mindblogging

Carpe diem

2011-07-18T02:01:00.005-04:00

After a long time comes along a movie that truly makes you believe that movies in some sense capture the zeitgeist of a generation. “Zindagi Naa Milegi Dobara” defines that for the twenty somethings of an India that is gradually emerging from being the India of the 9-5 job-family-kids “settled” conservative middle class to being the free-spirited global India that takes a risk and explores its boundaries. As it explores these new horizons, there is much trepidation in the uncertainty of the future and the fear of losing the comfortable cushion of predictability.

Watching the trailer made me think that ZNMD would be a Bollywood “Hangover” with DCH like characters thrown in the mix to make it a sequel. Surprisingly it did not have any risqué jokes or run-of-the-mill bachelor party themed cringe-worthy content. As a sequel, it works even though DCH was made 10 years back. In a sense, some of the characters were cast from the same DCH mold: the brooding artist with layers that run deeper than his external persona, the hen-pecked “nicest-guy-in-the-world” character who gets tormented by the women in his life and the practical emotionally unattached guy who measures everything in terms of returns. Despite these commonalities, the personalities of these characters appeared to be well hashed out: complete with histories and baggage from the past. Also the theme revolving around these three characters has grown from being a lighthearted romantic one, to a journey of the characters facing their biggest fears, both, through potentially fatal challenges that they undertake and in breaking free from their comfortably numb lives to discover a truth about themselves. This is not to say that the movie lacked levity, in fact it was filled with “just for laughs” type gags, college humor-taking a jibe at the English challenged professor, situational humor and a Holi-like tomatino festival. The songs were great and blended easily into the story except the "Senorita" song which probably got added in as a Hrithik dance number.

Farhan did a surprisingly great job of being the inscrutable artist who used humor and juvenile pranks as a façade for a more profound inner self. As an effervescent boy trapped in a man who was unafraid to push his limits with everything and everyone, Farhan seemed to switch gears almost effortlessly. Abhay as the fun loving and incredibly sweet pacifist who could not bear to disappoint his family or his girlfriend, pulled it off with great ease. Hrithik, as the money minded practical guy who drove out every iota of emotion from his life because of his past experience, was plausible to some extent, but the portrayal of his cathartic experience post deep sea diving came off as contrived. Also his romance with Katrina seemed very superficial even though the premise that she opened his eyes to a world outside money and job security, was genuinely refreshing. The setting in Spain was an unusual choice, probably a conscious attempt to be off-beat than the hackeneyed US-London-Switzerland-Australia locales. Perhaps post ZMND, Spain will be the new Switzerland or perhaps I should say post-DCH Goa.

Most people who didn't get DCH will not get ZNMD either because they are expecting a strong core story. Both DCH and ZNMD were never about the stories, they were about the attitudes of characters in specific phases of their lives and how they interact with each other. They are about moments that trigger change. The pace of story-telling is closer to the pace at which real life moves and the personalities a closer to what you might encounter in your own life. Rather than make a movie situation-centric with players foisted into it, these movies bring out the of this generation : whether it is about finding love or about seizing the day and living it completely with no fear.

Pinnacle

2010-09-01T00:58:00.005-04:00

She stretched her vision across the city spreading beneath her. From that altitude she could still see people bustling around on the sidewalks, cars tailing each other on the highway like an army of ants: so busy and consumed in the microcosm of their own lives. She watched them as a curious bystander would watch an ant hill or a beehive: removed from it's seemingly chaotic yet infinitely intricate ecosystem. But did she choose to distance herself from it or did she reconcile herself to life of solitude?

There was no unambiguous way to answer that question. On the one hand she had risen through the echelons of the advertising world from a bright eyed student of design to the most coveted creative director in business. There was never a dull moment at work or a day when she woke up without feeling the energy to take on the next big client. Of course, there were days when things went horribly wrong, ideas misfired and people with mighty egos clashed like gladiators in the Colosseum. And yet through such trying situations her detached mind would conjure up some of the most fantastic ideas that would diffuse the situation and accelerate her ascent to a position her peers could only dream of. She couldn't imagine being more satisfied creatively, professionally and financially.

Even so, it was lonely up there. Most of her peers now worked as her subordinates and most of the men she had met were laid back, unambitious and immature. She was fairly old school in wanting a man to make the first move and secretly hoped that it would bring out her coy and vulnerable feminine side. Yet her public persona was that of an alpha female often repelling any self respecting alpha male from approaching her. The one time she felt that a relationship was working for her, she realized years later that she had only deluded herself in all her youthful optimism that she could entirely trust the one she loved even though they were professional competitors. Was it the bitterness and mistrust that made her detached? She could feel the pulse of a market and spin an idea that would touch the raw emotions and desires of an entire target population and yet she found it painfully difficult to feel those very emotions and desires. Was it her trade that made her an uninvolved spectator of human behavior that it almost was beneath her to exhibit those very emotions and behaviors that made her a livelihood?

She watched a happily married couple in the ocean of people below: the husband carrying his son on his shoulders and the wife scooping their second child out of a stroller. That could have been any of her numerable peers or classmates. Was she afraid of normalcy, domestication and mundaneness? Why was life so complicated for her that she did not have that simple joy of being a mother or a wife? She chided herself as the thought ran through her head. Never covet another's joy she almost said aloud. She pursed her lips as she did not want the excruciating hollowness to pour out of her being and yet she couldn't control it from brimming her eyes and blurring out her happiness.

As she watched the young family make its way through the fluid of unrecognizable faces she could feel a drop streaming down her cheek. But before it could fall into oblivion she spread out her hands and dove after it. As her feet left the comfort of being at the solitary apex she felt powerless, unable to control the speed at which she was hurtling down towards the ground. As she felt the wind rushing through her face and the building floors flying past her, the blood rushed faster to her head. Even so, there was an inexplicable calm on her face for she knew it was a happy place to be, to be able to let go of everything and still be in control. Within seconds she knew it would be over.

Below, people stopped in their tracks in horror. They were pointing and screaming in almost the same hapless way that her body seemed to fall. She quickly tugged at the parachute which broke her fall and eased her descent onto terra firma. Illegal BASE jump off the Petronas, check. Got arrested for it, check! Life wasn't that complicated after all.

Is it all about Money Honey?

2010-09-01T00:57:00.000-04:00

When I came to the US as a student I found that my roommates and friends were a lot more generous in their spending than the folks I hung out with in the UK who were working professionals in IT companies. It was odd to find that these professionals who earned more than the students did, tended to be a lot more stingy and tight-fisted and in turn appeared to extremely dissatisfied, harried and unhappy. I would wonder if it was money that made them the way they were.

It also reminded me of the maid who used to work in our house a long time back. When she had no money to get through the month she would lavishly spend on her son's jeans (she once bought a pair of jeans worth her monthly salary) and take her daughters out to the fair without any sight towards the future in terms of savings. She seemed to be the happiest person in the world despite her drunk husband and her abusive mother-in-law. As the wheels of fortune turned, after the death of her husband she acquired a huge ancestral farmland worth over a crore and she transformed from a poor yet happy maid into a rich, unhappy, vexed and now bored crorepati. Money does have that effect on people who did not have much of it: they know the power it brings and are unable to deal with it.

For some people it is aspirational: they dream about a lifestyle that comes with it and turn bitter when their dreams don't come true. In a world that is now reeling under the repercussions of bad investments, instant gratifications and a complete disregard towards saving, it might seem bad advice to be investing in one's happiness. There was a time I used to tell my mom to advice our maid on saving, but now I realise that she was happier blowing it up on a 1000 rupees jeans for her son! That goes for my student friends too. They might have crossed their credit limits long back but I saw contentment on their faces on that rafting trip and when they bought yet another $20 fish for their fish tank! They were not going to buy a condo saving that $200 rafting trip. I am not advocating being a spendthrift and going bankrupt is great.

I believe that investing in happiness once in a while reaps more rewards than seeing your bank balance rise. A good friend of mine recently accused me of putting myself on a higher pedestal than others because money was not a #1 priority for me. I am pretty sure I wasn't being 'elitist' about it or for that matter being condescending towards others to whom it is important. I realize that some people know what money can buy and see it as an instrument to fulfilling their own dreams and that of their families, while others know its value because of the dearth of it in their lives and therefore acquiring it becomes a huge priority in their lives.

Having said that, I have grown up in an environment learning to spend within my means and being happy with it. I don't have a car in the US and I am not unhappy about it. It is a capitalist conspiracy to keep enticing people to seek 'happiness' in possessing things that are not really necessary. They tell us that we are the next big dud on the block if we do not own that plasma screen TV or that iPod nano or iPhone or Macbook air and they charge a bomb for it because it was probably manufactured out of a single block of moonstone! If our happiness is contigent on these capitalistic aspirations then unhappiness is the sum total of our experience because everyday there is going to be a new iGizmo to covet our attention and entwine us into a vicious cycle of endless desire.

And now that I am done extolling the virtues of saving, wish me well on my skydiving adventure.

Published by PenMyBlog for iPhone 4

Eventide

2009-12-16T01:28:00.001-05:00

He sat alone at his usual spot on the beach as he watched the sun kissed horizon blush into hues of crimson and pink. He lifted a handful of sand and watched it slip through his fingers, fast at first and then reducing to a trickle. 'Moments', he thought, 'slipped out of my fingers just when she filled my arms and now life without her has reduced to this tedious trickle.'

He hadn't had the time to say goodbye and he could never really have brought himself to say it. Tears, emotions and sentiments made him unstable, vulnerable and probably a little more human than he would let himself be. He had not even told her how much he loved her. She, on the other hand, had always been effervescent and articulate and words were not her only form of expression. They came in myriad forms, from gifting him a gold tie pin to say thank you to baking brownies to apologize for burning his favourite shirt. He had almost flown into a rage and yet the moment he saw her brown eyes and the brownies, his knitted brows melted into a smile, that rippled across his lips saying the unspoken words, ‘It’s alright sweetheart’. He needed no words to communicate when expressions sufficed.

And yet today he wished he could have those grains of moments back when he could tell her a million times how much he cherished her. The thought that she was so far away made even the gentle evening breeze seem cold and heartless. There were so many memories in the breeze, the sand and the sea and even a million waves couldn’t wipe out those memories. He remembered how they drove his speedboat over the raucous waters every summer and how he chased her down the lashing waves till they were soaking wet and he scooped her into his arms and carried her back home. They needed nothing else and no one else in their happy little microcosm.

But he knew this day was coming and a part of him wished it away despite its inevitability. He resented every man she even spoke to and withdrew into a shell not speaking to her for days when she questioned his behaviour. He thought she would understand, like she always did. She couldn’t take his autocratic and distrusting attitude. She felt stifled in the unfathomable labyrinth of his silence and left him a letter explaining everything.

When he read the letter, it first made him laugh deliriously, he was confident that she would come back for she loved him too dearly. A part of his brain also reminded him that he had taught her to be the master of her own decisions and that she was by no means trifling with him. For the second time in his life he sobbed uncontrollably and helplessly. He frantically called the police and they said they could do nothing in the matter.

As years of unshed tears dried up in his eyes, he got up and dusted off his pants he felt a familiar arm touch his shoulder. He knew it was her before he even heard her voice say, “The most beautiful sunset isn’t it?” He turned around and embraced her and planted a million kisses on her face when he spotted a young man standing a few feet away behind her. She pulled both of them together so they could meet. “Dad, Josh and I are married. Would you like to come live with us?” Tears rolled down his eyes and he said, “Of course my dear. I love your brownies.”

Capitalistic Conspiracy

2009-10-04T22:43:00.007-04:00

In what seems like a mainstream realization of the greed that capitalism breeds, Michael Moore packs a punch with 'Capitalism a love story'. It is a more contemporary version of what 'Zeitgeist' and 'The Money Masters' attempted to unveil long before the big avalanche on the stock market in 2008. Were they just conspiracy theories or was capitalism the real conspiracy?

The movie starts off with an attempt to define the capitalism that US once romanced and got married to during Reagan's era. The honeymoon was long over but even as America tries to come to terms with the real avaracious and shortsighted face of the ideology it married to spite Russia, it is in serious denial that anything can go wrong with it. As it grapples with it's own daily battles to survive this bad marriage, everyone from Paul Krugman to Michael Moore is screaming for a divorce. They are calling for government regulation and not 'free enterprise'. The moment such a thing is even suggested, one gets labeled as a commie because a large part of America still thinks economic ideology is binary: capitalist or communist. There is no happy medium and even though Obama burst onto the scene with promises to rescue people's money, they do not want socialism because they view it as a betrayal to the very foundation on which their nation grew to such great heights and was revered by the world. But Michael Moore questions this sense of betrayal stating that the founding fathers of America never laid down capitalism as the pedestal of this country.

The movie has the uncut version of everything that got onto Michael Moore's camera especially if it was sensational like a guard at GM denying the filmmaker access into the building. But it is not unedited random shooting: it spoke a language that people in the theater cheered and identified with as their own. It told a story of broken homes and broken cities that vaguely resembled the crumbling erstwhile USSR. It told a story of broken dreams, despair, angst and outrage that raged across the nation like wildfire within a span of a year. But Moore doesn't simply stop at the disease and its symptoms, he also tells the story of the healing process: worker protests and co-operative societies forming companies : something that India has long adopted as a socialist nation, something that for once, I believe the architects of our nation did not get wrong!

Moore finally ends with his trademark symbolic shenanigans: parading outside Wallstreet trying to make a citizen's arrest of the bank CEOs and cordoning off the NYSE building with crime scene tapes. What intrigued me the most was not so much the content or theme, but the fact that artists have some of the most powerful instruments and vocabularies to reach out and make their thoughts heard and yet it is very few artists who take that gift and become the voice of the society.

The Choice is Yours

2009-08-23T02:07:00.004-04:00

Volition, like most other gifts of democracy, comes with a price and a burden of responsibility. Whether we choose for ourselves consciously, making an educated decision, or the choice is forced upon us by circumstances, it is each one's prerogative to defend one's choice but not impose it on others. In a social environment that debates every single choice and silos them into stereotypes, it almost becomes imperative to be able to justify one's stand on anything from personal habits to sociopolitical issues. Unfortunately, these debates seldom end in a 'we-don't-see-eye-to-eye-on-that-but-we-won't-sock-each-other's-eyes-out' ceasefire: they are raked up every now and then, resulting in one too many blackened eyes, of course, only verbally.

I often get asked questions about my vegetarianism and distaste for alcoholic beverages. Although my answers vary according to the level of intelligence and state of consciousness of the inquirer, I found that most meat eaters and beer drinkers insist that I am missing out on something good in my life.

To be completely honest, I did sip a few alcoholic drinks just to find out what it is that makes people want to drink it all the time and I still do find it a mystery. For those who have never tasted it, in my humble opinion, it is mostly repulsive in flavour and odour. What I find more outrageous and condescending, though, is the persistence of these folks in their attempts to initiate me in their 'gang'. Well, they aren't so much concerned about being 'inclusive and considerate' when they talk amongst themselves in a tongue foreign to others, but oh no, they have to get include everyone in getting stoned out of their senses by morning whether they are 'Delhiites', 'Gultis', 'Mumbaikars' or 'Bongs'! If only our interstate wars could be solved by tequila shots - cheers to national integration Hic hic Hurray!

When it comes to finding vegetarian food, I thought UK was pretty bad, but I had another thing coming when I came to the US: it stinks! No wonder you see people around carrying three truck tires around their bellies, because anything and everything must have cheese in it. Much to the frustration of my friends who eat anything that flies, hops, runs and poops, I continue to send them on a wild goose chase for a restaurant that serves vegetarian food, which only results in yet another veg versus non-veg debate.

On a more general note, almost everyday I see a bunch of 'pro-life' supporters picketing around the Women's med center which is presumably the place abortions are done. I have even see a priest come and sermonize people about the sanctity of human life. While I personally hold a very moderate view on the issue, I do believe that assuming the women in question know the status of their fetuses and are allowed to choose to keep the baby or abort, these protestors of abortion should respect their choices. Although that appears to be pro-choice, I believe, the women should be made fully aware about how much their fetuses have developed and they might essentially be killing another human. Having said that, most 'pro-life' campaigns are almost akin to the moral policing that is prevalent in India, except that, so far, it has not been blatant or physical.

People are adept at using their freedom of speech and undertaking unsolicited advising like they are being paid for it. I believe that such self appointed advisors find every opportunity to reaffirm conviction in their own choices by advocating them to others and recruiting yet another member into their 'tribe'. There's almost a social need to be just like everybody and yet the individuals who are considered exemplars are ones who walked against the social tide even to the point of ostracization for standing by their beliefs. So yes, I am advising people to lay off the gratuitous advice: please choose to respect others choice.

Gross Anatomy

2009-07-04T10:22:00.006-04:00

Warning: People who are squeamish about body parts should avoid reading this. Even if you are not, do not read this while eating. Don't blame me if you barf your lunch on your favorite laptop!

Pep talk to self pre-course: "This isn't going to be too bad. After all you have done dissections in the past on rats and despite the initial disgust you felt for the whole process, it turned out pretty interesting, didn't it? You have also been to the 'Bodies' exhibition. I am sure it's not a big deal."

In the classroom: "I am the only girl in this class! I am sure none of these guys are vegetarians! I am doomed! I don't even have scrubs! Arrrrggghhh! Let me out of here..."

In the Lab: Dr. P: " ....most students do not have a problem with this lab. But occasionally there are cases..."
Cases of what? Students swooning, vomitting, having nightmares of cadavers running after them?
Dr. P: "Just make sure when you are not feeling ok, you raise your hand and I will have someone walk you out. Some students just walk out of the room without saying anything and it's only when I hear the crash in the hallway that I realize that they must have had a problem with what they saw."
'Gulp! I am next in line for that.' Dr. P noticed the horror writ all over my face and thought, 'Oh yes you are.'

Dr. P started making an incision from the nape of the neck and I could feel the hair on my neck stand. As he got down to the superficial fascia and layer of fat, I could feel my morning cuppa tea trying to make its way out the wrong way. The nauseating smell of fat subdued the odoriferous formaldehyde and began to overwhelm my olfactory nerve till my head starts to spin and I decided that I've had enough. Steve accompanied me out to the lounge outside.

Pep-talk to self post incision incident: "That lady was dead years ago. She cannot feel pain. Yes it takes just a scalpel to skin a person! She voluntereed to give her body for science so her soul won't wince at what we are doing to her. Go back in there, girl, and validate her sacrifice."

So back I was all pumped up to wrestle with the fat and the muscle and the blood and everything human that could possibly ruin my apetite for the rest of the day. 10 minutes into the dissection and I was right back in the lounge trying to get some air into my lungs.

Pep-talk to self post failed pep talk: "You are not a mouse! It is a human body just like your own. This is a one time opportunity to see how it all fits in together and works. C'mon clench your fist and say you can do it."

For the rest of the class I hovered around the table scalpel in hand just observing the dissections of the back muscles and even that made me rush back home after class and shower till my body became red. My olfactory senses became fully functional only after smelling and drinking coffee. Thankfully my apetite returned too.

Since then it's been less bumpy on the road to understanding human anatomy. I think I am getting the hang of telling the blood vessels and nerves apart and needless to say, it is immensely interesting. I believed it's the initial inhibition both physiological as well as psychological, one needs to overcome. If anything, being a vegetarian in an anatomy class makes it easier for me to handle what I am doing. The food I eat rarely looks like a body part. But every once in a while, there are cases : teammates who will insist on cutting open the gall bladder and insisting it looks like spinach, Dr. P cutting open the caecum with gloves covered in semi-formed faeces, dissection around the anus, turning the cadavers over and the arms almost detaching from the body, fat splaying on people's faces, dissection of the testis with fluid oozing out of it...it never ceases to get grosser and I spend a lot of time in the lounge!

'Altar'native Rock

2009-06-11T00:16:00.004-04:00

They all waited with baited breath with eyes pealed on the giant altar. Some of them restless by the long wait and tedious distractions that made minutes seem like months. Some of them up on their feet ready to herald the arrival of their demigods. Some jostling among the early birds to get ahead of the crowd and get a priceless glimpse of the demigods. This could easily have been a scene at a popular Indian temple, except that instead of prasadam there was pizza, instead of agarbattis there were ciggies, instead of teertham there was beer and instead of the devotees rising to their feet chanting mantrams at the unveiling of the idol, the fans rose to their feet singing the leitmotif of 'Viva La Vida' at the arrival of Coldplay. Blasphemous? Maybe. The euphoria surrounds when you are standing in the middle of a rock concert, just as the beating of the drums and the cymbals do when you are in a temple during the Aarti. Of course, one cannot begin to equate the madness of rock music fans with the devotion of Hindu followers.

I have always been a great admirer of the Coldplay's compositions and lyrics and hoped to see them perform live some day. And Voila! They landed right here in Cincinnati. While it was anticipated that they would jump start their performance with the most popular Viva La Vida, they started with an instrumental 'Life in Technicolor' instead, which although not entirely disappointing didn't seem as quite appropriate for the start. While the crowd in the pit and the benches seemed to have a great direct view of the band and their shenanigans, back in the lawn, we were trying to use our psychic powers to request for our favorite numbers. Just as I was screaming 'Fix you' Chris Martin dedicated the number to all of us 'lesser' souls out on the lawn. Somehow the lyrics of that song strike a chord with a lot of what one goes through in life and the fact that the 'lights will guide you home', while being awfully cliched, is perhaps one of the most reassuring thoughts one could hope.

Violet Hill soon became Cincinnati Hill and huge yellow balloons descended during their rendition of Yellow. The whole band then decided to tour the Riverbend Amphitheater and they even made a pit stop at the lawns, where they regaled us with a cover of Neil Diamond's 'I'm a believer'. We were just a few feet away from their stage and couldn't believe our eyes and actually couldn't stop screaming our lungs out. Chris Martin looked positively stoned and yet incredibly charismatic and attractive. N and I were pinching each other to make sure we were actually seeing Chris Martin from such proximity. N had a good mind to jump across the crowd and try to shake his hand but decided she didn't want to be arrested for hooliganism.

The band then pretended it was over and time to go home, when we were wondering why they didn't play the hugely popular 'Scientist' yet and screaming out the leitmotif of Viva La Vida. They returned on stage and obliged us with 'Scientist', an encore of 'Death and his Friends' and 'Escape'. The cherry on the top was the free CD of their most popular compositions that we received at the end of their concert.

I am certainly not one of those maniacal fans who follows the band, star-struck, around the world and worships even their sweat. I am not even one of those devoted fans who shells out 400 bucks for a front row seat at a concert, buys every CD that comes out into the market and remembers all the lyrics of all their songs like nursery rhymes. I am just a curious fan who paid 50 bucks for a good time in the lawn with friends and aquaintances, got my money's worth seeing them as close as the front benchers and came home with memories of having screamed like a teenager till I nearly lost my voice.

Shards of faith

2009-04-13T22:10:00.003-04:00

She handed him an urn of innocent clay
Borne from the gentle, pristine earth
Unsullied by the squalor of the sly
Shaped by her open palms of faith.

It had no pomp of silver or gold
Nor embellishments of outer design.
A labour of love that would hold
The true reflection of their mind.

‘Twas to be burnt in the kiln of pain
And endure the merciless test of fire
But fortified by love it would remain
Indestructible by forces higher.

Alas, it fell from those callous hands
‘fore it could mould into permanence.
Smashing as it hit the veritable land
And she picked up the pieces in silence.

The crumbling pieces filled her hands
As she fervently fixed the urn again.
But now defiled by amorphous sand
The purity of ere it would never regain.

Her quivering heart upon him turned
Questioning those hands that wavered
Her reflection drained through the broken urn
Leaving her trust unanswered.

-Kirthi Radhakrishnan

I dream of a White Christmas

2008-12-26T00:35:00.004-05:00

As the smoke smoulders over the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and the Indian media insisting on fanning the flames by reeling out images 24/7 and mindlessly interviewing every Tom, Dick and Harry who has an opinion about it, I believe its time people stopped the finger pointing and mourning and started thinking of affirmative action.

All the media can do is keep reminding us of how tragic the whole incident was and keep scratching the scab so that the wound never heals. It has only one purpose, like all cheap entertainment: to titillate; by either voyeurism, fear or sorrow. It seldom talks to the right persons who have concrete and useful solutions, because it truly seeks no answers and probably because the right people hopefully would be on top of the problem rather than speaking with a bunch of looney journalists who could kill each other for a sound byte from some 'important-sounding' person. Peace protests and boards filled with messages of solidarity only serve at best to unite people until the time they forget the tragedy and go back to their microcosms.

With every tragedy come the scapegoats and inevitably the first on the firing line are the politicians. The people are ostensibly tired of politicians and the media seems to fire it back to the people for not exercising their franchise: like it would make a difference! Its the same herd of jackasses up for elections each time and they just keep playing musical chairs: once in the opposition, the next time in the ruling. Our country is what it is, whether good, bad or ugly not because of our government but because of the people: right from the rickshaw driver to the corporate honcho. The politician serves only as comic relief.

The next heads to roll are obviously those of the Pakistani government and to date all the diplomatic and not so diplomatic ways of getting them to be declared a terrorist state have proven to be futile. Even if we have them declared a terrorist state, would that stop them from producing and harbouring jehadis? Would that give us a tangible excuse to go to war against Pakistan? War between two countries has never served any purpose more fruitful than a shouting match between two raucous juveniles: no matter who win., The former get battered economies and piling debt unpayable for any forseeable future and the latter get their larynxes battered and can't speak for a forseeable future. There are a lot of countries out there that could benefit from this war given the global economic situation, and one of them most certainly isn't India or Pakistan.

In this whole post-mortem of the terrorist attacks a few things were blurred out of the context. One cannot keep one's safe unlocked and expect no one to steal. The whole process of tackling the terrorists left a lot to be desired: for one we were caught napping, next our forces did not have the right ammunition, the commandos reach the hotel and then rummage for maps and layouts and further the terrorists used GPS when our average joe NSG commando would never have laid eyes on one! It beats me how a country with top IT giants can fail at the most rudimentary tranferrence of information.

Now that the war is no longer fought in battlefields of Panipat or for that matter Kargil, one would expect the security forces to be armed for such civilian warfare and on their Christmas wish-list would be getting the right arms and ammunitions and fast enough, getting briefed about the layout and locations well in advance and to top it all getting the media out of their hair when they are on an operation. With an apathetic government, a Prime Minister and a President who are a travesty to the posts they hold, one can only expect inaction from them on this wishlist. Its time corporate India which has so far been a silent spectator, largely viewed by the public as an emblem of capitalistic greed and an equally visible finger pointer in this whole circus begins to take affirmative action and becomes the 'secret Santa' of our security forces. Corporations like Tatas, Wipro and Infosys have been pioneering in trying to effect social and infrastructural changes in cities like Jamshedpur and Bangalore. I am sure the security forces would be happy to use CCTV cameras installed in public areas, lobbies and hallways of commercial buildings, databases containing layouts of buildings and for God's sake a good PR who would get those rapacious media hyenas out of the way and cordone off the area before they start a tea party amidst gunfire.

Ideas of having paid public toilets, of installing pollution meters, of manning traffic during rush hours, of building a city around steel plants took birth within corporations that looked beyond merely profit margins and annual turnovers. They sought to change the situation around them not just point fingers and blame lazy governments. Lazy governments came and went and yet the cities that survived were those with responsible corporates. It is time that those within corporate India cogitate and percolate such ideas with the powers that be to reclaim our belief that we the people truly run our country.

Deja vu

2008-11-02T02:00:00.002-05:00

Upon this familiar path I set afoot
The caressing grass I have trodden before
Its sinuous windings as I saw them last
Beckon my footsteps to explore

I know the little leaves that wave me by
The pebbles that crumble under my feet
The breeze that whispers into my ear
Foreboding the destiny that I am to meet

Anticipation throbs through my being
My footsteps hastens every moment
Alas! Visions of the past cloud my thoughts
And rain emotions without relent

Why did the leaves smile as they do?
Does the harbinger wind prevaricate?
Are the celestial beings conspiring too,
To make this path my only fate?

Wisps of forgotten smoke filled the air
An odour of irreversible abhorrence
The burnt bridge now a lonely decrepit
Recites its story in a chilling silence

Of a path once green with ebullient spring
Wafting with love and tenderness
Lives floating through the dreamy clouds
Treading towards a bridge of promise

Alas! A bridge of deception t’was
Feeding on my guileless faith
But a mirage lasts not the storm of reality
Crushing every memory in its wake.

But this path that now enchants my mind
Promises bridges that need to be built
Will the ominous clouds of the past disperse
Before the flower of hope begins to wilt?

Kirthi Radhakrishnan

'Hulla'baloo

2008-10-21T23:56:00.007-04:00

Its been a while since I have visited this long derelict and probably decripit website. But I am indeed, very grateful to all of you for egging me on to keep writing. So I guess although my fingers are rusty and my creative right side of my brain is hibernating, I will try to grease the phalanges of my fingers and awaken the moribund neurons in my right brain with something I do with relative ease: a movie review. I did not pick up a Bollywood blockbuster or gigantic budget potboiler to shoot down: KJo what's with you? You haven't made your annoying genre of movies in a while: so much less fodder for some pseudo-intellectual like me to chew and churn to dust! I did not pick a Hollywood flick to gloss over and by the way, I found The Dark Knight a little overrated. I actually enjoyed a simple, seemingly nondescript movie like 'Hulla'. It does not have a fantastic concept or big stars. It is about a simple situation in a typical building complex in Mumbai. The protagonist (if we can Sushant Singh one) enters a new apartment with his wife and finds himself being disturbed every night by the night watchman's 'rounds'. His insomnia reflects on his quality of work and his irritable disposition throughout the day. He tries to deal with the problem in every perceivable way: pacifying the watchman, talking to the secretary of the housing society, using sleeping pills, earplugs, bribing the watchman with new job prospects and even lodging a police complaint. What is interesting is how a small problem like the watchman's rounds snowballs into bigger issues and becomes a social commentary on people's self-centered and self-absorbing ways. It is used as a background to portray contemporary socio-economic wars that happen everyday in a highly stratified urban India. For instance, when the secretary of the society (played by Rajat Kapoor) finds his wife comparing his economic status to that of the protagonist's, he tries to bolster his self esteem by claiming that the security arrangements he made for the society serve as an exemplar for other neighbourhoods to follow, that being the greatest achievement of his lifetime of failing attempts at doing business. The sense of defeat that the middle aged secretary feels as he watches the newly wed couple enjoy a car and a two bedroom apartment while he grapples with his ramshackle Kinetic Honda and a family of three living in a one bedroom apartment is a picture straight out of middle aged middle class urban India fighting to keep its head above the water in the onslaught of the DINK (double income no kids) couples and newbies earning twice the former's current salary. The servile attitude of the watchman who grew up in colonial British ruled India and listens not to reason but only the orders from a man of heirarchy and the transformation of a normal sophisticated and successful stock broker into a raving self-absorbed vengeful maniac are also very real scenarios. What I really liked about the movie was that it ended with a karmic message without being too preachy. As a result of the stock broker's insomnia and his irritable nature, he ends up pulling down the stock price of a company that his client has invested in and is forced to quit his apartment which was being financed out of the client's pocket and to add to the repercussion, the secretary who also has a stake in the company is forced to sell off his apartment to cover for the loss. So with both ending up as losers in a battle of egos they have to let go of their vainglorious attitudes and eat a humble pie in front of the whole society. For those who watch movies with an intent to escape into a world of fantasy and unrealism, this movie will seem as bland as boiled vegetable: avoid it. To me movies do not serve as entertainment, they are a reflection of today's society: in terms of attitude, aspiration and values. 'Hulla' made a passive commentary on it in a realistic and in a sense, sattirical way. The very fact that there is money invested in such a movie shows that the concept of realism is not dead in Indian cinema which sadly for a good part of the time invests in mindless megalomania.

