tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48102045822870853212024-02-07T07:52:37.313+05:30The Moving Finger WritesAn irreverent take on life and miscellanyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-56115632740523796122020-05-01T13:09:00.000+05:302020-05-01T13:09:38.921+05:30I'M BACK<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Said Arnie famously.<br />
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Or, did he?<br />
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He did say "I'll be back" after escaping the unspeakable villainy of a shape-shifting, transmogrifying, transparent - why are villains of the robotic variety transparent? - villain. I should imagine that an essential feature of villainy is a lack of transparency followed by dark shades, a cat on the lap and a German accent. Be that as it may...Arnie promised to be back. I'm quite sure he was indeed back. The issue at hand is did he declare that he was back when he came back?<br />
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Some might prefer to split hairs and suggest that that the act of being back is itself sufficient and that it is not necessary to declare that one is back when one is indeed back. There is some merit in that argument, I concede. The initial promise was / is known to all fans of Arnie and his macabre series of movies that involve sticking transparent glass short swords into living people and trailer trucks (semis to American friends) chasing Harleys down storm water run-offs in some megalopolis.<br />
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I was and still remain a non-fan of Arnie and his above referred movies. I was perforce introduced to the Terminator (or was it exterminator?) by an enthusiastic salesman selling large screen TV at a trade show decades ago. Those were the days when a 24 inch CRT TV with half-decent sound output was something to drool for. If it was a colour-TV, one died and went to heaven. There was this salesman trying to impress me with his 42 inch TV with booming bass and crystal clear treble via the truck-chasing-the-Harley scene. Every time Arnie fired off his sawn-off shotgun, the bass boomed; and every time the truck driver ground his semi into the the concrete wall of the storm-water run-off, the trebles screamed and screeched. It was a sensory overload. For your information I was unable to take the salesman's offer owing the small matter of money which, with 2 kids in school and a penny-pinching employer, was in short supply. But I digress....<br />
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The Arnie situation was not dissimilar to the one involving a forest, falling trees and some who did not see / hear them fall. Those who wanted to know, simply walked into the forest and saw for themselves if trees had fallen or not. Likewise Arnie's promise: if you wanted to know and were not averse to watching people stabbed with transparent glass swords or trucks being driven at reckless speeds down sewers or to the sounds metal being violently torn off by solid concrete from the body of aforementioned truck, you would go see the movie and satisfy yourself if indeed he was back as promised and, more importantly, if he uttered something pithy about his return, like, "I m back".<br />
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I digressed a lot. Arnie can do that to you if you are not careful with his movies, now that you have TVs that cover entire walls, are attached to sound systems that can blow the roof clean off your home at full volume, and display high definition pictures with diamond like clarity and sharpness.<br />
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I meant to say that I am finally back to my blogging ways before getting distracted by Arnie's famous promise. Since the last time I blogged, I have gained a grandchild, a daughter in law and lost a parent. Omar Khayyam famously wrote,<br />
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'Tis all a checkerboard of days and nights</div>
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Where destiny for men as pieces plays</div>
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Hither and hither moves and mates and slays</div>
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And one by one back in the closet lays"</div>
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And so it was with my father - he's back in the closet and won't come out to play.</div>
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But I, my friends, shall blog again per popular demand. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-23068271798598855802015-03-05T15:16:00.003+05:302020-05-03T20:21:26.413+05:30PRIDE (AND NO PREJUDICE)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I am going to be a grandparent any time now. When the news got out, I was deluged with an outpouring of congratulatory messages. As if I had something to do with it. Whatever I have to do with it, first happened a couple of decades ago and then when I said yes to my daughter's choice for a husband. They took it from there and here we are, awaiting a grandchild. In their enthusiasm to be seen to be friendly / enthusiastic / polite or whatever, people mistakenly congratulate me.<br />
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<i>People, if you must congratulate someone, please do that to the parents-to-be.</i><br />
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Get it right people. When X and Y get married (or are engaged to be married), or when X or Y (or both) get a Nobel prize or or when their yet to be conceived child makes it to that prestigious coaching class for the hard-to-get-in IIT or something like that, or when they win a few hundred million dollar lottery, or when they achieve something worthwhile, go ahead and congratulate them. Don't pollute the earth with stupid, meaningless and unfelt messages of happiness just because you have an electronic device that can commit mass-murder of this type and you don't wish to be seen not expressing your (fake) happiness at the happy event.<br />
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It is so typically Indian. You don't want to be seen to be missing the action. For example, my mum always found reasons why I should attend some wedding of the fourth grandchild of a fifth cousin six times removed. She used to say, <i>you can miss anything, but not a happy occasion like this</i>. When that fifth cousin six times removed died, I would be told <i>you can even miss a wedding, but not the last rites. </i>The central point was, you don't want to stand out in anyway; blend in, be one in the crowd, don't draw attention to yourself. I suspect this remains a central theme of Tambram existence.<br />
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This is similar to the typically Indian English usages like <i>your good name please, your good self, please clarify, can we pre-pone the meeting, </i>etc etc which irritate me no end<i>. </i>When I started working, official letters mostly started with<i> "I beg having to advise you that your account is now overdrawn....", </i>and ending with<i> "yours faithfully" </i>if one was in the private sector<i>. </i>If one were writing as a civil servant,<i> </i>he would claim to<i> "have been directed to inform you".</i><br />
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I was warned more than once that if I continued to begin letters - especially the ones to the Head Office - with <i>I should like to inform you that blah blah blah... </i>and end them with<i> yours truly </i>instead of begging to advise them and remaining faithful to them, my career would remain in the doldrums. My attempts to convince them that I was neither married to my boss to be faithful nor owed him / her allegiance beyond the call of duty fell on deaf years. It was thus that my letter of resignation began with "<i>I beg to advise you that I am unable to continue in your employment..."</i> and ended with <i>"Yours faithfully"</i>. The irony was lost on them.<br />
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I am irked no end by Emails and postings in Facebook showing "Proud grand parents" with the hapless newborn. For god's sake one should be proud when one has achieved something worthwhile. What exactly did the grand parents do to get a grandchild? Other than nagging their poor daughter / daughter-in-law to beget a child to keep up the family honour - Family Honour! Or badgering sixty four million Hindu deities resident in historic towns - or even in the illegal street corner temple that sprang up last year - for the favour?<br />
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Proud? Why? What did the poor little bawling, squirming thing do except get out of a dark prison that was quickly getting too small for it? Yes, the poor girl who had to support the little one inside for 10 months and then has to do it lifelong <i>outside, she has something to be proud of as we have of her. </i>Even the father of the little one, for having put up with <i>"the hormones" </i>for ten long months and who has to endure interrupted sleep for ten more, even <i>he</i> has something to be proud of. Parents of the new mother can <i>justifiably be proud of their daughter</i> for all the hardship she has already endured and which probably has just begun.<br />
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One can be <i>happy</i> that the birth happened without any glitches or complications. One can even be happy at the baby's good looks although the matter of looks in newborns is highly exaggerated. All newborns look like newborns and do not rank very high in the looks department. That happens later. Some are happy that they now have an heir for their (dubious) legacy. One can be genuinely happy that the girl's ordeal of pregnancy with all its manifold risks is finally over. That relief is justifiable as is the resultant happiness.<br />
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I am all too aware that this rant notwithstanding, my phone lines are going to get jammed and my email boxes are going to overflow with messages congratulating me on the birth of a grandchild. I am going to be labelled a proud grandparent.<br />
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Let me assure everyone that I am a proud parent (for what my children have achieved in their young lives) and will be given many more reasons to be proud. The grandchild might even make me proud by reciting something aged two - Vishnu Shahasranamam is a Tambram favourite. <a href="http://www.geek.com/news/homer-simpson-solved-the-mass-of-the-higgs-boson-in-1998-1617084/" target="_blank">Calculating the mass of Higgs Boson a la Homer Simpson</a>, might do it for me.<br />
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For the moment, though, my pride is where it rightfully belongs - my daughter.<br />
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PS: <i style="font-weight: bold;">The grandchild was born later that night!! </i>(updated 3rd May 2020)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-4328634913161286512015-02-02T21:45:00.001+05:302015-02-02T21:45:16.945+05:30TRANSFORMATION, INVARIANCE AND CONSERVATION<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
To those concerned that this post might delve into esoteric areas of Physics let me say, I put in all those fancy words in the title just for effects. However let me also admit that I am not above a bit of posing, posturing and showboating when it comes to that. So some references to Physics and Mathematics will be presented so as to impress the reader. Today you can find anything by googling. You must, however, know what to look for though.<br />
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We were taught in school that there is a Law of Conservation of Energy. Who has not memorized the words, "energy can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be destroyed" without even understanding what it really meant or how it really worked. We were told that chemical energy from coal can be transformed into heat energy of steam which then can be transformed into kinetic energy by driving a great big engine. We accepted all that without questioning, despite also learning that these transformations were not 100% efficient and that there were always <i>losses. </i>Ah, those were the good days when you could accept something uncritically on the say so of teachers and elders. The problem is, today we are the elders and I am not sure what to say..<br />
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We were also told that the Law of Conservation of Momentum made billiard balls fall into different pockets or that in a line of suspended steel balls it made only the balls at the end move, or, in a macabre twist, prevented motor cars from stopping before travelling a certain distance when brakes were applied. The most mysterious of all was how Physicists divined the existence of unseen and unseeable particles and their properties based just on this Law.<br />
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We were told that there existed a whole menagerie of particles with all sorts of exotic names and possessed of weird properties. These were thought to exist based almost entirely on the conservation of something or the other. In the 1960s mankind's understanding of the universe was held together by gossamer threads linking weird particles, fields, forces, and suchlike, most of which one could not hear, see, feel or touch, only talk about. But we accepted their existence nevertheless, and the universe they represented.<br />
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At the centre of our knowledge was conservation of something or the other, which came about because of the "invariance" of some properties under certain "transformations". A very smart young lady, a rare female mathematician in a field overrun with men, came up with an original thought in the second decade of the twentieth century. Emmy Noether's work stated that if any system remained invariant under certain transformations, some property of it was conserved. The words are mine and admittedly imprecise.<br />
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For example if a system remained invariant under linear transformation in space or time, its linear momentum is conserved. If a system remained invariant under rotation then its angular momentum is conserved. And so on and so forth. Using mathematics Noether proved that Laws of Conservation were the result of invariance under transformation. The important thing to remember is that Conservation of something <i><b>resulted </b></i>from invariance under transformation.<br />
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Nearly a hundred years after Emmy Noether propounded her eponymous theorem, and many many particles, properties and universes later we have another type of Law of Conservation. This one is propounded and maintained by another female, albeit one of considerably inferior academic achievements, so inferior that you don't speak of this person and academic achievements in the same breath. Whereas Emmy was born to a mathematician father her modern-day equivalent was born to a bricklayer of shady credentials. Emmy was invited to University of Gottingen by luminaries such as David Hilbert and Felix Klein. Her modern day equivalent paid her way through a language school in Cambridge. The contrast couldn't be starker.<br />
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Both Emmy and her modern-day equivalent posited their own theories of conservation. For Emmy Conservation resulted from Invariance under Transformation.<br />
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For Sonia, conservation of family power is central to any transformation. Only transformations that ensure invariance of family power and which conserve family dynasty are allowed.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-64891749605805975662015-02-02T17:34:00.001+05:302015-02-02T17:34:33.844+05:30LOVE IS BLIND <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Time and again we have been told that Love is blind. Movie empires have been built on that notion. We have also experienced and encountered in our own lives events situations which appear to validate this. Examples of this usually involve pretty girls falling for plug-ugly men with no prospects, and occasionally the other way round.<br />
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Sometimes this maxim is invoked to explain one or the other party overlooking or being oblivious to the faults of the other party which are only too evident to all. This might be a case of what Margaret Heffernan calls Willful Blindness. She argues that <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro-1, ff-tisa-web-pro-2, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"> we </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro-1, ff-tisa-web-pro-2, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">choose</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro-1, ff-tisa-web-pro-2, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where “we could know, and should know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know.”</span> Don't women close their eyes while kissing while the man in the kiss has his eyes wide open and is scoping out his next victim(s)? <i>Women just don't want to know what the guy is up to lest their worst fears are confirmed...</i></div>
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Dan Ariely of Duke University performed some experiments involving the brightest and the best at MIT, some arithmetic, and a few smutty magazines. Guys - yes, they were all men - who could ace SAT, GRE and GMAT all at the same time with half their brains removed, had difficulty getting basic arithmetic right after a few minutes with the lissome lasses of those glossies. Suffice it to say that boys have a difficult time coping with anything after some mental stimulation of the prurient kind.</div>
