Costumed clowns

There are only a few things from my childhood favourites which I've had the maturity to outgrow and at the top of the list is my former devotion to 'pro' wrestling. WWF (WWE in its more recent avatar) was a craze for almost every young one with a TV back then and names like Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock were right up there with the Sachin Tendulkars and the Zinedine Zidanes. Why well built actors playing out scripted roles on an unusually violence prone stage was so likable and almost up there with real sportsmen in terms of popularity I don't know but it was and it still is going strong judging by the "sports entertainment" categories unflagging popularity.

Early on in the days of cable TV, I used to walk down to my cable operator's house in the hot summer sun and pick a fight with him only to have Star Sports/ESPN re-instated amongst the handful of channels which could viewed at one time. Then I'd run back to my house to catch Summer Slam, Royal Rumble or Monday Night Raw as the toothpick chewing Razor Ramon, the coldly impressive giant Undertaker and Shawn Michaels went about their rehearsed business of jumping off ring corners, dropping knees into abdomens and other methods of bone crunching physical retribution.

Evenings would turn into late nights as friends would gather debating who was likely to win that vengeance re-match complete with steel cage and a room full of hazardous looking fight props. We were ready suckers for it all: the drama, the trademark entries (like Austin's shattering glass, the Undertaker's gong and Rock's "If you smeyallll...") and the choreographed violence performed in the most outlandish of costumes. If a real wrestler were asked to wear it, he'd probably be too ashamed to even come out of the dressing room. But no, not these guys! They drank in the crowds appreciation and the fawning crowds loved them back even more. As if falling off ladders, falling through tables, smacking someone's head with a chair while parading in fluorescent pyjamas were as natural an activity and as essential a function as breathing air. I am sure there were definitely more educational and practical programs on other channels at the same time but we sure as hell weren't watching, mesmerised as we were by what was nothing more than a circus of costumed clowns.

A cruel choice

I was on my tour coach heading back to the glitz and garishness of Las Vegas. It was nearing the end of the day but a more awe inspiring day I had rarely seen. I had spent the day on the hauntingly picturesque South Rim of the Grand Canyon and I was doing my best to retain the serenity that had lodged itself inside me during the course of the day. The excitement and the vibrancy of the last 2 nights spent in Las Vegas were completely supplanted by a hermetic peace of mind, a mature wise ruler deposing the cranky passion driven prince.

As the sun started to approach the limits of its westward March, the endless desert spread on both sides as far as the eye could see. Brilliant colours fostered by the dying sun were splashed across the skies interrupted fleetingly by the outlines of the rare desert shrub and by hulking silhouettes of rocks in the Arizona drylands, backstage men hurrying to get out of the stage limelights. No one on the bus spoke a word. Nature it seemed had decided on setting up the grandest possible conclusion to our day of wonder.

Then the bus driver rifled through his stock of DVDs and put on "No Reservations" on the coach's TV. This quite ordinary movie about two master chefs (From the little that I can remember of the story) was blessed with an quite so extraordinary presence - the divine beauty of Catherine Zeta Jones. Her pouts, her smiles, her laughs, her perfectly curly dark hair, every syllable of her honey syrupy voice, every glimpse of her ivory skin, every frame devoted to her heavenly perfection - all of them were acknowledged without exception by this rapt admirer.

It wasn't the best of situations to be in. To have to pick between Nature's breath taking bounty inside and outside but my decision was made. Today I can only speculate that the sunset that evening may have been stunning too. It was already pitch dark outside by the time I had looked through the window again.

A childhood unexpected

Kulti is a little town in north west West Bengal close to the Bihar/Jharkhand border. During the early decades after Independence, it was a place bubbling with enthusiasm and energy with a steel plant and all the auxiliary government infrastructure that comes with it. A major portion of my dad's childhood was spent in this town, my grandfather being a government officer was posted here for a significant number of years. We had grown up listening to stories of the house where my dad and his 3 siblings had spent the formative years of their life but had never had a chance to see it yet at least not within my first meaningful memories. My cousin's marriage a couple of years ago afforded me an oppurtunity to visit this marker of my dad's past.

