Sometimes you feel like even though you are saving many a dollar in this manner; after you turn 40, the high blood pressure medical treatment that all this is leading to is going to cost you a hell of a lot more. I should have thought about it before I invited female company to go shopping. By now it was too late.

The day of dread was finally done and giving credit where it's due, the expert advice has made my new apartment a completely equipped and livable place without breaking my bank. I also have the raw materials, resources and instruments to cook anything now (on paper) but the fall-back on Maruchen Ramen & home delivered pizza is inevitable. For the majority of the week, I play this obnoxious game for which I have had a life long aversion so that I can be that kid in the verandah again for those two glorious days of freedom which follow the work week. Here I am, living through the cruel joke that the regular life pulled on me, playing "Ghar gatta".

On the chin

2011-03-27T22:17:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

A couple of days, South Africa were knocked out of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 in a typical, long-associated-with-them batting collapse that saw them concede a half-won match to New Zealand. Hundreds of pages had been devoted to their tendency to "choke" already and this most recent episode of epic on-field nervous breakdown will contribute a hundred pages more to their tragic history of cricket World Cup performances.

The South African team did once successfully chase down 434, the highest run chase in cricket One Day Internationals history (a record which still stands) in a super high pressure series decider against the then-top team in the world, Australia but as is human nature no one seems to remember this monumental achievement of theirs when their critics fire up the "CHOKERS" branding iron.
http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2009/06/434.html

The South African captain, Graeme Smith, was visibly shattered by the chain of events that led to his team's loss when he spoke at the post-match presentation. His response to the first question put to him about his sentiments was something to the effect of "Words can't describe how (bad) I feel right now. We just got to take it on the chin and move on..." In that brief statement projecting the image of having received a knock-out punch to the chin, was embodied one of the major lessons anyone from full-time professionals to back-yard team reserves take from playing a sport, any sport.

Losing in sport hurts, in a very bruising sort of personal way. Most people know the bitter aftertaste of defeat even from being on the vanquished side of a close neighbourhood terrace cricket match. It's funny because it is a stupid (at least it seems so in defeat) set of enforced rules that we subject ourselves to and then gripe about how the others outdid us in this simulated restricted environment. Isn't life and its real world issues complicated enough to keep us busy instead of us voluntarily participating in stress inducing play-acting?

Sport (especially professional sport) is often criticized for promoting the "Winning is everything" philosophy. "Do what it takes" is unfortunately a very fine line away from "Do whatever it takes" and the reason why some sporting greats (Cristiano Ronaldo, Diego Maradona spring to mind) I feel are poor ambassadors of the central idea behind sports no matter how talented they might be. Because the beauty of sports lies in playing by the rules, not flouting them when nobody is looking. In busting your gut, in drowning in sweat, being delirious in pain - and yet losing out because you were just that half a percent short of what was required to win. And then return next time, digging yourself out of that emotional black hole, ready or should I say hoping to write a new chapter.

The real reason why thousands of kids around the world, look forward to after school hours or holidays with such anticipation; bat, ball or racket in hand is a lot more sublime than the crude sentiment of "Winner takes all". The sometimes gritty nature of playground sporting battles, does not take away the fact that in the end, even the most bitter of quarrels was settled and some of our most pleasant childhood memories comprise of friends and experiences on the playing field. Through the joy and the disappointment of being bound by a common set of play rules, a message of balance is being broadcast to us, a slightly modified version of what those who denounce sports say. "Winning is indeed everything... but no one can win all the time" And that is a lesson well learnt, in sport and in life, especially for days when you have to take it... on the chin.

Divine vision

2011-02-12T15:27:00.005+05:30

The year I remember correctly was 1998. I had accompanied my dad on a work-related trip he had to make to Delhi. With his meetings for the day done, both of us were strolling around the Connaught Place shopping area taking in the sights and sounds of the hub of the capital city. Delhi, setting aside for the moment its reputation for housing the not-so-rare irrationally or criminally ill-behaved citizen, happens to be the only Indian city truly deserving of being the capital of our nation thanks both to its historical importance and the imposing architecture & infrastructure of New Delhi.

So there I was, a small town boy wandering through the endless rows of alluring shops and restaurants, eyes peeled for all of the details, all of 13-14 in impressionable age. It's hard to say whether it caught my eyes first or my dad's but it can be said that we reacted simultaneously, hard core car enthusiasts that we were. A board over a newly opened showroom on CP said "Hindustan Motors-Mitsubishi" and both of us moved in its direction, mice uncontrollably drawn towards the cheese (if Tom & Jerry cartoons are to be believed)

India was still a very bad place to buy modern cars or even spot them on the road back then, and cars like the Daewoo Cielo and the Ford Escort had just arrived to add some colour to the road traffic. The richest of the rich could still afford the 200% flat import duty on BMWs and Mercedes, which were visible on the streets of Bombay and Delhi but few and far between. For the common man, the only option for a modern car was the Maruti. Any new car launch was a breath of fresh air. Both my dad and me were extremely curious.

Stepping inside the showroom, I took a sharp breath in and let out a wolf-whistle, instinctively and unashamedly. Ask any genuine car fanatic, and he (here I am discounting any similar lunacy in the opposite gender) will tell you that cars are not cars, they are people. Every car model has a story, a character and a reputation. What I saw there was a modern day legend. The room's interiors were purposefully poorly lit and in the centre on a slowly rotating dais under a perfectly sized spotlight, stood a red as blood Mitsubishi Lancer, gleaming with intent and begging to be raced away.

Reigning World Rally Championship champion (in its Evo avatar), the Lancer was a car that every car magazine worth its salt devoted pages to praising. How it looked, how it drove, how it stirred the soul as it roared and skid through snow, sand, gravel and tarmac; through mountains, deserts, forests and cities was all what I had been reading about dreamily uptil now. Now that dream had been physically manifested right in front of me, out of the blue, on my home turf. I desperately wanted to possess it and I wanted it to possess me. It was as strange a sensation as could be. I was in love... with a car!

Jhamelaa

2011-02-10T08:37:00.001+05:30

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First up, let me state this frankly and clearly. In the past, I have avoided helping road accident victims. Many times. Because of the supposed 'jhamelaa' (complications). The normal excuses that people give like "The police will instead harass you for bringing in the victims about what you were doing there!" or "The hospital won't admit the injured victims in and they will die in front of your eyes outside the hospital entrance." were good enough for me to not get involved in any rescue operations.

What I never did and never will do though is to hang around the scene of an accident, especially one in which the victims look critically injured without any purpose. It is surprising how many people actually do that in our country where the ambulance always takes too long a time to show up (due to a million reasons not under the control of the ambulance service) and the best chance for saving lives is to get them to the hospital in time somehow through personal initiative. If I cannot be of help, I move on so that someone who actually wants to help can do his/her job.

On Wednesday evening, the day for Saraswati Puja here in Bengal, as I was making my way back home after work, on the narrow Beliaghata bypass road bordering the canal, I saw what I hated to see once more. Two guys sprawled in the middle of the road, heads split open, blood spurting out of their major head injuries and a huge crowd gathered around them. My first reaction was to thread my motorcycle through the people and go ahead ignoring the commotion, but this looked like something which had happened half a minute ago. I pulled over on the side and I still don't know why because this wasn't how I had behaved in similar scenarios before.

Enquiries revealed that a speeding Ambassador car had knocked down the pair from their motorcycle, and then the car had fled from the scene. Needless to say, neither the car nor the motorcycle were driving at civilized speeds and the youngsters aboard the bike were wilfully ignorant of the rule that a helmet should be worn at all times while riding. People were standing around passing judgements "Should've worn helmets!", "I shouted at them to go slow just 200 m before. Now look!" or "The first one will definitely not make it. Look at the blood he is losing right now. He's gone!"

I asked if anyone had called the police or an ambulance yet. No one had. I called the police emergency helpline 100 from my cell. Guess what? It was busy! And so it remained for the next 10 attempts I made. I asked of the locals if there were any government hospitals with emergency wards in the vicinity. Private hospitals have a even worse reputation when it comes to acceptance of accident victims for treatment so government is the way to go. I got a name, the Neel Ratan Sarkar hospital next to Sealdah station but no one had their emergency number. I finally got through to the police and gave them the location of the incident via consultation with the locals, and they said that they were sending help right away.

The minutes were passing by and there was no sign of the police or ambulance. The pool of blood around the prone bodies was horrifyingly large now. Some kind soul was splashing water on their faces but that was about it. People were angry in a directionless kind of way and were diverting traffic away from the narrow side street we were on. I once again asked the people milling around the victims, "Is there no doctor around? Is there any way we can get these people to the hospital ourselves?" Back came the aggressive reply "Don't you know how much trouble you can get into with the police in simple cases like this. Lots of trouble. Who will take the risk? Will you?"

And I said yes. To their credit, within a minute or so they found a Tata Ace mini tempo whose driver volunteered to help get the injured to the hospital. Bear in mind, all private vehicles had made sharp U-turns when the same request to assist was made to them. The injured were placed in the cargo hold but no one, absolutely no one from the waiting crowd wanted to accompany me to the hospital. I was asked to sit beside the driver and we set off for the hospital, with two critically injured persons just lying in the open hold like transported goods. It wasn't the best way to proceed but our options were limited and it certainly didn't feel nice as we headed towards the Sealdah hospital on a bumpy road. Half way there, we came across a lumbering police van making its way towards the scene of the accident and they asked us to move on towards the hospital.

I was really tense now as I madly waved a red rag out of the window, the universal signal for an emergency, so that traffic cops would let our vehicle pass. How crudely would the police and hospital react? So were the tempo driver and his assistant. The driver said, "I am a poor man who drives this vehicle for someone else. I hope I don't get into trouble for trying to help." As we drove into the premises of the hospital and reached the emergency ward, we were on tenterhooks. Then came the real anti-climax when I ran into the entrance and explained the situation. The police inside the emergency ward were prompt in their response and the hospital staff even more so. True, they were one stretcher attendant short at that point of time and I had to assist to get the more critically injured person to the Operation Theatre (OT), but the doctors were buzzing around and doing their best. The cops were not interfering in any way and waited till both the victims were wheeled into the OT before asking me the basic questions of where, when, and how.