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We are told that women are not like that. Aren't they? </div>
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For a start they kiss with their eyes closed, symbolic of their ostrich syndrome.</div>
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They buy into the most implausible of stories from their boyfriends / fiances / husbands, stories whose link with truth is tenuous at best. They are blind to even simple economics when it comes to their men as the following story will attest.</div>
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Our maid is a very unfortunate young 26 year old. She lost her parents early and was brought up by a kindly aunt whom she calls "mother". She met and married a young man at 14, against the advice of her "mother", and had three boys by him by the time she was 18. After the birth of the boys, her husband predictably began losing interest in her.<br />
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By the time she came to work for us two years ago the loss of interest was total and complete. His loss of interest in her did not extend to her earnings. He took to a life of ease in front of a TV purchased with loans she was made to sign for. His notion of working conditions are much more generous than even what the French have. In short he was willing to offer his lack of skills for the wages of a hedge fund manager.</div>
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The poor maid pays for his every whim by working in a number of households. The whims include a TV, a VCR, movie rentals <i>everyday</i>, copious amounts of alcohol and <i>other women</i>. The last category has at various times included a college-girl and a fifty year old cougar.<br />
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The college girl appears to have been smitten by him, however fleetingly, blinding herself to the realities of a wife, three kids, no work and lots of drinking. And then again she may have been experimenting, being a college girl and all. She even used to gallivant around town, giving <i>him</i> rides on the back of <i>her</i> scooter, in a clear case of role reversal. It appears that the poor wife even paid for his treating his college-girl paramour in various eateries around town, even as she herself starved many days. She would not confirm if she paid for the petrol as well.</div>
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It appears that when the college girl had learnt whatever he had to teach her, she got tired and dumped him. This brought on many a lachrymose bender all paid for by the hapless, dutiful, wife.</div>
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Thereafter the Michelangelo-in-waiting - for this lothario is a painter of buildings and walls - figured, in a Stephen Vizinczey-esque moment, that older women were possibly a better bet. The cougar's reasons for taking up with him are for the present obscure. The presence of an obliging wife to pick up the bills must be a great attraction, almost as powerful as receiving the attentions of the much younger man. </div>
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The poor wife confronting him proved to be of no avail. The painter would threaten suicide when asked to end his affair with other women. From the wife he wanted a roof and food, not to mention TV, VCR, and movies, all paid for by her, and the freedom to pursue women of his choice. This is what most men dream of but are unable to achieve. Life indeed is strange, for it denies the seekers and rewards those who thumb their noses at it.</div>
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Then one day, tiring of mere threats, he cut his wrist. What he intended as a life threatening severing of veins and arteries turned out to be just a superficial cut inflicted with the blunt edge of a kitchen knife. Neither life nor much blood was lost, but the incident had the desired effect - the wife was distraught, borrowed even more money for the treatment and recovery and promised him all that he desired. The cougar wisely ducked and stayed out of sight for a while. Wise woman, that one, who may yet disprove all my theories - and those of Heffernan - about women, love, and blindness.</div>
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After recuperating on a diet of good food and many movies, all paid for by wife's borrowings, our indefatigable Lothario was on the move again. For reasons I am unable to fathom, he took up with the same cougar. Perhaps the supply of willing, credulous or willingly credulous college girls with scooters had dried up suddenly. The cougar's lack of wisdom, however, is more baffling. Is she merely willfully blind or is she playing a game beyond ordinary comprehension?<br />
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Many more threats followed, all of which turned out to be empty. Our hero couldn't even nick himself with a safety razor let alone terminally injure himself .<br />
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Then one day the putative painter decided to trade his paintbrush for a sickle.<br />
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The sickle, in other parts of the world, is an agricultural implement. Here in Tamilnadu it is the weapon of choice, if you believe the Tamil tabloid press, of cuckolded husbands and irate fathers of wronged girls. It is the symbol of manhood for any red-blooded Tamilian and is an essential part of student attire at a few Chennai college. They may come to college without pens, paper, pencils and books, but to be seen without a sickle dangling from the collar is a sign that screams "Wimp". Tamil movies and TV soaps do their bit to reinforce this image.<br />
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Armed with a sickle and fortified with his favourite brew, the intrepid painter went out onto the street to proclaim his intent to decapitate someone, anyone. While he was thus raving and ranting without harming anyone, the police arrived. These gentlemen of the law normally passively spectated when the painter beat up his hapless wife advising instead that as the wife, she must practice "give" while the husband took. That day perhaps they had had too much of sickle-waving booze-induced bravado.<br />
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The painter was arrested and charged with creating public disorder, threatening with a dangerous weapon etc etc. Public drunkenness is NOT a crime here; on the contrary it is required of all Tamil men. He was booked under a number of offenses and carted off to a prison. <br />
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After a week or so the cougar brought news that the bail has been set at ten thousand rupees, a near-impossible sum for the wife to raise. She advised the wife to raise yet another loan and bail him out.<br />
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The wife did. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-46483285392948093842015-01-21T22:30:00.001+05:302015-01-21T22:30:54.010+05:30A FIDDLER ON THE FLOOR AND A DANCER ON THE ROOF<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">"When the only sound in the empty street</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">That belong to a lonesome cop </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">I open shop",</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Wrote Cole Porter </span><br />
<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white;">"When the moon so long has been gazing down</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="background-color: white;">On the wayward ways of this wayward town</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="background-color: white;">That her smile becomes a smirk, </span></span><br />
<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white;">I go to work"</span></span><br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">I dont know what town Porter had in mind. New York? LA? Peoria, IL, perhaps? </span></span>He may well have meant Chennai had he known my neighbours.<br />
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One of my neighbours goes to work long before the moon begins to gaze down on the wayward ways of this wayward town, and well after its smile becomes a smirk. But not before his morning ablutions which, most days, include a stern dressing down of his hapless wife. These days the prayers have doubled to accommodate the ones meant to speed up his father's recently departed soul which, without some help, might lose its way and hover around its earlier haunts. With nine ancestors waiting for a forward nudge from the most recently departed soul, the latter's failure to join the astral queue could be calamitous.<br />
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Then he begins to fiddle. Literally. My neighbour is in the process of learning, at an advanced age, to play the violin. His effort is commendable. His talent, alas, is not. More often than not he also sings the notes he is supposed to play on the violin. His stentorian voice lends itself admirably to scaring a business rival or a hapless wife, but not to the tonal discipline of Indian classical music. "Off-key" is putting it mildly. 100% for effort, 0 for results. Now I understand how Lord Macaulay's view of Indian music ("caterwauls") might have been formed.<br />
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There are no cops, lonesome or otherwise, leaden-footed or light of feet, on our street at night. Occasionally they cruise by in their newly acquired SUVs with the flashing blue and red beacons. Mercifully their sirens don't work owing to their serviceable batteries having been exchanged for the dead ones in their bosses' private vehicles. Else they would have been turned on at full volume; we in Chennai do like to be heard. In general our Chennai cops are too busy attending to VIPs when not consuming free food or alcohol to plod the lonesome streets.<br />
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The heavy tread of heavy feet are those of the neighbour living directly above me. It is an interesting household which appears to be founded on the principle that a working marriage requires the spouses spending the least time together - a very sound idea, I might add. It is also a household that, like vampires, appears dead through the day and comes alive only at night. The latter is interesting in a town where the days ended at 6 p.m. and only lights went out at night.<br />
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Things have changed a bit since Madras became Chennai and coding took over from manufacturing as the principal provider of family incomes. With an eatery around every street corner - some streets have quite a few - eating out has become the main post-sunset activity. It is only second to drinking. Drinking here is not to loosen inhibitions and tongues sufficiently enough to have a good time fully conscious; the object of drinking in Chennai is to get inebriated as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It is all about the efficiency of inebriation. All that malarkey about fruity notes, smoky hints and clean finishes are for those who do not care for the quick oblivion that the Chennai man favours. But I stray.<br />
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The lovely family above me comes alive after 11 p.m. While my fiddling neighbour has gone to bed, no doubt after administering another tongue-lashing to his wife, the one above begins to dance. Sometimes it's ballet leaps, sometime the rhythmic Kathak and yet some other times a Bharathanatyam piece, but always involving heavy foot-stamping. I used to think that they played squash in their living room, but the arrangement of furniture ruled that out, unless of course they have invented an interesting variation involving playing the ball off items of furniture. The later the hour, the more intense it gets.<br />
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Is it, as Miroslav Holub put it, "<a href="http://poem4us.blogspot.in/2012/02/love.html" target="_blank">hundred miles from wall to wall</a>", recalling a love that was lost? Or two? Or is one running from it while the other is chasing? Whatever it is, for me it is an "eternity and a half of vigils" every night.<br />
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Believe me when I say it is NOT beautiful.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-61786378210508950602015-01-17T12:33:00.002+05:302015-01-17T12:33:42.468+05:30MORAL RELATIVITY<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"None of the actors in the programme encourage or endorse smoking" proclaimed a public interest advert on the telly, more out of a legal obligation to do so than out of conviction. I would imagine that it should be quite easy <i><b>not to show</b></i> on-screen smoking or drinking. Don't non-smoking villains and vamps exist? Judging by Indian movies, it would be difficult to conceive of villains and vamps who do not smoke or drink.<br />
<br />
Could it be that the Indian mind associates smoking or drinking with badness / moral decay?<br />
<br />
When I was growing up in Madras, the association between smoking and eternal damnation was very clear and straight forward: most believed, especially among Tambrams, that smoking led to drinking, drinking led to chasing women and chasing women led straight to Hell. Mathematically inclined that the Tambrams were (and still are), the equation was plain and simple: Smoking equals Damnation with a constant thrown in (S = D+k).<br />
<br />
Not chasing women might have gone down well with the 60's and earlier generations, but today it might well be symptom of a malaise deserving a worse Hell than the normal one in the Tambram scheme of things. This raises the notion of different grades of Hell - a relatively less disagreeable one for minor infractions, worse ones for husband-beaters (wife-beating seems to be approved behaviour), progressing on to the deepest and hottest level for those guilty of "Moral Turpitude".<br />
<br />
What constituted the aforementioned MT changes with the times. All you have to do is invent worse forms of behaviour for previously unacceptable ones to become tolerable ones. Standards of "public morality" and public behaviour are lightening. Faced with the spectre of same-sex couples in PDAs, the general public is willing to "tolerate" PDAs between opposite sexes. I also see around me attitudes to inter-caste or inter-religious marriages relaxing - the possibility of the son / daughter taking up with a man / woman boggles many a mind.<br />
<br />
The opposite is sometimes true, as captured in a mischievous email joke about a grandmother's relief that her grandson's love interest is a boy from the same caste as opposed to a girl from a different caste!<br />
<br />
The truth is when faced with a worse possibility, we are willing to accept what was earlier unacceptable.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-37722459439869464102015-01-11T14:32:00.000+05:302015-01-11T14:32:10.199+05:30HOW TO ......?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is going to be easily the shortest post I've ever made, including the title.<br />
<br />
I was trying to understand how to speed up my laptop running Ubuntu Linux 14.04 loftily named "Trusty Tahr". For those uninitiated into the wonderful world of Discovery Channel, Tahr is a a sort of mountain goat, only bigger and very elusive. I once spent nearly a whole day on the misty slopes of Anai Mudi near Munnar hoping to get a glimpse of one. To the considerable irritation of the children there was only mist rolling in, they were getting very hungry, and our driver was getting increasingly concerned about the visibility on the way back if the most kept rolling in. There was no Tahr, trusty or otherwise.<br />
<br />
Be that as it may, I was trying to understand how to speed up my tiring old laptop with a spanking new version of Linux. As in all other matters, the best way to do anything today is to start with Google. Time was when we would start with a "Vinayagar suzhi" or a "Ganesh doodle" and hope the elephant-headed god would guide all our endeavours, such as untangling the mysteries of high-school history paper or the esoteric world of Quantum Electro Dynamics.<br />
<br />
It is a different matter that God helps those who help themselves and that I did not help myself very much when it came to QED which was very different from faffing on about historical events. Besides, I was artistically and faith-wise challenged and couldn't do the special doodle signifying Lord Ganesh. It was thus that I was reduced to figuring out how to lend more money to those that didn't deserve it instead of figuring Higgs Boson's behaviour.<br />
<br />
The ever-helpful Google got to work even as I started typing and by the time I had gotten to "How To" it had come up with the following suggestions:<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>How to kiss</li>
<li>How to get pregnant</li>
<li>How to lose weight</li>
<li>How to download Youtube videos</li>
</ul>
I am stunned by the genius of the good people at google. Not only they knew how to lead me to the answers I was seeking, but they could also list the answers before I completed my questions and put things in the proper sequence as well: kisses (presumably google kisses happen only between members of the opposite sex) could lead to pregnancy (eventually) which leads to baby fat, necessitating the loss thereof. Eventually one would need to download Youtube videos to learn parenting, to keep the little ones entertained (in order to get some "mum-time"), keep the mothers entertained, and finally to learn how to manage the little monsters.<br />
