Benares

It's close to falling to pieces; it's so overcrowded that it defies belief; for the city's people, cleanliness is definitely not next to Godliness, and yet I love the place. I was on a trip to Benares in mid-March for a family function and I found that despite the place living up to all its negative stereotypes, it's hard not to appreciate the place. To know that this was already a city in the time of Gautam Buddha and has sustained itself ever since is in itself awe-inspiring. It's evident from the time you step into the city that this is a different kind of place. The narrow, cramped lanes, the innumerable number of ancient ghats, and the expanse of the Ganga which quickly takes up the hues of the sun- all make for a grand spectacle. The evenings are especially beautiful with the tolling of temple bells all along the riverside, and the lines of lighted 'diyas' carrying a wish or the memory of a loved one into the heart of the holy river. Early morning reveals the best of Benares, when the crowds are still stirring out of their sleep, and you have the history and legends of this extraordinary place all to yourself.

Some more pics from my Benares sojourn

http://picasaweb.google.com/anuranjan.roy/Benares

The Dark Knight

My first formal introduction to Batman was through the completely corny TV serial that ran on Star Plus in the early days of cable television in India. With the "Kapow", "Bang" graphics during the fights and 'Boy Wonder' Robin's frequent "Holy Cow", "Holy Horror" dialogues, it was highly popular amongst kids back then and I too was caught up in the frenzy. But only when I graduated to the more 'real' Batman comics and the really edgy "Batman - The Animated Series" on Cartoon Network, did I start appreciating the dark, combative nature of the character.

Here is a comic character not based on the fairytale that only good things happen to good people. Victory when it finally comes to the side of the good is not without its bitter aftertaste. All characters in the strip are in various shades of gray and it does lend a very morbid and brooding atmosphere to every story. But then that's what makes it stand apart. In every struggle against his inner self or his half-mad adversaries, Bruce Wayne a.k.a Batman finds himself more in touch with his darker side. Yet his justice is not one stained with malice or grim satisfaction for the injustices life has wreaked on him, its a course correction duty that he himself would love to pull out of. His optimism even when he is at his depressed best stems from the fact that if he doesn't do the job, who else will?

Being on the right side of justice has its own heavy price to be paid, but on the other side of the fence only means a lifetime of fear and eventual, inevitable defeat. Up on the highest skyscrapers of Gotham City atop a stone gremlin, with his silhouette framed against the full moon, he represents the trials and tribulations of an active conscience to perfection. Possessed by an unshakable belief in the invincibility of his cause and powered by sheer grit, the world rests easy because it knows that justice is now an ally of the night.

B.A, Mechanical Engineering

This post has been a long time coming and I think I really owe myself this explanation. It may come across as a lame excuse for the four years of B.Tech spent in tomfoolery and reckless enjoyment, but its really necessary. I need to evaluate for myself why someone who is still hopelessly addicted to every NGC or Discovery Channel show that involves science and technology, and literally worships all engineering feats was so disillusioned with engineering itself that he feels like running away at the mere mention of it. The person in question is yours truly and here's my story.

Engineering college I discovered was pretty much like school. Solve the 'important' questions and plunge through the papers of the past 3 years and you could pretty much ensure that you were a B. Tech (Honours) graduate if not a topper. It really don't matter if you can't tell the difference between a motor car and a thorn bush because at the end of the day, a degree is just another piece of paper, right? Not that I myself am given to an intensely scientific frame of mind which abhors all practical considerations but this level of apathy was really choking. 90% of the people around me could very much be doing a B. Com (Honours) if that offered them their dream job which in their case was not a job they had dreamed of since childhood but the highest paying job around. And as I would discover soon, this was to be the least of my issues. Well, to tell you the truth I really don't think aiming for a 'dream' job is such a crime. The jobs are there only because you've got the talent to fulfill them.

