Snow

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Influence

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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Denial

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.

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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

Wannabe

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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..."

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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.

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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?

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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?"

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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.  

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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.

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

It's like shopping!

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?" 

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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.

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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!

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

Chaudhary chai

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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 a line from an Eagles' song I would hear later in life and indeed the Eagles would have never heard of the kids either yet they share a sentiment, in equal parts comforting and cautionary. 

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

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

Boy scout

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.

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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.

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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?]

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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