Mars and Venus

2008-02-17T21:21:00.004-05:00

Disclaimer: This story is purely fictional and has only fictitious characters who bear no resemblence to anyone dead alive or yet to be born. Please refrain from speculation.

‘This one is the worst I’ve ever seen.’

“…and then she came into my kitchen and yelled ‘Hi’. I was so taken aback that I screamed and threw the salad bowl into the air. I so hate it when people creep up from behind and say something. It was so hilarious all the cabbage was on my hair. I could have passed off for Bozo!…” she giggled to herself.

He stared at her for a moment and realizing he was supposed to react, he smiled.

‘It just gets worse every time doesn’t it?’

“ So what’s up with you? Do you have such crazy embarrassing things happening in your life?”
She dug into her sub as the mayo dripped from the sides.

‘I am getting a bad feeling about how this has been going…’ he stared at his mobile and sighed.

“Well, my friend once took off the signs on the restroom and I walked into the ladies room and literally got beaten by a crummy old hag with a stick. It wasn’t funny then, but I guess it is funny now.” he shrugged.

She laughed with her mouthful almost choking on the banana peppers while he pecked at his pasta. He had almost lost his appetite. She noticed.

“Is something wrong with your ravioli or with you?”

‘How am I going to get myself bailed out this time?’

“Err nothing. I am just not too hungry right now. The ravioli is wonderful.” He dug up a forkful and stuffed it in his mouth to prove the point.

“ Oh ok. I remember once at a restaurant we were served some really rotten cheese and my friend told the maître d' that he should inform the chef that even her dog would not eat that. And he told her….”

‘Should I call Shailesh? Maybe he’ll help me out of this one. He’s such an expert in such situations.’

“…then we planned to walk out of the restaurant after meeting the manager and telling him what a rotten restaurant he has. But he didn’t want us to give his place bad publicity so….”

‘I’ll text message him first.’ He started punching the buttons.

“…and every time we go there we get a little dessert or a discount.”

By now he was totally distracted and did not make any effort to hide it from her.

“Is something bothering you or is it just me?”

His mobile beeped. “I’ll be right back with you in a few minutes.” He rushed clutching his phone to the restroom.

“Would you like to order a dessert tonight Ma’am ?”

“No I’d just like to wait for a while before I decide.” She glanced at her watch once more. He had been in there for over half an hour. She considered requesting the manager to check on him but didn’t want a manager peering at her date in the restroom during their very first meeting.

‘Maybe he had a bad stomach. That explains why he was not eating.’

A few minutes later. ‘What if he stood me up? He could have climbed out of the vent in the restroom and run away. I could tell he was not even interested in me from the beginning. Hah! He didn’t even have the guts or the decency to tell me on my face. Men!’

She signalled the waiter that she wished to pay the bill.

At long last he emerged from the restroom with a sullen face. Seeing the empty table he threw his hands up, “Story of my life. I just lost all my money to the stock exchange and now I lost her too. They somehow sense a pauper. Women!”

Noose: that's what the Indian media needs

2008-02-14T17:33:00.003-05:00

At the risk of repeating myself, I subject you readers to yet another of those rants on the current state of journalism in our country. Despite the fact that 24 x 7 news channels have burgeoned faster than breeding bunnies, the scenario is more or less like our unplanned cities: ugly and disoriented.

They have reduced themselves to entertainment shows: some even report on hour to hour basis about entertainment channels. Such utter lassitude that they'd rather just walk into the next studio room and take the interview of the sweeper of the Indian Idol studio rather than get their microphones half way across the country and cover some really pressing issues. What's more is, one channel thinks of a brilliant idea to fuel their laziness the rest of the channels will follow suit with 'exclusive' pictures of the sweeper of Indian Idol studio copied from the first channel: so much for 'new'ness in news!

Of course, all that is old hat: but this is what really ticked me off. While we are quite familiar with the pettiness of journalists who ask 'Aapko kaise Lag raha hai' to folks who lost their families and homes in earthquakes; it is quite distressing to know that despite the source of pressing news (in this case the Chinese insurgence in Arunachal Pradesh) being handed to them on a silver platter by none other than Arun Shourie, they didn't bother to get their act together and make it exclusive. They'd rather hang around at hip socialite parties happening a mile away from their cozy Delhi studio, taste some 5 star food and catch some politicos brat smoking pot or as in this case Shilpa Shetty kissing away to glory! So much for covering ground breaking realities.

Furthermore, the apathy towards reality is compounded with the political leanings of these news channels. The 'serious' news channels are not supposed to be blatantly voyeuristic or sensational. So they'd rather pick out a political angle out of a piece of information only to reiterate that they are 'serious'. They are happy supporting the party in power or at times opposing it, simply to open a can of worms, when even their weather report has nothing new!

This is the 'truth' as doled out by the news channels: the geography of India comprises only 3 cities : Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. That is where 'true India' lives, kisses, dances, drinks pot, shines and dies. Every once in a while the news channels discover obscure villages like Kumbakonam where a Tsunami hits or Kargil where the Indian Army fights insurgency. These places miraculously disappear from the map of India once the sensationally tragic yet newsworthy events cease to grab eyeballs.

Now what is so newsworthy about the Chinese army blowing up a Buddhist statue in Indian territory: a few hurt Buddhists in Arunachal Pradesh that's all! It pales in comparison to monumentally significant events like the desecration of an Ambedkar statue in Delhi or a Shivaji statue in Mumbai. They are not going to go up in arms and burn taxis and buses, besides whose taxis and buses will they burn? Chinese?

On a different note: I really wonder why some political parties are fixated with the idea of incinerating public property to express their angst. Is it to reinforce a Hindu ritual like a Yagna? Still on this 'burning' issue: I really wonder what kind of a message Mr. Thackrey's party and we as a nation of petty warriors will be sending back to China which insists on swallowing up a whole Indian state, while we are still bickering over which Indian has the right to live in an Indian state .

Now that I am far away from the obnoxious Indian news channels, I try to look up what is happening back in India once in a while. But for the rest of the time I enjoy the onion : I think it presents far more realities than any news channel would be willing to divulge. What's more, it's entertaining. I wish they'd make one of these in India!

Resurrection

2008-01-15T02:30:00.000-05:00

She threw the lacy wrap around her shoulders. It slid gently off her satin nightgown. The solitude of the night had ceased to perturb her. Making herself a cup of coffee she tuned to the radio station that they both loved. She cupped her palms around her mug letting the warmth spread through her hands before the liquid could warm her insides. She glanced at the coffee table in the living room. He was already there waiting for her. On that cold winter morning she did not need the coffee for the warmth, all she needed was a glance at him to infuse it into her being till it exploded into a smile on her face.

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

She stroked her bloated abdomen gently and she could feel the form that love had metamorphosed into. She wanted his hands to feel them as well. Tears of silent desperation moistened her soft cheeks as her mind flipped through the pages of their photo album: their days in college, their graduation party, their first date by the riverside, their first kiss, the first time they made love…
She could feel the cold draught mock her need to be caressed by his tender touch. Memories of his laughter rang through her ears shattering months of the deafening silence she had grown accustomed to.

“Lost!” “Missing!” The headlines had screamed.

Her thoughts clung precariously onto a precipice called hope. “He will come back!” she shouted deliriously at the empty walls. But the desolation in those words echoed shaking her fragile hope. Her body pleaded her to let go and collapse into an eternal abyss so that miraculously his arms would wrap around her and transport her far away from the benumbed unfeeling world. But it was no fairy tale and his masculine hands were not there to lift her out of her misery. She yearned to stare into his deep hazel eyes reassuring her during every struggle that they would make it through. Instead all she saw was a hazy light on the ceiling that faded with every ticking minute until silence and darkness pervaded her mind.

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

“Isn’t that the old Billy Joel song playing there?” he asked.
“Yes. Pretty old. Reminds me of the good old days…” she turned up the volume for him.
Her eyes were filled by the image in front of her. She felt as if she was walking into the past and almost said 'He is back'. ‘The same wavy hair. The same hazel eyes. The same aquiline nose. The same baritone…’
“Happy Birthday Mum” he wished her and smiled warmly.
‘The same smile. He is us.’, she looked at her son on the screen proudly. She was glad the pills hadn’t worked.

Jigsaw

2008-01-05T23:11:00.000-05:00

My fingers toyed through the confounding pieces
Feeling the myriad contours and shapes.
My eyes searched for a semblance of order
In the labyrinth of undefined spaces.

The vivid memories of shadowy pasts,
Sprung forth from distinct moments in time.
Each seemingly detached from the other,
They confronted the rationale in my mind.

As I drew myself further away,
Lifting the haze of present from my eyes,
The pieces connected to take form
And I perceived a picture arise.

At each dark piece, I would wonder why,
It perturbed the quiet waters unknown?
Until I stepped back to realise
They formed the picture of the stepping-stones!

-Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Sweetheart

2007-12-18T00:51:00.000-05:00

Maya woke up with a start on hearing the car tyres crunching the gravel at the driveway. 'Oh great! Dad's here. What have we done to this place! He is going to fly into a rage.' Her eyes darted around from the stereo which was still blaring, to the plates of half eaten biscuits and sandwiches on the table, to the tilted lamp shade, to the sofa cushions lying on the floor. It seemed like a tornado had hit the place. His head was still on her lap. They had spent the whole night together. She even smelt like him now. She looked at him tenderly as he slept and yearned that he could stay forever. She ruffled his hair gently. He seemed to stir. She didn't want to awaken him. 'Such a sweetheart!' she remarked as she watched him turn towards her belly.

She saw the hickey on her ankle and she was alarmed. 'How do I get rid of it?' she thought as she heard the door of the car slam. He had such a foot fetish! He loved her toes and she loved the way his tongue sponged and tickled them. The warm saliva on her bare toes. It seemed impossible not to love him. In fact, he was irresistible even at first sight. She was jogging at the neighbourhood park, when their eyes first met. Both of them stopped on their tracks. The moment she saw those deep brown eyes she felt the warm fuzzy feeling like molten chocolate spreading all over her heart. He too felt a strong connection draw him towards her.

But Maya knew her dad would never approve of his kind: roadside types. 'Pedigree, my dear child. Learn to appreciate and demand it!' he would say so often. But her affection for him was strong enough to goad her to rebel against her father's notions. Thus began the clandestine meetings at the park. It seemed perfect. Her dad would never know of it: he would never venture into the park for he exercised only on a treadmill.

However, soon enough the initial affection grew exponentially with every meeting and it had become almost heart rending for her to tear away from him to even go home. So finally after much deliberation, she brought him home. Dad was away at a conference and wouldn't return home until the next day. The coast was clear and they had the whole house to themselves. He was fascinated by the grandeur of her house but followed her silently as she led him into her bedroom. They had dinner together on her sofa. She loved watching him eat. He was as insatiable when it came to food, as he was when it came to her affection. She turned on the TV and they watched her favorite shows together. Later at night she turned on some loud and energetic music and they danced like crazy till they were out of breath. She plonked herself on her sofa and drew him in an embrace. She didn't remember much of what happened after that and the next thing she knew was hearing dad's car.

She panicked. Her brain was telling her to act fast: get rid of him, clear the room, spray herself with a deo and meet dad downstairs before he smells a rat. Her heart on the other hand, clung onto him and was ready to face dad and the consequences no matter what they were.

She could hear dad's footsteps climbing towards her room. She felt her heart exploding through her rib cage.
The door swung open.
'Maaaya....' her dad's excited smile metamorphosed into shock, bewilderment and finally anger.
'What's going on here?' he demanded.
'I can explain dad.' All the commotion and her pounding heart awakened her sweetheart.
'And what's that thing doing in my house?' Her dad's eyebrows were knit and his veins were throbbing on his forhead.
'Excuse me dad! But this is not a thing!' She said mustering some courage in his presence. 'He is Joey dad. Just look into his eyes! Aren't they cutest you've ever seen? Please let me keep him daddy. After Lassie this house is so lonely! Pleeeeeaaasseee Papa!'

She made a puppy dog face that her dad got confused which one was the puppy. He just left her with her sweetheart shaking his head hoping that when she grows up, her choice in men would be a bit better.

War heads

2007-11-01T15:28:00.000-04:00

When I was travelling by the shuttle today across the campus, the radio was tuned into 700 WLW. The broadcaster normally intersperses the news tidbits with his own views on them. I normally don't have an objection to that method of presentation because the views expressed are usually moderate and more like rhetorics. But today I was outraged beyond words and was fuming by the time I reached my lab.

Today's top news was that the Hiroshima bomber, Paul Tibbets died at his home in Ohio after living a ripe age of 92 years. The radio announcer apparently after much "thought" subscribed to the bomber's views on the bombings and was "mourning" the death of a brave soldier and a true patriot. Mr. Tibbets had no remorse for his act of having annihilated 140,000 people in a split second. He probably never understood the full import of his execrable act because there are another 80,000 Japanese (called Hibakusha) who suffered inconcievably terrifying diseases and mutations. The consequences of his act even today loom large over a population that was undeniably blameless in this whole ratiocination of why his act was "justified". I can even exempt the aforementioned bomber for having had such views, because that was one way for him to psychologically shut out the brutality of having killed thousands of stillborn children and condemning several others to misery and suffering. Escapism and reiteration of his intentions of ending war was one way to keep himself mentally sane which explains his longevity I suppose!

It is however, beyond my comprehension that the radio announcer should endorse such a view! What really incensed me was the fact that he illuminated only one side of the aftermath. The bombing brought a halt to the imminent war and nipped the alleged plans of Japan to attack the US in the bud. The highlight which was underscored repeatedly was that the incident saved the lives of some 10,000 odd GIs: a "commendable" achievement from the RJ's highly parochial and bigoted standpoint. While he reiterated that the war could have wrought havoc on 200,000 lives, the bombing doesn't seem to have made a significance difference given the aforementioned numbers, unless by "lives" he meant American lives and not human lives.

So isn't it as good (or as bad) as supporting the opinions of a terrorist-bomber? How is a terrorist any different from Mr. Tibbets? Every Jehadi believes in the nobility of his violent acts, so did Mr. Tibbets. A Jehadi decimates the perceived threats with bombs to safeguard his clique, so did Mr. Tibbets. The only difference being that a president of a nation that redefined the word superpower, ratified Mr. Tibbet's act.

If a broadcaster can advertize such a view openly, I won't be surprised if another 40% of Americans espouse it too. I now fully understand why George W Bush got re-elected! Most Americans haven't seen misery, the only graphic image of destruction that their eyes would have encountered is that of the WTC crashing. They will never understand or empathize with the destruction in the rest of the world sitting in their pretty glassy buildings with leather chairs and suede cushions. All they know is their lovely fantastic little microcosm needs to be protected from "percieved" or "potential" threats. So in their "global" view its the American lives and the American interests that need to be safeguarded.

Coming to think of it at a macro level, I think such Americans are really no better than some of the uncivil Indians in terms of selfishness except that the scale is much larger and the consequences more significant: the latter keep their houses clean and throw the garbage outside onto the street while the former keep their country bomb-safe by throwing bombs on other nations. Consequentially we Indians have to only deal with a few dirty streets, while America creates a few mutilated nations.

We do need some education

2007-10-26T22:18:00.000-04:00

Seeing two ends of the spectrum of the educational system is a unique experience. While it would seem rather churlish to compare one in a country of 300 million and that in a country of 1 billion, it would be interesting to contrast the diametrically opposite aspects of each. It would become a tome if I were to enumerate all such differences, but these are a few things that struck me as stark contrasts in terms of attitude.

Disclaimer: These are a few scenes I have witnessed and wouldn’t dare to extrapolate them to any generalisations.

Scene in an average-Joe undergraduate Indian classroom:
Enter professor: students rise to wish him, like he is an emperor who just made a royal entrance in front of his subjects and begins to hold session without much effort.

Scene in an average-Joe undergraduate US classroom:
Enter professor: everybody is seated and is playing with their laptops, clickers, mobiles, chewing, eating and drinking till he draws their attention to the session. In many cases the students proceed with auxiliary activities despite the professor's efforts, which I attribute to their limited attention span spawned by handheld digital distractions. So the professor has to use technology to fight technology: he makes animated power point presentations, uses the overhead projector to write down the keywords for inattentive students.

Scene when an Indian professor doesn't know an answer:
a) Professor lets his imagination run amuck without any statutory warning about where real ends and fantasy begins and students initially accept the gas. Students later realise that it was a load of dino-shit and stop asking questions in the lecture.
b) Professor is creative enough to retune the question so that it is within the realms of his knowledge. He answers the question he frames and assumes he has answered the original question.

Scene when a professor in the US doesn't know the answer:
The professor acknowledges that he doesn't know and requests the student to email the question to him so he could find the answer.

Scene in an Indian classroom when the class does not perform too well in the test:
Professor has a smug look and blames the truancy and inattentiveness of the students for the miserable performance, when in fact most students would study from the textbook rather than attend his lectures. He frightens them with dire consequences of failure and the high likelihood of tough questions in the next test that cannot be found in any textbook.

Scene in a classroom in the US if the students don't perform well in a quiz:
Professor urges the class to do better in the next class and even bets that 90% of the class will do well. He encourages and lures them with easy and sometimes mind-numbing questions, which some dimwits still get wrong.

Scene when a lecture is extended by an hour without prior warning:
Students begin to whine and protest, eventually the dissent dies down and the extended lecture proceeds without much ado.

Scene when a lecture spills over by two minutes:
Students have packed their bags and evacuated the classroom like it is on fire, while the hapless professor still shouts out the last words of his sentence so they can hear it on the corridor.

Scene in a laboratory in India:
Limited equipment, unlimited students. Students crowd, push, kick and pull other students out of the way to gain access to touch, feel and see the elusive piece of equipment even if it is a dissected rat.

Scene in a laboratory in US:
One piece of equipment for two students period. Students can take their time to fiddle around and get the hang of it, but they’d rather get it over with and scram.

It is not just the method or approach towards pedagogy that is different; essentially it appears to me as an attitudinal chasm in the educational system of the two countries: both of the students and the professors. In India the professor is many times unduly albeit grudgingly given the kind of respect that is superficial but inordinate. The students seldom learn in class, what they learn is only what they study at home and yet they show respect to their professors. In the US, the professor-student relationship is blurred by an informality in interaction, in that there is no "pretence" of respect. It is actually the lack of respect when it is due, that comes across as apathy and ungratefulness of the students despite the fact that they sometimes have better faculty and facilities. But then again, they have not seen worse to know what is better.

Given the factors like higher population, higher emphasis on academics and therefore grades and the fact that teaching is not a highly coveted profession in India, one would think the condition of the education system is perhaps the best in these circumstances. But what really exacerbates the situation is the fact that we also have reservations, so not only is it fiercely competitive purely because of the population, but also because of the unfair handicap that undeserving candidates get over meritorious ones by virtue of their caste. The learning process is never relaxed, enjoyable or stimulating because it is always about one-upmanship and unhealthy competition.

Having said that, one feel good factor about the mess called Indian education system is that, its made us somewhat resilient: most students from India manage to survive and adapt to the US education system; what are the chances of the reverse happening?

Shot!

2007-08-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

I got shot thrice in three days! No I was not prowling around in the forests of the Sahyadris to get hunted down like that. Nor am I facing the flash lights and shutterbugs because I am not ultra famous. I needed to get my immunization against a horde of diseases that seldom get the same level of limelight as bird flu, dengue and chikangunya in our country of unidentified flying objects having a predilection to inflict disease on unsuspecting human victims.

I am terrified of needles and other weapons of incision. Fear breeds procrastination. So I tried in vain to put off the inevitable till it grew like a humongous insurmountable task and an unconquerable race against time. Of course I exaggerate! After making an enormous effort to shake off the mental inertia and irrational fear, I brought myself to the clinic of our family doctor. He took a look at the immunization history form and engaged in a long interrogation about the vaccines I was given as a kid. My mother did not happen to keep those receipts and normally hospitals did not award a certificate of merit and good conduct to kids who don’t throw tantrums during immunization. So we had no documented evidence of what diseases I was immunized against. Of course I do have bodily evidence of the small pox vaccine, but then there was no date written on it! When they give kids a shot they should also tattoo a date and time stamp just below the spot where the needle was inserted. So much for fear of needles!

In any case, for those diseases that required an adult dosage, I had to get a shot as early as possible. The doctor himself offered to administer one if I could procure the vaccine and the syringe within his visiting hours. It was as if the hunted was being asked by the hunter to buy the rifle and the bullets to have itself shot. So here I go about on a wild goose chase for the drug store he mentioned and finally found that they would need to go the warehouse for the vaccine. It nearly made me jump for joy, but at the same time I needed to take my shot at the right time. I decided to try my luck elsewhere. I was really amazed that there are so few, in fact, no questions asked when one shows a doctor’s prescription for something as significant as a vaccine and it is just handed over without much ado.

Back at the doctor’s clinic I saw the waiting room filled with folks who had more serious ailments and deserved more attention than I did. I was willing to patiently wait my turn and in fact would have been deeply grateful if the doctor had left without seeing me. But the receptionist thought otherwise and led me straightaway into the examination room. I sat upright on the bed rolling up my sleeve and trying to visualize the size of the needle and the proportional pain that was to follow. When the doctor saw my horrified face he asked me whether there was something wrong. I was just about to tell him about my fear of needles when a quick legerdemain of his deft hands left me speechless and actually quite disappointingly painless. Pain as they say is all in the mind so I could feel my muscle go numb for a while before the doctor patted my shoulders and said I would be alright.

The next day I was to get yet another shot and this time, as advised I went to the nearby hospital instead. Once again I was told that the vaccine was not available and I would have to purchase it over the counter. I was about to take to my heels with that excuse when the voice in my head reminded me that I still had the tetanus injection to take. So there I was lying on my side in the casualty room remembering all the horrid typhoid shots on my hind side that I received as a kid and cringing with fear. Why does it have to be the gluteal muscle? Can’t all these things be administered as an oral medication? Just as I was reflecting on such profound needs of mankind that the world of medicine failed to fulfill, I was caught unawares by the pointed end of the syringe jabbed onto my backside. One can’t even get mentally prepared for things happening behind one’s back!

As I got off the bed soothing my sore butt, I informed the nurse that I needed a certificate. She gave me a look of disbelief. While she simply said, “We never issue certificates”, she actually meant, “Are you going to frame it and hang it in your living room?” Perhaps she thought I would award her a certificate for rapid and painless injection. The doctor asked me if I would be back with the MMR vaccine as well. I had had enough puncturing for a day, so I decided to postpone the last one for the next day.

The next day when I arrived with the bullets and rifle, apparently the hunter was way too busy shooting down and tearing apart other rapacious creatures to bother with me. Fifteen minutes of gore and sickness outside the casualty room was enough for me to mentally shout, “Shoot me shoot me shoot me”. Finally when I decided to barge in and get it over with, my eyes caught sight of the gruesome denouement of a road accident and I retreated into the waiting room. When the nurse eventually decided to put me out of my misery, I was rather relieved to see the needle jabbed into my arm.

But not all was happy and gay in Shotsville. Three shots in three days gave me a horrible reaction and I was down with fever on Independence Day.

High in the Highlands

2007-06-29T06:55:00.000-04:00

My last post was a rant and those were the least of the memories I would carry from Scotland. It is the ultimate hunting ground for folks who love natural beauty and enjoy photographing it. Every moment leaves you feeling in awe of the creation that surrounds you. Three days are really not enough to even scratch the surface and I realized that while planning the trip.

Most people don’t like planning their own itineraries and prefer guided tours. Guided tours and professionally planned itineraries seldom leave time to venture too far into the wilderness. It becomes a packaged experience in every sense of the term with even the photographs looking like the same big nature posters with different faces stuck on them! Of course the flipside of not going with a package tour would be like wandering around the streets of London and completely missing the Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus and Thames! But then if you don’t do the clichéd tours and packaged pictures then explore it your way and plan it your way!

Here’s a low-down on how I did it. In retrospect, apart from the fact that we were bound by the train and bus timings and I would advice any keen traveler to drive around instead, I really thought it worked out pretty well in the end. Of course there were a few minor things which could have been done differently too.

Day 1: York – Edinburgh – Loch Lomond (via Glasgow)

We took the 7.30 am train to Edinburgh from the York station via Newcastle upon Tyne. The train journey was quite enjoyable, traveling through bustling cities, quiet villages and English countryside in the interim. Post Newcastle, the train took a route via Berwick upon Tweed along the coastlines leading to Edinburgh. The view of the sea over the jagged rocky edges of the precipice, the quaint little town stations like Dunbar and meadows stretching to the horizon were visual treats that literally zipped passed the window. I just wished they weren’t such ephemeral images that flashed by and that I could linger a little longer till they filled my mind’s eye.

At the Edinburgh Waverley station, I left my strolley at the luggage area. Much as I attempt to be a light traveler, and I digress, I end up carrying a lot of stuff like my life depended on it, but I’d rather be mentally at peace having that load rather than ruin my vacation traveling light and having to buy stuff along. In short I have reconciled to the fact that I am incorrigible in this respect.
I had already been to Edinburgh on my last trip to the UK, but the moment one steps out of the Waverley station is worth savoring any number of times one visits Edinburgh. Everything around vies for one’s attention: with the humongous Edinburgh castle looming in the background, the Sir Walter Scott memorial spiraling towards the clouds, the shopping malls thronging with myriad weekend shoppers and visitors, the open top sight seeing buses waiting to be loaded with the next batch of eager travelers and the central garden lined with trees and benches beckoning the weary ones to repose awhile. The city is vibrant and like most cities in the UK is a quaint mix of Victorian architecture and modern structures. We headed towards the bus station to book our tickets to Loch Lomond later that day. To kill time we walked along the Castle Street towards the Edinburgh Castle. Again since I had been there and seen the castle from the inside, I didn’t feel enamored about paying another 6 quid and seeing it all over again. But yes, for castle lovers it is worth a visit and it gives a lovely panoramic view of the city and the sea.

We walked back to the St. Andrew’s square to catch our bus to Loch Lomond. We had a transit through Glasgow where we took our connecting bus. As we drew closer to Loch Lomond, watching the billboards outside, I started to panic that we might miss our bus stop. So I pestered the bus driver till he promised to inform us when we reached there. He dropped us off at what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. We could see the Loch at a walking distance, a board indicating Duck bay area, a Loch Lomond Youth hostel board directed into the thick of the Trossach’s national park and a highway on which cars and motorbikes screamed across at unimaginable speeds that could blow us away. The Duck bay area was under renovation so they did boat rides only from Balloch which, we were informed was a 15-20 minute walk from Duck bay. Walking through the Trossach’s national park in the canopy of towering trees was a rejuvenating experience with the sunlight filtering through the virgin pale green leaves, the sound of a little brook running by, a small clearing with a moss laden table and a creaky wooden bridge over the brook. Just when we had covered half the way to Balloch, we saw a gate leading towards the lake. I enquired with an old man walking towards us about it. He was kind enough to give us a ride in his car. Sometimes it’s really the free rides that take you places and make you feel the serendipity of traveling and discovering on your own!

At Balloch, fortunately we managed to get the last cruise into Loch Lomond. God bless that old Scottish man! Loch Lomond happens to be the largest natural fresh water lake in Scotland and supplies water to many of the important cities including Edinburgh and Glasgow. As the boat glided into the quiet waters leading into the Loch (lake), we took to the deck. Apart from the occasional wave rocking the boat, it was a fairly quiet cruise at reasonably slow pace to look around at the castles along the shores and the Inchmurin Island in the middle of the lake. Of course if you are looking for some adrenalin pumping experience the speed boats and water scooters are for you, but its best to reach Balloch earlier than 5 pm to go on one of those rides. On our way back to the bus stop we dined at an Indian restaurant at Balloch (where do you not find one of these!) We returned by the 8.30 pm bus to Edinburgh.

For the night’s stay I had booked the BlackFriar’s Youth Hostel which is near the Waverley station. We had some difficulty locating the place, but I found the folks in Scotland pretty helpful and we finally reached our youth hostel. The scene outside the Hostel was that of typical UK nightlife and I was pretty apprehensive about my own decision to stay in a youth hostel! I met only one of my would-be roommates in the Ladies dorm at 11 in the night. She was from Canada and looked like a student. I hit the sack for an early rise the next day and was hardly aware of when the rest of my roommates piled into the room.

To be continued.....

The day the "Shutter" Bug bit me

2007-06-19T07:56:00.000-04:00

I have despised the horror genre of movies right from my childhood. Even the ‘Onida’ devil used to make my hair stand on ends and I used to hide behind my grandma’s back while watching ‘Vikram Aur Vetaal’. Jaws could keep me away from the swimming pool for a week and my friends refused to associate themselves with me after I screamed while watching ‘Kaun’ with them.

DJ on the other hand gets an unfathomable thrill out of watching horror movies and I normally keep a safe distance from the living room when infernal noises emanate from the TV. But this time around there was no escape! I visited the apartment of A, S and M to finalize our Scotland trip plans. Their living room gets a good wireless signal and there wasn’t much recourse to getting out of that room without booking the tickets. While I surfed the net for the best possible deal at a decent Youth Hostel, the guys were interested in scaring the living daylights out of themselves. I politely declined the offer, so they drew the curtains and turned up the volume for the perfectly diabolical ambience. The Thai horror movie was called ‘The Shutter’. Its funny how, when you don’t understand a language you tend to listen even more carefully and that’s what makes such movies even more scary! While I successfully managed to wean my eyes away from the screen and concentrate on locations in Edinburgh, my ears could not escape the frequent yet sudden screams and crashes that made me jump out in fear every time. After booking the tickets I pretended to busy myself with surfing the net but snatched a few glances of the nefarious movie. While I was told that I missed one of the scariest visuals of the vindictive ghost, I was not too sure about sleeping well that night.

At 10 I bade goodnight to A, S and M and turned homewards. The streets were well lit and I made sure I took a road that was likely to have some semblance of life on it. But the creatures of the dark crawling out of the pubs of Great Britain were not the species I’d have liked to encounter on a night like this! As I marched confidently repeatedly telling myself that I was a sane individual and it was just a movie, I felt something hitting against the back of my windcheater. I was horrified, screamed and spun around to see what it was. Just my laptop wire bobbing out and rubbing against my back! As I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, I saw a man across the street waving out to me. His inebriated presence was only adding to my discomfort. I walked as fast as I could lug a 3 kg laptop. He drew closer and flailing his arms malevolently he tried to beckon me and asked if I’d like a drink. I couldn’t have given him a more disgusted look as he slithered away into the darkness, while I fled in a fit of terror towards my home chanting all the Shlokas I could ever remember. I only stopped when I was in the safe environs of my apartment. I related the incident to my roommate and warned her of the rough night ahead.

I tossed around a few times in the bed and silently crept out to the living room. After indulging in a few midnight tidbits I turned on the TV to watch something soporific enough to tranquilize me to sleep. There were some mind-numbing word games, baseball match and a snooker match to choose from. I couldn’t tolerate the blithering butter mouthed game show host, so I chose the baseball match. But every now and then the commentator would yell out the score loud enough for the whole of the European Union to wake up. If I turned down the volume I tended to stay awake and think of the depraved ghost and how she haunted the photographer all his life. As my focus drifted from the baseball game to the hallway I could see the staircase light flood in through the door and cast a spooky shadow on the wooden walrus hanging in the hallway. On a normal day I wouldn’t have thought much of it, but just for safety sake I decided to close the door of the living room and shut off the view of a potentially satanic shadow. As I kept telling myself to think rationally and that there were no such things as ghosts or Santa Claus, the door of the living room swung open right in front of my eyes. I tried to stare hard into the darkness wondering if it could be my roommate checking to see if I am ok or was it a figment of my macabre imagination! With my heart pounding like it would explode through my rib cage, I turned on the lights. The door was open alright and there really was no one! I checked the bedroom: my roommate was fast asleep. ‘Think logically’ I reiterated to myself. I tested the living room door again. Because of the friction of the carpet it stayed in place for sometime but the loose hinge and the weight of the door caused it to swing open after a few minutes.

