On The Ganga Mail

Tamarind City

2012-01-29T22:05:00.008+05:30

A city is a lot like a woman. You may fall for it because of a certain physical attribute — the eyes, the smile, the dimple — but it is the chemistry you develop over time that eventually makes you stick to it.

Millions of people visit Agra every year to see the Taj Mahal, but how many choose to settle in Agra just so that they can have a glimpse of the architectural wonder on their way to work every day? Mumbai, on the other hand, can be very harsh on its citizens, yet people who have spent a few years in the city almost always talk of it fondly — that's chemistry. That's what happened between me and Chennai.

When I came in January 2001, I had no idea I would end up spending eleven years here — and god alone knows how many months or years more. I came here more as a tourist-journalist, who wanted to experience Chennai and use it as a base to tour the whole of south India in the next three or four years before returning to Delhi to settle down there.

Then something happened. Just the way I had discovered Chennai as a conducive place to be in, Chennai also discovered the writer in me. Thus began a lasting love affair, the result of which is Tamarind City, whose cover pages I am finally able to share with you today.

The book is a tribute to the city I've called home for eleven years now — the city that nourished me as a writer and at the same time let me be (Chapter 5 is titled 'Sex and the City'). I hope it is liked by readers and reviewers alike.

Pongal Diary: Eleven Years In Chennai And A Book

2012-01-16T23:13:00.006+05:30

For nearly two months I slept with them — books, notebooks, various pens, newspapers and the laptop, which formed a heap on wife's side of the bed. No matter how often I changed the sheets, the books and the notebooks would grab their place sooner than later, leaving very little space for me. At nights when I turned to the side while sleeping, I would often find my knee placed on the cold, glossy cover of a book.

On Sunday morning, the morning of Pongal — the date is relevant here too: 15 January 2012 — I decided to clear up the mess. It took a couple of hours to make the bed look like a bed, after which I prepared myself a decent meal: rice, bitter-gourd sambar and raddish-carrot-tomato salad. In between, I also mopped the entire house (someone in the maid's family always happens to fall sick when wife is not in town).

Finally, at two in the afternoon, I poured myself a glass of pre-lunch wine and lit up a cigarette and lay down on a fresh sheet. The bed smelt good. I felt good. For once, my laptop was not on. From the bed I looked outside the window. I could see the sky and a coconut tree, its leaves a sparkling golden in the gentle sunshine. A beautiful day for Chennai! — you have the sun out, and yet cold enough for you to keep the fan on low speed. An ideal day to be outdoors — maybe in Mahabalipuram or on the Marina. But I was happy to be indoors, resting my back on the same bed on which I had just finished writing my book on Chennai.

It is one thing to be working on a book, quite another to actually finish it and mail the manuscript to the publisher. I had been working on the book for two years now — chunks of it were written in Chennai, in Kanpur, in Gurgaon and in Kolkata, but it was on this bed that I finally wrapped it up and clicked on the 'send' button.

Wrapping up can be as painful as writing a fresh book, especially if you happen to be the kind who is deeply embarrassed rereading the chapters that were completed long time ago and wants to rewrite them all over again. And so, for those two months, the bed served as a torture chamber as I wrote the unwritten chapters, rewrote the already-written chapters and at the same time went to work to justify my salary.

On Sunday afternoon I was a peaceful man. I had finally managed to dispatch nearly one lakh words. The unwritten book no longer tormented me: I had finally written it. And so I looked out at the gentle sunshine and told myself what a beautiful day it is. That's when another thought struck me: have I not just completed eleven years in Chennai!

It was on 15 January 2001 that I first set foot in Chennai, little knowing that I would end up staying this long. The book — called Tamarind City, to hit the stands in April — intends to be evidence, hopefully lasting, that I spent the best years of my life in the city.

Life In A Metro: Goodbye, Guide

2011-12-10T11:29:00.002+05:30

The death of Dev Anand has left us with two important lessons

When I got a call from my brother unusually early in the morning last Sunday, I was naturally alarmed. It turned out to be bad news not for me, but for my generation. When someone like Dev Anand dies, you realise that the earth has been spinning all this while even though it appeared stationary, and that someday it will be your turn.

You didn't expect – rather you didn't want – someone like Dev Anand to ever die. He began acting when my father was a toddler and my mother wasn't even born. And then it was my turn to grow up with him. How can I ever forget the thrill of watching Johny Mera Naam in the theatre, sometime in the late nineteen-seventies? As long as Dev Anand was alive, I felt I was safe, my family was safe. But last Sunday, the protective wall – someone whose presence I had taken for granted – was gone. I feel vulnerable.

But then, as Dev Anand sang, “Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya.” Life is a game which has its rules; whether you win or lose you have to play along, something he did with gusto. As one ponders over his passing away, one can't help think of the two lessons that his life has left us with.

One, never say die. I have never had the chance to meet or speak to Dev Anand, but fellow journalists who have interviewed him tell me how infectious his energy was. He could liven up your day even over the phone. People often console others – and even themselves – saying that age is just a number, but Dev Anand demonstrated that. Age might have shrivelled his skin but it could do nothing to deplete his energy. A lesser mortal would have faded away long ago and led a quiet retired life, occasionally going down memory lane whenever a journalist visited.

But words like ‘retirement' and ‘inactivity' did not exist in Dev Anand's dictionary. It was simply impossible to imagine him on a wheel-chair or lying on a hospital bed. Always agile, alert and flashing that trademark smile with a glint of mischief in the eyes – that's probably how he was in his last moments before death came. All this, in the face of rejection. The audience long stopped going to the theatres to watch his films. They would rather travel long distances to watch him, at some event or the other, but not his films.

Yet, Dev Anand soldiered on with the same enthusiasm he had stepped into Bombay 65 years ago – discovering new faces, scouting for new locations, to make yet another film that nobody was going to watch. So that's one lesson: if you have the enthusiasm, even advancing age and adversity cannot stop you.

Lesson no. 2: Never fall in love with your own style. Dev Anand, as an actor, worked best when someone else directed him. Some of his most memorable films – Guide, Johny Mera Naam, Tere Mere Sapne, Jewel Thief – were directed by his younger brother, the talented Vijay Anand. The only big hit that Dev Anand himself directed was Hare Rama Hare Krishna, and that was a good forty years ago. Since then, he had been trying to recreate the magic of Hare Rama Hare Krishna, giving himself the central role,his trademark mannerisms intact,but each time he failed miserably. He might have remained evergreen, but his storytelling looked dated.

One need not cow down before age, which he never did, but one must acknowledge age, which Amitabh Bachchan wisely did. Amitabh Bachchan, had he been Dev Anand, would have started directing himself to keep the angry-young-man image alive and would probably be busy making The Return of Amar Akbar Anthony at the moment. But he reinvented himself in the late 1990s by becoming the young old man and staged a dramatic comeback into the hearts of the audience.

But who knows, perhaps it was his love for his own style that gave Dev Anand the endless reserve of energy to live life to the fullest – till death plucked that evergreen leaf of Hindi cinema.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, December 10, 2011.

A Ghost In Hong Kong

2011-12-04T10:39:00.004+05:30

I had barely flung myself on the bed, after three hours of waiting at the airport and another five on the flight, when my eyes fell on the large LCD screen facing me:

“Dear Mr Ghost: Welcome to The Mira Hong Kong. Thank you for choosing to stay with us.”

How I wish I were Mr Ghost. I wouldn’t have to endure long hours in a plane or spend hard-earned money in order to travel the world (though this trip didn’t make me any poorer because I was a guest of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, and the journey from Chennai took barely five hours).

Nevertheless, I was quite pleased with what I saw on the screen and got up to fiddle with the remote, when I found a cordless keyboard. Ah, so I could check email and Facebook on the big screen! Then I noticed a welcome-envelope waiting to be opened: it was addressed to Mr Bishwanathan. Meanwhile, I had arrived in Hong Kong barely an hour ago on a boarding pass that identified me as Mr. Gosh.

Never mind. My name didn’t matter now. For the next five days, I was going to be a nameless tourist, one of the tens of thousands who come to visit the former British colony every year. This year the arrivals crossed the unprecedented one-million mark, and the tourism board is now eager to exploit the Indian market, even though the number of tourists going from here has already doubled compared to last year.

The five days were roughly divided into two activities: looking up in amazement at the high-rises that define Hong Kong and looking down at them in equal amazement from even greater heights — even as one kept hopping between Kowloon peninsula and the islands of Hong Kong and Lantau. These are the three regions that primarily comprise the tourist’s Hong Kong.

My discovery of Hong Kong began that evening with a visit to Sky100, the observatory on the 100th floor of the world’s fourth tallest building — the newly-opened 108-floor International Commerce Centre in Kowloon. The elevator propels you the 100th floor in 60 seconds, and there you are, treated to a 360-degree panoramic view of the city — far more mind-boggling than a pair of human eyes can take.

So this is Hong Kong, I thought to myself as I watched from behind the glass wall a neat arrangement of yellow lights spread out below — one of the very few non-Western cities you somehow get to hear of right from childhood, even if you were not particularly fond of the atlas; where the British planted the Union Jack in 1841 and withdrew from as recently as 1997, returning it to China.

Due to the 156 years of the occupation, Hong Kong is today part-British, part-Chinese — a classic example of East-meets-West. Ninety-five percent of the population is Chinese, but the official language is still English; residents can hold British passports until 2047; the Hong Kong dollar remains in circulation and is convertible.

I was now going to spend some of those dollars, for next on the itinerary was a visit to the Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival, a recently-begun annual feature that takes place by the Victoria Harbour. Rosanna, my feisty but friendly Chinese guide, had already pointed at the venue from Sky100: from that great height it had looked like the ultimate party place, right next to the harbour on whose still surface the occasional boat was leaving a temporary scratch.

But at the festival venue — which was jam-packed, resembling a college carnival — the view of the waterfront had been blocked by countless stalls set up by wine companies from across the world. Fine wine is lost on me — I can only tell the red from the white. But the sun was long down and I needed my drink, and at the same time I was very hungry. Since my arrival I had been surviving on bread and cheese.

As I went searching for my kind of food so that I could drink (even if wine), two young Chinese students accosted me. They wanted my feedback about the festival. I patiently answered all their questions (asked in broken English) and they took a picture of me with their iPad.

“Now, can I ask you something?”

“Yes, yes,” the boys said.

“Is there any stall where I can get vegetarian food?”

“What food?”

“Vegetarian?”

The boys looked at each other in bewilderment. They hadn’t heard of the word. “Sorry sir, I don’t know what you say.” They were red with embarrassment.

Fortunately, I found a French stall selling cheese croissants. I bought a half-a-dozen of them. The rest of the evening I drank red wine and ate cheese croissants and admired the young women of Hong Kong who stylishly held their (plastic) wine glasses as if they were in a Page-3 party. This was of course a Page-3 party, only that the guest list was multiplied by a thousand.

Back in the hotel, located on Nathan Road, I felt hungry again and set out looking for Indian food. I walked a considerable length of the road and after a few left and right turns, came upon Jordan Street, where I found the Bombay Indian Restaurant. The owner, a salwar kameez-clad Punjabi woman who said her family came to Hong Kong some 20 years ago, sat on the pavement calling out to potential customers. A young woman in jeans, presumably her daughter, waited on the tables.

“Spicy or non-spicy,” she asked me in accented English as I ordered daal makhani and naan.

I thought for a moment and said, “Spicy.”

The next morning I was at the Kowloon Cricket Club, to watch a match of the Hong Kong Cricket Sixes, an international six-a-side, five-over-each tournament that the club has been hosting since the early 1990s. In terms of brevity and entertainment value, this format can rightly be called the father of Twenty20. But since I gave up watching cricket ever since Twenty20 walked out of the pavilion, I couldn’t tell, under the harsh sun, who was bowling and who was batting. As many as 12 cricket-playing nations were participating in the tournament this year, and outside the Club, a large number of Pakistanis were waiting to catch a glimpse of their favourite cricketer. There was a flutter when Sanath Jayasuriya walked in. I just about managed to take a picture of him: I had never imagined I would spot him in, of all places, Hong Kong.

I had half a mind to watch Jayasuriya bat — live — but it was time to head to Disneyland. Even if you are young at heart, Disneyland isn’t quite the place for you to spend an entire evening unless you are taking your children along. But what do you do when you are deposited there and you don’t know your way back? You have no choice but to sit back and enjoy.

But to tell you the truth, I enjoyed Disneyland. Not just because of the Halloween parades that can blow one’s mind or because of the breathtaking toy-train trip that takes you along the circumference of the fantasy land, but mainly because of the Space Mountain ride. It is a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride that takes place in total darkness, as if you were negotiating invisible curves in space at the speed of an aircraft. Unknown to you, cameras capture your expressions during the most stomach-churning moment of the ride, and the evidence of your fearful self is shown to you once you step off the roller-coaster. But the picture is not part of the deal: you need to buy it, for a steep price. Welcome to Hong Kong.

*****

“See my new boots! How are they?” asked Rinku, my fellow Indian traveller.

“Awesome!” I said. I had to say that. She had spent 2,500 Hong Kong dollars to buy four pairs and was wearing one of them now.

And so we set off for Lan Kwai Fong to party. We had had a long day – and what a day.

The morning had begun on the island of Hong Kong. It was this island that the British had first taken in 1841 before they went on to expand their control to the Kowloon peninsula, and finally more areas north of the peninsula and also some islands, which they chose to call the New Territories. Collectively they came to be called Hong Kong. The island is, therefore, home to the city's colonial heritage and our host, the Hong Kong Tourism Board, put us on an open-top bus for a heritage tour of the city.

But when your eyes are blinded by the dazzle of the high-rises, how can you look out for humble heritage, which would probably be too embarrassed to show its face? So I sat back on my seat on the roof of the buses and enjoyed the carnival of the high-rises, each eager to kiss the sky first, as the bus snaked through the all-important roads of Hong Kong. If the dictionary doesn't define the word ‘opulence' for you, Hong Kong will. And I also realised: a concrete jungle may not look beautiful, but it can certainly look elegant.

We alighted at Peak Tram terminus on Garden Road. We were to take the tram right up to the Victoria Peak, now called just The Peak, which became the summer getaway for the colonial rulers ever since Governor Richard MacDonnell built a residence there, in the late 1860s. After tram service to the Peak began in 1888, the hill became an exclusive residential area for Europeans and remained out of bounds for locals for a number of years. Even today, the hill is home to the last of the fast-disappearing colonial bungalows in Hong Kong. The tram we take is new, but the route is 123 years old – a steep vertical climb right up the hill.

The moment we alighted we got sucked into a massive multi-storied steel-concrete-glass structure. We were on the Touristy Peak and not the Victorian Peak – but it was The Peak nevertheless. Souvenir shops, shopping malls, eateries, even Madame Tussauds gallery – the building contained it all. But it was the roof that mattered most: from there you could see all of Hong Kong, and even Kowloon. A sight to die for. A concrete jungle can also look beautiful.

After lunch at The Peak we drove to Ocean Park. The entertainment park, spread across 870,000 sq m of land, has a mountain standing in between and to get to the summit you have to take the cable car. As the cable car trundled high above the South China Sea, one could see the sun bowing out for the day, disappearing slowly into the sea. Against the fading sun was the silhouette of the roller-coaster which was to soon scare the life out of us. It was at Ocean Park that Rinku and I hatched the plan for Lan Kwai Fong.

The idea was to have a drink and stroll around the Soho of Hong Kong. But it turned out to be the night of Halloween, and, emerging out of Central station, we found that the whole of Hong Kong had descended on Lan Kwai Fong. To get to Lan Kwai Fong from the station, otherwise a two-minute walk, took us nearly two hours. Once she realised that Lan Kwai Fong was so near and yet so far, Rinku took off her Hong Kong boots. “They pinch,” she said and put them into her bag. Out came the humble Indian chappals.

Once in Lan Kwai Fong, we broke off from the unending procession and squeezed ourselves into the little space that was available on the pavement outside Hard Rock Café. There, clutching cans of Guinness, we watched the young of Hong Kong go past, thousands and thousands of them – it was the wedding of Grotesque and Grace. It's a night I am not easily going to forget – energy meeting imagination and the two of them saying hello to the no-holds-barred spirit.

The people of Hong Kong are a happy lot. According to Rosanna, our Chinese guide, the city-state made a net profit of 2,000 billion Hong Kong dollars from the stock exchange in 2010. The benefits were passed on to the people: every citizen over the age of 18 received 6,000 Hong Kong dollars from the government as ‘lucky money', and those above 65 got 3,000 dollars extra.

The next morning, we were at 1881 Heritage, one of the most expensive hotels in Hong Kong which, once upon a time, was the headquarters of the marine police. Such is the hotel's heritage and snob value that couples getting married and youngsters who've acquired a prestigious degree come to pose against the handsome colonial building. As if a degree or a marriage certificate is not valid until the photograph outside the hotel has been taken.

On the final day, in the island of Lantau, we took a stunning 5.7 km cable-car ride to the village of Ngong Ping, where a 34m Buddha sits on a hill. The spectacular 25-minute journey provides a panoramic view of the Buddha statue, the flora and fauna of the North Lantau Country Park, Tung Chung Bay and the airport. The Ngong Ping Piazza, opened last year, is lined with statues of the Twelve Divine Generals. And from there, it is a 268-step climb to nirvana. What a peaceful way to end a journey.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, December 3, 2011.

Life In A Metro: Death Of The Dictionary

2011-11-19T12:49:00.002+05:30

Who needs a doorstop of a book when a right click is right at hand?

The first dictionary that I ever owned was won by me in a drawing competition at school. It was the first prize, a miniature dictionary bound in red, which I still preserve. Below her signature the principal had inscribed the date, '17.11.79' – which means I was nine years old then, most likely in the fourth standard. For many years after that I did not need another dictionary: the 5,000 or so entries in that tiny gem were more than sufficient to define the world I lived in.

I vaguely remember buying a dictionary much later, perhaps in high school, though I have no particular memories of it, which is very strange. All I remember is that I bought it only to prevent my prized possession from being shredded to pieces. But once I became an adult and decided to make a living out of the written word, I began to invest in voluminous dictionaries – the heavier the better. It was as good as bringing home a teacher who would look over your shoulder while you read a book or wrote a report, and at other times would sit patiently on your desk.

There is something venerable about the dictionary. It's a sage, grandfather, headmaster, teacher, judge, cop – all rolled, rather bound, into one. It's an institution by itself and perhaps the only thing in the world that is capable of making anyone, no matter how educated and accomplished, feel small. After all, the dictionary always knows something that you don't.

Of all the dictionaries I possess today, my favourite remains the One Hour Wordpower Dictionary, co-published by The Sunday Times of London. Simply because it was the first purchase I made after arriving in Delhi to join PTI as a probationary journalist, way back in 1994. I had bought it from a bookshop on Janpath; its pages have since yellowed and I don't think it's still in print. I also like it because it does not follow the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols for pronunciations. If you want to know how the word 'jugular' sounds, it simply tells you: jug-yoo-la. Subsequently, from a book fair in Pragati Maidan, I bought the BBC English Dictionary. And then many more. It is a different matter that most of them remained untouched, their pages accessed only by particles of dust.

Today, the dictionary-buying days are way behind me. I no longer need one. Why just me? When was the last time you actually reached out for one? Haven't you been right-clicking on words all this while? But remember, each time you right-click on a word, the sale of dictionaries drops by one percent – okay, I just made up that figure, but I can't be way off the mark. A distributor told me the other day that bookshops were indeed recording a decline in the sale of not just dictionaries but reference books as a whole. Reference books, he said, are fast migrating to the textbook category and it is just a matter of time before general bookshops stop stocking dictionaries and encyclopedias.

I am not shedding a tear. But one fear grips me every now and then: what if I am asked to write a test in written English, with nothing but a pen and a few A-4 sheets at my disposal? I will stand completely exposed! To begin with, I wouldn't know how to spell ‘manoeuvre' (I actually had to dig out a dusty dictionary to type out the word for your benefit because spellcheck gives only the American spelling). I wouldn't even know whether it is ‘focused' or ‘focussed.'

Since I've already crossed the age of 40, it is unlikely that I will ever be asked to write a test again, but you never know. Imagine a 40-year-old journalist not knowing how to spell ‘manoeuvre'. The horror it will evoke, according to me, will be just as bad as the one that will strike you when you arrive in a strange town to find your mobile phone missing. You can't even call your wife to inform her about your plight because you never felt the need to remember her number. You are as good as a lost child who remembers what his home looks like but doesn't know how to get there. So much for the dependence on gadgets.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, November 19, 2011.

Life In A Metro — The Lingering Taste Of Birthday Cake

2011-11-11T19:38:00.004+05:30

We are so focussed on the future that we often forget to relish the present. And before we realise, a year has gone past

Nostalgia is a recurring theme in this column and not without reason. I believe that nostalgia is your only true wealth, which makes you feel rich until the last breath, while everything else is transitory and temporary – here today, gone tomorrow! If your story is that of rags to riches, you can tell people: “You know, once upon a time I used to hawk vegetables on this very road.” If your story is that of riches to rags, you can tell those who are still around to listen, “You know, once upon a time, I used to own half the houses on this road.” In both cases, the memories warm your heart – irrespective of whether you are presently a prince or a pauper.

Nostalgia would not have been such a precious commodity had Father Time taken his sweet time in passing – so much so that you craved for the new day to break. But even as you blink, a day has passed. Now we all know that time flies and all – is there anything new in what I am saying?

Nothing really, It's just that the cruelty with which time flies past hits you hard as you approach certain personal milestones of your life, and makes you wonder whether it's worth leading a life when dates only stand for deadlines and delivery and when holidays are looked forward to so that you can catch up on sleep. Our minds are so focussed on specific dates that we often forget what month of the year it is – I mean, you may know what month it is but in a very clinical way without a feel for it. When realisation strikes, you are a year older.

Realisation struck me this morning when I was writing out a cheque for the newspaper vendor, who rang the bell early this morning. I put down the date as 10.10.11, when he reminded me, “Sir, it should be 10.11.11, but never mind, it is still valid.” It then hit me: ‘11' stands for November, which means next month is December, when I celebrate my birthday!

Now wasn't it just the other day – really just the other day – when I celebrated my birthday? I can never forget last year's birthday because I turned 40 and had celebrated the milestone by inviting each friend I have in the city. The taste of the cake still lingers in my mouth; the noise that is created when some 50 people gather in a hall is still ringing in my ears; many of the gifts I received are still to be opened; people are still commenting on the pictures of the party on Facebook; and I am still calling myself 40, happy in the knowledge that there are many more months to go before I turn 41.

But what is this: the time has already come! The prospect of turning 41 does not pain me so much as the fact that 12 months are about to pass without my even realising it. Father Time gave no notice, he just sent a last-minute alert in the form of the newspaper vendor. What was I doing when these months were passing by – why didn't I notice?

I guess I am yet another victim of the devil called deadline. My eyes are so perpetually fixed on a future date on the calendar that I miss out on today. What a pity that I listen to this song almost every day but am yet to get its import – it's an immortal song written by Gulzar, set to tune by R.D. Burman and sung by Kishore Kumar, from the film "Gol Maal":

Aane wala pal,
jaane waala hai
Ho sake to isme,
zindagi bita do
pal jo yeh jaane waala hai…

The moment that is arriving
is already about to leave
why not spend a lifetime in it
for it is about to leave.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, November 12, 2011.

Life In A Metro — Hong Kong Diary

2011-11-04T20:36:00.002+05:30

Jottings from a trip where the best of the West met the best of the East

When you are visiting a foreign country as a tourist, it is one thing to check into a posh hotel and pore over the brochures handed out by the tourism department, and quite another to read the newspaper the next morning. The brochures invariably take you to fantasy land, where everything is perfect and where anything unpleasant safely belongs to the past – a place you would love to settle down if the laws permitted and if you had the cash. The newspaper, on the other hand, tells you the truth – though in some countries you may have to read between the lines.

In the case of India though – and I am not ashamed to say this – truth kisses you long before fantasy can take you in her embrace. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the foreigners who adore India happen to be the ones in search of truth. But then, India is also a country where reality often fuses with fantasy: on one hand you can get fleeced or have your pocket picked, but on the other you will find total strangers inviting you to their houses for a meal.

Right now, though, I am going to talk about Hong Kong, where I spent five days recently at the invitation of its tourism board, which is eager to draw to tourists from south India. (A detailed account of the trip will be presented in the travel pages in the coming weeks). As you drive from the airport into the city, the first thing that will strike you is the flawlessness about Hong Kong – everything is in order. And once you get into the city, you will also find it an exciting place to be in. Hong Kong, after all, is a king-sized and far more vivacious version of London. Here, the best of West meets the best of East. But then.

On the very first morning that I woke up to in Hong Kong, I was greeted by a rather distressing piece of news. Axe hangs over private historic homes on Peak, screamed the lead headline of South China Morning Post, the largest English newspaper in Hong Kong and one of the most respected in the whole of southeast Asia. The Peak, once known as Victoria Peak, is a mountain that today overlooks the high-rises of Hong Kong. It used to be the summer capital of the colonial rulers and is still home to old bungalows, some of which have already been turned into high-rises while the remaining are awaiting such transformation, much to the concern of heritage enthusiasts.

“Heritage advisers said the government should make an effort to preserve those (houses) that were reminders of key public figures who contributed to Hong Kong’s development, or reflected the life of early residents,” the newspaper reported. It remains to be seen who wins eventually, the heritage advisers or the skyscrapers – though one knows the answer already.

The morning after, another piece of alarming news: Hong Kong is worried by the “growing youth drinking problem” and the government is urged to raise either the duty on alcohol or the legal age for drinking. There was a crime story too: that of a law student allegedly locking up and assaulting his girlfriend for three days to force her to reconcile with him. The reconciliation effort, however, landed him in jail, though he was released subsequently on bail.

And the morning I checked out of the hotel, I read, over breakfast, a piece of news which the newspaper thought should worry Hong Kong. According to the paper, the examiners for A-levels as well as Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination had blamed students for their “narrow-mindedness”, “immaturity” and “bad grammar.” One can understand the bit about poor grammar, but immaturity and narrow-mindedness? Welcome to Hong Kong.

Yet another headline on the same day, same page: Flasher strikes again in Sau Mau Ping. Oh well, even paradise must have its share of problems. Hong Kong is one such paradise.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, November 5, 2011.

The Mind Of A Doctor

2011-10-24T22:28:00.003+05:30

Thanks to my hypochondria, which is getting worse with advancing age, I have a new fantasy these days: to romance a doctor. That way, I could kill two birds with one stone -- get the woman's attention as well as assurance ("No baby, nothing is wrong with you! You are just fine, trust me!").

Romancing a doctor is quite different from marrying a doctor. When you marry a doctor, your home becomes a mini-hospital and all your vices are junked into the bin. No smoking, no drinking, no junk food, eating on time, sleeping on time -- everything that makes you feel alive is snatched away from you overnight. But when a female doctor chooses to romance you, she is well aware of your vices and is largely accepting of them: in fact, through you, she gets to see or lead the wild side of life which her professional conscience otherwise prohibits. For example, when you light up a cigarette, she may even take a drag or two, but at the same time she is likely to warn you, "Enough, this is the last cigarette you are having this evening. You can have the next one after dinner."

Experience, however, has taught me that the longer the romance rages, you begin to see more of the woman and less of the doctor. "Baby, nothing is wrong with you" becomes "Fuck you, go and die for all I care." Even then, I continue to be fascinated by women doctors -- at least the idea of them. It is not at all same as having a male doctor as a close friend.

If you call up a male doctor-friend, who is aware of your hypochondria, late in the night and tell him that you are experiencing a mild pain in the chest, he is most likely to tell you, "Have two glasses of water and try going to sleep. I don't think anything is wrong. If the pain still continues, go to Apollo tomorrow morning and get an ECG done. After that we will see."

But try calling a doctor-girlfriend to break the same chest-pain news and her first reaction, if it is within her control, would be, "Wait, I am coming!" Actually, the very fact that you have a doctor-girlfriend is good news: she would not have come anywhere close to you and have chosen to admire you from a distance if you really were a storehouse of diseases (which a hypochondriac thinks himself to be). And when she tells you, "Fuck you! Go and die", she is actually giving you a fitness certificate.

Which is why women doctors (or 'lady doctors') fascinate me. Each time I happen to find myself being examined by one, a barrage of questions assault me: Is it possible that she likes me? Does she wash her hands before she eats? Does she hog whenever she sees good food? Does she lust for men, knowing fully well what lies inside the human body? Does she have sex once she returns home from the hospital? If she does, does she analyse medically, in her mind, the whole act -- from arousal to orgasm? While kissing her lover, isn't she deterred by the fact that she is actually letting her mouth into a beehive of bacteria? Does she cry when a loved one dies, even though she knows, more than anyone else, that death is inevitable? Does she cry at all?

Strangely, these questions don't spring up in my mind when I am being examined by a male doctor. Maybe because I know that men are men, no matter what profession they are in. They are always guided by basic instincts. Women, on the other hand, are always conscientious and sincere. To imagine that they could have a naughty side when they are not examining a patient with a stern look on their face -- that can be titillating.

The other day, at a small gathering, I happened to meet a young doctor. She was specialising in, of all things, oncology. The hypochondriac in me wanted to stay miles away from her, lest she detect some strange growth on my body. Fortunately, by the time she pulled a chair next to me -- she turned out to be a reader of Ganga Mail and wanted to have a chat -- I had had two drinks to feel brave and philosophical.

"Sir," she began, "I have always wanted to tell you one thing. Please smoke and drink less, so that we can keep enjoying your writing."

"One will remain healthy as long as one wants to. It is all in the mind, you see. The mind is the most powerful human organ, which no doctor can touch or feel." It was the alcohol talking.

"Oh sir, it is pointless to argue with you intellectual types," she smiled. She looked shyly at the glass of beer she was holding.

"Tell me one thing," I said, "you have worked on cadavers, right?"

"Of course!"

"So you know how a man looks after death."

"Of course!"

"And you also know what is inside a human body -- the intestines, the organs, and so on."

"Of course!" she laughed, wiping the froth from her upper lip as she took a sip of beer. "Why do you ask all this?"

"I will tell you why. Suppose you are with a man, someone you like. Imagine a situation when you are standing or sitting very close to him. Are you going to be aroused, or are you going to think of all that is inside him -- the bones, the intestines, the organs?"

"Well, sir," she said, "it's like this. My brain will know what all is inside him, but my heart and eyes will see what is outside."

500th Post And Six Years Of Ganga Mail. Destination: Salvation

2011-10-15T23:21:00.002+05:30

On an average, each post in Ganga Mail is about 500 words. Now multiply that by 500, and it will easily translate into three 250-page books. Three books! Alas, I can't keep them in the shelf. They are invisible books. But they've earned me what real books achieve for their writers: a little bit of recognition.

Tomorrow, if fame comes knocking, the credit will still go to Ganga Mail because it was this blog which helped me find and develop a distinct voice as a writer. I still have a long way to go, but at least I know now that I am capable of telling a story. This would not have been possible without the constant encouragement from the people who read and have stood by Ganga Mail -- to all of you, my heartfelt thanks. With you around, life isn't so lonely.

Ganga Mail was born out of loneliness. I was two months short of 35, still single and, for the first time in my life, without a steady girlfriend. Forget steady, I did not have any woman in my life, with the exception of my mother, who was worrying herself to death about the fact that her elder son was still not married.

There were a couple of women in my life, but they were unknown, unseen beauties with brains who were capable of engaging you in a conversation all night without letting your interest sag even for a moment. They were among the people who read my column in the New Sunday Express and had got in touch, and the conversation with them, even though intense, would be anything but personal. They had built such strong walls of anonymity around them that getting anything personal out of them was next to impossible. Moreover, after a long, stimulating chat, while they would go back to their respective beds or lovers or perhaps spouses, I would be left alone sitting on the mattress and staring at the screen. I had no one left to even call up.

Thus was born Ganga Mail -- as an attention-seeking device. I wanted to be read, to be appreciated. Writing for the paper was not sufficient enough -- that was just my job.

If you dig into the archives of the blog and read the first fifty posts or so, you will encounter the soul of a lonely (though not unhappy) man. In my opinion, that lot contains some of my best posts -- honest and free of the fear of being judged. I would write a post over several drinks and by the end of it would click on the 'Publish' button in a mildly drunken state, without worrying about what I had written -- something that I no longer do.

The lonely phase didn't last long. I started Ganga Mail in October 2005, within six months I was married. By then the blog had assumed a life of its own. It had become my diary, my conscience keeper, my mouthpiece, my front desk, my scribbling pad -- all rolled into one. Above all, it had become my best friend, who not only showed faith in my writing skills and helped me sharpen them, but also taught me that every single moment in your life, no matter how mundane or insignificant they may seem, can be transformed into an engaging piece of writing provided you put your mind into it. That way, you never consider anything to be mundane -- be it the 90 seconds you spend at the traffic signal or the 30 minutes you wait in the queue to pay your phone bill -- every moment, every experience is laden with a ripe fruit called the 'story'. You only have to know how to pluck it. Ganga Mail taught me the art.

Tonight, as I write this landmark post, my mind goes back to the old posts that gave Ganga Mail unprecedented visibility and helped it earn new reader bases. Two such posts easily come to my mind: one, my eyewitness account of Mani Ratnam in action, and the story of Shivani, a fictitious woman I had created.

But the two posts that will always remain close to my heart happen to be written during the lonely phase: one, my search for a particular song, Raat banoon main aur chaand bano tum; two, my eventual realisation that the route to immortality is only through mortality, courtesy a Sahir Ludhianvi song from Kabhie Kabhie. If Ganga Mail were to have an anthem, it would be Raat banoon main -- and it is not even sung by Kishore Kumar, the singer this blog is committed to celebrating.

