A POETIC PLUMBER

I am of a certain age and I am reminded, not infrequently, of a long-forgotten rugby song  lamenting   the turning of one's sex-appeal into a water spout. Waterspouts require regular visits to the plumber to get the  plumbing checked. I make annual visits to mine.

My plumber's parents seem to have had a rather exalted  notion of their newborn's musical abilities - they named him after a famous sitar player. He  appears medically competent but I do not detect any semblance of music in him, other than his name. He is as prosaic as it is possible for a human being to be and if music redeems, he is irredeemable.

My household plumbers - the ones who fix leaky sinks and the like - are not especially musical either. One was of a distinctly sour mien and was not given to many words. He would listen to our complaints with a stony expression and then would proceed to hike up his "veshti" (dhoti) to the half-mast position preparatory to peering under the sink and giving the U-bend a mighty thwack with his wrench. If one were not particularly careful to look elsewhere one would be treated to a view of his own plumbing as well. But he did fix the seepage that rotted the wooden cabinet below  (the rot had proven irresistible to the termites that ate my smartphone). Notwithstanding his unmusical bearing he was a capable leak-fixer.

The one whose work had created the leak in the first place, Ismail, could wax lyrical and hum a tune or two, especially when he smelt a good mutton biryani. Once when we were heading to the hardware shop on his motorcycle he took the left rather than the right at a certain fork. I was surprised, because I knew he was familiar with the area and promptly remonstrated with him. His response was that the aroma of Ambur Mutton Biryani was pulling left against his wish to steer right. Ambur is a small town further south and for countless years been the tannery capital of Southern India.

The skins and hides trade in that town has been the preserve of the Muslim community which fed the smelly tanners with aromatic biryanis. I am a complete vegetarian and know not the intricacies of biryanis, but the aroma wafting in the air that day, reportedly that of Mutton Biryani of the highest class, was particularly appealing. On the other other hand, the plumbing skills of the said Ismail distinctly less so: his plumbing leaked and his electrical work consisted of feeding "live current" through the "neutral" wires.

No sooner he smelt the Ambur biryani, Ismail burst forth into a Tamil song to the effect that his heart was on song, that the beloved (in this case the biryani) was making him forget all else and he desired a quick union with the object of his affections (the biryani). Quickly wrapping up his work he proceeded to what would have been a joyous union, between him and his Ambur Mutton Biryani, leaving me with a primed termite bomb that would explode a year down the road.

Despite his lack of plumbing and electrical skills, he had music in his heart, at least where mutton biryani was concerned. Although he was partial to Ambur Mutton biryani, he did claim that he appreciated the Dindigul (another small town, even further south) variety too. The one whose services I used in between the Musical One and the Surly One fancied himself to be the prince of plumbers and his fees reflected that. Whenever I called him, I got an earful of devotional music. He would pick up his phone only after agnostics like me had been exposed to a sanitizing dose of devotional music.

My readers might take issue with me for expecting well-developed musical abilities in plumbers and physicians. There is a reason and a connection: being a good musician is all about the invisible connection, rapport, with the audience, inspiring them and being inspired by them in turn. Being a physician, albeit one specializing in such lowly matters as human plumbing, also requires a rapport between the plumber and the plumbed. The plumber has to inspire confidence. Whether it  is at all possible to be inspired by the state of human plumbing is moot; but inspired by it a plumber has to be, in order to be successful in his chosen field.

Aldous Huxley once famously observed that when Shakespeare wished to express the inexpressible he laid down his quill and called for music (or was it silence? I get a bit mixed up between Music at Night and The Rest is Silence). I dont set such standards for doctors - the thought of a surgeons laying down their scalpels and calling for a spot of "Born To Be Wild" in the middle of  brain surgeries boggles the imagination. Being in sync with the patients, understanding them, and empathizing with them makes many a poor medical grad good physicians. Bedside manners, I believe, it is called. My GP was knighted precisely for this reason a couple of years ago though I think he would have difficulties with a medical quiz.

