High hopes

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Will having too high an expectation of a place ruin the experience when I actually get there? When I think Goa, I am reminded of palm fringed beaches, silver sands and the blue ocean. When I think Goa, I see old colonial mansions painted in exuberant colours and crumbling old churches clinging on to the present. When I think Goa, I dwell on lazy days lounging on a hammock in the sun as the sea breeze plays your nanny swinging you to sleep. When I think Goa, I hear the steady thump of a mighty Enfield which has given me the honour of riding it as it grandly cruises its way on a road hugging the crashing waves and spectacular cliffs. When I think Goa, I imagine a never-ending party with the strumming of guitars and banjos, beautiful faces greeting strangers with the most familiar of smiles. Maybe I am setting myself up for disappointment on all of these counts, but what the heck, dreaming don't cost no money! In exactly a couple of days, for better or for worse, I am going to find out for myself if the legends are true.

"Take it easy policy"

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A few mornings ago, my box radio was blaring out music beaming from a Calcutta station, the usual mix of good, bad and ugly. In a stark reminder of how fast time moves on, they played one of the big A.R. Rahman Bollywood hits from back when we were kids, "Urvashi Urvashi" from "Hum Se Hai Muqabala" [As it was dubbed in Hindi] under the Retro section! Besides conjuring up images of Prabhudeva and his troupe's incredibly flexible but incredibly weird dance moves atop a moving glass roofed bus, a line in the the song's lyrics of convenience seemed oddly relevant in the present context. 

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"Billiyaan naa shaakaahari, har koi Ram nahin hotaa..." [Loosely translates to "Cats aren't vegetarians and not everyone is Ram..."] was what drew attention when the day for the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case judgement was near. Not everyone is Ram, because Lord Ram is one of the most straightforward and just Gods of our pantheon, free from any grey areas, never compromising on what is right for the need of the hour, unlike most other heroes who have featured in our mythology and the Mahabharata. Not everyone is Ram, because when Mahatma Gandhi began his mission of truth and peace, he chose to call the ideal world based on these standards "Ram-rajya" [The kingdom of Ram], the reason being Lord Ram did live his life by these standards.

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Concrete evidence of whether Ram existed as a person is bound to be a long-drawn meaningless debate between faith, history and science, but irrespective of the outcome, it still is a royal shame that his name has been hijacked by those who rape, loot and destroy. The essence of his legend is lost when instead of talking about a kingdom of justice and happiness, the extremist Hindu right-wing movement forces all non-Hindus to accept their essential "Hinduness" in a horribly warped version of Ram-rajya, one of their own making. Raking up hatred for what Muslim conquerors did hundreds of years ago, and directing it towards the innocent Muslim on the streets is about as far away from Ram's ideals as anyone can get. Their present loutish behaviour, disrespect for other religions and the destruction of symbols of faith puts them squarely in the same category as Mohammad Ghazni, Timur the Lame, Aurangzeb or any other historical maruder that they claim to hate. Far from being the so-called 'protectors of the Hindus' and the people who 'set things right', they are the mega-sized warts on the face of Hinduism which draw all the attention and who alongwith fellow loonies like extremist Muslims, war loving corporate-government conglomerates and revolutionary Lefties make the world an increasingly dangerous place for live in, for Hindus and all others.

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Disagreements are unavoidable in a world where cultures are so radically different and in times of strife, it is very very difficult to find common ground but what choice do we really have except to put up with each other, thereby saving ourselves a whole lot of bloodshed and tragedy. The 'developed' world is reeling under what it calls 'immigration issues' but it should stop freaking out and take its cues from this country which has been handling 'immigrants' for thousands of years now, rapidly digesting the immigrant label in its cast-iron stomach. Falling back on good ol' Prabhudeva and A.R. Rahman's one-stop solution "Jeet kaa mantra hai [The magic spell to victory is]... take it easy policy!" Considering that it is after all a policy, I should add "Conditions apply! Please read the offer document carefully before investing." but in the long run and the short, I hope it becomes evident that this is the only worthwhile policy on the market.

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[Due apologies to Gautam Buddha, the Sufi saints, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Fonda + Dennis Hopper, The Eagles, TVS Scooty and everyone else who have espoused the "Take it easy" cause throughout history and who also have been consistently ignored. I did not intend in any way to make light of the importance of their message.]

