Shinkansen

The other day on a visit to the hospital where one of my relatives was undergoing some minor treatment, I met a couple who had just returned to India a few days earlier after visiting their daughter who lived and worked in Japan. As they related with wonder, tales of the technological marvels that are a part of Japan's everyday life, they had just started talking about the Bullet Train when I rudely interrupted their talk with an abrupt "Shinkansen". Needless to say they were polite enough to be appreciative about my knowledge of Japan, rather than be a little dissed at this unwarranted display of my limited Japanese vocabulary.

Shinkansen is the Japanese name for the superfast and legendary Bullet train that was for a short while in the past the fastest train in the world and still represents in many aspects the high water mark as far as land based public transportation is concerned. I was surprised and mystified myself as to where my knowledge of the word might have come from. We had learnt Japanese for a couple of months during my training at my current employer's but that was more on the "Hello, how do you do" kind of lines. Yet the way I blurted out the word almost unconsciously indicated that this machine and its habitat dominated the landscape of my travel obsessed engineering geek imagination much more strongly than I had realized.

Japan has always seemed such a mixed bag of cultures - of mist covered mountains and of Tokyo's glitzy billboards; of secretive, meditative ninjas and of flying humanoid robots; of hidden away ancient monasteries and of endless steely cityscapes; of gritty, weighty sumo wrestling and of cutesy, funny video games. How can the same country manage to be all of this and more? The only satisfying answer will be found in getting there and walking its streets or past its bubbling jungle streams. Until fate or life offers me such an opportunity, I must wring my hands and wait!

Lessons learnt by a bathroom guitarist

It's not easy to be 25 years old and the slowest student in class! Unfortunately, that's a place I find myself in at my weekly guitar class. When a sudden urge to pick up the guitar overcame me at a late age, I did not expect to be a Mark Knopfler within the first few weeks. Yet I hadn't set my aims so low as to find after 3-4 weeks that a jarring octave was all I could muster out of my supposed future passion. Nonetheless, being as thick skinned as a rhino does have its advantages and I struggle on.

This week, in front of my guitar teacher I managed to undo all of my hard practice from the past 7 days. In a freak show of uncoordinated hand movements, I managed to convey an impression of not having practiced for a week or so while the reality was that I had doubled my practice times. Ah, what would life be without bitter days like this! We all need days when we can look back and say "Well, at least I am better off than that day!"

So in the process of getting a verbal roasting from my normally tolerant teacher, as some sort of nonsensical defense I blurted out "But I play way better than this when I sit and play alone at home. All this attention is playing havoc with my practiced notes!" which prompted an even sharper response from my teacher.

Of course, what he said was hard to withstand especially with the sniggers of my more guitar-capable classmates but it was very much the truth. My teacher said something to the effect of "That's the silliest thing I've ever heard in my life. Playing alone? What purpose does that serve? An artist, from the smallest to the greatest must always play/draw/paint/write for an audience. Art is nothing if not shared and appreciated. Only then can you grow and only then can you claim that you love your art form. Learn your art with your heart but only because you want to exhibit it to the world when you are ready. Would Pablo Picasso have been such a great name if he hadn't put his paintings on display or for sale, and just hung them up in his bathroom?"

His scalding advice took me back to the very first post I posted on this blog and a statement/request which I had made without having too much conviction in what I was stating (http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/06/third-time-lucky-maybe.html). This is no secret diary, this is a journal. The world is a cruel judge sometimes really unfair on something you put your heart and soul into, yet all such content must be put out there, to be hoisted to the heavens or to be mowed down into the dirt!

Respect

Badminton does not make for a very spectator friendly sport. It is an intense, involving game to play but watching it... let's just say doesn't exactly rouse the passions. We have had a world champion player in the form of Prakash Padukone (Unfortunately for him, nowadays better known as the father of Deepika Padukone) in the past and a few years ago, Pullela Gopichand won the All England Open, one of the most if not the most prestigious badminton championships. P. Gopichand is not a M.S. Dhoni or a Sachin Tendulkar so it is not unexpected that very few stories appeared in the Indian press during his heyday. But one incident does stick on like Feviquik to my memory.

