The Toy Train

It is seven in the evening and I am in room no. 1 of the 115-year-old Coonoor Club. I am reclining on the bed, nursing a drink and writing this. I have left the door leading to the patio wide open, and I can see the hills lit up like Diwali night. I feel like switching off the air-conditioner for a while: the room has become a bit too cold for comfort. I realise it doesn’t have an air-conditioner, not even a fan. This is Coonoor, not Chennai. Chennai I had left last night.

About 12 hours ago, around 6.30 am, I was at the Mettupalayam station, having spent a sleepless night in the Nilgiris Express from Chennai. These days I don’t sleep well in trains: rarely do I take one anymore unless the destination is Bangalore. So from one o’ clock in the night, I had been wide awake, glued to Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, trying to decipher the sentences from whatever little light seeped in as everybody else in the compartment snored. And then magic happened.

As I stepped on to the platform at Mettupalayam, I forgot – instantly – that I had just made a nine-hour train journey and hadn’t slept almost the entire night. I felt as if I was stepping out of my home for a morning walk after a restful sleep. The air was crisp and chilly, and the station presented a pretty picture. It has just one platform – on one side the train that had just got us in, and on the other side the toy train waiting to take us to Coonoor. And right across on the horizon, facing the two trains, stood the mountains. It was through these mighty mountains that the train was going to chart its course, as it has been doing for the last 100 years. The trip is now part of world heritage.

The toy train is just that: a toy. Just five small wooden carriages that are pushed – and not pulled – by a steam locomotive. The engine is at the end, while it is a first-class carriage that is right in front. Outside the leading carriage is a panel, the frontage of the train, where a guard sits with red and green flags. He is the one who blows the horn and switches on the lights whenever the train passes through a tunnel. He also doubles up as a guide for passengers sitting in the front carriage. This morning, I was one of those few fortunate – getting the first and a direct view of whatever lay ahead as the train chugged at the speed of a cycle-rickshaw.

Mountains don’t have arms. But when you take the toy train, the mountains assume the form of a bewitching beauty that spreads her arms to welcome you into an intimate embrace. Those who take the road miss out on the intimacy. On the winding road, your mind is primarily focused on oncoming vehicles. And then, you have many other vehicles for company – cars, buses, trucks. But the train takes you through green, virgin territory – as virgin as it has been for the past 100 years. All you are required to do is sit and watch.


At 6.45, the steam locomotive hissed down the track and positioned itself at the rear of the train. At seven a bell rang out, and five minutes later another. At 7.10 sharp, the train moved. In our part of the carriage, we had, for company, three couples. Two of the couples were very young and newly married. Like the train, their life-journey too had just started. Like most passengers, they were clueless about what lay ahead: only an idea. Throughout the journey, the young men and women were to spend more time looking into each other's eyes than looking outside, where they should have been looking because in virgin territory, even the sight of a blade of grass is like window-shopping for diamonds. The third couple was elderly, in their seventies: they had been through the forest of life, and now were rediscovering togetherness on a route they had never taken before. So they sat erect, savouring the visual pleasure that nature was offering them now. Then there was us, wife and I: not too young, not too old -- we were just two travellers who happened to be married to each other. Nothing theatric, unlike the honeymoon couples, about being together: the real theatre lay outside the train, with the stage changing every moment.

So far, the only time I had seen a toy train -- the truth to be told -- was in Aradhana. In the film, Sharmila Tagore, who is sitting in the toy train to Darjeeling, is wooed by Rajesh Khanna, who is following her on a jeep, with the immortal song, Mere sapnon ki rani kab aayegi tu. I don't know how fast the Darjeeling toy train runs, but I can tell you that the Nilgiris train does not match the 'speed' of this S.D. Burman song.

There was no Rajesh Khanna to chase our train, only small boys who would pop up once in a while to wave at us. The guard, on behalf of us, would smile and wave back. The boys would pop up only when a station was round the corner -- technically they should be called hill stations because they are located on the hills, but practically they are tiny dots of civilisation in wilderness -- oases in the desert of dense forests.

These small stations that fall in the way -- Hill Grove, Runnymede and so on -- are, to me, the real honeymoon spots. Plot to be left behind by the train and you will have no hope until the evening or the next evening till another toy train comes along to take you to proper civilisation. Till then, you can spread a mat and have a picnic. Even time will stand still and have a few sandwiches off you. And if you feel upto it, take the mat a few metres away from the station and you can make love in the open. No one is going to watch you, except a few monkeys maybe, and the birds and the bees. Why go all the way to a concrete jungle like Ooty?

We were, fortunately, not travelling all the way to Ooty. I had heard enough about the place to stop short of being seduced by it. My wife, who had already been there once, shared my sentiments. So we stopped one station short of Ooty. Coonoor it was.

If you have never been to this hill town, let me tell you that there are two Coonoors: Lower Coonoor and Upper Coonoor. Lower Coonoor is where the railway station and the bus stand are located, and it is as congested and ugly as the most congested part of your town or city -- no matter where you live. It is in Upper Coonoor where the real charm lies. The silence there is very British -- a reminder of the times when you had to walk for a while before you came to a cluster of shops from where you bought necessary items such as bread or medicines.

It is the walk that matters in the hills -- one moment you are overlooking a valley and the very next you are admiring a mountain and the lives of people living atop it. Either way, you are wowed. Fortunately, our destination, the 1885-built Coonoor Club, happens to be in Upper Coonoor. Thanks to its silence, I can relive every single moment of the toy train journey. Thanks to its silence, I can still hear the steam locomotive loud and clear, Dhadak, dhadak! Dhadak dhadak!

Marriage

Someone I know, who is just 22, is very upset these days. She had a fight with her boyfriend sometime ago and since then, he is refusing to talk to her. "How does one win back a man without seducing him? What do men want, really?" she asked me this evening.

While he remains uncommunicative, she has no idea whether they will eventually make up or break up. Though she would rather they make up, because she wants to marry him because they have been seeing each other for four years. But at the same time, she is prepared for a break-up as well.

In our society, whenever one acquires a girlfriend or a boyfriend, no matter how young you are, the idea is to get married. The girl and the boy first stake claim on each other and then go out on dates, rather than doing it the other way round. Either way, sex happens. If not sex, then almost sex -- this far but no further.

The root of many of problems when you are in your late teens or early twenties is the tying of every relationship to marriage. But this is a mistake we all make. We realise it to be a mistake only when we grow up and become wiser and then look back and laugh. When I got my first girlfriend at the age of 17 and broke the news to parents, my mother, always the emotional one, hit the roof and dragged me to the puja room and made me touch the feet of the gods and promise that I would never see the girl again. My father, as usual, was unruffled.

He told me, "When I was your age, I also had a lot of friends. But where are they today? I am not in touch with a single one. We have all moved on."

"But I've already told her that I will marry her. What will she feel if I back out now?"

"You are not going to be in school forever. When you grow up and see the world, you might just change your mind. Why rush into decisions now? You are not even in college."

But in the flush of youth, I refused to see his point. Eventually, experience won over impulse. Now when I look back, what a crime! -- choosing your life partner at an age when your facial hair has not even fully grown.

My father was 43 when he had this chat with me. Today, I am nearing 40 and I am perhaps wiser than him. Wiser because, unlike my father who remained committed to just one woman all his life till she died suddenly last year, I have far more experience in the field.

Age and experience teach you the difference between being fascinated and being practical. In my humble opinion, fascination rarely ends in happy marriage because you feel like running away the moment the bitterness of practicality sinks in. On the other hand, if you get married for practical reasons, the togetherness usually leads to fascination for each other.

Some years ago, I knew a woman, a Tamil Brahmin, who was 20 then. Or maybe 21. She was madly in love with a guy who belonged to a different religion. Even while she dreamt of marrying him, she dreaded the lifestyle changes she would have had to make in order to be a member of his family. But she didn't mind doing that: she said she was more than willing to adjust to the new lifestyle because she loved him so much.

Borrowing from my father's wisdom, I told her she was only wasting her time breaking her head over a relationship that was not going to work.

"How do you know it is not going to work?" she angrily demanded to know.

"Because I just know."

"I know why you are saying that. But I am going to marry only him, ok? Any problem?"

"No problem."

Just a couple of years after we had this conversation, she went to London for further studies. I was spared of the constant outpurings about her complicated love story. And then came an email, that she was finally getting married. The groom was a fellow Tam Brahm, someone she had fallen in love with in London. Hello, what happens to the time I had spent listening to the sob stories about an affair which I had predicted would never materialise?

So I won. My father won.

How I wish I could get back to my twenties armed with the wisdom I have earned in the past two decades. That, however, is impossible -- as impossible as people not making mistakes in the flush of youth. But I only hope people don't hinge the best and most productive years of their life on men or women who may never belong to them.

What would you prefer, really: marry someone and then go on a world tour, or go on a world tour and then decide who to marry? When I say world tour, I don't mean it in the literal sense. What I mean is the expansion of mental horizon.

Cumin And Curd

Reena Roy, the actress, thought he was Chinese. Can't blame her: most Indians still think that all people with Mongloid features belong either to China or Nepal. But in spite of his 'Chinese' looks, he blended so well with 'Indian' characters that he went on to become one of the top villains of Bollywood.

As far as my knowledge goes, only in one film did Danny Denzongpa actually play a Chinese, that too a half-Chinese. The film is Lahu Ke Do Rang, in which he turns out to be the half-brother of Vinod Khanna. Their father is a freedom fighter -- also played by Vinod Khanna -- who ends up sleeping with a Chinese woman who gives him shelter while he is escaping from British forces.

