A bad day for dreaming

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My job is way too mundane. For whom exactly am I putting up with all this pressure for? If I were putting in so much effort on something my heart lies in, what a wonderful life and a wonderfully happy me, it would have led to! Do I really see myself doing this job or something of this sort till I reach the age of 70, sometime in 2054? Home to office and office to home, is there something more to life than this dreary routine? When exactly will the compensation I receive for spending the majority of my life sitting in a cubicle be just right? Can the value of my life be estimated by an annual package or should it even allowed to be measured in so gross a manner?

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All right, so who pays for the petrol in my beloved motorcycle? And the growing stacks of unread books that I keep ordering online? Year 2010 has already seen me do major trips to Himachal Pradesh, Goa, the Sunderbans and  a cross-India road trip, so wherefore did the money come from? Well, what about the Airtel broadband connection where I spend learning and writing about things in our infinitely interesting world? Remember the time when I had get back to work even though a week was left on my official leave just to while away the time and get back momentum in my life again? Do I not get to do all the things I want to anyway, without having to put the most basic of my expenditure requirements at risk by choosing an alternative career? Honestly, if this isn't the good life, then what is?

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It's a sinusoidal wave of questions with crests and troughs on my personal happiness index. Is it fair to expect it to flatline on the happier side of things? Who on earth is perfectly happy? Is there someone else I'd rather be? If life is a compromise and acceptance is the only way forward, then there is that one day when this truth shines out like a diamond in the dirt. End of the month. Pay day.

Rules of the road

Image by !borghetti via Flickr

In case, you are planning to take a 2300 kilometre road-trip through the case study of unpredictability that is India in the company of your beyond-retirement-age parents and a permanently immature dog, here are a few handy pointers towards what to expect:

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1. You should accept for a fact that your dad has never been a fan of your driving and thinks that anything above 40 kilometres per hour even on the emptiest and widest of superhighways is 'dangerous driving' when you are at the wheel. However when he himself takes over the driving seat then the speed limits can be doubled or tripled because you see "He has been driving for close to 40 years now!".

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2. The roads of India have a tendency to literally shake up things every once in a while by putting in a huge pothole in the midst of kilometres of smooth road. Too much of a good thing is bad, thinks the Government of India. But when you are at the wheel and hit that pothole with a not-so-pretty clunk from the car's underside, an immediate reaction from your dad will be "You'll break the axle! What are you doing? You'll break the axle!" followed by further tirades about how you were totally insensitive to how a car needs to be protected from the vagaries of the road. A similar pothole when driven over by dad at the same speed and producing exactly the same sound leads to a loud clearing of throats, giggles on the part of the co-passengers and studied long silences on the part of the driver.

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3. Your mom will be the most cheerful of companions as long as the sun is bright outside and the scenery is something to remember. All calls on your never-out-of-tower-range cell phones will be greeted enthusiastically by her, telling everyone and their grandmothers about how much she was enjoying the adventure of this trip. But the moment, the engine starts overheating or the sun is on the wane or there are bad traffic/road conditions (as is a quite common occurrence on an Indian road trip), boy, will she give the male occupants of the car a hard time. "I told you we should have taken the train. My life is so full of people so who just can't behave normally!" will be an oft-repeated refrain which you learn to accept without retorting (that'd be suicidal on your part) for the period of time it takes to find a mechanic/find a hotel/find a clear stretch of road.

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4. You are not allowed to get angry and complain about the wayward human beings who invariably jump out onto the road when least expected and when the slowest of tempos, overloaded and blocking the road ahead, refuses to let you overtake. Any expressions of disgust will invoke a wise "This is not 'your America'! This is how India is and you have to adjust your driving likewise." from your dad ignoring the completely natural expression of bewilderment on your face on hearing the words 'your America'. So now in the eyes of your dad, not only are you a bad driver but also a traitor to your country!

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5. Hotels as a rule are not very eager to allow dogs into their rooms even if it is a tiny miniature dachshund like yours. When you finally convince a hotel clerk, after talking to his manager and the manager's manager about how well-behaved your dog is and about how she would not cause any trouble to other people in the hotel, as proof the dog will step out and pee right on a ground-level board where the hotel's name is displayed. You may hurriedly throw a fistful of sand to cover up this instance of misbehaviour but then later your normally quiet dog will bark her heart out and chase the room service staff out of the room when they show up. Good behaviour at home does not readily translate to good behaviour on a road-trip.

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This is only a sampling of expectations to have and there's of course the more memorable parts of making such a trip. These are times when you really forget that the whole purpose of making this trip was fun.

