Readjusted estimates

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?"

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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

[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.]

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07:30 AM

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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

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

December 8th, 2009

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"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. 

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2010/12/question.html]

Some important facts of life

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?

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The answers are all here in the link below:

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

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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!

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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

Image via Wikipedia

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.

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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.

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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

Image via Wikipedia

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.

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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!"

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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!"

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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.