 My musically-named unmusical plumber would probably have breezed through a medical quiz but would struggle with a musical one.  He seemed to love the sound of his own voice too much to establish any rapport with his patients. In the spirit of giving him as accurate a picture as possible as also to enable a quick and error free diagnosis of the state of my plumbing, I once started narrating all my symptoms  and complaints which I had meticulously noted and memorized earlier. The un-musical one brusquely stopped me in mid-flow (pardon the pun) saying that while my "research" could possibly get me a PhD, it would not help my problem. I wasn't amused.

As you can see the relationship with my plumber was fraught. Would you blame me for looking for an alternative?

I have since been on the look out for a physician with empathy and one who can strike an immediate rapport. I don't quite need a singing physician but one whose medical competence is complemented by a bit of music in him, a bit of poetry in his heart. It was then that I saw the following sign at my neighborhood clinic and my heart started racing:

Dr J. Pablo Neruda

Hopefully his parents were better at divining their offspring's talents. Closer reading revealed he was a plastic surgeon, though.

I think I'll have a nip here and a tuck there.

ODDS AND ENDS

More odds than ends, really.

Since retiring to the not-so-salubrious environs of Chennai I have become the family shopper; ie, I started doing the family shopping which is something I had not done the previous forty-plus years. With retirement my excuses for not taking responsibility for the weekly chore had evaporated. What was at first a chore soon became quite an entertainment, owing not so much to the "retail high" as to the many amusements and diversions it provided.

Studies show that spending money lights  up the human brain like a Christmas tree, just as it does under sexual stimulation or addictive drugs. If I were to wire myself to an FMRI machine while I do my shopping, I am sure it will show similar results, even when I don't actually buy anything or spend any money. Each one of us gets our kicks differently, and mine is finding interesting odds and ends. You could say that shopping is my vertical expression of a horizontal desire....

So what excites and amuses me so much ? It is the exciting range of goods on offer. Take the ordinary Gujju Thali for example. It is many things to many people, but I never thought of it as colourful as the following blurb claims, if you forgive the bad spelling:

Are they promoting a meal reddened by chillies, or is it a Gujju Thali  redefined? Whatever it actually is, the mystery is  killing me - even as it excites me. I've been there a few times and am no closer to solving the mystery than I was at the beginning.

I also get excited when I see a "charming" oatmeal breakfast such as this:

It is not only charming, but "vigorous" as well, not to mention that it contains all-important fibre. Who can say no to a bit of vigour and fibre in the morning ?  I wish I had known of the rejuvenating properties of oatmeal earlier - I would have indulged a lot more for a lot longer, secure in the knowledge that regular oatmeal breakfasts would set everything right.

We Tamils experienced The Italian Connection a few centuries before the rest of India. Some say even longer. Reportedly Romans traded with the Tamils; but then Romans traded with everyone, went everywhere, and subjugated everyone. Our connection was the Jesuit Father Constanzo Joseph Beschi who came to convert and got converted instead to the cause of Tamil literature. I would have said "seduced" by Tamil, but I have to show proper respect to a man of the cloth. 

Beschi adopted a Tamil name, Veeramamuni, and translated the "Thiru Kural" into Latin (his adopted name translates somewhat clumsily as The Great and Valiant Saint  in English - valour and sainthood don't usually go together except in the cause of proselytizing which was what he came here to do). Not sure how much proselytizing he did, but he did an awful lot of translating of Tamil works. He aimed to introduce to the world with the beauty of Tamil literature. Introduction of an Italian of a different sort to a member of modern Indian royalty happened centuries later and would have deleterious consequences for the country. 