During a vacuum in the marriage proceedings, we as a family managed to sneak out of my uncle's house and drive a little down the road and up the hill where the house of childhood legend was located. When we got there, it was evident like the rest of Kulti this house too had seen better days. The paint was peeling, the garden was overgrown with weeds and the beauty of the spacious verandah was blighted by strings laden with drying clothes - all indicators of the less than ideal economic circumstances of the family residing there now. We didn't venture inside the house leaving it to its most recent residents and hoped that all the families that had lived in it and left since the 1960s when my grandparents moved out had found peace and happiness within its old walls. I looked upon the road below the hill which was quite some way down from where I stood on the path leading to the garden and the house, and contemplated some things which had never occurred to me before.

It is really easy to imagine mom as a child because like all women she is given to very visible displays of emotions, call them little displays of immaturity if you will. The pampering of my mom by my maternal grandparents right up to their last days gave me a clear enough picture of her as a child. The amount of time invested by moms in bringing up their children provides enough time for the kids to understand enough of their mom's nature to consider the possibility of her ever having a childhood.

But to think of the cheerful but notoriously stable guy who set out on his daily office trip like a man on a mission in the same uniform and in the same frame of mind, of having any other avatar was quite difficult. My paternal grandmom however had passed away before I was even born and my first memories of my dad's dad are those of a genial but painfully restricted and bed ridden old man. The only real display of my Dad giving in to emotion I can remember is when he let his stubble grow for a week's time on my grandfather's death, an unprecedented event in my dad's disciplined life.

To stand here on this ground was to discover a new image of my Dad's life. Of a kid who used to leap out of the back windows of the house when being punished by being locked into a room for some misdemeanour, the boy who would spend too many hours playing out in the sun with the family's pet Alsatian, Tiger pausing only when scolded back into the house at the end of the day, of a guy smitten by the huge American cars that plyed the roads those days and eager for any chance he got to ride in them, of the cycle trips that he and his classmates would undertake in what was then the wilderness of Kulti - all those much heard stories danced around me with vivid life. A child who I had never really thought existed was standing beside me and grinning.

Gilded cage

No one is really free inspite of their vehemently claiming so. Everyone walks around with a cage around them, all at once serving the dual purpose of restricting and protecting them. Like God, the rule of law seems like a sort of distant irrelevant reality until the moment of crisis arrives. Then it is the only shelter around from miles and miles of barren, unforgiving lands.

I found this out very recently when I was nearly swindled in a used car deal and managed to get justice through some rules I had hardly paid attention to before. I was glad that someone had foreseen the exact predicament that I found myself in and had ensured that there was a fair way out of it for me. We spend our happy-go-lucky lives thinking that the sun will always shine so very bright. The truth is that the sun does get blotted out much too regularly and that we can thank our lucky stars that someone had the vision to plan for it all.

These are not the laws of God that I am talking about. Its the laws of men, of civilized nations and borne out of great minds, of hundreds of sheets of paper where every possible scenario has been played out and there is an exact specification of how it is to be handled. I think every constitution is an infinite novel: mix and match, pick and choose and you'll have a billion possible combinations and a trillion interesting stories. Right from the day I was born in a hospital in Calcutta and my name was noted down on a piece of paper to the hour of my death when a doctor will pronounce me lost to the material world, someone has thought of every plausible or implausible mishap that might waylay me and that to me is a very amazing achievement. I tend to get dazzled by the flashiness of technology and swayed by the deep reaching impact of art. I tend to forget that the only entity that plans (maybe imperfectly) for a safe and happy life for all good individuals in a quiet, unobtrusive way is neither art nor science or not even God. It is the gilded cage we all choose to live in but rarely appreciate enough, called the law of the land.

Postponed

It's the one word which sums up sufficiently these first 3 years of my working life. When it comes to learning some new skill or technology that might actually help in furthering my present career, I successfully ward it off till it ceases to be of any relevance. Civil Services preparation? Pushed back initially to a later time when I'd have more time on my hands and when the time came of not having less time as an excuse, kicked so far behind that it'll have to wait till my next birth (provided I am lucky enough to be a human again). Taking up anything remotely related to making my dream job of being a writer come true? Indefinitely delayed for very ill defined reasons. In recent times, all activity related to the purchase of an ultra necessary car and the paperwork related to my parents' coming over are the latest to be hit out of bounds by my incredibly powerful and fail safe 'postpone' club.