<br />
My mind boggles to think what my grand parents, parents of a whole dozen, could have achieved had they Googled and not just doodled.<br />
<br />
As for the Tahr, it remains as slow as the real one is elusive.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-4264916701717387742015-01-06T23:04:00.000+05:302015-01-06T23:04:09.873+05:30AIR INDIA ANTICS 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Air India today cancelled its Chicago flight in favour of the one to New York. This reminded me of what happened a decade ago. By the way, after my recent travails with a ticket to Chicago on Air India - such as an economy ticket costing as much as a business class one, but with only economy class privileges - I was happy I was not booked to fly on that airline after all.<br />
<br />
To the decade-old story:<br />
I was booked on Air India in order to attend the once a year board meeting in Paris (France, not Texas). I always had a healthy dislike of Air India, but had to fly the airline thanks to our collaborators who were constrained to only use it for overseas travel. I was not a big fan of Air France either but it had its positives: the wine was excellent as was the champagne; it arrived in Paris at 8 a.m. enabling a full day at work.<br />
<br />
I was even less fond of Delta, which I sometimes found myself flying unwittingly without meaning to, thanks to their code-sharing arrangement with Air France. While it was generally far easier to be understood on Delta - if you spoke American, that is - the wine was far inferior and the beer execrable. How the Americans call Budweiser a beer is something I'll never fathom. But the clincher against traveling Delta was their security arrangements at Paris airport. While Delta and Air France passengers to Bombay / Delhi boarded the same aircraft operated by one or the other, the security that one had to go through was like chalk and cheese, the cheese being AF.<br />
<br />
Once the Delta security staff was so offensive that I swore I shall never travel Delta if I could afford another airline. The African-American security officer asked me all sorts of offensive questions and it sounded as if he doubted my right to fly Business and indeed fly at all instead of riding a bullock cart. Some say Indians look down upon African Americans. I'd say that we look down upon them and they resent us. I think the officer was enjoying himself, over and above the call of duty. While the Delta security staff were trying their best to discourage passengers traveling Delta, the security queue was getting longer and longer and the danger of missing the flight was getting more real by the second. I feigned an incoming business call, made a smart about-turn and joined the Air France queue and breezed through.<br />
<br />
Traveling Air France had its problems too and little English, albeit cutely accented, was just one of them. Obtaining vegetarian meal was another - whenever I requested it, I was given vegan meals sans everything and alcohol. Usually even these were allowed to be hijacked by some enterprising Jain family in the back of the bus. I am of the view that if God had wanted me to eat raw leaves and vegetables He would have endowed me with four legs, solid molars, four stomachs and a tail. And some horns, while we are at it. All I want is a wholesome meal without any flesh of any sort - walking, flying or swimming - lots of wine and no melted cheese. <br />
<br />
To me the redeeming aspect of traveling Air France, minus Delta of course, was that not once was a flight delayed / cancelled / diverted or postponed or "merged" with another for reasons that the fourth nephew of the third cousin (twice-removed) of M.Mitterand / M.Chirac / M.Sarkozy was travelling or was unable to travel on it. If one were sufficiently handsome in some dissipated French way, one did get extra attention from the stewardesses. That didn't matter to me since they were all matronly and past their sell-by date in this route. Flights were cancelled / delayed / diverted for reasons that the Unions were up in arms against the management, the Government, the people, the Americans, the Europeans, the English, the French, or that it was too cold, or too hot, etc; but never for the reason that someone known to the high and mighty was / wasn't on it.<br />
<br />
Back to Air India:<br />
<br />
I was travelling to Paris with our business partners for a board meeting. I wasn't looking forward to this particular visit as it involved the onerous task of chaperoning our board members through Parisian evenings punctuated by mandatory visits to French cultural and gastronomic icons like the Lido, Moulin Rouge, Eiffel tower and sundry Indian restaurants. Some times it got particularly embarrassing as when the topless and feathered Lido girls decided to high-kick in our face. But all that was after we landed at Paris. First we had to get there.<br />
<br />
We boarded the flight at Mumbai to be informed that there would be a "technical delay". We settled in and started reading - mostly fiction regarding how we were going to make our firm the biggest and the baddest. The flight purser turned up to shoo us from our business class seats - to the First class. We were quite pleased at this good fortune and assumed our new seats before the purser changed his mind. Thereupon he uncorked some champagne and offered it to us which was a bit surprising considering it was 9 a.m. The purser might have been used to the French ways like drinking champagne at 9 a.m. but we were all of solid middle class stock, mostly Tambram, and the only thing we drank at that time of day was holy water (prasadam in other words).<br />
<br />
Notwithstanding our protests that it was too early for a drink, the purser managed to persuade one or two weak ones among us and grabbed one himself. Proceeding to make himself comfortable in a nearby seat, he started regaling us with idle chat and gossip. To remind the pest of his station I inquired about the delay and when the steering might be fixed so we could get airborne. He floored me saying "there is no technical problem with the plane". Seeing the look of surprise on my face he proceeded to refill his champagne flute and explain what was really going on.<br />
<br />
It seems that the previous day's flight had been cancelled due to "technical reasons". The passengers from that flight had been accommodated in our flight which explained our being bumped up to first class. The delay was due to boarding these passengers. Assuming a conspiratorial look, he further explained that after our flight took off, the previous day's aircraft would effect a miraculous recovery and would be fit to fly later in the day. Minus fare-paying passengers of course. The simpleton that I was, I pointed out the illogicality of this whereupon he gave a pitying look and explained further: a certain minister would make a last minute booking for him and his family from Mumbai to New York and the Jumbo jet capable of carrying 400+ passengers would take off with about 40 members of the Mantriji's family.<br />
<br />
The twists and turns of the story of the delayed flight beat anything I had read until then; even our own stories to our Board.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-41168500112173496162015-01-06T16:12:00.001+05:302015-01-06T16:12:30.888+05:30AIR INDIA ANTICS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
No, I did not misspell "antiques" and this post is not about the cabin crew of the said airline, although they (commonly referred to as "aunties" in a sexist fashion) deserve that sobriquet. <i>That</i> will be the subject of a future post.<br />
<br />
Air India is a wonderful airline, no doubt, and one that despite all odds continues to fly. But its connection with business or economic logic is tenuous at best. How else could one explain the largest orders ever by an airline even as it was going down the drain, without a clear or viable turn-around plan? I should think it is Hope that is not only keeping Air India, the corporation, afloat but also its planes flying. The God of Hope must be smiling on Air India in the most indulgent and benign way as if it were His/Her favourite child.<br />
<br />
I mentioned something about the airline's tenuous connection with logic earlier. Indians in general have a tendency to replace Logic with hope and myth. Even by those standards what I saw today must come as egregious lack of logic and business sense, not to mention extreme customer-unfriendliness.<br />
<br />
Having become what is delicately referred to as a "Senior Citizen" I thought that it is only reasonable that I reap the benefits of this tag. By the way, in India definition as to who is a "senior" itself is not unique; it depends on whom you ask: for the Tax Man it is 65, for superannuation from Government service it is 60 (in the Private Sector it is 58 and at least one bank puts you to pasture at 52), for the Railways it is 60 for men and 58 for women and so on; for the general public it is the appearance of white hair or disappearance of hair altogether; for the young it is anyone over 25, and so on.<br />
<br />
So I surfed Air India's site in order to get myself a deal on account of my being of a certain age. What I discovered was nothing short of amazing. Whenever I book myself on a train and procure my tickets on line, the initial sticker shock is alleviated by the various concessions accruing thereon, namely 40% off on account of my Senior status and 50% off for my wife on account of her being a Senior and a woman. Thus I am able to travel in a class couple of rungs above what my wallet would otherwise permit. This class offers me air-conditioning, cushioned seats, a coupe with lockable doors, a "Western" toilet that is slightly less smelly than the "Indian" one, and tomato soup with bread-sticks.<br />
<br />
I was licking my lips in anticipation of a sticker shock and the immediate alleviation thereof at the Air India site. I am not a sadist and do not enjoy pain in any form. Truth be told, I am afraid of doctors' needles and take injections or permit drawing of blood only when the alternative is too dire to contemplate. The licking of lips was on account of the anticipated exemption from full fare. It is like buying gadgets at a discount and feeling you have saved money. The elation of paying less than the sticker price is unbeatable. I am sure you are familiar with ads that encourage you to spend (on things that you dont need) in order to save.<br />
<br />
The "normal" fare to Delhi at the Air India site was on the wrong side of Rs.8000/- Confident that this will be pared down to about Rs.4000/- or so on account of my Senior status, and happy that the savings so effected would afford me a couple of new books or a Solid State Drive for my old laptop, I proceeded to check the fare for seniors. When I did so the sticker shock was <i><b>elevated</b></i>, not alleviated. Even allowing for the fact that in some parts of India <i>alleviated</i> is pronounced <i>elevated</i>, this elevation was distressing.The price for seniors was more than 17000/-.<br />
<br />
Concerned at this fast developing hole in my finances, I decided to heed the exhortations of the adverts and save by spending more. I went <i>International</i>. I checked the prices for a flight to the US of A. Being Indian every inch, Air India, in true Indian tradition, offered different classes of economy travel. India without class hierarchy is like Scotch without alcohol. AI offered Economy, Super-value Economy and Super-saver Economy. Ditto for business class. You might feel that a person of parlous finances such as I ought not to even <i>think</i> of Business class. But, as a certain web-based seller claims, you save more by spending more.<br />
<br />
Sanity and reality were soon asserting themselves and I started considering business class only part of the way and back of the bus the rest of the way. Airlines are set in their thinking and do not permit flexible-seating like business part of the way and back of the bus thereafter. They are not even willing to consider one class for one sector and another thereafter. On a non-stop flight this would not work of course and a different approach is called for.Very unimaginative lot, the airline managements are. I can imagine a cabin attendant waking one up to inform that one's time at the front is up and that its time for a stint at the back of the bus. Radical, yes. Impractical, may be. But sensible. Of course they might need to employ some hefty bouncers to escort passengers reluctant to make the switch mid-flight.<br />
<br />
Since I prefer a non-stop flight, and since airlines are hidebound and unimaginative, I can't travel Business until I am over the Black Sea and economy thereafter. I have to consider business class all the way on the way out and economy on the way back. Air India has three classes of Economy and three of business, enough to satisfy even the most fastidious and picky of travelers. Here is where things get interesting: the cheapest economy is about 46K each way. If I travel lowest economy both ways, I can travel for 46K +46K. If I choose a higher class on the way out, the cheapest economy class fare on the return journey changes upwards to keep pace. For example if I choose a business cabin costing 117K on the way out, the simple economy costing 46K becomes 117K on the way back. Please explain that to me.<br />
<br />
I can only surmise that being the national airline of a Socialist Republic, Air India feels obliged to practice socialism, not merely pay lip service to the idea. In this scheme of things it is time Seniors, having earned a living for a considerable period and having enjoyed many privileges paid for by the employers, paid up for others; hence the Senior "Concessional Fare" being twice the normal one. In the same vein, if I can afford Business class, that puts me way above the average Indian in terms of financial standing and consequently I must pay more for Economy.<br />
<br />
That's the essence of socialism, isn't it, from each according to his ability?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-45562118811392354072014-11-08T11:29:00.000+05:302014-11-08T11:29:28.160+05:30MORE ON MORINGA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4810204582287085321#editor/target=post;postID=8880185257305517855;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=1;src=postname" target="_blank">Some time ago I waxed eloquent</a> - if not exactly waxed, sang paeans of praise to - on the humble Moringa Oleifera, aka Murungai kai in Tamil and how it has suddenly been discovered by the West to be the latest "Superfood" in an unending chain of "New", "Magical", or "Super" foods.<br />
<br />
The principal requirement for an object to belong to this category appears to be the ability to violate the laws of Physics and Nature; ie, provide something for nothing, mainly gain without any pain (like weight-loss without control over what and how much we eat, how much we exercise, etc). Moringa is only the latest in this genre which has at various times included Acai Berry, African Mangoes, and the like, and which to the best of my memory was started off by the Kiwi Fruit in the 1970s.<br />
<br />
To those who doubted my ability to divine the future trends and stay a few steps ahead of the rest, I would recommend<a href="http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/Food/musings-on-the-moringa/article6574663.ece?ref=sliderNews" target="_blank"> <b><i>this article</i></b></a> where the redoubtable Ms Vandana Shiva of sundry causes, mostly of the green persuasion, expatiates on the humble Moringa.<br />
<br />
At a tangent, I am somewhat intrigued by the title that has been bestowed upon the aforementioned Ms Shiva (bestowed, or self assumed? My guess is the latter); she has been described as a <i style="font-weight: bold;">"seed activist". </i>What exactly is a seed activist? What does a seed activist do? Theses questions have been agitating my mind since I read this latest neologism, egregious even by the standards of global activism. The only satisfactory answer I have come up with so far is <i><b>a seed activist</b></i> is one who sows the seeds of agitation and sits back and enjoys the fun in considerable inactivity.<br />
<br />
Enjoy reading more about Moringa; perhaps even a Sunday lunch of Murungai Sambar.<br />
<br />
As for me I shall for ever live in the shame of not knowing that benzoil is derived from Moringa - I used to think it was the manufacturer-recommended engine oil for a Mercedes Benz.<br />
Thank you Ms. Shiva for<i> </i>being my<i> knowledge activist!</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-88801852573055178552014-09-14T00:09:00.000+05:302014-09-14T00:09:38.006+05:30THE HUMBLE SUPERFOOD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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I have just been
informed that a humble veggie that we were forced to consume and one
which was associated with frugality - even poverty - in my
childhood, has now become the new superfood.</div>
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<br />
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It is known as
Moringa Oleifera in botany. In Tamil (“Tamizh” in Tamizh) it is
the humble Murungai Kai; the Latin Moringa doubtless derives from the
Tamizh “Murungai”, “kai” being the generic Tamil (?) suffix
for any green vegetable which is not a root. Roots get their own the
suffix “kizhangu”. If non-Tamil speakers can – and dare -
pronounce it right they can call them whatever they want (“kizangoo”,
which is what I most often hear, just wont do). Given that there is
no known equivalent in any language other than Tamizh (ah ha, it was
coming, wasn't it?) for the sound loosely represented by “zh”,
those that dont speak Tamizh get it wrong. Heck, even the Tams get it
wrong most of the time – they say “kilangu”, or even the
typically Madrasi or Anglo-Indian “Kaing”.
