Where the Dragons Fly

Indian car buyers: a smarter generation

2011-09-21T10:03:00.001-07:00

If you are an automobile manufacturer and want to launch a model in India, you albeit have to do a lot of market analysis. And the huge market in India provides a sea of data to base your analysis on. How many Mahindra Scorpios were sold versus how many Tata Safaris? What is the preference of any particular geography? Did more Safaris get sold in the Northern parts of India? If yes, why so? Does it have to do with the cultural preferences of a particular race? According to a market research agency, although a Mahindra Scorpio is more reliable and the service experience is infinitely better than at a Tata outlet, North Indians have shown the Safari preference over a Scorpio solely on the basis of aesthetics. Do Indians go by hearsay or do they make their own decisions? Is www.team-bhp.com a place where potential customers gather their information from? How does it influence their final buying decision?

You can understand if a foreign manufacturer like Nissan or Renault have not had the chance to do a lot of research before coming into the market and hence some of their solo products are not even taking off. Nissan, for example, have sold only a handful of their Teana, which is a premium luxury sedan. On the other hand, Skoda could manage to sell a lot of their Superb in the same price bracket. The number has nothing to do with the quality of a premium product like that but with a customer's buying behavior. Now let's look at what influences an Indian customer's choice between Renault Fluence or Chevrolet Cruze. The Cruze is better marketed both in print and television ads, there are many Chevrolet outlets in your city, and a test drive can easily be arranged. Because there are other Cruze owners around, one can ask around about any quirks that their cars have shown. So, even if there are persistent clutch problems and climate control issues reported in a Cruze, a customer can be seen preferring it over a Fluence. If the customer, however, prefers elegant European designs over flashy American ones, she might think between the Fluence and the Skoda Laura and opt for the latter. "Let Renault sell some more cars without the help of Mahindra, let them set up a few more dealerships in my area/city, and I can think about it."

Chevrolet themselves couldn't get it right initially. They were launching petrol models one after another, and all of them tanked at the box office. The much publicized Aveo lost out to Ford Fiesta, which had a diesel variant coupled with aggressive sales. The U-VA was launched a few years ahead of its time when the Indian mindset was to buy hatchbacks priced only below Rs 4 lakhs or so. Their diesel Tavera did sell as a people mover, allowing them to stay afloat, but it was the launch of the Optra Magnum diesel that changed the game for them and brought them back to contention.

The only manufacturer that staunchly held on to its "only gasoline" cars was Honda. And in the current scenario, they have also been forced to slash the prices of their models drastically. When you get a Fluidic Verna crdi or a Ford Fiesta Kinetic TDCi for a similar price, why would you buy a petrol Honda? The Jazz, a premium hatchback, was frugal in terms of fuel efficiency (the 1.2 liter mill being a really efficient one), but the initial pricing was a huge mindblock for an Indian customer. "If I pay 8 lakhs, why should I go for a hatchback?" So the price cut on the Honda Jazz is the biggest we saw in recent times.

Did the Indian manufacturers have it easy? Take the case of Tata Aria, premium 4wd UV with 17" wheels and unlimited features. The people who did the market research for Tata got it all wrong. They launched a product at such a premium pricing that nobody who could afford to shell out that kind of money would want to settle for a Tata product. They could easily go for a Ford Endeavour, a Chevy Captiva, or more importantly, a Toyota Fortuner. More reliable, better plastics and interiors, better service. Why Aria? I will leave out the discussion about its design because it is just a little more inspiring to look at than the Innova, and the front grille looks straight out of an Indica. At least borrow the Safari's grille? But that's my personal opinion and nobody has to subscribe to it. So, after all this didn't warm up the Indian customer, they had to go back to the drawing board, take off a lot of the features, take away the 4wd transmission case, and relaunch it at a much lower price point. Within days of this rethinking, one could see many Arias on the road.

The Skoda Yeti 1.4 is coming, did you know? Another relaunch, another story of having read the Indian customer wrong. The price will be around 11 lakhs. The one available abroad delivers a peppy 122 ps so one can expect this 2wd beauty of a car to get a fresh lease of life on Indian shores. Surely the Indian car buyer can't be fooled no more. And there are some morons still building the Morris Oxford and trying to sell it to us.

Where to?

2011-05-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

You ask me where to, and I don't have an answer really. Where to is a question that can be answered by people who have a specific destination. Like they would say, to the horizon, to the edge, to see the sun going down. I can't say that. I would laugh as I say that because knowledge lends a certain humor to things that are impossible. But then, sometimes you want to say things that don't make sense in general but make a lot of sense to you. For example, if I start writing about one of my experiences without any context, you wouldn't understand, but that would be writing for myself, without thinking of you. You, the reader, would cease to exist. Is that how one should ideally write, without any cognizance of there being a reader or a bunch of them later? The wine on an empty stomach burnt its way down and I felt I should have first had some butter at least for it to not affect me adversely. It fucked me up for a while, made me high-strung, temporarily. I am not high-strung. Is it hyphenated as a noun? Maybe not, but right now I can't check. The wine and then the acceptance speech for my Oscar. Yes, thanks guys for recognizing my talent. You have a lot more coming. Those wrinkles can't be hidden, but somehow they aren't hindering normal life. Did you know that? That despite wrinkles people like you and get attracted to you? That you don't have to listen to all that crap about ageing because ageing is natural and doesn't really mean ceasing to live? I didn't. I always thought I had to look good and then I couldn't live up to that expectation. I would look into the mirror and get a shock. And then gradually I stopped looking, stopped bothering about the crumpled shirt or that obstinate strand of hair. Stopped bothering about my body being not perfect, about the head being too big, about the nose being crooked (and now short after the surgery), about the love handles and the paunch, about the spindly legs. I realized I can still love myself with the flaws and the people who love me are not really bothered. They love me for other reasons and the flaws are just human in their eyes. For long, you know (yes, you are right...am still writing for you and not just for myself), I was not high-strung. I never grew up knowing that it is okay to want. I was always told it is not okay to want something. So every time I wanted something, I told myself it was wrong to want. And somehow it became a habit to do what others wanted me to do. It is good to please others. Who said this, initially, for me to believe in it so strongly? Is it part of our culture to grow up to please others? So, along with doing things for people and conforming to their image of me, I also stopped believing in feelings. It is not right to feel. You are coldblooded, you can't feel. You can't feel love. If someone gives you love, love him back. Don't love by yourself. Loving means pain, and pain makes you high-strung. I quite like the hyphen by now.

But then the wine and the acceptance speech and a movie that makes you cry were together working toward opening me up. And I opened up. Only two drops? Is that all you can afford to cry? Isn't it okay to cry when you should? Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead, remember?

Like the other day when you left me alone and slammed the door behind you. That day when I could hear the click of your heels fading away into the distance. That day, I stayed back behind the closed door and thought if it has moved me. You took my hand and wrapped it around your waist. "See? Nothing happened, see?"

Well, perhaps nothing happened. Perhaps a lot happened. Perhaps the setting wasn't right for us because if I were at your place, I wouldn't have stopped there or taken my hand away. You worry about me being in love, but here I am telling you that I have been taught never to fall in love. I haven't even come close to falling. Women have come and gone, using me as I customized myself for them. Funnily, I was never paid. Right now, a striptease is in order. Just take away that mirror from this room because I don't like to see me again.

When you wait

2011-03-28T08:19:00.001-07:00

When you are infinitely waiting, time loses its significance.

"When I was fifteen and you thirty, and your toes ran up my shin, you could control my heartbeat. You could make it go faster, and my mind race through smooth, reflecting corridors at breakneck speeds. You controlled me. You controlled the rush of blood to various points, you controlled how frequently I had to go relieve myself of my bursting-at-the-seams libido. That particular act by you, running your toes up my leg under the table (something they casually refer to as a footsie today) was enough to make me want to marry you, proclaim my lifelong love for you, and make love to your utterly white legs in the bright neon light. To your legs because then I probably didn't know what lay between them. I mustered up the courage and ran my hand up your legs one day after bath. You seemed to enjoy the journey as my palm caressed its way up to a crucial point and then suddenly held my hand. It was like holding up the red flag to an already delayed train. It was lust, you were convinced despite my all-out attempts to make you believe otherwise. To me it was love and I had already waited long enough."

At fifteen

…

Life brought your toes up my shin

Like the message in a bottle came to the shore

When I ran myself up your lane, though

Was it time for you to reason or run?

"And then, the permutations of age brought me to twenty-six and you became twenty-three or so. It was still you though, this time thrown in together with me at a crucial juncture of our lives. Traveling salesmen don't have it easy, and as we rode my scooter from one client to another in the summer, it was just us clutching on to each other for comfort. If my sales dwindled one month, you covered up for me, and I did the same for you. You were way smarter, just like you were ten years back and I happily became your sidekick. We traded clients, covered up for each other but nobody minded as long as the sales figures didn't go down. I knew I couldn't live without you but couldn't tell you so. You told me ten years later. Ten years too late, don't you think? And why? Your black Peshawar eyes still dance my blues away."

A button-less shirt that can hardly cover a bust, I wanted so you don't see the tears

Your voice through electricity, comes crackling,

I miss you, so do I, but what can I say?

Today definitely is not our day.

"I silently listened to your stories. The age gap had somehow been moving like an undecided scale. Now you were perhaps ten years younger, or more. I felt older, wiser. Wisdom can get you there, you know? If you weren't a teenager with a perpetual blood rush, you could still get it. The attention, I mean, and there you were, longing in your eyes, coming straight at me, making me feel heady, young, ready to hit the treadmill. You needed my advice, counseling you to cope with your trauma, holding my hand and keeping it on your chest to listen to your heartbeat. It had gone slow, with pain. I felt pain with you, silently listened to your stories. Coffee, ice-cream, known and unknown streets, your hand in mine, my grip on life silently slipping away.

It was my turn to talk one day. You kept your phone away."

I was here, promised to be

For a longish period of time,

But then giving has its day.

The road takes a U-turn, eventually

"But the map said another way?"

Maps have given way to GPS, dude, maps have given way to GPS long back only you didn't know about it. How will you? Stuck in your love stories, unfinished, you hardly had the time to catch up.

"And today, your hand on my lap is warm and inviting. It has a language of its own. You like reading me, you say, but then I hardly write. You like the way my mind works, but the only inlet you have is this blog, so that's hardly representative. It is trash, didn't I say? Your hand finds its way to my heart. It hasn't stopped yet. It has raced with you, slowed down with your pain, sobbed uncontrollably with your departure, and has slowed down for me now. Keep it there for a while as I pick up my pieces from the virtual world. Scattered also has a pattern, someone said."

As I walk in a trance,

a million pieces of light dance on the floor

would have called it a disco

had they not been showing me the way

around my life.

Of Gemini Minds

2011-02-22T07:49:00.001-08:00

Who is that man in the red tee? He isn't particularly handsome, but has this really infectious smile. It is such a clean and disarming smile, you can't really not smile back at him. His eyes would get smaller, the crows feet would get prominently stretched, and his uneven teeth would peep out of his otherwise thin lips. He has very average features, but altogether they make an attractive picture. I caught myself not just smiling, but thinking about him even after he had gone.

Will he ask me my name? Will we meet again next week at Dr. Sushma Rao's clinic? Why does that man need therapy? He might be a single parent, but seems to be in control of himself. So why? Has he come to pick up a date? A psycho therapy workshop for single parents who're not being able to cope with things is a good place to pick up a date, isn't it? He hasn't done too badly for himself either, on the first day. He spoke about the trauma he went through when his wife died in a freak accident. And I could see two other ladies giving him the looks. I remember his account very vividly and kept wondering if I had come here to pick up a date as well? Haven't I? I am being able to cope pretty well with my single status because my mother has volunteered to step in and look after my Trisha, who's only two, but why did I want to come here? Poornima suggested Dr Rao. She felt I was going into depression and suggested I come for therapy. It is a workshop and the first day we took turns in talking about how we became single in the first place. We were not supposed to show any sympathy towards the person talking, the light would be focused only on him or her, and they would be made to talk to the darkness, pretending nobody was around. Weird, I thought. How true will the accounts be? Will they all be truthful? I, for myself, didn't talk about the absolute truth. I didn't tell them the real reason why Shobhan left me. I made up a nice story and put the blame subtly on him. I know it wasn't his fault at all. I was tired of him. I perpetually want to move on and I made things so impossible for him that he had to leave. He didn't want to go, but then, how long is love? For me, it has never lasted very long. Have I ever fallen in love ever? Do geminis fall? What is the name of this guy in the red tee? How will it be to make love to him? He has strong arms. Strong arms.

I woke up from my stupor with a shudder. What was I thinking? I didn't even know his name for god's sake! He is Three in the workshop. I am Four to him and to the others. I was impatient for the next session. Next Friday.

P.S. One spent his entire time today staring at me. A very handsome man with a hoarse voice. What was his problem? Why can't I remember?

The next Friday came and we had to put ourselves in each others' situations. Strange situations, really because how could I, for example, think that I am a man and my wife has left me? I was put in One's shoes and I had to play-act his part. After a while it started feeling good as the gender divides were broken and I started feeling very much like a man who's been spurned by his wife. One doesn't have a kid, so it is easy, but it was difficult to cope with the hurt. Today we were asked questions, and when Three (in a blue tee today) asked me questions aimed at One, it was a strange experience:

Three: So, how did you feel when your wife left you?

Me: I felt bad. I was in love with her and had absolutely NO clue that it wasn't working for her. What hurt most was how abrupt it was.

Three: Did it ever occur to you that you perhaps brought some arrogance into the relationship with your good looks? (he stared deep into my eyes now...is he complimenting me? is he referring to One being handsome?)

Me (this was difficult to answer, posing as a handsome man!): I can't help being handsome and, by the way, where did you notice the arrogance? I was just doing my job as a husband. I used to buy her flowers, I took her out regularly, and even went with her to her concerts.

(We were given a lot of details about the characters we would have to pose as, and I did my bit of homework. One's wife plays the violin and often had these concerts at various places in India and abroad. She has even worked with Dr L. Subramaniam and Jean Luc Ponty, so I could see where the breach must have come from. One wasn't possibly as intellectually inclined or capable as her and probably couldn't provide her any stimulation or useful company. But being in his shoes, I had to defend him.)

Me: We married knowing our vastly different backgrounds because there was love. I can't appreciate Carnatic Classical music and she knew my limitations. But then she doesn't know about software either. I am one of the best programmers at Oracle and even have five patents in the US for my work on the Oracle 8 database. So the basic premise was love. If it had worn out for her so soon, she could have told me, given me a hint at least? You can't just walk out on someone just like that? I still can't believe it."

This entire exercise was very emotionally draining. We all had to shelve our own problems, read up about the other person, enact his/her role ignoring the fact that the person being discussed is present in that room, in the darkness, probably fuming. There were many gasps and grunts, and at one point when Three was enacting me, I protested. He had read me all wrong. He kept talking about how I pushed Shobhan away. I didn't want to agree with that, but Dr Rao asked me to sit quietly. Was this therapy? What shit was this? How could Three read into my mind so well? How the hell does he know that I was the one who drove Shobhan up the wall? Oh my god!

I hated him for this. I wanted to hit him on the head. I kept thinking about Three the entire evening and late into the night. Who is he? Why was he so cocksure? And as my tablets started taking effect the hatred turned into reluctant lust. I noticed his thighs today. And when he stared deep into my eyes, I could feel something stirring in my tummy. My friend Sohini says her tummy hurts when she's aroused. I was not thinking of him, I wasn't aroused. You just notice these things but then you don't really act on them, do you? One asked me if I really found him handsome, to which I said he should actually ask Three about it because it was him who brought it up. How irritating. No wonder his wife left him and is perhaps composing music in Luc Ponty's studio, sitting naked with him. Serves you right, you prick.

The classes were going on fine for many months and we were even given our real identities after that exercise on Trust. We were made to fall backward trusting the person behind us to break the fall. It takes a hell lot to let go. I waited for my turn to be held by Three and when I fell backward, he held me firmly from behind, making my knees buckle. He is Pranjal, an Assamese. He told me about the accident but wasn't very curious about my husband. I asked her why he assumed I was the one who drove Shobhan mad and he said he was just playacting and that unless he added some color, it would have got really boring. Should I tell him the truth? Never.

He has asked me out next week. We will go to CCD Jayanagar, perhaps. He says he will come over in his jeep and pick me up sometime in the morning. He wants to drive around aimlessly and also mentioned that he might "abduct" me, which I didn't understand quite. This wait, this anticipation is so exciting, I end up shaking my leg a lot. I do that when am excited. Don't you? I can't show him my excitement. Was I too hasty in saying yes? What will he make of it? What have I said yes to anyway? Nothing. He says he wants to abduct me. Does he mean keep me for good? Gotta wait and find out.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ding dong.
"Hi, you're late."
"Yeah darling, what to do...the same bullshit routine...how did your Friday yoga classes go?"
"Oh those, Shobhan? Boring, as usual. Sushma is like good, but not brilliant."
"Hmm...why go then?"
"Just need to do something on Friday evenings, don't I? Did you get the veggies I asked you to?"
"Yeah, but I couldn't find those fat aubergines...what are those called? BT Brinjals?"

"Daddyyyyyyyyyy" a little girl runs into the room and straight into his lap.

"Oh Trisha baby, my woogly baby...lemme rinse me hands first?"

(conversation fades)

The Yellow Manila (a repost)

2011-02-22T01:46:00.000-08:00

It was a lazy morning and all I could think of doing was to sift through stuff gathered over the last couple of years. And out came the yellow manila that I'd almost forgotten about. There was a picture of her draped in an orange sari and many other paper memories. Photos of some missions in California, some even looking like an old South Indian temple. Especially that of the Mission San Antonio De Padua, the third of California's 21 missions.

She'd scribbled descriptions of all the articles on post-its behind the postcards and photographs. There was one paper napkin she'd saved from our visit to Lori's Diner. Neatly folded and as white even after being mothballed in the yellow manila for more than two years now. That evening at Lori's Diner we ordered one banana split, which, when it arrived, had us gasping.

It was a very big banana.

And then there were these unused BART tickets that she never used. Just so I could save them as memories. All this prompted me to shoot off an e-mail to her. As I waited for a reply, I thought about the last evening we spent sitting on abandoned railroad tracks facing a lake.

"Why didn't I meet you in school?"

"Yeah, that would have been nice. You'd have been this tall girl two classes my senior, on whom I'd have had a crush. And we could have gone biking in abandoned wastelands."

"Why abandoned? Why not on streets with cars? Or people?"

"Then I wouldn't have to share you with anybody else's gaze. I could watch you in peace."

"Oks, let it be abandoned wastelands then."

We didn't speak for a long time after that. She was dropping me to the airport that night and I still hadn't packed.

**********

I didn't get a reply to my e-mail the next day. The message came back saying there were permanent, fatal errors with the address.

Bovine Confidence

2011-02-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

When I dated her, I swore that I will make her drive a truck one day. It was almost like a mission I had taken up with a lot of conviction in the dictum "anyone can do anything." In my case, this anyone was someone who had forgotten to ride a bicycle, so you can guess the gradient of this uphill task. Cycling and swimming are things you never forget, and this anyone in question had forgotten the former and never learnt the latter even after two floral costumes and gallons of chlorinated water in her system. To make her drive a truck? Hopeless. Some literature students also mentioned that I will be left hapless, a word am yet to find the meaning of.

The first car came and went after four years. She never tried it. The second one was a relatively new jeep, which she tried driving a couple of times. She managed pretty well given the jeep's steering sends you zero feedback about the road and the brakes lend you no confidence at all. I was getting hopeful that one day from the jeep she will graduate to a truck. I was proving people wrong and would take videos of her at the helm, with the jeep doing most of the driving. Driving this jeep is like taking your St Bernard out to walk and letting him take control of you, so sometimes I wondered if she was driving at all or just sitting there, pretending to.

But she was the driver indeed, as all her four licenses (from four different Indian states) stated with authority. It is criminal to have more than one license in this country, but you can have as many as you like. This probably explains why she makes a U-turn every time there's a cop on the road. Once at this junction the traffic lights weren't working and the cop was managing the traffic. When he gestured towards us, she made a sudden U-turn, pushed the smallish car in the right lane onto the median, and sped back towards home. I realized most of our weekend outings would go waste if all we did was to go a certain distance and turn back because there were cops on the road. I took over. And she went to the passenger side.

Our child, who watches most of his classmates being ferried from home by their driving moms, was waiting to show off a jeep-driving mom, but that was not to be. Using the cops as an excuse, she gradually forgot to drive, like she forgot how to ride a bicycle. Unbelievable, but true. I tried reasoning that we should keep only the local license in the jeep and put the rest in the locker, but her fear of cops probably has something to do with her being a criminal in her past life, as her mother poignantly observed from the rear seat.

Meanwhile, people from the past, who had pitied me for having taken up such an impossible task, started showing up on various social networks. Some were fat, some were beautiful, some divorced, some married multiple times, and they were all suddenly curious (after having found me in the virtual world), how I was doing as far as buying a truck was concerned. I argued for a while that a jeep can also be called a truck, but that was what we had initially settled for years back when a truck meant a lorry.

I was generally burnt out with all this drivery I had to do and one fine day just dragged her to a car showroom and made her buy a car. The smallest available because she had forgotten how to handle the breadth of the jeep and wanted to start with a small car. Easy on the pocket in the long run, frugal, and peppy, so we were generally happy. Although it was a step backward (jeep > truck being the logical progression), I welcomed it with open arms. Finally someone is going to share some of the burden of driving and she can soon move from the small one to the jeep to eventually a truck. And then I will show my Facebook friends what a gentleman's promise really means. And she started driving.

First with a lot of trepidation, seat pulled to the front, eyes glued to the road, one foot on the clutch, one hand on the gearknob, one husband by her side. The husband in turn had one hand on the handbrake and the other held outside the window to warn all the other vehicles of a potential disaster. But gradually the husband learnt to relax and even breathe at times. One hand came in and the other one came off the handbrake. She moved from one gear to another, and settled for an optimal third, which can take you everywhere inside Bangalore pretty quickly.

All this while the little one was watching this progress from the rear seat. And yesterday when she did a 30 km stretch through relatively crowded roads from the south to the north of Bangalore, he decided to make a suggestion about how to handle the impatient, honking drivers behind you.

"You have to have the confidence of a cow, mamma."

"A cow?" I could almost see her eyebrows taking on this weird shape at this bovine hint. "What do you mean?"

"A cow, simply. What else? Haven't you seen how they don't budge from the road even if you honk? That's confidence. You should also ignore those guys honking behind you. Just like a cow."

Sugar?

2011-02-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

"Sugar?" he exclaimed, quite taken aback by my suggestion of mixing some in my vodka. He doesn't like vodka because the Russian engineers at MAMC made him sample some crude Russian stuff, hardly distilled, mixed with nothing but water. No wonder he hates vodka and treats male vodka drinkers with a certain kind of alarm...as if they may suddenly either turn queer or strip to their pink panties. And when the first of his daughters got married to one such male, he went into depression for quite some time. I can understand his feelings, can almost empathize, one can say. Almost like how I would feel if Aaron gets into a romantic liaison with a vegetarian Tambram. Wouldn't I be affected if something that monumentally catastrophic happens to my son? Wouldn't we all be? On top of that, this fellow is mixing some lime cordial and sugar into his vodka. Lime? Which respectable drinker worth his whiskey ever heard of mixing anything citric in his drink? Doesn't that entirely defeat the initial purpose? Of getting drunk?

Despite all these conflicts in his mind, and probably because he doesn't really have a choice when he's at my place, my pa-in-law has gradually started accepting this drinking aberration in me. Almost forgiven, after all these years. He quietly sits with his whiskey and watches me turn my drink into a sherbet. He can't help let out snorts from time to time, snorts of utter disdain at my absolute lack of drinking taste. But the snorts aren't audible perhaps burdened by the knowledge that I put up with his daughter in the first place.

"Hrrmmph...brave guy, after all. Hrrmmmph."

Tonight was one such night. He misses the husband of his second daughter, a man with impeccable taste in Scotch and Bourbon alike, a man who can really be called a man at last. Armed with the knowledge that his second daughter made the right choice and resigned to the fact that fifty percent success is not a bad score in life's intricate math after all, he appears mostly happy these days. Happy with his sudoku, crossword, and his grandson, who is showing all the right signs of growing up to be a whiskey drinker.

This happiness lasted many years, seven to be precise, when suddenly it was dealt another blow. The whiskey drinker son-in-law decided to move to London and move he did. And how. Every day over the internet voice chat wafts out stories of how the whiskey-drinker son-in-law is enjoying the various beautiful things the Scots have manufactured, packed in glass bottles of various shapes and sizes. He sounds so near over Skype, you can almost smell it all in the room. And that smell in your mind stirs memories. And memories can make you touched in the head at times.

So tonight. Yes, let me come to tonight finally. Tonight as I was frying a newly discovered fish in the kitchen and the atmosphere was thick with the smoke and smell of heavenly dinner, he let out one fairly audible snort. "Hrrmm...smells good...what's the point in having fish fry if not with something?" Before his words could fully come out, the whiskey and vodka bottles were out along with two glasses at speed that would have been jaw-dropping for Speedy Gonzales himself. Onions were finely chopped, the steaming fish (crisp and freshly fried) brought to the table, the rich sound of pouring liquid filled our senses, and the lights were dimmed. I could think of only "smooth" to describe the entire ambiance when suddenly there was a jarring note. My bad:

"Lemme mix some sugar in this."

"Sugar? Hrrmmmph."

But over the years his hrrmmphs have mellowed, have softened, have almost acquired this warm and caring tone. All the hrrmmmphs that followed tonight were of the same nature:

"So I will buy a Harley this year."

"Hrrmmmph."

"I want sex. The new SX-4 diesel."

"Hrrmmmph."

"Kids should be spanked by default every morning and evening."

"Hrrmmph."

"Am divorcing your daughter."

"Hrrmmph."

"Am pouring sugar into my vodka."

"Sugar? Ha ha. Pour me another one, wilya?"

Alto K10: A Dhantenan Road Trip (log of days 2 and 3)

2010-12-28T11:06:00.000-08:00

On Dec 25 we woke up at 4 in the morning, feeling like young gorillas. The Disprin had worked wonders with the fatigue and all the three of us were rearing to go. Aaron didn't have Disprins, but he too was excited to make up for the lost time the previous day. His sole aim was to reach Calcutta early, ring the doorbell, wait for his granny to open the door, and pounce on her. And for that to be achieved on time, we had to cover up a long distance on day 2.

Leaving Hotel Garuda Residency and finding NH-5 was pretty easy. We tanked up the car and set off. By the time we left the town, it was nearing 6.00 in the morning. My wife kept paying the toll along the way and saved the receipts. I will make a list of those as well. The road was fantastic like we found it between Naidupeta and Ongole. (On day 1 we found that between Ongole and Vijaywada, the road is being broadened, so you can expect the average speeds to come down a bit.)

After Vijaywada, the road in entire Andhra Pradesh is just amazing till the Orissa border, at Ichhapuram. We reached Ichhapuram around 3.00 in the afternoon. Before that we faced some stiff peak day traffic while crossing Vizag, but that wasn't much of a bother because Vizag is a beautiful town. It has the distinct smell of the sea from the right and the sight of the hills to the left. We could see boards pointing to the port and planned to visit it on our way back. Last time we did Vizag in 2007 Jan, we did a trip to Araku, but missed visiting the port.

Vizag is 386 km from Vijaywada and we reached around 11.30, clocking real good time. But it took us about 45 minutes to cross the town. We reached this distance in 25 liters of petrol. I was happy with the FE overall. Sayantani sounded pretty optimistic about doing Bhubaneswar, which is 429 km from Vizag. But memories of our last trip loomed large in our minds. Last time, in 2006 December, we suffered for about an hour at Ichhapuram, and to do Bhubaneswar, you have to cross Ichhapuram again. It was a chance we had to take.

As expected, at Ichhapuram, trucks entering Orissa had lined up and blocked the left side of the road. We had to move to the other side and keep going. Very soon we realized that even the other side is blocked by ongoing traffic. I really didn't understand how the oncoming traffic managed with their road being blocked as well, but for me, trying not to be sandwiched between those huge trucks was the primary concern. Luckily for us, this impasse lasted only ten minutes as the idle truckers doubled up as traffic cops and helped clear the traffic. All this without the help of the administration. The few policemen at the checkpost were busy getting their palms greased.

So we entered Orissa without much ado after all. What next? According to the map of the GQ http://nhai.org/gqmain_english.htm, only 37 km of the entire stretch is under construction and the rest is done. But if you cross Berhampore, you are suddenly taken off the road into a village that leads to another village. The condition of NH5 in Orissa is so pathetic, you wouldn't know where you are going. There are long traffic jams on narrow roads. There aren't any milestones to tell you where you are. The villages of Rambha, Balugaon, and Ganjam have three railway crossings between them, and getting stuck at any one of these can make life very miserable for you. By the time we crossed Ganjam, about 100 km from Berhampore, we realized that the NHAI map is seriously misleading. Bhubaneswar was still about 90 kms when we came back on the golden quad, but by then it was already 7.00 and very dark. We finally reached Bhubaneswar at 8.30 that night.

We should have listened to Arnab of IndiaHighways and checked in to Ridge Residency on the highway. The room they showed us was pretty rundown and we thought of finding a proper hotel inside the city and went in. Unfortunately, we missed out on the last room at Arya Residency, a decent hotel in downtown Bhubaneswar. What we eventually settled for was so pathetic, we ended up rather grumpy. The room was small, the toilet unusable, and the bedspread kinda creepy. The food came at 11.00 in the night and by the time we slept off, we had already started fighting with each other.

Day 3, Dec 26

The Disprins we had downed the previous night freshened us up the next day. We left early to avoid any more fights and the moment we hit the road again at 7.30 that morning, we felt very excited. According to our calculations, we had another 400 km to go. But hey, what does the milestone say? It says Calcutta is 493 km! How come? And then came many confusing milestones, one after the other, saying very contradictory things. The next one said 421, another 491, and yet another 405. Because all were pointing towards Calcutta, we kept going. And then the milestones got uniform.

We knew that the Orissa-Bengal border is also going to be a painful experience at Jaleshwar, but this time Jaleshwar was a breeze. The roads all the way from Bhubaneswar to Jaleshwar are being constructed, so do NOT believe the NHAI map at all. All you get is a single lane, with the other one being used by the local farmers to display their harvest.

After Jaleshwar, as we entered West Bengal, the roads were fantastic once more. But there was something strange that I noticed in this state. All the way from Andhra to Orissa, at all the toll gates, there are smiling, nice people collecting the fees. They wish you happy journey, smile generously when you say thanks, and make the next leg of the journey that much more pleasant for you. In West Bengal, somehow, NONE of the toll collectors had a smile on their face. They didn't make eye contact, they didn't respond to my "thank you sir" even once, and they had no helper standing outside to collect the toll and make the entire process more efficient. Poor Bengalis don't love the jobs they are doing because all of them perhaps think they are cut out for superior, intellectual things. Everyone is grumpy and full of some strange attitude, and the experience of an outsider is nothing short of entering a city infested by rude Parisians.