The Italian connection with Tamilnadu goes far deeper than poetry and politics: it is today firmly rooted in food habits. What could be more Italian than Pasta, and more Tamil than "Payasam"? The former is a humble day to day staple and the latter the desert for special occasions and comes in as many variations as there are deities and gods in our culture (even the die-hard atheists and "rationalists" partake of the ceremonial Payasam). The melding of the two is as unique as the union of a scion of the Indian Political Royalty with an Italian waitress. We celebrate this union thus:

We Tamils are also people of soul. That we have sold it to devils of a certain political persuasion is neither here nor there. We used to write soulful poetry the like of which Fr.Beschi translated; now we write soulful film songs. Most of our movies involve the handsome hero looking soulfully into the eyes of the pretty and generously built heroine and singing soulful songs with the camera panning, at the critical moment, to a flower being vigourously pollinated by an amourous bee. How did we get so soulful? Surely not just on Idlies and Dosas? We can attribute our soulfulness to stuff like the following which are soulful as well as fulfilling, not to mention delicious and healthy:

As the label suggests, it isn't just soulful, it fills our souls. With so much soulfull foods is it any surprise that we all  are somewhat full of figure? 

We used to have a matinee idol running the state when he was not running around trees chasing ladies half his age, imitating the busy bee with the vigourous mien and amourous intent. One day he passed away. Now his on-screen love interest does that job - not running around  trees, mind you, but running the state and giving us the run-around. They used to team up in many a Raja-Rani movie. One eatery  immortalizes this on-screen pairing in the form of a dumpling:

Any suggestion as to her resemblance to a largish dumpling is entirely unfounded and totally mischievous.

ECONOMIC SCIENCE

That sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? If a youngster came to me asking what an oxymoron is, I would quote those words as an example.

A young Harvard economist does not agree with me. Many people have disagreed with me on many things over the years, but this is the first time a Harvard economist disagreed with me. I am honoured. There is an old saying in Tamil to the effect that if someone had to wrap you on the head with his knuckle, let it be one wearing a golden ring. Social station matters a lot in this world and so it is with me and economists.

The said Harvard economist is Raj Chetty. No doubt overcome by Physics envy, and unable to contain it any longer, he recently asserted that Economics is a Science. You can read his article here. I am proud of young Raj Chetty for a number of reasons even though I don't know him and he certainly hasn't even heard of me. He teaches at Harvard, is of Indian origin, and his name suggests  origins in my corner of India. The one blot in his CV is that he is an economist. But nobody is perfect; somebody has to be an economist. No doubt Mr Chetty's Physics Envy was stoked by the presence at Harvard of Raman Sundrum, the theoretical Physicist, which would be ironic considering that Mr. Sundrum himself was considering leaving Physics for Finance which is an offshoot of Mr.Chetty's domain (he was saved in the nick of time by Lisa Crandall, later to be his collaborator).

In his defence of the dismal science, Chetty claims that inasmuch as economists make hypotheses and empirically test them out, his domain is a science. Quickly he proceeds to highlight the difficulties in such empirical testing of economic theories just as in Medical and Public Health domains.  Robert Schiller and Gregory Mankiw  are on Chetty's side and they both are heavy weights indeed - the first is this year' Nobel winner and the latter the most widely quoted economist. The latter was also reportedly advanced a million dollars for a text book before a single word was written. Paul Krugman, the economist-gadfly, sort of agreed with Chetty, saying that may be all economics is science but not all economists are scientists. I don't know what it means, but I suspect Krugman's tongue was not in its normal place.

What is the word from one who is unlikely ever to win a Nobel, unlikely to ever write a book let alone receive a million dollar advance, does not seek out windmills a la Krugman; i.e, me?

I do not think economics is a science and will not be until study of human behaviour becomes an exact science since economics concerns itself mainly with human behaviour. My reasoning is as follows:

 Two and two is always be four. Positron-electron collision always results in photons (not quite always, but the collision products under given conditions are always the same). No ceteris paribus about it. Ceteris is never paribus. In Tamil we say that an aunt sporting a moustache is an uncle which is quite graphic, if you overlook the appalling anatomical ignorance.  By the way, Tamilian aunts sport much moustache but are not uncles. But that is a line of enquiry for a different post.

