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!
Monday, 31 March 2008
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Yeh Chand Sa Roshan Chehra...
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.
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.
Sunday, 23 March 2008
Romba Thanks!
“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!
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!
Friday, 21 March 2008
On travelling sleeper class...
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!
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!
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Athanda Ithanda Kumbhakarnan Naan Thaan Da
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.
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.
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The Sahib of Saraidadar, Part 2 of 2
(Illustration below by Sandeep Sen. Originally published on Pangolin Prophecies , a blog maintained by Krishnapriya Tamma.) It was Diw...