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Moringa, I am told,
is a family by itself and thus quite unique. We Tams are quite unique
too: we arguably speak the oldest language, which has no known
progenitor and only a couple of derivatives, with hardly a change
over centuries. The various arguments that the Northerners might
advance to deny us our uniqueness not withstanding (all of which are
specious anyway), we and our Murungai Kai are unique, one of a kind
and very very tasty. Alas I cannot say the same for Tam clothing
sense.</div>
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Back to the humble
Moringa.</div>
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For the sake of
simplicity and ease of writing I shall use the Latin version Moringa
rather than the Tamizh Murungai Kai in the following paragraphs. This
in no way represents my preference for Latin over Tamizh. Besides,
Moringa sounds very much like how this veggie is colloquially known
in the land of the Tamizh people. Some might quibble that it is a pod
and not a veggie; to them I say botany does not matter when something
tastes as good as this.
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Murungai Kai Sambar
is without doubt one of the high points of Tamizh cuisine if not its
most evolved and most subtle expression. This, in English, is Moringa
in a Tamrind-and-Coconut sauce, but that description doesn't even
begin to do justice to what a “Sambar” is. Given that English
Cuisine is an oxymoron it is not surprising that the English language
is inadequate to describe the subtleties of Tamizh cuisine. If I am
permitted to be factually correct but politically incorrect I might
say “Tamizh Brahmin” cuisine (TamBram cuisine for short).
</div>
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<br />
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The Sambar, most
often incorrectly pronounced “Sam-burr” by the ignorant
Northerners, does use Tamrind and Coconut as two of its ingredients,
but that's is not all. To call it it a “sauce” is sacrilege,
knowing what the English sauce is all about. This is not the forum
for discussing the culinary intricacies of Sambar, the benefits of
using cold-pressed sesame oil as against a generic “refined”
vegetable oil, or the use or the absence of Fenugreek seeds or a
pinch of Asafoetida; nor for using Tamarind instead of Kokum
(Garcinia Indica) favoured by those from our Western Coast; nor for
singing the praises of a significant regional variation thereof
involving the use of sour “buttermilk”. You just have to accept
it on my authority as one possessed of a subtle palate.
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The very popular
Sambar comes in a variety of flavours involving a wide range of
different vegetables from the humble potato to the delightful horse
radish. Once, in England, when shopping for the latter root to make
sambar with, I was countered with a question if I kept horses.
Apparently people there didnt eat radish in any form and I didn't look
like the “horsey” type. I was also asked the same question when I
was shopping for Oats to make breakfast porridge with. Suffice to say
I wasn't the “horse-keeping” type and it showed. I stopped
shopping at that particular supermarket which appeared to favour
horse-owners over normal people.
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<br />
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Moringa is truly the
food of the indigent. It grows on a tree which grows all over the
south of India. The tree gives of itself liberally and its leaves are
also used frequently in our cuisine. The tree however has a secret or
two which you ignore at your own peril: you never climb it, for even
the strongest-looking branch or limb is apt to break without any
notice at the application of the smallest of loads. It also has
another trick to protect itself from the depredations by humans or
animals: it harbours a certain variety of caterpillars (known in
Tamizh as “Kambli Poochi” or “woolly insect”) which appear to
find its leaves irresistible.
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In certain seasons the Moringa tree is covered in these caterpillars with stiff
wool-like bristles (hence the sobriquet). Woe betide those who came
in contact with these larvae; “itching” doesnt even begin to
describe it. The unfortunate humans usually end up with painful welts
and swear off Moringa for the rest of their lives. The trick for
harvesting the veggie is to attach a sharp sickle to the end of a
long bamboo stick and cut the pods out from their branches from a
safe distance – safe from falling branches or caterpillars. Or you
can take the easy way out and shop for them. However, horsey
supermarkets do not stock this veggie.</div>
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The leaves are
similarly safely harvested, making sure that no larvae are present
when one cooks them. This is a useful precaution for I have seen
nothing, absolutely nothing, molest those larvae. Not even the crows
which are generally voracious and are not very discerning eaters. I
might have seen a foolish crow or two trying the woolly larvae one
time; but they never returned for second helpings. The dead crows in
our garden were probably dead from consuming this larvae and had
nothing to do with the catapult I used to wield with considerable
skill.
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The leaves were
supposedly possessed of cleansing properties; useful in cleansing the
remnants of unwisely large and rich meals, that is. Monthly
administration of these leaves was as much part of my childhood as
after-school exercises in arithmetics or Algebra. I am sure that
Srinivasan Ramanujan was fed more than his share of Moringa in his
childhood giving him a certain abnormal facility with numbers. Given
his claim that certain goddess spoke to him in his dreams offering
solutions to mathematical exotica, I am equally confident that those
leaves he was fed were not very well cleaned of the woolly larvae. It
is surprising that he did not have any offspring, though.</div>
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Surprising, because
the humble Moringa pod is considered a substance that inflamed a
man's base instincts. It is supposed to be avoided during the times
when one's thoughts are supposed to turn towards spiritual matters
and away from temporal stuff. Even today many elders avoid this
veggie on holy days of the Hindu calendar. I am unaware if its
purported aphrodisiacal properties are based on facts or are merely
myth. It is certainly not phallic in looks unless of course one were
ignorant or optimistic enough to imagine a male organ of 20 inches in
length (in which case its girth would disappoint).
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This is not a
vegetable that lends itself easily for the making of a “vathal”,
another TamBram specialty. A vathal, literally, is a sun-dried vegetable. Careful as they are, TamBram families usually bought green
veggies when the latter were in season and the portion surplus to the
day's requirement was sun-dried for use during the off-season. With a
veggie like the Moringa, which had a thin layer of pulp inside the
fibrous and tough outer layer, the sun-drying eliminated the pulpy
layer as well as its delicate flavour. But still some
sun-dried it for future use. They were mostly the Iyengars.</div>
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It is said that if
some one could tease a yarn out of a stone or sun-dry a Moringa,
he/she has to be an Iyengar. These Vishnu-worshipping sub-set of
TamBrams produced no Nobel Winners but did produce a few outstanding beauties. It
is generally believed that the Iyers had the brains but Vishnu
favoured his devotees with the looks. During the ninth and tenth
centuries these two sects were at each other's throats and even took
part in palace intrigues of the Chola dynasty. In more recent times
the Iyers have focussed on migrating to America and the Iyengars on
making desiccated veggies and succulent women.</div>
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Imagine my surprise when recently I
read that the humble Moringa is the latest superfood, imbued with all
sorts of exotic goodnesses and that discerning and health conscious
Americans are taking to it.
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Something tells me
that it is not for its alleged cleansing properties.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-11994927064790209232014-04-10T14:04:00.001+05:302014-04-10T14:04:54.446+05:30A VISITOR<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is not yet another rant about people dropping in unannounced at all times of the day (or night for that matter). Don't get me wrong - they continue to do so with the regularity, lack of consideration, and a sense of entitlement that only Madrasis can muster. Ubiquity of fixed line phones and the near-universality of mobile phones appear not to have made one iota of difference to their visiting behaviour, which you may recall, is to arrive at any time of the day without so much as a phone call expressing their intention to do so. Some times they call us after getting no response to ringing our doorbell. So it cannot be the cost of a phone call that deters them from making that call <i>beforehand</i>. It must be a sense of entitlement to be received as a guest should be. <i>Athithi Devo Bhava</i> and all that.<br />
<br />
Unannounced visits can be especially embarrassing; embarrassing to us, that is; the visitors are never embarrassed and are possessed of a sang-froid usually associated with cuckolding Frenchmen caught in the act. Our respective schedules are literally as different as night and day. For example, most of the visitors have had their "meals" or lunch when they arrive; we are just about contemplating breakfast which occasionally may involve eggs which is a big no-no in Tambram households. Sometimes they arrive at their "tiffin" time which is our lunchtime. We are expected to offer "tiffin" at that hour, but we are too tired and in need of a short postprandial nap to bother getting back into the kitchen. They are offended at such patent lack of courtesies, and we are offended that they are offended, and so on.<br />
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There is a school of thought, of which my father is a firm adherent and a vehement proponent, that family means not having to say they are coming. I am unable to summon up any level of enthusiasm for this view which he attributes to my "westernized" outlook and decades of absence from Madras. He dissociates himself from my decidedly family-unfriendly ways by telling callers - there are some misguided elements in this city who do call to check our convenience - that they can come anytime with an emphasis on "anytime". So far subtle hints or even brazen ones have failed to effect a change in the visiting behaviour. I suspect that their sense of entitlement far outweighs any guilt at not having called before. This is what results from a life based on self-denial.<br />
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Be that as it may.<br />
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Last evening I had an unannounced visitor. Given that Elections are around the corner this in itself is not an unusual event. Elections are occasions when people who dont think you matter come to seek your support; just in case. The visit itself was not a surprise. Of course they did not call - this is Chennai after all.<br />
Around 7 p.m. the doorbell rang and I attended to it in my sweat-soaked tee. Outside stood a well-groomed middle-aged man and he was whispering something in tones suggestive of great reverence and awe. He was accompanied by our watchman or gatekeeper. "Gatekeeper" may be an overly-optimistic description of the role he plays for he does nothing to keep the gate; ie, he does nothing to screen visitors. He is like a traffic policeman who has been told that he can only direct traffic one way or another but not stop it in any direction.<br />
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This chap, the gatekeeper, is not a loquacious sort. He is the laconic type. He is also an ace mumbler. He uses his mumbling to great effect. When he wants to claim having informed you of something that does not want you to know, he mumbles in a most incomprehensible way. He would have made an outstanding senior Babu in our government. Think of him as Sir Humphrey Appleby with a pronounced speech defect. When he is asking for a raise or a day off he can be remarkably precise and clear. He also never smiles. Never ever. Not even when his son recently got engaged to be married and, I suspect, even when his own marriage was fixed. Last evening he had on a dazzling million dollar smile. If he had had more hair on his head or his mustache been darker, he could have passed for a Tamil starlet who just got her big break. He was smiling like a "light-boy" on a '60's movie set who got lucky with the Great Diva who made a career out of cavorting with a geriatric "hero" when not getting wet under a waterfall.<br />
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Imagine the scene, if you can, that confronted me as I opened the door: a well-dressed man speaking in hushed tones of reverence and awe, accompanied by our watchman who was smiling from ear to ear. After requesting a few repeats I gathered that some VIP had arrived in our compound and was requesting our presence. Despite the hushed reverential tones and the presence of a beaming Cheshire cat I was in no doubt that it was a demand rather than a request. Quite an art, that is: sounding reverential towards one's master (Mistress in this case) even as one sounds imperious towards the subject of one's address. It was so breathtakingly audacious that I was gobsmacked and was without a response other than, "yes of course, I shall come down to meet her".<br />
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When the door shut, and all my rage at the political class boiled over. After a short but sharp rant against them I went back to watching the mating habits of crab seals in the southern ocean when the doorbell rang again.<br />
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The flunky was there again, as was the Cheshire cat. There were two young women too, each holding a large stack of hand-bills. And there was this middle-aged woman who managed to look imperious even as she was pretending to be supplicating, and left you in no doubt that while she was obliged to put on the latter mask, the former was what she really was. The flunky once again went into a mumbling introduction. The Cheshire cat was speechlessly beaming away. She cut the flunky short and introduced herself as "the Artist's daughter".<br />
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Now in contemporary Tamil the word "artist" is exclusively used to denote a certain screenplay writer of the sixties who parlayed his screen-writing skills into a successful political career and unimaginable wealth even as the Cheshire cats remained poor as ever. They are still smiling, which beats me for they have nothing to smile about. Just so there was no doubt as to who I was dealing with, the lady added for good measure that she was the sister of a politician named after a great Soviet Dictator.<br />
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They are so confident of winning, that the rivals headed by the Diva with a penchant for standing under waterfalls did not even bother to show up and ask for my vote.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-71170876464558995362014-02-24T15:34:00.002+05:302014-02-24T15:34:52.989+05:30GIVING AND RECEIVING<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The regular readers of this blog might have noticed that after my attempts at waxing poetic about plumbers and (human) plumbing in late November, I have been silent. If you haven't, then you are either irregular or you don't care, neither of which possibility augurs well for my literary ambitions.<br />
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Now this word "irregular" means a lot where I live. Preceded by "highly" it denotes cause for extreme alarm, annoyance and disfavour, as in "what you have done is Highly Irregular". That phrase used to be the death-knell of many a budding career, but with a steep decline in public morals and financial propriety at workplace it is no longer so. Unless you are "Highly Irregular" you are not even trying. It has become a badge of honour just as a Tax Raid signifies having arrived.<br />
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The word is also used to describe someone's bowel habits or in a delicate reference to the possibility of a bun in the oven. Unlike the English the Tamils are not obsessed with the former, perhaps because we are full of it. The latter is a matter of great concern for the mothers of unmarried girls and of anticipation to mums of the married ones. The word "Regular" or its variants are also used by banks in India to refer to the conduct of loan accounts. That was of course before Loans became "Assets" and their condition began to be referred to as "Prime", "Impaired", or "Non-Performing" and Gibberish replaced English as the principal language of Banking.<br />
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Down where we live there is nothing irregular about giving and receiving, though. It is the very basis of all retail therapy in which a certain area of Chennai tops the rest of the country. Accordingly we have created many occasions for giving and receiving. Childbirth, naming of the baby, its first birthday (even when it is given its first rice-feed - feeding rice-based infant formula does not count), various birthdays, what is referred to obliquely as "coming of age" - or its male equivalent the "thread ceremony"- engagement, marriage, getting pregnant, becoming parent(s), men turning sixty, them turning eighty, completing every decade thereafter and finally on being bid the final goodbye, and so on.<br />
