Ideally

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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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

Nice

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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]