Dark Water

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Sometime in early 2007, the smiling technicians from Eureka Forbes (Yes, the "Friends for life" people from TV) came smiling into my house and set up a water purifier system, the drilled-into-our-heads-through-incessant-ads Aquaguard system in one corner of my house. This was the second Aquaguard system being installed in our house, adding on to the one already installed in my uncle's kitchen. It just goes to show that if you run your publicity campaign before the advent of attention splintering multi-channel satellite TV in any country, you have your loyal customers booked for life.

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I have no complaints with the service that the machine gives. It's as close to perfection as any machine can get. Litres and kilolitres of potable water have poured out of its tiny nozzle and it has never even hiccuped (fingers crossed/touch-wood). What I do have an issue with it is the tremendously ominous music that plays along while the purified water is pouring out.

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The aforementioned first Aquaguard of our house was installed by my uncle a long long time and the music it plays is a tinny monophonic version of "Sochna Kya Jo Bhi Hoga Dekhaa Jayegaa [Why worry too much, we'll take life as it comes]" from the movie Ghayal (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYCguKQnTm8 if you want to relive your inexplicably weirdly dressed early 1990s Bollywood memories) while the water pours out. It was a song whose lyrics are positive to say the least. Like so many other Bollywood movie songs, this song was a direct lift, this time from a Spanish song "Llorando se Fue" by Los Kjarkas (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT4T5GyGqRQ if you want another good laugh). "Llorando se Fue" apparently in Spanish means "Crying... one went away"(so says my favourite translator http://babelfish.yahoo.com) but I don't understand Spanish all that well and for me that tune was permanently associated with the cheery spirit of the Hindi version than its morose Spanish one.

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With the passage of time, like monophonic ringtone technology on cellphones had morphed into polyphonic grandness, the new Aquaguard, my Aquaguard has spectacular polyphonic speakers. So what does it choose to play? A musical piece which combines the sentiments of the words "gloomy", "depressing", "foreboding", "menacing" and a few hundred more of that nature from the English dictionary. I don't know what the name of this new tune is and neither do I want to find out. There is just that one tune and although I understand it made business sense not to include an in-built MP3 player, but couldn't it have been a more cheery one. Cheery tunes I would imagine sound so much better on polyphonic speakers.

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Early in the morning groggy with sleep or late at night drained by the day's work, standing in front of the purifier to fill up rows of waiting PET bottles is almost an ordeal. A quick press of a button quickly mutes the awful tune in the real world but it keeps on playing like a funeral song at the back of your mind all the while it takes to achieve the drinking water supply targets. Someone at Eureka Forbes seems intent on teaching us about the true tragic nature of life while we get our day's quota of water. There are days when you can't help but agree with the infernal machine's outlook towards life. But on days when the sun is full and bright outside and you realize how much worse things could have been, you feel like getting into The Joker mode and ask the forever depressed Aquaguard "Why so serious?"

It happens

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A couple of months ago (even after which I find my acoustic guitar playing abilities tending to zero) a junior colleague called me on my cell on a sunny Sunday. He had started learning the guitar just then and had too optimistic an expectation of my progress, begun as I had in the January of this year. He told me how difficult it was even to get the most basic finger positions right for the chords and asked me whether it was this tough an endeavour for everyone.

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I could have told him that I had struggled just to play the seven notes of a octave for two whole months. I should have told him that my guitar teacher, a very patient man by any standards was compelled to chastise me for my dismal lack of progress despite being quietly appreciative of my tireless but frequently fruitless efforts. If I had said that it looks like it'd take me 10 years to generate any kind of sound from the B and F barre chords before I could look any further, I wouldn't be telling a lie. The progress in guitar playing capability that some guys and gals had made starting at the same time and batch as me put me to shame and put my physical co-ordination abilities firmly at par with the abilities of a whale having to run a complete marathon on dry land. If I were a truly honest man, I would have said that if I can be so bad at it and still keep at it, anyone should be able to achieve much more satisfaction and success than I had in the past 10 months.

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What I did instead was to make a patronizing clucking sound and make this sagacious statement "Just relax, man! It happens with beginners!"

The real deal

When the Gujarati grandmom, a fellow tourist on the Sunderban Tiger Reserve launch, the MV Chitrarekha which was both our Tiger Reserve hotel and Tiger Reserve vehicle, yelled a shrill "Tiger!" at 7:05 AM on the morning of the 14th of November, 2010, I had very good reasons not to feel excited. The previous day had already seen overexcited eyes identifying a herd of Chital deer and a sauntering, casual wild boar as the big sighting, a dream which I unfortunately had to puncture via the 10X optical zoom digital camera borrowed from a friend for this trip. The feeling of being inside a jungle was tremendous in itself but hallucinations were not to be encouraged. Nonetheless I moved quickly to the starboard (right) side of the vessel and looked in the direction her shaking finger was pointing to because like everyone else who was making this trip or had done so in the past, a question loomed large over my head. What if?