We reached Calcutta by 4.00 in the afternoon after a lazy day's drive. The Alto, as I mentioned in my first log, behaved superbly. It is a fill-it, shut-it, forget-it car, and responds to the throttle pretty quickly. For 3.93 lakhs on road in Bangalore, it is a real value-for-money, go-anywhere car. Now it has to take us back to where we really belong: Bangalore.

Alto K10: A Dhantenan Road Trip (log of day 1)

2010-12-26T08:26:00.001-08:00

The last-minute change of vehicle meant drastic changes to our entire plans. The Alto K10 is new, faster than the jeep, but can we take it from Bangalore to Kolkata? And what will happen to all that luggage we packed for a road trip to South Africa? This is one of the smallest hatchbacks in India and the luggage is meant for a Bolero. My wife (who was about to pack for a one-year-long road trip) was very dejected at the proposal, but I was secretly excited for two reasons:

she will learn to pack lean
I will get to drive the young and peppy Alto K10, which forever wants to fly

I quickly took the Alto to the nearest accessories shop and got sun films for the windows, a local stereo, and an entry-level roof rack that I didn't intend to keep after this trip. We were supposed to start very early on December 24, but I spent a long time at the accessories shop at Tilaknagar and came home really tired. When I reached, I was shocked to see that the first bullet point hadn't been addressed at all.

"What man? I thought you were packing everything into one bag?"

She had an evil grin on her face: "But then you got a roof rack, didn't you? Don't worry, I unpacked your three pairs of shoes and offloaded all your trousers. You have to survive with only two pairs of jeans for 21 days."

"But why still four bags?"

She had no explanation. She had packed things from one bag into another and when she finished, the number of bags was still the same and so was the bulk. We went off to sleep really late with a lot of apprehension about the size of the car...will it go?

Dec 24: Our journey started at 5.30 instead of at 4.00, and by then the fog was setting in. We had decided to give Old Madras Road the skip and took Hosur Road instead. The drive till Dharmapuri was slow because of the fog, but after a bio-break, we reached Vellore around 9.00 in the morning. Our target was to go from Vellore to Chittoor, and then touch Naidupeta at least by 11.00 in the morning. That seemed absurd right now, but so far, the Alto K10 seemed to be doing faster speeds than the Bolero. It is very easy to maneuver and if you are negotiating a zigzag overtake of two vehicles, it manages it with elan. I would never even dream of doing such maneuvers in the Bolero given its high CG. After a quick breakfast at Vellore, we hit Ranipetta and took a left turn towards Chittoor. That little distance of 43 km between Ranipetta and Chittoor was beautiful and quick. Beautiful because of the landscape all around and the winding road. Quick because there was hardly any traffic. Before Chittoor, we took a right turn toward the Tirupati road (also known as Chittoor bypass). We finally reached Naidupeta at 1.00 (350 km from Bangalore), way behind our original schedule. Rajmundhry seemed impossible that day, but Vijaywada, another 386 from Naidupeta, was within reach.

We reached Vijaywada at around 6.00 and entered the town. That is an average of 77 km per hour, quite a bit more than we could achieve during our last trip to Calcutta in the Bolero GLX. By 6.30, we had checked in to Hotel Garuda Residency, which is bang opposite the star-rated Gateway Hotel. We had carried lunch on the first day, so the stops were mostly under trees. I gradually started appreciating the packing by then. Everything was neatly arranged and planned, from the route map, the food, to the medicines (we Bengalis frequently need digestive pills...some say even after a yawnful of oxygen intake) and back at the hotel the clothes to wear and slippers. The Alto K10 behaved pretty well during the journey and hit 100 kph at 3000 rpm very easily. Despite the load, it touched 120 kph at 3500 rpm, but then there are many toll booths on the entire stretch to not let you be very adventurous. The fuel economy was pretty decent at 16.49 kmpl, and given the frequent third-gear chases, I feel it is very, very frugal indeed.

The Alto K10 has an amazing third gear. The manual says you shouldn't go beyond 119 kmph in third gear. Keeping that in mind, I made it zoom till 100 kph in third gear, much to the shame of many SUVs on the road, who are all mostly aggressive drivers to say the least (I, for a change, am a "nice" SUV driver...I never am aggressive...I never nudge cars off the road...I never swerve towards other cars trying to overtake just to make them scrape the median and topple to the other side only to be thrown into the air by a truck...I never switch on all my six lights while driving on the wrong side, blinding oncoming traffic...chhheeeee!!). Opposed to that, if I gradually try to speed from 80 to 120 in fifth gear, it takes a few seconds longer. Such decent behavior will obviously return more than 20 km per liter of petrol. But for me, the thrill of the sudden lunging forward in the third gear is too tempting to resist.

The food that night was awesome: kalmi kebabs, butter naan, and daal, followed by a couple of usual digestive golis and a couple of Disprins. I will talk about the effect of the Disprins later. Now for some sleep.

SIMULTANEOUS LIVES of a SAINTLY MAN

2010-12-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

“although I don't know if I should send an email to this account of yours, here I am, sitting in front of this email window, composing an email, a letter, or whatever nomenclature we attach to it now. some people hyphenate e-mail, even we used to a couple of years back, until the American Heritage Dictionary said it's okay to use it without one. do I care?”

she: hey

me: hey

she: nothing, emni

me: I am in the middle of an email

she: writing? reading?

me: nobody writes to me. you know. I'm the one who writes to people. you saved all my emails in a CD once.

she: yes I did. nobody wrote such beautiful emails to me ever. so i saved them. and now you don't write.

me: I do.

she: but not for me.

me: brb

"I really don't know if I do. I don't know my preferences like I don't know my mind. Do I like the Congress or the BJP? Do I hate both? Do I like the Communists? Or do I like a socialist ideology? Am I a capitalist? A consumerist? I never have a stand. I squirm at the thought that I have to belong somewhere, in some group of likeminded people who flock together, drawing courage from the fact that I'm not alone. What are you, a conformist? You too, like me, seem so confused. Not about your gods perhaps, because you are clear in your belief. That's one thing I'm clear about as well, only we don't see eye to eye. But when you look me in the eye and say "go away" while am still trying to unbutton you, I don't understand you. I feel you don't mean it. And you ask me if that is all I wanted of you when you very well know that it isn't a destination by itself. That is a physical manifestation of what I feel for you always. What do I feel? A strong urge to be near you. And we have achieved that."

me: hey

she: yes?

me: what would be the noun form of unnecessary?

she: isn't it an adjective? like unwanted?

me: yeah, for example, I want to say Am sure about the unnecessariness of gods in my life. what do I use?

she: LOL

me: what?

she: you made gods sound like unwanted appendages.

me: to me, yes, but to others they are necessary for various reasons.

she: is a tail an appendage?

me: no, it is necessary. Huko Mukho Hyangla had two tails, but was continually perplexed about which one to use to swat the fly.

she: for him then?

me: for him, yes...one can be called an appendage.

"We have been together, read together, bought music together, had coffee, spent nights in each others' company. Okay perhaps not the last one, but because I've always been with you even when alone, that thin line between what has happened and what hasn't has dissolved.

right now, the picture of you standing there in your black skirt with your back to the wall is vivid in my mind. The image is so real, you are moving in it, asking me to stare at your ripe little breasts from a distance. "No, don't come near," you are pushing me away with your forefinger, "look at me from a distance." And as you are trying to gauge my reaction, watching me devour your beautiful body with my eyes, I keep looking at the watch because time is running out. Our time always runs out before it starts. When will our time start? And then it has to end one day, but why can't it start? I have already made a fool of myself inside you last time, so all I wanted was a kiss. A proper kiss without you moving your head away. Don't, don't, hold it still for a second and let your lips part. Am parched. There you go, nodding your head and swinging your hair, which lashes me on my face like long, thin whips, leaving invisible marks that will never go."

she: but then, can you swat a fly with your tail?

me: huh?

she: you said Huko swatted flies.

me: I said he didn't. He didn't know which one to use. Gimme a minute.

she: hmm

"I miss you. I miss being with you right now. I miss lying still on your lap and looking up into the leaves and the stars beyond. Where was it that we sat like that, under a tree? I could see the Pole star very clearly that night, giving me a feeling I was somewhere really up north.

me: hey, where's the Pole star located?

she: how do I know? Whom are you trying to impress? Nobody's that gullible anymore, am sure.

me: hmm

"But do you get to see the Pole star from the north? In my imagination, that is precisely the case. I miss you when you stay incommunicado, perhaps looking for your answers, perhaps looking into your daughter's eyes and wondering if this thing we share is worth it. See? In my imagination you already have a daughter. You already are married. You already are behind that spotless, impregnable sheet of Saint Gobain glass, so near yet beyond the reach of my fingers. But all I want to see now is you walking through my door, which is left ajar in anticipation. I know you will come, perhaps without knocking. You never need to knock because all I have is yours anyway."

she: hey, he wants a Jeep Nukizer.

me: what is that?

she: oh, the ultimate off-roading machine now that the Hummer's decommissioned.

me: really? lemme check.

me: WOW, it looks awesome. so he is buying one?

she: I said wants.

me: I will be all alone tonight, do you wanna come?

she: WHAT? are you out of your mind? We are over all that, so please don't be weird.

me: but I love you!

she: how fucking lame can you get?

me: brb

"It isn't worth a Jeep Nukizer, but then you never needed a jeep. You probably need a quiet study. Let me go build that now, it takes a few seconds..."

she: you get me worried at times. why don't you buy some sex? I can't sleep with a man who isn't ready to take it further. I was a fool once, but not any more. I thought we understood each other. You make me feel sick at times.

me: hold on, hold on...someone's ringing the bell...brb

Road Tripping

2010-12-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

I know you will go awww when you hear that it is again a road trip to Calcutta, but after my dad's passing away, we have left a lot of things unattended there. He left some farewell notes that he had been writing since March, but to us it seemed like he died in a hurry. There were things to be discussed, stories to be heard, history lessons from the subaltern's point of view, of how Haji Mastan was killed, of how the Japs bombed Calcutta during WWII because the Americans set up a base there, of how jazz came with them, and nightclubs sprung up. It would seem to you that he timed his death in a manner that had a finality to it. He just finished his last manuscript a couple of days before he passed away. Like full stop, am done, here I go.

So the road trip this time is to go again in search of his vast mind, stored in the form of newspaper clippings from way back in the fifties and sixties, books purchased and collected over a period of sixty years, old and yellow letters exchanged with his friends (some of whom are not there any more), some new books that I brought him during my Penguin and OUP days, my old books, the books that I flicked from the university library (which he never reprimanded me for), books of history, music, and poetry, of Latin American music and culture, of Italian short stories, Picasso, and a humongous collection of Russian literature. It will take time to reach 2000 kms by road, but even more time to sift through all the material in the little time that I have.

The jeep is ready. At 99000 km, the Mahindra Bolero GLX (with the XD3P Peugeot engine) still is strong as a war horse, quietly going about its duties. I don't hear a creak so far, but I can pat myself on the back for having treated it well. I got it new shoes at 47000 kms, rotated the tyres at every 5000 kms, got the suspension overhauled from time to time, kept changing the belts (there are four under this bonnet) and the various pipes at regular intervals. The nicks and cuts were tended to, it got regular touch-ups done, and now it has some new stickers too, and nice fog lamps. The upholstery is new and so are the alloys, so the overall experience is not that of driving a relatively old jeep.
This time the route will be almost the same as the last time, apart from a slight change on the first day. Instead of going via Old Madras Road, we will take the NICE corridor> Hosur Road> Krishnagiri> Vellore> Chittoor route. It will take us to Naidupeta via Tirupati and will be a tad longer than going via Kolar and Palamner, but because the Old Madras Road is being made now, we would like to stick to the Golden Quadrilateral as much as we can. We want to do Rajmundry (more than 800 kms) the first day (anticipating about 14 hours of driving), failing which we can stop even earlier at Eluru or Vijaywada. Photos and updates on Facebook will be done en route. There's a Belkin car adapter to power everything from a laptop to a mosquito repellent, so we even plan to have mobile tea, courtesy Sayantani, my navigator. She's been busy looking up the maps and surfing for hotels online, and has also managed to pack enough stuff for a journey all the way to South Africa. "You never know," says this lady who can be described in short as never-a-backpacker-when-you-can-carry-fourteen-pairs-of-shoes. How we will manage to put everything inside the jeep is another issue, and worse comes to worst we might even have to get a roof rack this week. A friend in Hyderabad has even been kind enough to offer his trailer to save my marriage.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. The luggage is well under control than it was last time. (For all you know, she might be reading this.)

The second day we would again like to cover a distance of about 750 kms, all the way to Bhubaneswar. Arnab Ganguly of IndiaHighways recently did this route and has posted some details of hotels and other resorts on the way, so am gonna keep his list handy. I have already passed on all the details to Sayantani. I received some good pointers about the first day's route from Raja Sekhar Kommu and Sriram Subramaniam of IndiaHighways, so those emails are being treated with more care than the Eicher atlas. Yes, we don't have a GPS device yet and probably will never need one in India. But then, we never wanted a cellphone either at one point!

So far so good. If we do Bhubaneswar on the second day, the third day's journey to Calcutta can be done in less than eight hours, giving us enough time to reach before sundown. Even if the first two days are a stretch, nothing can beat the beauty of the St Paul's Cathedral spire or the Victoria Memorial's dome catching the last orange rays of twilight. It will be sad to enter the vacant apartment my dad had so nicely maintained, but am sure he will be present in every particle of dust to have settled on the bookshelves.
Pics courtesy:

www.bl.uk for St Paul's Cathedral

rovinglight's photostream on Flickr for Victoria Memorial

An Evening in India

2010-12-07T08:45:00.002-08:00

"Shroff is Punjabi," Tulika said with a period.
"NOOOO, this guy is so not a Punjabi. He is a Kannadiga."
"We'll ask when he gets here then?"

We four were at Pecos, listening to Jerry Garcia, as the waiter came and refilled our mugs. Tzameena had come back to Bangalore after four years in the US, Tulika had come to meet her from Pune, and their friend Tever Peer was always in Bangalore. I knew only Tulika, and the other Ts I was meeting for the first time. Being the only guy with three girls, the idea of another guy joining us soon made me brighten up. I didn't quite care about what language he spoke, Punjabi or Kannada.

The girls were being themselves, their squeals and cackles making me feel like a distant observer. Observe I couldn't much because of my shades, which I had to wear to cover my infected red eyes. And Pecos is dark, pitch dark. Some say the food tastes good there mainly because you can't see it. Or you don't care because the draught has already started dancing with your senses.

"Even the loo is the same," Tulika remembered. I knew she got nostalgic, but this was the first time I saw someone getting nostalgic about the dingiest loo in the dingiest pub of Bangalore. I say "dingy" but that's where I go back to. It has this deliberately retro, rundown look, with deliberate Floyd, Grateful Dead, Doors playing from old audio cassettes, to remind you that the world was a lot more beautiful before the iPod generation set foot on it.

"Yes," I nodded in agreement. I had to go twice already to prevent the beer from screwing up my balance, so I knew what she meant. The loo definitely was still the same. And then I discovered popcorn in my beer. I've had corned beef. Liked it pretty much, I must say. But corned beer? I thought I will let it pass as merely a typo when something strange caught my attention. The girls were aiming at each other's necklines and dunking popcorn like those deft NBA blokes. I forgot about the popcorn in my beer and watched in utter horror. The people at the other table were busy head-banging to Bad Moon Rising and didn't seem to mind one bit. Eventually a few of those got dunked into my shirt and I got into the spirit of the game. By then the tacos and crabs were almost over and the free popcorn too.

Shroff came in late. Short, bearded, my liking for him was almost instant. Some might want to argue that it was mainly because I was craving for male company all this while, but then, let's not argue about the "why" now. Fact remains I liked him. We struck up a conversation and then in walked Roshni, another friend of a friend. The conversation grew, multiplied, criss-crossed, and soon looked like a busy underground network. Meanwhile, we somehow managed to move from Pecos to Koshy's and the group had gotten bigger. We could see Prof Ram Guha sitting alone for a while before being joined by two of his friends. I contemplated going up to him for an autograph, but didn't have a proper diary/notebook in which to take it. I don't want to disrespect India's best-known historian by asking him to put his signature on a piece of napkin. Mr Prem Koshy (who was there too, looking dapper in his shawl) perhaps wouldn't mind doing that given that the napkin would have Koshy's written on it, but Prof Guha? Nawww. Some other time, then.

Tzameena couldn't drink at Pecos (because she hates beer), so she was filling herself up like a tank in a hurry. Tever was quietly taking pictures. Shroff found himself in the unenviable situation of being between two beautiful ladies who had joined us later. I remember asking him which one he was seeing, but because the question was put bang in public, all he could manage was an "ummm" with both the girls curiously trying to lipread his mind. Roshni constantly came up with novel catch phrases and kept us entertained. She was narrating a story of how some huge blokes once chased her in Ohio and all I could manage was a stupid laugh! I think the laughter was because she talked about their "size" meaning "bulk" and me doing some instant napkin math. But then, you hardly want to analyze the reactions of someone in high spirits.

We discussed nothing in particular but then almost anything under the sun. It was a motley group of unconnected people sitting together and enjoying each others' company, exchanging notes on almost every topic. A gang of 25-40 year old urban Indians. And as I went to a distance and listened to the buzz, to the topics they were freely discussing, I realized that middle-class, urban India has had a paradigm shift in its thinking since I last witnessed it. From gay relationships, live-in relationships, jazz bands, Bertolucci's Dreamers, anti-rightist political leanings, jobs around the world, Mahasweta Devi, latest mobile apps, motorcycling adventures, cleavages, and the need to care for your parents while they are still there, these people were already open and aware. They knew what they wanted, they had their opinions, and even after having enjoyed one evening of revelry they will go back to their respective lives, chores, and influence others who are probably not so privileged with information. This is not a judgment about whether it is good, bad, sinful, or inadequate to be what we are today, but just a huge exclamation mark a few points bigger than the normal font. I changed some of the names here to make them race-agnostic, but even if I put the real ones, you would realize that this can be a scene from any city in the world. Am I trying to make a point here? What started off as just a casual description of one evening spent with known and unknown people suddenly took a serious turn, giving the impression that I am trying to make a point in this article. I am not. I am not saying anything new to you. You perhaps witnessed this change yourself. I perhaps hadn't, being busy changing diapers. I have a vague feeling it isn’t a change after all because all this was so part of the Delhi I saw ten years back. My parents would perhaps argue that this was the scene fifty years back in Calcutta as well, when the fervor of Mao, French cinema, and unreal idealism gripped the youth of an entire city. In Delhi, when I saw it ten years back, these groups were not common, not from the dregs. There was always emancipation in small pockets, restricted to the college campus or intellectual dos. This somehow seemed more generic, more everyday to me. Am I calling this emancipation? Maybe not. Maybe just a change in some direction. Maybe just the illusion of a change. Maybe there was no such evening, or many. I, unlike the people I met today, am scared to have an opinion of my own, living in the comfort of the dark alley between two houses where nobody asks you uncomfortable questions.

I came home and raised a silent toast to all the people I met today and also to the ones that came after us and sat at different tables. We finally forgot to ask Shroff if he was a Punjabi or a Coorgi. But that didn't make any difference to the evening.

Boredom

2010-11-25T01:18:00.000-08:00

Boredom spreads all over and around you like a blanket and gradually comes down to wrap you around. You're lucky if you have caught it in its flight towards you and escaped its reach. But if you're caught, you end up being infinitely bored. All you can say to her is "you make me want to floss." And then the jeep racks seem boring, the fabricator's nag sounds like a whine (doesn't help that his name is Nagraj), the emails piling up in gmail look like tripe, the available list of chatters look like people you can piss on, the upcoming meeting at 3.00 pm sounds like an invitation into the Colosseum, only you are not a spectator this time. And then you are reminded of Roman Holiday, Return of the Dragon, and Jumper and want to go to Rome. Not to the meeting.
How is the line "You make me want to floss"? If a woman makes you want to floss or use Listerine, if a woman makes you careful about the smell in your armpits, if a woman makes you want to wear socks for a change, can you just say these things blindly to impress her? Like hey, I don't wear socks, but then it's you, so...
What would you expect her to say? Will she react favorably, do you think?

And then the clock strikes three.

So there

2010-09-29T01:20:00.000-07:00

I wanted to tell you how many of them came for your last journey, although I wish your face hadn't become altogether unrecognizable. It did occur to me get your dentures, which were lying gingerly on the chair next to the bed, but I discovered them only the next day. I couldn't recognize you at all and the entire exercise of going to meet you in that room full of corpses is something that will remain with me for a long time. I have tried to shake it off but it comes back. With time, the frequency of this imagery haunting me will reduce, perhaps, but I am looking forward to many more years of having to close my eyes, grind my teeth, and clench my fists to shake it off. Yes, you weren't a very pretty sight dead, but none of the other people lined up before and after you were pretty either. I distinctly remember all their faces although your last look is fast fading from my eyes. Anjanda and Chayanda were with you all through the day, Puja and Joy were there all through the night and so were Kaku and Jayanti di. And that day, as you had wished for, you were brought back to the cooperative society where people put some flowers all around you. You have probably seen all that from wherever you are, but because I don't believe in the concept of a trapped spirit hovering around, I am not taking chances and writing you this email. If not anything, you are definitely going to be online to check your email from time to time. Have you had the opportunity to meet Mr Russell up there? You got me, although everybody around me connects the name Russell with Russell Peters, the standup comedian. I bet Mr Bertrand Russell isn't any good with computers, so you have a good chance to impress him. I bet you are looking for one Mr Tagore whom you had worshipped all your life and more so towards the end of it, but then, I don't have any messages for him. Do tell him if you get to see him that I love his song Fuley Fuley used in Charulata. He has probably already met Mr Ray and the others, so am sure you will find that space rather crowded. Do they have a coffee shop too? Tell Mr Bishnu De that I'm reading his An Acre of Green Grass. Although I'm reading it more out of respect for you than for him, you don't have to tell him that. There are many things that are best left unsaid. Like I couldn't tell your publisher from Sumitra Prakashani that I don't like the quality of his production. Oh yes, he had come to the crematorium to see you. Initially I thought it was out of love and respect for you, but I have a sneaky feeling that he has some other reasons. He was really looking for that last manuscript you promised him. I wanted to tell him that his holier-than-thou attitude was highly suspect. And yes, I always wanted to tell you that all these holier-than-thou pansies that you had sucking up to you aren't the kind of people I can respect much. I think all those pseudo-intellectuals from Bengal should be given a free tour of how the rest of India has progressed. How long can you discuss Tagore's views on self-sustainable villages or his art? Or his cautioning of the world of the vices of nationalistic feelings? Well, Europe was ready to listen to him but then we had Hitler too. You despised that man, I know, but then the whole world did. I remember the paintings of Hitler that you showed me as a child and all those books on Nazi Germany you had. You never rated him highly as an author and didn't keep a copy of Mein Kampf either, but then I am an objective kind of man. I am not too passionate about anybody and am always ready to change my opinion. Something you should have tried doing yourself. It helps. It helps sometimes to accept that what I held as the sole truth all my growing years can crumble with one huge sweep of Perestroika. It helps to accept that I am wrong. I can do that from time to time. I can accept that my views on someone or something yesterday has changed today. And that yesterday I was wrong. Have you ever, in your lonely moments with yourself (I know you incessantly spoke with yourself), ever accepted that out of so many things that you stood for all your life, many weren't worth it? Were you always right? If you died thinking that, I guess you were very wrong. You weren't right in my eyes for various reasons. You weren't there as a dad although you were there for all the others who cried at the memorial service we held for you. I was your son, with no intellectual pretensions. I am a plain guy, but then you couldn't accept that, could you? Or that I married a plain woman who can't engage in a lengthy discourse about Abanindranath's water colors or Dinu Thakur's notations? But then, I am not complaining. I wish I could be there to at least give you an aspirin and make you come back because I felt you had many more years to go and many more books to write. Even if I didn't read them, people called in from far and away, just in case you are wondering. I saw you through their eyes and was left bewildered. What are they talking about, hello, I mean, he was MY dad, so what do you know better than me? They all knew better than me. They knew who you were and they said so. I, in the melee, forgot to ask you who you really were.

In and Out: the books in two trays (July-Aug 2010)

2010-08-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

In the In tray I had almost a hundred-odd books, lying there gathering dust since my Penguin days. To that I had kept adding at random, books that I always wanted to read but couldn't find the time to. And there are some authors that you just pick up even if you aren't gonna read them right then. One of them is David Lodge, everything by whom I have read so far (except for Author Author, which is a biography of Henry James and very unlike what I'm used to reading), and another is Roald Dahl, of course.

Last month I started cleaning out the In tray by reading one book after another. I instinctively reached out for the British authors from the In tray. First to go was How Far Can You Go? by Lodge (yeah, you guessed), which is about growing up in the Catholic England of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The young ones who could not come to terms with the Church's teachings, about condoms being forbidden, about discovering the pleasures of sex and trying to have a balanced life but failing miserably. Most of the characters ended up having around four kids not because they could afford to have them but because the safe method was neither scientific nor safe. I learnt about rectal thermometers, much to my disgust, and kept wondering how I would have fared as a Catholic in the England of the 50s. Perhaps my faith would have evaporated a little too early, who knows. FYI, most of these guys fell out of faith eventually and couldn't care much about Sundays any more.

Then was the turn of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, published in 1995. Wicked, British, and a modern-day Catcher in the Rye, of lesser proportions. I got to know about bands that I didn't know existed and also fell in love with Nick's narrative style. Casual, matter-of-fact, and very bold.

Third was Nice Work, by Lodge again, a book I had read long back in the early nineties as a PG student. Or perhaps when I was a salesman in Calcutta. In this book the British universities, living off grants and government dole meet British industries, probably on the brink of a recession, through two people, Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox. They try hard to understand one another and eventually the book triumphs in being able to make each understand the world of the other. Robyn, belonging in her ideal world of socialism and equality can't figure why the dirty jobs in the factory are being done by the Asians and how unscrupulously the management can get rid of them without a single thought. Vic, on the other hand, is aghast at the way people while away their time over coffee in the universities, apparently working. For him, spending money studying arts is itself a huge waste for the government exchequer, an idea that I quite liked. Not to side with him, but the very thought and the way it is argued, is worth giving a dime for.

Yes, Lodge makes them sleep with each other, something that I couldn't understand the need for. But maybe that symbolized the mating of industry with higher education. And when Lodge wrote this novel in the late eighties, the universities were trying to make money and sustain themselves. Maggy Thatcher had cut the grants. Gone were those days of idyllic lounging in the vast open spaces thinking of Saussure and Derrida and refuting everything that's said because it isn't what it apparently seems. Semiotic theory was always confusing.

Fourth came Roald Dahl's Going Solo, a book I finished overnight. It is racy, it is from the pen of the master storyteller, and what a story it is! It is devoid of any symbolism, full of stories from the second world war, and replete with images of Africa. Black and green mambas, Tiger Moths and Hurricanes, ju88 bombers, 109s and 110s from the Germans, and one guy called David Coke, who would have been the Earl of Leicester had he not been killed in his Hurricane by the Germans. This story, a real one, was so vivid and so nicely told, I couldn't for a moment put down the book.
I loved it when he comes back to the arms of his mom. For a moment it made me think of my mom, whom I lost a decade back. It also made me reflect on my life, which has been so dull and actionless unlike his. But then who wants to grow up in the middle of a war? That's what I would call the ideal storybook.

Next in line are some more British favorites from the libraries of our parents, I guess: Gerald Durrell, Tolkien, and Jerome K. Jerome. Yes, you won't believe, but I haven't ever read them apart from snippets or paras here and there. And then I will re-read some Peter Mayle, another British author settled in France, whose novels are free and beautiful. You can feel Provence in his stories, as if you are there, good French wine, and crimes that seem almost Italian in their panache.

Abandoned Chapter

2010-08-04T09:03:00.001-07:00

(This chapter has been bowdlerized from my "book" for being explicitly sexual in nature. So it can feature here.)

"I was about to come. Russell Peters calls it arriving but you know how it is when the act is hardly over and all you want to do is squirt it all inside. I slowed down and tried to savor everything about you. Your closed eyes, the muffled moans to not let your neighbors figure what was going on inside, the light jazz playing on your turntable, the moss-green satin bedspread, and the huge yellow cushions. I wasn't prepared for this and I had come to say hello and give you some imaginary flowers. White, I think. Or yellow, don't know. How did it start? I wanted to reconstruct how it all started but felt myself laterally expanding within you."

You can't really write an email explaining things after a lovemaking session goes horribly wrong. But that's precisely what I sat to do. Write to her about why I came so soon. Laterally expanding within a woman is a surefire indication of things coming to an end. And end it did, although it wasn't supposed to be over so soon. How long, five minutes? Maybe seven? What is wrong with you, Shuvo? And now she won't want to meet you a second time, I guess. Like all the others. Like Babli in Calcutta who was hardly warmed up by the time it was all over for me. And I didn't get a second chance.

"Hey, am in Calcutta next week, would you like to meet?"
"Oh, Shuvo, what a pathetic mistiming! I am leaving for a shoot today and won't be back in almost a month. How long are you here?"

Mistiming, indeed. It is all about getting your timing right. And that's where I went wrong from class 2 in school. Mrs Dhar couldn't make me learn to read time. "What time is given in the first diagram?" she would ask me, pointing to a diagram on the humongous blackboard that ran from one end of the classroom to another. Believe me, the clock turned into Donald Duck. And when I finally learned to read time, it wasn’t anything to show off because even Daffy could by then. So, my timing was wrong and so was everything else. I could manage to get a girl to bed, but would invariably abandon her when she was in midflight. And then she called. Not Babli, the woman from today.

"Hey..."
"Hmm...
"Am sorry, you know... I was so... unprepared"
"What are you sorry for Shu? I enjoyed every bit of it. Am just feeling bad about him. I shouldn't do this to him."
Okay, so she was trying another excuse about not meeting me again. Not bad, she almost sounds convincing.
"Don't worry, let's not do it again. I mean, I too didn't know it was all gonna happen. Just those ladies outside your lawn..."

When we were about to leave her house, we spotted some of her neighbors chatting outside her lawn. We both had to leave in a hurry, but were stuck inside. In consternation you hug. We hugged too and somehow this was a long one. She didn't stop my hands from sliding inside her kurta in search of gold. Her eyes were closed, breathing heavy, and as I tugged her kurta upwards, she lifted her arms. Before I knew it we were on her green bed, stark naked. And we made love, slowly, with caution, muffling our moans. It was pure, natural, missionary, and without any foreplay. The situation was our catalyst. It was all so lovely, so romantic; I just wanted it to last forever, forever. But then came this lateral expansion thingy almost like a Hun and ended it all for me. (Why do we associate Huns with everything bad?)

