Aik re baba! Gheun tak!

As the MNS and Shiv Sena continue their criminal madness and as a result unfortunately continue to drag Maharashtra's name, the image of the "Marathi manoos" and that of historical figures like Shivaji through the mud, for once I am tempted to follow their perverted logic. Lord Shiva lived/lives on Mt. Kailash in the Himalayas, so by default geographical location he is a "North Indian". What now? Your party's name has a "North Indian" connection. Time for a name change?

Who the hell are these people? Mumbai/Bombay (I always will refer it to as Bombay, unless of course I am standing right in front of Mr. Bal Thackeray himself :P) is my favourite city in the whole wide world and I wonder when its current issues of water shortage, clogged transportation and flooding amongst others will be handled, instead trying to drive lakhs of hopefuls on whose backbones the city is built, out of the city. It is quite sad that a state in which great freedom fighters (who were fighting for a liberated INDIA BTW) were born and the seeds of Indian freedom were sown is now the fiefdom of these morons. Or maybe not, because these guys are not even in power!

As far as I am concerned though, the Maharashtrian who really really really really really (X infinity) matters has already spoken. In his quiet, unassuming off-the-field manner, he said "Mumbai belongs to India. I am a Maharashtrian and proud to be a Maharashtrian, but I am also an Indian". For everyone else opposed to his point of view, Sachin's closed fist in the picture above is a broad hint. Aik re baba! Gheun tak!

Con job

It's too easy to pan all religions as wool being pulled over people's eyes for thousands of years. The idea that an old, old guy sitting atop a mountain or up in the heavens directs our fates is almost hilarious today, in the age of flourishing science and technology. All we need is that men be rational in their actions. That itself should be sufficient to serve the purpose of ensuring justice, equality and social order, the eventual aim of all religions. All very true, but yesterday's solar eclipse made me do a little rethink.

The moon made a pass past the sun's blazing face sometime in the late morning and continued its journey through to the afternoon. My office is located at the heart of the IT sector in Calcutta, packed with glass towers and thousands upon thousands of IT employees. If there was ever an industry that literally grew out of the dust over the past 20 years, this was it. We were essentially working jobs which had existed only for the past 2 decades thanks to the exponential growth in communication tech, compared to the thousands of years humans had spent on this planet doing a whole lot of other things in isolated pockets.

The attention that a perfectly explainable natural event like a solar eclipse drew even at our workplace is what needs mention. We all knew that it was only the moon blocking the sun's path as it crossed across its face, but all of us did take some time out to sneak a peek at nature's version of turning the auditorium lights down low. Some of course proceeded to devote the entire afternoon to this activity but that is a different disease popularly known as the IT syndrome. For the most part, inside the modern buildings and air-conditioned buildings, there may have been a vague feeling of uneasiness. The heavenly body that was the sustaining source for all life on earth was playing a very very brief game of hide and seek, and alarm bells were set ringing inside our animal selves. We all knew that the sun would come back and continue to toast us when summertime came, but seeing it back in its wincing glory was still reassuring.

Transpose this situation back by just a couple of centuries, and it's hard to miss the tremendous contribution of religion. The world must have been a bewildering place for a time when scientific basics were not being drilled into primary school kids. Every thunderstorm, every drought, every earthquake and every bitter winter were scary possibilities and beyond explanation. If not for religion, man would have had to spend most of his time cowering in fear inside caves which would mean that his demise was sealed as tiger prey given his infinitely inferior physical strength compared to the predators of the natural world. Worshipping nature or celestial beings who control it may seem like a foolish thing to do today when every quirk of nature can be explained with the help of physics, chemistry, maths and biology, but back then it was an essential survival tool. It gave a reason for human beings to stop behaving like animals confident in the belief that someone up there was taking care of them and making a note of all their actions. All these are just the practical benefits of having faith in a higher power, leaving aside the emotional support that belief in the "Every twist and turn of life is part of a divine plan for ultimate happiness" philosophy offers.

Some people say that religion and God are inventions by man himself, and I the eternal cynic am inclined to believe them. If so, religion should rank right up there, next to fire and the wheel, no lower, among the greatest achievements of humans as a species. On the other hand, there is that beautiful reply by a scientist/sci fi author when he was asked about his opinion on the existence of God. He quoted William Cowper, an English poet stating "Absence of proof is not proof of absence!"

Mutation

I had imagined that the three weeks that I'd planned to spend at home after returning to India would be the quickest three weeks I would know. I was wrong; totally, surprisingly and horrifyingly wrong. The first week back was definitely an action packed one as it was my cousin's wedding but soon after the wedding, I had nothing to do. This is when I was fully conscious that something somewhere had quietly gone wrong with me.