Glad that the world of ratiocination had not deserted me when my mind was getting overwhelmed by thoughts of ghosts and irrational stories I finally slept with the lights turned on and snooker on the TV at 4 am in the morning out of sheer exhaustion.

Footnote: I haven't revealed much about the movie 'Shutter'. I don't want to spoil the fun of all you horror maniacs out there. Watch it if you like to spend a sleepless night wondering if two cadaverous hands will come and grab you under your sheets!

Scouring Scotland with a Sack of Potatoes (The Rant)

2007-05-09T09:14:00.000-04:00

Visiting a new place and a new culture is always a different learning experience. I found that we Indians tend to be more insular to these cultures and in general make for one of the most finicky, fussy and lazy travellers ever. I have seen the “we are like this only” attitude surface every now and then; a complete refusal to adapt and a fiercely defiant need to stick to the Indian ways, unmindful of whether they are good bad or ugly. But is it really an Indian trait or was it just me picking the wrong group to travel with?

I was in the heart of Scotland with the 3 'wise' men from 'Indolia'. It would of course eat up all the available webspace if I were to expound their ineptitudes, but it would just suffice to say that they were nothing but deadload on the trip. What is with the strange obsession to look for an Indian restaurant and eat a three course Indian meal whilst in the heart of the Highlands? Yes, the Brits and Scots dote on our Indian food: but is that the pièce de résistance of travelling in Scotland? Every precious minute of our stay in Inverness would have ticked away at some dingy “Indian” restaurant playing infernal Indian remixes with seemingly Indian décor but run by Pakis and Bangladeshis, had it not been for me putting my foot down! While I managed to inveigle my co-travellers out of dining at an Indian restaurant, what followed seems even more baffling: eating take away food sitting in the restaurant! Take away food should be, and no prizes for guessing, just taken away and eaten as you go. It took me 5 minutes to eat my Veggie Sub whilst walking around the city centre, so it beats me why it should take 45 minutes to eat a Macburger and fries! There is much more to do in new place than to stuff oneself with fast(!) food.

Another thing that irks me the most is lethargy on the tour: indolence of both the brain and the body are totally unacceptable to me. When one goes touring, one looks forward to getting as much value for money from the journey as humanly possible or at least not lose an opportunity to see something exotic, do something adventurous and feel exhilarated by the very thought of doing it. So if a good part of the day is already spent getting there and then one would want to spend the rest of the time snoring inside a youth hostel when it’s bright and sunny outside, it really gets on my nerves! Most of the times in UK, the best way to get around anywhere is walking if there are no buses. I’ve found walking anywhere in UK very rejuvenating and not as tiresome as it is in India. Given my physique and dietary habits one would think, I couldn’t manage more than 2 kilometres at a stretch and that folks twice or thrice my size and rapacious eating habits would be ‘well-equipped’ for a physically exerting excursion like a 6 kilometre walk around the River Ness. Not only did I see one of the most divine looking river crossing, islands and a beautiful rainbow on my 6 km peregrination but also had my dinner and returned to the hostel before sun down whilst the rest of them were cooling their heels at a salmon eatery after a mere 2 km walk. Of course sacks of potatoes do not have legs do they?

I think the problem really starts with not knowing what to expect out of a trip.
The last thing one would want is a person going to Scotland to see sharks swimming in an artificial aquarium. Scotland is a place of natural beauty, so if one would go seeking a rollercoaster ride in a theme park at Scotland, I wouldn’t be surprised that one would meet with anything but disappointment and a big hole in the pocket. It’s a place you would want to travel into the tranquil wilderness, to sit on those little benches on the islands, soak into the capricious weather climb atop those castles and to capture the colours of terrain, the flowers and the joy of spring on your camera. In my view, a person who cannot appreciate these should never really venture into a Scotland trip. Travelling all the way there simply to claim that one went to Scotland is like raving about a bestseller one hasn't even read!

What exacerbates the situation is not planning it right! When you are focussed on what you want to experience and know the best place you can find it, nothing can really stop a determined traveller: rain, turbulent weather, hunger or even languid company. Unplanned travel is a sure shot recipe for disaster, wasted time and unforeseen expenses. So when one has no plan of one’s own it’s not rocket science not to figure that the next best thing to do is to stick to someone who has one! It’s totally juvenile to go to a tourist information centre and act like a kid in a candy shop. It is even more vexing when the person who knows what do next, is made to look foolish and dragged back into a redundant discussion to take a consensus. When you don’t even know which direction you are standing in, how on earth are you going to decide where to head? Men never believed in reading maps that’s why Columbus landed in the wrong country. And what’s more? He was egotistical enough not to accept his mistake and called the natives there as ‘Indians’. Men!!!!

Footnote: Like I said before every trip teaches you something new. For me this trip where I was carrying an extra baggage of 3 sacks of potatoes, taught me to travel light next time!

'Stuff'ed

2007-03-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

Sorry folks,
I do apologise for the long sabbatical. As to what has happened of me, lets not get into that: because at the moment I am "stuffed". Stuffed: that's a rather strange word and one would think I am stuffing myself with a lot of Muffins, but that's so not the case! Well actually my manager likes to bandy that word around and I am absolutely fascinated by it. He'd say 'Gosh we are stuffed' which loosely translates to 'We are in deep shit.' 'They just stuffed us in.' which means 'They pushed us into deep shit.' The first time I heard it I went 'Whaaaaaaaat?' (no not that loudly)! But I wondered about the origin of this phrase: does it mean 'stuffed like a christmas turkey and cooked in the oven' or does it mean 'stuffed with so much food down one's throat that one would want to puke' or 'stuffed like a trophy head of a moose' or perhaps 'stuffy and suffocating'. That's a lot of stuff to think about but I don't have the time or the energy at the moment so I'll leave the thinking to you brilliant folks. Okie dokie. Cheers!!
By the way if any of you thought I was drunk when I wrote this you are right: Happy All Fools Day!

Patience

2007-02-07T08:04:00.000-05:00

Note: The post has nothing to do with the Take That song. Nor do I intend to allude that my readers should have some patience before they find my next post.

I never believed in it and yet on a day when I was physically and mentally drained and too exhausted to even react, let alone vent my anger, I learnt the value of equanimity: the one that breaks adversaries and brings them down on their knees.

I live in an area which is close to the heart of the city and owing to the burgeoning traffic the road near my house had been considerably widened and finally converted into a wide road one way. Despite this there are innumerable bikers who drive onto the pedestrian sidewalk near the signal just to get ahead of the others and zoom past when the signal turns green. It has been making me irascible by the time I reached home almost on a daily basis, the irritation vented long after the cause was out of sight. Initially, I thought anger management techniques would help: I counted ten till my ears went red and the caricaturesque steam would come out of my ears, I tried nipping the vexation right at the bud by spewing expletives at the root cause of my irritation: the bikers, I tried to give myself feel-good factors to distract myself from the anger: singing songs while walking, eating a cake before walking back from the bus stop and even watching Seinfeld after going back home. But invariably that five minute walk back home managed to ruin the next five hours that I spent pacifying myself.

Yesterday as I stepped onto the sidewalk a truculent biker was weaving his way through pedestrians followed by his uncouth brethren on their respective vehicles. With an inexplicably calm disposition that overcame me, I stood my ground and refused to give way. Another colleague walking with me also stood by blocking his path completely. It was now the biker’s turn to be irritated, he gestured that I could squeeze through like the others and let him proceed. But I told him that I could stand waiting there forever till he got his motorcycle off the sidewalk. He thought that it was just an empty threat and a half pint of a girl like me wouldn’t last a second longer before his burly bike. I did not make an empty promise and continued to glower at him. It did not take longer than 20 seconds before his caravan of fellow bikers obediently move their steeds onto the lawful route after which they jibed him to follow suit. I waited with no seeming hurry or care in the world. The other pedestrians passed us by and coaxed us into letting go. He even began to plead but we did not budge nor did we sermonize him on what was a lawful place to drive: because everyone knows the law but few of us follow it. We persisted. Soon the traffic light turned green and he realized that it was he who was in a hurry not we. As he lowered his vehicle onto the road, my partner slapped me on the back and said victoriously, “We did it.”

Yes, some things get done by sheer persistence and patience: both of which I need to practice especially when dealing with people who are not at par with me but more on that later. At the moment the 50 seconds of patience and equanimity would probably keep me jubilant for another 50 hours. I wasn’t the one to advocate Gandhigiri (a clichéd term by now) in daily life and yet I inadvertently practiced it and won: not just against the biker but also my anger.

Book review: The Inheritance of Loss

2006-12-23T10:18:00.000-05:00

I am not much of a reader and can quite easily lose patience with books that are slow and uninteresting to me, which in itself explains why I have not done a single book review on this blog thus far. It’s pretty much an aberration of the genes, I believe because my parents and even grandparents are voracious readers and my mom and grandmom are known to have devoured books of varied genres: right from business magazines to reader’s digests to novels to religious texts to comics. Having said that, surprisingly, I have brought myself to read some of the most insipid pieces of fiction (Last Man Standing David Baldacci, Acceptable Risk Robin Cook) and my mom was amazed that I managed to reach the last pages of these books when she herself used them as a soporific for her afternoon siesta. But that is beside the point. I did manage a few good reads apart from the absolutely racy and fantastically unreal pieces of pulp fiction by the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Sidney Sheldon.

I had never read a Man Booker winner so far and didn’t have any preconceived expectations from Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. I found her style reminding me of a rare concoction of the styles of R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond. Although the narrative is set in the late 1980s there is contemporariness in the context: a senile old grandpa with a colonial hangover, typical old world aunties with their silly British accents, a convent bred teenager coming to terms with a world outside her own, a gutless Nepali who on one hand wishes to join his brethren and claim what is rightfully theirs and on the other hand lacks the courage to let go off his puppy love, an illegal immigrant in the US who leads a more miserable and wretched life than his poor father in India would have ever seen in his entire lifetime and a paradise called Kalimpong torn in pettiness of war.

The narrative is a bit slow especially when it veers away to Jemubhai Patel’s ancestry and Gyan’s family tree. However, the descriptions are so vivid that you can almost feel the picture grow in front of your eyes as you read it. The metaphors are so accurate that you jump at the comparisons and say “Didn’t I think of that too!”
Sample this excerpt:

“Unsuspecting of the approaching news, Lola was in her garden picking caterpillars off the English Broccoli. The caterpillars were mottled green and white with fake blue eyes, ridiculous fat feet, a tail and an elephant nose. Magnificent creatures, she thought, studying one closely, but then she threw it to a waiting bird that pecked and a green stuffing squiggled out of the caterpillar like toothpaste from a punctured tube.”
Déjà vu ! How many times would DJ have squished a caterpillar under his boots and exclaimed “Cibaca!” as a kid.

Kiran describes human nature so beautifully. Look at this gem:

"Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life's priniciple. Contentment was no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camoulfage it, pretend it was something else."

The language is peppered with so many figures of speech that it is literally a hunting ground for English teachers (I can almost imagine Mrs. Aga jump at this book). Where words don’t suffice to paint the picture, sounds do, which seemed very Ruskin Bondesque. Despite the floweriness in the English, the liberal use of Hindi words keeps the feel very Indian. You can see flashes of R.K. Narayan in the heart wrenching, yet funny depiction of the characters: each one pretentious and yet so painfully human that you don’t whether to laugh or to cry because you see a reflection of your own mind in their foibles and contradictions: Gyan, who is so childlike in his need for love and doesn’t want to stand up to his calling; Biju, who despises the Americans and yet yearns to settle in America; the judge Jemubhai Patel, who cannot see beyond his microcosm of his dog Mutt and him, even as a war is tearing the landscape; Sai, who turns away at the abject poverty of her lover; Noni and Lola who fall off their high English horses when they see their opulent lifestyle shredded down to the bare minimal needs of survival during war. You sometimes wish these characters would rise above their frailties and become the heroes about whom books are written. But alas! The book is not about overnight saints, gun-totting heroes of war or a rags-to-riches success of illegal immigrants in the US. Like the title suggests, it is about loss and losers: loss of peace in paradise, loss of dignity, loss of direction, loss of love; yet it is not recounted like an elegy or a rant. It just leaves you with a medley of feelings.

I am not the one to judge whether the contents and context are universally appealing and I am not even aware if that is a criterion for a Booker. Even so, as an Indian reader, I would think it comes the closest to portraying the dichotomous state of the present Indian society and the Indian minds. It’s not a book meant to be read at a super fast pace in a superficial manner because it doesn’t have any dramatic turns or unexpected climax, it is slow paced like real life. It is meant to be savored and mulled over just like rolling your tongue on a mint and letting the flavor pervade all the taste buds.

What Women Want

2006-12-13T07:43:00.000-05:00

Warning: This post has nothing to do with the movie of the same title. Nor does it provide a step by step analysis peering into a woman’s mind. Disappointing, I know. Sorry guys! Also feminist brigades can do well to keep off.

The idea of egalitarianism in our society is quite befuddling. I have often wondered, when we talk about women’s equality or equality of the castes, whether we actually mean equality in the absolute sense of the term or we actually provide them with crutches to “help” them feel equal. I see the latter being the order of the day and there is a supercilious air with which this equality is bestowed upon the “lesser” mortals subtly conveying that “you can never become equal without these crutches”.

What do you feel when you see seats in a public transport bus that say “Only for Ladies”? Does it mean “Ladies, we have tormented you for ages and now as a token of atonement we offer you reserved seats”? Does it mean “Women, you still are like weak dandelions that will get blown away by the fierce wind of a man’s world. So sit down and don’t hurt yourself”? Does it point out, “Females, the harsh reality is that we men are ill-mannered and cannot control the movements of our hands and our eyes. Hence in view of your own safety we suggest you sit down separately.”? I have come across seats reserved for the elderly and disabled persons in the buses in UK and even a special area for buggies but never seats reserved for women. So is this what we are really looked forward to as equity in our country?

The other day as I was taking the public transport to office, I did not find a seat while some blokes were occupying the seats meant for ladies. A lady, who herself was seated, started arguing with the men seated in the reserved section and pointed out to me as a victim of their incivility. She wanted me to join her Mahila Mukti Morcha Andolan and claim what was lawfully mine. I simply stood spectator. There was another incident where a friend of mine demanded that her colleague should be chivalrous enough to offer her his seat and reproached him for his thoughtlessness. It goes for all the acts of chivalry and many women outright demand it: we love to dump our heavy shopping bags on the men while our hands remain free to twirl our locks and adjust our makeup, we expect them to open the Bulund Darwazas for us while we make our regal entry like Queen Victorias (we could do with some applause as well), we demand that they draw our chairs out so we can place our fragile bottoms on those exquisite cushions at fluffy sounding restaurants and yet we’d like ourselves and the men around us to believe that we are superwomen! I am rather amused at the dichotomous stand that we women take on what we believe is equality and I surmise many men are quite bemused too. I am not too surprised that we do not get what we really need because we are not clear about it ourselves! We expect reservations right from seats in the buses, to engineering colleges to parliaments and yet we want to be judged on level playing field and be awarded promotions and raises at par with men. I do not have problems with engineering and medical colleges solely for women or the fact that women’s tennis is played as best of three instead of best of five. These cases accept that there are areas where women have niche skills even though nature has not endowed them with the physical prowess of men.

Breaking the proverbial glass ceiling has become an obsession for women’s lib brigades. Why don’t they accept that some women out of their own choice would like to quit their high profile careers to devote time for the family? Why are women, who choose to stay at home and become “mere” housewives, looked upon with derision for having “wasted their qualifications and professional degrees”? Isn’t liberation all about volition even if you choose the same path your grandma was forced to take? I think the most memorable scene in the movie Mona Lisa Smile is when Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), a feminist arts professor at Wellesley women’s college, is shocked by her best student’s decision to settle into family life. Katherine did not realize that in her ambitious plans for her bright student she was treading on the latter’s right to choose family over career. Although the movie was very pro-feminist, it did not show either the career woman or the housewife as a winner or a loser. Instead it just questioned their ideologies. Perhaps it is time women just sat back and asked themselves what they really want rather than live life in one big blur of time and fighting the wrong battles in their lives.

What's up doc?

2006-11-01T06:05:00.000-05:00

Strange things happen in the medical world, but stranger are the denizens of the medical world. I visited a general physician today, to check up my foot problem. He is a very amiable and familiar person in our locality and we have consulted him on several occasions in the past including the time I was bitten by some unidentified creature leaving two fang marks on my foot and the time I was bitten on my hand by an unidentified human being! What is with all the biting around?

This time an unidentified pointed object lodged itself into the sole of my foot causing a minor swelling. I was rather concerned that a small white spot was developing into it, so I walked into our friendly neighborhood GP’s clinic. He began his friendly chat with small talk in Marathi. I cut to the chase because I was supposed to be on my way to the office in another half hour. I stated in clear terms how the problem came to be and voiced my concern about the probable infection.

The doctor frowned and asked me, “Are you feeling feverish?”
“No.”
“Do you feel cold since the past few days?”
“Well the weather is pretty chilly nowadays isn’t it?”
“Do you keep shivering all the time?”
‘Eh? I would, if I came out into the cold without a sweater!’ I shrugged.
By now I was pretty much worried about where this conversation was heading.
“Are you on any medication?”
“No.” I eyed him with suspicion.
Then he picked up the torch and stared down my gullet. Nodding in a rather concerned manner he said, “Your throat is pretty inflamed.”
“Yes. I had a cold last week and I am having a cough now.”
“Right. So what did you take for it?”
“Nothing. Just vitamin tablets and hot milk.”
Wow! A poke on my foot can cause me fever and a sore throat? Must be one of those holistic medical principles.
Then he walked into his medical counter and started rummaging for some pills.
Yipes! He was getting serious, but I wondered if he heard my real problem. I was trying to replay the conversation mentally and figure out how “foot” got replaced with “throat”. I was even trying to figure out if “throat” in Marathi sounded like “foot” in English.
He was back with his trademark neatly folded paper packet of pills.
“Have this twice a day (or was it once I can’t remember from the stupor) for the next three days.”
I was stumped for words and was wondering how old he must be to get senile.
“Do you have an earache?”
“I had a scratchy ear last week from the cold.”
“Ahh a cold huh? So did you go out of town for a vacation?”
“No. I was right here.”
A cold from out of town can cause a swelling in my foot? Wow! How the medical world has progressed! Perhaps he can tell I went for a long drive out of town last week by staring at my tonsils, or the sole of my foot. Yes foot! Right! I want to talk about my foot.
“Come and see me on Thursday after you are done with the pills.”
He stood up to lead me to the door but I remained seated and refused to budge. I was not going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he could be deaf or senile or that he was trying to humor me with some placebo. I am not a hypochondriac: I don’t need to be humored with vitamin pills!
I showed him the sole of my foot and asked him, “What about my foot?”
He took a cursory glance at it and said, “Ohh that’s a corn. Just soak your feet in saline water for an hour. It hurts doesn’t it? Don’t run around too much.”
He smiled as I walked in a dazed state to the door. “Come back on Thursday and I’ll tell you if you need more medication.”

I laughed all the way home and narrated the incident to my parents. My dad said, “Perhaps he has been treating too many chikangunya patients these days. Maybe he thinks you’ve got it because of a mosquito bite on your foot!”

Cheep! Cheep!

2006-10-10T23:25:00.000-04:00

I was amused when I read this in JP’s blog. I have had a fair share of incidents when I have had to keep a straight face with people around me make horrible howlers in pronouncing English words. I completely understand that they may not have had the opportunity to study the language in great detail. What gets even more hilarious is the use of English words in the vernacular language.

The other day, I was at the Fotofast store to get prints from my digital camera for the first time. The last time I had prints done was way back in 2001 when we didn’t have a digital camera. At the counter I saw a couple getting their photos downloaded onto the PC first. I hadn’t brought my USB cable along so I wondered if I could borrow theirs.

I informed the salesgirl at the counter that I didn’t have a USB cable.

Salesgirl: Cheep ahe na?

Me: (Yeah right I know it is cheap to get prints at Fotofast.) Majhya kade USB cable nahiye.

Salesgirl: Ho kalale. PaN cheep ahe na?

Me: I know you need to endorse your shop and all that with the competition increasing but I have a problem here. *gawking like I landed from Jupiter*

Salesgirl: Tyachyat memory cheep aste. *quiet exasperated by now*

Me: Oh no no, my 512 memory card was not really cheap. And I don’t want to buy one more from you even if you say it is cheap. *Still gawking*

Finally the irate salesgirl took me to the Fujifilm kiosk and showed me the slot for the memory card.

Me: Ohhhhhhhhh Chip!

The salesgirl looked at me as if I was a cavewoman.

Sorry folks, I didn't translate the conversation to English because it would have killed the joke.

Ein Stück

2006-09-26T08:17:00.000-04:00

I have been learning German for the past couple of months. I find the language very interesting primarily because like a programming language it has well defined rules and constructs. A lot of English words have their roots in German and there are a lot of commonalities between Indian languages and German. What I really like about the language is that with whatever limited vocabulary I have, I am comfortable constructing my own sentences without much too many howlers as long as I stick to the rules. The exceptions to the rules are fewer and less irrational as compared to English. Of course I have a very enthusiastic tutor and extremely boisterous classmates to make the learning process more enjoyable.

Within four weeks of the commencement of a new batch at Max Müller Bhavan (Goethe Institut) there is a Student fest held. It provides the students with a platform to showcase their talents with German as the mode of communication. Since mine is not a fast-track course I had the opportunity to participate in two Student fests so far. Both occasions have been memorable, yet, the one I attended last week was more creatively satisfying. Since the last Student fest saw us singing two German songs which had been taught in class, we needed something simple yet novel and entertaining. With just two days to the Student fest and no concrete ideas brewing in our heads, we were on the verge of calling it off. I have always held that inspiration is like a fickle guest: she lands up at the wrong times and never turns up when you invite her. This time I am glad I was wrong. The result is this script. I can’t take complete credit for it because the initial scene is ripped off from one of our German lessons and the song was our Tutor’s idea.

Franz sees Claudia outside the restaurant. He pulls out a flower from his pocket.

Franz: (sings) Wollen wir ins Kino gehen? (When shall we go to the Cinema?)

Claudia: (sings) Tut mir Leid, ich kann nicht. Tut mir Leid, ich kann nicht. (Sorry, I cannot. Sorry, I cannot.)

Franz: (sings) Wollen wir ins Kino gehen? (When shall we go to the Cinema?)

Claudia: (sings) Tut mir Leid, ich kann heut’ nicht. (Sorry, I cannot today.)

The flower droops....

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

Müller Familie beim Frühstuck

Mutti: Franz!

Franz: (snaps out of his reverie) Mama! Claudia ist wirklich hübsch. Ich mag sie sehr. (Mama! Claudia is really pretty. I like her a lot.)

Papa: (irritated) Jedes Jahr bist du in ein anderes Mädchen verliebt. (Every year you take a liking for a different girl)

Franz: (complains) Oh Papa! Und der Max?....Er hat ja jeder Woche eine neue Freundin. (Oh Papa! And Max?....He has a new Girlfriend every week.)

Max: (nonchalant) Dieses Mal ist es Rita...(dreamy)und...und sie ist so lieb! (This time it is Rita...and...and she is so lovable!)

Franz: (defensive) Aber Papa! Claudia....ich liebe sie sehr! (But Papa! Claudia...I love her so much!)
(to Mother) Und morgen hat sie Geburtstag! Ich möchte ihr eine Überraschung geben. Was soll ich denn für sie machen? (And tomorrow is her Birthday. I want to give her a surprise. What should I do for her?)

Mutti: (suggests) Eine Geburtstag Party im Restaurant? Oder geh doch ins Kino....sieht sie Filme gern? (Throw a Birthday Party in a restaurant? Or go to the Cinema....does she like watching films?)

Franz: Ja....aber das ist keine Überraschung. Wir gehen ins Restaurant jeden Tag. Ich frage sie „ Mochtest du ins Kino gehen?“. Sie sagt „Nicht“ immer. (Yes...but that’s hardly a surprise. We go to the restaurant everyday. I ask her, “Would you like to go to the cinema?” She always says “No”)

Papa: (folds the newspaper in his hand and bangs it down on the table) Aaaha! Und lernen möchtest du gar nicht. Wann lernst du für die Prüfung? Du flirtest immer! (Aaaha! And you never want to study. When are you planning to study for your exam? You are always flirting around!)

Franz: (makes a face) Papa, ich kann nächste Woche beginnen. (Papa, I can begin next week).
(to Mother) Mama, bitte gib mir deine Kreditkarte. Ich gehe in den Supemarkt und kaufe ein Geschenk für Claudia. (Mama, please give me your Credit card. I am going to the Market to buy Claudia a gift.)
(to Max) Max, mochtest du mit kommen? (Max, do you want to come along?)

Max: Ja, natürlich. (Yes, of course.)

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

Im Supermarkt

Franz: (examines a CD player walkman) Oh Schau mal! Der CD Player ist wirklich originell. (Oh look! The CD Player is ingenious)

Max: (puts his hand understandingly on the younger brother’s shoulder) Ja, aber ein CD Player zum Geburstag? Das ist keine gute Idee! (Yes, but a CD player for a Birthday gift? That’s not a very good idea).

Franz: (nods) Was soll ich denn fur sie kaufen? (What should I buy then?)

Max: (thinks awhile) Einen Diamentenring! Frauen mogen immer teure Geschenke. (A diamond ring! Ladies always love expensive gifts.)

Franz: Ach so! (Ah right!)
(to shopkeeper) Verzeihung! Wo finde ich Schmuck und Accessoire? (Excuse me! Where will I find jewellery and accessories?)

Verkäuferin: Bitte kommen Sie mit. (Please follow me)

Takes them to the counter. Shows them the display and hands Franz a sample.

Franz: (selects a diamond ring) Ahhh! Wunderbar! Wie viel kostet denn dieser Diamentanring? (Ahhh! Wonderful! How much does this diamond ring cost?)

Verkäuferin: Nur 990 €. Das ist echt Diament. Es lohnt sich! (Only 990 €. That is a genuine diamond. It is worth it!)

Franz: (shocked and almost drops the ring) Das ist wirklich teur! Ich kaufe keinen Diamentenring für 990 €! (That is very expensive! I am not buying any diamond ring for 990 €.)
Dials from the mobile phone.

Meanwhile Max continues interacting with the Shopkeeper.

Mutti: Müllers!

Franz: Hallo, Mama! Ich möchte einen Diamentenring für Claudia kaufen. Aber der kostet 990 €. Das ist zu teur. Was soll ich denn tun? (Hello, Mama! I want to buy a diamond ring for Claudia. But it costs 990 €. It is too expensive. What should I do then?)

Mutti: Franz, die Liebe kann man nicht kaufe. Mit der Zeit wird sie groβer. (Franz, one cannot buy love. It needs to grow with time.)

Franz: Das stimmt, Mama! Ich kaufe ihr kein Geschenk. Ich schenke ihr meine liebe. Vielen Dank, Mama. Tschüs. (That is right, Mama! I am going to buy her any gift. I shall gift her my love. Thanks Mama. Bye.)

Mutti: Tschüs.

Franz: Max, wir gehen nach Hause. (Max, we are going home.)

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

Morgen im Restaurant

Franz: Viel glück zum Geburtstag, Claudia. (Happy Birthday, Claudia.)

Claudia: Danke schön Franz. Und wo ist mein Geschenk? (Thanks a lot Franz. And where is my gift?)

Franz: Ich habe keins gekauft. (goes down on one knee) Ich schenke dir mein Leben und meine Leibe.(I am gifting you my life and my love.)

Claudia: (confused and a tad bit sad) Ohhhhh... Aber mein neuer Freund kauft mir einen Diamentenring. Schau mal! (shows the ring in the finger) Ich bin wirklich frohlich heute. Franz er ist Max meiner Freund. (Ohhhhh...But my new boyfriend bought me a diamond ring. See! I am extremely happy today. Franz this is my boyfriend Max).

Max: (sings) Wollen wir ins Kino gehen? (When shall we go to the Cinema?)

Claudia: (sings) Ja, ich geh’ mit. Ja, ich geh’ mit. (Yes I will go with you. Yes I will go with you)

Max: (sings) Wollen wir ins Kino gehen? (When shall we go to the Cinema?)

Claudia: (sings) Ja ich geh’ oh ja! (Yes I will go with you, oh yes.)

The German is of level 1 so it might come across as crude in terms of vocabulary and the translation to English quite comical. Even so, it was immensely gratifying to be on stage (I did a cameo) and see my classmates enact it so effortlessly even though none of them had been on stage before. Much of the credit for the applause and laughs we received goes to their acting. Our Tutor was particularly proud because we carried on confidently despite some minor glitches and earned a word of appreciation from some German visitors in the audience. In hindsight, I was planning to give this Student fest a miss but I am glad I didn’t because I had the time of my life.

Mahatma Munnabhai v/s RDB

2006-09-10T10:52:00.000-04:00

Sequels have seldom worked or so the critics would have us believe. Perhaps, that statement is justified, in a way, because a creative idea quite often loses its novelty when churned out again like old wine in a new bottle. But I would think the biggest mistake directors make is trying to start off a sequel where the original ended. There is really no need to do that!

Rajkumar Hirani proved it with his latest offering "Lage Raho Munnabhai". He uses the same set of characters, the goon with a heart "Munna", his witty and lovable sidekick "Circuit" or "Cirkeshwar" and even the adorable Parsi grandpa! Hirani starts with a clean slate and resketches those very characters in a different scene: with a fresh dialogue, old Bhai-ishtyle (Circuit's dialogues are a big riot), fresh theme, old cast, fresh love interest, old courting technique. All of it happens in such a well paced manner that you don't want to know what happened to Munna with his MBBS degree or wife Gracy from the original. With something as serious as Gandhian philosophy as the backdrop, one would wonder how a comedy like this would work out: but work it does from Goondagardi to Gandhigiri! Hirani has perfected the art of making his audience laugh their guts out and cry their eyes out within seconds of each other: just when you get emotional over how Gandhigiri wins, Circuit would burst onto the screen and have you in peals before you can even wipe those tears away.

As entertainment value I would think this movie is topnotch, except for a bit of sermonizing. Yet somehow I cannot stop myself from comparing the ideology of Rang de Basanti and that of Lage Raho Munnabhai. Both movies brought forth the contemporary relevance of two antipodal ideologies that were integral to our struggle for Independence: in Rang de Basanti the revolutionaries and in Munnabhai the Satyagrahis. In the long standing debate of the efficacy of either of ideologies, I believe it is Rang de Basanti that stands today. The uniqueness of Gandhigiri transcends boundaries and reaches out to people and yet it means nothing without a guiding leader to harness the anger of the masses and transform it into Satyagraha. Every great saint, Mahatma and Christ preached the virtue of non-violence and winning the opponent with love: how actionable is that for a common man whose mind is not within his own control? He keeps needing that Mahatma to direct him towards a means greater than his mind can fathom. In fact it is truly the people skills and charisma of Gandhiji that forged a nation to see, believe and realize the ideology. Gandhigiri is not effective without the people or its leader. Today when each one is to his own and fights his own battle everyday it is easier to pull the metaphoric trigger and get rid of the offending entity than to make peace with it till it sees the light of truth. RDB showed the inefficacy of today's Satyagraha when the voice of protestors was squelched by brute force. Yes Gandhians fought that too because of the unwavering support of an entire nation and indefatigable patience. Gandhigiri is definitely the harder and nobler of the two paths, but my generation of McFries and Diet Coke has no patience for the Khichadi to cook, it prefers the "Ghoda" over the "Lathi".