"Oh no Shu, it was lovely."
What was she saying? Does she want to..."Do you want to come over this week, sometime?" I almost regretted saying it.

There was a long pause, to end which I hastily added "I mean, to have coffee, perhaps, or Darjeeling tea, anything?"
"Did you like me so much, Shu? Do you?"

What can I say? She is really not making an excuse, is she? Is she, does she...I mean, really?

"You know I'm in love with you, don't you? I'm just wary of saying it. It will make both of us very neurotic. We will both want things we can't give each other. And you have a child."

"So do you, so do you..." her voice faded, as if she didn't want to believe in it for a while.

Total Effects

2010-07-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

"Hello, mamia, shunte pachhen? Can you hear me?"
"Yes, shuvo, tell me. Why didn't you come over with your wife and child this time?"

I was in a supermarket, watching the queue at the counter grow, and I had to decide something very quickly. A call with mamia (our aunt in Delhi) doesn't end quickly as she always has a lot to say. Usually it is about why we are not moving back to Delhi asap. We try to tell her that the weather in Bangalore is way too good for us to move anywhere else, but her love for us is so heartfelt, we can't say no on her face. We end with "one day we will have to move back to Delhi, that's where we are from, after all."

We are not from Delhi. We are from an industrial town called Durgapur, which would remind you of the mining colonies from Lawrence's novels. When we were born, Durgapur was infested with medieval people who were still learning to button their pants. As with all Bengalis, all Durgapuris also had their share of intellectual hangups, which made them try their hand at theater and singing, stuff that upheld your Bengali "culture." There were some "bhodroloks" from Calcutta, Jamshedpur, or Ranchi, bastions of Bengali culture, and there were also those that upgraded from nearby districts of Bankura and Purulia, whom the bhodrolok Bongs looked down upon. People were segregated according to the dialects they spoke, and it was really a rich experience observing the capers. Some Durgapuris could still associate with it and felt they belonged there because of their schools, but I couldn't say the same about myself. Being an average student, I had to change three schools and hence felt no emotional association with Durgapur whatsoever. So, to mamia we would always say "will come back to Delhi." Because that was the first city I bonded with, the first city that acknowledged my presence, and the first city that seemed like the stories I had heard of the US of A, a land of dreams.

This rushed conversation with mamia was not about assuring her of our eventual moving back to Delhi. It was about something else altogether. I just blurted it out.

"Mamia, which Oil of Olay do you buy?"

She was zapped. She probably didn't know the context of my question. My sister, who'd recently been to visit mamia, came back with stories of how her complexion is glowing these days and how all her marks are gone. With cheeks full of acne scars, I happened to latch on to the conversation my sister had with my wife. They mentioned Olay somewhere in their conversation and I remembered that.

"Oil of Olay? I have an oily skin, why would I need to apply oil on top of that?" Mamia had a point there.

"So what is it that you use? Something that takes care of the wrinkles and also the acne spots?"

I suddenly noticed that some lady shoppers around me were curiously listening to my side of the conversation. I was standing in front of the cosmetics section, and seldom do you find men standing there.

"Oh, that's Olay total Effects, shuvo. It is very effective. But why would you want to use that? It is for women?"

"Ahem, umm... you know, am like 39 already? And my wrinkles are not fine lines any more, mamia. They are showing almost everywhere: under my eyes, on my forehead, next to my mouth... umm... so, I was thinking if I could use something?" At about this point in the conversation I noticed one little girl fiddling with my shoelaces! I stamped my feet to scare her and carried on with this long-distance call that wasn't promising to come to a conclusion very soon.

Mamia for a long while tried to convince me that when she last saw me I had impeccable skin and that I still look 25, but I wasn't ready to believe her. The mirror has something very sordid to say, and I better paid heed.

"So which Olay should I buy? I can see Total Effects, a moisturizer, and a whitener."

"Don't buy Olay. That's for women. Why don't you buy a Nivea Natural Whitening moisturizer instead? Your uncle uses that."

Luckily I could find Nivea nearby and started reading the instructions on the pack. Apparently it was for men who spent a lot of time out in the sun. It also whitens your skin and controls oil. That interested me because I have always had this secret desire to be white. All Bengalis want to be white like the Europeans, and the only thing we could do so far in that regard was to learn English as best as we could, but now it seemed there was a solution to the other desire of physically resembling the whites as well. I was always worried what people do neck down (you can't possibly apply fairness creme on your entire body) but resigned to the fact that the face should do for starters.

The Nivea pocketed, I thanked mamia, and started walking toward the counter. But my feet seemed paralyzed for a second and refused to listen to the instruction from my brains to walk. They stayed where they were, as my upper body nonchalantly tried to move on. You're right, before I could realize it, I nosedived to the floor. I actually landed on my nose because somebody had tied my shoelaces while I was on the phone with mamia. As I got up and felt the blood oozing out of nostrils, trying to figure out if my jaw was broken too, the shopgirl who helped me get up asked me "sir, are you all right?"

Some people were smirking, some looked genuinely concerned. Having forgotten about my desire to turn white, I kept my Nivea back where it belonged and picked up a bottle of Dettol instead.

Your Argentina or My Brazil?

2010-06-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

I was thinking why we change loyalties or suddenly like one specific team. i don't know much about football, so i decided that all south americans (basically the Portuguese and Spanish colonies) are ppl to be looked down upon because they are unscrupulous, drug peddlers, and verminous like us Indians... and only the proper Caucasian Europeans (not ... See Morethe pirates from Spain and Portugal) have any real character. I hate Argentina because Maradona, despite being a great footballer, is not a trustworthy man. Can I idolize Tyson? NO. Likewise, we cannot idolize someone like Maradona, a man of dubious morals.

So, loyalties/hatred toward any team are often formed because of one hero or antihero. people loved Pele when he came to Calcutta and half of Calcutta became fans of Brazilian football. My frnd Meghadoot da follows European football for quite some time and he absolutely adores Platini and later Zidane. Hence his love for France. I support Germany, England, Denmark, Netherlands and again Brazil, Cameroon, Ghana, and any Asian country. Why the English? They were our masters for a long time and the inertia of genuflection towards whites remains in me. It's a pity they left us in the hands of Indian politicians. A General Dwyer is perhaps less harmful than we Indians are to ourselves. Than the Congress has been to the Sikhs? The Brits also have the best sense of justice. Warren Hastings was tried for misappropriation of funds at one point, and Robert Clive was driven to suicide because of the probe against him after he left India. They built India and we all bloody know it. So support them.

Why the Germans? For the love and respect they have for their country. The way the Germans rebuilt their entire nation so strongly despite the aftermath of the World War, you naturally want to stand up and salute them. Even in business their love of the nation comes to the fore. SAP buys tickets from Lufthansa, Bosch buys SAP applications. They all buy Audi, BMW, or Merc, whereas we Indians buy Japanese or Korean. They love their nation, unlike us. And in football they might not have individual brilliance at the same level as the Argentinians or Brazilians, but they play as a unit, which is very beautiful to watch.

Why the Scandinavian countries? Somehow, the Nordic people seem to be the most caring about human life. In places like Sweden and Denmark, a citizen's medical expenses are forever free. That's the way they value human life. We can't come anywhere close (forget the USA). Hence, they are generally good people...so support their football teams too. Okay, I admit this is kinda lame.

Why the Africans? For Roger Milla, for Didier Drogba, for Asamoah Gyan, and also for all their authors. For Chimamanda Adichie, whom I discovered only recently. For their downtrodden status. For the hatred and racism they faced all these centuries. If an African nation wins, you have tears in your eyes. You stand up and salute.

Being Indians, and left with nobody to look up to but for Leander Paes, Vishy Anand, or Saina Nehwal, what choice do we have? You support your Argentina, me my Brazil. End of the day, we remain bloody Indians after all, with only a commercialized cricket team we can call our own.

To YOU: I'm Dead

2010-06-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I had to die. For you. And to you too.

When your hands brushed against mine, I couldn't sense the urgency in your fingers. It was natural, perhaps accidental. And then you started telling me the story of the princess. And I started talking about how you are beautiful and how beautiful you are.

"How much" was a spiel on the degree of your beauty and "how you are beautiful" was about my perception. I circled you, looked for that angle from which you are not that beautiful but couldn't find it, really. Piled up the books we collected and balanced your face on top of it to see which looked better. And I couldn't even remember the titles or the authors. You passed. Your overwhelming beauty made me gasp... for breath, and for reality to sink in at times. "Someone tell me she is a dream."

While I was wallowing in self pity about you, toying with the possibility of falling for you, trying to build up a story about you, you came running to me with that packet full of groceries dangling. I could see some tuna, some canned sardines, and celery. You are in love with me, you said. I didn't look at your face.

And I had to die. I had to leave that generic letter for nobody in particular. Much like our "to whomsoever it might concern" letters that are aimed at the air around us. I left it for the police. And for the person who will find my body eventually. I am not Pamuk's corpse though. I had to die because I wanted to quietly slink away from your mind that I'd been fucking for so long. And I did. I hid. I cooked up a body in my imagination and left it for them. And they were still looking for it while the doctor gave my death certificate almost in a trance. The insurance claims are already being processed. The house behind yours is vacant. The last place you will search for me.

Not sure I like being dead. Because I am alive. And my mothballed second identity has been brought out and dusted. The money, the money. The money has to come quick and I can't resist rubbing my hands against each other in anticipation. The only thing I can think of is travel. But I can't go very far from you either.

Why did you fall for me? I could live with me falling for you or anybody else, but why did you have to? I am not used to this, you know. Of people like you falling for me? Or people falling for me in general. They don't, with emaciated, yellow, wrinkled dogs. Harsh? I am. On myself, mostly, but then, that's twisted modesty if you read my mind. That's fishing. That's expecting you to say you want to make love to me although you are not attracted. But then you say you are in love.

Are you confusing me?

When I told the other woman about you, she threw a piece of brick through her window at me. She keeps solid bricks inside her house. To throw at passersby and dogs. Or for the kicks of it. She had thrown me out of her house when I hadn't held her with affection after we fucked. She too, like you, likes to call it making love. I prefer fuck. She wants to see me bruised but still wants me to forget you and go back. This is getting confessional so I will keep it private, but heart of hearts I haven't thought about making out with you. I have, but the thoughts couldn't grow into anything realizable. Some cop in my fantasies rejected them. I would prefer a walk down a jungle path, listening to your princess story. It was unfinished, if you remember. Yes, I would definitely love to hold on to your soft hands.

You wonder why I use words like "beautiful" and "soft" despite them being used ad nauseam, but even today, beautiful is just that, a superlative in its own right, and soft is just like a rabbit's bosom.

The house the house. Will it cage me in? The second identity, will it let me go far and wide?

The freedom from life, will it kill me in the end?

The Green Mug Has a Flower on It

2010-06-22T02:40:00.001-07:00

"Get up, we have to rush," urged Manjunath to his wife. They had to catch a bus to Tirupati where they wanted to ask for a son. Silpa was already pregnant for six months, so if they delayed this prayer trip to Tirupati, she might eventually have another daughter. Manju was obviously concerned. Being an autorickshaw driver, you didn't want daughters in Karnataka. Anywhere in India, he consoled himself. "Get up, like now!!"

Silpa was in this blissful state of having had a complete sleep with no hurry to wake up. She had asked for two days off from all the houses she worked in. And today was a paid leave for her and she wanted to enjoy it by waking up late.

"I don't want to go."

Manju pretended not to hear her. He always felt lucky to have found Silpa. She was beautiful, with big eyes and a round face. Her skin glowed like those foreign chocolates the babu's kids eat all day. And she had the best smile. It wasn't sensuous or inviting, but very charming. A little beguiling too because Manju couldn't make out if she genuinely liked him or if it was just an innocent smile. He was always in love with her, so couldn't believe his luck when finally their alliance was arranged by the families. So he pampered her. Dropped her to the colony every morning in his autorickshaw and waited till she and her shadows got engulfed by the huge buildings. Every day he waited for a few more minutes, wishing for her to come out and smile at him again, but she never came out. But that wait had become habitual.

"I said, I don't want to go."
"Come on, just get up and drink some tea, and we can catch the bus."

Their only daughter was with Silpa's mom for a few days and their mornings were usually free. Her mom sent little Usha to school everyday and the next one should ideally be a son, they all thought. Silpa, somehow, never talked about her preference. Manjunath had a sinking feeling that Silpa probably wants a daughter again, but he was too afraid to ask. After all, they had gone to the local temple and asked for a son and now it was time to please Lord Venkateswara. He didn't want to miss the bus today.

"I think I've already seen god, so I don't wanna go." Silpa was feeling the baby in her bump and fondling her. She knew it would be a daughter. And she had lost trust in day trips to Tirupati in the heat. The buses were crowded, the journey tiring, and the queues horribly long. That wasn't what she expected from a visit to god. And what do they say about Him being omnipresent? No, she doesn't want to go.

"I have already seen him."
"What are you talking about?" Manju was getting impatient and now she was talking nonsense. From the time she started working at the house of those North Indians, she's come back with a lot of strange stuff. They are Hindus but don't have any temple inside their house. The lady of the house smokes. And although they had given them an interest-free loan of Rs 5000 and also paid her a lot more than the other people in the colony, Manju didn't quite like them. And now she comes up with this new story.

"Guess what happened yesterday? These guys bought me a new tea mug."
"So what's the big deal in that? We are getting late for the bus, let's please go now?"
"No, no, listen to me first. Guess what happened after that. A new tea mug isn't what am talking about. They kept the mug in the same rack where they keep theirs. Can you believe it?"

For a moment Manju was not sure of what she talked about, but then it dawned on him. She kept talking about how she's treated in most of the houses: she has to keep their footwear in the shoe rack; her tea cup in most households would be a chipped or old one, kept on the window sill; one day an Oriya lady threatened to not let her into the colony for being late by thirty minutes...there were many such stories that the other girls glossed over. They had thickened their sensitivities and carried on. These rich bastards will die of plague one day...was a collective hope among her people. But Silpa didn't like to be treated like the others. She felt bad every time one of her employers raised her voice. Tears would well in her eyes and Manju would have to make do with no dinner those nights. Manju knew what she was talking about.

"They what?
"They kept your mug with theirs? Are you kidding me?"
"No, when I washed my mug yesterday and kept it on the window sill, sir came and kept it along with theirs, saying 'Silpa, why can't you keep your mug where we keep the other mugs?'
"I don't know Manju, but I could have cried there. You don't know what it means to me."

Manju was silent for a long time. He came and sat on the bed next to her. He had tears in his eyes too. So what if the madam smokes, they are not like the others at all. They acknowledged and smiled at him every time they met him on the roads, they treated them like human beings. He kept sitting there for a long time and heard Silpa say that if there's god, He has to come in human form. And that she has seen him already.

Tirupati didn't happen that day. They enjoyed their weekend, driving to Bannerghatta National Park in his auto. Just the two of them. It was bliss, and forgive me Lord for I enjoyed my time in Bangalore, thought Manju. The next day, Silpa came out a few seconds after entering the building and gave him a smile. It was like falling in love all over again. Maybe she is right about god and his human avatars…Manju thought as he said a silent prayer for the North Indian employers of Silpa.

*****************************

Arka got Campari from Sri Lanka for us. "I didn't notice the 'bitter' part on the label when I picked it up from the duty-free," he quipped. The sun was setting and we were out on the balcony, savoring the last rays.

"How about some tea? I make a fine Darj brew. Wanna try it?" he offered.

"Awesome...I don't mind the guest making himself useful, but remember not to pick up the green mug."
"Which one, this green one with the flower on it? What's wrong with that?"

"Oh that belongs to our maid. We are a politically correct household, sir, can't you see?"

"Ahha, impressive! That must work wonders, huh? The one with the bump? She's hot, man...I hope the child ain't yours?" Arka laughed even as he suggested it.

"Lower your voice, bugger, Niharika will be here any minute."

It was a good joke that led to another and yet another. Evenings, as I always noticed, have this distinct advantage over days when it comes to turning memorable.

David Davidar: My Hero

2010-06-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

Since morning I received three calls and several messages from friends all over. And all were about David Davidar. Why did people remember me when they read about him in their morning newspapers baffles me because I left Penguin 13 years back after what can be called a really short stint. Well, the reason might be because I never stopped talking about David ever since. I have told the denizens of Bangalore about him, my common friends about him, my girlfriends about him, and pretty much everybody that I can remember. Even my wife, who's seen him from a distance like you see a luminary from the fringes of a social do, is at awe. Still.

What did I tell people about him? First that I looked up to him. Literally, because he was 6'3" in 1997 and I a mere 5'7". He would like "Hello" in his booming voice down at me, a scrawny, mongoloid, tongue-tied editorial assistant who was taking in everything he saw and heard. And second, that he was surrounded by a bevy of beauties, who never, ever complained about him trying to make a pass at them. Never. I know because I have been really close with some of them and they would generally complain about lecherous men to me. But nobody, ever, spoke about David. We were all, always, at awe of him. Third, because he would finish reading manuscripts overnight, or write for the Book Talk column (in The Hindu) in a flight! Fourth, because he was as handsome and charismatic as Vijay Amritraj, but never used his power or charms to go philandering about. The publishing world is very incestuous when it comes to wagging tongues and nobody talked about him slapping any woman's bottom or asking them to meet him after work.

I know Shobhaa De will write about this tomorrow. She, in her memoirs, has written about almost everybody, even about Sanjeev Kumar (whom we all have so much respect for) being a lecherous drunkard. But she always had good things to say about David.

David married a pretty lady called Rachna in 1998 after a longish affair. And what happened in the last 13 years that made him fall for someone like Lisa Rundle? Did he fall for her? Were they in a relationship? He says they were friends for three years, so what happened? Did she fall for him and didn't get a response? Is this her way of making some quick buck? At what expense?

I, even after 13 years, will have to stand by him and show my solidarity. Whatever version of truth comes out after the trial.

Dilemma of Probashi Bengalis

2010-04-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

More than resident Bengalis, the probashis (those living outside Bengal) try desperately to hold on to their bangaliana. As long as that includes Bengali khana (food) and gana (music), it is palatable and savory, but when it comes to their fanatical love of Sourav Ganguly, the problem arises. And the problem arises with the children of the probashis, who cannot fathom why all their parents worship him. I can understand though, because I am his die-hard fan, but my son finds it difficult to see why I support KKR of Calcutta although I studied in Banaras, found my first footing in Delhi, and currently work in Bangalore. It is as blasphemous as my Brahmin neighbor having to argue with his son about the existence of all the Hindu gods. That little brat didn’t wear the sacred thread, frustrated my neighbor by asking him to summon god to the puja room, listens to Linkin Park, and is a fan of Wayne Rooney. On a more serious note, he doesn’t even utter the Gayatri mantra, a must for every Brahmin worth his sacred thread. As a true-blue, die-hard Bengali, I find this unacceptable. And I’m not talking about my neighbor’s problem.

“Ghorer Shotru Bibhishon?” I asked my son the other day when he kept cheering Robin Uthappa, the upstart batter of Royal Challengers Bangalore, as he battered the KKR bowling attack.

“Huh?”

“Bibhishon, Bibhishon, don’t you know your Ramayana?

“Bibhishon was the brother of Ravana, who decamped and joined Rama as a spy. He had all the vital information about Ravana’s capital, Lanka, and helped Rama win. Such betrayers, over the years, are called Bibhishon. Ki bhishon! And you, being a son of two true-blue Calcuttans, are supporting Rahul Dravid? The very man who plotted with Chappell to remove Sourav from the captain’s post?”

“But you yourself say you aren’t a bong, don’t you?” was my son’s prompt defense.

“Na, I mean I might not be a bong, but then, when it comes to Leander Paes and Sourav Ganguly, I am very much a bong. Just like I am a bong when it comes to Satyajit Ray, Jim Morrisson, Mark Knopfler, Robindronath, Usha Uthup, Arunlal, Dilip Doshi, Nandan’da, Roman Polanski, and Subhas Chandra Bose.”

Aaron wasn’t listening. His eyes gleamed with joy as mine glistened with the sadness of twin blows: that of KKR’s loss to RCB and the bigger loss of a Bengali son to an alien city. I wished I could tell him how the rest of India has always been plotting against us Bengalis. From Nehru and Gandhi plotting against Subhash Bose, Raj Singh Dungarpur plotting against Pankaj Roy, CV Raman plotting against Meghnad Saha, Sunil Gavaskar plotting against Dilip Doshi, Rahul Dravid plotting against Sourav, and Mahesh Bhupati plotting against Leander Paes, it has been a long history of subterfuge by lesser races against the Bengalis. But there are sad moments in Bengali history where one Bengali has plotted against another and ousted him, like Mir Zafar against Siraj’u’daullah, or David Gilmour against Roger Waters. Sometimes we hear rumors of Chet Atkins actually squeezing Mark Knopfler’s balls before quitting Dire Straits, but we don’t want to hear such trash about Bengalis. All this bad publicity is a ploy of the lesser races of the world to malign the only non-white humans of this world, the Bengalis.

But emotions apart, Sourav is losing his plot. His team is heavy on foreign names, who aren’t delivering except Angelo Mathews, and the local boys either don’t know cricket or lack the temperament to win a match for their team. Wriddhiman Saha never looked inspired in his entire career save behind the stumps, but he is called a batter. Manoj Tiwary and Laxmi Ratan Shukla are mediocre from all angles. There’s no Ashwin, no Vinay Kumar, or Ambati Rayadu who can turn around a match for the KKR. They are good in flashes, when Sourav or Chris Gayle shine. And when they don’t we hear Sourav losing his cool about how poorly his kids performed on the field.

Has the time come to turn our coats? Maybe support Punjab? Or Delhi? My mind is uncertain about all that save one thing: KKR will definitely lose their remaining matches, one thing I’m certain about. Would I want them to win? YES. Resounding yes. But do I trust them to win? Do I have faith in them? NO.

**********************************

“Arijit, you there?”

“Yeah, tell me Atanu.”

“Thought I would share something really unfortunate with you.”

“What is it?” I was alarmed.

“My younger son has turned into a fan of MS Dhoni, of Chennai Super Kings. Am wondering how to bring him back to faith. Ki hobe bolo toe?”

The auction of a virgin

2010-04-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

why aren't you inviting me to your wedding?

-- i don't even know you that well.

why get married?

--the sasur (father-in-law) seemed like a good man.

and the girl? did you see her?

--no. but he is a good man.

stay away from him if he has a daughter. but hey, hold on. is he paying you?

*********
Sir, I have four daughters.

-- Hmm.

To marry off each I have to spend about 17,000.

-- Hmm.

But then they also ask for dowry in my caste.

-- Hmm.

And the dowry is not less than 1 lakh per girl.

-- Hmm.

Where will I get all this money, sir?

-- Hmm, so don't pay the dowry, stop this menace. And why so many children in the first place? Anyway, the lift is here, don't forget to lock the gate in the night.

********************************************

Papa, what will you buy Nikhil?

-- Nikhil?

Oh papa, my Nikhil, come on!

--Oh, that idiot? What a horrible dressing sense, I tell you. You want to marry him! Why should I buy him anything?

Papa! He is such a darling. Okay, not him then, buy me a Honda Civic? Mamma is already buying me the entire Nakshatra range. Have you seen Katrina in the commercials, papa? Won't I look like her? Tell me naaaa!

--Hrrmmph

************************************

So you still want to get married?

--My sasur is a good man.

So WHAT! You will be saddled with a woman all your life.

-- But he is a good man.

You can buy sex, do you know that? But this woman will tie you down now. You can't sleep with Malati any more, you can't come with me to Kadapara for all the new Nepali and Bengali girls. Why get married? For some money? How long will that money last?

-- I'm marrying because he is a good man. And I am NOT asking for any money in return. Can't you get this in your head? I am done with the virgins, the teenagers. Most of them cry. Every one of them, every time. I've come back so many nights without even touching them. They have so much to tell. So much. And I always loved stories. My mother used to tell me stories every night.

So whom are you marrying! Who is this good man? And who is the daughter?

-- It is our postmaster.

Who, Mishraji? He is long dead...oh, you mean Malati? You are marrying Malati? BUGGER... chhupa rustam...

(as their laughter fills the hollow midnight streets, you think some stories are happy, some incomplete, some debates universal, and some questions never answered.)

Save you as a fruit

2010-04-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

I want to hide you in this house because you are too good to let go. But there are people around. They will see you and raise an alarm, so you can live with me as a bunch of black grapes. You are dark chocolate, so tweak the hue a little and pose as grapes. But hey, not that, not that. Not a brinjal for god's sake. Yeah, dark, curvaceous, but you know I don't like vegetables much. I prefer fruits, so be my black grapes, wilya?

Just hide with me in my room and let me eat you one part at a time.

B-Call

2010-03-09T06:03:00.001-08:00

Now if you wanted to call a girl out of her hostel, you had to send a chit through the security guard with your name on it. Often we could see the boys dressed up, waiting, reeking of the same after-shave lotion. Chances were most of these guys were wearing Old Spice, because Arup was generous with his cosmetics and on days we had the chance of a girl actually coming out to meet us, he would let us use his stuff.

I, for one, never knew any girl that well enough to call her out of the hostel. Often I had tried my luck with many of them, waiting in vain for many minutes before the security guard came out and announced in full public view that "Malvika Madam doesn't want to meet you." Egos are usually brittle, but I had taught mine to steel itself against such odds, so the next day I would probably get to hear that Ranjana didn't want to meet, or maybe Maya. Arup, on the other hand, enjoyed some sort of liberty with the girls because if he wanted to call one, very often almost two or three of them came out. He was single, handsome, and drove a jeep back home. It was another matter that he used my mountain bike at the university to impress the women, but a young guy of 18, handsome, who can drive, was too much for the girls to resist. When I realized Arup's problem of plenty, I devised my own cool method of getting to meet a girl. I just accompanied him on his evening sojourns to the girls' hostel. It was called a B-call, to accompany somebody who had the privilege of sending an A-call. Somebody or the other was always extra, and I was always there, smelling of Old Spice even inside my pants. Always be prepared was my principle, although Arup complained that it will never be of any use. He was right and looking back today I wonder how come he had so much foresight.

I liked Suma, from Bokaro. She liked Arup. And Arup liked Rubella. Rubella, against the principle, liked Arup back. Suma and Rubella were roomies, so I could go out with all of them when Arup went on a date with Rubella. We would often go to the ghats of the Ganges and sit there, staring at the river. Arup and Rubella would try to get cosy after dark and Suma and I would be left talking about anything from her childhood to the lights on the other bank. There would be people offering evening prayers, and sometimes an odd train could be seen in the distance crossing the bridge over from Mugalsarai to Kasi.

One day Suma suggested we walk on the steps of the ghats up the length of the river. There were little oil lamps at the edges of the steps, lending the otherwise crowded Dashashwamedh ghat a romantic orange hue. As we walked up and down the steps, sometimes over mud and again back onto concrete, we had to hold hands many times to pull each other up. The initial hesitation overcome, sometimes I held her hand a little longer than necessary. And she didn't pull it away either. When we reached about halfway between Dashashwamedh and Assi, we saw a strange thing. I later asked Suma and she hadn't seen anything like that either. A man, alone, was pulling his dead cow from the top of the stairs down to the river. It must have taken him quite some time because the carcass was heavy and bloated. Some strange curiosity made us sit on the steps as the man pushed the corpse into the water and watched it float away.

"Why did you put an oil lamp in its mouth? Do you have to perform some last rites for cows?"

"Oh, Sundari was my favorite. She died of a strange disease. Am afraid my other cows will be affected. Dunno why I did that, but that was the least I could do." I silently agreed with what he did.

That was Gopal.
He later let us take out his boat on hire for Rs 10. We rowed the boat up the river to Assi ghat, watching the ghats getting smaller. At one point, from the middle of the Ganges, the city seemed garlanded in yellow. Suma exclaimed, "isn't it beautiful, Subho?"

In her excitement, she wanted to lean back and touch the sliced moon in the water.

But something made her clasp my hand instead. Did she think of the cow? But that was downstream and we were rowing upstream. Of other carcasses? Or of the flowers and leaves from the prayers offered up there in Assi ghat? Something about the water that night made her uneasy.

With her hand in mine, that Rs 10 ride seemed to last forever.

Seva

2010-02-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

"This is Banaras HINDU University my dears, and we, as student representatives of Hindutva, must make our presence felt in bringing down the Babri Masjid. Advaniji has almost reached Ayodhya, so we must go NOW. Who all are joining me?"

The response, painfully loud, harsh, and animalistic, pushed me away. But the ABVP activists, among them our own seniors and batchmates, had turned into different people somehow. They didn't have the time for our usual student conversations and their eyes somehow had that glassy look, as if they were living in a waking dream. All of them. I even tried to dissuade some that I considered my friends... "Will take you to the girls' hostel this evening. Why don't you meet some of my friends there?" Not that I had any friends there, but because there were many pretty girls from my town, people thought I was the lucky ticket to the girls' hostel. But then, nobody was interested in meeting the girls any more. There was this madness that reminded me of stories of Hitler's propaganda against the Jewish. The Babri mosque was apparently built on a temple of Lord Rama, whom we all knew as nothing more than a powerful mythological character. And these guys, incited by the right-wing political party BJP, were suddenly up in arms to save what was erstwhile a temple. They were planning to do kar seva, carry bricks from all over India to rebuild the temple after demolishing the mosque.

When I was walking back towards my hostel, I befriended another Bengali guy, Biplab. He looked downcast, definitely troubled.

"All this isn't good," I mumbled.
He looked at me for what seemed a long moment and nodded his head.

"I mean, The Ramayana is a great epic. A fantastic piece of literature. To me, it isn't anything more than that. And moreover, after Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghnadvada Kavya we don't really have a lot of respect for Rama, do we? He is more a North Indian hero to me, and wasn't a man of great moral strength either."

Biplab had a smirk on his face. He was unusually fair, had a shock of hair on his head, and walked with his head stooped. "Why do you say that?"

"Compared to the heroics of whoever was on Ravana's side, consider the cowardly and dastardly acts of Rama." I offered, happy that I had a chance to argue my case. "First was when he killed Bali from the back. Which hero would do that! How can one idolize a guy like that? But forget idolizing, these guys are worshiping him as god.

"Compare with Indrajit. He fought like a true hero. How did Laxman kill him? By sneaking behind him when he was deep in prayer. And we worship these guys as our heroes?"

"But then, Ari, Ravana took away Sita too, didn't he? Rama was just out on a mission to save his wife."

"Hey, if he loved her so much, what was the need to burn her at the stake after rescuing her? That was dastardly. That wasn't heroic at all, was it?" And then I went on and on about why Ravana was actually besotted with Sita's beauty and couldn't resist abducting her. I had a soft corner for Ravana, who I always felt was a true king, and although I couldn't really defend why he abducted her, I didn't see anything wrong in it. It happens everyday. People seduce others' girlfriends away by promising the moon. He probably didn't have the finesse, so he used force.