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There's a long gap between getting married and the man tuning sixty during which he may not <i>receive</i> gifts; the modern lot celebrate all sorts of events in between like birthdays, promotions at work, successful deal-making and stuff like that, but none of them carry the weight or sanction of tradition. Traditionalist or modernist, he will however be expected to <i>give</i> gifts on various occasions listed above in the lives of those near, not so near, dear, as well as despised ones. Our forefathers knew a thing or two about economics of retail consumption and realized that giving and receiving made the world go round. <br />
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The art of giving - and what a fine art it is - has its own overt and covert rules, practices and traditions. The act of giving is an expression of respect or blessing depending on whether the recipient is superior to the giver in age and social and economic statuses. It must be appropriate to the occasion, and must always reflect the financial position of the giver while being sensitive to that of the receiver. For example back issues of Playboy magazine is not appropriate for the sacred thread ceremony, even though a portion of the cash gifts received may find itself surreptitiously invested thus; a loud Hawaiian party shirt is not an appropriate sixtieth birthday gift.<br />
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A popular gift at weddings is the Taj Mahal. Not the real one, but a miniature look-alike. It symbolizes not only the love between a husband and his wife but also their fecundity - after all Mumtaz Mahal died delivering her fourteenth child. When you have no idea what to gift the couple at an Indian wedding, especially a South Indian wedding, a miniature Taj Mahal is a safe bet. These items come in plastic, plaster of paris, terracotta painted white, or in marble, enclosed in a glass cube or without one, and with or without little blinking lights. When we wed, my wife and I received many Taj Mahals; we remain married but only have two children. Modern couple cleverly get around this problem by prohibiting the giving of gifts, shrewdly guessing that the Indian habit of never going to a wedding empty-handed would result in cash gifts!<br />
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The second most popular wedding gift is the "lemon set" comprising a glass carafe ( brittle plastic is a popular alternative) and six matching glasses. This is expected to enable serving visitors lemonade on a hot summer's day. Whereas one is expected to wear the items of clothing received as gift, Taj Mahals and Lemon sets are marked for recycling; that is, it is perfectly OK to repack them and gift them at another wedding or some such occasion. After all what would anyone do with a dozen Taj Mahals and even more Lemon Sets? One must not be too disappointed to see a Ta Mahal gifted at a long ago wedding coming back as a sixtieth birthday gift. What goes around, comes around.<br />
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Sarees and Veshtis (aka Dhoti) are for the close family. These items being open-ended fixed-lengths of fabric, are free-size and can be worn by anyone within a fairly wide range of waist sizes. They are thus ideally suited for recycling, but the eagle eyed females of the species are bound to catch you out if you tried to recycle a saree. The women commit to permanent memory the colour, shade, patterns and fabric of every saree ever gifted and god help you if you tried to recycle one back to her. The Veshti, being white in colour, is difficult to identify as the one you or I gave and is therefore shamelessly recycled. I once tried to set off the inflows of Veshtis with the outflows but the timing went awry and I was left with three dozen Veshtis which was three dozen too many for someone who never wears them. The timing is impossible to get right, so one has to accept a certain idle inventory of veshtis.<br />
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It is mandatory in Southern India to gift women guests of whatever status, rank or relationship with shorter pieces of fabric known as "Blouse Pieces" or fabric to make bodices with. The precise significance escapes me, but I suspect it is a not-so-subtle injunction to other women to cover up and not tempt our men. These items are always recycled. I have noticed, partly with alarm and mostly with glee that the length of fabric so given is shrinking with time and am hoping that I live till ninety.<br />
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Reciprocity rules giving and receiving. As you give, so shall you receive. Quality and quantity of textiles (read veshtis, saris, shirts, etc) given shall determine what you will receive when your turn comes.<br />
To assist in this process, the price tag is thoughtfully left on the gifts.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-30053931486937880672013-11-27T12:34:00.003+05:302013-11-27T12:34:54.305+05:30A POETIC PLUMBER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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As you can see the relationship with my plumber was fraught. Would you blame me for looking for an alternative?</div>
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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:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Dr J. Pablo Neruda</b></span></div>
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Hopefully his parents were better at divining their offspring's talents. Closer reading revealed he was a plastic surgeon, though.<br />
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I think I'll have a nip here and a tuck there.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-58606254165232982002013-11-18T16:24:00.001+05:302013-11-18T16:34:58.404+05:30ODDS AND ENDS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
More odds than ends, really.<br />
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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.<br />
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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....<br />
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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:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_t2OcaiJoypBrNIHtCcoUea06bA8JIPZsUwh6e6zd1n7-kRwszOxEQ7R3ZFGSqVDX9YSuxbjy096ajduC94LDqiRk3sbMtNP8VFJGnWyagPWnPp8Xdm7vZKT5o9TN5fstoUDFKA2XGmY/s1600/Colourful_meal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_t2OcaiJoypBrNIHtCcoUea06bA8JIPZsUwh6e6zd1n7-kRwszOxEQ7R3ZFGSqVDX9YSuxbjy096ajduC94LDqiRk3sbMtNP8VFJGnWyagPWnPp8Xdm7vZKT5o9TN5fstoUDFKA2XGmY/s320/Colourful_meal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Are they promoting a meal <i><b>reddened</b></i> by chillies, or is it a Gujju Thali <i><b>redefined</b></i>? 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.</div>
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I also get excited when I see a "charming" oatmeal breakfast such as this:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0lm5mBKF3ErRwKOWVuIZJPjbMaZljkdR6OuL-ZMQa0rXQAnlWP4-cIE_mqAKBLeyTyyrfE32ZZcjDMsF3d8NyL9wYGV0Q68ewdpkk9UJYcTcKym66LtREc4NESfhXkNa8dyaxc8lain4/s1600/Charming!.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0lm5mBKF3ErRwKOWVuIZJPjbMaZljkdR6OuL-ZMQa0rXQAnlWP4-cIE_mqAKBLeyTyyrfE32ZZcjDMsF3d8NyL9wYGV0Q68ewdpkk9UJYcTcKym66LtREc4NESfhXkNa8dyaxc8lain4/s320/Charming!.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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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.</div>
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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. </div>
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Beschi adopted a Tamil name, Veeramamuni, and translated the "Thiru Kural" into Latin (his adopted name translates somewhat clumsily as <i>The Great and Valiant Saint </i> 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. </div>
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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:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtRHaH7RV4d7lqIitFsNQult5dW8gHNVQ435WTawQBY8Fu5oipP4E1-z7xvEQDWdAPitCUQPEhNA2kBGtgMCAJK0UfbCDlRYr6rjVr6Kz-7XAkSs-4DyiYUUsDAtHZoFmJdJS2zF4kJ3s/s1600/Pasta_Payasam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtRHaH7RV4d7lqIitFsNQult5dW8gHNVQ435WTawQBY8Fu5oipP4E1-z7xvEQDWdAPitCUQPEhNA2kBGtgMCAJK0UfbCDlRYr6rjVr6Kz-7XAkSs-4DyiYUUsDAtHZoFmJdJS2zF4kJ3s/s320/Pasta_Payasam.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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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:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJqyXkJEb-AK26UmvRg-LONixxPmWHAn9FBxva33vY8XYIbsx90oEtyxCOhpSdw48Pxuqh515n9yolx-MNHetINBq1FbqUu3aHHwaFRsURU8NY3o6n9UUTQYNo7_bx_Iau8BShmV64sgc/s1600/SoulFull.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJqyXkJEb-AK26UmvRg-LONixxPmWHAn9FBxva33vY8XYIbsx90oEtyxCOhpSdw48Pxuqh515n9yolx-MNHetINBq1FbqUu3aHHwaFRsURU8NY3o6n9UUTQYNo7_bx_Iau8BShmV64sgc/s320/SoulFull.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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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? </div>
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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:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUp97Z5NyfHvIe-3GQ6Bmbepkf4dmCDK68QKTrsQdh8tXgkKpHuBz0lF71FMmzDlYkKwcHY_sXe0mpJzCl5CbGi6SKZluCBV-hksv0O5yMxwdaxBJBQUzDopr9-m4G6nOSzS1dEYAKNpE/s1600/Royal_Fare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUp97Z5NyfHvIe-3GQ6Bmbepkf4dmCDK68QKTrsQdh8tXgkKpHuBz0lF71FMmzDlYkKwcHY_sXe0mpJzCl5CbGi6SKZluCBV-hksv0O5yMxwdaxBJBQUzDopr9-m4G6nOSzS1dEYAKNpE/s320/Royal_Fare.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Any suggestion as to her resemblance to a largish dumpling is entirely unfounded and totally mischievous.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-90167891675565792072013-11-08T15:16:00.001+05:302013-11-08T15:16:07.502+05:30ECONOMIC SCIENCE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/opinion/yes-economics-is-a-science.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>. 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).<br />
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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. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/nov/06/is-economics-a-science-robert-shiller" target="_blank">Robert Schiller </a>and <a href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.in/2006/05/scientists-and-engineers.html" target="_blank">Gregory Mankiw </a> 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. <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/maybe-economics-is-a-science-but-many-economists-are-not-scientists/" target="_blank">Paul Krugman, the economist-gadfly, sort of agreed with Chetty</a>, 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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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:<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Above all Physics and Mathematics, such as they are, are sufficient for our day to day lives.<br />
Can we say that about economics?<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-60529939686174229122013-11-07T22:48:00.000+05:302013-11-07T22:48:44.741+05:30TERMITES ATE MY SMART PHONE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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Well, they sort of did.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
With more and more people flaunting smartphones I was developing an incurable case of screen envy.<br />
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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.<br />
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That's when a termite army decided to chomp through half my kitchen.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-20848529519497843302013-09-30T13:38:00.004+05:302013-10-01T21:43:18.411+05:30CHENNAI WOMEN LOOK UP TO MEN<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
We men in Chennai have always looked down upon our women. They were the weaker sex. They were also shorter. Women taller than men were not able to find a mate and thus the line of tall women was ended; one by one, until women were noticeably shorter than men such that we men could look down upon our women and the women had to look up to us.<br />
Now we have research validation for this.<br />
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New research says that when women look for love (since we Tamils are coy about sex and mating, we shall use the word “love” instead) they look up to men who are exactly 1.09 times their own height. Those researchers were mostly women who limited their interpretation to physical height. But I know for a fact that women look up to men. Period. At least in Chennai, whose women are said to be the ideal for all of womanhood.<br />
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The same researchers also concluded that men liked to look down upon women and therefore preferred shorter women whose heights conformed to the abovementioned golden ratio. We Chennai men look down upon women in any case, never mind the ratio of 1.09 in heights. Therefore the so called new research findings leave us cold - there is nothing new that we haven’t known from the time of Tamil Sangams and Thiruvalluvar. Our own research has it that they knew everything there was to know but preferred erudite discussions of Tamil poetry to other temporal matters. Being the hospitable people we were and still are, we let the West take the credit for discovering theories of everything. The weak need the reinforcement that public adulation brings. We, on the other hand, are Marathamizhar (brave or stout Tamils; can also be mean "wooden") and are not weak of mind or body. Not for us the Aryan frailties.<br />
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We considered women were the weaker sex notwithstanding their occasional propensity to burn down entire capital cities in response to miscarriage of justice (as in the hanging of the wrong man for alleged theft of crown jewels. The wife herself was wronged by the husband, leaving her for an another woman only to return later, passion and wealth exhausted, but that seemed to matter little to the wife - we train our wives well). Her “purity” (read sexual fidelity to husband) gave her a fiery edge. This purity is a jolly interesting concept. We let our women buy into the idea(l) which ensures that they stay on the straight and the narrow, leaving us men to swan about with as many women as we want. Of course we look down on all of them and they look up to us. This is an age-old arrangement that has worked well for us Tamil men. We reinforce the idea(l) through movies, TV serials popular fiction and personal lives of social and political role models. <br />
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Why change a winning formula?<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-53320638340741537502013-09-15T19:09:00.001+05:302013-09-16T13:54:23.131+05:30CHEATING ECONOMICSIn a previous post I had outlined a specific situation from my life to which I had applied common economic sense. To recap: 1. Our domestic help was highly irregular. 2. She was also deep in debt. I thought these two aspects were connected and that the latter was the cause of the former. Thinking that if her debt problems were solved she would be more regular, I paid off her usurious debt. She stopped working for me the very next day.<br />
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Consider the facts: her crushingly usurious debt was cancelled and replaced with one at a modest rate of interest. Even this cost would be refunded to her once the principal was repaid to me. In short she was getting a interest-free loan without any collateral. Furthermore, by giving her this loan I rendered her employment with me secure at least until the loan was repaid, for if we fired her anytime before, there was no way I could recover the loan. To sum up, she got an interest free loan, a bonus at the end, and job security. Some fall-out benefits too: no more threats from the loan shark and possibly no more beatings from her husband. Why then did this "rational" economic agent act in a patently irrational manner?<br />
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Classical economics has no answer.<br />
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Let us see if the "Game Theory" can explain it. The most famous example of this theory is the Prisoner's Dilemma. In short, two political prisoners are each offered a deal by their captors. By confessing and betraying his friend he will get a lenient sentence and the friend will go to Siberia. Refusal to betray the friend will attract a stiffer punishment. I will not burden you with the detailed logic of it, but suffice it to say that in a situation involving only two prisoners the better strategy is to betray the friend. But In situations involving more than two, it is better to clam up and not betray any one. The latter is like a prison for the real baddies where, if you betray anyone, the others will get you and the best option is maintaining a code of silence.<br />
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The maid situation is somewhat similar. By betraying our trust, she has ensured we will never lend money to any other maid, however dire her situation and howsoever trustworthy she would turn out to be. Actually this is now one of the very first conditions we stipulate in discussions with potential employees. As our story spreads, more and more employers would be put off by the possibility of a loss and would avoid lending any money to their domestics; this in turn would put off the other maids in the market who would turn on the one who was the cause of it all. So according to Game Theory, the maid made the wrong choice. <br />
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You might argue that the maid was ignorant of von Neumann, Nash et al and the theory they developed. You will be right there. But game theory has got embedded in many societies as part of social norms and mores (in order that the collective interests are not affected by the acts of individuals). The above example has a parallel in almost all societies. Simply put, do good unto others so that others can be good to you. There is a negative form of this: don't do bad unto others so nothing bad is done unto you. The maid may have been ignorant of Game Theory but not this injunction which is very strongly inculcated in our communities down south.<br />
