Songs of sixpence

Filmi Belles from the South, Part II - Waheeda Rehman

2009-12-12T02:05:00.020+01:00

Like a million men before me, I fell in love with Waheeda Rehman at age 21. If you’ve watched her movies, especially the early ones, I don’t have to tell you why. Among other things, I think I particularly fell for the way her luxuriant hair seemed to grow all the way past the temples from the sides of her forehead.

There’s so much about Waheeda Rehman on the net and on other blogs that there is scarcely anything original for me to write about. I knew from early on that her origins lay down south. On a visit to the leather industry town of Ranipet many years ago my aunt proudly spoke of her as a ‘Ranipettai girl’. This, I realised only recently, was slightly off the mark for she was actually born in the neighbouring district town of Chengalpattu, or Chingleput as it was known in her time. Minor inaccuracies apart, the fact is that life took her a long way across the Palar, the river that flows past both Ranipet and Chengalpattu en route to the Bay of Bengal. (I imagine that it carried a lot more water seventy years ago than it does today. Industry has killed this river but we’ll talk about it another day.)

Like Vyjayanthimala (see earlier post), her illustrious peer from the south, Waheeda Rehman was a skilled danseuse who put her skills to good use. Unlike her, however, she did not act in a single Tamil (or Malayalam or Kannada) movie even though her career originated in Telugu filmdom in Chennai. (There being no Ramoji Rao Film City in the early 1950s, and the Nizam having become the ex-Nizam, Hyderabad had only the Char Minar.) This was, of course, before she was whisked away, barely two films old, to Bombay by Guru Dutt.

Despite her long innings and rich repertoire as a leading lady it is in the early part of her career that I count my favourite characters. The novitiate debutante brings to the screen a certain energy that remains unmatched in its naivete and freshness. So here we go as Gulabo the prostitute, all grace and risqué elegance, seduces the pensive poet, Vijay, in Pyaasa:

The song was probably shot on a set but the tall columns tend to remind me of the curved stretch between the Mumbai Samachar building and the Central Asiatic Library at Horniman Circle in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, in this evergreen number from Bees Saal Baad, Waheeda is the classic village belle, lively, teasing and coy at the same time, being sung to by Biswajeet:

My favourite song from Bees Saal Baad is actually the hummable Beqarar karke humein yoon na jaiye. Incidentally, this is the song that we find Amitav Ghosh humming to himself as he walks down London Bridge in his first novel, The Shadow Lines, surprised at having picked on it for he ‘never had the record’. Zara nazron se kehdo ji is visually more pleasing though.

Considering that her latest film release was Delhi – 6 earlier this year, it is evident that Waheeda Rehman has enjoyed a remarkably lengthy professional run for a female actor in Indian moviedom. Indeed, from Bharatnatyam-loving daughter of a liberal Muslim father to peerless veteran, this lady has travelled a long way.

Is Boost the secret of your energy, Waheedaji?

Telangana

2009-12-10T14:04:00.013+01:00

(Picture source: http://www.topnews.in/bjp-reiterates-demand-separate-telangana-state-219420)

I wonder whether Potti Sriramulu, had he been buried rather than cremated (as I assume he was), would have turned in his grave. Or whether he would have been pleased that a leaf had been so ably and successfully drawn from his book by K. Chandrasekara Rao, whose long fast, backed by popular support has won for the people of Telangana the promise of a separate Indian state.

As is known, the Madras-born Sriramulu went on a fast-unto-death beginning 19 October 1952, demanding the creation of a separate Andhra state for Telugu-speaking people. Sriramulu already had a quirky history of emulating his icon, Gandhi, and in the mid-forties had fasted for the rights of Dalits to worship in the temples around Nellore. Unlike KCR, Sriramulu was not a politician and took himself seriously, perhaps too seriously. In fact, he began his own fast quietly without any fanfare, and did not go through the motions of breaking his fast upon a token acceptance of his demand (we-will-look-into-it sort of assurances were not for him) and then hastily resuming it in response to public anger as happened in the current case. Public support for Sriramulu’s cause picked up only in due course. Barely six months into his first elected term as Prime Minister, Nehru was inclined to ignore Sriramulu; likewise, Rajaji, the Chief Minister of Madras, was also against the creation of provinces on a linguistic basis, seeing it as a fissiparous tendency and a potential danger to the survival of a nation still in its infancy. But the intransigent Sriramulu had his mind all made up. Even as the government began responding grudgingly to mounting public pressure, Sriramulu passed away after almost two months of fasting on the night of 15 December, barely a few hours before Nehru made a formal declaration initiating the formation of an Andhra state. Sriramulu’s fast and death served as the impetus for the reorganisation of Indian provinces on a linguistic basis. Now, exactly fifty-seven years later, KCR has ensured that the Andhra Pradesh that Sriramulu gave up his life for will be split, at least into two.

(Picture source: http://maharashtrapost.gov.in/htmldocs/march2000.htm)

It is however, unclear what exactly Sriramulu had in mind. He asked for an Andhra state for the Telugu-speaking people. I do not know if he had in mind the merger of Telangana (then already in existence as a distinct Hyderabad state) with the Telugu-speaking parts of Madras state. He believed that Madras, the city, would be the capital of Andhra – his fast was, in fact, carried out in Madras, but this did not happen. The Andhra state that came into being in 1953 did not initially include Telangana/Hyderabad, and its capital was based in Kurnool. It was only in 1956 that Andhra Pradesh as we know it today took shape with the merger of Telangana and Andhra.

The creation of Telangana is something of a watershed for independent India. It debunks the theory of linguistic unity, which is the basis on which the larger Indian states are organised. Unlike the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh from which new states had been carved out in recent times, Andhra Pradesh seemed to have a more cohesive linguistic-cultural identity. This identity has now been shown to be tenuous.

Considering that India’s population has grown nearly four-fold since independence, the creation of smaller states is not a bad deal. Small states ought to make administration and governance easier and more responsive by helping cut down on the distance between the average citizen on the one hand and bureaucrats and elected representatives on the other. But as the experience in other parts of India shows, small states seem to be more prone to political instability and are hardly marked by exceptional governance. On the contrary, their administrative mechanisms are weak, their politicians exceptionally corrupt and their people often subject to violent conflict.

So, where is Telangana likely to lead us? Will the idealism that has driven its creation sustain itself? Or will another illustrious successor of Sriramulu (and KCR) call for a bifurcation or trifurcation of their state some years down the line? Too early to tell.

Humankind has a tendency to draw lines around itself and to shut itself up in ever smaller boxes.

For the moment, may the Telangas rejoice!

Ugly face in the mirror

2009-11-27T23:43:00.011+01:00

One way to form a picture of the Indian middle class is to look up the comments below the stories carried on Indian newspaper sites. Trust me, it’s not a pretty picture. For what may start of as an innocuous news story can end up as a sickening slanging match, loaded with invective, between readers by the time you scroll down to the end of the page. For example, this straightforward record of a prominent cricketer’s sentiments on the terrorist attack on Mumbai last year is followed by utterly unrelated wild comments in which readers attack one another along caste as well as communal lines. Stories on politics attract the greatest number of comments, and many of them are as cheap as they can get. Making below-the-belt personal attacks on personalities as well as other readers is quite the norm. While expressindia.com, a popular newspaper website, tries to check the use of language when readers post their two-bit, it does not seem to have a policy of moderating comments, and readers who want to have their chauvinistic say can have it with ease. Meanwhile, its separated sister publication down south, expressbuzz.com, has a no-censorship policy, so that here you can find readers posting the most nauseating comments with gay abandon.

One may well say that the churlish tirade of the internet-savvy urban Indian middle class reflects its sense of deep-rooted frustration with matters in its country. It is not hard to understand this. Anyone that belongs to this biradari or community, including yours truly, knows that there is no end of things in mahan Bharat to fulminate about. But this does not justify the remarkable lack of critical understanding that the comments display. Quite frequently, readers take recourse to conspiracy theories revolving around prominent Indian politicians, religious communities or caste groups, and countries in the neighbourhood. Very often, comments are solely aimed at denigrating the objects of their tirade. There is little or no attempt to be constructive in one’s criticism or to observe a minimum sense of decorum. The internet provides complete anonymity for hit-and-run readers of this kind, who revel in adopting warped pseudonyms (Jai Shri Raam, n.r.i., Indian etc.).

Given that the ability to read and write in English, and access to the internet are hallmarks of relative privilege in India, the nature of comments that one comes across are a deeply sad commentary on India’s educated, ‘upwardly mobile’ and ‘rising’ Indian middle class. It does not say much of the education it goes through either. Of the values that it inherits at home, perhaps the less said the better. The middle class produces successful entrepreneurs and tech wizards, cracks competitive examinations, infiltrates corporate offices (in India and abroad), and fills high-level government offices. Yet its ability to comprehend its everyday environment, cultivate the detachment essential to engage in useful debate and accommodate divergent points of view seems to be shrinking in direct proportion to its increasing material achievements.

Illiberal, spiteful and destructive – that’s the ugly face of the urban Indian middle class that one gets to see on the internet.

But I still have hope.

Is there such a thing as agro-imperialism?

2009-11-23T23:37:00.009+01:00

The Malthusian bug has bitten the Arabs. Countries in the Persian Gulf import about 60% of their food requirements and are worried about rapidly climbing food prices. Consequently, Middle Eastern nations, already high on their ecological footprint, are investing vast amounts of money in Africa, taking over thousands of acres of fertile land for massive, large-scale agriculture that will help secure food supply for their arid countries the future. African governments seem only too happy to give away land in return for the investment that is coming in notwithstanding the fact that some of these countries are themselves victims of famine and do not grow enough food for their people. Moreover, the ownership credentials of the land itself are dubious. In Ethiopia, for instance, land was taken over from farmers under Communist rule and never returned even after non-Communist governments came to power. The land thus, originally belonged to individuals who are now seeing it being given away by the state to agribusiness at dirt cheap rates. However, governments argue that agribusiness brings in capital and expertise apart from creating employment, and will make it possible for them to reduce their dependence on foreign aid.

The complex issue is highlighted with nuance in the following New York Times article, "Is there such a thing as agro-imperialism?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22land-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

Filmi belle from the South - Vyjayanthimala

2009-11-18T22:16:00.009+01:00

The Hindi film industry has an interesting nexus with South Indian belles. The earliest of the demure ladies to cross the Cauvery, metaphorically speaking, were Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, followed in succeeding years by Padmini, Rekha, Hema Malini, Meenakshi Seshadri and Sridevi (not to forget more recent ones: among others, Bhanupriya, Madhoo, Divya Balan and Asin Thottumkal).

While Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman were undoubtedly the pioneers, the former maintained her links to South Indian filmdom actively and found time to shuttle between Bombay and Madras, showcasing her linguistic prowess in addition to her dancing and acting skills in the process. She acted with leading men both north and south. Her films with Dilip Kumar, in particular, met with considerable success, beginning with Devdas (1955) and continuing with Naya Daur (1957), Madhumati (1958), Paigham (1959), Ganga Jumna (1961) and Leader (1964). (Incidentally, Dilip Kumar's comeback film in the 1960s was with the other leading actor of South Indian origin, Waheeda Rehman. This was Ram Aur Shyam (1967), a remake of the 1965 Tamil movie Enga Veettu Pillai.) She is believed to have created history of sorts by refusing a Filmfare Award for Devdas. Awarded for Best Supporting Actress in her role as Chandramukhi, Vyjayanthimala considered her role to be a main rather than supporting role, on par with that of Paro (played by Suchitra Sen).

Here we have her in the first flush of love with tongawallah Dilip Kumar in Naya Daur:

In Tamil, she hit it off well with Gemini Ganesan as co-star and three of their movies are on any movie buff's must-watch list: Vanjikottai Valiban (1958), Parthiban Kanavu (1960) and Then Nilavu (1961). Her 1960 releases with the other two giants of Tamil cinema - Sivaji Ganesan (Irumbu Thirai) and MG Ramachandran (Baghdad Thirudan) were also immensely successful, elevating her to the apogee of her career. It is impossible not to make a mention of her superb dance duel with Padmini in Vanjikottai Valiban. Film critic Randor Guy describes it as "scintillating and enthralling" and "one of the best dance sequences in Indian cinema".

In this evergreen song from Then Nilavu we have Gemini Ganesan wooing a recalcitrant Vyjayanthimala in 'khambe-jaisi-khadi-hai' mode (even if on horseback):

Being serenaded by the leading actors of her day was by no means a bad deal. But while she happily sings along with beau Dilip Kumar in the first video, she pays no attention to the eminently more handsome Gemini in the next one. Why this discrimination, dear Mrs. Bali?

How to cheat on your partner and feel good about it!

2009-11-17T22:16:00.004+01:00

If you cheated on your partner and are feeling bad about it here's the way out! Offset your guilt by paying someone who's loyal to their partner to remain so. Or pay someone who's single to remain single. Log on to Cheatneutral.com NOW!

http://www.cheatneutral.com/projects/

Once you've read through the page go to "about" on the menu. Or if you're still on this blog click on this link: http://www.cheatneutral.com/about/

This has to be the greatest spoof on the Carbon Trading Mechanism! And a great way of exposing the scam that carbon trading is.

Illuminating lesser-known lives

2009-11-16T23:12:00.009+01:00

In the winter of 1999, I journeyed by the Grand Trunk Express from New Delhi to Chennai Central, clutching a book that I had picked up out of pure fancy for its title, An Anthropologist among the Marxists and other Essays, at a bookshop in Connaught Place some weeks earlier. When I returned to the harsh embrace of the Delhi cold to begin the last term of my second undergraduate year I did so with the thrill of having read a refreshing collection of essays that had kindled some sort of an intellectual urge. The following year I was lucky enough to be nominated for an award that let me choose books worth a modest sum. Intrigued by the repertoire of an author who, at the time, wrote a fortnightly column on cricket history in The Hindu, while bookshops carried his works on (what I then saw merely as) environmental issues, I picked up another of his books, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals & India. (In the meantime I had devoured Wickets in the East, a delightful collection of cricketing anecdotes in the possession of my cricketer room-mate.) I read through Savaging the Civilized even as my final year exams were just around the corner but found it simply unputdownable. The consequences, I might ruefully add, were far from pleasant. I flunked one of my papers, although in all fairness, the book was only one of other far more crucial factors responsible.

It is now ten years since I acquired the acquaintance of Ramachandra Guha through his books (and on more than one occasion, in person) and have never had reason to be unduly disappointed given his prolific output. I do not necessarily agree with him on all things; nor do I particularly appreciate his polemical, even if bold, manner of joining issue with fellow writers; nonetheless I enjoy reading him. While I have particularly enjoyed his writings on environmental history as well as cricket, it is his superb biographical portraits of relatively lesser-known Indians that I cherish the most. His essays on Dharma Kumar and CS Venkatachar are among my top favourites and those on M Krishnan, TG Vaidyanathan, CV Subbarao, PK Srinivasan and DR Nagaraj come a close second. To Guha's expanding repertory has been added, rather recently, one more portrait, that of the late K Balagopal, whose life holds especial value in these turbulent times as the Maoist insurgency threatens to consume almost a third of India. This is an essay which, like it or not, deserves to be read.

http://www.indiatogether.com/2009/nov/rgh-leftist.htm

Awaara hoon

2009-11-16T01:16:00.005+01:00

What do you do when you meet an ex-flame after many years and realise with a pang that you've lived these years in the delusion that you had gotten over it but that, in fact, a bit of your heart still seems to be pledged to her?

You sing "Hum Tujhse Muhabbat Karke Sanam".

Hahahahahahahaha!!!

The bazaar of Palampur

2009-11-09T02:53:00.008+01:00

Many years ago I read a story entitled 'The Day-Dreaming Darzee of Darzeeganj'. I have forgotten what it was about save that it was about, well, a darzee. But I remember being struck by its poignance although I remember none of its details. The only reason I invoke it now is because it seems to have been acting upon my sub-conscious in the title I'm using for this post. But there is also something RK Narayan-esque about it, isn't it? It seems to go with his book titles such as 'The Vendor of Sweets' or 'The Painter of Signs'. The difference, of course, is Palampur is a place, not a person. More along Sarojini Naidu's alley, perhaps? ('In the Bazaars of Hyderabad'?)

The Palampur bazaar is indeed a delight. Palampur is a fairly old town; the police station is still housed in a quaint colonial era building. The sights of the bazaar took me twenty years down memory lane: this is how markets used to be in the 1980s, I said to myself, though now I think it was just an overdose of nostalgia at work. I like small towns, and the visits to Palampur during my stay in Rakkad were like a dash of opium.