We were digressing from our topic. And we both agreed that Babar was a more flesh-and-blood character than Rama, whose existence our Indian historians have laughed away. If Babar built a mosque in the 1500s, five hundred years later, it was part of our history and we must protect it. There might have been atrocities by the Muslim rulers, who destroyed temples and built mosques all over North India, but the concept of exacting revenge five centuries later seemed either foolish or was a harbinger of dark days to come. And this wasn't the India I wanted to live in or be part of. 1992 was a dark year, followed by even darker decades. And today we can safely say that the Congress government's allowing of the mosque to be eventually demolished was a sly political game and the event as shameful as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the taliban later.

Biplab and I walked to a T, where we parted. We promised to catch up later. He could be found in the economics class.

As I was nearing the hostel, I could see a lot of commotion in the distance. There were the proctor's guards and the state policemen running around, chasing students. I could hear teargas shells. A student passed by on a bicycle as if his pants were on fire..."they are sealing all the rooms, don't go there, just flee, man...they will arrest us all..." he screamed as he rode past.

I had nowhere to go. My stuff was in the hostel, my parents lived 600 km away in Durgapur, and I was almost a km from the main gate of the university. I could see many students running towards where I was, trying to flee the police. I started running with them too, and my mind went numb. It was not time to reason if I had done anything wrong. It was time to run, and running I was. I ran to my right towards the huge water tank opposite the Sanskrit students' hostel and before I realized anything, I was on top of it, with two other students.

The view from the tank was awesome. It was as if we were waiting in a clearing of a jungle to see tigers below. As the night descended, I felt like Jim Corbett. Only wished I had some Odomos handy. One of the guys had a packet with litti chokha in it. Delicious Bihari dish, and we savored it together. "I was reading my Competition Success Review, man, when I heard the firing. What are they clamping a sine die for?"

"A sine die? As in sealing our hostels?"

It turned out that because of the violent protests by the ABVP activists, inciting students and creating mobs out of them, the university decided to vacate the hostels and cleanse the menace. It meant hell for many of us who couldn't immediately leave, but we realized it was for a greater good.

Around 8.00 in the night, after having spent four hours on top of the water tank, we came down and walked out of the campus. There were policemen everywhere. I didn't have any money on me, but looking back, it wasn't much of a bother those days. We had credit khatas at any tea stall, and the stall owners were happy as long as we paid them at the beginning of the month.

"Mausiji, e'go bun aur chai dijiye." I sat on the bench, waiting for my tea. Looked to my right and there was Biplab.

"Hey, so they threw you out too, did they?"

"Umm...not really. What about you?"

"Dunno what to do. Will probably hop on to a train tonight without ticket. There's a handsome chance I won't get caught by a TC...apparently many students are just taking the trains without bothering to buy tickets."

"Why don't you stay with me tonight? It's Friday, so you have only one train at around 10. Tomorrow you can withdraw some money from the bank and go." But where did he want to take me?

"I am in the International Hostel. We don't have to vacate. And I was coming back from the local mosque when I met you."

The mosque? Why on earth?

"Oh, I am Biplab, Shah Muhammad Ahsan Habib Biplab...from Bangladesh," he held out his hand to me with a smile, "I think I will wear my fez some other day."

*******

P.S.: I and some others stayed with Biplab for more than a month, and he and his friend Zaheer looked after us and protected us from the proctor's guards. They also fed us and never took any money later when we offered to pay them at least for the provisions. That was one seva I won't forget even if the shame of kar seva fades from my memory.

Burn it down, mates!

2010-02-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

"Let's burn the post office then?" suggested Abhay bhaiyya.
And we all screamed in unison. Yes, that will be our contribution towards the fight against the Mandal Commission. I didn't have the vaguest idea what this Mandal Commission was all about, but from what was happening all around me, I knew it was going to ruin our future because most of the government jobs will be reserved for candidates from the backward or lower castes. It seemed only appropriate to burn the post office being the juniors in college because the postgraduate students had already volunteered to burn the railway station that night.

We were all very excited. If the railway station of Varanasi gets burned down, VP Singh will definitely listen to us and scrap the Mandal Commission and make all the government jobs open to all. We all hated VP Singh, and even though I could never understand the implications of the Mandal Commission or was even touched by it, I enjoyed the news of his prolonged suffering and ultimate death. Mar gaya saala kameena.

Having absolutely no clue about how to burn a building, we formed a committee and chose students with a dubious past to give us some advice. From what it turned out, even they didn't have any clue. I was frustrated. We always grew up listening to stories of how the Biharis were always burning this and that and here I was, with a bunch of sophisticated Biharis from the best missionary schools, who had no idea about burning buildings whatsoever. They were all looking at me for inspiration...

"Abbe Bangali, why don't you tell us something? You guys are forever burning buses and trams in Calcutta? What did you learn there?"

"But, but buses run on diesel, don't they? The post-office is a brick and mortar building after all! And from what I heard, bricks are already burnt in kilns to make them strong..." I tried to defend a Bengali's choice of burning a bus over a post-office. But by then we had found a solution: we had to somehow procure diesel, petrol, or kerosene. This sent us off on a tizzy because petrol and diesel were too expensive and the sale of kerosene was rationed by the government. You had to have a ration card to procure kerosene. How much kerosene would one need to burn down a post-office with three rooms? It was a beautiful little building at the back of the Acharya Narendra Dev (AND) hostel and all my letters used to come from there, I thought, already attributing it to a thing of the past. Maybe now the letters will come from the main post office? Was there another inside our university? Or will they come from somewhere outside the campus?

The letters that I received from Madhumita were the toast of my batchmates. Even the senior guys from our wing of the hostel would borrow them and have a gala time. Madhumita's letters were nice and juicy and she always talked about what she would like to do to me once I visited Calcutta for the summer hols. Madhumita let her guard down while writing those letters, secure in envelopes addressed only to me and opened always by Abhay Singh Bhura, a guy with red hair and green eyes. Although I knew I was letting her down, I scored in front of my friends who envied me like crazy. Sometimes the letters came back to me crumpled or wet, arousing dark suspicions, but the attention they got me was enough for me to ignore their physical state.

What will happen to these letters now that the post office is no more? But I was not one to allow my personal preferences come before patriotism. And today we were about to do something for our country, which is above all else that Madhumita promises to do to me.

Some money was collected and it was a fairly handsome amount because people donated generously towards the cause. A bunch of us went outside the campus to buy kerosene. The money was in my pocket because according to Amit Vidyarthy I didn't have a moustache and hence looked the most innocent of the lot.

Right behind our campus were three shops, one where we had jalebis every morning, one was our ration shop, and the third one that of a guy who ran a video cassette library.

Very boldly we went to the ration shop and asked for ten liters of kerosene.

"What for?"

"Oh, to run our mess, you know. We have run out of LPG and want to cook food for the entire hostel." It was spoken with a lot of conviction, but the ration shop owner was not having any of it.

"Bhaiyya, you first need a ration card to purchase anything here, and even if you get ten ration cards, I can't give you ten liters of kerosene, find someone else."

Amit and I looked at each other. We hadn't lost heart, but the smell of hot jalebis was very tempting. And that night when we all sat to watch porn borrowed from the VCR fellow, our seniors came back from the railway station bruised and beaten (the handful of GRP were enough to send them packing), having made no headway. The movie was famously called Emmanuel in Denmark, and it soon managed to soothe their bruises and hurt egos. Nobody talked about the post office or the railway station after that, but the mention of Emmanuel always elicited a satisfied smile from every one of us.

Madhumita's letters kept coming for a few more months, after which the frequency came down, till she stopped writing to me altogether. The Mandal Commission fever gradually left us as almost everybody starting preparing for written tests and group discussions. Apparently there was a degree called the MBA, which made you immune to the problems of the caste.

Solar Eclipse 2010

2010-01-15T00:26:00.000-08:00

some pics of the eclipse, the first one through three layers of x-ray plates... the others clicked with just the phone aimed at the sun...

Whose Land Is It Anyway?

2009-11-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

There's a new scam involving Indians at some duty-free shops abroad. Indians shopping at duty-free shops in Dubai or Bangkok are being targeted for extortion and here is how it works. When you buy stuff and are at the billing counter, the billing assistant will slip in another package that you haven't bought. Once you come out of the shop, the police will accost you and want to see the receipt. When they find the item not paid for, they will arrest you for shoplifting and detain you. In your desperation, you will pay all your cash to get a release. And that cash is enjoyed by the shopowner, billing assistant, and the airport police. There have been quite a number of such cases according to one email floating around. And all these cases are involving Indians.

I know what you are thinking. Maybe the Indian fellow did shoplift after all? I thought so too.

We all think, despite being Indians ourselves, that Indians will haggle, steal, and cheat. That is the general perception of Indians abroad, making unsuspecting and innocent Indians the target of a smooth nexus like this. If the Indian embassy hears that guy's plea, every single Indian working in the embassy will believe the story...he must have done it, man.

The world works on such perceptions, and perceptions are formed from real stories. Maybe there are many such repetitive real incidents that help others form a general perception about a community or set of people. When a Dutch guy in Mahabalipuram is caught for being a pedophile, everybody believes it. From Amsterdam, no? Must be a pedophile. Maybe he is, maybe it is a true story, but then, the general perception about the Dutch or most Europeans is that they are here for the sex industry. There are thousands of Europeans who come as photographers, travelers, seekers of spiritual freedom, but they are mostly branded together in one slot. Because that's how our minds work and we love generalizations. That gives our lazy, unthinking minds something to talk about: Malayalis are always yapping away in Malayalam, all Bengalis wear balaclavas, all Punjabi women have well-endowed derrieres, or all Gujaratis pronounce "hole" for "hall."

We are all afflicted by such single stories of races and cultures, and believing in these generalizations makes us very narrow-thinking individuals. This is not a spiel to say I am above all this, because we grow up on stories and generalizations that are handed down to us by our parents, neighbors, and society and it is very hard to come out of such mindsets. I cannot, but I will try.

Last month I saw novelist Chimamanda Adichie's talk on the dangers of a single story and remembered the movie Crash, about which I had written earlier. It shows the workings of a society that lives just on single stories about other races or cultures. So, all I borrow from Ms Adichie is the phrase "single story," which is a very catchy and apt phrase indeed.

How do we come out of it? Where do we get the proper education to be global citizens or at least Indians instead of being Brahmins, Marwaris, Sindhis, Malayalis, or Marathis? How do we ensure that entire India doesn't start hating Biharis just because MNS in Maharashtra is throwing them out. They are hardworking east Indians who had to leave their state to find livelihood. And they went to other parts of India, their own country. MNS calls them "north Indians" and throws them out of Bombay, because Bombay belongs only to the Marathis. Who said Biharis are all unscrupulous cheats? If you look back into the history of the eastern region through the eyes of popular literature in Bengal, you will find that the delicate babus from Bengal relied on the strong Biharis to protect them from dacoits and thugs. All the watchmen were from the "West" (meaning UP and Bihar). All this talk about Biharis being thrown out shows the MNS and die-hard Marathis in bad light, but it also damages the already damaged reputation of Biharis in the mind of the Indian.

In our cross-cultural workshops where we are taught about respecting other cultures, we leave out one basic thing: respecting ourselves as Indians. We learn about the gun-weilding cowboys (another stereotype), about all Americans going dutch with their restaurant bills, but we are not taught to mingle, mix, and learn to respect other Indians. "The Tamilian Brahmins, no matter how vehemently Swaminathan Aiyar tries to deny it, try to instill Brahminism in their kids and make them stay away from other bad influences like Bengalis and Malayalis, who introduce little Tambrams to the pleasures of beef, fish, and whisky." That is my single story, a story I believe in, although I know many Tam Brams who aren't religious (some are atheists), many bongs who don't have beef, and many mallus who don't drink at all.

I see the solution in marrying people from other castes, religions, and languages. And that can happen when young men and women from one state go to other states for education. I can cite the example of West Bengal, which started experiencing a student exodus since the early nineties. Same from Kerala. (For the uninitiated, these two states were under the communist rule for ages, and have stopped functioning altogether... education sucks, there are no jobs, and in West Bengal the law and order is in the hands of the extreme leftists). These young people, coming out of their states, venture into greener pastures, mix with other people and often marry people from other races, castes, and religions. If you see a tall Punjabi man walking with his short, rotund son, you know he married a short, fat Bengali woman. Like that. Fluids, blood, sweat, everything is getting mixed these days and along with that the accents. Thick regional accents are giving way to a more cosmopolitan lingo. This trend has to be encouraged. Go out, meet others, and multiply so that one day you have Gujjus who aren't selling diamonds, marwaris who aren't staring at the sensex, bengalis who aren't writing poems, and malayalis who aren't forming political parties. You may one day even find a Sindhi in a charitable organization.

I am eternally hopeful.

Two Conversations

2009-11-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

"Hello? Asif?"
It's been quite a while since we discussed his exploits with the latest girl, but I could hear someone panting on the other side. Did sound like Asif, but couldn't tell for sure.
"Yeah, it's me all right. Why do you call at such odd hours?"
"Nothing unearthly about 3.00 in the afternoon...I thought you would be at work? Are you like...at it? Right now? WITH WHOM, MAN!"
"Don't be crazy, dammit, am on the run, boss, am on the run. And all because of you."
"ME!"
"Yeah, had you not asked me to target Sunaina, I wouldn't be in this position today."

Sunaina is hot. And of course beautiful, intelligent, his colleague, a divorcee, and someone I'd helped him set his eyes on. She had short hair when I saw her last in Bombay, well-endowed, and pink. In this age when all the girls are trying to go zero, Sunaina was proudly extra large and loving it.

"What happened? I thought you enjoyed every moment with her? She was lonely, fantasized about making love to ghosts, and you were a flesh and blood person, her colleague, and handsome too. Single even! What was the problem? Why are you on the run?"

"Oye, you forgot about my girlfriend, did you? She got to know. And am on the run now, will talk later." Asif disconnected the phone.
We have always kept our conversations very focused till now, only both of us had forgotten that he was officially seeing someone else, another friend of ours from the college, Jasmine. How could we forget about her when we targeted Sunaina? I felt responsible for having landed Asif in a mess. It was I who made him notice what Sunaina was made of, how she was all about the sun, scorching our eyes, and waiting for someone to come to her life. Why did I notice her and why didn't I go for her instead? I've always sacrificed the best girls for Asif...always...and ended up playing Cupid for him. And he managed to screw up every bloody relation! Takes some caliber to do it, man!

I thought of Jasmine. Sweet, good-natured, and loves Asif with her life. I accept she is a little pushy at times, but which woman isn't with her boyfriend? Jasmine is the kind of girl you wouldn't want to hit on if you knew she was already seeing someone else. Unlike most of us guys and girls from college, she believed in sticking on, in commitment, and all that old-world romantic stuff that books are filled with. I often want to associate the term morality with her, but can't call her names, can I? After all we shared many coffees together growing up. Calling her a girl with morality might make her look like a geek in the eyes of the others. Even to you guys who are reading this. (Frankly? I changed her name. Her name is not Jasmine.) When I got Asif introduced to Jasmine, I really believed he would change his ways and stick on to this sweetheart of a girl. What business did I have showing him Sunaina's charms three years down the line?

Ashamed at myself, a feeling that usually lasts not more than a few minutes, I hung my head down in shame. My shoes shone brilliantly in the late afternoon sun. Calcutta, in December, is the place to be. I longed for the company of Asif again, at least on Christmas eve, to be on Park Street together. I remembered the time we had seen Victor Banerjee and Lillette Dubey shooting for Bow Barracks. It was Christmas eve too, and we were headed to Someplace Else in The Park.

Right now, I was on Park Street again, walking up from the graveyard toward St Xavier's College. I took care to shine my shoes this morning, but didn't end up at the venue of the interview. I do not want to work in the services sector, no matter how enticing the money sounded. I do not want to ... work. Not that I have to, really. I don't have a dire need to take up a job. I can waste my degree walking on the streets, or perhaps pass on whatever I learned to the kids. I stopped in front of the yellow building of St. Xavier's college. Teaching here won't be a bad idea. But they don't need me. Asif, on the other hand, needed the job. He and Jasmine were planning to get married, and probably have kids too. Shucks! Asif... kids... just the thought made me cringe for him, empathizing with his pain. But Jasmine made him take up the job in Bombay and took him away from me, putting an untimely stop to our numerous escapades with the marwari and bengali girls that we had constant access to. Without Asif, I don't feel complete. When is the bugger coming back?

I sat on the ledge of the wall. It's uncomfortable and not really meant to rest your bum on, but then, I was lonely, hadn't gone for the interview, and could think only of Subhasishda to make a call to. No point going home now, too early to get into Peter Cat for a beer, and what's a beer unless you have friends with you? So it was the uncomfortable ledge of the St. Xavier's College wall for me.

"Hello? Subhoda?"
"Arre, tell me man, nice of you to call. I would have called you anyway tonight."
"So, what's up? How was your day?"
"Oh, very, very fulfilling indeed. I could make Eamon count the beats with me today."

Subhoda has set up his own school for the special children in a village called Adisaptagram, and is the music teacher there. He keeps telling me about Beethoven's 9th, Vivaldi's Summer, and all the other music that he has tried as therapy on his kids. He treats all the kids as his and exults in joy every time there's some significant improvement as the result of his therapy. I sometimes wonder why I can almost feel his joy sitting out here. Maybe because I love him so much.

"Eamon doesn't usually respond to his dad. And today, when I tried the scale of C on the keyboard, he sang along... hummed really."
I keep listening when Subhoda speaks because an inspired dialogue shouldn't ideally be interrupted. And gradually I could see the gleam in his excited eyes as he talked to me over the phone.
"Did I tell you about the guy who plays the chand-sarangi on the Bandel line?"
"No, you didn't."
"That man plays old Bengali songs so soulfully on his sarangi, you would think someone's actually singing them. And he seems oblivious of the surroundings. Who notices him on crowded trains? He goes unnoticed just as Joshua Bell went unnoticed playing his violin on a NY subway. But for Bell it was an experiment on the human psyche. Apparently some children wanted to listen to him play. Whereas, our man here, who is perhaps as talented or as passionate about his music, goes unnoticed every day. How much money does he make by pursuing his creativity? By being a mendicant whom people sympathize with? I mean, couldn't he have ploughed the land or pulled a hand-cart for sustenance? He probably could have. But then that wouldn't have made him happy.
Adi, if I am doing this here today, it is much like that. Pursuing what my heart has sent me for. Every time a child responds to my music, I feel I have earned a few millions."

Maybe I will think like him some day too. Learn to pursue what my heart sends me for.

After we spoke for almost an hour, my battery ran out, and I got up from my uncomfortable seat. Got up and walked back to where I came from, not transformed or enlightened, not a changed man, but toward the graveyard on the other end of Park Street.

Compact Diesel SUVs in India

2009-11-11T07:39:00.000-08:00

With the Gypsy gone and the Bolero Crde being priced on the steeper side, the market for sub 7-lakh SUVs is a huge vacant space. Suzuki could have launched the Jimny to fill this void with the same 1.3 liter multijet engine doing duty on the diesel Swift, D-Zire, Indica Vista, Fiat Palio, Linea, Grande Punto, etc, but they haven't.
(Suzuki Jimny)

And suddenly you have Premier Automobiles, a company that is faded from our collective memory, launching just the thing: a sub-7-lakh diesel SUV with the same old Peugeot IDI engine that was used in the 309 GLD. Apparently they were always there and didn't die out. All these days they had a strategic collaboration with Tata Motors to provide specialized engineering services.

Here's an image of the Premier Rio. Cute, small, lovable, and an SUV for the common man. An IDI engine means you have to wait for a glow plug to go off before ignition. The car is a small Daihatsu, made by Zoyte Motors of China, with the legacy French mill that can well be called Indian now. In an age where multijet diesels are ruling the market, launching an IDI engine from the prehistoric era may sound a strategic blunder, but if you look at the price tag, you know who the Rio is targeting. All the auto mags this month are carrying stories about the Rio, so we have to wait and watch where this story heads.

Am sure other auto majors are gonna wait and watch this story like us, and I won't be surprised if this attempt at resurgence by PAL is sabotaged by other companies. What we would want is a healthy competition from Suzuki with the Jimny 4x4, which has a better finish anyday. Maybe Mahindra will launch the Classic in a compact avatar again (think Jeep Wrangler Sahara) and price it at that band? The choice of engine will have to be the 2500 cc, 97 bhp engine from the Bolero Crde.

(Jeep Wrangler Sahara)

And that would give prospective buyers of the Skoda Yeti (to be priced at 12 lakhs on road) a chance to think twice. And the Yeti will die a slow death like the Fabia even before it is born.

Way to go, Premier.

(Skoda Yeti)

Images from:
http://blog.cochesalaventa.com/_fotos/Skoda-Yeti-SUV-to-enter-production_77061_1.jpg
http://www.theautochannel.com/media/photos/jeep/1998/98_jeep_wrangler_sahara.jpg
http://allworldcars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/suzuki_jimny_1.jpg
http://www.ithappensinindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Premier-RiO-1.jpg

The Rumor of Angels*

2009-11-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

I brought you some blue whisky glasses. Really beautiful ones.
I realized it was absolutely out of place to say that at someone's funeral pyre, but that's what I blurted out. And whisky glasses are never blue.

The body was placed on the floor, covered in white cloth. The feet were jutting out, so I sat there and felt them. The same old white feet, only whiter. I ran my forefinger along her cracked heels and smiled. She was still there, and I couldn't tell if she were just sleeping, in coma, or dead. One of her toes had twitched a day before. That wasn't there any more. She was dead after all, then. It is the end. And very soon her ashes will fit into an urn that you could hold in your both hands. The strangeness of death, from so close, was lost on me. There were people all around. "They've all come to see you." And they were all there indeed. Cousins I hadn't met in a long time and probably wouldn't meet again. All of them.

I could overhear someone discussing me. About how cold and unfeeling I had become. But then death was always just another phase to me, like the period at the end of a sentence.

This time when I went to visit my cousin who looked after my comatose mother for over a month, I saw those glasses again. She had stacked them up in a glass cupboard, one after another, like sentinel on duty. There was one missing though.

"You brought me those."
"I know. That was to say thanks. Dunno really how to..."
"I know."

And we were quiet for a while. If she hadn't taken ma to her hospital, we would be bankrupt by now. And ma would still be dead.

I walked back from her Rail Vihar apartment to our house. The otherwise broad road was crowded with shops and people and garbage. There was a bus pushing its way through the crowd, the conductor calling out for passengers to Howrah. All the noise fused together after a while, like a viscous lump one could easily stash into a can and close shut, savor the void for a few seconds, and open it again, slowly allowing the fused lump of various noises to get back to their distinct shapes again. One of the shapes could well be the clink of the missing blue glass.

*A Rumor of Angels is a beautiful American film starring Vanessa Redgrave.

The Friendship Drive

2009-09-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

The friendship drive is something I have always secretly desired all these years. It is about touching base with all my friends in India, old and new. It would be a drive all around India, starting from Bangalore.
The drive from Bangalore to Calcutta (2000 kms) will take me about 2.5 days. In Calcutta I will meet four people:

Arup: a partner in crime since 1990, Arup and I are often mistaken as brothers. I can't tell you what all we did together in our hostel room. Even today when we start exchanging notes on various matters of interest, time flies by unnoticed. I love this guy. If I were gay, he would have been my (rather unfaithful) partner.

Gargi: a chat mate turned soul mate whom I met in 1999 in the Kolkata chatroom of 123india and have a long association since. We are what they call "poles apart" in our nature, outlook, and worldview. She is suave, sophisticated, in a black business suit, and never utters anything untoward, while I am just the opposite. We complement each other and thus are the best of friends.

Gora: from bunking school to watch porn to ogling at all the girls at the univ (where Arup joined us to form the unholy trinity) Gora and I have a strange association. Found him after a gap of 15 years in 2008. I hate him with all my heart at times for all his untimely spilling of beans, but can't think of not giving him a bear hug every time I meet.

Bubunda: (Lazyani, the blogger) this is the longest association, of 31 years... we grew up together, me trying to idolize and emulate him and never succeeding. My first cricket and football captain, and also my first hero. Bubunda also has the distinction of being the first one to tell me about sex.

then I move on to Durgapur, where I meet:

Meghadoot da: again from the university, Meghadoot da filled the void left by Bubunda when I went to Banaras. a musician from his heart (and a master esraaj player), an avid listener of hindustani classical and jazz, meghadoot da epitomized the craziness hiding in all of us. We still have one-hour phone calls almost every week, often with him singing from the other end and discussing music. Right now he is in love with Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, the Azerbaijani pianist and jazz vocalist. I just hope he never stops falling in love because that will be the end of him.

The Kolkata to Durgapur drive is only about two hours, so I next go all the way to Banaras, some 500 kms from Durgapur. There I meet:

Banibrat: A junior at the Univ, Banibrat Mahanta was one guy who had a lot of potential in him. A quiet, good student, Bani is now a prof of English at BHU. Have to have tea at Lanka with him.

Prof Vanashree Tripathi: A lady who had more faith in me than I myself did. She instilled in me a lot of confidence and also was a great friend. It is another matter that as a young student I had a mild crush on her. It was more awe than a crush. Am sure she was so busy discussing Michel Foucault that she didn't even realize.

From Banaras, it would be a trip to Delhi, some 800 kms away. This will take me an entire day.

The Delhi list is long, so I will keep the descriptions short:

Manini Chatterjee: she is famous, might not have time to meet me. But I have to buy her a copy of Da Vinci Code, which she deliberately never read.

Manjari Rathi: My "saaala" colleague. She saalas me and I saala her. The most apolitical colleague ever, she has a special place in my heart. She disapproves of everything I do and dislikes everything I write, but am sure will be grinning from ear to ear when she sees me in Delhi.

Ritu Malhotra: I have a love-hate relation with this girl (now a mother of two) since 1998. Having joined together as Assistant Editors at OUP, Ritu and I were friends with clashing egos. We fought about everything, but used to ride together in the Delhi rains. We have fond memories at work. Am very fond of her even now, but have a suspicion it might be more for her striking beauty than anything else :-P. We will meet for the OUP lunch at Berco's.

Sourav Dutta: This neo-Nazi guy has been a buddy since 1996. He is the famous blogger velvetgunther and has a very eclectic taste in history, art, music, and literature. He is a fascist of the first order and hates Asians of all hues. I share this hatred and love him for it. He also drives a Merc.

Dilreen Kaur: A brief 2-year association with Dilreen was enough to remember her for life. Clearly the most beautiful girl I've ever worked with, Dilreen was funny, gullible, and very feminine. Found her again in 2009. We will have lunch at Berco's, CP.

Soma Goswami: She made me start smoking again at the age of 27, ten years after I had quit. She and her husband Gaurav are the best hosts I have ever seen. We share a hatred for one particular boss, but we can't talk about her now. If Soma and I get together, we will bitch about Dilreen, Ritu, Hari, Mithlesh, Abhijeet, Mr Bhowmik, and a few others. And also get very very drunk in the process. Soma is in the UK now and says she will come down for that lunch at Berco's CP.

Shikha Gupta: Missing since 1999, she is an integral part of our OUP memories. Many of us swooned over her. And she would often come to my desk to be able to breathe (she sat in the same room with the boss). She was fond of the lightning-struck tree in the backyard of the YMCA building. We have to find her out and bring her for that lunch at Berco's, CP.

Arindam: My ever-enthu bro-in-law, who is closer to me than to his cousin (Sayantani)

Udayan: He is some bigshot with Penguin Books, so I can't possibly write that he resembles someone from the Italian mafia. But his is a strange face with the coldest eyes and the warmest smile you can imagine. Another foodie, we used to heap chicken bones on a separate plate as Smriti Vohra looked on. He was also our steady supplier of Tintin, Asterix, and hindi movies. Apparently he now has a lab called Pluto, whom I must hug too.

From Delhi...now this is a stretch because already am worrying about how many leaves I have left still... I must make a trip to Kumaon and one to Ludhiana and Manali.

In Kumaon, I want to meet:

Vinay Badola: the owner of www.otterreserves.com, Vinay was the first man to initiate me into Royal Enfields. Sourav and I rode with Vinay and Revati to the Himachal in 2000. Forever smiling, this pahari from Dehradoon is what a true leader is made of. He might be available near the Kali river in Kumaon.

In Ludhiana:

Mampi: a new friend from blogland, mampi's humor, enthusiasm, and absolutely punjabi approach to everything in life is very refreshing. She is a bad cook, apparently, so I will have a lassi at her place and also meet her family...she can yap, yap, and yap... a perfect match for me. She is a professor of English with Punjab Univ, but we won't discuss Jane Austen for sure.

In Manali, it will be:

Rimli Borooah: Clearly the Gwyneth of India, or Mary Stuart Masterson. quiet, beautiful, serene like the landscape of Manali, she can also be like the sea, I heard. Although I first saw her in 1998, our friendship started after I left Delhi in 2001, over emails. A foodie and a great pal to drink with. She is a writer and I envy her that.

Delhi to Bombay is a great drive, Anirban tells me. He had done it once in his Fiat Adventure in two days. In Bombay:

Anirban: Kind of like my Arup of DK days. Can talk about almost anything. Well read, passionate about cars and a gizmo freak. We, however, restrict our conversations to cars, women, absynthe, and Irish cream. He might join me in this drive.

Amala: Sweetheart of a woman. She has worked with Resul Pookutty and has also recorded the sound for Aamir Khan's Ghajini. A woman in a man's domain (sound recording), Amala was the first one who inspired me to walk in to Penguin Books for an interview in April 1997. I owe her a couple of large whiskies on the rocks.

Titin: A chat mate turned chum. She calls herself the universal mother, and apparently her friends agree. Met her once when she came to Bangalore and we drank till 3 in the morning with James. Will come to James later. In Bombay, we plan to drink till 4 in the morning. She might join Anirban and me in this drive.

Alpa: She goes by various names: Estelle, Wild Cat Charms, and a whole lot more. Neurotic, hippy, poet, fairy tale romance, poet, cold, sexy, psychic, clairvoyant, poet, are some words you can associate with her at various points in time. She will take me to Marine Drive.

Harikrishnan Menon: I met him probably only thrice in my life. But his was the first Royal Enfield that I rode inside the YMCA compound in New Delhi. He left OUP a little before Ritu and I joined, but used to keep coming to check out the hottest women in Delhi. We met again in Bangalore (we had rabbit meat at Ponnuswamy) and this time we want to have Ridley turtle fry in front of the Greenpeace activists in Bombay.

Ujjal and Benu: Out of all the times I played Cupid, only this succeeded. Ujjal and I were in BHU together, and I met Benu later at DK. Both were single, I passed the email IDs, and the next thing I knew, Benu flew to Calcutta to meet him!! They are yet to buy me a pair of Levi's, which was Cupid's contract.

And then, the 1000 km run back to Bangalore will start, probably alone because by then Anirban and Titin would have been dropped back to Bombay. I might just make a slight detour to Goa to meet:

Brian Mendonca: a friend, a poet (his second anthology being published now), a guitarist...Brian cooks awesome pork and lives like a hermit. He recently left Delhi for Goa, so it will be a poetry reading session on the beach some evening with him. With port, fenny, and fish fry.

