BROTHERHOOD OF WORDS

If You’re But a Dream

2020-05-15T03:15:00.001-07:00

His eyes twinkled behind closed eyelids, looking at the speed dial on his dashboard. In his dream, he was still on the road driving at speeds exceeding 180 kmph. “Baby, come on. Let’s go faster” he said, slowly pressing his foot on the pedal. He loved the car. It was his home, his love, an extension of himself. After all, he had picked up the pieces and parts that had been lying scattered and built her from the ground up. It had taken him a considerable amount of time.

There were the best of days; there were the worst of days. On a day she’d purr eagerly at him, he wanted nothing else but to be enveloped in her embrace and drive on forever.

On days of snag, he had wanted to walk it all off. But within a few meters, he’d hear her purr again and walk back into her open arms.

The trips they had gone on together were fresh in his memory. At unexpected moments, he’d have flashes, of images he had seen during the trip. Not scenic images that he had photographed, not postcard pictures that were for sale. Just random images of random frames his mind had captured. A curve in the road that they had hugged together, a lonely tree that stood on a shoulder they had stopped on to catch breath, a house beyond that sudden bump in the road when his hand had gone to the gearshift.

And now here he was with her. In the lap of France where they had wanted to come together. She had already been here before, but all by herself. This was his first time. They were at one of the most prestigious races in the world. The Le Mans 24.

“Will you be able to stand me for 24 hours”, she had asked teasingly.

“Stand? I’ll run with you, all our lives, forget 24 hours!”

Not that he liked cheesy lines, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to throw one at her. A deep purr had emanated in response.

He had turned that purr to a roar as he drove. From the beginning of the race, she had given him a great head start. They had put up one hell of a show. They had set the Mulsanne Straight on fire and danced on the curves much to the envy of the others watching.

He was overwhelmed with joy as she curled into his lap filling him with her warmth, as it started raining. He didn’t mind the rain or the incessant drizzle on his windshield. They were drowned by the sound of the stories she told him. He held her steady, hoping to go all the way through with her.

But he wasn’t the most stable of drivers, or of men. At times, his rage had gotten the better of him, and he had abused her, pushing her limits, driving her beyond the threshold, to realise his errors only when she had demurred, and attempted to apologise.

But perhaps she had had enough. So, pop went a fuse and he had to slow towards the pitstop with a hot engine.

“It’s time for a break. He’ll take over from here”, they said, showing him the suave, younger driver. He protested, in short sputters pike a broken engine. “No, I’m fine. I know her best. She wants me to drive all the way. We're not even halfway through the 24 hours. We still have most of the ride left”.

There would be none of it.

So, he reluctantly closed the door and walked backwards looking at her, to the resting zone, hoping to come back a fresh man.

As she departed from the pitstop, his eyes closed, not wanting to see the taillights. She rode off with her roar growing fainter and fainter.

As he fell into the abyss of sleep, reality morphed itself to suit his dreams. The distant vroom of the cars he heard, was him driving her. The naked bulb by his side was her headlights showing him the road. Nobody had driven her away. She was still with him. She was still his.

All in his dreams.

His eyes twinkled. “Baby, come on. Let’s go faster”, he said with his leg pressing down an imaginary pedal.

Somewhere away from his dreams, Sinatra sang,

“So darling,
If our romance would break up,
I hope I never wake up,
If you are but a dream.”

*Inspired by Ford vs Ferrari and other non-contests.

Time

2018-05-09T09:48:00.003-07:00

Sometimes, when we talk to friends from years past, from times where the clock hands touched upon diamond studded digits that reflected the light of laughter that shone off our glistening teeth, the sharp hands of the clock, sensing the moment, move backward, back to those times.

Conversations that once could have been called banal, come back in foggy memories, and yet, are perhaps the brightest and only remnants of days that like lost civilizations are remembered through indecipherable scripts and can never be understood fully, only marveled at.

Perhaps this is why a text or a Whatsapp call consumes more from our data pack than is justified by its length, because it carries in it more than voice. It carries the sight and smells of the world that we once inhabited with the person now on the other side of the line. The "Hello" brings with it the dampness of the corridor of the house, the intake of breath, a reminder of the stairs climbed to meet.