The Palampur I'm talking of lies in Himachal Pradesh, by the way, and is not to be confused with the Jain temple-town of Palanpur in Gujarat. It lies on the way to Baijnath, which is home to a beautiful temple, apparently dating back to the early 13th century and with plenty of mythology attached to it. Palampur is three kilometres away from the fabulous Kangra Valley Railway, on which, rather unfortunately, I could not hitch a ride. The narrow gauge railtrack has a width of roughly 2 feet 6 inches, and stretches for a length of 164 kilometres from Pathankot to Jogindernagar.

And lest I'm hauled up for not mentioning this, let me add that Palampur has plenty of tea-gardens, whose produce is the well-known Kangra tea. Kangra, because that's the valley stretching between the Dhauladhars and the Shivaliks, in which Palampur is nestled.

The pictures, I should say, were all taken by ringsinmypond. Her pictures are bright even if her poetry is melancholic.

Memories of Rakkad

2009-11-08T00:25:00.012+01:00

I had almost forgotten about the existence of this blog when bethebird wrote in last week saying that it cannot be that I have nothing to write about. I was, to be honest, quite flattered although also a little wary for bethebird is an impish sort and at times I'm not sure how far to take her at face value. In any case, I have had but one ardent reader - Mampi - to whom I am deeply grateful for the attention that she has bestowed on my songs of sixpence.

A great deal has happened between my last post and now. I was living in a little village called Rakkad near Dharamsala. It was a lovely place to be in with lovely people around. For this post I will simply post some pictures taken by my friends RL and ringsinmypond.

The banana tree in the picture above is almost as tall as a mid-sized coconut palm making it impossible for the fruit to be plucked from the ground. The very fact that it is thriving far from its home in the tropical south makes clear the enormous implications of climatic change for the Himalaya.

Songs of Sixpence rises sphinx-like from the ashes!

2009-05-16T08:30:00.006+02:00

Talk of tall claims! Nonetheless, seven and a half months of disappearance later, Songs of Sixpence is back. And appositely, on another day of election results, in another country, my own. Do I have a reasonably unique distinction of having gone through national elections in two different countries in less than eight months? Unlike 29 September 2008, 16 May 2009 seems relatively more heartening. The UPA is leading. Not that I root for them but only that they seem to be the lesser evil among the others.

Hopefully, I will be back again.

Till then, here's my tanner for Manmohan.

Elections in Austria

2008-09-30T19:17:00.004+02:00

A day after I walked through the portals of the Habsburg Empire (see previous post), Austria went to the polls. All of Austria voted on a single day, which would be a novelty to any Indian, used as we are to multi-phase polling. (But of course, all of Austria’s electorate – numbering approximately 6.5 million – is probably smaller than that of many of our state capitals.) In the run-up to the elections there was little to indicate that the country was at the hustings. There were no cutouts, no graffiti, no mega-posters, no traffic jams. No public rallies, no loudspeakers, no locality-wise, let alone door-to-door, campaigning. The only indications of the election were the posters, blow-ups of the leaders of the various political parties, all put up in the place of regular advertisements, at tram or bus-stops, or along the sidewalks. The two main political parties, the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), competed between themselves, luring voters with the promise of “Die neue Wahl”: The New Choice, and “Die bessere Wahl”: The Better Choice. (I may add that the translations are not authentic.) Also in the fray were the Greens, the Liberal Party and two right-wing parties, the Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria. The right-wing parties, as one may imagine, have an open dislike for immigrants and Muslims, a proclivity for Nazi policies, and their agenda includes, in addition to a full-stop to further immigration, deportation of foreign migrants as well as an anti-EU stance that demands the return of certain powers to Austria currently vested in the EU.

The results, announced the same night, have come as a nasty shock. The right-wing parties together nearly doubled their presence in the new Austrian parliament, polling about 29% of the popular vote, only marginally lower than the front-running Social Democrats, who polled 29.7%, and more than the People’s Party, who came second with 25.6%. The numbers for the two main political parties are their lowest since the Second World War. They seem to have paid the price of their internal bickering as coalition partners in a grand coalition; the current elections - snap polls really since they were not due until two more years - were a result of the their failure to work together in the incumbent government. The fractured mandate of the current elections gives rise to the very real possibility of at least one of the two right-wing parties becoming a part of the new government, although protracted negotiations may precede the formation of a new coalition.

The implications of the elections cannot be more blunt. Clearly, Austria, as indeed various parts of Europe, is in the grips of a spreading xenophobia, notwithstanding suggestions from political commentators that the vote-swing in favour of the right-wing parties may be read more as a negative vote for the two main political parties, as a petulant response to their inability to collaborate in the incumbent coalition.

At the root of xenophobia lies insecurity. And human beings seem to be growing insecure across the world. Not least in our very own Mumbai.

The New Zealand Herald seems to have carried a more interesting analysis of the Austrian political developments than other news portals on the net. Take a look.

A Coimbatore TamBrahm in a Habsburg court

2008-09-28T21:16:00.007+02:00

The sun is out in all its blazing glory! Exactly two weeks after it staged its disappearing act. I’m light at heart and high in spirits!

For the last three weeks, I’ve been letting the sights of the city sink into my eyes. This is a beautiful city, there can be no doubt about it. Even on the greyest of days, and in the face of the dullest weather, this is a fact one cannot gainsay.

However, I’ve really not done any sight-seeing. Struggling to come to grips with the sudden onset of cold, wet weather, I’ve allowed myself to be led by the nose by automatons. Of which, two have become surreally close buddies. Tram 52 and the U4. Every morning I mutely coast along a longish length of Linzerstrasse, followed by a turn into an almost equally longish stretch of Mariahilferstrasse. In the evenings, I mutely coast back. Except on some occasions, when I take the underground. But every journey is a journey undertaken in muteness. To be in a land where you cannot speak the language is some experience. But traveling by tram is relatively better. Because it travels over the ground it gives you a sense of life.

But yesterday, disgusted at myself for turning up for work for the third consecutive Saturday, I allowed a brief appearing act of the sun to give me an excuse that let me march out onto the streets of Vienna. I traveled to the St. Stephan’s Cathedral and walked down the old city. Briefly I peeped over the banners of an anti-Israel demonstration and lent my solidarity. I marvelled at the wares of itinerant artists and the music of indigent violinists. I took wistful rides on the horse-driven carriages. And walking down the streets of the old city I wondered what the Austro-Hungarian Emperors would have made of me, a puritanical TamBrahm, lounging in a Habsburg courtyard.

In circumstances such as these – alien language, alien culture, an excessive sense of order (as may appear to an Indian whose exit amidst much jostling and queue-breaking at the New Delhi airport is followed, upon touchdown, by a bewilderingly sanitized and agonizingly empty environs) and self-imposed poverty – it is perhaps inevitable for a sense of loneliness and longing for company to sprout. One of the first people I was introduced to was MT – and I took an instant liking to her. We talked academics, Austria and India; shared Indian food, cake and coffee, and in the process, found common interests. The conditions were ripe for one’s heart to mellow. One was taking it day-by-day, looking forward to some sunshine in the midst of the depressing weather, wondering all the time whether there was a possibility of anything more than what met one’s eye. And one fine day, not very long ago, words were dropped about a boyfriend, so that with a sharp stab of pain and a dizzy spin of the head, the roller coaster drew to a halt, bringing to an abrupt end one's little would-be romance!

But the bright spot so far has been the cooking! Unencumbered by a loving grandmother, who felt that the entry of a male – no matter that it was her grandson – into the kitchen implied a shirking of responsibility on her part, I have been engaging in some interesting culinary experiments. My pongal is a stepbrother of khichdi, and I eat it with rasam. Last week, my sambar turned out watery (my mother advised me to use rice flour, an ingredient missing from my limited pantry, to thicken it) and the cabbage curry burnt. But elation stemmed from small achievements: fine tomato rice, puliyodarai, rasam and chapattis!

For consolation, I brace myself with the hope that padhai na sahi, ladki na sahi, Hindustani dhaba hi sahi! In the worst event perhaps, I can open an Indian eating joint. ;)

Well, so long, till next time!

Lustlos!

2008-09-26T16:29:00.007+02:00

I'm writing this in a long overdue bid to rescue a collection of cyber-writings slipping ever deeper into the dustbins of trivial history with every passing day. To the left of my keyboard lies a desultory pair of glasses over a sheaf of papers claiming to unravel the secret of institutional change. To my right, there's a mouse. (Well, what did you expect?) The weather outside has slipped into gloom once again. I am in an alien land, far from the delightful, sunny landscape on the outskirts of my hometown. And for no particular reason, with nothing even remotely resembling the emotions they describe, I'm humming these lines in the mind:

Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth

But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth

For here you are standing there loving me, whether or not you should

So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good

Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could

So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.

No, I’m not bored. Just listless!

Guess where I am?

A trip to Bengalooru

2008-08-07T23:04:00.009+02:00

Last Saturday I was in Bengalooru, taking a much-needed break from dusty, rainless Coimbatore. An invitation to a Ramachandra Guha discussion from a generous reader of this blog served as an excellent excuse for me to break away from an existence that was becoming dangerously humdrum.

Bengalooru was delightful. Luckily, I didn’t run into too much pollution or traffic. It rained, but not at the wrong times. Despite all the construction that is happening in and around the city, Bengalooru continues to have sizeable wooded, green spaces.

On the train from Coimbatore I wondered why Guha was addressing an elite audience of only twenty-five (which is how the talk had been advertised). Guiltily, I asked myself why I had to be a part of this elite gathering.

My sense of guilt eased when I picked up Thursday’s Times of India (its Bangalore edition is relatively sober compared to the Mumbai and Delhi editions) and saw that Guha had been lecturing on the same topic – Will India be a superpower? – the previous day at the National Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) in the city. And, as I discovered during the course of the discussion on Saturday, Guha has been engaging on this question quite actively. I came away from the discussion with the satisfaction of having listened to a genuinely public intellectual whose questioning of India’s aspirations to superpower status is very much desirable.

Guha’s arguments on the grave challenges that wannabe-superpower India faces are available on the net (they were first published in a recent Outlook issue). He thinks India may not become a superpower and doesn’t want it to be one. Needless to say, his views have generated much heat, particularly among the middle class, which has prospered greatly from the bull run on the Indian economy in recent years, and is now in a hurry to take on the world. I do not propose going into Guha’s arguments beyond stating that I hold broadly similar views with some disagreements, and adding that it takes considerable boldness for someone to air contrary views publicly on a holy cow of an issue in the way Guha has done.

The interesting part of the discussion, in my opinion, came in the form of the questions asked by some of the young people present (I presume they were college students). It seemed very likely that they were listening to Guha’s views for the first time and it was apparent that they were quite bewildered. One of them thought that India had done well on all fronts despite the many challenges she had faced in the years since independence and therefore why could the country not surmount present dangers and become a superpower well nigh? Guha responded, of course, but the boy pressed his question, seemingly unconvinced. Another question came from a young lady, who wanted to know that if India was not going to be a superpower then what were we to tell our children?! A third question, from a young man sitting next to me, was dripping with penitence – how could the common man try to 'solve' the various problems (Naxalism, religious fundamentalism, widening economic inequality, abysmal socio-economic status of adivasis, environmental degradation etc. that had been discussed earlier) that he had brought upon himself?

The appeal lay not in the quality of these questions as much as in the way they were asked, disbelief and naivete couched in a certain diffidence that is characteristic of that age when one is introduced to a world outside of one’s orbit. My thoughts went back ten years ago to the time that I had myself taken tentative steps into college life. Perhaps it is the nostalgia that makes me dwell on the youngsters so much, but the experience showed just how against the grain it is to take a contrary stand on an issue that the urban Indian middle class, by and large, would like to treat as close to its heart as to that of a zealot.

But then, Bengalooru was much more than the Ram Guha discussion. It was a trip on which I caught up with friends, aunts and cousins, and sampled my former room-mate's excellent culinary skills. There were moments when I was confronted by chauvinism: a driver-conductor duo at the Shivajinagar bus stand refused to give me directions unless I spoke to them in Kannada; and there were moments when absolute strangers, also Kannadiga, gave me extensive guidance on where to get off and how to make my way to such-and-such place on such-and-such road. With their help at hand, I let myself sink into the fairly luxurious interiors of the Bengalooru Mahanagar Palike townbuses as I crisscrossed the city, listened to abuse of the newly constructed international airport (someone likened it to a cowshed unfit for cows), lunched at an Andhra restaurant called Bheema’s, eavesdropped on passers-by talking in various tongues, and caught my return train to Coimbatore feeling very cosmopolitan!

(PS: I call Bangalore Bengalooru for purely idiosyncratic reasons - because I love the way it sounds. It is also closer to one of the legends about the city’s origins, of a king separated from his hunting companions who stayed over for the night in an old woman’s hut. The old woman fed him with what little that she had, some boiled lentils or ‘bendha kalluru’, giving rise to the name Bengalooru for the place where she lived. The tale is also narrated in R. K. Narayan’s “The Emerald Route”.)

Profit from rising oil prices?

2008-07-23T18:04:00.002+02:00

At a time when rising oil prices are spelling misery for a lot of people, there seems to be a perverse touch to this call to investors: http://www.valueresearchonline.com/story/h2_storyview.asp?str=100024

A forest and its people

2008-07-17T19:24:00.008+02:00

(Am recycling an old travel piece. The reason? Have been thinking of Joseph, Douglas et al for a while. I wonder how they're doing. It's been a long time.)

It is a fine morning and as I peer out of the window, the azure waters of the Indian Ocean lap at the shores of Malindi, a little tourist town on the Kenyan coast. This delightful town, an important yesteryear port, has an interesting Indian connection: this is where Vasco da Gama is believed to have hired a guide who led him successfully to India in 1498, thereby capping the long search for a sea route from Europe to the sub-continent. After two days of rain the sky looks gay and friendly, and I think I can finally move out of Malindi. I have been staying at the dharamshala attached to the Malindi Swaminarayan Temple. It is the month of May, which is the slack tourist season, and the town is enveloped in tropical ennui. But it gives me the opportunity to make friends with the temple keeper, David, an elderly African who has been around for more than twenty years. To my astonishment, I discover that it is David who cleans out the sanctum sanctorum, lights the incense and adorns the deities everyday. He has been doing this ever since the temple priest passed away some weeks ago. A new one, who must belong to the Swaminarayan sect, is yet to be found. Till then, for all practical purposes, the priest at this Hindu temple is a Christian African who takes immense pride in his work! I see this auspicious confluence of religion and race as a good omen and set off to the village of Gede.

Gede is 18 kilometres south of Malindi and is known for the Gede Ruins, the site of an Arab-African settlement that is believed to have flourished between the 13th and 17th centuries. This is now a Kenyan National Monument and is managed (remarkably well, one must add) by the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). My own interest in Gede lies in NMK but for a different reason. The NMK is the site of a ‘kipepeo’ (Swahili for butterfly) farm and on the day of my visit, is teeming with farmers from nearby villages carrying butterfly pupae for sale. The pupae are exported to live butterfly exhibits in Europe and serve as an important source of income for the farmers. The butterfly farm is an outcome of the remarkable Kipepeo Project, a community-based butterfly farming project developed with the specific intention of getting local communities to develop a stake in the conservation of the neighbouring Arabuko Sokoke Forest.

As a matter of fact, it is the Arabuko Sokoke Forest that has drawn me to Gede, about 120 kilometres away from the port city of Mombasa. For Arabuko Sokoke is the largest remaining fragment of rich tropical forest that once stretched across the East African coast. About 42,000 hectares in size, the forest is rich in biodiversity and is regarded as the second most important forest for bird conservation in mainland Africa. It is the home of the enigmatic Clarke’s Weaver bird (Ploceus golandi), which is found nowhere else in the world, and of the Sokoke Scops Owl (Otus ireneae), which is found at only one other site, in north-east Tanzania. These are only two of the more than 230 bird species recorded in Arabuko Sokoke. Also found here are three rare, near-endemic mammals: the Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus), Ader’s Duiker (Cephalophys adersi) and the Sokoke Bushy-tailed Mongoose (Bdeogale crassicauda omnivora). The forest also supports a population of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana).

As much as I am interested in its wildlife, I am also interested in the people living around the forest. These are mainly the Giriama, an indigenous people who are believed to have originated from present-day Somalia, which lies to Kenya’s north-east. From Gede therefore, I move onward to the village of Dida, which hugs the Arabuko Sokoke Forest in the southwest. I plan to be there for a few days.

The road to Dida is a dirt trail often cutting across the forest. The forest hangs low on either side and travelling here at twilight or later can be quite eerie. My escort is an immensely friendly forester who gets me engaged in a conversation on elephants. He keeps me riveted with anecdotes that illustrate the pachyderm’s intelligence. Among his stories is one of a villager plucked off his bicycle and dashed to the ground as an act of revenge. I swallow, and utter a silent prayer to Ganesha, hoping that I will remain in his good books, at least till I leave the forest.