Physics does have some issues in its farthest boundaries which boundaries are being constantly pushed. So does Mathematics (Riemann conjecture, for example). But a vast majority of both disciplines rest on firm and unshaking foundations. The foundations may be shaken, as Physics' was a hundred years ago. When it did, a new, coherent, and consistent whole took the place of old Classical Physics. There are some kinks to be ironed out (reconciling the physics of the very small and the very large, for example), no doubt, and some of the best brains are working on it such as the aforementioned Mr. Sundrum.

Above all Physics and Mathematics, such as they are, are sufficient for our day to day lives.
Can we say that about economics?

TERMITES ATE MY SMART PHONE

Implausible as it might seem, they did. As stories go this is not in the same class as "dog ate my homework" which is fictional, and is a hope rather than reality. Termites really did eat up my smartphone.

Well, they sort of did.

For a while now I have been hankering for a smart phone, if only to appear smart in the presence of smartphone cognoscenti which is just about everyone under the age of 30 these days. I have always been fascinated by phones that could sing, dance and generally do the things that I myself can not.

My first phone was a Nokia brick which could double up as a lethal weapon in an emergency. It so happened that I never had to use it as such, Mumbai being a non-violent sort of city at least where I tended to move. It did destroy many a shirt and used to create a suspicious bulge when secreted in the inner pocket of my jacket or a an embarrassing one in my trouser pocket. Those were the days of the famous "One Black Coffee please" advert, and size (of phones anyway) was inversely proportional to the impression it created. Ericsson sold the teeniest of flip-phones which could be concealed in the female palm (as in the advert) as it cupped her comely, tilted, face. Matters appear to have reverted to norm and now size (as in screen acreage) matters once again.

My second phone was the size and shape of a largish pebble with smooth,  rounded, edges and had a lurid green display. It was also called  pebble, I think, albeit without any vowels in it. One could, if sufficiently practiced and suitably cool, flip the keyboard lid open with the thumb of the hand holding it when a call came through. I could do it, but my friend needed both hands; fat lot of good this ability did, for my company sent him to N.Y and I am retired and in Chennai. Still for a while I was cool and he wasn't, which isn't saying much because he is a Gujju and I am not. All that cool flipping inevitably led to the lid coming off permanently and it wasn't cool to carry a flip-phone without a flippable  lid. I gave it to my daughter who had a long commute each day to the seamier side of Mumbai and in my opinion needed some form of self defense.

I replaced the pebble with, I am ashamed to admit, a phone in girly colours. I was going someplace which required a "world phone" and the only one I could afford came in girly colours. No sooner I returned from the journey than I switched back to my old pebble, much to my daughter's discomfiture at losing her personal concealed weapon - an all-black pebble is not nearly as conspicuous, even without its flip-lid, as one that was a fluorescent shade of blue.

 Thereafter I quickly replaced the pebble with the legendary Nokia 6210 - small, light, grey and powerful - with the pebble reverting to my daughter and the blue girly phone going to my wife. This one was and still remains my all-time favourite. It could store 500 names with 5 numbers each, could connect to the net via something called WAP, could sync with my laptop / PC, and had an effective calendar.

You could even exchange business cards through its infra red port. It had a concealed antenna, which was uber cool, and yet it could pick up weak signals. But alas, it was monochromatic and the display was dot-matrix LCD. If these attributes sound like something you don't want to step on, that is because they are, in today's world at least. I must admit though, that I experience pangs of regret for having ditched my faithful companion, when I see Brits still carrying it, a full 13 years after it was introduced.

I could do all sorts of stuff with it, including surfing the internet from my laptop anywhere, any time. This last one might not surprise anyone today, but in the days before dongles and 3G, internet on the move was nothing short of miraculous. I understand that those crafty Finns could do a lot more with the 6210. They're all a bit crazy,  the Finns, car-racing on frozen lakes and starting companies that switch from making pencils  to paper to TVs to mobile phones (a la Nokia), when not enjoying saunas or singing joiks.