Other than that, Danny has always played 'Indian' characters. I have seen countless films of him, but the ones that stand out in my memory are Dhund and Jawaab. Both very powerful fims, minus the usual frills of Bollywood.

Danny, by the way, is -- or at least was -- a good singer too. Search for the song Sun sun kasam se from Kala Sona on You Tube, and you will know what I mean. He has sung it so well that one of the two persons who posted this song on You Tube has credited the male voice to Shailendra Singh, blissfully unaware that it was Danny who did the playback under the baton of R.D. Burman.

This is one song I listen to when I am struck by hypochondria, and it does cure me most of the time. Danny, after all, is a man of clean habits -- someone you can look up to if you want to lead a healthy life. Way back in 1994, when I was a journalist on probation with the Press Trust of India in Delhi, one of my jobs was to scan all the 12 newspapers published from Delhi at the time and make a report on how the PTI had scored against its rival, the UNI, or the United News of India.

One Sunday morning, while scanning the papers, I came across an interview of Danny in The Sunday Observer. It was one of those interviews that changed your life or least inspired you to make amends. But those days, as a young bachelor, I could only feel inspired because there was no provision to make amends. The interview was about the eating habits of Danny.

Sadly, there was no internet then, and the newspaper itself is defunct now, so neither can I produce a link nor can I paste a scanned copy. But it's all pasted in my head. I can sum up for you what I had read then:

Danny hates eating out. He does not trust any food other than what is cooked in his kitchen, with spices brought from Sikkim, where he hails from. He loves jeera, or cumin, because he believes it can make even the blandest of dishes interesting. One evening, Danny and Jackie Shroff were attending a Bollywood party when they scooted just when dinner was about to be served. They did not want to eat the rich dinner, so they returned to Danny's home.

Since it was late in the night, the servants were fast asleep. Danny decided to cook himself. He opened the fridge and found a few brinjals. He cut them into small pieces. He then heated a spoonful of oil in a frying pan and spluttered cumin seeds and added the brinjal pieces. Jackie, who had found a couple of green apples in the fridge, wondered why they could't be chopped and put into the pan as well. Danny thought that was a good idea. When the brinjal and the apple pieces were mildly fried, seasoned by jeera, he added curd to the pan and covered it.

Whatever came out must have been delicious. They had the brinjal-apple dish with bread, accompanied by a bottle of red wine that Jackie had just opened. A perfect dinner. From the interview, I also gathered that Danny, whenever he was shooting outdoors, always sent his boy to the nearest village to get the local, freshly-cooked food. If nothing else, just curd and rice.

I got to emulate Danny Denzongpa only seven years later when I came to Chennai in 2001, when I finally had a functional kitchen of my own. And I realised that any vegetable, no matter how much you hate it, tastes heavenly when you season it with cumin seeds and add curd to it. Cumin and curd are a deadly and a delicious combo.

Aging Is His Enemy

Accomplished yoga gurus are unlikely to have enemies, but the legendary BKS Iyengar has one: aging.

"Nonsense!" That’s been his standard, typical one-word response whenever someone has tried suggesting that he should take it easy because he was getting old. "When you are young, the body has tremendous strength. As you grow old, vitality drops and fear complex sets in. But why should one stop doing what one has been doing for years just because of age? I fought the fear complex and I won," declares Iyengar, the Pune-based yoga guru who will turn 92 in a few months.

The victory is written all over his face: not a single wrinkle, even though the flowing hair is silver. The spine is straight and the chest spread wide. Even today, he devotes four hours daily to yoga practice.

"I wake up at six, and 6.30 to 7.30 I do pranayama. Then I read the papers to know what’s happening in the world. From 9 to 12, I do asanas non-stop. Earlier I used to more asanas, but now I do less asanas but hold them for a longer time, till I am able to penetrate into my inner self and realise that my body is getting refreshed," says the yoga legend, who began his yoga pratice in 1934 in Mysore.

It was strict discipline and commitment to yoga that saw him through the vicissitudes of life, including those initial difficult years in Pune when schools or colleges would make him wait for hours and finally ask him to come some other day. Salvation came in 1954 when Yehudi Menuhin, the renowned violinist and conductor who then on a tour of India, was overcome by a nervous attack. Iyengar set him right in a matter of hours, after which Menuhin invited him to teach in Switzerland. The rest, as they say, is history.

But unlike many yoga gurus of today who use their Western connection to make money, Iyengar remains humble and committed to his practice. He still does the headstand for 30 minutes, besides the shoulderstand and other inversions -- these are the poses that postpone the onset of old age. "Even today my feet don’t oscillate even a bit when I do the headstand," says Iyengar.

Post-yoga, it is time for bath and lunch, after which he heads to his yoga institute where he sits in the library to work on his new book. Iyengar has authored a number of books, including the Light On Yoga, often considered to be a Bible of yoga. "The new book will decode Patanji’s yoga sutras for the common man, especially the younger generation. The depth of the sutras shall be retained, but the words will be simple," he says.

At six he heads back home. Time to watch TV. "Sometimes I watch movies, sometimes serials. I also like watching National Geographic," says the guru. His favourite movies include "CID movies" and comedies. Nine-thirty is dinner time, followed by some more television. By 10.30 pm, one of the world’s most famous yoga gurus is asleep. Iyengar’s guru, the revered T Krishnamacharya, had lived till the age of 100. He died in Chennai in 1989. Another disciple of Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois, who found the ashtanga yoga and was teacher to stars like Madonna and Sting, died in Mysore last year at the age of 94.

Iyengar’s precription for staying young even at 91, apart from regular yoga practice: "I never think of the past. I live in the present. I live moment to moment. I reflect. I reflect when I am holding my poses. That keeps me refreshed."

R Replies

M never replied, but R did. She wants it to be published, like newspapers publish letters to the editor. Here goes:

Dear B,

I think what you are going through is the emotional equivalent of the aftermath of too much porn.

This is the classic tragedy of male-female relationships, men have sex, women make love. Men orgasm in seconds, women orgasm long after their men have left them. Men will give a part of themselves, women will give themselves wholly. Seems to me M made the classic mistake of revealing herself to you too completely. But one cannot blame her. You are like a flame, and us fans are like moths, drawn to you. As long as we are protected by the glass we futilely beat against we are safe, but come to close and we will singe! On the exterior you are a smoking, drinking give a damn, writer, but underneath all that there exists a man far more perceptive to women than the image suggests. A man who reeks of danger, but can see through to the heart of a woman, make her feel like she is the most important person in the world... It is a potent combination that your M probably never stood a chance in the face off!

But what confounds me is why you want to skew the beautiful equation you seem to share with your M. Why not just savor a relationship that few people are lucky to find? Why question to M about What you are? Who you are?

Does it really matter? If two people's minds ignite, and the mind is the biggest aphrodisiac why bring it down to the level of a personal touch? I mean B, face it, a man and a woman could never connect quite so strongly if they did not belong to opposite sexes. Men and women can be friends but the underlying chemistry that seasons their relationship is what makes it so irrisisitable. Those little chats about sex you have with your M are tasty because they are flavoured with attraction and seasoned with the bitter knowledge of never seeing a conclusion. Do you really want to risk what you have for a physical touch that might not amount to as much?

And like the quintessential man, you lay the blame at her feet, or at the door of technology, everywhere but yourself. Did you have nothing to do with this?

The internet is a dangerous addiction, it can take away our loneliness by creating an illusion of a world the way we want it to be and yet it can also isolate us more than we ever imagined by becoming bigger than life itself and separating us from real life and the real relationships we a fortunate to have. But we should not blame the internet or the Mobile phone for our weaknesses, they are only tools that become an extension to achieving our desires. It is up to us to use them well, to stop at the invisible line beyond which decadent indulgence becomes a corrosive poison.

I think, M should make it so you only get virtual hints of skin to tantalize you from now on, and delete your number from her phone!

R

The Personal Touch

Dear M,

It is 4.30 in the morning. By now a man with clean habits should be waking up to take on the new day. But I prefer to see the new day in before going to sleep. That way, I have an upper hand. It is so much better to catch the sun in its nappies than let its rays catch you in your underwear.

By the time I finish writing to you, the sky outside my window would just be beginning to light up. I had to write to you tonight because I want to tell you a few things -- things that have been weighing heavily on my mind of late. We have been talking, off and on, almost the entire day, over phone and internet, but somehow it didn't occur to me to tell you things that I am going to say now. Right now there is calm, and I can think.

You live in Bombay, I live in Chennai. How I wish we lived in the same city, preferably in Bombay. There, we could meet every evening for an hour, just to catch up. We could sit at a spot on Marine Drive, watching the sun dip right in front of us. Or maybe some place in Bandra. Just like Amol Palekar and Tina Munim in Baaton Baaton Main. How I wish I could fly back to that era, don't you?

In that hour we spend together, we could talk; or maybe not talk but just hold hands and watch what's going around us. It is your physical presence that would matter. Being with you would be a relief, a respite, a revival. I would go back home recharged, with fresh hope -- if not anything else, the hope to see you again the next evening at the same spot.

