Hair care for my bald head

A couple of years ago, I remember sitting on the ledge waiting for my turn at the barber’s to get my hair cut. The guy was just finishing up and it was my turn next, and I was glad the wait was coming to an end. But funny as it was, just as I stood up to make my way to the chair, the Director of institute walked in. Well, what did I know? He wanted his hair cut too. We exchanged pleasantries, and I let him take my place. The thought crossed my mind that I’d stubbornly shove him aside and rightly claim my turn. After all, I had waited for so long, and he had but just walked in. But no; instead I sat and stared at the bald patch on the back of his head and thought “Jeez, he’ll never get to see it like everyone else can. That must be a sad feeling.”

Besides all the profanities I dedicated to him under my breath that afternoon, I remember distinctly saying one other thing to myself: that when you’re in a barber’s chair, it doesn’t matter who you are. Here was the Director of an institute, in-charge of a couple of thousand people, head of a dozen committees with all the power and strings attached at all levels in the Government, plus this inter-galactical academician. Yet, for those 15 minutes under the comb and scissors (after a barrage of news-reports saying ‘under the knife’, I didn’t want to feel left behind), he was literally a nobody on that chair, and if I may say so, was at the mercy of the man wielding the scissors.

They say humans are protective about their space bubble, i.e we all carry around us a three dimensional boundary and everyone we come in contact with is kept beyond the periphery of this imaginary bubble. This explains why we get uncomfortable when someone gets too close to us while talking. As adults, a few exceptional cases when this bubble is burst, and we ‘let people in’ is while kissing, while at the hairdresser’s chair and at the doctor’s table. I will get off this topic right here, and recommend that you read Allan and Barbara Pease’s Body Language if you’re a seeking a deeper explanation into this bubble thing. But now, back to barbers (I’m told this word is on its way out. We call them hair-dressers these days.)

This monsoon, I found myself screaming each time I came out of the bath and dried my hair. Invariably, I kept getting shown that there was a good chance the towel had more hair than my head. Now, I’m one of those who does a laugh-out-loud when I see the before and after ads for hair regrowth therapy. And, I certainly wasn’t readying myself to model in those ads anytime. Hence, my predicament drove me to the trichologist, and these guys always scare you. They somehow convince you that if you don’t take their remedy which costs an arm and a leg, you’ll go bald before you leave the clinic. But in my case, the Doc (it’s funny that the first thing one always looks at is the tricholigist’s hair) sent me away saying I had a scalp infection which was triggering all that shedding and that, besides medications, I had to keep a clean ‘zero’ look for the next three months.

Which brings me back to barber angle of this narrative: there are 2 hair dressing salons within walking distance of where I live. Let’s say they are called B1 and B2 (I like fighter jets, but let’s not deviate). B1 has been cutting my hair since I was in class 1. I’ve been to B2 only once in the past, because he’s just opened recently. B1 is the guy who’s been running the place before Bangaloreans were swimming in money, and hence, there’s no air-conditioning, no cable TV and no fancy chairs in his store. For the price one pays, all you get is a tattered Women’s Era (yes, girls, for some reason, that’s what every men’s hairdresser keeps to entertain his audience while they wait), the Kannada daily all scrummy and the sheets hanging loose, good old scissors and comb, and the cheapest available shaving cream, after-shave moisturizer and talcum powder. In most cases, the hair cutting machine is broken. B2, given that he’s opened only in these yuppie times, is a kid of the new generation of air-conditioners, Tata sky, fancy push back chairs, and ergo, hair-raising rates. But he still maintains the same genre of magazines I told you about.

Dr. Tricho’s instruction to get my head shaved had me in a spot. This was about putting the blade to the scalp, and I wanted to make sure it was done right. I disregarded all sense of loyalty and ditched Mr. B1 and decided to go to Mr. B2’s 'sanitised' salon. There was only one trouble though- to get to B2’s salon, I had to walk past B1’s. And as I did so, Mr. B1 himself was seated on a stool outside his shop on the sidewalk, and pleasantly wished me good day. I guess he noticed the hair on my head. That’s what barber’s do, right: they notice the hair on your head just like cobblers are always looking at people’s feet. I got my head shaved at B2’s whilst enjoying the temperature controlled setting coupled with forgivable annoying numbers being played by one of the dozen radio stations. I paid him a handsome sum (I have no problems skipping meals if my money can instead buy me the looks), and walked into the afternoon feeling conscious about my shaved head, somehow thinking that everybody on the street was looking at my bald head. I had my head down, looking at the path and humming a tune, that I forgot I still had to pass by B1’s store to get back home.

I walked past B1 rather mindlessly, but I smiled at him nonetheless. This time, he didn’t return the greeting and instead turned the other way. I got home wondering what could have made him unhappy. Maybe it was the tea he drank; boy, we get some bad tea here in this city.

Surely, there must be another way of putting it.

It took three days of loneliness and solitude away from the madness of the city to bring me back to terms with what has been happening around me. We just inaugurated the largest nanofabrication research facility in India in the academic setting on the 5th of Jan 2011 at IISc Bangalore, and I’ve lost many nights of sleep in the walk up to it. But all-in-all it’s a proud moment for all of us involved in it, and certainly a landmark event that should set the pace for India’s foray into nano-scale R&D over the next decade.

I escaped to the some-what lonely beaches of Gokharna, a getaway in coastal Karnataka about 12 hours drive from the capital Bangalore. I spent the good part of my vacation lying in a hammock, drinking beer and reading Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. Short walks, morning pranayam and conversations with strangers happened too, though not necessarily in that order. And then I got back home, because I just couldn’t wait to show up at work on Monday morning. But this post (after a break of some 5 odd months; apologies (not like anyone cares)) comes on a totally unrelated subject, the signs for which have been jumping at me from all corners.

This one’s about… I don’t really have a smart phrase/word that will capture the whole idea, but let’s just say it’s about phrases/words that leave you a bit confused than you initially were. Let me take an example here to get started. I was traveling in a bus only recently, and you see these advertisement hoardings. I saw one, and for the life of me I can’t remember where this was, or what the ad was for. But I did take the catch line away with me and that’s enough fodder for my case. The line for this product read ‘Changing rules. Changing lives’. Right, I’m sure you’ve heard a similar version of that a zillion times before, as have I. But for kicks, and also because my i-pod had run out of battery and I wasn’t exactly sharing my seat with a pretty 20-something that I was sketching my opening lines, I began to replay what I had just read: Changing rules. Changing lives.

Let us take the first part i.e. ‘Changing rules’. What do these two words mean? Well, for one it could mean that the act of ‘changing’ (goodness knows what!) was one that commanded a superlative compliment- Changing rules! Like you would say Iron Maiden rules, or the sight from the mountain top rules, implying that there is no comparison, because the object in question is by far superior to anything else comparable to it. Hence, by that equation, changing rules. The other meaning is the obvious one implying the change of rules, like the change of weather, or a change of clothes. The third meaning of this phrase could be one to point the change of power or authority, as in the ‘the rule of such-and-such dynasty’. Therefore ‘Changing rules, changing lives’; well, not necessarily. You might think that I’m merely trying hard here to show you other cases similar to ‘time flies like an arrow’. Probably, yes!