Then there are countless other posts which I am proud of and wish people would read and reread them, but I can't recall their titles right away to run a search and reproduce the links here. But one of them would certainly be my experience of cremating my mother at the Manikarnika Ghat in Banaras, a place where every devout Hindu desires to be cremated. My mother, even though highly devout, never went to Banaras with the intention of being cremated there: she was merely visiting my brother who happened to be posted in the city, and she just died one fine afternoon while having lunch, three days before her 59th birthday and exactly three hours after I had spoken to her over the phone.

Here again, Ganga Mail came to my rescue: the moment I received the news of her death, I became a blogger-reporter who set out to cover his mother's funeral. I was no longer thinking of my mother, but about how to deliver the news and describe the event to my readers. The readers had become my relatives.

Six long years and 500 posts on, Ganga Mail continues to flow. May not be with the same ferocity when it could be heard even from a distance, but perhaps with a gentle gurgling sound that encourages you to step into the cool waters and splash some of it on your face.

During its journey through the six years, Ganga Mail has received numerous compliments. People who gave those compliments, at various points of time, might have forgotten all about it, but the nice things they had had to say about the blog not only remain engraved in my heart but also lie scattered, as evidence, in the comment boxes of various posts.

But one compliment deserves special mention. It came very recently from someone totally unknown to me, someone who hails from Lucknow, who mentioned my blog on his friend's Facebook wall, saying, Inko padhte jaiye, jeete jaiye, zindagi chakhte jaiye.

Inko padhte jaiye, jeete jaiye, zindagi chakhte jaiye -- Keep reading him, keep living life, keep savouring life.

Now, isn't that the mission statement of Ganga Mail?

Fireflies

2011-10-08T01:24:00.004+05:30

It is always a pleasure to hold a new book in your hands -- even more if the book happens to arrive at your doorstep in a parcel. It is the time taken to tear open the parcel that heightens the pleasure. You know what exactly is inside, but the effort that goes into unravelling a brand new book is what really makes it worthwhile.

Then just imagine the pleasure if the brand new hardbound book you pull out of the parcel happens to be printed forty years ago! I must have been only a few months old when, in 1971, Alfred Knopf printed the American edition of Shiva Naipaul's best-known book, Fireflies.

I, of course, wouldn't know how many copies were printed and how many got sold from that lot, but it is now certain that some copies remained, unsold and untouched, in some storehouse where no light reached for forty long years. So what I held in my hands last Saturday was a first-edition copy of a celebrated book published at the time when I was born (Andre Deutsch published it in Britain in 1970 and Alfred Knopf published it in America the following year).

I kept rereading, in amazement, these words on the opening page: Alfred A. Knopf / New York / 1971. And also what the jacket of the book had to say about the author: Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and was educated there and at University College, Oxford (where he received an honors degree in classical Chinese). Fireflies marks his debut as a novelist -- he has previously published short stories, three of which have appeared in Penguin Modern Stories 4. Like his brother, the novelist V.S. Naipaul, he now lives in England.

In a recent edition of the book, if at all there is one, the author intro would stand drastically altered. Shiva Naipaul would be described in the past tense (he died in 1985, aged 40) while V.S. Naipaul would not be called a mere novelist but a Nobel laureate. Fireflies, though I am yet to start reading it, seems to be Shiva Naipaul's answer to his elder brother's A House for Mr Biswas. They are equally voluminous and are set in Trinidad.

Between the two Naipauls, I somehow prefer the younger brother. While the elder one is like a dour-faced teacher who looks down upon you (yet you stick to him because you've got so much to learn from him), the younger brother is a good-natured soul who takes you along on his journeys. I have read, cover to cover, two books of Shiva Naipaul -- North of South and Beyond the Dragon's Mouth -- to be able to say that.

Somehow, Fireflies always eluded me. Each time I decided to look it up on Amazon, either the book would be out of stock or my credit card would have crossed the spending limit. Finally I got a first-edition copy, thanks to Soma.

Soma and I were born around the same time. We lived and grew up in the same neighbourhood and went to the same school. We were in the same class. As kids we were great friends, but adolescence erected a wall of awkwardness between us. I don't recall having a single conversation with her during our teenage years. By the time we could step out of teenage, she was already married and had gone off to America. We ceased to exist for each other -- not that it mattered to either of us. Then, one day, some twenty years later, Facebook reunited us. We were two different people now -- both embracing the age of forty and much wiser.

About a month ago, Soma came down to India to visit her parents in Calcutta. Since I was going to be in Calcutta too around that time, we planned to meet up for lunch at Peter Cat on Park Street. A couple of days before she took the flight out of the U.S., she pinged me: "Dude, is there anything you want from here?"

"Nothing at all," I replied, "But just in case you happen to visit a bookshop before you leave, and if in that bookshop you find a book called Fireflies, please pick it up for me. I'll pay you."

Little did I know that she was going to do what I also could've done sitting thousands of miles away in India. She went to Amazon.com and ordered the book. Unfortunately, the book reached her home after she had left for India. Which meant I could not get my copy of Fireflies during the lunch at Peter Cat (I was secretly hoping I would). But so what, I've got it now and I can finally proclaim, proudly and honestly: That's what friends are for!

Really, the copy of Fireflies is a certificate of that friendship -- a friendship that goes back forty years, when Shiva Naipaul had just finished writing the book and when Soma and I were still in our nappies.

P.S. Talking of siblings, my brother Rohit also has a blog now.

Life In A Metro — The Circle Of Life

2011-10-07T22:32:00.000+05:30

Rebel all you want — but life has a way of pulling you back to the basics

This Durga Puja, which got over just two days ago, I went pandal-hopping with gusto even though the festival is celebrated in barely five locations in the whole of Chennai. Which meant shaking hands with hitherto-unknown Bengali men who, like me, are also living in the city; admiring the beautiful Bengali women who made you wonder why you don't ever run into them during the rest of the year; savouring the artery-choking Mughlai parathas and cutlets sold at the stalls; admiring the beautiful face of the goddess as the priest waved burning incense at her to the beats of the dhaak – the sound of Bengal.

Each time I stood in front of the goddess, transfixed, as the incense was being waved at her, I could see my mind racing thirty years back in time to a city called Kanpur, where I, as a ten-year-old, stood watching a similar spectacle.

Back then, Durga Puja meant at least three sets of new clothes, each to be worn on saptami, ashtami and navami. The cloth would be purchased and given to the tailor more than a month in advance. During those three days, you would be granted immunity against homework. Also during those three days, you discovered the joys of eating out – the biggest joy, and sense of achievement, being derived from the eating of the bhog, or the community feast, consisting of khichuri and labra.

Khichuri (a soggy preparation of rice and lentils) and labra (a mix of crudely-chopped vegetables) can only count as the humblest of dishes one can think of, but when eaten collectively out of leaf-plates at the puja pandal, the khichuri-labra combo becomes a delicacy in itself. The smell of khichuri is something that gets embedded in the nostrils of a Bengali child right from the formative years.

Then, one day, youth intervenes. You rebel against the practices you've followed as a child; you find it uncool to waste a day at the puja pandal; you find it horrifying that people should queue up for the khichuri and labra as if they were beggars. You want to do your own thing, much to the disappointment of your parents who want you to come along for the puja just like you did in your childhood. Then comes the stage where you are too busy making a career to be thinking of festivals. Who has the time to go back to Kanpur to attend, of all things, Durga Puja? Years pass.

Finally, one day, you miss the smell of khichuri. You suddenly crave it. You want to take the train back to childhood but it is simply too late. So guided by your nostrils, you scour the streets of Chennai and eventually come across a puja pandal, where scenes from your childhood are being played out. You meekly join the queue with a leaf-plate to have some khichuri and labra scooped on to it. Over the meal, you make new friends and perhaps meet your future wife. And then you start coming to the same place, year after year. You've become a part of Chennai's Durga Puja celebrations.

But just when you are beginning to relive your childhood, you realise that your child is no longer a child but a young man – a rebel – who would rather have lunch at Bay Leaf with his friends than sweat it out with fellow Bengalis over a boring meal of khichuri and labra. But when he takes up a job in the U.S., and once he gets as old as you, he too will crave the familiar smell someday. He will scour the alien streets of his city and eventually come across a pandal crowded with Bengalis speaking English with an American – and not Bengali – accent. He will become a part of the New Jersey Durga Puja celebrations.

Someday, many decades down the line, his grandson will tell himself that he has had enough of the American way of the puja, and that in order to enjoy the festival in its truest sense, he must return to Kanpur. So he will be standing there, on the invisible footprints of a ten-year-old, watching the priest wave burning incense at the goddess. Life would have come full circle.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, October 8, 2011.

Life In A Metro: Books, A Click Away

2011-10-01T22:25:00.004+05:30

That's one evening I am not going to forget easily. It was October 2005. A colleague, who is also a good friend, and I were at Landmark, the bookstore, trying to make the most of the annual sale. As we went about picking books, I eagerly waited for the phone in my pocket to vibrate — our salaries were expected to be credited that evening, and as soon as the money hit the account, I was to receive a text message. Since my friend hadn't signed up for the intimation facility, he walked up to me every now and then to ask, “Did the SMS come?” We were getting panicky. Our evening depended entirely on the message from the bank.

Finally it arrived, just when we had run out of patience and were considering putting the carefully picked books back on the racks. It is difficult to describe in words the relief that overcame us; suffice to say that we pulled out our debit cards with flourish.

Today, even though that particular evening remains in my mind, the whole experience of whiling away time at bookshops has already become a distant memory. I simply can't recall the last time I went to a bookshop with the specific purpose of buying books. Why should I when I have the bookshop coming to my doorstep — that too with books I thought would be available only in a quaint bookstore in some corner of Europe? Can life get any better?

If you are a book-loving internet-savvy Indian and haven't heard of Flipkart yet, you are probably living in a cave. Flipkart, India's answer to Amazon.com, has brought about a revolution so sweeping that it is soon going to change the way the lay Indian shops — and not just for books. Why should you go to a bookshop and pay Rs. 250 for a book (not to mention the hundred bucks you shell out as autorickshaw fare) when Flipkart delivers the same book at your doorstep for just Rs. 188? For the discerning reader, it's not just about the discount but also the access to books that are never available in Indian bookshops.

Take Henry Miller, for instance. He is one writer I don't just admire, but also envy. But what do I find of him in the bookshops? Two long-unsold copies of Tropic of Cancer and may be a solitary copy of Sexus? And maybe a surprise copy of Black Spring? But run a search for Henry Miller on Flipkart, and you will hit a goldmine. For a few thousand rupees, you can own every single word Miller wrote in his lifetime. Ditto for other authors. You no longer have to lament: “Oh, I love his writing! He wrote that great book, what's its name? I tried looking for it, you know, but couldn't find it anywhere.”

The fun has just begun. It will be more fun starting next year when Amazon begins its India operations. According to informed sources, it has already set up an office in Bangalore (Flipkart is also headquartered in Bangalore), though it remains to be seen whether Amazon is going to function under its own brand name or piggyback on a local franchisee.

The surging popularity of e-tail is, needless to say, giving sleepless nights to the large chains of bookstores. Stand-alone bookstores, which are run out of passion for the written word and which have a loyal clientele, may still survive the onslaught as long as the elderly owner, most likely to be well-read himself, genially guides customers into buying the right books. But it's the big chains, who shell out a fortune each month to maintain their stores in plush malls or in prime locations in various cities, which will take the hit. Eventually they will sell less books and more of other items.

For once, I am not complaining about the changing times. More cars mean more pollution and congestion, more connectivity means less privacy, but more books only mean a bigger library at home. Which person in his or her right mind would ever grudge that?

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, October 1, 2011.

Seeds Of The Raj Were Sown Here

2011-09-30T14:29:00.004+05:30

In 1639, the very year Shah Jahan made Delhi his capital city, the seeds of the Mughal Empire's doom were sown in a hill-surrounded south Indian town called Chandragiri, located in present-day Andhra Pradesh.

By then, the powerful Vijayanagara Empire had disintegrated into smaller kingdoms which were now ruled independently by their erstwhile governors, the Nayaks. Chandragiri, which had been the capital of the Empire, was ruled by a Nayak called Damarla Venkatadri, whose authority extended to the East coast, from Pulicat to San Thome. On August 22, 1639, he put his signature on a deed allowing the East India Company to set up business on a strip of beach close to San Thome.

On that sandy strip the Company built Fort St. George, which turned out to be the springboard for British rule in the sub-continent. From Fort St. George also grew the city of Madraspatnam, known today as Chennai, a metropolis bursting at its seams with a population of nearly 10 million. But Chandragiri, where it all began, is a small and contented town of 10,000. Located 12 scenic kilometres from Tirupati, it's bustling with activity, nonetheless.

Bazaar Road, its only main road, is commercial as well as residential — flanked by houses of varying vintage, shops and provision stores and busy eateries. At Murali Haircutting Saloon, which is pulsating with the beats of a racy Telugu song, barbers are snipping away at the hair of their customers even as film star Venkatesh smiles at them from a poster. Vegetable vendors, all women, have their wares spread out on the pavement. The road also accommodates the town's busy bus-stand, police station, a wine shop and two modest lodges. Yours truly spent a night in one of the lodges: an AC room came for Rs. 700. If Chandragiri was Mumbai, it would have been equal to staying at the legendary Taj Mahal Palace.

But few luxuries beat the pleasure of exploring a tiny town on a drizzly night at an unhurried pace, smelling the idlis being steamed by a roadside vendor-couple or watching a masterly chef stationed on the pavement expertly roll out egg dosas. The dosas, which might be the best you've ever had, cost you barely ten rupees. Perhaps the time has come to promote small-town tourism, when you travel to a nondescript town and savour life in slow motion, that too in a princely manner.

Historically, however, Chandragiri is anything but nondescript. The three-storeyed Raja Mahal, where the Nayak is said to have signed the lease, is about a kilometre from the town and attracts a trickle of tourists on a daily basis. It has been renovated and turned into a museum by the Archaeological Survey of India and houses artifacts and bronze statues belonging to the Vijayanagara era. Across a neatly-kept lawn is the much smaller Rani Mahal. There are benches for visitors in the shade of jamun trees — you can't help trampling upon a few jamuns along the way — and a small lake for boat rides. A pleasant place to meditate upon history.

The two palaces are part of the Chandragiri fort, a substantial portion of which lies on top of the overlooking hills. From the lawns of the palaces, you notice fortifying walls peeping out of the vegetation on the steep hills. At certain places, you find the boulders glazed — the idea was to prevent the enemy from climbing up. Alas, the hilly part of the fort, believed to be dating back to 1,000 A.D., is closed to visitors.

"The climb can be very dangerous. We can't allow people for reasons of safety," says G. Thirumoorthy, the assistant superintending archaeologist. So what was up there? "Must be the treasury," he replies. So, a cloud of mystery hangs over the hills. One untested way of clearing the cloud could be to make friends with an enterprising goatherd: you will find a number of them loitering on the foothills.

The two palaces, however, do not give a feel of history. Thanks to the renovation by the ASI, the structures look rather new. The durbar hall of the Raja Mahal, in fact, bears a recent coat of pink. But Raja Mahal, no doubt, is old, very old. "Archaeological evidence suggests that it belongs to the late medieval period," says Thirumoorthy. He, however, laments the lack of archaeological studies done on Chandragiri, considering that it had been a capital of the Vijayanagara Empire (it became the capital after Hampi was reduced to ruins by Muslim invaders during the Battle of Talikota in 1565).

Meanwhile, life in Chandragiri, the town, goes on. Residents don't seem to have many complaints against life. "There are only five pawn brokers in this town, and I am one of them. We are all doing good business. Why should I go elsewhere?" asserts Vishnu Prakash, a pawn broker from Rajasthan who chose to settle in Chandragiri. Why not Tirupati, where business could be even better? "Why should I?" argues Vishnu Prakash, "The cost of living is so low here. Chandragiri is paradise."

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus Weekend, September 30, 2011.

Life In A Metro — Back To School After 25 Years

2011-09-24T09:29:00.003+05:30

Why nostalgia may not always be a good thing

It feels as if I never left school or the neighbourhood I grew up in, even though more than two decades have passed since I left both. Every now and then, during the past few weeks, the screen of my laptop turns into a mirror in which I see myself sitting obediently in the classroom or playing cricket in the neighbourhood playground that nourished me as a boy. The reason: Facebook.

Sometime ago, an enterprising senior started a Facebook page for our school; and even though I already had many of my classmates on my list of friends, the new page opened the floodgates. People I had forgotten all about, people I thought I would never see again, people I was eagerly searching for, people I idolised, people I didn't look forward to seeing again – they all came rushing in to the Facebook page with a collective cry of joy, exactly the way we rushed out to the school playground at the sound of the bell. Overnight, the page had close to a 1,000 members.

After the initial joy of seeing the all-too-familiar names came a series of grim realisations. Realisation no. 1: how much time has passed since we last saw each other! Two-and-a-half decades is a long, long time. And there was no escaping this fact since there was pictorial evidence. Young men, who barely had beards sprouting from their chins when I last saw them, now looked like what their fathers looked like back then. They are the new ‘uncles' – who now have children as old as we were then.

Even the women – I mean the girls – had changed beyond recognition – not to mention their changed surnames. When I was 15, I had a serious crush on a girl called Payal Gupta (name changed, as journalists often say), but after I left school, I never saw her again. When Facebook – the ultimate missing-persons locator – arrived a few years ago, I searched for her. I came across many Payal Guptas, many prettier than her, but not her. Then the other day, one Payal Kapoor, who happened to be a member of the school page, sent me a friendship request. She was no longer the ‘girl' I knew, but a middle-aged mother of two teenage daughters!

Realisation no. 2: I too must be appearing to them an ‘uncle'. My father was 44 when I passed out of school, I am myself 40 today.

Realisation no. 3: You don't have much to talk about even though you are reconnecting with people after a quarter of a century – the same people you looked forward to spending time with while in school. After the passage of 25 years, you don't even recognise yourself in the mirror; how can you expect to connect with a long-lost schoolmate with your heart and soul, that too when he is not in the same profession as yours? Maybe that is why after the initial, enthusiastic bursts of Hi's and Hello's, most members on the page slipped into an uncomfortable silence – wishing each other only on occasions such as Janmashtami, Eid and Vinayaka Chathurthi.

I am not trying to boast here, but I did try to generate some conversation by posting this message on the wall: Those who passed out in 1988 and before: How about recalling your first crush in school (with names and all), now that a lot of water has flown under the bridge. Perhaps a nice way to warm up middle-aged hearts? The idea was to engage schoolmates who are now 40 and above in a juicy conversation – not that I expected anyone to spell out names.

But a senior of mine in school, whom I idolised once, rebuked me. He posted a comment saying that if the girls are named, their husbands may not take kindly to it and that might cause a storm in their lives. I was so amused by the comment that I did not feel like telling him that I was only kidding. Instead, I decided to play along. I posted another comment, saying: “You are so right. If I ever found out that someone had a crush on my wife while she was in school, I would file for divorce.”

Upon which yet another senior, a woman, pounced on me. “On one hand you are asking people to name their crushes, and on the other you are threatening to divorce your wife! You are the biggest MCP I've ever seen.” Even before I could reply, yet another senior commented, “You should respect your seniors. That's what our school taught us.” I wondered if it was really necessary for me to revisit the school.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, September 24, 2011.

The Godmakers Of Kumartuli

2011-09-18T00:05:00.000+05:30

Come Durga Puja, their creations will hold the entire city of Kolkata spellbound for five days. Yet, for the artisans on the banks of the Hooghly, it is just a means of survival. BISHWANATH GHOSH watches as the gods take shape under their skilled hands...

“You are taking pictures,” Bikash Mondal warns from his perch, “you'll have to give us money to buy tea.” Standing atop a wooden platform in a workshop that is crammed with incomplete clay images of the goddess, the elderly artisan, clad only in a soiled lungi, is preparing to install the head on the tallest of the idols.

His warning is only half in jest. This is, after all, a back-breaking time for the artisans of Kumartuli, one of Kolkata's oldest neighbourhoods, nestled on the banks of the Hooghly, which provides the city its greatest source of joy — idols of Durga. There are barely three weeks before the goddess transforms from a crude structure of clay-and-hay to a beautiful, bedecked Bengali bride and reaches the countless pandals of Kolkata. Distractions, therefore, are not welcome.

It is almost five in the evening when I arrive in Kumartuli. But Rabindra Sarani, its biggest road, bears a deserted look. Most shops are shut. The absence of traffic lays bare the pair of glistening tram lines stretched out on the road. Running on them now, however, are not trams but the occasional taxi and autorickshaw and, of course, the human horses — lungi-clad, weather-beaten men pulling rickshaws with the strength of their bones.

Is it a public holiday? Not that I know of. Or is it that the shops in Kumartuli close in the afternoon for a post-lunch nap? I'm not sure of that either, though that is more likely. But stroll into Banamali Sarkar Street and the languorous air melts into a buzz of activity. This narrow street is the nerve centre of Kumartuli, flanked by cavernous workshops that are packed with large idols of Durga and her four children in various stages of completion. Wiry artisans squat on the street, kneading the clay or working on smaller idols, ignoring the attention of curious passersby and amateur photographers. That their creation is going to leave Kolkata gaping in admiration for five full days is of no consequence to them — for them making gods is only a means of survival.

The workshops of Kumartuli — there are about 450 of them, many of them concentrated around Banamali Sarkar Street — are run by families that have been into idol-making and pottery for generations: Kumartuli means potters' quarter. During the Puja season, they hire extra hands from across Bengal because making the idols of Goddess Durga is a grand affair. The goddess, after all, does not like to be presented alone in a pandal: she must be accompanied by her four children, not to mention the lion she rides and the curly-haired, muscular demon she is shown slaying. And with new settlements coming up around Kolkata and with Bengalis reaching newer shores across the globe, the demand for idols has gone up over the years. Kumartuli is known to create close to 4,000 sets of Durga idols every year, some of which are shipped abroad. All this calls for a lot of work — work that demands intricacy and, very often, creativity.

The flash of my camera may have irritated the elderly, bare-chested artisan who is trying to fix the head on a 12-ft statue of Durga, but his employer, Nanigopal Rudra Pal, is in a meditative state as he works on the goddess' fingers. Strewn on his table are a set of clay fingers, each large enough to befit the 12-ft idol. He is picking them up, one by one, and delicately running his fingers on them to impart them his masterly touch, to make them look as human as possible. The fingers look very real — and a bit spooky.

“I have been in this business for 45 years now,” says Pal, now 68, without even looking up to see who he is talking to. He is too engrossed creating the nail on a thumb of the goddess. So how many idols is his workshop making this year? “Twenty, may be 25?” I decide to leave him alone, and find someone chatty.

Out on the street, in an isolated corner, one artisan is busy applying clay on the protruding belly of Ganesha. He is Gobinda Dey, who has come from Nabadweep. A typical Kumartuli idol, he tells me, is made of bamboo and hay — the bamboo serving as the skeleton and hay the flesh. Once the structure is ready, it gets a skin of entel maati, a sticky variety of clay procured from the bed of the Hooghly. Once it dries up, the finishing touches are given with bele maati, a finer variety of clay which also comes from the river. The idols are always pre-ordered and never sold off-the-shelf.

“I've been making idols ever since I was 18 or 20,” Gobinda, now 40, tells his story without stopping his work. “It takes about four days to create an idol” — he is talking about the goddess' children. “But Durga's idol takes about a week. Each year I make about 20 idols.” I ask Gobinda if he always wanted to be an idol-maker.

“I didn't have a choice. Lekha-pora to sikhtey paareni (I could not get education). This profession may not give me a good life, but it gives me what I need — two square meals a day. I have no one to look after; my parents are dead and I am single. So I am able to manage,” he says.

So how much does he earn during a season? Gobinda does not give a direct answer: uneducated he may be, but he is clearly aware of the never-ask-a-man-his-salary rule. “It all depends on skill and experience. Some of us get Rs. 1,000, some get Rs. 2,000, some others a little more. Food and lodging are provided by the employer.” A pittance, but, as he says, they don't have a choice.

I saunter along the street: never before have I seen so many idols at the same time. One set of idols sit right next to a public urinal: I guess it does not matter. Until they reach the pandals, they are not gods but just images of clay and hay. Three weeks later, a multitude of people will be standing before the same idols, with their hands folded and a silent prayer on their lips.

I am standing by the Hooghly now, its waters darkening in the rapidly fading light. The bell of the riverside temple rings. A group of labourers, wet from the river, has just deposited a boatload of black clay on the banks. From this mound, the clay will be scooped and taken to the various workshops. Two more clay-laden boats are approaching. All this for five days of festivity, after which, the idols will be consigned to the river. The clay will dissolve and return to where it belongs.

Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine, 18 October 2011.

In Carnival Mode

2011-09-18T00:02:00.000+05:30

Kolkata has many faces but during Durga Puja there is no space for anything else but celebration ... and a little bit of sadness

What you think of Kolkata depends a lot on how you come to Kolkata. If you come in a train and alight at the Howrah station, you will drive into a city that is a prisoner of its long-standing image — the iconic bridge, trams, hand-pulled rickshaws, stream of labourers propelled into a half-run by the heavy load on their heads, pavements turned into kitchen by poor migrants, crumbling colonial-era buildings giving off a whiff of heritage and decay.

But if you fly down to Kolkata and take the Rajarhat Road into the city, you could be rubbing your eyes in wonder. You will tear through a global-era landscape: upscale high-rises, state-of-the-art offices of IT giants, snazzy malls. North Kolkata, where the city originated, may continue to be a living museum of the olden times, but the metropolis, on the whole, is no longer what you saw in black-and-white Bengali movies. Unemployment is no longer a burning issue. There was a time when high school students, during their exams, were asked to write essays on the subject of unemployment. Load-shedding is a thing of the past. Traffic jam, once Kolkata’s best friend, has now become the principle foe of other cities. And Kolkata today has a night life like no other city.

But come Durga Puja and it does not matter what route you take to Kolkata. No matter what your mode of travel, you arrive in a city where celebration is the uniform civil code. From whichever corner you look at it, you will find nothing else but puja pandals, food stalls and a multitude of people out on the roads until the wee hours. It’s carnival time. It’s a religious event, cultural occasion, music season, literary fair, food festival, fashion show — all rolled into one. Many of the popular songs of R.D. Burman that you listen to today were originally recorded in Bengali as part of Puja albums. And the story for many a celebrated Bengali film had been originally written for the Puja-special edition of local literary magazines.

There is, however, a gloomy side to Durga Puja. Bengalis, even though they wait for it all year, actually become very sad once the Pujas begin. Even while they enjoy the five days of festivity, they are also extremely mournful about how quickly it is all going to end. On panchami, they realise that only four more days are left. On sashti, it strikes them that just three more days are left. By saptami, the heart is heavy. On ashtami, there is a lump in the throat. By the end of navami, there are tears in the eyes. They are left with no choice but to look forward to the next year’s Puja. It is the looking forward that keeps Kolkata going. As they shout while taking the idols for immersion: “Aaschhe bochhor abaar hobey (we are coming back next year)!” It’s Kolkata’s way of assuring itself that the party is not over yet.

Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine, 18 September 2011.

In the state of Paschimbanga, a slice of Pondicherry

2011-09-17T12:21:00.004+05:30

The sun, as it began to set, sprinkled the river with drops of orange; the sky, meanwhile, was rapidly turning into a patchwork of grey and deep blue. A number of elderly men, sitting on archaic wooden benches in groups of twos and threes, were watching the spectacle. For them it was not a spectacle but a sight they came across every day after their evening walks on the Strand in Chandannagar, once known as Chandernagore. But for us it was — and we had made it just in time to watch the sun set over the erstwhile French colony.

It takes roughly an hour to reach Chandannagar from Kolkata, but it took us three. The reason being my two companions got into a heated debate and forgot all about the crucial right turn that had to be taken in order to reach the tiny town located on the banks of the Hooghly. And since the debate, inspired by a new Bengali film called Iti Mrinalini, was about extra-marital relationships, the driver must have had his ear placed on the conversation so firmly that even he forgot to take his foot off the accelerator. The car kept speeding forever on the wide, smooth Delhi Road.

By the time we realised our mistake, we were way beyond Bandel, another town further up the Hooghly which boasts of a Portuguese-built church dating back to 1599. Moral of the story: discussing extra-marital affairs leads you nowhere. We made a U-turn and took the next visible road turning left, and were soon on the historical Grand Trunk Road, travelling downstream alongside the Hooghly. The road, built by Sher Shah Suri, which runs from Sonargaon in Bangladesh right up to Peshawar in Pakistan via the fertile Gangetic plains of India, assumes the form of a narrow lane at many places in this part of Bengal. Only upon reading the various signboards — the signboard of the neighbourhood doctor's clinic, of the local grocery store, of the crowded sweet shop — did we realise that it wasn't the lane that was small; it was actually we who were crawling like an ants on the lap of history.

In hindsight, the debate turned out to be a blessing. Had we reached Chandannagar a little earlier, we would have been caught in the rains. We might have turned the car back and thought of returning some other day — it's a day that never comes. But right now the town was freshly bathed — all set to welcome us and also draw its residents out of their homes. It was time for their evening walk.

As far as looks go, the similarity between Chandannagar and Pondicherry is unmistakable. While Chandannagar has the river, Pondicherry has the sea — that's the only big difference. Though Pondicherry, having been the capital of French India, has far more French-built buildings on the waterfront than Chandannagar, the atmosphere that prevails in the evenings is strikingly similar: people out on their walks, young women commuting on bicycles, hawkers selling ice-cream and local savouries. There is definitely something French about women riding bicycles — it's a common sight in Pondicherry as well.

What is, however, definitely Indian is the urge to have a steaming cup of tea and something freshly fried when the air smells wet. And so, before walking the length of the Strand, we parked ourselves on a bench in front of the eateries that line the short road connecting the Strand to the Sacred Heart Church, built in 1875. The three of us had hot cutlets, both mutton and vegetable, followed by tea served in miniature earthen cups. The bill: Rs 25.

Chandannagar's modern history dates back to 1673 when the French obtained permission from the Nawab of Bengal to set up a trading post on the banks of Hooghly. Bengal was then part of the Mughal Empire. Over the decades, the traders went on to become rulers — now that's a familiar story, isn't it? In 1730, Joseph Francois Dupleix was sent from Pondicherry to take over as the new governor of Chandannagar; and under him the town developed and prospered so much that he was soon sent back to Pondicherry as the governor-general of French India. Dupleix is best remembered for his rivalry with Robert Clive of the British East India Company. In the end Dupleix lost and Clive won, as a result of which Pondicherry lost out to Madras and Chandannagar lost out to Calcutta in terms of their importance as towns.

And what if Dupleix had won? Perhaps this piece would have been written in French.

Dupleix's home, still intact, continues to be the most prestigious building on the Strand. It is under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India: part of it is a museum and part of it serves as an institute where you can learn French. In the museum you still get to see Dupleix's four-poster bed — so tall that it could be climbed only with the help of a small wooden stairway that also stands preserved alongside the bed. Another landmark on the Strand is St. Joseph's Convent, a girls' school founded in 1861 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny. It continues to be one of the best educational institutions in the country and its alumni, today, is spread across the world. I get to see two of them on a daily basis — one at work, a colleague; and another at home, my wife.

Even as you gaze admiringly at these buildings while walking on the promenade, it is impossible to miss the sights offered by the other side of the Strand — that of the tree-lined river bank and the river itself, flowing serenely towards the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. And across the river, you see the chimneys of jute mills rising above the green vegetation, piquing your curiosity about what lies on the opposite bank.

A one-way ferry ride costs three rupees each. We got into a steamer and climbed to the upper deck with the intention of getting a view of the river against the receding town, but a man stopped us and directed us to the lower deck, where we sat face-to-face with the daily passengers — mostly office-goers returning home. One of them sensed our discomfort and remarked, “It will take exactly three minutes.”

It was precisely in those three minutes that night descended; and on the opposite bank, by a temple, rickshaw-pullers waited to take passengers up the darkened path. Since we had no particular destination in mind, we lingered around the temple and ate peanuts. The peanut-seller once worked in a jute mill that has now closed down — another familiar story, isn't it?

When we returned to Chandannagar, the promenade had turned into a venue for addas. Elderly people in small groups were plunged in discussions — one group was discussing Anna Hazare. Young girls were dismounting their bicycles to greet known faces. The hawkers were out in force — selling ice-cream, jhaal muri and paani puri.

On our way out, one of my companions suggested that we stop by at the legendary sweet shop of Surjya Kumar Modak. It was another way of saying — a trip is incomplete without dessert. There we gorged on freshly-made sweets: maal-pua, sandesh, rabri and rosogolla. Needless to say, food turned out to be the subject of discussion on the journey back to Kolkata — a subject that, if you are a true Bengali, is any day more interesting than extra-marital affairs.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 17 September 2011.

Life In A Metro: In Pursuit Of Parking

2011-09-16T21:28:00.000+05:30

Earlier, happiness meant owning a car. Now, it's finding a spot

I have been living in Chennai for 10 years now – I had arrived just in time to watch the city transform. Had I come a few years earlier, I would have been too old-time a resident to notice the changes; had I come a few years later, I would have landed amidst the change and would not have noticed it.

The thing I loved most about Chennai when I came to live here in early 2001 was my street – a clean and tree-lined stretch of road where you could only hear silence even though it's a stone's throw from the cacophony of T. Nagar. No matter what time of the day, the street would be empty, and when viewed from either end, would resemble an elongated arbour. I would often climb down my house and stand on the street just to meditate on the silence and listen to the birds – it made me love Chennai.

Today the same street resembles a parking lot. Throughout the day, cars and bikes are parked on either side, not only narrowing the once-handsome street but also causing traffic jams each time two large vehicles come face to face. The street that, not too long ago, had no traffic now witnesses frequent jams! Now that should give you a fair idea about what's going on in the rest of Chennai – considering that nearly 1,000 new vehicles hit its roads every day – and in other cities as well.