In my glory days, that would have been my dream come true and I'd blissfully engage myself in the business of achieving a state of zero energy. You know that you are over the hill when you cannot seem to enjoy what you had always craved the most. Sleep was no longer attractive as there was no critical unfinished job that would have been missed out on by succumbing to its charms. Blogging or writing was an unbearable drag as the constraints of the clock were irrelevant. The same spare time that was once so fleeting and memorable was now a chewing gum stuck to the bottom of of my sole, persistent and unwanted.

So to my utter dismay, there was no option for me but to join office a whole week and a half before I had intended to. Catching up with the team I had left behind, formatting & printing my name out to plug on the wall of my cubicle, getting my system up to speed and making note of the sour faces that must necessarily be displayed at the beginning of every workday - all of this and more of such mundane unglamorous activities made me feel better somehow. At the end of it all, man needs work and work needs man. The relationship has all the hallmarks of a cranky marriage - charming in its soothing familiarity and jarring in its strangling repetitiveness. Killing time, the only thing I could claim to be a professional at was turning out to be not so easy any longer.

Closing chapter

The time that I spent in America was such a whirlwind of extraordinary experiences that I'd be a fool to try and summarize them. One incident/experience at a time is all I can handle. Back in Calcutta now, working from the same sofa that I had bounced around on as a kid when it was at my grandparent's place, it is hard to think that a month or so ago, I was in such a radically different environment 12500 kilometres away and yet it had ceased to be a surprise despite the glaring dissimilarities. This imperviousness to wonder is not a feeling to be encouraged but it does help a lot when it comes to focusing on the daily chores which are a nagging reality whether the country be India or the USA.

The last few days went by in a flash, almost a faintly remembered dream with my parents coming over and me the wide-eyed visitor to that country from a year ago now the experienced (I'd like to think) guide helping my folks negotiate the streets of New York and the hallowed streets of Cambridge. The final 4 days saw a flurry of activity with 3 cars playing the lead roles in this hallucinogenic phase of time - the fortuitous sale of my dear Toyota Corolla when I had given up all hope of getting a fair price for it; the Chrysler 300, a car which I had lusted after for long rented out to me as an unexpected but not undeserved customer loyalty reward from the Enterprise guys in my hometown of Taunton and then the luxurious behemoth of an SUV, the Lincoln Enclave which was to be the rental to take me to the airport from where I'd take the flight back home. Driving an SUV was a fair conclusion to the multitude of typical "American" experiences that I had had as I drove an unnecessarily powerful and obscenely equipped vehicle (Video cameras at the rear end for reversing the goddamn thing) which occupies pride of place in the ridiculed with a lot more than a tinge of jealousy American lifestyle.

Greenpeace can hate me for it but when tons of snow came down pouring down on that Saturday evening (Our flight was on Sunday), I was glad I was in the comfy confines of the SUV. In fact, I was thrilled. The headlights of my petrol guzzling elephant caught the snow as the flakes rushed down to smother the land and all that lay on it in their spotless sheet of white. But the big boy's toy in my hands made sure that I needn't be confined inside the four walls of my home. The roads were empty and pristine, as were the barren winter-time trees now sprouting flowers of snow. I was doing my closing bit of intrepid exploration on this, my first trip across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Adventure does not end where the weather goes grey and the crowds thin out. In fact, that is where adventure might just begin.

Oh, what a Happy New Year!

Should I voice my contrarian opinion that "Five Point Someone" is an extremely over-rated book and that Chetan Bhagat is possibly the most over-hyped undeserving author of all time? And can I claim in the same breath that I found "Taarey Zameen Par" to be a tad too preachy for my liking (I loved the first half of the movie before the character of Aamir "Know-it-all" Khan, the finger wagging art teacher appeared)? There! Nothing to be done. I've already said it! Then I must also tell you that 2010 is going to be an awesome year for me because the storm raging over the "3 Idiots" has me thrilled and clapping with glee, making me start the New Year with a mile wide smile.

Taking up the case of FPS and its author first. My family is a family of book lovers, all of whom have read innumerably more books (and good books at that) than me. Unfortunately for me and to my utter dismay, they are all fans and supporters of Chetan Bhagat. So within my own household, I am outnumbered 4:1 but still I hold fast to my point of view. I think that the book reeks of a 9 point something fellow trying desperately to imagine what the life of a five pointer might be & therefore someone who fails miserably in his attempt. Sure, we want to listen to an IIT+IIM graduate drone on about breaking away from the "beaten path" and fighting the system. He may have made truckloads of moolah as an investment banker for 10 years, but we'd just ignore the irony of the situation and the hypocrisy of his advice. Yeah, right!