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I was lucky not to be completely pessimistic on this occasion because what I saw was too far away to tell how big it was, but it doesn't take too much to tell the distinctive coat coloured in a combination of black and gold. At the edge of the water in one of the many narrow water channels that we had seen in this thick jungle leading off from the main channel through which our big launch was plowing, stood the top predator of the jungle casually looking at us. The top deck was nearly empty but for about 10 odd people as the few people who had groggily woken up for the sunrise had gone back down to their beds. The launch was well past the channel where the animal stood and I got only a 5 second look at it before we lost sight of it.

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The launch was too big to brake to a sudden halt and turning it around would generate so much engine noise that the creature would be scared off anyway. So the pleas to the launch's Captain to turn around by those who had missed it fell on deaf ears and the vessel chugged on. That would be the only glimpse of the Royal Bengal tiger that we would get on this vessel in this trip, rare as it is to spot a tiger from a launch in the Sunderbans.

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All of the mystery, all of the fear, all of the awe of being in a jungle stemmed out of the presence of this one creature and the fervent hope of seeing it in its full wild glory. I hardly saw it for those few seconds with concentration as my heart was working overtime and my eyes analyzed the possibilities before agreeing on the obvious. By the time my brain was ready to make a decision, the visual link was lost.

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It was there. Like a ghost, like a myth, like a legend - its existence believable and valuable to only those who had set eyes on it and those young at heart. Everyone knows that the Sunderbans are teeming with tigers; everyone knows that the terrain is the most unsuitable for viewing a tiger and the chances of seeing one are close to nil yet so many are still willing to take that slimmest of chances. I took that chance and fate favoured me. I almost felt happy that I did not find time enough to take a picture to show the world and thankfully neither did the few who spotted it. Having all its mystique reduced to a piddly concrete JPEG image on my desktop is not how I would like to remember my first encounter with a tiger in the wild. It still stalks the jungles of my imagination, elusive, powerful and majestic. It was no coincidence that the date was the 14th of November, the day that India celebrates as Children's Day. Save the tiger not just for the environment, not just for the future generations and not just for the integral place it holds in our culture. Save the tiger because it keeps that child of adventure and wonder inside us all alive.

An audience with the king

Image by Douglas Brown via Flickr

Tomorrow I set out for a trip into the most heavily populated tiger sanctuary in the world... both in terms of people and in terms of tigers. 274 odd Royal Bengal tigers inhabit the Indian portion of the forests of Sundarbans but oddly enough, it is the place where all around the year the chances of spotting a tiger are the least. The thick mangrove vegetation of the Sundarbans (the picture above is of the Siberian tiger not the Royal Bengal tiger, hence all that snow) with narrow channels of water where the tourist launches cannot go (Too swampy for jeeps and elephants the terrain happens to be) is just one of the reasons why it's so difficult to spot them. The other reason is that the tigers of the Sundarbans have a knack for wilyness and carry a nasty reputation of being scientifically acknowledged man-hunters! Nowhere else, does the tiger have to come across so many human beings in his domain and likewise nowhere else is a tiger attack more common.

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Then there's the mystique of the animal. The powerful, graceful top of the food chain predator commands respect even in our imagination, let alone when it growls imperiously in its own domain of the wild. To be able to see it very frequently would ruin its powerful grip on our thoughts as we cruise wide-eyed through the water channels in search of a fleeting glimpse of the yellow and black coat. In the midst of his vast kingdom, we would be praying that the king will grant us audience.

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This, being November, is not at all the season for tiger-spotting, our tour operators have already told us. In the summers, when the heat brings out the tiger for a drink to the water's edge is our slim but best chance of spotting one. But I am going now in the off-season so to speak and they say there are lots of other creatures to see including a personal favourite monster of mine, the estuarine crocodile (the salt water crocodile) which regularly grows 20 feet long and is also a known man-eater. To add to that there is the hair-standing-on-end thrill of being in a jungle, with the safety and security of urban civilization only distant dreams. 

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If we do not come across a tiger, as is the most likely outcome, it will only be a re-affirmation that out in the depths of the forest, we are his subjects, and subject to his powers and not vice versa. Will I be happy if I spot a tiger in the Sundarbans? Will I be unhappy if I spot a tiger in the Sundarbans? The answer to both those questions (subject to the master hunter not coming too close for comfort as in this video from Kaziranga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4SqXl9Zj6k) is a paradoxical yes.

Doomed to gloom

Image by TW Collins via Flickr

Long-due sympathy for a certain Ms. Roy

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The link below leads to an statement by Arundhati Roy only 3 paragraphs long so even if your concentration span has been reduced to one of a demented puppy thanks to guaranteed IQ evaporators like Twitter, this is something you should be able to plow through. This is as close to Twitter that Arundhati Roy is ever going to get. Thankfully no 160 character rants from her yet!