Time was when buying a car brought you happiness and gave you a sense of achievement. It was one of the milestones of life – once you crossed it, it meant you were on the road to prosperity. But today, we even have cars that are specifically made for the common man – the idea is no one should be without a car. And so, overnight, the meaning of happiness has changed. It's finding a parking space that now brings you joy and gives you a sense of immense achievement. (Possessing a car, on the other hand, only reminds you of the number of instalments that still remain to be paid.)

Today when you go to watch a movie at a multiplex, parking the car turns out to be a greater event than the movie itself. Once you are home, the scenes that play in your mind are not from the movie but from the parking lot. And I have lost count of the number of times my wife and I had to abandon the plan to watch a movie simply because a sign at the gate of the mall would read: Parking Full.

And yet, we watch wide-eyed the advertisements for cars, little realising that cars are slowly making us unsocial. It's just a matter of time before we completely stop visiting people or inviting them over: we can park ourselves on couches, but what about our cars!

Isn't it time we had companies that manufactured parking space? I guess it won't be very long before some enterprising companies actually begin doing that. And if that ever happens, you don't have be a rocket scientist to predict that space will cost more than the car. Imagine watching on TV a commercial selling space – how do you show a thing that cannot be seen!

This column is, in fact, inspired by an incident that took place last evening. The wife and I were at the basement of a mall, snaking along the rows of parked cars, trying to find a slot. Following us was a line of cars, in search of the same elusive thing. Suddenly my wife, who was driving, spotted a narrow vacant slot that we almost drove past.

“Quick, quick!” she told me, “Just get out and stand right there while I back the car.” Her idea was that if I stood there, I would automatically lay claim to the vacant space. Even as I considered whether I should actually do that, the car behind us slithered into that spot. She has not been talking to me since.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 17 September 2011.

Perception

2011-09-15T23:30:00.000+05:30

I don't remember since how long S.S. and I have been drinking together. Wait a minute, I do. It's ten years now. If drinking were a creative act, we would have both been celebrated members of the society by now -- the amount we have drunk together! But who says drinking isn't a creative act? In fact, it can be the most creative if done in the right company.

The best part about S.S. is that he is not a fussy drinker. Very much like me. I know men who drink only beer and nothing else. I know men who drink only wine and look down upon other varieties of alcohol. I know men who can drink their whisky only with soda and their rum only with cola. Some can't drink without ice. Some others are very particular about 'side-snacks.'

S.S., however, makes no fuss. Neither do I. As long as there is some water to pour in the drink, anything, just about anything, will do. Most of the drinking, all these years, happened either at my home or in the dingy, dirty bars of wine shops. Today neither of us goes to these bars for the same reason -- they are dingy and dirty. After all, there comes a time when you no longer do things that you did in the younger days and are better off with the memories of it.

But there was a time when we liked going to such places. I particularly liked it because here you met people who did not wear masks. They were what they were -- the labourers, the autorickshaw drivers, the small-time businessmen, the marketing executives, the medical representatives... And alcohol made them even more honest and human.

Very often, we would be approached by men in tatters. They would be holding out their alcohol-filled glasses and begging for some water. They would have managed to collect just about enough money to buy the alcohol, and had no money left to buy a pouch of water. When you are drinking out of habit and not as a social obligation, you always understand a fellow drinker's needs and compulsions. You are sympathetic.

But there is one sight I can never forget. Some years ago, S.S. and I were busy discussing 'office politics' over drinks when a bloodied hand clutching a plastic glass came in between us. One look at the man's face and I was horrified: he had a terrorised look on his face, his soiled shirt was coated with dust and the right sleeve was soaked in blood. He was begging for water.

There are countless such episodes I can recall if I try very hard, but right now they are as hazy as the previous night's antics under the influence of alcohol and I would rather let them remain that way.

But a few weeks ago, S.S. and I got together for a drink at a wine shop after God knows how long. Only that the wine shop was not in Chennai, but in a village in Andhra Pradesh, on the highway to Tirupati.

"I am free, man! Why can't I come with you?" S.S. told me when he learned that I was preparing to leave for a small town near Tirupati. "We could go in my car." So off we were -- the two old drinking buddies -- getting away from the city together for the first time. With each kilometre we travelled the smell of freedom grew stronger -- freedom from what, I was not sure.

At Thiruvallur, we lunched on freshly-fried Mysore bondas and Thums Up at a roadside stall. S.S. has a fetish for roadside food. Not that I don't, just that I am careful while making a journey. The man who was frying the bondas, obviously pleased with the number of bondas we ate, pointed to a road which he said was a short-cut to Tirupati. S.S., who blindly trusted the man's bondas, was reluctant to trust his sense of direction. I finally coaxed him: "Come on, man! This guy lives here. He knows better."

Obviously the bonda-seller knew better. Because even before we realised, we had crossed into Andhra Pradesh. S.S.'s eyes lit up when he noticed wine shops with Telugu signboards. For residents of Tamil Nadu who love to drink or who love their drink, every other state in India is a paradise. Tamil Nadu is the only state in the country where you don't get cans of Kingfisher beer (or any other beer) or Bacardi Breezers. In fact, you don't get anything in Tamil Nadu other than brands of hard, headache-inducing liquor that are unheard of in the rest of India. Why so -- no one seems to know or wants to know.

And so, we had entered paradise. "How about some beer, Ghosh?" S.S. asked me, overcome by glee. "May be when the next shop comes along," I replied. We were driving on a practically empty highway, cutting across lush green fields that looked greener under an overcast sky. And then, the first set of hills showed up on the horizon. The thing with hills is that they look very close but it takes forever reach them. As we drove on, believing they were just round the corner, a signboard came into view: Himalaya Wines. S.S. took his foot off the accelerator.

Himalaya Wines is the most picturesque wine shop I have ever seen or will ever see. On the face of it, it is just another well-stocked wine shop on the highway that is more eager to cater to commuters from the city; but in reality, it is a wine shop located in the middle of an unending stretch of green fields with the hills looking over. Its bar is nothing but a thatched roof shed where people from the nearby villages gather to drink. A thatched roof is all you can ask for in the middle of nowhere -- it was five-star luxury when compared to the dingy bars of Chennai which we once frequented.

We bought two cans of beer each -- S.S. bought Corona while I stuck to Kingfisher -- and settled at a table under the thatched roof. The attendant, seeing customers from the city, came running. We ordered omlettes and sundal. There was pleasure in every moment -- in holding the moisture-coated cans, in clicking open the cans and watching the froth form around the gaping holes, in tasting the beer that actually tasted like beer and not horse's piss.

We had just begun enjoying our beers when an elderly man, in crumpled clothes, walked up to us with his hand outstretched. "Oh no, not again," I muttered to myself, "and we don't even have water. We are drinking beer, can't he see?"

The elderly man came closer, his hand still stretched out. On his palm rested two bondas, and he was telling us something in Telugu. "What does he want?" I asked S.S. "We don't even have any chutney or sauce."

"Wait, let me find out," S.S. said as he got talking to the elderly man in Tamil. It so turned out that the elderly man was a farmer from a nearby village who was not asking for anything but was actually offering us something -- the freshly-fried bondas that he had bought from a roadside stall before walking into the wine shop.

"Since you are an outsider, he considers you to be his guest," the attendant, when he returned with the omlette and sundal, explained. "He has been coming here for years, but I have never seen him offer food to anyone."

Life In A Metro: Flighty Thoughts

2011-09-04T21:26:00.002+05:30

What goes on in the mind of a cattle-class passenger

Whenever I am on a flight, the most anxious moment comes when the plane is about to land. I am not alone, I'm sure. Horrible things are known to happen during landing, and I usually find a silent prayer involuntarily slipping out of my lips when the plane touches down.

It was no different last Sunday when, returning to Chennai after a pleasurable week in Kolkata, I held my breath as soon as the tyres hit the runway. I was eager to reach home safe so that I could pull out of my bag the large collection of books and CDs I'd bought from Park Street and look at them with renewed pleasure. A purchase is not a purchase until you've spread out the objects of desire on the bed upon reaching home for one final inspection before they become a part of your daily life.

The plane was still bouncing on the runway and I was yet to exhale in relief when I heard a cry from behind. “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me, sir!” It was the air-hostess who was strapped to her seat at the rear end of the aircraft. “Please go back to your seat! Please!” She was pleading, at the top of her voice, with a passenger who, within seconds of touchdown, had got up from his seat to retrieve his bag from the overhead compartment.

What surprised me even more was that the passenger – a bespectacled, thinly-built man who must be in his forties – returned to his seat with great reluctance, as if he did not like following the orders of a woman half his age. Had the plane been forced to take off again suddenly due to an emergency situation, he could have fractured his skull and died. It is not for nothing that the air-hostesses politely keep telling you to keep the seat belts on until the plane has reached the parking bay. But since they are pretty, petite and polite, you don't take them very seriously: replace them with menacing lathi-wielding police constables and you will find not a single mobile ringing during the take-off and not a single passenger unlocking the seat belt within seconds of landing.

But it's a very Indian thing: to defy rules if the rule enforcers happen to be of the courteous kind and if rule-breaking does not attract any penalty. We become like a classroom full of unruly students. There can't be a better example of this than the aircraft. No one seems to realise that the rules are for their own good, for their own safety. And yet, you will find passengers overcome by the sudden urgency to speak on the phone once they board – even though they had been idling their time away at the departure lounge. I guess for most of them, it is the thrill of being able to talk from the aircraft.

It no longer surprises me when phones continue to ring even after the pilot has announced, “Cabin crew, prepare for take-off.” What really surprises me is the scene inside an aircraft after landing. Though not many display the courage to get up from their seats while the plane is taxiing towards the parking bay, almost all passengers are up on their feet the moment the plane comes to a halt.

There is usually a long wait, which can extend up to twenty minutes, before the ladders arrive and the doors open, and yet passengers give up the comfort of their seats and stand up, often craning their necks under the overhead compartments, as if that would hasten their exit. At that point, the plane does not look like a plane but a truck packed with cattle. Cattle: doesn't the word sound familiar?

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, September 3, 2011.

Life In A Metro: Oh! Calcutta!

2011-08-26T21:59:00.002+05:30

A letter from the capital of Paschimbanga (or West Bengal, as you knew it)

“Twenty minutes to touch down,” announced the captain, and I looked down the window to find the plane hovering over the city – a maze of luminous dots. So where was I going to land – in Kolkata or in Calcutta, in the capital of West Bengal or in the capital of Paschimbanga?

To me it made no difference. When I speak in my mother tongue, I instinctively refer to the city as Kolkata – like any other Bengali. When I am talking to a non-Bengali, I find ‘Calcutta' automatically rolling off the tongue. Likewise, I am as familiar with West Bengal as with Paschimbanga, which is merely the literal translation of the English name and has already been in use for as long as one can remember. Therefore, I don't see the change from West Bengal to Paschimbanga altering the life of the Bengali in any manner. But when I land, even though the temperature is a pleasant 29 degrees, I find Kolkata sizzling with arguments over the name-change. I have arrived just in time to catch the city engaged in doing what it loves to do best: debate.

The warmth of North Calcutta or the sophistication of South Calcutta? Shiraz biryani or Arsalan biryani? Mohun Bagan or East Bengal? Sourav or Sachin? Suchitra Sen or Supriya Choudhury? Uttam Kumar or Soumitra Chatterjee? Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak? Feluda or Byomkesh? Presidency College or Jadavpur University? Darjeeling or Puri? These are perennial debates that divide Kolkata, or Calcutta, into two fiercely independent nations. Perhaps it's only appropriate that the city and the state have two names each – one official, another universal.

Food for thought

In Kolkata, food is not only an integral part of any event worth celebrating, but is a celebration by itself – for which you need no particular occasion. Food columns, supported by high-resolution (read mouth-watering) pictures of preparations, are a prominent feature of every newspaper worth its salt; food festivals are usually the talk of the town, and food alone can rival the female form when it comes to the selling of a product through advertisements. At restaurants, any meal is incomplete without a passionate discussion about the food served to you. You should be able to tell whether the fish is good or not so good, or whether the lamb is as tender as it was the last time you ate there. You are considered lowly if you don't have an opinion to offer. Kolkata, after all, is a city of opinions – everybody has one, about almost everything under the sun.

The other day, I went with a group of friends for lunch to Oh! Calcutta, an upscale restaurant that serves authentic Bengali cuisine. The conversation at the table went rather smoothly until the arrival of the hilsa, which sparked off a debate: was the fish locally procured, or had it come from the river Padma in Bangladesh? One faction said the hilsa was too good to have come from the Indian side of the river, another faction countered that they'd had hilsa that tasted just as good as the ones from Padma. Since I don't eat fish, the discussion made no sense to me and was, in fact, getting on my nerves. I called the waiter and asked him: “Is this Padma hilsa or local hilsa?” He disappeared into the kitchen and returned after a few minutes to announce that it was indeed the Padma hilsa. Suddenly, a gloomy silence descended on the table. I realised my blunder: by putting an end to the discussion, I had made their meal bland.

Did you know?

As of this moment, theatres in Chennai, where I live, are showing about half-a-dozen English movies. But in Kolkata, which was once the capital of British India and where a large number of people still preserve the English way of life, only two English films are being screened in multiplexes: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Spy Kids 4. “I so badly wanted to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a local friend, who is heavily into sci-fi, complained. “But they only show children's films. I wonder why.” Even I wonder why.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 27 August 2011.

Life In A Metro: Life In A Lodge

2011-08-20T00:02:00.002+05:30

It's not so bad, sometimes, to forsake the big city for a small town

Money – as the Beatles and countless sagacious souls have said – can't buy you love. There is something else that money can't buy, and that's a decent hotel or a lodge in a small town. By decent I don't mean five-star luxury when you have to tear off a white ribbon to even lift the toilet seat – but a clean and comfortable bed and a clean and functional bathroom.

Cleanliness and comfort don't seem to figure very high in the priority list of people who run hotels and lodges in small towns. It's almost a rule that the bed-sheet should bear stains, the tap should leak, and the curtains, if there are any, should smell. The sentiment behind this deliberate oversight seems to be: “This is just a halt, not a home. Why invest in giving guests the feel of home when they are going to check out the next morning anyway?”

You have no choice but to check into one of these lodges, for a measly tariff that can be as low as Rs 150 a night. Even if you are willing to spend Rs 1,500 a night – which is, again, peanuts by city standards – you have no choice but to check into a smelly room for Rs 150 because that may be the only lodge the town boasts of.

Why should anyone, in his or her right mind, leave the comfort of a home in the city and travel to a small town to check into a mosquito-infested lodge? The answer is simple: necessity. You could be a young MBA graduate peddling biscuits, or a journalist collecting material for a story, or a pilgrim visiting a temple – there comes a time in life when a train or a bus deposits you in the lap of an otherwise unknown town and when the first thing that crosses your mind is, ‘Where do I stay?'

By now, I am a veteran of such occasions, though this is nothing to boast about – or maybe it is. The cheapest place I've stayed in was a lodge in Mughal Sarai, in eastern UP, where I checked in at four in the morning. I paid Rs 180 for a filthy, mosquito-infested room lit up by a candle (because of frequent powercuts), and where the leaking tap in the bathroom kept making a sinister sound all night.

The strangest lodge I've ever stayed in was one in Jolarpet, where the drainage mesh was located right in the middle of the bathroom floor. Each time you had a bath, you had to step over a frothy, circular puddle that would have formed at the centre of the floor. The dirtiest experience, however, has to be the lodge in Arakkonam where, after settling into an air-conditioned room (which itself smelt like the godown of a scrap-dealer), I made horrifying discoveries in quick succession – used toothpicks shoved under the edge of the mattress, the bathroom bearing muddy footprints, and the toilet seat lying on the floor.

Once, in Nagapattinam, a small army of taxi drivers stood in my room and watched a movie that I was playing on a borrowed DVD player. How that came to be merits a separate story. And during a recent trip to a small town in Andhra Pradesh – too small for you to have even heard of it – I discovered that the bathroom of my lodge did not have the provision for a light, even though the room was fitted with a brand-new AC.

But I quite like staying in such places. The trick is to spend a night there, either by sipping a drink and reading a good book, or by talking on the phone to a loved one (and silently marvelling at how technology keeps you connected even when you are in a godforsaken town), or by simply gazing at the ceiling and meditating upon life in a silence that only a small town can offer you. Once you cross the one-night milestone, things begin to look rosy. The bed-sheet begins to smell of you; the room begins to look familiar because your belongings are scattered all around; you begin to see the loyal side of the room boy who can do anything for you – including fetching bread-and-omelette at an unearthly hour – if you are nice to him. You discover the humility and simplicity of small-town India.

Each time I check out of a lodge, I feel the tip of a knife touching my heart. I feel like staying on. You can call it Stockholm syndrome – or whatever may be its equivalent in the hospitality industry.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, August 20, 2010.

A journey to remember — The disastrous route to paradise

2011-08-06T22:49:00.001+05:30

This happened when budget airlines were yet to show up on Indian skies and when an air ticket from Chennai to Delhi cost nearly half my salary, when train tickets could be booked only at the reservation counters in railway stations, and when the mobile phone would receive signals only at important stations — leave alone trains having plug points to charge your phone.

It was during those difficult days that one Diwali eve, on an annual visit to my home in Kanpur, I found myself in the sleeper class of a train called Lucknow Express. I had never travelled on this train before. The more respectable trains bound north were already full, and even on this train the seats in the AC coaches had all been sold out.

The train was to depart at 5.30 am — most self-respecting long-distance trains depart from the station of origin only late in the evening -- and when I showed up at the station after a sleepless night, two things struck me as odd. The coaches of the train were still painted in old-fashioned red, and there were only nine coaches in all. I wondered about its position in the pecking order of the railways.

I went to sleep as soon as the train started, and woke up some two hours later at Gudur. I was ravenously hungry: I hadn't eaten properly the night before, hoping that I would have a hearty breakfast from the pantry car. But this train — not surprising any more — did not have a pantry car. I stepped on to the platform and bought a dosa and two idlis.

One bite of the dosa and I spat it out, while the idlis were hard like pumice stone. The food was stale. I flung the paper plate on the tracks and returned to my seat, and from there, made an astonishing discovery. The people who had crowded around the vendor’s cart were not hungry passengers at all: they were mostly his own men who had picked up paper plates as soon as the train arrived and pretended to eat hungrily in order to give the impression that he was in demand. Thirty-five hours and nearly 2,000 km still lay ahead of me.

I made peace with the circumstances and the next 24 hours passed without event: I would either stare out of the window or observe my fellow passengers — most of them men working or studying in the south and now going home for Diwali holidays. Bad news awaited us at Itarsi — I didn’t have a good feeling about the journey from the very beginning. We learned that there had been a derailment near Bhopal, which was further up the route, and that our train was now going to be diverted via Jabalpur. Travel or travail?

Once we left Itarsi station, the train stopped, literally, at every kilometre, mainly to let more important trains pass through. Who cared about a bunch of U.P.-wallahs travelling from Chennai to their homeland! Before long, we were stranded in the lap of the mighty Vindhyas. The train was now an orphan — a baby elephant left behind by the herd. It was difficult to tell whether the driver, whenever he moved the train a few metres (before coming to a halt again), was doing so on the instructions of the nearest control room or on the orders of my fellow passengers who marched up to the engine in an intimidating manner every time the halt became too long for their comfort.

While exasperation overcame my fellow passengers, it suddenly struck me that I was now the happiest person on earth. The battery of my phone had died a few hours ago, which I meant I was free from worldly attachments for the time being. The train, I realised, was standing at what could easily be one of the most beautiful railway stations in India. The station may be too small to figure in the railway timetable, but there it was — a solitary building, with a solitary bench, overlooked by green cascading hills and surrounded by wild flowers. No sign of civilisation for miles around.

What better place to honeymoon than sitting on that solitary bench, right in the middle of a jungle, and watching the trains go by? What better place to contemplate life — and maybe write? It can’t get more romantic. For company you will have a Pyare Mohan or a Ram Lal, the genial weather-beaten signalman who will regale you with anecdotes — maybe even ghost stories. The company of such men — who in their long years of service have seen it all — can be very assuring.

During the next few hours, Lucknow Express was to stop at many more such tiny stations in Madhya Pradesh. Stations that made you wonder, “What is this place doing here in the middle of nowhere?” I soaked in the sights and the smell of fresh, fragrant forest air. Fellow passengers, meanwhile, kept having heated arguments with the hapless driver. But I was no longer in a hurry to get home. I don’t think Paradise has a fixed address. Even if it exists, it has to be in the middle of nowhere — just where I was right now.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, August 6, 2011.

Life In A Metro: Then The Music Stopped

2011-08-06T22:34:00.001+05:30

What do you do with the cassettes you've accumulated over the years?

The unique thing about technology is that it can be your best friend and at the same your worst enemy. The realisation dawns upon me, the self-styled nostalgia specialist, every so often, but it hit me rather hard last Sunday when someone I know put up a rather unusual status message on Facebook. He said he was looking for a deserving candidate to take away his impressive collection of music cassettes. I hope he has found someone who understands their worth and preserves them – preserve for what, even I don't know, considering we now live in the digital era.

After reading the status message, I opened my cupboard and looked at my own dust-coated collection of cassettes. There must have been some 500 of them, hiding in the shelves like scared rats. As I ran my fingers through their spines, memories gushed up:

“Ah, this I bought in Kanpur when I was returning home from college that afternoon!”

“And these two I bought in Delhi when I was roaming around Connaught Place with this girlfriend of mine – well, what was her name?”

“Ah, this RD Burman collection was gifted to me by that woman – what's her name – on my 26th birthday. Or was it my 27th birthday?”

“This entire lot was bought at Music World in Spencer Plaza soon after I came to Chennai.”

In a matter of minutes, each of those cassettes had been accounted for – where they were bought, and during what stage of my life. And each of them would have faithfully burst into songs had I chosen to insert them into the cassette player. But why would I do that when the songs they contain are already sitting in the ‘Music' folder of my laptop?

Today you can build an impressive collection of music by spending just one night on the computer. Not only that: you can even carry around those hundreds of songs in a device smaller than your thumb. But that was not the case in 2001, the year I relocated to Chennai, when it required a large bag to accommodate those many songs. The cassette-filled bag turned out to be the heaviest part of my luggage when I said goodbye to Delhi one foggy night and boarded the Tamil Nadu Express. (The collection of books, which would have been heavier than anything else, had been locked up in a trunk and left behind, for the time being, in the care of a friend).

Those days, it would take you years to build a collection of music of your choice. When a particular cassette was available, you wouldn't have the money. When you had the money, the cassette was no longer there – and God alone knew when the collection would hit the market again. You were totally at the mercy of the retailer who, in turn, must have been at the mercy of the whims of the recording company.

And so you built your collection, brick by brick. Simultaneously, you also invested in ‘head cleaners' and in cassette holders, and paid visits to shops that recorded songs of your choice on blank cassettes for two rupees a song. You faced distressing moments when the tape would accidentally get entangled in the pin of the cassette player and you would rush to press the ‘Stop' button and carefully straighten out the numerous coils formed around the pin, making sure your fingertips didn't rub too hard on the magnetic tape. Retrieving an entangled cassette safely from the player was perhaps as challenging – and gratifying – as saving a child from drowning in the swimming pool.

Music, in short, was sweat and blood: you had to earn it and work hard to preserve it. But technology intervened one fine morning. Today, even an 8GB pen drive or iPod can hold more music than you would ever want to listen to in your lifetime. But what do you do with the collection of cassettes you've painstakingly built over the years? Give them away? Doesn't that amount to giving away a chunk of your childhood or youth?

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, August 6, 2011.

Old Song, New Thoughts: Kishore Kumar Lives On

2011-08-03T00:12:00.007+05:30

Tomorrow, August 4, if you happen to sit in front of television for a while, you are likely to see a familiar face. That of Kishore Kumar. Tomorrow is his birthday: had he been alive, he would have been 82, perhaps leading a retired life and giving the occasional stage performance. But can you imagine a doddering Kishore Kumar climbing on to the stage with the help of a walking stick -- that would have gone against his very name and also nature. Even when he died at the age of 58, in 1987, he was still dancing on the stage in spite of having suffered two cardiac arrests. It isn't, therefore, surprising, that he didn't live long; entertainers like him don't.

There are two Kishore Kumars I know. One belonged to the black and white era, the actor who also sang his own songs. I wouldn't really waste my time collecting those songs. Though there might be exceptions, such as O.P. Nayyar's Piya, piya, piya... or Ravi's Nakhrewaali...

The other Kishore, the one I worship, arrived on the scene riding the metaphorical Sholay-type of bike (denoting friendship and partnership) with Rajesh Khanna. A bike song (Zindagi ek safar hai suhana) and a jeep song (Mere sapnon ki raani) for Rajesh Khanna marked the reinvention of Kishore Kumar as the country's most sought-after playback singer. And Kishore Kumar lived up to his status: he made it appear as if it was the actor, be it Dev Anand or Randhir Kapoor, who was really singing the song and not him. The best example is Muqaddar ka Sikander: can you ever tell whether O saathi re was sung by Kishore or Amitabh Bachchan? Bloody hell, he sounded convincing even in the throat of Amol Palekar! -- Aane wala pal, jaane wala hai.

But which song, according to you, is Kishore Kumar's best? The best?

Readers are welcome to send in their choices, even though it's an unfair question: it's like asking a 70-year-old man to pin down the best meal he has ever had in his life. But since Kishore Kumar is one of the guiding forces of Ganga Mail, and since tomorrow happens to be his birthday, I have decided to search for an answer to mark the occasion; and I think I have found an answer, after three drinks and spending two hours surfing You Tube.

The most wholesome song that Kishore Kumar has ever sung, according to me, is Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koi (from Aa Gale Lag Jaa). When I say wholesome, I mean a song that gives your soul all-round nourishment -- good lyrics set to a catchy tune and a great voice that does justice to the tune as well as the poetry. In short, a situation when you are unable to decide who should get the real credit for the song -- the lyricist, the composer, or the singer? This song is one such song.

The movie got released sometime in the early 1970's, but the words written by Sahir Ludhianvi, the most sensitive lyricist Hindi cinema ever had, still hold so true. Every so often, irrespective of how old you are or whether you are married or have married several times, you come across an engaging person from the opposite sex who makes you silently remember the lines, "Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koi, yun hi nahin dil lubhata koi (I'm sure we had a connection in the previous birth, or else why should you fascinate me so much!). The works of a great lyricist or writer, even if he himself dies an early death, transcends time.

Now, Sahir could have written this song for Shankar-Jaikishen, who in turn could have got Mukesh to sing it. What a disaster the song would have been! If the song still happens to be entrenched in public psyche today, it is mainly because of the racy tune that R.D. Burman imparted to Sahir's lyrics. And once thought-provoking lyrics are set to a catchy tune, what can be a better voice than Kishore Kumar's to carry the message to the masses? Kishore Kumar, the untrained singer, but possessing the voice of the serenader living next-door. He never sang at you, but sang to you; you had no choice but to listen to him, and in the process appreciate the music as well as the lyrics.

It is, therefore, not surprising at all that Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata is recognised, even today, as a Kishore Kumar song. Very few will associate the song with Sahir Ludhianvi or R.D. Burman. Such was the power of the man's voice. Thanks to the song, Kishore Kumar continues to come to the rescue of those men and women who like each other but who can't figure why.

The song comes thrice in the film, under different circumstances -- each time a delight to listen to! Listen to this and this. My favourite lines from the song -- that's also a message from Ganga Mail to its readers:

Dekho abhi khona nahin
kabhi juda hona nahin
ab ke yuhin mile rahenge donon
waada rahaa yeh iss shaam ka
jaane tu ya jaane na
maane tu ya maane na...

Life In A Metro: Clothes Make the Woman

2011-08-01T11:48:00.001+05:30

What people do is more important than what they wear — right?

YouTube hadn't arrived yet – or at least had not become part of everyday life – when I became a serious practitioner of yoga. I would spend hours on the Internet, painstakingly searching for yoga photos and videos that I could download and watch over and over again, so that I could stay inspired.

The videos were not easy to come by, though I did manage to build a small collection of clips, each of which was barely two minutes long. Two of the clips happened to feature Western women who were gracefully getting into the most difficult of yoga poses, in the most exotic of locations, without a stitch on their bodies. What more could a man have asked for? Or so I thought, until I started watching the two clips seriously.

The women, far from being objects to be gazed at, became a source of envy and frustration. I would carefully notice their movements and try to imitate them, and most of the time, fail – miserably. Finally, I learned to drop back into urdhva dhanurasana from the standing position; it will, however, take me another lifetime to get into the scorpion pose.

All the while that I watched these women and tried to imitate them, never did it strike me that they were in their birthday suits. All that mattered to me was the ease with which they struck the poses.

Such ease can be accomplished only after years of practice; and when a person puts in years of dedicated practice, he or she becomes worship-worthy, clothed or unclothed. What they were doing was important, not what they were wearing (or not wearing).

And yet, the kind of clothes you wear becomes an issue every now and then in our country, where college students are often forced to abide by a dress code. A medical institution was in the news recently after specifying a dress code for its students, male as well as female. Jeans and T-shirts are out, naturally; hair should be preferably oiled, men cannot leave the first button of their shirts open, while women have been prohibited from wearing sleeveless kurtas. No bracelets or rings for men, and only a minimum number of bangles for women. And so on.

In spirit, such a dress code is understandable and, to a great extent, justified. Can a jeans-clad doctor, strutting around with his top button open, inspire confidence in a patient? Or for that matter, a female doctor whose bangles make a tinkling sound as she places her stethoscope on the chest of a panic-stricken patient?

But is a dress code really aimed at maintaining sartorial hygiene in the university? The answer, alas, is a big ‘No.' The dress code for women in the medical college, which even prohibits them from wearing footwear that exposes their toes, concludes with a memorable line: “All this is to ensure that female students do not create the feeling that they are women (while examining male patients).” Now that's a real shocker.

A female doctor is a female doctor: she does not become gender-neutral by merely covering her toes or by giving up wearing bangles and nail polish or by oiling her hair. Since when did femininity require cosmetic embellishment to make its presence felt? Or is the university trying to suggest that a woman becomes a woman only when she wears T-shirts and jeans and nail polish and toe-revealing footwear? Shouldn't it also invest in a voice-modulation programme, to make its female doctors sound like males when they treat male patients?

But really, what is the big deal about a male patient being attended to by a ‘feminine' female doctor? If you have chest pain and if you rush to the nearest hospital, and if the doctor on duty happens to be a female, is the gender of the doctor going to make any difference? Are the bangles on her arm going to make any difference? All you look forward to is getting out of the hospital as soon as possible after being certified as healthy.

If in such critical moments the gender of the doctor still has an effect on you, then the source of your ailment lies not in your body but in your mind. What you need is a bouncer and not a doctor.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 30 July 2011.

When I Feel Ashamed To Be An Indian

2011-07-28T22:24:00.006+05:30

I am usually proud that I am an Indian, and that I live in India, a country of emotional, sentimental people; a country where people don't just live but also look for the meaning of life. A country where the spiritual and the material coexist in equal strength.

But there are moments when I feel deeply ashamed to be an Indian. Moments that make me wish I lived elsewhere, in a country where prime ministers and chief ministers were not always doddering septuagenarians or octogenarians, where ministers were not always keen on leaving sufficient wealth for their grandchildren's grandchildren to live in comfort, where politicians were sensitive enough to put an arm around the shoulder of a flood victim or embrace the son of a bomb-blast victim, where television channels showed adult films instead of 'breaking news' (you can never be bored by the sameness of watching a pair of breasts as long as they belonged to different women, or if the same woman made an appearance at different times; but to watch the same footage for hours on end and listen to hysterical anchors -- that's torture!).

However, what made me feel ashamed to be an Indian most recently had nothing to do with what's happening in India, but what happened in faraway Norway, where nearly 100 people died last week at the hands of a mass killer. Since I don't watch television except while having lunch on Sunday afternoons(I often finish eating while an interminable ad break is still on), I read about the tragedy in the next morning's papers. Most papers had front-paged the picture of a rather good-looking man moving about in a state of daze (one paper showed him embracing another man by way of consolation).

In fact, I happened to notice the picture first, and thought he was a Hollywood actor, the kind who did a lot of World Cinema. Only when I read the headline and the caption did I realise he was the Norwegian prime minister, who was fearlessly out in the open to console the victims of the mindless shooting. The image made my chest swell with pride, even though I have never set foot on Norway nor do I know any Norwegian. And then I sighed to myself as I lit up the first cigarette of the day: "Will we ever have a leader like this?"

Our leaders only pay visits to hospitals long after a tragedy has taken place, and there they solemnly stand by the bed of a victim or two, their hands joined in front of them (perhaps a way of saying that their hands are tied), and return to New Delhi to resume normal life. They don't know the important of body language -- no matter whether they are inaugurating a project or visiting a hospital to condole victims, they always wear the benign grandfatherly expression. Had the Mumbai kind of blasts taken place in the US, Obama would have been on the spot of the blasts, with his arms around the shoulders of the affected and with an expression in his eyes that the perpetrators of the blast would have read as, "Just wait, I am going to fuck you!"

But then, this is India. Here, people have enormous tolerance levels. And such tolerance levels only help in thickening the skins of politicians. There was a time -- oh, that was so long ago -- when railway ministers resigned after a rail accident. It was not as if the minister's negligence would have caused the accident, but there was something called moral responsibility (an extinct term today) and they owned it up.

But today we have politicians like B.S. Yeddyurappa, the chief minister of Karnataka, who continues to desperately cling to his chair in spite of being slapped with serious charges of corruption and in spite of being asked by his own party to step down. Any self-respecting politician would have stepped down by now and declared: I will not hold public office again until I come clean. But the desperation of Yeddyurappa to hold on to power is evident from the fact that at least during the last several months, he has done little other than visiting various temples in various states to seek divine intervention in his favour. How much more shameless one can get! So as an Indian, I routinely get treated to pictures such as the one produced below. What a shame!

(Since the pictures above were sourced from the internet, that too in the heat of the moment, I am truly unaware of the identity of the photographers or the agency distributing them. I only hope nobody minds the pictures being reproduced here).