In Dida I am entrusted to the care of the forest guard, Douglas, who beams as he receives me, having been informed by radio of my arrival. He lives in what turns out to be one of the few concrete structures in the village. It is also very old and looks as if it might collapse any moment. I consider invoking Viswakarma, the divine architect. There is no electricity in Dida, as in most other villages around the forest. However, as I step into the house, I can see that Douglas has taken great pains to make things comfortable for me. His own bedroom has been made over to my disposal with a couple of small kerosene lamps to light it up at night.

One of the first people I meet the next day is Joseph ‘Radio’ Kajomo. 35-year old Joseph has an honest face and an earnest way of talking that makes me take to him instantly. He volunteers to take me around the village and I accept at once. For the next few days Joseph is my constant companion. He carries a small radio with him all the time, which is the only connection to the world in these parts with neither electricity nor newspapers. I am taken to his house where he proudly throws open a battered trunk containing his proud possessions - books. His star possession is an old encyclopaedia set, purchased eight years ago from a second hand bookshop in Mombasa. It cost him 15,000 Kenyan Shillings (approximately 9,000 Indian rupees), a small fortune that he repaid from his farm income in instalments over eight long years.

One of the butterfly farmers whom I met in Gede the previous day lives in Dida. A message of invitation is sent out for me to Douglas, who arranges for me to meet Felix and his wife at their house. Felix is 43, has a gentle beard and a generous grin. I learn that he was once an inveterate small-time timber poacher, who went to prison thrice. After being introduced to butterfly farming though, he has turned over a new leaf. Butterfly farming helps supplements his income from growing maize and plantains. He is now strongly in support of protecting the forest. Felix’s grin grows wider and wider as I am being told all this. “From thief to conservator,” he says, “that’s my story!”

Joseph takes me around Dida and its neighbouring villages, Kafitsoni and Kahingoni. The houses are all located far apart and it takes quite some walking. We talk as we walk; when we fall silent the radio crackles to life. I meet some interesting, even inspiring, people. One of these is an elderly widow, Kadzo Masha, with a reputation for industry. Beginning as a widowed landless labourer, Masha raised her children well and was able to buy land for her family through sheer hard work. At 74, she works daylong on her farm and keeps a beautiful home. I ask Joseph to tell her that she reminds me of my grandmother. Masha is very pleased. “God bless you”, she says.

The staple food in these parts is warri, boiled flour eaten with baked kidney beans. I partake of this simple but filling meal at the home of Thomas Barawa, a village elder. He explains that the people are suffering ever since their entry into the forest was forbidden some years ago, on grounds of conservation. They are now forced to depend on the market for basic necessities such as firewood and charcoal; their nutritional status has fallen since they can no longer enter the forest to hunt small animals, pluck fruits or collect honey.

Before I realise, it is time for me to leave. I want to pay Douglas for all his troubles but he declines. “You are like my brother”, he beams at me, his hands resting on my shoulders. “I cannot take money from you.” Douglas supports a family of three children - they live in his village further south – on his meagre salary. I am overwhelmed by his gesture. As for my guide, Joseph, I dare not even mention that I would like to pay him. It would be an affront after the camaraderie that we have developed. Douglas and Joseph see me off on a rickety minibus to the town of Kilifi, where there will be a connecting bus to Gede. My friends in Dida may be poor, I say to myself, but they have something that money cannot buy. Dignity. I look back towards Dida and say softly, “I came, I saw, I was conquered.” Never mind if Caesar turns in his grave.

(An edited version of this piece was published in The Hindu Magazine, 8 July 2007.)

Nishant

2008-07-15T09:10:00.012+02:00

I’m not a film critic, nor do I aspire to be one. My solitary foray into the business of appraising a film happened six or seven years ago, when I took on the formidable Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, extended my critique onward to Kaaghaz ke Phool, and in the impetuousness of youth, sent it by post straight to The Hindu, which had only the preceding week published an atrocious (as it seemed to me then) review of the same movie by the eminent writer, Meenakshi Mukherjee. As if this was not enough, I was cheeky enough to enclose along with my essay a covering letter that in its tone hovered dangerously over the thin line that sometimes separates would-be-smartness from impertinence. Had I rummaged through the rubbish-bins of Kasturi Building, 858, Anna Salai, Chennai, a few days later, I might have found material that looked distinctly familiar (unless of course, someone in a fit of disgust had taken the trouble to reach for the shredder). The only gain from the whole exercise came from the bit of looking-up that I did, mainly some insights from Nasreen Munni Kabir’s biography of Guru Dutt, which was yet to hit the bookstands at the time.

It is therefore with some trepidation that I choose to record some of my impressions of Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. This 1975 film is the second of what is considered his quartet (the others being Ankur (1973), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977)), which, as I understand, met with reasonable success in breaking ground with mainstream cinema without suffering an undue discount in terms of viewership. The occasion for watching Nishant came about through my discovery of the Konangal Film Society, a group of cinema-lovers in Coimbatore that holds regular movie-screenings. The discovery was reinforced by the draw of the authorship of Nishant’s screenplay, which rests with the fiery Vijay Tendulkar who passed away recently.

Nishant may loosely be translated as ‘the end of the night’ (निशा + अंत) or better still, in the context of the movie, ‘the end of darkness’. For it is indeed the darkness of debauchery and terror, flowing from the haveli of the zamindar, that engulfs the village in which Nishant is set, and which is seemingly dispelled when the village turns against the zamindar. However, while the end of the zamindar may mark the end of darkness for the village, such a luxury is not available to the central character, a violated woman who is solidly restrained by the fetters of social norm that rule out her return to a respectable existence. A question-mark as a suffix to the film title may not have been out of place.

The film is nourished by the splendid performances of the cast, which includes Amrish Puri as the zamindar, and Anant Nag (of later-day Malgudi Days fame) and young Mohan Agashe as his villainous brothers. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in an uncharacteristically tentative role as Vishwam, the youngest of the zamindar’s brothers, although his character is pivotal to the way the story unfolds. Girish Karnad is slightly wooden as the schoolteacher. Shabana Azmi as Sushila, the schoolteacher’s wife, delivers a fine performance. Smita Patil, as Vishwam’s wife, shows promise.

It is interesting that in exploring the complexity of relationships and the bearing that social mores have on them, Nishant seems to completely overlook the complexity of societal make-up in rural India. The film presents us with bipolar opposites with the diabolical zamindar on one side and the rest of the village on the other, ignoring the heterogeneity of caste and class divisions that typify an Indian village and pose a daunting impediment to any attempt at mass action. This neglect is enhanced by the uneven temporal balance of the film. While the first half proceeds at a leisurely pace dwelling at length on minutiae, the call to rebel and its execution is accomplished in double-quick time.

The choice of the elderly temple priest as the medium that incites the village to revolt is curious. As was perceptively pointed out by one of the viewers in the discussion following the film, the priestly class, particularly the practising priest, has scarcely gone down in history as a bugler of incipient radical change, and is more often than not found on the side of the reactionary.

On the whole, however, Nishant does sufficient justice to a lay-audience – among which I count myself - that seeks out the film in the hope of a compelling experience. Backed by some excellent cinematography and Benegal’s ciné-vérité, the film is a remarkable product of its time. Its refusal to dumb down the viewer makes it deeply provocative and rouses one to think along not-so-comfortable lines. Which, at least in part, is what good cinema should be about. Isn’t it?

Tag: The man who knew infinity

2008-07-02T19:23:00.008+02:00

Songs of sixpence has been tagged by Mampi. The tag asks me to quote sentences numbering six, seven and eight from page 123 of the book nearest at hand. In my case, the book in question happens to be The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Now before you jump to conclusions and accuse me of engaging in an exercise in narcissism by reading a biography of my namesake, let me make it clear that the book has come into my temporary possession absolutely by chance, thanks to a friend of mine who fell for the charms of Nalini Chettur, the keeper of Giggles, ‘the biggest little bookshop’, in Chennai. This friend already has several books piled up waiting to be read, so he passed it on to me, mistakenly thinking that I possibly had more time at my disposal. I say ‘mistakenly’, because I have my own pile of unread books. Nevertheless, I gave The Man Who Knew Infinity top priority because it has to be returned, and allowed it to jump the queue of books begging for my attention. To my delight however, I believe I do not have much cause to complain and might even want to hug my friend for his act of generosity. Having traversed about three-fifths of it, I find the book quite engaging. Anyway, here goes:

He devotedly studied his Wisden, the cricket annual crammed with bowling averages, test-match results, and other arcania of the game. In 1910, the minutes of a Cambridge club would alliteratively cite his command of “the University Constitution, the methods of Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” As a young Fellow of Trinity College, he’d play a bastardized form of it in his rooms, with walking stick and tennis ball.

The lines are from the fourth chapter, and as you have probably guessed already, describe Godfrey Harold Hardy, the celebrated Cambridge mathematician who was responsible for dragging Ramanujan out from near oblivion as a lowly clerk in the Madras Port Trust and into the hallowed portals at Cambridge. The book is as rich in biographical detail of Hardy as it is of Ramanujan. As is evident from the lines above, Hardy was a great cricket enthusiast. In fact, he was very much unlike the picture that one may carry of a mathematician: he was extremely good-looking, an excellent speaker and a fine writer. Nonetheless, to partly justify the slightly stereotyped perceptions of a mathematician, he had his share of eccentricities. He was known to refrain from shaking hands and to walk down the street face down, without exchanging greetings with acquaintances among passers-by. For a flavour of the man, I take the liberty of quoting some more lines from the book:

In The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring, a Sherlock Holmes mystery written half a century after the death of Arthur Conan Doyle, the characters include Ramanujan and Hardy. In it, author Randall Collins pictures Hardy as a sort of White Rabbit hopping around the Fellows Garden at Trinity in white flannels and cap, cricket bat in hand, frantically searching for his cricket gloves, crying, “There’s a match due to begin, and I can’t find them. I’m late! I’m late!” In a prefatory note, Collins abjures all claims to historical accuracy. But in Hardy, he’s close to the mark.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is written by an American, Robert Kanigel, and he writes about the considerable difficulty of having to straddle two worlds very different from his own – those of South India and Cambridge - in researching the book. Indeed, his description of life in (South) India when he is discussing Ramanujan’s early days, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (his denigrating description of sambar as ‘a thick lentil soup stocked with potatoes’ still rankles!) Yet, in tackling two highly complex personalities of the twentieth century along with their daunting mathematics, one must accept that overall, he has done more than a decent job. After this, I am more eager than ever to lay my hands on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk.

Fiction: Wedding Invite

2008-06-19T22:53:00.007+02:00

(This is a product of the crazy wanderings of my mind during the wedding season last year. This was sent to a couple of friends as a prank with a rather tragic outcome: one of them has stopped writing to me. :( Alas!)

My Dear Friend,

I am pleased to announce the consummation of nearly two years of courtship with Sripriya Sasidharan, Lecturer in Microbiology at Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Sripriya and I shall enter into wedlock in a little over four months’ time, and we extend a warm invitation to each one of you to grace this happy occasion with your august presence. For Sripriya and I, the wedding is an effort to indulge in a celebration of cultural values and at the same time, display our love and concern for the environment (which, we believe, is a core Indian cultural value, although in a state of emasculation today). We plan to celebrate our wedding in the traditional manner over a period of five days from January 9-13, 2008. The venue is our ancestral village of Kolinjavadi, on the banks of the river Amravathi, at a distance of 45 kilometres from the city of Coimbatore. We strongly urge you to treat the wedding as a vacation in the sylvan retreats of the beautiful Kongu region and partake of the personalised hospitality that our village is famous for. The dates of the wedding have been carefully chosen to dovetail with Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival which commences from January 13, the same day as the wedding ends. (The wedding draws to a close on the morning of the 13th, leaving the day free for the initiation of Pongal celebrations.)

Traditionally, the purpose of a five day wedding has been to allow the bride and the bridegroom to grow out of their coyness and get to know each other, in the process developing the inseparable bonds that shall bind them together for life. Long weddings served as occasions for guests to socialise; middle-aged parents would look for prospective matches for their children-come-of-age; young boys and girls would court and fall in love (perhaps even elope in the next weeks); while the elderly would meet with faraway relatives, engage in family arithmetic (accounting for additions by way of marriage or birth; and subtractions arising from death) before eventually parting with sadness, knowing well that given their age this might well be the final farewell.

We hope to recreate this atmosphere in the course of our wedding.

The highlights of the wedding will be the various traditional ceremonies, particularly the Virudham, Paaligai Thelikkal, Mapillai Azhaippu, Oonjal Paattu, Kasi Yatra, Ammi Mithikkal, Meen Vettai and Nalangu. There is immense scope for guests to participate in many of these ceremonies. Sripriya and I are particularly keen on the last two ceremonies, which are in the nature of games played between the couple with others egging them on, and are most mirthful and entertaining when staged in all fullness. In addition to these ceremonies will be numerous informal events involving traditional music, song and dance. Exponents of the nadaswaram (a musical instrument somewhat akin to the shehnai) and the thavil (a percussion instrument) will purvey strains of music befitting the occasion. Womenfolk will sing wedding songs. Wedding songs can serve to tease and create merriment; some extol the beauty of the bride and bridegroom; some are distinctly risqué, while others are typically sad, marking the separation of the bride from her family. There will be performances of kummi, a traditional folkdance. This is a simple dance in which all are encouraged to join in. Some of Sripriya’s cousins also plan to stage a bharatnatyam performance at the temple grounds.

Living arrangements will be made in the roomy ancestral houses belonging to our families. Guests are urged to sleep on reed mats spread on the floor, in the traditional way. Beds can be arranged in the open for those desiring a particularly close communion with the beautiful night sky. Morning ablutions may be performed along specially earmarked sections of the river bank. We expect the wedding to generate enough nightsoil and organic waste to serve as manure for the next crop in the village that will be sown in late January or early February. Guests will enjoy their morning bath in the cool, crystal-clear waters of the Amravathi, one of the few rivers in our country left undammed. While bathing areas are separately marked out for men and women, it is a common prank for boys to hide the clothes of the bathing girls. (Despite suggestions from some quarters, Sripriya and I decided not to have the song, Tere man ki ganga…, playing in the background, on the grounds that this would be a most jarring external cultural influence.) Adventurous girls, particularly those with a taste for the bucolic, may take potshots at the boys bathing in the river, by climbing up the trees in the mango orchards. Catapults will be made available for this activity.

The food will be South Indian vegetarian with the distinct flavour that is a hallmark of the Kongu region. Some of the special traditional drinks to watch out for are paanagam, a tasty energising drink made out of jaggery, neer mor or seasoned buttermilk, and sanjeevi, a drink made out of crushed ragi and corn. Guests are encouraged to help with the cooking, which will be done on earthen hearths. Food will be served on banana leaves spread on the floor and will be handled entirely by volunteers among the guests. We shall be delighted if you are to step forward and nominate yourself for this task. The serving of food is the highpoint of hospitality and we want this to be marked by conviviality and warmth throughout the five days of the wedding. (Please note that all volunteers will have to be appropriately attired. The right kind of sarees and dhotis will be arranged for.) Guests will be required to burp with pleasure at the end of the meal indicating that they have eaten their fill.

Evenings will be taken up by folk performances. This is also a good time for courting and minor flings. Serenading is possible in the coconut groves, where one can endlessly run around the trees and sing to their heart’s content. Couples can hide in the overgrowth along the river bank (this will be sufficiently thick by early January, thanks to the nourishment of the northeast monsoon) and display their amorous affection for each other. For those who believe in elevated love, there are plenty of asoka and banyan trees with thick foliage. (If you are unable to climb up the trees, ladders can be strategically positioned upon request.) We will be delighted to see as many of you take advantage of these romantic pleasures as possible.

Now to the travel logistics. Bullock carts will be waiting at the Coimbatore railway station (you are urged to take a train to Coimbatore since air travel is highly polluting and contributes greatly to carbon emissions) on the morning of 9 January to ferry guests to Kolinjavadi. This is a non-polluting and truly enjoyable mode of conveyance, which will give you a panoramic view of the lush green fields of the Kongu region. You will draw deep breaths of clean, fresh air, a rare commodity in Indian cities today. (Guests arriving on other days are free to charter their own bullock carts. We request them however, to make arrangements for collecting the bullock-dung that will be dropped on the way. As you are aware, this is an important source of manure.) If some of you wish, we can arrange for a few express horse carts. However, horse-dung is believed to be inferior to cattle-dung in terms of fertiliser quality.

We look forward to hosting all of you at Kolinjavadi and enjoying your company on the occasion of our wedding. Your contribution to both tradition and environment shall be equally momentous. (Since some guests are being invited only for specific ceremonies, kindly take a print-out of this page of the invitation, which shows that you are invited for all of the five days. The print-out will serve as something of a season ticket, not unlike the ones sold at five-day cricket matches. We are sending out only electronic invitations to avoid the use of paper.) Please mark the wedding dates on your calendar. Do let us know if you have any suggestions. Our email address is sriram.wedding@gmail.com

With best regards,

Ramanujam

PS: Sripriya delivered a little bundle of joy in the last week of August. Our bouncing baby daughter, Alai Osai (which is Tamil for ‘resonance of the waves’), will be all of four months at the wedding.