The cops asked me the questions in as polite a manner as I have ever heard anyone speak, thanked me for not giving in to stories about their corrupt & rude 'behaviour' and said I could leave if I wanted to. The victim's family was being contacted by personnel from the nearest police station, they told me. All those stories about how victims were refused treatment and how their rescuers were prosecuted may have some basis in truth, but we as a people are so bogged down by preconceived notions of 'jhamelaa'. This is the 'kalyug' (Dark age) some people say and so we must weigh all the possible 'jhamelaas' before we even think of doing what is right.

The injured persons were still conscious and moaning in pain when they went into the OT, something which surprised me considering the massive amounts of blood they both had lost. The human body is a resilient machine and it fights till the very last. I do not know if they lived to see the next day. God willing, their lives may have been saved but at least I think I did what I could to the best of my limited abilities to give them a chance. What I do know is that I ride a motorcycle to work everyday and I wouldn't want to bleed to death on a side street while a couple of hundred people stood watching the 'tamashaa' (spectacle), just because they want to avoid the 'jhamelaa'.

All said and done, India is a country with imperfect systems and we have very little or no faith in them. We blindly assume that since the systems are bad, the people in it must be equally rotten too. When we have faith, hope and the will to make things better and operate under the assumption that people are basically good, the first 999 times out of 1000, the experience is likely to turn out to be bitter. It is an almighty struggle to maintain that belief in most situations we find ourselves in, but nothing is more important. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" may sound like a ridiculous cliche which is all too frequently disproven, but it forms the primary basis of how we as a species have survived thus far. If you don't trust your fellow man to behave as you would and be helpful, you are basically stating that you don't trust yourself to able to be useful. And that is a very sad state to be in.

Imagine

2011-02-04T07:02:00.002+05:30

Imagine... that you are Sachin Tendulkar, with 20 years of international cricket experience with you walking in to bat. It's early on the windy first day of an India v/s South Africa Test match at the Newlands stadium in Cape Town, South Africa. Two quick Indian wickets have already gone down but the crowds have poured into the stadium for exactly the situation you find yourself in. You absorb the the noise, the atmosphere, the excitement and the expectations of the watching thousands plus the millions watching live on TV; gather a deep breath and take guard.

Steaming in towards you, without the slightest hint of goodwill in his intentions, is the best fast bowler currently in business in international cricket, Dale Steyn. He can swing the cricket ball like it's on drugs; bowl at speeds that will shatter your stumps before you can blink and also crack your ribs if you are caught unawares by one of his mean short length deliveries. Accuracy and discipline is not something he can be faulted on, not to forget that this is Cape Town where the ball swings, bounces and bites anyway. Any other person in your place would have just raised his hands in surrender and walked away. But not you.

Because you are Tendulkar. You've been in tight corners like this before. Where there is Steyn running in, there was once a Wasim Akram or an Allan Donald or a Glenn McGrath or a Shoaib Akhtar. If it's short and wide, cut it; if it's full outside off, cream a cover drive; if it's full and straight, punch it back past the bowler; if it's full on the pads, flick it away on the leg side; if it's short and heading towards your body, pull it; if it's really short, hook it or just weave away from it. You have an answer for almost anything. Almost. 20 years in the business of extraordinary batting still haven't helped you prepare for the "corridor". In fact, the thrill of the "corridor" might the only reason that you still revel in the challenge of playing cricket.

Of all the expressions frequently used by cricket commentators, "Corridor of uncertainty" has to be the most evocative. The good length delivery in the narrow zone on or around the the off stump (the aforementioned corridor), poses multiple questions to the batsman in that brief half a second it takes to get to the batsman. Back foot or front foot? Play it or let it go? Thump it or stonewall it? So many questions, never a definite answer. Uncertainty as defined in the English dictionary assumes the form of a live snarling creature. Being Sachin and the bowler being Steyn, you half expect what's coming. There it is, the perfect good length delivery at blistering pace in that doubt breeding region around the off stump.

There are three South African slip fielders and a wicketkeeper waiting for a nick which they will gratefully pouch. Your critics will then snigger behind your back ignorant of the reality of two decades of invaluable service to the team, "He is useless in critical situations." Maybe you should let this one go and wait for an easier one. But what if this comes back in towards the stumps? It'll be too late to react then! If you half play it, there is every chance of a thin edge so why not smack it? A crackling boundary to start with works wonders for your confidence. All difficult choices to be facing but the truth is that you love being there, at that position of potential. There may be glory to be hoped for or sheer disappointment to be coped with, but the real incentive is not knowing what will happen, until you make your move.

Negotiating the bewildering path of life is so much like playing an infinite Test match as a batsman. You need patience and you need judgement; you need anticipation and you need self-belief. Opportunities come and go, like zippy Steyn deliveries. On a bad day, you grit your teeth and try to weather the storm. On a good day, you middle the ones that are clear-cut run making chances, the short balls and the full ones. Yet anything in the corridor of uncertainty is always a mystery, no matter how long you play.

That is when you need that rare combination of pluck and luck as you shape up to face the unknown. Rule number 1 is to accept that life is frequently unfair and you shouldn't be complaining about how life handed you a raw deal, especially since you are by far not the first person that something ridiculously undeserved happened to. It is in the nature of life to slap you in the face for no reason at all, and all those years of hard work in the nets might amount to a big round zero on match day. There might also be wrong choices made, but it's pointless to rue them for long. Of course being dismissed hurts, but the only option you have in this life is to back yourself and live to fight another day. Then, there is the exciting possibility of things going right, of achieving a flow that keeps you at the crease for a long, fulfilling innings. People will say what they say anyway but at the end of the day, it's your life to live and your route to choose. Quoting Liam Thomas Ryder:

"Time sets the stage; fate writes the script; but only we may choose our character."

Imagine that you are Sachin Tendulkar.

Outing

2011-01-16T00:20:00.000+05:30

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The little zero bulb above the wash-basin came on with an audible click casting ghostly yellow beams on my portion on the bed and my face. It was still dark outside but mom was already up to keep up with ours, the kids' schedule for the day. For a change, I did not mumble or grumble but sat straight up. It was the one school day of the year when waking up early was not a pain. Brushing my teeth, I could hear the pre-dawn trains blow their whistles many kilometres away from the Narmada bridge, a sound which would not make it to our housing society when the traffic grew heavy on the road in front later in the day. Though train travel was rarely a requirement on most of our school trips, the shrill calls of the incoming trains were symbolic of the restlessness and anticipation of the trip to come.

Done with her duty of packing the snack-boxes for my sister and me, it was time for dad to step up for his role in the early morning ordeal. He was in charge of taking us to the forever fixed starting point for all school trips, the patch of land in front of Maharaja Hotel where the buses were waiting to take in the troops of school children and so were our other excited classmates/schoolmates with their equally tired looking parent escorts through the yet darkened roads of our small town. A quick visual scan done to check for the arrival of any members of our respective buddy groups and then the accompanying parent was suddenly as good as non-existent. As the official time to leave approached, the role calls began and though order was restored as far as the standing in neat rows was concerned, the noise levels were consistently on the rise. The teachers accompanying us on the trip would get an early taste of the headaches in store for them as kids who just about barely heeded them inside the classrooms were now expected to obey in this great long trip outside of school. The teacher shouted for silence, the children chattered on regardless, the teacher shouted again for silence, the children chattered on again regardless, the teacher gave up and sighed - was the usual pattern on display.

All loaded into the bus, the buses would roll out onto the highway and the usual antics of unreasonably happy schoolkids would begin, spurred on by the mild chill that still hung in the air. Civilized debates transforming into bitter slanging-matches over which audio cassette to play, for example, a choice between "Taal" or "Pyaar Mein Kabhi Kabhi" were a common feature. So was woefully out-of-tune and fearfully enthusiastic Antakshari singing with winks and nudges being passed around of the "He is actually singing for her"/"She is really singing for him" type. Then there were the paper ball throwing face-offs, plastic bottle duels and some random quote from a poor soul which tickled the humour of the entire bus (or at least the entire bus pretended so) which served as the basis for mindless maniacal laughter for the next few minutes. All of this cacophony would last till the sun went up full and strong. Afterwards there would be something of a lull till the destination for the picnic was reached.

School day trips were mostly to nearby forest areas. The Sagai [wink wink :)] forest and Jambughoda forest trips are names I can recall but there was one every school year and I think I did them all. The destination was not of too much consequence as the behaviour of the trippers was always similarly bizarre. The students would pour out of the buses like busy insects and proceed to do exactly the opposite of everything that the teachers would tell them, behaving much like an ant hill on drugs. "Everyone will stay in a single group" they were instructed and within the first 15 minutes there were as almost as many groups as there were children. Some raced ahead to keep up with the guide, some trailed off into checking some alternate routes confident that the noise of the other hundred stampeding children would prevent them from getting lost and some just hung back to make the most of this golden chance to irritate and worry the teachers at the same time. "Remember... we will stay here only for 15 minutes" said the supervisor at the most wonderful spot of our day long walk with a wild, magnificent jungle waterfall to play around in and so immediately the students decided that 15 minutes meant 2 hours. Only when the PT teacher came down chasing everyone with a cane did the pool at the base of the waterfall rid itself of the splashing, thrashing school children. The impromptu cricket and football sessions were also a constant presence given the availability of any minimum amount of space and time.

With the arrival of evening, the slow trooping back to the buses would be complete and the final role call before the return journey was the closing of the loop. It's a wonder given the consciously created disorderliness amongst the students that thankfully no one ever got left behind. Someone up above must be keeping an eye out for indisciplined school kids, I guess! The trip back home was a rather morose affair in the yellow lighted interior of the bus with even the most vocally capable of our troops being reduced to a mild murmur given the exertions of the day. Some gloomy soul (Me thinks it was the driver who was fed up with the constant wall of human noise behind him while he was driving around) would put on "So gayaa yeh jahaan, so gayaa aasmaan... [The world has fallen asleep, so has the sky]" in the music system, finally his choice of song, and if you were to raise your head to take a peek around inside the bus in that final leg of the return journey, you would find it tough to disagree. The immediate world around me was indeed asleep but only after revelling in an amount of happiness and fulfillment that'd be increasingly difficult to attain as time carried them forward into the complexities of their futures.