It seems that Pepsi had offered Gopichand a sponsorship provided he did a TV commercial for them during the time when he was at his sporting peak both in terms of popularity and on-court success. Gopichand quietly declined stating that he did not drink any carbonated beverages and as any player would tell you, sportsmen and carbonated drinks do not mix no matter how many beaming smiles of promotion you see on TV ads by your favourite cricketer/footballer. The glory days of sportsmen are very limited and their fall from the limelight is brutal and swift once their playing days are over. This is especially true of lesser watched sports like badminton, hockey etc. In the face of such stark reality, to hold off on something which easily could have ensured a comfortable existence for him in the years to come just because of that old fashioned value called integrity, for a product whose usage he did not want to promote, I have only one word. Respect.

My bike has an appendix!!!

It is becoming quite difficult for me to pass one week without learning a weird new fact about this weird little world of ours. Here's one for this week! My bike was literally breathing fire after a Friday night office party as the spark plug was not only sparking inside the engine but was showing as a cool blue flame outside the engine too. Though I felt that this looked really neat ala a bike modded with nitro for illegal street racing and felt an intense urge not to have it repaired, I finally came to a conclusion that putting my pants on fire on the way to work was not the ideal way to begin what would be a really tough day anyways. Besides, there were some other niggling issues which had been bugging my bike thanks to its 1.5 years of hibernation while I was away in the USA and which were begging to be fixed.

So I handed my bike to the nearest Bajaj service centre on Saturday morning who proceeded to strip my dear Pulsar down to the very basics to my extreme concern, but thankfully managed to put it together and in the same order that they had taken it apart! Now the problems were fixed and I on my bike was back to ripping the roads & being shattered to bits by the occasional sneaky pothole. Then today as I got onto my bike and was feeling around for the fuel valve, I accidentally pulled out a pipe which seemed like it had a purpose in life before I accidentally yanked it open. Infuriated with myself at this unintended dismantling of my bike, I took to my local mechanic as the Bajaj service centres are closed on Sundays.

The guy takes just one look and says something like "Don't worry. This is a pipe which drains water out of the fuel tank if any seeps in there. Not required to fixed at all. Let it hang loose! Drive away without a fear." I was dumbfounded. When my bike went in for repairs, I kidded about it having an open heart surgery. Appears that I wasn't too far off the mark. This pipe, this unnecessary piece of rubber hosing that just chills out within my bike without being of any use is somewhat like what the appendix is to the human body. A vestigial organ from our herbivorous ancestors, the appendix kind of lies around in the intestine without helping anyone and occasionally bursting to cause some unlucky folks really extreme pain. I just found out that it is not God alone who play games with his creations adding a tube here, removing a chunk of flesh there! So do motorcycle design engineers and other like minded human beings! What next? I can't imagine. Do I find out one day that my bike did not start one morning because it was out partying with its buddies for way too long the previous night?

The happiest days of our lives

It was late afternoon yesterday and the repeated refreshing of the Internet scoreboard brought no good news. Work was impossible to attend to so you had to go down to the office cafeteria where the TVs were and find it already packed. The look on the people's faces already there seem to in agreement with your worst fears. If any team could avoid victory from this stage on, it could only be India. As an Indian cricket fan, that is a fear you learn to live with and internalize.

Only one wicket to be removed for glory and the opposition had been hanging in there for a 100 odd balls already. The two batsman looked invulnerable, a wall of stone to the little pebbles being hurled by the Indian bowlers. The slightest of non-chances were greeted with a roar both from the Eden Gardens and inside our cafeteria, both desperate for any opportunity to relieve a little bit of the intolerable pressure building up inside. The overs were running out rapidly as end of day approached. Sachin was given the ball but even his magic failed this time around. A couple of really close calls did occur as the balls turned unexpectedly sharply and could've have ended the match but we were getting that sinking feeling that the fickle Lady Luck was not on our team's side today.