Waiting For My Katrina

2011-07-25T01:58:00.005+05:30

If you put Sideways, Hangover I, Rock On!! and Dil Chahta Hai in a mixer and blend them nicely, what you get is Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

But that's only one way, a hopeless way, of looking at it. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, which I watched just an hour ago, comes like a splash of cold water on your face after you've walked a mile in the sun. Not an ounce of flab: each scene well thought-out and delectable.

My favourite scene was the one in which Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif are lying next to each under a star-lit sky, and while giving him some gyaan on life, she holds his hand and in a casual, rather absent-minded, manner places it on her stomach. It can't get more sensual and real-life. Another favourite scene was Naseeruddin Shah rolling up his cigarette and exhaling rich (and most likely aromatic) smoke. He looked every bit an artist, which he is anyway in real life. I felt like lighting up right away.

Though I wish the movie had ended with the frozen shot of the three men running while the bulls chased them: the final song during the rolling of the credits, even though feel-good, was superfluous. But if the audience was enjoying it, why not!

The movie has a message; it's the same message that the commercials of Mountain Dew, the soft drink, have been trying to drive home for a few years now: Dar ke aagey jeet hai -- Once you conquer fear, you are in the arms of victory.

Mountain Dew, in fact, is one of the sponsors of the film and Hrithik, in one scene, is shown holding a bottle of the drink while Farhan Akhtar, in another scene, mouths the same catchline -- Dar ke aagey jeet hai!

But you can't really trust a soft drink manufacturer when it eggs you on to conquer fear, can you? Their intention, after all, is to sell their product. But when the stars of a movie as grand as this set out to prove the same point, you are bound to sit up and think. I won't be surprised at all if the Spanish Embassy in New Delhi is already flooded with visa applications (the film was shot in Spain). And I can bet on my life that a number of people, who are otherwise busy making money and chasing targets, must have signed up for skydiving as well as deep-sea diving after seeing the film.

Fear, after all, is the biggest enemy of the human being. I can give you my own example. Even though I learned how to float in water (while holding the breath) some five years ago, I learned how to swim, in the real sense, only a couple of months ago. Today I can gracefully swim the breaststroke like any professional swimmer, thanks to the hours of daily practice and watching videos on You Tube for tips on improving one's strokes, but I am yet to muster the courage to go to the deep end of the pool. I have gone up to seven feet but not beyond that: 9.5 feet is far too scary! What if I drown?

"No problem sir, if you drown I am there to save you," the lifeguard assures me every evening, "but please go to the deep end." When I refuse, he sulks and refuses to make eye contact for the rest of the evening. He has every right to sulk: he can see that I am now capable of swimming in the deep end with ease, but how the fuck do I make him see the fear that grips me every time I set out towards the deep end? Each time I come up for air, a question gets sucked into my mouth:

What if I drown? What if the lifeguard does not notice me while I am sinking? Even if he dives into the pool, will he be able to save me? Won't I make a spectacle of myself? What will happen to my father if I die? Poor man, he just lost his wife! What will happen to the unwritten books I have in my head? Is it really worth going to the deep end when I can get my exercise even in the relatively shallow part of the pool?

If I were a 10-year-old child, I would not analyse so much: I would merely follow the orders of the coach and dive into the deep end with my nose shut. But as you grow older, you tend to become a slave of fear. Fears, irrespective of their nature, begin to guide your life.

But after watching Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, I have new-found hope. Hrithik, in the film, happens to be a non-swimmer who is naturally scared of deep-sea diving. But Katrina Kaif, the instructor, sucks the fear out of him and puts in tears of gratification into his eyes once they have done a round of the underwater world.

I am now waiting for a Katrina Kaif to help me proceed from seven feet to 9.5 feet. She doesn't have to be model-like as Katrina (I hate the model-types in any case) but someone intelligent and inspiring enough to make me overcome the fear of depth and cross over to victory.

Life In A Metro: Bus-Stop Blues

2011-07-23T12:01:00.001+05:30

A FEW MINUTES at a bus stop can be a revelation about life in a metro

At least once a day, to give my eyes a break from staring at the computer screen, I step out of the office and stand outside its boundary wall, on the pavement, which also happens to be a bus stop. I lean against the wall and watch the world go past.

Right across the road stands the new Secretariat building, Karunanidhi's dream, its side view resembling a row of mammoth water tanks (oil tanks, if you like), which was abandoned by the new government even before it could be fully completed. My eyes have long become blind to the structure. Most of the time, they are focused on the people at the bus-stop. I watch them and try to imagine their lives – a pastime, rather a luxury, I couldn't have afforded had I myself been waiting for a bus.

Had I been waiting for a bus, I would be constantly watching the display board at the crown of every oncoming bus, and would have been part of the small and ever-replenishing crowd that you always find at a busy bus stop.

The people I see here are collectively known as the ‘common man' – who forms the vast majority of the population in any city and who is powerful enough to make and break governments. But individually, they are powerless and helpless, and their lives are governed by a number of factors, including the timely arrival of the bus. The bus stop is as important a theatre of their life as their home or workplace.

Last afternoon, I noticed a man lying face down on the pavement, lifeless, as if he had just been shot. There was no warm blood trickling out of his body, but there was something else trickling out of his clothes – it was obvious that his urinary bladder had given way soon after he passed out. But why did he pass out? Was he too drunk? Or could it be that he has had no money to eat and been surviving only on water for a couple of days? Or had he suffered a heart attack or stroke? No one knew or even bothered to find out – all I could see were people steering clear of the trickle which was soon collecting into a puddle.

I am ashamed to say that I was among the people who remained totally indifferent to the unconscious man. Such indifference, I think, stems from two reasons. One, it is quite common to see men, presumably drunk, passing out at bus stops; two, who has the time to play Good Samaritan? Each person is in a hurry to reach somewhere. That frightens the hypochondriac in me, though: what if I ever faint at a bus stop? Will I be left to lie on the pavement?

Unmindful of this man lying face-down, a bunch of uniformed children, talking to each other in sign language, played with marbles at the bus stop. Their teachers stood in a small circle and laughed and gossiped while waiting for the bus. The children looked extremely happy in each other's company – did they get to play with the ‘normal' children in their respective neighbourhoods? A little away from them sat an elderly man, wearing a sky-blue shirt and a dhoti. He looked forlorn, lost deep in thought. What was he thinking about: the loan that he had taken for his daughter's wedding? His wife's ailment, which was fast depleting his savings? About a dozen other people, of various ages and bearing varying degrees of frowns, waited too. Why do people in bus stops look unhappy? No, there was a young woman who was constantly smiling – the source of her smile was plugged to her ear. Boyfriend, perhaps?

A bus arrived. The uniformed children, minded by their teachers, got in. The elderly man got in too, as did some of the people who had run behind the bus as it approached the stop. An elderly woman, who couldn't run as fast, was still a few steps away from the door when the bus took off. She was carrying a toy in her hand – grandchild's birthday? She had missed the bus. She now joined the young woman who was still smiling. Meanwhile, the man who lay on the pavement remained lifeless.

Now multiply this scene at the bus stop with the number of stops the city has. What you will see is the real life in a metro.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus on July 23, 2011.

Simpler Times

2011-07-17T00:07:00.003+05:30

July. August. Up north, where I emotionally belong to, these are the monsoon months. The month of Shraavana. In Hindi, saawan ka mahinaa.

This is the time of the year when the Ganga is usually swollen and its waters muddy. This is the time when the Ganga, which otherwise flows serenely and nourishes the millions settled on its plains, can assume a devastating form.

The evidence of the two different moods of the Ganga lies in the yoga-cum-puja room of my Chennai home. Two white translucent cans are sitting there, both containing water from the Ganga. One of them has water that I had collected during a boat ride in Banaras in November 2007, when I had gone there to collect material for Chai, Chai. The water in it is still crystal clear.

The other contains water I had collected, also during a boat ride in Banaras, in August 2009, when I was there to cremate my mother. A thick layer of sediment can be seen at the bottom of this can. How can I ever forget 29 August 2009: I stood there under an overcast sky, in the furnace-like heat generated by the over a dozen burning pyres, watching the Ganga -- swollen but sluggish.

Monsoon seems to have hit the Ganga Mail too. The more swollen the mind with thoughts, the muddier the thought process, and you can't see what exactly is there at the bottom of the mind that needs to be expressed.

The less the number of thoughts, the simpler and more effective the thought process. People living in the hills are simple people, and they lead a simple life. That's where the Ganga gurgles down with great force, and the water so cold and clear that you can often see what's at the bottom. It flows like a good piece of writing.

It's time to pay a visit to the hills; to return to simpler times.

Life In A Metro: Cool Writer

2011-07-16T12:49:00.001+05:30

The business of writing has changed – everyone wants to become a published author

The other day, a childhood friend of mine, who is now a senior uniformed officer, called me up. He began by making polite enquiries and went on to ask my opinion about the future of the DMK. Since he called at 10 in the morning, when catching up with old friends would be the last thing on the mind of an office-goer, I knew he would soon come to the point. Sure enough he did.

“By the way, do you have Ruskin Bond’s phone number?”

“Whose?” I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

“Arre yaar, apna Ruskin Bond! The writer!”

“But I don’t have his number!”

“Why not? You are also a writer, na? Don’t writers have other writers’ numbers?”

(In late 2009 I wrote a travel book; therefore the ‘writer’ tag.)

“But why do you want his number?” I asked him.

It turned out that his boss’ teenaged daughter had written some short stories, and the boss was keen that Ruskin Bond should take a look at them. When the boss brought up the subject during a meeting, my friend volunteered to get Mr. Bond’s number from a friend – that’s me. He obviously wanted to please his boss – nothing wrong with that – but he had clearly overestimated my status as a ‘writer.’

It is one thing to have written a solitary book – as countless people have – quite another to have earned a reputation as a writer.

After he hung up – I promised him I would try my best – it suddenly struck me that this was perhaps the fifth or sixth call I had got in a span of two months on behalf of aspiring writers. And in all cases, the aspiring writer in question happened to be a teenaged girl, and the caller a highly concerned parent.

One worried mother, who had been turned down by established publishing houses, confessed to me that the number of stories written by her daughter was not adequate enough to add up to the size of a book. But she had a solution for the shortcoming. “I can put in some of the poems she has written. She has written some beautiful poems. If we still fall short, I can put in some of my paintings. I have done some beautiful paintings,” she told me. “But how do I find a publisher?”

Had I known the answer, I would have been a rich man today, sitting with my laptop in a villa in Goa or Kasauli, after having sold half-a-dozen ideas (most of which would’ve come to me while I was shaving) to a publisher for a huge advance. But the business of getting published remains mysterious – no one quite knows what works for the publisher and what doesn’t.

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road failed to find a publisher for six years before it changed the way people wrote. James Joyce's Dubliners got rejected 22 times before it got published. The first two novels written by Graham Greene got rejected by each publisher he sent them to, and it was his third novel that officially became his first book. And without Greene’s helping hand, what would have happened to our own R.K. Narayan, despite all the lucid prose and eye for detail?

But publishing is one field that has never concerned the lay Indian, who is usually too bogged down by other demands of life to spare money for books. Even today not many would have heard of R.K. Narayan, leave alone Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand – they formed the triumvirate that pioneered Indian Writing in English. Writers like them lived in a small island, hoping to be connected to the mainland.

Shobhaa De changed the game. She not only got people interested in her books but also in the business of writing books: “If she can, why can’t we?” Subsequently, Arundhati Roy enlightened India about the existence of the Booker Prize (and the prize money it entailed). But it was Chetan Bhagat who brought about a revolution – he brought down writing from the pedestal of exclusivity and took it to the masses, and in the process stoked a million literary ambitions.

Today, the writer is no longer a faceless entity. The successful ones now get the attention that once only movie stars and cricketers did. It is, therefore, not surprising that parents are suddenly spotting the ‘writer’ in their children and frantically knocking at the doors of publishers. Ruskin Bond, alas, did not have that luxury: he had to struggle to find a publisher. That reminds me, does anyone have his number?

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, July 16, 2011.

Time Flies, After All

2011-07-15T22:44:00.002+05:30

I am a fairly new entrant to the locker room. I have never been used to the idea of changing in front of strange men -- or rather strange men changing in front of me. But now that's become a part of my life, considering that these days I'm pretty regular at the gym and the pool in the club.

Almost every evening I am subjected to about half a dozen instances of unintentional mooning, and to tell you the truth, when I come face-to-face (or should I say face-to-cheek) with reality, I often can't decide whether to instantly turn my gaze away or to look at the naked posterior of a man as if it was a bald head. Most often, I look away, but the eyes invariably manage to capture a few seconds of the images that the mind would rather not like to store.

And the other day, my eyes saw more than they had bargained for. I noticed a tall, well-built foreigner -- a white man -- standing right next to me as I fished for my swimming trunks in the bag. I had been noticing him in the pool during the recent weeks and even admiring his swimming skills, and now he was standing right next to me, changing into his swimming trunks. I don't wish to describe what the corner of my eye saw, but suffice to say that I was instantly reminded of two expressions -- "hanging loose" and "well-endowed".

All these men happen to be of varying ages and possessing varying degrees of fitness. In most cases, I don't ever want to be them, given their girth; and in some rare cases, I so want to be like them, especially the kinds who swim effortlessly. And then, there have been times when I looked at myself in the mirror, clothed waist-down of course, and thought: "Not too bad. Maybe a little more sculpting?"

One such evening, when I was looking at myself in the mirror, reality slapped me hard on my face. Mr S, a senior member of the club with who I had become friends in the swimming pool, had got himself entangled in his T-shirt.

Mr S, a widower, must be nearing 80 now, if not already 80-plus. He was born in Islamabad, from where he migrated to Ambala after Partition, and subsequently ran a business in Calcutta for a few years before relocating to Madras. "Dada, kamon achhen?" he would ask me routinely, in Bengali, as he took toddler-like steps in the pool, perhaps on the advice of his doctor. That evening, as he was taking his T-shirt off to get into the pool, the muscles of his hands suddenly gave away. He just couldn't pull the T-shirt off his head. By the time I could reach him, a young man had already helped him out of the T-shirt. That was the last time I saw Mr S in the pool (these days he just drags a chair and sits by the pool to watch other people swim).

Today, whenever I look into the mirror, I can see Mr S smiling back at me. I may be physically fit and having a well-sculpted body today, but the future belongs to the likes of Mr S. Tomorrow, in spite of the fitness levels I enjoy today, I might not be able to lift my arm to even wear a shirt. What's the point, then, in trying to remain fit? That too when old age is not too far away -- time flies, after all.

The Sea

2011-07-09T01:56:00.002+05:30

The moon peeped in through the coconuts leaves, as if trying to eavesdrop. The strong breeze from the sea blew her hair across her face. At some distance the waves were breaking, softly enough for me to hear her sighs. She leaned forward across the table and formed an extra curtain of palms around mine to help me light up a cigarette.

"Thanks," I said, as I sat back and took a sip of the beer.

"As I was saying," she continued, "I can't have sex with a man unless I am in love with him."

"Really?"

"Yes, if I love a man, I wouldn't mind sleeping with him."

"But why go through the whole process of falling in love?"

"Without love I can't have sex. And it doesn't take me long to fall in love; it can take just three or four days. I just know when there is an emotional connect."

"Of course there has to be an emotional connect," I said. "But I wouldn't call it love?"

"But you do believe in emotional connect, don't you?"

"I do."

"So there."

"Are you tipsy already?" I asked.

"Just one Bloody Mary, what bloody tipsy!" she laughed.

"So how is it going with Atul?"

"Hey come on! Just because I was talking about him does not mean I am in love with him or going to sleep with him. Come on, I know him since the time we were kids. We grew up together!"

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, I like him and all, but not in that sense."

"I see!"

"And you know, he drinks only beer. And I don't like men who drink only beer."

I looked at my glass and suddenly felt like a man who had been caught with his fly open. She read my thoughts instantly.

"I know you are drinking beer now, but I also know that you have other drinks too, don't you?"

"Yes, I usually drink whisky."

"See! I knew."

"But how?"

"I read you."

"Oh! But what is your problem with men drinking only beer?"

"When a man drinks only beer, it means he is playing it safe and is not open to adventure. Such men are not my kind."

"I like that!" I said. I flicked the ash of the cigarette, even though there was no ash to be flicked, and turned my gaze to the sea, which was now so black that it had merged with the blackness of the sky.

I found it safer to gaze at the nothingness than looking into her eyes.

Life In A Metro: Resting In Peace

2011-07-09T00:45:00.001+05:30

Uninterrupted sleep is no longer a necessity - it’s a luxury

Let me make a small guess: two out of every five people reading this column are doing so half-heartedly. They have something else nagging them, apart from the weekly whining by yours truly. Their mind is seized by a thought, rather an unfulfilled desire: Wish I had slept a little more!

You may have an Audi parked in your garage, you may be travelling business class in planes, you may have the biggest flat-screen mounted on your wall, you may be sipping single malt or vintage wine every evening from the stock that keeps getting replenished by your regular stopovers at duty-free shops, you may even have an air-conditioner installed in your bathroom. But you cannot purchase what has turned out to be the biggest luxury of our times – a sound sleep. You may try stealing it though.

Ironically, the better your position to buy the regular luxuries of life, the more elusive this luxury tends to get. And considering that almost everybody these days wants to be in a position to buy a flat or bring home a plasma TV or send their children to the best of schools, irrespective of their incomes, people are working harder than ever before. Good life, after all, comes at a price, and these days, the price seems to be uninterrupted sleep. But is life any good if you haven’t even slept well?

We have, however, made peace with interrupted sleep. Anybody can wake us up at anytime: it could be the hysterical boss who is prone to waking up at five in the morning; it could be a panicky colleague urgently in need of your guidance at midnight; it could be a man from the bank reminding you about the minimum payment due on your credit card; it could be a woman from the same bank offering you a loan to clear the outstanding dues on the credit card; it could be the call-taxi driver reminding you that he is waiting outside your flat to take you to the airport (while you are still in bed); or it could just be the alarm programmed in your mobile phone reminding you that it’s time to wake up your child because the school bus will be coming soon.

When I was a child, which was not too long ago, a sound sleep was taken for granted. The three biggest enemies of sleep – satellite television, mobile phone and laptop – were yet to invade our bedrooms. There was Doordarshan, but it would end transmission by nine – or was it 10 pm? The announcers on All India Radio too took leave by 11 pm. After that, you had no choice but to sleep.

And it was very easy for one to fall asleep those days. Most people bicycled to work; and they thought nothing of walking a kilometre or two every evening to the nearest market to fetch vegetables and groceries. The road was their gym. Real gyms didn’t exist anyway.

Today we either order groceries over the phone or stock up for the entire week during a Sunday visit to the supermarket. We no longer know what it means to walk. There may be gyms now in every neighbourhood where you can walk on the treadmill, but does it mean you get to sleep like a log at the end of the day? No. You usually doze off either while surfing the net or answering a text message or watching ‘breaking news’ on TV – only to be woken up soon after by a phone call. Even before you realise, it is another day.

The Internet is replete with stories about the death of the immensely fit Ranjan Das who, at the young age of 40, was appointed by SAP, a multinational software provider, to head its operations in the Indian subcontinent. Within two years, in 2009, Das dropped dead after a workout in the gym, and the cause of his death has been pinned down to lack of sleep. He slept for less than five hours, as he had admitted during a television interview – even though doctors these days prescribe seven hours of good sleep, especially for those who have touched forty.

If you sleep less than five hours, the chances – so I learn from the Internet – of high blood pressure increases by 350-500% and heart attack by threefold. You can’t really dispute such claims when you are used to waking up in the mornings feeling unwell and craving more sleep.

This column, in fact, is inspired by a Facebook page called Ghum, which was started recently in Bangladesh, most likely by a sleep-starved soul. Ghum, or ghoom, in Bengali, means sleep; and as many as 134,327 people ‘like’ the page as of date. Compared to that, only 6,976 people ‘like’ Franz Kafka so far; while only 6,545 people have bothered to click on their mouses to ‘like’ George Clooney. Sleep, clearly, wins hands down. Really, when was the last time you slept like a log?

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, July 9, 2011.

Life In A Metro: The Might Of The Majority

2011-07-02T22:16:00.002+05:30

Majority opinion is everything — it can even change your surname

When I started my career in journalism nearly two decades ago – “20 years” would have made me sound just as ancient – as a trainee sub-editor with The Pioneer in Kanpur, one of the errors I looked out for in a copy was the merging of “per cent.” Most reporters spelt it as one word, and I would dutifully draw a line between “per” and “cent” to indicate to the compositor that there should be a space between the two. Those were the days of the horse-shoe desk, when the news editor or the chief sub-editor sat at its centre and distributed typed or hand-written copies for editing to his juniors who sat in front of him, pens ready.

Within a year and a half, I moved to Delhi to join the Press Trust of India. There too, it was “per cent” and not “percent.” But in the impeccably edited copies spat out by the ticker machine of Reuters, with which PTI had a news-sharing arrangement, it was already “percent.” This was in the mid-1990s. Today, even spell-check does not underline the word in red.

But is it really correct to say “percent” instead of “per cent?” No. But the majority, be it in Parliament or in society, always has its say – and way – and the custodians of the language had to allow it as an acceptable word.

It is only a matter of time before “inspite” and “accomodate” become acceptable too: the number of people who are either ignorant or don't bother to insert the space and the extra “m” respectively in the two words is getting too large to ignore. Many American magazines today use "Prez" instead of "President" – something that might have been considered irreverent even a couple of decades ago. A classic case of the corruption of a word gaining public acceptance is “juggernaut.” The original word is Jagannath, another name for Lord Krishna in Puri, who is taken out in a chariot in a massive procession each year. Somewhere down the centuries, Jagannath happened to enter the English dictionary as “juggernaut,” defined as “any large, overpowering, destructive force or object” (the definition, obviously, is inspired by the chariot procession).

Talking of present times, the expressions that we use during online chats, such as LOL (laughing out loud) and OMG (oh my god) were incorporated by the Oxford English Dictionary in its updates this year. WTF – I don't wish to expand it here – was already included in 2009 (or so I am told). So go ahead, coin your own abbreviation. How about IABM – In A Bad Mood? If it gets picked up by the public, chances are that your creation will enter the OED.

Once a misspelled word gains currency, it no longer matters how it came to be misspelled in the first place – it could have been ignorance, indifference, laziness or a stupid clerical error.

As far as clerical errors go, who should know better than Mr Henry Sullivan Graeme and Mr Richard Yeldham.

These two gentlemen lived around the same time in East India Company-ruled Madras. Graeme, a civil servant, was a member of the Madras council for five years from 1823. He owned a bungalow in Nungambakkam, and the road connecting his bungalow to Mount Road was subsequently named Graeme's Road. Yeldham, on the other hand, was a merchant of the Company who went on to become the mayor of Madras. The road from his palatial house in Teynampet to Mount Road came to be called Yeldham's Road.

Today, Graeme's Road has been rechristened Greams Road, and Yeldham's Road is Eldams Road. Who is responsible for the changes in their names? No one knows. But today, even if Mr Graeme and Mr Yeldham were to come out of their graves and plead with Chennai Corporation to restore the correct spellings of their surnames, they are most likely to be turned away. Mr Graeme would return to his grave as Mr Gream and Mr Yeldham as Mr Eldam. Such is the power of popular usage.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, July 2, 2011.

While It's Still His Birthday...

2011-06-27T23:32:00.002+05:30

Here's presenting a gem composed by R.D. Burman who, if alive, would have been 72 today. Though not necessarily as popular. There is something magical about death: it makes the world realise the true worth of an artist. But when alive, the same artist has to prove his worth with every single composition or song or book in order to stay alive professionally. Or else the 'world', which can be very mean and ungrateful, tends to forget you -- until you die. Look what happened to Michael Jackson.

This song, Hum tum ghum sum raat milan ki, is close to my heart for two reasons. One, it happens to be one of the three songs that got ingrained in my mind when I was still a baby -- too young to even know what a song is. (The other two songs being Kanchi re kanchi re and Panna ki tamanna: both Pancham!). Reason no. 2: this song belongs to the great body of rarely-heard songs that Pancham created during his lifetime. This great body of work, containing songs that are as perfect as a Hindi song can get, was discovered and toasted only after he died. Chancing upon such songs is like finding an unopened whiskey bottle in the cabinet of your long-dead grandfather. This song is one of them -- I am so glad that I did not stumble upon it recently but had the tune buzzing in my head since childhood: Jhumnaa jhumnaa, jhumnaa jhumnaa.

It's a sensual song, and just look at the way Kishore Kumar has modulated his voice! He is neither humming, nor is full-throated -- he is somewhere in between, to suit the mood of the evening. Asha Bhosle, of course, matches up to him effortlessly. Sip the song and enjoy -- and while you do so, do remember me!

Pancham Beats

2011-06-27T12:45:00.003+05:30

Today is R.D. Burman's birthday. Here's my review of the book, R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music, written by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, which appeared recently in The Hindu:

The story of R.D. Burman is not so much about the successes he enjoyed as a music director during his short life. It is more about the stark truth that, had he lived a few weeks more, he would have had the last laugh, after having sustained a longish lean patch that saw one loyal producer after another deserting him.

Shortly before the songs of 1942-A Love Story stirred the nation in 1994, their composer had died heartbroken, at the age of 54, little knowing that the world would soon be at his feet — rediscovering, reliving, relishing, and remixing his music. Seventeen years after his death, his fans are still busy discovering — and gathering like awestruck schoolboys — hitherto unheard gems he had composed either during his lean phase or for films that had bombed back then.

In short, the story of R.D. Burman is not so much about his life as about his death, after which he seems to have permanently become Hindi cinema's No. 1 music director — ask the RJ of any Hindi FM channel or the salesman of any music shop. Whether such a story celebrates a posthumous triumph or laments an inevitable tragedy, it is difficult to say. But it's been told quite well — in delectable detail — by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, who have done great service to Hindi cinema by bringing out this book.

For the fans of R.D. Burman, or Pancham, this book should be a Bible. That this is the first book to be written about him in the 17 years since his death is a matter of shame, considering the number of lives his tunes continues to touch even today. Better late than never, though, because in Pancham's case, the later you discover him, the better he sounds. Just like wine.

One, however, wishes the title of the book had been more imaginative. But R.D. himself never cared much for the titles of the films he made music for, be it the intriguing Gol Maal or the aggressive Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin. Incidentally, these are two films whose songs are, like nursery rhymes, ingrained in the psyche of every Pancham fan, especially the notes of the trumpet that open their most famous songs — the Chaand Mera Dil medley and Bachnaa Ae Haseeno(Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin), and Aane Wala Pal(Gol Maal), for example.

So who played the trumpet in these songs? It's an important question for the Pancham fan — as important as asking a sixth standard student, "Who's the President of the United States?" Commonsense suggested that it might have been Manohari Singh, Pancham's long-time music arranger who played the saxophone for the senior Burman in Gaata Rahe Mera Dil for Guide. But no, the man who played the trumpet was an Anglo-Indian musician called George Fernandes! For a hardcore Pancham fan like yours truly, this piece of information alone is worth the Rs.399 the book costs.

There are other priceless pieces of information too, but most of them tend to break your heart. This is what singer Abhijeet had to tell the authors: "From a time when he would record at Film Centre, Panchamda had slid to recording at a small studio in Khar. He would urge me to go to Anand-Milind and Rajesh Roshan as he did not have any work to give me."

Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who made 1942-A Love Story, explains Pancham's lean patch thus: "Lack of self-confidence. People close to him, including Asha Bhosle, left him. He began thinking that he lacked the ability and was burnt out. This was untrue, but he somehow got swayed by other people's opinions and ended up losing his belief in his music."

Pancham losing belief in his own music? This sounds funny now because his music is considered the yardstick for Hindi film music. But cruel are the ways of the world — the way it treats a man when he is dead is different from the way it does when he is alive. The book successfully dissects the hypocrisy.

Life In A Metro: The Big Fat Truth

2011-06-25T23:57:00.002+05:30

Worrying about weight has become a national obsession

Even as you read this piece, 17 million people across the country are sweating it out in their neighbourhood gyms, another two million are busy practising kapaalabhati kriya (according to Ramdev, each exhalation makes you lose 10-15 gm), about a million are carefully reading the ads of weight-loss clinics and saving their numbers on mobiles, and 0.75 million have just resisted the temptation to have an extra paratha or dosa for breakfast.

I just cooked up these figures – I could be wildly off the mark. Or, who knows, maybe I am not. But there is no denying the big fat truth. Never before in recent history, apart from the struggle for freedom, have urban Indians single-mindedly worked this hard towards a goal. The goal is simple: just losing a few pounds of weight! Achieving it is even simpler: walk as if your life depends on it. But as the wise man once said, the simplest of things are the most difficult to achieve. As a result, weight-loss has today become a multi-million-dollar industry in India.

Wasn't it only the other day when, in our society, being a little overweight was considered a sign of good health and prosperity? In north India, where I grew up, a man was expected to grow a paunch soon after getting married – it was the litmus test for his bride's culinary skills. If the man remained skinny, it reflected poorly on the woman: “She can't even feed her husband properly.” And in cinema-crazy south India, where I live now, men have traditionally been great fans of women who never starved themselves in order to look slim. Even today you have actresses who are worshipped for their girth.

Indians have always been comfortable with the idea of weight. Excess weight, at the most, was an unwelcome guest, but never considered an enemy who needed to be chased out. But the turn of the century, when we were reaping the benefits of economic liberalisation, saw the much-publicised wedding between obesity and illness. Urban Indians suddenly woke up not only to the health benefits of being slim but also the immense social benefits of staying in shape. A recently married man, for example, began to realise that while his newly grown paunch may speak volumes about his wife's cooking skills, it only made him less appealing to other women.

While it is heartening to see more and more Indians sweating it out, it is amusing that the eagerness to lose a few kilos has become an obsession. Weight loss, in fact, is urban India's biggest obsession today. It is threatening to become a disorder in itself. Eavesdrop on the conversation at the next table in a restaurant and chances are you will hear the familiar expressions, ‘calories' and ‘cutting down'. Calories – until 20 years ago, only physics students were familiar with the word. Go to any Page-3 party and you'll find people gushing to each other about their waistlines. And if you happen to detest a woman, you only have to tell her, with a hint of concern, “I think you have put on a little weight since I saw you last time. That time you were very slim.” Your words will play on her mind throughout the evening – the effect will be as disastrous as a doctor breaking to her the news of a terrible disease.

A few weeks ago, returning to Chennai from Bangalore in the early-morning Shatabdi Express, I found myself sitting next to a woman who must have been in her early forties. She was plump. When the attendant who handed newspapers to the passengers offered her a copy, she refused and instead covered her face with a shawl and went to sleep. While I turned the pages of the newspaper, she was woken up for breakfast, and then she busied herself with her mobile phone. Once I was done with the paper and was about to put it away, she spoke: “Excuse me, can I have it for a minute?”

I watched her curiously from the corner of my eye. She did not even throw a glance at the front page, as one does instinctively when picking up a newspaper, but went on turning the pages hurriedly, as if searching for something. She finally paused at page 17 and settled to read an article on top of that page. I peered discreetly. It was a London-datelined report she was reading, that was headlined, “Want to stay in shape? Drink donkey's milk.”

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 26 June 2011.

Desi Thoughts, Desi Babu

2011-06-24T22:41:00.006+05:30

This post is being written at a time when the scene outside the window of my study presents the perfect setting for a late-night Hindi-film murder: it is raining heavily and is pitch dark, except when the lighting brings into view the neighbouring houses for a fraction of a second; and the tyres of passing cars are making a sinister sound as they cautiously roll through water. On nights such as this, the fate of many families has taken an ugly turn -- in Hindi films, that is.

In the kitchen, meanwhile, rice is boiling. I can already smell it. Very few aromas are as delectable as that of boiling rice. The rice is going to be my second dinner tonight. Usually, I have my dinner very late -- at times so late that I can hear the chirping of the birds along with the beeps of the microwave. But what to do, I can't write on a full stomach. Today was one of those rare days when I had my dinner early, at the club, after an invigorating workout. I was hoping to lie down in bed and watch a movie or read a book and fall asleep. I was hoping to begin Saturday on an energetic note.

But while we were driving back home, I asked my wife (she's the one who always drives, because I can't) to stop at the supermarket. I wanted to buy cigarettes. As I picked up two packets of Gold Flake Kings and queued up to pay, I noticed, in their fridge, Amul Butter! All these years -- at least for the past 10 years -- I had become totally blind to the existence of butter, only because of the fear of its artery-clogging properties. I had even forgotten how butter tastes like, and was reminded of it only occasionally during my stay in luxury hotels. Planes and trains serve so little butter that you don't even get to taste it even after chewing up the two slices of bread.

But this evening, my heart melted like butter when I spotted the so-familiar Amul slabs, carelessly dumped away in the rack of the refrigerator along with varieties of cheese. Suddenly, memories came gushing! When was the last time I had Amul Butter -- with the knowledge that I was having Amul Butter? I couldn't recall. And when was the last time I had steaming rice with a chunk of Amul Butter melting in it, with half-a-lemon squeezed and some salt sprinkled over the combo? Fuck! This was even harder to tell. Whenever it must have been, it must have happened at the insistence of my mother, who was the only one to understand my taste in food.

My taste in food is very simple. Steaming rice with a spoonful of ghee or butter, served with a sliced lemon, a little salt, and a piece of green chilli to bite on -- that's luxury eating for me. Place a bowl of arhar ki daal and a saag around that plate of rice and I shall be grateful to you all my life. Embellish the plate with a ball of boiled potato mashed with chopped onions, green chilli and mustard oil and I shall be your slave. Simple food not only nourishes your body but also your soul -- or so I believe.

So, while the rice boils, I have decided to write. And to create the hunger for my second dinner, I have poured myself a drink. Since the cooker will shut itself off once the rice (and the two potatoes in it) are cooked, I can focus on the drinking and writing. As long as the birds don't begin to chirp when I take the butter out of the fridge.