Having said that, there is always space for a little bit of Gandhigiri in our lives: be it telling the truth, improving our handwriting, encouraging indigenous craftsmen of our country or cleanliness. Hirani said in an interview, "... I believe in Gandhian ideals which is why I made this film. Today when someone tells me they came out of the theater and threw the ticket away only to return and pick it up and put it in the dustbin, I feel my movie has been a success." Sorry to disappoint you Mr. Hirani, as I walked out of the theater, cappuccino cup in hand to find the dustbin, I saw my fellow audience stream out leaving behind a trail of royal mess: despite the Gandhian sermon given in the platter, all that our immature audience took along was "Kya bolrela Mamu!"

To Miss with Love

2006-09-05T07:59:00.000-04:00

As my bus passed by my school today, I tried to crane my neck over the high compound wall to catch the glimpse of the uniform I had worn for 10 years of my life. Everything just seemed untouched by the ravages of time or perhaps so I wish. Flashes of memories from our Teacher’s day celebrations at school run through my mind: covert drama and dance practices unknown to the teachers, (of course they always knew!) calling out to our favorite teachers as they walked up to their audience seats in the “New Hall” and presenting flowers and cards to our favorite teachers during the recess.

There was one particular teacher who received fewer flowers that day and perhaps even those who gave her one did it more out of terror than love. And yet she is the most enduring memory any pre-2000 Josephite worth her salt, has of this school! The impeccably white PT shoes and white socks, the trademark knee length skirt, the tailor made blouse, the gold wrist watch, the short crop of hair with not one strand out of place: the visage of the martinet of our school. Through her glasses her piercing eyes were capable of sending shivers down the spine of the most intractable brat in school. “I have four eyes: two in front and two behind my head”, she would warn the mischief mongers and that wasn’t far from the truth. The red lipstick: the only feminine form on an otherwise masculine face was equally “terrifying”. Her every stride commanded discipline: silence would descend on a hall full of cacophonic cackles and miraculously transform into a solemn prayer assembly with her presence. Even parents were not spared: every Josephite’s mother knew how long the sash on the beige uniform should be and what brand of PT shoes were to be bought every year.

I wasn’t particularly fond of her when I was in school: neither was my mother because she had to braid my two plaits every morning thanks to Mrs. Pereira’s rule on the length of hair. I would rather have erred on the side of caution and done Mrs. Pereira’s bidding rather than earn a flaming butt. So the uniforms were ironed at the dhobhi’s, the shoes polished the night before, (ok I used the chalks to polish them just before the PT period just a couple of times) the hair bands and ribbons were in place. I don’t recall ever getting into her bad books but I wasn’t her pet student either. I was a rather unobtrusive student when it came to sports and PT. I only did what I was asked to: be it yoga, march-past or PT exercises. Keeping my distance from her kept me happy. Even so, it is her that I remember from the most vivid recollections of what I learnt in school.

As ex-students each one of us had something valuable to take back from Mrs. Pereira: perhaps cleanliness, maybe discipline or for some, physical fitness. But for me one of the most unforgettable lessons I learnt from her was to value people who serve us. She taught us, convent bred snooty snobbish brats, to respect our service providers: right from Shakubai: the lady who cleaned our toilets to Sitaram who drove our school bus. Learning to treat them with some respect and that a bit of camaraderie, small-talk or a word of gratitude would go a long way in them feeling content about the services they render, feeling a little more significant in the scheme of things. It was possibly because of this lesson that I never found difficulty in minding my P’s and Q’s in UK where social etiquette demanded it. Even today, as I let Purushottam the canteen vendor joke about my twin sister, as I talk to Sanjay, the infrastructure in-charge, about the Ganpathi festival, as I thank the Xerox copying assistant every time I get papers copied, I remember Mrs. Pereira’s words of wisdom.

Yes she was one tough cookie in school universally feared and respected by generations of Josephites. Yet the disarming warmth that she exuded on meeting me outside an ice cream shop a couple of years back showed that she was a chocolate chip cookie: tough crust with surprising little chips that melt in your mouth. I never said this to her when I was in school: Happy Teacher’s Day Mrs. Pereira.

Endure the Yarn Redux!

2006-08-25T07:20:00.000-04:00

Somehow, the short story I started here didn’t quite end the way I wrote it long back on paper because in its second avatar it took a completely different route. I am glad I kept my promise and rerouted it back to its intended ending. A special thanks to SP for egging me on. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing. Also a word of gratitude to Vc for having reviewed it. Thanks for the feedback. Of course all you discerning readers are most welcome to post in your feedbacks. And yes I am still look for a suitable title.

She sat on the leather couch in the lounge outside Javedji’s studio examining her own reflection in the full length mirror in front. She was delighted at the coiffure her stylist had done up. She adjusted her curled locks against her neck and brought one lock down her forehead where it cascaded gently over her cheek. She stared impatiently at the clock above the mirror. She detested having to wait upon someone.
“Joking in front of the press? Javed Mian, you don’t quite understand! You’ve given your word in front of the entire media and besides, it won’t be so much trouble painting such a femme fatale.” Shukla winked at Javedji and started to leave.
“Shukla, why don’t you try and understand? I am not the one to paint goddesses and kings. I despise the very notion of portraits”, hollered Javedji.
Shukla stormed out of the studio before he could hear out Javedji’s protests. He smiled genially at Nayantara on the way out. Javedji sulked as he approached his subject.

“I hope you do understand that it might take ten to twelve sittings. I am sure you are quite accustomed to having to sit still for long hours.”

“That is not a problem Javedji. But I hope you do understand I have other commitments too. I will get my secretary to book you for a convenient schedule.” She entwined her fingers through her curls.

‘Your convenient schedule I suppose. Hah! Like I have all the time in the world just to wait upon you!’ he grumbled to himself as he led her into his studio.

As she seated herself in front of the easel, he drew the curtains and drew in a long breath. “Look out of the window”, he said, ending the disconcerting silence.
‘Am I actually supposed to look out of the window? Is he trying to put me at ease with some distraction or is he being a sarcastic crabby old man that he is?’ she wondered and decided it was better to follow his instructions.

“No, no, we don’t want you grinning like that!” Javedji shrieked. ‘Am I doing a portrait or a painting of a toothpaste ad huh?’ he mumbled under his breath. “Let your natural look come to your face,” he said, finally calming his nerves. He waited long before beginning the first strokes with his 2B pencil. For over an hour all that could be heard was the pencil furiously abrading the canvas. Javedji put his weapon down, stared for a moment and finally declared, “Tomorrow let’s begin afresh.”

At the end of the third day at the studio, Nayantara flung herself on the couch on reaching home.
“That’s it! I am not going there again, Anish. Please cancel my appointments with him.”
“But madam, don’t you think it would be better to get it over with, right now? Next month…”
“Oh well I care a fig for that portrait. It’s so tiresome and monotonous. No ‘You look elegant today m’lady’ like Alex used to say before taking my shots. He does not give me any feedback. He doesn’t even show me how far he has reached! I can’t sneeze, I can’t yawn, I can’t breath”, she bawled hysterically.

Shukla looked grim, “Javed Mian, can’t you just finish it from the memory of her face? I mean you painted ‘Musings’, ‘Aura’ and ‘Cynosure’ right from the memory of persons you saw at one glance.”
“Aha, now you expect me to paint a portrait without a subject. Well she asked for it and now she has vamoosed!”
“What about from a poster?” Shukla tried to negotiate. Javedji’s glare could have burnt him to ashes.

Later that week, Feroz Dastur, the young CEO of Altech Corp. came visiting Javedji. “Javed Saab, I’ve been a great admirer of your works. It is unfortunate that I missed your last exhibition. I am grateful to you for letting me to visit you at your studio”, he said with genuine warmth.
“Oh no, no! It’s my honor to have you visit my studio”, he mouthed the pleasantries.
He began to show him around the paintings that remained unsold from the exhibition.
“May I see this one Javed Saab?” enquired Feroz pointing to the covered easel.
Shukla pulled off the cover to reveal a faceless enchantress before Javedji could begin to explain.
“Well! Isn’t that perfect for my living room!” Feroz gushed with excitement.
The purchase created quite a furor in the elite circles. The page three of every daily was rife with speculation on the price tag and carried numerous snaps of the CEO with his trophy canvas. He waxed eloquent about it, “It’s a magnificent masterpiece. The faceless woman is such a wonderful metaphor for inner beauty. Javed Saab is a real genius.”

Suleiman lowered himself from the billboard. It was the third he had completed in two weeks. As he collected his wages and returned home, he saw the photograph of his billboard make it to the front page of an English eveninger. He was elated at the publicity his painting received and purchased a copy, not that he knew any English. But who was to tell him that the caption below the photograph read “Illegal billboards to be brought down”?

Perceptive Images

2006-08-14T11:42:00.000-04:00

In this extended weekend that I have had, I watched three movies: Crash, Wait until Dark and Hollywood Ending. Each one of them is brilliant in it’s own right. What connects the first two movies, in larger scheme of things, is the way our perceptions about the world around us get shattered every time we stereotype it.

“Crash”, for me resounded with this theme. Apart from the fact that it had too many coincidences (why do we pan only Hindi movies for them?) and too many characters, it was well made and well edited. For once, Hollywood quit being politically correct in depicting a backslapping black-white camaraderie and instead touched the layers of the American psyche (and here I mean across all races) that are quiet invisible to outsiders. It didn’t moralize and sermonize, just presented images and left the viewer to decide his interpretation of them.

"Wait until Dark", on the other hand, is an old thriller which is set in a mere two-room apartment. Again, one doesn’t expect a blind Audrey Hepburn to fight off three goons alone, well, neither did they when they planned their charade to fool her. It takes a creative director and an excellent script to keep the audience on the edge of their seats with a two-room set. Just goes to prove that you need “real” imagination to entertain, not obscenely obese snakes (Anaconda, Cobra, Python and perhaps Green-eyed Yellow banded Boa Constrictor) and bloody-faced dolls (Chucky 1, 2 right up to 43225).

“Crash” and “Wait Until Dark” do talk about expecting the unexpected and not judging people by their race, color or for that matter physical incapacities, but is that really possible in a world of 6 billion and counting? Why, the very basis of Carolus Linneus’ classification is grouping common characteristics. We could have argued with him that dog A and dog B are not to be put under the same genus because dog B is smart for he knows tricks but dog A is dumb. Mr. Linneus would then come back to us with a statistic saying that 73% of all dogs don’t know tricks and he would conclude that dogs are generally dumb (No offence pooches and Maneka Gandhi). I am not saying that we are planning to classify and remember characteristics of 6 billion people like we did to the animal and plant kingdom (ok I know there are 5 kingdoms)! The point is, human learning and knowledge stems from categorizations: wasn’t it easier to learn geography grouping the iron producing areas with the steel industries? This tendency to classify, stereotype and generalize gets rubbed off when we meet people too. We look for commonalities between one depraved personality and another and we tend to keep away from them. If nine out of ten terrorists happen to be Muslims we draw our conclusions about Islam. Where we actually go wrong is in inferring that every Muslim is terrorist: the case of every square being a rectangle and every rectangle not being a square! We confuse generalizations with blanket rules. I am all for generalizations: they give a broad idea about a personality, more like first impressions.

On a lighter note: Woody Allen’s "Hollywood Ending" was superb. For the benefit of those who haven’t seen it, it’s a story of an eccentric director (Woody as Val) who faces the vicissitude of Hollywood through his psycho-somatic blindness and ends up making his best film blind: of course it gets panned by all Hollywood critics. I hope for the sake of sanity and sense in Indian films that KANK bombs big time too. Of course I would never watch it even for free, like I didn’t watch Kal Ho Naa Ho. The Kekta Kapoor of 70 mm, Karan-Kreatively-bankrupt-Johar, thought he was breaking new ground in Indian cinema with a theme of divorce and infidelity! Well, here’s news for you Kkkkaran: stay home one afternoon with your mom/bajuwali aunty watching serials, you don’t need to overhear a couple break-up over a Koffee in Starbucks for your next script, try plastic surgery or amnesia. I know the movie is not going to bomb, as long as there are nut-case desi New Yorkers watching it after paying what could have been an orphan’s meal (oh yes at least pretend to weep about that)! After all like Val said in Hollywood ending, “I may be a bum here, but I am a hero there”. Val’s movie was a hit in Paris!

Endure the Yarn please don't yawn

2006-08-10T08:39:00.000-04:00

From the Author's keyboard:

Since it is short-story season I have decided to put my very first hand at fiction on the blog. Brickbats and bouquets are welcome. I am almost feeling like I did the first time I tried my hand at cooking and waited with baited breath for my guinea pigs to give me a thumbs up. Don't ask me the denouement of that exercise.
I would appreciate it if you could think of a suitable title for this.

Suleiman looked down from his precarious perch. In the sea of traffic below, he spotted a beggar heckling at the darkened windows of the Innovas and Corollas that whizzed past him with an indifferent roar. In a moment of respite that his work spared him, Suleiman quietly reflected that at least he had a respectable job that fed his family. Turning back to the giant billboard, he resumed filling the model’s bosom with a color that would entice prospective buyers to purchase the mobile phone in her hand. The brush in his hand kept swooshing effortlessly while his mind drifted to the innumerable such scantily clad models selling everything from staplers to SUVs. Semi-nudity to him signified penury and he found it rather befuddling that the richer people got, the less clothes they wore. Ironically, it was this quirk of the society that in some confounding way provided the shirt on his back.

The incessant honking from the traffic jam below snapped him out of his reverie. An unusually long fleet of sleek cars glided through the junction below. “Wonder which minister is in town today?” Suleiman thought aloud. It wasn’t a minister.

A few blocks away the journalists jostled each other to get a word, a rehearsed plastic smile, a gaffe captured onto their lenses to make it to their dailies’ front pages. As slender legs emerged from the door of the Porsche, the flashes and clicks reached a crescendo till Nayantara revealed her perfectly sculpted curves in a shimmering Versace gown. As she stepped into the art gallery, the coterie of photographers followed like Pied Piper’s mice.

At the center of the gallery stood Javed Mirza regaling his celebrated guests who hobnobbed amidst the easels that were meant to be the piece de resistance of the event. “Yes Mrs. Gupta that, in fact, was painted a year back. I was thinking of a stark theme and was deeply intrigued by this scene during my morning walk. That is when I decided that world should know about it…” explained Javedji as he tried to give a rather philistine Mrs. Gupta an insight into an artist’s thought process. He was disconcerted by nouveau riche customers who neither understood nor attempted to understand art, but instead “invested” in art like yet another trophy of the opulence and extravagance that providence showered on them. ‘Investment’ indeed! What did they think it was? Real estate? He was losing his patience as Mrs. Gupta began haggling with his agent Shukla about the price. Was he to sell it to her on a per square inch rate?

Just as he tried to waggle out of the situation, Nayantara presented her ethereal self by his side and they pecked each other on the cheek providing the scribes yet another photo-op. Mesmerized by her presence he devoted his full attention to her and guided her through his masterpieces, “See that subtle hint of gray in her eyes? Don’t you feel her sorrow?” Nayantara nodded like an automaton that was programmed to be polite. The cameras followed them like a spotlight tracing the path of figure skaters gracefully sliding across the granite floor of the gallery. “So we hear you are planning to sign-up with a leading director in Hollywood. Is it true that you will be doing movies?” prodded a scribe. “No comments.” Nayantara silenced the heckler. Javedji appeared to be absorbed in his own works.

As he approached his magnum opus he felt the same tingling spasm run through his neck as he had felt while receiving the National award for it. He lingered longer at the charcoal of a loving mother staring coyly through a veil that covered half her face and fell gently onto her bosom at which her child clung not wanting to look at the cruel world that would engulf him. “Javedji, why don’t you ever paint models?” Nayantara finally broke the aura of silence. The scribes waited with baited breath for a philosophical rant to follow. “I don’t find it challenging enough”, he said measuring his words, for he had been warned by Shukla to steer clear of any conflicts with potential clients. “Well, what if I were to request you to paint me?” Nayantara fluttered her eyelashes. Shukla broke into sweat as he contemplated over possible face-saving statements that he would have to mouth to silence the tabloids. “Now that is a request I would possibly consider worth my while.” Javedji grinned. Shukla breathed easy on hearing the miraculously affable response from the normally irascible artist.

Later as a barage of questions poured in from the journos, Shukla swiftly waived them off and swiveled Javedji towards the alcove. “Today is the last day of the exhibition Javed Mian and we haven’t been able to strike a single deal apart from the two lakhs for ‘Musings’. I think you will seriously have to do the Nayantara portrait to keep our heads above the water.” Nayantara daintily stepped into her Porsche glancing momentarily at the gigantic hoarding of herself in the latest T-mobile advertisement before zooming off.

Discordant Hymns

2006-08-02T06:40:00.000-04:00

In general I would not think of myself as a big music buff. I listen to a few tracks far and in between and I am very picky about it, not specifically the genre because that again depends on my mood. I am definitely not one of those who has a tune stuck in my head and can’t move to the next track! I am also not one of those who can’t work without music, because I do not like multithreading in my head: you know too many threads can end in a knot and naught. It was therefore rather strange that I was invited to a rock concert and even more queer that I consented.

It was held at the YMCA hall and none of us had a clue of what we were in for, or at least I hadn’t. The program commenced with us being requested to reflect on our actions in the past and how God will liberate us from our sins only if we believe in Him. It reminded me of the documentary series on the BBC that reflected on religion being the root cause of evil: there was a particular episode in which showed the spread of Evangelical Christianity in USA. They used rock concerts as platforms to draw crowds into spirituality and more specifically Christianity. I have often wondered how utterly sacrilegious musical renditions from the ilk of Marilyn Manson and Metallica can turn people towards religion. Here, I got to experience it first hand. The lyrics having spiritual/religious content were being projected onto a screen while the rock band set the stage on fire.

I was not too sure whether to follow the lyrics or the music and I settled for the latter because honestly speaking the two seemed rather disjoint. Call me a purist or an orthodox fuddy-duddy, but I have always believed that spirituality is something that is invoked within. For that you need to be in a different plane of consciousness which is facilitated by serenity and definitely not pulsating rock music. Rock music speaks a language of angst and turmoil, not necessarily in the lyrics but in the way it is generally played. It is more inspired by manmade sounds like an engine or a motor or a train, very rarely will you find sounds similar to say, the birds chirping or the wind blowing in a Rock piece. Rock music, therefore, tends to bind you more to these worldly aspects rather than liberate you from them. This is where religions that need to be constantly propagated fail to realize that in an attempt to reach to a younger audience through such means, the very essence of their preaching is lost. In fact in a macro-view, religion is so preoccupied with the act of propagation that it loses sight of its real objective.

Later, as we left the hall, we were given pocket booklets of the New Testament. (Funny, even MS word wants ‘New Testament’ in initial caps like ‘God’!!) Frankly, I did not want to take it, primarily, because I believed I came to a rock performance and not a religious caucus. So I handed it over to my friend who now has two copies. I would think that the music especially the percussionist in the band rocked if not the religious connotations of the event. Mixing religion and rock music to me is like having Pizza with Pal payasam.

Gulmohar in Siachen

2006-07-29T03:32:00.000-04:00

Beneath the comforting canopy I lie,
Unscathed by the merciless rays,
Shielded by a crimson parasol
Basking in my personal space.

The fertile earth bore verdant shoots
That in the aegis of the canopy dwell
They know not the raging battle above
Nor the whithering blossoms that fell

On the yonder pristine white hills
Hundred vermillon drops trickle into streams
Carpetting our ingrate feet with peace
So we can live our verdant dreams.

--Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Footnote: Thought I'd lost it!! Feels good to be back.

A Blast from the Past

2006-07-12T08:46:00.000-04:00

Yet another blast has gone down the annals as past and yet again the epicenter of terrorist attacks shrugs off the aftermath and lives another day like nothing happened. This time it was a two-pronged terrorism: internal and external. In a quirk of fate the former got drowned into oblivion in the wake of a more fatal attack. I am not going to speculate on any possible nexuses between the two, because I believe that any act of terrorism is at best an attention drawing mechanism, except that they don’t have Rakhi Sawant as the bait. What I really intend to write about is the fallout.

Some folks believe it is resilience that enables Mumbaikars to survive terrorism, floods or both put together. Showing no fear is perhaps the best solution to foil a terrorist attack: but is it actually no fear? Perhaps not. In a city in which you probably need to buy breathing space, not going to work for a day can be a bigger nightmare than dying while going to your work place. Perhaps I am being too churlish. Probably it is the belief that a thief never strikes twice in the same house: quite misleading in this case with 8 (don’t nitpick on the stats even the Mumbai police still don’t know) blasts going off on the same line. Probably it is just the complacence of it-won’t-happen-to-me. Perhaps, a few hundred lives in a railway compartment may not matter to a 10 million populace that drives the country’s economic hub. The machine called life just chugs on: a few tiny cogs that went kaput get replaced by a few others. Before you bring your tanks out against me, labeling me a cynic, let me make my point. I am not advocating fear or for that matter the “celebration” or to be more politically correct “mourning” of the dead for 3 years a la 9/11.

It’s time the law enforcement intelligentsia in our country gets their thinking caps on and not start digging wells only when they are thirsty. It’s time public places were safer and not graveyards for the common man. We are not cogs, the lives of which cost 1 lakh. In a country of one billion and counting, we readily dismiss any notions to systematize our living with a perennial excuse of “population problem” and there are countries around the globe that rue the lack of population.

History repeats itself and repetition becomes tedium and invites nothing but apathy. From apathy stems inaction. It happened to Kashmir and it is happening to Mumbai and Delhi too and very soon we’ll have a few blasts right in our backyards except that they won’t be Diwali crackers.

Noise about News

2006-06-21T07:39:00.000-04:00

I am not unraveling the mystery of the Holy Grail by saying that the fourth estate often prejudiced, foists its own opinions and priorities as a picture of reality. This is particularly true about the television media because herd mentality is likely to be more prevalent in a medium that is financially and content-wise more demanding. A newspaper can get away with printing fifteen pages a day, how do 24X7 news channels cope with dearth of “news-worthy” stories?

Well they don’t use creativity or for that matter do any real field work because for them India really comprises two cities: Delhi and Mumbai. So if Bunty of Kanjurmarg kisses Bubbly of Juhu at Bandra bandstand or wicked Vicky smokes pot, it makes headlines: never mind that the viewer sitting in Bhubaneshwar would rather watch K-serials for his daily dose of sensational drama. Reality television on news channels has become so sickening that most viewers prefer to watch commercials on the sports channel while having dinner. The problem is, not one channel dares to be different, 15 news channels all clones of one another: even the ticker color and content are the same (age of reusability engineering you see). All of them cover the kiss and the snort like the GDP of the nation depends on these two events.

I am not entirely dismissive of the 24X7 forum dedicated to news. In fact in a country like India it is very much needed. My point is that the lack of news is definitely not the reason for channels to stoop to such abysmal levels. There is news and it is definitely happening all around us, but the channels want to cover only “happening” stories: much like the Bollywood directors pandering to the “masses” with potboilers. If the kiss-and-yell formula works show it 24X7X30. In that sense the print medium (Slimes of India being an exception) has retained its dignity by focusing not on sound bytes and “live” data but on implications, the bigger picture and some investigative journalism. They are not trying to compete with the “live” television on who gets to shoot Aishwarya’s eyelashes first or gets the first words out of Rahul’s mouth (now don’t ask me which Rahul). In print, the experts get to express their thoughts freely without being interrupted, hackled, disconnected and veered away by the TV journalists. At least the back end editing is appropriately done to prevent the interviews from appearing like police interrogations and the reader is spared the grotesque digressions and arguments.

Instead of swarming like ants to a grain of sugar, they could use a bit of creativity to be different. Dedicate one hour to focus on a specific city (one hour on air for a 24 hour news channel is not going to cause loss of viewership, given that flipping channels will soon become a national sport). Announce the name of the city under scan a day in advance. Get viewers to post in their issues: there is no city/town that has no issues and sufficient number of cities in India to keep this alive. Get down to ground zero, investigate the problem, cover the good as well as bad aspects of the situation and get authorities to address the issue. Before you start your “pragmatic and practical” feasibility analysis to destroy my idea: this is not rocket science or utopia. The ITV in UK had a small variant of such a kind on air and it was hugely popular: it was a mission to destroy all old/ill-maintained/illegal structures that had become eye sores and public nuisance. Given the kind of air time that is afforded by the 24X7 news channels, this is definitely more viable, relevant and newsworthy than how to illegally procure cocaine in India.

Journalism today, is a mere spectator and commentator to say the least. In fact it is much worse; it serves like a crude form of entertainment by titillating and distracting people from the real social political and economic issues. Gone are the days when active journalism moved masses and governments into action, today it is the voyeuristic needs of the masses and airtime for politicians that drive the newspapers and channels.

On My Blindness

2006-05-18T10:11:00.000-04:00

Before you start imagining the bottoms of soda bottles embellishing my eyes, let me inform you that I am not blind, at least not as blind as the poet Milton who penned such heart rending poetry of the same title. All the same my myopic vision coupled with my disgust for my glasses and compounded my refusal to use my lenses, has almost always gotten me into trouble.

As my earlier post might tell you, it is a fairly recently added feature, as in I wasn’t born with it! I am fairly comfortable viewing things that are less than half a meter away, the computer screen for instance. The problem with constantly viewing things within the same range is the lethargy that the ciliary muscles eventually develop. I used take pride in the fact that I could actually see the stars in the sky as distinct dots and not as blurred blotches. Of course there are far more serious repercussions of being visually impaired than not being able to see gases burning billions of light years away.

I was walking home from the bus-stop one evening, of course sans specs and lenses. A rather familiar yet blurred face seemed to be smiling at me. Before I could even register the face on the retina, leave alone run it through the complex face recognition algorithm that nature created and I ruined, the face zoomed away on a two wheeler. Minutes later at home, I received a call and barrage of choicest abuses flow including “Princess Snooty of Snootington” for having looked right through my ex-neighbor. I tried to fawn over my disability for which I got a sermon on the uses of spectacles and how spectacular they could make my personality.

But incorrigible that I am, I continued to wander the streets with my naked eyes. I had a lot of interesting ways to work around the problem.

I squinted hard enough to be passed of as a person of Chinese origin.
Expected outcome: It would be proof enough that I can’t see.
Actual outcome: People stared back like I had gunk stuck in my teeth.

I stared long and hard and didn’t look through people.
Expected outcome: I would finally register the face on my optical sensors.
Actual outcome: People started examining themselves to see if they had gunk stuck in their teeth.

I put on a perpetual smile on my face.
Expected outcome: The familiar faces think I am smiling at them.
Actual outcome: The unfamiliar faces think I am mocking them.

I stared only at my feet.
Expected outcome: No one would see me or at least they would know that I am not looking at them.
Actual outcome: I bumped into a lot of trees, people and parked vehicles.

The worst was yet to come: I was looking around the cafeteria for my friends and encountered this yet-another-familiar face staring back: yes I definitely saw the wheatish blur black tassels hanging from the top and two black blobs looking in my direction and smiling. I smiled back and gestured asking where the rest of the gang was. The smile seemed to disappear and I approached nearer to take cognizance of the crazy gesticulations which again were blurred like the slow motion special effects they use in Matrix. By that time the proximity was sufficient for me to identify the face. She was just an acquaintance and we met only for professional reasons. I nonchalantly said, “Hi. I had some questions about XYZ tools, since you’ve used them so extensively, I was wondering if you had any documents on them.” I knew I was trying to hook a powdered delivery which I barely could see and waited with baited breath to see if the fielder in the deep would drop the catch. She was quite flummoxed by the sudden query and responded with a noncommittal, “I don’t know about any document of that sort. I am a bit busy and don’t think I can help you out with it.” I wanted to say, “Right! Excellent! By the way I don’t use those tools any more.” But I had to continue to with the charade and the chagrin and ended up saying, “Oh! No problem. Thanks anyway.” I bolted from there only to be brought back to the same seating area by my friends. Even today, I give this particular colleague a sheepish grin and scamper away.

After waving out to virtually unknown people, grinning at mannequins in shops and watching a hazy world go by, I realize that blindness adds to my eccentricities. There are people who stand and wait alright and then there are people who stand and squint.

Achtung Baby!

2006-05-08T23:11:00.000-04:00

When my mom sees DJ flip channels at the rate of 16 channels per second and ends up watching a flickering screen she thinks our whole generation suffers from chronic ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). But that isn’t my point. In these days of miniscule attention spans we constantly need something new for our disport. Certainly there isn’t a dearth of specimens to fuel our attention deficiency. Sample these:

Scene 1:
Location: Family restaurant

People are quietly minding their businesses and enjoying their meals. Suddenly out of the blue, “WOHOHAHAHH” rends the tranquility. Everyone turns in unison towards the direction of explosive laughter. Guy-who-believes-in-“live-implementation”-of-ROTFLOL continues to clench his stomach and erupt with laughter exhibiting what a chewed piece of paneer looks like in the human facial orifice. Despite sensing the disgusted pairs of eyes boring into him, he nonchalantly returns a you-did-not-hear-the-joke-losers look to his inadvertent audience and turns back to his group with the you-did-not-get-the-joke-losers look. While the “sad-sacks” around prefer not to display the process of ingestion to others, he ensures that such spasmodic outbursts ruin others’ appetite. So much for getting the entire restaurant to believe that he is gag-bag Tommy Cooper reborn!

Scene 2:
Location: Bus (it’s one place replete with interesting anecdotes)

I am busy staring out of the window into nothingness and a co-passenger plonks herself next to me, ears wired to her new iPod and hands shuffling through the pages of Pride and Prejudice. Obnoxious music blares from the ear phones enough to shatter my ear drums: I wondered if hers had already exploded. She fidgets with the iPod to change her play-list and tries to resume reading page 10. I adjust to the remix of radio-mirchi and crazy-frog and finally give in to exhaustion. Almost an hour later, she is still on page 10 and still on crazy frog. So much to have me believe that she is interested in English classics and English music!

Scene 3:
Location: Office campus

Gajagamini walks by in a tight fitting top with her flab oozing from every conceivable part of her anatomy err that should be morphology. Her hair streaked in an ungainly blonde and gogs perched on her head to protect her pea brain from getting scorched. Heads turn at every corner that she treads, her nose up in the air she struts around making a new fashion statement, “If you lack it, flaunt it”. One of the male heads that turned, asks, “Was that Tuntun redux?” So much for being the momentary cynosure of all eyes!

Scene 4:
Location: Cubicle

Bonded-laborer-of-the-IT-industry(BLII) 1 screams and gesticulates across the room, “Hey BLII 2 send across that design document. Make sure you zip them with the reports version 1.2 and also send the presentation from last week trainings. Don’t forget to send the MOM of yesterday’s meeting A-SAP.” Right, we all know you have been busting your butt sending forwards and listening to Kajarare all this while. So much for “visibility” and a great appraisal!

They all grab your eyeballs, tympanum membranes and injure your aesthetic senses successfully: 15 micro-seconds of glory to them and 15 minutes of misery to all. Seeking attention isn’t something new to the human society. We always sought a human feedback, approval, appreciation and acceptance for our thoughts and actions. Although it seems inherently human to do so, inordinate ostentation to sate one’s self-consuming narcissism is a crass way to prove one’s class. For most people it doesn’t suffice to possess something and cherish it, they need to strut their stuff and derive a great vicarious thrill of having made it covetous for others. But that’s not what amuses me. It is those people who pretend to have “it” and love to scream from the rooftops to prove that they do. It does quite remind me of the Emperor’s new clothes. I’d love to see which little kid comes along and tells them that they are naked.