You began to console yourself as the cafeteria began to empty with 5-6 overs to go. Not everyone had the time and the gumption to stomach that feeling of defeat. You hung on putting on a brave face and mouthing "If we lose, we lose, but we stay to watch and support till the end." without feeling even the smallest shred of optimism as a bitter taste of dejection welled up in your mouth. Whatever happens in life happens for the eventual good, you had to explain in vain to the painful sensation in your heart. After all South Africa played really well, didn't they? They deserved to save the match. Accept reality and move on. Can't expect everything in life to go your way, can you?

The TV broadcast showed the crowd in the stadium to have gone silent too. One or two eternal optimists tried to drum up a "India! India!" chant in the stands without much success. Everyone it seemed had resigned to their fate. Then... on the second ball of what could have been the last over for the day, a flash flood of happiness! He's out! He's out! He's out! Oh my God, its over! India win! India win! India freakin' win! What a feeling, what an God awesome mad stupendous feeling of relief, of surprise, of redemption! The world around you is delirious with pleasure, pleasure that runs right from the heart to the depths of your soul. There's a buzz in your brain, an incomparable high as the people around you perform their own personalized version of a situation induced lunatic dance. The world is once again a wonderful place to be in and you love it, all of it, down to the smallest pebble in the deepest ocean!

"What is joy without some pain,

What use is the sun, without the rain,

This is my life, this is my song,

Let it play... freakin' all day long!"

How am I supposed to live without you :P

I have been guilty of extreme overuse of emoticons like ":P"s, ":D"s and ";)"s etc. It's about time I stopped using them in all of my comments if I want to be taken seriously on any matter! So much so that I have to specifically state that I am not joking just to prove that there was no sarcasm intended. I have been trying quite hard to de-addict myself but so far the attempts have been a disaster.

A buddy of mine (popularly known in our college circuit as the Great Digital Artist :P, Felix Jamestin) once told me that where words do not suffice, use an emoticon. Though I didn't realize the depth of his statement at that moment, I do acknowledge it now. How "I love you :P" means exactly the opposite of "I hate you :P", and if not the opposite, some hidden complicated message just by adding the "Phffffffffffttttt" tongue poking sound of my most favoured emoticon is very very interesting. It's like the written language has added a comic book flavour to it with these, the simplified representation of emotions which carry far more deeper hints to what the person is saying than the words themselves. It's always quite wonderful to have this niggling doubt in the mind, "Did the statement really mean what I thought it meant or was it more like the opposite thanks to the ":D" or the ":P" or the ";)" that followed?" Guessing games are really great fun especially if you end up guessing right!

The Incredibles

I am sure everyone have their own weird tantrum stories. Kids are little monsters most of the time if my favourite little childhood tantrum (out of the ones which I remember) is an indication. Being the youngest in my family by a long margin, I was always being molly-coddled by my parents to the extent that they indulged me like they were my grandparents! I used to sleep right in between Mom and Dad for many many childhood years, come what may, an honour not to be shared with my elder brother or sister under any circumstances whatsoever.

Not satisfied even with this position of privilege, I had one tremendously annoying habit. At any time of the night, I might find myself awake and thirsty. Irrespective of whether the time was 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM and whether the season was winter or summer, I would bawl out aloud "Jollllllllllllll" (which means water in Bengali) despite the fact that I was completely capable of getting out of the bed and fetching myself a glass of water. I must have continued with this terribly sadistic torture on my folks until I was 10 or 11, yet not a single memory do I have about either of my parents grumbling about this spectacularly unreasonable demand of mine. Religiously either one of them would get up, go to the kitchen, pour a glass of water and get it to me as I lay prostate on the bed they'd have liked to stay a little longer on. In retrospect, I think what a pain in the behind I was and what did I ever do to receive this kind of royal treatment!

So when I read Ayn Randian philosophies of "selfishness" being the only ultimate virtue and about how every kind of "sacrifice" is a tool for weak people who are less talented and capable to gain attention, I laugh, laugh aloud. I know not all parents are ideal but I am sure the good ones outnumber the bad ones a million to one. What a fool I'd be to sneer at such devotion that my parents or indeed most parents show their kids, what a monster I'd be to say that they loved me so incredibly deeply and unconditionally and still do just for their personal benefit.