Only this evening, I was driving down near Palace Grounds and like always they’ve got these exhibitions going. The organizers had a giant board put out at the entrance that announced ‘Old Hindi film songs and food mela’. Now you must help me here. Like many others, I have trouble using ‘and’ in its right place. But I spotted this one, aha! What was the mela about afterall? Take your pick:

a) Old Hindi film songs (cds, records whatever) + food (food in general)
b) Old Hindi film songs + Old Hindi film food (?)
c) Old Hindi film songs + Old Hindi food (?!)
d) Old Hindi film songs + Old food (doctor’s fee included in the entrance ticket).

I haven’t slept well last night in the bus from Gokharna to Bangalore. We had some gear box problems, and came to a halt in the middle of a forest. And somehow, just somehow, the driver managed to fix the issue temporarily till we got a mechanic to fix it for good at the nearest town 40 kilometers away. And that was at 3:30 a.m. So, I will have to end this here since my eyes are sagging like Preity Zinta’s face in the IPL auctions earlier today. But I will leave you with this thought, and I’ve said this earlier on Facebook as well: if 'thrifty' refers to someone who's diligent with the his/her money, how come 'spendthrift' means exactly the opposite?

Constipated about reading magazines

I subscribe to two magazines at home: Forbes India and Reader’s Digest. I took up Forbes for a two year period because of the amazing introductory price that was offered. And with Reader’s Digest (RD); well, who wouldn’t want to read RD, even more with the way they keep turning out annoying ‘confirm your address for the luck draw’ mails in the post.

Forbes India shows up at my door step on the first and the third week of the month. RD shows up when ever it likes. For many years I was forced to read magazines that were ordered by the adults at home. Barring Tinkle and the occasional center page poster from Sportstar, there was little to choose from in terms of taste. There was always plenty of variety though: The Week, Outlook, Gruhashobha, Overdrive, Top Gear, Women’s Era, Competition Success and names like that. As age caught on and the teenage years kicked in, Tinkle and Sportstar were replaced by the auto-car reviews by Adil Jal Darukhanawala’s crew. And the distress columns in some other publications, but we won’t go there.

The longing was always to subscribe a magazine that I wanted, for subjects that I cared about and I paid for. Given my taste for things and my constant pursuit to up my IQ points a couple of notches, Forbes was an obvious choice. I was also told that people who appreciated jokes that made you tickle and longed to feel included in this world read RD. So, I couldn’t say no to that either. But little did I know then what I know now: that when one decides to start subscribing to the RD, the editors there sense it in the ether and start showing you ways of getting rich quick overnight in a lottery where every number wins.

I gobbled up every word of almost every article in the early editions. When the new editions arrived, I carefully took the expired one and placed it in the book rack and as the months rolled by, I ensured the chronological order was maintained. All this collective wisdom could just come in handy, you never know! I wasn’t the one to sell this off for its weight.

And then, marginal utility showed up. Like with all good things in life except one, this too came to end. I soon realized that I had stopped reading the editorials in either of the magazines. Soon after, articles on China and Health care were being skipped and the Word power column was for my one and half year old cousin sister. And then, it got to a stage where I read only what interested me in the publication, and most of them half way through. These are busy times, and the world knows it. Before I knew it, there were magazines that were untouched. The weeks would go, and the new edition would arrive. But the plastic cover had still not come off the previous edition. And I like reading my magazines in chronological order for I like to know the sequence of events. I learnt that a long while ago in school, the importance of chronology. They always taught us history before current affairs.

So with this obsession for reading magazines by their date of publication, I soon found myself in a position where I had magazines piling up and time slipping away. Soon my subscription period would end and they’d stop sending me the stuff. I began to feel obsolete as such; how sharp can I possibly be reading June’s news in July? This was like buying French Fries from McDonalds and taking it home to stuff it in the cupboard to eat it someday when you felt hungry. “What sense did that make?” I asked myself. It was me at the vortex and the magazines in a swivel. I had bitten off more than I could chew; chewed more than I could digest, and digested more than I could … you get the point.

I found a way out luckily. All the months of reading the magazines had rightly up’d my IQ a couple of notches. Instead of trying to read and assimilate everything from both the magazines, I now decided to focus on getting just one point out of each magazine. Any one good article that makes me laugh, or teaches me something useful and makes me wallow in misery is all I aim for. This ways there’s no pressure and my IQ continues its upward march. In 12 months, I would have 24 (Forbes) + 12 (RD) new ideas that worked/will work for me. Over a period of 5 years, that number would be 180. So if my projections are right, I’m well on course to winning the title of Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in Davos by 2021, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by 2030, and the Oscar the following year from then. Not to mention a couple of bravery awards between now and 2020.

My current challenge is to apply the same principle of ‘1 idea per magazine’ to the 2 newspapers that come to my house each day, and the hundred thousand online publications I read every hour.

The plan was to meet at Mandarin at 7 for dinner

The plan was to meet at Mandarin at 7 for dinner. I was told this place was at the intersection of Double RoadCMH Road. I knew CMH to be a lengthy road, so my guess was that Double Road intersected it somewhere in between. I live 12 kilometers from Mandarin. Auto prices were hiked yesterday. Yesterday was 1^st August. I was so not getting into an auto, riding 12 kilometers, getting ripped off along the way to get to a place whose location I wasn’t sure of for a dinner I was in no hurry to attend.  

I recently made a list of things I hate. At the very top was ‘wax matches’ followed by ‘the sight of food after a heavy meal’. Lower down the order were ‘pants that are shorter by an inch’, ‘travel plans getting cancelled’ and ‘the political situation in North Korea’. But somewhere in between was ‘auto drivers in Bangalore’. Fire-spewing, mean talking always looking to make easy money off people’s bones; aaah! What would I not do to have them sent away to a land far far away never to return.  All this agony, all the baggage and my world view of auto drivers and yellow top autos (even the ones without digital meters) found itself turned on its head last evening. 

I was determined to ride the bus, even if that meant I’d be an hour late. I visualized it in my head. My friend would text me saying ‘where r u’. I’d say ‘reaching in 10 mins’. Twenty minutes later I’d send another text saying ‘stuck in traffic, be there soon’. And I ride the bus for 12 kilometers for the next hour through the traffic free roads of the city on a Sunday evening. I must have been but 200 meters from the bus stop when I noticed an auto parked by the side of the road playing the song Pehli baar miley hain from the movie Saajan. Goodness! It’d been donkey’s years since I last heard that song. I slowed my paces as I walked past the auto just to take in more of the song. And just I did that, I noticed the auto was empty. There were no passengers or the driver, but the song was playing aloud. I stood there listening to it. What the heck, I thought.

The driver, who had been answering nature’s call not too far from the auto stood, came to where I was. He must have assumed I was waiting to hire the auto. But phew, like, “Yea right! An auto is what I need”, I almost said to myself. I was just there for a few more seconds of the song. By now, I was six years old once more, teleported into the 90’s and slyly grinning as I stood there listening to the track completely lost.