It was a very good phone, and the call quality was excellent - those were the days when a phone was a device to talk to someone and not for watching jerky videos or  for baring what you did last summer which you proceeded to regret for the rest of your life. I saved a bomb on new shirts and was saved from excessive frisking at airports and embarrassment in the presence of ladies. Despite getting a bit hot next to my ear, its battery lasted a three or four days on a single charge under heavy use. I got a special kick out of carrying it, for at that time I used to work closely with the French and this phone was streets ahead of anything the Frenchies had - for one they had to pull out their antennae  with their teeth when a call came through and I didn't have to.

Then dawned the age of the Palm Pilot and every one had to have a PDA with stylus and all. That's about as far as PDA got in India. Social types like Shobha De did a lot of air-kissing and engaged in various types of PDA but the vast majority of us had to be content with intently staring at out Laptop screens while the fortunate ones with Palm Pilots checked  their mails with a certain insouciance.

My first PDA was a clunky Taiwanese knock-off running a Microsoft operating system. Soon it broke down with a broken battery cover - big ambitions humbled by the smallest of things.  Then came HTC's PDA, the O2 XDAII. It sounded like something out of Lockheed skunk-works but was actually a phone and a PDA running a version of Windows. It had a stylus but also a back-lit sliding keyboard. This last named bathed your face in an eerie, blue, otherworldly glow when the lights were dimmed on a late night flight. It was good to be Blue Man, if only for a short while, playing solitaire.

The XDA II never failed to impress those who couldn't afford its asking price (very steep) or master its operations (mostly the socialites).  It read my handwriting well and I have had full-fledged reviews with my lieutenants even when I was far from base. It was, in short, awesome. Like The Brick it was heavy, but without being able to create a suspicious or an impressive bulge in the right places.

The Blackberry had arrived by then and I was provided with one when my boss decided I had to be available twenty-four seven. Or may be it simply had to do with my position in the organization - you see, in India, provision of phones, cars, and the like depend on your position in the hierarchy and not on whether your job required them. I found the BB capable as it was, very plebeian, without the reassuring heft of The Brick, the gee-wizardry of the 6210, or the "convergence" of the O2. Its only useful feature, the Map, had been disabled by the wizards in IT, so I was still lost in the streets of Paris where its possession would have given me a clear edge over the Alcatel-wielding Frenchies.

I now became the carrier of two mobile phones, much like the safari-suited businessmen and fixers for whom I have had nothing but unconcealed disdain. Thereafter followed a stream of nondescript phones including some Nokias and a brace of Sony Ericssons.  Somewhere along the way my daughter gave up the security of the Pebble for the sleek lightness of the 6210.  Monochrome screens gave way to coloured ones, and the shrill monotonic ring was replaced by polyphonic ones. Cameras were also incorporated into the phones. Probably the worst ever picture of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence was taken by me on a Sony Ericsson.

Apple introduced the iPhone and wanted you to lose the stylus in favour of your index finger. Believe it or not, the world agreed and was willing to pay many times what it cost to make the iPhone for the pleasure of wearing its index fingers thin. Somehow the good people at Apple managed to convince the general people that their phone was "smart" the way other ones weren't.  Smart phones were born and they became all the rage. Suddenly Nokia was on a slippery slope and was headed rapidly downhill.

I couldn't afford the asking price for an iPhone and till date do not have one, save my son's hand-me-down for a brief while. When I had it, I hated the way it  limited me to the Apple Ecosystem, thus setting up healthy annuities for Apple and a constant drain on my finances. So when an opportunity presented itself, I rid myself of the iPhone and hired an extra help at home with the money thus saved.
With more and more people flaunting smartphones I was developing an incurable case of screen envy.

A Samsung today needs half an acre of screen to do what my old XDA could do nine years ago with just 2.5 inches.  My 6210 did not hang and did not have to be reset now and then. I didn't look like an idiot even with The Brick clamped to me years, the way I would with any of the so called "Phablets". But despite all that my smartphone envy has not dimmed; it has been growing undiminished. I finally decided to give in, even if it meant giving up the extra help at home. I zeroed in on a Windows smartphone, the Nokia 925.

That's when a termite army decided to chomp through half my kitchen.