An Iyengar Family

Sunday noon: I am in Triplicane, the nucleus of everything Iyengar in Chennai.

The blazing sun has emptied the streets around the temple; only a sprinkling of shrivelled elderly men, naked except a thin white dhoti around their waist and the elaborate Vaishnavite mark on their foreheads, lie half-asleep in the shade of trees or verandahs of their crumbling houses.

I am in the home of Thirumalai, whose son Ramanujam is standing erect under the spinning ceiling fan. “Here, look,” the son tells me, “my head is not touching the fan. But my younger brother has to duck all the time. He is 6 feet 3, I am only six feet.”
 

Ramanujam may be narrowly missing the fan, but even he has to bend each time he enters his home and goes one room to another — so low the doors are. “Our house is like a hut, sir, the kind you see in villages. This must be about 150 years old,” smiles Thirumalai, 57, as he watches his strapping son demonstrate the negligible gap between his head and the spinning blades.

Thirumalai, who works in the advertisement department of a local paper, also grew up in such hut-like houses, including this one — all in Triplicane — but not tall enough to have to negotiate fans and door frames. But given his young sons’ heights and their lofty ambitions — Ramanujam, 22, wants to be a financial analyst and his younger brother, who is 17, a fast bowler for the Indian team — he may finally have to consider moving to a new dwelling someday.

That would also mean moving out from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.

Over time villages metamorphose into towns, and towns into cities — but the bustling metropolis of Chennai, in existence for nearly four centuries now, still holds on to its bosom small clusters of such village houses that date back to the ancient times.

These houses are part of the agraharam, or the garland that the humble dwellings of Brahmins have historically formed around a big temple — in this case, the eighth-century Parthasarathy temple.

Whether these huts stick out like sore thumbs in a modern city, or whether modernity sticks out like a sore thumb in a setting that so belongs to a folktale — depends on which side of heritage you are in. But Triplicane is a living museum. Changing times may have stamped out the garland-formation but there are remnants from the holy necklace that continue to preserve the old — lock, stock and tradition.

Thirumalai’s house is right next to the temple; and the room we are standing in is the largest in the house, about eight feet long and five feet wide. Aged pictures of Lord Vishnu, in his various avatars, adorn its walls.

In Brahmin Triplicane (there is a Muslim Triplicane too, dating back to the times of Aurangzeb) it would be sacrilege not to have his pictures on the walls. Even greater sacrilege to display pictures of others gods, such as Shiva. Staunch Iyengars firmly believe that Vishnu is the tallest in the hierarchy of gods and that it is he who has appointed Shiva and Brahma to their respective divine positions.

In the space between picture-frames are scribbled mathematical equations and phone numbers that must remain handy. A Haier television set, resting on a low stool, adds to the clutter. “There are eight of us living here. My parents, me, my wife, my two sons, my sister and her son,” Thirumalai tells me as I survey his home. A small space abutting this room serves as the kitchen.

There must be a bathing area somewhere around — I don’t ask where — but I know there is no toilet. The houses in this agraharam use a common set of toilets located down the street.

We troop back to the living room, which is the only other room in Thirumalai’s humble dwelling. In the narrow passage that connects the two rooms sits a sleek desktop — broadband connected — on a table. It’s the only symbol of the present in a house so symbolic of the past. The background image on the computer screen is that of Lord Vishnu.

The living room, barely six by six, is furnished with a cot and two chairs. I share the cot with Thirumalai’s father, who is sitting uncomfortably upright — as if he has just recovered from a bout of coughing and is trying to suppress another.

“How old is your father?” I ask Thirumalai.

“Eighty-three.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sthalasayanam.”

“How does he spell it?”

The young Ramanujam points to an aged nameplate, which reads: ‘Sthalasayanathuraiwar Swamy.’

“Just Sthalasayanam will do,” Thirumalai interrupts as I open my fountain pen for the pleasure of putting it to use. “It’s one of the names Lord Vishnu is known by.”

“When did he move in here?”

“1970,” replies a hoarse voice. The father, who I thought was trying to suppress a bout of coughing, starts speaking. He tells me that he was born in 1929 in Mahabalipuram and spent much of his childhood in Kancheepuram before coming to George Town in Madras in 1942 to become a scholar in Sanskrit and Tamil.

Sometime in the 1950’s — he is unable to recall the exact year — he got the job of a Sanskrit teacher in a girls’ school in Triplicane. Ever since then he has lived in Triplicane, moving into this house in 1970, even though he went on to teach in Corporation schools across the city.

Suddenly it strikes me: in this six by six room, I am surrounded by three generations of devout Iyengars — Sthalasayanam, 83; Thirumalai, 57; Ramanujam, 22. What makes them family is not just the red flowing in their veins, but also the white they are attired in. Each is wearing a white dhoti, with a piece of white cloth thrown over bare shoulders, and the white Y-mark on his forehead.

There are two sects of Iyengars — the Vadagalais and the Thengalais. The Vadagalais paint a white ‘U’ on their foreheads; while the Thengalais wear the ‘Y’ mark—they have a tiny line descending from the ‘U’ to cover the bridge of the nose, making it resemble a ‘Y’. It is the Thengalais, considered more orthodox, who call the shots in Triplicane.

Thirumalai explains to me the significance of the Y-mark. The ‘V’ on the forehead stands for the feet of Vishnu, while the small line descending to the nose depicts a lotus: “the lotus feet of the lord.” And the thin red line that runs in the middle of the ‘V’ represents goddess Lakshmi. “We wear the mark twice a day,” Thirumalai tells me, “once in the morning, immediately after bath, and once in the evening. It doesn’t take long, not even five minutes.”

Wearing the Y-mark isn’t all that they do to prove their loyalty to Lord Vishnu, who lives, in their case, just a shout away. Thrice a day, they chant out 12 particular names of Vishnu by touching various body parts — each name corresponding to a particular body part — and also recite the Gayatri Mantra a minimum of 26 times, each time. And they know the Divya Prabandham — a collection of 4,000 Vaishnavite hymns — by heart.

I ask Thirumalai if they are always dressed like priests at home. “Always,” he emphasises, “only when I go to work do I put on a shirt on top of my dhoti. My sons, when they go out, wear shirt and pant. But at home we are always like this.” He seems rather proud to be living within the halo of the temple.

“Don’t you feel cramped?” I ask him.

“At times I do. But I can’t afford a bigger house with my salary. Here the rent is just Rs. 1,000.”
 

The rent is paid to a trust run by a family of Mandayam Iyengars —they are Thengalais who traces their origins to Melkote in Karnataka. Much of the sum collected from tenants in the agraharam is spent on maintaining the Thengalai temple the Mandayam family has built in Ayodhya. The landlords, says Thirumalai, have often wanted to demolish the huts and build new structures for the tenants, “but where will we go in the meantime?”

I ask him what’s going to happen once his sons get married: will the daughters-in-law fit into this house? He says he doesn’t know, but he is particular about one thing, that both his sons marry girls from the Acharya Purusha sect of Thengalais.

I turn to the young Ramanujam. I ask him if fellow students ever made fun of the Y-mark. “Yes, initially they would tease me. But they soon got tired of it.” I ask him if he was going to marry a girl of his father’s choice. “Of course, without doubt,” he replies shyly.

“Will you bring your wife here?”

“I don’t think she can adjust here,” says Ramanujam, “that is why, as soon as I get a job, I am going to take up a new house and move there with my parents. But getting a new house in Triplicane is impossible, it will be very expensive, so I will build a house in Kancheepuram.”

So he plans to kill two birds with one stone: Kancheepuram, less than 80 km from Chennai, is an important seat of Vaishnavism; and that’s where all the jobs are these days — the manufacturing plants of multinationals are all located in Kancheepuram district.

Seventy years ago, where the jobs were in Madras, his grandfather came to Triplicane to teach as well as to be near Lord Vishnu. And now, Ramanujam plans to move in the reverse direction for same dual purpose. Once he does that, life will come full circle for this devout Iyengar family.

A couple of weeks after I met the family, in June 2012, Sthalasayanam passed away.

Eight Years To Go

The last rays of the sun streamed in from the door of the drawing room that once hosted many luminaries and still draws celebrity visitors.

Ajay Das and I sat on either side of the door, with the sunlight illuminating the lines of my right palm which he was reading with a magnifying glass.

'One thing I can tell you, you are highly ambitious,' Das told me as he felt the palm.

'But will I be famous? A famous writer?' I asked him.

'Yes, but not before the age of fifty. You still have eight years to go.'

'Eight more years? Nothing before that?'

'What I mean is,' he leaned back on the chair, 'you will reach the peak of your popularity at fifty.'

I thought: what's the point reaching the peak of popularity at fifty when I would already be climbing down the hill into the waiting arms of old age? Then, second thoughts: these days, when life begins at forty, and considering that I published my first book only at thirty-nine, recognition at fifty isn't such a bad deal.