In Bangalore, at LoR, I will meet the following:

(cartoon courtesy James)

James: ten years and still going strong, James and I have been to San Francisco together. Need I say more? This bugger is a guitarist, cartoonist, adventurer, and now a fitness freak. Great company, anywhere, anytime.

Shuvo (whom I spend all my weekends with): My bro whom I met in 96, on the streets of Calcutta, often bumping into each other at the same interview venue. His sense of humor is unparalleled and he has the class to lace even a bawdy joke with British humor that makes it sound very sophisticated. He married Sayantani's sister and we never mix his whisky with my vodka.

Raja da and Khukudi: Bubunda's cuz, Rajada and I were playmates as children and later met in Banaras again. We have also been together in Delhi and now he has come to Bangalore. Their's is one place I can go to without a prior appointment and still expect a great meal. Both of them excel in their culinary skills and both can drink like tanks, Khukudi in a more unassuming, matter-of-fact manner.

And then, I will go to meet my biking group buddies, probably the next weekend, on our bikes.

Rocky/Pal, Love, Prateek, and Doc: This is a close biking group, with Rocky and Pallavi being the initiators. They got us all together. And Rocky and Pallavi are probably going to grow old with us in Bangalore. Rocky is to me here what Bubunda was to me when I was a child. Rocky also made me fall in love with Mahindra's slow and steady workhorse, the Bolero. He went and picked up a faster, crde version later. Pallavi is my stand-up comedy partner.

Prateek rode with us to the Himalayas and that's when I realized what a great soul he is. A quiet, firm guy of principles, Prateek has done epic solo rides. He has the dubious distinction of owning two Enfield 500s!!

Love and Tana are young and sweet, and very much in love. Love has tattoos all over and is boisterous. Tana can match him. And I love to compete whenever we meet. We literally talk nonstop.

Doc, while extracting my teeth, never speaks of bikes, and while riding, never speaks of my cavities. I want to grow up to be like him, a steady, solo rider. He has done Ladakh alone on his Eliminator.

And then, one day on Church Street:

Atanu: He is back in Bangalore after two years in Pune. We worked in four companies together: Apex, OUP, DK, and Oracle. At Oracle, we became buddies, and our early morning tea sessions discussing everything from George Bush to Sourav Ganguly are to die for. He has a sweet tooth and even sweeter children. I will meet Atanu at Blossom Book Store on Church Street. He will buy some LPs, and then we will walk to Empire International for some succulent kababs.

And finally, back home, I will narrate my experiences to my best friends ever:
Sayantani and Aaron.

Sayantani will sulk for not taking her along, and Aaron will want to go out on a bike ride with me right then, but I will explain to them why it was necessary for me to touch base with all the others that I love. Life is too short, so I had to go ahead and say hello to all the people who matter to me in my life.

Disclaimer: sisters, cousins, children, wives, dads, moms, etc. are out of this because this is about friends only.

Tights versus Pajamas

2009-09-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

After the cycling helmet and the headlight, I naturally added cycling tights to my list. This met with vehement opposition from my wife, who felt it would be absolutely unnecessary to show the bulge around. Now that's one good way of reminding myself at this age that I am a man, I argued, but she wouldn't have any of it. She even cited an example of cycling shorts being banned in Utah for being obscene. Apparently, the Citizens for Decent Attire are trying to ban cycling shorts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I was surprised to see this because in a country that hosts the World Naked Bike Ride, calling a pair of cycling tights indecent was taking things a bit too far. Undeterred by my wife's protests, I asked my bro (the anon who leaves cocky comments on my blog every now and then) to check out some cycling tights when he went to buy his tennis gear. He called saying there's one L, which he didn't think would fit me. According to him, my crotch would asphyxiate and die inside the L. Please don't get ideas as these tights are sold by the waist size and not any other size. Going by my waist size (or how it has become over the last couple of months), XL would be a safer bet, we both decided.

As children, most boys wanted to wear their briefs outside à la Superman. I was no exception. I spent numerous afternoons prancing around in front of our mirror dressed like that. My critics (mainly my dad and mom and later my wife) hold that this particular activity in front of the mirror for many years cost me my grades in school. I have always disagreed with them. You should ALWAYS disagree with someone who points out errors in you. After all, your life is too short to while away trying to conform to what others think is right. So I kept wearing my briefs outside, but never outdoors.

After having bought the bicycle I felt the time has come to live my childhood dream. If not briefs, at least through my cycling shorts. Beware Bangalore, SupAri has arrived. (this cartoon is courtesy James, who has always nurtured a clandestine desire to see me in the nude)

And so I finally went out in them one day, the bulge notwithstanding. Some people noticed, some didn't, some kids were bothered only about the "geared bike," and some others noticed only Aaron's Firefox with its headlights. The ultimate macho dad of Aaron was riding next to him, showing off his thighs and crotch, expecting all the moms in the neighborhood to swoon, when suddenly he was chased by a pack of hungry dogs who sensed something new in this attire. Whether the dogs chased my feminine legs or the bulge, I cannot tell, but riding away from them that day was my fastest run so far. It was so maddeningly fast, I can't even emulate it if you ask me to.

So now I don't wear them tights any more. I preserve whatever I have inside baggy shorts and ride next to the same dogs who don't even cock an ear when I ride by. Gone are the dreams of being Robin or Superman. I have settled to be a decent husband instead, fetching groceries on my bike like my dad used to many years back, wearing pajamas if possible.

Let the Ram Sene guys take over for all I care. At least I can send them a pack of wild pets if not pink panties.

(image from http://reviews.roadbikereview.com)
(for the MOST hilarious pic, check out http://www.funnycoolstuff.com/2006/09/18/why-bicycle-shorts-are-always-black/)

Stuck at the Y

2009-08-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

E&Y E&Y and the Bay the Bay the Bay
the red red sedan
that she drove away
the french fries scattered on a plate

are images that won't walk out the door

get me more than Frost at this strange Y
get me a bench under a tree
tell me am I any richer today

or am I forever poor?

vestiges of my mind
neatly packed, to be taken away
are back in their appointed corners

never one less never one more

away didn't work yesterday,
a U-turn did
away works for her

as she goes away for sure.

Knock Yourself Out

2009-08-22T10:57:00.001-07:00

Malthusian Disaster

2009-08-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

In 1996 I read a long article about the Malthusian disaster, predicted by Robert Malthus, in which he said that by 2015 most third world countries will cease to function. They will be there, but there will be utter chaos reigning. As in, to take India for example, we can safely predict it will cease to function as a nation. The reasons he cited had nothing to do with stars colliding with each other or any blind astrological or religious faith. His reasons were sociological, economic, and political, and very valid ones at that. He mentioned the mass rise of the poor against the haves, he mentioned religious intolerance, various epidemics that spread faster than you can produce a cure for them, and of course floods and other natural calamities.

And then we had the earthquakes, followed by plague, the rising religious intolerance resulting in various state-sponsored terrorist activities (from the Babri masjid demolition by the kar sevaks to the Pakistan-funded attacks on India), the tragic tsunami, the epidemics that are coming, e.g. H1N1, which will affect 33 million Indians in two years, or dengue, the naxal uprising that seems uncontrollable, and the natural calamities that are ravaging Taiwan and South East Asia now.

According to his estimate, it would all settle down by around 2050. I kind of believed him. You all believe in certain things and that belief is inexplicable at times. The most rational of beings can be seen standing with their hands folded in front of symbols of strength, be it the idol of a goddess, or a monkey god, or the statue of some great leader who lived 5000 years ago. They quietly avoid any reference to their belief, which can be called irrational, beyond reason, or something sacred. Sacred means beyond the purview of reason. No questions asked. My belief in that article about Robert Malthus' theories is also sacrosanct. If The Holy Bible is true to you, that article, which appeared on the op-ed page of The Statesman way back in 1996, is true to me.
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of that, but whatever I read that day sounded so true and possible, I didn't want to question it.

It is all coming true and am sure this is just the beginning of a lot of shit that is about to happen to us. It is only about how we prepare ourselves to face it. Some of us have kids so we have an added responsibility to ensure as much safety for them as we can. Some of us are single, so are covered. Whatever maybe the situation, we shouldn't lose hope. We shouldn't write articles about the Malthusian disaster and act as irresponsible bloggers. We shouldn't provoke people to read about him and his predictions, or about the H1N1 now. We shouldn't scare others by saying we bought the last three available masks from a nearby pharmacy. We shouldn't create panic by proclaiming to have witnessed the sale of tamiflu in the black market. I am not gonna do any of this despite knowing I can very well be one of the 33 million Indians who will be affected by the virus in the next two years.

I only hope you all are as responsible citizens as I am.

Being Nikhat Kazmi

2009-08-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

By wielding merely a pen, one can write off a person's year-long effort with a snort.

An average Bollywood movie takes about 10 months to 1 year to complete, during which a huge amount of money changes hands, the dancers and spot boys wipe a lot of sweat and manage to earn their bread, the heroes make an ugly amount of money, the heroines make a little less, the producer keeps hoping he would get to sleep with the heroine or at least the lead dancer... the sound recordists, the studio guys, the editors, the cinematographers are kept so busy that they either grow their beards for lack of time or go sleepless for weeks. The psychiatrists make hay soon after as fresh people fill in the looney gap. The businesses of the drug peddlers, from the drug companies to our street-side vendor selling brown sugar or at least hash, can stay afloat. Not to mention that midnight pao bhaji bar or frankfurter seller. The film magazines, ad agencies, marketing consultants, web designers can be seen working overtime to meet this huge demand. Someone wants to market a film, someone wants to market a film with a scandal, someone wants just a scandal, someone wants a web site made.

Bollywood is on 24/7 and can beat any outsourcing unit hollow with its constant flow of business and services. Now when a person, let's say someone like Rajat Kapoor, who has always had a dream of making his script into a movie gets a chance to make one eventually, he/she spends an average of 12 months to get everything going. Can be more. Put yourself in that person's shoes: the dream, the script, the arranging funds, the actors, the tantrums, the heartbreaks, the scandals, the paparazzi, and finally the big day of release.

What happens next? You have the critic waiting outside to pounce on you. I don't know what the typical critic looks like, but I would put her as a hormonal, middle-aged spinster or a constipated, sex-starved wannabe of a man. Both of them are veterans. Digging into their pasts you will see that the woman was the assistant to a director but could never make it big and the man was so much of a failure that he could gather only vitriol so far. They are bitter, frowning, and have mastered sarcasm to such an extent that the pen spews acid and the keyboard is rickety with violent abuse.

The critic rips apart the film and if you are stoic about it, you can ignore it and move on. If you are Sajid Nadiadwala, you can laugh at them and keep producing the trashiest stuff. If you are a filmgoer, relying on the critic's appraisal of a movie, you end up reading books instead.

Why Nikhat Kazmi? This person (of whose gender I am unaware...will assume Nikhat, which means pure, is a woman) has made a harsh critic like me sit up and take notice of Hindi movies. She has, with constant practice, mastered the art of willing suspension of disbelief. When she enters a screening, she enters with a free mind, ready to enjoy, ready to be entertained... almost like, "hey, lemme see if you can please me tonight." And she has been generous with some movies, showering praise where it deserved and being critical where she needed to point out a flaw. She never went to a screening with any baggage like huh, this is no Fellini, this is no Ray, so lemme write it off. She is like the perfect kindergarten teacher happily encouraging Indian commercial cinema as it takes its first baby steps toward maturity. We get to see an unconvetional Vinay Pathak steal our hearts in Dasvidanya, Bheja Fry, or Straight. We also get feel-good romantic movies like Jab We Met from the stable of Imtiaz Ali. We do have Akki too, but then someone has to entertain the braindead as well.

She enjoyed Dev-D like any of us and was so kicked, she even gave it a 5-star. I mean, WHY NOT, Nikhat! We love you for being one of the first critics ever to hit the theater with a normal filmgoer's mind. A discerning one too. She knew that New York has a lot of basic flaws in the script and also lacks any locus standi per se, but she gave it a 4-star because she enjoyed it like we all did. New York has unrealistic characters that don't get any time to blossom under the pressure of glam. So we gloss over that bit and try to see if there's any message in the film. Someone asked why this movie had to be set abroad. Why not! Why not abroad? And the message, in fact the messages, can be sieved from the glam and held up to dry ... they will eventually seep in.

One was that post 9/11 the US govt went into merciless ethnic profiling and held almost 1200 people for just being Muslims. This in turn created a new breed of terrorists.
A second message, coming from the lips of powerful Irrfan Khan was that only Muslims can work toward repairing the image of the Muslims in the minds of the world.
The third was, in the last scene, where young kids playing baseball have the son of a terrorist on their shoulders, celebrating their victory... and as Irrfan Khan puts it... it is possible only in the US of A.

Being Nikhat Kazmi is not easy. She caters to normal audiences like us. And we love her for that. She doesn't expect a Bollywood movie to be at par with Crash or The Departed. She does not have any intellectual hangovers. She does not draw unnecessary parallels but treats Bollywood as unique and evolving. Am sure she can choose to be the hormonal spinster and suddenly rip everything apart by comparing Barah Anna with Ray's Protidwondi (late 1960s classic also available as The Adversary) because both are primarily about survival. But she hasn't lost her marbles yet. When she writes for the readers of The Times of India, she writes for the Indian filmgoer who doesn't mind commercial cinema along with a late night dekko of Into the Wild. For the Indian who can listen to the brass band version of "Emotional Attyachar" and also "Kind of Blue" off vintage vinyl, one after the other, and enjoy both.

She has successfully stepped into the shoes of Shobha de and Santosh Desai, who probably first started the trend of calling a spade a spade and not denouncing it for not being a sceptre.

P.S. If Nikhat is a he, replace all the "she"s with "he"s...

Pics from: imageshack.us, dhingana.com, amazon.com, blogspot.com

Are we meeting tomorrow?

2009-07-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

"Are we meeting tomorrow?"
"Where?"
"Anywhere you say, I can pick you up?"
"My pups? I have two now..."
"We take them along?"
"Hah, like you mean it...what if..."
"What if what... what if we..."
"We what?"
"You said 'what if'"
"And you assumed..."
"What did I assume? Would the pups mind if I kissed you?"
"That was past tense, you should ask, 'will the pups mind if I kiss you?'"
"Ahem... do I assume you will allow me to kiss you then?"
"I can't drink though, I gotta go to work in the evening."
"You didn't answer my question, do I get to?"
"How about coffee?"
"Coffee meaning what it actually means?"
"Do you have a one-track mind? I meant cappucino or latte or whatever"
"Do I?"
"Like coffee?"
"Have a one-track mind?"
"So when is it?"
"I thought you said tomorrow?"
"No, I seriously can't take the pups."
"Okay, when they grow up, or when you get them a nanny. I want to abduct you."
"And?"
"And take you somewhere far."

Michael calls it forbidden. I call it a dream. He calls it reality and puts on his doc martens, with a smirk on his face. Who gave the bearded philistine the confidence to shape his life with his own hands? Michael still calls it forbidden.

And then they met one day when her children were home. It rained as they drove on aimlessly toward the sea. The radio played Ghost Story by Sting. He thought of touching the tattoo on her thigh peeping out of her sarong and she didn't think about anything. The dogs, perhaps? Or about when he said he will abduct her? His breathing was heavy. A creaky door closed behind them that day that perhaps won't open again, definitely not to let them in, because they had chosen a path together. A path that went straight to the Western sky, where the sun was sinking.

Nailclippers

2009-07-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Why did we have to have cities, I wonder? Weren't we happy in our villages, herding sheep and cattle, collecting dry wood and having our nails clipped at the local barber's? I have seen a village belle come and clip the nails of my granny, who used to sit like a matriarch in her huge verandah with two German Shepherds guarding her. Earlier in the day I would take the dogs out for their morning crap session, and they would drag me all around the village, Maheshpur. Maheshpur is now in Jharkhand, about two hours from Dhanbad in the mining heartlands, but those days it was in Bihar.

Sundar da (although a Bihari, he spent 40 years at our place and turned Bengali) asked me if I would like to go with him to fetch milk. I would jump at the opportunity. There weren't any other kids to play with at my granny's place and I would get bored playing with the dogs, who didn't think much of me as a playmate. We would walk to the khataal, a place where the cattle were, humongous black buffaloes mostly. The milkman would give us a canful of frothy, creamy milk that we carried home. Back to the dogs. The dogs ate beef and rice every day and hated taking bath. But we would tie them to a post next to the well and give them a nice bath every Sunday. Sundar'da managed this alone as I watched from the steps.

My granny was big, black, and wore black spectacles. I was told stories of how she once caught a robber on a running train and handed him over to the police at the next station. She sat alone, watching the road, huge stick in her hand, with Betty and Darling on both sides, ready to lick the world to protect her. She was sad. Four of her five children were away. Her youngest son was the only one who lived with her. My mom and I would visit often because we lived about 100 kms away in a neighboring state. Often she would lift her thick glasses and wipe her eyes. I couldn't understand why as tears always made me uncomfortable, but I lay there, at her feet, playing with a toy, perhaps, and thinking why the others couldn't come to see her. They did come, once a year, and those were times when I had a lot of fun. Four boys and three girls, we made quite a bunch, but I guess we all got together only twice in our lives. Those are memories to die for.

The food was fresh, we had a kitchen garden where we grew some veggies, and Maya di managed the kitchen. I remember her perpetually making rotis. She had a room in the garden and she would read Gopal Bhar stories to me. She wasn't as friendly as Sundar da, who had a golden heart. He came as a young boy to our place and died much later, some say of cancer. I never saw him not smiling.

Today when I bit my nail too close to the skin and shrieked in pain, it all came back to me. The girl who would come to clip our nails, making life so easy. Someone to cook for you, someone to look after your dogs, open the gate for you and close all the doors after you have gone to sleep. These relations were symbiotic. Poor people whom our government did nothing for survived on employment created by the middle class. Fresh milk, vegetables from your own garden, trucks carrying coal, the postman coming at 1.00 in the afternoon with letters from Australia, Madhya Pradesh, or Durgapur.

No such luxury in a city. Here you are handed a nailclipper, which you are too lazy to use. You end up biting your nails to their right length and shape. And sometimes, it is too close for comfort.

Prior Knowledge of Death

2009-06-10T01:40:00.000-07:00

I was trying to gauge how we react to the death of an unknown person who isn't even remotely related to us. And the difference in reaction between knowing the person is "going to die" and the reaction when you know "the person is dead."

Recently, a fellow blogger Titin posted on her FB profile some pics of an art exhibition held in Mumbai. The painter, 17 year old Shobhit, looked a little strange: unusually thin, head shaved, and with death in his eyes. The paintings were nice, his family was around him and everybody was happy and smiling. Titin informed me that Shobhit is terminally ill and has only a few days/weeks to live. I looked at his pics, the smiles on the faces around him, and also at his smile. And, despite not knowing him, I was affected by the knowledge that he may die any moment, any day. I kept thinking how he is or if he is alive at all. I asked Titin a week later and they said he is in pain and on morphine. I wondered if he had ever enjoyed some essential things in life. Does he have a Munnabhai next to him to make him enjoy his last few days? Would a kind woman make love to him to show him how life began? Does that woman necessarily have to be on hire? The next time I asked her, he had passed away. Everybody seemed to be relieved to see him not in pain anymore. Sometimes, we wish death came faster.

When you see his pics with the knowledge that he is already dead, it probably doesn't affect you much. But if you knew about it before he died, you would have tossed and turned in your sleep. When Dhananjay (the lift operator who raped and killed a girl in Kolkata) was hanged, and we were all waiting for it, I woke up on two nights thinking whether he is dead yet! Such is the power of impending death. Of anybody. To know that Saddam will be killed tomorrow will make you more uneasy than the news of his death greeting you the next day.

Here are some pics taken by a plane crash victim moments before he himself died. The plane was hit by another one and broke into two. This guy managed to click some last pics, in one of which you get to see a man flying off. Look at the anguish on their faces, not knowing what hit them, with not even split seconds to react. There's not even fear on some of the faces, just plain bewilderment. How soon did they die, I wonder? I hope they died before realizing that they are about to die. These two pics were so disturbing that I deleted the email which brought them. But there was also this morbid desire to see the pics again. I guess the only time I was so affected was when I saw Daniel Pearl's death on video. The most gruesome, although you can derive solace from the fact that his pain lasted not even a second. But he knew he was dying, right? How did he cope with that knowledge?

And suddenly one day my brother sent back these air crash pics to us confirming these are hoax pictures. There was a sense of relief, much like you are probably feeling right now.

One of my aunts who died of a painful throat cancer used to maintain a diary on her deathbed. She addressed all her letters to my dad, and sometimes I am curious to find out if she had mentioned death in those letters. How do you get ready for death? And if you meet death in the eye, how do you ready yourself? What do you think? Any last ditch attempt to jump out of a plane at 37,000 ft?

I feel it is much easier to cope with death that's already happened than with death that's about to. A friend of mine says "pass on" to imply there's still some world for the spirit to go to. I guess I need to start believing in a whiteness post death where my spirit can live without the bodily pleasures.
Until then, I will be shit scared of death.

Futre vous

2009-05-28T00:18:00.001-07:00

What all can you buy with 350 euros? A lot, if you convert it into INR. It is almost 19 K, with which you can buy a lot, for example, groceries for eight months, etc. If I get hold of that money, I will definitely buy a sidecar for my motorcycle. However, the 55 Indian passengers of the Air France flight who faced racial discrimination on their flight back to India, are not too happy with that money.

Being Indians, I wonder how they felt bad at being racially discriminated against! I mean, hello? The Air France guys are not only white, they are French as well, culturally the most advanced race in the world, boasting of the best artists, best museums, and owners of the most rich language, French. They are even smart enough to pronounce difficult spellings in their indigenous way that nobody else can understand. They are the French. They have all the right to be obnoxious. Even Rowan Atkinson, in his stand up about welcoming people to Hell, categorizes the French as being naturally disposed to get entry into Hell just by virtue of being French.

We Indians were supposed to be farmers and bicycle repairmen. But suddenly we decide to make a trip abroad. Why do you expect the French will give you chairs to sit and loos to defecate in? No wonder they treated us Indians as Indians should be treated. We can't blame the French now, can we? We should gladly accept the 350 euros they have offered to each passenger and buy eight months' worth of groceries, feeling happy that we saved one-way fare.

But no. The Indians, very uncharacteristically, felt insulted. And they are going further, pressing charges at the international court. I mean, HELLO... the father of your nation, Mr MK Gandhi, was thrown out of a train in South Africa only a few decades ago. For being Indian. What gall, I say! To stand up against racial discrimination? What has happened to us? This problem of gross insubordination to the whites (and especially to the French) makes me wonder if we are in the midst of a metamorphosis. Are we turning human after all from being Indian?

To sign off, lemme put it in French: Futre Vous, France... may those 55 Indians shove the 350 euros up your culturally rich asses and give you constipation for 350 days.

White Chicken in a Thick Cashew Gravy

2009-05-17T09:17:00.001-07:00

Around 7.00 in the night, have a glass of red wine.

There are quite a few things that I want to write about but right now it is difficult to remember all. In fact, after having had the chicken in cashew gravy, my mind has gotten even number. But that doesn’t stop me from writing about the chicken in cashew gravy.

Marinate a kg of chicken in 500 ml curd and ginger-garlic paste overnight. In two teaspoonfuls of olive oil, fry some finely chopped onions and cinnamon in a rice cooker until the onion turns brown. Pour the marinated chicken, add some sugar and salt, and close the lid. Let it cook for about 30 minutes. Keep checking the level of water because if you don’t add water, sometimes the gravy may get too dry. Add half a cup of water after every 15 minutes. After about 30 minutes, add the cashew paste (about 100 gms of cashew ground in milk to form a thick, white paste). Stir a little. Your white chicken in cashew paste is ready.

As Bengalis, we add a couple of potatoes in a kg of chicken. Just cut the potatoes in half and put them in with the chicken. They ensure your gravy is even thicker.

To serve with this, you need either gobindobhog rice, which is found only in West Bengal, CR Park (New Delhi), and most places in the US, or zeera samba rice, which is found in Bangalore. Both the varieties have small grains with a beautiful aroma that can waylay an otherwise determined hunger striker. Rumor has it that Karunanidhi recently had to break his half-day hunger strike after some supporter of Jayalalitha started cooking zeera rice in the vicinity.

Mix the two and eat more than your usual intake. Expect a little flatulence and a heavy feeling that starts with your eyelids. The dreams following such a meal are often rather primordial in nature. You may see yourself giving successful chase to some nubile nymphets. A closed deal like that in a dream can obviously result in a little bit of wetness, which is pardonable. But remember to start with a glass of red wine around 7.00 in the night.

Good night.

The Congress Has Won Again

2009-05-17T08:23:00.001-07:00

Here's an article posted and later taken off the blog on May 12, 2009. The Congress has won at the center, but my leader, Krishna Byregowda, has lost by a margin of 37,000 votes.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Of Mostly Ugly Leaders: Who Will Lead India?
Difficult question given that a major part of the last 62 years has seen the Congress ruling India. From the welfare government setting up heavy industries and recruiting 500% more labor than necessary in the fifties, the Congress government has come a long way. We can see biracial faces as leaders in Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. They are well educated, can speak chaste English (and even other European languages am told), are from a family of leaders, and look nothing like the common Indians. When the beautiful daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru married Parsi Feroze, the political career of the Nehrus would have been in jeopardy if our Gandhiji didn't accept Feroze as his son and give him his name. What strikes me as funny is why the rather handsome children of Feroze and Indira chose to keep the name of Mr Gandhi, who was decidedly ugly and very misguided. So now, we have as our leaders the Gandhis, who should ideally be called the Khans.

Befitting surname for a goodlooking family. I would have loved that. India's royal family, the Khans. After Rajiv Khan (Gandhi) was killed by the LTTE terrorists, it seemed that the royal family won't rule the Congress any more. But we Indians had served the Mughal kings, British kings, and the Queen for a long time and we needed that to continue. So, the beleagured and corrupt Congress leaders (I especially remember Sitaram Kesri, possibly the only man uglier than Gandhi and even Dhanno, the woman who killed Rajiv Khan) went and fell at the feet of Rajiv Khan's widow, Sonia. They wanted a queen to lead our famous democrazy. The people of India were divided on this issue...Sonia is an Italian Catholic. How can we let her lead the leading party of India, was the question people were asking. As a twenty-year old then, I didn't have an opinion about this. All I could say was, why not her? She is better looking than the Sitaram Kesris of the world and is also the mother of my childhood crush Priyanka Khan.

The Jansangh was another party that was coming up. About its history, please ask Manini Chatterjee. She knows a lot about their past. Apart from the fact that Shyamaprasad Mukherji was their founder leader, I didn't know much. I also knew that Shyamaprasad Mukherji was allegedly murdered in Russia. People in West Bengal will tell you it was Jawaharlal Nehru who plotted this murder, but who has proof? It is also alleged that Nehru got our fighter leader Subhas Chandra Bose captured and locked up in Russia till his death much later. But who knows all this for sure? So, the Jansangh later became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and gradually turned into a formidable opposition under the able leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

So, what did the Congress do about the basic things that a country needs? Let's talk about industry, infrastructure, education, population control, creating employment opportunities, telecommunications, energy (electricity, hydro, renewable, solar, nuclear, etc.). Or let's not. For 62 years, a lot has happened. A lot that could have happened, hasn't. Everybody has a cellphone in India now, so it can be safely predicted that the number of Indians with brain tumors will soon reach manic proportions. Some states have prospered, some haven't, but we cannot generalize and squarely blame the Congress party for all that has gone wrong. For example, in West Bengal and Kerala, the communists have ruled. If these states don't have any roads, jobs, hospitals, schools, etc. you cannot blame the Congress for it, can you? But they do, the communists. The Congress had set up heavy industries in every state. In West Bengal there were steel plants and mining machinery to name a couple. But the communists ensured that these industries close down. They have the hammer and the sickle in their emblem, but all they ask their followers is to lay down the hammer and the sickle and just pick up red flags instead. Don't work, is their slogan. Don't work, but fight for your rights. Ask for more wages, ask for leave, ask for better working conditions. In a state of beggars where getting work itself is like striking gold, can you choose your working hours? About a hundred years before that, when the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK, people thronged the cities, lived in squalor and filth and choking drains, died in epidemics, sacrificed everything for a developed nation to be born. It would have been a lot better here, had it not been for the communists. If we worked when we should have worked, this nation would have gone a few more rungs up the ladder toward being called developed. But, thankfully, they couldn't spread their cancer to any other state and were beaten hollow elsewhere. They could survive only in the hot and humid states of Kerala and West Bengal, where people are genetically and geographically inclined to laziness. No wonder these states welcomed the communists as the entrepreneurs fled and the government institutions suffered a slow death.

They don't feature anywhere in the greater scheme of things, so we will not waste another paragraph talking about this misguided lot (rot), some of whose clean-shaven brethren in Delhi can be seen jumping around like midgets in the Parliament. They have no agenda, no qualms, no ideologies, except for jumping around against the ruling party. Oh, there's also a third front in India, where these insignificant idiots have found sympathizers. Oh lord, may the commies and the Third Front come under the great feet of Kumbhkarn one day, is our only prayer. If they ever come to power, they will all die fighting each other over portfolios. Imagine if PK held the external affairs portfolio? He would single-handedly screw up our relations with every other nation in the world. Our only friends will be Huge Chavez and Infidel Castro. Nothing against them... in fact I like them for giving it to Jr Bush, but hello, can we survive today by befriending these countries? The communists (secular, atheist, etc.) also like radical muslims a lot and have let them build terror schools in the name of madrassas all over West Bengal and Kerala. Why do you think no Muslim bombs are going off in these states?

Shit, those were two paragraphs of venting out my frustration. No way, will come back to the Congress and the BJP now.The Congress is a behemoth with one part of the body unaware of another. This party has attracted casual crooks who don't steal too much and are moderately corrupt, but don't have any ideology to talk about. The sarkari babus ask for chai paani, the police ask for bribes, and the wheel moves. Some people complain, but life goes on under the Congress. The Royal Family of the Khans humor us by trying to appear Indian in kurta/pajama and sari when they make a public appearance and it is a safe kingdom to live in if you can cover your eyes and ears at times.

There is no visible anti-incumbency to talk about, the rich are rich and the poor are poor. There is no insubordination whatsoever. Your maid listens to you and works like a slave the entire day for a pittance without a complaint. And you smilingly give her child your son's old bicycle. The peace and happiness is almost like an English fairy tale. How to topple them? How to bring discontent in the minds of people? How to usurp the throne? In comes the BJP with a new agenda: Hindutva.