Auto-pilot

2011-01-13T23:55:00.000+05:30

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Having spent year after childhood year wanting to learn never quite translated into action but January 14th was the day when I renewed my yearly oath of "This year I will coax one of my buddies into teaching me how to fly a kite... definitely most definitely!" By the time, the next Uttarayan/Makar Sakranti came around, there was I again holding on the 'charki' (spindle) while some friend or the other engaged in fierce battles with fellow fliers, my involvement being restricted to the level of a loud excited "Kaipochhe (Cut it)!" or to the menial response to the barked order of a defeated fighter of "Abbey lappett (Hey, wind the thread back)!"

A few charitable souls did try to teach me a thing or two about the magical (at least to me) art of coaxing a glued patch of paper on a stick framework into the air but it wasn't very long before they discovered that they would need extra stocks of kites if I continued with my merry tug-when-the-head-pointing-downwards kite destroying ways. I still looked forward to the kite festival though. The long rows of sunny roofs unmindful of the winter breeze, filled with people, loudspeakers blaring out the latest Bollywood numbers and very liberal amounts of sweet groundnut 'chikki' being spread around offered a great environment to indulge in along with my troop of friends while eying all the girls on the neighbouring terraces (Murphy's Law dictated that there were to be none on the terrace we chose to be on).

Above all, there was the faint promise of redemption, the chance that the hours of patient 'charki' handling would yield something tangible for however brief a period of time. For when in a freak space of time with the sky was clear of immediate competition, the friend who was flying the kite would feel bored by the inactivity and offer me a chance to be the man-in-command. I would jump at the opportunity, to feel the weight of the long line of string leading up to the messenger in the sky. It's wonderful to be in charge of something that distant, cruising the winds and swimming in the vastness that we as human beings will never have such unrestricted access to. The kite it would seem was living the dream and that very string which ran from its straining ribs to my hands carried to me indistinct whispers of all the wonderful things that it could see but could not fully describe. The few moments of blissful navigation lasted only till an aggressive neighbour started homing in on my aircraft. Then once again, the command would switch and I would rushed back to my critical but unglamourous position in the engine room. I didn't mind. Being a pilot or at least imagining myself to be one was always fun, so what if the plane was in Auto-Pilot mode all the time while I was in the pilot's seat.

Readjusted estimates

2011-01-08T23:31:00.001+05:30

Until as recently as 5 years ago, I was blessed with the gift of a no-trace-of-fat-or-muscle-retained stick thin figure despite an insatiable appetite especially at job treats, electric heater aided room cooking sessions and farewells that lay thick and fast across the duration of the third and final year calendars at engineering college. The most common question put to me tinged with a trace of shock then as the pile of chicken bones grew thick and fast around me (sometimes even the bones were not to be wasted) was "How can you eat so much? Where does it all go?"

Then came the 4-5 years of lounging around in front of a computer screen at office and it was only on this Thursday that I understood the full social impact of my inactivity based physical transformation. A colleague was in his last week of work before his transfer to another location and he had taken us, his soon-to-be-ex team members out to lunch. I wasn't quite hungry and post college, my appetite had really gone down from an equivalent of 100 to 5 but as the future event will suggest, my appearance may be reflecting an opposite trend. Though it was a buffet, I opted for just a single helping of all the items on the tables. As I was winding up the meal with two scoopfuls of icecream and gulabjamuns, three different people at my table had exactly the same question for me. This question maintained the element of shock in it. Except for the fact that now the question was "Aapkaa ho gayaa?!! [Are you done?!!]". Darn it!

Foggy parathas

2011-01-04T00:21:00.001+05:30

[Tonight is a cold night in Calcutta, cold by Calcutta standards that is, but just the right kind of cold if you ask me. The motorcycle ride back home through deserted late night roads is faster by 20 kmph as your shoulders stiffen up to brave the chill in the air. Your twitchy on-the-verge-of-sneezing nose & numb fingertips feel like they belong to somebody else. Your eyelids are cold, like they have just been dug out of snow. Just the right kind of cold that a man can take... and robustly enjoy! Makes me think back to the four winters spent in the heart of Haryana, last experienced only 4 years ago but already seems like 4 decades ago.]

07:30 AM

I have always been a creature of the light, never a creature of the night even through the routine murdering lifestyle of an engineering college hostel. When the sun is up, I have to be up too no matter how late I sleep or no matter how much of a biology v/s fermented liquids challenge last night's party was. So all too frequently on a winter's morning on a weekend, I would find myself blinking like a deer caught in the headlights and grumbling my way out of the sensational comforts of a thick blanket. It didn't matter that I would be taken down by another wave of extreme sleepiness at around 11:00 AM, but for the moment, I was hopelessly awake.

A hostel bears an uncanny resemblance to a graveyard in those hours of the morning, so deathly quiet is the surroundings. Every party worth its salt has already ended in tearful emotional moments of the "You are a real friend!" nature and the chorus of puking heads out of the verandahs of decadence has long gone silent. It's a surreal world, especially in contrast to the mayhem and the noise and the loud music that inhabited the same space just a few hours ago. Then there's the all pervading morning fog rolling in from the sunflower fields in front of Hostel Number 5, almost looking responsible for putting all the party revellers to a much needed but vehemently-fought-against slumber.

I lumber down the stairs after pulling on my worn-down-to-the-last thread blue jacket as the cold stings my ears. The few odd inmates (Yes, we have had some notices which referred to us as "Inmates of Hostel No. 5"!) who were also in wait for breakfast to begin also come shuffling down, a mini army of zombies staggering through the fog in search of the one thing they craved, the only thing that could justify being awake at that - hot paranthas! Methi, aloo, gobi whatever may be the stuffing - all welcomed onto the cold steel of the railway catering style steel plates, topped off with a cube of butter and then another cube of butter to serve as the 'subzi' component of the meal.

The warmth of the first morsels of food awaken the other senses and I can hear the sound of the carrom board striker whacking into the sides. Somebody has already got down to business in the common room neighbouring the hostel mess and I am sure by the time I leave the table, none of the newspapers pinned to the boards would be free for a read. Nonetheless, I wander into the common room out of sheer habit and check out what's on TV. Wonders of wonders, it's not ETC with its endless stream of Bollywood movie trailers but a West Indies v/s Australia Test match live. Lara is hitting the hide off the Aussies and it seems that the word has got around already. A few familiar faces, cricket-fans as they are, rush in and take up the first row. I too find my nook, in the second row with an empty chair in front to prop my legs up on to half doze, half dream my way through the wizardry on display on TV. Another blissful day of anarchy thus progresses in REC Kurukshetra, in the land of foggy parathas.

1.1.11

2011-01-02T00:46:00.000+05:30

Image by randihausken via Flickr

It's very strange how the number 1 is indicative of a beginning and also of closure. '1' is the all important first step in a journey to success and '1' is the place where the ladder of success ends. So on a day when the calendar is bursting over with '1's, I find myself horribly confused. Is this post my first step towards achieving perfection in writing increasingly meaningless pseudo-philosophical babble or my crowning achievement in my attempts to waste the time of people who bother to read me. Happy New Year 2011 anyway. And sorry... insufficient sleep trying to catch up and an extreme will to post on the first day of a new year often combine to achieve randomly inexplicable results like the content of the post above.

The question

2010-12-16T07:43:00.005+05:30

December 8th, 2009

"So how do you feel? [About returning to India]", asked a friend from the seat row ahead of me as the British Airways flight from Boston to London circled above the bright night lights of England's capital. This was the half-way mark on my return to India after one and a half years in the USA but I lacked the gung-ho optimism which had been my constant companion till the second I had boarded this flight. I replied rather circumspectly "I don't know!" I felt uneasy; like one would feel if every invitee gifted him a deodorant on his birthday.

Putting it mildly, I was having a blast in the USA. An ever growing circle of friends; a significant number of well settled and welcoming relatives sprinkled around the country; California one weekend; New York City in the other; U2 live; canoeing in the forests of Maine; sailing on the Atlantic; skydiving; driving for hundreds of miles of spectacular open highway in a variety of vehicles yet I would simply laugh off the suggestion if anyone ever mentioned "settling in the US". Life itself was some sort of adventure, the people were friendly and the work culture was awesome yet...

Not being able to justify "yet" even to myself was frustrating. The long queues and noise at Heathrow airport added to the gnawing doubt that an objective answer to the question posed was not going to be so comfortable. My parents had come visiting in the wonderful last 2 months of my stay there and our collective luggage handling on the return journey was a chore which kept me busy at Heathrow. Finding my seat on the plane to Bombay, I waited till the plane took off and buried myself in the in-flight movie options just to escape my thoughts.

In the process, I ended up watching the Pixar Studios animated "Up", a movie about Carl Fredrickson, a retired widower who had filled a lifetime with happy dreams of travels to faraway lands with his beloved wife but never got to fulfill them as the pressing needs of a regular life kept them entangled. With his wife now deceased and old age caretakers knocking on his door, he ties thousands of multi-coloured helium balloons to his house making it float away for a highly entertaining and touching journey. To my relief, the story was such that I was completely engrossed.

Soon we landed in Bombay, a city that I had always adored blindly, at least before I left the country. But now its airport looked in complete and utter chaos. The luggage conveyer belts were mobbed and it was hard to last 10 seconds without having a marauding trolley crush your feet. Completely spoilt by my brief stay in a more orderly nation, I really shouted at an overenthusiastic luggage bearer who only wanted to transport our suitcases and asked him to move on, cruelly ignoring the fact that all he was trying was to ensure his hard-earned daily bread.

It was past 3:00 AM when we left the airport and headed to my brother's flat down the empty Western Express highway. I noticed more than ever before how much of a work in progress my country was. There were flyovers and buildings coming up everywhere, a screen of dust in the air, barefooted families walking alongside the highway for an early morning arrival at the Siddhi Vinayak temple as the driver of our vehicle speedily ignored one red signal after the other. As expected, not much had changed in my time away and a deep seated dissatisfaction troubled me.