Das had been watching a Mohun Bagan versus East Bengal match on TV when I called on him at his ancestral home in north Calcutta. At eighty, he is one of the oldest surviving members of the K.C. Das family, the famous confectioners. He had abandoned the match to show me around the four-storey house, built in 1929, and as our conversation veered from one subject to another, Das, a bachelor, revealed that astrology and palm-reading were among his hobbies and had offered to read mine.

'When you come next time, bring your horoscope along. If I go through it, I can be more precise with the dates,' Das told me as I got up to leave.

I lied to him that I would. I did not want precision: a fair degree of uncertainty is always good when it comes to the knowledge of your own future. In fact, uncertainty is the only truth when it comes to the future. Yet one likes to hear nice things from astrologers. You secretly borrow hope and confidence from them even if you don't believe in astrology. I walked out of the K.C. Das home with a smile. But I had other reasons as well to smile.

I started working on the Calcutta book in the spring of 2011, and in the two years that have passed since, I have gathered sufficient material to paint a first-class portrait of the city. But the question is: will I be able to? It's one thing to collect material, quite another to transform it into an engaging book. For a writer, an experience is of little use unless he is able to express it in words effectively enough to make the reader undergo the same experience.

At least I've gathered the ammunition: that's forty percent of the battle won. When I landed in Calcutta two years ago to write the book, I was banking mainly on friends living there to help me discover the city. But, as I have increasingly realised over the years, people who you consider to be friends are of little help when you need them the most. Your life is of no interest to them. In contrast, people whom you barely know and expect very little from turn out to be your biggest benefactors in times of need. And so, I had total strangers holding my hand and leading me into the lanes of Calcutta. I don't wish to embarrass them by naming them here, but I shall remain indebted to them.

But now comes the path that I will have to negotiate all by myself: writing. It is so much easier to post a picture on Facebook: it takes barely five seconds. But to describe the same picture is words, five hours -- even five days. Why describe, then? That is because when you post a picture, readers merely 'see' it, but when you take the trouble of describing, the readers get inside the frame -- they 'experience' it. Pictures merely show, whereas writing tells.

And so, the journey begins. Long, lonely and arduous. I have for company two laptops, two Rubberband notebooks (with chrome yellow pages) that arrived this afternoon, several fountain pens and about three dozen books that I have kept aside to dip into from time to time for relief and inspiration. It shouldn't be so difficult considering I have been through it before: twice.

What I can't believe is how quickly these two years have passed. Wasn't it only the other day when I left Times of India and spent a month in Calcutta before returning to Chennai to join The Hindu? If two years can pass even before I could blink, can eight years be too long a time?

The Sub-Editor

Today, February 1, I complete 20 years as a journalist. One news agency, five newspapers.

I can't say if the journey has been worthwhile, or whether I would have done better in another profession, but there has never been a moment of regret. I wanted to be a journalist, I became one, and it's been a smooth ride so far.

Some of the sensations from that beautiful spring morning in 1993 are still alive. Pioneer, the Lucknow paper which had recently launched in Delhi, was now going to start in Kanpur as well. I had been hired as a trainee sub-editor (salary Rs. 2,000) and my appointment took effect from February 1. The first 15 days were to be spent at the Lucknow office, learning editing skills.

So on the morning of February 1, I took a bus from Kanpur and arrived two hours later at Charbagh in Lucknow. I remember wearing an off-white turtle-neck T-shirt with grey trousers and a navy-blue blazer. I reported at the office at 10 o' clock only to find the thick smell of newsprint and cigarette smoke hanging in the air -- hardly a soul in sight except a few peons. But I instantly fell in love with the smell: to me, it was the smell of journalism and it remains so, even though newspaper offices have long become no-smoking and shifted their printing presses in remote locations.

Back then I did not know that coming to a newspaper office at 10 o'clock is like ringing the bell at someone's home at four in the morning. I was told by one of the peons to come back at four. So I strolled down Hazratganj, inhaling the fragrant air the first day of February had to offer. I was 22, I had just got a job, that too the job of a journalist; I was now 'Press'.

I stopped at Ram Advani Booksellers and purchased -- I didn't know much about books then -- a copy of Roget's thesaurus (I still preserve it). Then I walked into a Raymond's showroom and bought myself a bottle of Park Avenue cologne. Lunch was at a plush old-fashioned restaurant (I forget the name) located right on the mouth of the road that led into Hazratganj. After which I watched Jackie Shroff's King Uncle (at the time I was a huge fan of Jackie Shroff and would even go alone to the theatres to watch his films). While walking back to the office, I opened the bottle of cologne and rubbed a few drops on my face.

At four o' clock, I met the resident editor: Sunil Saxena. I had met him during the interview but now saw him closely. With the goatee and the pipe hanging from his lips, he cut an impressive figure. He spoke only in English, even when communicating with the peons. He ordered coffee for me and said, "Have some coffee." I was too nervous to even lift the saucer in his presence but I had to. (Eight years later, in 2001, when both of us had left Pioneer way behind, I happened to spot him at the Press Club  in Delhi, where I usually had my lunch. I walked up to him and reintroduced myself. I told him that I would like to work with him again. 'But I am now in Chennai,' he said, 'are you willing to shift?' I replied, 'Of course.')

When I walked out of the resident editor's cabin that evening in 1993, the teleprinters were already screeching and typewriters rattling away. Computers, back then, were used only for the purposes of pagination. Soon I was handed a typewritten copy to edit. And then more copies. The senior who oversaw my work said, 'You see, the idea is to make a copy crisp and coherent. That is what editing is all about.'

Later that evening, a jeep took me to the Pioneer guest house, where the cook had prepared a home-like meal. When I woke up the next morning, I decided to write a letter to my girlfriend (no mobile phones or internet those days) to tell her about my new job. But each time I wrote a sentence or two, I would tear the page off the pad and crumple it into a ball and throw into the bin. I wanted to write a perfect sentence. I realised I had become a sub-editor.

Random Thoughts

This evening, spent considerable time at Music World on Park Street. Bought a number of CDs, almost all of them -- predictably -- compilations of Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman. The real treasure among them being a new release called Parampara, a set of two CDs that feature  songs of the Burmans that have been inspired by traditional Bengali music. Was surprised to learn that Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke (Pyaasa) was influenced by the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana (play the two tunes in your head and you will see the similarities). What fun!

At Music World, Hindi songs by Abhijeet were playing in the background. Perhaps he has released a new album, or maybe a new movie in which he has sung all the songs. Listening to his voice, memories went back to 1977 or 1978, when I, as a child, had watched Abhijeet sing live in Kanpur during Durga Puja. At the time, he was the lead singer of an orchestra group run by a local legend called Prashant Chatterjee.

Prashant Chatterjee -- Proshanto for Bengalis -- lives on The Mall: his house sits right where the Murray Company bridge begins. Those who are familiar with Kanpur will know. I hope he continues to live there (I did notice the familiar signboard, 'P. Chatterjee', until a year ago); I also hope he is still alive. These days you never know, considering that 2012 has particularly been a year of goodbyes: even A.K. Hangal, who had one foot in the grave for many years now, chose to breathe his last in 2012. Basically, the generation that nourished us and played the cushion against realities of life is in the process of taking the final bow. It's our turn now to take over.

I turned 42 about ten days ago -- my first ever birthday in Calcutta -- but somehow I don't feel that old. When my father was 42, he seemed old to me because I was already 16 by then. He had shaved off his moustache at the first sign of greying in order to look young, and he remains clean-shaven ever since then. Whereas I happily wear the grey on my chin, because I believe that you can't shave off the years by merely shaving off facial hair. Age lies in attitude, not in appearance. You can't beguile people into believing that you are still young, the idea is to make them realise that you are still young despite the grey on the chin.

Confessions Of A BJP Reporter: How I Outgrew Its Charm

Beautiful Sunday morning. Two headlines in the papers — Shatrughan seeks Gadkari resignation and Pollster predicts Modi sweep — brought back memories.

I was only ten when, in 1980, Jana Sangh became the Bharatiya Janata Party (the idea behind the change of name was to adopt a secular face that would be acceptable to larger sections of India).

When you are just ten years old, you are more familiar with the names of reigning film stars than those of political leaders.

But by the time I was twenty, BJP leaders had become stars in my part of the world, the Hindi heartland of Kanpur, which was being swept by the winds of Hindutva. They were seen as our saviours: Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati. In the riot-stricken city, it had become fashionable for middle-class Hindus to put up BJP flags atop their homes.

In 1996, I began covering the BJP; and for five years I spent almost every afternoon at 11, Ashoka Road, the party’s headquarters in Delhi, sniffing for news. In any case, one had to be there for the 3 o’ clock press briefing. As a cub reporter, I would be a little intimidated to engage the likes of Vajpayee and Advani in a conversation, something that seasoned journalists did with enviable ease; but I would spend a lot of time with those who were easily approachable — the late Kushabhau Thakre and Sundar Singh Bhandare being among them.