But what do I write about? I really have nothing new to say. At the age of forty, I am now leading a pretty boring and predictable life. No new encounters, no new experiences. On top of it, courage seems to be deserting me. Time was when the wife would be out of town and I would remind myself excitedly about the things I could do in her absence. Today, whenever the wife is travelling, I ruefully remind myself of the things I am unable to do in her absence. I really miss her. A wise man would describe this phenomenon as 'conditioning.'

In such a situation, I can only blog about three things with confidence -- things that affect me on a daily basis: my mother, Kishore Kumar and writing. Each day, I make new discoveries about my feelings towards these three elements that currently rule my life.

Hardly a day goes by when I don't recall -- and relive -- that phone call from my father who conveyed the news to me in a very level-headed manner: "Your mother is no more." It is nearly two years now, but the measured voice of my father still keeps ringing in my ear. But I can't keep blogging about it, can I, especially when I have written several posts about my mother's untimely death?

And what new to write about Kishore Kumar? I have written countless heart-felt posts about him. Come to think of it, Kishore Kumar and my mother died at the same age. My mother had had one heart attack, a silent one, before she underwent a bypass surgery, while Kishore Kumar had had two, and even then he went on singing and dancing during stage performances. Of late, though, there have been things I wanted to write about him. Kishore Kumar might have been a great singer, but he could also be mean-minded. When R.D. Burman gave a chance to newcomer Abhijeet (a fellow Kanpurwallah) to sing some of the songs in Dev Anand's Anand Aur Anand, in which Dev Anand was introducing his son Suneil, Kishore Kumar got livid and stormed the recording studio.

Dev Anand managed to pacify Kishore Kumar, assuring him that all the songs pictured on him (Dev Anand) in the film would still be sung by him (Kishore Kumar). But Kishore Kumar still demanded to know why the voice of Abhijeet and not Amit Kumar was being used for Dev Anand's son Suneil. Can't blame Kishore: he was human and not above being insecure. The petty-mindedness, in any case, does not take away from the large-heartedness of his voice.

Then comes writing. What can I write about it? Writing can be a pain in the ass, and I would rather write than talk about writing, even though I have been foolish enough to write several posts on writing in the recent past.

What should I blog about, then? I would rather spend my time reading Desi Babu. Since the past few weeks, a number of friends who stop by my blog have asked me: "BG, who is Desi Babu?" I wish I knew. All I know is he is a kind soul and a brilliant writer who has recently started a blog, The Peanut Express. When I read his recent post, on Greece, I felt extremely flattered that a man of his calibre should have nice things to say about Ganga Mail. It's strange that some of the best writers I've known on blogosphere don't write for a living and choose to stay anonymous (and also have a Bong connection).

Life In A Metro: Workout For The Brain

2011-06-22T16:50:00.002+05:30

Instant messaging maybe good news for man, but bad news for mankind

Imagine having a dozen suits in your wardrobe, dry-cleaned and mothballed periodically, but nowhere to go. Every now and then, you open the wardrobe and look at the suits lovingly and longingly, hoping that an invitation will soon arrive requiring you to wear formals. But the invitation never comes. My condition is somewhat similar today.

I own a rather decent collection of fountain pens. I clean them with water periodically and fill them up with fresh ink, but rarely do I get the chance to put these pens to paper. Yet, greed keeps getting the better of me. About a month ago, I ordered a Ratnam pen from Rajahmundry (the brand is named after its founder Ratnam, who started manufacturing fountain pens in the town way back in 1932, after Gandhi gave the call to boycott foreign goods), but I am yet to find an occasion to take it out of my pocket. Other than using it to initial the attendance register every morning.

When you use a pen, especially a fountain pen, you think several times before committing your thoughts to paper because you don't want to be seen striking out words or sentences too often. As a result, only the clearest of thoughts get transferred when you are writing with a pen, unlike in the case of a computer, where the luxury of the ‘delete' and ‘backspace' keys spares you the trouble of thinking hard before typing out a sentence.

When the screen of the computer is staring at you impatiently, you often make do with thoughts that are floating on the surface instead of plunging deeper. Who has the time?

But, strangely, in an age when communication is instant, communication itself is fast becoming a vanishing art. What we do today – over phone, SMS or online messengers – is merely keep in touch or make small talk.

No longer do we have the urge to communicate, by way of gathering thoughts and putting them down coherently on a piece of paper, because the people we would have liked to write long letters to are now available online 24/7.

We've paid a big price for instant communication, and the price is introspection. While instant communication may be good news for man, it is a terrible thing to happen to mankind. About 100 years from now, when historians set out to document our times, what will they have to fall back on? They will have to break into email accounts or chat transcripts of the who's-who of the 21st Century. Even then, they are unlikely to stumble upon great pieces of literature, but only brief exchanges in SMS lingo.

Even as I write this piece, I can see the spines of two voluminous books peeping from the bookshelf – A Literate Passion(a compilation of the letters between Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin) and Under the Sun (a collection of letters by Bruce Chatwin, the celebrated travel writer).

Books such as these would not have existed if Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin exchanged text messages, or if Chatwin carried an iPad. This is another way of saying that in 100 years from now there will be no new biographies or compilations of correspondences between great minds.

In the latest issue of Time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David McCullough, when asked whether people not writing letters on paper will affect the study of history, laments, “The loss of people writing – writing a composition, a letter or a report – is not just the loss for the record. It is the loss of the process of working out your thoughts on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren't [writing]. And that's a handicap. People I research were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.”

What he calls calisthenics, I call introspection, which died unnoticed the day communication became instant.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, June 18, 2011.

The Real Man

2011-06-17T20:35:00.003+05:30

This evening, the status message of a friend on Google-talk read: A man can love a million girls but only a real man can love one girl in a million ways!

I did not ask the friend whether she had borrowed the line or coined it herself, but I went over it a few times and was tempted to add some words that would have made it read as: A man can love a million girls but only a real man can love one girl in a million ways (even while loving a million others)!

And then a few questions struck me (just as two questions keep striking me these days -- 1. Who on earth in Anna Hazare? and 2. What on earth is Civil Society?):

1. Who/What is a real man?

2. Why should he love just one girl?

3. Why should he love just one girl in a million ways?

4. Is it possible to reach the million-mark in one's lifetime (that was more of a thought than a question)?

5. What if the girl decides that he is not her kind of man, even if a real one: does our man continue loving her in a million ways?

Midnight, Music And Musings

2011-06-12T00:46:00.004+05:30

I was introduced to Bengali music quite late in life. I was already 12 or 13 when I first listened to Rabindra Sangeet; and it was not until the age of 26 or 27 that I discovered the other songs. I have described the discovery in great detail in an earlier post (I was searching the archives of 2009 and 2010 to locate this link but found out that it was written in 2007! How time flies).

Today I can boast of a decent collection of Bengali songs and no longer consider myself inferior -- even if not equal -- to a music-loving Bengali. I preserve the songs like gems because I have searched for them and earned them, unlike a Bengal-bred person, for example my wife, who has inherited them. And the best part about not being bred in Bengal is that there is a new discovery to be made almost every other day.

Tonight I made a new discovery -- a stunning one at that. For years I have been listening to a song, one my favourites, sung by Kishore Kumar and composed by Salil Choudhury for the 1977 Bengali film Kabita:

Shono shono go shobe shono diya mon
bichitro kaahini aek kori boronon...

I have never watched Kabita, but I don't need to see the film in order to like the song, which I have always liked for two reasons. One, Kishore Kumar is in his elements in this song -- he throws his voice not only out of his throat but also his heart and soul. Two, I was very familiar with the tune. Salil Choudhury had used it way back in 1966 for a famous song in the award-winning Malayalam film Chemmeen, which went in the voice of chorus as:

Kanaa poomeeninu povana thonikkaraa
Maanathe ponvala veeshana thonikkaraa...

And in the very next stanza, Yesudas takes over (now the tune is that of the Hindi song, Baag mein kali khili bagiya mehki from the film Chaand Aur Suraj):

Chaakara kadapurathini ulsavamaayi chaakara
Thera purathini malsaramaay...

So Salilda had separated his landmark Malayalam song (composed in Woodlands Hotel in Madras) into two more famous songs, one Hindi and another Bengali.

We are talking about the Bengali part here:

Shono shono go shobe shono diya mon
bichitro kaahini aek kori boronon...

What a full-throated song by Kishore Kumar! How he breathed life even into Bangla lyrics! But did you know who sang this song on the screen? Kamal Hassan! Here, watch it.

So that's the discovery I made tonight. I am sure many of you might already know it, but please don't kill my joy.

Life in a Metro — Saffron Robes, Black Money

2011-06-11T00:08:00.001+05:30

Alas, Ramdev thought he could go from curing the body to curing a nation.

Dog biting man is no news, but man biting dog is – that's what generations of aspiring journalists have learned in classrooms. But today, for a TV channel, the incident of a man publicly biting a dog would not only be news but ‘breaking news'. The footage of the man biting the dog would be shown repeatedly, with perhaps a red circle pointing to the exact moment his teeth sink into the poor animal. And then there will be sound bites (pun not intended at all) from various people: a psychiatrist analysing how the man could stoop to such a level; an animal lover demanding imprisonment for the man; the veterinarian giving an update on the dog's recovery; and so on.

A few years ago, a cat stranded on the sunshade of a high-rise became the ‘breaking news' on one of the channels, and that was when I completely gave up watching news on TV. I began catching up with the day's events the old-fashioned way – reading the next morning's newspaper.

Until last Sunday, when I decided to make an exception by being a couch potato, and as a result found myself caught in the crossfire between the Central government and Ramdev. The channels – all of them – reported no news other than the midnight eviction of Ramdev from the Ramlila grounds in Delhi, where he had sat in protest to demand the return of stashed-away black money to the country.

As I watched the drama, memories went back to 2003, when I was initiated into yoga in an ashram located in the forests of Kerala. Also around that time, a channel called Aastha had started telecasting live the yoga camps conducted by Ramdev in various towns.

Since I knew my yoga by now, I took an instant liking for him: a good-natured, talkative, saffron-robed man who had taken yoga from hallowed ashrams into the drawing rooms and bedrooms of the common man. He demystified yoga and brought about a revolution in urban India.

But is that why he is so popular and powerful today? No. His real power stems from the evangelist-like statements he makes about the curative powers of yoga. The kapaalabhaati kriya alone, he says, can cure all diseases that afflict mankind. He, therefore, came as a godsend to the middle-class, middle-aged Indian – as someone who promised them quick, painless and free cures for their raised sugar levels and blocked arteries.

While the health benefits of yoga cannot be disputed, it is not known how many diabetics or heart patients were actually cured by following him on television. But faith can be blind. So the number of his followers swelled by the millions, and Ramdev went from strength to strength, holding a yoga camp even at Rashtrapati Bhawan, at the invitation of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. And then, success went to his head. He became ambitious. He thought it was time for him to cure the nation of its ailments.

But Ramdev made two mistakes at the Ramlila grounds. One, he forgot to discard his saffron robes. A saffron-robed yogi is supposed to be a renunciate who pursues spiritualism and preaches detachment – he does not take on corruption but instead seeks to rise above it. Two, he forgot that people come to the camps for purely selfish reasons – they are interested in Ramdev as long as he talks about yoga and its benefits. Corruption is something they've learned to live with; their real enemies are diabetes and hypertension.

Which is why his campaign failed: it got mass coverage, but not mass support.

Today, all that is being talked about is whether the government was right or wrong in evicting Ramdev from the Ramlila grounds. Black money remains where it is.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, 11 June 2011.

Song Of The Road

2011-06-08T23:01:00.002+05:30

The road called life -- my life, your life. From Rajnigandha, directed by Basu Chatterjee.

Life In A Metro — Urban Blues

2011-06-04T10:49:00.002+05:30

In its transition from Garden City to Mall City, Bangalore has lost its identity

When you live close to a city or town of public interest – say Agra or Pondicherry – you invariably end up never going there because the proximity makes you take the place for granted. “Oh, what's the hurry,” you keep telling yourself as the years roll by, while people living thousands of miles away keep coming in hordes to visit the very place.

I came to live in Chennai in early 2001, and it was a good four years before I happened to visit Bangalore, barely 360 km away, and five years before I finally travelled to Pondicherry, just 160 km away. They may say it's better late than never, but in the case of Bangalore, had I delayed my visit by a couple of years, I would have never known what it looked like in its heyday when it was also known as the Air-conditioned City, Garden City and Pensioners' Paradise. I had made it just in time – the reverse metamorphosis of the city, brought about by the IT revolution in the late 1990s, was beginning to be visible but still far from obvious.

As with everything ‘first', the sensations of that maiden trip to Bangalore in June 2005 are still alive. As soon as I stepped onto the station – it was close to noon by then – a cool breeze caressed my face. The portable, invisible air-conditioner was to accompany me throughout my stay. And one evening, when a small group of people had gathered in the balcony of a friend's house for post-dinner conversation, it became so cold that the friend had to dig out all the blankets and shawls she had in her cupboards. This was June, when Chennai was a furnace!

This small group of people, that included me, went pub-hopping every evening. Bangalore took great pride in its pubs – they weren't mere watering holes where people just went to get drunk; they were the symbols of its sophisticated culture where the young rubbed shoulders with the not-so-young to get drunk on music and conversation. The frothy beer was mostly an excuse – and, at times, the catalyst – for the enjoyment. How can I ever forget the sight of young men frenziedly playing the air guitar with their eyes shut as the DJ brought on Led Zeppelin!

June 2011: As I got off the train and walked down the platform on a bright morning, the first thing that struck me was the heat. I waited several minutes for that familiar breeze to brush past my face but none arrived. By the time I reached the parking lot, where a friend was waiting to show off his new car, I found patches of sweat on my shirt. “Next year we are going to buy ACs for our bedrooms. The summers have become quite unbearable here,” the friend told me as he navigated the station traffic. His wife added, “We would have bought them this year itself, but we spent quite a bit on the car.” I hadn't even brought up the weather.

The same evening, I returned to M.G. Road. I found it brutally scarred by the monster called development. It is no longer a place for a stroll, but a cramped pathway where you navigate crowds. And the less said about Brigade Road, once the most fashionable stretch in the city, the better. Today, it is a slightly upscale version of Chennai's Ranganathan Street, where it is impossible to walk without your elbows touching those of total strangers.

The Pensioners' Paradise is today undergoing reconstruction to accommodate the migrant workforce. The green cover is shrinking, the population is exploding. Much of the migrant population has never known the charm of old Bangalore: they are dazzled by its malls and so more malls are coming up. A huge mall is opening shortly on No. 1, M.G. Road – and is most likely to be named after its enviable address.

Later that evening, I made another heartbreaking discovery: the death of Bangalore's nightlife. I was aware that nightclubs now follow a strict 11.30 deadline, but what I didn't know was that many of the popular standalone pubs I had visited during my maiden trip had shut down. In any case, today's Bangalorean hardly has the time to wind down with mugs of beer. After a hard day's work, he has a bigger challenge waiting for him: the long and strenuous drive back home.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, June 4, 2011.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee or Basu Chatterjee? A Midnight Analysis

2011-05-23T23:00:00.003+05:30

You don't have to be an avid watcher of Hindi films to have heard of Hrishikesh Mukherjee or Basu Chatterjee. In case you still haven't, let me tell you that without these two directors, the Hindi film industry would be as poor as a rich man with all the grandeur but without a soul.

I would, in fact, place them on a pedestal that would make them stand taller than Satyajit Ray. It is, of course, fashionable to worship Ray. Especially as a Bengali, if you are not found to be in awe of him, or Tagore for that matter, you are bound to be sneered at. No doubt Ray was a genius -- you only have to watch Nayak, Aranyer Din Ratri and Ghare Baire to get an idea about his mastery over the craft. These happen to be the only Ray movies that I would like to watch over and again. Let me add Seemabaddha and Pratidwandi to the list. On the other hand, I found Joi Baba Felunath foolish (I would any day settle for Johnny Mera Naam) and Agantuk to be replete with overacting.

Between these two extremes, Ray made numerous other films that I have always found depressing and never had the patience to watch -- not to mention the insufferable background scores. I have also always wondered why he never hired S.D. Burman or Salil Chowdhury to do the background score for him. I guess the whole idea was not to have big commercial names on board -- most award-winning films either don't have background music or have a score so boring that you instinctively know it is an award-winning film.

Now, if this makes me an intellectually-challenged Bengali, so be it. Ray's films have had nothing for me -- me, as in the average Indian (and not French) movie-watcher who once upon a time could afford a ticket and now has the money to buy a DVD. I wonder how many people living in the villages of Bengal have actually watched Pather Panchali (it would be a good idea to find out even now); am pretty sure the film, no matter how good, got immortalised due to people who had their breakfast in Flurys or sipped red wine in French cafes. Appreciation of Ray's films came to exemplify the art of inverted snobbery -- an art that continues to flourish in parts of Calcutta and of the world even today. If you happen to be spending the night at a Bong woman's place, and if, over drinks, you choose to watch Amar Akbar Anthony over any of her Ray collection, be warned that that could be your last night with her. Unless you are so good with the basic skills that she switches off the TV and throws away the remote.

Even when Ray was at the height of his creative genius, two fellow Bengalis happened to make friends with the audience. They were Hrishida and Basuda. They told the audience stories that they could instantly relate to, and in the process made them laugh as well as cry. In short, they touched hearts. End of the day, that's what matters.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee made Satyakaam, Chupke Chupke, Anupama, Anand, Abhimaan, Guddi, Gol Maal, Aashirwad, Baawarchi, Namak Haraam -- to name a few.

Basu Chatterjee made Piya Ka Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, Khatta Meetha, Apne Paraye, Manpasand, Shaukeen -- to name a few.

These two men -- who gave their best in the 1970's and 80's -- successfully demonstrated that a Hindi film did not have to revolve around a superman-like hero chasing smugglers (who landed on a deserted Bombay beach under the cover of darkness) or baying for the blood of his parents' killers. The hero, they proved, could be you, or the man next door -- basically the middle-class Indian man, without superhuman powers, who could be working as a clerk in some private firm or the other.

Now, the question that arises in my mind is (actually the comparison to Ray was quite pointless here, but never mind): who is greater of the two, Hrishida or Basuda?

It's a tough question, but I have an answer ready: if there is ever a fire at my home, I would first save the DVDs of Basu Chatterjee's films. Why so? Wait for the next post -- if you still want to.

Life In A Metro: A Victory For Fort St. George

2011-05-21T09:08:00.001+05:30

"Changes of time are fickle,” Francis Day, the hard-drinking and womanising employee of the East India Company wrote in an emotional and personally delivered letter to his boss Andrew Cogan, “and if you suffer this opportunity to pass over, you shall perhaps in vain afterwards pursue the same when it is fled and gone.”

The year was 1639: the East India Company, competing with the Dutch, was eager to build a permanent settlement on the east coast, and Day was trying to hard-sell Cogan the idea of building it on a sandy strip of beach, which he had already negotiated for with the local chieftain.

The strip of beach was barely three miles away from the Portuguese settlement of San Thome, where Day had had a good time during his expeditions to scout for land — he even found himself a lover there.

The passionate grab-it-or-regret-it tone of Day's letter had its desired effect. On February 20, 1640, both Day and Cogan, dropped anchor at the appointed piece of beach after winding up business at Armagon (today known as a town called Durgarajupatnam, in Andhra Pradesh), where they had a trading post until then. On that dreary strip of sand they built a walled settlement and named it — rather grandiosely, after the patron saint of England — Fort St. George. Madraspatnam, today known as Chennai, grew out of Fort St. George.

But it is not Chennai alone that owes its existence to Fort St. George. When Day and Cogan founded Madraspatnam in February 1640, Delhi was still a medieval city that was ruled by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and was actually known as Shahjahanabad, while Bombay and Calcutta weren't even born. The construction of the Fort, therefore, can be considered the starting point of modern India. In other words, modern India was born out of Fort St. George.

It is a different matter that this historical fact is never celebrated — either out of ignorance or indifference. Kolkata still fondly remembers its founder Job Charnock – there is a popular shopping complex-cum-restaurant called Charnock City – but Chennai has never had a Cogan Café or a Day Dosa. In fact, much before he founded Calcutta, Charnock got his daughters baptised at St. Mary's Church in Fort St. George.

The soil of Fort St. George seems to possess a lucky charm. A number of clerks and soldiers and administrators who came to serve here as non-entities got catapulted to unbelievably high positions — high enough not only to decide the destiny of India but also of Britain. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, a number of illustrious Britons, including prime ministers, commanders-in-chief, governors-general, members of Parliament and bureaucrats had one thing in common — the Fort St. George connection.

It was in the Fort that Elihu Yale made his riches, a small part of which was subsequently donated to a cash-strapped university in Connecticut, which decided to name itself after Yale in gratitude. Then there was Robert Clive, who arrived here as a clerk of the East India Company and got so depressed by the nature of his job that he decided to put a gun to his head. The gun failed to fire and Clive went on to become a “heaven-born general” and lay the foundation of the British Empire.

Similarly, Arthur Wellesley, who as a young colonel spent several months in the Fort planning (and then fighting) the war against Tipu Sultan, went on to win the most iconic battle in British history — the battle of Waterloo. Warren Hastings served in the Fort as the export warehouse-keeper before he was promoted and sent to Calcutta as India's first governor-general. The list of people who went on to be kissed by greatness after a stint in Fort St. George is long.

For 371 years, the Fort remained the seat of power in Madras. But in 2010, chief minister M. Karunanidhi decided to move out of its charmed soil — only to meet his Waterloo. He conceived a new Secretariat building on Mount Road and had it constructed in a tearing hurry so that it could be inaugurated while he was in power. One of the buildings sacrificed to make space for the new Secretariat was the 250-year-old Government House, perhaps the most precious piece of colonial heritage in the city after the Fort itself.

Eventually, Karunanidhi lost, Fort St. George won. It's gone back to being the seat of power — at least for the next five years.

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, May 21, 2011.

Life in a Metro: The Mind of a Mother

2011-05-14T12:35:00.002+05:30

Until that evening, I thought a hospital was the most depressing place on this planet. In a hospital, there is at least hope. In an old-age home, there is none — the inmates are like passengers of a bus that is taking them to the sunset of their lives. In the fading sunlight, they can only observe the world from the window; they are not permitted to alight until the bus has reached its final destination.

Quite symbolically, the sun had begun to set by the time I could locate the old-age home I was visiting to research a book. And quite ironically, the home happened to be situated right next to a park where elderly men were already out in their walking shoes — some of them would get back home to have their quota of two small drinks before dinner, some others would play with their grandchildren or help them with homework.

But in the old-age home, the inmates had no home to go back to; that was their home. A cold silence greeted me when I walked in. Not a soul in sight. I tried to listen for footsteps or coughing, but I all I could hear, in the silence, were sighs of resignation and the chirping of birds from the park. I was spotted soon enough by an attendant, who quickly rounded up the residents in the hall so that I could interview them.

It was the same story repeated over and over again: once upon a time they were a happy family until the sons landed dream jobs in the U.S. and the daughters got married to respectable professionals settled abroad. The elderly parents suddenly found themselves stranded in their own city. When one of them died, the surviving parent was either forced or coaxed by the children, all leading prosperous lives abroad, to move into the old-age home. No parent categorically blamed the children; all of them claimed that they had moved into the home out of their own choice. Except one woman — let's call her Ratnamma.

Ratnamma, 74 years old, was bitterly critical of her daughter. "My husband and I were living together until he died two years ago. Within 10 days of the funeral, my daughter brought me here. Imagine, she is my only daughter!" she seethed.

Ratnamma could only speak Tamil, and the inmate who acted as my interpreter had initially tried to present me with toned-down versions of her outbursts — it was quite obvious that he didn't want to bring a bad name to the 'children'. But Ratnamma had sufficient understanding of English to realise what the interpreter was up to. She rebuked him: "Let him know what I have been through." After which the interpreter began translating her sentences verbatim.

"I would have liked to stay with my daughter after my husband's death, but no, she did not allow me to!" Ratnamma went on. “She just dumped me here!"

"What does your daughter do?" I asked Ratnamma. "How old is she?"

"She is 42, she is an engineer. She is earning quite well. She has a son who goes to school."

"Why doesn't she want you to stay with her?"

"She says: 'Amma, who will look after you when I go to work and the child goes to school?' Am I bedridden to be looked after? Tell me. I get my pension. I am not going to be a burden on her."

The other inmates looked away in an uninterested manner as Ratnamma continued her tirade. They did not want to be seen in the same boat as hers.

"What does her husband do?" I asked.

"She is divorced. She and her child are living alone. Still, she is hell-bent on keeping me here!" she said.

Suddenly, there was silence. The anger on Ratnamma's face began to melt into embarrassment. "But I must say that my daughter is of good character," she sought to clarify.

"Good character!" the interpreter mocked her, seeking his revenge. "All this while you were saying how bad she is."

"She may be bad," Ratnamma fought back, "but her character is good."

Published in The Hindu MetroPlus, May 14, 2011.

I Am The Entertainer

2011-05-11T22:26:00.000+05:30

Thanks to a gentleman who makes me wish I could write like him and whose real name I do not know, I am hooked to Billy Joel's The Entertainer these days. In the moments of self-doubt and low self-esteem -- they seem to be occurring more frequently these days -- this song acts like an invisible hand that runs through the hair and automatically straightens out the eyebrows raised with worry. It goes like this:

I am the entertainer,
And I know just where I stand:
Another serenader,
And another long-haired band.
Today I am your champion.
I may have won your hearts.
But I know the game,
You will forget my name,
And I won't be here
In another year,
If I don't stay on the charts.

He knew the game obviously. After all, he managed to stay on long enough to be nominated for the Grammy 23 times and to win it six times.

The Entertainer was written sometime in the 1970's. Around the same time, an Indian lyricist also happened to express exactly the same sentiments in a song that went on to be a legend. The song is Main pal do pal ka shaayar hoon from Kabhie Kabhie, written (with a fountain pen, most probably) by Sahir Ludhianvi. To quote from it:

Kal aur ayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale
mujhse behtar kehne waley, tumse behtar sunne waley
kal koi mujhko yaad karey, kyon koi mujhko yaad karey
masroof zamana mere liye kyon waqt apna barbadh kare
main pal do pal ka shaayar hoon.

My translation of Sahir's lines: Tomorrow, there will be new writers and new connoisseurs / there will be poets who will write better than me and listeners who will be more appreciating than you / why should anyone care to remember me tomorrow / why should the busy world spare it's precious time for me / I am a poet only for a moment or two.

Sahir, without doubt, is the only literary lyricist that Hindi cinema has ever had. He was a genius: his lyrics needle your mind even today. It was not for nothing that Amrita Pritam, once he left her home after paying her a visit, would light up the cigarettes stubbed by him in the ashtray and smoke the leftover tobacco, just to feel him in her lungs. For further evidence of his genius, you must listen to the songs of Pyaasa and Aa Gale Lag Ja at the same time.

The two films belong to two different generations, but Sahir effectively demonstrates that it does not matter which era you live in -- it feels all the same when you are in love or when you have been ditched. But Kabhie Kabhie, since it concerns the life of a poet, would go down in history as Sahir's landmark film. A long time ago, I wrote a lengthy post on the songs of Kabhie Kabhie, but back then, not many people read my blog. I hope you will be kind enough to read it now.

End of the day, be it Billy Joel or Sahir Ludhianvi, they mean the same thing: Keep it up, before they forget you. Unless your favourite holiday spot happens to be a town called Oblivion.

Return Of The Column

2011-05-10T21:39:00.004+05:30

What's most rewarding about being a writer is that every single moment in your life presents you with raw material that can be turned into a piece of writing. If your bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you are stranded for several hours, you have a story to tell. If you happen to be bitten by a dog, you can write write a 500-word humorous piece and send it to a newspaper. If in bed, you happen to find your partner wearing her undies inside out, you can quietly store away that little discovery for use in a future book. Even if you are doing nothing, just lying in bed and watching the blades of the fan rotate furiously, you can use the image to open your new novel -- "Are they blades of a fan or hands of a clock -- he wondered. Time flies, sigh."

In the end that's what makes you feel powerful -- the ability to transform every moment into a story. Money and fame, if at all they come, cease to matter beyond a point. And nothing can be more gratifying for a writer than finding himself a platform from where he can share such -- seemingly -- day-to-day stories with readers without having to write lengthy articles or novels. A newspaper column is one such place.

Until about three years ago, I wrote a column called Sunday Spin in the Express. I don't remember exactly for how long the column ran; I think it was close to three years, initially as a fortnightly and then as a weekly. Every Tuesday night, around 10 o' clock (Wednesday was the deadline for the Sunday magazine to go to print), I would sit in front of the computer wondering what to write. Eventually an idea would arrive and I would manage to flesh it out into a 650-word column by two or three in the morning.

Before going to sleep I would mail it to two people, Sushila Ravindranath and Baradwaj Rangan. Sushila was the editor, while Baradwaj supervised the page in which the column went; so it was natural that I had to mail the piece to them. But the idea behind finishing the column and mailing it to them before daybreak was to make them read it as soon as they switched on their computers in the morning -- while there was still sufficient time left for me to make amends, if required, before the magazine went to print. They were people whose opinion I trusted blindly and I still do. But then, they also happen to be the nicest people I've known. By the time I switched on my laptop after waking up late in the morning, their feedback would be waiting in the inbox: "Very nice" or, simply, "V. Nice." I hope they meant it.

In February 2008 I left Express. I wanted to change with the Times. In the process, Sunday Spin died a sudden death. I had no idea that the column had become so popular until the Valentine's Day that year -- I had already submitted my resignation by then -- when I walked into the WITCO showroom on Cathedral Road with my wife to buy a bag for her. The elderly man at the payment counter, upon seeing my credit card, exclaimed: "Bishwanath Ghosh!" I panicked for a moment: was I on the defaulters' list or something?

"Bishwanath Ghosh. From Sunday Express. Right?"

"That's right. Why?"

"I read your column every Sunday, sir."

I felt like a star. At the same time I also felt a lump in my throat. Until then, I had been receiving complimentary emails and letters from numerous people who read Sunday Spin, but this was the first time -- and also the last -- that I came face to face with a 'lay reader' of Sunday Spin.

"But you won't read me anymore, sir," I told him as I signed the slip. "I've just quit the Express." For the next three years, I did not have a column but I wrote two books -- one already published and another about to be.

Today, Baradwaj and I are colleagues once again -- at The Hindu. And once again, I have a column. Looks like the good times are back. Only that the column is now going to appear on Saturdays in Metro Plus, and under a new name -- Life in a Metro. The deadline, though, remains the same: Wednesday.

My Interests

2011-05-08T23:45:00.004+05:30

If you go to my profile page on this blog, you will find the following listed under 'Interests' category (I've cut and pasted):

Sex, Scotch, Spiritualism, Yoga, Writing, Travelling, Travel Writing, Fountain Pens (not necessarily in that order).

I started the blog in October 2005, and even though I mentioned "Not necessarily in that order", I strongly suspect there was some logic behind that order. Perhaps it reflected my state of mind at the time. I was not yet 35, still single, and had no complaints against life -- so perhaps it was natural to subconsciously spell out the 'Interests' in the order in which they interested me.

Sex interested me immensely back then, not just as a means of pleasure or conquest but also as a subject. People read you if you wrote about sex -- not titillating stuff, but analysing human behaviour towards it and thus giving voice to thoughts that otherwise remain in the throat. Alcohol was another thing I could not do without, though it was not always Scotch -- a number of posts on this blog during that time were written in the afternoons, under the mild influence of alcohol. Yet, at the same time, I was in touch with my spiritual side and was also totally into yoga, never stepping out of home unless I had done 10 rounds of sun salutations and a few basic postures such as the chakrasana and sarvangasana. Then comes writing. It was a foolish thing to list it under the 'Interest' category because writing was not an interest, but a necessity. It was my bread and butter -- though I did write a lot of stuff out of my interest in writing. Towards the fag end of the list, you will see Travelling, Travel Writing and Fountain Pens. That was because I would occasionally travel to new places and write about them, and was gradually discovering the pleasure in doing so. Most of such writing happened on the spot itself, on the stationery of the hotel or the resort, with my fountain pen. I possessed not more than one fountain pen at a time.

Today, nearly six years later, my interests rank in the reverse order! I now have a collection of nearly two dozen fountain pens (excluding those I've lost or given away over the last few years) and am in the process of adding to it. My latest acquisition is a Ratnam pen. Mr Ratnam of Rajahmundry started manufacturing fountain pens way back in 1932 after Mahatma Gandhi gave a call against the use of foreign-made goods. Subsequently, a number of illustrious men, including Gandhi, have used Ratnam pens. I ordered a pen last month and it arrived within three days of my sending my address to them over SMS. But the pen had a defect: it would suddenly stop writing. When I called them up to convey the problem, the man who answered the phone advised me to dip the nib portion of the pen in water for an hour. I did as advised, but it didn't work. Quite magically, the very next morning, Mr Ratnam's son, Mr K.V. Ramana Murthy, who now runs the family business, called me. He apologised for the defect and asked me to send the pen back, along with a few lines in my own long hand so that he could also craft the nib according to my style. Once again, I did as advised. The pen came back to me in three days, along with a letter from Mr Ramana Murthy (produced at the bottom of this post). Suffice to say that if that pen were a woman, I would have married her right away -- that I already have a wife would not have mattered.

Travel Writing and Travelling would figure next on my current list of interests, considering that's what I am occupied with these days -- no longer for the pleasure of it but professionally, in order to earn my place under the sun. These two interests, by and large, define what I am today and tomorrow could well be my identity. Pleasure, by the way, has long been replaced by pain.