When we reminisce that we were so happy with so less, was it because what we feel as happiness, as contentment and an ability to be satisfied with little, was actually the command and control that were given to us as we were Masters of our own Time?

சமூகம்

2018-05-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

நெருங்கி கை நீட்டியவர்க்கெல்லாம்
கொடுத்து கொடுத்து சிவந்த கரங்களை
வானில் உயர்த்தி "குளிரடிக்குது, காப்பாத்து!"
என்று கேட்ட நெருப்பின் மீது, ஆறிப்போன
அழுக்கு நீரை வாரி இறைத்து, ஆடி சென்றது சமூகம்.

Search: Keyword Unknown

2018-05-09T09:40:00.002-07:00

Sometimes the mind works as though it's on a blind date with a library shelf long forgotten to the dusty annals of the wheels of the rickety chariot of Time.

In the darkness of its blindfold, it retrieves images and shadows of images and tugs hard at the open ends of the Present to knot it with the smoky silhouette of a memory, as though that alone could call back to life moments mired in mud.

A slipped swara, the jarring off pitch note, coming out of the wispy vapours as abroken quaver whose hanging tail is tied to the trembling voice of the singer on stage, as though the throats were the same, separated merely by the illusion of space and time.

In the resuscitation of the memory, the broken note walks on the stave, although with a limp, carrying with it a newly formed thread, the sutra that binds pages of the Book of Life, hidden somewhere in the dusty shelves of the darkened library of human existence, that continues its search with the gnarled fingertips and blindfolded eyes.

Parable of the Train Engine

2018-05-09T09:38:00.002-07:00

There was once a Train Engine, whom we shall call Thomas the Train Engine, for want of a better name. Thomas the Train Engine was an active although ageing, energetic steam locomotive that thundered down the tracks day in, day out.

Thomas visited several towns and villages in his journeys. He pulled with him a long line of carriages that carried fruits, vegetables, books, newspapers and even people who visited their loved ones. Everywhere he went, people gathered together to greet him with eager, happy faces. Thomas took in all the adoration he received and was satisfied that he could bring happiness to so many people who needed him. Oh yes, Thomas was indeed a satisfied Train Engine.

Little did he know.

Thomas was the leader of a long line of carriages that he pulled with him wherever he went. The carriages moved when Thomas moved, stopped when he stopped. They carried in them everything that the people, of the places Thomas visited, needed. Thomas with his eyes front, focussed on where he went, did not know how much of a load each carriage contained in itself. It did not matter. No matter how heavy the load, he would pull it forward. He was Thomas the Train Engine. He would never be found slacking on his job.

With time, as Thomas aged and could no longer pull as well as he once did, he started getting suspicious. He was pulling as hard as he could, just like he did all the time. But why weren’t things moving? The question haunted Thomas, even as he thundered about his work. There were still people gathering to greet him, to approach him and be seen with him, while he brought them gifts from lands far away, but there was the niggling thought in mind that something was missing, that more could be done.

Thomas thought and thought even as he trundled down the tracks. Could it be that the carriages he was pulling? Could it be that they are pulling him back even as he tried to pull them forward? Were they not able to handle the load they had to carry? But why? He was doing all the work, wasn’t he? He was the one pulling them forward and onward. What problem did they have simply carrying the weight? The faltering faith in the line he led plagued Thomas from inside. Even as he went about his work, Thomas was found huffing and puffing. The once-bright smile was nowhere to be seen. The face was contorted with irritation. The crowds that gathered may have noticed, but that did not affect their behaviour much. They still waited for him with expectant eyes and eager hands.

But Thomas wasn’t satisfied. He wasn’t alone. The huffing and puffing from Thomas was passing down the line he led. The steam he threw back was getting loaded more and more with soot. The carriages behind began to take note.
Thomas pulled them all forward, but they had their hands together, pulling each other forward too. They knew, unlike Thomas, that the expectant eyes and eager hands were not for them, but for what they brought. Therefore, even as Thomas pulled, they had to hold themselves together to ensure that nothing they carried fell out of the carriages. All carriages, together, ensured that their movement was only forward and not side to side. They moved forward as Thomas pulled, and also pushed downward to stay stable and grounded. Thomas did not mind or even notice when he was young. But it was different now. They all knew Thomas was getting old. They all knew that they did the best they could. They all knew that Thomas’ irritation was misplaced. But none told Thomas. They respected him too much.