In those days there was no coffee!

2008-06-17T07:25:00.009+02:00

Take the exclamation mark at the end away and you have the title of a book. Yes indeed. In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History is the delightful title of a book by A.R. Venkatachalapathy (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), a bilingual author prolific in both Tamil and English.

In Those Days There Was No Coffee is a collection of nine essays that explore life in the Tamil-speaking parts of early 20th century Madras Presidency. The title is slightly deceptive, for only one of the nine essays is on coffee. Arguing that history is not a straightforward reading of the archives, Venkatachalapathy asserts that a careful study of popular literature can provide a nuanced understanding of the past and offer valuable perspectives denied by the archives. Using coffee as the object of the title essay, the author uncovers references to the drink in Tamil newspapers, journals, short stories and autobiographies of the colonial period to purvey rich insights into cultural values and perceptions of the early 20th century, accompanied by a superb exposition on how these were influenced by the coffee-drinking habit. The perspective that unfolds in such an unusual reading of history is likely to pose something of a surprise to any Tamil worth their salt who has grown up with the ubiquitous aroma of filter coffee wafting through the house thrice a day. Admittedly, in my own case, I was well into my twenties before I could even begin to conceive of a past when coffee, the common man’s elixir, was unknown and people drank something else.

Venkatachalapathy captures the tension and ambivalence of early 20th century society when coffee was seeping into popular Tamil middle class consciousness, conferring status and sophistication on the drinker. However, conservative elements inveighed against what they termed an ‘evil influence of modernity’ and ‘a copy-cat imitation of the West’. The contention was partly over the supplanting of the traditional morning drink neeragaram (the word is a combination of the Sanskritic words, neer and aahaar) by an alien, coffee. To quote the author, ‘Made by fermenting water drained after cooking rice, and adding water and salt to taste, neeragaram's demise was lamented by many intellectuals - a sign of their cultural anxiety.’ My grandmother confirms that in her younger days children and elders alike woke up to a breakfast drink of neeragaram, and that in the countryside this could be prepared even out of raagi, kombu, cholam (maize) and other traditional grains. She adds however, that in her time the rice was dehusked at home using the olakai or the traditional metal-bottomed long wooden pestle. As a result, it would not be dehusked completely and would possess considerable nutritive value, quite unlike the rice of the present day, which is polished clean by the comprehensive mechanised dehusking of the rice mill.

The public denouncement of coffee went to extremes that may sound at once ridiculous and amusing to us at this point in time, a hundred years later. One writer reviled the drink, calling it even more addictive than arrack, and went on to regret, ‘In those days people lived a hundred years [by drinking neeragaram]; nowadays times have changed. Even the women who work the fields demand coffee. There is not a single household without a coffee drinker’. Another critic complained, using the language of modern medicine, that ‘with the increase in coffee-drinking in our country, infant mortality, diabetes, constipation and other lowly diseases have begun to afflict our brothers and sisters’!

The attack on coffee extended also to women, by women. Thus, the Stri Dharma, published by the Women's India Association wailed:

Alas! This damned thing has got hold of women! Two cups of coffee have become the order of the day...This habit has taken over even aged women. These old women who were adept in home remedies now rush to the doctor, making a beeline to the hospital for the slightest headache.

The railing against coffee and women spilled over to the realm of the political. A highly sexist letter to Gandhi, apparently in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement, went thus:

The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women. Some of them are very reactionary, and a very large number of the high class Brahmin ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.

These vituperative attacks on coffee, by their very vehemence, suggest that the anti-coffee brigade was fighting a losing battle. Very much so. For coffee gradually moved on from being a mere refreshment to become an integral part of cultural consciousness relating to notions of refinement and hospitality. Writers began to use coffee as a metaphor. For instance, the short stories of Pudumaippithan, the celebrated Tamil short story writer, are littered with references to the drink. In fact, one of his stories, Kadavulum Kandasamy Pillaiyum (God and Kandasamy Pillai), considered a classic, has Lord Shiva descending to the earth to meet the central character, Kandasamy Pillai, in Madras, whereupon 'the latter instinctively leads him to a nearby coffee hotel'. Here the following conversation ensues:

As God sipped the coffee, a divine demeanour of having drunk soma suffused His face.
"This is my divine handiwork", said God.
"This is not Your handiwork, but the hotelier's. Mixing chicory with coffee is his handiwork. Show your mettle when you pay the bill", whispered Kandasamy Pillai into His ears, content that he had sorted out the issue of paying for the coffee.
"Chicory...what's that?" God looked up quizzingly.
"Chicory powder resembles coffee, but is not coffee - like those who defraud people in the name of God", replied Kandasamy Pillai.

Coffee came to be closely associated with the upper caste, predominantly Brahmin, middle class. Its growing popularity led to the setting up of 'Brahmin coffee hotels' or 'coffee clubs', which served only coffee (in addition to snacks) and no other drink, in urban clusters. The coffee hotels, like coffee itself, also found their way into popular literature as we have seen in the excerpt from Pudumaippithan’s story. However, they came to be targetted - with success - by the Self-Respect or anti-Brahmin movement, which excoriated the obnoxious practice of keeping some seats out of bounds to all except Brahmins.

Coffee’s dominance among the Tamil middle class contrasts sharply with the universal popularity of tea elsewhere in India. In Tamil Nadu, tea is seen as a working class drink and a cultural 'other' of coffee. This perception has even entered the popular idiom so that somebody with a touch of the loony about them may be described as ‘a chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel’!

Some of the other essays in the book are delightful as well. One of them is on the introduction of cartoons in Tamil newspapers, an influence carried over from the English Punch, which spawned an entire genre of Indian journals ambitiously named after the original as The Delhi Punch, The Punjab Punch, Urdu Punch, Gujarati Punch and so on. Among Tamil newspaper publications of the time, it was in the weekly, India, that cartoons were first introduced by its editor, the celebrated Subramania Bharati.

Another essay that stands out is Excising the Self: Writing Autobiography in Colonial Tamilnadu. Venkatachalapathy persuasively argues that autobiography as a literary phenomenon met with the popular approval of the Tamil audience only by the 1930s but was quickly appropriated by writers to provide a historical account of social transformation rather than scrutinise their own lives. This was an indigenisation of the western literary genre, which in its original form served as an expression of individuality and a narrative medium for reflection and self-realisation. The early autobiographies wove their themes around contrasting pictures of ‘those days’ and ‘these days’, producing a romantic narrative of a pristine past, whose order and social harmony was gradually chipped away by the rapid social and technological change permeating society in the wake of the colonial encounter.

In Those Days… offers a splendid peep into the life of the middle class citizenry of the colonial period, painting an evocative picture by drawing from popular literary sources of the time. In brilliantly capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from its unconventional sources, it shows that history is not the exclusive domain of the pedantic and the obscure. The lay person with an inquisitive mind may not only stake claim to it but also revel in the delight of its more accessible forms.

Bombay Dying?

2008-06-11T22:00:00.007+02:00

For quite some time now, no news is good news as far as Mumbai is concerned. It is a case of the bride suffering from the attention of more than one overzealous suitor, each staking a violent, obsessive claim over the city and its people. New strictures are being regularly passed: who is welcome to the city and who is not; who can be criticised and who cannot; who belongs to the city and who does not. By common consent, tolerance is on nobody's 'Approved' list. Mumbai or Bombay is no longer a byword for cosmopolitanism.

Mumbai is a palimpsest, and traces remain of each of the various layers that make it what it is. The Koli tribesmen, who must surely be given their due as the original residents of what is now the city of Mumbai, are almost gone but not fully so. Ironically, adivasi families that have lived for generations together in what has come to be set aside as a national park in recent times - the abhorrently named Sanjay Gandhi National Park - are now treated as trespassers in their own territory, and are sought to be evicted by the government.

Within the national park, the Kanheri Caves, which are dated back to the period stretching from the 1st century BCE to the 9th century CE, offer ample proof of an extensive and well-organised Buddhist monastery. On the other side of the railway line, in the same suburb of Borivali, lies the Mandapeshwar rock-cut cave temple. Together with the cave-temple in Jogeshwari and the more elaborately sculpted caves in the island of Elephanta, these splendid specimens of art are a reminder of another era and people who lived and flourished in parts of what now comprise Bombay city and its suburbs.

Modern Bombay was shaped by the Europeans, chiefly the British 'servants' (which is what the staff were called) of the East India Company, which acquired it on lease from Charles II, the then English monarch, for a goodly loan plus annual rent, in or around the year 1668. It is of course, well-known that Charles II himself acquired the island of Bombay as a wedding gift when he married the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.

While the British developed their possession into a port, it was not they alone that made the city. As it goes with port cities, Bombay attracted people of a multitude of ethnicities. By the early 19th century, Bombay was peopled by a mercantile community comprising, in addition to the British, Parsis, Marwaris, Konkani Muslims, Gujarati Banias, Bohras, Armenian and Indo-Portuguese. The city's growing prosperity attracted migrants from the hinterland.

Bombay's rise was concomitant with the decline of the port city of Surat, but its fortunes were really built upon the illegal opium trade with China. The merchants who smuggled opium into China had extensive networks and deep pockets, and for all their risks they were rewarded with windfall profits. It is another matter that these merchants who made their pile at the cost of Manchu China's deep misery were probably the 19th century prototypes of modern-day arms dealers that feed upon civil wars in the Third World to keep themselves in an extremely lucrative business. Some of the oldest family names in Indian business today, including the Tatas, may trace the origins of their business empires to the days of the opium trade.

It is interesting to find that there was a point of time in the late 1700s, before the opium trade took off, when Bombay, a town little other than a port in those days, was proposed to be shut down in view of the enormous drain it posed to the finances of the East India Company. Amar Farooqui, in his insightful book, Opium City, quotes the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, who observed that the Company had ‘appropriated the whole of the surplus revenue of Banaras and Bahar (sic) to the support of Bombay’ but was nevertheless ‘obliged to send many lacs thither from Calcutta’, and went on to propose that the Company’s operations there be restricted to ‘just a small factory’. However, things were to take an altogether different turn.

By the mid-19th century, the city’s meteoric growth made it one of the foremost seats of the British Empire. In 1857 it acquired the distinction of being one of the three sites of India’s first modern universities with the establishment of the University of Bombay (now renamed University of Mumbai). This development, complemented by the existence of wealthy patrons, was germane to the setting up of a number of educational institutions, many of which exist even today. The rise of an educated Indian middle class and modern intelligentsia in Bombay and the other Presidency towns fed into the growth of Indian nationalism, an all-too-familiar story that needs no recounting.

Bombay’s political future came under question for the first time only after independence, when popular upsurge demanding the creation of linguistic states threatened to redraw the map of independent India. A States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) was appointed in 1954 to consider the demands from various parts of the country and to make recommendations to the Government of India. It is a matter of considerable interest that enormous heat was generated over the question of Bombay. Several prominent citizens of Bombay, counting among them luminaries such as JRD Tata, in addition to other industrialists, lawyers, scholars and doctors, organised themselves under the banner of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and printed a 200-page book as a submission to the SRC to argue that on the grounds of history, economic importance, multicultural character and geography, Bombay should be kept out of the state of Maharashtra that was being demanded by Marathi-speakers. In Parliament, the Bombay MP SK Patil went a step further to demand the creation of a separate self-governing city-state of Bombay. Totally opposed to this stand and vociferous in its demand for a state of Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital was the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (earlier Parishad), which drew support from members across the political spectrum, so that it included in its ranks, Congressmen, Communists, Jana Sanghis, Socialists as well as the towering constitution-maker, BR Ambedkar. It was alleged that the Bombay Citizens Committee was dominated by the Gujaratis, a major linguistic community in the city who were loath to see Bombay go to Maharashtra. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, the government of the day at the centre refrained from appeasing either side, choosing to retain a bilingual province of Bombay even as linguistic states were carved out elsewhere towards the end of 1956. For this the Congress paid a heavy price in the form of serious losses in the 1957 general elections and the subsequent municipal elections. Their hand forced, the Union Government finally settled the thorny issue with the creation of the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960. Bombay went to Maharashtra.

Mumbai today is a city where prince and pauper alike literally joust for space. This is only natural. With 16.38 million people, Mumbai is India’s most populous city. It holds at least 3 million more people than the second largest city, Kolkata, although it is two-and-a-half times smaller. Thus, Mumbai’s mind-boggling population density, at 22,000 persons per square kilometre, is incomparable with the corresponding figures for Maharashtra and all-India: 315 and 324 respectively. Inevitably, housing is a severe problem. Between 55 to 60 per cent of the city’s population lives in slums, in highly degrading living conditions. Or to put it differently, less than five people out of ten live in a proper house.

Commuting is a daily nightmare. Despite the large numbers of private vehicles that keep the city’s roads perpetually clogged, public transport accounts for 88% of daily commuting. The suburban rail system, which ferries 6.4 million commuters across the length of the city everyday, is hopelessly overstretched. On an average, four people die and four more are injured in accidents on railway tracks every single day. An average of 824 people falls off local trains every year. And all this is just getting worse in a city where planners failed to wake up in time to the mammoth logistical problems confronting them, and have seen them worsen with the passage of time.

While organised crime and corruption in the police ranks may not touch citizens’ lives everyday, the scale they have attained is deeply worrisome for a democratic, civilized society. They are so deeply entrenched that for many years now they have become a common subject of portrayal, sometimes essayed with bone-chilling realism, in Hindi films produced out of the same city. Yet, their detailed exploration in some recent popular books, for example, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, the narrative non-fiction work by Suketu Mehta, and Shantaram, an autobiographical novel, leave the reader shocked and aghast. These factors combine with Mumbai’s sheer population density to make it a prospective terrorist’s delight. It has already suffered two major terror attacks, apart from several smaller ones, since 1993 – and continues to remain extremely vulnerable.

To these existing woes have been added political ones, with deep sectarian and communal colourings. Although their presence is not something new, their continued existence and intensification in recent times do not bode well for the metropolis. The political factors in play have sought to create mythical icons with attributes that defy fact and to enforce a rigid, narrow discipline accompanied by broad definitions of what might constitute an infraction. Today, the remark of a critical journalist; tomorrow, a scene in a particular movie or play and on another day, the exchange of greeting cards – all are subject to the whims of a clumsy moral discipline, with any ‘infringement’ being met with swift, violent retribution. In many ways, Mumbai is India’s own Wild West. Given the resort to violence at the drop of a hat, one may very well doubt the existence of a laboriously compiled constitution in the country, drafted, ironically, by a Maharashtrian who was also a resident of the city.

The mark of a flourishing civilization is its openness to the winds that blow from different directions. The great universities of the world, whether in the East or the West, sought to attract and welcomed talent from other lands. This practice holds good to the present day. The decline of the sophisticated Indus Valley civilization has been attributed by some historians to the trenchant hold of the priestly class, which upheld traditional forms of art and craft and treated innovation as near-felony. Likewise, the fall of the Mughal Empire is traced not merely to the bigoted Aurangzeb, but even further back to his father, Shah Jahan. On one hand, the latter abandoned the creative, pluralist outlook of his grandfather, Akbar, which had encouraged the flowering of native talent; on the other, his wars with the Persians and the Uzbegs effectively plugged the flow of immigrants from Central Asia, so that an important source of new ideas and thoughts that had enriched India over the centuries dried up. There are lessons here for the men and women who seek to rule over a city that is dangerously slipping in the direction of inexorable decline.

In 1954, when the question of Bombay was being hotly debated, the two sparring sides sought to arrive at an understanding. Shankarrao Deo, President of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad met Sir Purushottamdas Thakur of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and said that while the central demand of Bombay for Maharashtra could not be given up, he was very much agreeable to preserving the ‘autonomous character of the metropolitan city [and] ensuring its cosmopolitan life’.

Few of the trumpeters who lay narrow claims to Mumbai today are likely to know of this compromise once offered as a price for the city; fewer still are likely to care for it.

References:

Samir S. Patel, Mumbai's Rough-Hewn Legacy, Archaelogy, Archaelogy Institute of America, 4 April 2007. Available at www.archaeology.org/online/features/mandapeshwar/

Nick Robbins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2006)

Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006)

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, (Picador India, 2007)

Manorama Yearbook 2007, (Kottayam: Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd., 2007)

Dionne Bunsha, Torture Trains, Frontline, 4 January 2008

Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)

Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)

Fiction: Rama came calling

2008-06-07T18:55:00.008+02:00

I rose from the bed to find Rama, my eldest brother, ensconced in my wooden chair, reading The Hindu.

"Hullo anujan, good morning ", he nodded at me pleasantly.

"When did you come?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, "You should've woken me up."