Spiritualism and yoga -- they are now like former girlfriends who you still desire and eagerly want to get back to, but you just can't figure how. As for sex -- oh, who cares! Today I pity people who still think that sex sells, and can't be bothered anymore about analysing or dissecting people's hypocritical attitude towards it. Sex is not something to be written about, it is meant to be had. Either you have it, or don't have it. Go have it if you can -- take the keys to my flat if you want to -- but leave me alone, at least for now.

Perhaps I was wise enough back then to know that interests can change with time and circumstances. Maybe that is why I took care to mention, "Not necessarily in that order." I am equally wise even today not to delete that line, because you never know.

The Mother

2011-04-10T01:39:00.003+05:30

Presented below is the telephonic conversation I recently had with a woman who, I am pretty sure, is never going to visit this blog. Even if she does, good for her.

"Hello, am I speaking to Mr Ghosh?"

"Yes."

"I believe you've published a book?"

"That's right."

"So how does one get published?"

I wish I knew the answer. Getting published, as far as I know by now, is a matter of luck. Sheer luck. It is not the same as applying for a passport, where success is guaranteed, even though you might have to wait longer than usual or bribe the odd clerk. You may turn out the best manuscript ever written but if you don't know a soul in the publishing industry, chances are very high that your manuscript will remain just that -- a manuscript. At the same time, the managing director of a publishing firm may be your childhood friend, but if you write third-rate stuff and pester him to publish it, chances are equally high that he will stop taking your calls and avoid crossing your path. Somewhere between these extremes lies the chance of getting published.

But who was going to explain all this to the woman. I advised her to visit the websites of various publishing houses and go through the submission guidelines.

"But I have already done all that. They all said 'no'. That is why I am calling you. You have published a book no?"

"Yes."

"So can you please give me the contact number of your publisher? I will talk to them directly. I want to get my daughter's stories published."

"How old is your daughter?"

"She is twenty. She has written some wonderful short stories."

"But isn't she too young? Maybe she should write some more."

"Why? If whatever she has written so far gets published, she will feel motivated to write more."

"As far as I know, you will be required to send in a synopsis plus three sample stories..."

"I know, I know. That is why I am calling you. The thing is, she hasn't written that many stories to be compiled into a book. So I plan to add her poems. She has written some beautiful poems. But that may still not be enough for a book, so I want to put in some of my paintings too. I have done some beautiful paintings."

"That's nice."

"I know. But these publishers don't seem to think so. I have tried almost all of them. Now I want to try your publisher. Can I have the number please?"

"I don't have any number. I too had approached them through the website."

"Oh, is it? What's the website called?"

I told her.

The Mistress

2011-04-05T21:51:00.003+05:30

Tonight ends my month-long holiday, during which, for the first time in my working life, I was technically jobless and therefore not answerable to any boss. I was answerable solely to my desires and curiosities, which took me around the roads and streets of Kolkata, partly on foot and partly by taxi. My constant companions were a notebook I'd purchased from Chennai airport and a black matte-finish Sheaffer fountain pen that I treated myself to on my very first evening in Kolkata.

Until now, Kolkata was my hometown-in-law, where I made the annual obligatory visit, usually during Durga Puja. Today Kolkata has become a mistress to whose arms I would like to go back as often as I can. She's like the bespectacled woman living next-door all these years who you never gave a second glance until one afternoon, when you spot her on the balcony, fresh from bath, her long lustrous hair left loose and her eyes wearing not a pair of specs but dreamy sensuality. I got seduced easily.

Give a dilapidated look to the buildings of London, then suck the permissive air of Paris and implant it over London and people it with Bengalis -- Kolkata would be that city. It is a different matter that most people living in Kolkata may not realise this -- most of the time they are too busy being agitated or angry. The cause of their anger could be anything under the sun, but it's mostly about politics, sports and work.

When India lost to South Africa in the World Cup, the family friend I was watching the match with remarked angrily, "India te ektai captain chhilo, shey holo Sourav Ganguly!" -- India has produced only one able captain, that was Sourav Ganguly.

I also happened to watch the final with him. Moments after Dhoni hit the decisive six and the Indian team rejoiced on the field, he remarked, rather bitterly, "Ei shob to Sourav-er ee toeri kora chhele" -- These boys have been groomed by Sourav, after all.

That's the typical Bengali man. He is, however, effectively neutralised by the Bengali woman. She can be deliberately coy or outright blunt, but she is almost always ravishing and intelligent. She loves to talk -- though, unlike the man, not about things that do not have a direct bearing on her life -- but also knows how to let her eyes do the talking. Doesn't matter if she is English-medium or Bangla-medium, south Calcutta or north Calcutta, domestic help or the lady of the house.

Oh! Calcutta!

Some images and sensations shall always remain etched: her hair sweeping across my face while I leaned to light the cigarette dangling from her lips as the taxi zipped through the wide empty road along the Maidan; hanging on to every word spoken by Sunil Gangopadhyay, the most popular writer in Bengal after Tagore, as he recalled the time spent with Allen Ginsberg ("He taught us that poetry is a 24-hour occupation"); the taste of aam panna sold on College Street; walking up and down Park Street, as if I was in Soho; sitting 80 feet above the Hooghly, on the deck of a ship turned into a hotel, sipping chilled beer while being caressed by the river breeze; digging the fork into delectable kebabs at Peter Cat and Mocambo; and, above all, the voice of Kishore Kumar! Every other song played on FM channels in Kolkata happens to be either sung by Kishore Kumar or composed by R.D. Burman -- listening is believing.

I am back in Chennai now. I had to be. Tomorrow, I take up a new job and return, after five long years, to Mount Road. It was on Mount Road that I worked for the first five of the 10 years that I've lived in Chennai, and those were the happiest years of my life so far. Tomorrow, hopefully, is the beginning of another happy phase. Kolkata, please wait for me.

Time Travel

2011-02-02T08:54:00.004+05:30

It is one thing to travel; quite another to travel back in time. When you travel back in time, every decade that you retrace mentally is equivalent to covering ten kilometres physically. That’s the way I look at it.

During a physical journey, you just sit back and watch the topography and culture change from one place to another; there is no imagination involved. But the canvas is totally blank when you travel back in time. You have the freedom to paint your own picture of the past, but your imagination must collate with written history. Otherwise, imagination becomes fantasy.

To imagine history while keeping historical facts in mind can be quite a task, it makes travelling back in time, even while being stationary, as tedious as undertaking a physical journey.

Murali and I, ever since we visited George Town this morning, must have travelled a total of 450 km back in time. If this distance were to be counted on the map, we would have been in Bangalore by now, sharing a pitcher of beer over lunch.

Chai On Kindle

2011-01-25T15:07:00.003+05:30

Chai, Chai now available on Kindle and The Nook.

Sunday Diary

2011-01-10T13:59:00.004+05:30

Had to be at Gandhi statue on Marina at six in the morning. So didn't sleep the night. The sun was yet to rise when the heritage walk started. We were to walk down Edward Elliots Road, now called R K Salai, from Gandhi statue to Music Academy. During the walk, learned that once the rich of Madras lived on that road. Most of the bungalows, of course, are gone now and replaced by tall structures with glass walls. Citi Centre was once a timber market. Hotel President is run by Muslims but serves vegetarian food in deference to the sentiments of the illustrious Brahmins who once lived on the road; and the hotel is named so because right across the road lived S Radhakrishnan, the former President of India.

Walked ended at eight. After which went to Triplicane. Had idlis, vada and coffee at Ratna Cafe. Roamed around the streets, saw the old houses. Visited the Parthasarathy temple. Chatted with a few mamis in the temple. Very interesting chat. They told me what it is to be a mami. The sun was rather harsh when I came out of the temple, so took an autorickshaw back home.

Slept for a while. Had some dry fruits for lunch. Took an autorickshaw to Mylapore in the evening. Roamed the streets. Old houses, old shops, the streets coloured with the colours of the fruits and vegetables spread out on jute sacks by vendors. Went to Kapaleeswarar temple.

While I was depositing my floaters before entering the temple, I heard Hanuman Chalisa being played in one of the shops. For the first time, heard a woman sing Hanuman Chalisa. There was something very powerful and persuasive about her voice. Walked barefoot to the shop and asked them for the CD that was playing. The singer turned out to be M S Subbulakshmi. Bought the CD and went into the temple

Had darshan. Placed a hundred-rupee note on the plate held by the priest. Suddenly, he opened the barricade and ask me to come right in -- right inside the sanctum sanctorum. I sat there, on the stone floor, and prayed. Felt good. Shiva and I go back a long way.

Was hungry. So had idlis at Karpagam Mess on North Mada Street. The best idlis I've ever had during my 10 years in Chennai. You must believe me because I love and know my idlis.

Hailed an autorickshaw again. Had barely got into it when I spotted a hawker selling wood apples. The auto driver helped me choose the ripe ones by bouncing them off the ground, much to the irritation of the elderly woman hawker. The driver bought one for himself too. We then set off for T. Nagar. I had finally found what I had been actually looking for all day, though I had not mentioned it to anyone -- not even to myself.

The Outsider

2011-01-08T14:12:00.004+05:30

Yesterday, I found myself on a picturesque, breeze-caressed campus by the sea near Pondicherry, attending an outbound learning programme with a batch of colleagues. The programme began with introductions -- each one had to stand up and tell a bit about himself or herself. That's when I realised two things.

One, travelling is the new interest. There was a time when you asked people about their interests, and the answer would automatically and predictably be "Reading and listening to music." Some would add gardening or cooking. That's about it: the lay Indian's hobby was always confined to home. He never thought of looking at the world beyond. But yesterday, about 50% of the people who sat in a large circle under a thatched roof said they wanted to travel, or travel more. That's good news for travel writers.

The second realisation was rather a reiteration, of the fact that I am an outsider. As part of the introduction, we were also required to mention our native places. A large majority of the people, I noticed, had a native place, and they all still lived well within the radius of its magnetic field, almost like the brand ambassadors of those towns or cities.

But I have no native place to speak of. Technically, my family hails from a village called Panchthupi in Murshidabad, the capital of pre-British Bengal, which lies very close to the hamlet of Plassey or Palashi, where the decisive battle between the forces of Lord Clive and the nawaab of Bengal was fought way back in 1757. But my father's generation never lived there. They had long migrated to other places to study or find jobs or do business. My father came to Kanpur, in Uttar Pradesh, in 1966 and settled there. He has lived in no other city since then. I was born in 1970.

So: Bangla may be my mother-tongue, but I am not a bona fide Bengali considering I was neither born in Bengal nor spent considerable time there during the first three decades of my life. I was born in Uttar Pradesh, but I am not a UP-wallah either because I am a Bengali. When I moved to Delhi, Kanpur was 'home', not my 'native'. And then I came to Chennai, and on January 15 will complete 10 years in the city. But that does not make me a Madrasi. Here, I am a 'North Indian' or a 'Bengali'. When I visit Kanpur now, am more outsider than ever, having lived in Chennai for so long. When I go to Calcutta, I am introduced as the man who works in Chennai but hails from Kanpur.

I am the permanent outsider. I belong nowhere, but every place belongs to me. I can make any place home and still write about it with the outsider's eye -- the primary requirement to be a travel writer.

Christmas Connection

2010-12-24T00:22:00.004+05:30

I am not a Christian, yet when Christmas approaches, I greet it with a deep sense of familiarity. Part of the reason is that I was born a day after Christ, though some 2,000 years apart; partly because I went to a Christian school run by the nuns. So Christmas is in the blood, as much Diwali is.

Though it does not feel all that Christmasy in Chennai, where I have spent the past ten Decembers without a break. Christmas, to me, means fog, if not snow, thanks to the carols one has grown up with. I mean, if you shut your eyes and imagine Santa Claus, you automatically see snow and pine forests and certainly not the sun and the sea.

My best memories of Christmas go back -- naturally -- to my childhood days in Kanpur. By December end, at least during those days of pre-climate change, the whole of north India would invariably be engulfed in dense fog during the nights and the much of the mornings. Our immediate neighbour was a Christian -- a jolly Mizo man who loved his drink and who was a die-hard fan of Indira Gandhi. When she won the elections in 1980, he distributed laddoos in the entire block, but when she was assassinated four years later, in October 1984, he remained in a state of inebriation for several days. With bloodshot eyes he would stare angrily at my Sikh classmate who often came home, and would slur, "You bloody Sardarji." I don't think he survived that Christmas.

But before tragedy, in the form of Indira Gandhi's killing, hit him like a thunderbolt, it was very assuring to have a neighbour like him. Always jovial. He was the Mongoloid equivalent of Om Prakash in Julie. The Christmas star outside his door -- shining through the fog -- was the sole indication for the neighbourhood that Christmas was round the corner. I mean, you know Christmas falls on December 25, but most often you need physical reminders -- that's true for any festival.

Those were the simple days. The TV station shut shop by nine or 10 in the night. The radio too went silent by, I think, 11 pm. After which, fog and silence would have descended on the neighbourhood. Suddenly, close to midnight, the silence would be shattered by the sound of live drums and guitar. And a chorus would burst out:

Jingle bells, jingle bells
jingle all the way...

My neighbour's doors would fling open, and a party, led by Santa Claus, would troop in. Loud laughter and bantering and some more carols would follow, and then the party would leave for the next Christian home. Jumping out of our quilts, shivering and wide-eyed, we would watch the spectacle from our windows. To me that's real music: something that you sing or play live in a chilling foggy night when nothing else is to be heard for miles and miles around. The music touches your bones.

That's how my love for carols was born. Even after my neighbour was dead and his family gone, I would make it a point to play carols on the radio or the cassette-player during those foggy nights preceding Christmas. For several years I was in the possession of a lone ecstasy-inducing T-Series cassette titled Disco X-mas. And I still have it with me in Chennai. The cassette gave me company during half-a-dozen Christmases, apart from serving as the background music for my workouts, during my late teens.

That's the thing about carols. When you are mellow and nursing a drink, nothing beats Jim Reeves. Who can ever forget his rendition of Silver Bells?:

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks
Dressed in holiday style
In the air
There's a feeling
Of Christmas
Children laughing
People passing
Meeting smile after smile
And on every street corner you'll hear
Silver bells, silver bells
It's Christmas time in the city

But Chennai has no bloody sidewalks. It is perhaps the only city in the world without footpaths. Anyway, Jim Reeves did not lend his silvery voice to the song keeping Chennai in mind. Oh, never mind. What I was saying was how the carols can adjust themselves according to your mood.

If you are in a mellow mood, Jim Reeves can hold your hand and guide you to heaven. But if you are in the mood for a long drive, what better companion than Boney M? Their rendition of Mary's boy child still gives me goosebumps. And if you are working out or dancing, there are countless adrenalin-pumping disco and rock versions of the good old carols. What pumps my adrenalin particularly is Feliz Navidad.

After I moved to Delhi, I kept the Christmas spirit alive in my mind for selfish reasons. It worked like this: if I was alive to Christmas, I would be alive to my birthday, and if I was alive to my birthday, I would realise that another year is soon going to pull the rug from under my feet and that I better buck up. On foggy nights, I have attended the midnight mass at some of the most handsome, British-built cathedrals of Delhi. One Christmas eve, I think this was 1995, sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan performed at one of these cathedrals and I can never forget his rendition of Silent night, holy night. That night, watching him, I realised the difference between a maestro and a musician.

So much for the carols. Now for the atmosphere. Isn't it foolish to sing "Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh" in the tropical heat of, say, Chennai? The romance of Christmas, at least the way we -- the former British colony -- know it, lies in the weather. Christmas is about Arctic winter: Dashing through the snow; Frosty the snowman; Winter wonderland; Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer; White Christmas.

Someday, yes someday, I intend to celebrate Christmas the way it is depicted in the carols. That would be a childhood dream come true. I would like to be in a village, American or European, where there is nothing for miles around except snow and pine forests and a solitary log cabin. The log cabin would, of course, be occupied by me and my companion. No wi-fi connection, no mobile network, no phones, but only a fireplace to warm the cabin and Scotch to warm the bodies. And as you sit by the window, cuddling and sipping Scotch and watching the snow, you suddenly hear voices coming from afar. The voices come closer, and soon you sight a party of men with flowing white beards, marching towards your log cabin and singing,

Jingle bells, jingle bells
jingle all the way...

Someday, someday.

Sean Penn

2010-12-23T02:23:00.005+05:30

He sat on the Besant Nagar beach all by himself, gazing at the sea. Suddenly he wondered what she must be up to, and if she could join him. He called her up.

"Hello, where are you?"

"Movie, movie," she whispered.

"Oh ok. Which movie?"

"Mystic River."

"Oh, who's there in that?"

"Shawn Penn," she whispered.

"Who?" He had heard John-something.

"SEEN PENN!" she said loudly.

"Oh," he hung up. Bloody bitch.

Birthday Thoughts: The Mellowing Of A Man

2010-12-18T21:39:00.008+05:30

It was in June 2005, if my memory serves right, that I first visited Bangalore. I wasn't married then, I hadn't started this blog yet, I didn't know I would be writing books in the immediate future, I wrote a weekly column for the Sunday magazine of the paper and the occasional cover story, Gmail/Gtalk had only just arrived and I was still using Yahoo mail/messenger, and, above all, I had recently bought a laptop and got internet connection at home.

In short, those were the good, carefree days when I had all the time in the world and no worries. As soon as I would get home I would sign into Yahoo messenger and chat, at times all night, with friends who were online. Occasionally, I would log on to the public chatrooms of Yahoo, and mostly go to the Chennai rooms, to fish for someone interesting.

By 2005, though, the novelty of chatrooms was wearing off and they were only flooded with men desperately looking for an erotic chat or to hook up with willing women. Hardly any woman signed in unless equally desperate, which is something rare. This wasn't the case, though, in the early years of the decade when chatting with strangers on the internet had suddenly become the new pastime of computer-friendly Indians and you could run into some of the most intelligent and well-read women in these chatrooms.

So that night, a few hours before I was to take the Shatabdi Express to Bangalore, I logged on to public chat and went to one of the Bangalore 'rooms', hoping to find an additional reason to look forward to the visit. Luck was on my side. I found Ms X who, the moment I pinged her, was kind enough to leave aside other men she might have been chatting with and pay attention to me. We got talking. In an hour or so, the conversation shifted from the internet to the phone. In about another hour, we had planned when and where to meet up in Bangalore once I arrived. Throughout the conversation, she kept on repeating, "But you must know, I am not that kind of a girl." To which I kept replying, "When did I ever say you were that kind of a girl?" Whatever 'that' meant.

What happened next, many people who read me in New Sunday Express might remember. But for the benefit of those who did not, I'll do a quick rewind.

So I met Ms X in Bangalore the next evening. She was good-looking and all, but if I were to describe her in one word, it would be buxom. We had coffee and cutlets at a restaurant, after which she had ice-cream. Then we found ourselves at Bangalore Central, the mall. I looked at shirts and jeans, but found nothing that I would badly want to possess. As we were leaving, I asked her if she wanted to buy something.

"No, nothing."

"I will buy it for you."

"No, nothing. Let's go."

"Are you sure?"

"I want a pair of black trousers. That's the only thing I don't have. But I couldn't find them here."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I was looking around. They don't have it."

So we left Bangalore Central and proceeded to Brigade Road. There, we entered a shop where I bought myself a T-shirt and again asked her if she would like to buy something. She fancied a particular pink top, and I bought it for her. It was expensive, but never mind. After all, I was the one who suggested that we meet. I was now all set to say, "So it was nice meeting you" and was itching to get back to my hosts in Bangalore who had planned out the rest of the evening for me.

But as we climbed down the steps of the shop, Ms X said, "But this pink top, it will go best with black trousers. Will you get me black trousers too?"

The question aroused the sadist in me. I wanted to punish myself for having got into the situation. And so, that evening and the evening after were spent in search of a pair of black trousers for Ms X. We did not miss out any shop on Brigade Road and Commercial Street, yet we failed to find a pair of black trousers for her.

The problem was her waist size, which she said was 36 inches. But size 36 turned out to be too tight in the wrong places, while size 38, which very few shops stocked, was too loose. Oh, the torture of waiting outside the trial room as she tried out one pair of trouser after the other, in one shop after the other. We took the search into lanes branching off these roads, yet no luck. The search eventually ended a few months later in Pondy Bazaar in Chennai, but that's another story.

Upon returning to Chennai, I wrote about my trouser-hunting experience in the paper. The next morning, my phone was flooded with text messages by the time I woke up. "So the next time I want to buy clothes, I know who to ask," teased one friend. "Can't believe that an assistant editor of a paper is writing about all this," fumed another. By and large, people were amused and so was I.

Today, however, I would shudder at the thought of reading such a piece under my own byline. How could I seek the company of a total stranger, and then write about the encounter, that too in the paper! Today I wouldn't describe such an encounter even on my blog. There are times when I visit the archives of Ganga Mail for some reason or the other, and find myself quite surprised reading some of the stuff I've written in the past.

Marriage, I think, acts as a filter. Today if I happen to go to Bangalore alone and seek an encounter with a strange women, I am not going to write about it unless I've lost the desire to live. But that's the only filter that marriage introduces as you transform your thoughts into words -- the personalised becomes generalised. Otherwise, even after being married, I've written lengthy posts on subjects such as love, sex, marriage, fidelity and infidelity (or the inevitability of it). And it irritates me no end when, from time to time, well-meaning people ask me if my wife reads my blog. When I tell them she does, some ask, "Does she say anything?" Others ask, "Doesn't she say anything?"

But the real reason why I feel horrified or embarrassed at the thought that I could write something like that back then, lies in a three-letter word that most people dread: age. Today, even if I were not married, I would not go to a public chatroom and waste time there, least of all to seek the company of a stranger in a strange city. Initially, the idea of meeting a buxom beauty (and the possiblities such a meeting may hold) may be exciting, but soon the thought tires you out. What for -- I would ask myself. And even if I were to undertake such an adventure, I would never write about it. What for -- I would ask myself again.

I can feel the age. When I arrived in Chennai a decade ago, I was only a few days older than 30. I was new to the city, the city was new to Yahoo messenger -- it was so much fun. But whenever I signed into a chatroom, where one is expected to give out age/sex/location so that the other person could decide whether to respond to you or not, I would always identity myself as '29/m/Chennai', or '29/m/new to Chennai'. I was finding it very difficult to accept the fact that the first digit of my age should now begin with '3'. Even though the ages of 29 and 30 are separated by merely 365 days, the psychological impact on you (as well on the person you are seeking to chat with on the internet or elsewhere) can be tremendous. For a very long time I remained 29.

Today I don't have the slightest desire to cling on to 39. I am looking at 40 with my chest wide open: "Come, stab me! Kill my 30s and take me along with you." Forty is so much fun. That's when you realise the importance of having fun and actually work towards it.

The idea of fun, though, might differ. At 40, it no longer matters how many people you are with, but who you are with. The circle of people you know might expand but the number of friends shrinks drastically. Above all, you no longer brag or boast, but would have learned the art of discretion.

Life At Forty

2010-12-15T00:32:00.003+05:30

Years zero to ten
you live in a small universe
called Innocence;
not many inhabitants
mostly mom, dad and the toys.
You don't know what life is.

Years ten to twenty
you grow out of the skin of Innocence
into the world called Adolescence
More inhabitants: mom, dad and the books,
teachers, friends and girlfriend; and
discovery of a sensation down the navel.
But you still don't know what life is.

Years twenty to thirty
Cosy in the sparkling skin of Youth
you expand your universe:
more friends, girlfriends and the boss.
Sometimes you listen to the genital
sometimes to the growling stomach
the remaining hours spent in office.
Too busy to know what life is.

Years thirty to forty
You're the Man. Mom's gone, but there's wife.
Coping with arrivals and departures in life
you cling on to something dearer -- your job!
More stomachs to feed, more ambitions to fuel
Besides paying for the new car and the flat!
And the genital? At times a caged bird, at times
an uncaged lion. You're so worried about life
That you don't know what life is.

At the age of forty
You've been there, done that: nothing to prove!
The genital winks like a battle-hardened general,
the stomach assures, "I can take care of myself!"
Memories are new girlfriends: ah, the joys of adultery!
and unfinished dreams your new drinking buddies.
Over Scotch you plan and plot; and when night falls
you place your head on the bosom of memories and smile:
So far I lived for others, lived by others, lived up to others
My life begins only now.

Shaily Baba

2010-12-12T12:53:00.003+05:30

How many still remember the names Jagmohan Sahni, Pammi Sahni and Shaily Baba?

They constituted a chhota, perhaps sukhi, parivar living in Jhumri Talaiyya. I have no idea what Mr Sahni did for a living, but his secondary occupation was to write in to Vividh Bharati with requests for songs. In the post-card, he would also include his wife's and daughter's names. The idea, of course, was to listen to your names being read out on the radio. Who knows, Mr Sahni (or perhaps Mr Sawhney) must be gathering his neighbours around the radio set/transistor before the programme in which he expected the names to be mentioned began. "Aaj radio mein hamara naam aane wala hai!"

I have spent countless, yes countless, mornings and afternoons and evenings, listening to these names, among two dozen others, being read out by the announcer before he or she played the song of their choice.

Does anyone still listen to Vividh Bharati programmes; and if yes, do you still hear these names being read out? I am curious to know, because Shaily Baba must be grown up by now and I don't think she would still have 'Baba' attached to her name. And who knows, she must be possessing an iPod by now, playing the songs of her choice herself rather than wait for the announcer to do so.

Shaily Baba, are you listening?

December

2010-12-11T02:26:00.005+05:30

We are finally cruising through December. It's a month you wish, at least I wish, never ended.

Once December ends, the year ends. Once the year ends, yet another chunk of your life gets junked into a transparent wastebin that bears the label 'Past' and whose lid shuts permanently once the clock strikes 12 on the night of December 31.

Thereafter, you can only look into the bin but not retrieve any of its contents even if you badly wish to. Past, after all, is past. What has been done cannot be undone; and what has not been done cannot be done anymore. The year has ended, after all.

The true measure of your success and happiness lies in how badly you want to dig into the bin. If you proudly lift the bin and place it on the mantelpiece like a trophy, it means you've had a good year. But if you happen to be wrestling with its lid in order to retrieve a junked piece of paper, in spite of knowing that the lid is shut for good, it means you have screwed up and badly want to make amends.

Then there are vagabonds like me, who don't bother meddling with the bin. We merely hide the label 'Past' by sticking over it a rectangular piece of paper that reads 'Nostalgia.'

The day you persuade your Past into becoming Nostalgia, you begin to extract the meaning of your life. Or so I think. But why do such profound thoughts occur only in December?

Two Trains

2010-12-10T17:55:00.001+05:30

First there was Ganga Mail. Now you also have Peanut Express. Enjoy!

'Wish The Earth Swallowed Me'

2010-12-03T01:00:00.000+05:30

This evening, a friend, who teaches in the kindergarten section of a top school, called me. She sounded upset.

"Is everything fine?" I asked.

"Don't even ask," she gasped. "I wish the earth split open this moment and swallowed me!"

"What happened?"

She told me. Last week, two students in her class, a boy and a girl, were caught trying to relieve each other their uniform (this is Upper KG!) and simulating unmentionable acts.

"When I asked them what they were doing, they said they had seen their parents doing such things at home. These days, if you hit a student, you go stright to jail. So what do you do?"

"What did you do?" I asked.

"We made the boys and the girls sit separately."

"Did it work?"

"No! This morning two girls were kissing each other in front of the entire class. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they had seen people doing it on TV."

I didn't know what to say. Then my friend chided me, "And people like you, what do you do? You write about all nonsense topics. Why don't you write an article on parenting? Why don't you at least write a post on your blog?"

Parenting is one area Ganga Mail stays clear of. But I think I have done my bit for you, 'Miss'.

And So Television Came To India

2010-12-02T01:58:00.009+05:30

This picture was taken last evening, during the Chennai launch of Urban Shots. The man to my left, in deep blue shirt, is P V Krishnamoorthy. He is 89. Let me tell you his story. I wrote about him in the paper sometime ago, and much of what follows has already been published.

Krishnamoorthy was born in Rangoon in 1921. There, he grew up on the same street where the Bengali novelist Sarat Chandra Chatterjee lived. As a young man, he rubbed shoulders with legendary singers like Pankaj Mullick in Kolkata. Even today, he plays Rabindra Sangeet on the keyboard with such flourish and enthusiam as if he had composed those tunes himself a few hours ago.

"Rabindra Sangeet must also adapt to the changing times, or else the younger generation will not be able to relate to it," he told me I went to his R.A. Puram home to interview him. "I am sure Gurudev won’t mind," he gestured to the portrait of Tagore hanging on the wall and winked.

Krishnamoorthy saw television in India being developed from scratch and later went on to become the first director-general of Doordarshan when it was formed in 1976. He may be leading a retired life today, practising his Rabindra Sangeet on the keyboard gifted by his son, but he is a repository of stories through which one can trace the birth and growth of TV in India. It all began with a trade exhibition at the Pragati Maidan in Delhi.

"I think it was 1957 or 1958. Philips had displayed a closed-circuit television in its stall. But they found it too cumbersome to ship the equipment back,so they gave it to All India Radio for a nominal fee. We set it up in a small room on the fifth floor of Akashvani Bhavan. There was no air-conditioning then, so we had to place ice slabs to keep the room cool," Krishnamoorthy recalled.

So, the equipment left behind by Philips became India's first TV station, which became operational in September 1959, broadcasting over a radius of 25 km. It beamed educational programmes,watched by a very limited audience on UNESCO-donated sets. Krishnamoorthy,who joined AIR as an announcer in 1944, was then sent to the US to study how TV can aid education.

"It was an experimental service for a long time. The government did not seem to be serious about TV," Krishnamoorthy told me. "It was Indira Gandhi, when she was the information and broadcasting minister, who said enough is enough and that we should get serious about it."

Still, TV remained a tool only for social education, till a full-fledged station was opened in Mumbai on October 2,1972,with Krishnamoothy as its head. Germany had already switched to colour TV, and it gave away its black-and-white equipment to India. The inaugural function was almost a disaster. The Maharashtra governor,the chief guest, almost forgot to turn up; Bismillah Khan, after waiting for the governor for long,disappeared for namaaz; Asha Parekh,who was to perform on stage with dancer Gopi Kishan, stepped on a broken soft drink bottle; the central camera collapsed. But none of these was noticed on TV and the launch was a success.

Krishnamoorthy, however, had a tough time explaining to the Hindi film industry that TV would not eat into their viewership. Among the filmmakers who were not entirely hostile to TV was Ramanand Sagar, who eventually exploited the medium to serialise Ramayana.

One day, while Krishnamoorthy was sitting in his office, a young,dusky woman barged into his room, crying foul. She had just auditioned for the job of a news reader and had been rejected. Krishnamoorthy got a third party to audition her and she was selected. But she didn't last long as a newsreader because director Shyam Benegal saw her on TV and offered her a role in his film. She was Smita Patil.

Years before that, in 1957, when Krishnamoorthy was the station director of AIR in Cuttack, he spotted a young man waiting at the gate one morning. The young man's father was a wrestler and wanted his son to be a wrestler as well. But the son wanted to play the flute,and had approached AIR in Lucknow. The station director there dispatched him to Cuttack, where Krishnamoorthy not only bought him a set of 12 flutes from Kolkata but also let the homeless boy stay in the AIR station for a year. The boy did not look back: he went on to become Hari Prasad Chaurasia.

The most gratifying moment in Krishnamoorthy's own career came in 1975 with the SITE,or Satellite Instructional Television Experiment,project,the brainchild of Vikram Sarabhai,which entailed using a US satellite to reach 2,400 most inaccessible villages in India. Krishnamoorthys job was to produce 1,320 hours of programming, in various regional languages. "It was the biggest, boldest experiment ever," he told me.

The project kept him busy in the remote villages of Bihar, Orissa and Karnataka,so much so that he was missing from Delhi most of the time, even when Indira Gandhi decided to separate TV from AIR and launch it as an independent body called Doordarshan in April 1976 and make Krishnamoorthy its first director-general.

"That's how I escaped the Shah Commission, as I was never there in Delhi. They had appointed an additional director-general to do the dirty work (during Emergency)," he laughed.

But there was one dirty job Krishnamoorthy had to do: to get the Raja of Mandi vacate his palace so that the studio of the newly-created Doordarshan could move in. "He was refusing to move out. Then V C Shukla told me, 'Tell him to vacate or else we will acquire his property.' I conveyed his message to the Raja and he vacated. We had to pay him, of course," recalled Krishnamoorthy.

The palace of the Raja is today known as Mandi House, the headquarters of Doordarshan.

Mr Mukerjee

2010-12-01T00:20:00.004+05:30

If you search for V.S. Naipaul on Google, you get 436,000 results. But if you search for Shiva Naipaul, you get only 19,400. It isn't surprising at all, but at the same time tragic.

But then, tragedy was the middle name of Shiva Naipaul: he died of a heart attack at the young age of 40, leaving five books behind and taking away many, many more along with him. He is remembered annually by a handful of people, when the Spectator magazine invites entries for the literary award it instituted in his name after his death. Otherwise, not many seem to know or remember or care to look for Shiva Naipaul, the younger brother of the world's most famous Naipaul.

I did not study literature; and there are not too many books that I have read cover to cover. I usually dip into them, read a few pages here and a few there, reread the passages that I like -- all with the purpose of self-education, to learn a trick or two about the craft of writing. So it may look foolish on my part to talk about or compare two literary figures. I mean, who am I to judge them?

But as a lay reader, who spends enormous mounts of money on acquiring books, I have every right to speak my mind, don't I?

As a reader aspiring to be a writer, V.S. Naipaul is the man I want to be, not just because of the fame and the Nobel, but because it takes an extraordinary human being to write a book like A House For Mr Biswas. In the book, to explain in Bollywood terms, there is tragedy in comedy and comedy in tragedy. And come to think of it, the book merely tells the story of an uninteresting man growing up in Trinidad.