But what really got my goat was the desperation, the blind ambition and almost criminal tendency to get marks any which way they came! Here were India's best brains who should have been almost vain about their supposed 'superior' mental abilities, but here they were squabbling and scheming over petty things like how to peek into the neighbour's paper, how to smuggle that chit in and to position themselves so that they got the best overall 'view'. Guys burning the midnight oil yet not above grabbing an eyeful of everyone else's paper. It's perfectly okay to feel that strong temptation without yielding to it but the urge to take cheating to a professional level as was evident all around me made me really sick. You know things are really REALLY bad, when Electronics students on the evening before the exam are more focussed on sending a group of girls to the teacher's residence to gain IMPORTANT hints than the last minute panic studying which in my opinion is the only way of dealing with the crisis. I could see for myself perfectly good people around me transform into rats intent on winning this obnoxious rat race for careers, MBAs and IASes. I figured I wasn't born a rat and had absolutely no intention of becoming one now. Success was the only thing worth aspiring for but not at the cost of my integrity.


To my mild amusement I found out that if I tried to implement my set of ethics on everyone else, I would have no friends left. So I settled for what was then the only way out for the rather forlorn me. To live my life on my own idiosyncratic terms, enjoy it (Now that's a resolution that I feel I overemphasized on) and not to tear my hair out over what everyone else was doing. Binary marks in internals were acceptable as long as I made it up by scoring enough in the finals not to flunk the subject. Topics that weren't even part of the syllabus were invariably more fascinating to me but I guess that is a pain that most people have to live with. Getting some marks on the board could hardly inspire me any longer. I understood perfectly that I could get the marks without having an iota of interest in the subject and in fact being uninterested might be the real key to success in the exams.

I will continue to look at engineering as I had always seen it, as a magnificent collation of tiny bits of common sense over the centuries and be awe struck by the achievements of those who really loved their work. I really don't get into all the debate over art, science and their differences. As far as I am concerned, all science is art when pursued with appropriate passion and all art is science when created with sincere dedication. I missed being a Honours graduate in engineering by a whisker (4 more marks in each of the 8 semesters to be exact) but I am obscenely proud of the fact that each and every mark is completely my own! I am certainly not amongst the better engineers in the world, but for the way I admire engineering I wouldn't hesitate to hand myself a B.A, Mechanical Engineering degree. I had to let go of engineering because in the most faux-arty kind of way, I just love it too much!

Oh, Happy Day!

Just received what would have to be the best compliment I've had in my life yet, albeit accidentally. Wandering about the Eastern Command Sports Stadium, I was revelling in the sights and sounds of all the beauties on display at the annual Statesman Vintage Car Rally. I came around to a particularly attractive group of cars with two Jaguars and a Rolls Royce on display. And to add to the magic, a really pretty lass, owner of this group of cars was floating around them exactly at the time I got there. She was dressed in a period costume to match with the cars, and it was a combination made in heaven. As I stood close to a 1938 Jaguar SS convertible (Pic below) admiring it from close range, a most pleasant coincidence came about. I swear that exactly then I was only admiring the car and she really was an exotic machine.


A middle aged man, camera in hand came up to me. With a real earnest look on his face, he asked "Son, can I sit inside your car and have my picture taken?". Pleased as punch and honest as ever, pat came my reply "Sorry, it's only for display!". She was visibly taken aback at this travesty but it was very hard to miss the humour in the situation. I smiled, and then she smiled and suddenly the world seemed so very bright! OK OK, honest that I am condemned to be, my imagination may have been playing tricks on me as regards only the 'then she smiled' part of this narrative, but the rest of it is as it happened on the ground!

Check out some more pictures from the rally.

http://picasaweb.google.com/anuranjan.roy/2008StatesmanVintageCarRally

And then I knew fear

Being completely devoid of emotion is an accusation that is frequently thrown at me by friends and foes alike. I agree with it to the extent that I am not emotionally expressive, but then I feel emotions just as much if not more, than any of my more 'humane' critics. And I still have a clear and not so pleasant memory of the first time I felt fear.

"I will tell Dad and then you know what will happen!" was a frequently cited threat by my Mom to stop my sister and me from whatever disastrous activity we were upto all through our early childhood. But with age, (i.e by the time we reached the age which has been rather fashionably named 'Tweens') we began to realize that this threat was hollow. Dad being the most benevolent and kindly gentleman he is, was hardly to take up a sudden liking for corporal punishment. In fact, the threat was always from Mom; with reflexes faster than Kung-fu Masters when it came to a quick twist of the ear or a painful chop in between the shoulder blades. So comfortable in the knowledge where the real danger lay, we carried on in our merry tantrum filled ways.