You have no idea how much I crave for your physical presence. In the two years that I have known you, how little have we actually met and had a chat: maybe four or five times? That's about it! Yet we have a minute-by-minute account of what is going on in each other's lives because we are connected 24/7. I see you online most of the day, and you have a fair idea what my day is like. Vice-versa too. When we are not online, we are just a text message or a phone call away. In fact, we are so used to seeing each other online that the moment one of us goes offline for longer than usual, the other gets worried. Remember the other day when I called you at two in the morning, just because you had been missing all day? And how two days ago, when I was attending a friend's wedding anniversary party and the battery of my phone had died, I received a bunch of panicky messages once I got home and put the phone on charge?

That makes me wonder about our relationship: What are we? Who are we? Mere online entities, online friends, who recognise each other by Gmail IDs or the names fed into the mobile phones? Even when it comes to having sex, we get naughty on the chat window and feel gratified. What happens to the flesh? What happens to the touch? What's the point in going to the gym and looking look when the person who you desire and want to be desired by is merely an online entity?

It's not just about sex, M. When did you last catch up with a friend and had a good time? Not in a long, long time, I am sure. Same with me: I can't recall when was the last time I met up with a friend without a specific purpose. Because for non-specific purposes, you can always go online or pick up the phone. The personal touch is dead, and that's what I miss. Really, I don't want friends who have an hour-by-hour account of what my day is like. I crave for friends with who I can spend an hour with, face to face, and feel like a normal human being rather than an online entity.

To tell you the truth, M, the thought that you are available to me 24/7 is somewhat putting off. You shouldn't be so readily available, because it affects your desirability. Availability and desirability do not go hand in hand. So log off and show me your real self. Just imagine going back to the days of Baaton Baaton Main.

The biggest culprit, I tell you, is the mobile phone. It weighs only a few grams, but it makes you carry the weight of several human beings who are attached to your life. Even worse is the internet, which weighs nothing but upon which relationships weighing tons are built. But what are relationships without the personal touch?

Shall we throw our mobile phones into the sea and log out of internet? Amol Palekar and Tina Munim lived happily ever after in Baaton Baaton Main even without present-day gadgets. Maybe if they had internet connnection back then, the film would have been titled Raaton Raaton Main.

Feminine Touch

Then she told me:

"And once, you know, there was this pretty girl standing close to me in the bus. Even when the crowd had melted away, I just stood close to her for no reason at all. I enjoyed each time our hands touched. She was pretty and fair. The feel of her white skin against mine, that perked me.

One more thing. Her breasts were touching my upper arms. She was totally unaware I was taking advantage of her. Poor girl, she was so trusting. I think I enjoy the feminine touch. Not that I want sex or anything. I think I know where it originates from."

Of Samosas And Abuses

Bhaiyyon aur behenon, it's time for some chai-samosa and gaali-galauj.

As many of you know, I was born in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh and lived there for the first 23 years of my life and go there at least once every year. Two things I miss about living in Uttar Pradesh: the samosas and the gaalis. Both lend flavour to the culture that bred me. This Sunday afternoon, as I pour myself some beer after a late breakfast of dosas and coconut chutney, my tongue is suddenly craving for Tiwariji's samosas and my ears are yearning to overhear some gaalis.

Before we proceed, let me caution you that this post is not for the genteel reader who gets easily offended by or cringes at the mention of obscene abusive words. So if you are the kind who plugs fingers into your ears whenever you find two men fighting and showering abuses on each other, my apologies to you: kindly skip this and proceed to my previous posts. Better still, read the post and pretend that you haven't.

My deepest apologies also to Mother Ganga, for writing this dirty post on the Ganga Mail. But then, it is in her lap that these profanities that I am going to showcase have prospered over the centuries. Also, what is the big deal: many Indian writers, starting with Khushwant Singh and Shobhaa De, have used dirty Hindi words in their books.

Just that dirty words sound dirtier when mentioned in Hindi or any vernacular language. 'Fuck' is so commonplace these days that no one bats an eyelid either while uttering it or listening to it. Now try saying the same word in Hindi (though 'fuck' or 'fuck you', as an exclamation, does not have an accurate equivalent in any other Indian language unless you bring in mothers and sisters into the picture) and it will sound crude. But that does not absolve you of the crime: why should 'fuck' be sexy and acceptable and its Hindi translation crude? We need to break the colonial mindset. So here goes.

First, the samosas though. Tiwariji runs a mithai shop in my neighbourhood in Kanpur. His samosas, I can vouch for it, are the best I've ever had. Too sad he will never get to read this blog. There are other shops in the neighbourhood which make samosas that are almost as good, only that they fry fresh samosas at particular times of the day -- usually at eight in the morning and five in the evening. You are extremely lucky if you happen to be at any of these shops when a bunch of samosas is just being ladled out of the boiling oil. Tiwariji's shop, however, has a heated glass case that keeps samosas fresh and warm long after they have been ladled out.

Outside of Uttar Pradesh, the samosas have been utterly disappointing for me. A good samosa, according to me, has a crisp shell: the moment you bite into it, you run into mashed potato flavoured with fried cumin, roasted cumin powder and dried mango powder. But in samosas that I've had elsewhere, the shell is hard and oily, and once you break through it, you find mashed potato richly embellished with paneer or other local delicacies. Worse, I have never seen them being freshly fried: the attendant heats it up for you in the microwave oven. What the fuck! Samosas and jalebis are something that become immensely delectable only when a karhai filled with oil is in sight.

Samosas being freshly fried for you: they are symbols of small-town innocence and honesty that become more defined as you move towards eastern Uttar Pradesh. Land up in any roadside shop in eastern UP, especially in a small town by the Ganga, and have a glass of tea and two samosas -- you will remember the experience for the rest of your life. That's the true flavour of Uttar Pradesh!

Now the other flavour -- the gaalis. As long as you are not the recipient, the gaalis are as delectable as the samosas. The gaalis, even though crude, have a certain zaayka (tang) and tehzeeb (good mannners). The same gaalis, by the time they reach Delhi, become more Punjabi and crude to listen to. But within the borders of Uttar Pradesh, they are so listenable and I so miss them.

"Teri maa ka bhosra!" These were the precise words that woke me up on the morning November 2, 1984. Indira Gandhi had just been assassinated, and there was curfew in most of north India, including Kanpur. People were supposed to be indoors. On that sunny winter morning, a policeman on a bicycle mouthed these dirty words as he chased the last of the cricket-playing boys out of the ground that my house overlooked. It was so funny, and still not so funny.

The best abuses come out spontaneously during day-to-day situations, be it a boy arguing with a friend, be it a police constable scolding a tempo driver, or two colleagues having a heated discussion. But when two men at each others throats exchange abuses, it's the right time to listen in and build your vocabulary of bad words.

Sitting in Chennai, however, these are some of the common expressions that I sorely miss:

"Aukat mein raho, samjhe? Nahin to gaand kaat denge tumhari."

"Jis din gaand kaat ke haath mein de diya na, sab rangbaazi utar jaayegi, samjhe bhosrikey?"

"Teri maiyya chodoon."

"Jab gaand pe do laath padegi, tab samajh mein aayega."

What kickass statements! There are many more. Many, many more. But it's time for lunch. So got to go.

On The Ganga Mail. Destination: Salvation

It turns out that my previous post, on the moon, was the 400th on Ganga Mail. A nice way to touch the four-century mark, considering that I quite like the moon post. It could have been better -- but that's always the case.

By now, after four and a half years and four hundred posts, I realise there is enough on Ganga Mail to make for a voluminous, autobiographical book. Alas, publishers don't touch blogs, unless you are a 'name'. About two years ago, during one of those moments of high when I felt Ganga Mail could be a book, I wrote to a publisher. The reply, surprisingly, was prompt: "Unfortunately we do not publish blogs. Please get in touch with us when you have written a novel."

Well, you can't really publish a blog. A blog is something already published. How can you publish the published? But there are people who are either allergic to or ignorant about the internet, and people who derive the pleasure of reading only from printed pages and not with the help of the scroll-down key. When you hold a book in your hands, the author belongs to you, at least for the moment; but when you read him on the internet, he is just one of the many people out there: if you don't like a particular piece, you hop over into the arms of others who are eagerly waiting for your attention.

So yes, it would be nice to see Ganga Mail in the form of a book, especially because it encapsulates the journey of a man who was still a boy even at 35 -- at times petulant, at times lonely, at times adventurous -- and who is now trying to grow up as he nears 40. And strangely, for me, it was during these five years that life-changing moments chose to visit me, one after the other, after having ignored me for three and a half decades: I got a wife, I lost my mother, I had a book published.

Ganga Mail effectively captures -- or so I think -- the various rollercoaster rides that I've had in recent years. It is, basically, an account of my life. It would be extremely gratifying to see readers carrying the account, in the form of a book, in their hands. Not because of vanity, but because my story is their story too -- only the circumstances and the timings might be different. Nothing can be more satisfying for a writer than finding readers discovering themselves in the sentences written by him. Someday, someday soon -- when many of the posts I've written are altered and expanded to be accommodated in a new book!

But irrespective of that, Ganga Mail continues to be the evidence of my existence. It is the most authentic bio-data that I can ever boast of, provided you take the trouble of wading through the archives. What I may appear to you in person might just be make-believe, but what I am in Ganga Mail is real, very real. Ganga Mail is my secret diary which I have left open for all to see.

The Moon

I live on the fourth, the topmost floor, of a building that has no lift. Every night when I get home, which is around midnight, I have to negotiate eight flights of stairs in total darkness since the watchman would have long switched off the lights and gone to sleep. Since I can climb the stairs blind-folded, thanks to years of familiarity, I haven't felt the need to ask the watchman to keep the lights on.