As Thomas spewed black soot in his irritation, the mute carriages began to take it on them. And now, the effect was visible on those expectant eyes that waited for Thomas. They still waited, but the eager hands now carried wipes and water buckets. The fruits were fresh, but covered in soot. You could barely see the real colour until you drowned them in water. The news was hot and new, but barely readable with the printing ink coagulating with the black soot.

This only made things worse for Thomas, who with his front-facing eyes, did not bother to see the impact of what he was doing to the line of carriages he led. But as the eagerness in the eyes of the people faded, he began blaming the carriages even more. Maybe they were not taking enough care of their constituents the way he wanted them to. Maybe they did not have the experience to understand their task given to them. And he huffed and puffed even more.

All the huffing and puffing turned to sheer frustration. It was the seventh day after the new harvest. For almost a week, every day Thomas and the line of carriages had carried full loads of fruits and vegetables to the villages far from the fields. Thomas had pulled and pulled. The effort was starting to show as his breathing was getting more ragged.

The seventh day dawned dull and gloomy. The carriages were packed so much with fruits and vegetables that they could barely hold them all from falling out. With the weight pushing them downward, they stabilized themselves to be able to move forward when Thomas pulled. Thomas was more irritated than usual. The hardship of the week had made him tired and cranky. He was ready to blow his steam off at the slightest provocation. “I’ll show them. I’ll show them how fast I can pull today. And if they can’t keep up, so be it. I will take with me only those that can handle the work given to them” he told himself. He spat a few coal cubes as the warming up caused him to cough. At the anointed time, he rumbled and pulled with such a force that it took the combined strength of all carriages to ensure that they stayed on the rails and stayed connected to each other.

Thomas pulled on and on, faster and faster. He was out of breath and frothing at the mouth, but that did not stop him. Despite the best effort of the carriages, the goods were falling out, all through the sides of the track. But any further effort to stay stable was responded by Thomas with a loud siren that deafened them. So, they ran with him. Thomas felt himself going even faster, as the carriages shed their loads, in order to keep pace with him.

“Yes, now they’ve learnt their lesson. Thanks to me, now we will never go slow.”

With hubris fuelling him, his speed increased as he ran down the last fifty kilometres to the first station. The carriages were slowly losing control. Some of them had shed so much of their content that they were wobbling off the tracks without any stability. As Thomas gave one mighty tug, the connecting hooks keeping the carriages together came apart. They started falling off, one after another. Thomas felt himself going faster and credited it to his feisty temperament and pulled again.

By the time Thomas reached the station, there were only two carriages attached to him, from the twenty he had started with. He could not understand the shocked look on the faces of the villagers. The few that jumped on the carriages gave an enraged shout on seeing them empty. The carriages closest to Thomas, those that had stood by him through all the journeys, had discarded all their constituents in their loyalty to him.

Thomas was trying to catch his breath as the first stone hit him. Before he knew what was happening, a volley of stones had found their way to him. Blow after blow followed. Thomas was in a trance unable to understand how his admirers and fans were now pelting stones on him. The frenzied crowd booed him. In a moment of unexpected unity, they got together and pushed Thomas and the two remaining carriages off the tracks. Thomas lost his balance and rolled on his side, taking down with him the two empty carriages that had stuck with him.

The carriages that had broken loose, the ones that Thomas had blamed for being not capable of handling their task, watched all this from the distance. Sadness overwhelmed them, but there was nothing that they could do. Thomas would run no more. And neither would the line he led. It was over.

Yoga on a Frozen Lake

2018-03-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

Question: What do you do when the world’s largest freshwater lake freezes?

Answer: You spread a mat and do Yoga.