It seems that the completion of all meaningful targets and indulging in possibly life rejuvenating activities always come with three options for me - 'Yes', 'No' or 'Postpone'. It is easy to forget that the big red 'Postpone' button that I have nonchalantly hit every single time such a choice confronted me is linked at the root to the 'No' button. It is a strange way of buying more time even though the ultimate choice has already been made. A fine method indeed it is of accepting that despite having surrendered and laid down my arms, I am either too proud or too yellow livered to publicly acknowledge defeat. The need to work for making something interesting of my life should be my pressing concern right now but I find that like every other important objective of my life, this bold vision too has been postponed.

Pool cool

I was very enthusiastic about learning to swim, at least much more than my lazy bones sister. I recall clearly the eagerness with which I had bought my swimming trunks and the joyful thrill of entering a swimming pool on a hot summer's day for the first time. Then on the very same day, I managed to slip in the shallow end of the pool causing chlorinated water to surge through my nose and spent a few seconds lying prostate on the tiled floor of the pool looking at the glimmering sun through 3 feet of water. I convinced myself that this was a near death experience, a close parallel to how drowning must feel like and from that moment my urge to go swimming was nowhere to be found. However the Rotary Club's swimming coach cum lifeguard was dogged enough to teach me enough about swimming to help me keep comfortably afloat. I will be eternally grateful to him for his lack of patience, because one day exasperated by my reluctance beyond measure he simply chucked me into the deep end of the pool and I discovered that I could swim for the pool's edge like I was born in water.

Water is so not a human being's natural habitat and that is what makes swimming so much fun. It's the closest thing to flying that an ordinary man can come to even though he is gliding through a fluid of a different kind from air. The tiny bubbles of air leaking through the tiles at the bottom of the deep end of the pool were always such a tantalising attraction. Just to dive down into the deepest point of the pool (All of 15 feet) and place hands on the steady stream of bubbles trying to choke them out offered an incomparable thrill. When friends would get together, there were sessions of stunt diving with most of them ending in a disastrous, painful and comical manner. Amidst the anarchy caused by us kids, there'd be the serious types committed to doing their 50 laps for the day and often impeded by us the plastic ball chasing amphibian hooligans. Stern glances were dealt out to little effect because everyone knew that it was as much our pool as theirs. Then there were characters like the fat middle aged lady who'd start shouting from the other end of the pool, "Bacche log, hat jaoo! Auntyji aa rahi hai!" (Kids get out of the way, aunty is coming through) before wading her way through our pack like a wheezy whale leaving trails in her wake.

A summer evening spent in the pool letting the cool ripples of water wash over our bodies, packed as it was with screaming kids, consoling parents, irritated athletes and time killers like us was undoubtedly the best way to chill. Only when the sun went down below the horizon, the water started to turn a little chilly and the bottom of the pool reflected the floodlights in an eerie haphazard manner would we give up our 25m X 12.5m sea of comfort. Lumber out, limbs aching despite not having swum a single complete lap with serious intent, grab the tastiest plate of "bhel puri" ever made (at the moment, it felt so to our hungry souls) and trudge back into the boring and hot old world of soil & feet.

Uncool ninjas

There is a lot of effort required to make mysterious assasins, trained in the most lethal of martial arts look boring but anime the wildly popular Japanese style of animation manages to do just that. I wouldn't have had so much of a beef with anime and we would have stayed away from each other in mutual agreement had it not invaded my personal space for nearly an entire year. I had borrowed my friend Subbu's PC for almost the whole length of my final year of engineering and had had to patiently put up with the incredible stupidity and blind devotion of Naruto lovers.

I have always loved comics and animation and still do but somehow the Japanese style of doing things always manages to get my goat. The weirdly coloured hair, the boringly repetitive facial expressions and the unnecessary iterations of the camera panning away to reveal two opponents squaring off in yet another yawn inducing ninja battle were asking for too much if they were asking for my attention. Japanese voices sometimes too coarse and others too squeaky talking gibberish like the "chidori" (Thousand bird power), the triple seal curse or yelling "Sasuke Kan" had started to appear in my dreams. My room was always packed with Naruto fans who seemed to love even his retarded "ramen" weakness & giggled like teenage girls and the series ran in 24 hour cycles within the closed confines of my room. The show was astoundingly popular and I was frequently given incredulous looks by anime devotees for not having liked even the tiniest portion of it. Being in the same room as this shabby work of art was a pain but it was still my room so I had to manfully withstand this assault on my good taste. My stand was crystal clear: ninjas cool, anime totally uncool.