On the whole BJP was fun beat: the party took great care of reporters. The snacks at the 3 o’ clock briefing was always something to look forward to; one was put up in the best hotels when travelling to cover the national executive or national council meetings; all facilities to ensure you are able to file your stories in time.

It was impossible not to be impressed with the works. And impossible not to be sympathetic towards them when you spent afternoon after afternoon in the company of leaders whose dedication to their ideology you admired, even if you didn’t agree with the ideology. You even felt sad for each time their coalition missed the majority mark by a whisker.

But dedication and discipline kept the BJP functioning like a well-oiled machine: the face of Vajpayee, the mind of Advani, the brains of Kushabhau Thakre and Govindacharya, the management skills of Pramod Mahajan, the PR skills of Sushma Swaraj, and silent contribution from countless others who remained in the shadows. Quite natural that one felt happy when the party finally won in 1998. It was a vicarious pleasure; my life remained just the same.

In early 2001, I left Delhi and moved to Chennai. And once I was out of the charmed radius of 11, Ashoka Road, something magical happened. I no longer felt the sense of bonding with my beat: from the distance, all the parties looked alike. The dark side of the BJP began to emerge. Bangaru Laxman, whose coronation as the party president I had attended in Nagpur only months before moving to Chennai, was now seen on TV, accepting wads of currency notes.

Gujarat happened. Egos grew. Personalities clashed. Dedicated old-timers were sidelined. And governance, as the 2004 elections proved, fell below expectations. It took just five years in power for a robust machinery to fall apart.

Today the BJP is a sum total of negatives: no leadership, no agenda, no vision, no orator, and — without these — possibly no future. I don’t know how 11, Ashoka Road looks like these days, but the party itself resembles a haunted house that was once brilliantly lit up by dedication, discipline and the dream to rule India someday.

I am reminded of the very first day I had stepped into the BJP headquarters. This was the summer of 1996. The office was largely empty — most leaders were out campaigning — and I nervously walked through the corridors peeping into the rooms, hoping to find someone to talk to.

Suddenly I came face to face with a man who wore a cropped beard, a kurta and a warm smile. When I introduced myself, he showed me into one of the rooms. We had a longish chat, and I took notes.

Finally, I asked him, “And sir, your name?”

“Narendra Modi,” he dictated as I jotted down, “National secretary, BJP.”

At least one man from the party has gone on to do very well — for himself.

Two Cities

These are difficult times -- packed with anxiety and the occasional dose of excitement -- for me. Till midnight, I am the City Editor of Chennai's biggest paper; and around quarter past midnight, when I have checked the last of the local pages on my tiny netbook screen, I click open the draft of my Calcutta book and get transported to that city and stay there, quite often, till the sky is just about to change colours.

Straddling two cities, and trying to do justice to both, is not easy. The moment I focus on one, the other starts nudging me for attention. So much so that when I wake up in the morning, I often forget where I am, until I notice the window. In the Chennai bedroom, the window is on my right, and in Calcutta, on the left. This worries me, because my mother used to always say, 'Never place a foot each in two boats, you will drown.' Will I drown?

I did not have this fear while writing Tamarind City. I live in Chennai, and it was a book about Chennai: so every single moment I breathed provided me with raw material to draw from. But then, the fear of drowning did not haunt me even when I was writing Chai, Chai, which was about seven different and diverse places other than Chennai.

I don't know where Chai, Chai will stand in a few years from now -- either they will find it endowed with literary value, or it will simply go out of print and be forgotten -- but it was a book I enjoyed writing. Those railways junctions offered an escape from Chennai each night as I sat in front of my laptop, midnight till 4 a.m. Only concrete benches, no benchmarks -- so I just wrote, and wrote with great pleasure.

But Calcutta is a different ballgame. It is easily the most written-about city in India. Sometimes celebrated, mostly derided, but rarely ignored by writers during the three centuries the city has been in existence. Almost everything has been written about it and almost everything about it written. So what new am I going to write, and how is it going to measure up to what has already been written about the city? That's worry no. 1.

Worry no. 2 is the discerning eye of the Bengali reader. Calcutta Bengalis are very sporting when someone makes fun of them (they'd even contribute a joke or two to your repository of Bengali jokes), but very touchy when it comes to their city or their icons. If you fail to see poetry in the faults of Calcutta, the fault is yours and not that of the fault.

And if the fault-finder happens to be a fellow Bengali, especially a non-resident Bengali, he will be instantly sentenced to death by residents fiercely loyal to their city -- residents whose guiding slogan in life is "Saala, jai bolish, Kolkata chhere ki thhaaka jaaye?"

Worry no. 3: the critics. I can already see them shredding the yet-to-be-published book into tiny pieces, saying how little I understand of Calcutta or Calcutta culture. (I can even visualise the editor of Outlook Traveller -- the only publication to rubbish both my earlier books, that too in a tone that reeked of malice -- engaging a reviewer to savage the book. Though I may just be rescued by the sudden closure of the magazine: if Newsweek is shutting down, then what field does this raddish called Outlook Traveller belong to?)

These are worries weighing heavily on my mind, but as long as they don't weigh me down, I should be fine.

Arriving In Calcutta

Didn't sleep all night. I never do when I have a morning flight to catch. So I stayed up filling new songs in my iPod -- songs that will keep me company during my walks in Central Park. The early-morning shower made me drowsy and I mostly slept through the two-hour flight to Calcutta. Had a joyous moment at the Chennai airport when I discovered a smoking room on the ground floor (the one on the first floor had been dismantled about a year ago).

Across the aisle, in the plane, sat a small Bengali family -- man, woman and child. Man perhaps in early forties (triple chin, paunch and thick moustache made him look older, though); woman in late thirties (and exceedingly gorgeous); child not more than five or six. I wanted to steal glances at her but the husband was blocking my vision. He was reading The Hindu. I was desperately hoping that he would pause at Sunday Diary, the weekly column I write in the paper, or at least read this article on Kishore Kumar I had written for the Sunday magazine. I was desperately hoping that he would read them admiringly and then lean to his wife and tell her, "Baah, ki bhalo likhechhe"; after which I would introduce myself as the writer of those pieces.

Nothing happened. He dismissively glanced through all the pages before settling on the Open Page (Sunday version of the edit page). I lost interest in him and his wife and went to sleep. I even had a short dream -- vivid and heart-warming. A real voice finally woke me up: "Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing shortly at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose international airport..."

Calcutta was cloudy when I stepped out of the airport -- straight into my wife's car. The meticulous planner that she is, she times her entry into the airport with my exit from the arrival lounge, so that neither of us are kept waiting even for a moment. Though I must say I miss the old days when I would spot her familiar silhouette waiting for me inside the arrival lounge. But how can I complain when I don't even go to the airport to fetch her each time she arrives in Chennai?

As soon as I got into the car, I rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette and put on the radio (the RJ was talking about Tagore being a god to all Bengalis, so I switched to the retro channel whose presiding deities are Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman). Calcutta is one place where you never feel apologetic about smoking in public -- even those who don't smoke are pretty accommodating about a smoker's urge to light up. And then it began to drizzle.

The drizzle; the cigarette smoke; the soul-lifting songs on radio; the festive spirit that refuses to be dampened by the intermittent showers -- it was such a heady feeling to arrive in my hometown-in-law, that too on the eve of Durga Puja. Suddenly I realised that Calcutta is no longer just my hometown-in-law but the subject of my next book; and that I should be spending more time on the streets, with a notebook and pen.

The Best Things Are Free

“Everything we eat,” said Jitendra Singh, the driver, as he opened the car door for the umpteenth time to spit out pan masala, “is grown in our fields. We buy nothing from the market, except spices. Everything comes fresh off the fields.”

His words made me hungrier. It was 2.30 now, and we had been on the road for over three hours. We were travelling from Kanpur to his village near the town of Banda, in the rugged Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. Bundelkhand is rich in history, poor in development: tales of valour are as much in circulation as tales of notoriety.

I had been conned into this trip. “If you want to get the real flavour of the elections, you must go to Banda,” Jitendra had been telling me since I set foot in Kanpur last February, with the purpose of capturing the public sentiment on the eve of the Assembly elections. I didn’t realise, until it was too late, that he insisted on bringing me to Banda so that he could visit his village. I trusted him because tradition dictates that if you are a journalist travelling out of town to report an event, you must take the local driver seriously. So one chilly morning, as I got into his Tata Indica, I told Jitendra Singh, “Chalo Banda!”

It took us a while to get out of Kanpur. It’s a city I barely recognise now, even though I’ve spent the first 23 years of my life in it. But once out of the city, it became a journey back in time: unending green fields — and the monotony of the green broken every now and then by either a small Shiva or Hanuman temple, painted in white; or the hut-like tea shop that also sells samosas and gulab jamuns; or the dhaba selling hot daal and rotis; or asbestos-roofed factories that have smoke coming out of their chimneys. These are sights I’ve grown up with and, no matter which city I live in, they will always denote home.