I was about 8 years old when we got our first refrigerator at home. It was a shining white, much taller than me and had a capacity of a hundred and sixty five liters. [It had two doors with the upper one beyond my reach and used to store chocolates and other attractions that were supposedly harmful for my teeth. It joined the family through the hands of two men struggling to carry to through the narrow doors of the house.] My mother explained to me that it was a big box that can hold ice. My mind always wondered why anyone would need a block of ice that big. A hundred and sixty five liters big!

As I got accustomed to using the refrigerator, one of my favorite things to do was to fill containers of various shapes with water, place them in the freezer and then carve out the ice frozen in the shape of the container. I fashioned myself as an expert ice sculptor. Among other things. Of course, living in tropical India, I did not see my ice sculptures last more than a few minutes.

When I first saw Lake Baikal from the air, it looked like the world’s largest refrigerator had been opened and the blocky sculpture let out to shine under the skylights of the sun. The Russian winter in Irkutsk touches temperatures that remain so low for so long that the surface of Baikal freezes over. Solid ice, for a depth of at least a meter, thick enough in places for cars to drive on. An ice sculpture that is made by the cold hands of the Northern wind and carved in the shape of the rocky rift of the earth underneath it.

The plan was not much. Finish off the work-related meetings to mutual satisfaction and travel to Baikal. But once I got there, the immensity of the landscape overwhelmed me. I couldn’t even describe what I was doing. I mean, come to think about it, wouldn’t it sound ridiculous if you said “I’m driving a car on a lake”?

The thing about Baikal is that you can walk on it once it’s completely frozen. But it does not freeze as a whole, in an instant. There are jagged ridges in the edges that look like they are the frozen remnants of waves that crashed on the coast. Looking through the ice is looking through a window into another world. There are vertical layers of ice that petal out like the pages of an open, standing book. There are frothy bubbles where snow froze with a layer of ice on top. Due to what we in school called the anomalous behavior of water, the water freezes in so many layers that looking through the ice into the depths, is looking at a mirror through a myriad of veils.

When I looked down through the glassy ice window of the lake’s surface, the layers of ice, frozen over the days and months of winter, reminded me of how our life’s memories are collected. For a moment, the brightness of the landscape dazzled me into a visual silence with my eyes blinded to all hues and shades.

An eerie calmness pervaded the very air that hung solid, frozen by the cold of the ice below it. A meditative serenity that formed the shore and bottom of this sea of tranquillity. I fished out the yoga mat I had carried in my suitcase, hoping perhaps, for just this moment.

Stepping into -22 degrees and a 10m/s wind, without a windcheater is an experience. It is as if the world has imported a pair of arms that had spent their lifetime in Pluto, and is using them to embrace you in a smothering, frigid hug.

After slowly undoing the layers I had worn to keep the blood flowing in my vessels, I began with Padmasana. After testing my balance with Vrikshasana, I let myself flow the way the Baikal would flow if it were warmer. “Be like water”, I told myself, “Take the shape of the container you are in”. So, I spread myself on the mat and let Baikal move me the way it wanted to.

As though wanting to contrast the white with the colors of the rainbow, Baikal gently bent my legs and thorax into a bow, Dhanurasana. Out of the bow, flew the pigeon in Kapotasana. Attracted by the snow, came an unlikely animal in a place with so much water, the Camel in Ushtrasana. Descending from the camel, the warrior stretched his legs in Veerabhadrasana. The stretched legs pulled the body into the wheel pose, Chakrasana. From Chakrasana, I moved into the Bhujangasana, the pose of the snake.

I wanted to wrap up the asanas, with the Bhujangasana, as the divine snake, Sesha, is what remains after everything else ceases to exist. But I found a solid block of ice, almost a perfect cuboid and almost exactly the length of my body. Unable to resist the temptation, I once again let the camel take over. As I returned from the Ushtrasana, I felt a sense of warmth flow within me. Even without the overcoat, the blood still flowed. Was this the Antaragni, the Tapas that Patanjali spoke about? Was the Bhujangasana not merely a pale imitation of Anantasesha, the endless snake, but also symbolic of the Kundalini coiled within us? With these questions, I rolled the yoga mat back into my suitcase, and bid farewell to Baikal.