Suddenly the quiet of the night was invaded by what sounded like countless buzzing bees. We looked to see a dozen odd motorcycles loaded with whooping and joyful youngsters zoom past us. These were not imported super-fast models, but regular Indian motorcycles doing 55 mph at the most yet the look on their faces said that they were having the time of their lives. The driver angrily blamed "Dhoom picture" for misguiding the youngsters; mom was making her clucking sound of disapproval; dad I suspect was, like me, smiling. I smiled because I realized the very personal nature of happiness.

The place and the environment that one has grown up in are inextricably entwined with what one needs to be happy. I used to think that this idea was solely based on the romanticized ideals of patriotism and gratitude to the homeland, but now understood that this was also cold fact. All things put together, in a life overburdened with personal wishes and desires, without being compelled to, the tricolour with a wheel in between had become my flag, the cricket team in blue was my team and a chunk of land in the south of Asia was my country.

I remembered being asked by curious foreigners to discuss Diwali, Eid, Royal Bengal tigers, the Mahabharata, Kalaripayattu etc and my limited but enthusiastic explanation of the same because an Indian was expected to know all of these topics and many more. I recalled hating "Slumdog Milllionaire" and the personal sense of guilt at being unable to deny that many people still did live like this in my country when an American friend asked. I was a fool to objectively compare what was irrevocably mine (both great and not-so-great) to foreign standards and crib about situations which were partly my responsibility.

So we have our problems of brutally real and politically projected inefficiency, injustice and inequality. "We are like this only" is a philosophy that should not be blindly encouraged. There is much to see, learn and implement from the world outside. I could easily give an arm and a leg to continue visiting foreign places and work there for brief periods of time. But all doubts were quelled and I was finally at peace. It was as clear as if Carl Fredrickson had floated the answer using multi-coloured balloons across the grey of the approaching Mumbai dawn. “Home. Heart. India.”

Some important facts of life

2010-12-12T00:01:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Here's some really vital, possibly life-saving answers to questions which you always wanted to ask but were too shy to. Like how big would a grizzly bear look if it stood right alongside me? Or do I really need to be afraid if a salt-water crocodile sneaked up on me? The tiger, the king of the jungle, that creature all those conservationists keep shouting about? How big is it anyway?

The answers are all here in the link below:

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/facts/?source=NavAniFact

Really! There's a graphic to show a 6 foot man alongside each of these rarely-encountered-by-a-person-in-person-who-lived-to-tell-about-it-creatures. You can hear how they would sound so that you can plan your panicked run beforehand. Then there are the vital stats of height and weight just in case you feel like challenging one of them to a wrestling match and also world maps to show where an appropriate arena might be found. For the purpose of choosing a wrestling match opponent, can I suggest leaving the giant squid out of contention? The nearest thing in size for us to relate to was decided by NGC to be a school bus!

I won't hold you up any longer now. Try it. It's way too much fun. I spent a significant portion of my young life down there already!

There will be blood... lots of it

2010-12-11T23:28:00.000+05:30

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There's a show that airs on the History Channel called "History's Greatest Warriors" and in its existence as a program can be found irrefutable proof that the world will never know complete peace as imagined by John Lennon, at least as long as it is run by men. There is something about violence especially in its televised or dramatized version that inevitably draws us menfolk to it to like flies to clotting blood. Not that all of us are thirsting to get destructive, but we sure as hell want to find out more about it.

Coming back to the aforementioned TV show, it pits comparable legendary warriors from different parts of the world and time periods in a showdown which history had unfortunately missed out on setting up. So we have a bunch of computer guys, martial arts experts and doctors coming together to analyze and ooh-aah over the devastating effect of the warriors' special weapons and techniques on a dummy which replicates the exact texture and strength of human flesh and bones. The outcome of a Samurai sword on a neck and a Viking axe on the abdomen is bound to be gory but I watch, transfixed by the spectacle. The icing on the cake is the final computer simulation where the two warriors square off in a spectacular fight to the finish.

And it's not just passive spectatorship either! Often times, I find myself cheering for a particular side. I was overjoyed when the street smart American Indian warrior, the Apache overcame the Gladiator from Rome in a swift hamstring cutting and then jugular vein slicing knife move! I was delighted when the disciplined Japanese Samurai absorbed the power surges and then clinically dispatched the extremely strong but equally crude Viking. Crushed is how I would describe myself, when the Ninja got his backside handed to him on a platter by the Greek age Spartan. A recent episode when the former USSR commando, the Spetznaz taught a hard lesson in combat to the American Green Beret is one for the pleasant side of the memory bank. All of the preceding combat was of course virtual in every sense of the word but if there is to be such a war, I always would want to know what channel it is on.

Death in the afternoon

2010-12-11T07:52:00.001+05:30

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Truth as has been repeated over a trillion times already is always stranger than fiction. A conversation over my desk phone at work on a hot day in May was just another example. No one could possibly imagine such a scenario and if you had read it in a story, you'd have dismissed it as just another author indulging in his much-abused right to creative freedom ignoring the requirement for a dialogue to sound real.

It was post lunchtime and I was in the torturous state between much required wakefulness and all-too-tempting sleepiness typical to that period of the work-day when my desk phone rang and I picked up if only to take my mind off the survival challenge it had taken on. A sombre voice over the phone asked for Colleague 1 with whom I share my desk number. I looked around for him and he wasn't in the vicinity. So I asked Colleague 2, a very close friend and flatmate of his if he wanted to talk to the voice on the phone. Colleague 2 came to my desk and after a brief conversation on the phone said to me laying the phone receiver aside "It's from the Nokia Care Centre where Colleague 1 had just given his cell-phone for repair this morning. Guy won't tell me what he wants to convey and insists on speaking to Colleague 1 in person!"

Both of us were naturally mystified by this secrecy and just the next moment, Colleague 1 entered the quadrant. We hailed him and he came up to the phone. He too talked very briefly before ending the call and he had a look of amusement mixed with wonder when he was done. He turned to us and went "Never had a call like this before! The guy at the service centre said that they were not able to repair the phone. For that they were sorry!"

The only rational explanation could be that the Nokia Care people, like most of us, were brought on the most typical of Bollywood fare. Remember the innumerable movies in which the worried family/son/brother/sister/boyfriend/girlfriend waits outside the emergency room with the red light indicating that the operation was on, glowing? Then the doctor would come out, all serious and grim and the person/persons outside would rush to his side with a questioning look on their faces and we as the audience would already know what he was about to say, essentially "I am extremely sorry. I tried my best!" So it was with such appropriate gravity, that the death of a cell-phone was announced.

Arrival

2010-12-05T21:52:00.001+05:30

Image by Manu_H via Flickr

I so wanted Germany to be the first foreign country that I visited. In a way, it was. My first footstep outside India was at Frankfurt airport, the home base of the Lufthansa flight I had taken from Calcutta. I enquired about a transit visa to step out in the land of Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Volkswagen as I was to spend 11 hours there before my connecting flight to Boston took off. But my plans were stone-walled by a tough looking German cop who informed me that there was no such permission available on such short notice. So back I went to the lounge and waited.

It was night by the time I had cleared customs at Logan International Airport on the 21st of June, 2008, a Saturday. I entered into the Arrivals area and got myself a few dollars in change to use on the Verizon payphone kiosks. I had my aunt's cellphone number written down somewhere and to this day, I can't understand why I couldn't use that payphone to make her a call. It was just a regular payphone kiosk like any other in the world but I struggled to make it work. Seeing my plight, a cop tried to help me out but ended up thinking of me as yet another weird foreigner invading his country as the number I gave him wouldn't go through though it was the right number. I had no option but to hope that either my aunt or my cousin brother would sneak a peek into the waiting area and identify me among the hundreds of passengers biding their time there.

A group of beautiful Latino girls were also in wait for somebody to arrive so it wasn't exactly a bad time to be hanging around. My attention then wandered to the complicated perpetual machine on display there with the rolling, dropping and leaping balls on a variety of mechanical contraptions reminding me that this was the city of MIT and Harvard. The arrangement kept me engaged long enough for my mildly familiar welcome party to show up. Over the period of the next one and a half years, they were to become family to me but right then I had had only a fleeting acquaintance with them back in Calcutta.

I hopped into their car and as we drove out on the maze of beautiful, night time streets that is the Logan airport, Big Dig and Tobin bridge area of Boston, my mind was still absorbing the new sensations all around me, a new country, a new life. One thing in particular struck my mind even though later, I would learn that it was just my way of coping up with the wonderful sensation of being in a new place totally unlike any place I had been to before.

I was looking at the traffic signals on the roads very closely and saw that when the lights went green, they were a solid circle of green even at intersections. In Indian road intersections, I was always used to green arrows pointing in all the legal directions that the driver could take. Here it seemed that everyone already knew where they were going on the road and in life. That was to become the most abiding if somewhat false first image of what the USA was amongst all the new things that caught my attention. A land where when the signal said "Go", everyone somehow knew where they were headed.

A bad day for dreaming

2010-12-05T20:55:00.001+05:30

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My job is way too mundane. For whom exactly am I putting up with all this pressure for? If I were putting in so much effort on something my heart lies in, what a wonderful life and a wonderfully happy me, it would have led to! Do I really see myself doing this job or something of this sort till I reach the age of 70, sometime in 2054? Home to office and office to home, is there something more to life than this dreary routine? When exactly will the compensation I receive for spending the majority of my life sitting in a cubicle be just right? Can the value of my life be estimated by an annual package or should it even allowed to be measured in so gross a manner?

All right, so who pays for the petrol in my beloved motorcycle? And the growing stacks of unread books that I keep ordering online? Year 2010 has already seen me do major trips to Himachal Pradesh, Goa, the Sunderbans and a cross-India road trip, so wherefore did the money come from? Well, what about the Airtel broadband connection where I spend learning and writing about things in our infinitely interesting world? Remember the time when I had get back to work even though a week was left on my official leave just to while away the time and get back momentum in my life again? Do I not get to do all the things I want to anyway, without having to put the most basic of my expenditure requirements at risk by choosing an alternative career? Honestly, if this isn't the good life, then what is?

It's a sinusoidal wave of questions with crests and troughs on my personal happiness index. Is it fair to expect it to flatline on the happier side of things? Who on earth is perfectly happy? Is there someone else I'd rather be? If life is a compromise and acceptance is the only way forward, then there is that one day when this truth shines out like a diamond in the dirt. End of the month. Pay day.