And now we were headed to Jitendra Singh’s home — his heart, rather. As for a home, he doesn’t have one at the moment: the road is his home. He is based, so to speak, in Kanpur, but he invariably spends his nights in the car, either driving or sleeping in it in some remote town. He is sufficiently happy with the money he makes as a driver, but his heart remains tethered to his village, where his wife lives with his parents and a large number of relatives.

The sight of the ripe crops had begun to make me hungry. I fantasised about the end product: hot rotis, arhar ki daal, sarson ka saag. That’s when Jitender said that everything from his kitchen comes fresh off the farm. For someone who depends largely on take-away meals, his words were music to the ears.

“Will you take me to your village one of these days?” I asked him.

“I will take you there right now, sirji.”

“What do you mean?”

“My village is very close to Banda. Once you finish talking to people in Banda, I will take you home. In any case I was thinking of showing you my village.”

That’s when realisation struck. But my anger melted even before it could build up — largely because of the pleasant drive through rural, central India and also because I was now too hungry to get angry.

“Can I have lunch at your home, then?” I asked.

“Would you like to have a chat with people in Banda first, or would you like to have lunch first and then go to Banda?”

“Lunch first.”

Jitendra called up his home and spoke to his mother. Even as he had one hand on the steering and another glued to his ear, we drove through a village that was a village in the true Indian sense of the word: thatched homes, cows and buffaloes loitering around, veiled women carrying pots of water on their heads, about two dozen children sitting cross-legged on the ground under a tree, facing a blackboard and a stern-looking teacher. The village stood like an island amid green fields.

We drove through few more villages before we arrived at Jitendra’s — I knew we had entered the boundary of his village when a bunch of children began chasing our car in excitement. The village could have easily been Ramgarh of Sholay — this was indeed a village of Thakurs — and Jitendra’s father presently emerged from the door wearing the dignified air of Sanjeev Kumar, albeit with arms intact. He seemed too important to take notice of me even as I sat on a charpoy in the verandah and drank tea. He was going for a stroll around the village.

As soon as he left, one of Jitendra’s uncles came in. He sought to know who I was. Jitendra replied with a tinge of pride, “He has come all the way from Chennai to write about our elections.”

“No wonder,” the uncle turned to me, “I saw you on TV last night.”

I gave an ambiguous nod: I had no desire to contradict him. I asked him his name. “Mulayam Singh,” he replied.

For a moment I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. His name was indeed Mulayam Singh, and he turned out to be one of the friendliest souls I’ve ever come across.

Lunch, I gathered, was still under preparation. I suggested to Jitendra that we take a short walk around the house. Mulayam Singh led the way. Just a few metres away from the verandah stood a small Shiva temple, at least 70 years old (it existed even when Jitendra’s father was born). Temples like these, modest and bereft of crowds, provide better connectivity to god — or so I believe. Next to the temple was a cluster of huts.

Outside one of the huts, two men sat in complete silence as they crafted the wheel of a bullock cart. The silence was so overwhelming that you could almost hear the horses of Gabbar Singh’s men storming the village. In fact, this was the kind of village that Ramesh Sippy sought to depict in Sholay, even though the movie was actually shot in an elaborate set created in the south Indian locale of Ramanagaram, near Bangalore.

The two Thakurs then led me to the fields. “That is arhar,” Jitendra pointed out, “and that is the mustard crop.” As a token of the newly found friendship, Mulayam Singh pulled out half a dozen radishes and a bunch of coriander leaves from the soil. “When you eat these,” he said, “you will feel the difference.”

A small boy came running to us, to announce that lunch was ready. And soon Jitendra and I were sitting across a centre table that had been placed in the courtyard of the house. The women were now in charge. The kitchen — a mud structure — was right next to us.

First came the salad: tomato and radish, soaked in lemon juice and garnished with chopped coriander. Mouth-watering. Then came the much-awaited decorated plate: chaney ka saag, arhar ki daal (with a generous piece of homemade butter floating in it), rotis (each soaked in homemade ghee) and rice. Very often we city-dwellers appreciate food only when we pay for it through our noses, whereas the truth is that the best things in life come for free.

Jitendra’s mother, who supervised the table, made sure I did not spend even a moment waiting for another roti. They just kept coming, and I kept tearing off pieces and plunging them alternately into the saag and the daal. The rice I ate with the daal alone. All along, I had been biting into a green chilli and also digging my finger into a small heap of greenish chutney, which did not taste either like coriander or mint, but it was — to use the gourmand’s cliché — delectable. I could not resist asking Jitendra’s mother what it was made of.

“Wood apple,” she said, “why, you don’t like it?”

I told her about my inexplicable fascination — dating back to my childhood — for wood apples. As a result, even before I could finish my lunch, a boy placed a plastic packet containing six large wood apples on the table.

“I will take them to Chennai,” I said.

“Look at their luck,” Mulayam Singh remarked from a corner, “they will be travelling in a plane. We have never travelled by air, but our wood apples will.”

One woman came with a mug of water, another with a towel. “Beta,” Jitendra’s mother said, “when you come next time, stay with us for a day or two.”

The sun had nearly set when we drove out of the village. As soon as we hit the highway, Jitendra slowed down the car. He said: “Sir, aaj hum aap ko ek naya jaanwar dikhate hain” (let me show you a new animal today). In the dimmed light, all I could see was a horse crossing the road. But why did it have a blue-grey coat? Oh, a nilgai! Not a new animal, but the encounter was something new, considering that I live in an urban jungle where you see only dogs and cats — and the occasional monkey — crossing the road.

I took out my camera and asked Jitendra to stop. But as soon as the nilgai saw me, it sprinted into the fields like a blushing bride.

This piece appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on September 30, 2012.

Poetry, Thy Name Is Woman

Perceptions. Tastes. Sensibilities. Beliefs. How they change with time. At least in my case they have. When I now think of the days when I was, say, twenty-five, I cringe with embarrassment.

When I was twenty-five, I believed one should marry only a virgin; considered it my birthright to know all about the past lovers of my lovers; was happy wearing Titan watches; drank only rum; always wore formals to work; hero-worshipped Khushwant Singh and envied Shobhaa De; disliked Bengali women; and hated the singer Bhupinder Singh.

But Exposure and Introspection are two angels who hold your hands and lead you out of the darkened cell where society had condemned you to live. Under the sun, you see things in a different light, besides seeing new things.

Take Bhupinder Singh, for example. The ghazal singer started his career in the film industry as a guitarist for the music director Madan Mohan (Bhupinder played the guitar in Tum jo mil gaye ho from Hanste Zakhm, the famous car-drive-in-rain song featuring Navin Nischol). He also sang small bits for Madan Mohan and S.D. Burman before he became a guitarist for R.D. Burman, who gave Bhupinder his first real break as a singer in Gulzar's Parichay, in which he sang the immortal Beeti na bitaaye raina.

Somehow, I could never bring myself to liking Bhupinder Singh. To me, he was a singer who suffered from a perpetual nasal block. I often felt like holding out a handkerchief to him: "Please blow your nose, you will sound better." And being a fan of Kishore Kumar, who threw his voice straight out of his lungs into the microphone, there was no way I could like Bhupinder. I pitied his fans -- including my father, who loved the song, Do deewane sheher mein.

That was then. Today, readers of Ganga Mail know what a great fan of Bhupinder I am. If there is ever a fire at home and I am allowed to save only 10 songs, the top two would be Bhupinder's: Raat banoon main and Aawaz di hai. Kishore Kumar's songs I can find anywhere, but these are two songs I had to work really hard to trace. They have entered my bloodstream and I simply cannot do without them.

So what brought about the change of heart? How did a singer, who I thought always suffered from a bad cold, come to possess a voice that I now think is silky and lilting? The answer lies in the song you see at the bottom of this post. The song, written by Gulzar and set to tune by R.D. Burman, changed forever the way I listened to Bhupinder Singh. Only Gulzar can write poetry that can detect sensuality in the commonest of things; and only R.D. could have whipped such static verses into a song.

And today, fifteen years after I first heard this song, it has also changed the way I look at women.

Women are the most wonderful thing to have happened to mankind -- we all know that. From time to time, poems have been written about the depth of their eyes, the lusciousness of their lips, the fulness of their breasts, the curves of their hips, the warmth in between their thighs, and so on. But are they really poetry or just lessons in anatomy?

The woman deserves greater tribute. How closely have you observed her when she:

Wakes up in the morning;

Makes you breakfast;

Comes out of bath, her face glowing and hair wet;

Pulls out a set a set of clothes from the wardrobe to decide what to wear for work;

Turns to you for advice when she can't decide what to wear;

Waves at you as she drives away;

Chops vegetables for dinner;

Changes the bedsheets;

Arranges the flowers before the guests arrive;

Buys nothing for herself but something for you whenever she visits the mall alone;

Takes ownership of the child so that you're not distracted from work;

Is pally with your drinking buddies;

But frowns when you drink too much;

Forgives you even if you get drunk?