But the other night, something magical happened. As I got into the staircase, mentally prepared to climb up in darkness, I found it gently lit up. I looked up. The tubelight was switched off, as usual. Perhaps a neighbour's door was open, letting the light out? That was the not the case either. Then I spotted the source of the silvery light: the moon. Oh, I had forgotten that the moon gives light. So I climbed slowly, guided by the natural light of the night at every alternate flight of stairs, trying to recall when was the last time I did something under the moonlight.

I could not recall then, but I remember now. It was in Kanpur, four or five summers ago, when I was drinking with my brother on the terrace of our house. It was like drinking under the glow of nature's zero-watt lamp: gentle, but bright enough to see the facial features of people around you and even read the label on the whiskey bottle. It is only when you do nothing that you notice the moon, and it is only in Kanpur that I do nothing.

The moon, however, has always been there. It still shines the way it shone when poets and songwriters were inspired by it. Only that we don't notice it anymore because we neither have the time nor the place. Today we all live in flats, in which the sky visible from the window is as good as a wall; and even if we have a terrace, who really has the time to go there and bathe in the moonlight? I can only hope that Uncle Moon, pissed off by the lack of attention and admiration he has been enjoying for centuries, does not decide to stop shining. You never know know, he might just tell you one fine day: "You silly buggers, you deserve tubelights and neon lights. I am off. Don't call me again."

I hope the day doesn't come till I've fulfilled two desires of mine. One, to throw a moonlight, or moonlit, bash in a farmhouse (preferably by the sea) where the dance floor and the bar are illuminated solely by the full moon. How gorgeous the women would look in the silvery glow!

Desire number two, to make love on a charpoy on the terrace of a house in a small town where no building is tall and close enough to overlook the terrace you are holed up in. The gentle light of the moon lets you see what you want to see, and yet it doesn't let you see what she doesn't want you to see.

The Magic Of 50 Paise

Here's a thought -- rather a scheme -- that comes to my mind once in a while. Alas, it is going to remain a thought and in never going to materialise, but no harm sharing it with you all. Who knows, some of you may even thank me.

What does one rupee mean to you? Forget one rupee, what does a 50-paise coin mean to you? Nothing, right? Even a beggar considers it an insult when you drop a 50-paise coin onto his or her palm. And it is only once in a blue moon that you actually find a 50-paise in your wallet these days. If a one-rupee or a 50-paise coin drops off your pocket, you are most likely to let it go because in order to pick it up, you have to bend, and bending can be such a pain, more painful than losing just half a rupee.

Such a useless piece of metal, the 50-paise coin! What can it get you these days, apart from a toffee? Even matchboxes cost Re 1. In other words, a 50-paise coin is something anyone can part with, even the poorest of the poor.

Now let's do the math. The population of India, till a couple of years ago, stood at 1,139,964,932. Assuming that on the average, four people make a household, the figure tranlates into 2,84,991,233 households. Go to each of these households and beg/ask for a 50-paise coin. If your ego comes in the way, invent a cause: child care, cancer care, saving the planet, saving the animals, and so on. Your enterprise will increase your bank balance by Rs 1,42,495,616! The idea might sound a joke, but the money isn't!

By my calculation (I am a bit drunk now), the amount works out to Rs 14 crore. Even if you invest Rs 4 crore in reaching every nook and corner of India to collect the 50-paise coin from each household, you are still left with Rs 10 crore. Ten fucking crores! And considering that lakhs of sympathetic households will oblige you with a lot more than just 50 paise, you can easily add a few more crores to the amount collected. That should make you worth about, say, Rs 15 crore. Fifteen fucking crores! You can either buy a house in London or a house each in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata.

Too lazy to travel or plan for things outside your city? Never mind. Stick to your city. The population of Chennai, I am told, is 4,631,704. By my calcutation, that should work out to 1,157,926 households. Now go to every household and ask for a 50-paise coin, and in no time you will be richer by Rs 5,78,963. Nearly Rs 6 lakh! And considering that thousands of sympathetic households will oblige you with a lot more than just 50 paise, you can easily be richer by Rs 10 lakh overnight!

Now imagine if you were to collect one rupee instead of 50 paise from every household by coming up with a scheme, 'Save the planet: one household, one rupee.' You would be richer by Rs 20 lakh overnight. Considering that thousands of sympathetic households and business houses will oblige you with a lot more than just one rupee, you can safely hope to make Rs 30 or Rs 40 lakh overnight. Who needs a housing loan from HDFC?

If you are shamelessly lazy enough to venture out of even your neighbourhood, then collect Re 1 from every household in, say, T Nagar or Adyar. In a matter of weeks, you would collect enough to make a trip to Bangkok and get a Thai massage, if not a trip to Paris. I would chose Paris, to take a look at the cafes where Hemingway wrote. But I just don't have the time to beg for so much of money, so I would rather earn it one of these days and take off. But then, it is not a bad idea at all: to go door to door and ask for 50 paise.

The Hawker

Whenever I am in Kanpur, I am woken up, every morning, by the call of the vegetable hawker. He pushes his cart, or the thela, street to street, calling out the names of the vegetables sitting in small heaps on the cart. It can be very irritating to be woken up by a shrill voice drilling into your ears, but each morning, the moment I go up to the terrace and light my first cigarette of the day, I forgive the hawker. He is, after all, doing his job.

It is not easy being a hawker. You are the managing director-cum-salesman of your one-man company whose fortunes vary day to day. The company's policy is clear: keep starvation at bay. So each hawker comes up with a signature tune to get housewives out of their homes and wave him down. I don't know if hawkers try out various ways of calling out before settling for one particular style that catches their fancy, or whether they naturally evolve a style during their initial days on the job. Either way, they know how to be effective.

Why don't you ever miss the call, Chai! chai!, which usually modulates into a throaty Chaayeh! chaayey!, at railway stations? Not only that: the way he calls out actually makes you want to have tea!

Ditto for the vegetable hawker. There are usually about half a dozen varieties of vegetables adorning his cart. So which vegetable should figure first and which the last in his self-made, crude, orchestra-less jingle? And what should be the order of the vegetables that find mention in between? Obviously, there is a method to it -- a secret the hawker alone knows. All I know is that he is bloody effective: the modulation in his voice tickles your gastric juices and makes you buy his stuff. He spares you a trip to the vegetable shop or the supermarket, while you spare him of poverty -- at least for that day. In other words, his target for the day has been achieved.

Now look at the number of CEOs who, in spite of sporting medals of education and experience on their chests, keep getting fired every other day for failing to achieve targets. And this guy, the hawker, is not even educated. He is not even a poet or a lyricist or a copywriter. Yet he is able to compose a one-liner and set it to a tune that is catchy enough to draw housewives out of their houses and flock to his cart.

The way I look at it, the CEO merely seeks to implement what he has learnt in the classroom, whereas the hawker, who has never seen a classroom, has his finger on the pulse of his target audience. You will notice one thing about them: no hawker ever apes the other. Each one tries to be distinctly different while calling out.

Also, classroom-educated CEOs are usually scared to deviate from what they've read in the textbooks. They are scared to take risks. The hawker, on the other hand, has no textbooks to fall back on. Hardship is his textbook, and he does not hesitate taking risks because he has nothing to lose. It is, therefore, not surprising at all that many of the business magnates who get written about in the papers today were once upon a time hawkers or petty shopkeepers.

Of what use, then, is qualification? Qualification, at best, can earn you bread and butter and maybe a decent life. That's about it. It won't take you up there, where you want to be. Dhirubhai Ambani never went to a business school, Amitabh Bachchan never went to the film institute, Hemingway did not take a course in creative writing, Mahendra Singh Dhoni did not enrol in an expensive cricket academy, Capt. Gopinath was only a pilot and not a businessman -- the list is endless. The finest sub-editor I've ever come across, Peter Mosley, the former and highly respected news editor of Reuters, never went to a journalism school. I spent two weeks with him in London, learning the nuances of news writing and editing, and the humble man never shied away from mentioning that he started off his career in Reuters as the boy who served tea.

Why are these people what they are? Because, in some way or the other, they are like the hawker who wakes me every morning when I am in Kanpur.

Dinner Date

Tonight I was about to write about Kishore Kumar, because this morning I read something very heart-warming about him. But about an hour ago, two friends -- a man and a woman -- happened to be passing my house and they asked me if I could come down to say Hi. They thought it was too late for them to come up. So I pulled a T-shirt over my lungi and went down and sat in their car.

Thirty minutes past midnight. Murugesan Street at its quietest best. Good time to talk. We enquired about one another's work, about common friends, and also discussed people who may not be common friends but of interest to us. This man, that woman, the babe we met the other day, the good-looking guy who has not been seen for a long time, and so on. The enquiries about the men did not interest me much -- how do I care, but my antenna was very much up when the women's names were being lobbed. The kind of names that sizzled in the chilled air inside the car: the charming best of Chennai! But then, these friends of mine happen to be high-society people, who consider any drink other than wine with suspicion. Whereas I buy my quota of alcohol from the government-run 'wine shops' and have spent most of my life in Chennai drinking from the filthy, dingy bars attached to these shops.

Whether you are a 'wine' man or a 'wine shop' man, who doesn't like to hear about women, that too when the women in question are worth aspiring for? I knew of most of the women whose names were mentioned, but I did not know anyone -- not even remotely. When one particular name was mentioned, I felt a little emboldened to press for more info, and my friend, the man, said in his clipped accent:

"Well, she is the hottest babe I know. But if you really want to know her, you probably have to take her out to dinner in one of the best places in town. Get her the best wine, the best food, only then she might agree to come."