“Indiranagar barthira ? (Will you come to Indiranagar?)” I asked him. What was going on! This was the enemy. I shouldn’t be saying this stuff.

"Indiranagar alli yelli? (Where in Indiranagar?)”, I heard him say so feebly, with his voice drowning in the tunes of SPB’s jingle.  

"CMH Road matthe Double road junction hathira.(At the intersection of CMH Road and Double Road)”, I watched words fly out of my mouth and they weren’t even mine. I was saying stuff that I knew I shouldn’t be saying.  He asked me to sit. 

I followed in to the comfortable backseat still humming along to the tune. Once inside, I turned around and noticed these huge speakers blaring beside me. No complaints, I assured myself as he got started and the meter was turned on.

In minutes, he flipped a switch and a bright set of overhead LEDs came on. All colours: yellow, green, purple, red were flickering at regular intervals like disco lights in the auto. Slowly, he kicked up the volume as the auto gathered speed. I felt like the kid in the candy store spoiled for choice. Here were lights, music, and an auto driver at the helm of things who knew the shortest route, and drove fast but not reckless. I took an occasional look at the meter. Whoo hoo! I wasn’t being cheated. I could just as well have been in a 2010 Chritopher Nolan movie.  

This is where I switch to present tense.

The track ends. In the silence before the next song on the CD starts, I ask him if he can repeat the one that just finished. He repeats the track. No questions asked. This is surely a DJ who drives an auto because no disco or pub would hire him. Idiots, serves them all right for overlooking this piece of talent. We stop at a signal. I look at the vehicles parked around us. There’s an auto on the left. The driver in it is sheepishly checking out the cool interiors of my auto. The passenger in it is a fat bald dude wearing lungi carrying several tiffin dabbas. Poor folks have no LED shows, no music and I’m sure the meter in that auto is rigged. I see to the right: a BMW 5 series with its windows rolled up. Rich farts and losers who can’t appreciate fresh air of the evening. To the front is a bike, and I can only see the waistline of the chik who is sitting on it. Bah! While I’m not complaining, I try estimating how uncomfortable that bike must feel what with it not having comfortable cushioned seats like my auto.

The signal is green, and off we go. It’s now Tu shaayar hai. This can’t be for real, I think. The songs are getting better. And the track changes before I wipe my smile off.  

Dhekha hey pehli baar … feels like an overdose of sugar that leaves your mouth tasting bitter.

And before I know it, we’ve arrived in front of Mandarin. He turns off the auto and the music shuts off with it. I want to tell him, “Screw the dinner, can we continue riding?”

But I get off and pay him.  I take two steps from the auto feeling sad. Very sad. I turn around and walk back to him.

“This is the best auto ride of my life.” My voice shakes as it come out. “Keep going this way.”

I note the auto number and walk up the stairs to catch fried noodles and schezwan rice for dinner. It’s two minutes to seven.

Keep your gift and let me home

For several years, we lived next door to a family that owned close to 20 cows. The main source of income for the household came from the milk they sold to people in the neighborhood. They had all kinds of cows – desi ones, big ones, small calves, two headed cows, and there was even one from Germany that flew into Bangalore in 1994 for a princely sum of Rs 45,000. It gave so much milk; the other cows developed a complex after a while. They made wonderful neighbors, and were the typical courteous family that you like to have around. They bought sweets on festivals, and their kids were taught to share crackers with me during Diwali. They had many kids running around the house, for there’s had been a joint establishment.

Anytime you have kids around at home, it’s a co-incidence that you have birthdays to celebrate. And anytime there are birthdays to celebrate, there are other kids to be invited. And anytime kids are invited, parents send their tots with a nicely wrapped gift to be handed over. My aunt was visiting us one evening, and as it turned out it was also one my neighbor’s kid’s birthday. I got the invite to attend the celebration just an hour prior to the actual candle blowing ceremony. And boy was I excited!

There was one issue, however. It was too late to go out and buy presents that I could take. So, my Aunt suggested that I should dig into my own unused stationery stock, make a nice little packet out of it and take it for the kid who was turning 5 or something. Probably re-gifting is not quite the norm with people in their 20s today, but ask anyone 45 or more, and they don’t seem to think it’s bizarre at all. I must have taken with me to the birthday party an imported pencil, a foreign eraser shaped like a light bulb, a stationery box and few more odds and ends as the present.

After the cake was cut and the fun was had, I gifted the little boy what I had got for him. He opened it right in front of me, with his mother standing there looking on. They must have expected to find something outrageous, I guess. But when the kid opened and found some cool looking stationery in it, he was happy. I think you could upgrade that to ‘ecstatic’. His mother assumed I was more grown-up in the head than I actually was, and so she tested me with the line “Oh, why did you bring all this expensive stuff?”

This was my moment to be the big man. It had finally arrived. Without as much as batting an eyelid, I said, “Not a problem, Aunty. All this stuff was at home, and so I decided to get it. No trouble at all.”

I learnt my lesson with gifts that day. I understood that you can never gift that ‘perfect gift’ to anyone. You just can’t. Maybe it’ll be too big for them, maybe it’s too small, maybe it’s the wrong time, maybe they’ll think you’re plain cheap; or maybe, they’ll think you’re just showing off. But whatever it is, they’ll never suspect that you’re re-gifting it. I’m convinced about it. When I get a gift, I might think what a cheapskate the person is, but I would never be inclined to think that he or she is just re-gifting the stuff. That would be the last thought in my head. Maybe this person would re-gift their things to others, but come on; to me? No way.

Then somebody came up with the idea of gift coupons. I once got gifted a voucher for five hundred bucks at a music store. I thought to myself, “The world needs more people like her. By giving me this coupon she’s telling a couple of things at the same time. One, she’s saying, here’s my budget for you. Now go do what you want with it. Two, I don’t really want to waste my time thinking about what you might like, or ask my friends what his tastes are. So three, here’s the money; you go do the shopping for yourself.” I loved this idea. I mean thank goodness I got a gift coupon from this person. What if she had given me something scary instead? Maybe like a horror movie DVD or something. Yuck, I don’t even watch horror stuff.

So off I went to music store and bought a couple of Steven Segal movies, Dirty Dancing and one or two other DVDs. When I looked at the bill total, it was fifty bucks more than the coupon amount of five hundred. I had two choices here: pay the extra fifty or keep back one of the DVDs. I thought about it for a while. Paying the extra money just didn’t seem right. It was a gift after all, and no one pays for a gift. But option two pissed me off even more. By keeping back one of the DVDs, the shop got to keep 50 bucks with them, because the total was now 450. That just didn’t seem fair. So I sprayed chilly powder into the cashier’s eyes and ran out of the door with all the DVDs. “Take that, you suckers.” I said to myself as I ran down the walkway to the store.

Gift coupons in stores are like the casino. The house always wins.

Did we get it right?