A man is all about reality, but a woman -- even in reality -- is poetry. You just have to observe her -- the smallest things about her -- like Gulzar did in this song:

 

Woo Me With An Asha Song

It is very unlikely for me to pay tribute to Asha Bhosle on her birthday, considering that for a long, long time I could not even distinguish between her voice and Lata's; for that matter, I could not tell one female voice from another.

It was always the male voice that mattered -- in my case Kishore Kumar's -- the reason being back then, when I was growing up, the hero alone mattered. You pestered your parents to take you to an Amitabh Bachchan film: it did not matter one bit whether he was paired with Rekha, Hema Malini, Neetu Singh or -- oh no -- Rakhi.

Consequently, the songs sung by the hero mattered. Since you wanted to be him, you wanted to sing his songs -- not the heroine's. If I were a parent back then, I would be extremely worried if my 10-year-old son sat transfixed by Dil cheez kya hai from Umraao Jaan, and find it normal if he danced to Khaike paan Banaraswala or I am a Disco Dancer. And those days, you really had some great 'hero songs', especially those sung on a bike or an open jeep, the most memorable of them being Rotey huey, aatein hain sab (Muqaddar Ka Sikandar). What a song, what a song!

I was so much of a hero-worshipper those days that I felt immensely relieved when Waheeda Rehman, playing Amitabh Bachchan's mother in Trishul, dies right in the beginning of the film. "Now that he is free from the burden of an ailing mother," my young mind told me in the theatre, "he is going to go out and fight all the bad people." Back home, when I told my mother that I was very happy Amitabh's mother died early on in the film so that he could do all the fighting, she wasn't amused at all. "Oh, the death of a mother means nothing to you?" she asked me, rather worried. This was 1979. In 2009 my mother died. Waheeda Rehman, who died ages ago in Trishul, lives on.

But memories of going to nearby movie theatres -- on my father's Lambretta -- remain etched in mind. One such movie was Mr. Natwarlal. I loved the song Pardesia yeh sach hai piya, in which Kishore Kumar makes a dramatic entry into this mindblowing duet with Lata, but thought nothing of  Tauba tauba, an Asha solo. The reason being the latter was purely a heroine song.

Then, one day, you grow up and your sensibilities begin to change. You begin to take a closer look at the opposite sex and start paying attention to their voices and their songs. Today, I get goosebumps listening to the same Tauba tauba. And many many other songs sung by the heroine -- even the vamp.

And if I were to compile a list of such songs -- songs in which I could very well do without Kishore's voice -- eighty percent of them would belong to Asha Bhosle. Lata, the elder sister, might be great, but Asha's voice dances right into your heart and pierces your soul. You instantly want to indulge that voice, even while reserving all the respect for Lata. You respect Lata, but love Asha.

Asha Bhosle makes for a third of the one-rupee coin of Hindu music I always carry in my breast pocket: the remaining two-thirds being shared equally by Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman. I may listen to -- and love -- the music of others too, but this coin is indispensable. Without this solitary coin, I would be the poorest man on earth.

Presenting five Asha songs that make a great difference to my world and make it worth living:

1. Raat banoon main; which happens to the most favourite of my Hindi songs -- and it does not even feature Kishore Kumar;
2. Aawaz di hai; a song that continues to haunt me -- no Kishore here either;
3. Jaane jaan; need I say anything about this song?;
4. Bechara dil kya kare: vintage Asha!
5. Chal saheli jhoom ke. You may not have heard this song before, but I think you will like it.

Postscript: Hindi cinema is replete with examples of the woman wooing/seducing the man with a song. At the age of 41, I don't expect to be dispensed with such kindness, but if at all any of you still thinks I am worthy of being wooed, that too with a song, please sing an Asha song.

Rain, Baarish, And Rimjhim Gire Saawan

Rain is romance. Provided it falls in the right amount. But what amount is right amount? What may be right for lovers and songwriters may not be sufficient for the poor farmer; and what may be sufficient for the farmer may not be sufficient enough for a parched piece of land that had been waiting for years to recharge its groundwater levels. And then comes a time when rain turns into a mass destructor, washing away people and their homes.

Rain is pretty much like a guest who shouldn’t overstay its welcome. Stay for a couple of days at a time and we will fete you, write poems on you, and even make love to the sound of the shower. But if you stay on for a couple of weeks without giving us a break, you become an enemy.

Yet, year after year, despite the destruction and hardship it causes, we eagerly wait for the smell of the wet earth and the sound of the pitter-patter on the window panes. Why so? That’s because rain brings much-needed relief and distraction when the world around turns into a blazing desert, which it does every so often.

Then there is something else. Few sights match the beauty of water descending from the sky in the form of a natural shower. Imagine the water falling from the sky just like it would if you were to upturn a bucket! — but no, nature has thought it all out. It has installed an invisible shower-head somewhere up there so that when it rains, you don’t stand under a waterfall but a shower. And the drops of water falling on your skin have an instant rejuvenating affect; what a pity that our first reaction, when it begins to rain, is to run for cover.

Rain. Baarish. Brishti. Barkha. How sensual they sound! Especially baarish. I love the sound of the word. People enjoy the rain in their own ways. The adventurous and the romantic — people I always envy — enjoy getting wet. They don’t worry about catching a cold. In fact, the pouring rain kindles a fire in them. The practical and the pragmatic, on the other hand, like to enjoy the rain from an arm’s length. They sit on the verandah and watch the rain and munch on freshly-fried pakodas and sip hot tea.

Then you have people who are practical as well as romantic: who don’t want to get wet in the rain but at the same time don’t want to miss out on its sensuality. Some like to go on long drives during a drizzle, while others see opportunity in the immobility caused by a sudden downpour and they open the windows, make a drink and pull out their favourite book. Or they choose to make love. The idea is to make use of the setting — the smell of wet earth, the sight of the grey sky and bathing trees, and the sound of falling drops.

Given my temperament, I would say I fall in the third category. But secretly, I desire to belong to the first category: adventurous-cum-romantic. Imagine getting wet in the rain without a care in the world! Oh, and the best part about getting wet in such a carefree manner is the fire it kindles within you.

Once upon a time, a few years ago, I knew someone who was equally fascinated by the idea of getting wet in the rain. During one monsoon, she wanted me to come to the beach with her so that we could both get wet together. I had even bought a bottle of brandy, just in case the sensation of dry clothes on wet skin wasn’t enough to stoke desire.

But there erupted a hitch: where would we keep our mobile phones? She suggested options, but I was very nervous about staying away from the phone for a prolonged period. And so the trip to Marina never materialised. Today she is the mother of a two-year-old boy. I don’t think I can plan another Marina trip with her in the next 15 years.

But the desire remains: to get wet mindlessly in the rain, without worrying about the phone or the leather shoes or about the voyeuristic world, and to follow it up with something equally mindless. Until such time, I am going to make do with rain songs. Presenting the top five on my list:


1. Roop tera mastana;

2. Barkha raani, zara jamke barso;

3. Kiss me, kiss me;

4. Bheegi bheegi raaton mein;

5. Aaj rapat jaayen to.

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the song topmost on my list. It is a simple rain song, shot in the most mundane of locations in Bombay, but the visuals (depicting innocent love) and the lyrics (explaining the sexiness of the rain) make Rimjhim gire saawan one of the most sensual rain songs ever made in Hindi cinema. Today, when I am 41, this particular song — and not the fight scenes I grew up with — makes me want to be Amitabh Bachchan.

What Akram Khan Taught Me

This evening I realised two things. They are things you realise from time to time, but you either do nothing about them or cannot do anything about them. But the fact that you realise them at least shows you have a mind that is in working condition.

Realisation no. 1: Practice makes a man perfect. Now this is something we all know, but the point is driven into your head like a nail when you watch, for example, a performance by the celebrated dancer Akram Khan. I am not much into dance, except for shaking a leg at the disco whenever I happen to visit one, though in the recent years, ever since I learned my yoga, I am able to appreciate the grace in a dancer's movements. But of Akram Khan I am a huge fan.

I first read about this Bangladeshi-Brit dancer, who has contemporised Kathak, in the Sunday Times of London a few years ago. It was a biggish piece, accompanied with a big picture showing him and a co-dancer in action. He piqued my curiosity. I immediately looked him up on You Tube and found videos that blew my mind. I watched these videos each time my energy levels dropped and I felt too lazy to work out. I also wished -- very badly -- that I could meet him and watch him perform live someday. But then, if you are living in India, it is not everyday that one travels to London, and even if you do, chances are remote that your visit would coincide with his shows.

But to paraphrase Maugham, when you want something badly, the entire universe conspires to make your wish come true. And so Akram Khan came to my doorstep this evening, all the way to Chennai, and I watched him perform with his troupe as I sat in the front row. There are dancers and there are dancers, but Akram Khan takes his art to a level that that can be accessed by only a select few. And with the support of his small but highly talented troupe, he appears almost God-like on stage, capable of movements and precision that most humans can't even dream of.