"Oh really," I found myself whispering. He had heard it.

"Why not? Just imagine this, when she comes, she is going to dress up for you. What more do you want, brother?"

I have this terrible habit: the moment a scenario occurs to me or is described to me, I lose no time imagining it. So there I am, with Ms X or Ms Y, at the table of a dimly-lit restaurant with only a candle and a bottle of wine separating us. Two waiters are standing at a respectable distance, just in case we need something. She gets up to go to the restroom, and that's when I check out her posterior, and when she walks back, I try to assess the overall package from a distance and quickly return my gaze to the glass of wine the moment she reclaims her seat. There has been no conversation so far, only small talk. More small talk over the pasta that follows. And then the waiter gets the bill: Rs 4730! The waiters deserve 10% of it as tip, but it is much easier to square off the amount by adding another Rs 270. So Rs 5000! -- only to check out a woman! No, thanks. No, really, thanks. I would rather have a woman take me out in order to check me out -- oh, I am just joking!

But seriously, think of the things you can do with Rs 5000: you can buy 10 best DVDs of your choice, or 25 books that you always wanted to buy but never had the money to buy them in one go, or, simply, stock up on you month's quota of liquor that will perhaps make you write 50,000 words of sensible stuff. Who needs a woman!

But you need women, of course. I mean, why the hell are you slogging, after all. But the kind of women that help you slog and share your spoils are not the kind who expect to be taken out for an expensive dinner before they decide to set foot into your world. They set foot on your world, and you set foot into theirs, only because two wires have connected. Why let the hotel play the prohibitively expensive electrician who merely touches two wires to see whether sparks emanate? What if there are no sparks -- the money goes down the drain, doesn't it?

My approach has always been simple: get a local electrician to connect the two wires first. He won't charge you more than Rs 10. If there is a spark, you can regally stride into a candle-lit restaurant and get down to the business of feeling good, unfettered by anxiety and the obligation of making small talk. Chances are even she might foot the bill!

In any case, the route from the bed to the candle-lit restaurant is any day more gratifying and sunlit than the anticipated route from the restaurant to the bed, which usually stinks of a scheme and is fraught with uncertainties.

So where do you find the electrician? Well, you don't even have to dial for him. All you need to do is log on. If she says 'definite' instead of 'definate', you know the electrician has got the right set of wires to connect. And if the first sentence she types or writes makes you want her to type many more, then you know the sparks are beginning to fly. And if her sentences make you toss and turn in bed, then the sparks are flying full-fledged. You are on. You have checked her out, without spending a penny! Oh fuck the money, we are talking about quality.

Tell me honestly: would you prefer a woman who doesn't know you and dresses up to impress you, or a woman who knows you well and still dresses up only for you?

Touch

Touch. It is perhaps the most deceptive word in any language. On the face of it, it is all about the surface, but in reality, it digs into your depths.

'Touch' is a word that denotes the most superficial and harmless of acts, physically speaking, yet it invariably acts like a ladle that plunges deep into your mind or body and stirs your insides, bringing to the surface what is hidden deep inside and sending to the bottom what floats on the surface.

The touch of a live electric wire can kill a man, while the touch of a woman he desires can bring a dead man alive. On the other hand, the accidental touch of shoulders between a man and a woman deeply desiring each other but who have not yet touched each other so far can electrify the atmosphere -- be it a crowded bus or a claustrophobic elevator or the hallowed corridor in the workplace.

When you have to pacify a child who has not done well in the exams or has lost a football match, you begin with a touch. When you want to console a friend for a death in his or her family, you gently place your hand on the shoulder. The touch has always the desired effect as long as it is an honest one: the feelings permeate the flesh and the bones and reach the desired destination that is located deep inside.

Even in bed, the wildest of actions begin with a touch. She may be well aware what is on your mind, and you may have a fair idea what's on her mind too (or else why'd she be there in the first place?), but you still have to follow the protocol of 'touch'. Doesn't matter if the fingers touch the fingers, toes touch the toes, shoulder touches the shoulder, or something else touches something else. But touch one must. Or else what is the difference between a dog who will make a dash for the mutton biryani at a buffet, and a human who will first have some soup (even if he is not used to having soups), then lift a plate and queue up and allow some biryani to be served onto it?

Once the biryani is on the plate, it does not matter how you eat it: like a dog or a human. But if you are a human, you have to go through the drill of touching, in this case a warm ceramic plate.

Today, most of us have everything we need on our platter, yet we lack -- and crave for -- the basic thing that stokes wants in life: the touch. It is not as if touch is in short supply. Touch, in fact, is in abundance. You only have to stretch out your hand to touch or to be touched. But elusive, forever, is the touch you most crave for, and the object you most want to touch.

Why did I write about 'touch' tonight?

This morning, I went to Sholinganallur, a township on the outskirts of Chennai. In the peak-hour traffic, I noticed a bike snailing alongside my car. Astride it was a young, handsome couple. Since I do not drive and like to be on the backseat smoking a cigarette and watching the world go past, I had the luxury of taking a close look at the couple. In spite of his helmet, I could tell that the man was in his late 20's. He was well-built. The woman on the pillion was just my kind of woman: a dizzying beauty who perhaps did not have a mirror at home to tell her what a head-turner she was. She sat rather awkwardly on the bike, squinting under the sun. I almost held open the door for her, "Babe, just step in." But the words that actually escaped my breath were, "Wow, what a couple!"

The traffic began to move. So did the bike. That's when it struck me: they were not a couple. The woman, all through the bike ride, had just one preoccupation: not to let her breasts touch the man's back. The traffic came to a sudden halt every now and then, but she held on tightly to the grip at the backseat to save her chest from the man driving her. Finally, at one traffic junction, when the red light was still on, she climbed down from the bike and waved goodbye to the man. The man smiled and waved back and became part of the general traffic: my eyes were no longer following him.

But the eyes at the back of my mind still followed the woman, who was now long lost behind in the chaos. Who was she? What did she really mean to the man who had just transported her from point A to point B? One could spend a lifetime guessing that, but one thing is sure: the woman had ensured to keep something completely out of the way -- the touch. And that goes on to show the importance of a touch in human lives and the kind of things it can trigger, even if accidental.

Template, Contemplate

Of late I have been thinking of changing the template of my blog. It is a minimalist template, the sort I like, but it does not have many features or applications that present-day templates have. Not that I really need those features, but when I see other people's blogs, I feel outdated. I guess it is time to change.

Yet I am hesitant. For one, it is tedious to look for a template that suits your taste, especially if you are looking for a minimalist template. I am yet to come across one that would make me abandon, without regrets, this particular template that I have been faithful to for over four years now. Had I been a techie, I would have meddled around with the codes and created one to my liking. So that's one obstacle.

Obstacle no. 2 is my own mindset. The look of this blog is the only thing about me that has remained unchanged over the past four years. Everything else has changed and is changing rather rapidly. This is the only relic that remains from the era of happiness, like a grandfather's pipe or pen. Should I exchange it for a new pen?

I remain undecided. The Ganga, meanwhile, continues to flow.

Best Days Of My Life

Supposing I was Guru Dutt, who lived for 39 years and three months, I would have been dead for over a month now. But what a shameful death it would have been: nothing to leave behind for this world, nothing to show to the maker. God would have asked: "Why the fuck did I send you there?" Or exclaimed, Gabbar Singh-style, "Khaali haath aaye ho!"

Guru Dutt, if you look at the body of his work, comes across as a man who must have lived up to the age of 70 or 80. But in that short span of 39 years, an age when you are not grey enough to be taken seriously by the world, he built an university of cinema where thousands of people still enrol every year, as students as well as spectators.

To tell you the truth, I am not a great fan of black and white cinema. I find it very difficult to sit through Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar films and avoid them altogether, but somehow colour (or the absence of it) ceases to matter whenever I watch a Guru Dutt or a Dev Anand film. (Those days Guru Dutt and Dev Anand, both almost the same age, worked mostly together.) That's because their films were marked by intensity.

Intensity, in my opinion, is not something that can be forced upon you through melodrama, with actors going overboard with facial expressions and a dozen violins or the esraj playing a sad note in the background. Intensity is best conveyed when a film or a scene -- or even a book -- sits lightly on your shoulder, so lightly that you are able to make friends with the characters and step into their shoes. And after having stepped into their shoes, you feel their pain. That's intensity according to me, and that was the hallmark of Guru Dutt's films and many of Dev Anand's films with which Guru Dutt was associated.

There can't be another movie like Pyaasa. What the Taj Mahal is to India, Pyaasa is to this nation called Intensity. The intensity of the film was, in fact, was born out of a marriage between sensitivity and sensuality. The sensitivity of Guru Dutt, S.D. Burman, Mohammed Rafi, Hemant Kumar and, above all, Sahir Ludhianvi, married to the supressed sensuality of the women in the film, portrayed effectively in Geeta Dutt's voice, "Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo, janam safal ho jaye; hriday ki peeda deh ki agni, sab sheetal ho jaaye..." -- Take me in your arms, my love, so that I am fulfilled in this birth; so that the ache in my heart and the fire in my body are taken care of. What a song, erotic and yet so aesthetic.

This post is not about Guru Dutt, but about the body of work he left behind in spite of dying at 39 years and three months and how I, in spite of having outlived him by a month so far, have nothing to show for. I have only written one book (which hundreds of others have done in India alone), have maintained a blog for four years (which thousands of others have done too) and have a few hundred bylines to my credit (so do a few other millions). So what am I, the bloody fool, doing, in spite of knowing that time is running out?