It was only after reading this book, about 10 years ago, that I understood why the world distinguishes between 'writers' and 'literary figures'. Jeffrey Archer maybe a writer, but he will never be considerd a literary figure, even though his income from writing is likely to be a lot more than that of Naipaul and Salman Rushdie put together. The distinction has been best explained by none other than Anthony Burgess, in an essay called Success:

"The trouble with fiction is that there are two ways of looking at it: as a business and as an art. Just up the coast from me at Cannes, sitting glumly but royally on his yatch, is a man who succeeded indubitably with the novel as a business. His name is Harold Robbins. He is, however, not satisfied with having sold a great number of copies of books about sex and violence: he wants to be regarded, on the strength of his evident popularity, as the greatest writer alive. Nobody will so consider him and this makes him sour. It does, of course, sometimes happen that the most popular novelist is also the best -- Dickens, for instance; perhaps even Hemingway -- but the one does not follow from the other. We expect great fiction to be too subtle or complex for popular acceptance."

I, however, think it is more about simplicity than complexity or subtlety. A writer merely tells you a story, while a literary figure sucks you into the story and makes you toss and turn in the bed and spend sleepless nights. A House For Mr Biswas may be the story of Naipaul's father, but it is also the story of each one of us. We all find ourselves in the book, described in accurate detail, in some chapter or the other.

I also admire V.S. Naipaul immensely for his comic writing. For readers of Ganga Mail who haven't read Naipaul yet, I would especially recommend the story One out of Many from the Booker-winning In a Free State, and The Perfect Tenants from the book A Flag On The Island.

But when it comes to travel writing, I would like to be Shiva Naipaul anyday. Thanks to Flipkart, I was fortunate enough to buy North of South, a description of his journeys through parts of Africa. All other books of his are 'out of stock.' Shiva Naipaul is a far more amiable travel companion than his elder brother, who is far too cynical and philosophical to let you enjoy the travel. When you are travelling with Sir Vidia, it does not matter whether you are in India or Indonesia: you are always in a nation that is dirty and rotting and where people are perenially complaining and whining.

Not so in the case of Shiva Naipaul. He is good-natured, humorous and loves to take things in his stride when he travels. Ever since North of South was couriered to my home about six weeks ago, I have managed to read it thrice, cover to cover. His skills to observe and describe people and places are far more superior than those of his elder brother, and I can vouch for this because in the book Shiva Naipaul has accurately described a Bengali gentleman, a certain Mr Mukherjee living in the heart of Africa. I am taking the liberty of reproducing some relevant passages:

The Goans of Arusha had organised an expedition to the Ngorongoro Crater. However, it was the not the Goans but Mr Mukerjee, himself neither a Goan not a member of the Club that was organising the outing, who invited me to come along.

Mr Mukerjee's influence over the Goans stemmed from the fact that it was he who had arranged for the charter of a bus at a special concessionary rate: Mr Mukherjee prided himself on having strange friends in strage places. I was a little reluctant to accept, having heard that there was some anxiety about the Club's being able to accommodate all its bona fide members who wanted to go.

But Mr Mukerjee was insistent. "If I say you can come, then you can come. You mustn't let these spineless colonials frighten you off. Nobody is going to argue with me if I say that I am bringing you along as my guest."

His belligerence confirmed what I had heard about him -- that Mr Mukerjee thrived on "confrontations." I began to feel that his invitation was motivated less by a desire to do me a favour than by a compulsion to exercise and test the limits of his power over the Goan Club."

And then:

"That night there was a discotheque, the music played on a scratchy, battery-operated record player supplied by the manager of the lodge. The poor reproduction did not dampen the ardor of the Goan girls (they outnumbered the boys), who danced dedicatedly with each other, "bumping" and "grinding." The German tourists who, at the beginning of the evening, were gathered in a circle in front of the log fire were driven out. Mr Mukerjee, seeking a confrontation, complained to the manager about the noise. The manager -- a big, bearded but unturbaned Sikh -- stood his ground.

"You can always go to your room if you do not like," he replied, politely obdurate.

"I have no desire to go to my room. My family and I have every right to stay here if we wish to."

"So have they."

"But do they have a right to kick up such a racket? It is disgraceful behaviour. I have not come all this way to watch a bunch of colonials making fools of themselves -- and disturbing the peace of the night into the bargain."

The manager shrugged, "If you don't care for it, you know what you can do." He turned his massive back on Mr Mukerjee.

This was more than Mr Mukerjee could bear. He chased around his adversary so that they were facing each other again. "Look here -- do you know who you are talking to?"

"I don't care who you are." The manager stared insolently. "It is I who am boss here, and what I say goes."

Mr Mukerjee's bulbous eyes started out of his head.

Mrs Mukerjee tried to restrain her husband. "Please, Dilip. It is no good arguing with him. Let us go to our room."

Mr Mukerjee pushed her aside. "I'd have you know, sir, that you are not talking to a spineless Asian colonial. You are talking, sir, to an Indian national, a citizen born and bred, of the Republic of India. I won't be treated in this way."

The manager remained unimpressed.

"Calm down, Dilip." Mrs Mukerjee took hold of her husband's arm. "Let's go to our room." She looked reproachfully at the manager. "You have no right to speak to him in that rude way."

Although still protesting, Mr Mukerjee allowed himself to be led away. The two Mukerjee boys followed their parents.

Malibu Delight

2010-11-30T17:38:00.003+05:30

At times, at times, comments such as the one reproduced below are such a delight to read. In just a few paragraphs, this man (or woman?) has held my hand and taken me on a guided tour of Ruskin Bond's Mussourie and Naipaul's Trinidad. I imagine the person to be living somewhere by the sea, where the sun is setting now and he, or she, has just shut the laptop and is reaching for the white bottle of Malibu. Cheers!

Very well written. You have a wonderful way with words Ghosh-babu, please don't waste it by writing odes to Kishore Kumar all the time.

While you were writing about the books you love, Ruskin Bond would have probably written about the bamboo rack you so casually mentioned. He would throw in a description of the dingy corner store in Mussoorie, he bought it from, and a paragraph about the unkempt store owner, who must have quarreled with his wife in the morning. If you want to feel how powerful words can be, you should read a short story he wrote describing his last day with his father. I remember tearing up the first time I read it.

Naipaul is another man. I remember reading An area of darkness in the eighties, shortly before making a trip to the Caribbean. I almost wanted to see the Banyan tree in the botanical gardens, where the Hindus would perform their ceremonies after taking permission from the authorities. The man is brutal, and spares no one. His description of the boring north Indian style of architecture in Trinidad, brought over by the indentured workers makes you feel like there is no future for us Indians. I remember a little section where he makes a trip to his ancestral village in India, only to be followed around by a distant relative carrying a sack full of rice, who wanted Naipaul to have his fair share of the family's inheritance.

He probably treats Kashmir with a little bit of respect. While Ruskin Bond would have gone around smelling the Deodars and the Chinars, Naipaul simply restrains himself.

I think you picked an awesome book as your first one, but if you like to enjoy your small-town hopping trips of India, taking mental photographs of the quaint bungalows and airbrushing the weeds out, Naipal will shatter your dreams. He definitely broke my heart when as a Desi in Pardes, I could no longer resist the tugs of home.

Will look forward to more such posts from you. Time for my Sundowner, it's amazing how good life is when Malibu tangos with pineapple juice...

My First Book

2010-11-30T02:09:00.008+05:30

This post is being written at the request of BlogAdda, which is running a contest on 'My Oldest Book and its Memories'. I am writing it, not with the hope of winning a prize, but because it gives me the opportunity to escape from an incomplete manuscript one more night.

I grew up surrounded by books at home, but they were all Bengali books. All hard-bound, all smelling delicious. I think my father wanted to be a writer. As a child -- I must have been eight or nine then, and my father about 35 -- I have seen him filling up a bunch of foolscape papers night after night. I was too young to ask what he was writing or who he was writing for. At times, I would find chunks of the manuscript crossed out with a red ball pen. I am not sure if he ever published anything. Or else I would have known.

My father's habit of reading and writing was eventually killed by my mother. She would keep on badgering him to take on more responsibilities of running a family, and soon, my father became like any other father in the neighbourhood. The foolscape papers disappeared first and then the hardbound books. After that I never saw a book at home. Though there were magazines floating in the house all the time: Manorama, Grihashobha, Saheli, Sarita, Filmfare, Star & Syle, Showtime, Stardust, Cine Blitz, India Today, Sunday, Probe, Mirror, Society, Savvy, Women's Era, Eve's Weekly, Femina, Gentleman... I grew up on them; they were largely responsible for my becoming a journalist.

It was on February 1, 1993 that I became a journalist. I reported for work at the Pioneer office in Lucknow, where I was to spend two weeks before returning home to join the soon-to-be-launched Kanpur edition. At the Lucknow office, I was told by the resident editor to return at four; that's when the newsdesk of a paper comes alive. So I went for a stroll in Hazratganj. There, I bought my very first book, Roget's Thesaurus. But a thesaurus cannot count as a book; in any case I rarely use one because I feel it only makes you adopt words that you don't need. A theft is a theft, why use 'heist'?

My first book, which I bought with my own money, with the knowledge that I was buying a book, was V.S. Naipual's An Area of Darkness. I bought the book sometime in 1994, shortly after I joined Pioneer. I used to be a regular reader of Gentleman magazine, and a guest columnist had once listed this book as one of the 10 must-reads. So I went to Current Book Depot on Mall Road, and bought the book.

I tried reading the book, but could not proceed beyond the very first paragraph in which Naipaul describes his landing at the Bombay port (his first ever visit to India) and being asked by a Goan who had been sent by the travel agency to see him through the customs, "You have any cheej?" It was not clear to me if the Goan actually meant cheese, or simply cheez, which means "stuff" or "goods." Naipaul himself did not seem to be clear about it. I left the book at that.

An Area of Darkness, therefore, is the oldest book I possess. When I moved from Kanpur to Delhi in August 1994, it travelled with me along with about half-a-dozen other books. Once in Delhi, I bought a small bamboo rack, big enough to hold only 30 or 40 books. I never thought I would ever need or come to possess more number of books than that.

Today I've lost count. The number of books in my collection could be anything between 800 and 1,000. But An Area of Darkness will always be special.

Back then, occasionally at nights, I would pull the book out from the bamboo rack and try reading it. It did not appeal to me the way, say, the autobiographies of Ruskin Bond, did. But it did plant the seed of travel in my subconscious -- the idea of travelling in order to discover people and places, and in the process, discovering yourself.

It's been a long journey since then; today I won't be able to recognise the young man who walked into Current Book Depot and bought An Area of Darkness. I've read the book several times since then, and each time it means something different to me. The last time I read it, which was a few months ago, it read like a complaint book.

and I connect with bloggers at BlogAdda.com

'In The Dark All Cats Are Grey'

2010-11-28T18:12:00.003+05:30

The advice Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, gave to a young man on the choice of a mistress:

June 25, 1745

My dear Friend,

I know of no Medicine fit to diminish the violent natural Inclinations you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man, and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness. Your Reasons against entering into it at present, appear to me not well-founded. The circumstantial Advantages you have in View by postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the Thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissars. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.

But if you will not take this Counsel, and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

i. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor'd with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding2 only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!!

Thus much for my Paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely Your affectionate Friend.

Attraction

2010-11-27T01:28:00.004+05:30

Twenty-two years have passed, but the sensations still linger. And then, last night, while trying to give voice to certain thoughts that kept criss-crossing my mind, I suddenly remembered that song -- and the film! Memories gushed back, and the sensations were ignited over again.

It was sometime in 1989 that I watched Aakarshan in a theatre called Sundar Talkies on Mall Road in Kanpur. (The theatre is now shut, like many others). The lead caste: Akbar Khan and Sonu Walia.

That was the time when I watched only two kinds of films -- the ones that had Jackie Shroff, and the soft-porn films exported from Kerala. Most of the time these soft-porn films would be dubbed in Hindi, but many of them retained the original soundtrack. The Hind-heartland audience, however, did not mind the Malayalam because they would come to the theatres to see and not to listen. But all these films would be given Hindi titles for the north Indian market, and the titles would invariably contain either the word 'Jawaani' or 'Jungle' or both. Only one of them had a numeral title: 4+4. I still can't figure what that denoted but that film had far more 'scenes' compared to the other Jungle-Jawaani films that I had seen. Oh yes, there is something else I remember from 4+4: the face of the lead character, a tall Malayali man with thick moustache, who was known as Dr Dinesh in the film -- a doctor who wore hawai chappals to the clinic.

So why spend an afternoon watching a film called Aakarshan, which had Akbar Khan, of all people, as the hero? I really don't know. I don't remember what made Anish and I stop by at Sundar Talkies and buy balcony tickets. Anish was my best friend.

Aakarshan turned out to be one of those films that lingers on your mind for days after you have watched it. The only other film that has had a similar affect on me was Rang De Basanti, which I watched first-day, first-show, in Kripa theatre in Trivandrum. The film kept disturbing me, tickling me for days after I had watched it, and so did Aakarshan.

Aakarshan affected me even more because at the time I was only 18 -- an age when your heart is like an empty canvas and your hormones are raring to paint a picture on it. Aakarshan: the magnetic attraction between a male and a female -- oh, the director brought it out so well!

In the film, Akbar Khan plays an actor and Sonu Walia an actress. They happen to work together in a film and come closer emotionally after a particular incident during shooting. In one of the shots, Akbar Khan is supposed to rescue Sonu Walia from a fire, but it so happens that there is a real fire accident on the sets during the fire scene, and Sonu Walia is trapped in fire for real. Girish Karnad, who plays the director, refuses to say "Cut!" because he wants to capture the authenticity of the rescue.

The real-life dare-devilry of Akbar Khan, therefore, makes Sonu Walia get emotionally intimate with him. Subsequently, due to the ups and downs of stardom, Akbar Khan is paralysed (I don't remember if the paralysis was caused by a stroke or a road accident triggered by emotional distress), and Sonu Walia eventually nurses him back to health, and they both go on to live happily ever after as acclaimed actors.

Sonu Walia was naturally sexy and glamorous. She was one of the few actresss, perhaps apart from Sangeeta Bijlani, who did not have to don extra makeup to look glamorous. Then there was Akbar Khan, the youngest of the handsome Khan brothers. Even though he could never step into the shoes of his elder ladykiller brothers, Feroze and Sanjay, he was quite hot in Aakarshan. Then there was Girish Karnad, the charismatic director. That afternoon, there were three women sitting right behind us in the theatre, and each time Girish Karnad came on the screen, they gasped, "Oh my god, he is looking so good!"

There was pin-drop silence in the theatre when this particular song, sung by Kavitha Krishnamurthy, came on:

Faasla rahe na, ek ho jaayen
Tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen
faasla rahe na, ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen

Maine teri dhadkanon to sun liya jaanam
maine teri dhadkanon to sun liya jaanam
maine tujhko meet apna chun liya jaanam
kuchh bhi soche yeh samaaj, ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen

Waqt jo guzra abhi tak bojh ka guzra
waqt jo guzra abhi tak bojh ka guzra
milke tujhse zindagi ka karz to utra
aaj se apne mijaaz ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen

Dhoop mein saaya bano, saaye mein humsaya
dhoop mein saaya bano, saaye mein humsaya
shukriya ki waqt mere zakhmon ho sahlaya
kyon rahe thodi si laaj, ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen

Faasla rahe na, ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen...

What a song, what a song! The song, which had the Niagra falls in the backdrop, ended with a lovemaking scene between Akbar Khan and Sonu Walia under the gaze of the same world-famous waterfalls. And that's when I, and perhaps Anish too, realised that erotica is not about what you show, but what you hide. At one point, when Sonu Walia bites at Akbar Khan's ear, we would hear gasps emanating from the women seated in the row behind us. So powerful the scene was!

There is something very powerful about aakarshan or attraction. Not many people experience it during their lifetime. Most people, when they marry or choose their partners or choose to fall in love, are either guided by commonsense or by well-meaning advice from friends or elders; or are simply driven by madness and obsession.

But it is rare, very rare, for a man and a woman to be instantaneously and mutually sucked into each other's magnetic fields. Mutually is the operative word here. Aakarshan, the film, raises to a toast to that attraction.

Such an attraction sends thunders clapping and tames lyricists into writing simple, soothing poetry and arm-twists composers into creating a tickling tune:

Maine teri dhadkanon to sun liya jaanam
maine teri dhadkanon to sun liya jaanam
maine tujhko meet apna chun liya jaanam
kuchh bhi soche yeh samaaj, ek ho jaayen
tod ke rasm-o-riwaaz, ek ho jaayen.

Of Love, Life And A Book Launch

2010-11-25T04:34:00.005+05:30

The primary purpose of this post is to invite those of you who live in Chennai to the launch of Urban Shots at Landmark (Apex Plaza, Nungambakkam) on December 1, Wednesday at 6.30 pm. It's a collection of 29 stories by 13 writers; yours truly has contributed two.

The stories, all set in urban India, celebrates what Ganga Mail stands for -- love, life, relationships; above all, basic human emotions. The writers live in different cities, and all of them are very young -- a majority of them biologically and the remaining, at heart (yours truly, who turns 40 in exactly a month, choses to be in the latter category). The book, therefore, promises to be a heady brew or a cocktail, if you please. So please come dear reader, it would be great to see you, to know you.

The secondary purpose (or was this the primary?) is to take the opportunity to share a few thoughts on love, since the book is about love. Well, the book is not just about love, because there is a lot more to it, but come to think of it, everything eventually stems from love.

It is love that gives birth to every single emotion under the sun. If you find a lost friend, you are happy. If you lose someone you love, you are sad. If you love material things, you create greed. If you love sex, you birth to lust. If you love the idea of being famous, you become a champion of ambition. If you are dumped by someone you love, you realise what a heartbreak is. If you love your job, you know what satisfaction is. If you love your motherland, you become an example of patriotism. And so on. Love, therefore, is the driving force of universe. No love, no nothing.

Yet, when you think of love, the image that instantly comes to your mind is that of a boy and a girl, or a young man or a young woman, exchanging shy glances and shy smiles. That's the kind of love about which I feel like sharing a few thoughts tonight. And as a self-proclaimed nostalgia expert, I am tempted to introspect about how the whole concept of love has changed over the decades. Basically, Then and Now stuff.

Back then, it was considered heroic and exemplary to fight for the woman you loved and to get her at any cost. If you won the battle, you were considered a hero, and if you lost, you were considered even a bigger hero because you sacrificed your life for love. But why don't they make movies like Heer Raanjha, Laila Majnu, Sohni Mahiwaal anymore? That's because today's society no longer has the patience and sympathy, leave alone admiration, for men who are so blinded by love that they ignore their own self. If they don't learn to love and respect themselves first, how how can they love a woman? The ditto holds true for today's women, I guess.

Today, if you happen to fancy a woman and subsequently discover that she belongs to a different social set-up and that her father has several goons at his disposal who could easily take care of you, you instantly escape from her magnetic field and settle for the next best thing. Life is far too precious to be squandered away for a woman. Today love is pragmatic and success-oriented: you carefully weigh the pros and cons before falling in love. No one, be it a man or a woman, wants to be in love with a loser. No one.

If you are a woman, touch your heart and ask yourself: would you like to love a man who meditates upon your name throughout the day and who always waits outside your window, sunshine or rain, just to catch a glimpse of you and who, if you ask him to do so, will readily jump into a river -- or a man who is normal and free of obsessions and is productive?

The loser belongs to the last century -- and he is far too entrenched in grave to hope for resurrection. Yet there are people I come across every now and then, who fail to understand that they first need to love and respect themselves in order to find and earn love and respect. I only feel sorry for them.

Then there is something else, apart from pragmatism, that stands between love then and love now. That is technology. Even today I am not sure whether techonology is of great service to lovers, or a great disservice. If you look at the plus points, you can thank technology with tears in your eyes. Today, two lovers can stay in touch real-time, through SMS and internet chat and Facebook. They don't have to meet up physically all the time. They can express their feelings for each other -- be it an overdrive of affection or a bout of sulking -- on Facebook by writing philosophical status messages or by posting songs from You Tube that effectively convey their emotions for the moment. Of course there is SMS and Gmail chat -- to profess love, to make love, to make amends, to make peace, to settle scores.

But the tragedy is that lovers don't write to each other these days. By writing, I mean the kind when you put a pen to paper, which is a mode of introspection. You can rarely lie when you are composing a sentence on a piece of paper with the help of a pen. The moment you hold a pen, especially a fountain pen, you plunge deep into your mind and come out with the truest sentence possible. A piece of paper, after all, does not have the 'Delete' or 'Backspace' button -- you better be accurate in describing your feelings in the very first attempt.

But on a computer, the 'Backspace' and 'Delete' buttons rob you of honesty. You are often tempted to speak your mind, but upon realising that what you speak may not go down well with the person on the other end, you keep fiddling with those buttons until you have composed a sentence that causes no offence. If you still think some damage has been done, you swiftly add a smiley or two to nullify its effect. You know what I mean, don't you?

Back then, the moment a letter arrived, you could tell from the handwriting that it is from 'him' or from 'her'. Not to speak of the smell of the paper. It always smelt of 'him' or 'her'. And the fact that thoughts could not be exchanged real time back then, unless you were face to face with the person, made you look eagerly forward to the letter. The letter was the sole substitute for the physical presence of your lover. Ah, the love letter.

Today, the love letter has fragmented into bits and pieces -- into 20-word text messages, 15-word status messages, 50-word emails and so on. And the fragments no longer bear the distinct handwriting of your lover -- they are all about fonts and font sizes. As a result, the email from your lover looks just the same as the email from your boss.

The battle is on right now, to smell one set of typed words from another. People are succeeding, I can tell you.

A Drop Of Water

2010-11-23T01:23:00.003+05:30

The train was going to stop at Guntakal for a while.

Guntakal was a big junction, and there, a few more bogies were to be attached to the train before it proceeded to Bombay. At Bombay, her husband would come to receive her, but some 30 hours still separated them. Right now, she was travelling with her two children -- a daughter who was five, and a son who had just turned three. They were travelling from Bangalore.

When the train came to a halt at Guntakal, she saw most male passengers getting down, to stretch their legs and loiter on the platform, to fill water, to have tea, to buy eatables for their families. It was a long stoppage, so no one was in a hurry.

This was the first time she was travelling unaccompanied for such a long distance. And this was the first time she was going to Bombay. Her husband had got posted there only six months ago, and now she was taking the children along for summer vacation. She looked at the water bottle. There was water but that might not be sufficient. She wasn't sure when the next station would come.

'Looks like the train is going to wait here for a while,' she suggested to herself, 'why not fill up the bottle?' She got up and stood at the door of the coach, looking out nervously at the length of the platform. She could see two taps sprouting out from opposite sides of a tiled pedestal. Not very far away. She walked up to it, filled up the bottle and was returning to the coach when she saw the train move.

She ran. The train was leaving her behind. Worse, it was carrying her two children away! Actually the train wasn't. Only the extra bogies were being attached to it -- the momentum makes the entire train move by a few metres, something that seasoned travellers were familiar with. She ran, and just as she was about to hop into the coach, she slipped and fell through the gap between the train and the platform. She died.

The train left at its scheduled time. Why should it wait, anyway? Guntakal was just one of the numerous stations that fell on the way, and she was just one of the 1,500 passengers it was carrying. Accidents happens, life goes on. The individual does not count.

Instead of the bogies being attached, had a moving train rammed this stationary train from behind, and if a few hundred people had died, then the value of each individual's death would have been jacked up manifold. In that case, it would not have been just an accident, but a rail accident. A rail accident makes banner headlines in newspapers and counts as breaking news for TV channels. But the news of a lone woman dying in a freak rail accident would not interest TV channels; though newspapers often find such news handy as a filler.

But if you view the death of this woman from a magnifying glass, you will find countless heart-wrenching questions staring back at you. What happened to her body? What happened to the kids? When did the husband get to know? Did he get to know at all? Are the kids safe? But no one probes these questions. After all, it is the death of an individual. Who cares!

Every drop makes an ocean. But individually, a single drop does not count; it has no value unless it joins other drops and forms a river, if not an ocean. As an individual, it can only wait to dry up or be wiped off by a human. The same is true for humans. If a hundred of us die together in a terrorist attack, news channels are bound to flock our respective homes, asking our grieving families what we ate for breakfast that fateful morning before falling victim to the terrorists' bombs or bullets.

But if one of us, an individual, gets killed in a freak accident or by the bullet of a goonda in the neighbourhood, we are mentioned in the 'Crime Briefs' column of the local newspaper. It does not interest the media one bit whether we had a hearty breakfast or good sex before being put to sleep forever.

Music And I

2010-11-22T01:50:00.013+05:30

The songs you cherish the most are the ones that you grow up listening to. You grow out of many other childhood fixations -- such as the fascination for an actor or a sport -- but music is something you become more possessive about the older you grow. There are times when you wish you could've put all those songs that appealed to you in a bag and carried the bag along across the years.

I would classify the growing-up years as between the ages of five and 20. Before the age of five, you are too young to be a discerning listener, and after you are 20, life throws up other fascinations and pressures for any new kind of music to get into your blood stream. After 20, you mostly like stuff that resembles what you've grown up listening to. The degree of resemblance may vary, though.

Here, let me make it clear that I am speaking for myself. Music, even though it is created for the masses, is a highly personal, rather personalised, matter.

During the years when I was growing up, that is between the mid-seventies and the late eighties, we were totally at the mercy of the radio and Doordarshan. If they played a rare song that you happened to like, you had no choice but to wait until they played it again. If you were lucky and thoughtful enough, you get to record the song on a blank cassette, but that would have meant sitting by the radio all the time.

I was 14 or 15 by the time I developed the strong urge to possess my kind of music, and by then we had a Sony music system at home that let me record songs from the radio. However, for every song I managed to record, from start to finish, there were two others I could not, for the simple reason that they rarely came on radio. Their cassettes weren't available either, and even if they were, the song(s) I was looking weren't contained in those cassettes. As far as music is concerned, I grew up in a strange era -- LP records were almost dead and CDs were yet to be born (the concept of iPod or internet downloads still qualified for science fiction).

I still remember very clearly, none of the Hum Kisise Kum Nahin cassettes had the four-song medley I was so desperately looking for. None, I tell you, and I had no idea why. Perhaps because we weren't a consumer-oriented country then and had to suffice with whatever shit was being served to us. I started hunting for the medley since 1985, and it was only in 1995, in Delhi, when I found a shop in Connaught Place that recorded songs on a blank cassette straight from an LP player. Oh, I still possess the cassette, with the shopkeeper's slip inside the cover bearing my name, "V. Ghosh". But look at this: for 10 whole years I was deprived of a set of songs my ears had been yearning for. What for?

Let me give you a brief list of songs which I wanted to possess from the age of 14 or 15 -- songs that I wanted to hear again and again and again -- but which I could rediscover only 10 or 15 or -- even -- 25 years later! Just a song, and yet so long!

1. The Hum Kisise Kum Nahin medley, starting with Chaand mera dil: a wait of 10 years.

2. Heeralal Pannalal songs, especially the Hemant Kumar-sung Aaja mere pyaar aaja (which every father should sing for his kid daughter): a wait of 20 years. Apart from this song, other songs from the movie are still not available in the shops. Find me a CD if you can, but no internet downloads please.

3. Mehmaan nazar ki ban jaa (what a Kishore song!) from Pataal Bhairavi: the wait still continues!

4. Raat banoon main aur chaand banon tum from Mangalsutra: 25 years! What a song, what a search! Aao baahon mein aao!

5. Main tere liye, tu mere liye from a Dev Anand film called Main Tere Liye. I am not sure if Dev Anand himself acted in the film because it never got released at the time when its songs hit the radio. All I know is that the hero was Dev saab's son Suneil and the director his brother Vijay Anand, a gem of a director. Anyway, this Bappi Lahiri song was very, very close to my heart when I was a 15-year-old and it still remains so. Only that I can't find the song anywhere else except on You Tube even after a search for 25 years! I did buy a cassette of the songs of this film, in 1987, for Rs 17! -- and listened to the song so often that the tape got demagnetised within a year or two.

Many people dismiss Bappi Lahiri as the disco king who made it big by plagiarising popular Western numbers, but he is a great composer. He was, in fact, a prodigy -- as at least one elderly person who knew him from his younger days testifies. Bappi's melody numbers are real gems, and even though I might be the craziest fan R.D. Burman ever had, there are several Bappi Lahiri numbers that give me the goosebumps. All his detractors must watch this film called Apne Paraaye -- you will end up with tears in your eyes. Heard Yesudas's Shyam rang ranga re, har pal mera re...?

Bappi Lahiri never failed to entertain you (entertainment being the operative part): on one hand he gave you a 'cheap' song like Jee lele jee lele (perhaps the only song to be sung on screen by the elderly and venerable Om Shiv Puri), and on the other gave you gems like Chalte chalte, mere yeh geet and Pyaar maanga hai tumhi se...

I don't know how many of you have heard of Anup Ghoshal. Well, he is the guy who sung Tujhse naaraaz nahin for R.D. Burman in Masoom, and I really can't think of anyone, not at least in my midly drunken state at this hour, who might not have heard that song.

Anup Ghoshal is an acclaimed Bengali singer: he sang for many Bengali films of Satyajit Ray, but his first brush with national fame was with Masoom. Oh what a song -- or so I thought, till I heard Anup Ghoshal sing this beautiful, beautiful number for Bappi Lahiri that I am presenting now. I found this song, finally, on You Tube -- 25 years after I listened to it for the first time and got mesmerised by it!

Back then I was an adolescent, today I qualify to be a middle-aged man. During the interim decades, the song was only a memory. But it has come back to me now and still gives me goosebumps. Please click on 'play' and listen to the song carefully. The lyrics are thought-provoking, the voice mind-blowing, and the music -- ah, vintage Bappi Lahiri!

Five Things I Miss In Hindi Films Today

2010-11-20T00:30:00.006+05:30

I don't watch too many new Hindi films -- except the occasional Akshay Kumar-starrer or the ones that have Irrfan Khan -- but I have a fair idea of what's going on. I am not sure if I like or dislike what's going on -- though storylines and scenes are far more credible and the production more Hollywood-style -- but I certainly know what I miss in them. I miss the fun, flavour and the mindlessness.

Watching Hindi films has now become some sort of an intellectual exercise; you take them far too seriously and in the process miss out on the enjoyment. The idea is to leave your brains behind when you enter a theatre, and not to put it to use once you lean back on the comfortable seat. I crave for the good, old dal-chaawal-roti-sabzi, the staple diet I've grown up on, and not exotic salads or basil-laced pasta. Here are five things I miss the most -- you don't really find them in Hindi movies anymore:

1. The fight scene: Today, the hero has the muscles, but there is very little he is required to do with them. Back then, they had no muscles, yet they took on 20 men single-handedly. Dhishum! Bhishum! I am not sure if these sounds were made from the mouth -- most likely they were -- but in Jawaani Diwaani someone certainly did use his mouth to make the Ae dhishum, Ae dhishum sound every time the not-so-macho Randhir Kapoor exchanged blows with the bad guys. Fight scenes were so much fun. You anticipated them and sat on the edge of the seat. Quite often it was with a fight scene that the hero made his entry into the film -- the camera focussed on a pair of feet that would walk slowly and steadily into the scene, while trumpets and violins built up the tension in the air and set the tone for confrontration. What was a movie without Amitabh Bachchan, and what was an Amitabh Bachchan movie without its share of fight scenes? Two fight scenes that I cherish and still relish are the ones that took place between Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna in Khoon Paseena and Amar Akbar Anthony. Amitabh Bachchan, apart from being a versatile actor, was Bollywood's most popular action hero, even though he did not even have the muscles. The action hero died once he aged. Today there is no slot for the action hero, which can certified by the fact that the two heroes who could have filled the slot, Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn (who is the son of a popular stunt master), are better known for comedy. Fight scene, RIP.

2. The bike/car song: When I was young, I used to be a huge fan of Jackie Shroff. The moustache I sport owes his existence to the hero-worship. I am no longer crazy about him as I used to be those days (collecting his pictures from magazines, going to the theatre alone to watch his films, considering writing to him), but it is too late to do away with the moustache because it has become part of my identity. In any case, I now live in the south, where the moustache can never go out of fashion. So there was this bike song filmed on Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri, Jhoomti bahaaron ka samaa, pyaar ki umange hain jawaan from a called Dahleez. Doordarshan often showed the song on Sunday mornings, and I would switch on the TV only to wait for that song. All songs sung on the bike or car have a sense of movement -- they pack in melody as well as high energy; and you can never, ever, go wrong with them in case you are looking for quality music to lift your mood or to store in your iPod. My most favourite car song is a little-known one, Kaho kahaan chalen, from the film Bulandi, and favourite bike song -- oh there are so many, including Rote huey, aate hain sab (please watch this video carefully for words of wisdom from Kader Khan) from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. And who can ever forget the ultimate bike song of Hindi cinema! -- can you hear Pancham playing the mouth organ?

3. The courtroom scene: "Order!Order!"
"Main jo kuch kahoonga sach kahoonga, aur sach ke siwa kuchh nahi kahoonga."
"Objection overruled!"
"Objection sustained!"
"To us din raat ko gyarah baje, aap kahaan thhey?"
"(Laughter) Order! Order!"
"Yeh jhooth hai judge saahab!"
"Saare sabooton aur gawaahon ke bayanaat ko madde nazar rakhte huey, adalat is nateeje par pahunchi hai, ki mulzim Dinanath..."

Fuck man! Don't you miss these lines? Place your palm on the Gita and tell me that you don't.

4. The comedy scene: The action hero is dead, and along with him, the comedian too, simply because the action hero has replaced him. Don't cite Rajpal Yadav please, I will puke if I see one more of his so-called comedy scenes. God, can you please breathe life back into Mehmood, Om Prakash and Keshto Mukherjee? These are people who did not have to mouth funny lines to make you laugh, their facial expressions were enough to lighten up your mood (Mehmood and Om Prakash were two rare comedians who could also effortlessly make you cry: I have a colleague who can't hold his tears each time he watches Mehmood's Kunwara Baap). Mehmood and Om Prakash, according to me, were the biggest comedians Indian cinema ever produced. There is, of course, Asrani, who you still see in Priyadarshan's films, but he is far too talented to qualify solely as a comedian. And if you want to see the power of Asrani's acting, watch Khoon Paseena. God is so unkind: he first snatched away the comedians, and then snatched away the slot for the comedian. At least give Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor back to us, will you? If I still believe in you dear God, it is only because of Paresh Rawal.