Yet he is just another human being, who consists of the same flesh and blood that I am made of. We were just 10 feet apart: but he was on stage, under the spotlight; while I remained seated in darkness, among the faceless audience that held its breath while he performed. So what really puts him there? Practice.

Practice is what separates the good from the best. All it requires to shine is to walk that extra mile, to take that extra effort to polish your skills. But very few have the patience to persevere -- and that holds true for any profession, not just dance. As a result, while you often meet the good, you rarely get to meet the best -- to meet them you need to seek an appointment. And when the best walk into a room, you know they are the best because their faces glow with accomplishment, even though you might consider them ugly otherwise.

Akram Khan is certainly not ugly. In fact, he is a beautiful man -- one of the most graceful men you can ever set your eyes on. As I watched him today, I silently resolved that I must resume my yoga practice without delay. I will never be another Akram Khan -- certainly not in this birth -- but I can at least be somewhat like him if I were to practise ashtanga yoga regularly. If nothing else, it will at least bring me good health and enhance my desirability among the opposite sex (who wants to be Akram Khan!).

That brings me to realisation no. 2: How time flies!

The last time I climed onto a treadmill was on October 31 last year, in the hotel I was put up in during a short visit to Hong Kong. That was also the day when I last stepped into a swimming pool.  When I returned to India, on November 2, I plunged myself into the draft of Tamarind City and ever since then -- it's going to be almost a year now -- I haven't had a decent workout!

My iPod is rusting (oh, those racy R.D. Burman numbers) and my Speedos are long lost in the large pile of Jockeys and FCUKs. My sculpted chest seems to be turning into boobs, my arms no longer seem to have the strength they had before, my knees hurt somewhat when I climb the stairs, and my lower back has begun to hurt. All this can be reversed in no time, but only if I have a sense of time. All this while, I've been postponing the resumption of my exercise regime, thinking, "Oh, wasn't it just the other day when I had a gratifying workout at The Mitra in Hong Kong? Why worry, I am still fit."

But the 'other day' is now 300 days old, which effectively means I haven't exercised in almost a year. I am sure it is the intermittent practise of yoga -- including the headstand and the shoulderstand -- that is still keeping me away from the hospital in spite of my highly erratic lifestyle. I only hope this evening -- after watching Akram Khan's magic on stage -- serves as a turning point, so that in the years to come, I can live better, write better, and do many things better. Better than ever before.

Photo:  British Council

Shades Of Grey And Grey Hair

This seems to be the season of sex. Thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey.

People are writing about sex. Reading about sex. Discussing sex: this time, in a very matter-of-fact way, as if they are discussing career moves or which school to send their children to. Somewhere in between, they are probaby having real sex too.

And thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey, a large majority of those who happen to be discussing sex are women. I don't think I would be wrong if I say the book has brought about a new sexual revolution in India in an era when sex is increasingly becoming notional than real. And women seem to be on top.

I am not sure if Fifty Shades has made the Indian woman demanding (or more demanding) in bed yet, but in the emancipated West, men are reportedly wilting under new pressure to perform.

Just look at the power of the written word: even though the writing is said to be mediocre (I haven't read the book, though women friends have told me all about it), Fifty Shades has gone to become the fastest-selling bestseller of all time. It tops the bestsellers' list even in places you had forgotten all about, such as Malta. Forget Malta, even in conservative Chennai.

So how can mediocre writing that peddles mommy porn melt millions of women and stiffen their men (in places other than where they should be)? I guess that's because the book feeds on -- and lends voice to -- unrealised fantasies. Fantasy is more powerful than fact, anyday. And fact may not be as tickling for women because traditionally, they have only submitted to male fantasies. The vice-versa rarely happens because women are either too shy or feel intimidated to spell out their kinks. They fear being judged. Fifty Shades, therfore, makes for good company.

But why buy Fifty Shades when porn sites -- countless in number and far easier to access than a physical book -- can act as cathartic agents? That's because porn is porn -- it's considered dirty. But at the same time, what's life without a dose of porn? Without porn, life would be as white as the robe of a priest.

If hardcore porn is black, the absence of any porn is white. No sensible human would like to embrace either extremes: they all want to live in the comfort of the grey area. Which is why you now have not just one, but fifty shades of grey! Take your pick.

What a time to find myself in my forties, burdened with commitments that keep me confined to my laptop. Even when not on laptop, there are other worries that silently eat into me: "How long before Tamarind City goes into reprint?" "How do I make the next book different?" "How long before I start calling myself a writer?" I am too busy counting the grey on my chin and chest to savour the changes that Fifty Shades is bringing about.

The problem in being a forty-plus man is that you either have a body that does not always cope with your desires and fantasies, or come to possess a mature mind that hesitates to cooperate with the body whenever it wants to have mindless sex. Either way you miss out on the fun -- unless an angel descends from heaven and assures you that you are still perfectly capable of giving shape to your fantasies.

But how often do you sight angels descending from heaven? Or have they all migrated to Facebook?

Oh Bishwanath!

Last evening, after I spoke about Madras and Tamarind City at the Gymkhana Club, an elderly couple sitting in the front row came up to me.

"Can I please have your email ID?" the man asked.

I gave him my card.

"I've been reading you in The Hindu," he said, "and somehow I always thought you were an elderly gentleman, sixty or sixty-five years old."

"You are not the only one, sir," I assured him.

He isn't the only one, really. From time to time, I am told by various people, once they meet me, that how they always thought the byline belonged to a much older person. I usually take it as a compliment (because to be thought of as an elderly man can mean the writing is mature), but at the same time I am also reminded how unsexy my name is.

Recently, when Tamarind City launched in Bangalore at the Leela Palace, I was told the same by danseuse Vani Ganapathy, who read from the book there. When I rushed up to the entrance to escort her to the book-reading venue as soon as she reached the hotel, she asked me: "Are you Bishwanath Ghosh?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You know what, I thought Mr. Bishwanath Ghosh is a very elderly person, and that you are someone he has sent to receive me," she told me as we took the escalator down. She then went on to read out two extra passages which she hadn't intended to earlier.

The older I grow, the more I am beginning to dislike my name. It only seems to be hastening the aging process. No matter how hard I try to imagine myself looking like an elderly man, I fail miserably: in my own eyes, I am always the child who is lusting for the green mangoes hanging from the tree in the neighbour's compound. But God knows what images people conjure up in their minds when they read my byline: Bishwanath Ghosh.

My father's name is Samir; my grandfather was Suresh; my grandfather's father was Umesh, my grandfather's grandfather was Govinda. Then why am I Bishwanath? Oh well, it so happened that when I was still in my mother's womb, my grandfather -- mother's father, that is -- happened to visit Vishwanath Temple in Benaras. He told the god, "If my daughter gives birth to a son, I will name him Vishwanath." Considering we are Bengalis, Vishwanath became Bishwanath (thankfully, not Bishshonath).

Ever since then, I've been carrying the burden of a long name. Ten letters! Certain long names can be sexy, such as Harshvardhan. But certainly not Bishwanath. I wonder if a shorter name would've have had a greater appeal among readers and also members of the opposite sex: Atul Ghosh, Tarun Ghosh, Bikram Ghosh, Ayan Ghosh, Arjun Ghosh.If the Shiva connection was so necessary, I wouldn't have minded even Shankar Ghosh. Or Shambhu Ghosh. Such short names would have certainly looked better on a book cover. Of what use popularity if majority of your audience assumes you are an arthritic old man who is hostile to attention: not everybody is on Facebook, after all.

Fortunately, for me, most people who matter to me call me either BG, Bish or Bishy. They sound sufficiently sexy and cosy. Many others call me Ghosh -- which is also perfectly fine. But I invariably develop a dislike for people who insist on calling me Bishwanath. I distinctly remember that afternoon, many years ago, when this woman, drunk on the cocktail of love and lust, happened to blurt out the offending words during a highly passionate moment: "Oh Bishwanath!"

I instantly came crashing to earth. I never wanted to see her after that. I never did.

Vagina Monologue Part 2

I needn't have written this post but tonight my hands itch to type. Ganga Mail is largely neglected these days, for a variety of reasons, and it is a good idea to water it once in a while before people forget all about it. The blog, after all, is an account of my journey on this planet -- I started writing it when I was yet to turn 35; and now I'm almost 42 -- and I am possessive about it.

The primary reason for the neglect is my commitment to write things other than the blog. Another reason is Facebook (and Twitter): a thought that can be developed into an engaging 400-word piece is often wasted as a status message.

Then there are travels that you don't feel compelled to describe once you've uploaded the pictures on Facebook: 'They've seen the pictures anyway, now what is there to write.' Sometime ago I went to Kasauli; more recently I visited Santiniketan -- these are places I really wanted to write about but found myself busy uploading their pictures. Someone intending to write a travel piece should never carry a camera or a smartphone: you need to decide whether you want to show the pictures or paint pictures with your words.