I will tell you what this bloody fool is doing. As of now, he is thinking of getting a tattoo on his upper arm because he believes that will make him look sexy and also slow down his march towards middle age. Time does not recognise tattoos to be an enemy, but the fool is still wasting his time debating whether he should get the sun or the trident (Shiva's symbol) impaled on his arm. His wife, always the wise one, is laughing and convinced that he would not undertake such a misadventure in "old age."

But now, the other side of the story. What a bitch life is, a real cock-teaser: it first gives you a dozen examples that make you feel miserable about your existence, and just when you are on the verge of giving it all up, it presents you with examples that, no matter how old you are, make you jump in joy and drive you to the nearest gym, if not a tattoo parlour.

I think life has a way of testing you: whether you think by your balls or your brains. If you let the balls take over your life and let the brains rust, then the end is near. Very near. But if you let the brains do the thinking, you will recognise that the balls need servicing every now and then and you will take corrective measures as and when required.

Really, why should one give up at 39 or 40, when the fun has just begun? If Guru Dutt died at 39, there is Gabriel Gacrica Marquez who became a full-time writer only at 40 and went on to win the Nobel prize. Then there is Frank McCourt, a writer I recommend to all, who published his first book at the age of 66 and won the Pulitzer prize. At 66, in India, your ambitions are long buried and you wait for your funeral -- in the interim, you play with your grandchildren. Forty-two per cent of Robert Frost’s anthologised poems were written after the age of fifty. Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when he was forty-nine and Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at the age of fifty-eight.

In other words, I still have the time -- to fool around, to get a tattoo, and work towards my goal of being a writer (when I say writer, I mean someone who has the ability to write books that bring him enough money so that he does not have to worry about holding a regular job).

Come to think of it, these are the best days of my life. I am not as silly as I used to be when I was in my twenties, either as a person or a writer, though back then I believed I was the best. And I am more mature than what I used to be during my thirties. Today, as I near 40, I have learned how to combine the 'carefree' spirit of my 20's with the 'careful' approach I had adopted in my 30's. The end result is fun. Really, these are the best days of my life.

Things I Want To Know But Don't Know Who To Ask

1. Where is Sadashiv Amrapurkar, the man who played the dreaded villain in Hindi films in the late 1980's and early 1990's, these days?

2. Is Competition Success Review still published?

3. Do they still sell the Nirodh brand of condoms -- the yellow pack with a red strip running in the middle?

4. Are Mandrake the Magician and Phantom still alive?

5. Is there anything you can still get for 50 paise? Apart from a toffee and a match box?

6. How much does a post card cost these days? And an inland letter? And how many rupees do you need to spend to post an envelope?

7. Do they still air Sangeet Sarita and Hawa Mahal on Vividh Bharati? (Does anyone listen to Vividh Bharati at all?)

Flesh

Flesh for funeral
flesh for foodie
flesh for fun
your flesh or mine!

Living In The Present

This is one post I am writing more for myself. I wish to record a debate raging in my mind because thoughts, unless you put them down in words, can evaporate or change colour in no time, leaving you to scratch your head.

This is an exercise in seeking clarity, being convinced and arriving at a conclusion. Unless the debate is resolved, I am going to find it difficult to proceed with my next book, and I better find an answer by the time I finish writing this post.

The debate is: should the book, a portrait of Chennai, be written in the past-tense format or the present-tense format? On the face of it, it is a silly conflict: after all, what you write is more important than how you write. But how you write is very crucial in conveying what you write.

In case of a 500- or a 1000-word piece, the format, in my opinion, is quite irrelevant. But when you are setting out to write 60,000 to 100,000 words, you have to decide beforehand on a tone that will suit you narrative as well as hold the reader's attention.

I am still wondering what the reader will like:

The first rays of the morning sun burst through the curtains like flames leaping out of a dragon's mouth. I looked at the watch: 6 AM. I had set the alarm for seven. Ah, never mind. I just earned an extra hour of the morning freshness. I jumped out of the bed and walked to the door, still naked, to get the newspaper.

or

The first rays of the morning sun are bursting through the curtains like a dragon spewing fire. I look at the watch: 6 AM. I had set the alarm for seven. Ah, never mind. I have just earned an extra hour of the morning freshness. I jump out of the bed and walk to the door, still naked, to get the newspaper.

Both versions create vivid images in your mind, yet there is a difference. In the first version, the past-tense format, there is a sense of action. You are following a man who has been there, done that, and you want to know what happens next. In other words, you are always on the edge of the seat while reading.

But in the second version, the present-tense format, you, the reader, are very much a part of the narrative and therefore you don't feel compelled to be on the edge of the seat. On the contrary, you lie back and soak in the experiences of the narrator at your own pace, as if you were the narrator -- what more can a writer ask for!

Both formats, if the narrative is gripping enough, can pull readers. But you have to make a choice. I wrote Chai, Chai in the past-tense format, and it worked. But then, there was no other way of writing it. I wrote the book long after I had finished my travelling, and since the places I'd written about about were so faraway, geographically as well as in terms of the time that had elapsed, a past-tense description was the only honest way of presenting them.

But Chennai is the city where I live: the first few thousand words I have written so far for the new book have instinctively been in the present-tense format. That had me worried, though: is it possible to be lazy as well as racy? Shouldn't I replicate the past-tense format of Chai, Chai, which most people I know have read in just one sitting?

I sought the opinion of two trusted friends -- the only people I turn to for literary advice because they have good taste when it comes to good writing and tell you off politely if you don't match up to their expectations. Past tense or present tense, I asked them.

One of them said the present tense worked the best for her, but in case I had a doubt, I could always write out a passage in both the tenses and compare. The other friend turned out to be a big fan of the past tense, but she thoughtfully added that since I was writing about a city I was living in, the present-tense format made sense.

So that settled that. I was going to write in the present tense. But as a conscientous writer, you don't merely go by what friends tell you -- no matter how trusted or well-meaning they are. Their opinion adds to your conviction of course, but in order to be convinced, you need to find your own devices, your own reasoning.

Past-tense or present-tense format?

Almost all books documenting travels within India, including the ones I so admire, are written in the past-tense format. But that's mainly because the writer in question -- usually a white man -- would have typed out the manuscript long after leaving India. India, for him, was past tense. But one book which I have always considered as my Bible, Ved Mehta's A Portrait of India, turned out to be, to my immense relief, in the present-tense format.

I must have read the book about half-a-dozen times during the past 10 years, without caring about the form of the narrative. But this evening, I dug out the book and wiped off the dust and read a few passages all over again. I realised the present tense can be as gripping as the past tense, provided you know how to tell a story.

Ved Mehta is one writer I have always aspired to be. He is a blind man, but the way he describes sights, sounds and smells makes you feel jealous of his craft. A Portrait of India, which solved my dilemma in a matter of seconds, is long out of print and happens to be my only ill-gotten wealth. I got the book issued from a government library 12 years ago and chose not to return it. Why should I, when the book was acquired by the library on "7.X.1970", that is October 7, 1970, a good three months before I was born, and nobody bothered to get it issued for three long decades till my eyes fell on it?

Hotel

If there is any place I love other than my home, it is the hotel. I have stayed in the most splendid and the most sordid of them, but there is something common in them: they have let me be. A friend's home may be as warm as your own, but still it's a friend's home, not yours. You can't laze around naked, unless the chemistry between you and your friend is such that you are better off without clothes; you have to eat what everybody else eats and when everybody else eats; and, above all, you can't be aloof whenever you want to be.

But a hotel room, as long as you are paying for it, is your tiny little kingdom. You don't have to lift your little finger: everything is at your beck and call. For a writer, there can't be a better place than a hotel to transform an idea into a manuscript, provided he has sufficient money (and leave, in case he is employed) to put himself up in a small, clean hotel, not necessarily fancy, in an exotic town. Paulo Coelho, as far as I know, lives in a hotel. He has two rooms to himself: in one he lives and in the other he writes. But then, he is Paulo Coelho: the royalties from The Alchemist alone must be sufficient enough to take care of the basic rent.

You don't really have to be a Paulo Coelho in order to afford a hotel where you can write in peace. In towns like, say, Kannur in Kerala or Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, you can get a fairly decent, airconditioned room for Rs 500 a day. Add another Rs 300 for food and drinks, which means you are spending only Rs 800 a day. And considering that a decent book can be written in a span of six weeks -- well, Evelyn Waugh took only that long -- you spend less than Rs 35,000 to turn in a manuscript. In the bargain, you also get to check out a new town.

The hotel can be a home but the home cannot be a hotel. When at home, the constant doorbells keep reminding you that you exist. But in a hotel, the choice is yours whether to declare if you are still alive. Home is where you are bound by responsibilities and commitments, but staying in a hotel is like being in a relationship with no strings attached: you can depart or return at your will. No one questions you, neither are you obliged to explain anything.

What can be a better way of starting the day: you get out of the bed and pull back the curtains and look out at a new town. You then call room service for tea or coffee, and over coffee, read the newspaper. If you have run out of cigarettes to give you company for coffee, you can always ask the waiter to get you a pack. And then the breakfast, which is always very special in a hotel, considering the choices you are offered. After a good breakfast, you can easily clock 2,000 words by lunchtime, when you order a beer and write another 1,000 words till the food, of your whim, is brought in by the waiter.