Sagar and I made the dreadful mistake of crossing an unmanned railway track at a local train station in Mumbai a couple of years ago. What a mistake. We were greeted by the railway police in normal clothes on the opposite platform. They lined us (along-with twenty others who made this stupid mistake) and took us into the station to have a ‘discussion’ with us, I guess. They kept us all in one room. The others were mostly day laborers, and being unaware of the consequences, had unassumingly walked across the tracks. A couple of minutes later, a constable came in and announced that each person would be taken into the inspector’s room where they would have to choose between spending 24 hours in jail, or paying Rs. 1500 as fine. Sagar immediately told me that till we left the station, the two of us would talk only in English or Kannada, and pretend to not know Hindi or Marathi. Guess what? That worked! The top cop gave us an earful, saw our college IDs and let us go.

Only yesterday, I was riding around my Hayabusa and the front number plate literally broke off and came out while I was on the road. I stopped, put the broken piece of metal in my bag and continued to ride. I was out looking for the first place where they make number plates. As rotten as luck can get, a few turns later at a signal, a cop spotted my bike sans the number plate, and as they so often do, he promptly walked up, turned off my gaddi and confiscated the key. So when a cop catches you, what do you do? Whatever you do, pretend like you don’t know the local language. If that ideology worked with the cops in Mumbai, then logically it should work with the cops in Bangalore too, I thought. How far from the truth was that? I rattled and rambled on in English and Top Cop wouldn’t reduce the fine by a rupee. After close to five minutes of this nonsense, I decided to give Sagar’s theory a rest and started off in Kannada. Result: Fine amount cut in half, Top Cop says he acknowledges that the number plate breaking off was unfortunate, and lets me know that his daughter is in eight semester of engineering at ABC College (don't ask why).

The approaches were of opposite nature in the above events, both leading to a desirable result. Which then is a better approach? You can most surely understand how knowing a language can help get your work done faster and in many cases as in mine, it can mean money in your pocket. But not knowing a language can sometimes cause sympathy and end up in a positive result as well.I was telling a friend recently about taking up Dutch classes. After a brief discussion, we came to a consensus that a foreign language class could be expensive. So we said, “Junk it.”

If Bachi Karkaria were to write about this fact- “How much does it cost to learn a language?” she probably would have concluded her article with:

Alec Smart said: “I know how much it costs to learn a language, but I sure don’t know how much it costs not to learn the language.”

Putting an end to the paranormal

Talking about paranormal stuff is just so cool, isn’t it? I don’t know about the girls, but I think no man can ever admit that he’s scared of watching horror on screen. And if you were to spot a bunch of eighteen year-olds discussing ghost stories, it’ll not be hard to notice that each one is waiting for the other to finish his story. Every boy wants to pounce on the rest of them with his tale, and each one hopes that his story is the one that freaks everybody the most. I have scores of tales from my engineering days to demonstrate this fact. There’s the story of Vinod Kambli’s fan, last room in the corridor girl’s room-mate, the Ambassador party, the Hotel waiter, the guy in the time capsule and many more. I mean, these are actual stories that have happened to either me or people close to me. But we won’t go into that until sometime later.

Many many years ago while in high school, I remember reading a book about paranormal stuff that people had experienced. One of the stories was about a couple that lived in some part of the world and had always wanted to visit France. Now this story happened sometime in the 70’s from what I recollect. So they decide to vacation there, and in a few weeks they find themselves checking into a hotel room in Paris. Later that evening, the husband and wife are walking down a street. Suddenly the man turns to the wife and remarks that if they were to walk till the end of the road and turn right, they would find a restaurant that went by a certain name, and he said the name of the place. The wife thought her husband was playing a fun game since they had never visited Paris before, and so how could he possibly know the name of this place and the fact that it existed there? But true to his word, they turned right at the road’s end, and found the restaurant with exactly the same name as he had said.

You might have heard this story, or something similar in the past. You might have even experienced something like this yourself. But that was in the 70’s. Let’s see what happens in the year 2009. I’m on a bike with my friend. We are headed some place in the city for some errand that I can’t recollect now. My friend is riding the bike and we are headed to this place. Now both of us haven’t been to that part of the city before. I’m hoping to get directions from people on the streets. After covering some distance, we reach a signal. My friend stops and shuts off the bike. He turns around and tells me that if you go straight from the signal and take a right, there’s a flyover and near that flyover is a Chinese restaurant by the name of Blah Blah. No passerby that we got directions from ever said anything of this kind to us. I thought it could be that this guy had come here before, but that was untrue. So obviously, this must be paranormal.

Not really. Our man had been spending too much time on Google maps before we left home. Darn it, they sucked all the fun out of ghost stories.

Fights Fought: 50. Clash

One of the greatest conspiracies of the 20^th century was the creation and the eventual popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF. Kids that grew up on fresh air and love had their appetites filled with a perennial flow of wrestling shows on cable TV. When WWF first started beaming into Indian homes in the early 90s, it must have been a shocker. Most parents then never really had a hold on the phrase Parental Guidance or PG, and as a 12 year old, you got away watching flicks on Star Movies that were meant for older folks – like 15 and above.

 

But besides Sachin Tendulkar and Bollywood movies set in Switzerland, not many things really caught on and stayed the course the way WWF did with kids. When I look back and wonder what created the roaring success with this sport (mind you, that’s part of the conspiracy) and its viwership, you can’t take the spotlight away from Trump cards. Remember that bunch of seemingly-useless-but-my-life-revolves-around-Papa Shango’s- biceps cards? Or around an overtly cacopygian Yokozuna? God knows why they called Trump cards (hell, I don't even know if this is a proper noun or not) by that name; but doesn’t look to me like the real-estate honcho was bent on lending his name to a bunch of cards that mostly featured muscular men in their undies, and an occasional muscular lady in her two-piece.

We played them all the time. We woke up thinking about Shawn Michaels, went through the day talking about Royal Rumble and Summer Slam, spent the evening looking at Tatanka’s poster, went to bed thinking about Razor Ramon’s numbers and cursing why you didn’t say ‘clash’ earlier. And while asleep we dreamt about Mr. Perfect’s biceps when we didn’t really know what biceps meant. Some part of the body, but who cares?(ad lib. A sentence has been excluded at this point since the pun sounds obnoxiously strong for most of the readers’ liking. But if you don’t mind a dirty joke, write to me. I’ll mail you the line.)  

WWF was mostly a show of odd balls. Hulk Hogan (rank 1) was like a professor of mine in college: you could never say how old he was and he never seemed to get older than that. And for some reason, he (not my professor) hardly fought fights and yet managed to retain rank 1 for as long as they printed Trump cards. Rank 2, the legendary Shawn Michaels, many kids claimed was the only wrestler who was trained professionally. The rest were junkies off the streets. The Undertaker was rank 3. As one can expect, anything said of The Undertaker will eventually measure up as undertone. To start with, my Aunt thought he was 100taker. This dude gave cats a run for their money. The guy had more lives than the demographic department could keep a track of. To top that, there was this short, stout ‘soul-keeper’ assistant of his who carried an urn to all the fights, which, as the story goes contained 100taker’s ashes from his previous life. Remember those douche-bag stories? No one could defeat The Undertaker. Not even Ranks 1 and 2. But the hero is never without his nemesis, is he?. For Rank 3 had his spokes loosened whenever he took on Repo Man. Repo Man was this i-got-no-life-so-I’m-here-in-WWF wrestler ranked No. 83. But he did prove to be a handful for The Undertaker. Surprising, you may say. But that was part of the conspiracy.