Rules of the road

2010-12-05T18:03:00.000+05:30

Image by !borghetti via Flickr

In case, you are planning to take a 2300 kilometre road-trip through the case study of unpredictability that is India in the company of your beyond-retirement-age parents and a permanently immature dog, here are a few handy pointers towards what to expect:

1. You should accept for a fact that your dad has never been a fan of your driving and thinks that anything above 40 kilometres per hour even on the emptiest and widest of superhighways is 'dangerous driving' when you are at the wheel. However when he himself takes over the driving seat then the speed limits can be doubled or tripled because you see "He has been driving for close to 40 years now!".

2. The roads of India have a tendency to literally shake up things every once in a while by putting in a huge pothole in the midst of kilometres of smooth road. Too much of a good thing is bad, thinks the Government of India. But when you are at the wheel and hit that pothole with a not-so-pretty clunk from the car's underside, an immediate reaction from your dad will be "You'll break the axle! What are you doing? You'll break the axle!" followed by further tirades about how you were totally insensitive to how a car needs to be protected from the vagaries of the road. A similar pothole when driven over by dad at the same speed and producing exactly the same sound leads to a loud clearing of throats, giggles on the part of the co-passengers and studied long silences on the part of the driver.

3. Your mom will be the most cheerful of companions as long as the sun is bright outside and the scenery is something to remember. All calls on your never-out-of-tower-range cell phones will be greeted enthusiastically by her, telling everyone and their grandmothers about how much she was enjoying the adventure of this trip. But the moment, the engine starts overheating or the sun is on the wane or there are bad traffic/road conditions (as is a quite common occurrence on an Indian road trip), boy, will she give the male occupants of the car a hard time. "I told you we should have taken the train. My life is so full of people so who just can't behave normally!" will be an oft-repeated refrain which you learn to accept without retorting (that'd be suicidal on your part) for the period of time it takes to find a mechanic/find a hotel/find a clear stretch of road.

4. You are not allowed to get angry and complain about the wayward human beings who invariably jump out onto the road when least expected and when the slowest of tempos, overloaded and blocking the road ahead, refuses to let you overtake. Any expressions of disgust will invoke a wise "This is not 'your America'! This is how India is and you have to adjust your driving likewise." from your dad ignoring the completely natural expression of bewilderment on your face on hearing the words 'your America'. So now in the eyes of your dad, not only are you a bad driver but also a traitor to your country!

5. Hotels as a rule are not very eager to allow dogs into their rooms even if it is a tiny miniature dachshund like yours. When you finally convince a hotel clerk, after talking to his manager and the manager's manager about how well-behaved your dog is and about how she would not cause any trouble to other people in the hotel, as proof the dog will step out and pee right on a ground-level board where the hotel's name is displayed. You may hurriedly throw a fistful of sand to cover up this instance of misbehaviour but then later your normally quiet dog will bark her heart out and chase the room service staff out of the room when they show up. Good behaviour at home does not readily translate to good behaviour on a road-trip.

This is only a sampling of expectations to have and there's of course the more memorable parts of making such a trip. These are times when you really forget that the whole purpose of making this trip was fun.

Dark Water

2010-12-02T08:05:00.000+05:30

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Sometime in early 2007, the smiling technicians from Eureka Forbes (Yes, the "Friends for life" people from TV) came smiling into my house and set up a water purifier system, the drilled-into-our-heads-through-incessant-ads Aquaguard system in one corner of my house. This was the second Aquaguard system being installed in our house, adding on to the one already installed in my uncle's kitchen. It just goes to show that if you run your publicity campaign before the advent of attention splintering multi-channel satellite TV in any country, you have your loyal customers booked for life.

I have no complaints with the service that the machine gives. It's as close to perfection as any machine can get. Litres and kilolitres of potable water have poured out of its tiny nozzle and it has never even hiccuped (fingers crossed/touch-wood). What I do have an issue with it is the tremendously ominous music that plays along while the purified water is pouring out.

The aforementioned first Aquaguard of our house was installed by my uncle a long long time and the music it plays is a tinny monophonic version of "Sochna Kya Jo Bhi Hoga Dekhaa Jayegaa [Why worry too much, we'll take life as it comes]" from the movie Ghayal (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYCguKQnTm8 if you want to relive your inexplicably weirdly dressed early 1990s Bollywood memories) while the water pours out. It was a song whose lyrics are positive to say the least. Like so many other Bollywood movie songs, this song was a direct lift, this time from a Spanish song "Llorando se Fue" by Los Kjarkas (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT4T5GyGqRQ if you want another good laugh). "Llorando se Fue" apparently in Spanish means "Crying... one went away"(so says my favourite translator http://babelfish.yahoo.com) but I don't understand Spanish all that well and for me that tune was permanently associated with the cheery spirit of the Hindi version than its morose Spanish one.

With the passage of time, like monophonic ringtone technology on cellphones had morphed into polyphonic grandness, the new Aquaguard, my Aquaguard has spectacular polyphonic speakers. So what does it choose to play? A musical piece which combines the sentiments of the words "gloomy", "depressing", "foreboding", "menacing" and a few hundred more of that nature from the English dictionary. I don't know what the name of this new tune is and neither do I want to find out. There is just that one tune and although I understand it made business sense not to include an in-built MP3 player, but couldn't it have been a more cheery one. Cheery tunes I would imagine sound so much better on polyphonic speakers.

Early in the morning groggy with sleep or late at night drained by the day's work, standing in front of the purifier to fill up rows of waiting PET bottles is almost an ordeal. A quick press of a button quickly mutes the awful tune in the real world but it keeps on playing like a funeral song at the back of your mind all the while it takes to achieve the drinking water supply targets. Someone at Eureka Forbes seems intent on teaching us about the true tragic nature of life while we get our day's quota of water. There are days when you can't help but agree with the infernal machine's outlook towards life. But on days when the sun is full and bright outside and you realize how much worse things could have been, you feel like getting into The Joker mode and ask the forever depressed Aquaguard "Why so serious?"

It happens

2010-12-01T22:49:00.004+05:30

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A couple of months ago (even after which I find my acoustic guitar playing abilities tending to zero) a junior colleague called me on my cell on a sunny Sunday. He had started learning the guitar just then and had too optimistic an expectation of my progress, begun as I had in the January of this year. He told me how difficult it was even to get the most basic finger positions right for the chords and asked me whether it was this tough an endeavour for everyone.

I could have told him that I had struggled just to play the seven notes of a octave for two whole months. I should have told him that my guitar teacher, a very patient man by any standards was compelled to chastise me for my dismal lack of progress despite being quietly appreciative of my tireless but frequently fruitless efforts. If I had said that it looks like it'd take me 10 years to generate any kind of sound from the B and F barre chords before I could look any further, I wouldn't be telling a lie. The progress in guitar playing capability that some guys and gals had made starting at the same time and batch as me put me to shame and put my physical co-ordination abilities firmly at par with the abilities of a whale having to run a complete marathon on dry land. If I were a truly honest man, I would have said that if I can be so bad at it and still keep at it, anyone should be able to achieve much more satisfaction and success than I had in the past 10 months.

What I did instead was to make a patronizing clucking sound and make this sagacious statement "Just relax, man! It happens with beginners!"

The real deal

2010-11-28T20:43:00.000+05:30

When the Gujarati grandmom, a fellow tourist on the Sunderban Tiger Reserve launch, the MV Chitrarekha which was both our Tiger Reserve hotel and Tiger Reserve vehicle, yelled a shrill "Tiger!" at 7:05 AM on the morning of the 14th of November, 2010, I had very good reasons not to feel excited. The previous day had already seen overexcited eyes identifying a herd of Chital deer and a sauntering, casual wild boar as the big sighting, a dream which I unfortunately had to puncture via the 10X optical zoom digital camera borrowed from a friend for this trip. The feeling of being inside a jungle was tremendous in itself but hallucinations were not to be encouraged. Nonetheless I moved quickly to the starboard (right) side of the vessel and looked in the direction her shaking finger was pointing to because like everyone else who was making this trip or had done so in the past, a question loomed large over my head. What if?

I was lucky not to be completely pessimistic on this occasion because what I saw was too far away to tell how big it was, but it doesn't take too much to tell the distinctive coat coloured in a combination of black and gold. At the edge of the water in one of the many narrow water channels that we had seen in this thick jungle leading off from the main channel through which our big launch was plowing, stood the top predator of the jungle casually looking at us. The top deck was nearly empty but for about 10 odd people as the few people who had groggily woken up for the sunrise had gone back down to their beds. The launch was well past the channel where the animal stood and I got only a 5 second look at it before we lost sight of it.

The launch was too big to brake to a sudden halt and turning it around would generate so much engine noise that the creature would be scared off anyway. So the pleas to the launch's Captain to turn around by those who had missed it fell on deaf ears and the vessel chugged on. That would be the only glimpse of the Royal Bengal tiger that we would get on this vessel in this trip, rare as it is to spot a tiger from a launch in the Sunderbans.

All of the mystery, all of the fear, all of the awe of being in a jungle stemmed out of the presence of this one creature and the fervent hope of seeing it in its full wild glory. I hardly saw it for those few seconds with concentration as my heart was working overtime and my eyes analyzed the possibilities before agreeing on the obvious. By the time my brain was ready to make a decision, the visual link was lost.

It was there. Like a ghost, like a myth, like a legend - its existence believable and valuable to only those who had set eyes on it and those with a young heart. Everyone knows that the Sunderbans are teeming with tigers; everyone knows that the terrain is the most unsuitable for viewing a tiger and the chances of seeing one are close to nil yet so many are still willing to take that slimmest of chances. I took that chance and fate favoured me. I almost felt happy that I did not find time enough to take a picture to show the world and thankfully neither did the few who spotted it. Having all its mystique reduced to a piddly concrete JPEG image on my desktop is not how I would like to remember my first encounter with a tiger in the wild. It still stalks the jungles of my imagination, elusive, powerful and majestic. It was no coincidence that the date was the 14th of November, the day that India celebrates as Children's Day. Save the tiger not just for the environment, not just for the future generations and not just for the integral place it holds in our culture. Save the tiger because it keeps that child of adventure and wonder inside us all alive.