"You know me better than that. Anyway, today's op-ed page is interesting. Why don't you freshen up? I'm not in a hurry."

I brushed, wondering what brought Rama here today, so early in the morning.

He read my thoughts like he did all the time.

"It's the kumbabhishekam at the temple in Ramnagar today", he said, without looking up from the paper as I entered the kitchen to prepare the decoction. "Oh, it's today, is it?" I exclaimed, reaching for the coffee powder. Putting water on the boil I went back to my room to switch on my laptop and play Venkatesa Suprabhatam. Rama grinned at me, looking up from the sudoku he was solving. He woke up to the Venkatesa Suprabhatam every morning and it was still good time for him to listen to it again.

He was peering into my bookshelf when I emerged with the coffee.

"Thanks, anujan."

"Looking for something?"

"Yes, do you have any Harry Potter?"

"Harry Potter?!"

"Yes, you know, the kids have been pestering me no end."

"Why didn't you bring them and manni along?"

"Your manni is very busy these days. She's launching a heritage walk company, you know", said Rama, settling into the wooden chair again. I pulled up the wooden stool and we sipped coffee silently for a moment, as I let the news of another of my sister-in-law's crazy entrepreneurial ventures sink in.

"You're getting very good at making coffee", he remarked, taking another sip. It was a left-handed compliment. I knew what he was getting at.

We sipped the coffee in silence.

"Did you speak to Urmila again?" he asked gently.

So this is why he had come.

"Yes, I did. It's the same story. She won't come back until I've got a steady job", I replied matter-of-factly. I paused and added, "Until I'm earning more than her".

Rama took in all this thoughtfully.

"She got another pay raise recently. Eighteen lakhs per annum. I can never hope to match that", I said. “She'll never come back", I added bitterly.

"Chha chha, don't say that", my brother interjected.

I glowered silently, thinking angrily of Urmila.

“She’s a demon!” I added, as the train of events in the mind halted at a particularly unpleasant station.

Immediately, I said, “Sorry.” It was wiser to say it than to look into Rama’s face. Not that he would be angry. He would be pained. Extremely pained.

And as I sobered down I indeed grew sorry.

“I don’t know what possessed her to do all this…life was so smooth”, I mused.

Rama cleared his throat. “You know it all began with your habit of keeping the chocolates in the fridge…”

“You know that isn’t true”, I declared hotly, “she made that all up. Don’t tell me you don’t know it. You’re a god. You know it. Of course, you know it.”

I could see Rama wasn’t buying it. He had never bought it.

There was silence again as I began to deflate. “I promised I wouldn’t annoy her again. That I would keep the chocolates in the basket like she wanted.” I paused before concluding. “But she said it was too late now.”

Rama had a half-smile on his face. “So you did get round to talking about it at last.”

I replied in one word. Yes.

“The world is changing”, I remarked bitterly.

“The world is always changing”, said Rama.

“It’s a market, a bazaar, that’s what it is”, I said with asperity.

I took off somewhat on a tangent.

“Do you know what happened to the last girl Natesh Anna spoke to?” I asked. I had no intention of waiting for a reply. “She turned him down because he’s an only son. She didn’t want his parents coming and living with them after marriage. And she wasn’t the only girl to turn him down on that count.”

I went on, “Then there was this lady who was known to them. She called up when she found that her daughter’s horoscope matched with Anna’s. She began to ask all sorts of things – how much Anna’s salary was, how much money he had saved, why he hadn’t bought a car yet. Poor Meenakshi Athai, you know how innocent she is. She answered that Anna was about to take a bank loan for a new house. And you know what the lady said? She said that they were willing to take matters forward only if Anna were to buy the house in her daughter’s name!

But this one really takes the cake. This guy, who was the uncle of a girl whom Anna found on a matrimonial site, came home the other day. And you know what? He was actually carrying a five-page questionnaire. A questionnaire! Can you beat that? It had questions like, 'What are your qualifications? Are your degrees genuine? Please provide Xerox copies' and 'How much money have you invested? How much has been invested in your name and how much in the name of your parents or brothers/sisters? Please provide a break-up of your investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, fixed deposits, gold etc.etc.' Anna was so angry! But he kept his cool and politely refused to fill up the questionnaire. Had I been in his place…”

Rama remained unmoved, his face tranquil and the wisp of a smile still playing upon his lips.

I continued, “I know you think I’m responsible for what happened between Urmila and me. But Natesh Anna? He’s as good as gold. Why should all this happen to him?”

There was not even a hint of an emotion crossing Rama’s serene face.

I was heating up again. “Why is all this happening? This isn’t fair. It’s all wrong. Why don’t you do something about this? You’re a god. You can put an end to this. Knock some sense into people’s heads. You’re responsible for all this. Do you hear me? You’re responsible…”

I was angry. Very angry. He had to answer this.

Instead, the only words that came out of him were, “Can you make me another cup of coffee?”

I shrank. The anger, the energy, drained out of me.

“Yes, sure”, I rose timidly and took the cup from his outstretched hand.

When I returned I must have looked miserable. Rama changed the topic.

“Do you know where Shatrughanan is at the moment?”

“There was an email from him yesterday saying he’s in Oslo.”

“That’s right. He’s on a tour of Scandinavia planning a holiday for us. We’re planning to vacation there next month. All four of us – me, your manni, Lava and Kusha.”

“Oh! That’s nice. The whole family together.”

“Yes, it’s so difficult to keep together these days. Either your manni or I are always out of town. Life’s gotten so stressful, you know. It really brings down your productivity. We’re looking forward to a break.”

Stressed out? Rama didn’t look hassled in the least.

“What you see is not what really is.” Rama read my thoughts as usual and stood up, smiling broadly at me.

It was nice to see him smile.

“You’re free to join us on the vacation, you know. You probably need a break as well.”

It was really nice of him to say it although he knew that I wouldn’t take up his offer. A part of my relationship with manni had turned cold since the day in the forest when she had refused to trust me, accusing me of wanting to possess her and forcing me to leave the house in search of Rama. What a rigmarole bringing her back had turned out to be!

“There’s a purpose to everything”, said Rama, reading my thoughts again. It was an enigmatic statement and I sensed that he was responding to something more than my immediate thoughts. I wasn’t convinced and showed it in my wry smile. It sounded more like a cover-up for divine intervention failure.

He did not argue. It was almost time for the ceremony at the temple.

“Ramanuja, my Lakshmana”, he brought his arms down on my shoulders with affection, “let me take your leave.”

“Wait a minute”, I excused myself, returning in a minute with a bundle of Amar Chitra Katha. “I don’t have Harry Potter but I’m sure Lava and Kusha will enjoy this.”

“This is great!” he exclaimed, “they will love it.”

He tucked the bundle under his arm. “Don’t fret over Urmila. I’ll get your manni to speak to her…”

He gave me a pat. The next moment he was gone.

The Great Man

2008-06-04T16:00:00.008+02:00

Through the misty dawn
His eyes pensive, brooding
The Great Man peeped out.
All night he had grappled
With existential questions.

He looked out over the town
His far-sighted eyes
Taking in all:
the empty bus-stand,
the constitutionals in the park,
the lonely woman sweeping the street,
the stall with kettle on the boil.

He thought of his day of resurrection
People crowding around
Garlands weighing him down
Eloquent speeches made
in extolment of the Great Man.

Every morning they embellished him
Fell at his feet
A woman wiped him clean
Although to his shame
He failed to turn tumescent at her touch.
But then they found another Great Man
And flocked around to him.

The hiss of dosai batter
upon the stove in the stall
Jolted the Great Man
back into the present.
To his crown of streaming crow-shit
Was added another smear
The bird flew away
He looked down
I caught his forlorn eye, smiled at him
And crossed the statue unconcerned.

Congress on the downturn

2008-06-03T20:01:00.003+02:00

There can be no doubt that the Indian National Congress's prospects for next year's Lok Sabha polls have been growing progressively dimmer. The latest reminder of this gradual decline lies in the results of the Karanataka Assembly elections. The story is not very different from what it was in Gujarat at the turn of 2008. Continuous infighting and the failure to project a chief ministerial candidate have been key among the various factors responsible for the successive defeats. Factionalism in the Congress has continually eroded its base all over the country, to the point that the party can scarcely boast of hardcore Congress cadre on the ground, quite unlike the BJP or the Left parties. Harish Khare, who is arguably one of the most astute political commentators in the Indian print medium, made some hard-hitting comments recently, saying that by adopting a please-all policy the Congress high command is trying to keep various faction leaders happy at the expense of the party's own survival. He pointed to the recent examples of K. Karunakaran, who has been welcomed back into the Congress and made a member of the Congress Working Committee, and C.K. Jaffer Sharief, who was placated after he made overtures to the JD (S) just before the recent polls in Karnataka. Khare has come very close to hitting the nail on the head. The Congress high command does not want to displease its heavyweights, and is allowing itself to be blackmailed. In the process, it is only weakening itself.

There is not much to speak of the UPA's performance in office in the last four years. The overall public perception of this government seems to be largely negative. At this point in time, the government seems to be battling a lame-duck nuclear deal with the United States and a perception of allowing terrorism to proliferate within the country, or at any rate, of being unable to curb terrorist attacks that occur with mind-numbing regularity in various parts of the country. The latter is partly a result of the BJP's successful gimmickry, which has played upon the UPA's 'pandering' to the Muslim community, as evidenced for example (according to the BJP), in the Rajinder Sachar Committee report. It is a different matter that the BJP itself does not have an exceptional record in battling terrorism during its years in the NDA government. The infiltration of Pakistan armed personnel into Indian territory that led to the Kargil War, the IC-814 hijacking which led to the humiliating release of three militants from Indian prison and the attack on Parliament - all of these, among others, were pointers to serious lapses in intelligence. Yet the fact is that the BJP has the upper hand in terms of public perception on terrorism. The broad division of labour between the incumbent Prime Minister and the Congress President, whereby the latter handles political and broad policy issues while day-to-day governance and policy matters are left to the former, has not been very successful. It has only exposed the Prime Minister to cries of being powerless and ineffectual. Certainly, Manmohan Singh does not have the stature of Atal Bihari Vajpayee or L.K. Advani within his own party let alone the Congress allies; Sonia Gandhi has not been able to use hers to sufficient effect. And as if this were not enough, in recent weeks, inflation and rising oil prices have become yet another albatross for the UPA government.

At the same time, it is not that the UPA government has done nothing remarkable in its four years in office. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Bharat Nirman initiative and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) are products of this government and at least the first among these, the NREGA, is landmark legislation that well and truly bears the impress of those in this government whose heart is in the right place. Although its record in implementation has been mixed, there is no doubt that if the shortcomings are attended to in seriousness, this legislation will go a long way in providing succour to the millions who live in the dark shadows of the India of 9% economic growth, and can transform the countryside where the majority of Indians live. Another positive offering of this government is the Sachar Committee Report, which, backed by extensive data, provides a pretty accurate picture of the status of the Muslim community in India. However, the government has failed to use the report to introduce major policy measures although it has attempted to introduce a focus on Muslim communities in its social welfare schemes. These have not been played up by the government though, and its efforts to follow up on the Sachar Committee Report have been quite inadequate, making it appear that it has succumbed to the BJP’s denouncement of the report – quite wrongly and cynically, one must add - as another instance of ‘minority appeasement’.

There is no doubt that the bulk of liberal-minded people in this country (unfortunately, there aren't too many of this ilk) are likely to support the Congress and/or the Left. This is less due to an instinctive identification with these parties than due to the lack of an alternative worth embracing. Nevertheless, the organisational decline of the Congress, and its reluctance to take tough measures to rejuvenate the party and motivate its rank and file, are cause for deep dismay. On the one hand, the BJP has already sounded the bugle for the 2009 polls; on the other, the Congress is yet to get its act together. Time is short, and the road to be travelled, a long one. As politically disinclined but concerned citizens, one can only wait and watch.

End of the inaugural IPL

2008-06-02T01:34:00.003+02:00

The IPL ended a few hours ago and the hugely close and exciting finish is going to be the talk of the media all of tomorrow and for the next few days and weeks to come. I will leave the analysis at the hands of cricket experts and aficionados, and limit myself to my personal impressions here.

I am of course, immensely happy that the Rajasthan Royals won. They had my support right from the beginning of the match. This is for at least three reasons. One, this team has truly shown tremendous character and camaraderie. Their high levels of motivation and team spirit were easily visible in the matches they played. Two, I have grown to appreciate the way Shane Warne led this team. He made the most of the chance to captain a low profile, or almost profile-less, team, without displaying any ego hassles. And what an opportunity he made of it! In the course of his international career luck refused to court him in the matter of captaincy of the Australian team, this owing not insubstantially to his misdemeanours off the field. In the IPL though, he led the Rajasthan Royals with great élan, and what proved endearing was his modesty, his grace in acknowledging his rivals and the space that he seemed to give to the players of his team, topping it up with generous, effusive praise of them. He has not been a mere leader; he has served to be an inspiring one. I am convinced that the cricketing world is all the poorer in not seeing him lead the Aussies as a regular, full-time captain.

Reason number three why I am happy about the victory is that the Royals were owned by Emerging Media, a relatively less known entity, of which one heard and saw very little. This extends also to the other finalist, the Chennai Super Kings, who are owned by India Cements, a long-time patron of cricket in Tamil Nadu, and who, one presupposes, know from their long association with the game that the best way of helping cricket is to leave it to the players. I am immensely happy that none of the four teams owned by high-profile film or corporate personalities made it to the finals. Of the four, I thought the owners of the Mumbai team conducted themselves with the requisite constraint and dignity. However, the other three were often in the news for the wrong reasons, and I think their teams would have been better off without all the unwarranted, unwanted shoo-sha that their owners brought them.

I did feel sorry a bit for Dhoni. He’s a fine captain and his short but meteoric career thus far as one-day skipper is a testimony to his astuteness. I appreciated the way he brought his team together into a huddle at the end of the tight finish and manoeuvred Shastri’s question about the turning point of the game during the awards ceremony, saying that the outcome was a team responsibility and no one or more individuals were to be singled out for the mistakes that were made. Yet, he could have been graceful enough to applaud the Royals for the way they played and it was disappointing that he did not do so. Nevertheless, he has proved his mettle by bringing his team back into the tournament with the limited resources that they had, especially in the bowling department, after they started slipping following Hayden and Hussey’s departure.
Had Dhoni’s team won, I fear, it would have marked yet another – almost the final one – nail in the coffin of the career of the senior players of the Indian team. Dhoni’s views on the team composition, which have been very plainly in the media, favour a young team in which the seniors, barring Sachin Tendulkar perhaps, do not find a place. His views seem to have been fed by his own successes, particularly in the Twenty20 World Cup last year, and there is more than just a tinge of arrogance in them. A Chennai victory in the IPL may have furthered strengthened his hands in matters of team selection, and possibly enhanced his hubris. The failure of four of the five teams led by senior Indian players to make it to the semi-finals is likely to go against them despite their sterling individual performances, and the omission of both Dravid and Ganguly from the recently announced one-day squad is a matter of sadness. They are both fine players who still have a good amount left in them, and it is rather unfair that their abilities are under question. Their treatment goes to say much about the fickle nature of public memory. In his heyday, the cricketer is saluted, feted and pandered to by a loving, almost hysterical, media and fan-following. In his twilight years, however, all his energy, effort and sacrifice are forgotten, and his match-winning performances that once had audiences going delirious with joy, are relegated to the margins of memory. The man is reduced to a bauble, a one-time fancy that is now out of both fashion and favour. Heroes deserve better treatment, especially when they are also fine human beings, as is the case with Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar. Despite the blips, Saurav Ganguly also deserves to join this list; he is after all, India’s most successful cricket captain, one who showed the chutzpah to take on the indomitable Aussies.

But I have digressed and must return. The IPL was truly well-packaged, well-marketed and well-organised but there were several unpalatable things on the table at the same time. Prime among these, as far as I am concerned, was the visible conceit of the organisers. Before the tournament began, near-impossible conditions concerning coverage and use of pictures were laid down for the media, and were withdrawn in part only at the eleventh hour when a media boycott seemed imminent (the conditions were not relaxed for cricket websites, as a result of which Cricinfo’s coverage looked forlorn at times, having to burrow into its archives for images). While the foray of film actors and corporate guns was a draw in the initial stages, needless controversies were stirred up around some of them. At another extreme, politicians saw capital in raking up issues of their own, such as the one relating to the presence of cheerleaders. I see nothing wrong with the cheerleaders being around. It is the Indian male who is depraved and intent upon staring at cleavage and midriff. Let him grow out of his perversion and shed the double standard of taking the moral high-stand all the time. Last of all, there is nothing to justify the treatment meted out to the Indian Cricket League (ICL) by the BCCI. The ICL did well to stage their tournament before the IPL in the face of severe limitations due to BCCI restrictions on use of stadia and facilities imposed on them. One hopes the success of the IPL will rub off on its less-fortunate counterpart, the ICL, and give it increasing visibility and recognition in the years to come.