The ranks went on, and every time a card game came down to the wire, the losing kid started saying ‘clash’ for the most un-clashable things in the hope of salvaging some last bones. That kid eventually lost. It was good fun playing these cards, and following the matches on TV. Especially the part when the gruff voice came which announced “Ladies and Gentlemen, coming in at a magnificent 480 pounds to set the stage on fire, here’s Bam Bam Bigalo.” And the crowds would go into frenzy and hold up placards that said “Bam Bam, my girl loves you more than me.”

The newspapers said some kid nearly killed his younger brother trying to work the choke slam. But here are a couple of things I gleamed from WWF many years later: 

-         That Giant Gonzalez wasn’t really 7 foot and 11 inches tall.

-         That aspiring to make it to the WWF wasn’t nearly as wise a career choice as engineering.

-         That kids who took WWF too seriously could actually end up hurting each other.

      -         That my Grandpa still remembers British Bulldog was ranked 11. 

      -         That it’s probably not a good idea to refer to The Encyclopedia of names of WWF champs: Past, Present and Future to find a name for your new born. They’ve got pretty cool names like Beefcake Barber, Andre the Giant and Lex Luger “Hands of Steel” in it. I’m not sure if I’d want my kid to be any of those.  

For years, everyone stared in awe believing the fight was for real. Then one day, some person sparked off a debate about the sense of showing such violence to young kids. It all went great for a while. And then, we fucked up the end game by calling it Entertainment.

     

Read this if you're engaged. What the heck! Read it even if you aren't

I don’t usually think of such stuff (I mean, I do, but not aloud), but today we’re going to swing it (forgive the pun) and see where this goes. This one is about love. Any moron like me who can write so much as two sentences that makes the slightest sense hopes to write on the topic of love some day. Chetan Bhagat too vouched for this in an interview when Two States was released. And you thought I was lying about the moron part?

At my previous work place, I was one of the youngest people in the team. Most of my team mates were in their mid and late twenties. To us lads who were fresh out of college, we didn’t really connect with the old-timers. Every once in a while an engagement or a wedding invite would land up on my desk. Sometimes, it would be an e-mail invite. To know what that meant, read this post that I wrote to let the world know how exactly I felt about e-mail invites (that aren’t at least followed up with a phone call). If you happen to be one of them who sent me an e-mail invite at anytime, don’t feel embarrassed about it. I wasn’t referring to you. I’m only taking it out on the others who send such stuff.

So, further to a somewhat lengthy title and introduction, here’s what appeared to be happening to people once they got engaged. They fell in love. Only recently, my friend and I were having a talk about this: the whole premise of falling in love after being engaged. (It’s funny how guys can have very chickish conversations and live in complete denial about it.) Love-after-engagement must be a different experience compared to getting engaged after falling in love. In the second scenario, when two people fall in love (in the traditional sense), the situation is still vulnerable. It is love that is based on the assumption that things might work out as planned, but with a relatively less degree of surety. You and she are still rowing a boat with an oar that may go one direction now and another direction later. You may or may not make it to the shore. Things may or may not work out. In the love-after-engagement situation, two people (who in most cases haven’t met before) are thrust into a ferry with an engine. Their chances of making it to the shore are far greater than the people in the boat with the oar.

Any couple that is engaged has a vision of what their married life would look like. They’re thinking beyond planning the next sneak-away trip to the sea-shore or the hills that their parents won't know about. As time rolls by, this vision crystallizes and strengthens to a point where the two partners overlook any immediate flaws in the other that might potentially lead to any kind of a disruptive misunderstanding at that stage. (I borrow this concept from Dr. Scott M. Peck’s legendary book The Road Less Traveled. The second chapter on Love is probably the best 100 pages anyone has written about on this topic.)

To wrap it all up, falling in love the way we know it is certainly an adventure in its own end: a story with several opening ends where anything could happen, or anything could go wrong as Murphians like to say it. One of these endings could be getting engaged. But from what I see, the story of love that develops after getting engaged is bound to be more mature and softer simply because it grows between two people who know they can’t turn any which way from here.

My apologies for the analytical and serious undertone this write-up contains. I wish I could have given a Wodehousian touch of humor to this theme. But that would mean I’ll have to be in love with a girl to do so. Only then can you make fun of it, right? See, they weren’t entirely wrong when they said that a person is like a tea-bag; his true color comes out only when he’s put in hot water.

Love being analogous to the hot water, in case you didn’t catch up to that joke.

The daring young man on the flying trapeze

I told Grandpa that I’d be stepping out of the house for ten minutes to grab a copy of the Saturday issue of The Mint yesterday morning. It was 9:20 a.m. Given that the newspaper vendor isn’t too far off from home, I should have expected myself to return home by 9:30 at max. But things turned out a bit different.

I returned at 9:30 p.m instead, and had my folks worried stiff in the meantime. I could have used a mobile phone, but never mind.

I won’t go into the details of why the delay happened, but I will tell you that as I stepped out of the gate, Navneet came and we went to CTR to grab breakfast. Later, we headed off to Palace Grounds to catch the 1 o’clock show of Gemini Circus. The Matinee Show – that’s what it said on the ticket.

The only other time that I probably had such a mixed bag of emotions was when I finished watching Forrest Gump. The other occasion happened yesterday when I walked out of that tent before the show ended. You’ve probably been to a circus before. It was certainly my first time yesterday. The trapeze artists started off the show, and were quite an amazing bunch of artists; reminded me of Popeye’s tune “The daring young man on the flying trapeze”. The crowd was mostly school children in their Saturday uniforms led by the teachers, some with whistles. There were the moms and dads scattered in some seats feeding their tots curd rice out of a tiffin box. Most of these kids wanted popcorn and cotton candy anyways.

Without boring you about the string of performers and what they were up to, I’ll get down to what I really felt strongly about. It was the clowns. There was this brief 10 minutes in the 2 and half hour show where this big clown and this other midget clown had a dual act. Here I was, 23 years old, and not finding any of the clowns’ jokes funny. Two rows behind me were some 60 odd seven and eight year olds that were ROFLTAO (…Their Arses Off). How come the two of us were so far apart on the same thing? Many years back, I would have most certainly ROFLMAO at the clowns’ slapstick humor. But not today. I’ve watched way too many sitcoms and comedy flicks, and mastered complex sarcasm so well, that now; a simple and straightforward joke made by a clown that a child can get seems to shoot off tangentially to my thick skull. I was per-occupied in analyzing the costume of the jokers, and how it could have been done better.