While you were Facebooking

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While you were Facebooking, the rain came down,
While you plunged in a stream of pictures, the sea sighed aloud
Lost in the web of viral videos, as the jungle lies unexplored
Ancient ruins have no visitors, yet statuses have 'likes' galore

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Your regular job may be boring, but hey, it pays the bills
Once you are done with the necessary, you still need a rethink
Friends are friends, let's not forget, it's good to keep in touch
But adventure awaits beyond the virtual, at the cost of being 'social'.

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[This is more of a reminder to myself that I should not be spending too much time on FB. But all of you FB addicts out there, feel free to take it personally and act as if insulted]

The simple truth

It's not easy to publicly admit, but the simple truth is that I am a thief, albeit a rather guilt-ridden one. And to be stealing from the very person I idolize, both for his creative output and for his principled and happy existence often times projected through his creations is even more unforgivable. Bill Watterson spent a lifetime fighting off the pressures of his comic book syndicate; refusing to lend his brilliant Calvin and Hobbes characters for any kind of commercial promotion and here I was knowing everything about all that, yet using a panel from one of his Sunday strips as a header for my blog, in a rather obvious and lame attempt to pull in readers already familiar with his brilliant work, even though my writing had absolutely nothing to do with the comic strip or its themes. Since then I have even tried to change my blog header a number of times but for some inexplicable technical reasons, I seem unable to do so. For now it seems that I am condemned to have my conscience pricked every time I open my blog's home page. The panel of the strip which I have as a background for my blog's title will hopefully disappear at some point in the near future if I put my head to it but it'll still be impossible to see a snow covered slope, and not be reminded of a tiny kid talking to his stuffed tiger as he drags his toboggan up the slope of Rigor Mortis Cliff.

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A lot of logic and rationalization is pumped out by the gallon about how downloading bootleg version of music MP3s, TV shows, movies and books is actually not 'stealing', rather it is essential to 'popularizing' the artist and helping 'more' people appreciate the content but I will skip all that nonsense. Though I have been guilty of the aforementioned acts myself multiple times over, I'll never console myself by saying that it is perfectly acceptable. It may be the smart thing to do but it certainly is never the right thing to do! More so in the case of Calvin and Hobbes, and for those to whom these things matter, here's throwing some light on the exemplary artist that is Bill Watterson and the most famous products of his imagination.

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Bill Watterson's speech for the commencement ceremony of his alma mater Kenyon College (http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html) is a masterpiece and a very precise encapsulation of everything that he wanted to convey through the delightful 10 year existence of Calvin and Hobbes. Achieving the roaring popularity which the strip saw was far from easy and the only thing that kept him going before his strip made it big was in his own words was "self-belief bordering on delusion" But when the peak of success did arrive, he stopped short of what could have added on millions of dollars to his bank account. That Calvin and Hobbes would never sell T-shirts; that they would not line toy store shelves as soft toys; that they would not sell insurance and that they would not keep running forever in newspapers scripted and drawn by ghost artists while Bill Watterson holidayed in some exotic Pacific resort is a testament to the guy's deep attachment to his protagonists and to his repeated stress on the higher purpose of art, disguised as a entertaining comic strip though it may be. Watterson wanted them to exist solely as comic strip characters true to the intentions he had created them with and he managed to keep them that way. My recent purchase of the "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" is a minor attempt by me at damage control because I believe that an artist as dedicated as him deserves every single cent or paisa of what is due to him.

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Not that any amount of money could ever come close to repaying the debt of laughter and food for thought that I and millions of other fans owe to the story of an imaginative 6 year old and his philosophical talking pet tiger. The painstaking artwork whether it be a stretch of imagination as ridiculous as T-Rexes flying F-16s or a scene as sublime as the pair jaunting through the woods in the beautiful season of fall speaks for itself. The humourous dialogue laced with sharp observations about the follies of people manages to establish a unexpected common boundary between deep wisdom and all-out entertainment magically retaining the essence of both. The man himself is candid enough to admit that the struggles of life that he had to face on the way were essential so that when Calvin and Hobbes finally came out, the content was just right for it to find the right audience at the right time snowballing into the world-wide phenomenon that it became. All I can say that I feel lucky that I was the part of the right audience, the supposed right group whose fancy Mr. Watterson's incredible work caught. Because whenever I think of life, philosophy, happiness, childhood, friendship, adventure, imagination and the incredible satisfaction gained out of just being yourself, the first thing I think of is Calvin and Hobbes.