There were also causes for celebration. The greatest attraction remained the thrill of watching players from different countries rubbing shoulders and playing as comrades rather than opponents. Saurav Ganguly hugging Shoaib Akhtar or Virender Sehwag applauding Glenn McGrath was a sight to see. It was equally exciting to watch many domestic players come into their own. The tournament truly produced an explosion of talent.

I agree with those who fulminate that the rise of Twenty20 cricket is the rise of the slog and the slow demise of elegant strokeplay. But one cannot deny that change, no matter how detestable, is essential for survival. It is the essence of evolution. Let us see how cricket evolves in the days to come.

For the moment, let us savour the joy of the present!

High upon the High Tatras

2008-05-27T14:22:00.026+02:00

A slightly edited version of the following travel piece of mine, based on a hike up the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia last summer, was published in The Telegraph from Kolkata last Saturday, 23 May 2008 (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080524/jsp/personaltt/story_9310441.jsp):

View from Malá Studená dolina ; Photographs by Gualter Baptista, reproduced with permission

The sight in front of us is stunning. At an altitude of 2,015 metres, we are perched on a rare piece of flat rock, between an endless expanse of cottony blue-grey sky on top and rock-cradled green slopes below, together merging into a panoramic view of the far countryside. To our backs, the craggy granite cliffs of the High Tatras rise up spectacularly, almost casting their shadows upon us. A little to our left lies an alpine lake, fed by melting ice and so freezing cold that my hands are still numb after having dipped into its waters. This is Malá Studená dolina (the Little Cold Valley) in the High Tatras, a mountain range stretching across the border between Slovakia and Poland. We are on the Slovak side, in a region called Vysoké Tatry.

The High Tatras are a part of the Tatra mountains, distinct from the Alps but noted for their similar appearance, climate and flora. They are breathtakingly beautiful. For the past week, from our hotel in the village of Stará Lesná in the plains below, we have been watching the snow-streaked peaks dally with clouds of varying hues of black and white. The summer is upon us but the late June weather is whimsical. At one moment thick, dark clouds are huddled around the mountains, as if locked in an embrace, and there is a wet chill in the air. Within hours, they turn white and wispy and move away, as if breaking up after a lovers’ tiff. In a few hours they are back again, this time as a boundless sheet of spongy white, standing well aloof over the mountains. And just as you wonder if they are going to make up, the clouds descend ever so lightly on the peaks, sealing their pact of reunion with a delicate kiss.

Enticed by their beauty, we resolve to go up the High Tatras over the weekend. Awakening to a brilliant Sunday morning, perfect for a hike, we walk down to the village of Tatranská Lomnica, which is the starting point for a cableway that can take you all the way up to Lomnický štít, the second highest peak in the High Tatras, at an altitude of 2,634 metres. We take a cable car midway to Skalnaté Pleso (or Rocky Lake), a popular picnic spot and the site of an astronomical observatory. The lake is crystal clear and we can see down to its bottom as we lean across the wooden bridge passing over it.

Cable car at Skalnaté Pleso

There are hiking trails branching out from Skalnaté Pleso. The trails are well laid out and marked with different colours, so that is possible to go on a hike by oneself without undue fear of getting lost. Nevertheless, our group is led by Norbert, an earnest young academic from Hungary who is today doubling up as our guide. He has carefully chalked out the plans for the hike and it is reassuring to have him around. We take the red trail, which winds around the edge of the mountains, offering superb views of the valley and plains below. About an hour later, it leads us to Zamkovského chata. The chata or mountain cottage is a remarkable feature of the High Tatras. A small number of them dot the mountains, and they are the only way of spending a night for hikers who wish to avoid the tourist resorts at the foothills. Interestingly, the High Tatras are a part of the Tatras National Park (TANAP), and camping is forbidden. The chatas are thus invaluable for hikers who want to explore the mountains over a few days. They provide refreshments and fairly inexpensive accommodation; they may also have a kitchen. Each chata is managed by a chatar, or inn-keeper, some of whom are a legend by themselves. One such is Viktor Beranek, who keeps the Chata pod Rysmi at the popular Rysy peak. Unlike many of his counterparts, he refuses to have supplies brought up to his chata by helicopter and prefers to carry them up over a four-hour trek on foot in time-honoured tradition.

We halt only briefly at Zamkovského chata; Norbert is soon leading us on the green trail that diverges from the red trail here. The path is now narrow and steep, and climbs up against a swift-flowing mountain stream. At one point just before the trail slopes up sharply, some of our fellow hikers find a fine spot on the banks of the stream to break for lunch. The sun is still bright, and upon finishing a light lunch of apples and sandwiches, it is tempting to stretch out to laze on the rocks with feet dangling into the water.

Hiking in the High Tatras is a popular pastime at this time of the year and it is not just young people who are into it. On our way, we come across barely-ten-year-olds with their parents, and middle-aged persons who politely sidestep to let you climb past. Most amazing of all is the sight of elderly couples negotiating the way with their hiking sticks, in eloquent testimony to their fitness and zest for life.

As we resume our trek, the stream flowing past us narrows to a brook and then eventually disappears. Soon we come to one of its sources, a crunchy stretch of ice. We walk across gingerly, stepping sideways to avoid slipping. The trail, now completely rock, twists its arduous way up. The distance between the hikers widens and we seem to be all on our own. I am glad for the green marks painted on the rocks.

The Tatras National Park represented by a Tatra chamois

I keep my eyes open for a Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica), the mountain-goat, which is the pride of these mountains. This subspecies of the handsome mammal, with a reddish coat and curved, hooked horns, is critically endangered and is placed by the IUCN in its Red List of Threatened Species. Less than 500 of these beasts are known to survive and it is little wonder that the TANAP can be found symbolically represented by a majestic chamois, with its neck arched so that its magnificent horns are on full view. The TANAP covers a breadth of 740 square kilometres, which includes not only forest but also these mountains, with all their twenty five peaks and a hundred lakes. In this extensive area, the chamois shares space with lynx, brown bears, marmots, golden eagles and wolves, but none of them quite match up to its stature. It is in a league of its own.

The Tatra chamois manages to evade us but we are euphoric as we finally reach Malá Studená dolina (which is where we found ourselves at the beginning of this piece!). Limpid waters fill the five splendid tarns, or mountain lakes, here, a reminder of the glaciation of the past. Also here lies Teryho chata, the highest of all mountain cottages in the High Tatras. Teryho chata has 24 beds and charges 280 Slovak crowns (roughly 500 Indian rupees) a night. At an altitude of over 2000 metres with nowhere else to spend the night, this is certainly cheap. Miro Jilek, the inn-keeper, is known for his exceptional brew of Teryho tea – and his hospitality. Apparently, no visitor in need of shelter is turned away. If the beds are full one is free to stretch oneself across the tables or even the floor.

A tarn or mountain lake

As we munch biscuits and savour the sight from the vantage point that we have temporarily colonised, the clouds suddenly start to hang low, blotting out the sun. A cold wind begins to blow. It’s time for us to leave our regal perch. We retrace our steps - but only partially, for Norbert is soon leading us through another trail that takes us into forested parts of the TANAP in the lower reaches of the mountains. We briskly make our way under the forest canopy, negotiating occasional waterfalls and clearings randomly strewn with tree stumps and fallen trunks of spruce. In mid-November 2004, a 180 kilometre-per-hour windstorm swept through the TANAP, uprooting trees and causing mayhem over an extensive area. Subsequently commercial interests sought to remove the fallen and damaged trees and tourism developers have used the opportunity to lobby for increased human activity and recreational facilities. These developments have generated much concern among civil society groups, including scientists, who fear for the fragile ecology of the TANAP and the High Tatras.

The descent is relatively quick although we are hiking all the way down without taking the cable car. Soon the forest is thinning and the meadows are visible in the distance. Eventually our trail opens out on to a road leading right to our village. As we step out of the woods the Slovak sun is out again, casting its warm glow on the evening. We look up to see the mighty Tatras stand tall and clear. Looks like they’ve had a lovers’ tiff again.

My favourite short stories

2008-05-22T10:46:00.020+02:00

If you were to compile a list of your all-time favourite short stories, which are the ones you would call upon? I recently finished reading a short story anthology that I picked up at one of the second-hand bookshops near Town Hall, and the question has been playing on my mind ever since. Included in this short story collection were some stories that I had read previously and at least two of them deserve to go into my list of faves.

However, compiling a freelance list of this sort is fraught with danger. The exercise brings home a sinking sense of inadequacy and exposes one’s limitations in terms of breadth (or lack of it) of reading. My nightmarish fear is that anyone with a taste for short fiction will go through my list with growing severity. “No Chekhov?” they might frown. No Saki either? No P. G. Wodehouse?! Where's Somerset Maugham? Jhumpa Lahiri? Satyajit Ray? Rohinton Mistry? And so on and so forth they might ask, reeling off a long list of names as I shrink in embarassment and shame.

Bravely, nevertheless, I shall take the plunge, on the strength of my own individuality and preferences. There are of course, some parameters to be laid out. I propose to discuss very briefly short stories that I adore, stories that I read over a period of time since my schooldays. Many of these are evergreen stories that one gets to read time and again in various short story collections. From the ones so discussed I propose to narrow down and draw up a list of approximately ten favourites. I can already foresee a bias towards earlier writers, and there is unlikely to be much contemporary writing.

After Twenty Years: Illustration from "Outstanding Short Stories", S. Chand & Company (Pvt.) Ltd., New Delhi, year unknown

One of the prime contenders for the list is a story that always manages to thrill although I have read it umpteen times. In After Twenty Years, O’ Henry tells the remarkable story of two friends who fix a rendezvous for 20 years later – and keep it, but with the most dramatic consequences. O’ Henry’s penchant for shocking the reader with a sharp twist of irony is at a pinnacle here as it is in another story of his, The Last Leaf, in which a failed artist eventually goes on to paint the masterpiece he has only talked about all his life. The Gift of the Magi, also an O’ Henry offering, stands out for the stab of emotion that hits the reader in the end. I have read this tale of love and sacrifice again and again, and a lump sticks to my throat every time.

Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace stocks a similar reservoir of shock and irony, which is unleashed in the very last line. It is a story marvellously told and for that reason it serves as an excellent ambassador for the writer across numerous short story collections. Boule de Suif by the same writer offers a penetrating insight into Prussia-occupied France of the latter half of the 19th century. The narrative compellingly exposes the hollowness of the gentry even as it leaves the reader with a deep sympathy for the anti-protagonist, Elizabeth Rousset.

C. Auguste Dupin’s investigation of the murders in the Rue Morgue in the eponymous murder mystery of Edgar Allan Poe remains a classic, evoking a certain thrill and awe with a touch of the sinister. Dupin himself was a forerunner of his counterpart across the English Channel, Sherlock Holmes. Their creators, Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle respectively, overly romanticised many of their sleuths’ adventures and borrowed liberally – and with a great degree of inaccuracy – from the exotica of the mysterious East. Yet many of their stories are a delight to read. Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, a strong contender for my list of favourites, combines romance, death, fear and adventure as Holmes summons his deductive prowess to crack one of his most intriguing cases.

Holmes listens in rapt attention: A Sidney Paget illustration from The Strand magazine.

In possibly the only case of its kind, Holmes is outsmarted - by a woman - in A Scandal in Bohemia, and in a somewhat singular peep into how the great detective’s gender prejudices were stilled, Conan Doyle, in Watson’s shoes, writes: “ And that was how … the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of ___, … it is always under the honourable title of the woman.” The story makes it a strong contender for my list for this unusual characteristic alone. This distinctive trait leads me to another story of failure, and the gentleman in question is none other than the little Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Published as a short story sometime between the two World Wars, Agatha Christie’s The Chocolate Box has Poirot narrating to companion Hastings the one occasion when his little grey cells failed him in his illustrious professional career.

The Man who saved Pumpelsdrop is a breezy story that describes the ascent of a town from the furrows of economic depression to the happy air of prosperity. This Walter J. Turner tale fed my schoolboy ambitions of becoming an economist and it continues to entertain although I am today merely an economist manqué.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More is often regarded (arguably so) as comprising the cream of Roald Dahl’s short fiction. Originally published in this collection (and later in others), The Hitchhiker never ceases to surprise and entertain with its account of an unexpected highway passenger’s uncanny abilities.

I am getting back home now. If one is to cast a glance at the gamut of Indians writing fiction in English one is compelled to give a wide berth to any dogma on what constitutes Indian identity. Yet few writers have managed to capture the nub of the average Indian’s life in the manner of R. K. Narayan. In my opinion, his novels are more engrossing than his short stories. Nonetheless, I can think of at least two contenders from his oeuvre for our list. One is a short story drawn upon the characters of his novel, The English Teacher. His wife desperately ill and unresponsive to medical treatment, Krishna is compelled to consult an astrologer as a last resort. To neutralise the extremely inauspicious position of the stars the astrologer can offer only one shocking remedy – Krishna must see a prostitute if his wife is to survive. The rest of the story describes how Krishna deals with this devilish dilemma. This is my favourite R. K. Narayan story but I do not know its title. I have no remembrance of where I read it and it is certainly not present in the two readily available short story collections of his, Malgudi Days and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories. My choice therefore, falls upon The Doctor’s Word, a story that is remarkable for its deft portrayal of human nature. Here, Raman, a doctor with a reputation for ruthless honesty in the matter of life and death, struggles with the realisation that the survival of his latest patient hinges more upon his prognosis than his medication. The story has been reprinted in more than one anthology.

My favourite Ranji story: Illustration from Ruskin Bond's "Three Stories in Cricket", The Students' Stores, New Delhi, 1990

Leaping across the Vindhyas we come to a writer for whom India is home. From Ruskin Bond’s expansive repertory I draw three contenders. Ranji’s Wonderful Bat is about a budding boy cricketer who has lost his touch with the bat and is on the verge of losing his place in the school team. The Girl on the Train is a more ‘grown-up’ story that ends with a twist. My favourite Ruskin Bond tale, however, is another Ranji story: Koki Plays the Game. It is to be enjoyed for its sheer charm as it captures the nuances of small town ‘maidan’ cricket, with young boys playing the game for sheer fun and pride. A far cry from today’s masala matches and a throwback to one’s own days of innocence. In the story, the gender barrier is broken as Kokila, Ranji’s girl next door, migrates from bowler-in-the-nets and cheerleader to twelfth man, and eventually makes it to the playing eleven in style.

Dal Delight: An illustration by Suddhasattwa Basu from "Best of Target Stories", Living Media India Ltd., New Delhi, 1991

Another ‘desi’ story scoring high on the delight quotient is Dal Delight by Subhadra Sen Gupta. Set in nawaabi Lucknow, the narrative takes the reader through a mouth-watering experience, giving anxious but exciting moments when Mohammad Qadir’s shahi menu is held hostage to the kite-flying whims of Nawab Hasan Ali.

The last contender is The Imam and the Indian, to include which I will have to bend the rules a little, for strictly speaking, this is a prose piece that meanders over the lines that separate essay, autobiographical experience and short story. Yet, its uniqueness is striking. This Amitav Ghosh product truly speaks of an age that arrived somewhat late in Indian English writing, addressing as it does the conundrums posed by a juxtaposition of different cultures. That it should have come from the pen of an Indian, a people largely self-absorbed and self-obsessed, is what makes it remarkable. If the Imam’s railing against the writer for the treatment meted out to the dead in his country is deeply startling, the more sympathetic but equally perplexed voice of the simple Egyptian villager brings the essay to an end on a note of amusement.

Now, the denouement. Having discussed the probables, the final selection turns out as follows:

After Twenty Years (O’ Henry)
The Last Leaf (O’ Henry)
The Necklace (Guy de Maupassant)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Man Who Saved Pumpelsdrop (Walter J. Turner)
The Hitchhiker (Roald Dahl)
The Doctor’s Word (R. K. Narayan)
Koki Plays the Game (Ruskin Bond)
Dal Delight (Subhadra Sen Gupta)
The Imam and the Indian (Amitav Ghosh)

Ten short stories and one prose piece.

The world is perfect!

2008-04-30T20:39:00.003+02:00

A friend of mine has this interesting email signature:

...........................................
My face in the mirror
Isn’t wrinkled or drawn.
My house isn’t dirty
The cobwebs are gone.
My garden looks lovely
And so does my lawn.
I think I might never
Put my glasses back on!
..........................................

Mera Bharat Mahan?

2008-04-24T16:55:00.005+02:00

It would be incredible were it not a fact. At a government hospital in Chennai (in Royapuram, to be precise), two mothers gave birth at the same time. The hospital staff mixed the babies up so that the parentage became suspect when it came to handing them over. One of the two babies was male, the other female. Inevitably a furore resulted. DNA tests were conducted. It took a week but eventually the babies were handed over to the right mothers. A silent thanks to technology. A million curses to the hospital which could not handle a matter at once as simple and crucial as this.