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So why did she do what she did?<br />
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"The poor cannot afford finer sensibilities like loyalty, gratitude and the nicer things of social intercourse", I hear you say. Not true. Recent research suggests altruism is hard-wired into human brains. Given that the class of people who do domestic duty all live in urban slums - possibly as one another's neighbours - they are likely to know each other and thus there is a very good chance that their common codes are enforceable quite easily. This should discourage deviant behaviour inimical to the common interest.<br />
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All the more reason for wondering why she did a bunk with my money.<br />
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Recent research (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130905085913.htm) has the answer: people get a "high" when cheating. Cheating may not be necessitated by want or desire. The act of cheating, doing what is not expected, getting something without paying for it, depriving someone else, or outsmarting another gives the perpetrator a high it seems. Which is why billionaires renege on agreements and cheat on taxes; why the powerful are corrupt, etc. Alcohol high costs money and women in this part of the world generally do not imbibe. Cheaper forms of intoxication like grass and weed are youth fad amongst upper classes, but not the lower classes. The only high my ex-maid probably could afford in her problem-prone life was to take off with my money. So when the opportunity presented itself, she did.<br />
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She had the added benefit of having her debts wiped off so she could borrow again, perhaps to buy a flat panel TV.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-72051091332414659652013-09-15T12:56:00.001+05:302013-09-15T15:29:09.908+05:30POOR ECONOMICSThis post's title unabashedly borrows from that of an eponymous book by an MIT economist of Indian origin and his French colleague, also of MIT. Their book was bought by many in India but read by a minuscule proportion of those who bought it. Not that it was dense or esoteric or otherwise incomprehensible; quite the contrary. Indian executives who criss cross the country and beyond in airplanes like to be seen with serious sounding tomes at domestic and international airport lounges and on board flights. There was a time when these gents carried copies of John Grisham's latest as evidence of their erudition. Those times are gone. Now they want to be seen with "serious" books. Once on board, they put away their books and start playing angry birds on their iPads.<br />
<br />
I am proud to say that I have read that book. Perhaps because I don't travel much these days, let alone criss cross the world. My travels are limited to thrice-a-week visits to the veggie shop and daily ones to the gym. Somehow I get the feeling that the crowd I encounter in those places are unlikely to appreciate the kind of serious stuff that one needs to carry to impress. I have acquired credibility at the former by expertly picking okra (ladies' fingers, bhindi) and sagely commenting on the relative freshness of veggies. At the gym I don't even try to get some street-cred with the weights or the treadmill; instead, I sit and do sudoku (an easier version that appears in the local daily).<br />
<br />
The book is all about the economics of poverty and how to make the poor less poor, although the authors go easy on the prescriptive bit, no doubt having learnt from the venerable Mr Jeffrey Sachs and his millennium development goals. It appears that the millennium communities that Mr Sachs poured much money into, in the glare of a million flash bulbs, have ended up poorer or at best have remained the same. Messrs Banerjee and Duflo may be younger, but are certainly wiser than their media-savvy fellow traveller in the treacherous world of the dismal science. I suspect that their title may be a tongue in cheek comment on the state of the dismal science itself. <br />
<br />
A short paragraph about the dismal state of the wanna-be science is in order. It all started with a scottish geezer postulating that supply will rise to meet the demand and prices will drop as supply increased and so on. He invoked an invisible hand to keep all of this working. He did not specify if this invisible was a steadying hand on the till or a hand that dipped into the till now and then. In practice it turned out to be the latter. This theory worked well until the world got bigger, industrial age was born, rapid transportation became the norm, and mass production and paper money were invented. The invisible hand was no more sufficient to explain how things worked - it could barely pass muster in explaining Maradona's goal in a world cup. <br />
<br />
Physics and Chemistry in the meantime were making dramatic progress and could explain a lot of things around us and could even predict many new things. No wonder then that Economists got a case of Physics Envy. Like Physicists did they also wanted to explain the real world in terms of elegant equations, integrate, differentiate, and talk about velocity, acceleration, rate of change of inflation and stuff like that. Economists became good at explaining why something happened the way it did after the event; physicists could predict what would happen next and mostly it did. Some economists tried substituting dense prose for equations but the results remained the same. Then economics borrowed a mathematician turned physicist to posit that it was all a game and tried to formulate a whole new discipline called game theory - the kind of stuff the American forces use to clobber the bad guys with in simulations but which in real life doesn't prevent them getting clobbered by goat herds wielding ancient rifles. Some others are trying to explain, with more success than the mathematically minded it must be said, economic activity in terms of human behaviour. <br />
<br />
Notwithstanding Prose, Physics, Mathematics, Game theory or Behaviourism, the dismal science remains dismal.<br />
<br />
There is a real purpose, apart from an acute case of Economics Envy, why I am posting this. I have a real problem which I want to share and for which I want a solution.<br />
<br />
Our maid was deep in debt as most people of her economic stratum are. She earned about Rs.5000 a month out of which she had to pay interest of Rs.3000 to a loan shark. The remainder was insufficient to feed her child and husband - we provided all her meals every day. From time to time she had to look for other sources of cash to pay off her monthly interest due or simply to feed her family. This and her necessity to hide out when the creditor came calling resulted in her absenting herself from work about two days every week. <br />
<br />
To curb her absenteeism, I proposed a win-win solution (I have Economics envy, remember?). I would pay off her loan shark and become her creditor. My loan would carry not the gazillion percent per annum interest, but a reasonable ten percent. Even that interest would be paid back to her as a bonus when she repaid the loan fully. As a result, her cash flows would improve by about Rs.2000 every month, even after paying the EMIs on the loan I provided. My maid would be free from an exponentially escalating loan and I would be assured of more regular help at home. I would have thought this was a fantastic deal and patted myself on the back for coming up with it. A beneficial corollary for her was not having to face the creditor who was not above roughing her up now and then. She could also be spared beatings from her husband but that was not certain - I surmised he simply loved beating her and would invent some other reason in the absence of dire financial situation.<br />
<br />
Duly money was handed over to the shark and I went round with a huge grin on my face for having shown the way where Sachs et al have failed. Surely, from then on my wife could look forward to regular help at home and I could do sudoku puzzles uninterrupted by the need to help do the dishes. The maid could even look forward to splurging on a movie now and then. Clearly mine was a triumph of logic over the dismal science.<br />
<br />
The maid stopped coming to work from the next day.<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-34417070381669099992013-09-13T14:17:00.001+05:302013-09-13T15:29:00.615+05:30SHOBHAA'S DAYToday must belong to to the formidable Ms Shobhaa De. I am possibly getting my knickers in a twist about this, but Ms.De appears to have discarded hers altogether.<br />
<br />
Ms De, as everyone knows, has some fan following amongst the ignorati in Mumbai and for reasons I cannot yet fathom gets column space in otherwise respectable newspapers. You are not anyone if you don't know who she is. She was a quintessential Marathi mulgi who parlayed her good looks into a successful career in modeling which in turn she used to edit a gossip weekly focusing on the lives and loves of Bollywood glitterati. Or was it a monthly? Whatever it was, it should never have been allowed out in the interest of good taste. <br />
<br />
She married into a once-famous business family whose taste in women was as questionable as its business calls - they are now a has-been business family. Continuing the trend of relentless social climbing she divorced and married more money and became self appointed arbiter of taste and fashion amongst the nouveau riche and wanna-be rich in Mumbai. Harking back to her days as a pretty and petty hack, she wrote many a column, mostly on the doings of the wannabe-rich and the wanna-be famous, bequeathing to Indian English such apt, if somewhat unoriginal, acronyms as SoBo (stands for South Bombay where the glitterati mostly lived). And a a couple of books too, whose themes consisted mainly of permutations and combinations of organs and orifices. <br />
<br />
Her recent avatar has been that of a Social commentator. She also expresses herself on the political and economic situations obtaining in India at this juncture. Her good looks have not faded, despite the relentless march of time. On the looks department, she is like a good vintage wine - sharp edges rounded a bit, well maintained and very much agreeable. her thoughts, though continue to be simple, personality-focused and quite irrelevant.<br />
<br />
Today she has commented on the change of guard at the RBI, the Indian central bank. Of all the things she could think of to comment upon - the credentials of the outgoing and incoming Governors, their track records, the problems that face(d) them and the policy options available to them, etc etc - the one thing she chose to comment on was their respective sex appeal. Raghuram Rajan's looks and purported "hotness" seem the raging issue amongst the Mumbai glitterati, judging by their favourite columnist, socialite, and author. Even for someone of her vacuity this is like plumbing the Pacific depths.<br />
<br />
It is said that the American has sex on his mind, and that the Indian has sex on his mind and fear in his heart. Shobhaa De is the exceptional Indian - she has sex in her heart but has no mind.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-58901761718665488712013-09-11T12:42:00.001+05:302013-09-11T12:42:16.618+05:30HOLI INSIGHTS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Holi '72 finally arrived. It was quite unlike Holi '71. I had attempted to run
away from the latter but it nevertheless caught up with me in an unexpected way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">During ‘71 I was in a hostel that mainly housed engineering
undergrads. While there was nothing
wrong with undergrads per se, even Engineering ones, they were not the same as
us, the Grad students. We were
like a handful of domestic cattle in the midst of a large herd of charging wild bison. They
were rambunctious, energetic, robust, direct, not too subtle in
their ways and were always in various states of high energy. We, on the other hand, were quiet, meek, even studious, world weary and in a state of perpetual stress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Close to the Holi festival in 1971, the undergrads began planning the festivities. It was rumoured most of them would be staying back at the hostel on Holi day. Given that most of them disappeared into town for the smallest break, staying back could only be for very strong reasons. This atypical behaviour of lads who were strongly attracted to the big city lights troubled me. </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Never having celebrated Holi before, my expectations of it were based on hearsay which indicated that it was one wild orgy of colours, noise, intoxicants (especially bhang) and socially-approved groping of women. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I heard whispers suggesting that the reason for the undergrads forsaking a holiday out on town was that dire plans were being hatched in which the chief entertainment was us Grad students. Whispers further suggested that in addition to the traditional sprinkling of colours and water-fights, they intended to dunk us in a mud pool being dug for that purpose. This would be preceded by heavy infusion of bhang, by force if necessary. For a person whose preferred stimulant until that time was tea, this was disturbing news indeed.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The dunking involved the victim being swung
by his feet and arms and thrown into a mud pond. A safe dunking depended on the distance over which the victim was hurled and the exact point of his release by his tormentors. The undergrads’ grasp of the physics of oscillations was tenuous
at the best of times. Liberal
consumption of bhang-infused milk would do nothing to improve their grasp of
Physics, nor their aim. As a result the victim would more likely land on hard turf than in soft mud. The victims' howls of pain and humiliation were supposed to spice up the intoxicated revelries of the day. Given the absence of targets </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">suitable</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">for groping, this was perhaps the best - albeit a distant second - entertainment they could think of.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> So it was good to get away from the Holi
celebrations if one could. That was tricky considering I had no family in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> whose doors I could darken under the
pretext of a religious observance. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It was at this juncture I became aware of a rock climbing
expedition of some sort organized by a Professor. I was not given to much
trekking and was totally unfamiliar with rock climbing, but the chief
attraction of this expedition to me was that it would take me well away from
the campus, mud ponds, and excited undergrads baying for grads in
the mud. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">So rock-climbing I went, early on the morning of Holi day in 1971 long before the undergrads had woken up. The trekking and climbing went off without
a hitch save for Prof getting detached from his safety harness and being in
danger of going over the cliff edge. Somehow we managed to get him
back to safety – he was a good one, you see. Had it been Prof XYZ in that
situation, I am sure we would have been found wanting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">While returning to campus in the evening, we encountered a group
of young boys from a village en route who were wielding not water pistols but tar and brush procured from a nearby road-repair gang. No one had
apparently educated them on the rules of engagement on Holi day which was that
post lunch, all colour and water throwing must cease. Untutored in the finer
social conventions, they were still playing Holi at </span><st1:time hour="17" minute="0"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">5 pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and demanded that we join in, noting that
we were "unmarked". They did offer to exempt us for a tenner each. This
is what I love about </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> - everything could be reduced to a business transaction and
settled with money. A tenner was probably a small price to pay to escape the dire alternative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">When Holi 72 came along, we grad students had our own
separate hostel, and did not have any undergrads hatching diabolical schemes in our midst. The celebrations would be voluntary and with everyone's
wholehearted participation. Those that could not participate physically were,
however, persuaded to contribute monetarily – we had absorbed the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> spirit after all. The planning began a month in advance.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The organizers were not from the North, but appeared to have
intimate knowledge of Holi celebrations in general and about bhang in
particular. They received expert advice from my friends from Geology who were a
cornucopia of information relating to Holi and Bhang. There was one ingredient we
had to do without - women, a commodity in short supply on campus.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Contributions were collected, colours and bhang
procured (and beer too - the organizers skimmed a bit off the collections for a
private party where beer would be served), and ground rules framed and
disseminated. Some of the mess employees were co-opted for the preparations of
the bhang for a liberal share of the intoxicants plus some cash gratuity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The H-day dawned peacefully and quietly in our hostel in contrast to the feverish, high energy and high-decibel activity that was evident in nearby undergrad Hostels. We awoke, breakfasted, read the day's papers and then by
common consent declared the festivities open. There was some perfunctory
splashing of colours and water as a prelude to the main event which was the
consumption of bhang. Everyone had seconds and may be thirds too. Possibly not
N, who was - and remains - a sober sort of a chap. “Brain” was home in Bandra.