5. The Climax: There were villains and there were villains. There were the sophisticated and the larger-than-life ones like Ajit and Amrish Puri ("Inspector saahab, main is sheher ka ek shareef aur izzatdaar insaan hoon"), and the dreaded ones like Amjad Khan ("Haraamzaade!"). But nothing to beat the two slimeballs, Jeevan and Prem Chopra -- the ultimate bastards you always wanted to kill with your bare hands. Hindi cinema will never see them again. The villain is a dying breed as well: the hero is grabbing his role too. Oh, how much I miss the bastards. Today if I watch Amar Akbar Anthony again and again, it is mainly because of Robert, that is Jeevan. Then there is Pran: but Pran mostly played the good guy throughout the 1970's and 1980's, the decades I was growing up, so I have no hatred towards him. Needless to say, it were these villains who inspired the climax of films during those days. And the climax invariably unveiled itself in a fortified godown or a hideout. You knew the movie was ending, you also knew the manner in which it was going to end, yet you sat on the edge of the seat, enduring the fight scene (with a bit of comedy thrown in when the heroine or the comedian hit back at the bad guys), waiting for either of the following lines:

"Hands up! Koi apni jagah se nahin hilega."

"Gireftaar kar lo in sab ko."

"Sab apni apni bandooken phaenk do."

"Khabardaar jo kisine hilne ki koshish ki to."

Inspector saahab, main kahaan hil rahaa hoon. Bollywood hil gaya hai.

Urban Thoughts, Urban Shots

2010-11-19T00:08:00.004+05:30

I've been blogging frequently of late, so much so that someone recently left an anonymous comment, wondering if I had lost my job. The anonymous soul thinks that if you are fired, you have all the time in the world to blog. On the contrary: a man who has to keep his kitchen fires burning and who has lost his job will be hardly at peace to think up anything blogworthy, or to think of blogging at all.

But frequent blogging is bad for me, nonetheless. Each post that I write eats into the precious time that I should be investing in the Chennai book, which is stranded in the half-done state for several weeks now. But I am weary of weighing words. You take a word in each palm and weigh them mentally for several minutes before deciding which one fits in better in a sentence -- it can be monotonous and tiring!

With the blog there is no such worry: it's your own bedroom, and no one is going to judge you whether you wear a torn lungi to bed or a proper night dress. The blog satisfies your itch to play with words without having to worry about how you put them across. Moreover, Ganga Mail is not a stickler for grammar; its sole guiding spirit is simplicity and honesty.

So of late, each night after I get home, I find telling myself, "Oh no, not the book again. Let me write one more post and then I'll give it a break. I am sure I will find something to write about." A blog post, unlike a book, is about instant publication, and instant publication leads to instant gratification. Therefore we all blog, even while nursing dreams of giving in the hands of the reader that one book whose pages smell better with every passing year.

In any case, it is going to be a long, long time before people reconcile to the idea that reading books no longer requires the physical presence of books. It might have happened in the case of music -- today a gadget tinier than your thumb can store a thousand songs -- but it is one thing to enjoy music and quite another to enjoy reading (enjoyment being the operative part).

To enjoy music, you need only a pair of ears that are in working condition. But to enjoy reading, all the physical senses simultaneously come into play -- the look, the touch, the smell, the sound, above all, the feel of holding a book. When you are reading a story online, you are a slave of the gadget on which you are reading it. If the gadget fucks up, you are screwed. But when you are reading a book, you are the master of what you are holding in your hands.

It is a lot like sex. The computer may provide you with virtual sex and give you the requisite orgasms, but it can never provide you with replacement for a smooch or a penetrative intercourse or even something as simple and gratifying as a mere touch -- no matter how much technology advances. Advocates of technology may argue what's in a touch when it comes to reading -- you now touch books, tomorrow you will get used to the touch of your iPad or Netbook or whatever. What's more, you can take your iPad (or even laptop) along to the bed or to the toilet, just like you carry a book.

But then, society is yet to validate online writing as works of literature: it will take perhaps another 50 years before bloggers become eligible for the Booker, and another 100 before they are considered for the Nobel Prize for literature. Or maybe even more. Till then, we will have to continue producing real books in order to be in the race, in order to be heard, in order to fulfil our ambitions.

My ambition, ever since Chai, Chai was released in September 2009, was to publish one book a year till I attained the age of 45, so that I could look back at my life with a small sense of satisfaction for having gone beyond the arduous task of keeping a job and yet at the same time feeding my ambition to be a writer. Success might eventually come at the age of 50 when I might develop erectile dysfunction and may not need the money that may pour in at that point of time -- but at least the success would keep my brain functional and yearning for more till the time I dropped dead. There can't be any worse death for a writer when his mind dies before his body.

In keeping with my ambition, I was hoping that my Chennai book would published this year. But fantasy and reality, idea and execution -- they are lines that rarely meet. And it is not easy when you are writing about a city you are living in. Each day you wake up to a new idea and to new people, and suddenly you find the complexion of your book changing and the word-length expanding.

I signed the contract for the Chennai book many weeks before Chai, Chai was released. My mother was alive then, and I remember her wishing me "all the best" -- I still remember making that call to her from the car park of my office. In spite of her death, I was confident that the Chennai book would be published in 2010 -- it was highly doable and I did try my best to make it happen. But then, mind is not a machine: it demands far more holidays and breaks and incentives. Needless to say, my next book will reach readers only sometime next year.

But, very strangely, destiny did not let me down. In 2010 too, I managed to get published, thanks to Urban Shots. Urban Shots is not my book, it is a compilation of 29 short stories, only two of which happen to be mine. But what a pleasure it is to hold a book in your hands and flip through the pages and find the sweets of your hard work embedded somewhere among them. Ladies and gentlemen, please buy Urban Shots and read the short stories, not just because Ganga Mail noses its way into it, but because the book is the collective result of enthusiasm and enterprise, of ambition and aspiration. You will know what I mean only when you read it. As far as I am concerned, I have fulfilled, albeit by default, my quota for the year 2010.

Airport

2010-11-18T11:19:00.004+05:30

Arrival lounge: smiles and embraces!
Taking a taxi to the city of Life
Return to the visitor's lounge --
to see off fleshly baggages, one by one.
Return again, without baggage
for the wait at the departure lounge.
Some flights are on time, some delayed.

Sexy

2010-11-16T13:38:00.004+05:30

"Bhaiyya, jaldi gate kholo," she curtly told the security guard as she reached inside her bag for the car keys. She was in a hurry. It was 7.20 am now, and she had a meeting at eight. She put on some lip gloss, made the thin, dark lips rub each other a few times, and turned on the ignition.

At 7.20 the roads were empty and the air chilly. She rolled down the window. The drive to work -- that was the only time she had for herself. But today there was a meeting, and there was no time to enjoy the drive.

"Fuck you!" she muttered, as the car in front of her at the signal lingered for a few moments even after the lights had turned green.

She imagined herself at the meeting. Two prospective clients were coming to see her. Mr Dutt and Mr Rajshekhar. She tried putting faces to their names: dashing? balding? clean-shaven? pleasant? scowling? She gave up after a while: reality is always different from the imaginary.

Just then, a bike carrying two young men slowed down by her, and the man on the pillion shouted, "Hi sexy!" Before she could spit out her anger on them, they had sped away.

"Bloody bastards," she muttered. "Hi sexy! -- how dare they!"

She adjusted the rear-view mirror and looked at herself. First at the eyes, then the nose, and finally the lips, which were still glowing. She smiled.

Gratifying Sip Of Chai

2010-11-11T13:32:00.005+05:30

Yesterday morning, I received my first royalty cheque for Chai, Chai. Neat sum, neat sales. Thank you, everyone, who bought the book and liked it.

But this morning, I received something which I found more rewarding (and touching) -- a mail from a reader in Pune:

I'm not much of a reader. Randomly, I would pick up a book off the shelves from a Crossword or a Landmark. While searching for a birthday gift for my father, CHAI CHAI caught my attention. The railway tracks with the cup of chai and a few birds flying here and there.

My father spent half of his life on the railway tracks. he went wherever his work took him. I thought I couldnt get a better birthday gift for him. He started reading your book. Might have completed a chapter or two. And well, the heavens took him away.

After a few months, I found the book in his files and papers, and I started reading it. Apart from it being an absolutely stunning read, the book someohow kept taking me back to dad and I was lost in the words you weaved across the pages.

It got me closer to my dad in some or the other way.

I just wanted to thank you sir. And all the very best for the times ahead.

If Chai, Chai has taken someone back to a departed parent, it was worth writing it.

Kishore Kumar: Random Thoughts Past Midnight

2010-11-10T00:31:00.005+05:30

Kishore Kumar's voice is like your car. You like it, you love it, and you need it every day, except maybe on the odd holiday when you stay at home. It cruises you through the roads and streets of life. The day your car goes for service, and you are forced to take public transport, it feels like being imprisoned in the home of a host who has nothing but Mukesh or Rafi in his music collection, and you have to pretend to feel the pain as one song after the other whines about heartbreak.

And then there are days when you drive your car not to get to your destination, but just to get the feel of driving it. One of those days when you on a long drive, only because you love your car. Today was one such day for me, when a friend and I were in the Kishore Kumar mood/mode, exchanging his songs and listening to them and feeling ecstatic. What a pleasure it is when your friend has never heard of a particular mind-blowing number that you cherish, and you proudly unveil it for him or her, as if you were the creator of the song!

Needless to say, Kishore Kumar has been humming inside my head since morning. Therefore this post.

It is very rare that I have agreeable company whenever I am get into the Kishore-Kumar mode. Even though those are the moments you badly crave for company -- not just anyone, but someone who feels exactly like the way you do for Kishore Kumar. But how can I find company at three or four in the morning? That's when, once I finish my quota of writing and drinking, I go to You Tube and listen to Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman. The rarer the videos/song, the more joy they bring. Alcohol, of course, magnifies the joy. Often I share the joy on Facebook, by posting a song or two -- a completely meaningless exercise because I am posting something that people are perhaps already familiar with, but how else does one share joy online?

The thing about Kishore Kumar is -- well, his voice. The way he 'threw' his voice into the microphone; the way he modulated it, as if it was a highly malleable piece of metal; the way he infected you with it -- a sheer work of genius! Rafi was a genius in his own way; there are songs I can never imagine anyone else singing -- the two that instantly come to my mind are Koi sone ke dilwala (Maya) and Dard-e-dil, dard-e-jigar (Karz). If Kishore Kumar is the car, Rafi is the bullock cart, who gently takes around the countryside, the bullocks kicking up the smell of Indian soil.

The only composers who recognised their respective talents, and showcased a healthy mix of them in movies, were the father-son duo of S.D. Burman and R.D. Burman. Guide, Jewel Thief, Aradhana, Hum Kisi Se Kam Nahin, Yaadon Ki Baarat -- they all had Kishore and Rafi singing their own kinds of songs without overshadowing each other.

But.

When you think Aradhana, you think Mere sapnon ki rani or Kishore humming Eh hey, ah ha ha, ah ha (before singing Kora kaagaz thha yeh man mera); when you think Guide, it has to be Gaata rahe mera dil; when you think Jewel Thief, the songs that instantly come to your mind are Yeh dil, na hota bechara or Aasman ke neeche. When you think of Hum Kisi Se Kam Nahin, it has to be the lively Bachna ae haseeno, lo mein aa gaya.

Well, that's the difference between Kishore and Rafi. Rafi is the glass of drink that soothes you after a long day, but Kishore is the minty toothpaste that shakes you out of slumber and energises you in a matter of seconds -- and it doesn't have to be only in the morning. Yoodlee-oo!

May be continued.

Shopping, Then And Now

2010-11-09T00:39:00.005+05:30

Today, Nilgiris, the 105-year-old chain of supermarkets, inaugurated its 100th store right next to my office. Needless to say, many people at work were seen walking in with Nilgiris carry bags. Not to be outdone, I took a 10-minute break and visited the store. The great thing about shopping in supermarkets and malls is that you walk in without being in the need of buying anything, and yet you walk out with purchases that make you feel extremely good. Some people call it retail therapy, I would call it a disease.

This evening, when I walked into Nilgiris, I knew I won't come out empty-handed. The question was, what to buy? Vegetables would have been a great option. Imagine, wife waking up in the morning and finding the fridge stocked: what pleasure! But it would be embarrassing to carry back to work a bag that has various gourds sticking out of it. Eventually, I found myself standing in front of the all-too-familiar shelf: the one that stocks grooming products.

The thing with grooming products is, they make you see a brighter tomorrow. Their very touch fill you with positive energy, and you secretly imagine yourself to be one of the male models who graces the advertisements in GQ or Esquire. You find telling yourself: "Fuck man, no more drinking from tonight. I am going to use these products from tomorrow and look good and get all the women."

Tomorrow, alas, never comes. It is always tonight.

So, I picked up a large bottle of Dove shampoo, a bottle of Neutrogena facewash, one Brut deodorant and a bottle of Yardley cologne (the original, not Indian-made). On the way out, I was handed a loaf of bread and a packet of atta -- they were gifts I was entitled to for having made the purchases.

"But I don't want atta," I told the attendant handing out the free items, "I saw people getting pieces of cake."

"But that's for minimum purchase, sir. Your bill is high."

"But I don't want atta."

"Can I give you another packet of bread?"

"Ok."

Back in office, I called up wife to announce the gifts: two packets of bread. After all, she is the breakfast person, while I wake up only around lunchtime. I thought she would be happy.

"But what all did you buy to get those gifts?" she asked me.

I told her.

"But aren't there so many bottles of shampoos and aftershaves already rotting at home?" she asked.

I told her they were all bound to get empty, sooner than later.

"If at all you were itching to spend money, you could have bought something for me."

"Well, I almost bought something for you."

"What?" she asked.

"Vegetables."

"What?"

After she hung up, I pondered over my purchases. I had just spent Rs 1,500 on things I did not need at all. Fifteen hundred bucks is peanuts all right -- even though that was my take-home salary when I entered journalism 18 years ago -- but to spend it mindlessly was criminal. With that money, I could have bought five Wality fountain pens fitted with Sheaffer nibs, or three good books, or one Calvin Klein T-shirt, and so on. The list is endless, and yet I fucking spent the money on shampoo and facewash and cologne.

That's what the supermarket does to you. It plays on your greed, not need.

One Sunday morning when you wake up, your wife announces that there is no turmeric powder at home. So you wear your clothes and head to the nearest supermarket to buy a packet of turmeric powder. But once at the store, thoughts such as these cross your mind and rapidly translate into action:

-- I just saw only three eggs left in the fridge. Shouldn't I pick up a dozen more?;

-- The wife did not ask for it, but no harm picking up a couple of packets of puffed rice. Maybe she forgot to mention it;

-- Oh yes, Maggi. Let me grab a few packets of noodles. Saves a lot of trouble when the cook or the maid doesn't turn up;

-- Hey, this new Nivea facewash, it says it lightens the skin. It would be criminal not to try it out;

-- Ah, a nice pair of toothbrush! One is supposed to change toothbrush every few weeks;

-- Olive oil? Awesome! It is good for the heart, zero cholestrol and all that;

-- Wait a minute, let me pick up a pack of Real juice. Why one, let me pick up two. Who the hell is going to come to the store again and again;

-- Hey, wait, wait. Ages since I had lime pickle;

-- Wait, wait, wait, how about some appalam! They go so well with sambhar and rasam;

-- Wait a minute, did I see them selling water bottles? I need one to take to the gym, and another to keep in the office;

-- Ok, let me check out of the store now. But wait, why not pick up that Gillette aftershave?;

-- Oh, before I forget, a few packs of Gold Flake Kings. There they are!

And so, there you are! You come to buy a packet of turmeric powder, but you exit the store carrying two heavy bags. They contain stuff you don't need at all, but you convince yourself into believing that you need them all badly. Reality hits you when the bank, at the end of the month, sends you the credit card statement, but even then you refuse to learn.

Oh how much I miss the olden days when, armed with a ten-rupee note, you could run to the neighbourhood grocer and buy a dozen eggs, a packet of Modern bread, a hundred grams of turmeric and other stuff, and still be handed back a few coins in return. Now what to do with those coins? With those measly coins you bought kampat -- each kampat cost five paise back then -- and the kampat was the commission you charged from your parents for every trip to the grocer. Does anyone even remember what a kampat means, leave alone its taste?

Those were the days when the shopkeeper asked you, "Kya chaahiye?" Today, standing inside a supermarket, you ask yourself, "Aur kya chaahiye?"

Roadside Life

2010-11-07T14:05:00.004+05:30

Three in the afternoon but it's dark in Chennai, raining off and on. A cyclone is supposed to be on the way. One of those days when you just want to stay home and look out of the window and watch the coconut trees dance in the shower. Well, I am home: it's Sunday.

While I am sitting at home and writing this, there are people who are enjoying the weather (or climate, as many say) outdoors, by way of a long drive or a romantic walk on the beach or elsewhere. I don't envy them because I just had my share of outdoor experience: I walked down to the supermarket to stock up on cigarettes in case the cyclone gets too harsh on Chennai. It was a pleasant walk, I must say.

But I can't help sparing a thought for people who have to be outdoors, sunshine or rain. People like us, who are out in this lovely weather either on business or for pleasure, have the choice of returning home whenever the rain becomes too steady for comfort. But there are people who live on the footpaths, for who the comfort of watching the rain from the window is as distant as my dream of owning a villa in Cannes.

I am not talking about the pavement-dwellers in general: they constitute such a large chunk of urban India that if you start feeling sorry for all of them, nothing will be left of your heart to be spared for the women who come your way. I am talking of people like Senthil, who made the pavement his home out of choice. People like him are honourable citizens of the pavement, who neither beg for a living nor curse their fate or the government.

I worked with the New Indian Express group for seven long years; and of those seven, five were spent at the sprawling Express Estates on Club House Road off Mount Road, before the offices shifted to faraway Ambattur. Today, Express Estates has become Express Avenue, Chennai's biggest and plushest shopping mall, while Club House Road is now better known as the address of the hotel Taj Mount Road.

Taj Mount Road was still a skeleton of bricks when we used to look at it while sipping tea at Senthil's shop, and wonder if anything was ever going to come up there. For years it was just a skeleton: perhaps the site was caught in a legal dispute. Senthil ran a tea stall on the pavement just outside the main gate of Express Estates. The table on which his stove and various jars of biscuits sat during daytime became his bed at night. In 2006, when we said goodbye to Express Estates and moved to Ambattur, I wrote a post about Senthil.

About a year later, while we were drinking at a TASMAC bar in Ambattur, I learned that Senthil had died. It had been raining in Chennai, and one night while asleep, Senthil had rolled off the table and fallen on the ground. He lay unconscious for hours, maybe a day or two, but no one noticed him because heavy rains had kept people away from Club House Road. Finally he died, under the table on which he lived -- a citizen of the pavement till the last breath.

Then the other day, I was walking down Venkatanarayana Road in the afternoon, when I noticed a body laid out on the pavement under a tree. The body, in shroud, was kept inside a glass case, and a few people sat mournfully around it. Next to the glass case was a table, on which lay a heap of tender coconut shells and twigs. In the heap there were a couple of tender coconuts that were yet to be hacked open.

I found it odd that people should place their dead on the pavement and mourn publicly, so I made enquiries. It turned out that the body belonged to the tender-coconut-seller, who was found dead that morning on the pavement. He had a family: some of them lived in Chennai, some in Madurai. But he, for some reason, chose to live on the pavement, selling tender coconuts, right at the spot where Venkatanarayana Road begins (opposite T. Nagar Club. I wonder if any of you were ever his customers). The spot under the tree was his home, so it was only befitting for his body should be laid there, bedecked in flowers, while the family waited for his daughter to arrive from Madurai. So here was another life that was spent and that ended on the pavement. The sun and the rain are best friends of such people, though such friends, like any friend, can turn treacherous at times.

Diwali Thoughts: Life Isn't The Same

2010-11-05T11:03:00.007+05:30

Change is inevitable; some changes you embrace, some you are resigned to.

When your son grows up and fits into your shoes, you embrace the change even though you realise that you are no longer as young as you used to be. Most often you don't even have the time for the realisation because you are so busy being proud that your child is now your height.

But when you lose a parent, you have no choice but to resign to change. Suddenly, you find the road behind you having disappeared. Suddenly, you are bereft of the biggest luxury of life -- the protection provided by parental love. Once you lose the luxury, no other luxury matters or can compensate for it. Of what use the luxuries if the person you want to share them with the most, or who would have felt extremely smug at the thought that her son has earned those luxuries, is not there anymore?

What will always rankle me is that my mother died very young -- she was only 58 -- that too at a time when I badly wanted her to be alive for a few more years. But destiny rarely lets you have your cake and eat it too.

In two months I will turn 40, and in these 40 years, I have never, ever, been away from Kanpur during Diwali, except twice -- last year and this year.

The Diwali of 2009 could have easily been the grandest of my life: the debut book of an aspiring writer had just hit the stands -- what timing! I could have savoured the fruits of my labour in the form of Tiwariji's samosas and sweets, burst a few crackers and lit a few anaars in celebration of Diwali as well as the publication of Chai, Chai, had some chai with the family (no sugar in my mother's tea as usual) in the verandah while watching sparklers light up the sky, and then retiring to the room upstairs as usual with my brother to drink, then, smelling of alcohol, going to Kali Bari -- Kali temple -- late in the night to mark the passage of time. The neighbourhood Bengali uncle who was once dashing is now old and balding, and this wife, the aunty, walking with a limp. But their daughter, once a snotty little girl in the class, has now flowered into a stunning Bong beauty: fuck, why didn't I ever think of marrying her! Finally, we return home, that would be lit up all night by the countless chains of tiny lights. Ah, my home!

But look at the timing: my mother died just a month and a half before Diwali. She even missed the book by just eight days -- after all the painstaking effort she had taken during my childhood to teach me how to write a story. So the Diwali of 2009 was spent in Chennai, in mourning, though there was a pleasant distraction: a formal launch of Chai, Chai took place at Taj Connemara just two days before Diwali. My father had come to attend the launch, and on Diwali night, we went around the city, first to the Ramakrishna Mutt, then to Citi Centre and finally to Kali Bari in Chennai. We missed Kanpur, but we didn't mention it.

The Diwali of 2010 -- that is today -- could have easily been the second-grandest of my life. Today also happens to be my brother's birthday. Since he is November-born, Diwali always threatens to coincide with his birthday but the last time it actually did so was perhaps 25 or 30 years ago. What an occasion it would have been this evening! -- celebration of Diwali, celebration of the younger son's birthday, celebration of the minor success of the elder's son first book and the fact that he had signed contracts for a few more, celebration of a nuclear family.

Alas, I could not be in Kanpur this year. I just took a long leave to go to Kanpur to perform rituals related to her first death anniversary and to spend time with my father and brother. I have no more leave to avail of this year. Even if I did, it would have been no fun being there without mother. She would have been very conspicuous by her absence. So that is why I am here, in Chennai, putting up with the ear-splitting sounds of crackers being burst since early morning.

Mother isn't around to serve the bitter-gourd juice, father isn't around to serve the morning tea, brother isn't around to share the evening drink with. Till recently, it used to be just the four of us, and we were quite smug about that. During Dhanteras, which falls two days before Diwali, it is considered auspicious in north India to buy either utensils or jewellery on that day. One Dhanteras evening, a few years ago, when I went out drinking with friends in Kanpur, my mother, who wasn't feeling too well to step out of home, had entrusted me with buying something -- as a token -- for the occasion. On the way back home, I picked up just two spoons from a very crowded utensil shop -- in any case, they were just supposed to be symbolic of a new purchase. When I reached home, my mother told me, "Whenever you pick up something like this, always buy four. Because we are four. Tomorrow, though, when you both are married, you may need to pick up six."

Dhanteras does not make sense anymore. Though this Dhanteras, I unwittingly treated myself to a Vality fountain pen. It is a chunky pen with a transparent ink-tank -- sheer pleasure to hold. You instantly feel scholarly and writerly. Many illustrious men in Tamil Nadu, starting with chief minister Karunanidhi, are loyal users of this pen. What's more, mine turned out to be fitted with a Sheaffer nib and therefore cost more: Rs 250, compared to the usual Rs 90. With this pen, I intend to write my onward journey, now that the road behind me has disappeared.

What Does She Think Of Herself?

2010-11-02T00:17:00.008+05:30

A few years ago, walking down the road in Kanpur, I noticed a small boy, holding his mother's hand, walking in front of me. Suddenly, the boy broke free from his mother's grip and ran. He almost came under a car but the driver, a young woman, applied brakes just in time.

"Kya samajhti hai apne aap ko!" the boy's mother yelled while looking at the car -- What does she think of herself!

I was quite suprised by her reaction: instead of scolding the boy, she was getting angry with the woman who had actually saved her son's life by applying brakes in the nick of time. Then I realised, had the driver been a man, she would have at the most shouted, "Dekh kar nahin chalte kya?" -- Can't you watch out while driving? But the sight of a woman on the driver's seat (in the car as well as in life) was a bit too unpalatable for this boy's mother. And therefore, the 'What do you think of yourself.' The mother kept throwing angry, backward, glances at the car till it was out of sight, and only then did she give one slap to the boy for sprinting out of her grip.

It is the 'What do you think of yourself' syndrome that bites the Indian, man or woman, whenever Arundhati Roy writes or says something in public.

I am neither a fan of her, nor a baiter; I haven't even read her, though I am aware of what she writes about because of the noise made in the media. And I think it is commendable on her part to raise issues that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. In the process, she at least creates awareness and every newspaper-reading Indian gets to examine or re-examine the issue she is raising. The opinion you arrive at after examining the issue is a completely different matter -- you are free to agree with her or disagree with her.

But why go after her hammer and tongs as if she was a witch going to eat up the nation? It was to understand, and perhaps explain, this question that I wrote my previous post. But the point seemed to have been lost. As far as Kashmir or the Maoist movement is concerned, your opinion may be different from mine and I have no quarrel with that. I only sought to address one simple question: why does the whole of literate India seem to be seething with rage every time Arundhati Roy opens her mouth?

She is hardly a threat, after all. She does not run a political party that can influence people. She does not even command a small-time political outfit. She is not even as influential as individuals such as Medha Patkar or Baba Amte. She is not even being a writer -- just a one-book wonder. And yet, so much of rage, so much of anger -- coming from people who have learned to live with the likes of Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray?

The answer is simple. Arundhati Roy is a woman -- a woman who is attractive and articulate, defiant and daring, who effectively uses glamour and celebrity to draw attention to the issues she raises. Too unpalatable for Indian sensibilities. Indians must revolt: What does she think of herself?

Had the same views been expressed by a khadi-wearing, jhola-carrying gentleman called Arun Roy, instead of Arundhati Roy, no one would have wasted their time and emotions in retaliating.

There is a genial doctor called Binayak Sen, who spent the best part of his productive life in Chhattisgarh, treating and fighting for the oppressed, and yet languished in jail for allegedly being kind to the Maoists. Now tell me -- and do tell me the truth -- how many of you had even heard of Dr Sen until he was released from jail pretty recently following intervention by the Supreme Court? And yet you bristle with anger and activism when a certain Arundhati Roy speaks her mind on the same issue. Why so?

An Indian woman is supposed to be shy and coy and conforming to the rules set by the society. Until very recently, the storylines of many Indian films, including Hindi films, have been about taming the tomboy. In the first half of the film, the heroine defies tradition and raises eyebrows, but in the next half, she is tamed by the macho hero into being as soft as a snowflake. The audience gave out a collective sigh of orgasm: "Wow, he taught her a lesson." It walked out of the theatre with a smug look, happpy that the social equilibrium remained undisturbed.

The mindset hasn't changed since then. Problems still arise when a woman stops being a doormat and decides to raise issues and ask questions. That's when we Indians take a big gulp and exclaim in outrage, "How could she? What does she think of herself?"

Why People Hate Arundhati Roy

2010-10-31T22:13:00.006+05:30

I first saw Arundhati Roy on our black and white TV, in a film called Massey Sahib that was directed by her husband Pradeep Kishen. Though at the time I did not know she was the Arundhati Roy. She played the role of a tribal woman, if my memory serves right, and I found her quite attractive.

Then, of course, we all got to know Arundhati Roy. The Booker and all. There were two other people with India connection who had won the Booker before, but Salman Rushdie did not live long enough in India, while Naipaul was never born in India -- they were as good as Brits. The news of their winning the Booker, for the lay Indian, must have been as significant, or insignificant, as the mayor of an American city inaugurating a library. But Arundhati Roy, by winning the prize, brought about a revolution. Just how Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, by winning the Miss Universe and Miss World crowns, made the average young Indian woman look at herself in the mirror again, Roy's Booker breathed fire into the ambition of the ordinary Indian who had always dreamed to be a respected writer.

I never bought a copy of God Of Small Things: I read a few passages from a colleague's copy and did not feel encouraged to invest money in it, even though those days -- this was in 1997 or 1998 I think -- I was buying books left, right and centre. Maybe I hadn't matured as a reader then, even though I was old enough.

I also never got around to reading any of Arundhati Roy's Outlook articles, maybe a few paras, though, thanks to the debates they always kicked up in newspapers and news channels; I have been aware of what she is writing about. It is clear that she likes to take up the case, or the cause, of voiceless people who do not have a strong spokesperson backing them. And I think that is highly commendable. Take the Maoists for example. If you treat Maoists as enemies, you will never win the battle against them. But if you look into the reasons why Maoist rebels are born in the first place, you might have a solution at hand. But then, an exchange of gunfire is far easier than making an effort to change the system -- so what if a few policemen lose their lives? Maoists, after all, are not enemies planted on Indian soil by al Quaeda: they are our own people -- very poor, very deprived and very humiliated.

When you are living in a big city, say Delhi, where everything is just a phone call away, right from the morning milk to the pizza for dinner, life is so hunky dory that you tell yourself -- "Wow, India has progressed so much! Couldn't have imagined this happening 10 years ago!" True. But it is only the cities that have progressed, India hasn't. In a city, all you need to do is walk up to the gate of your apartment with your child, and soon a school bus will arrive to take the child to school. But in non-urban India, children walk for kilometres to get to school. Just imagine pairs of tiny feet walking five or six kilometres just to get to school. Can it get any more cruel? In many cases, they have a river or a stream falling on the way: they wade through it too.

Now, how many of the pizza-eating crowd have ever bothered to take up the cause of such people -- people who are poor, who live in remote areas, who fight not only their fate but also the system perpetrated by the state? Yet they all like to talk about the harm that Arundhati Roy -- of all people -- is causing to the nation!

What's so drastically wrong if Roy spoke in favour of Kashmiris seeking freedom? Kashmir does not become an 'integral part' of India just because the Indian government says so. It is for the Kashmiris to decide whether they consider themselves to be an integral part of India or not. If they think so, well and good, but if they don't, just too bad. People like us, who don't live in Kashmir and are not even remotely concerned with it, have no business forcing them into being an integral part of India. Cyril Radcliffe had left Kashmir out while partitioning India, but when Pakistani raiders entered the Valley in October 1947, the maharaja acceded to India and since then, the 'Kashmir issue' was born. Even when there was peace in Kashmir, the Kashmiris referred to us as Indians -- which meant they did not consider themselves as one. Slogan-shouting is one thing, ground reality another.

The Indian government is aware of the ground reality, that is why it did not book Arundhati Roy for sedition. I am sure there were many benevolent Britishers who thought that India must be freed from British rule, but I don't think Britain tried them for sedition. That's the beauty of democracy. You speak your mind. The day you are hounded for speaking your mind, you are no longer living in a democracy but in an autocracy.

The real reason why there is so much of anger against Arundhati Roy, every time she writes or says something, lies elsewhere. It lies in the Indian mindset. She is attractive, intelligent, articulate, bold and defiant -- something unpalatable for the chauvinistic Indian, male or female, who want women to be always conforming. So they go after her, hammer and tongs, even while being indifferent when serious cases of corruption are exposed day after day. Recently I put a status message to this effect on my Facebook profile, and was greeted with several angry comments. I would like to quote from two of them:

-- Can the freedom of speech in a democracy be stretched to challenge the sovereignty and integrity of the country? Rights come to citizen along with responsibility. Citizens should heckle her instead of government doing that.

-- The anger of people has increased with every irresponsible statement she made which has shown complete disregard to this nation. The nation cannot sit back and ignore her when she keeps on making those politically provocative statements again and again and again!!!

Nation. Sovereignty. Integrity. Big words. But, then, we are a big nation. A very big nation. Yet threatened and outraged by the views of just one woman activist. Why?

Till I Met You!

2010-10-13T04:07:00.002+05:30

Today is Kishore Kumar's death anniversary. Kishore Kumar! -- I can do without women, but not without his voice. Never.

His songs mark my existence, they are the core of my being. People associated with my childhood, my growing-up years will fade one day -- my mother is already gone -- but Kishore Kumar's voice will remain just as fresh, an unbreakable pillar from the past.

He sang countless songs, most of which I like, needless to say. But there is one song which I totally identify with -- beautifully written, composed and sung. I am proud to say that the lyricist is on my friend's list on Facebook (I was the one who shamelessly added him out of hero-worship), which means he is very much a part of the present and not yet of the romantic, unreachable past. Am talking of Amit Khanna: he wrote quite a few memorable songs for Kishore Kumar, the best known among them being Chalte chalte, mere yeh geet yaad rakhna, kabhi alvida na kehna...

But this song is special. Lie back, plug the earphones, shut your eyes and -- enjoy!

Get this widget

Track details

eSnips Social DNA