In another event, this time in Tiruvallur, five children fell ill and were admitted to the government hospital after they were administered measles vaccine shots (which are meant for children below 13 months of age) at a Primary Health Centre earlier in the day. Three of them died. Another death occurred, for the same reason and on the same day, although the child received his measles vaccine at another PHC. Reportedly, the vaccines came from the same batch and might have been contaminated. However, about 20,000 other children have received vaccine shots from the same batch thus far without any incident. So what went wrong in these tragic cases? At any rate, four deaths later, the batch has been withdrawn from use and samples sent for examination. Perhaps I should say ‘purportedly withdrawn’. For the way things work, some careless nurse might still use one of the vials tomorrow and some more deaths may follow.

Both these incidents are reported in today’s Coimbatore edition of The Hindu (www.thehindu.in). I have no words to express my disgust and revulsion.

New Year and a scientific error

2008-04-17T20:37:00.008+02:00

The last fortnight has seen a spate of New Year days. Last Monday, April 7, was Ugadi and Gudi Padva, for the people of Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra. This Sunday the 13th marked the beginning of the Tamil New Year (although there has been a fair bit of controversy over the decision of the incumbent DMK-led government to mark the beginning of the Tamil calendar with the month of Thai, which begins in the middle of January). The next day, the 14th, was Vishu for Malayalam-speakers, which coincided with Baisakhi in the Punjab and Bihu in Assam. A prominent exception to this spate of New Year days have been the Gujaratis, who celebrate their New Year on the day after Diwali.

The New Year is believed to spring from the transition of the sun from the raasi Meena (Pisces, or the Fish, among the constellations of the zodiac) to Mesha (Aries, or the Lamb). This year the transition brought to an end the Tamil year Sarvajithhu, and the beginning of the year Sarvadhaari. The Tamil calendar (which draws from the overarching Hindu calendar) consists of an iterative cycle of sixty years, with Sarvadhaari numbering twenty-second. It appears that the Tamil calendar does not follow an ordinal number year system. After consulting the almanac, my grandmother announced that the current year is the 5109th year of Kalyuga, and that is the only number that we seem to have, in contrast to other regional calendars in the country.

The Tamil year is a solar calendar while the calendars followed by the Kannadigas, Maharashtrians and Andhraaites are luni-solar, adhering to the movements of the moon as well as the sun. In the luni-solar calendars the months commence with the bright half of the moon. This explains why Ugadi (and Gudi Padva) is celebrated a week before the Tamil New Year (and Vishu, Bihu, Baisakhi et al). Ugadi always falls on the day after amavasya or the new moon. India's diversity extends to the various calendar systems followed by the people. For example, people in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra follow the Shaka era with the year 78 CE as the base year whereas those in Gujarat, Rajasthan and India's neighbour, Nepal, follow the Vikram Samvat era with the year 57 CE serving as the base year. Another interesting difference between the two is that while both are luni-solar in nature, the months in the Samvat calendars commence with the dark half of the moon (that is, the day after the full moon), in a mirror-like contrast to the Shaka calendars.

Despite minor differences, all calendars are rooted in an overarching system that may be called the Hindu calendar, which marks the year to the season. The Hindu calendar is based upon the observations made by astronomers of the sub-continent from Vedic times, with modifications being made periodically. The calendar system that we follow today seems to have taken roots around the middle of the first millennium CE. Curiously, despite their advanced attainments in astronomy our ancestors ended up making a mistake with the Hindu calendar. This lay in the phenomenon called the precession of the earth’s axis, wherein the motion of the earth around the sun is influenced by the rotation of the earth’s axis. Our astronomers, while aware of the phenomenon, failed to take it into account while calculating the length of the year. Consequently, the Hindu calendar year is about twenty-three minutes longer than actual, which implies that it accumulates a whole day in about 60 years. In the approximately 1400 years since it was designed, the present calendar has accumulated (with a minor approximation) a whopping 24 days. In other words, our calendar presently tells us the seasons with a lag of approximately 24 days, which is almost a month! Thus, the New Year, which is supposed to mark the transition of the sun from Meena to Mesha (or Pisces to Aries) is actually out of sync with the actual event for the sun has already entered Mesha following the spring equinox, which falls on March 21. Similarly, our observance of Makar Sankranti, which indicates the movement of the sun from Dhanusha to Makara (or Sagittarius to Capricorn) is late by a period of approximately 24 days. The actual event marking this transition has already occurred in the form of the winter solstice (when the sun shines right over the Tropic of Capricorn) on December 22! In this way, we are no longer celebrating our festivals in the same seasons as our forefathers.

This error in our calendars has not remained uncorrected. Far from it. Newly independent India set up a Calendar Reform Committee in 1955, led by the physicist Meghnad Saha, which tried to rectify the gaps in the traditional calendar system. On the basis of its recommendations, a uniform Indian National Calendar encompassing the various regional calendars was adopted in the year 1957. However, the use of this calendar is confined to official usage. For popular purposes, we continue to use our erroneous regional calendars.

So, does this take the sheen off our New Years? I don’t know. We live in an age where the significance of events has largely been forgotten and replaced by a cultural symbolism. In other words, we celebrate many of our festivals, not so much for their underlying importance but more as a matter of custom: because they have been celebrated year after year by people before us. Thus, while there is compelling reason for us to rescue our calendars before they turn into an overly embarassing anachronism, there is still enough justification to see the joie de vivre and enthusiasm of our festivals as a cause for celebration in themselves. That, at any rate, is my two-bit!

(While this post draws from several sources in order to confirm the facts mentioned, for an interesting and a more detailed and complex discussion on the scientific error bit one may refer to http://www.frontline.in/: article entitled Medieval Mistake under the issue dated March 15-28, 2008.)

Telugu-speaking Tamils

2008-04-17T19:03:00.006+02:00

On the day of Ugadi recently, my grand-aunt was here and we got talking about the Telugu-speaking communities of Coimbatore, for whom the day marked the beginning of the New Year in their calendar, which seems to follow the Shaka era. (The Shaka calendar is approximately 78 years behind the Gregorian calendar, so that this Ugadi marked the beginning of the Shaka year 1930.) The most prominent among them are the Vishnu-worshipping Naickers, who also call themselves Naidus. The word Naicker seems to come from Nayak, which was the title for middle-level chieftains under the Vijaynagar Empire. The Naidus of Coimbatore are a prosperous community who have who contributed much to Coimbatore’s twin reputation as a city of entrepreneurs as well as a centre for higher education. Their enormously successful foray into the textile industry in the first half of the 20th century was made possible by the investment of sizeable agricultural surpluses accumulated by virtue of money-lending and shrewd economic sense, a sine qua non in matters of commerce. Even today, almost the entire stretch of Avanashi Road, from LIC at one end to SITRA on the other, is Naidu territory. (One must add that there are some sub-castes of Naickers whose mother-tongue is Kannada. E.V. Ramasamy Naicker ‘Periyar’, for instance, belonged to one such sub-caste.)

There is then the Telugu-speaking community of Devanga Chettiars, weavers by tradition but carrying the belief that their ancestors were kshatriyas. They have contributed to the city one of the landmarks of Coimbatore – the Devanga Chettiar High School near Poo Market. They worship at the Sowdeswari Amman Temple on Raja Street, along with another Telugu-speaking sub-caste of the Chettiar clan, the Komutti Chettiars, who apparently prefer to be called Vysials. The latter are businessmen, and seem to specialise in jewellery. Besides, some of the famous saree showrooms, such as Nalli’s are also believed to be owned by members of this caste. (Somebody correct me if I am wrong!) The Vysials have also left their imprint on the city. Many of the jewellery shops on Raja Street supposedly belong to them; in addition, they have a whole street named after themselves, Vysial Street in the heart of Coimbatore.

A Telugu-speaking community with a curious name is the 24-Manai Telugu Chettiar. They are again a trading community, but are clustered mainly around Madurai and Thanjavur, and in Kongu Nadu they are spread across the towns of Pollachi, Udumalpet and Coimbatore. T.S. Avinashilingam Chettiar, a doyen of education, and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya as well as what is now the Avinashilingam Deemed University, was also a Telugu-speaking Tamil, belonging to the cotton-trading community of Tiruppur Chettiars (I presume they have a more formal name that I am ignorant of). Both of the remarkable institutions that were founded by this Padma Bhushan awardee and lifelong bachelor were born out of the enormous profits earned by his family during the War years.

There are probably many more Telugu-speaking communities that I am not aware of (and which I shall be extremely happy to be informed about). The upshot of this discussion is that contrary to perception, Tamil Nadu is not as homogenous a land as it appears. It is a land enriched by the presence of various communities that are Tamil by virtue of many generations of residence here, and speak the language eloquently, but break into a non-Tamil tongue (which, besides Telugu, can be Kannada, Tulu, Marathi or Malayalam) upon their return home. They have preserved, in more or less pristine form, many of their traditions and customs, even as they have probably evolved new ones. Such ecumenical diversity is a cause for pride and celebration.

Whence and why did such various groups of people make their way to these parts, abandoning their original towns and villages? History probably has elaborate insights to offer but I choose to end this song of sixpence with a delightful extract laced with wry humour:

My ancestors were Telugu-speaking Naidus, but the family had lived in the Tamil country for many generations. My seventh grandfather cut down the forest, ploughed the first field and built the first house in our village. We must have been in Tamil Nadu even before that, but from where in Andhra we came and where we lived until we made a home in our present village remains unknown. Nor do we have any idea as to whether we came as conquerors or perhaps as refugees…The only clue is a very old sword sheathed inside what looks like a walking stick, which has been in our family for as long as anyone can remember. On the strength of his slender evidence, the martial background of the family was presumed, but rarely insisted upon.

(The passage is taken from the memoir Climbing the Coconut Tree, authored by Kasthuri Srinivasan, industrialist and founder-director of the South Indian Textile Research Association - SITRA. Srinivasan was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, and an illustrious son of Coimbatore. There is today an art gallery in his name on Avanashi Road in the city.)

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar and Tamil poets

2008-04-02T23:05:00.009+02:00

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar lived in the early 18th century. He was a wealthy man, a Muslim and an owner of ships. If one is to judge from the paeans composed in his name by the itinerant and innovative Tamil versifiers of his era and later ones - and I am taking M. Krishnan’s word for this - he was an extraordinarily generous man, a benefactor of poets. The indigent freelance poet, who wandered from land to land visiting one prospective patron after another, went to him with great expectations. Apparently, the songs in his praise that have outlasted him suggest that he was a person with a great love for the Tamil language, and show that he let nothing, least of all religion, come in the way of his noblesse oblige when called upon by a poet with a hole in his pocket and free-flowing verse at the tip of his tongue.

Thus, one such verse in his praise, translated by M. Krishnan from the Tamil (as is the case with all verses in this post), reads as follows:

Spent with his blaze the sun is red; the eyes
of women redden in the toils of love:
the poet’s heart grows red reading the classes –
and Seethakkaathi’s hands are red with giving.

These lines come from the stylus of Padikkaasuthambiran, a contemporary of Seethakkaathi. This poet also has to his credit some angry, resentful verse in self-castigation of his pursuit of poetry, a calling that embraced the goddess of learning only to be abandoned by the goddess of wealth. One such vituperative poem goes thus:

Foredoomed, with many callings there, we chose scholarship witlessly, thinking it great.
We did not learn the street magician’s art, dance the pole-dance, or practise sleight-of-hand.
Not born full-breasted prostitutes, we did not, abandoning accursed Tamil, enter service with women as their go-betweens.
To what a wretched life have we been born!

The fortunes of the poet depended greatly upon the munificence, or lack of it, of the patron he went visiting. These patrons, who could be mighty kings, but more realistically speaking, were generally little more than petty chieftains, landlords or merchants, could be unpredictable, ranging from the open-handed to the tight-fisted, and from the miserly to the downright mean. It was not uncommon for the poet, trudging for days together from his village to the town, to arrive at the patron’s stately home and sing his laurels employing the latest novelty in technique and rhythm, only to find his expectations belied. For example, here is a verse by Ashtavaadhanam Saravanaperumal Kavirayar of Ramanathapuram laden with a thick patina of satire:

‘Whom visits me?’–‘A poet’–‘And where are you from?’
‘From Vadakasi.’–‘What brings you here?’
‘Your fame has brought me here.
Hearing of you we have composed sweet verses in your praise.’
‘You were not wise. Which of my long line of forefathers has
listened to verse? A slight unknown in all my ancestry
is what you bring! Go far away before there is bloodshed.’

The poet would leave no stone unturned to thaw the heart of the most pitiless of misers. Thus, Chockanaathappulavar tried to seduce the springs of kindness in the bosom of a certain Bhoja, saying:

Bhoja, when as a thunderstorm you showered
gold-rain upon the spread of the earth beneath,
not a drop touched me, for my poverty
shielded me wholly with its deep umbrella!

In the case of Seethakkaathi, one imagines, poets sang his praise in all sincerity, free from the anxiety that their lyrical labours would be found wanting by a man so generous. Legend has it that a weary poet reached Seethakkathi’s town only to hear of his death. Making his way to the cemetery where the merchant was being buried, he burst into verse, his elegy hinting that the patron’s life had been claimed by the weight of poverty that the poet had brought with him. At this, the dead Seethakkathi’s right hand, bearing a diamond ring, flung open in the direction of the disappointed seeker. Even in death, the great patron did not disappoint.

(The contents of this post are based upon M. Krishnan’s essay, Verse for a living, from Ramachandra Guha, ed. (2007) Nature’s Spokesman: M. Krishnan & Indian Wildlife, Penguin Books, New Delhi. This book is a must-read for nature-lovers, enthusiasts of Tamil literature, aficionados of cricket, and lovers of the English language.)

Letters to the Editor

2008-03-31T22:02:00.009+02:00

In one of the more humorous of his numerous delightful essays, M. Krishnan states that he held the view, in his younger days, that one who wrote for the correspondence columns of a newspaper had passed the litmus test for incipient senility. For “the fact that he has time for such correspondence (let us take it that one letter in ten gets published) shows that he has reached the age of superannuation”.

Having just typed out, printed and posted a letter complaining about the rat and cockroach menace in trains, I am already beginning to feel a little jobless and worried about the screws in my head. I try to comfort myself that the letter was written to the Deputy Director (Public Grievances), Southern Railway, and not to a newspaper. But I know in my heart of hearts that all said and done, the honourable Deputy Director is still a close proxy to the newspaper editor. For there is a letter, on this very day, in the correspondence columns of The Hindu, written along similar lines.

I have always wondered about the vocation of the people behind the names that regularly appear in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. For a while, I also used to wonder what they looked like, but have given it up long ago, impeded as I am by my severely limited powers of deduction as well as imagination. So I stop myself after making a mental record of the names that appear repeatedly. (Although it may be truer to say that the names inflict themselves on the mind with their frequent appearance in print.) Thus, the names spill out somewhat easily; I can effortlessly reel out names of some of the more activist readers of The Hindu – Hilda Raja, C. Varadarajan and Kasim Sait from Chennai, Shahabuddin Nadeem and Ved K. Guilani from Bangalore, Amit Arora from Mumbai and Pachu Menon from Margao. Together, they fulminate on anything and everything under the sun, be it the auctioning of cricketers for the Indian Premier League, the ruckus over government-formation in Pakistan, the 60,000 crore-rupee loan waiver in the latest budget or the stepping down of Fidel Castro as ruler of Cuba. Then there is Kangayam Rangaswamy, who until sometime ago, used to write in regularly all the way from the United States of America. Meanwhile, after a longish absence, T. Marx wrote in the other day from Karaikal, commending the Supreme Court for setting up a Special Investigation Team to probe riot-cases in Gujarat. Being a namesake of the father of communism, his letters must surely be heart-warming for the editor of The Hindu, a newspaper with manifest left-wing predilections. Little wonder that his latest letter stands at the head of the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column, with the title ‘Ray of hope’ bestowed upon it (by the indulgent editor, who else?). Closer home, my neighbour two houses away, K. Vellingiri, puts in an appearance now and then every Monday in the ‘Reader’s Mail’ column, which publishes letters exclusively from readers of the Coimbatore edition. Out-writing him to the editor from the same neighbourhood is Sripada Rajan, although neither of them, unfortunately, seem to have anything very substantial to say. (This is an attribute common to several such writers of frequent letters to the editor.) Some letter-writers are distinctly annoying. One such source of constant irritation is someone who I shall choose to call by his initials, KDV, a resident of Coimbatore. KDV seems to be inclined to criticise anything and everything, and at the very least, has an opinion to offer on matters that may be best left to persons more knowledgeable. Thus, his rants have ranged from the closure of the cash counter at the Saibaba Colony Telephone Exchange to the gender, racial and religious prejudices of the American media, even as he has proffered sage counsel to the leaders of the PPP and the PML(N) in Pakistan, asking them to do their best to restore democracy in their country. The frequency of his published letters is so high that I seriously wonder if he writes not one or two, but a dozen letters to the editor every week, each on a different topic to improve the chances of publication.