Bus bahut hua

2006-04-09T23:07:00.000-04:00

From the Author's keyboard: Before my readers swoon on seeing the title, I would like to warn all of you that this post is biligual, primarily because I wanted to relate it verbatim.

My trials and tribulations with the public transport system in Pune are almost never over. Once again I had the doomed misfortune of traveling in one of those magnificent modes of conveyance. This time however it wasn’t the vehicle itself that peeved me, but the customer support personnel..errr a rather contemporary designation for a bus conductor.

On landing amidst a sea of dilapidated steel gargoyles at the corporation bus stand, I felt rather like a lost lamb. “Ask ask ask” I told myself. Spotting a booth which looked like a miniature gaol with a grill through which even a caterpillar cannot pass without getting squished, I strained to make eye contact with the jailbird sitting in solitary confinement.

Readers please bear with me for the switch in language (that’s a first time on my blog)
Me: Hinjewadi la kuthli bus zatey? (Which bus goes to Hinjewadi?)
Jail bird (JB) aka in-charge: Hinjewadi la Hinjewadi chi bus zatey? (The bus to Hinjewadi goes to Hinjewadi)
Me: Yeah right you demented fool! I thought the bus to Hinjewadi goes to the moon!
(And returning to sanity) Me :Buscha number kay ahe? (What is the bus number?)
JB (arbitrarily does a mathematical calculation with Jacobian transforms): Shambhar. (100)
And before I could further tax his mathematically challenged brain he said: Pula palikade thambli ahe. (It’s parked across the bridge)

JB furiously starts scribbling on a piece of paper and I scamper off without asking for the latitude and longitude. Much later I figured I should have asked except that I didn’t know what latitude and longitude were called in Marathi. Ambling across the road and encountering a humongous stream of PMTs, I posed the same question to another bus conductor.

BC1: Tee bagha lasht (gasp! English?) ubhi ahe. (See that one parked last)

By the time I walked to the end of the endless queue of decrepit buses that deserved a collective cremation at a bus graveyard or at least an oldage home, I started wondering if BC1 had a chip implanted in his eye for him to be able to see a bus light years away from him! The bus driver was chewing tobacco like a cow ruminating its cud and reading the latest local gossip in a Marathi newspaper. I posed the eternally confounding question, “Hinjewadi la kuthli bus zatey”. He looked up; vexed by the intervention in his spiritual train of thoughts, and seeing his bloodshot eyes I beat a hasty retreat. I decided I needed a more reliable source of information.
Approaching an officer (yeah he could read and write) surrounded by BCs who were reporting to him, I thought this is the enlightened man who would direct a poor desultory soul like me to the correct bus, but he seemed to be working on the Riemann hypothesis. Even so, I decided to bother him with the mundane question which had nothing to do with prime numbers. He did not even acknowledge the question as his stooges tried to redirect me with, “Kuthe tari ahe”. (It is there somewhere). Voila, so that ascertains that the bus is not an imaginary number! Pointing to one of the other sycophants, he said, "Ha tya buscha conductor ahe" (He is the conductor of that bus). And after what looked like a charade of feigned ignorance and amnesia, BC2 finally admitted that the bus will indeed arrive soon and I did not want to clarify whether "soon" was in terms of hours or decades or millennia.

Later in the bus as I amused myself with the interior decor of the bus, BC2 came around issuing tickets. He used his clipper to awaken dozing souls to a reality that their hair or ears could get potentially clipped if they tried to travel ticketless. The macabre creature also loved playing a little game, keeping with the sinister intentions of those of his ilk. Just as the bus would screech to halt at a bus stop, he would ring the bell leaving the hapless travellers with less than 2 nanoseconds to clamber onto it or at least grab the sleeve of the person before them. They would dangle precariously onto a miniscule metallic protrusion. To add to his malevolence he would demand "Mala sutte dya." (Give me change) like we had a mint in our backyards. Thankfully he didn't say,"Mala sutka dya" (Relieve me of this). We would have gladly obliged.

After a bus ride which was nothing short of a Bollywood masala pot-boiler with a jailbird, a sadhu, a mad scientist and a barber moonlighting as bus conductors and drivers with wild-goose chases, amnesia and trapeze stunts, I was convinced that such a wholesome customer experience has no peer across the globe.

Last heard: Due to the increasing popularity of Bollywood and CTM a bid was being made to outsource jobs of First bus personnel to India.

Conquering the Coast

2006-03-17T07:02:00.000-05:00

The sea has always been a great source of inspiration and fascination for me. Pune being a landlocked city surrounded by the gargantuan Sahyadris, the allure for the sea had always seemed greater. In fact, that was the only saving grace I could see in a city like Chennai.

Even so, I returned from my latest expedition to the Konkan coast without the usual blissful smile on my face and my hands ceased to itch to pen poetry. I wonder why?

1. Was I suffering from poet's block? I never penned poetry so regularly anyway.
2. Was I disgruntled about the trip not being a magnificent success? Perhaps!
3. Was I more caught up with more mundane philistine issues to bother about something as "frivolous" as poetry? Frivolous poetry? Is that an oxymoron?
4. Was I getting sea sick? Quite unlikely.

While I forage for answers of this rather preponderant question you can read the whole account on my travelblog.

Ride At Your Own Ris(c)k

2006-03-05T00:36:00.000-05:00

After a long time, my mom and I set out together on a shopping spree. Since both of us now share a common fear of crossing the road right outside our house, we beckoned the auto rickshaw driver at the stand across the street. With the temerity of a bull-dozer driver he propelled his rickshaw right into the raging oncoming traffic. Unfazed by the flurry of honks, expletives and the burly bus that screeched to a halt microns from his rickshaw, he parked his ricketty steed in front of us, waiting for the damsels in distress to mount his chariot.

His coutenance reminded me of the masked marauder with a kerchief bound around his face and only two piercing macabre eyes visible. We told him the destination and the engines roared under his command throwing us completely out of gear. As we sat up and blinked at each other, he was busy weaving his way through the crawling cars and trucks as though he was playing road rash. It probably never crossed his mind that his was a 3 dimensional vehicle with 3 wheels! We clung precariously onto everything within our reach.

Just as we were about to recover from the horror, he kept honking incessantly at the cyclist ahead of him. After an exchange of ineffable expletives he got the obdurate cyclist to cede. He cut through the red signal despite the ominous PMTs and insane Sumos that threatened to pulverize the insolent rickshaw. I covered my eyes and peeked at mom through my fingers. She was praying fervently for divine intervention to deliver us of the evil rickshaw driver. I was ruminating that all these years of mom's prayers had been reduced to our survival in this rickshaw ride. Further, he decided that for greater customer satisfaction there should be some in house entertainment and the speakers behind us blared with infernal tunes. My mom let out a "Narayana" and "Hare Ram" to nullify the diabolical events around by sacred chants of the Supreme being. The rickshaw driver was, of course blissfully unaware that his ingrate passengers were ascribing execrable epithets to his valorous character. In his own eyes he was a superhero, nothing less than Shaktimaan, trying to transport two members of the weaker sex (pardon me, but all superheroes take this sexist stand) to their destination at lightning speed and fighting off Saitaan PMTs and Krur truckwalas who tried to sabotage his noble mission.

As we regained consciousness from our spiritual state of mind, we realized that he had driven his ramshackle 'ram pyaari' into a bylane which had recently been awarded by Radio Mirchi as the winner of the 'Sabse Bada Khadda' contest for the biggest and largest number of potholes. On the brighter side, we got to measure the shock absorbing capacity of the adipose tissue on our hind sides. Of course, we had ascertained long before that the upholstery of the seats had none and that Indian rickshaws were manufactured without shock absorbers. It also enlightened us about the innumerable nuts and bolts that were rhythmmically drumming their unfastened state into our ears. One of them happened to fall off and roll from our hero's head.

Unable to endure the ordeal any further mom requested him to drive by a different route. He snapped back asking why we hadn't informed him of our preferences before hand. Carping about our fastidious feminine minds, he swerved into the nearest lane a la` Michael Schumacher negotiating a turn on the F1 track. But we weren't in the Monaco GP because he almost ran into a a herd of jackasses ambling across the street. More expletives came spewing out as the phelgmatic creatures sauntered at their own sweet time. But our hero was adept at handling obstinate mules of both human and bestial forms. He pressed the horn and turned on the accelerator so that it sounded like a menacing bee threatening to sting the living daylights of any fleshy target.

With the animal caravan out of his way, he sped like an athelete covering the last leg of the relay after being handed the baton by his teammate. As we crossed the mall we intended to shop in, my mom asked him to halt. Unmindful of her request, he veered his vehicle through a 180 degree U turn with a flourish almost propelling us out of the vehicle. Before he could subject us any further to his superheroic stunts my mom and I screamed in unison loud enough to awaken Satan himself.

As money changed hands, we discovered that he owed us a few rupees. "Rakh lo" my mom said ridding herself of the masked villian. Encouraged by the generous gratuity, our superhero set off on his future mission to terrorize several other unsuspecting passengers by taking them on a rickshaw ride of their lives.

Lost in Transition

2006-02-11T07:07:00.000-05:00

As the Boeing hit the scorching tarmac, the air was clouded with dust and a smell of Mumbai rented the surrounding, I knew I was back in India. After an excrutiating wait of 2 hours at the immigration and customs, I was too exhausted to express my exhiliration. Was it just the exhaustion? Even after two weeks in India, I do not quite feel at home yet.

Having stayed in a rather sterile environment for about six months, it was fairly disconcerting being enveloped by airborne particles and smoke and not particularly surprising that I eventually caught a flu. Presently I am very bewildered at the strange fears I have so subconsciously developed. There was a time when I had numerous caustic comments on my mom's over-cautious techniques of crossing the road: today I am on tenterhooks while doing so here, especially after having pressed a button and patiently waited my turn for the past six months.

Commuting to office is such an onerous task, that it is more stressful than my actual work at office. Earlier, I did not think twice before I did a triple somersault to get to office. At York, I was so accustomed to the high frequency of buses and proximity to the office that I rarely woke up scratching my head over how I would get to work. Of course I did wake up scratching my head over a lot of other mundane things like what I would carry for lunch or whether it was dress down day, which I do no more.

My stay abroad forced me to grow more and more detached and independent of people. I didn't need people to amuse me all the time and so it was easier for me to acclimatise myself to the tranquility in the true sense of the word. Further, I alone was answerable to my decisions. Honestly, unrestrained freedom can be very intimidating and invigorating at the same time. While it felt divinely elating to be in command all the time, there was also a nagging fear of becoming a rebellious tyrant once I returned to my Indian civilization. Fortunately, I haven't invited any complaints on that account so far.

As my previous posts might have amply indicated, I had infinite holes to pick in the British lifestyle. Most of it was out of an innate urge to keep myself rooted to my Indianness. I must admit that unlike most Indians I did not want to come across as an 'awestruck desi' in a foreign land and so I consciously chose to write about events and attitudes that peeved me. I did earn a lot of flak for all those relentlessly unforgiving rants, yet, they somehow balance out my 'Back there life's a lot easier, Ma' statements that I have lately subjected my mom to.

It would appear rather bizzare that the enormous emotional build up of returning home might have been reduced to a whimper when I actually did. Although I am physically present in India I guess it will take some time for me to mentally get back here.

The Battle of the Binge

2006-01-18T14:30:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: The following contains language that may be viewed as offensive and politically incorrect by sensitive readers. I recommend that weight watchers should desist from reading any further.

After two months of coaxing consumers into stuffing themselves with ‘party food’ till they start resembling the Christmas turkeys, the media and the food industry have finally decided to do its philanthropic bit by canvassing ‘health products’. Of course, like all societies, the British society meticulously follows suit.

The festive season saw the entire nation seduced by the ilk of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver into bloating themselves with luscious lobsters and tantalizing turkeys. But in the second week of January the tube experienced a total revamp or but I’d do well to use a mot juste and call it a ‘make over’: the culinary shows were consigned to the toilet pot while the fitness gurus and diet doctors hogged prime time idiot box. In their attempt to awaken the audience to a national crisis, they show repulsive images of diseased and disproportionate bodies and nauseating faecal analyses. Boots, one of the largest retail pharmaceutical vendor, went one step ahead in enticing customers post new year: ‘we help you keep your new year resolution’ it endorses the personal fitness pack! Kelloggs eggs the audience to drop a jean size with its fat free cereals. Marks and Spencers which was advertising its sparkling Xmas Cava and Caramel pudding a month back now advocates the ‘healthy stir fry and fresh fruit salad’. Detox and fitness DVDs have now exploded across the racks of local supermarkets with equal ferocity as the Christmas puddings and chocolate brownies did a few weeks ago.

Is Britain suddenly bursting at its seams after a harmless festive season? Not quite. Ever since I set foot on this soil, I have felt overawed by some of the gigantic masses of lard that I see on the streets of Britain. Most of them wear pencil heels and I cannot help but laud the shoe manufacturer who stress tested stilettos for over 100 kg weights. Greater commendation should go to the wooden floor constructors who reckoned the juggernaut of a 150 kg mass balanced on pointed heels with a predilection to trample everything in its wake.

The truth is the NHS has refused to treat certain obscenely obese patients with disorders offset by their accrued adipose simply because the patients in question refuse to change their diet and will avail of the subsidised knee replacements and heart surgery till the death knell relieves the doctor of his patient. Now don’t ask me who dies first! The root of the problem is not only a lack of awareness but also the absence of a systematic and disciplined way of consuming food. There is really no ‘lunch time’ even at my workplace. People just sit at their desks and eat whenever it is convenient. It all starts with disturbing the digestive cycle and filling it in with garbage snacks at odd times to making the garbage snacks the staple diet and finally robbing the body of its nourishment, simply because the snacks pander to the needs of the papillae on the tongue rather than the tissues and muscles inside the body. Post festival, the media uses this already existing epidemic of expanding adipose to their advantage. Detox one of the biggest buzzwords in the health industry has been rightfully decried as ‘a marketing strategy for selling purgatives’ by an NHS physician. Corrective surgeries have the cosmetic surgeons pocketing the fat with a fat cheque. Vegetables, pulses and sprouts have become ‘fashionable’ and I use that term with all the disdain I can muster, because there is a special celebrity weight watcher show on the tube. Yes, vegetables are sold at the prices of nuclear bombs in this country, but it is a price worth paying for one’s health. Coming to think of it, the exorbitant prices shouldn’t be a factor dissuading these people from eating nutritious food given that they spend a lot more at Debenhams trying in vain to purchase an XXL size of a bikini. Perhaps there is a special festival edition XXXXL size nowadays!

The worst outcome of this mega-marketing ploy is the guilt and self consciousness that impels heavily endowed individuals, constantly bombarded with negative images of themselves, into anorexic habits and uneducated techniques to rid themselves of the oozing waistline. However, I surmise, this is just a passing wave, once the wave has hit the shore and the waters withdrawn with the tide into the sea, the shore will go dry once again. Sad but true, a month later, the gruesome images of a pig: ears, nose, eyelashes inclusive, being butchered to make processed meat will be long forgotten and the incorrigible epicures will continue to gorge the crisps, devour hot dogs and wash it with a whisky like tyrannosaurs with insatiable appetites.

Seasons of the Sun

2006-01-10T13:56:00.000-05:00

A golden warmth gushed through my tender leaves
Diamond dew drops cascaded off with the breeze
A wafting scent of blossoms pervaded my being
The voice of the birds soared with the tune of spring
Draped in green, bejewelled with life and spirit
I basked in a luxury that to a monarch would befit
Alas the sun of fortune would not infinitely shine
For He too has to keep a promise divine.

As greater darkness upon me drew
A spine chilling wind from yonder blew
My precious leaves, lifeless, departed one by one
My strife against adversity had now begun.
As I struggled against inclement times
Some fair feathered friends left for warmer climes
While some steadfast ones nested in my heart
Even as my defences were falling apart

My skeletal branches implored heavenwards for mercy
To end this horrendous state as a bad reverie
A celestial snow descended to clothe my bareness
And the song of life twittered through the distress.
A dawn of wisdom, true warmth permeated
I realized reason as I quietly ruminated
Fortune and doom are seasons a changing
True companions persist even after spring.

--Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Season's Greetings

2005-12-31T06:10:00.000-05:00

When you are away from home, it is during the festivals that you miss your family the most. The clamour in the kitchen with gastronomical aromas wafting through the air. The ununsed audio cassette player crackling alive with divine chants of mantras in MS Subbalaxmi's voice. Dad driving mom up the wall telling her that the pooja is getting delayed because she is slow. DJ lurking in the background trying to be unobtrusive and just waiting to sink his teeth into the savouries. And usually I can be anywhere in the spectrum of over-enthusiastic participant and mom's right hand woman to a lazy lump waiting for the rituals to get over.

My parents embraced the festivals of Maharashtra wholeheartedly, like the ten day Ganesh festival. We celebrate it with the traditional Marathi Aarti every evening and Usha Mangeshkar's Ganesh Bhajans. Fortunately for me, the last day I spent in India this year was Anant Chaturdashi, the day Ganesha returns to his abode. Dassera was lowkey and almost invisible : only the pictures of Durga in mail postcards to remind us that there exists such a festival. As Diwali approached, we Indians were more determined to stamp our Indianness all over York. The Indian community here got the ball rolling while, we back in office were harbingers of the festivities to commence: distributing sweets and savouries. It was heartening to see the Brits interested in our culture and rituals. I am usually very apprehensive about community celebrations, but when I reached the York College hall I was amazed to such a massive turnout. The prayer service which was more stylised to suit the British audience and to sensitize them towards our religion and heritage was very patchy, the Om Jai Jagadish hymn was improvised because the singer did not know the lyrics or the tune for that matter. But despite these glitches the essence of the celebration was not completely lost, simply because an air of communal harmony and camaraderie floated around. The British let their hair down for the Dandiya, Garba and Bhangra. Surprisingly, Diwali coincided with the Bonfire week and we witnessed fireworks all round the week which indeed gave us a taste of India.

Christmas preparations began a month in advance, with the windows being dressed with the bright red, green and white theme, lights and bauble dotting the streets and and insane crowd hitting the shops for presents. The warmth and spirit of the festival rubbed off on me too. I would karaoke with the carols and Christmas numbers that I knew as a kid. The office was agog with shouts of Merry Christmas instead of the usual 'cheers' and 'morning's and the desks were laden with mouth watering chocolates and goodies. It was a long weekend and I found my way to the York Minster on the 25th to partake in the festivities. As I lit the candle and prayed along with the Christian family standing next to me, I felt that there is a single message of familial unity that pervades through festivals all over the world.

As I walked home from the bus-stop last night for the last time this year, I met a frail old man who stopped me and said 'Happy New Year and you promise to be a good girl'. I was so touched by that elderly gentleman I had never seen before that I thought he was Father Christmas without his 'Ho Ho Ho'. It did not matter to me anymore that I will see sun rise on 2006 without cozying up with dad on the couch watching a football match!

Flakes of Fantasy

2005-11-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

It’s been getting exceedingly chilly in York. A week back we experienced a frosty morning. The leaves seemed to have a white lace sewn on them. The lawn resembled a classic sponge cake with castor sugar sprinkled all over. The cars looked like they had been in the freezer over night. The fallen maple leaves appeared to have white mould spreading on them.
As the week progressed, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland saw snow. As much as I hated the cold, I also prayed fervently for that elusive snowfall. I was told that the probability of one, at this time of the year, in York, was miniscule because snowfall begins only in January end.
Today, as the rain turned into spittle like drops the entire office peered outside the windows to get a view of the aberrant shower. Random flakes hit the tar and dissolved into the puddles. It appeared like someone in the sky had had a pillow fight and dispersed the fluffy contents onto earth. I, now, truly fathom the ecstasy expressed by SP when he talked about the first snow. I unleashed my infantile instincts when I saw my first snow. I was bounding around the office like a kangaroo. Thankfully the wooden flooring did not get a crater in it to bear testimony to this historic event.
Delirious, I ran outside. The guard at the reception was amused at sudden exodus of Indians rushing out to welcome the first snowfall of the season. As the flakes gently buoyed by the breeze settled on my hair and windcheater, I looked skywards to let the divine particles to settle on my face.
I swirled amidst the falling icicles as the other employees chose to contain their enthusiasm in a stoic smile. Some of them were concerned that I would catch a chill. I rushed back only to emerge with a camera and a second round of snow dancing. It is not unusual that I discard my composure and relish a simple natural phenomenon with an intrigued mind of a child. Nature has always provided me with a source of endless enchantment, an inspiration and at times an unadulterated pleasure beyond compare.

The United Kingdom of Idiosyncrasies

2005-11-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

The more I interact with the British, dare I call it, culture, the more confounding it gets. I must admit that a lot of my preconceived notions were consigned to the trash can as I embarked on a journey of discovering these quirks.

To begin with, like most outsiders, I would expect the British English to be grammatically impeccable and liberally sprinkled with queen-sized expressions and metaphors. However, I have been disappointed on more than one account. Not only is the language, written and spoken, very pedestrian in quality, but it also frequently hits appallingly abysmal lows bordering on cheap slang. No doubt, it would be incomprehensible if they spoke in archaic Shakespearean English, but we certainly don’t need graduates from Oxford to be able to differentiate between ‘now’ and ‘know’.

I had always believed that the British cherish their literary heritage more than the hair on their heads. Mythical, it seems to be, for, a young man from Cheshire playing ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ did not know that George in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five was a girl. Probably he is potty about the Potter books! Potter-mania has swept across England like Bird flu. It certainly won’t affect me, I am a vegetarian. (Now that was my lame attempt at British humour). I had been to a particular bookstore in the city center a couple of times, mainly for the delectable coffee, and I happened to be browsing through the ‘Humour’ section. It was dejecting to find that most themes were sleazy and most authors were American. I must, however, accede that the humour in some of the talk shows more than make up for the lack of satire in writing. The radical shift in focus from books to electronic media for entertainment is a global trend, and I probably should not be attributing it to the Brits alone.

Talking of global trends, as in politics, the Americans are definitely calling the shots in every sphere of life here. Most of the music is American based. Now again, what were the US country music awards doing on prime time UK television? The US sitcoms like Joey and Friends rule the tube. British cinema neither has the global coverage of Hollywood nor the mass appeal of Bollywood. It doesn’t even have the Kung-fu of Chinese films. The fashion is largely French driven and the electronics Japanese. Such is the force of globalisation in the UK that the local vegetable market is thronging with Spanish tomatoes and Belgian capsicums. So his Royal Highness Prince Charles had to pose along with his favourite pigs in their sty to endorse the organic farmers’ products!

What astounded me the most was the complete irreverence towards tradition and religion. I suspected the Brits, like most monarchy driven cultures, would have been fiercely conservative. The British society is perhaps still orthodox by and large but they are certainly not very passionate about their religion. I am stunned that despite their Christian leaning, they don’t consider it blasphemy to convert a parish chapel into a pub! As a concession they christened it ‘The Parish’.

Anurag Mathur wrote about the inscrutable ways of the Americans, perhaps inspired by some of his own personal experiences. I most certainly find the British very peculiar, and definitely not on the high pedestal that I had elevated them to. But it would be a long way before I chronicle it in a ‘novel’ style, for, I surmise what I experienced was just the tip of a whole iceberg that can sink Britannia.

Seasons Of Change

2005-11-07T14:03:00.000-05:00

Droplets of rain mist over the window
Trickle down into infinite oblivion
Glistening tear drops cascade down my face
And disappear into a sea of emotion

Flaming leaves on a withering autumn
Mellow as they touch humble earth
Yellows pervade through the greenhorn
Experience permeates the raging youth

The frigid frieze of frozen seas,
Thaws into warm waters sublime
My cold apathy and stony countenance
Melt with a gracious deed benign

Flowers spring up in the summer breeze
Petals parch in the merciless sun
A smile dancing across my lips
Droops on hearing words of scorn.

Seasons arrive and seasons depart,
Splashing vibrant colours of time.
Perceptions, emotions metamorphose
Into this kaleidoscope of mine.

--Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Footnote: This poem took me by far the longest time to pen or rather type. I generally refrain from using the computer for my poetry because I feel typing invariably robs it of a human touch and a personal stamp. Unfortunately, the machine prevailed this time around and it would rather be the scapegoat for, perhaps, one of the shoddiest verse I have written in quite a while. I won't be so self-deprecating to term it as doggerel just as yet!

Escape to Edinburgh

2005-10-29T10:27:00.000-04:00

Again this post is long overdue. I visited Edinburgh about three weeks back which was actually a part of the whirlwind weekends I have been having so far. Apologies folks because although I intended to put most of my experiences in the travel-blog, I am pressed for time and also memory, which, as most of you are aware, is pretty much volatile!

Edinburgh is an enchanting city which has retained its quaint charm. Not so much like Whitby which greets you with a whiff of the sea, but more of a prefect blend of historical sites and scenic beauty. I have uploaded part 1 of the pictures which were taken on day 1 . Most of these pictures were taken from the GNER train we travelled in. So pardon me for the motion blur but I couldn't stop myself from going shutter-happy!

COMING SOON: Day 2 pictures and if possible the travel blog.

Britannia beckons

2005-10-17T13:45:00.000-04:00

Note: I know this comes in a bit late. But I do hope I did justice to what I intended to write.

In my constant endeavour to find my identity, I find myself in a foreign land where my identity stands as Indian/Asian, without much ambiguity, which in a way makes me feel secure. I have noticed that most Indians, in their quest to embrace the culture of a foreign nation, go overboard. Do in Pommieland as the Pommies do but it is sometimes good to be Aussie (or Indian as in my case)!

Right from the moment I stepped into a foreign land, I was becoming more and more conscious of the much ‘vaunted’ cultural shock that I was bracing myself to face. No matter, where you belong in India, be it the Silicon city Bangalore, the economic capital Mumbai or the much touted industrial belt of Gurgaon; the exposure to alien cultures is far more limited compared to that in other metros of the world.

I made efforts to refrain from staring at the myriad colors of hair and the pop-star and belly dancer apparels that people donned with remarkable comfort while I perpetually preferred my astro-suit. There was a lot that I had to get acclimatised to apart from the Westerly winds that stung my ears. The United Kingdom, tiny as it appears by global standards, does not seem all that wee in terms of its dialects of English. The accents and pronunciations vary remarkably quickly across the country and it is daunting to have a ear for all their sing song ‘Hiya’s and ‘Eeia’s ‘Righty-ho’s and ‘Okie doke’s. Smaller towns like York have their own unique salutations. I cannot throw my sandal at the cab driver if he addresses me as ‘My Love’. I cannot quip ‘I am a teetotaller’ if the bus driver says ‘Cheers’. However, unlike my other colleagues it was easier for me to mind my P’s and Q’s. They resorted to saying ‘Thank you’, ‘Cheers’ and ‘Sorry’ all in one breathe: more like pick the expression you want and get on with it!

I think of York as the City that sleeps (unlike the Citibank which supposedly keeps awake). They shut shops by 5 here and go pub hopping till 1 am. It is never a restaurant here (I guess they hate the French so they never had one): it is a pub, a coffee shop or a burger-pizza joint. Even Express Holiday Inn is a BnB (bed and breakfast). For room service please fly to Egypt. They rave about a chicken tikka Masala (CTM) allegedly the national delicacy of Britain, which my meat-eating friends tell me tastes like cooked rubber. I am flummoxed by the strange duality that marks the lives of these folks. They like to think themselves as sticklers for propriety, stiff upper lipped and extremely formal in their bearing and it is probably this mental and behavioural abstinence that urges them to day in and day out go to the pub to let their hair down almost kindred to lunatics. It is beyond me to fathom the fact that even kids are taken to the pub for their initiation into the drinking ritual.

I amused myself one weekend watching the local television channels. It is intriguing how reality shows have captured the imagination of the entire world. The shows here were a little more innovative, hopefully not Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V-ed from the US of A. Practically everything was being swapped: a parent swap, an age swap and even a gender swap! Now whoever thought the prudes of the Victorian era would openly embrace such profane ideas!

There was, however, a queer observation I made after a certain incident. I walked into an Indian restaurant and ordered a take-away at the counter being manned by a Brit of Indian origin. There was a certain look of disdain and a supercilious air to his mannerisms that were unbecoming of a regular hospitable Indian. He probably could not stomach the fact that he was ‘serving’ Indian Indians: those very folks who belonged to the clan of his innumerable cousins sitting in the elephant and snake charmer land and thinking that vending machines were the coolest inventions on earth! Those very folks who treated him like he was Prince Williams back in India were now ordering him around. Strange psychology it is!

What struck me the most about these folks was their astounding faith in the goodness of human nature. A colleague of mine left his newly purchased expensive camera phone in the public transport bus and the bus depot personnel called his friends number on the phone and had it returned to him. The constant fear of some prowling scavenger waylaying to pounce on our personal property can be put to rest given the fact that these guys normally shop for groceries in Marks and Spencers and for clothes in Laura Ashley!

As I try to blend into the ways of this queer land that ruled us for over 100 years, I find not only strange idiosyncrasies that prove to be a source of entertainment, but also values worthy of emulation. Yes they don’t have Winzip in any of their damn PCs and they disable the right button of their mouse. But they sell Ziploc bags for dirt cheap prices and they too find mice in their refrigerators!

Memoirs from Britland

2005-10-03T13:17:00.000-04:00

It's been a long hiatus from my blog and it's not because I am suffering from blogger's block but because of the constraints on my blogging activities: so much that I have resorted to good ol' traditional paper pencil rather than bits and bytes. Britain is one place that is riddled with strange rules that shackle my freedom and grate on my sensibilities. It beats me that their lives are so clock-driven. People drop their work at the stroke of five, probably inspired by Cindrella and rush straight to the pub. I could probably fill up tomes about the Brits' idiosycracies but I will save it for a later date.

I have, however, resumed writing on my travel-blog accompanied with the pictures on the photo blog. I have been travelling almost every weekend and haven't taken the time to discover the city of York where I am currently residing.

Tagline

2005-09-09T14:29:00.000-04:00

The first time I got tagged, I was asked to write about the books I read. Pity, I had to politely refuse, not because I was short of time or I read too many to list them, but because I read none whatsoever, given that India Todays and RDs don't count. Before you fry me like Victoria Beckham, I'll hurl the Albert Einstein quote at you(for those frogs in the deep gorges of the grand canyon, the darling wife of England's blue-eyed boy earned some flak from the press for her non-existent reading habits). On second thoughts, I won't, because this time around I got tagged to get my hands onto something challenging.

I have also been accused of prolixity, bombast and circumlocution. If 55 words is what you want, so be it.

Never

“It’s the eyes. Exactly! Those innocent eyes that kill me”, she told herself, as she turned to snatch one last glance of that endearing look and she withdrew herself from the sight to follow. He was dragged mercilessly by two burly hands. One savage stroke, he bleated his last.
And she never touched meat again.
(55 words)

While I was at it, I thought I'd have another go.

Vertigo

He looked at the spine-chilling abyss below as he dangled precariously. The wind had dislodged his firm grip. He held onto one tenuous string that broke his steady fall. But it was not in his genes to get intimidated by heights.
The spider shot another silk strand from his spinneret and swung himself to safety.
(55 words)

I hope I did a good job. Now for the chaining part. I would love everyone, who has seen this to take a shot at it. Put it up on your respective blogs and notify me. Those of you who don't have a blog can put it in the comments section right here. Clever me.
(55 words No, that was for real.)

Rats!

2005-09-08T15:13:00.000-04:00

Note: I wrote this a couple of years back or probably more. It had been published in my college magazine. I don't know if my style has changed eversince. All the same, on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, I thought it would be apt to pull it out of the dust and share it here.