Yeah, so what did the BJP do to come to power in 1999? How did this so called right-wing party manage to topple the Congress government? Well, they brought with them the trump card of Hindutva. Not a bad one, that. It appealed to many as they painstakingly started with how Gandhi was the first communal leader of India and appeased the Muslims in the name of secularism. This emotional tickling of the average Hindu yielded results in the cow belt. It is called the cow belt not because most Hindi-speaking people think like cows, but because in the states of Bihar, UP, MP, Rajasthan, etc. people worship the cow as one of their gods. We do have staunch Hindus in Maharastra and Gujarat as well, but they aren't part of the cow belt because they don't speak Hindi. I must find out more about the association of the cow with our national language.

Meanwhile, the small time crooks of the Congress party were aiming for higher levels of corruption and some of them got caught. Even poor Rajiv Khan got embroiled in a controversy involving the Bofors anti-aircraft guns deal. Apparently there were many kickbacks and some people got rich (it is still a nebulous thing to me) and there was another Italian involved who either made money or gave money or slept with somebody. We would never know. This gave BJP another trump card. They left no stone unturned to malign the name of the Congress in people's minds and came up to be reckoned as a powerful opposition. To keep their Hindu votes alive they also went and demolished a historical monument protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. 1992 was the darkest year for us. (The Talibans later emulated us and destroyed the great Bamiyan Budhha statues in the mountains of Afghanistan.)

It so happens that one Mr Valmiki once wrote an epic called the Ramayana. It was a good versus evil story in which the mythological character Rama wins over Ravana.
So, this Valmiki bloke wrote his story and many hundreds of years later it grew into an epic. Because most folklore traveled by mouth, new subplots were added at various points of time until this story became like a legend and Rama became a god to the people living in the cow belt.

Now, if Rama is god, the story becomes god's story. The places mentioned in the story gain more religious than historical significance. Valmiki, poor guy, mentioned a place called Ayodhya as Rama's birthplace. The BJP did some research and figured that the mosque in Ayodhya built by Emperor Babar in the 16th century was built upon an erstwhile Ram Temple. And they hit a jackpot. Let's tell the people of India that Rama was born here.

You should have seen what happened when they hatched this plot. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? But millions of people from all over the cow belt went to Ayodhya and demolished the Babri mosque, which you might have otherwise visited as a historical monument. The BJP was seen as a capable party who can "do" something. And this incident made India an unsafe place after 1992. With the Congress at the center doing nothing to stop this barbaric act, the Muslims were estranged and threatened. The petty and big criminals among them, who were busy smuggling and extorting money, got furious and funded the first serial bomb blasts in Bombay... in 93.

The picture of India started changing since then. If you see the Hindi movies made back in the 70s, we had smugglers to fight against. That place was taken over by the terrorists in the 90s. The Muslims needed a voice and some of them found it in the form of terrorism. Sadly, they didn't target the perpetrators of the crime but targeted the common Indian, who had nothing to do with the demolition of the Babri mosque. The BJP surged to power in 1999 with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the Prime Minister of India. If you look at it objectively, those weren't bad years for Indian business. The finance portfolio was held by Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh and they were not like Chidambaram of Congress. Chidambaram has always cut the wings of the common man by taxing him the maximum. BJP brought tax sops, made home loans cheaper, increased the forex reserves manifold and brought down the inflation. They started major infrastructure projects, one of which is the Golden Quadrilateral, connecting India by road. And what roads those were! All this made us wonder what was their need to come to power using the Hindutva bandwagon. They could have chanted the mantra of progress, prosperity, and industrialization instead. Foreign direct investment increased during their tenure and there were jobs created in India by multinational companies.

All was well save the Hindutva part. The right-wingers within BJP grew into Frankensteins and started going around as self proclaimed culture cops. If you think about it, these guys are even more misguided than the communists and are equally if not more dangerous. They captured liberal and forward thinking places like Goa and Bangalore and attacked the revellers there. And as part of their agenda to make these "western" places into regressive and backward places, they succeeded in spoiling BJP's game. In the name of Hinduism, which has always been the most tolerant of religions after Buddhism, they tried spreading fear and superstition in the minds of people. Sample this: our CM says on national television that one Mr Deve Gowda wants to kill him with black magic! There's more: funds allocated for the state government of Karnataka are publicly directed to Hindu temples! This is gradually getting worse than living in medieval Europe!

The other fallout of the Hindutva angle is the ire of the Muslim terrorists. They are constantly planting bombs under our asses almost in jest. You don't know when you will blow up. It is like a game of musical chairs. Who dies first?

So, whom did you choose? I chose a clean shaven Krishna Byregowda for Bangalore South. He has studied International relations in Washington, D.C., does not wear a white mark on his forehead proclaiming to be a Hindu, does not have a criminal record, and is just the kind of leader we should all go for: young, educated, clean, and with a purpose. He isn't as ugly as the others either. Let the wheel amble on, let there be corrupt officials (we can't change that because its human nature to be corrupt), let there be no roads, let there be no electricity...let life go on as it was in India all these years. Let's clutch our cellphones in the dark and for once not be afraid of being a woman, a Muslim, a Christian, or an atheist in India. Let's hope these young leaders (viz. Rahul Gandhi Khan, Omar Abdullah, Krishna Byregowda) take our country on another course and gradually change the way things work. I am eternally hopeful. I didn't have to live in any fear when I grew up under Congress rule. And that made me vote for the Congress again. Let's be back to being Indians.

P.S.: The Congress got a thumping majority. The country has voted out the regressive BJP and their Hindutva stand has bitten the dust. The earlier red bastion, West Bengal, has voted the Congress and its allies to power. Are the times changing? An African ruler of the world, Prabhakaran dead, the Talibans being hammered from both ends... is it all true?

aiween ee

2009-04-17T00:32:00.000-07:00

1. Jayanagar, despite being branded as a Hindu Brahmin area (people from North Bangalore look down upon it because of its vegetarian influence), is where a huge Muslim population do their business. I get to interact with mostly the cloth merchants and tailors, and this pic was clicked from outside one dupatta shop in the basement, called Lu Lu Dupatta shop. They have all the colors on earth, and despite the area being rather dark with fumes from petrol gensets all around, I couldn't resist clicking this.

2. Later that day, again in Jayanagar, Aaron was waiting for Mr Victor Albert (his piano teacher) to come back from the Church. It was Easter, and we could understand his being late by about 30 minutes. Aaron, meanwhile, checked out the lingerie shop downstairs. When I was his age, a pic of a woman in her lingerie would be hard to come by, and most ads in the magazines and newspapers were sketches. Today, models are fighting to grab a plum role for a leading brand. "Daddy, your Jockey is available here," he announced pretty innocently (and loudly). Strangely, he was looking at women's innerwear!
3. Tawa toast, if made with a lot of patience on a thick tawa, tastes better than bread from an electric toaster. Not uniformly toasted, with some parts a little burnt and some parts nicely toasted, they go very well with marmalade and darjeeling tea early in the morning. Like they serve you in a forest rest house or maybe in some Army canteen... tawa toast, a lump of butter, and black tea.

A 2 mp phone camera gives you pixelated pics that look hazy when blown up. But there's some fun in being able to click at random. Much handier than your digital camera, which you don't carry always... I have also taken some pretty weird pics with this, stuff I dare not share... and am freaking out.

Of slippers and slipping away

2009-03-31T10:06:00.000-07:00

Have you seen those jute Osho sandals? They are cool, eco friendly, and loved by all the white tourists who come to India. Not just the hippies, but also the normal tourist who wants to wear flipflops and "feel" India. I bought a pair in 2005, but this story is about 1992, when I had no idea where these beautiful jute sandals came from. In Banaras I had seen the white tourists wear these and a disturbing urge of flicking a pair from someone was rearing its ugly head inside my mind. Where do you have sandals lying unattended? Outside a temple, of course. And which temple do most of the tourists visit? Why, it is our very own Sankatmochan!

"Meghadoot da, have you heard Dil Gira Dafatan? It is from Dilli 6." Now, among my musically inclined friends, mentioning AR gets me brickbats. AR Rahman produces stereotypes, and makes music for the musically challenged masses of India. Remember Muqabla? Well, that's what he is capable of. Talk about music, they will insist. But I took a chance. I had to tell Meghadoot da about AR's music in Dilli 6. Although it is at times signature AR, it is beautiful and various. It has the smell of Dilli in it, it has Masakkali, it has fresh voices like Ash King's or Mohit Chauhan's... it definitely has the poetry of Prasoon Joshi (who IS this guy and how many women are running after him now?), and AR has poured out his best in this album. His soul is captured in this album.
"You know... there's something about the tempo of this song... the fast guitar in the background and the magically slow vocals by Ash King in the foreground... which creates a temporal confusion in your brain...that's akin to being stoned after quality pot... I feel stoned every time I listen to that track.

"I also listened to Lopamudra's Krishnakali right after that, but after a while, I switched to Dilli 6 again. Is it because I can't understand Tagore's music? Why doesn't it appeal to me?

And then he told me about how, if you are not a singer with a range like Lata or Asha, you can't do justice to all kinds of Tagore's songs. The different moods, the variation in the tempo according to the mood, the absolute melancholy in one song that aligns with your grief today and the fresh hope in the next, is what Tagore is all about. Unfortunately, the new generation of singers have not been able to grasp and render that same variety in their albums. There's a whole dimension missing, that of the depth. The emotional depth. If one fails to do that, one fails to grasp the attention of a potential listener like me.

"Remember Sankatmochan?" I remembered Sankatmochan. This old temple with an expansive courtyard hosts a classical music conference every year. It is nothing like your Dover Lane Music Conference in Calcutta. It has a charm that is known to have waylaid many lay persons and made music lovers out of them. It is free, and it has the best classical musicians performing every year.

Knowing I would find the nice Osho sandals there, I went with some other students one night to the Sankatmochan temple. It is about a kilometer from the university entrance and we went barefeet, determined to get nice sandals for ourselves from the piled up footwear outside the main hall. The mood of the place made me curious. There were families from villages who had come from long distances on their bullock carts and there were hundreds of European tourists among the thousands of Banarasis. They were waiting for the stalwarts to perform.

"Yes, I remember Sankatmochan. I distinctly remember Pt V.G. Jog and Mme Sisirkana perform, and I also remember how Pt Jasraj started late in the night and sang the raga bhairavi to usher in the morning. But did I tell you about this, Meghadoot da? I liked Sisirkana's violin recital a lot more than VG Jog's. She used a viola, five strings, and would sometimes play two strings in harmony with each other. That made her rendition a lot more soulful. I couldn't identify the raga, am a layman, but the soul of her music still reverberates within. It is gonna be there for a long time."

Meghadoot da doesn't know perhaps that I went to flick a pair of Osho sandals from a music conference. But he also doesn't know that I came back barefeet that year. And every year after that till 1995, a potential thief, waylaid.

Tasmanian Devil

2009-03-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

When you are married to someone whom you've known from school, you happen to act like schoolkids at times even though you are on the wrong side of 40. You cuddle, hug, pick them up, or sometimes dive into the bed together. These are mostly asexual acts, and can also pass off as wrestling maneuvers if the WWF bosses are asked to judge: "There, there, he has pinned her to the bed and what is this? What is this? She has kicked him in his balls. OOOOH, that must've hurt!" Moral of the story is, buy a bed with strong legs.
So, these things keep happening. I have seen my neighbors do it. I have seen their Labrador, Buddy, trying to snuggle in between his sparring human parents. And here sneaks in the subject of my article today. What if you have a hyphen at home? A hyphen that questions this public display of affection? Yesterday, during one such crazy moment, Aaron came in between us, pushed me away, and called me a Tasmanian Devil. If you are used to watching Looney Tunes, you know what a Tasmanian Devil is. It is this horrible beast that all animals in the jungle are scared of. Save Bugs Bunny, of course. He somehow manages to trick this Devil into submission.
But, despite being a real dumbass, it is a scary looking monster no doubt.

(image from www.webweaver.nu/clipart/cartoon2.shtml)

Now this guy is really afraid of the Tasmanian Devil. Every time the animals announce that the Devil is approaching, you can see him cower, cringe, and try to hide behind a curtain. To him, it is the ultimate fear factor. And he called me a Tasmanian Devil.

I tried telling him that it is a politically incorrect term and that the Tasmanians, if they could speak English, would have had serious reservations about this animal being called a Tasmanian. But to no avail. He wanted me to stay away from his mom. That got me thinking: how much show of affection is okay in front of kids? I know of one really horny couple who used to make out in front of their little kid, resulting in the kid turning out to be a real psycho. They happened to be Bengalis too, much to our embarrassment. When a kid sees his parents in an embrace or loving each other, it feels insecure and left out. But that doesn't mean you don't kiss or wrestle, right?

I called up our psychoanalyst Meghadoot da. Although he has a postgraduate degree in Horticulture, he seems to be really good with my brain. He has counseled me many times and I sincerely rely on his advice. For example, the time when I wanted to get admitted to a hospital to get a girl's attention, he dissuaded me from it, saying it won't really help. He also helped me find a girl of my mental level, which is difficult in a university of such repute. So, this urgent call to Meghadoot da found him in the midst of a drinking binge. He had mixed vodka and rum, and was flying when I called.
"Shuvo...did I tell you about Asha?"
"Ah...Asha? But how do you know about her? She works with us here."
"Ah, i mean Asha Puthli."
"Who is she? I don't seem to remember."
"A jazz great. She was hot on the music scene in the 70s. Find her out on youtube."

And there ended our conversation with Meghadoot da perhaps going back to his imaginary duet with her. But my question wasn't answered. How much display of affection in front of kids? A peck and not a kiss? How long? What about the times when you want to push her down the stairs? What about her kicking my ass? Aren't we supposed to do all this?

And then i found my answer. "Do as the Tasmanian Devil does," a divine voice inside my mind seemed to tell me. I picked him up and threw him into the bed. He sank into the pillows and by the time he could recover, I had thrown her into the bed as well.

Cross Dressing Woes of a Bengali Gentleman

2009-03-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Of all the occasions when I wore a woman's clothes, the first time was very involuntary. In fact I had no say about it at all. My mom bought me a couple of white, embroidered pennies to wear at home. There weren't any diapers those days and paddling all around the house wearing pennies meant I could pee anywhere, any time. What was a thing of convenience for my mom turned out to be something people like to call a psychological aberration today. Not that I always cross dress, but the sudden act of running around the house in my wife's negligee scares the holy almighty out of my son, for sure. Maybe one reason why he doesn't trust the gods too much. (I wonder if the first skeptic had a cross dresser dad too.)

My friends from all the different stages of my life have had the good fortune of seeing me cross dress for some reason or the other. You may remember the time I inadvertently wore a pair of panties to my office, but that was, as I said, inadvertent and completely unintentional. Panties, by their sheer flimsy nature, are not technically fit for men. And I am not referring to that episode at all. The first time I came out wearing a pair of jeans and a tee, dressed as a girl with short hair, was when I was about 14. The seeds that my mom sowed way back in 1971 were bearing healthy fruit, you can say, because apart from my cohorts, most of our other classmates were fooled hollow. Many of them tried to follow us (three boys and a new girl!) on their bicycles that evening. The secret was never revealed and if any of them are writing their autobiographies today, you may read about their first crush being a girl in a blue tee and fiery red lipstick. If they remember, she had a slight hint of boobs too, probably the size of ping pong balls. Poor guys.

Experimenting sexually with boys was very in, and although most of them have grown mustaches and are helping their wives make babies by the dozen now, we were a collective gay community those days. Everybody had measured everybody in that clandestine group and we were ready for the women. Unfortunately, girls were hard to come by. So we went back to measuring each other.

As we grew up and started transforming from boys to men, we were repulsed by each other. The feminine curves were gone, we sprouted hair at unwanted places, and suddenly we discovered the joys of cricket. Yuck, was our collective sigh, but by then the external tuition classes had started and the girls were within easy access. By access I mean to talk to. That high, believe me, was much more than what an entire bottle of Jack Daniels can give me today. Atasi, our principal's daughter, was yet to walk into puberty, but she was the only one who spoke with all the boys. We used to sit all around a cot on little cane stools, and while our teacher would try to teach us physics, almost a dozen legs would reach out for Atasi's under the cot. The silent melee that this resulted in under the cot, with all of us maintaining straight faces above it, was no less than a battle of Panipat. I don't remember who managed to reach Atasi's leg, but I never did. The max I had gone was upto Subham's legs, who enjoyed an hour-long tickle without protesting, thus giving me the idea that Atasi liked me a lot and would probably make babies with me later. Unfortunately, I could not find Subham later to give him a fitting reply.

By the time we reached the university, most of us had been able to do what all American boys are rumored to have achieved on their prom nights. We were men now, but much to my amusement, that strange streak of cross dressing hadn't left me yet. One winter day in Varanasi, as we waited for the girls to come and cut the fruits for Saraswati Puja, it struck me again. Soumitro was taller and I made him my boyfriend as I came out wearing a huge red sweater, a longish bandana and jeans. By now, the ping pongs had given way to earthen bhaars meant for curds. He held me by the waist as we sauntered around in the garden, waiting for the girls to make an entry. I was very curious to know their reaction as I could feel many pairs of eyes trying to check out my bottom through the long, red sweater.

This was a huge success because all the girls who had their eyes set on Soumitro were pretty much bothered. In fact, when I made a normal entry later, some of them asked me who the girl was. It was a strange moment for me. None of the girls were interested in me. I was trying to attract their attention. As another woman! It was time for introspection. What was I upto? Am I growing up all right? Do I need to sit with Meghadoot da for a counseling session?

Many years later we had an ethnic-wear day for one of our office parties. I nonchalantly took out one of my wife's kurta-churidar sets, donned a banjara cap, wore a necklace and went rather boldly to the party, expecting I would attract some attention. Many years of being in the oblivion of trousers and shirts had brought out the rebel in me. I made an entry. Almost in slo-mo, I walked into the huge ballroom of Leela. The crowd had gathered somewhere else. People were discussing something in hushed tones. The entire atmosphere of the place was pregnant with the possibility of a sudden outburst of laughter. A little more into the crowd and I saw what they were all about to laugh at. At the center of the hall was one of our Bengali colleagues, in a traditional Bengali kurta with some khajuraho paintings on it. It would have been a prized exhibit in the wardrobe of any woman, but on that guy, it looked downright hideous. It was a red kurta with a golden statuette painted on it. It was something all Bengali men wear whenever they want to look handsome. And mine was just a plain blue one with shirt collars.

And I realized, I was never a cross dresser. Always a true-blue Bengali.

More on Film Awards

2009-03-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

But I would like some British humor do the talking instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfD2JFfwxLY&feature=related

My favorite hero, Sir Rowan Atkinson, says it all like nobody else can.

Shameful Day

2009-02-23T06:44:00.000-08:00

One would want to rever the Academy, but it turns out that they have been swayed by the shit being sold by Danny Boyle, maybe because someone told them that the F18 hornets have a market in this subcontinent. The Indians have to be kept happy. And if you select one of their hundreds of silly song-and-dance fantasies and give it a bunch of Oscars (art for the economy's sake), the brown bastards will come out of their slums and do a jig a la Jai Ho. Did you, did anyone...see the mindless Bollywood dancers strutting their shit on the revered stage? And Rahman winning an Oscar for THIS shit? At least Masakkali from Dilli 6 would have been a better choice. Jai Ho? Rahman had become stereotyped and had lost it long back, but this is one of his WORST compositions, as everyone sadly agrees. An Oscar for that?

I mean, whom are you trying to please here? You think by giving away some Oscars to India for a B-grade, over-the-top movie you can have a market here? Maybe you are right. Like Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons, despite being utterly mindless, bags all the Oscars, at the cost of art. And you had a nice market warming up to you in China.

Yes, so you will probably give some Brazilian movie all the possible Oscars soon, or maybe you already have, and yes, I grant you this: you have been able to conquer all the markets. But, unfortunately enough, you have let down a world full of serious moviegoers by your judgment. You have lost your right to be at the judge's seat.

Indian commercial cinema has a long way to go, so the lesser said about that the better. We have had stalwarts in parallel cinema, but because their films could not make enough money at the Indian Box Office, we wrote them off as psuedointellectuals. We hailed the Raj Kapoors instead. So, the moment you base your judgment on the amount of money a movie makes, you are talking about a business. Not about art. And Slumdog Millionaire comes nowhere near art in any form. Like Aamir Khan said today, it is a little over the top. Like Bachhan and Arindam Chaudhuri slammed it, it should be written off as just any other movie. It definitely doesn't have what the other Indian nomination got: Taare Zameen Par. Poor Aamir Khan. He is considerably fair, but probably not as much as a Caucasian. And Aamir, lemme tell you one thing: you are not any bit poorer for not having won it for your masterpiece. If this is what the Academy judges are capable of, you can at least look forward to some kudos from the Europeans, the true keepers of art.

The Academy Awards? Thanks, but no thanks.

A World Outraged

2009-02-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

Just now I got some threat messages from right-wing Christian groups for having published my last blog. They objected to the word psalm, but I didn't get an opportunity to tell them that a psalm means a sacred song or a hymn and it has NO reference to the book of The Holy Bible whatsoever. So I will change it to a shloka. Does a shloka, by virtue of being a Sanskrit word, become a Hindu term? Can't there have been Christian shlokas in The Holy Bible?

And then some women pointed out that clicking a picture like that was very objectionable and that they will take me to court for having outraged their modesty publicly like this.

Mallika Sarabhai* called to say that the subject is fat and thus by putting up a picture of someone's fat ass I have outraged the aesthetic sensibilities of bloggers and online joggers. Mallika actually believes obese people hurt our aesthetic sensibilities. I silently agree with her, but then, for the fear of brickbats from expected and unexpected quarters, I publicly disagree with her. What utter nonsense, I say!

The Muslim waqf board has expressed its utter disgruntlement at this picture being clicked at a kabab joint run by Muslims. I fail to see the connection here, but then...

The Hindus were the most noisy of all. And this is the group that came up with a variety of conflicting viewpoints, much like their conflicting gods at loggerheads with each other. First, a group claimed that me being a Hindu, I should have elaborated on that hand in the picture. They feel it can belong to anybody from Durga (who has ten arms) to Kartik (who has four). Closer inspection of the picture, they further said, revealed that it was a male arm, and because Ganesha has fat arms, this arm definitely belongs to Kartik. They now want to perform kar seva at the Muslim kabab joint because they feel it was Kartik's original birthplace. Another group of Hindus (and their leader calls himself Mr Mutalik) asked me about the identity of the woman in question and are out looking for her for not having worn a sari to a public place. I pointed out to them that she isn't wearing a pink chaddi either, but that must have further outraged them.

The last threat was from Israel. They want to know why a falafal is being called a shwarma roll, why Muslims have not paid any royalty for having stolen their recipe of a falafal, and why there is no hummus used if it is a falafal after all. When I told them that these rolls indeed have hummus in them, they filed a lawsuit against the Muslim kabab center at the International Court of Justice for damages to their intellectual property rights.

The only congratulatory mails have come from some really fat, mid-Western Americans. I wonder why.

*Mallika Sarabhai, to serve your short memories, is a famous danseuse and twenty times better looking than Mallika Sherawat. It wasn't a typo.

and then He said: psalm 29.3, SGR

2009-02-19T02:22:00.000-08:00

and then He said, do you want some of that? And we both turned to see where he was pointing.

Holding His Hand

2009-02-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

Suddenly I woke up with a fear. What if he grows up? What if he starts cleaning himself after potty and doesn't scream DAAAADDDDDY, AM DONE? What if he doesn't place his hand in mine and say "keep holding until I go off to sleep"?

What if I lose him? Frantically looked for some pictures to put up here and reassure myself that he is still my lil son. He isn't grown too much yet. He still likes it when I holler out every evening "where's my lil darling" at his day care. He wants to ride his cycle with me next to him. Wants to go on motorcycle rides. I have very selfishly not included his mom in these pics (apart from in one) because it is usually a dad who loses his son and not the mom. I always went back to my mom with my stories while my dad and I were moved further apart. This is a selfish exercise to remind him later that it WAS ME, MY SON :-), who brought you up.

He moved to his room (adjacent to ours) a year back, before he turned six. It was on my insistence, actually. And then I started missing his little palm snuggling in mine. Went to his room and got him back to his bed (this too is adjacent to ours). I used to be very adamant about sending him to a good boarding, but now am not so sure. I know am in for a big shock when he finds his wheels. He already has, you know. He rides his cycle within the street right now unless I am on my motorcycle escorting him, but very soon he will turn that corner and vanish. Ride into his own life.

Till then, let me savor the memories. Let me try not to hold him back. But also not push him away when he still wants to snuggle into me.

A few years back when he used to go to this day care run by a vegetarian family, I almost felt that I have lost him. His taste buds changed and he started preferring curd rice and sambar instead of food. He would refuse beef and sometimes even chicken. Those were very depressing months for us but we managed to get him out of that vicious vegetarian grip. Now, things are much better and he eats normal food. He has even learned to eat chicken rolls and momos like Bengalis. I could almost thank god for that had I had any gods available at that moment.

I guess that also rules out the possibility of him going for a vegetarian Kannadiga girl. Now my eyes are set on my current mixed doubles partner in badminton. She is about seven and is a Mangalorean. Hits the shuttle like nobody's business and is very aggressive on the court. She also happens to be the prettiest thing I have seen in a long time. hehehehehehehe . . .

I guess the best way to keep him by my side is by finding him a girl besotted with Uncle Ari. Wot say?

Two fantastic diesels

2009-02-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

Two fantastic diesel cars were launched recently, and I sincerely hope both of these do well. I couldn't say two beautiful diesel cars because while one of them is from the same design house that designs Maseratis, the other looks like an Australian hybrid cow. But they both seem set to be champions in their respective segments.

The first is the Fiat Linea. Designed at the Fiat Style House, it has European elegance written all over. In an age when the Japs are busy making their midsize cars look like spaceships, the Linea is simple and beautiful without too many nicks and edges like the new Honda City, which loses it in trying to emulate the beautiful Civic. While the Linea has two petrol variants, it is the diesel (1.3 liter multijet, tweaked to make 90 bhp and capable of 160 kmph) that will sell in the midsize segment, given the price sensitivity in that class.

From the back, the Linea will remind you of an Opel Vectra, and the front grille continuing down to the bumper is a powerful style statement as well. I am an elegant car, and not a wannabe. Here's a design that takes the Linea from the midsize and places it right in the executive segment, where the Civic, Accord, and Camry rule.

What's attractive about the Linea is its pricing. It is priced lesser than the ugly Korean Hyundai Verna and also a lot lesser than the Honda City or the Toyota Altis. Will it be able to wean away Honda and Toyota buyers? There's little chance of that happening, but people considering buying the Swift Dzire (which gets the ugliest car award along with Suzuki Versa, Toyota Qualis, and Toyota Innova), Tata Indigo, and Mahindra Renault Logan will definitely consider this as a viable option. It would have been nice to see Indians falling in love with the European character of a car instead of falling prey to boring Japanese reliability, but Indians are only second generation car buyers and you cannot expect a lot of class and maturity in their choice. They want practical cars, and Honda and Toyota give you stable, practical cars that don't give you any trouble. The fact that they don't give you any pleasure either can be overlooked in a market like this. I would like to keep aside Mitsubishi from this discussion because that's one company that has given us cars that you don't want to part with. You can soup up your Lancer, add a different engine, take it to a rally, and give it a wacky paint job after you have had it for ten years, whereas you will only upgrade from your Honda or Toyota.

Will Tata be able to do justice to the Fiat name? Unfortunately, no. The Tatas make the Safari owner and the call center Indica driver stand in the same queue when they come to get their cars serviced. It is doubtful that they will do any justice to the Linea either. It would have been a different case had Fiat had their MoU with Mahindra and Mahindra.

Coming to Mahindra, the Xylo is the other car that I want to write about. It baffles you at first. Is it as ugly as the Innova? Is it as butchy and mean looking as the Scorpio? It will be nice if you can reach the driver's seat before you can make up your mind either way. If you think it is ugly, you will miss what this car has to offer once you are inside. Plush seating, lots of legroom, unexpectedly sweet ergonomics for an Indian car, and a lighter and surprisingly fast engine. It also has the most spacious third row, and is ideal for the big, fat Indian family, like mine. I sometimes have to take 8 people in one vehicle for distances anywhere between 300 to 650 kms. And the knowledge that they are not trying to fit themselves in in the third row of my Bolero on those two jump seats meant for monkey-sized people is a huge relief. In my Bolero, I always feel awkward sitting in the driver's seat because I know two of them at the back must be cursing the roads and everything else in general.

Will the big Indian family now buy a Mahindra Xylo instead of an Innova or a Tavera? I hope they do. It makes sense because again this baby is priced at 7 lakhs on road, which is way cheaper than the Innova. The 2.5 liter engine of the Xylo produces 112 bhp, and despite the weight of the vehicle, it is very quick. I read that the cons are braking and the lack of anti-roll bars at the back, but I haven't driven one to confirm that yet.

What will it be for you, then? Practically thinking, a person like me should go for a Xylo, but the beauty of the Linea (and the affordability factor) is too tempting to resist.

Images from:

http://fiat-india.com/gallery.aspx?ModelId=5

http://mahindraxylo.co.in/view_gallery.html

Of Prostates and Other Stuff

2009-01-29T00:11:00.000-08:00

You guys make up your mind for once. Recently I read a report saying people who masturbate a lot are not likely to get prostate cancer when they grow old. Okay. Nobody complained. Yesterday there was this report that people who masturbate a lot and lead active sex lives in their youth are more prone to having prostate cancer at a later age.

Now, for once, give me the facts instead of doing numerous studies and coming up with different conclusions. I don't want to get prostate cancer. Is there any other way to ward off the possibility of getting it later? Do I stop being religious with the antidote or is that an antidote at all?

Newspapers confuse you. I will soon start skipping the health page.

Today I hit one Tata Safari with my jeep. My metal bumper got lodged into that SUV's rear bumper, and ripped it off. Apparently it costs quite a lot, while mine can be beaten back to shape for a nominal Rs 200. Am expecting that guy to give me a call any moment. Sudden expenses at the end of the month, especially when your otherwise healthy mental state has been challenged by a disturbing newspaper report, are very unwelcome to say the least.

And then there's this fever that came right in the middle of a conference call last night. That too on the slide that spoke about some revenue figures. I had also come to know yesterday that my wife's company is getting rid of a lot of people by the end of this month, so the general mood was not very rummy. A glass of rum was what I needed right then, but unfortunately, didn't have stock.

So I planned to take off tomorrow. Sitting at the desk with fever is not a great idea, and moreover m dad's leaving tomorrow, so I can spend some time with him, I thought. And just now received a meeting request for 11.45 a.m. tomorrow.

I want Charles Berlitz to write about Doomsday 2012 this time. That will give me something to look forward to.

Twenty in Four Years

2009-01-27T08:08:00.000-08:00

This year I have some resolutions. One of them is to try and publish some short stories. I was always under the impression that I have many of them in this blog, but after searching all the posts since 2005 I realized there are only 20 so far. How many of these are publishable? Of course not the one about sniffing panties or the one about pouring mustard oil into a little boy. That means 18. These 18 stories cover only 33 pages in Word, so I must think of some more stories to make it stretch to at least 50 (pages in Word), meaning another ten stories or so.