When H had his Nth helping there was only a thick sludge of ground bhang left
over. He was grateful for what he could get and helped himself rather
liberally.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Lunch time approached and we showered, ate lunch, and were soon
overcome by sleep by about </span><st1:time hour="14" minute="0"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">2 pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> or so. A loud discussion </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">outside my door, </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">more lively in
my opinion than was warranted, woke me up from my siesta. Upon
investigation I found H and R having a very highly animated discussion on the relative complexities of BCS Theory and A-B Effect. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I don't quite recall exactly what R was on about, but it was something
about two gents named A and B and an eponymous effect in which electromagnetic fields
were doing things they were not supposed to do. H was animatedly explaining how he
was actually seeing some scalars, vectors and matrices jiggling about inside a
crystal, making some theory or the other crystal clear. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">H was a very placid sort of a chap and totally unflappable in any situation, a veritable iceberg in temperament and size. I had never seen H so
excited about anything, not even when his brother bought him</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> a Grundig 8 track spool-type tape
recorder with spools full of Jethro Tull. The bhang had clarified to him things in a
way the faculty had failed to. Life is like that; simplest and the most
unlikeliest of things and situations have the most profound consequences. It
was H's </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Eureka</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> moment. We had to contain his enthusiasm
lest he do an Archimedean dash round the block or, worse, round the campus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Art this point I spied a delegation of Physics girls bearing down
on our hostel and it was clear they were intending to call on us to extend Holi
greetings. I remember going down to the lounge area to receive the ladies and
stall them from proceeding up to "our" wing, leaving R and the rest
of the gang to try and “sanitize” our respective rooms and to bring H down to
ground state. One was flying so high that he was reporting altitude sickness and had to taken to the campus hospital. The visit was managed with reputations fairly intact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">H and R went on to work on BCS theory and AB effect respectively
for their dissertations. At that time I hated it that whereas my encounter with
bhang had left me groggy and grumpy for a week, it had made
it easier for them to comprehend their world. H went on to pursue this line of
inquiry for the rest of his life which was cruelly cut short by illness. His work may yet usher in room-temperature super conductors. R
moved on to other pastures. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">As for me, bhang could not compensate for my lack of critical insights in Physics and therefore I dropped them both soon after the above events.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-13352505496199042162013-09-08T12:57:00.001+05:302019-02-23T23:34:37.865+05:30COMING HOME<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">For me the best part of every semester at college was going home. Not that I missed Madras or home much. Holiday time was an escape from the indescribably bad food in the Hostel. Vacations also provided a respite, however brief, from the onslaught of lectures, assignments, quizzes and deadlines, not to mention doing one's own laundry. Every course was like a rough sea from which one needed a safe haven now and then. Much later I understood that a certain level of stress actually facilitates learning but by then I was too old to care.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">These periodic escapes from the rigours of academia were not without their own set of problems: the chief among them being procuring a ticket on a train going home, which would ordinarily be a very mundane task but which in Socialist India was a great, exciting adventure and an almost insurmountable challenge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">You see, in socialist </span><st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">India,</span></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> a vast majority could not afford a train ticket which probably cost near about a month's earnings of the average villager. In order to even things out – isn’t that what Socialism is all about, evening things out? –government of the day decided to make the act of procuring a ticket difficult for those that could indeed afford the fare. The idea was that if you have got one thing (money) you can’t have the other (ticket), for Socialism is all about keeping everyone in a state of equal deprivation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Either you could not afford a ticket and did not travel or if you dared to travel then you must be made to jump through convoluted hoops at great personal discomfort and financial cost. I cannot imagine, even after all these years, a better way of leveling disparities between people. Pulling poor people up, the oft-suggested cure for poverty, <b><i>could</i></b> work; pulling others down down was <b><i>certain </i></b>to work, easier to accomplish, and a lot more satisfying. Hence <i><b>that </b></i>was the preferred mode of achieving social and economic equality in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> circa 1970. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The politicians and the Babus had their own special quotas in everything from foodstuff to transportation. Trains and planes waited for them to come aboard before commencing their journey – the business of Socialism was a serious one and the movers and shakers of Socialism had to go places and move and shake things for it to work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The act of procuring a ticket involved standing in queues which were long and doubled back on themselves many times over and criss-crossed each other. It was usually very hard to spot which ticket window a queue led to. This was important, for if yours ended in the “wrong” window, you could be buying a ticket to an East-bound train while you actually wanted to go West. You usually discovered if you were in the right queue only upon reaching the window and thrust your application form in the face of a very hassled, harried, resentful and sweaty clerk. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">At the end of the day, usually </span><st1:time hour="17" minute="30"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">5.30 pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, the clerk would shut shop noisily, without a look in your direction and would leave his post, thus nullifying all your efforts of faithfully queuing up the entire day. His preparations for shutting would start as early as 4.30 p.m when a glazed and absent-minded look would descend on him. Thereafter he would orally cross-check four or more times all the details which were in front of him in writing, on the “prescribed” form. Socialism was all about vigilance against waste in general and unnecessary travel in particular and vigilance tended to flag towards the end of a long hot day. If the clerk were a woman the preparations for closing would start an hour earlier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">At the appointed “closing time” everything was “reset” and the progress you had made during the day was erased and you would have to start all over again the next day. Or, like the vast majority of our countrymen, you could choose not to travel. This was Socialism at its best: all were equalized at the end of the day should the aberration of individual progress raise its ugly head during the course of the day. Socialism wasn’t perfect, and could be corrupted in the course of the day, but no longer; by the end of the day the incipient error was noted and rectified and the situation restored to normal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Soviet </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Russia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and Communist China dealt with the problem rather peremptorily: there the government decided when, where, and if at all you could travel. Given to democratic pretenses, Indian government couldn't take away your <b><i>right</i></b> to travel, but they could and did make it damn sight difficult, thus in effect, achieving what they could not mandate but would have liked to. Thus was kept alive the flimsy fiction of Democracy with Socialist underpinnings. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But this kind of Socialism gave rise to an unexpected consequence: Free Enterprise - the very thing that Socialism sought so assiduously to eliminate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In this case the free enterprise involved “touts” substituting for you in the queue until you were ready to take your place - in return for a fee of course. That was the first hesitant step towards outsourcing at we which we have become rather good today. Over time it evolved into the touts actually purchasing the tickets on your behalf – being smart entrepreneurs they figured that the </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">margins</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> were </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">better in end-to-end servicing of clients. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This comprehensive service involved paying the tout a multiple of the official price for the journey. Soon the queues comprised solely of touts, which attracted new rules (like how many tickets a single person can buy at one time) which in turn elicited even cleverer responses from the entrepreneurial touts, which resulted in ever more complex rules, and so on, ad infinitum. It was a Darwinian prey-Vs-predator ball, played out in railway ticket offices all over </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> to the strains of <b><i>L’Internationale</i></b>.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">My friends from Kerala, who were born pink and tended to lean left preferred to thumb their noses at us by traveling in "unreserved" coaches. It was darkly muttered that even they employed touts – a different kind, to occupy the required number of seats while the coaches were still in their sheds. Upon the coach arriving at the station platform, and was still in motion, the intending passengers would dive headlong into them through windows strategically opened at the right time by the touts lurking inside. Reserved coach or otherwise, the touts had to be paid in advance. Instances of money and tout disappearing were not uncommon.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">As for reservations procured at high cost, they were usually not of much value. I was once presented with a very clever argument by a gentleman with his family of nine occupying the seat that had been reserved for me: he claimed that “reservation” was only valid while the train was stationary at the starting point and that once it started moving, those rules did not apply. Surely this guy had read Einstein, and understood that things were different in a moving frame of reference. Years later I read an article </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">on the net</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> by a professor of physics that the principles of Relativity were contained in the teachings of Prophet Mohamed. Perhaps it was written by the man on the train.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">One time a group of us managed to keep away the "unreserved" hordes from form entering our coach by the simple expedient of standing at the door at every station and barring aspirants from getting in, shouting “rejerbed” (= reserved) in what we thought was a North Indian accent. This worked well until we crossed over into the state of Uttar Pradesh at which point our resistance turned futile. With a collective "han, han dekh lenge" (oh yes, we'll see) the mob just burst past us. Things today remain very much the same in that part of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The other difficulty in going home was the journey itself, which could last between 32 and 82hours, depending which train I traveled by. It could be longer if the train was "delayed" which was often the case, especially if I took the “people’s express” train. The latter was a brilliant example of Socialism: it was an attempt to please everyone but in reality failed all of them. They had the worst equipment, often broke down, no lights at night, no water any time, had no priority over anything else on the tracks and had elastic schedules. They stopped at every wayside station and for good measure in between them too. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This train leveled everyone by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The so-called People's Express trains were hauled by wheezy steam locomotives which were slow and clanged in a most alarming manner as if something big and critical was about to give way rather spectacularly. They also bathed the passengers in considerable amount of coal smoke and soot which evened out the skin tones of the passengers by the end of the journey. It never arrived at the scheduled meal stops at the appointed meal time and thus every one, irrespective of his station in life, went hungry - a brilliant example of socialism at work. People's Expresses was classless, and always yielded to other trains, presumably carrying important Babus and politicians in plush Air Conditioned First Class.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">When the 1971 war broke out I was aboard one such People's Express, heading back to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. It was forced to make way for long trains with their contents (army tanks and field guns) barely covered by inadequate tarpaulins. At one station we were told of a minimum stoppage of 12 hours before we would start moving again; some pious passengers made a quick dash to Tirupathi temple, which was not far off; I watched cock-fights in a nearby village.We did not have to switch off our lights at night as a precaution against air attacks, for lights never worked in these trains any way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Meals on trains were a challenge. Railways were well organized, providing meals at wayside stations as well as packed ones on board. Both were limited in numbers. If you weren't fast enough off the train at the meal stop or if you weren't awake when orders for on-train meals were taken, you could go hungry I preferred the former challenge. Alighting nimbly even before the train came to a complete halt, I would make a smart dash to the dining hall where meals were laid out on rows of tables. If I made the first round, I was OK. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The real challenge was catching breakfast at a station named Daund en route to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. The trains usually stopped for 10 minutes which seems like a lot, but actually wasn't. There was no time to order a la carte. I had to choose the table which served my kind of breakfast. I got it right most of the time. The reward was freshly made masala omelets, crisp buttered toast and hot </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Darjeeling</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> tea. On a cold winter morning that was heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Most times a few of us traveled together – two heading to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Madras</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and the rest further south. The latter's coach would be detached from our train and re-attached to a different train at a station one hour from </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Madras</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. On the way to Bombay their coach would be attached to the Bombay bound train at this station. We would spend the almost the entire journey together playing cards, chatting or simply smoking and reading. This involved leaving my luggage in my allotted seat and moving to where the rest of the gang was. I always found my luggage intact when I got back to my own coach, something that cannot happen today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Sometimes all of us did not get sleeper berths and therefore the available berths would be used by turns. Once, in my absence, my shoes had been moved by someone and had fallen into a gaping hole in the side panel of the coach, far beyond my reach. To the considerable irritation of my brother who had come to receive me at the destination, I arrived barefoot, wearing a colourful batik-printed T shirt in </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">psychedelic</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"> patterns</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and with longish hair. My appearance provided much grist to the family mill.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The biggest problem going home presented was not any of the above. It was timing my smoking so as not to run out of nicotine-high too early or reek of tobacco upon arrival at Madras. You see, mum suspected that I smoked, but hoped otherwise. Breaking that illusion would have been of painful consequences for everyone.The trick was to stop smoking about four hours before arrival at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Madras</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. On the return journey the problem was one of procuring cigarettes: the pater invariably came to see me off and stayed on until the train actually started moving, affording little opportunity to procure cigarettes. He would stoically decline all my entreaties to leave early to beat the traffic. I had to wait till the next big station, two hours away, before being able to buy cigarettes, the longest two hours of my life. The next station brought a double bonus - friends from Kerala and cigarettes.The rest of the journey was heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Arriving at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> still left a few mountains to climb: getting on and off commuter trains with all my luggage, fighting for and getting a taxi or fighting to get on the bus with my luggage and finally the long trek from the college gate to my hostel which was at the other end of the campus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Back at the hostel I felt as if I had finally come home!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-16731424865813512332013-09-06T21:54:00.002+05:302013-09-06T21:54:28.526+05:30MY FIRST TIPPLE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">If there was an impression that when I left home for a Graduate programme I was a naive, callow, youth unwise to the ways of the wicked world,