An audience with the king

2010-11-12T11:39:00.010+05:30

Image by Douglas Brown via Flickr

Tomorrow I set out for a trip into the most heavily populated tiger sanctuary in the world... both in terms of people and in terms of tigers. 274 odd Royal Bengal tigers inhabit the Indian portion of the forests of Sundarbans but oddly enough, it is the place where all around the year the chances of spotting a tiger are the least. The thick mangrove vegetation of the Sundarbans (the picture above is of the Siberian tiger not the Royal Bengal tiger, hence all that snow) with narrow channels of water where the tourist launches cannot go (Too swampy for jeeps and elephants the terrain happens to be) is just one of the reasons why it's so difficult to spot them. The other reason is that the tigers of the Sundarbans have a knack for wilyness and carry a nasty reputation of being scientifically acknowledged man-hunters! Nowhere else, does the tiger have to come across so many human beings in his domain and likewise nowhere else is a tiger attack more common.

Then there's the mystique of the animal. The powerful, graceful top of the food chain predator commands respect even in our imagination, let alone when it growls imperiously in its own domain of the wild. To be able to see it very frequently would ruin its powerful grip on our thoughts as we cruise wide-eyed through the water channels in search of a fleeting glimpse of the yellow and black coat. In the midst of his vast kingdom, we would be praying that the king will grant us audience.

This, being November, is not at all the season for tiger-spotting, our tour operators have already told us. In the summers, when the heat brings out the tiger for a drink to the water's edge is our slim but best chance of spotting one. But I am going now in the off-season so to speak and they say there are lots of other creatures to see including a personal favourite monster of mine, the estuarine crocodile (the salt water crocodile) which regularly grows 20 feet long and is also a known man-eater. To add to that there is the hair-standing-on-end thrill of being in a jungle, with the safety and security of urban civilization only distant dreams.

If we do not come across a tiger, as is the most likely outcome, it will only be a re-affirmation that out in the depths of the forest, we are his subjects, and subject to his powers and not vice versa. Will I be happy if I spot a tiger in the Sundarbans? Will I be unhappy if I spot a tiger in the Sundarbans? The answer to both those questions (subject to the master hunter not coming too close for comfort as in this video from Kaziranga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4SqXl9Zj6k) is a paradoxical yes.

Doomed to gloom

2010-10-31T12:38:00.007+05:30

Image by TW Collins via Flickr

Long-due sympathy for a certain Ms. Roy

The link below leads to an statement by Arundhati Roy only 3 paragraphs long so even if your concentration span has been reduced to one of a demented puppy thanks to guaranteed IQ evaporators like Twitter, this is something you should be able to plow through. This is as close to Twitter that Arundhati Roy is ever going to get. Thankfully no 160 character rants from her yet!

"I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning's papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir..."

[http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267656]

Thereby begins Arundhati's 'post' from Srinagar. Look at me and worship my courage, it says in not so many words. Me the tragic heroine in yet another underdog's cause, abandoning all concern for personal safety and comfort, fighting for what is the 'one and true certified inarguable whole-and-soul, white as white comes, no greys, browns or blacks' version of right, the voluntary 'Take me, I am here' martyr a-la the new Che Guevara under the constant glare and sniper focus of Big Government, Big Corporation and Loony Right Wingers. No wonder Sergei Nechaev from Hamilton, Bahamas comments on the same article "in homage to a fearless & heroic writer of staggering talent and insight. If there were ten others like her the world would be a very different place. But there aren't." Like him, there are way too many people completely sold on the legend.

What title can I possibly attach to her name which someone else has not already? 'Defender of the weak', 'Secret agent of the Vatican', 'The last hope of humanity and feminism', 'Anti-national', 'The most articulate voice of dissent', 'Pathological attention seeker' are just a sampling of the thousands of nominations/accusations being bandied around. I think I'll add another... 'Clinically depressed', for her life is so full of sadness and only sadness.

Come to think of it, there is so much real injustice in this world that no one has any right to be happy before they are all solved. I had a Che Guevara poster in my college hostel room which said "Always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anybody anywhere in the world." Arundhati Roy, I believe, may have taken this directive too much to heart. Which issue of injustice is more important than the other is a very very tough call to make. So many issues, so little time. No wonder this lady is quite so bonkers.

The issues which she takes up are all very real and so it is difficult to resist reading her immaculately composed articles. But in the middle of a few good paragraphs of what is wrong with my country, while I am finding myself in mild agreement, she wrecks it all by going [Faking a quote here but read any of her articles and you'll find one version of this quote of her's in all her articles] "India is a failed nation meant only for the Hindu, upper-caste and class. Period... shobbie doobie doo" or while touching upon some truly ridiculous sections of the Indian Constitution, she ruins it by going [Fake quote again] "All said and done, the Indian Constitution is a document that has never worked for anybody... rum te tum!" And from her standard bag of literary tricks, she will also hoarsely whisper to the reader [Fake but real quote number 3] "Read my article for this may be my last. The CM/PM/capitalist monsters/powers-that-be have marked me for destruction. Ooooh!" and you can almost see her smiling when she says [Fake but real quote number 4] "In a weird kind of way, the Maoists/tribals/militants/protestors are the upholders of the Constitution while the powers-that-be trample the ideals enshrined in this all-of-a-sudden-highly-valued document. Take that!"

The essential difference between speaking for a subjugated people and speaking like a subjugated people eludes her. As a visiting observer, you cannot claim to have felt as outraged as the victims themselves and if you make such a claim, your double standards will be exposed for all that are sane to see. The benefits of voicing their opinion to the outside world are completely lost if you speak the same warped language of one-sidedness and rhetoric as in their case, they may have valid reasons for feeling so but not you. It's the same India and largely capitalistic world that gave you a childhood, an education and a thinking mind to analyze the world as it is the same India that gives you a national platform to air these views. No one is asking you to sugar-coat the truth but is it too much to acknowledge that the matter is much more than a simple case of black-and-white. But Ms. Roy insists on being vehemently sad and making others feel likewise too. All she ends up doing is pooling a general mistrust, cynicism and bigoted hatred not only for herself but also the causes she espouses almost dooming them to failure.

The ultra-nationalistic (read extremely stupid, extremely intolerant, extremely violent, fundamentalist and corrupt) elements that keep promising to bring her to 'appropriate out-of-court' justice need to take a hike. Neither do we really need to jail her. Arresting her under the Sedition Act would only make her and her followers swell up in pride as the Act used by the Brits against the likes of Tilak and Gandhi at their peaks is being used to silence her. Instead in keeping with her fondness for conspiracy theories, I have one proposed by my dad, quite easily the most cynical person yet strangely optimistic person I have known (His theory should throw light on the unique category that I bracket him in). He says that the reason why Arundhati Roy will never be arrested or harmed is that by keeping her out of jail and letting her voice her staunchly anti-government opinions openly, the Indian government is making an international advertisement of how free speech is encouraged in this country unlike our Communist neighbour, and the more she flourishes, the more in international circles, the fame and reputation of India's historical claim to tolerance grow. In panning pretty much everything under the sun, Ms. Roy is doing us a world of good. I hope someone lets her know that. In her subsequent gloom, lies her redemption.

High hopes

2010-10-07T23:04:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Will having too high an expectation of a place ruin the experience when I actually get there? When I think Goa, I am reminded of palm fringed beaches, silver sands and the blue ocean. When I think Goa, I see old colonial mansions painted in exuberant colours and crumbling old churches clinging on to the present. When I think Goa, I dwell on lazy days lounging on a hammock in the sun as the sea breeze plays your nanny swinging you to sleep. When I think Goa, I hear the steady thump of a mighty Enfield which has given me the honour of riding it as it grandly cruises its way on a road hugging the crashing waves and spectacular cliffs. When I think Goa, I imagine a never-ending party with the strumming of guitars and banjos, beautiful faces greeting strangers with the most familiar of smiles. Maybe I am setting myself up for disappointment on all of these counts, but what the heck, dreaming don't cost no money! In exactly a couple of days, for better or for worse, I am going to find out for myself if the legends are true.

"Take it easy policy"

2010-10-02T08:02:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

A few mornings ago, my box radio was blaring out music beaming from a Calcutta station, the usual mix of good, bad and ugly. In a stark reminder of how fast time moves on, they played one of the big A.R. Rahman Bollywood hits from back when we were kids, "Urvashi Urvashi" from "Hum Se Hai Muqabala" [As it was dubbed in Hindi] under the Retro section! Besides conjuring up images of Prabhudeva and his troupe's incredibly flexible but incredibly weird dance moves atop a moving glass roofed bus, a line in the the song's lyrics of convenience seemed oddly relevant in the present context.

"Billiyaan naa shaakaahari, har koi Ram nahin hotaa..." [Loosely translates to "Cats aren't vegetarians and not everyone is Ram..."] was what drew attention when the day for the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case judgement was near. Not everyone is Ram, because Lord Ram is one of the most straightforward and just Gods of our pantheon, free from any grey areas, never compromising on what is right for the need of the hour, unlike most other heroes who have featured in our mythology and the Mahabharata. Not everyone is Ram, because when Mahatma Gandhi began his mission of truth and peace, he chose to call the ideal world based on these standards "Ram-rajya" [The kingdom of Ram], the reason being Lord Ram did live his life by these standards.

Concrete evidence of whether Ram existed as a person is bound to be a long-drawn meaningless debate between faith, history and science, but irrespective of the outcome, it still is a royal shame that his name has been hijacked by those who rape, loot and destroy. The essence of his legend is lost when instead of talking about a kingdom of justice and happiness, the extremist Hindu right-wing movement forces all non-Hindus to accept their essential "Hinduness" in a horribly warped version of Ram-rajya, one of their own making. Raking up hatred for what Muslim conquerors did hundreds of years ago, and directing it towards the innocent Muslim on the streets is about as far away from Ram's ideals as anyone can get. Their present loutish behaviour, disrespect for other religions and the destruction of symbols of faith puts them squarely in the same category as Mohammad Ghazni, Timur the Lame, Aurangzeb or any other historical maruder that they claim to hate. Far from being the so-called 'protectors of the Hindus' and the people who 'set things right', they are the mega-sized warts on the face of Hinduism which draw all the attention and who alongwith fellow loonies like extremist Muslims, war loving corporate-government conglomerates and revolutionary Lefties make the world an increasingly dangerous place for live in, for Hindus and all others.