We had begun the preparations for the 10 daylong Ganesh festival. Even as the house was agog with clamour of voices and noises, we did not fail to notice that little intruder who dashed across the corridor like a super sonic jet into my bedroom. We analyzed his morphology from the split second image that our brains captured. Shivers went down our spines as we recalled our previous rendezvous with the rodent family. Tattered clothes, half eaten fruits, disgusting droppings and last but not the least a rat maternity home right in my cupboard! The very thought of it made me hop onto my bed: what if that little critter makes my feet a target of his insatiable appetite!

My mother was the first to recover from the reverie and take to the offence or rather the mighty broom. Banging the broom on the floor, like some indigenous villager trying to scare a man-eater from its hide out, she tried to prod him out from his haven underneath the bed. But the wily rogue cleverly crept under the cupboard. As the long and tiring hide ‘n’ seek continued, with me in the background playing musical bed and chair my mother’s patience started wearing out. When he finally tried to dash out after his little recreation for the day, he discovered that he was trapped in a locked room. Gotcha! and my mother seized the opportunity to lay a deadly blow with the broom on his head. But the mightiest blows of a broom are never fatal enough even on a measly cockroach.

Just as I was contemplating on the possibility of our house being razed to the ground by one rat a la` Mouse Hunt, he climbed on to the broom, swung onto the chair, quite reminiscent of his reel life counter part Jerry of the Tom and Jerry fame. We watched agape as he fled through the balcony. Heaving a sigh of relief and locking the balcony we prayed that he had vamoosed forever.

Unfortunately for us, mice or Mooshak have great affinity for Lord Ganesha. How can the Vahana stay away from his Master, especially when He is being propitiated by one and all? Our belief of having snuffed out the rodent was shattered when we heard an incessant gnawing sound from the kitchen. However the human mind is too optimistic to believe what it refuses to accept. Dismissing the sounds as some stray noises from the neighborhood we continued the festivities with much gaiety.

However, our fears were finally confirmed when my grandmother spotted his tail late in the night when he was on one of his nocturnal adventures in the kitchen. As we were coming to grips with the situation she tried to pacify us by explaining with an air of authority that it was just a harmless shrew. Like an expert on vermin she elucidated that the queer droppings found near the dustbin were not those of a mouse. Awed by her profound knowledge we put our fears to rest without much cross examination or objection.

Much to our chagrin, day-by-day, reports of stolen goods were pouring in from the kitchen. Two rags were lost, a slice of bread gnawed beyond recognition, an oil lamp wicker: minor thefts but worth an investigation. Another day there were tell tale signs of a massive garbage raid. Putting the pieces of evidence together we held the rodent culprit. The plot was becoming clearer, the little pest was planning to raise an entire clan of the mouse gang! But we couldn’t charge sheet him because the only witness, my grandmother, refused to identify him on religious grounds.

So mom began to hatch a plan to kill him in an encounter. Poison was bought in wholesale. She lured him with a gastronomical fare ranging from bread to dosas and idlis, of course, liberally smeared with rat poison. As we immersed the idol of Lord Ganesha during Visarjan, we prayed for His divine intervention so that he would take His vehicle to Heaven. But unfortunately, this vehicle conjured up some starting problems, so He had to leave His Mooshak with us.

Even weeks after the Lord had left for his Heavenly abode, his vehicle was still alive and kicking the garbage (not the bucket). We began to have nightmares that he was some mutated form that had become immune to rat poison and that he would one day turn into a ferocious gigantic creature (courtesy Hollywood flicks) and unleash terror in the city, as the helicopters with special task force (in the Hindi version) rained futile bullets on him.

Just as we were reeling under these terrifying thoughts, mom spotted a branded rat poison in the market that guaranteed the rat’s death only after it ran out of the house. After experimenting with her new biological weapon she rejoiced at its success when she found a malodorous smell emanating from outside the kitchen window. However, her newfound joy lasted only a few seconds when she discovered that he had not even touched that unholy looking cake of poison!
Finally, desperate to get rid of him, she bought a dose of poison from another peddler. Keeping her fingers crossed, she once again tempted him some poison laden idlis. The next day she found him crouched up in the garbage bin. She gave such a blood-curdling scream that the horrified creature took to his heels under the cabinet. However, his tail was stuck and he seemed to be motionless. For an entire day he appeared to be frozen in the same position. When my father returned in the evening he pronounced the mouse dead on arrival.

There was much debate over the postmortem report of his death. I was strongly of the opinion that he died due to a cardiac arrest on hearing my mother scream. My father disagreed saying that the first peddler had sold adulterated poison while the second vendor sold the concentrated one. All said and done, mom had spent a fortune on his upward journey. We bid him adieu as we saw the watchman unearth his smuggled possessions – the 2 rags, the bread pieces and some coconut choir from his illegal godown under the cabinet. Triumphant that mission impossible was accomplished and a tad sorry for the departed soul we looked on as the watchman performed the last rites, as an undertaker, by dumping him in the public garbage bin.

Tommy Nobody

2005-09-03T14:14:00.000-04:00

I still possess a series of teensy weensy books called My Nature Library. They bring back fond memories of my childhood when DJ and I would read them over and over again fascinated by the vivid depictions of the animals involved in the stories. DJ had even added to the caricatures some lasting pieces of modern art for which he was sent to the balcony for an entire afternoon. My mom had taken it upon herself that she would train us in such good English that would put even the Buckingham Palace to shame and so these books became an inseparable part of our formative years.

One particular book titled 'Tommy Nobody' is about a fledgling who is a slow learner and as he gradually learns to fly, he wanders away from his siblings. He lands on a bird table where he encouters a motley of birds. Having no clear identity of his own he asks each bird, "Who am I?" He attempts to compare himself with their characteristic traits, vibrant plumes and eating habits. As he gets rejected by every bird, he hops off the table. He then comes across a song-thrush who looks as brindled as he does. The song-thrush asks him to sing and as they sing in mellifluous harmony, he finally realizes that he too is a song-thrush. Tommy Nobody becomes Tommy Somebody.

As I reflect over this fable, I can't resist pondering over the fact that at several periods of time, I too embodied that 'Tommy Nobody'. In school I never 'belonged' to a peer group. My classmates may shout their voices hoarse about the unity of our batch but the truth is we always had factions and I belonged to 'Cat on the fence'. In junior college of course I did have a bunch I hung out with, because they came reasonably close to being individualistic: we never coerced each other into conforming with any ideas (ie bunk or attend lectures as you please without having to cover up for others and vice versa or for that matter going for lunch together). Simply put, I could get away with being 'me'.

In engineering college, there were several complex factions in the class:
The 'Har har Mahadev' clique which further had some hardliners who spoke English like it was a derivative of Marathi. They had posters of Shivaji Maharaj in their bedrooms and they sometimes looked like they would blow up every convent brat with the cannons of Sinhagad. The moderates were a little more liberal with their associations. They would mingle with the non-maharashtrians occasionally without making them feel like intruders on their "Amche Pune" territory.

The non-maharashtrians basically did not understand Marathi and therefore were spoken to, like they had just landed from Jupiter. Most of my friends, for the lack of another identity, belonged here.

The convent bratpack was a clan of "trendy" babes who had been admitted into the engineering college because of a terrible administrative glitch.They actually had taken admission in the School of Fashion Technology but ended up making circuit designs instead of apparel designs. They showed great initiative in extra-curricular activities so much that it left them no time for academic pursuits. Although there were several Maharashtrians in the group, they would never deign to speak in Marathi and if they ever did they would pepper it with an anglicised accent that would make Pu La Deshpande turn in his grave.

The hostelites were mostly from interior Maharashtra and spoke in different dialects of Marathi and commonly in Hindi. They had a strong labour-union like adherence and loyalty to their group. This was because they had a common motive and motto "I want to go home". They were willing to copy 20 assignments in one day for that!

The invisible had members who hardly made an appearance in class. On the day of the exam, on seeing an unfamiliar face, I would often ask my friend, "Hey did she get a double promotion today?" and would get rapped on my head. They normally had serious excuses for not attending college, like an accident, their own marriage or maternity leave, but for three years? What is our society coming to!

Now where did I fit into this communal equation? The responses I got from people around me would often make me introspect my core identity. When I spoke fluent Marathi I was asked, "Are you a Maharashtrian?" After I replied in the negative I was interrogated about my lineage to try and figure out how I manage to articulate so well in an alien tongue. When I told them that some of the convent babes had been my classmates in school I was met with a confuzzled look saying, "But you are not like them and you don't hang out with them."

It does not bother me till a point that I can be proud of my uniqueness and individualism and that I can easily break the ice with both Maharashtrians and non-Maharashtrians. But the fact that I struggle to associate myself with any particular identity pricks me from time to time. More so, because I have deviated away from the one that has been given to me by birth. It is outright mortifying to be standing in front of a Maharashtrian not being able to defend my own people simply because of the lack of knowledge. I dread translation exercises and would be more comfortable holding a grenade without the pin. Even when I backslap with DJ it is "Kay re" not "Enne da".

It's easy to say "I am an Indian" and ramble jingoistically about how I choose to live in a "world not broken up by narrow domestic walls". But deep down inside Tommy Nobody is still asking "Who am I?"

In gratitude

2005-09-01T13:43:00.000-04:00

Note: This one is all about Vc. No three mile long words in this one so don't open dictionary.com!

It has been nearly six months since I met Vc through my blog. For most readers here, he would seem to be the zany one who has contributed some 'Very Cool' quips at all the wrong times. To tell you the truth, these comments of his take the wind out of all that I have said in the post! His uncanny inclination to see the lighter side of everything, often gets on my nerves and yet somehow puts a smile on my face.

It might seem rather wicked that we are always pulling each other's hair and nose, but that's the package deal and since neither of us really takes all that to heart, it adds to our camaraderie. Quite unintentionally we manage to innovate ways to keep up with each other! He taught me to let the kid inside me live. (Mom if ever you read this you know who is responsible for my premature senility).

On the occasion of Rakshabandhan Vc gave me this. After he told me how he got hold of it having done some trapeze tricks and driven his friend Anand nuts, I have no words to describe my gratitude. But I am still wearing that 'You did this for me' look. This is a zillion times better than the Pt rings that I wanted! I can imagine myself sitting on an arm chair fifty years from now and telling my wide eyed grandchildren all about it. Thank you Vc. You have given me more than I asked for.

We are drawn to persons around us for different reasons; we admire some for they epitomize everything that we'd desire to be and are not; we adore some folks for their personalities are in sync with ours and we identify ourselves in them (egotists that we are!); while we love some people simply because they love us back. Somehow Vc falls in all three categories! Ok stop going green and get yourself a soul brother. Try the friendly neighbourhood blogger you find when you click on 'next blog'.

This day that year

2005-08-30T14:20:00.000-04:00

The world around us has a strange predilection for orbs and circles. Look around: the globe, wheels, cogs, nuclei of cells, electrons in atoms and even your restless pet dog loves to run around in circles. I wouldn’t be way off the mark if I say this phenomenon applies to life too. There have been occasions when I have remarked: Haven’t I seen this before! Déjà vu !

Right from mundane things like the bus I travel in, it feels like I have circumnavigated a year and come back home! When I joined here exactly a year back, I took a minibus to office and mine happened to be the first stop back then. Ever since that route got scrapped I have experimented with every possible means to reach office : right from taking a rickshaw to a stop a kilometer away and catching the company bus in the nick of time, doing a triple somersault ( a rickshaw, share auto, six seater), the public transport bus and even a truck ! Maybe I could have tried a bullock cart and a hot air balloon. Today, my benevolent company has decided to resume the minibus services starting from my stop and I can’t help reminiscing how I orbited a year to reach my destination.

The myriad technologies that I have been trained on throughout the past year cover the whole spectrum of high level languages and platforms. Coming from a background of microprocessors which understand only machine instructions, it seemed a daunting task to make one’s vision more abstract and to restrain oneself from inquiring how it works and instead concentrate on how to apply it. From java and MVC architecture for web applications, moving to legacy job control language and COBOL I was moving backwards in terms of the era of IT but not the level of the language. Now when I see Assembler, it seems like I am back home with jumps and storing and loading register contents after having seen the world of polymorphism and working storage sections! Do I feel at home: I am yet to discover that! Another iteration loops back to the first command.

Flashback: I was sent packing off to Chennai for my induction and training. The whole family was upbeat albeit apprehensive about where my final posting would be and how I would cope with the ‘independence’. Fortunately for me, it was as comfortable as staying at home since I had relatives to smother me with affection there.
Cut back to the present: again I am being packed off to a farther land and the family is yet again reliving those moments in the ‘sermon mode’. What’s more, lucky as I am, a close colleague is doing the ground work for me to have a smooth landing and has even found a potential apartment although it costs a nuclear bomb! Once more I will miss some of my favorite festivals which have always been witness to the vivacious side of a normally laggard me!

I find myself amused and bemused by this cyclical course of life.

So ticks the wheel of time: standing on the threshold of future,
Consigning every moment to the sea of past.
For every cycle of the wheel resembles the previous,
And yet every span differs from the last.

Anti-Aunty Rant

2005-08-21T14:08:00.000-04:00

The month of Shravan marks the genesis of the festive season in the Hindu calendar year. It goes without saying, that I relish the moments of gaiety that pepper the mood around the house. It also implicitly means a lot of social hobnobbing. Although I am not averse to the idea of meeting people from the older generation or for that matter indulging in meaningless banter, I have learnt from a couple of recent experiences, that at least for a year or two, I should be standing several light years away from these folks.

There are several occasions when it is customary to invite folks over to partake in the religious celebrations. I have accompanied my mom to several such social gatherings, more often than not, simply to sink my teeth into the delectable delicacies. I vividly recall, when I was in the third year of my engineering and busy munching yet another helping of the 'sundal' during a Navratri festival, the notoriously nosy aunty asked me 'Are you planning to give your GRE?'. 'Are you planning to fund my MS?' I would have loved to ask. But not wanting to appear boorish I gave a vague answer tending towards the negative and before I knew what was happening she announced to the caucus gathered around her, "Look at this clever girl, she is going to marry an NRI and settle abroad. I wonder why my grand-daughter insists on doing her MS..." I so wish that she would have predicted whether my grandson would graduate from the Harvard Business school.
A lot of aunties would keep tab of my academic and career graphs. My final year was filled with social gatherings which seemed more like a interrogation room of the Scotland Yard and sometimes a free career counselling center. 'Do your MBA. It adds value to your profile.' and I would want to retort ' I have as much interest in finance as you have interest in Football.' The news of my recruitment in Wipro leaked into the circles through a classmate and I had to keep a low profile while my mom parried the blows for not having 'ceremoniously announced my intiation into the professional world'.

Very recently, I attended the wedding of a family friend and having grown fond of one of mom's sarees, I draped it for the reception. The moment I set foot into the reception area, I knew I had to soon find a table to duck under and eat in peace. The number of aunties who kept hovering around me, kept the other guests wondering if I was serving the sweet dish. Apart from telling me about some obscure 'brother's sister-in-law's son' and his glorious academic feats, they would outright insist that mine would be the next wedding on the anvil (or was it altar). I tactfully reminded them of the veteran bachelors of my generation who were yet to take the plunge. Having successfully raked up the grapevine instincts in them, I steered myself clear of any further badinages. I decided that it would be prudent to tag along with mom and learn some tactics of being savoir-faire. There I bumped into yet another aunty who got into the nitty gritties of the "M" subject. She inquired about my gothram and nakshatram and other such details. Although I am aware of it, I gave her a sheepish look that spelled 'ignoramus' on every crease of my face. She glared at my mom for having brought up a modern-age brat who had no clue about her identity. I wanted to ask her if her NRI grandchild knew his national anthem, or for that matter to which nation he belonged.

Having completed a year in a reputed IT company and having seen the glint in the eyes of those aunties the last time, I have decided to forgo my 'sundal's and field mom as my spokesperson this year. The last time I saw her in action, I knew I had to hire her for this post.
Matrimony Mami: 'How does she find her job?'
Mom: 'Good I guess. Maybe.'
Matrimony Mami: 'Are you folks planning to find a groom now?'
Mom: 'Err.Umm. Not really. The kids these days love the do-it-yourself way.'
Matrimony Mami: 'Oh I know a smart boy of XYZ gothram.'
Mom: 'Oh really? Then he is her brother!'

Shop Talk

2005-08-06T14:00:00.000-04:00

As I promised in the last post, I am obliged to create a post on my shopping exploits. I don't have an itching propensity to go shopping every weekend at the same time I am not parsimonious either, in fact by bourgeoisie standards I am a profligate. The way people go about their shopping has been of endless intrigue and entertainment for me. Without being totally categorical, I can aver that most shoppers would fit one of the following categories.

Save a penny for the rainy day:
Undoubtedly philistine characters that would cut corners at every step and make another trouser out of the supererogatory shreds. They are always under the impression that the cheapest deal is the best. They will probably go haggling even in fixed price shops and in all likelihood make you want the earth to swallow you before the salesperson thinks that you came from the local slum. What's worse is that in all probability their rainy day will never dawn in this life. Maybe they can use inter-era union money transfer to carry it over to their next lives or perhaps tie it to their chests and carry it to nether land where the cost of living is probably cheaper.

Meticulous planner:
They will always keep their eyes open and antenna up for the best offer, discount coupons and freebies. Their market survey would be so comprehensive that they can take up "shopping consultancy" as their avocation. They are utilitarian whose ken and experience rarely allow them to make a bad deal. The ideal people to take along while buying expensive gadgets and gizmos but party-poopers while shopping for jewelry and clothes.

Money is mud:
If they are from the upper class where money is actually flowing through the taps, this attitude does not come as a surprise, but prodigality is seen even among the lowest economic stratum of the society. Let's call them the wannabes. Some of them probably won't even have enough to pay for their school fees, but the branded goggles and the Nike shoes are important to keep them at the helm of their clique. Further there is the occasional parvenu who is bedizened with all the labels prominently sticking out to attest his discernment for "class and quality". He will swagger into a sophisticated and supercilious looking shopping center which has no price tag that reads below 4 digits and he will turn on his "phoren" accent and speak a dialect of English that even Laloo Prasad Yadav fails to comprehend. It goes without saying that it’s best to excuse yourself from going shopping with any of these characters even if you can't fabricate a better excuse than "I will be falling sick tomorrow."

Penny wise pound foolish:
These are by far the most unpredictable and have bizarrely irrational priorities that seem recondite and inexplicable. They would rather travel in a ramshackle rickety public transport vehicle on the day of their job interview but would splurge on several Allen Solleys and Lee Coopers without a second thought that formal wear is not really daily wear. They, actually, are a confused hybrid between the "save a penny.." and the "money is mud wannabes". What makes it perilous to shop with them is their pendular swing between the two extremes. Most of the times it is an insurmountable task to make them see any reason because as a rule they never follow any reason!

The shopaholic:
It is a ritual that impels them to visit the mall or the supermarket every weekend or the first day of the month when they have received their paycheck. In some cases it has blown out of proportion into an incurable addiction or a psychological state like OCD. For some its an anti-depressant but for most it is just a means to savor the power of the money they have earned out of their own toil. Yes it gives them a 'kick' and a 'high' to possess something material that can be procured from the paper and plastic money and substantiates their sense of affluence. No harm in accompanying them when they are on their 'trips' as long as you are not cajoled into indulgence.

The intuitive:
They don't go about taking a reconnaissance of the market prior to shopping. They have a reasonable idea about what exactly is the requirement and therefore won't be easily swayed by heckling salespersons or liberally fund the granite floors every time they shop. Of course they do make a few bad deals in the bargain but that only hones their intuitiveness. They will know when utility supersedes aesthetics and vice versa. Depending on the occasion, they will be ready to shell out the dough for something special. Shopping for them is a learning experience each time.

The shopping experience is never complete without postmortems on the purchases. Although these can be didactic activities, most of the time they are exercises to hunt down a scapegoat who will bear the brunt of a bad buy. Sometimes it seems more rewarding to shop alone: you are unprejudiced by others' opinions, nobody interrogates your decisions and choices and you become a more sagacious shopper.

Beats me!

2005-07-31T12:47:00.000-04:00

Somehow we end up doing certain things without giving a thought to the underlying purpose. The superficiality of our actions need not necessarily arise from a lack of perspicacity, but rather the fact that the situation warrants it. And yet when I don't see the real purpose being met, I find it a total waste of time, effort and resources.

The other day a colleague of mine wanted me to take a few printouts of the material she sent by mail as she had no access to a printer at her seat. So, I obliged and expedited the printing as she said it was urgent. Of course, I did give a "print on both sides" to save paper, but I did not bother about the contents of the power point presentation slides being printed. When she came to collect the copies at the printer she said "Oh now I'll have to print these again." I stood there stultified by her words and demanded an explanation. Then she blurted out that her superviser did not like wastage of paper by printing a single slide on a page. Moreover he apparently said that its a waste of ink if the background of the original slides was dark. She did not want to rub him the wrong way so she would have to get the copies printed all over again. I was so outraged by the preposterous idea that I hit the false ceiling and left her with my desktop but not before I gave her a piece of my mind about how she was beating the whole purpose by wasting twice as much paper and not to mention : ink! Ludicrous as it may seem, her superviser would probably have given her medallion for her husbandry!

I have often wondered whether the idea of "unlimited food" you get in some vegetarian restaurants really serve any purpose. Very few people really manage to eat a second or third helping of most of the preparations or for that matter everything that's served on their plate especially since its so oily and satiating. I normally end up just having two or three of the dishes. In fact I have even made up my mind that in a la carte` restaurants as well I shall have the starters and straightaway take the desserts or maybe just sate my senses with the sights and smells of those delicacies: goes easy on the pocket and the stomach!

When I went shopping this weekend, I noticed that there is a total lack of standardisation in our clothing and footwear. Its easier when I stick to a brand that I have always used or a shop I have always purchased from. But that was not the case this time around. I found it ridiculous that a size "xyz" in a pair of jeans can range anywhere from not being able to even stuff myself into it to the jeans dropping off my waist depending on the brand! Oh right they were using different metric systems: one measured in FPS and the other in MKS. Or maybe I was shrinking and bloating every fifteen minutes! If size "xyz" is not what it says it is, then is it some codeword which has to be put through an RSA algorithm with different keys each time to figure what it actually stands for? Buying a pair of jeans is not as easy as walking into a store, asking for your size, picking your color and cut, paying up and zooming out! I spent a total of 4 hours in the trial rooms for two pairs of jeans. The salespersons were tearing their hair and my parents were hollering. My shopping adventures and misadventures will probably fill up another post, but it seemed appropriate to mention that when they have different sizes being passed off as the same, they are beating the whole purpose of measurement.

There can be innumerable ways to gloss over these incidents I have just recounted. My colleague was probably justified when she did not want to earn the displeasure of her senior and that was top priority to her. People are probably hoodwinked into believing that they can really eat unlimited food and that's how these restaurants run their economics. The clothing companies are probably not having any QA team to guide them. But all of it is speculation for it beats me when the purpose is beaten.

Coming back

2005-07-23T09:08:00.000-04:00

Note: The contents of this post are fraught with figuratives. The reader is requested to employ his or her imagination to figure it out.

Its funny how life comes to a full circle and then you are back to square one. (I am not sure now how I passed my geometry exams!) I have always vacillated whenever I stood on the crossroads unsure about which road to take. Sorry Mr. Frost I did not take the road less travelled. I have always kept my options open and believed in thinking of the bridge when I reach it. So, there have been several instances where the possibilities have been endless and I had become too spoilt by choices to make a choice. The reason for my indecision can range anywhere from being totally whimsical to having a backup plan to get cushioned from misfortune and sometimes a fear that walking on a particular path too far ahead might just not leave me with the choice of coming back.

Further there have been occasions when I missed the bus while trying to decide my destination in the first place and then had to take a circuitous route to reach it. My dad has often chided me for being a desultory wanderlust and much to his chagrin I have always maintained that "been there and done that" is better than totally shunning another possible avenue. He has always been a compulsive planner and a meticulous architect of his career. Contrastingly, my plans have always had a tendency to fail and I have always had trouble focussing single-mindedly on a particular area of interest, I like the round-robin way of doing things. That's why my fingers have always been in different pies as I stated in my earlier post. I went all the way to Mumbai to taste one of these pies. The Mumbai experience is yet another post and very soon I will get to sink my teeth into another one of those pies.

Sabbatical Sorrows

2005-07-17T02:50:00.000-04:00

It might seem a bit out of character that I choose to be expostulatory about my absence on my own blog for such a long period. What's more: it is not about my exploits, travelogue, perspective, poetry, politics or sports. Though I have always maintained that my scribblings are never aimed at pandering to the readers' interests, I deem it approproiate to apologize for the content of this particular post.

Caveat : You might find the words lacking zest and this entire post wanting some sense of purpose and direction.

My last post came in nearly a month back, so says blogger, though it actually seems a lot longer than that to me. Maybe it is Einstein's analogy of "time", at work. What's worse is, there has been so much happening around me that I myself have no control over and events that portend to have a decisive effect on my future. A nebula of uncertainty hangs over everything that envelops me. I have my fingers in different pies and I haven't a whit of an idea which one I am going to eat. How characteristically Libran!

A lot of you folks have been speculating on the reasons for my unannounced departure. I am glad that you people haven't abandoned this blog, despite the fact that I left it derelict for so long. I thank all of you for showing the interest and concern. Vc's monoacting on my previous post was comical indeed; thanks for always being there. Karthik, thanks for the concern you showed on orkut. SP, thanks for calling up and no, a blue Accent won't do! Hoh, thanks for coming to Pune, I had a good time.
I shall defer delving into the intricacies of events that transpired during this interlude, as I am pressed for time, my volatile memory fails me faithfully and I am faltering at every other step. When the mist clears, when I find the purchase that will let me surmount the daunting mountain that looms over me, when I find the space and time to retrospect I will share with all of you my reflections.

It goes without saying, that I am itching for this phase to pass over, get my hands on the keyboard and listen to the keys clatter rapidly as my thoughts flow through my fingers and get published as the next post. Much as I am need of patience, I need you folks to be patient with me too.

Weekend Wanderings

2005-06-26T10:10:00.000-04:00

I was enjoying the onset of the monsoon this weekend at Karla-Bhaja caves. The comprehensive travelogue is here complete with the snaps. Of course, I am not a very good web-designer for I make you guys click on too many links, but that's the cost of keeping my blogs free from clutter.

Fallen

2005-06-19T06:54:00.000-04:00

So far, this year has seen the celebrated heroes of sport being subverted by the underdogs.As the minnows rise to conquer, proving that diligence and perseverence are the right ingredients for success, I wonder if it is so much about success as it is about retaining that success unperturbed by all the chaos around filled with critics and fans who write an encomuim one day and then write your obituary the next day.

The year began with the formidable Fedex being routed by Marat Safin in the Australian open and then Rafael Nadal in the French Open. Has success become such an inveterate part of his life that it no longer fires his desire? He seemed to be complacent in the initial rounds against unknown faces. His shots were looking casual and there was a supercilious air to his demeanor. Did the heady success that he earned, very early on in his career, go to his head or was he trying to keep his attitude so cool that it froze his backhand returns?

In F1, the indomitable duo of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari had made the podium their home; but today they struggle to find their footing on it. Until last year, they had conquered the race tracks so consistently that a lot of people had started to find the lack of competition in F1 a big turn-off and today we see that even small fry like Heidfeld has more points than Michael.

The soccer field saw Liverpool pull off an unexpected and nail-biting victory over the favorites AC Milan in the UEFA Champions League. While the big bosses at UEFA were twiddling their thumbs wondering whether to let FA field 5 English teams in the subsequent UCL, Liverpool who are ranked at a consolatory 5th in the EPL rewrote soccer history. Was it just fluke as many dismiss it or a stroke of brilliance that came to the fore when the situation demanded it?

The latest to capitulate to this trend being the arrogant Aussie cricket team which fell with a resounding thud after baby Bangladesh blew their top order batsmen and then plundered the kangaroo bowlers in a historic debacle that left the Australian captain with an incredulous smirk plastered on his cherubic face. Of course, I rejoiced as much as I did when India won the Adelaide test. I guess the whole world did too, for I believe that despite their laudable reign at the helm of the cricketing world, they are not the true champions of cricket lovers. They have robbed the game of its traditional gentlemanliness and replaced it with a roguish imperiousness that becomes only of the pirates of the caribbean. While it is not easy to say whether this marks the beginning of their downfall, it definitely made them eat the proverbial humble pie.

On one hand, while we are enamored by the story of the underdog, we also look forward in anticipation for the phoenix to rise from the ashes and regain its lost glory. As the mighty bite the dust and the dark horses race to victory, the fact remains that as long as the winner is able to wear the diadem of success without letting himself be crushed under its weight he shall go down the annals of sport as a true champ.

Washing My Blues

2005-06-17T08:26:00.000-04:00

“Young lady, in our days, even a table fan was a luxury”, was a common admonishing refrain I heard from some not-so-techno-savvy-elders whenever I raised an issue about some medieval mechanism lying around in the house. Try telling them that it is not the order of the day to think like that in an age, when the P4 becomes as archaic as a Von Neumann before you can bat an eyelid, and you can be assured that a harangue of ‘Old is Gold’ is going to hit you next.

We got our first washing machine way back in 1991. At that point of time, the bourgeoisie had not thought of going beyond manual labor for something as complex as washing clothes. Machines, they thought, were meant to be in factories, to churn out tonnes of identical goods and washing and drying required far superior cognition than a mere machine could afford. Anyway, it did not really matter to my mother that it was a semi-automatic. She was so fascinated by it that she spent hours wiping and washing its tubs and tubes and keeping it sparkling clean. Her incessant kvelling over her new possession was actually beating the whole purpose of reduced labor and time expended on mundane activities. And then of course, since washing technology was still nascent in those days, we could not have expected some sophisticated child locking system. So the blanket rule was that any entity below four feet, found fiddling with the buttons, had to face the dire consequences of standing in the balcony without any toys for one hour.

As the years flew by, houses changed, TVs and refrigerators changed, nail clippers changed, and of course computers changed. The world was marching into a new millennium with dreams of an automated tomorrow; and here my mother clung onto her dear semi-automatic like it was some bequest from her great grandmother. We tried to discuss at length its retirement to an old age home (Juna Bazaar). I even perused some interesting CVs of prospective replacements. “7 sensor wash tub-why do I need a robot to wash my clothes?” “Fuzzy logic…you mean bubble logic right?” “Programmed wash…hey isn’t that what you do…I can’t handle such a complicated machine!!!” With these kind of responses I knew I was dealing with one tough customer! She would not buy any of my arguments. “Besides, I do not have a single complaint against my old one”. And that did it. We, the management did not have a good enough reason to give it the pink slip.

A couple of years later it started to show signs of depreciation. Its battered inlet pipe refused to fit into the faucet. Now, I thought was the opportune moment to reopen the “Operation Wash out case”. But much to my chagrin, my joy was short lived. My ever-so-ingenious father picked up a reusable rubber holder to keep it snugly in place and sneered at us engineers for not having “applied thought”. So there was the vintage machine dutifully extracting more manual intervention from my mother than it actually deserved. So much, that I even started to imagine this to be a smash hit script for Matrix-IV “Top-Loaded”.

I had just started to resign to my fate, when the machine started developing serious mechanical problems. It had start to groan as if ready to kick the bucket and was stubborn enough to refuse to spin dry the clothes. I was called in for the diagnosis. “Bearings are weak, perhaps even a motor failure” I said nonchalantly without the slightest clue about the what those words meant. My mother gasped at the enormity of the words. “Is there no way out?” she asked so endearingly that I wished I could end the charade. I ruminated thoughtfully, “Maybe if a part transplant from the Japanese makers was possible, it might survive, or else it is …”, I signalled a decapitation. I had almost begun to imagine a funeral and a memorable epitaph on the tombstone of the deceased, when the infernal machine roared to life the very next day as if nothing had happened. And that was the last straw.