With 30 of them, I can have a paperback of around 190 pages, priced at Rs 99 and available at all the wheelers and airport bookstalls. Something a bored passenger can pick up. But again, considering a person is adventurous enough to pick up a book by a complete stranger, what will ensure he/she reads it at all? The stories have to have some stuff in them to keep them engaged, glued to the pages. Something tells me sniffing panties is not such a bad idea after all. Most of these passengers are single. Single men, if not women. Men are generally horny and kinky, and more so when single. A horny, married man, out on a business trip and desperate for a fuck, jerking off and starching all the hotel bedsheets is what I am banking on. And they are available aplenty. Pot bellied, mostly, craving for attention, trying to strike up a conversation with single women, these men can be kept happy only if I give them the opportunity to experience some kink. That means I can include the two bowdlerized ones. Come back, faded brown, come back my mustard oil. But, how much kink can I churn out, knowing my sources are limited?

I guess digging back into my memories will serve my purpose. More on that later. For now, let me think of a cover for the book. It cannot be blatantly sexy. That might even be considered vulgar. I have to make sure the new Hindu moral brigade doesn't get to understand what's inside from the cover. But the title should be catchy enough for the single, bored, married man to pick it up and read the blurb.

Will meet Sudeshna soon. Will jump the manuscript on her during one of her least unsuspecting moments. Will talk to some editor friends who have volunteered to help.

And will finish writing those ten more stories. I have them in my mind. Be prepared to be scandalized even more.

The same debate

2009-01-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

Strangely, although not having been taught about gods or their absence altogether, Aaron has become a little skeptical.
Who is our creator?
Well, difficult question. Scientists say it was a Big Bang, and the latest experiment to understand what happened during the Big Bang is currently on somewhere in Europe. CERN. If you want to, I can find out more about it. So, I am not in a position to answer your question. But there is no evidence to corroborate the "who" part of your question. "Who" suggests the presence of a being, either human or superhuman, and that itself is misleading. Why do you assume it is "who" and not "what." "What" can encompass anything from a phenomenon to a living being, and is a broader term. So, ideally your question should be "What is our creator?"

Can I fly if I wear Batman's cape?
No. Many children died trying that. Do you want to jump out and see for yourself?
He didn't want to.

Why does Durga have ten hands?
The same reason Ravana has ten heads.
Daddy, ten heads mean he has a lot of brain power.
Who told you? So you accept it is all symbolic? That Durga's ten hands carry ten different arms and symbolize her superhuman strength?

If Durga was created today, she would have been a superwoman, wearing a jetsuit and perhaps with blond hair.

Who brought me the gifts this Christmas?
Why, it was me, of course...I knew he knew.

No daddy, it was Santa.

When did you lose your virginity?

2009-01-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

(Disclaimer: The owner of this blog can't be held responsible for you being grossed out after reading this account. Please proceed at your own risk to read this partly fictional account that came up during lunch today. And for anybody who has doubts about me after reading it despite the warning, I still remain the same decent guy that I was till my last post.)

We have all come across this question some time or the other. Either from our girlfriends/boyfriends or later from spouses, or during guy or girl talk, when you want to appear smart among your peers. For a long time I held that I first lost my virginity to a girl called Prerana, whom I met in 92. She was waiting for her medical exams while we went for our service selection board exams (the four-day interview process to join the Indian Army). We were a bunch of 52 boys, and the first day our introductions happened in the nude, hurriedly soaping each other in a cramped bathroom accommodating three.

"Hi, I'm Virat."
"I'm Upamanyu."
"Are you from Nepal?"
"No, the Armenian pirates once raped my great grandmother in Chittagong (which is now in Bangladesh). Otherwise I would have looked like a Bengali."
The third guy was busy soaping my balls while I soaped Virat's hands. In that five-minute break for a bath, with 52 guys rushing into 10 cramped bathrooms, we had no other choice and we didn't mind that either.

Just don't bend to pick up the soap, was the only rule.

In the course of the four days we became thick as a group, already at the battle front, ready to lay our lives for each other and for our country. It is easy to get swayed in that collective jingoism, and I was only 21. All we were looking for was to don the bottle green uniform for India.

The evenings were different and mysterious, because some of us realized that there were six girls selected from the previous week's exams, waiting for their medical tests. The otherwise thick group that we were, we somehow used to get shifty every evening with some of us making up weird excuses to go near the canteen. Prerana was one of the girls, obviously a bold Punjabi woman, and very smart. I also remember Kalpana, who was like a mentor to all of them and was selected as a radio officer. Some of us got friendly with both of them and I could sense that Prerana liked me a little more than the others. So did Kalpana, but she was like this elder sister, counseling people around. Prerana started with why, being a Bong, I was here. Being a Punjabi she was under the misconception that the Army was Punjab's backyard, but I couldn't blame her. Bengalis usually love their rice and fish and big tummies. I, strangely, had a romantic dream of joining the Indian Army.

I never thought it would work out, and it finally didn't. The selectors realized that I had no clue about how to negotiate my battalion out of a tight spot, true to my Bengali genes. Sadly, the story of the Armenian pirate raping my great grandmom was not true. I also blurted out in the interview that if I don't get through, I will do my post graduation in French and go on to become a teacher. Of course they didn't hire me despite me scoring the highest marks in the physical exams. And I thought just jumping around from trees and climbing walls would get me into the Army!

The limited interactions with Prerana weren't enough for us to know each other, and the day I realized only 1 guy (ironically, another Bong named Shantanu) from our group got selected, I didn't have the guts to go say goodbye to her either. She was a cowgirl and I was shy. Never met her after that. On the way back in the train, I made up a fantasy about being seduced by her in one of the railway retiring rooms. Ajay Dharni (No. 7, Akbar Road, Cantt, Allahabad) was one friend I was in touch with for a long time, and I think he later joined the Indian Administrative Services. If you find him, ask him about Chang from CDS Bhopal.

Those were days when we wrote letters. Long ones, each one an article in its own right. Ajay moved from Allahabad and we lost touch after a couple of years.

At about that time...one day I was walking with a classmate in front of Raj Bhavan in Calcutta, when she asked me if I were a virgin. When you are with a potential "maybe she will sleep with me" candidate, truth is the last thing on your lips. So out came Prerana from a wicker full of old laundry. Of course I wasn't a virgin, I boldly narrated my story.

I don't know if this sounds absurd, but if you toss around a lie in your mind for a long time, you eventually start believing it. The Nazis were the best in propaganda, and now the blatant untruth in some Palestinian and Pakistani history textbooks can make you shiver. My private untruth kept burgeoning into a big story that everyone started to believe. It does you a lot of good, this story of having lost your virginity. You are treated with respect by your peer group, some are jealous, and the juniors flock around you for some chance wisdom that may slip from your lips and open lucky doors for them. How, when, how was she, why you, how did it feel, the questions were unending. One guy, a fellow unvirginated being, asked me if I tried something strange (that I can't write about here) during the act. I mean, where do they make guys like that seeking empirical evidence from everything in life?

The story grew with me as memories of Prerana faded. It was time to lose it for real and we had no prom nights in India. Maybe still don't. Later I had to confess to one of my subsequent girlfriends that this was a made up story. And someday I lost it for real. Strangely, (or not so strangely as I later discovered in the movie American Pie) I didn't talk about it to anybody when it happened for real. Until I realized much later (when gay rights were being talked about) that having sex with boys is considered losing your virginity as well. Memories of a little boy running around my house with his ass on fire came back vividly to me. In the absence of a proper lubricant, I had poured mustard oil in him. I don't remember the date. I was a little boy myself too.

Don't ask me the question. I don't know exactly when I lost my virginity.

"...and for non-believers"

2009-01-21T01:10:00.000-08:00

so said our 44th prez. In a country that tried to hide from the world that Kennedy is a Catholic... in a country that has refused Bertrand Russell an NYU chair of philosophy because he openly proclaimed he is NOT a Christian...in a country which has on its bank notes "In God We Trust"... we hear someone say... this country is also for non-believers! I mean, THANKS, man... you are benevolent, aren't you? You allow the non-believers to stay!

did I hear right? you mean someone has acknowledged that there ARE non-believers? like aliens? a handful of people being suffocated to death in the midst of the blind millions who spread blindness in the name of religious superstition?

religious minority? i'll tell you who're minority in this world. the atheists.

if one of our new political leaders had the guts to accept that there are atheists even in india, instead of meekly breaking coconuts to make everything "auspicious," we could have asked for some special status too, huh? Some 3 % reservation in government jobs?

Too much to ask for?

But then, if America is coming of age, India is still infested with... i tell you... indians. someday, even if in my dreams, I will shove a bloody coconut up some auspicious asses and garland them.

The Burden of Buying a Bike

2009-01-19T23:24:00.000-08:00

So, it was decided that I will buy a bike. Which one? I asked Abhi of http://bikeszone.com and he promptly suggested Hero Thunder.

I went to Commercial Street to check out Hero Thunder, but liked something much more beautiful from Hercules. How much? I asked, knowing it will be around Rs 5,000 or more.

"This is eighteen."

So, I promptly scaled down my tastes to settle for something that didn't look all that good, but still managed to have a lot of drool value. That was around seven thousand.

With my mind set for this cycle, I came back and started doing the calculations. A spare-wheel rack for two bikes (to mount the bikes on my jeep) will set me back by another 10,000. (image courtesy http://www.jk-forum.com/showthread.php?t=13001)

It is made by Thule of Sweden, and adds some character to your jeep. Okay, so 10,000 plus 7,000 make 17,000. Easy math. A pair of saddlebags for the bike will be around Rs 700. Plus a helmet for me for around Rs 800.

How much? Not much.

Called up the guy who sells spare wheel racks. Hey, so what's the weight that your carrier can manage to hold?

Sir, it is meant for foreign bikes made of aluminum. Ah. So I want to buy a Hercules blah blah for myself. Will that do?
No sir, you better buy that Rs 18,000 model to be able to carry it in this rack.

How much? 18,000 plus 10,000 plus 1500?

I am NOT buying a bike. Decided. Aju is selling his bike for Rs 1500. I am not buying, didn't I say?

My first million

2009-01-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of months I've been rather worried about Aaron's fascination with money. He keeps asking whether something is expensive or affordable, about how much each thing costs, and when he will be able to make millions of dollars. At the age of six, it is a pretty disturbing development in a kid who was born in a household of erstwhile, disillusioned commies. The mention of dollars (not rupees, he wants dollars, mind you) didn't help things much and I could realize my brow and that of my folks going into this thinking knot. Everybody was worried but I could sense that the blame was being directed at me. Somehow. Bengalis would know how difficult it has been for one Mr Nondo Ghosh, who has been blamed squarely for every little mishap in West Bengal. The saying goes: "Joto dosh, Nondo Ghosh."
And despite my name not being Nondo, the Ghosh kind of attracts at least half of Nondo's share of blames. The fact that Nondo is nowhere to be located these days makes it even more difficult for the Ghoshes of the world.
So, people at home suspected me for having inculcated these absolutely capitalistic trends in a kid who was supposed to grow up and study philosophy or history and possibly teach in China if not sacrifice his entire life for the upliftment of the downtrodden. "All this is because of you" lamented some aunt. "You taught him about money."

I couldn't deny it altogether either. I have had to dissuade him from making me buy big toys by explaining how these are expensive and thus unaffordable. "Your dad can't buy a Scorpio, okay? You have to make do with a cheaper jeep? Is that okay?" And he has listened. He has also gone ahead and claimed to his friends that the cheaper jeep was superior than a Scorpio. After realizing that his dad has a limited buying potential, he has even stopped asking me to buy all the toys from one particular shop at The Forum. Yes, so I have taught him about money in a different manner, and was really happy at how this knowledge was received by him.

"Yes I have taught him about money, but about how one should value money. Not to splurge. Haven't you seen the numerous articles in the newspapers about the need to teach children about savings from an early age?" I tried to defend myself. But frustrated communists are difficult to convince. And all communists are frustrated anyway.

But I was worried too. I didn't want my son to keep talking about money all the time. After a point he procured a piggy bank from somewhere and went around asking money from everybody. My dad, usually a little careful in the matters of money, somehow showed him a lot of generosity and started giving him a five-rupee coin every day for his piggy bank. He would roam all around the house with that tin can and tell us how much he has. Soon he lost count. The tin started getting heavier. We all contributed. And our worries touched the cieling. What if he starts demanding money for the services he renders, we all started thinking. He cleans my motorcycle as a pleasurable activity at times, but the moment he realizes it can fetch him money, he might revolt, right? What if he demands money every time we ask him to get water from the kitchen? Or even worse, every time he craps because we ask him to?

This worry kept the entire household awake till the wee hours every night. Sleep-deprived denizens of the Ghosh household could be seen walking around at three in the morning, making a paan for themselves, or going for a late night walk. A house that is filled with various scales and timbres of snoring at night started becoming unusually calm save the slight rasp of blankets brushing against agonized bedspreads.

A few days back he learned to ride his bicycle. It happened by accident, almost. Let me explain. During our recent trip to Calcutta we met the kids of our classmates for the first time. A six-year old girl we met was found to be almost ten inches taller than Aaron. Again all eyes fell on me. "You don't make him ride a bicycle. That's why he hasn't grown at all." An urban myth, I tried to convince them. Look at this picture of the girl's mom with me in school. She was taller by almost a foot when we were children. But communists don't listen to scientific reasoning either, unless written in their Quran, Das Kapital. Some of them promptly referred to a dog-eared copy and some other leather-bound books and informed after a while that Marx and Engels never mentioned that girls grow faster than boys. Hence, it is a myth. And obviously my fault that Aaron hasn't grown beyond 3.5 ft at the age of 6. Ray Manzarek was the shortest in his class for a long time. So was Satyajit Ray. They both turned out to be rather tall later in life, I reasoned.
But...by now my shoulders got used to being perpetually drooped.

So last week I cleaned the cycle, filled air in the deflated tyres, and made it ready for him. I also removed the support wheel. And he learned to ride in a few seconds. This sudden discovery of the joys of riding made him so delirious, that he couldn't think of anything but riding. I noticed, however, that I never got any appreciation for passing on my riding genes to him. He was hailed as a champ by everybody, and in the general excitement that followed, the fear of his "capitalist" dreams got buried.

"I will buy a bike too, to ride with you to the tennis club."
"When, daddy? When will you buy yours?"
"Next month, beta. This month I don't have any money."
"I will give you all my money, daddy. I have a million dollars in my piggy bank. You can take it. But please buy your bike today."

Mazhab ki larai?

2009-01-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Ashish'da used to come over once a month, and every time he came, I was advised to go to the other room. We had only two rooms, so Ashish'da and dad talked late into the night discussing something serious, while I would spend a curious time in the other room, wondering why I was kept away. I was allowed to meet every other friend of my dad but those late night visits by Ashish'da meant we had to switch off all the lights and pretend to be asleep.

Much later my dad told me that he was a guerrilla fighter who fought for some ultra leftist ideologies. He was a student of the regional engineering college in Durgapur, and they had a group of people engaged in extremist activities. My dad befriended him when they had come to burn the library of the A-Zone Boys' School, where my dad was a librarian. Somehow he convinced them against it, and sold them the idea that anarchism that cuts off your own limbs will serve you no purpose and eventually paralyse you. A library is a repository of knowledge, and no matter which ideology you belong to, you cannot act like the Romans. Remember when they burnt to ashes the entire Greek effort at ancient science? That took us back a thousand years. In your fight against the corrupt system of governance, where every government official from a peon to a policeman is corrupt, go ahead and kill those guys, but don't destroy schools and libraries and public property. If you ever come to power, you will have to build everything from scratch again.

I can't imagine how he managed to brainwash a group of charged, young boys away from that day's destruction, but he sure earned the status of mentor to these isolated bunch. He used to lend Ashish'da some books, and also tried convincing him that mainstream politics was the only way to come and fight the cancer that had gripped our country. The guerrillas, naxals as they were known then, most of them brilliant students, died a lonely death, and perhaps Ashish'da too, killed mercilessly by the West Bengal police.

That was then. Discontent about various issues have ensured that the world has always had extremists fighting for something or the other. The fighters of this generation, however, seem to have lost their reason. The advocates of pan-islamism today tell their cadres that they will go to jannat if they kill innocent people in another country. The operatives themselves are brainless today as opposed to the naxals of yore. They have lost their faculty of independent thought and operate on weird propaganda created by their mentors. Pan-islamism. A term very few countries are ready to utter. There's oil and there are friendly Islamic countries, so tread softly. Call them jihadis, terrorists, extremists, whatever, but do not utter that word. It is going to be the fight for the next few centuries, and any sociologist worth his/her salt will tell you where we are headed: Islam versus the rest of the world. A particular violent streak of Islam, which has otherwise seen great spiritual heights during the sufi movement, or has been the seat of learning for many centuries when Europe was plunged in sheer darkness. We haven't forgotten the Baghdad where scientific text was preserved in Arabic and later translated into Latin to pass on to Europe, hailed to be the continent of modern science. We haven't forgotten the Mirza Ghalibs and the Saahir Ludhianvis. We still love Gulzarsaab and Javed Akhtar's lyrics. We expect Aamir Khan to create magic in every new film. But somewhere, somehow, today's extremists want us to remember only WTC, the Bamiyan destruction, the killing of Daniel Pearl, or the latest Mumbai carnage. Every time a Muslim name is uttered, your first reaction is of doubt.

Who has to fight it? Definitely not MJ Akbar, who is busy lambasting the people in power from an almost overt soft corner for the jihadis and their "cause." After every attack or dastardly act by the Muslim terrorists, he has, instead of directly condemning it, somehow tried to find another viewpoint. We definitely do not need him in this fight. And we cannot fight this fight. It is for the Muslims to come forward and fight this fight for themselves. Muslims who consider themselves as Indian as any Indian. Who don't hoist Pakistani flags inside India. The normal, everyday Muslim who has come out of the ghetto and the burqa. Who, when they delve into their deep rooted culture of music, art, and architecture, can put to shame many wannabes today. Where are they? Why is it that the Kasabs have come to the fore and the Naseeruddin Shahs and Shabana Azmis have taken a back seat? Why can't Ghulam Ali come to India any more and why can't so many of us Hindus, Christians, Sikhs fall at his feet again?

Naseer saab's powerful performance in A Wednesday was so realistic, I can say with conviction that he acted the role of the angry common man from his heart. It almost came across as a scream from a person who is on the wrong side by mistake. And I don't know what the script writer had in mind, but the character there is definitely an irritated common Muslim man. He says "mazhab" for religion, and that gives him away. When he says cockroaches are infesting my home, he means both India and his religion.

Only a common Muslim man who looks like anybody else, eats what we all eat, listens to the same music as others, and is living in constant fear as any other Indian can help us overcome this new menace. We cannot push them away by constant racial profiling everywhere. A pious Muslim with a long beard entering a mall with a backpack isn't carrying a gun. Don't make him feel like a terrorist by stripping him naked and emptying his bag in full public view. Don't push further away the only people who can help you in this fight. The clean-shaved man that you allowed to pass, can be another Kasab or Ismail Khan. He can also be an LTTE bomber, a ULFA operative, or one of these newbie Maoists from Andhra who is clueless about where Karl Marx or Mao Dze Dong advocated bombing people shopping in a mall.

Aadi Sutripti

2009-01-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

After a hard and frustrating day at work, at the end of which you aren't sure if you will be able to meet the month's target, a cup of tea can stem your suicidal thoughts. But at Aadi Sutripti, you can let your first cup linger for a maximum of 30 minutes, after which the waiter is gonna hound you. What else? Is that all? Are you gonna leave now? Do you wanna order something else? In 96, even an extra cup of tea pinched. But we had to spend some more time, to have futile discussions about how to get into better paid jobs, about how to save enough for a life together. Not a big, fat Indian wedding, but something good enough to convince our parents that we can survive on our own. Right then, we couldn't. The next cups of tea came, but the waiter was not gonna allow us another 30 minutes. Scheme. Sacrifice the next day's money today and buy some more time. To hear each other's frustrations reflect off square cups and saucers.

Some days, when I could sell, we treated ourselves to Moglai Parotas. But the waiter still had the same disdain on his face as if we were unwanted filth on borrowed time.

I went back this time with a good mind to order ten Moglai Parotas and nibble a little from each...and perhaps spend the entire day just giving back all that disdain to the waiter.

He just wasn't there after 13 years and nobody could recollect him from my description. I didn't have his name. Thinking how much he earned then and what could have happened to him now, the acerbity suddenly vanished and gave way to a strange worry for an unknown man.

Was it Kolkata, or am I being dramatic? Someday, we have to give back that city all that we stole from it.

Blue

2009-01-04T08:47:00.000-08:00

Samyak stood by the window, looking out. You couldn't see much from the window save other houses and a slice of the sky, but he stood still, awestruck, like someone facing the sea for the first time. Actually he was lost in his thoughts, like most Bengali men of his age are. Samyak was waiting for the sound of a car down below.

At 32, Samyak has done decently for himself and earned himself quite some name as a percussionist. He plays the tabla, and has recently been invited by Dr L. Subramanium to perform with him at Bangalore. If you ask him how he feels about it, he will tell you it is like having achieved something beyond his dreams. From his initial days of learning tabla from Manibabu, the tall, dark teacher who used to come riding a bicycle wearing a white dhoti, to playing with Dr. Zakir Hussain at Banaras, Samyak has come a long way. He has even made a statement by refusing to play at the Sankatmochan music conference in Banaras, thus creating quite a stir. He had his reasons, he said on national television. But critics say he refused because non-Hindus are not allowed to perform at the Sankatmochan temple. And he feels, like all musicians do, that music is created to spread the word of peace and break barriers created by religions and races. Despite having come this distance, Samyak didn't forget about Manibabu. He died of a mysterious disease. His family didn't allow anyone to visit him the last few months. Not even Samyak.

He has even been approached by a couple of producers from Tollygunge to act in some Bengali movies, but he refused. He doesn't have the time. Apart from being immersed in practising, studying, and experimenting with music, he now has a new occupation. A little disturbing, you can say. Samyak is falling in love. And that is keeping him busy.

Samyak is not traditionally goodlooking, but his long wavy hair and his tall, sinewy physique make him a rather desirable date for most young women of Calcutta. Once, just after a performance at Kala Mandir, a crazed fan begged for his silk kurta drenched in sweat. And he has not pushed away this attention either. He has loved it like Cristiano Ronaldo would, and while some have looked away, most prude Bengalis have raised a questioning eyebrow...art doesn't give you the licence to...ahem.

So Samyak is falling in love. And the world doesn't know about it. Yet. He denied it to himself all this while, but when Gayatri gets off her sleek, black Civic and walks to him, he momentarily wants to forget that she is married with a kid. They met when he was a struggling prodigy, trying to get a slot in the local Doordarshan studio. Most of the producers were a little wary of his talent, and the local singers weren't too happy when he pointed out how off-rhythm they were, so the going was generally tough. Normal tabla players were in demand, not prodigies. That's when he met Gayatri, a city-based lawyer, married to a businessman in New Delhi.

Gayatri had heard him perform, and probably even took a personal interest in him because she herself arranged for him to meet her dad, who helped Samyak bring out his first solo cassette. It was a series of jazz percussion compositions, using absolutely unmusical objects to create heady, crazy, and sometimes eerie sounds. Although the local Bengali magazines pooh-poohed his attempts, a critic from the Downbeat magazine came across a copy of his album and lauded his efforts. There was no looking back since then. It was 1999. The year he met Gayatri.

Samyak stood in front of the window, knowing Gayatri wouldn't come. But his ears were trained on every sound that they could capture. Nothing much was happening in his locality that afternoon. It was sleepy, soundless, with the lazy crow soaking in the winter sun and letting out an occassional kah as if in thanks. Do crows pray? Samyak thought for a while, but then brought himself back. This new streak of absurdity is either a fallout of too much work or of going crazy altogether. A few days back he caught himself in a delirious bout of thinking about elephants flying and covering the sun.

Gayatri had moved to Delhi in 2001. But she used to come over once a year. Once she came with her daughter, about whom Samyak had no news.
"Whoa! How come you never told me about her?"
"So I haven't told you about so many other things too."

Gayatri was always at an arm's distance, but just beyond his reach. Samyak never thought about her much, but when she came with her daughter to Calcutta, he was a little shaken. Somehow, perhaps because she helped him of her own will, or because she listened to most of his whims, Samyak felt she was his. She wasn't after all. She went and had a kid with another man. Her husband, yes, but another man. All his flirtatious attempts at taking her to bed were in vain, but because he always had someone or the other to come home with, he didn't realize when simply missing Gayatri had turned into something serious.

He turned back after a long time and felt the wrinkles on the blue bedspread. He brought it out after two years, to make Gayatri's visit today special, reminiscent of their last meeting in 2007. That day Gayatri wasn't in her black business suit as always. She always wears black or steel grey business suits and Armani glasses, looking stunning. But that day she wore a white tee above a pair of blue jeans. She threw herself on the sofa, something very unlike her, but placed the flowers carefully next to her.

"Come and sit next to me, Sam" she patted the sofa and beckoned.
"You...you look so different in a t-shirt."
There was a questioning look in her eyes.
"I mean, even more beautiful. Almost human. Like I can reach out and touch you."

"And you couldn't all this while?"
There was a whirlwind working its way through his mind. Before he knew it, they were engaged in a kiss that seemed to last longer than he could hold his breath. "Gayatri..." he managed to gasp, but she pulled him deeper and deeper into her.

Samyak had tried to remember their lovemaking later in many of his late night fantasies, but couldn't find anything special in it. Sex with Anindita is always more experimental and vast. She manages to surprise him everytime. But despite being vast, it is devoid of something essential in making love. Something Samyak hadn't known before Gayatri. He had finally fallen in love. And he could chuck a thousand Aninditas and their Saharas for one little boring oasis for the water in it.

"Why were you so generous today?"
"I always wanted to give you this. All these eight years."
"But why now? Why not before?"
"You weren't ready."
"Didn't you want to kiss me that night we ran inside Nandan from the rain?"
"Not that I can think of," there was a glint of mystery in Gayatri's eyes. She was smiling, and he knew she won't tell. Despite having made love to her, he realized how far she still remained from him.

"Marry me, gee."
"I will, Sam. I will, the day you mean what you say."

Since then till today, Samyak has changed. He has waited for her, saved the blue bedspread they made love on as it was, and put it in the closet. And memories of the Aninditas and Sahanas have been taken over by memories of that one afternoon. Even his harshest critic, Sagarika Ghose, has mentioned in her latest article about a newfound element in his music: feeling. According to her, Samyak Basu has graduated from being just a technically brilliant composer to a musician from his heart.

Gayatri hasn't given him her number and isn't calling up either. She prefers to stay the mystery that she always has been. Incommunicado, just out of his reach. But today she will come. Has she left her husband? How old is her daughter now? Samyak started getting fidgety. He plugged in his iron and tried smoothing out the wrinkled bedspread. What will she think? If it is wrinkled? Will she not want to marry him thinking he is incapable of looking after himself? But isn't that too far fetched? Why would a woman take that as a sign of his incapability! Absurd. He wasn't incapable. She had closed her eyes when they kissed. She had kept moaning when he slowly entered her. She cannot think he is incapable. She hadn't made love in a long while. Or had she? But wasn't he thinking of his abilities as a husband? As a homemaker husband? What is the term for them? But will he look after the home? Her daughter, her daughter...where is she now? How old? Five, six? Will she come with her? Will Samyak be a father? Will the wrinkles on a blue bedspread, which has been spread out to rekindle memories of a blissfull afternoon, be held against him? Samyak kept ironing the ends vigorously. And then the phone announced a message.

Gayatri will not come. Ever. "Have a good life, Sam" was staring at him from the screen. He called up the unknown number but it was just that: unknown.

You can see Samyak in silhouette now. He waited all afternoon, standing in front of the window facing west. And now he is back there, facing an orange sun, wondering if he should turn back and crumple the ends of the bedspread to keep intact the memories as they were. He couldn't remember if Manibabu was his father. The flying elephants had started covering up his orange, setting sun.

Bongs and Slang

2008-12-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

Indians, being repressed, are not very forthcoming about the wonderful repertoire of slang that exists in our different languages. A punjabi always reminds you that you slept with your mother and that your sister probably has a cock, a bong can tell you with some conviction that you (even if you are a virgin still) have had sex with a fool umpteen times, and Malayalis generally confuse people with mongrels. By now you probably have an idea that we are dealing with creativity at its best. However, the middle class (which forms the majority of the urban Indian populace) would have none of it. They learn everything at school, practice the choicest of slangs with their classmates, but pretend to know nothing when it comes to mixing with people of other age groups. For example, a group of 14 year old boys, despite holding masters degrees in slang, would use normal language when they meet 20 year old seniors or 40 year old dads, who all, in their respective groups, are comfortable using this different lingo altogether.

Slang has its benefits. It makes expression easier and less convoluted. A Bengali word like Baal (which is akin to "balls" and literally means pubic hair) can be used to express anything from chagrin to disgust to disagreement.
"The Democrats will win."
"Baal."

You can also choose to use it generously whenever you find yourself cornered in an argument. It is very effective against logical argument of any kind. It can make a universal truth sound like a blatant lie.

"The sun will rise in the east."
"Baal."

And you don't have a good comeback.

I heard of one Bengali who got himself in trouble when he tried using this in Punjab. He said "baal" to mean "balls I will go with you," but the Punjabi thought it was the English word ball (which is pronounced in Punjab as baal) and took offence thinking he meant "balls." Although the essence was the same and the effect would have been similar if the Punjabi guy knew what baal really meant, we are dealing with serious semantics here.

However, slang not being included in popular literature means that in a language like Bengali, to write about a fictional account of two people fornicating, you have to resort to very archaic words from a dictionary by the famous AT Dev. I don't know much about him, but he has been immortalized in the famous rhyme about the Bengali dick. There are no proper, popular, acceptable terms for the various body parts that are involved in a foreplay or the real act. AT Dev, I believe, borrowed everything from the famous poet Kalidasa of the sixth century*.

The current Bengali langauge available for literature, with its nitombo for the butt and ston (with a soft t like in Perestroika) for breasts, is way too Victorian for authors to try writing about sex. But has it deterred them? No way. If you read the recent novels that are being written, you would wonder whether any Bengali character has not had an affair outside her/his primary relation. The latest literature, sometimes set in the US (too many Bongs there, I hear), sometimes in the posh localities of Calcutta, are all about gigolos and married women hankering for sex outside their marriages (primarily the reason why I want to make an investigative trip to Calcutta next week...to gather empirical evidence for/against all that is being written). I wonder why the usual everyday slang, despite being used every day by everybody in his/her comfort zone, is not being accepted in the language used for literature.