As we stepped out of the tent, we saw the 4 elephants and 2 camels that were part of the show chained to nearby posts. Not too far from them was a traffic cop conversing with the organizers of the circus. Navneet still believes that the cop was there to write out a No Parking ticket for the misplaced elephants and camels. I think he was trying to get his way in without having to pay for the ticket. You know how these cops can be, right?

A Brief History of Bad Breath

That’s right; bad breath. That’ll be the theme for this post.

When was the first time in human history that man first started brushing his teeth? Why did he start this at the first place? Did he do it necessarily to keep up oral hygiene, or did he get started on it because early woman demanded it of him?

I don’t know why they started it, but I’m sure glad that one day someone was wandering in the woods. The guy probably broke off a twig and stuck it in his mouth and lo and behold, the dental care market was born. We’ve heard tales from Jataka where neem twigs were used in the early days of dental care. In fact, it is still used widely in several parts of rural India. People then (and even now) used mud to clean their teeth. How then did we evolve from twigs and mud to Sorbitol, Sodium Silicate and 0.04% Methanol in mouthwash?

The answer to this complex question lies at the intersection of a historical time line and biological evolution. In the early days, humans were sparsely populated across a geographical stretch. Just like all animals, humans too have a personal space (or bubble) around them. As dogs go around the block leaving their excretions to demarcate their territorial space, so do humans. Public urination is proof enough.

So when humans were fewer in number, they had relatively bigger personal spaces. As we got good at mating, the per head availability of space reduced, and consequently the size of each of our bubbles shrunk. This was about the time when early woman refused to sleep with early man any longer unless he started his day by biting away at the neem twigs. As more and more people came inside a given territorial boundary, they started interacting at closer quarters and began heavily encroaching each others’ personal spaces. By this stage, even early woman was sucked into biting away at twigs and sediments. Very soon everyone was at it. The common denominator of society was set at brushing when you woke up.

Unlike other evolving social trends, oral hygiene demands a person to stay a cut above the rest in order to smell ‘better’. If I have good breath and you have good breath, then we both don’t realize that the other has good breath because both of us now operate at the same level. But if one of us has good breath and the other has bad breath, now you can tell the difference. This perfect imbalance spawned the market for the tooth paste and then the tooth brush. (Truly speaking, the story of the tooth brush and the tooth paste is a chicken-and-egg problem. So we won’t go into that one.) Now the whole world started using a toothbrush and toothpaste in the morning. To get ahead of competition, some guy started brushing twice a day.

You see, the story could have ended there. But in order to stay ahead of the rest of the pack, I have filled my toilet shelf with the latest battery operated toothbrush, a tongue cleaner developed by NASA for its astronauts, a 5-in-1 toothpaste that squeezes out of both ends of the tube, a set of dental floss so fine it can pass though the two syllables of ‘Hello’, a bottle of mouthwash with a higher percentage of alcohol than absinthe and a self invented, patent-pending mouth spray so strong that even a whiff in your eyes can cause permanent blindness.


Good luck to the rest of the world!

And then, you have these…

Here are two tales that I think you ought to know :-

How do you bring down the roof of a pub?

My friend was out with 5 other guys one evening in a pub in Mumbai. The evening was great with the music, the drinks and the crowd, until this lady walked in. She was extremely gorgeous, and carried the air around her that made many heads turn around. As she settled down on a stool at the bar, my friend and his pals couldn’t hold back from remarking to each other about the beautiful thing that had just walked in. One of them came up with the idea to pen some lines on a paper napkin and have it handed to this lady through the waiter.

The lines were well thought out and written out on a tissue. The waiter was called. The guys handed him the paper napkin, and along with a tip of Rs 30 asked the waiter to hand the message to the girl on the stool.

The waiter walked up to the girl. The guys held their breath eagerly at the table watching while the waiter approached the girl. He handed the paper to her while pointing that it came from the table ‘over there’. And then, he handed her the 30 rupees. He didn’t know it was his tip. He had assumed that the money was a part of the package.

I was told by my friend that the girl stormed to their table and yelled at them. It must have been loud, I guess.

How to make your way to the front of a concert crowd?

I think this idea, which comes from another friend, is pretty cool. This guy finds himself at the back of the crowd at an Iron Maiden concert. So how does he go to the front? He taught me a two step process that is worth sharing.

Firstly, as you start making your way through the initial rows from the back, there’s bound to be resistance from the people from letting you go forward. So, you say to them – “My girlfriend’s in the front”; and they let you move. But after a certain distance of advancing, the crowds become less forgiving and that line doesn’t work any longer. So here’s where step two comes in. You say to them - “My boyfriend’s in the front”; and they let you move.

He tells me they always oblige. Try it and tell me how it goes.

A Home University

We are 5 of us living in an apartment in Chennai. After some tiring days of searching for houses that were more than just a hole-in-the-wall, we found a reasonably big and comfortable place to stay in Srinagar Colony, very close to Great Lakes Institute of Management. You must visit Srinagar Colony the next time you are in Chennai. This residential area is cut off from the hustle of the fast paced life of the city. The colony is typified with a temple and a banyan tree, and an upscale crowd that goes on jogs each morning in their Nike cut offs. Unlike us bachelors, the families around us are well settled and quite well-off. We are glad to be living next door to some influential names in south Indian cinema, theater, academia and politics.

Many of these families have kids that are growing up, in the age group of 12 to 21. Like any parent, the average parent in Srinagar colony would want their kid to excel in studies and in certain extra curricular activities as well. But the well-to-do families would also be willing to pay just as much a price for it too, for they understand that it isn’t wise to nickel dime good coaching. So Kashe and I got talking about setting up a Home University for these kids. Here’s the crux of the idea:

Like I said before, we are 5 of us living in 2 bedroom house. Now each of us is good in certain areas. For instance, one of us can speak and write Hindi very well. One other person is good at yoga and stretching exercises. Another one is good at cooking. Like this, by combining the areas of expertise of 5 of us, there is roughly about 15 areas that we could teach kids aged 12+. Classes would start every morning at 6. The yoga teacher would handle the yoga classes in the hall. The cooking classes would go on simultaneously in the kitchen. Math and French would be taught in each of the rooms respectively. Here’s the tentative list of subjects our home university is offering currently:

1) Hindi – Read, write and speak
2) Physics, Chemistry and Maths
3) Programming in C, C++ and Java
4) Basic Lessons in Salsa
5) Cooking
6) Basic Housekeeping for guys
7) Pranayam, Yoga and light exercises
8) Football
9) Riding geared bikes (only for valid license holders)
10) English – Write and speak fluently
11) Handling household electrical appliances
12) French – Read, write and speak (on Sundays only, special visiting faculty)
13) Western Vocals
14) Time Management
15) Geography

If you’d like to excel in any of the areas specified here, contact the marketing executive that is me. We can work out a package for you.

We are still working on a name for our home university. But we do have a punch line for the time being: “One school. Many skills”

The calf syndrome

Thanks Ramya for the engaging conversation last evening. I’m sure Accenture wouldn’t be too pleased to read this! But nonetheless, you won yourself a surprise gift for the surprise idea.

I’m looking for the answer that settles this question once and for all: what is the right age to enter the workforce?