There's something else, too, that makes me hesitate to express my thoughts freely about certain subjects these days: spiteful comments. If you look up the archives of Ganga Mail, you'll find plenty of posts related to sex and relationship, but if you go through their comment boxes, you'll hardly find a comment that can be seen as a personal attack. The occasional chiding, yes; but no personal attack.

But in the last couple of years or so, my posts have been attracting their share of poisonous comments (as opposed to criticism), and that does make me somewhat sad because I have not, at least knowingly, harmed anyone to deserve such malice. An easy way to tide over this would be to enable comment-moderation, which a number of respected bloggers do, but the Ganga Mail supports free speech and uninhibited expression of thoughts. I consider it unfair that only the blogger should be allowed to have his say while the comments of the readers be subjected to moderation. And in the seven years that I've been blogging, I have rarely needed to delete a comment.

Not anymore. For my previous post, Vagina Monologue, which was merely a reaction to the advertisement of a vagina-tightening gel being already peddled in the market, I've had to delete five malicious comments so far -- some more instantly than the others, thanks to Blackberry. There were a couple of others which I was tempted to remove, but did not do so for the sake of free speech. One male commentator, quoting a 'good' feminist friend of his, screamed at me: ITS NOT A VAGINA! ITS A FUCKING VULVA!!!! Quite obvious that the feminist friend cannot distinguish one V from the other -- unless the feminist in question is a man with pathetic knowledge of female anatomy. You can't tighten the vulva, brother, you can only tighten the vagina.

Vagina Monologue, in fact, kicked up a reaction I never expected, even though it is an extremely harmless post compared to what I've written about sex on the blog over the years. Ganga Mail is not the most popular of blogs: on normal days when I do not write anything, the number of hits it attracts barely exceeds the 200-mark, but on the day I wrote Vagina Monologue, the number of 'unique visitors' alone crossed the 200-mark (total hits were nearly 800 on a single day).

And then the whispers I overheard in the corridors:

"Did you read his latest post?"

"No, I haven't. What's it about?"

"Haven't you read the one about vagina?"

"No."

"You haven't? Go read it. You'll know what the fellow is up to."

Oh well, this fellow is up to what any other normal man is up to. A man, any man, is cursed right from birth: he is born with an extra piece of flesh that keeps him on his toes all his life. The smart ones know what to do with it, the remaining make do with titillation.

The word 'vagina', as I just realised, offers far more titillation than the word 'sex'. (Personal vagina trivia: for long I thought it was 'wag-eena' and not 'vuh-jaaina', because the biology teacher had deliberately skipped the chapter on reproduction and there was no way of getting the pronunciations right. Even penis was 'pen-is' and not 'peen-is').

That reminds me of yet another comment to the Vagina post, which I am reproducing verbatim:

What next? Penis-vagina dialogue? You are reducing the entire human being to the piece of flesh between the legs? Will you be able to talk to your mother, sisters and wife on these lines?

Dear Respected Commentator: Human beings are indeed born out of the penis-vagina dialogue, just in case you did not know. I am not sure if you descended directly from heaven, but as for humans, they are indeed a piece of flesh who are forever in pursuit of another piece of flesh -- all the time looking in between the legs. As for my being able to talk to my mother, sisters and wife on these lines -- well, my mother is no more; I never had any sisters; and as for my wife, she reads my blog posts and often shares the links on her Facebook wall. But let me assure you: if my mother happened to be alive, or if I had sisters, they would have asked you, even before I could, to fuck off.

Vagina Monologue

The world descended from the vagina. It lives on because of the vagina. It revolves around the vagina. A word that you cannot pronounce without embarrassment painting your cheeks a mild red, even though its vulgar variants roll off the tongue with relative ease and, often, wicked relish.

A tiny artwork of flesh, on the face of it; but the most powerful weapon on earth. Block the vagina and mankind would be wiped off the face of earth in less than 50 years. Such is its power, such is its allure. The power lies in the allure.

In an age when millions can be made out of anything and everything provided you come up with the right idea, won't it be utterly foolish to ignore something whose power and allure is so universal? And so, they now want to whiten and tighten your vaginas. First came the ad for a whitening cream, and now the ad for a tightening gel (featuring, of all people, a joint Tamilian family!).

I am not sure whether these commercials are shown on television and therefore reach the larger Indian audience; but they are certainly a rage on the internet, mostly because of the opinions expressed against them by women bloggers and writers. Each time a writer vents her anger, she also weaves You Tube links to these commercials into her thought-provoking prose, in the process only popularising the products further. Of every 10 women reading such posts, I am sure there will be at least three who, once their outrage has subsided, would be tempted to try out the products. That's precisely what the marketing guys want: to play on the insecurity of the women about how they look down there.

I find such sense of insecurity to be utterly foolish -- just as I find foolish the obsession of certain men with tightness (though I've never heard anyone lament the lack of whiteness). True, any sexual relationship between a man and a woman fructifies at the vagina; but does the whiteness and the tightness matter?

The vagina is not a product that you check for whiteness or tightness before you decide to enter it; you usually enter it out of blind passion, no matter how it looks or feels. The vagina may be the culmination of togetherness, but it certainly cannot be the starting point of togetherness. If your man finds you any less desirable because your vagina is dark and not so tight, dump him! -- or ask him to get a penis just as white and perpetually hard as they show in porn films.

The vagina, in my humble opinion, is as beautiful and alluring as the woman it belongs to. When you are truly into a woman, you don't really care how white or tight she is, do you? In fact, you feel grateful when she lets you go down on her, because it is more fun exploring the vagina of a woman you admire than exploring a woman whose vagina you admire. The woman comes first, the vagina later. The vagina may be the most powerful weapon on earth, but it's the woman's mind that holds the key.

Life's Journey, What Kind Of A Journey

If only he hadn't appeared in the Havells fan commercial. It would have preserved the romance of Rajesh Khanna and hidden from adoring fans what age and disease can do to a man who was celebrated for his looks and mannerisms not too long ago.

Even more heart-crushing is to watch the video on the making of the commercial. You will realise that even the line, 'Babumoshai, merey fans mujhse koi nahin chheen sakta,' is dubbed by a mimic artiste because the former superstar had completely lost his voice by then. He looks gravely ill -- a pathetic skeleton -- and speaks in whispers to the interviewer, as if he is on deathbed. Well, he already was already on deathbed: just that no one cares about a faded actor unless he actually dies.

Now that Rajesh Khanna is dead, maybe the makers of the commercial did the right thing. They gave him one last chance to face the camera and assert his erstwhile superstardom: 'Babumoshai, merey fans mujhse koi nahin chheen sakta.' They made him sign out of the world in style. The sad part is, he was only 69.

I was not even born when Aradhana released -- my date of birth being 26 December 1970 -- and by the time I was old enough to understand movies, Amitabh Bachchan was already the new star. Yet, I knew Rajesh Khanna -- his superstardom had left its traces just about everywhere, including the saloon in Kanpur where I would be taken by my father on designated Sundays for a haircut. At the saloon, the word 'hero' was synonymous with Rajesh Khanna, and not Amitabh Bachchan. The hairdressers would often ask patrons if they wanted their hair styled in the fashion of Rajesh Khanna.

I was fifteen when I first saw Aradhana -- by then I had seen most of the famous Amitabh Bachchan films, including Sholay -- yet I was struck by the handsomeness of Rajesh Khanna. How can a man be so charming? And the song, Roop tera mastana -- I still rate it as the most sensual song ever created in Hindi cinema.

I saw Rajesh Khanna in person only once, in 1996, when he was chosen by the Congress party to contest the Lok Sabha elections from the New Delhi seat. He was already the sitting MP from the constituency (having defeated BJP's Shatrughan Sinha in the previous elections), and now that he was formally going to launch his campaign, he had invited the media to his home on Lodhi Road (if I remember the address right).

I was a cub reporter back then. Those days there were no television channels, only print media. After a press conference, Rajesh Khanna and his wife Dimple and their two daughters got up on a stationary jeep for the benefit of news photographers. "Dimpy, zara wave karna," he told his wife. The entire family waved at an imaginary crowd while the photographers clicked away.

He lied to the readers back then, he lied to the viewers now. Back then, readers could not tell whether the jeep was stationary, but this time, in the fan commercial, it was evident that the famous journey that began with a song on a jeep was nearing its end.

With Rajesh Khanna's death, yet another solid pillar that stood between our generation and mortality has caved in. Dev Anand died just a few months ago. Perhaps a matter of time before the remaining of the pillars fall and we stand on the edge of the world, waiting to board the plane that never returns. How come so soon?

The Script

The Calcutta-born Bengali man — he could be the faceless clerk travelling with you in a train or the elderly sophisticated bhadralok having a drink with you at the club — doesn’t just talk; he reads out from a script. A script that intends to have an effect on the listener, that intends to create drama in the most mundane of locations, such as the stifling compartment of a local train or within the humid confines of a government office. Pretty much the kind of scripts that Kadar Khan wrote.