'Busa fever

I couldn't believe my eyes. This was insane. This was amazing. This was unprecedented. On a pleasant August Sunday afternoon (last Sunday in fact), a Suzuki Hayabusa, the fastest road-legal motorcycle in the world as of today was slowly growling past my very own garage down the narrow lane in front of my very own house in central Calcutta. All in black, with those huge twin exhausts and the massive rear tyre, this wasn't the first 'Busa that I had seen. In fact I had seen many of them on the freeways of the USA and the occasional one in Bombay and Delhi. But describing the visual impact and contrast of seeing a motorcycle which can touch 320 kmph, inching along in my home lane, where hand-pulled rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws form the major chunk of regular traffic is beyond my current writing capabilities. My eyes followed the bike and its lucky rider till the 4 way intersection a little after my front gate, where it turned left and glided on to wherever it was headed. Luckily I had just returned from a 120 km riding adventure of my own and was still outside my house about to roll my Pulsar into my garage. On most other Sunday afternoons, I would be found fast asleep after breaking personal pledge no. 99968 of not falling asleep on a weekend aternoon. This was a clear case of divine intervention, for me to present on the road at that exact moment in time and to add another pleasant memory to my car/bike/engineering marvels obsessed life.

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Even those who are not really as big as a car/bike/engineering fan-boys like me would find the legend of Hayabusa's creation totally irresistible. It's part of modern manufacturing folklore, something you might want to tell your grandkids as a bedtime story. OK, just kidding about that part, but it's still a very cool story. Towards the late 1990s, the four Japanese motorcycle biggies namely Yamaha, Kawasaki, Honda and Suzuki were engaged in a tussle to consistently outdo each other in the top speed figures of their production (i.e road-legal) motorcycles pushing the limits of motorcycle and aerodynamic design with every new model that they launched. As the year 1999 arrived, at the top of the high speed hill was the Honda CBR1100 Super Blackbird with the speedometer capable of touching nearly 300 kmph. The Blackbird motorcycle was in turn named after the SR-71 Blackbird, an US Air Force (USAF) fighter plane which had for decades held the title of the fastest plane in the world consistently cruising at speeds above Mach 3 and had to be eventually retired because no fighter plane really needs that kind of speed under existing combat conditions. The natural world also has a bird family called blackbirds, inspiration for the plane's name but they are not really remarkable in any way except that they are found all around the world in one form or the other. The only reason the plane might have been named the Blackbird was not its record-breaking speed but probably its stealthy dark looks. Whatever logic there might have been behind the naming, the folks at the USAF and subsequently Honda were quite lazy when it came to choosing a name for their top-end machine. A point which folks at Suzuki, Honda's rival must have noted.

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The avian natural world has a very real speedster though. The peregrine falcon - with it sharp eyes, and even sharper talons is capable of reaching speeds of 200 mph (320 kmph) during a dive to catch their prey. The migratory ones fly 15500 miles (24800 km) a year from the Arctic circle to South America and back. The word 'peregrine' means wanderer and with all the bird's talents, calling it a superfast wanderer wouldn't be inappropriate. And amongst many other smaller birds that form the peregrine falcon's food, there is a certain bird called the blackbird which shares the same habitat as its predator. When the Hayabusa was launched by Suzuki in 1999, it beat the Honda Blackbird's top speed by a good 10-12 mph (16-19 kmph) reaching nearly 200 mph, thereby making it the new fastest motorcycle in the world, a challenge which Suzuki engineers had taken up very seriously and completed. Soon after that, Kawasaki tried to top that speed with the Ninja ZX-12R but failed and then for the sake of rider safety and government regulations around the world, the 4 Japanese motorcycle rivals reached an unwritten agreement that they would not try to outdo each other on the speed front any longer and concentrate on the comfort of the ride instead. Therefore, the Hayabusa has remained for a long time (frome 1999 till date) on the top of the velocity charts for a bike you can buy from a showroom and straightaway zip out onto a road. As for the name chosen by Suzuki, the Japanese kanji symbol for Hayabusa, in the language's beautiful pictographic way of depicting objects, gives a big clue (See image above) as to what it means. Look carefully and it's hard to miss the shape of a bird of prey descending on a hapless smaller bird, a graphic which can be found on the sides of all Hayabusas and is also a very popular motorbike sticker in India, without most people knowing its significance. The Japanese word for the peregrine falcon, if you haven't guessed it already, is hayabusa. Hence was born the legendary motorcycle's name - Hayabusa, the hunter of Blackbirds!