An engineering college that is chock-a-block with entertaining characters and the madness of hostel life is so woefully represented in FPS that it really made me feel like crying or more likely chuck the book down one of those early morning hostel toilets with a non functional flush. It's really sad that a setting that had the potential to be so tremendously funny and energetic turned out to be a drab, slow, pedestrian account of 3 uninteresting characters and their trying-too-desperately-to-be-interesting (Read sex, drugs and rooftop rock-n-roll) lives. In the country of R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond, it's a true shame that Bhagat is the "best selling" English author. Not only does he murder the promise in such an extraordinary story, at the same time he also manages to gain a cult following among his "readers" who are also quite aggressive in their defense of him. I have been at the receiving end of many such "offence is the best form of defense" attacks to the tune of "You are such a phoney criticizing something just because it is popular", "Pseudo-intellectual" and such like. All I wanted was just a bearable set of characters/plot/style of writing, none of which came through in FPS for me.

Another tragic piece of news that drove a skewer through my heart was when I heard that Rajkumar Hirani of "Lagey Raho Munnabhai" fame was making a movie with Aamir on... horror of horrors, FPS. Aamir Khan is still my favourite actor in Bollywood by miles, even though TZP's in-my-face second half morality lessons have significantly reduced my appreciation of his work. But the real horror was that the script writer of the fundamentally super (Over the top - Yes, too melodramatic - Yes, loaded with social messages - Yes, still amazing - Yes) Munnabhai movies saw something of interest in that sorry sapper of a novel and wanted to make his third movie out of it! Until 2010 showed up and with it, the sometimes a bit too coarse debate over credits for the movie. It's rather mean to take pleasure at someone else's plight, but that's so me once in a while.

I haven't seen the movie yet I was overjoyed to see Mr. Hirani vehemently fight it out with the media over the changes he had to make to the script to turn the novel into a watchable film. Maybe the film is still heavily based on the book and if so, Bhagat's name definitely should up at the beginning of the movie rather than stuffed away at the end. But what fills my soul with gladness is that the need to make these changes was felt, to veer away from something which was paltrily ordinary to create what the reviews of the film seem to indicate, something truly extraordinary. "3 Idiots" here I come. No matter how the movie actually turns out to be, thanks for giving my 2010 such a great start. There is after all justice in this world and the hands of fate juggle us all. Being at the right place at the right time might get you up to where you do not deserve to be, but it won't keep you there!

One more for the ages

The urge to make resolutions is hard to ignore

Though the past has seen breaches galore,

The age-old sun rises just the same

Still must we play this pointless game.

This day is different, you see, not like the ones before

It's a new calendar, you fool, right down to the core,

Why then is life unchanged, frame for repetitive frame

Is there self-deception, a mass hypnosis to blame?

Seeing past the frenzy, bringing logic to the fore

Hope's house needs refurbishment, rooftop to the floor,

Slaves to routine we are, no matter how we strain

A stop we need, to hop off this slow moving train.

Worries and fears, only deeper will they bore

Joy and laughter, strictly rationed is their store,

The road retains its mystery, the destination stays unknown

Pause we must to ponder, to paint time in a suitable tone.

Istanbul

As far as improbable connections go, a link between a pizzeria, the Corner Cafe on 500 Mass Ave in Boston and my book-shelf back in Calcutta must be quite high on the list but there is such a connection! "Istanbul", a personal memoir by the Turkish Nobel winning author Orhan Pamuk was one of the first books that I bought with my own money and also one of those books which I have forever wanted to begin and hadn't found the time to begin. It rests like an unopened box of treasures in the small cupboard that I use to keep my books together in Calcutta.

Then four days before I return to Calcutta to pick up this unfinished task of mine, I sell my car to a Turkish guy who is going to use it for pizza deliveries. The pizzeria is run by a Turkish fellow Mehmet, who has two employees both of whom are Turkish again, one of whom bought the car off me. Consequently I spent half a day in company of my Turkish friends answering questions about India and learning about the bridge country between Asia and Europe while we went through the formalities of transferring the car ownership. Though none of them were from Istanbul, the awe with which they described their capital city made the city seem all the more alluring. Maybe someday I'll visit this grand city whose personality is split between wanting to be Asian and wanting to be European. In the meantime, even reading about Istanbul when I get back to Calcutta would have a uniquely personal perspective to it.