Today, it is still there and it can no longer be called semi-automatic or quarter-automatic or anywhere even fractionally close to automatic. As I see it day in and day out leak oil, occasionally splutter and belch, I try to give my mother one of those looks of reproach and tell her that it does not even deserve to be in the museum, I know my sarcasm goes unheard because all she says is “Hail Hitachi”.

Vanity Fare

2005-06-14T12:20:00.000-04:00

There are some peculiar subspecies of the Homo sapiens that can spotted from several nautical miles away as the ones you'd rather keep right there : several nautical miles away, namely, phonies, bullies, braggadocios or better still a combination of two or more of these. Surprisingly, these people display similar symptoms : narcissism and an unparalleled level of egotism.

The braggart is normally the most harmless of the lot. You'll normally find a coterie of ingenuous myrmidons hovering around him to listen wide-eyed to his tales of bravado that he can conjure up even in a comatose state. There is never an occasion when he fails to regale his audience with his material acquisitions and feats. The latest gadgets, fashion accessories, designer apparel and vehicles which would normally be coveted by his reverent minions would be his perpetual means of captivating his devotees. Of course the price tag, hologram of authentication and "Made in " tag should be conspicuously displayed for veering the talk to munificent kin who showered their largesse on him. Fortunately, there isn't much he can do apart from blowing his own trumpet, as you could just dismiss his Versace suit by saying that Khadi has a better feel.

Browbeaters are in a league of their own because there isn't much that they see beyond their own preponderance. While the traditional bullies like Moe in Calvin and Hobbes have only remained in caricatures, the new-age bullies employ tools like emotional blackmail with such adeptness that you start wondering if they were born with a degree in Human Psychology. They possess such supreme confidence in the power of coercion and blandishment that there isn't much you can do to wriggle out of the situation except follow the tenet "If you can't beat them join them." or rather "Give them a dose of their own medicine".

Hypocrites or the pretenders take it a step further: they can range anywhere from innocuous wannabes to two-faced gargoyles. The wannabes are usually loyal adherents of the braggart since they lack a mind of their own. They show-off their fake Levi's and counterfeit Swatches "Made at USA" (Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association for the uninitiated) in a quest to emulate their idol. The double-crossing ones are more baleful. It's never easy to tell where the catch is in their actions and words. Further, when you question their inconsistent behaviour, they provide you with a perfectly reasonable explanation for their deeds to which you conveniently acquiesce since it appeals to your logic. Then after eons have elapsed, you begin to realize that you have been taken for a camel ride in the Sahara desert with Switzerland pictures as the screensaver in your cerebral monitor.

While we loathe these specimens of extreme ego, we ourselves are not exactly edifices of modesty. Even so, there is a voice in our head that chides us for overstepping the thin line that separates self-respect from self-advertisement, urging someone for a favor from breathing down their necks and presenting oneself differently in different situations from misleading people with capricious behaviour. Unfortunately for the tyrannical trio that voice gets drowned by the fanfare of vanity.

Aperture of my eye

2005-06-12T01:04:00.000-04:00

My mom has opened a free bistro inside our house, before you start inquiring about the menu and cuisines, I'd like to clarify that it is not meant for Homo Sapiens: its for those who enter the house through the kitchen window of our 4th floor apartment.
While her clientele has grown manifolds over the past two and a half years, its only recently that I have taken the interest in photographing the furry and feathered visitors. Recounting the entire saga of the inception and development of this queer but gratifying pursuit, is not my intention: mom has already done so with aplomb, through her articles in Women's Era and Mangayar Malar.
I have uploaded some of the images on my photo-blog to share them with all of you.

Love of Labor

2005-06-09T07:18:00.000-04:00

It is strange, the way, over the years, our aspirations and dreams keep metamorphosing in tandem with our capricious outlook towards the world surrounding us. In accordance with our labile ideals, our idols too get superceded by the latest victor, or should I say victim, of our fickle fascinations.

As toddlers, overwhelmed by the awe of the seemingly ‘prominent’ people around us, we were enamoured by the proletarians who epitomised physical labour and were, in literal terms, winners of their bread by sweat and blood. I recall, as a six year old wanting to be a stewardess, and it wasn’t just me, my brother wanted to be a mason, the neighbourhood tot wanted to be a farmer. A playmate of mine even used to say she wants to become an engine driver like her father, who was actually an engineer. Of course, we all fulfilled our dreams with make-believe games and role plays. I don’t have any regrets about not having gone ahead and realized my childhood quest; what astounds me is that the brushes with reality, ingrain in us a disdain for these very people whom we had apotheosized as guileless children. Over the years, either empirically or by conditioning, we have inevitably inferred that these “blue-collared” jobs have little prestige and offer miniscule remunerations. With that we conveniently topple the figurine of our fantasy to bite the dust.

I happened to observe that while we show utter contempt for physical labor in India, we relax these prejudices on foreign lands where a larger populace believes in the dignity of labor. The derision that we harbour is translated into a situation where there is a complete insouciance to the safety and well being of people in such professions. Contrastingly and quite ironically, given that countries like the US have capitalist economies, the safety of laborers is treated with the kind of gravity it deserves. While the contract based Indian laborers dangle precariously from the buildings, their American counterparts are well harnessed by laws that protect their interests. It so happens, that our movies also reflect our attitudes. While Hollywood glorifies labor, elevating it to a respectful status, with movies like Backdraft and Sudden Death, closer to home, Bollywood, seeks to paint a rosy picture of opulence of the aristrocrats, with chimerical movies like Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. While we had some interesting movies in the past like Coolie and Kalaa Patthar with protagonists being blue-collared laborers, the general tone of these movies was to rise above the bondage, to pioneer a rebellion against tyrannical managements and other issues that inundated the lives of these people in the process underlining the meniality: it was not a voice of pride and ardor for one’s job.

I cannot refute the fact that in today’s scenario the earnings are inversely proportional to the effort. While our infantile minds saw a limpid picture of labor, our adult eyes percieve it jaundiced by the lucre.

Breezy Rendezvous

2005-06-05T03:23:00.000-04:00

Into his outstretched arms, I rushed
He engulfed me in a mesmerizing embrace.
He threw my locks into rollicking ravels
Running his fingers through my billowing tresses.
I could feel his aura captivate my thought.
His rhythmic breathing tickled my neck,
Setting my palpitating heart aflutter
And palliating my mind of its encumbered weariness.
A waggish whiff serenaded my ears
As a chilling spasm permeated my being
'Twas an ephemeral gust that courted my senses
And departed leaving me in awestruck enamour.

--Kirthi Radhakrishnan

In My Elements

2005-05-29T23:13:00.000-04:00

The vast expanse of the azure sky
My inquisitive mind explores by disquisition
It ceaselessly questions the morality of hell and heaven
An insatiable quest for the paradise of learning

The undulating terrain of the imperious earth
Challenges the prowess of my ambition
To tread the perilious yet exhilirating path to glory
And scale the precipitous cliff of a success fulfilling

The merciful drops of the benevolent water
Bless my being with rejuvenating aspiration
Washing away the tears of regret and repentance
Purging the gory past with divine healing

The rambunctious gust of the puerile wind
Plays through my heart without inhibition
Goading me to chase my wild quixotic dreams
Vanquishing every trace of a trepidation of failing

The feisty blaze of the raging fire
Inside me ignites a maverick rebellion
That burns insular convention to amorphous ashes
And blazes a trail of neoteric thinking

At the end of life's peregrination
I would stand on the yonder horizon
Not questioning the eternal sky that embraces the unconquered sand
Not raging like the setting sun that dips into the benign sea
But rising with the gentle zephyr as the shadows lengthen
And disappear into a darkness of quiet oblivion.

Poetic Injustice: Sporting justice?

2005-05-23T10:32:00.000-04:00

I was watching the FA Cup final last weekend. Throughout the 90 minutes there were moments I wished that Theirry Henry would don his colors and jog onto the field, but he did not seem to show any inclination of taking off his suit. When the match entered extra time, I was almost feeling reassured that it would go into a penalty shootout (what my dad calls Russian Roulette). The final outcome: Gunners winning the FA Cup thanks to Lehmann's streak of brilliance (or stroke of good fortune) pleased me as much as the way they won it disappointed me. It hurled back at me a pertinent question about the extent to which technology should play a role in sports. Furthermore, on a larger perspective, what is the role of sports in society today.

From every corner of the world, we see technology making inevitable forays into the sporting world. It was this very technology that denied our Payyoli Express a medal and probably this very technology that has saved us some one day matches. Watching Cole and Toure get away with glaring handballs that could have cost Arsenal the match and within minutes watching Reyes being sent off the field for what looked like a Bollywood fight sequence where his hand barely made contact with Ronaldo's face, I wondered if in the world of sports sans technology, injustices got evened out (what we justify as being poetic justice). I cannot refute the fact that these "so-called" injustices took place in the past when the current technology was not readily available and that the players fate was at the mercy of the referees and umpires. Today we raise a rebuking finger at these pall-bearers of sporting justice, only because we have the means to point out their inerrancy. So why belittle our intelligence and make a mockery of their arbitration by showing a replay at tenth of the real speed? Instead if it were put to use by the third umpire it would completely obviate human error in judgement.

A lot of purists may counter that the sanctity of sport should not be desecrated by imposing on it the shackles of technology. While they cry themselves hoarse in favor of umpires on the field than off it, we have Biomechanists rewriting the rule books on bowling as though they expect the umpire to learn geometry and then measure the arm bends using imaginary protractors. As the two ends of the spectrum: the anti-technology zealots and the tehno-geeks battle it out in board-rooms, court-rooms, drawing-rooms and everywhere except on the playing field, we start to wonder what exactly is the essence of sports in our lives today? Is it, like the purists have us believe, the celebration of human spirit and sportsmanship: a display of sheer mental and physical prowess that transcends the boundaries of race, creed and religion, epitomizing the peerless qualities of humanity? Or is it a commodity sold to us like a form of new-age entertainment that has been created with a brand of being "live" with "no-cuts" and "no-retakes", that has our adrenaline pumping while we sit on the bean-bag?

I have a predilection to think it is the latter: the commercialisation is so rampant that it would not be too late before "nipple-gate" happens in India. When that happens, poetic justice and sporting injustices can be summarily thrown out of the window along with Themis : the blind lady of justice.

P's and Q's

2005-05-20T00:56:00.000-04:00

Apologies to all of you for my uninformed but brief absence from the blogging world. I was too tied up with mundane activities to indulge in such elevating pursuits like blogging. I cordially welcome back all those people who had been banned from viewing my blog since my last post. I would also like to thank each and everyone of you discerning readers, who not only keep my blog alive with your priceless comments but also egg me to surpass myself each time I sit down to type here.

It’s a strange scenario, when we learn to mind our manners all throughout our childhood with parents goading us to say “Thank you uncle” and “Sorry madam” and somehow we never carry it through to our adulthood. Not only do we not care for such niceties ourselves, but also chide those who display punctilious behaviour. I cannot quite ascertain what was the cause and what was the effect; but it has become more of a chicken and egg paradigm: is it our lowered expectations of decent behaviour that has eroded off years of propriety from our lives, or is it our adamant rebelliousness towards societal norms that has itself, become a norm.

We grew up with movies like Maine pyar Kiya where we were imbibed with new philosophy like “friends don’t say sorry and thank you.” Why on earth I wonder? Is saying a Thank you and a sorry so ceremonious and perfunctory that it sullies the sanctity and profundity of a relationship? Sure, I agree that these words when uttered like clichés appear like fake art, one can’t make out which one is genuine. But, I would definitely say “thank you” to my grandma whenever she gives me an oil massage, even though she dismisses my gratitude with a playful rap on my head, because I wholeheartedly appreciate her effort. Sometimes responses like “mention not” or “come on that was nothing” which are said to make oneself appear modest, make the thanker rethink if he was making a mountain of a mole hill by expressing some gratitude. “You are welcome” is seen more like an open agreement to offer more help so most people take the safer route with “Glad to be of help”.
Furthermore, we have become so used to being critical about ourselves, the system around us and paranoid about our performance that when genuine appreciation comes along we view it with a skepticism that would do the CIA proud. Our cynicism weans us away from savouring a moment of glory while, ironically, all that we really crave for is a pat on the back.

Apologising and owning up to one’s mistakes is an even more dangerous zone: especially when our egos grow exponentially once our physical height stabilizes. More so, in a case when it involves apologizing to a subordinate. Somehow, prima facie though it seems irrational, apologizing even when it is not one’s fault puts the true perpetrator into a guilt mode and an easier way to call it truce. It takes quite some character to openly admit one's error, because despite the common consensus on the infallibilty of humans, we are prone to nitpicking and guillotining others for their smallest lapses. I clearly recall an occassion when my grammar teacher in school had the heart to admit that she was wrong, the answer given by our classmate was right and that she stood corrected. I still hold her in high esteem because, although her English was immaculate and her knowledge profound, she could own up in front of a bunch of rambunctious teenagers waiting to pounce on her flaws.

We mind our manners only when the situation demands it: in the presence of superior authority, formal occassions and with strangers. As intimacy grows, the polished surface appears to discard its luster and assume a rugged and uncouth form: frankly our family and friends deserve better.

Beep Beep

2005-05-10T11:36:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: The author is not responsible for any damage caused to callow and prude minds after reading this post and therefore cannot be sued for objectionable language as the topic warrants that she use it.

Recommendation: For those readers for whom it is their wont to spew profane expletives it is a must read.

I happened to read an article in the newspaper a couple of weeks back about how kids of today's generation have become so precocious that they have started using adult lingo in their day-to-day conversation. I don't intend to sound like some overbearing toothless old hag here, but the truth of the matter is that I was shit scared to pronounce even the word "shit" in front of my parents. Kids learn by imitating their parents, so now we know how these toddlers learnt to say "bastard" and "bitch" before they learnt to sing "Baa baa black sheep". What's more is that, the parents have a cavalier attitude towards the kind of vocabulary that their children are developing because firstly, they lose the right to chasten the child having themselves used it liberally and secondly they find that once the child knows that something is a profanity and should not be used, the more the reason the kid wants to experiment with it (the forbidden apple psychology).

The repurcussions of such widespread use of profanities can extend anywhere from being facetious to outrageous. We can imagine a kid saying something like "fuck the fucking fucker" and also call the principal the son of a bitch. What was meant to be used with a great deal of discretion and to express an angst enormous enough to evoke such profanities, has now become such a platitude that we could probably go to the restaurant and say "Fuck will you get me a cappuchino".

I do not understand the rationale behind using these four-letter words in any case. Is it supposed to be an indication of how "sexually" liberated we have become and how our rebellious tongues freed our minds from the Victorian shackles? There are a great deal of confused folks particularly men who consider it 'macho' and 'gratifying' to use these words. Perhaps it could be ascribed to their limited vocabulary or, if I could be a little less unforgiving, they are too tongue-tied when they are irascible that four-letters are the best their fight or flight mechanism can conjure up. They have probably fucked and screwed a lot more people than they have shaken hands with: well that explains the population explosion.

Personally I find it immensely satisfying to curse in a language that nobody understands. For instance, Captain Haddock is a great inspiration in this regard. I would kill to look at the face of someone who has just been called a lily livered bandicoot or a bashi-bazouk.

Powerless

2005-05-05T10:16:00.000-04:00

It was only when I was within the city limits throughout the day, for the past one month or so, that I realized the kind of agony that Puneites have been subjected to owing to the drastic loadshedding. The perpetually malevolent MSEB comes up with innovative schemes to torment the citizens of Maharashtra. As if that were not enough the State Government has also become a conniving partner in their machinations.

The current State Government (NCP, Congress coalition) was elected after canvassing with great fanfare for providing free electricity to the agrarian community. Today, it is this very Energy Minister D. Walse Patil who sits in his AC room and nonchalantly shrugs his shoulder saying, "It is a load shedding of ‘only’ 9 hours per day in the rural areas and 4 hours per day in the urban areas." If only I could bust the power supply to his house and see his corpulent body roasted in the summer heat. The opposition party workers of Shiv Sena ransacked the MSEB offices to vent their ire on behalf of the citizens and Nitin Gadkari did not mince his words when he said that the government has to face the music. Little did he realize that only when we have electricity, can we play any music for the government to face!

Our government enterprises (or the notoriously retrograde machinery of our country called PSUs) have a penchant for digging a well when they start feeling thirsty or when their lethargic asses are on fire. What's worse is their complete refusal to concede their callousness in any planning and the current chairman unabashedly admits that we fall short of 4000MW. Whatever happened to the short-term and the long-term 5 year plans? Or did they exist only in civics text books in school? When Maharashtra was not reeling under the kind of power crisis that it faces today, the former chairman of MSEB had the gall to say that we have excess power generation and had been munificent enough to lend it to some destitute neighbouring states. Today, as Maharashtra's industrial development is burgeoning the government and the MSEB are culpable for impeding growth and not maintaining a vital infrastructure like electricity. The state's exchequer is an impoverished beggar burdened with debts from all over the world and this was the last straw enough to repel any entrepreneur from setting shop here and encouraging several others to migrate to greener pastures.

The reason our sinister ministers don't see the import of the crisis at hand is because they sit in their cushy headquarters in Mumbai, which is given a precedence over other cities of the state when it comes to such issues because it is the economic hub of not only the state but also the entire nation. While the rest of the state is held ransom by the MSEB, the mollycoddled Mumbaiites go up in arms when some electronic billboards don’t get power supply. They can afford to luxuriously bask in the warmth of their neon lights only because their electricity supply is not state owned. Why then can’t the rest of the state also emulate a similar arrangement with the private sector? Why are the industrial belts in Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Nashik being given step-sisterly treatment over the ones in Kalyan and Thane? With the Dabhol power project mired in controversies and legal loopholes and the current government in coalition with some anti-disinvestment species of Marxist origin sitting at the helm in the center, we can safely perish any notions of fully privatised electricity.

Incidentally, yesterday, a thunderstorm hit Pune and wrecked a great deal of electric poles disrupting the already spartan electricity supply to a large part of the city. After enduring 24 hours of powerless life, I am sure, most of us would appreciate the fact that we have power for a good 20 hours a day.

As we breathe technology through every living instance of our lives, right from basic necessities like water, cooking and lighting to luxuries (which unfortunately outweigh the necessities) like entertainment, cooling and communication, we realize how suffocated we feel in today’s world without the oxygen of technology called electricity.

Post It

2005-04-30T05:41:00.000-04:00

It has been ages since I had been to a post office. As a toddler I would often accompany my grandma to the local post office only because I could romp around with the hens from the poultry farm on the way. I suppose all the years of learning through the school days about informal and business letter writing have all been overwritten with information about email-etiquette. My mother on the other hand still believes in the beauty of an antediluvian art called snail-mail. In fact when I was away from home, she unfailingly wrote a letter every week and I would lazily saunter to the PC in the next room and type out a reply and hit send without a second thought that she had taken the trouble to buy stamps and trudge to the post office to communicate with me.

Unfortunately for me, today I had to reply to a business letter by snail mail as I did not want to risk giving out my credit card number on the internet. So there I was rummaging through the desk for an envelope apparently something that I only see as a virtual icon on my outlook. After all the trouble of finding one of the right size, it dawned that despite the philatelic interests that I pursue, I do not possess a single postage stamps worthy of using. While my mother gloated over her minor victory in the battle she believed she was waging against me on behalf of all the troglodytes of the yore, she informed me that the post office is open on Saturdays only for 3 hours in the morning. "Hah!" I retorted, "imagine yahoo and hotmail informing the users that they can send mails only from 10 am to 1pm."

As I reached the post office, reminscing about my childhood exploits, I found it more like a congregation of senior citizens. I was one of the very few youngsters standing in queue for the stamps. The old man standing ahead of me gave me a warm, benign smile which more or less said, "Welcome to our world". All of a sudden the lady at the counter decided that communication was to be stalled as it was time for her tea-break (just imagine the trouble people face when the mail server goes down for maintainence). The irritation on my face was becoming palpable and the old man gave me a reassuring look and said, "Don't worry she'll be back." He then asked me where I wanted to send it. When I told him I wanted to send a registered post, he authoritatively took out an antiquated ink pen which looked straight from the local museum and pointed out that I had to write registered post on the top and the sender's name and address on the back of the envelope. He even marked the "from" title for me and if I had not stopped him, he would have gone right ahead and filled it up for me. At that point of time, I was amused at the irony of the whole situation. I had just about managed to teach my grandma about emails and mobile phones and here this patronizing old man was teaching me about how to grapple with letters and stamps. I played along and let him be my teacher. As I was entering my address, I was fumbling for the pin code (I have an uncanny knack of forgetting my own address and residential phone number), he told me in a consolatory tone, "Don't be in a hurry. Take your time.She won't take another tea break yet." at which I smiled sheepishly for being such a distrait clown. Then as I bought the stamps, he handed over the tray of obnoxious looking blue paste, which they claim is an adhesive. I could not bring myself to touch that infernal semisolid gunk and I could see that "you spoilt youngsters" look pervading through his face. As I handed the envelope to her and thanked the old man, I promised myself that I would try to be more appreciative of people who continue to seal their letters with a kiss and stamp it with love despite the quantum leap that today's communication has made.

When the old man gets back home, he'd probably tell his grandchildren, that he met a member of their Gen-X who got lost in his world and how he gallantly extricated her out of the mind boggling quagmire of postage stamps and envelopes.

Dressing down

2005-04-24T06:09:00.000-04:00

Apology: Sorry, I shall not be providing a glossary with this post for all the esoteric words that I have robbed from the fashion world, for I myself don't know the meaning of half of them.

As a lay person looking at the fashion world which never ceases to amuse me, I find the LIFW a major source of entertainment: with anorexic femme fatales sashaying down the ramp wearing skimpy clothes that are supposed to make a "style statement". I would often wonder if this was some new-age art form that has become an integral part of global culture. Just last week my hypothesis was confirmed when the designers started branding their goodies as "wearable", implying that so far they were not!! Well, just let that designer wear her own creations and travel by public transport everyday then we can talk about how wonderful the A-lines and the silhouttes are.

Then there are the omniscient fashion critics or "gurus" (u see desi is "in" these days) who allegedly can shred a Sabyasachi apparel to pieces. I just realized that there are so many dare-I-call-them professions that are so inane and redundant that we can probably hire all the unemployed and claim hundred percent employment. These folks actually get interviewed for their "insightful and knowledgeable" verdict on these fashion shows. Just throw words of fashion jargon into the air and voila you have the journos eating out of your hand. Talk about spangles, accessories, glossy and matted looks, layers, embroidery and abracadabra you have three hours of utterly futile fashion talk.

I wondered who actually would wear such ghastly attire? The models of course get paid a good handsome price to don them. In fact one of the news channels was having a sneak peak into the green room of one the designers. The reporter decided to interview the model who was getting made up. The cameraman was trying very hard to focus on her face but all the colorful chop sticks (I don't know what they were called in fashion lingo) in her hair veiled her pretty pied face which had splashes of green and fluorescent yellow.

Reporter: What do you think of the Fashion Week this time and the kind of clothes that you have been sporting?
Model: (trying to look in the right direction) I think the clothes and the make-up is pretty understated(I could have killed myself with laughter). There is a lot of stress on accessories this time around....

Just as though her face was not gory enough to scare Godzilla away, the make up girl dabbed some more grease paint on her face.
But seriously, are the designers supposed to cater to the needs of the buyers (if there are any) or the buyers supposed to buy them just because it is a Ritu Beri or a Malini Ramani? There was a time when I believed that fashion stays right where it belongs - on the ramp and never gets off the shelves. But recently when I heard that colleague bought a designer dress for a whopping unquotable unearthly price, I was reassured that insanity keeps the cash registers ringing for these folks. There are also some jobless people driven by herd mentality who not only follow whether bootcut jeans and stilletos are in or out but also emulate it in real life.

Personally I care two hoots for trends, I prefer going to an emporium and buying my own cottons and getting them stitched the way I want. In fact it gives me a sense of satisfaction that I have bought it from the indigenous weavers who are pretty under-rated in this country.

We live in a world where ostentation and peripherals take a precedence over utility and durability. In the quest of being unique in style, we as consumers ultimately end up following trends or patterns set by someone else: so whats all the talk about the so-called novelty? Apart from driving the consumers to becoming one of the herd, there is a certain pretence that pervades through the entire gamut of the fashion industry. The ramp is a world where the ragamuffin/banjaran/gypsie look gets the plaudits while the real-life ragamuffins and banjarans can rot in their abject doom.

The evanescent flicker

2005-04-22T10:56:00.000-04:00

He stood in solitude in the looming darkness,
A candle of unrequited love mired in a tempest,
He burnt himself in futile waiting,
For a ray of hope to enliven his being.
But she turned deaf to his heart-rending pleas,
And blind to the drops, rolling down his cheeks.
Leaving time to heal his damaged destiny;
As she watched him melt into oblivion.
She thought the dying flame would leave no trace,
But in the hardened wax she could still see his face.
-- Kirthi Radhakrishnan.

Divine Ablution

2005-04-17T12:08:00.000-04:00

Scorched by the fury of the sun ablaze,
That breathed fire with every passing day,
She tirelessly strode on the long trodden path,
Undettered by the sun's bludgeoning wrath.

She bore the semblance of a withered woman:
Her parched barren body burning in penance,
Seeking penitence for her fallible progeny,
To emancipate them of their sins and ignominy.

As if to answer her solemn prayer,
The flowers at the alter had fruits to bear,
Benign clouds engulfed the sky incandescent,
The air was redolent with an earthy scent.

They poured copious showers of blessings,
Purging her defiled body with holy drops,
The heavens thundered : an augur of rebirth,
Singing paeans of a sanctified Mother Earth.

--Kirthi Radhakrishnan

April showers bring May flowers

2005-04-15T09:50:00.000-04:00

The heat here was getting pretty much unbearable. With trees being cut down like someone was mowing the lawn, the Pune skyline was looking like a crew cut army cadet. The hopes of traditional April showers had weaned over the years and I could hear dad talk about the Pune of the yore, summer after summer.
But this time, the Gods were to prove him wrong and the skies were filled with ominous clouds last afternoon and burst into spontaneous showers as if answer the prayers of the arid and scorched soil. For the first time I was seeing it hail, something that dad used to write about in his letters, years back, when I was happily getting roasted in my summer vacations in Chennai while he drenched himself here. And today I witnessed those much touted, enigmatic downpours from heaven. I was talking on the phone and I was screeching with ecstasy. As I stepped into the balcony to enjoy the weather despite my sore throat, I espied my parents in the other balcony. My dad, in his childlike glee was collecting the hail and handing it over to mom who was squealing in delight like a little girl. After all these years there seemed to be a heartwarming magic between them. I was rummaging for my camera to capture that moment for posterity. Just then a lightning flashed across the grays and I smiled, as I knew that God had clicked the Kodak moment before I could.

Mumbai Mania

2005-04-07T10:39:00.000-04:00

Sorry junta was not able to post for sometime. I was in Mumbai last weekend. Had a real blast. I have taken the "pains" to type a vivid report of it. So you jolly-well read it and like it!! Would have loved to share some pix, will try to upload when possible.
PS: There are some links on the blog which get more detailed than ever!! Brevity was always my bigest enemy :( !! Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!!

Mum's the word

2005-03-29T06:23:00.000-05:00

Mom was away for a week for grandma's 80th birthday. I had to take the reins of the kitchen and the housekeeping from her. I was not quite prepared for the onerous task which undoubtedly was also tedious and physically demanding. Being a typical lazy Libran the ennui set in sooner than expected. At the end of day one, I wanted to fly off to any god forsaken country like Ethiopia.

It made me wonder though, why my generation happens to be so loathful and lethargic when it comes to housework. Everything has to be automated right from washing and cleaning to cooking and shopping. My mom would wax eloquent about how she managed her studies and the home when her mother went for pilgrimages months on end. The tales of her deeds made me revere her like she was a woman Hercules. That was only till I heard of my grandma's feats. Fetch water from the river, wash clothes and vessels in the river, cook a complete south indian meal, milk cows and buffaloes, tend the cattle, collect and dry the cowdung (disgusting) all at the age of 12 years. While I at the age of 12 did not know how to braid my own hair!! Manual labour, over the three generations has been on the declivity. My grandma at 80 is fit as a race horse and still handling household chores in Chennai cheerfully as ever, my mom takes an ocassional break from the tedium, while I show outright disinclination for anything in the kitchen and prefer pressing buttons.

Technology has made our generation a bunch of spoilt brats according to mom. We have it too easy, to appreciate the value of labour. Simple things like making a meal for the family has become so tiresome that we prefer take-out and reheated food. Our palates and olfactory senses have been benumbed by so much of trash that we have forgotten how to relish a meal made lovingly at home. Simplicity and homeliness have lost their way in this world of Thai Lebanese and Mexican cuisines. Incidentally, I happened to learn how to make Chinese fried rice before I learnt how to make sambar.

We have all the necessary amenities to make our life cushy and comfortable. And yes, despite mom being staunchly anti-technology we do use all the household appliances. It takes her probably more time to get acclimatised and learn the wherewithalls of the machines. During one such instance, she strained her back trying to free the ceilings of the ugly cobwebs using the new vacuum cleaner. It so happened that grandma was around too. And then I got a sense of deja vu when she told my mom, " Your generation has been spoilt by technology! Look at yourself... one cobweb broke your back!!" So saying she lifted the broom and deftly removed the cobweb without too much fuss.

What lies Beneath

2005-03-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

Silent waters of calm flow non-chalantly
A visage of quiesence and serenity
Is there more than meets the eye
At the river bed that the surfaces belie?

Gently breathing through the leaves,
The zephyr mellifluous plays along,
I hear not the imminent portent
Is this the calm before the storm?

I wish not; to skim the facade of quietude
But to plunge into a profound undiscovered world
I desire not; to be captivated by the fleeting tune
But to listen to the song unsung, unheard.

- Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Have mercy

2005-03-26T06:32:00.000-05:00

This is probably the first time I can say I don’t have an opinion and it’s actually killing me!! Euthanasia or Mercy killing has been hitting the headlines on every medium. It is an ethical issue for the medical fraternity to be “putting to sleep” the patient when he/she has gone beyond a point of recovery. Wonder why it is non-issue when it comes to pets: is it because they are incapable of expressing their instinct to live?

Looking at it from the perspective of the kith and kin of the diseased/comatose patient, it seems agonizing to see someone suffer and whither away every single day. When the end seems imminent, why not keep it dignified and less painful? It seems unjustified that life should be artificially pumped into an unresponsive body that has been afflicted by fatal illness. What purpose would it serve to keep someone alive on life support systems for a few months, when the probability of him/her recovering is so miniscule?

On the flip side, the very fact that the light of life has not yet been extinguished from the body speaks volumes of its desire to fight death. Science has, so far not been able to answer the pertinent question as to why some organisms continue to survive despite medically being unfit to live. Nature’s law of survival of the fittest has been in the firing line several times. Does fitness always imply physically and physiologically? Survival is a basic instinct of every living organism right from a unicellular amoeba to the blue whale. Why do some people come back to life when they have been declared clinically dead? The will to live has no rational explanation.

Then comes the moot question: Is it our prerogative to decide if a person should die-we cannot be playing God! We cannot speak for someone who is incapable of volition. But then again, when hundreds are killed wantonly in wars we do not ask ourselves about our right to take someone’s life. Moreover, the same question can be turned around as: do we have a right to flout the law of natural selection and retain a life, which would have been eliminated by natural death?

The more we inch towards the elusive elixir to keep our human race sustained and immortal, the more these ethical issues mire our medical world. Moralistic questions do not have universality in their answers, so one man’s life may mean another’s death.