This trait, depending on the mood you are in, can irritate the hell out of you; but most of the time it makes Calcutta an interesting, a very interesting, place to visit and an interesting subject for a book. Quotes flying around.

The TTE in my compartment of Santiniketan Express was one such Kadar Khan.

“Age proof achhe (Do you have proof of age)?” he asked the elderly bhadralok sitting across the aisle.

“Haan achhe (Yes, I do),” the bhadralok replied.

“Ektu dekhan (Please show).”

Just as the bhadralok was about to stand up to reach his suitcase, the TTE gently patted him on the shoulder and said, “Na, na, thhaak. Eto boyesh hoeche, mithye to bolben na. Theek ache, theek achhe (No, it’s ok. You are too elderly to be lying about your age. It’s alright, it’s alright.”

The TTE moved on, leaving the old man shocked and speechless. About an hour later, the Talkative Ticket Examiner found me standing by the door.

“Mone hochche cigarette khete chaan (Looks like you want to smoke),” he told me.

“Haan, kintu matchbox ta hariye phelechhi (Yes, but I’ve lost my matchbox),” I told him truthfully.

“Ei je, neen na (Here, take this),” he handed me his lighter. “Eikhanei daanriye khaan. Keyo kichhu bolle amake daakben (Stand here and smoke. If someone tells you anything, call me). The emphasis was on ‘me’: he was the supreme authority in the compartment.

But I did not listen to him: what if another Kadar Khan came along and questioned my right to smoke in the vestibule? So as soon as I lit the cigarette and he returned into the compartment, insisting once again that I should call him in case someone objected, I hid myself in the lavatory and took quick drags.

While the TTE read from the script to exert his authority and to amuse himself and the passengers, the others, such as singing-beggars and hawkers, used the ‘dialogue-delivery’ effectively to stuff their pockets, even if with smaller currencies.

During this short trip to Calcutta, even though I carried along a notebook, I did not take notes; I find it too tiresome to start working on another book right away. But the scripts from this trip remain fresh in my mind: they will ferment over the next few weeks and maybe then the first line of the book will crystallise. Once the first few lines are ready to my satisfaction, I only have to follow the script.

The Nice Girl

Two nights before her 31st birthday, she looked into the mirror before she removed her lenses.

"Shit, I don't look bad at all," she began telling herself, "in fact I look good! Then why don't I still have a boyfriend? Why am I still a virgin?

"Everything else in my life happened with clockwork precision. I started learning the hymns from the age of five. I joined the dance class when I was eight. I gave my first stage performance at the age of nineteen.

"I started working when I was twenty-one, went to Harvard at twenty-two, returned three years later to get triple the salary. Ever since then, have been given handsome hikes and promotions every two years.

"Today my salary is about a lakh. Amma is happy. Appa is happy. They are happy not because of my salary and designation, but because I chose to come back. I can't find a better set of parents. They never try to persuade me to get marry. They tell me I am free to find my own guy.

"But why haven't I found a guy yet? Why am I still a virgin? Even at thirty-one?"

The next morning she shampooed her hair, slipped into the Marks & Spencer lingerie she'd bought only the Sunday before, and applied kajal and lip gloss standing half-naked in front of the mirror. Then she plucked out a pink Fab India kurta and a white pair of churidar from her wardrobe. "Not bad!" she silently exclaimed at the finished package in the mirror.

She waited all day for the clock to strike six. Five minutes before six, she went over to the cubicle of the hunk.

"Can we go for a drive after we wind up, and then do dinner somewhere?" she asked the hunk.

"Oh sure," the hunk said, "shall we go on my bike or in your car?"

"In my car, of course," she said.

The sun had long retired for the day when they finally set out. She debated between two destinations: Marina and the Besant Nagar beach. At Besant Nagar, she was likely to run into people she knew, but Marina promised anonymity. So Marina it was. She drove through Radhakrishnan Salai, drove past the statues of Sivaji Ganesan and Mahatma Gandhi, entered the service lane at Marina and parked between two large tourist buses.

The hunk, excited by the sight of the Marina at night, began to get out of the car.

"Wait," she said.

"What happened?" the hunk asked.

"Kiss me," she commanded.

"What?"

"Kiss me," she looked into his eyes.

"Oh ok, but..." he brought his mouth close to hers.

"But what?" she put her palm between their lips.

"I mean I am surprised. I thought you were a nice girl."

"Why, nice girls don't want to be kissed?"

"No, I didn't mean it that way. Just that I didn't expect you... I mean, you are such a nice girl."

"Shut up, just kiss me," she withdrew her palm.

And so they kissed.

While they kissed, the hunk tried to put his hand through the pink kurta in order to unhook the bra. He struggled his way up, and was barely half-way up her spine when she said: "Ok, leave it, leave it. I think I am hungry now. Let's go somewhere and eat."

"Are you sure?" the hunk asked.

"Very sure," she replied, as she switched on the ignition.

The hunk sat back.

"This is probably the worst kiss of my life," she told herself as they drove back into the madness of the city. Then the afterthought: "But how can I say it is the worst, when I have never kissed a man before?"

SPB Saar

I've been listening to the voice of S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, or SPB, ever since I was 11, when Ek Duje Ke Liye came out (in 1981); and even though I wouldn't count him as one of my favourite Hindi singers, he will remain one of the landmarks of my growing years. Much later when I came to Madras, in 2001, he became my favourite Tamil singer: I didn't have to know the language to sense the magic he infuses into compositions, especially those of Illayaraja. And after watching him perform live in a few concerts that I was fortunate enough to attend, I became a devotee.

To me, SPB is South India's Kishore Kumar: one can try to be him, but one can never be him. Like Kishore Kumar, he effortlessly throws his rich voice into the microphone, making even difficult compositions sound easy to the ear. I've had the good fortune of listening to the live renditions of Ilamaiyenum poongatru, one of the masterpieces of Illayaraja, and Swasamae swasamae, one of the last brilliant Tamil compositions of A.R. Rahman before he went became global and stopped making meaningful music. And no party at my place is complete until I force my guests to listen to Sippi irukkudu muthum irukkudu and Illaya nila. Search for these songs on You Tube, listen to them, and you will know what I mean.

I am writing this post because SPB turned 66 yesterday, June 4, and a tribute is in order considering he has enriched my stay in Madras. But why I really feel compelled to pay him a tribute on his birthday is not because of the Tamil songs that I happen to admire, but because of his Hindi songs that mark my childhood as well as adolescence. True, he is not my favourite Hindi singer -- even SPB won't fancy himself as a singer of Hindi songs -- but some of his Hindi songs brought about a rush of adrenalin back then and they do so even now with the same intensity.

Some of these songs are:

1. Mere jeevan saathi (Ek Duje Ke Liye)
2. Hum tum hum do raahi (Yeh To Kamaal Ho Gaya)
3. Dekho dekho yeh to kamaal ho gaya (Yeh To Kamaal Ho Gaya)
4. Paagal dil mera (Aaja Meri Jaan)
5. Aaja meri jaan (Aaja Meri Jaan)
6. Idhar dekho, udhar dekho (Angaar)
7. Yeh mera dil (Gardish)

I watched Yeh To Kamaal Ho Gaya, on video (which had just come to India), when I was in class 6. Even to my young mind back then, the song Hum tum hum do raahi denoted ultimate romance, and it does even today. If you happen to fancy someone but are unable to convey your feelings, play this song -- executed impeccably by none other than R.D. Burman -- and you might succeed.

SPB and R.D. Burman were always fond of each other. R.D. Burman, when he was going through his lean phase, was hired by Gulshan Kumar to produce an album called Aaja Meri Jaan. To sing the title song of this album, R.D. invited SPB. It was a song R.D. had already sung in Bengali with Asha Bhosle -- Tumi koto je duure -- and he now wanted SPB to sing the Hindi version along with Anuradha Paudwal. SPB found the song difficult and when he begged to be excused, R.D. told him, "Bloody fellow, that's why I called you from Madras. You can do this!" The song was recorded.

Somewhere down the road, Gulshan Kumar, the juice seller-turned-music magnate, decided to scrap the album. Instead, he made a movie called Aaja Meri Jaan to launch his brother in the film industry but retained the R.D. Burman-composed title song in that film. Such humiliation contributed to the fatal heart attack that the out-of-work R.D. Burman was to suffer soon. Gulshan Kumar did not live for long either: he fell to the bullets of contract killers soon after.

But S.P. Balasubrahmanyam lives on, hale and hearty. Touch wood. He is one of the very, very few surviving links between the various eras of music that I've lived through since my childhood. He lives in the present day, and yet is the active ambassador of the eras gone by. Therefore this tribute.

Tamarind City Travels

At Chennai, 15 May 2012.

At Bangalore, 17 May 2012.

At New Delhi, 25 May 2012.

At Gurgaon, 26 May 2012.

At Mumbai, 1 June 2012.