Whether you write after lunch or take a nap, the decision is purely yours -- there are no doorbells to answer or appointments to be kept. Around five in the evening, you take a walk around the town which you are now getting familiar with, treat yourself to some street food and return to the hotel by seven. You shower if you feel like, watch TV for a while and then order your drinks over phone. You sit down to write again, clocking another 2,000 words before it strikes you that you must eat something now. You don't have to go through your kitchen or fridge shelves to decide what's for dinner: there's a telephone within your arm's reach. And so the day ends, with you having done 5,000 words. Multiply that by 42, which is the equivalent of six weeks, and you have 2.5 lakh words to show for!

Considering that a regular book contains only 60,000 to one lakh words, you can perhaps take it a little easy and treat yourself to little pleasures of life that are best savoured in the privacy of a hotel room. But make sure you don't fall below 2,000 words a day.

So easy, isn't it? But then.

Ranganathan Street

From the second anniversary edition of Times Of India, Chennai:

A SHORT WALK DOWN DISCOUNT LANE

Ranganathan Street: The Spirit Never Sags At T Nagar’s Golden Mile For Shoppers

Bishwanath Ghosh | TNN

IF the people after whom streets are named got paid a small token amount, say 50 paise, for every footfall, then the kin of Rangaswamy Iyengar would easily be one of the richest families in India. Not that Rangaswamy Iyengar would have accepted the money: the sub-collector of Madras Presidency, who built a house in T Nagar after retirement, was so humble and god-fearing that when the civic authorities suggested that the street on which he lived be named after him, he requested them to name it after Lord Ranganatha instead. So, what was about to be called Rangaswamy Street became Ranganathan Street.

If you want to punish someone for a heinous crime without being brutal, make him count the number of people on Ranganathan Street from 10 am to 10 pm everyday, till he gets the accurate figure: chances are he will count heads for the rest of his life, so crowded the street is. At 2 pm, with the sun blazing overhead, the crowd may be thinner, but only compared to what it was in the morning –– for the rest of Chennai, it is still the most crowded street, even at that hour.

Till a few years ago, two sugarcane juice shops on either side of the street, greeted you as you entered Ranganathan Street from Usman Road. One shop displayed its loyalty to the DMK on its signboard, while the other declared its love for the AIADMK. When election results came out, you didn’t have to switch on TV to know which party was winning: you could tell from a glance at these two shops. If the DMK-supporting shop had downed its shutter, you knew the AIADMK had won, and vice-versa. But some time ago, the AIADMK juice shop became a garments store, leaving the portrait of a smiling Karunanidhi, gracing the signboard of the rival shop, to welcome you.

In an upmarket mall, you might, in a genteel fashion, call them lingerie or innerwear. But out here, on the pavements, the nomenclature is without any frills –– just bra and panty, so is the display –– dozens of pieces piled up in stacks, serving as the front office for vendors who also sell nighties and hankies and towels. Rubbing shoulders with them are those who sell cheap toys and ‘Rolax’ watches. Looming over these vendors and their wares are the big stores –– gigantic in size, exhaustive in range. Cool breeze wafting out these air-conditioned shops create pockets of respite as you walk under the sun, wondering why anyone, at this hour, would stop by one of the stalls selling cutlets and vadas glistening with oil. But tastes differ: the stalls are doing decent business.

Even the elderly, sunbaked woman who sits almost in the middle of the street with a basketful of jasmine is unruffled by the fact that her flowers are wilting under the sun. She knows she will find buyers. That’s the thing about Ranganathan Street: the hawkers don’t run after you. They know that of the thousands who walk the street, a small fraction is bound to stop. As for the gigantic stores, the attendants behave as if they are doing you a favour by responding to your call.

One sari store is so huge that it even has a reception lounge, as if it is a corporate hospital. In the air-conditioned lounge, women, in small groups, are squatting. They are clutching bags bursting with saris, but they all seem to be in a daze, as if they have a close relative fighting for life in one of the wards. The women, who seem to be from neighbouring towns, are clearly dizzied by the size of the store and the variety of saris they have had to choose from.

You keep walking. More bras, panties and nighties. And then yet another big store, which can easily the one-stop shop for a man marrying off his daughter. A board outside the shop gives an important piece of information:

Gold 1 gm Rs 1448; Silver 1 gm Rs 29.60

You walk on. Suddenly you notice Mambalam railway station. You’ve reached the end of Ranganathan Street. Once again, the smell of crushed sugarcane pervades the air, but this juice shop seems to be apolitical. You really don’t need to be loyal to any political party in order to make a living from Ranganathan Street: all you need is common sense.

Look at these two women: one of them is selling raw tamarind as well as safety pins — what a combo — while the other is selling drumsticks as well as ladies’ hankies — what a combo again. But look at their business sense: while you are looking at the hankies, you might suddenly remember that you have run out of drumsticks to prepare the next day’s sambhar; or while you are buying drumsticks to prepare the next day’s sambhar, it might suddenly strike you that all your hankies are worn out and it’s time you bought some new ones.

And the best part is, while rest of the city takes a lunch break and indulges in an inevitable post-lunch laziness, Ranganathan Street, even under the blazing sun, has its business — and business sense — alive and kicking.

Ganga Mail at 400

This evening, a careful look at the dashboard made me realise that Ganga Mail is almost 400 posts old now -- 388 to be precise. Not a very large number, considering that this blog has been around for over four years and that there are 365 days in a year. But not a small number either, considering each of these posts have been painstakingly written, mostly in the dead of the night.

Only the first 20 or 25 were written during the afternoon, but that was because I was a bachelor then and lonely too and I didn't know how else to spend a gloomy, rainy day other than drinking and writing. Those days I was not required to show up at work all six days. And those days the blog used to be called Thought Process. But soon after, I discovered someone else had a blog by that name too. Moreover, I was myself not too happy with the name: I had wanted something that would be in sync with the URL of the blog, www.bytheganges.blogspot.com. Then it suddenly struck me.

Only about a year before that, I had travelled to Haridwar and to Allahabad, in immediate succession, and I had written a piece for the paper comparing the Ganga to a long-distance train running across the Hindi heartland: the coaches, the seats, the toilets are all clean when it starts from the originating station, and by the time it nears its destination, they all get soiled. And yet, thousands and thousands of people take this train every day in search of that elusive destination called salvation. I had titled the piece On the Ganga Mail.

Suddenly, I had found a new name for my blog. Salvation is always elusive, but in order to live you must seek it, and in order to seek it you need to make the journey. This blog is nothing but an account of a journey -- the journey that began two months before my 35th birthday and continues even three months after my 39th birthday. Was I really making the journey, or was I just standing on the bridge all these years, watching the Ganga flow under it, carrying with it the embers of my youth? I don't know.

Whether you are journeying or standing static, you can't avoid being carried piggyback by Father Time. And so you grow old. And at times, you also grow. Readers of Ganga Mail, those who want to know the real me, should read the first 200 posts. After that, it is the modified me. Did marriage change me? I don't think so, because one night, barely two months after our marriage, when my wife was to take the flight to Mumbai the next morning (she was going to be away for a month), I remember keeping her waiting for dinner and writing a post on idlis.

At times I regret having done that: after all, I was just writing a blog post, not even a cover story or a column for the paper, and that too on idlis! How shameful! But there are times when I think: what's so shameful about it? As a writer when you are seized by an idea, you are bound to become blind to everything else till you have finished saying whatever you had set out to say -- doesn't matter if the subject is as frivolous as idlis and if the publishing house is as insignificant as your own blog. What matters is the urge to write and the obsession to put your thoughts across as simply as possible.

My wife, very fortunately, understands all this and lets me be. The fact that I could conceive and write Chai, Chai only after I got married and can now think of writing many more books speaks volumes of the luxurious atmosphere she has created for me at home in order to write. This, in spite of the fact that she writes too. And unlike me, she does not need alcohol or an unending supply of cigarettes or the tranquil of the night to write. She has a repository of short stories, some of which I have read. My first reaction, as soon as I began reading her stories, was to straighten out the opening sentences without even knowing what followed next. Finally I decided to keep the trained sub-editor inside me on a leash and read through the stories like a lay man, only to silently wonder in the end, "Why didn't such ideas ever come to me!"

When you have a woman who is a sensible wife and a sensitive writer and above all a dignified human being, the least you can do is to keep her sensibilities in mind while writing a personal blog. In that sense, marriage has, over the years, changed the way I write. Even then, the change has only been minor: the things I write about still remain the same, only that they are now expressed more in the general sense than personal. Literary licence has its limits too: it may work fine for a book but not necessarily for a personal blog.

Age also is a factor, why blame marriage alone: at 30 or 35, you can openly write about your fascination for, say, breasts. But when you are touching 40, you are slightly dignified about the manner in which you express your thoughts. You either avoid a direct reference or call them mammaries instead of boobs or tits, at least while writing.

But then, what's in a name. Really. A sheep's clothing does not turn a wolf into a sheep, does it? So the journey continues, my dear friends. Welcome aboard Ganga Mail.

Two Questions

Being a journalist, I can find easily the answers to these questions with a bit of legwork or by making a couple of phone calls, but at times it gives you more pleasure to wonder aloud and throw up questions instead of searching for answers which may only turn out to be silly excuses.

1. Why doesn't Chennai, instead of painfully doing up its existing airport, have a brand new airport somewhere on the outskirts? The airport is located on GST Road, a very busy road, and no matter how much you renovate or expand it, the volume of traffic on the road will remain unchanged and will increase with time. What is the point of having a swanky airport if you still have to grapple with traffic on your way to catch a flight? Why not free the road of airport traffic? -- it will be good for the road as well as for passengers: both can breathe easy.