If that question is leading you to think in the direction of child labor, pause. What’s running through my head after close to a year in the corporate world is more or less what almost every other kid of my age is thinking, which is: work life sucks. I want to go back to college.

Let’s call this the calf syndrome. If you’ve seen a new born calf, you’ll know that anytime it tries to stand on its fours, the legs slip away in the opposite directions and give way. The calf lands with a thud and stays comfortable sitting. Until the legs stiffen up and get strong, the calf cannot do much but to stand and fall again.

The first year (at least) out of college into the workplace is like that in my opinion. You are trying to find your feet. Suddenly, the world looks bigger and more unforgiving than you initially anticipated. You come to realize that the kid in class who told you that rules are meant to be broken wasn’t quite right, after all. You get your Form 16 and you have no clue what it even means. All of a sudden, that thing called independence is no-where to be seen. For those of you still in college, you’ve been warned.

You know where I’m going with this. Close your eyes for a moment to all those souls who are crying to get back to college.

I’m reminded of an old joke that did the rounds: What’s common to an engineering college and a public toilet? Answer: The ones outside want to get in and the ones inside want to get out.

You can substitute ‘engineering college’ in that joke with ‘corporate’. And if you’re a fan of Shawshank Redemption, the calf syndrome lasts till you get institutionalized. How long would that be?

Depends.

It’s all in the blood

While Malleswaram sits still on a platter, here’s a small diversion before we get back to eateries that serve good food and don’t rip people off.

The theme for today’s post is about habits – specifically those that have come down the family tree because no one really bothered to stop and ask why. My grandmother, like grandparents of many of us, grew up in some pretty tough times. It was just around the time of independence and growing up on a very limited income was a challenge. Money and resources around the house in general were mostly in a shortfall. This meant that every food item or every piece of clothing had to be utilized sparingly and to the fullest extent possible.

Such was the case when the household bought milk each morning. Grandma would transfer the milk to a vessel on the stove, and the one containing the milk initially was washed well with a small quantity of water and later poured into the second vessel containing the remaining milk. This was done to ensure that not a drop of milk was wasted. Time went by and the state milk corporation started delivering milk in packets of half liter and one liter. With Grandma, the same steps applied for the plastic packets. Cut, pour, rinse and pour. But there was an additional step this time. The packet would be washed thoroughly once again with water, and the water would be allowed to drain by the kitchen sink. The inside of the cover would dry in a few hours and the now redundant milk packet would go into a big yellow plastic bag along with milk packets from the previous weeks. This collection of milk packets went on for a month or two till the big yellow bag could hold no more. Grandpa would then dispose them off to the paperwala in exchange for 2 bucks.

This practice is prevalent in many south Indian households. Watching this in action, my mother sub consciously grew habituated to cleaning milk covers and collecting them. Years rolled on and the family finances stabilized to the point where drops of milk could be deemed insignificant to the monthly budget. But the habit stayed in the blood. We lived in a fabulous neighborhood, would eat out at fine restaurants, wore good clothes and even bought a PC when PCs at home were uncommon. Yet, my mother continued to clean and dry milk covers and collected them in exchange for 10 bucks from the paperwala: not because she wanted the 10 bucks, but because she was so programmed to what her mother did that she continued to do it without once stopping and questioning the relevance of the practice in present day.

I learnt the same from my mother in my early teens. I would cut open the packet of milk, pour it, rinse the cover, pour it again, clean it, dry it and stack it. It was in the DNA. Until one day in high school, I went to a friend’s house. His mother was not at home. We decided to whip up a yummy chocolate milk shake on that summer noon. My friend opened the fridge in the kitchen and got out the packet of milk. He poured the contents into a vessel. And right there before my eyes, he threw the cover in the dustbin. I almost had a heart attack at that young age. I guess his great grand parents were well to do.

Grub and tunes for the road

Did you know they have golf carts at the Infosys Training Center in Mysore? Anoop tells me it’s meant for use only for the top guys. The rest have to walk or use cycles. Similarly, IIT Madras has these battery run shuttle buses for commuting inside their beautiful campus. Such environment friendly transportation should be made a norm across other campuses as well.

Talking of buses, I was in one traveling overnight from Bangalore to Chennai earlier this week. If you’ve been on an overnight bus journey across cities, you know these guys stop at roadside dhabas. Over the last couple of years as Pratik and I made several trips across Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal, and even as recent trips in the south have shown there are a couple of observations I wish to share. Number one: almost without exception, the food served at these dhabas is miserable. Yet, the chai kicks ass. The food not only tastes bad, it looks scary as well. I mean, go to the dhabha (it’s a big one where all the buses halt) on the GT Karnal Highway between Karnal and Panipat in Haryana and check out the bread pakoras for yourself. On this bus ride between Bangalore and Chennai, the driver pulled over at this place. We don’t call them dhabas here in the south. At 2:40 am, I got out of the bus and found the guy behind a counter slicing watermelons and fixing an assortment of fruits. I bought it; it had been more than 5 hours since dinner. Here’s what I mean when I say the stuff you get is weird: the guy had taken the word assortment to a new level and had included cucumbers along with papaya, watermelon, pine apple and grapes in the salad. Yew! I bought 2 plates to amuse myself.

And the other given at these highway stopovers - they play obnoxious music really loud. As you sleepwalk out of the bus, the blast of incoherent music being played at illegal decibel levels comes as a jolt. Try it sometime.

And those golf carts at Infosys - they can be used by the other non-top employees too. But just not always. It’s for them to transport the luggage from the living quarters to the main gate up on getting the pink slip.

The cycle of music

The cycle of music is a popularly observed phenomenon in urban India. It is something that most of us are familiar with, but only did not realize that we knew it. Let me fill you in.

The cycle of music documents the variation in the interest in a particular type of music that the average kid goes through in his years. We all start off the same way: listening to our first beats, rhythms and lyrics in our mother tongue because that’s what mom and dad played on the music system every morning. Maybe you watched Doordarshan on weekends, and got hooked on to Hindi music. Or maybe it was that North Indian neighbor that played tracks from Mohra that got you hooked to Philips Top 10. And do not discount Rangoli on Sunday mornings. We all grew up to the tunes from Roja, didn’t we?

Years passed, and one day you were playing with an older friend in his house, and you noticed the cassette cover of Aqua on his desk. He played it on the speakers to show you that kind of music you ought to be listening to. You loved the tune of Barbie Girl. You took the tape home, slid it into your deck and played Dr. Jones loud enough to herald the arrival of English music into your life. And thus began a long journey into the world pop music. This was it – the years passed with Boyzone, Spice Girls, Vengaboys, Backstreet Boys and Aron Carter. You looked around at your classmates with head held high like they were losers listening to Hindi music. What era were they in, to get a high out of Yash Raj’s Movie Tracks? Pop music was the way of life. You had arrived.