it is absolutely correct. This was also the impression my parents carried. I might have smoked a cigarette or two (at college parties and such
like events to look cool in front of the girls) but never inhaled. When it came
to spirits I had not even inhaled their fumes, let alone imbibing or swallowing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I was introduced to the pleasures </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">of alcohol by a "senior" </span><span style="font-size: medium;">- at that time it seemed more a
pain and an acquired taste wholly without any redeeming features, an impression
I quickly corrected over the next couple of years. The senior, let's call him K, was a Brown Sahib if ever
there was one. He could put on a
clipped Brit accent just as easily as he could break into rickshaw-puller's patois
laden with the choicest expletives. He also regularly beat me at badminton and
once he made me run around so much that I was too knackered to wrangle with Lagrange and Hamilton preparatory to my end-of- term exam the next day. I had to renew my acquaintance with Messieurs Lagrange et Hamilton at the end of the year.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Back to K. I am going to let you you all in on a secret that no one in college knew: at home he was known as "Jilly". He
could kill me if he read this and knew where I lived. May be his parents were
hoping to have a baby girl but K was born instead. It is my good fortune
that I have not met K after I got to know this fact from his family
circles. If I had, I'd be dead by now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">K started working for a "Foreign" Bank after passing out in 1971 and used to visit me not
infrequently in the campus. The reasons for such visits were rumoured to be a few, not the least of which was his infatuation with one of the girls <i><b>in my junior class</b></i>. The other reason, which I knew to be a fact, was he wished to avoid the expensive weekends that staying on in the City entailed. When the junior girl found out about the infatuation part, instead of being thankful for the attentions of what was considered a prize catch, she took off on me as if I had put K up to it. Such is the lack of gratitude in this world.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">On one such visit he decided to treat some of us to
a beer or two at our dorm which we shall call H9. For some mysterious reason I paid for it and also
procured it whereas it was supposed to be <i style="font-weight: bold;">his treat - </i>that was the charm he could exercise over people if he chose to<b>. </b>What's a beer
(or two) between friends? Besides, at Rs.2.50 a bottle one couldn't go terribly
out of pocket. B</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">ack in '71 that was equivalent to 30 American cents which probably was a lot for a bottle of beer, but then we were in India and in the middle of a "prohibition" which resulted in a hefty premium, no doubt.</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">K insisted on proper beer mugs which we couldn't manage. So
he got the only glass tumbler around and the rest of us made do with stainless steel tumblers
from the H9 cafeteria (a.k.a. "mess", perhaps in reference to the quality of food served therein). K thought that drinking beer from steel tumbler was
terribly plebeian. He could say such things and still make us feel that he had said something profound.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The beer was warm and therefore we proceeded to cool it with some
ice which that experience taught me never again to do. But I was callow, and knew not
a warm beer from a chilled one. He then proceeded to tell how the beer tasted like
horse's p**s. I did not know anything about horse's bodily fluids but thought
that the man of the world that he was, he would have known. Attracted by all
the hullabaloo a crowd had gathered wanting a piece of the action. All of this resulted in further dilution of the beer
which by this time was really beginning to taste like horse's p**s, even to
an inexperienced palate like mine. Tiring of the raucous plebeian masses and commandeering my bed K soon went to
sleep, thoroughly disappointed with </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><i style="font-weight: bold;">my </i>bungling of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="font-weight: bold;">his</i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> </span>beer party<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><b>(</b></span><span style="font-size: medium;">paid for by me of course which he conveniently overlooked</span><b style="font-size: 13.5pt;">)</b><span style="font-size: medium;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Having thus had a very disagreeable introduction to beer, I was to
stay away from it for some considerable time. Having given up on beer for its
close association with horses, I turned my attention to spirits. Surely they
must taste better, have nothing to do with horses and thus provide an agreeable
experience. I was all
agog and was looking forward to my encounter with spirits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">My introduction to spirits was courtesy of S's cousin from
</span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Dubai</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> - or was it </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Aden</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">? Those days the </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Middle East</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> meant the area between </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Turkey</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Israel</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and what we now know as Emirates was
known by the un-glamorous name of </span><st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Trucial Oman</span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. Oil had just begun to flow out in shiploads and Keralites were flying in by plane loads.
S's said cousin was one of the early ones. On a home visit the gent thoughtfully brought S a bottle of White Horse Whiskey (damn horse again!), a few
cola tablets that fizzed in water and tasted like coca cola, and a Marlborough
calendar featuring the best bikini clad babes. Understandably the demand was
most for the last-named item, followed by the fizzy tablets, and the White Horse
was a distant third.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The calendar was soon in pieces with sheets stuck strategically
behind room doors such that when the door opened, it did so flush against the wall, and the picture was invisible to the
visitor - this was important, for those days parents, uncles, aunts, grand parents, cousins, second cousins and even Nth cousins could all arrive unannounced to check on the welfare of "the poor boy living all alone in a hostel". I drew February 71 and a jolly good February it was too, right on
until May '72 when it was time for me to pack up and go home. After the initial enthusiasm for the lissome lasses wore off,
our attention turned to the fizzy stuff and the White Horse both of which had remained surprisingly unmolested, something I cannot say for the Calendar. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I was determined
that I should taste the spirit, equine reference notwithstanding. Water was
procured, fizzy tablets dropped into it and the whiskey was added. The fizzy
tablet was quite strong and managed to mask the burn and the taste of the
whiskey. In all the excitement of the "booze session", we forgot all
about dinner and by the time we remembered it, the "mess" had closed for the night
and we had to go hungry. With the cola masking the taste of whiskey, the drinks
went down a treat and not at all like horse's p**s which was my only
previous exposure to an alcoholic beverage. Soon all of it was consumed with
most of us taking judicious sips whereas yours truly had had a rather injudicious and somewhat generous helpings. S had wooden legs and in any case he was a reticent sort of a bloke, so the effects of the whiskey on him could not be properly estimated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In due course good nights were bid and everyone turned in. That's
when the horses kicked in. On an empty stomach. Thence the horses
proceeded north to my head. I was in all manner of difficulties and never having
experienced alcohol before wasn't sure if it was the effect of alcohol or if it
was the onset of something terminal. My room was spinning on a strange oblique
axis if I opened my eyes; if I did not, then my stomach wanted to exit through
my mouth. I have never prayed as hard as I did that night for the
experience to end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">When I woke up the next morning the horses were still prancing inside my head and even two full sticks of S's strong Charminar cigarettes could not quell the rebellion. The night's prayers and vows were soon forgotten to be replaced by the justification that there must be a <i><b>better way</b></i> to consume spirits, like in a proper crystal glass for example.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I learnt later that as in learning, the trick with alcohol is to persevere. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">By persevering I have learnt the art of making spirits an
agreeable experience, something that I cannot say I did with Messieurs Lagrange and Hamilton..</span></div>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4810204582287085321.post-40663747152868314662013-08-27T12:31:00.000+05:302013-08-27T19:44:02.487+05:30SORRY SEEMS TO BE HARDEST WORD (OR NOT)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2e4NlnLr28" target="_blank">Sorry seems to be the hardest word</a>", sang Elton John in 1976 to great popular acclaim and economic success. He has covered that song many times over since, with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y29dWcuqQY" target="_blank">Ray Charles wailing</a> in a plaintive voice in a recent oeuvre.<br />
<br />
I disagree with Elton. Not because of his outlandish shades and his even more weird dress sense. Nor even for his pitiful choice of vague-looking boyfriends. I used to dislike him in his younger days. His songs were very popular on both sides of the Atlantic then and I could not fathom why. Elton has mellowed and so have I. I am less intolerant of weirdness (including the quantum variety of which I remain clueless). I actually like him these days.<br />
<br />
But I digress.Sorry. That wasn't so difficult. Not at all. That brings me to the real reason why I differ with Elton John about sorry being the hardest word: <i>It simply isn't. </i><br />
<i><br />
</i>Linguists and statisticians claim the article "<i><b>the</b></i>" to be the most commonly used English word. I beg to differ with them too. I think the honour goes to "sorry" and my conclusion is based on solid empirical evidence, not on some namby-pamby statistical sampling.<br />
<br />
Just look around yourself and listen carefully for a few minutes and you will hear the word sorry spoken a million times. Sorry I'm late; sorry I don't have any change; sorry I have run out of juice in my phone, can I borrow yours?; sorry it is not for sale; sorry it is not available; sorry (and then again, may be not) I stepped on your toe; etc, etc ad infinitum. More plentiful in use or not, "sorry" certainly rolls off people's tongues more easily, with greater regularity and ease than "the".<br />
<br />
The word "the" also suffers from being uttered unconsciously, as part of routine English usage, without having to be consciously employed. It is almost a "space filler" in the English language. Its abundance also owes considerably to the usage in most parts of India, where it is considered mandatory to prefix proper nouns with the word "the", as in "have you seen the Joshi?", "have been to the Madras?" etc etc. I look down upon such loose usage. However, I do not hesitate to say "the U.S.A." even as I shrink from a visit to "the England".<br />
<br />
Sorry; my intent was not to give a lesson in English grammar although one would not be wasted in the days of text-language devoid of vowels and articles and filled with emoticons. I was merely pointing out that the exalted status of "the" owes more to liberal misapplication of it rather than to proper use. Hence, I humbly submit that the honour of being the most used word in English belongs to the word "sorry".<br />
<br />
The word "sorry" is not capable of being grammatically misused, as in "sorry Chennai" or "sorry Manmohan Singh",  , for both these usages are quite legitimate and correct.<br />
<br />
The ease with which "sorry" rolls off people's tongues also renders it devoid of any emotion attached to it. In that sense it is closer to its rival, "the". When was the last time you attached any emotion to "the"? How many different ways can you say "the" aside from the two different pronunciations while preceding a vowel or a consonant? It sounds and means the same irrespective of your state of mind.<br />
<br />
Sorry has become so routine that the speaker is generally acknowledged not to be expressing contrition at all. It is merely a face-saving device, a filler, a time-buyer when you have done something you ought not to have, like stepping on toes, or walking into a room without knocking first. Even as you are formulating something clever to say when faced with the embarrassment of unintentionally catching someone with their pants down (sometimes literally too), "sorry" comes in handy and buys you precious time as you arrange your thoughts and the other party their dress.<br />
<br />
When someone digs you in the ribs with their elbow or the tip of their umbrella in a crowded train, and if you happen to take note and shoot a cross look at them, "sorry" rolls of their tongue. No contrition, no apology. It is just something that they say; like when the dulcet voice informs you, "sorry, the number you have dialed is not available" over and over again without in anyway conveying a sense of apology, regret or contrition for the inconvenience the unavailability has caused you.<br />
<br />
Sorry, however, is not mandatory under all circumstances. In love, for example, you don't have to say sorry or so the famous tear-jerker "The Love Story" informed us decades ago ("Love Means never having to say sorry").<br />
<br />
Rest of the world may over-use the word sorry, howsoever insincerely.<br />
In Chennai we love every one.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0