The planners of Bangalore and Hyderabad were not fools to have built swanky new airports way outside the city. In each of these cities, passengers headed for the airport are usually free from general traffic within 20 minutes of leaving home and for the next 20 minutes they zip across breathtaking terrain, breathing some fresh air on the way, before making it on time for the flight. And the moment you step into these airports, it is like stepping from a developing nation into a developed nation. Till 20 minutes ago you were part of third-world traffic, but now you are an international-class passenger!

All this while I was mighty impressed by the Delhi airport, which has truly reinvented itself into world class. The departure lounges even have a revolving brushes that shine your shoes. Then there is the new Bangalore airport, standing in the middle of breathtaking barrenness, which could give the Kuala Lumpur airport a run for its money. But it is the new Hyderabad airport that takes the cake. It is easily India's pride, as far as the aviation industry goes. Words can't describe its handsomeness or the beauty of the landscaping that surrounds it for a couple of miles.

Chennai airport, compared to it, is like a bus-stop: it does not even have a decent bookshop or a restaurant/cafeteria. It treats domestic passengers like cattle-class who deserve nothing better than rows of chairs and electronic display boards. Even if it matches Bangalore or Hyderabad in five years from now, big deal: things should have happened five years ago!

2. Why doesn't Chennai have radio cabs yet? Okay, there are radio cabs, what we call the 'call taxi', but they are nothing but a fleet of battered, non-airconditioned Maruti vans and Ambassadors run by private operators in their respective neighbourhoods for the benefit of passengers headed to the railway station or the airport.

But when you get out of the Chennai airport, the only decent mode of transport available is the 'pre-paid taxi', which is necessarily a rickety, smelly yellow-and-black Ambassador car whose driver often begs for a tip upon reaching the destination. This is 2010 and not 1970: why should the Chennai passenger still settle for a 1970-built Ambassador which smells like a horse and which has no air-conditioning and still pay through his nose? Why can't he stride out of the airport in style and hail a Meru cab and get to his destination in style and comfort?

For the uninitiated, Meru is a company that has changed lives in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. It runs a huge fleet of cabs, mostly airconditioned Tata Indicas, which are fitted with digital tamper-proof meters that give you a printed receipt and an automated voice system that warns the driver: "You are crossing the speed limit. Please slow down." The voice, that of a woman, can be irritating when you know your driver is speeding only because there is no one on the road for miles ahead, but it still does its job of pricking his conscience. Why should a Chennaiite still have to make do with smelly, rickety Ambassadors, whose drivers behave as if they are doing their passengers a great favour by bringing them home and sulk if you don't tip them?

Any answers?

Deflowering Cricket

I've grown up following no other game than cricket. As a boy, when there was no television coverage, I would stare for a long time at the newspaper pictures depicting action from a Test match. The pictures would usually show a batsman in a stylish action and the wicketkeeper looking in the direction of the ball with his mouth open.

Then television came and they began to show highlights, and for a long time I believed that in international matches, captains took the liberty of changing bowlers even before they had bowled the six balls. I would not realise that I was watching a crunched version of the day's game.

Those days, cricket meant a five-day business, with a 'rest day' thrown in. One-day matches were unheard of, at least to me. By 1983, when India won the World Cup, watching live telecast had become as integral to middle-class Indian life as the one-day game had to cricket. The man with a transistor glued to his ear, as shown in the films, had become archival material.

Back then, watching a Test match on TV was not just a five-day picnic. Cricket was a sport, and the government felt duty-bound to take the matches to every Indian home. No one had thought money could be made out of it. So the cameras remained focussed on the ground even during the drinks break, and you could see what your favourite cricketers were up to when not playing. And when rains interrupted a match, Doordarshan would pull out live performances of Kishore Kumar or Asha Bhosle from its archives and use them as fillers. What more could you ask for?

Those days you enjoyed cricket because you looked forward to it. You looked forward to it because there was not much cricket happening. At the most two series in a year, which gave you enough time to build up your appetite and salivate. As a boy I aspired to be a fast bowler, and since I am left-handed, I would often watch TV from a hand-held mirror whenever a bowler whose action I admired would be bowling. The idea was to observe how he would bowl if he were left-handed -- bowlers such as Andy Roberts, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee.

It is a different matter that I eventually turned out to be a leg-spinner whose bowling action was very close to Ravi Shastri's. But even today, at 39, my dream is to bowl like Hadlee. I think he is still the best -- the man who was most capable of knocking off the middle-stump, the ultimate shame for a batsman. Ah, how my dream was to be a left-handed Hadlee: hell, I can still imitate his action in the little cricket I get to play these days, with a tennis ball that is. These days, in fact, I am trying my hand at tennis and am quite pleased with my forehand. And my palm, during idle moments, holds an imaginary tennis racquet instead of an imaginary leather ball.

But cricket is cricket. Every cricket-loving Indian, who was in the age-group 10-60 in 1983, is likely to have the sequence of events of the World Cup final at Lords etched in his memory. I could have said 10-70 or 10-80, but chances are very slim that someone who was 70 or 80 in 1983 is still surviving today. I was 12 years and 6 months old at the time, and India's victory, which I watched on television, proved one thing to me: that the West Indies players were as human as Indians. They were not as invincible as I had thought them to be, thanks to the cock-and-bull stories I had heard from my classmates.

In my opinion, the best cricket took place around the mid-eighties. Perhaps I am saying this because I was a teenager then and eagerly following the game, but it is also true that the mid-eighties was the time when almost all the present-day legends of cricket, no matter which country they belonged to, were at their peak.

Which is what makes the 1985 Benson and Hedges Cup, played in Australia, so memorable. Twenty-five years have passed since then, but I would still rate it as the best cricket tournament I have ever watched. Security was hardly a concern and the dashing Imran Khan, fielding on the boundary, would be spending his idle moments signing autographs for spectators.

Not to mention the India-Pakistan matches played in Sharjah, which invariably had a nail-biting finish and which attracted even spectators like Dawood Ibrahim, who would be shown by Doordarshan cameras pretty often, smoking a cigarette and sitting with a pretty woman. Back then he was merely a fugitive smuggler doing rather well for himself in the UAE. Life was by and large peaceful then -- the Babri mosque was yet to fall and blasts were yet to rock Bombay -- so the Indian cops let him be. India was obsessed with the Bofors scandal and, subsequently, the Mandal Commission report. Cricket was a pleasant distraction.

The one-day game was god-sent for the temperamentally lazy Indian man. He could no longer hover or laze around the TV for five full days, neglecting his domestic and official responsibilities. In other words, the emergence of one-day cricket spared him from four extra days of yelling by the wife or the boss. And once they realised that cricket was now only a day-long affair, the wife and the boss too joined the fun. What was so far a cricket addict's fix had now become a family picnic.

So it is pointless to explain why life in India comes to a near standstill during the World Cup. To talk of recent times, most people still haven't gotten over the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, even though seven years have passed, while most people would like to forget the subsequent edition held in the West Indies in 2007, because it was merely a marriage of farce and tragedy. But people still sat through the tournament, more out of habit than excitement.

Now, touch your heart and speak the truth: do you remember where the next World Cup is going to be held, and in case you still care to remember, are you really looking forward to it? Ideally you should, because it is only a year away, and the fever should be building up by now. But between 2007 and 2011, you have watched your favourite teams and players play so often that you wish they took a break and gave you a break.

I mean, after watching the IPL matches for one whole month, would you still have the appetite to watch the Twenty20 World Cup next month and then to watch the regular World Cup next year? If the daily burdensome life is the wife for the lay Indian, then cricket is the seductive mistress that provides him with succour during stolen moments. But if cricket becomes the wife and begins to breathe down his neck 24/7, he is soon going to find another mistress, maybe in the form of hockey or football. The managers of Indian cricket should understand this.

They have already screwed up big time by introducing IPL. To begin with, it made horses, rather asses, out of talented players. Anyone could be bought with money, that too by people who might not even entirely understand cricket but want to be proud owners of a team. Imagine Yuvraj Singh explaining his poor batting to Preity Zinta or Sourav Ganguly falling at the feet of Shah Rukh, begging to be given another chance. Sachin Tendulkar might be the greatest Indian cricketer, but when he plays for IPL, he too knows that he is answerable not to India but to India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. What a shame: are we watching cricket or horse-racing?

In any case, the Twenty20 format, according to me, is a shame. Cricket, unlike football, is all about style. Each player, be he a batsman or a bowler, has his own signature style, which comes to the fore if only he is given sufficient time on the pitch. But in the Twenty20 format, when you are perpetually in a do-or-die situation, where is the scope to display your style? You have to hit the ball, come what may, or else your ass is on the line.

As for the audience, they are a disoriented lot now. IPL has screwed their sense of patriotism. The non-Indian cricketers they admired but despised for obvious reasons till the 2007 World Cup are now the torch-bearers of Indian cities/cultures playing in the IPL. Shane Warne is the pride of Rajasthan, Chennai can't do without Hayden, Sri Lanka's Sangkarra is the captain of Punjab, and so on.

Tomorrow, if during an international match, Hayden hits Sachin for a huge six, should Chennaiites rejoice that a Chennai Super Kings player has punished the Mumbai Indians captain, or feel sad that an Australian batsman has hit an Indian bowler for a six?