As I write this, my six year old son turns in his sleep and swears "saala," making me cringe. I can't blame him. He doesn't use it as a swear word. He has picked it up from Pappu can't dance saala. Saala, for the uninitiated and the Americans who read this, means "I'll do your sister."
It is perhaps the only term that has been rendered harmless by overuse. It has been used in popular songs, and you can see Bollywood heroes keep saying "abbe saale" all through any Hindi movie. It has almost become synonymous with the word dude. When I was growing up, saala was a taboo term. Today my son can sing a song with saala in it and I pretend not to get alarmed.

But there are so many rich, creative, beautiful slang terms out there for us to accept and make our own. The day we will be able to make slangs part of our everyday, generic vocabulary, we will be able to revolutionize our languages. Literature in native Indian languages will become much easier to translate. But, if no one heeds my advice, we will be drowned in the onslaught of the "fuck yous" that have invaded the lingo of our generation now like a horde of Huns. Every Indian boy or girl can nonchalantly say "he is so full of shit" about their teacher or use "fuck you" instead of a nice and crisper "baal" to express disagreement.

Stop our languages from this invasion. Spread the swear word. Call your neighbor a bansod instead of the oh-so-boring "good morning, how is your Earl Grey tea this morning, dear sir?"
You will feel liberated. Try it alone in front of the mirror first and then go out boldly to face the other world. Imagine screaming "bokacHHoda" with your dad and raising your fists up in the air when Sachin scores a century. Doesn't the idea feel good? It kinda grows on you, like the warmth inside a blanket . . .

*I have no clue which period Kalidasa belonged to. Not something we have been encouraged to learn in our English schools.

dear dad

2008-11-27T00:13:00.000-08:00

sometimes you want to break down and cry and have someone tell you all this is going to pass.
why did we have to grow up? now it is our turn to tell our children that india is not gonna collapse by the time they grow up, without any conviction in our voices. is this what they are trying to achieve? break the backs of the common man and inject panic in our bloodstream?
and our foolish media has played into their hands, publicizing the acts, doing the job for the terrorists . . . man, they must be laughing at this fourth pillar of our democracy. in a bid to outrun the other channels, each TV reporter is eagerly waiting for more blood and gore to show us. they are sensationalizing the incidents and calling it the second largest terrorist attack after the WTC. the terrorists are laughing and raising a toast.

and then one of our leading newspapermen will take time out of his harem and write a column sympathizing with the cause of the terrorists. in chaste, almost ostentatious English. it is the government's failure that we are paying the price for now, he will harp. like all americans should be made to pay for Nixon's troops in Vietnam or all Germans should be hated because there was once a hitler there.

history shows that after every war the world has come back to its feet, but i am not so sure. something's welling inside and can't be held back any more. i want to cry, sob uncontrollably, and not pretend to be a strong man ready to protect his family and country.

dear dad, can i come back to you? will you protect me today?

good sense, they say...

2008-11-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

good sense, they say, doth prevail even if the racist followers of white and protestant Christian supremacy have ruled the US for the last eight years and gone all over the world like plundering Huns with no conceivable reason, making us lose our faith in the average American voter. but look up now! can you see that the republicans are gone, and the world will be safe? no more will you have to take out processions in Berkeley against the war, because there won't be any unnecessary wars. no WTC will be bombed by the CIA again. no frankensteins like the talibans will be created, no saddams will be hanged... india will probably have to worry about the nuclear deal not coming thru, but then, humans have come back, so rejoice. the democrats are humans and they (despite being Americans) respect women, black, Catholic, Jewish, hispanic, or gay rights unlike the illiterate republicans, who represent the generic illiterate, school dropout, religious, blind American. we have always known and looked up to good human beings like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. they are the Americans we adored. strangely, the same Americans elected people like Nixon, Reagan, or the Bushes to power. we are Indians, so we don't know much, but that's one behavior by the world's richest and most advanced people that we could never fathom.

we aren't as interested in the politics of our own country because it had gone to the dogs right during the days of Gandhi and Nehru. the humans left us in the hands of a handful of indians, can you believe it? Indians ruling India? so they created a constitution that was heavy and complicated and wrapped in red tape. in an euphoria similar to that of students when teachers leave the school, the indians sixty years back sat in the chairs meant for and suiting the British. and we have never looked forward since then. it has been socially, morally, and culturally a backward journey that will eventually end in a bottomless abyss. religions of all kinds gained prominence, the caste divisions were exploited as vote banks, the divide between the rich and poor increased even further, intolerance reached absurd levels...and we got cellphones and a rocket to the moon. a handful of indians wanted the humans beings to come back, but then, they were economically brow beaten after the second world war and could not sustain their empire. America and Russia emerged as the superpowers instead.
Our prime ministers have always exchanged roses with the Russian premiers and the ruling Congress of senile old fools had a socialist leaning. But some Indians read Allen Ginsberg and some others listened to Lennon and Morrisson. America it was. It will liberate us. To get ready for our liberation, we promptly increased the size of the flared bottoms of our trousers. Nothing happened, really. We were left disillusioned.

Even now many Indians follow the American polls like it is gonna decide their life tomorrow. Like Obama will liberate us from us Indians. Some are disenchanted. Some know that the evil will gain victory over the good by proving that Obama loves to have sex. Maybe even with his intern.
And soon enough all our liberated, emancipated Americans will vote for a republican candidate... oh blasphemy... how can a prez let someone else give him a blow job?

he he, if we started bothering about our scandals, we would have to let the military rule us instead of the khadi clad pigs out there. Chandrasekhar, our ex PM, had to have sex with one minor boy every night. A new one every night, mind you. And this is a rumor, I hear. I love rumors because they have some element of truth in them. Maybe he kept one boy for a week? Some bastards tweak reality for some selfish, sadistic pleasures, I tell you!

So, dear Americans, listen for a second. Even if your Obama dear goes around fucking twenty different men and women, please show your good sense and elect another democrat (or Obama himself) next time round by keeping in mind his good deeds the next four years. he will take the troops off Afghanistan and Pakistan, resulting in the terrorists being left with no agenda of killing Americans (they mean Americans, but plant the bombs under our asses because we signed a nuclear deal with the US while Pakistan was kicked out by China) and turning into farmers or truck drivers. He will give the Americans back their jobs, so they will agree to unrecognize the word Bangalored from their vocabulary. Americans will learn to sing and write again and may also start talking of world peace (that will be a miracle, lemme sound Mr Benedict off on this). Lennon may come back from his grave. LSD might again be allowed freely in our country. We may get another chance to burn lingerie. With Indian women mostly wearing satin these days, it will be a welcome activity. For all you know, I may be able to take my motorbike from India to Redditch through Afghanistan and Iran without being hit by 2,064 bullets. Oh for the sweet little dreams that Obama has brought into our minds. The bankers are rejoicing, and my mutual funds are looking up again with a rising sensex. Never has some other kinda arousal brought so much pleasure before. "May Obama have the sexiest intern ever, but may he never get caught," is our collective sigh.

pashbalish

2008-10-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

It has long been proven that Jesus was a Bengali. He was with his mom for 35 years; he thought his mom was a virgin; his mom thought he was god. Now, these three are common with all Bengali sons, and it also proves beyond doubt that he too was none other than our Jishu. Historians are looking for just one proof before declaring this to the world. Did Jishu use a bolster while sleeping?

If he was a Bengali, he must have used a bolster to sleep at night. Bengali sons, who sleep between their parents till the age of about 15, are given a bolster thereafter as they move to their own room. By 15 they have obviously learned to jerk off, so the arrangement of another room. Most Bengalis could not afford a separate room for their children until even the last decade, and that also perhaps explains why they had to keep their children in the same bedroom, but something tells me they don't want their children to grow up.

In the other room, the Bengali son goes off to sleep after hugging a soft bolster. In his wet dreams, of Madhurima, Tilottama, Tamali, Tisyapali, or even of goddess Saraswati at times, the Bengali son chokes the bolster to death.

And then he grows up and is sent to the hostel. Bags are packed, a horde of relatives accompany him to the railway station to see him off. Everybody is teary eyed, as he fades with the train into the distance, his fat lunch box still dangling from his other hand. With one, he is busy wiping his tears. "Dugga dugga."

The Bengali son writes his first letter: Ma, I reached. Got my room and put up your pic there. My roommate is a Bihari, a very studious guy. My bolster is a huge hit with the others. Arup borrowed it the other day to get a good night's sleep after his class tests. You know ma? Everybody is a nocturnal here. They stay up till 3 or 4 in the morning. I too join them at times. I take my bolster there and our senior dada, Gora, who has failed a couple of times, leans on it and tells us stories. Bishnu says he will get a nice, embroidered cover for my bolster from Gujarat this summer.

The Bengali son grows up even more. Almost can be called a man by now. He has learned to shave and also say hello to the girls. But even today he terribly misses his bolster when he visits the girls' hostel. That could have given his restless limbs something to hold on to like a koala hugs a branch. In the absence of a bolster, the Bengali son is absolutely clueless about what to do with his limbs, and mostly one can see them hang about his body without any definite purpose. "They gave me a nick, ma, but I like it. They call me a chimp." So, the Bengali son has learned to pocket his hands and has also coined the idiom "deep pocket," which has found some different connotations these days.

The Bengali son gets married. All these years of jerking off are going to pay off now. He will step into manhood. For a brief moment, the bolster is relegated to the backyard of the Bengali son's mind. All he can think of is how to pounce on his live bolster the night of his wedding. In anticipation, the Bengali son keeps checking himself in the loo and goes around asking his friends about the female anatomy. Just where is it, can you tell me? The experienced Bengali sons tell him. He enters the room. The bed is covered in rose petals. His bride is perched on the edge of the bed with her face covered. She too has forgotten her bolster for a brief moment and is counting her rapid heartbeats. He reaches the bed. She looks up at him. But his gaze is fixed somewhere else.
There are two red bolsters on the bed, covered in nice red velvet.

"Eta tumi nao, borota aami nilam" you can hear the Bengali son mutter with a big smile as he takes the bigger of the two. And then they go off to sleep.

the monk on the 19th floor

2008-09-22T08:38:00.001-07:00

Deepesh mailed me the other day asking if I was interested in this rather nice 3 bhk apartment being sold at the L&T. What's the price? Oh, I didn't ask, but you can calculate . . . the apartment is about 2060 sft and the going rate here is around Rs 4000 per sft.

I calculated and could just manage a wry smile that is best known as kashtho hashi in Bengali (literally translated it means a wooden smile). It costs a whopping 82 lakhs. Even if the guy negotiates, he will probably bring it down to 76? When did the property prices skyrocket like this, and who allowed it? When our parents, mostly government officers, retired, they made a paltry amount that they deposited in banks for a good return of about 15%. With the inflation rising and the banks making lesser profits, those interest rates came down to around 10, and even lesser. My dad suddenly realized he has to cut a lot of unnecessary expenses to make do. And meanwhile, the salaries kept rising beyond the limits of decency, and when the companies realized that it was probably sensible to hire an Irish or a Romanian instead, our economy had already been sitting on a huge ball of uninflammable gas. If the ball deflates, people would fall and die, so no need for me to make them burn for the sake of prose. They will die, that's it.

No Deepesh, how can I? I can't make so much money by selling my apartment, and it is indecent to ask for so much, I commented. Deepesh, however, left Mr Subramanium's number with me.

Came home and told Sayantani that we shouldn't keep dreaming of absurd things like a flat at South City in 2008. Maybe, if we bought one in the year 2000, it would still have been affordable. Now women, let me tell you, seldom like to see reason. She made me call the person.

"Hello? Mr Subramaniam? I'm Arijit. Got to know about your apartment and was curious about the price." I managed to squeak over the phone.

"Oh, hello. We can talk about the price later, Mr Arijit. You just come and check out the place."

So, we fixed an appointment with him and went over to check out his place. It was on the 19th floor, huge, and with an awesome view. "Where's your furniture?" I was curious because there was nothing in the house, making it look even huger. The marble on the floor shone like a mirror and the midday sun was reflected on it like a huge ball.

"Oh, I just use the kitchen to boil my vegetables and I sleep in that room," he pointed to the third bedroom that we hadn't checked out. I went in and found a mattress on the floor, with a pillow on it. Everything was very clean, but I was a little surprised because a person who can buy an apartment in a condo like this definitely is rich. Maybe he doesn't stay here, I was thinking, when he almost read my thoughts and said

"I do stay here, you know :). I have a phone, some utensils, my clothes in one of the wardrobes, and that bed. I know you are surprised, but that's all we ever need, don't we?"

"Oh, not at all. I wasn't thinking about that. Very true indeed... what else do we ever need?" I need my internet, my car, my mobike, my freezer full of meat, and also need to change my cell phone every two years, so I was another middle-class man with middle-class dreams. It reminded me of my mom. All she had as a teacher were a huge gladstone, a table fan, and a small kerosene stove. And she could survive on anything. She didn't splurge, neither was she stingy when it came to my needs, but for herself, she needed just a fan. It was hot in Durgapur and she was always overweight. Just a fan, now, but as a student we didn't have ceiling fans either, she used to tell me. I wondered how that was possible. To live without a ceiling fan. It always reminded me of how Gabriel Garcia Marquez keeps dwelling on how sultry and hot it is in his country. His descriptions of heat can make you squirm in discomfort at times. Where is he from? Spain or Mexico? Like Senator John McCain, I too forget my geography at times. And like my mom, Gabriel Garcia Marquez never allowed his protagonists the luxury of a ceiling fan.

"So..." I tried coming to the point, although I knew I could never afford even half of that amount even after selling everything I had and paying off my mortgages "...how much are you selling it for?"

"How much are you ready to pay?" he smiled at us.

Now it's coming, I thought, and was about to say something when I realized it's best not to give him false hopes. "Well, frankly, sir... we cannot afford this place at all, but then, we just extended our dream and made it spill over into our reality." I tried being abstruse. "If I sell my apartment and pay off the mortgage, I will be left with about half of what this apartment is for. And no bank will lend me the remaining amount because we cannot pay so much in EMIs."

He smiled and walked to the french window.

"I'm sorry, sir, we must go now. Thanks for being kind enough to show us around."

Sayantani looked at me and smiled too. I guess she too finally stepped out of her absurd dream and joined me in my reality. There, on the floor, were our Bata shoes, not Guccis.

"But I never told you my price, did I?"

"You don't have to, sir. I know the going rate, and it is rather high for us." I kind of leaned toward the door, pretending to leave...

"Hmm, see... I bought it in the year 2000 for 20 lakhs. Now I am leaving. So you pay me those 20 lakhs and the apartment is yours."

"LOL" I snorted and then broke out into a laughter. (Damn this chat lingo, man, I can't even laugh normally these days)

"Good joke, sir. And my son Aaron can pay you the remaining 60." I tried to continue the humor.

But it turned out that he was serious. Mr Subramaniam even worked out my finances for me. "If you sell your apartment and pay off your mortgage, you have x amount left. Pay me 20 from that, and the remaining can be your retirement package. Just retire and stay here."

I couldn't believe what he said. My wife was about to walk away, thinking he was deliberately insulting us, but he was serious.

Then he told us his story of how he turned into a monk. But now it is almost midnight for me.

Anne comes back

2008-09-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

The last post about Anne Frank brought back memories of the other Annes in my life. Well, they were never part of my life and neither will they ever be, but they did take up a lot of time in my growing-up years, occupying a large enough RAM in my brain to deserve a mention in my blog today.

The first was Anne Frank, whose 13-year old photo was of the most beautiful girl I could ever imagine. As a 10 year old boy, I couldn't fall for anybody else at that time. Anne Frank, the girl who, if cryogenically preserved and brought back to life today, will be my girlfriend forever. I will make sure she never gets to shed a tear. I will make sure she never runs out of food. And many of you out there must have fallen for Anne like I did. It wasn't unnatural. Many of my friends were in love with her too. We were of course in love with little Priyanka Gandhi at the same time, because she was the most beautiful Indian girl we had seen, but then, Anne was dead and gone, and indelible from our memories, whereas Priyanka was probably still wetting her bed on troubled nights.

And another collective crush was on Nazia Hassan, who brought disco to India. Everybody I knew was in love with her. All the girls were in love with her brother, and their LP Disco Diwane was a must have in all homes, save the ones of the proletariat, who shunned these American influences on their carefully preserved culture. They welcomed Allen Ginsberg with open arms and Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong were revered, but The Beatles? Trash, I tell you. That's gonna ruin your culture.

I agree with the Bengali proletariat. Poor guys. But anyway, Nazia's LP was coveted as much for her picture on the cover as for the songs.

Meanwhile, most of Enid Blyton's characters had made a rather boisterous entry into the collective psyche of the school students. Sometimes to such an extent that the girls chose either to become the tomboyish Georgina (George) or to become Anne, the perfect British blond schoolgirl. We heard of sausages and bacon and made our parents run to Janata Variety Store in Benachitty to find out what these things meant. That man had canned food: the food of the whites! Every time we passed by, we looked at the Russian, German, and British engineers and their wives buying their monthly provisions. We were certain that they read Enid Blyton too and got the idea of having sausages from her stories.

I was in love with Anne of Famous Five. With the character, believe me! She was small, sweet, a little foolish at times, scared of darkness, and needed protection. Can't really explain to you here how she appealed to me. And to add to my wonder, they started telecasting the Famous Five series produced by BBC at more or less the same time. No, maybe I am wrong... maybe I had moved to Alistair Macleans by then, but I was in my early teenage years when they showed Anne on TV. We had a portable, b/w TV and the transmission wasn't clear, so it was difficult for me to get her name from the credits. Sometimes the credits move too fast, don't you think? I think I got her real name and also the address of the BBC, but don't know if I could finally muster the courage to write to them about her address. Maybe I did. I do remember that I never got an answer.

Many such crushes followed: Suchitra Sen in the movie Shaar-e Chuattor (Seventy Four and a Half), Meg Ryan, and later Helen Hunt. I would watch their movies and stay mesmerized for days, but all of this faded after a few days. There was also Carrie-Anne Moss in that list but I hadn't noticed the Anne in her name until recently. I was growing up, feeling responsible enough for my age, happy with the Anne I married (she too is afraid of the dark and needs a lot of protection) until another Ana arrived in the scene.

And this is Ana de la Reguera. She looks too beautiful for someone who can fall for Jack Black, but the beautiful sister in Nacho Libre looks like someone you can keep on the altar and worship all your life. A google search of her images will yield better results, am sure (if you want to see her posing in the nude), but I like her in her nun's habit, thank you. I guess she has never looked prettier in anything else, or rather, anything less. However, I saw her last night and already her memory is fading.

But I doubt if anyone can ever take my Anne Frank away from me.

Terrifying Lullabies

2008-09-08T03:33:00.001-07:00

Why is the door open? Why can't I lock it? What if the robbers come in?

The door in question always remained just out of my reach. I would desperately try to close it, bolt it from within, but wouldn't be able to. When I later discussed my dreams with friends or read about dreams unexplained, it was seen as a plain and easy case of insecurity. You had an insecure childhood, people concluded.

So I believed them and blamed the insecurity on the communication gap between me and my parents. They were both 34 when I was born, and weren't very communicative, if you know what I mean. Of course my dad wanted to baptize me with Dialectical Materialism and Marx when I was in my kindergarten years, but then, there wasn't any kind of heart-to-heart possible with them. If I was insecure for some reason, I had to handle it on my own. And because there were no gods to turn to either, it was a helluva lonely experience. If I socialize a bit too much today, it is because friends meant everything to me.

Insecure childhood it must be. I was sold to this idea pretty much until the other day when a friend mentioned that her daughter wanted a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. That's when it all came back to me.

My dad studied the WWII to the core and still has almost a hundred books starting from the proverbial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to The Diary of Anne Frank. He didn't of course have those Commando series comics that I later read and thoroughly enjoyed. Were those published in the UK? The jerries always got beaten in those. Yeah, so my dad, when he put me to sleep, used to tell me about each day of Anne Frank. Or about how the French surrendered. Or about how some brave little boy in Czechkoslovakia fled with a German train! Stories of war. And then the stories of the Vietnam war as well. Pictures of how the Americans tortured the Vietnamese: of a smiling soldier twisting and breaking the arm of a lady or of three soldiers cutting out the liver of a live Vietnamese guy! Gore? Osama is a kid compared to the Americans in Vietnam or the German concentration camps. The Muslim terrorists of today are nothing. When you cut open a guy's liver, he stays alive for almost an hour after that, writhing and dying a slow death. Daniel Pearl died in about three seconds. Have you seen that video, btw?

So, these wartime stories, of bravado and victory of the good over evil, were playing on my mind. The enemy was on the other side of the door. I was a little kid, hiding inside, from the german troops, our dwindling resources getting over by the day. And the door, slightly ajar, was always just out of my reach.

[{(delimiters)}]

2008-08-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

This morning we were looking at some style issues and suddenly i came across something that made me sit up. "What is this? You have it wrong here," I asserted vehemently, because what I had in front of me was definitely wrong, and far away from the truth about mathematical equations that I learned in school. the style guide had the braces as the outermost brackets in a mathematical equation, in this sequence: {[(blah blah) x blah] + blah blah}. the person with whom i was looking at the stuff, somehow felt this is correct, but given her mathematical acumen (or what I believed was utter lack of it) I didn't pay much heed to what she had to offer. I know what it is like:

[{()}]

And I couldn't be wrong.

So I wrote both [{()}] and {[()]} on a piece of paper and went around our bay, to almost twenty people, quizzing them about what they thought was right. Some had always used the former, while some others, hold your breath now, had actually used the latter. So, soon we had two groups discussing and debating which one is right. Veena, from the publishing team, came to me with a photocopy from some style manual, which supported {[()]}. A vice president with a consulting company told me it is [{()}] and also that her son learns the same thing in his ICSE school.
Soon the entire office was abuzz with this issue and gradually we were losing out, the supporters of [{()}], that is. Only Lata Sundar was kinda nonchalant about it. Although she felt [{()}] is correct, she was the only one who didn't feel too strongly about it. How does it matter, she felt, as long as it is consistently used?

Meanwhile, some people looked up the Web and someone looked up the Chicago Manual of Style and it was {[()]} all over. I hadn't really ruled out writing to the Chicago Manual board of editors and wasn't ready to accept something other than what I had learned in school. It was like my faith being shaken. It turned out that the ICSE board still uses [{()}] while the CBSE changed to {[()]} according to some international rules, but it still wasn't clear.

I was constantly asking people around over chat and over phone about what they thought was right, still trying to digest the thought that some conspiracy this big could be hatched behind my back without me having an inkling about it, when I remembered to call up doc.

"What do you use doc? Do you keep braces or brackets at the extreme ends?"

"Oh, Arijit, braces and brackets are basically the same thing. Braces are made of metal or plastic, braces include brackets attached to the teeth and wires that connect them...
... but wait a second! I thought you needed a root canal treatment, and not braces! Where did this question come from?"

And I realized, the sequence didn't matter after all.

jealous pig

2008-08-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

well, only in this case, the pig is not jealous, it is me who is jealous of the proverbial pig who has its orgasm for thirty minutes. strunk recently sent me this joke and although i knew abt it, i laughed again when I thought about it. laughed, with a tinge of jealousy. thirty minutes!

i have seen some blogs with a huge readership. always looked at those blogs askance, you know. like okay, what is this person writing about that it attracts so much readership? i have of course survived without almost any, so can't say not having comments is in any way detrimental to writing; i survived with the hope of getting published one day, and "wait and see who has more readership" was always my comeback, albeit uttered to myself. but recently i saw a blog with thirty comments on one single post. somehow, that reminded me of the pig. the joy of reading thirty comments on your blog is probably comparable to the epitome of all orgasms: that of the pig. it is a pleasure incomparable with anything else. you can buy a merc and tomorrow get bored of it; you can own an industry, but that will probably give you grey hair...but to be read and appreciated by so many netizens is like something i have always dreamed of.

some are lucky enough to be pigs. i am still striving to reach that suilline level. in both.

(image copyright: http://www.hillquest.com/images/pig-lipstick.jpg)

dharma

2008-08-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

according to AnandaDasa, the dharma of any object is the basic characteristics of that object. the dharma of water is to be liquid. it is the state you are in.

when did a religious connotation rear its ugly head into something that pure and essential? my dharma is clear thinking and not to be waylaid by any religious overtures. religion of any kind is like a multi-headed serpent waiting on the sides of the road that leads to salvation. if you can overcome the challenge and move on, you will soon be all alone, but free. your mind will see things in perspective. you won't be surprised when humans defy death or when aliens come visiting. you will wish you were with Daniken. you will look up Zacharia Sitchin's articles on the Web. you will work as a volunteer with Teach India. You will work for the Church that takes care of HIV-infected children. All this, with an open mind.

Come out. Let clear thinking be your true dharma.

the new mullahs

2008-08-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

i have removed this post in the wake of the new violence that erupted in Orissa, initiated by the Hindu extremists against the Catholic missions in that state.

time to sleep

2008-08-18T11:49:00.001-07:00

after five posts in quick succession, all with enough proof about my growing insanity, i give in to the temptation to sleep. try visualizing a light tap on a cymbal and it fading away in slo mo. try hearing it. and associate it with the fading out of conscious memories of the day. can u hear it any more? the nnnnnn fades and you slip into the darkness of a whale stomach. the projector is on.

which movie should i play for you, sir?

the rain

2008-08-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

is sinusoidal today.
going up,
coming down
filling you with hopes of sinning
and new beginnings,
but going up again

origin of poetry

2008-08-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

like an extended private moment during long hours of solo biking, another nice time to let your mind wander is in the morning when you are at the kitchen. a slice of sun through your window, which keeps out the early morning chill. you are waiting for the newspaper, the tea is brewing.

yes, the tea takes time to brew. about five minutes or so. the trick is to not let it get bitter or too dark. so, the best way to get that optimum level is to stand next to your teapot and wait for the right aroma. you must keep your cups ready, washed in boiling water to keep them warm till the time you take the first sip. sugar in the strainer. that's what my mom always did to ensure just that right amount of sweetness. she hated saccharine. ready, you can sense the tea ready, nicely orange, the leaves floating on the surface. pour it out and serve it with digestive biscuits.

when the water is boiling, and this is before you have put the tea leaves into the water, you can add a cut slice of ginger and a little piece of cardamom. after about fifteen seconds of boiling, turn off the flame and then add the leaves.

thankfully am not a technical writer. they would have found the sequence wrong, perhaps. why didn't you write about boiling the water first? you will end up confusing our makers of early morning tea. and then they won't buy the manual. but this is not a manual. this is the free state of a wandering mind. it is a democracy and no matter how you want me to prepare for the visit of the inspector of schools, i will remain free. and tell you about that private moment when you can stand in front of your teapot and think.

try it. am now going to embark on a therapeutic lecture. try it. it increases your love for the person in the next room, packing your child's schoolbag.

bad poetry

2008-08-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

if you read my earlier post, you will have a good example of what bad poetry is all about. i have always held that poetry should be spontaneous (although I pretend to like the modernists) and should not be attempted when you don't feel it from within. some translations are weak, but the essence of the spontaneity comes through even through that. that is when a poem is successful. i have read some really pathetic poems in my lifetime, and some really abstruse ones, but the ones that are most dangerous are like the one I have published below. my own blog, so i can publish anything, but this was done with a purpose. is poetry always conceived and executed with an end in mind? is it just a means to an end? always? do love poems satisfy the lover and make her yield into an abyss, a victim of charm?

whereas this was an example of something that came out of casual flirtation, there are also serious attempts that are born out of deeper emotions. emotions are flirtatious too: they are always transient and seem foolish the day after. so, if your objective of using that emotion for creating something is met, you are successful.

I am not a fan of Derek Walcott. Or Ted Hughes even. Give me a footnote to howl or something, baby, to light my fire.

the same poem, written for the same person a year later when things are deeper, may read:

eventually
walking back to the kettle
another morning,
i drank straight from it.
my rational faculties,
awake by then,
didn't ask me a why or a how.

by then, after the night
i knew
it was tea to be savored
hot, cold, dark, or orange.

and from my lips
it went straight to His ears.

and hers.

darjeeling tea

2008-08-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

i can feel something brewing,
and the heat seeping out in the form of smoke
from under the lid

i can feel something brewing
but i can't see the water getting its color
from above the lid

i can feel something brewing
but with a finite limit in time
and something tells me now
i must lift the lid and see
if it is my darjeeling tea

i walk out of the kitchen and stand in the dark room.
let it be a dark decoction
darker than the witch's broom...

she says she wants to fly
to srilanka and kashmir
she is not scared of bombs
"a witch is covered by virtue of being a witch" do you see?

i know something is brewing
let it be for you
my darjeeling tea.

India's next Olympic medal

2008-08-15T01:03:00.000-07:00

Although Leander and Mahesh and the three boxers are still in the fray, I am gearing up for 2012. I will be 41 by then, and four years should be enough for me to get India's next Olympic gold. Only problem is, I haven't been able to decide my sport yet. Individual scull? Taekwondo? Or plain marathon? Maybe long distance cycling?
With my knees giving in, running is ruled out. I have to decide soon. Time is not on my side, but India gets a gold in 2012.

In something.

I will be famous then. I will get lots of awards. And if I write my book after the gold medal, it will sell too. But what if the book is not on sports but of sports of a different kind? What if I write about the emotional sparring and tactical gaming that you need to master when you date someone? Will that sell, you think? I think it might. But I can write a treatise on mindgames right now, right from fucking someone's mind to allowing another person to slide into a dangerous comfort zone with me? I can pass on the trade secrets to all the budding gamers and mindfuckers? So why wait for the gold to write? Let me write my book now and also work on the sport. Individual scull, I think, will be good. I can row faster than many. I could, some 13 years back. I could row upstream in the Ganges for almost thirty minutes or more. With practice I can win a medal. Not much time left. Let me continue with my pushups for the time being, till I decide which sport.

It wasn't Aravind, it was Akhil Kumar who said he will get the gold. So all the best, Akhil. I will join you next time.

This day, 61 years back, was the saddest day for millions of Indians from Punjab and Bengal. Rendered homeless and sent out of their country to another because of their faith. Millions died in the riot, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. Come let's celebrate the day our country was divided into three parts to make room for Muslims and Hindus. They could not cohabit any more, so the ever so thoughtful Brits made a hurried line on a paper map. Let's celebrate our Independence from the Britishers and also the going over to the hands of Indian politicians. And let's vow to get a medal each for India in the next Olympics. Despite the politics, despite our limited dreams, despite the fact that we are mere Indians after all.

We can kill though. If killing were a sport, how many Michael Phelps would we have created, I wonder. We kill after raping a minor, we kill when someone hits our car from behind, we kill when someone refuses to serve a drink after the stipulated hour, we kill policemen when a celebrity dies, we kill at our own free will. We kill Hindus with bombs, we kill Muslims in riots, we kill innocent Sikhs when Indira Gandhi is killed. Believe me, we are good at this. And there are plenty available too, to kill. More than a billion, in fact.

Think of a sport for me, people. I can't kill either. I can sleep, talk, and fart. I can blog all my life. I can talk of a gold medal and promise you the moon.