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"I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning's papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir..."

[http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267656]

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Thereby begins Arundhati's 'post' from Srinagar. Look at me and worship my courage, it says in not so many words. Me the tragic heroine in yet another underdog's cause, abandoning all concern for personal safety and comfort, fighting for what is the 'one and true certified inarguable whole-and-soul, white as white comes, no greys, browns or blacks' version of right, the voluntary 'Take me, I am here' martyr a-la the new Che Guevara under the constant glare and sniper focus of Big Government, Big Corporation and Loony Right Wingers. No wonder Sergei Nechaev from Hamilton, Bahamas comments on the same article "in homage to a fearless & heroic writer of staggering talent and insight. If there were ten others like her the world would be a very different place. But there aren't." Like him, there are way too many people completely sold on the legend.

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What title can I possibly attach to her name which someone else has not already? 'Defender of the weak', 'Secret agent of the Vatican', 'The last hope of humanity and feminism', 'Anti-national', 'The most articulate voice of dissent', 'Pathological attention seeker' are just a sampling of the thousands of nominations/accusations being bandied around. I think I'll add another... 'Clinically depressed', for her life is so full of sadness and only sadness.

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Come to think of it, there is so much real injustice in this world that no one has any right to be happy before they are all solved. I had a Che Guevara poster in my college hostel room which said "Always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anybody anywhere in the world." Arundhati Roy, I believe, may have taken this directive too much to heart. Which issue of injustice is more important than the other is a very very tough call to make. So many issues, so little time. No wonder this lady is quite so bonkers.

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The issues which she takes up are all very real and so it is difficult to resist reading her immaculately composed articles. But in the middle of a few good paragraphs of what is wrong with my country, while I am finding myself in mild agreement, she wrecks it all by going [Faking a quote here but read any of her articles and you'll find one version of this quote of her's in all her articles] "India is a failed nation meant only for the Hindu, upper-caste and class. Period... shobbie doobie doo" or while touching upon some truly ridiculous sections of the Indian Constitution, she ruins it by going [Fake quote again] "All said and done, the Indian Constitution is a document that has never worked for anybody... rum te tum!" And from her standard bag of literary tricks, she will also hoarsely whisper to the reader [Fake but real quote number 3] "Read my article for this may be my last. The CM/PM/capitalist monsters/powers-that-be have marked me for destruction. Ooooh!" and you can almost see her smiling when she says [Fake but real quote number 4] "In a weird kind of way, the Maoists/tribals/militants/protestors are the upholders of the Constitution while the powers-that-be trample the ideals enshrined in this all-of-a-sudden-highly-valued document. Take that!"

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The essential difference between speaking for a subjugated people and speaking like a subjugated people eludes her. As a visiting observer, you cannot claim to have felt as outraged as the victims themselves and if you make such a claim, your double standards will be exposed for all that are sane to see. The benefits of voicing their opinion to the outside world are completely lost if you speak the same warped language of one-sidedness and rhetoric as in their case, they may have valid reasons for feeling so but not you. It's the same India and largely capitalistic world that gave you a childhood, an education and a thinking mind to analyze the world as it is the same India that gives you a national platform to air these views. No one is asking you to sugar-coat the truth but is it too much to acknowledge that the matter is much more than a simple case of black-and-white. But Ms. Roy insists on being vehemently sad and making others feel likewise too. All she ends up doing is pooling a general mistrust, cynicism and bigoted hatred not only for herself but also the causes she espouses almost dooming them to failure.

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The ultra-nationalistic (read extremely stupid, extremely intolerant, extremely violent, fundamentalist and corrupt) elements that keep promising to bring her to 'appropriate out-of-court' justice need to take a hike. Neither do we really need to jail her. Arresting her under the Sedition Act would only make her and her followers swell up in pride as the Act used by the Brits against the likes of Tilak and Gandhi at their peaks is being used to silence her. Instead in keeping with her fondness for conspiracy theories, I have one proposed by my dad, quite easily the most cynical person yet strangely optimistic person I have known (His theory should throw light on the unique category that I bracket him in). He says that the reason why Arundhati Roy will never be arrested or harmed is that by keeping her out of jail and letting her voice her staunchly anti-government opinions openly, the Indian government is making an international advertisement of how free speech is encouraged in this country unlike our Communist neighbour, and the more she flourishes, the more in international circles, the fame and reputation of India's historical claim to tolerance grow. In panning pretty much everything under the sun, Ms. Roy is doing us a world of good. I hope someone lets her know that. In her subsequent gloom, lies her redemption.