Disagreements are unavoidable in a world where cultures are so radically different and in times of strife, it is very very difficult to find common ground but what choice do we really have except to put up with each other, thereby saving ourselves a whole lot of bloodshed and tragedy. The 'developed' world is reeling under what it calls 'immigration issues' but it should stop freaking out and take its cues from this country which has been handling 'immigrants' for thousands of years now, rapidly digesting the immigrant label in its cast-iron stomach. Falling back on good ol' Prabhudeva and A.R. Rahman's one-stop solution "Jeet kaa mantra hai [The magic spell to victory is]... take it easy policy!" Considering that it is after all a policy, I should add "Conditions apply! Please read the offer document carefully before investing." but in the long run and the short, I hope it becomes evident that this is the only worthwhile policy on the market.

[Due apologies to Gautam Buddha, the Sufi saints, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Fonda + Dennis Hopper, The Eagles, TVS Scooty and everyone else who have espoused the "Take it easy" cause throughout history and who also have been consistently ignored. I did not intend in any way to make light of the importance of their message.]

While you were Facebooking

2010-09-14T23:27:00.002+05:30

Image via CrunchBase

While you were Facebooking, the rain came down,
While you plunged in a stream of pictures, the sea sighed aloud
Lost in the web of viral videos, as the jungle lies unexplored
Ancient ruins have no visitors, yet statuses have 'likes' galore

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Your regular job may be boring, but hey, it pays the bills
Once you are done with the necessary, you still need a rethink
Friends are friends, let's not forget, it's good to keep in touch
But adventure awaits beyond the virtual, at the cost of being 'social'.

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[This is more of a reminder to myself that I should not be spending too much time on FB. But all of you FB addicts out there, feel free to take it personally and act as if insulted]

The simple truth

2010-09-04T18:12:00.009+05:30

It's not easy to publicly admit, but the simple truth is that I am a thief, albeit a rather guilt-ridden one. And to be stealing from the very person I idolize, both for his creative output and for his principled and happy existence often times projected through his creations is even more unforgivable. Bill Watterson spent a lifetime fighting off the pressures of his comic book syndicate; refusing to lend his brilliant Calvin and Hobbes characters for any kind of commercial promotion and here I was knowing everything about all that, yet using a panel from one of his Sunday strips as a header for my blog, in a rather obvious and lame attempt to pull in readers already familiar with his brilliant work, even though my writing had absolutely nothing to do with the comic strip or its themes. Since then I have even tried to change my blog header a number of times but for some inexplicable technical reasons, I seem unable to do so. For now it seems that I am condemned to have my conscience pricked every time I open my blog's home page. The panel of the strip which I have as a background for my blog's title will hopefully disappear at some point in the near future if I put my head to it but it'll still be impossible to see a snow covered slope, and not be reminded of a tiny kid talking to his stuffed tiger as he drags his toboggan up the slope of Rigor Mortis Cliff.

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A lot of logic and rationalization is pumped out by the gallon about how downloading bootleg version of music MP3s, TV shows, movies and books is actually not 'stealing', rather it is essential to 'popularizing' the artist and helping 'more' people appreciate the content but I will skip all that nonsense. Though I have been guilty of the aforementioned acts myself multiple times over, I'll never console myself by saying that it is perfectly acceptable. It may be the smart thing to do but it certainly is never the right thing to do! More so in the case of Calvin and Hobbes, and for those to whom these things matter, here's throwing some light on the exemplary artist that is Bill Watterson and the most famous products of his imagination.

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Bill Watterson's speech for the commencement ceremony of his alma mater Kenyon College (http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html) is a masterpiece and a very precise encapsulation of everything that he wanted to convey through the delightful 10 year existence of Calvin and Hobbes. Achieving the roaring popularity which the strip saw was far from easy and the only thing that kept him going before his strip made it big was in his own words was "self-belief bordering on delusion" But when the peak of success did arrive, he stopped short of what could have added on millions of dollars to his bank account. That Calvin and Hobbes would never sell T-shirts; that they would not line toy store shelves as soft toys; that they would not sell insurance and that they would not keep running forever in newspapers scripted and drawn by ghost artists while Bill Watterson holidayed in some exotic Pacific resort is a testament to the guy's deep attachment to his protagonists and to his repeated stress on the higher purpose of art, disguised as a entertaining comic strip though it may be. Watterson wanted them to exist solely as comic strip characters true to the intentions he had created them with and he managed to keep them that way. My recent purchase of the "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" is a minor attempt by me at damage control because I believe that an artist as dedicated as him deserves every single cent or paisa of what is due to him.

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Not that any amount of money could ever come close to repaying the debt of laughter and food for thought that I and millions of other fans owe to the story of an imaginative 6 year old and his philosophical talking pet tiger. The painstaking artwork whether it be a stretch of imagination as ridiculous as T-Rexes flying F-16s or a scene as sublime as the pair jaunting through the woods in the beautiful season of fall speaks for itself. The humourous dialogue laced with sharp observations about the follies of people manages to establish a unexpected common boundary between deep wisdom and all-out entertainment magically retaining the essence of both. The man himself is candid enough to admit that the struggles of life that he had to face on the way were essential so that when Calvin and Hobbes finally came out, the content was just right for it to find the right audience at the right time snowballing into the world-wide phenomenon that it became. All I can say that I feel lucky that I was the part of the right audience, the supposed right group whose fancy Mr. Watterson's incredible work caught. Because whenever I think of life, philosophy, happiness, childhood, friendship, adventure, imagination and the incredible satisfaction gained out of just being yourself, the first thing I think of is Calvin and Hobbes.

'Busa fever

2010-09-04T17:39:00.004+05:30

I couldn't believe my eyes. This was insane. This was amazing. This was unprecedented. On a pleasant August Sunday afternoon (last Sunday in fact), a Suzuki Hayabusa, the fastest road-legal motorcycle in the world as of today was slowly growling past my very own garage down the narrow lane in front of my very own house in central Calcutta. All in black, with those huge twin exhausts and the massive rear tyre, this wasn't the first 'Busa that I had seen. In fact I had seen many of them on the freeways of the USA and the occasional one in Bombay and Delhi. But describing the visual impact and contrast of seeing a motorcycle which can touch 320 kmph, inching along in my home lane, where hand-pulled rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws form the major chunk of regular traffic is beyond my current writing capabilities. My eyes followed the bike and its lucky rider till the 4 way intersection a little after my front gate, where it turned left and glided on to wherever it was headed. Luckily I had just returned from a 120 km riding adventure of my own and was still outside my house about to roll my Pulsar into my garage. On most other Sunday afternoons, I would be found fast asleep after breaking personal pledge no. 99968 of not falling asleep on a weekend aternoon. This was a clear case of divine intervention, for me to present on the road at that exact moment in time and to add another pleasant memory to my car/bike/engineering marvels obsessed life.

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Even those who are not really as big as a car/bike/engineering fan-boys like me would find the legend of Hayabusa's creation totally irresistible. It's part of modern manufacturing folklore, something you might want to tell your grandkids as a bedtime story. OK, just kidding about that part, but it's still a very cool story. Towards the late 1990s, the four Japanese motorcycle biggies namely Yamaha, Kawasaki, Honda and Suzuki were engaged in a tussle to consistently outdo each other in the top speed figures of their production (i.e road-legal) motorcycles pushing the limits of motorcycle and aerodynamic design with every new model that they launched. As the year 1999 arrived, at the top of the high speed hill was the Honda CBR1100 Super Blackbird with the speedometer capable of touching nearly 300 kmph. The Blackbird motorcycle was in turn named after the SR-71 Blackbird, an US Air Force (USAF) fighter plane which had for decades held the title of the fastest plane in the world consistently cruising at speeds above Mach 3 and had to be eventually retired because no fighter plane really needs that kind of speed under existing combat conditions. The natural world also has a bird family called blackbirds, inspiration for the plane's name but they are not really remarkable in any way except that they are found all around the world in one form or the other. The only reason the plane might have been named the Blackbird was not its record-breaking speed but probably its stealthy dark looks. Whatever logic there might have been behind the naming, the folks at the USAF and subsequently Honda were quite lazy when it came to choosing a name for their top-end machine. A point which folks at Suzuki, Honda's rival must have noted.

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The avian natural world has a very real speedster though. The peregrine falcon - with it sharp eyes, and even sharper talons is capable of reaching speeds of 200 mph (320 kmph) during a dive to catch their prey. The migratory ones fly 15500 miles (24800 km) a year from the Arctic circle to South America and back. The word 'peregrine' means wanderer and with all the bird's talents, calling it a superfast wanderer wouldn't be inappropriate. And amongst many other smaller birds that form the peregrine falcon's food, there is a certain bird called the blackbird which shares the same habitat as its predator. When the Hayabusa was launched by Suzuki in 1999, it beat the Honda Blackbird's top speed by a good 10-12 mph (16-19 kmph) reaching nearly 200 mph, thereby making it the new fastest motorcycle in the world, a challenge which Suzuki engineers had taken up very seriously and completed. Soon after that, Kawasaki tried to top that speed with the Ninja ZX-12R but failed and then for the sake of rider safety and government regulations around the world, the 4 Japanese motorcycle rivals reached an unwritten agreement that they would not try to outdo each other on the speed front any longer and concentrate on the comfort of the ride instead. Therefore, the Hayabusa has remained for a long time (frome 1999 till date) on the top of the velocity charts for a bike you can buy from a showroom and straightaway zip out onto a road. As for the name chosen by Suzuki, the Japanese kanji symbol for Hayabusa, in the language's beautiful pictographic way of depicting objects, gives a big clue (See image above) as to what it means. Look carefully and it's hard to miss the shape of a bird of prey descending on a hapless smaller bird, a graphic which can be found on the sides of all Hayabusas and is also a very popular motorbike sticker in India, without most people knowing its significance. The Japanese word for the peregrine falcon, if you haven't guessed it already, is hayabusa. Hence was born the legendary motorcycle's name - Hayabusa, the hunter of Blackbirds!