Kandid with Karan

2005-03-20T22:28:00.000-05:00

Wonder what made me watch Koffee with Karan after having heard horrendous reviews about it. Probably it was because the guests were Konkona Sen and Rahul Bose. Karan was effusively effeminate, well nothing better could have been expected from him. Rahul couldn't have been better at his kick ass best!! Konkona in a Fuschia pink saree looked pretty and was mincing her words which I found was terribly unbecoming of her.

Rahul Bose stole all the thunder with his candour. He wasn't there to butter big daddy up just because he wasn't having a penthouse in Juhu. He was "splitting wide open" the truth and laying it bare for all to see: 95% films made around the world are trash, Bollywood musicals (a euphemistic way of calling Nach-gaana) had mindless pieces of dance sequences that spoilt the integrity of the film and they were meant to be fast forwarded. When asked what he thought about serenading to the heroine the way SRK does over and over again, he said it took a lot more effort from him to get his act right in split wide open and his gesticulations perfect in kalpurush. Karan thought he nailed him down by asking him how he felt when all his lead heroines went on to win accolades like the national award, he said he felt depressed and vindictive so much that he was making plans to murder every one of them. Touche`!!

Rahul's quips had me in rotfloling right till the very end. The rapid fire round (Q: What do you think about Saas Bahu serials? A: Kalashnikov rifles!!) and the lipsycn with the soap (Mujhe leg spin aati hai, off spin aati hai, magar googly nahin aati) were hilarious. Konkona on the other hand, was either not sure whether she was going to be forthright on the show, or she was just being plain dumb.

Its been quite a while since I have seen a celebrity interview shorn of any sycophancy, giggly girliness (Karan has all the ingredients for it with his pouty lips which would put Bipasha Basu to shame) and white flowers (read Simi Garewal's rendezvous). Kandifloss Karan has to taste bitter Koffee from time to time.

Visa Power

2005-03-19T07:40:00.000-05:00

Note: This page is not going to give you any advice on how to use your credit cards.

So, this week saw Modi being denied a US visa. I am not a member of the RSS or any of its coterie of like-minded political parties, but I certainly feel a great deal of indignation about the way the US chose to prevent him from entering their "highly-sanctified" soil. That very soil that produced inhuman brutes of today. If the Gujarat riot was the bone of contention and Human Rights the issue then I wonder if any of their benevolent senators, Governors and Presidents would be valid citizens of their "saintly" nation let alone sit at its helm. People living in glasshouses should not be throwing stones at others. President George Bush: words are too mild to describe his villany, for having used US military force in Iraq and having in full consciousness got several humans (Iraqis and Americans) killed in a war fuelled by personal vendatta, he should be banished from America. To add to this we have our own diaspora campaign against Modi's visit. We all talk about humanity being a greater emotion that should transcend geographical borders; but is shouting from the Rockies about Modi's atrocities going to change or bring back human lives?

I whole heartedly agree that Modi is not fit to hold office in Gujurat and that his macabre acts have brought all of us Indians to see this shameful day. He deserves to be condemned for his murderous motives, however not at global level. This is not an international issue : but as usual the US being the "universal upholder of truth and justice" needs to intervene and perhaps prosecute Modi in an international court. Moreover, I do not see how President Musharraf is permitted to enter the hallowed US of A when his countrymen have been openly incriminated for terrorist acts in India.

By denying entry into their country, the US has reiterated that they have the rights to call the shots of a movie of which they are not even the dictators (oops...directors). Maybe we should learn to throw our Indian weights around in this world as well. Perhaps, frisk Condi at all Indian airports, refuse the President Musharraf a ticket to the test match.....on second thoughts, let's just cancel Bucknor's visa and send him back to West Indies, maybe then we can hope for a win.

The Rationale behind Relations

2005-03-14T03:20:00.000-05:00

I have seen a strange way things work when we explore new relationships in our lives. Be it friendship, acquaintances, colleagues or that “special” someone; there is a peculiar course that the entire experience takes, that I can, from personal experience, generalize over all relationships.

No matter how much I prevent myself from being judgemental, invariably I do indulge in trusting my first impressions a lot. I won’t say that they are the be all and end all images of a person. But I like to put it this way, “not guilty until proven otherwise”. Oh yes, I am open to correcting and altering my opinion: not because of someone else’s prejudice but because of my own observations. When it comes to first impressions, what is it after all: a gut feeling. I won’t call it impulsive or instinctive, I’d rather put it in the higher level - the intuitive.

The intial phase is that of discovery and exploration. It can be anything from sports and favorite movies to tech talk and gothrams. It is actually a very insightful odyssey learning about someone from his/her interests and beliefs. This is where I really look for pointers about how “compatible” I am with a person or should I call it wavelength matching. Of course, I do trust that information provided by the person during this phase is 100% true. This is a period when the relationship is on its acclivity because there is a lot of time and energy going into building it.

When there are common threads to bind two persons together, like interests and hobbies, then gelling with the other person becomes a lot easier. I have heard a lot of talk about opposites attracting. But it doesn’t quite work everytime. I feel a lot more at home with people who share my tastes and beliefs. I can’t go on talking about art movies and nature to a finance junkie. At least in my case, I believe that birds of the same feather flock together.

A period of lull normally follows after having exhausted all the reasons for interaction. I normally find that two things happen when this sets in: either both of us decide to enjoy the others’ silence or the silence is so disconcerting that it becomes a tacit reason to fall apart. I accept both fallouts as a valid result of this stage. If it is the former, then it means that we are mature enough to accept that our relationship has reached a state where we don’t need to make conscious efforts to “keep in touch” or “keep a tab” on each other’s daily routine. We have grown out of that and have let each other have the space to retrospect and introspect. In the latter case, it is possible that the sagging interactivity levels may invoke two different reactions. For one, there might be a violent need to be constantly in touch with the other because it has become like an addiction; which might be seen as intrusive by the second party. Secondly, the silence leads to an ego-fed cold war that normally ends in a break up. This is where the endurance of the relationship is tested.

There are innumerable occasions when both parties are put through acid tests. It can be times of trials and tribulations, pangs of jealousy, petty rows over which restaurant is better and moments of truth. There maybe ugly face offs, skeletons coming out of the cupboard and true colours being revealed during such incidents. In every single gesture and reaction and with every word we speak, we unknowingly unravel a new facet of our personality and somehow it gets cached in the human memory. When we learn to accept and embrace a person with his/her idiosyncracies that’s when we’ve learnt to see the bigger picture despite knowing the true vignette down to its last strand of hair.

If everything is always hunky dory, it means that the relationship never got going anywhere. It is a warning sign of a superficial bond that is precariously resting on the precept that you have to always appease the other party. Without a few daggers drawn and minor personality clashes, there will be no zing left in the whole process.

A relationship is like an emotional roller-coaster ride, there will be moments when the bumpiness gets too queasy for comfort. But hold on tight and go headlong into it. When the wind hits your face, it might just feel like flying into free skies or on the other hand it might feel like plummeting into an abyssmal chasm. Whichever way, it is an experience of a life time.

Con"flag"ration

2005-03-06T00:43:00.000-05:00

In a country, where it is like moving the Himalayas to get people to feel a sense of national pride, the latest rules on public display of the national flag only added fuel to fire. It seems unreasonable that a player should be disallowed from donning the national colors. Denigration of the national flag is an irrational pretext.

Has anyone ever raised his voice when our jingoistic politicians splurge on streamers of the national flag which remain trailing, defiled and sullied after it has won their election for them? So much for respecting the national flag, that we can gloat over a picture of our Railway Minister and the honorable former CM of Bihar sitting through the National Anthem. How many of our saintly politicians even know the significance of the Ashok Chakra to disallow it from an attire?

Moreover, the essence of sportsmanship, where representing one's country is as much an honour as guarding one's borders, has been trivialized by this ordinance. I still recall swelling with pride each time Sachin kissed the tricolor on his helmet, Rajyavardhan Rathore wrapped in the Tiranga, Harbhajan waving the flag on his victory lap to cheering spectators. And it is we who carp about sportsmen lacking any national pride. Isn't it invigorating to see thousands of cricket fans chant slogans wearing tricolour bandanas, faces painted in saffron white and green goading our eleven on the field? No, I am not degenerating the idea of patriotism by embodying it in a "mere" national flag. It is the misplaced sense of propriety, the bureaucrats and the politicians are imposing on the general public, that has peeved me to no end.

The Flag, the Anthem, the Ashok Chakra, however symbolic they appear to be, stand as a constant reminder of our identity through the ravages of time and space. Today, if conscious nationalism is not sold to us, there will be millions of crazy identity-lacking Indians buying apparel that conspicuously flashes the American star and stripes and probably singing the Star Spangled Banner.

Copy Paste

2005-03-04T01:47:00.000-05:00

I believe, most of our childhood we have spent in learning by imitating the actions of the people around us. We grew up aping our idols, be it our favorite teacher, favorite actor or even our parents. We learnt speech and script by simulating others actions. Has this set in a trend for our duplicating actions even when we have grown out of that mode of learning?

The incident of mass copying that occured in Hutatma Rajguru school during the HSC exams set me thinking. Of course, we have a hazaar excuses for unfair means used in exams: parental pressure, fear of failure and all that jazz. To me it is as plain and simple as laziness. Why would I want to apply my own brains when I can use someone else's! It goes without saying that the someone else to whom the brain belongs, gets no dues for using his own.

In a country where people turn a blind eye to copying at the school level itself, it should not come as a surprise that it is rampant in the adult world. Plagiarizing must be considered a peccadillo in a country where copyright means right to copy. Sahara's "Karishma..." versus Barbara Bradford's "A woman of substance" is just one case in point. I would not be too wrong if I said (much to Amitabh Bachchan's disgust) that Bollywood is a pastiche of Hollywood. If each of the Hollywood script writers started prosecuting their Indian counterparts for violation of IP and copyrights, they would soon be able to fund all their movies without having to go to production companies.

Incidently, I was also reading the book "Honour Among thieves" by Jeffrey Archer, had a lot of copies of the America's Declaration Of Independence. Ironical, that the American Intelligence sacrificed three lives for a counterfeit. Sorry guys those who haven't read the book; its not worth your while.

Well, what can I say but that our lives are Powered By Ctrl-C and Driven By Ctrl-V (now where did I hear that one!!).

Scribe Scribble

2005-02-28T21:54:00.000-05:00

Scribes belonging to all forms of media, be it print or electronic, had a field day last evening. They had an array of events happening on the local, national and global scale: in the fields of cinema, economics and sports. What would normally have fed the journalists enough to chew on for over a week was occuring all in one day: the union budget, the oscars and the Pakistan cricket team arriving in India. And boy, am I happy for them: at least it kept them on their toes!! Especially since this comes week after Indian media took a beating at the hands of a Saurabh Singh who had everyone from the media to NASA (the real one) taken for a real ride.

There are times when lack of "news" forced journalists to nitpicking over non-issues, "unearthing" the deplorable living conditions of some obscure tribals in Lakshadweep (as if they are to win the Magsaysay award for their discovery) and what is popularly known as yellow journalism. I even believe there would be a time when our favorite news channel would film a colony of ants on a local anthill and have a three hour assessment on social impact of ants in the household sector.

Has competition in the media led to degraded quality of news coverage? Is there so much news that can only be satiated by having more news channels to fill out TV bandwidths? Is it why journalists ask perfectly pertinent questions like "Aapko kaise lag raha hai?" to tsunami victims who lost life and property to nature's fury? Is it why psephologists, who only speculate on exit polls and stock experts, who have no clue about why the market behaves the way it does, become our primetime heroes?

While you ponder over these questions that profoundly impact and reflect contemporary socio-politico-economic situation in India, I'll go take a look at the latest party scene in Pune Times page three.

Dare to dream

2005-02-27T10:09:00.000-05:00

Dreams are like small ripples of water,
That build on each other into a gigantic yet ephemeral wave.
The moment they hit the rock of reality,
They shatter into a thousand droplets and disappear into oblivion.
But some waves continue to relentlessly lash the rock of reality,
Shaping it into a future form.
Such is the power of dreams:
An untiring desire to cut into reality and make it your own.
Reality does not bite,
You can bite into reality.

- Kirthi Radhakrishnan

Footnote: This was something I wrote when I was extremely inspired to make it big. I read it whenever I feel low or have lost sense of direction.

Spooked

2005-02-24T23:54:00.000-05:00

Acknowledgements: This blog is dedicated to the "friendly neighbourhood blogger" without whom this piece would not exist, simply because he is the subject here.

I just discovered this week, that God too has an assembly line with prototypes of personalities. And He has very queer ways of making sure that the products from the same assembly line do not meet. But unfortunately, He forgot that He is dealing with the IT world, where kms are converted into kHz and the distances vanish within microseconds. Sounds bizzare and ludicrous doesn't it?

I was down with fever a couple of days back, bunked office(when will I stop using college lingo) and was in bed for the better part of the day. Evening dawns (nocturnal creature that I am). I solved the daily crossword, and was looking for something that my brain could chew on. I check my blog thinking I will find something to blabber about and I see some comments scribbled on my previous blogs. Out of curiosity I checked his blog and see this "Food for Thought" staring back at me. I decided to return the favour with some tongue-in-cheek quip. I hit F5 to see my comment added and alongside a reply from the other end. I don't throw the towel in that easily. That began a word wrestling match. While the topic was about the pitfalls of being single, I managed to single out one obscure quote on communication and waged an epic war with him. When blogging speeds were a hindrance I decided to ping him. So there began a strange journey into discovering an identical personality.

It was like standing out on a hilltop and hearing one's voice echo. Before I could type something, I could already see it flashing in my window. Incidentally, I was also discussing issues like clairvoyance, instinct and intelligence with my father. We touched upon some unanswered questions like what is telepathy? how is his cousin in the US able to sense that he remembered her and calls him immediately? Do phenomena like serendipity and intuition have logical explanations? Is it possible that two minds enter a common realm of thinking together? While I was busy firing these questions to my dad, here I was experiencing it in real life. Two different persons sitting in different parts of the world, thinking the same thoughts, sharing closely matched interests, opinions, quips, tastes and more importantly "chancing" upon each other in such a peculiar way. There were way too many aspects common between the two of us that it actually was not sinking in. I have seen a lot of crazy things happening over the internet, but this is one of a kind.

I guess I'll just sign off leaving the suspense hanging on this mysterious blogger whom I prefer to call my soul brother (though it actually means something else to the Americans, to me it means a person whose personality and thinking is a replica of mine). Anybody can come and take a wild guess on who he is....... except Vc.

My verdict In "Black" and White

2005-02-20T22:21:00.000-05:00

Going to the movies is not a ritual for me every weekend unlike some of my cine-worshipping colleagues and friends. It is a rarity that I agree to go out to the theatre, simply because I don't deign to splurge money on some slipshod fare doled out by Karan Johar and his clones. I'd rather watch it at home when it hits the small screen. But for "Black" I thought I should make an exception, basically because the idea of watching a Hindi movie without the song and dance routine was as novel as playing in snow in Pune. Considering Khamoshi, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's first offering on the silver screen, I thought he was one of those directors who chose the untrodden path, but his later releases like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas spoke otherwise. The grandiosity and ostentation that oozed out of the 70 mm of these two movies left him no better than the Messrs Chopra and Barjatya. That however did not dilute my expectations from his new venture.

Having known that "Black" is on the lines of Helen Keller's life, I had an inkling that the movie would make me lacrymose at times. It did not disappoint me on that account. The depth of characterisation was laudable at the same time the cast was not as convincingly poignant as the script required them to be. I say this of Indian cinema's superstar, Amitabh Bachchan: he was anything but the perfect actor for the role. No doubt he has done a lot of intense roles in the past, but in Black he did not fit perfectly. The overdramatisation overpowered the scenes of an eccentric teacher making them look too hammy for an actor of his calibre. On the other hand Ayesha Kapoor as little Michelle pulled off a brilliant performance that would put even the stalwarts to shame. Rani Mukherjee probably had a role other artists (artists: because not all actresses would crave for such a mind blowing role) would kill for. She did well in being restrained in her enaction.

There were several heart rending moments in the movie: like her first word, her toast to her sister's engagement and her graduation. If I were to pick one scene that was the defining piece of Bhansali's talent, then it was the complex relationship that Michelle shared with her teacher: she dreamt that one day he would be her lover, which was a very human desire since he was her only contact to the world around her. It takes not only a lot of gumption but also a profound understanding of human behaviour to bring out such issues on the screen; and kudos to Bhansali for having done that. What pulls the narrative down is Amitabh's Alzheimer's affliction. He is totally unconvincing in his Parkinsonian twitch and his bleary look appears more of drunkenness than of oldage. Moreover, the whole tragedy revolving around Michelle's (dare I call it) handicap, obviates the need to shift attention to an oldage disease like Alzheimer's. That's where the movie loses focus, and as has been proved since times immemorial, Indian directors try to din the tragedy into the viewers head by making the protagonists life look wretched and martyred.

Dialogues and direction were upto the mark. There was attention to detail at every point which is a trademark of Bhansali. It takes a lot to make a good movie and this is one of them. I guess his masterpiece is yet to come. Definitely a good watch for people who appreciate some sense and sensibility in movies.

Amrapali - The little blossom

2005-02-18T03:30:00.000-05:00

Spreading her largesse across the countryside,
Abounding in beauty Spring arrived.
A little blossom on a tree was born,
Stretching out her petals to greet the morn.

Dancing to the mellifluous tunes of the breeze,
She wondered if her mirth would ever cease.
The sun bathed her fragile petals with care,
As her enchanting fragrance rented the air.

Alas! Joy is like a fleeting butterfly,
That flits out of our life into the azure sky.
As the tempestuous wind seized her arm,
Shattering her world of a spring so warm.

Detached from her tree she groped along,
Thrown into a world she did belong
Where dirt defiled her pristine body white,
The virgin blossom became a squalid sight.

As she lay derelict engulfed in sand,
She was lifted by a benedict pious hand.
Strung on a sacred, delicate cord,
She reached out and touched the face of God.

Kirthi Radhakrishnan.

PS: This has been published in Wipro's intranet site. Just wanted to share it with friends outside Wipro.

Eye-spy

2005-02-03T09:13:00.000-05:00

Myopia runs in my family. Yet I wasn't a victim very early in my life, with a history of my grandmother getting spectacles at the age of 17, my dad at the age of 13 and my brother at the age of 10. It was only at the age of 21 that the genes started showing or perhaps just my insensitivity towards eye care that resulted in diminishing eyesight. On that fateful visit to the family ophthalmologist (ya we have one considering the heredity of visual impairments), he pronounced the number of glasses and it sounded more like a jail sentence to me. He said it with such nonchalance as though nature had been so benevolent enough to bestow me with a relatively less poor eyesight despite the odds. Whatever it was, I wasn't exactly ecstatic about this newly inflicted handicap (yes, I still consider it a handicap). Not that I was able to see molecules and cytoplasms earlier, but the fact that I had to let a disgusting pair of glasses perch on my nose all the time really psyched me out. I decided I would wear it only when I really needed it. After much debate and trial rounds, I finally selected a pair. My dad looked at me lovingly through his pair that said "Now that's my girl"! Next day in college, I was glad that I could rightfully get back to sitting on the last bench. Of course the new accessory did not escape the sharp eyes of my classmates. "Welcome to the world of geekdom", my bespectacled friend hugged me as though I had just graduated to an elite society! I had entered the spectacular realms of convex lenses and shortsightedness and looked quite a spectacle myself. I would quickly slip on and take off my glasses whenever I was too desperate to read; in the process misplaced a couple of them. I wasn't too keen on getting them back either. I had enough trouble cleaning them and adjusting them when they perpetually slid down my nose till I could not breathe. I was trying very hard to eliminate them from my life but the spectacled Terminator boomed into my ears "I'll be back".
When computers, LCD projectors, mobile screens and flat screen TV began to hog 90% of my waking hours, I knew that the only radiation of hope were my spectacles. I had to put up with the discomfort of wearing blinders like a race horse, not that my sight of the future was getting any better because of them. Driving with glasses was a bigger nightmare. I guess I need the statutory warning, that they put on mirrors of vehicles that says "Objects are actually closer than they appear", put on my glasses too. Even to this day, I find my spectacles a big nuisance. In an industry which requires me to strain my ciliary muscles for 9 hours a day, it was only fair that they have free eye checkups to reiterate my denizenship in nerdland. We had one such health drive last week that bore more bad tidings for me. A lazy left eye that had twice the number of the right eye and that meant a permanent fixture of glasses on my face. Perhaps I'd have to wear them even at night just to make sure that I see my nightmares well.

Eccentric Exploits

2005-01-24T23:45:00.000-05:00

I had quit all the adventurous stuff when Nancy drew and Famous Five ceased to be my idols, or so I thought. Not that I consciously decided to renounce the world of tom foolery and wild escapades that sent the adrenaline pumping. Somehow the strictures of the society and the sense of properiety that is dinned into our adolescent brains start taking effect, gradually eroding every vestige of shenanigans from our lives, which is more so in the case of women.
It is not all that easy to quietly morph into a lissome lady from a boisterous teenybopper. Once in a while the juvenile demeanour shows up in one way or the other.
I am not a strict follower of time. I like things to happen at their own pace. Moreover I am not a morning person. To add to this, I have not been a big fan of the public transport. So it really does not come as a surprise, when I say that missing the morning bus has become more of a norm than an exception. On one such morning, despite skipping breakfast and sprinting across the streets as fast as my lazy legs would permit, I managed to see the hind of the bus disappearing away into sea of traffic. Suddenly a wave of resolve hit me. I decided, my sacrificed breakfast is not for nothing. I had to get to office by hook or by crook. Catching hold of the nearest rickshaw driver I ordered him to follow the bus. He joined in the curious adventure weaving his way adeptly through the chaos as he was closing in on the culprit (a la bollywood cop-thief flick). "Faster", I demanded wishing that I could fish out a pistol from somewhere and puncture the tyres of the bus. As we overtook the bus I craned my neck out of the rickshaw trying to signal the driver to stop (CBI police officer style), but I was darned when realization struck that I was following the wrong vehicle all the while. In a moments flash I was reduced from the victorious DCP to the comical sidekick hawaldar. Swallowing my pride, I told the rickshaw driver to stop mumbling some inaudible explanation for the fiasco.
Stranded on the Expressway with a trickling stream of vehicles early in the morning, I contemplated my chances of getting to office on time. I approached what looked like a request stop. There were a couple of persons standing on the pavement apparently waiting for something. This time around I had decided not to be presumptuous and asked one of them if there were any buses going towards the IT park. "There are only trucks going that side at this time". His reply left me sullen and frustrated. By the time I could recover from the disillusionment of his words, I was jolted back to the situation as he flagged down a truck, climbed in and said, "This is the only means right now, take it or leave it". Before I could even give it a second thought, I found myself saying, " What the heck! Why not." Hoisting myself into the truck, I gave its interiors a perfunctory glance. "Not exactly a Merc, but you have no choice now honey", I mused. The driver and the cleaner were the least bit bothered that a female had invaded their domain. "Which company?" the driver asked gruffly before increasing the volume of the radio, as though it was a courtesy question the answer of which did not matter much. Cruising along the Expressway, I observed how miniscule the other vehicles looked from that elevation quite reminiscent of the view from atop an elephant. A medley of thoughts flooded my mind. I could not believe that I brought myself to do this, was I insane? Another voice said "Let mom get to know of this misadventure of yours and you can be guaranteed that they'll start their groom hunting session very soon". I wanted to holler at the way the day was turning out and at the same time savour those moments of an unexpected expedition. I wondered what the driver and the cleaner might think of me; it also crossed my mind that this certainly was not the safest mode to get to office, especially when crimes against women were on the rise. My co-passenger indulged in meaningless banter with the cleaner boy as the driver karaoked (or rather croaked) along with the radio. I perished the thought: sometimes we tend to associate poverty with felony which is totally a misconception among the general public.
I decided to spend the rest of the journey scrutinizing the decor (dare I call it that) of the truck. The ricketty seat I was sitting on was more or less like a broken chair whose legs had been chopped halfway and had been nailed onto the floor of the truck....reusablilty engineering, I smiled to myself. A cloth rag, soiled from years of cleaning, hung from one side of the window; a lucky charm to ward off the evil spirits; the dangling remanents of a paper streamer that gets replaced only every Vijayadashami...the truck came to a screeching halt. "IT Park", the driver called out to me, as though he had been moonlighting as a bus conductor all his life. Paying him a nominal five rupees for a 15 kilometer hitch hiked ride I alighted almost feeling like a victorious queen.
When I reached my cubicle I pacified my worried friend and narrated the entire incident to her. As has been proven since times immemorial, women can never keep secrets and as result the tale of my escapades spread like wild fire through a broadcast technology. Even to this day, I have people who come up and ask me if I come to office everyday by truck. I guess I can enjoy the momentary publicity it has given me as long as it does not reach my parents ears.

Hell-met??

2005-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

The recent, ruling making helmets compulsary for two wheeler drivers has spurred me write this.
I can't figure out why people are complaining. Our ever-so-benevolent government has so patronizingly opened our eyes to some reality. The roads will remain as they are forever; like they have been bombarded by all the meteorites in the solar system. They are left that way just as a preventive measure to see to it that if you ever happen to speed you will never be able to say "speed" for the rest of your life. Taking into consideration the increase in two wheeler traffic in the city, the corporation has decided to widen the roads and retain the electric poles in the center of the road so that some unsuspecting road rasher can have an electrifying and exhilarating ride to the ICU. In addition, to curb the unruly collegians the corporation has planned to strategically position the road dividers and speed breakers so that vertical takeoffs are facilitated for an upward journey without a return ticket. Having ensured our journey to paradise, like a good travel company they have concerns about our "safety". Hence the helmet ruling.
I don't see why so many people are cribbing. Look at the brighter side. Until today, the Pune girls wrapped up their faces in scarves and dupattas and ended up looking like members of a terrorist "outfit". Now its time for a makeover, Senoritas. Your new avatar is that of a Roman warrior princess with a carbon fiber headgear out to battle the potholes of Pune sans the lance. If this doesn't satisfy your fashion sensibilities then you can put Sabyasachi Mukherjee to shame with your innovative statement: the "fuzzy-after-taking-off-the-helmet-look"!
If the guys are feeling left out on the fashion front then there is something in store for them too. The government itself has given the "Dhoom" look a thumbs-up. So all you dudes can vroom on your Karizmas and CBZs (so what if they will never look like a Harley Davidson or a Honda Gold Wing) a la John Abraham ishtyle.
For all you students who are perennially afraid that the data that you have crammed over the years will fall out of your ears, fikar not and wear the helmet to the exam hall: you will pass with flying colors; guaranteed!
Those specimen of the female species who have terrorized even the streetlights with their berserk driving, will no longer be bothered by incessant honks from car drivers and expletive spewing rickshaw drivers. The helmet provides them an acoustically isolated globe aroung the ears so that unholy sounds won't disturb their peace of mind.
It is a godsend for all you spiritually inclined souls, don't go to meditation gurus and satsangs. Let your helmet be your philosopher and guide. Just as Krishna taught Arjuna to concentrate on his karma on the Kurukshetra battlefield, your helmet or rather your metal horse blinder will teach you not to worry about who is behind you or trying to overtake you. Your ultimate goal is to zoom the way you please - make your own path to salvation. May the halo of the helmet protect you from any obstacle except broken bones.
So the ultimate mantra of all ye Puneites should be "Hail Helmet". Now go get yourself one with the Swastik - oops! I mean ISI mark.

Sound bites

2005-01-21T01:46:00.000-05:00

PROLOGUE: I am sitting at my cubicle reading something intently when a sudden burst of high decibel vibrations shatter my concentration. I look around for the perpetrator but no one seems to be perturbed.

So often the ruggedness of the daily grind in our lives becomes so ingrained in us that I sometimes wonder what life would be without these sights and sounds. Sounds especially! Many a times we tend to overlook (though I’m very tempted to use “overhear” in this context, a pun is not what I intend) some of the most obnoxious and infernal vibratory disturbances that normally qualify as noise. To be more specific: ridiculous ring-tones and loud banter on the cell phone.
Today, just about anybody who maybe a nobody has a cute little gadget that beeps at all the wrong times and in all the wrong places. So in the IT industry, you become Neanderthal if you do not possess one. Such is the urgency to speak, that we’d rather go through a WLL network to get connected rather than Walk, Look and Listen to a real person trying to connect with our frequency. But then, you know we’d rather have conversed in MHz to some one several kilonauts away rather than in Hz to a person sitting a cubicle away. It is not just the disregard for the human life around that peeves me, but also the fact that I’m made privy to “what has been cooking" (not necessarily in the kitchen).
I have also come across some of the most bizzare ringtones ever. One that moos like a cow, bellows like a buffalo, the maggi ad, the DD news background score et al. You name it I’v heard it. I cannot help but laugh at the owner’s taste when I hear one of those brilliant musical scores that would put Beethoven and A R rahman to shame. People change their ringtones like they change their clothes because it has become a “cool” quotient (or maybe I should type it as kewl just to disgust myself and added to the coolness of the already cool word). In fact they don’t even know if their own mobile just rang and how do they make sure? Flash it out and then begins the “Oh yes it is my new Nokia 3650 with camera phone with blah blah technology” conversation. There goes another bloke on an ego trip!
The mobile phone technology, primarily made for communication has become more of a toy with more added features than primary features. For those button happy maniacs who suffer from AUD (An Unknown Disorder) that their phone did not ring since the past three microseconds, the phone manufacturers made sure that they can pursue other interests like 3D gaming, TV viewing, video shooting all rolled into that one single chip. And then there are those ornamental plastic embellishments that promise you to get the perfect date just in case your date happens to be a fashion freak who’d freak out if your mobile strap does not match your shirt. I'm pretty certain that there will dawn a day when our mobiles will start producing milk.
I am not anti-technology; in fact being an Electronics Engineer, I marvel at the kind of cutting edge science and ingenuity that goes into going into making such devices. I am just reiterating the predicament that science has faced since times immemorial…Abuse of technology.

EPILOGUE: I am still looking for the one who victimised me as the beeping continues. Now it is enough to arouse others attention in my cubicle. My colleague turns at me accusingly and says, “Will you take that call for Christ’s sake!!”

RIP: Reservations In Private sector

2004-12-11T19:03:00.000-05:00

Reservations in private sector??? That's only thing left to be done so that not a whit of India's brains remain in India.
I have always had my reservations over the reservation issue. It has always beaten the purpose of "uplifting the backward classes". Instead of creating a healthy atmosphere with equal oppurtunities for all, it has only embittered the rest of the society against them. Just the other day I heard one of my colleagues comment that, being a Brahmin boy in Mumbai's engineering college race is the worst possible situation one can be in.
Is it really necessary that after 57 years of independence that we should provide the crutches of reservation for the "downtrodden" so that they can stand on their own feet?

What's worse, is that by having reservations, people from backward classes take it easy: they don't need to toil that hard, don't need good scores in their academics; all they need to do is fish out the OBC or some obscure NT1 certificate each time they want to get into the creme` de la creme` of the engineering institutes, mecical colleges or business schools. What it does is, it creates virtually a red carpet for them even if they have several percents less than the requirement while the rest have to fight tooth and nail for a single mark. More importantly, what has it done to their lot? The tribals are still tribals in some inconspicuous village. To find one of these people who has made it big would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I am also opposed to women's reservations in the LS. It is totally uncalled for. It will only create 10 more Rabri Devis sitting at the helm. Did people like Sudha Murthy and Kiran Bedi require reservations?

What can we do about it? We keep asking this question because either we really don't know how we can make a difference or it is simply a rhetoric to give ourselves an excuse for not doing anything about it.
For one you can sign this e-petition if you are anti-reservation: http://www.petitiononline.com/RESPVT/petition.html