One day in a fit of false rage, over some highly irrelevant hurt, I kicked off both my slippers in the drawing room lauching them in an ideal trajectory for projectile motion. As fate would have it, the end point of one of my innocuous projectiles doing multiple loops in the air was my Dad's cool-as-cucumber head as he sat peacefully watching TV, oblivious to all the chaos around him. The situation was undeniably comic and I allowed myself a giggle! Then I saw the look in my Dad's eyes...

My blood ran cold, a shiver ran down my spine, my life flashed before my eyes and all those literary cliches were reality for me in that split second. So the moment of judgement had come, out of the blue and I was just into double figures as far as my age was concerned. What ensued was one of the two times that my Dad actually gave me a beating (The second one I'll save for another day). It wasn't pleasant and the necessary effect has shaped my wayward life from that point in time. Needless to say, the much ridiculed threat was no longer hollow. I daresay my Mom indulged herself in a beaming smile for the manner in which my Dad finally got the message that it was high time. Well, all's well that ends well, I got to see the next day and many days since. But it's unlikely that I'll ever have a closer acquaintance with that emotion called fear!

Creativity-Intentional and otherwise

Looks like some people can really look into the future. A little town in South Gujarat, which does not merit even a express train stop eponymous with the golden boy of Indian cricket!

I think Airtel needs a new slogan. Presenting the "Lo Kar Lo Baat" STD PCO booth!

Now it all makes sense. That's why Kolkata Municipal Corporation (K.M.C) keeps breaking up perfectly good roads at the drop of a hat. Although the statement also sums up my behaviour in office whenever I am forced to do something that I am not interested in, which again is most of the time.

She fell from the sky

How do I that she is indeed a 'she'? Well, for that I depended on my 7 year old nephew who came up with the information that male budgerigars (Or love birds as they are commonly called) have gray or blue beaks. So by virtue of having an orange beak, my pet is a girl or a rather old lady I should say. Don't know what her original name was, but in her new home she was promptly christened Tweety in keeping with the wishes of my cartoon loving family. Having escaped from some cage in some neighbouring house, she had fallen battered and bloodied on my house's roof and if it hadn't been for my domestic help's timely intervention, the crows would have finished the job. But luck was on her side and she landed in what would definitely be the most animal friendly house in the neighbourhood!
Having a long standing specialization in treatment of injured birds, my aunt and my mom set about fixing Tweety up and soon enough she was chirping her heart out much to the dismay of my grumpy, disturbed early in the morning self. Night time requires her cage to be plonked inside the top floor room where I sleep and it takes only the first ray of sunshine to invade the room and she is chirping at her highest pitch and her birdy language "Put me outside! Put me outside!". Muttering in rage, it invariably turns out to be the first task I have to perform in the morning. And in contradiction to popular notions about bird-brains and their lack of cubic capacity, Tweety is a pretty smart chick. The first task that she carries out is to shake her bird-feed dish a little so that some of the seeds spill out. This ensures that she has the company of her sparrow friends who chit-chat and hop around her cage all day long.

People tell me that the quintessential definition of love-birds is that they live in pairs, so I should get her a partner. If I had it my way, I'd have set her free as I detest the idea of a beautiful creature like a bird imprisoned in a tiny cage. But out here in the big bad city, she probably wouldn't make it to the next street with the dark hordes of crows keeping a hungry eye out for her. And to her credit, she seems to have adjusted pretty well to her lonely existence. She only gets to see in the morning when I set off for office and then late at night when I return to put her cage inside the room. As I catch all the late-night football matches, I frequently find her hopping down from her perch for a midnight bite. And then all through the day, she has the company of her sparrow friends who are casually ignorant of my existence on weekends and holidays, even if I stroll by them. Tweety is great company on lonely days with her crazy antics like hanging upside down from the top of her cage, rock climbing around her cage with her beak and claws or doing a rapid back-and-forth dance routine on her perch bar. She is an fully independent function- pretty, cheerful and demands very little attention, but it wouldn't be unfair to say that she commands it. Succinctly put, she is my kind of girl!