The years went, and Enrique Iglesias, Michael Jackson, Peter Andre and Ricky Martin had their time with you. Gradually Bryan Adams came, and you moved to the next step. And now suddenly, Backstreet Boys was for sissies. Bon Jovi, U2, Queen you started moving up the music ladder on band at a time. Bohemian Rhapsody was the new favourite. In the teenage years, rock defined you very existence. The progress from pop to pop-rock took a while. The move from pop-rock to rock to metal was much faster. This was when you tore the life out of anyone listening to pop music.

“Blue and West Life need to go kill themselves.”

Before you knew it, Metallica and Iron Maiden were the new Gods. Pink Floyd and Aerosmith had no equal. You woke up each morning thanking the heavens for sending the electric guitars and the double bass to earth. This was the real you – with the screaming face of Eddy on your chest saying “Dance of Death”. The peak had arrived. A few maniacs had tried to over do things and had fallen off on the other side: they tried death metal and gothic stuff.

Like all things, this pattern changes too. We grow and mature like we should. Today, we open Winamp and enqueue Backstreet Boys and Westlife and Enrique. Pop music doesn’t seem so bad now. You can give these guys some credit atleast, even thought they all look gay and stand in a straight line to sing the song. Hindi music is getting better and better as we are seeing lesser and lesser of Anu Malik. But the day you’ve arrived is when open your CD tray and slide a music CD of your regional language, so that your kids may re-live the cycle of music.

A confident lie

School memories have a way of flashing back. I was never really a big fan of school, but I think some days were better than others. Like the day we counted 27 bikes on the road. Here’s what happened:

There was this class once a week called SUPW where you painted and sewed and sketched. For me, being artistically challenged, it was a good distraction that helped me take my mind away from Math, Science and EVS. Mrs. Ratna Patwardan took the class from the time I was in Class 1 till the day I left school in class 10. Only recently, I went back to visit my alma mater. She still teaches SUPW to this day. This was a teacher who had a great sense of humour and a way with handling pesky brats (and the girls too, but more on that some other day).

One day in class 4, Jesu and I sat in the last bench with the window behind us. It was SUPW class, and the Mrs. Ratna had stepped out of the class briefly. The two of stopped our work mid-way (painting a piper, maybe) and started looking outside the window and talking. A minute went by, and the teacher came into the class. And she was not very pleased to see Jesu and me gazing at nature (well, peak hour traffic on Bellary road is about as close to Nature as you can get to in Bangalore). We got our punishment: for the next 10 minutes, we were to count the number of cars, buses, bikes, cycles and birds that we could see from outside the window and go back and report the numbers to her.

I felt smug and self-assured looking out of the window. The rest of the class was painting away. I told Jesu, “We’ll just go and tell her some random numbers. She won’t know it.” I mean, I had read the story where Birbal confidently says that there are one thousand four hundred and thirty three crows in the city.

10 minutes went by in mindless chatting; and then we were summoned to the teacher’s desk.

“So, how many crows did you see?”

“17.”

“Bikes?”

“27. 5 red ones.”

“Maruti cars?”

“11.”

“Buses?”

“6.”

“How many bees did you see?”

I looked confused, and I could see from the corner of my eye, that Jesu was just as perplexed.

“I said “How many bees did you see?””, she said trying to look annoyed. I could see this woman was having fun.

“None, Maam.”

“None?”

“Yes. We didn’t see even one.”

She stood up from her chair, and told us to follow her to the window at the back of the class. The other kids stopped painting and became the audience. We walked to the window.

“So, are you sure that you didn’t see even a single bee.”

I’m a believer in confidence. “Yes, Maam. Not even one.”

And she pointed at the bee hive hanging from the ceiling of the building across the road.

There was recession in Heaven

Let the scientists figure out how and why dreams occur. I am here to experience them; some will be good, most will not make sense and the odd one or two will send me looking for the water bottle at 3 am. It’s the dreams that have absolutely no logic to the sequence in which they unfold that are the most interesting ones; and I’m sure it’s the same with most people.

I had this one particular dream, back in 2003, which I found so hilarious I began laughing in my sleep and consequentially woke up. It was one of those no-brainer nonsense jokes, but I guess the punch line at the end of the dream was too good that even today, 6 years hence I can recount every detail as it unfolded.

The scene is set in the prayer hall of my school. There isn’t much lighting around in the hall but for what’s filtering through the windows on a cloudy December morning. There’s a stage and I’m standing on it. The hall is empty and spacious with the big wooden door on my far right. There are framed photos of freedom fighters on the walls on my left hand side. At the entrance to the hall near this door is a tripod stand supporting a black coloured board with holes (the kind you would find at the entrances of reception halls with yellow and white letters stuck in it announcing the event details). I see my Head Mistress and my two best friends Satya and Anoop standing in front of the board reading what’s displayed on it. Curious to see it for myself, I get off the stage and walk towards them. As I get around to facing the board, I call out to my friends. They can’t hear me, for they aren’t responding.

Here’s what I see on the board – in big white letters is the word ‘Prayer’. Following this, in smaller letters are four lines of English poetry; the first three ending with commas and the last one with a full stop. I don’t remember what the lines were, but interestingly after the four lines, I see something else. In tiny yellow it says ‘Rs 81’. That’s right, Rupees Eighty One. Anoop is reading out the lines on the board with my Head Mistress and my other friend Satya nodding along approvingly. I’m a mute spectator to all of this. All the while, I’m standing there thinking “What is the ‘Rs 81’ doing there at the bottom? What does it mean?” Soon enough, Anoop completes reading the ‘Prayer’ and looks towards the teacher. She asks him in her bossy commanding voice “What do you think of this prayer?” Without a moment’s hesitation, he replies “It’s good. But why did you have to pay 81 Rupees for this English prayer? You could have bought a cheaper Hindi Prayer for 25 bucks.”

I woke up with spurts of laughter that morning. I’m still trying to figure out what the 81 Rupees was for. Maybe even God wasn’t spared of the 2003 market downturn, and He had to resort to selling copyrights of His prayers to lesser mortals like us. For the record, my school prayer was Gajananam, bhoothaganadhi sevitham ....

Who needs a life here?

You know what’s funny? It’s the choices we make. I recollect seeing rajmah for the first time in my first week of college in Hamirpur. I’m talking about that reddish brown kidney shaped group of pulses. Gosh, I hated the very sight of it in the mess. Every Tuesday night meant a trip to Ekta café, Tilak, Canteen or anywhere as far away as possible from Rajmah for Narayan , Sagar and I. And on Thursday mornings we had oats and banans for breakfast. I felt like these mess guys really needed a life. Who has oats at 7 am for crying out loud? I always waited to get out of college and get back home to Bangalore where I could have ‘good’ south Indian dosas, idliys and filter coffee for breakfast.

Now that I’ve relocated to Chennai, I must not have any problems with the food here, right? There’s dosas and idlies and pongal and gallons of filter coffee available; I just need to wave my arms to get it. But instead, I choose to have rajmah, black dal, cauliflower and rice for breakfast AND lunch. I prefer oats, banana and milk for dinner. I’m serious. It’s like when you’re growing up in India in your twenties, you’re thinking of blonds and bikinis. And after that second year in Amsterdam in your early thirties, you are thinking of gold and silk saris.