Slumdog reality

2010-08-04T00:01:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

I just finished reading Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" and find myself in a curious place between anger and acceptance. The novel is unsparingly scathing in its appraisal of India's 'progress' post liberalization and its hard to deny that it is brilliantly written. Its been a while since I raced through a book in a couple of days as I managed to do with this one.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was a horribly made movie especially in contrast to the sheer brilliance of the writing in "The White Tiger" but for the moment I'll put both of them under a single spotlight as portrayers of an image of India that we'd rather turn our faces away from. They are more a recreation of how a Westerner would like to perceive India as. We don't live like that, we console ourselves, yet that is the image that a Westerner wants to retain - as "the poor people, hungry people" scene of Munnabhai MBBS fame illustrates. We have fine world-class buildings, houses, schools and factories, we claim, wondering why don't the Westerners discuss those for a change!

It is so sad that we continue to pull this wool over our eyes. Crores of our people live in those sub-human conditions, on our city's footpaths, in our city's slums, in faraway villages without the most basic of amenities and mostly without even enough food, unable to lead a respectable life, caught in the vicious quicksand of communal violence, extremist regionalism, social evils like the caste system, overwhelming corruption and unimaginable levels of poverty. So obscenely are the odds stacked against our country that it is a wonder that we haven't self destructed as a nation already.

The novel speaks in the voice of the protagonist of the metaphorical 'white tiger' who will have to, will need to eliminate certain obstacles in his way in the foulest way possible to even achieve a humanly acceptable standard of living. Or he will have to stay trapped forever in the cage which his birth and economic situation have plunged him into. As of today, there is no way forward for the hardworking, honest fellow (Was there ever though?) especially with respect to that strata of our nation, the majority of our population actually, which has difficulty in making two ends meet and is at the mercy of the government's 'welfare' schemes. Intelligence fortunately or unfortunately is not just a privilege of the rich and the comfortable. So if some drastic action is not taken to correct the injustice in the system and to remove the stink of thievery in broad daylight from it, we will indeed become a nation of 'white tigers', a nation of super-intelligent criminals who have discovered that the wrong way was the only right way to survival and success.

The deepest cut

2010-08-03T08:21:00.000+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, I saw it happen once again. I have witnessed it so many times by now that I am sure it is an inevitable tragedy for anyone who has the guts to sit at the wheels of a car in this city. It was a slow speed accident. Something about a high speed crash says that yes, you were driving rashly and quickly on a stretch of road which was not meant for it and so in a sense, you were asking for trouble. But when the traffic is moving at a snail's pace, and you are safely guiding your own vehicle through the mess one foot a minute, it is so much more heart-rending when some buffoon who is on the same slow course dings your car.

This time it was a brand new red Tata Indica who got tagged by an oldish grey Honda City. The Indica driver was on the verge of tears and sputtering angrily at the driver of the City "I will punch you to pulp. I'll beat you black and blue. I'll smash in all your car windows!" He knew fully well that he could do none of those things with a cop standing next to him and the huge back-up of cars behind him on the narrow lane that he now blocked, honking in unison for him to make a move on. He also knew that on another day, it could've been him trying to sneak his way past another excruciatingly slow car and in a last moment error of judgement failing to come down on the brakes quick enough.

This unfortunately is the bitter reality of Calcutta's roads. The joys of owning and driving a brand new car are balanced out by the terror of getting into scrapes and head-on encounters with some wayward driver or the other. The slight ding or scratch must hurt like hell even if you are not the typical car lover. After all, the thing costs a lot of hard earned money and who doesn't like a new and shiny ride to stay that way. I have come up with a solution of my own for the time when I buy my own new car (A red Swift is high on my list of the car I have forever wanted to buy). Before venturing out on the roads to take on the incredibly horrible traffic of this city, I would request a hammer from the showroom's garage. Then I would swiftly ding my car with the aid of the hammer and drive away with the knowledge that the worst deed that can be done to a glinting, metallic beauty of my new car has already been done and at least find some consolation in the fact that I myself was to blame for it!

Billoo barberisms

2010-08-02T07:33:00.001+05:30

Image by deep shot via Flickr

May 30th 2010 was just another Sunday for me. I woke up quite late and on confronting myself in the mirror saw that something needed to be done to tame the wild state that the hair on my head had progressed to. So digging out a old T-shirt and retaining my over-worn pair of shorts, I walked out of my house and took the corner just a couple of steps away from my main gate. "Janta Hair Dressers" said the board which must have been painted 30-40 years ago and it is very much the typical Indian barber shop with its customary creaky old slow ceiling fan and creaky old wooden chair on which customers relax while the barber does his job. As with the board, not much has changed since the shop opened its doors with framed pamphlets on the walls still displaying a sampling of haircuts which could have found social acceptance only in the crazy 70s.

There is a senior hair-dresser or 'naapit' as he is called in Bengali in charge of the saloon and a number of his younger trainees who report to him in the important task of getting rid of unwanted facial hair. Depending on who's free at what time, the master or the trainees take up the challenge of executing a unstylish but effective haircut. My lot fell with the grizzled old master who was in his late 60s by now and I could foresee one of our usual hair-cutting conversation on the horizon.

As expected, half a minute had not transpired before he began in his gruff voice "It is about time you got married, Babu!" 22 years of cutting my hair, back from when I was 3 years old and my uncle's, father's and grandfather's before that, had earned him the right to advice me on anything at all so the only reaction I could muster was a sharp "Why?!!!" The reply did not take long in coming "Marry while you still have such great hair. Once you start going bald, which good girl will like you, tell me?" Why such a critical chapter of my life should be decided by the lushness of my hair was beyond me but it was his perspective of looking at things and very much in line with what a barber would think of as the single most important criteria in life. So I just rolled my eyes at which my hair surgeon found reason to smile. He liked the idea of having a captive audience at the mercy of his scissors and blade on whom he could foist his hair-centred ideas.

In the meantime, another regular to his shop popped into the shop and asked the chief barber "Have you voted already?" He replied without pausing in the snip-snippy motions around my head and with a sense of resignation, "I did. Early in the morning when the queues were small. You've got to do. what you've got to do!" Today was municipal election day for Calcutta, I remembered and also encountered a rising sense of guilt because I had not even registered myself on the voting list here. I knew what question was going to be thrown at me next. "And you, Babu?" was the query to me. "Yes! Yes! Of course!" I swiftly lied, more out of shame than anything else.

Here was a man in charge of civilizing my hair, a man who took his daily bath at the public municipal taps that line Calcutta's streets, a man who could never dream of earning even half as much as me and who was just educated enough to read the Hindi newspapers which he subscribed to. His voice did not contain any trace of hope that his vote was going to make any difference to whoever he brought to power and he was old enough to be cynical about election results after having seen so many of them come and go.

Would the ridiculous corruption levels go down; would the area see long due development; would the promises of a better tomorrow for him and his children be fulfilled? All he had his mind set on was that he complete his end of the duties. Because he did not need a college degree or an MBA to develop this most basic of understandings about the democratic process. It is an understanding that millions of 'uneducated' voters who line up to vote at the numerous polling booths around the country have while the majority of the cynical urban 'educated' snigger at the effort put in by the other not-so-privileged half while they enjoy a day off from work. After all, your opinion and importance on any matter related to deciding the fate of you yourself, your family, neighbourhood, city, district, state or nation,will only be as important as you yourself think it to be. There may be a million other factors that determine what eventually happens but if you have the slightest belief in your own capabilities and your ability to make a difference to the world around you, you will cast your vote, no matter how long the queue.

Bengali school : Day 1

2010-08-01T00:00:00.002+05:30

Image by lorises via Flickr

Everyone knows of how sentimentally attached the stereotypical Bengali is to his daily diet of fish and rice (maach-bhaat). The consumption of fish also entails dragging his otherwise lazy self daily (Because he 'bill' eat fresh fish only please) to the local fish market, a real horror story for anyone who has a thing for sanitized environments. I am not one of those persons with a thing for sanitized environments but it still takes a lot of strong reasoning for me to even consider going to the muddy floored, fish entrails strewn, noisy, crowded hell hole that is our local fish market. Thankfully for me, my Dad is such a bazaar-oholic that I don't even need to raise a finger before the painful duty of buying the 10000 different variety of food items that my mother usually requires is enthusiastically volunteered for by him.

Today my golden days of irresponsibility in the fish shopping department came to a grinding halt. The electrician was working on some new wiring at home and Dad had to supervise him. With some guests invited for lunch, the onus of performing of the most Bengali of Bengali duties fell on me. I was chosen by compelling circumstances on this rainy, wet Saturday to pay a visit to the Beniapukur fish bazaar.

"What fish should I buy?" I asked my old man, the in-house expert on all things bazaar. "Buy any fish which you like, but just not pomfret as the guests are not fond of it, OK?" Drat! I thought to myself. It's the only fish which I could identified from its shape and now that was off the list of candidates.

With doubt rapidly flooding my mind, I entered the tin roofed area where the fish market is housed. As expected, all the fish looked ominously similar to my inexperienced eyes. Silver scales, big dead fish eyes, longish bodies seemed to be the common theme running through their species. There were a couple of stalls which were selling black whiskered fish (I guessed they were catfish just on basis of their whiskers) which were still alive trying desperately to swim in thumb depth water. I decided that I would not be the agent of the Grim Reaper for their wriggly existence and stuck to choosing between those fish which were already dead.

Confusion and the utter lack of any sort of fish related knowledge was writ large on my face. This I found out when without any sort of prompting, the sellers began to identify aloud the fish for me pointing at each of them and going "Mackerel! Rooee! Hilsa!". Frankly speaking it was really tough to tell the difference or maybe the importance of the occasion was getting to my nerves. I nodded feebly in acknowledgement before deciding go with the evergreen favourite in the Bengali foodies world, the Hilsa (Eeelish in Bengali). Without chancing a look at any more fish, I quickly ordered 700 gm of Hilsa to be hacked up for me.

In those final few moments before it was sliced up on the seller's mean blade, I tried to store a mental image of how the Hilsa looked. I thought I had the shape memorized successfully only to wander my gaze to a different pile of fish and discover that those darned things looked very much like Hilsa fish too. So I ended giving up the hope of learning anything of significance on this trip to the fish market. Not that I hadn't tried... there were just too many fine differences for me to tear my hair over. This after all was my first day of attendance in the Bengali lifestyle school.