Slumdog reality

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I just finished reading Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" and find myself in a curious place between anger and acceptance. The novel is unsparingly scathing in its appraisal of India's 'progress' post liberalization and  its hard to deny that it is brilliantly written. Its been a while since I raced through a book in a couple of days as I managed to do with this one.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was a horribly made movie especially in contrast to the sheer brilliance of the writing in "The White Tiger" but for the moment I'll put both of them under a single spotlight as portrayers of an image of India that we'd rather turn our faces away from. They are more a recreation of how a Westerner would like to perceive India as. We don't live like that, we console ourselves, yet that is the image that a Westerner wants to retain - as "the poor people, hungry people" scene of Munnabhai MBBS fame illustrates. We have fine world-class buildings, houses, schools and factories, we claim, wondering why don't the Westerners discuss those for a change!

It is so sad that we continue to pull this wool over our eyes. Crores of our people live in those sub-human conditions, on our city's footpaths, in our city's slums, in faraway villages without the most basic of amenities and mostly without even enough food, unable to lead a respectable life, caught in the vicious quicksand of communal violence, extremist regionalism, social evils like the caste system, overwhelming corruption and unimaginable levels of poverty. So obscenely are the odds stacked against our country that it is a wonder that we haven't self destructed as a nation already. 

The novel speaks in the voice of the protagonist of the metaphorical 'white tiger' who will have to, will need to eliminate certain obstacles in his way in the foulest way possible to even achieve a humanly acceptable standard of living. Or he will have to stay trapped forever in the cage which his birth and economic situation have plunged him into. As of today, there is no way forward for the hardworking, honest fellow (Was there ever though?) especially with respect to that strata of our nation, the majority of our population actually, which has difficulty in making two ends meet and is at the mercy of the government's 'welfare' schemes. Intelligence fortunately or unfortunately is not just a privilege of the rich and the comfortable. So if some drastic action is not taken to correct the injustice in the system and to remove the stink of thievery in broad daylight from it, we will indeed become a nation of 'white tigers', a nation of super-intelligent criminals who have discovered that the wrong way was the only right way to survival and success.

The deepest cut

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Yesterday, I saw it happen once again. I have witnessed it so many times by now that I am sure it is an inevitable tragedy for anyone who has the guts to sit at the wheels of a car in this city. It was a slow speed accident. Something about a high speed crash says that yes, you were driving rashly and quickly on a stretch of road which was not meant for it and so in a sense, you were asking for trouble. But when the traffic is moving at a snail's pace, and you are safely guiding your own vehicle through the mess one foot a minute, it is so much more heart-rending when some buffoon who is on the same slow course dings your car. 

This time it was a brand new red Tata Indica who got tagged by an oldish grey Honda City. The Indica driver was on the verge of tears and sputtering angrily at the driver of the City "I will punch you to pulp. I'll beat you black and blue. I'll smash in all your car windows!" He knew fully well that he could do none of those things with a cop standing next to him and the huge back-up of cars behind him on the narrow lane that he now blocked, honking in unison for him to make a move on. He also knew that on another day, it could've been him trying to sneak his way past another excruciatingly slow car and in a last moment error of judgement failing to come down on the brakes quick enough.

This unfortunately is the bitter reality of Calcutta's roads. The joys of owning and driving a brand new car are balanced out by the terror of getting into scrapes and head-on encounters with some wayward driver or the other. The slight ding or scratch must hurt like hell even if you are not the typical car lover. After all, the thing costs a lot of hard earned money and who doesn't like a new and shiny ride to stay that way. I have come up with a solution of my own for the time when I buy my own new car (A red Swift is high on my list of the car I have forever wanted to buy). Before venturing out on the roads to take on the incredibly horrible traffic of this city, I would request a hammer from the showroom's garage. Then I would swiftly ding my car with the aid of the hammer and drive away with the knowledge that the worst deed that can be done to a glinting, metallic beauty of my new car has already been done and at least find some consolation in the fact that I myself was to blame for it!