Interestingly, the count of women among these regular letter-writers, after also including those names that I have not mentioned here, is negligible. Of the ones named above, only one is clearly distinguishable as a woman by her name: Hilda Raja. I suspect Sripada Rajan to be a woman (partly from the name, and from the content of her letters), while Pachu Menon, by the utter ambiguity of the name to me, may also be a candidate. What should one make of this? There are three theories that immediately surface: one, that most writers of letters to the editor of The Hindu are men; two, that most readers of The Hindu are also men, and; three, that most readers of English newspapers in Tamil Nadu, considering that The Hindu is the most widely-circulated of its ilk by a huge margin over its nearest competitor in the state, are again, men. The first theory definitely holds good if one is to take published letters into account; the last two are somewhat tenuous but possibly true.

Can we generalise these theories across the entire English print media spectrum in the country? If we were to use the letters to the editors of the various English-language dailies in India as the basis, the answer would probably be in the negative. To my knowledge, no other daily newspaper in English devotes as much space to reader’s feedback as does The Hindu. Therefore, there is not enough data for the lay person to support such sweeping observations.

Meanwhile, as India’s population ages and reaches superannuation, I have no doubt that letter-writers writing to the editor will flourish and multiply. Even my city compatriot, KDV, will sooner or later begin to face the heat. But I have no doubt that with his boundless zeal and energy he will continue to best the competition for a long time to come. I am sure that even as I am typing this, he and other members of his clan are already planning their next letter to the editor.

However, to grudgingly confess, writing to the newspaper is not a bad thing really. At the end of the day, it is an important way of getting the world to feel your pulse, of registering your grievance and airing your opinion. Fulmination and protest is not only necessary but also integral to a democratic setup. As a matter of fact, such opinion-building and peroration is eminently desirable in order to create a more informed and articulate public discourse. Viewed from this position, it may not be too far-fetched to claim that sensible writers, who complain, criticise, comment and have something substantive to say are, in fact, rendering public service that contributes to the common good.

Indeed, M. Krishnan, with whom we began this post, himself underwent a change of heart in the course of his essay, modifying his unkind position when he discovered that "these selfless people are, in fact, the pillars of our democracy. They risk brawls in public in the interests of equity, and I think their letters, far from disclosing senility, prove their virile community spirit and mature daring."

May their tribe increase!

Yeh Chand Sa Roshan Chehra...

2008-03-27T18:20:00.008+01:00

She held my eyes
Like she always did
Brown with a reddish tinge
Hazel, perhaps?

Lustfully
I stared
At her charming face
Fair as the moon
She let my eyes travel
Over her sinuous curves
I yearned
For her body, soft to the touch
Of one so debauched
As myself
I longed to reach out
And caress her naked
She walked away and looked
Back over her shoulders

She was a mother; her children
Born out of wedlock
And yet I wanted her
Badly, in my arms

I could see
Her reading my thoughts
I pleaded
But dignified and proud,
Determined
To give Man no quarter
A last burning look
Of her moon-lit feline face
Was all that she could spare
As she drew in her claws
And jumped off the wall
Leaving me with the sadness
Of having come tantalizingly close
And lost.

Romba Thanks!

2008-03-23T20:23:00.011+01:00

“Do the buses to Coimbatore stop here?” I enquired on Friday, at the bus-stand in the temple-town of Karamadai. One of the three gentlemen, to whom this query was addressed promptly replied, “If you want to take the service bus you will have to wait outside on the main road. But all the town buses start from here.” I was pleased, not so much with the crispness of his response as with the genial way it was offered. It immediately seemed to mark him out as a country man, probably a resident of the town. “Romba thanks!” I said gratefully, using a colloquial expression, part-Tamil, part-English, meaning ‘thank you very much’.

This revived a line of thinking upon which I have pondered upon in the past. Is there at all an indigenous equivalent for 'thank you' in many parts of this country? In the normal course of things, it seems to me, it is unusual to verbally express thanks in the first place, which indicates that any help rendered is considered to be a part of, as Reader’s Digest would have it, ‘all in a day’s work’. Which makes it a cultural characteristic. So, one might express one’s appreciation through one’s body language, such as a sideways wiggle of the head, which is particularly common in the Tamil country. Or it might be expressed in the tone of my voice in saying “Sereenga” or “Sereenganna”, seree being Tamil for okay, with –nga and –anna serving as suffixes indicating a sense of respect. Of course, if I am profoundly grateful or somewhat highly cultured, I might be quite voluble in an extensive articulation of gratitude. But this is decidedly unusual when you are dealing with strangers. Which explains why, sometimes, people look up with some surprise when I say thank you in a bank or a shop. It serves to remind, somewhat painfully, that my manners are excessively urban and westernised. And that I am a cultural misfit in my own land. To my relief however, ‘romba thanks’, which is conveniently positioned between the wholly anglicised ‘thank you’ and the conventional countrified practice of not explicitly expressing thanks at all, seems to be fairly common colloquial usage among my generation and succeeding ones.

What about other parts of the country? During the days in Ahmedabad we said "Aabhar". To passers-by who threw the cricket ball back to us. Whenever we sent it flying all the way down the terrace. Which was a literal translation into Gujarati of 'thank you' and sounded somewhat contrived. It reflected our middle-classness, with the very fact that we were apartment-dwellers indicating a cultural position removed from that of the passer-by on foot or bicycle.

I do not recall any local expression equalling the brevity of ‘thank you’ in either rural Maharashtra (Palghar, Beed), rural Udaipur or the Nicobars. The conventional way of expressing gratitude was through one’s body language – especially through one’s face, combining the modesty of the supplicant with a beam of happiness or a radiant smile. Of course, an effusive articulation of one’s feelings followed where one felt overwhelmed by the kindness shown.

There is really no scientific basis to my observations, and I have always tended to be dismissive of my thoughts on this matter. But my arguments were bolstered when I was reading the novel Shantaram. Talking about the long stream of patients who would come to be treated at his clinic in the slum, Gregory David Roberts observes:

He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that. (p. 243-244)

Coming from a man belonging to a different culture, and therefore probably more sensitive to the cultural differences between his part of the world and ours, this is surely a significant comment.

I might want to preen myself now, imagining that there is reasonable ground for the contention that the average Indian generally does not say thanks, and that there is no exact equivalent for ‘thank you’ in an Indian language. But there is evidence to the contrary from the Hindi belt. What does one make of dhanyavaad, Hindi for thanks? Even if one were to dismiss it as a product of Sanskritised Hindi (but not uncommonly used in some parts, such as among the relatively urbane of southern Rajasthan for instance), and therefore at a remove from the everyday Hindustani of the common man, one is still confronted by the more popular shukriya. But given the latter’s Urdu origins, and the fact that Urdu was the language of the nobility, my argument is that uttering thanks is still a class phenomenon, attributable more to the ‘cultured’ classes. In my view, the aam aadmi is unlikely to care whether or not you thank him for the trivial assistance that he has rendered you.

Of course, nothing in this post is definitive. Any useful comment either in support or in opposition to my argument, or offering a fresh perspective on it, shall be greatly valued. To all those who spare some time on this song of sixpence, romba thanks!

On travelling sleeper class...

2008-03-21T11:05:00.001+01:00

Ironically, the more I travel by AC three-tier on our trains, the more I begin to appreciate the pleasures of travelling plain sleeper class. This is although, or maybe precisely because I’ve been travelling quite a bit since December. Which has been eleven train journeys in all, of which only five were completed in sleeper class. And two of these were night journeys from Coimbatore to Chennai and back en route to Calcutta recently. So that makes it nine long distance journeys (eight of these being at least 1500 kilometres long), three of them in sleeper class and the rest by AC three-tier.

Why, what’s wrong with AC three-tier, you ask? It is, well, suffocating. One is so completely cut off from the sights and sounds that one associates with train travel. You can’t look out of the window, and even if you are on a window seat, you have to really wonder how it is on the other side of the tinted glass. Is it sunny or cloudy? Is it cold or warm? Is it really windy or just the train trying to live up to its reputation of being an express? AC travel does not help you with answers to these questions. Nor does it let you enjoy the tadak-tadak of the train, as it rolls along the rails. Mind you, this is the most fundamental aspect, the very essence of train travel, this tadak-tadak sound. It is to a train what aum is to the soul. It is a sound which has to get inside you and touch the very bones to give you the thrill that comes of travelling by train. Equally thrilling is the rumbling of the train as it crosses a bridge. The longer the bridge the more exciting it is. (My favourite is the crossing of the river Krishna just before Vijayawada when one is northward-bound. As a child I loved to peer all the way down at the river-bed with my head pressed to the window, and enjoy the kick I got at the way my head reeled!) Unfortunately, such thrills stop short of an AC coach, which is more or less acoustically sanitised in this matter.

I haven’t even mentioned the countryside yet. Isn’t that the most exciting part of travelling by train? For me, it certainly is. When one sets out from Coimbatore to Mumbai by Kurla Express, the train snakes its way through the Kongu region with its beautiful paddy-fields ringed by coconut palm trees. There are lovely farms with groves of coconut and occasionally, mango. The soil is black – you can see this from the fields that have just been ploughed. At Salem, the route branches off from the Chennai line, and the train chugs away towards Bangalore. The countryside here gives you a sense of isolation, and nature overwhelms the settlements, which grow increasingly few and far between. The stretch up to Hosur is remarkably beautiful, with its undulating terrain and the hint of woods here and there. As the train makes its way into Karnataka, then Andhra, and finally into Maharashtra (where it makes its entry from the Solapur end), the soil grows red, brown, blackish and then brown again while the tiled roofs of houses in the countryside are replaced by thatch, slate (particularly around Gulbarga) and once again, by red tiles. The fields give way to waste land and craggy hills of rock before agricultural land claws its way back up to the tracks. And then there is the beautiful stretch, the ghat section between Lonavala and Karjat, where the large number of tunnels is as great a source of delight as the breathtaking valleys.

Often, when you wake up from your siesta and begin to wonder where your train is, a sense of geography is offered by vendors and the myriad wares that they are presenting for sale. En route to Delhi, bhelpuriwallahs doing the rounds of your coach quietly proclaim the train’s entry into the Telangana– Vidarbha country. Nagpur announces its proximity in oranges being sold in bagfuls. Agra and Mathura are indicated by boxes of petha, the sweet for which the former is especially famous. On the Mumbai route, the Lonavala chikki serves as an easy marker of one’s geographical moorings.

I always feel it is easier to slip on and off for food whenever the train halts if one is travelling sleeper class. Here too, the food on sale on the platform gives you a good idea of where you are. Maharashtra (also northern Karnataka) is vadapav-land. The northern stretch towards Delhi, particularly beyond Jhansi is aloo-puri pradesh. And south of Maharashtra, you know you are in familiar territory when your eyes fall upon hawkers vending idli, dosa and omelette on the railway platform. Further south, particularly from Vijayawada downwards, the cuisine turns more discriminating. Omelette gives way to biryani, thayir satham, lemon rice and even puliyasatham. The larger food stalls in Vijayawada, one must not forget to mention, may offer piping hot pongal or idli-vada, served with excellent sambar-chutney, if you are lucky. Such pleasures may not be yours if you are travelling air-conditioned class. For AC coaches are generally positioned at one or the other extremity of the train, which means that you find yourselves at a far end of the platform, with no food-stall (or bookshop) in sight. You are thus, more or less entirely at the mercy of the pantry car.

With sealed windows and regulated temperature, AC travel is synthetic, artificial. Not infrequently, one may end up with somewhat troublesome co-passengers, who being unfamiliar with the ways of using the linen offered to them, may actually end up using that of their fellow passengers’. Such a misfortune befell me twice recently during my travels.

Travellers in sleeper class, it seems to me, are quite free of the stiffness that one may find among the upmarket passengers of the AC coaches. One of my recent sleeper class journeys was from Delhi to Coimbatore by Kerala Express. For company I had a nun who could speak only Malayalam, two young chaps - Malayalis working for the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy here in Coimbatore, and another couple of Keralites, a 20-year old girl and her older male companion. It was great fun, although I was the only one in the group unable to speak any Malayalam! When I missed a meal on the first afternoon, the nun fed me with tamarind rice and onion pickle. And the next day, believe it or not, we all played snakes and ladders, a game I hadn’t played in years! How singularly entertaining an otherwise silly game can be when played in a group of six on a train!

For all my noisy tomtomming of sleeper class travel I must, at the end of this post, acknowledge the bitter truth that sleeper class coaches are nowadays overrun by roaches and rats. For all his financial wizardry, it appears that the Hon’ble Railway Minister is now up against a challenge that is oxymoronically speaking, both modest and menacing. Perhaps it may help if he were to ensure that trains are thoroughly cleaned and fumigated before they set forth on their long jaunts across the country. At any rate, as a result of the humble rat and the humbler cockroach, my sleeper class journeys turned out to be a terror at nights, with the latter crawling all over me and nightmares of the former biting through my luggage playing on the mind all the time!

So now you know, for all my rants about the pleasures of sleeper class travel, why I travel the way I do!

Athanda Ithanda Kumbhakarnan Naan Thaan Da

2008-03-20T18:46:00.000+01:00

I’ve become something of a Kumbhakarna these days. I dare not count the hours that I’ve spent sleeping in the past week. Sleep, pee, shit, eat, sleep, pee, check email, eat, go online, pee, read, pee, sleep. That’s become the daily routine. Makes me feel as if I’m little else than stomach and testicles. Shit! You know, that’s why I’m writing this and forcing myself to revive my moribund blog.

Stomach and testicles. That’s how a zamindar in Bengal described his bitterly poor tenants to an English officer. Although from the insights that one gets into the debauched lives of the zamindars of late colonial Bengal, one might say of our illustrious zamindar friend and his ilk that they were probably all testicles, and more testicles. Thanks to Cornwallis, perhaps? Sorry, I’m talking about a book. A humdinger of a book, actually. A Princely Impostor? is its title. It’s a superb story, grippingly recounted. Was the Bhawal sannyasi really Ramendra Narayan Roy? What really happened in Darjeeling? Almost exactly a century later, the gaps remain awning gaps. That’s the beauty of the narrative. And boy, what an end! Fact, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Excellent fodder for a movie. (Maybe I should get in touch with Sugata of New Theatres Limited.) I’m glad I bought the book. Fittingly, in Calcutta. A toast to the Bhawal estate. Another to Partha Chatterjee. Yet another to Patnaik, from whose bookshelf I first picked up the book - out of sheer curiosity. And of course, one to Pannalal Basu, subordinate judge of Dacca district. He taught philosophy at St. Stephen’s College before joining the judicial service. What a courageous judgement it was for a lower court judge!

It’s been funny weather out here in Coimbatore. For the last ten days. Cloudy and rainy. Today it rained like it was monsoon. I got drenched on the scooter and stopped at the Ayyappa temple to take shelter. It was fun to watch the Asokapuram schoolkids. They were playing in uniform when it started raining. They were having the time of their lives. Some were dancing. Some playing catch in the rain. We were also like them once. What wouldn’t I give to be their age and play cricket on the ground again!

Dataone broadband is the latest saga to hit my life. I wanted a new phone line with a broadband connection. The line will be given in two-three days, I was told. And that the broadband connection would be ready in a month’s time. Two weeks passed. No sign of the lineman. I went to the Thudiyalur telephone exchange. The lineman turned up. He checked. “The box is full. No capacity for a new line”, he declared. Back I went to the exchange. Today. The AE is a lady. Seems quite prompt. But why do I have to present myself in person for things to move? Anyway. Would you like to take a wireless phone instead, she asked. You get a speed of 144 kbps. Unlimited downloads. All for a monthly bill of Rs. 250/-. Damn it, something is better than nothing, I thought. Filled up the form. Come back on Saturday, she said. Between 11 and 12. Hopefully then, Saturday should mark the end of the dial-up. And of 3500-rupee phone bills. Will let you know. In another song of sixpence.

Singing a song of sixpence...

2007-12-06T07:42:00.000+01:00

Why songs of sixpence? Because it doesn't really mean anything. Because existence is beginning to seem rather meaningless. Because today I am crushed. Defeated. Down and out. Because today my self-esteem took yet another battering. Because life doesn't seem worth very much. Certainly not more than sixpence. (Which at today's rate of exchange, is about four rupees eighty paise in Indian currency. What can that get you? Not even a pocketful of rye, I'm sure.)

So today, I sing my first song of sixpence, a mournful one. Hopefully others, more cheery ones will follow. For I shall live to fight it out and see another day. With sixpence. That's my capital.