Of course, my grumbling stomach told me that I had quite literally “burned” calories to keep myself warm. It was time for lunch.

Lost in Translation

2016-11-15T02:29:00.001-08:00

Often, between translations, thoughts are lost. They wander around the darkness, looking in vain, for a way to complete their journey, bouncing from one dark shadow to another. They know they can’t go back home. That door is shut.

I wonder what happens when we speak, you and I, in languages that are bright as sunlight to the speaker, but are foggy and confusing to the listener. What happens to the numerous thoughts that trickle away, misting the surface of the dark canopy of the secret world of our conversations? Thoughts rising up to the canopy, touching its cold innards, cooling to tear drops, crying in despair and falling as homesick rain that looks to fall in the same pond it evaporated from. The pond is filled with the ripples of our conversations. Drops fall on the glass bangles of the ripples, breaking them with the weight of their loneliness.

And when the pond freezes over, with no more new conversations to keep it warm, the thoughts lost in translation linger on, gliding on the ice, like hockey pucks, moving around here and there, between your frosted lips and my reddened ears. Thoughts getting licked by your tongue and pushed away by my ear, Thoughts persisting like hunger, rumbling like echoes of thunder on a rainless night.

Thoughts lost in translation, that knock the drumming doors of the ear, always trying to reach inand declare their lives complete. Thoughts that want to enter my ear, so you can declare that you have made a goal with the talking hockey stick of your tongue, and cheer in ecstasy.

But no, the defense of my ignorance stands guard, preventing the puck from entering the ear and so the thought remains lost. You can't take it back, having uttered it in your language. So you try to play around, move it every now and then, with your tongue, uttering it in several, but always incomprehensible words, trying determinedly, hoping that the thickness of my ignorance would melt, making way for the vagabond thought to one day reach its destination.

Maybe one day it will. Maybe.

Maslenitsa - Dasvidaniya, Winter

2016-04-15T15:07:00.001-07:00

“Wake up, waaaake up!” her hands dug into the chestnut brown coat of the bear. His snore ruptured and ended up becoming a staccato. She bent over, moving closer to his folded ears as though she could speak him into wakefulness. Her auburn hair falling all over her face, it was difficult to say where her face met his. She spoke softly into his ears, almost in a song; she wanted him just awake, not awake and terrified.

“Waaaaake up!”

Problem was she didn’t know how sweet her voice was. She only pushed him deeper into his slumber. It was tiring. She had walked all the way to his cave to wake him up. It was time, wasn’t it? The trees had been barren too long now; the forest had gone silent without the tickling partridges and the laughing flowers.

She didn’t like any of it. She was Spring. She wanted to run around, her long frock combing the lush grass, and the bright colors of the land wanting to adorn her hair. The evening sky would blush at her curious glances and the streams spoke rumors of their secret love. In the shallow bottoms of the grassland, rabbits gathered to gossip about their romance.

But, that was all in the past. Winter had played spoilsport. Why, even now, she was sitting there on the fallen branch of a once majestic tree, smugly watching Spring try to wake up the bear. She knew. Her time was not up yet. There were several days left. The bear will not wake up.

“Waaake up” Spring said again. His pudgy forehand stretched to take hers into his. With her warmth comforting him, he snuggled in some more. Her honeyed pleas were not enough to wake him up. She did not know what to do. Spurned and sad, she lay on his furry back and closed her teary eyes.

Winter sat on the fallen branch, the hem of her bluish white dress draping its rotting bark. Her smile was smug. Spring had gone back to sleep. “Maybe this time”, she told herself, “I’ll stay back longer”. She snapped her fingers in glee. Snow powdered from the sky. She briefly suspended a snow flake and smirked at the sight of Spring’s teary face resting on the back of the sleeping bear.

It was a minute. It was a day. It was a week. We may never know. The suspended snowflake was liberated by gravity and fell to the ground. Winter looked anxious. Her ears had picked up something. She turned her head around in the direction of the sound.

It was faint, but was growing louder fast.

The lack of rhythm in the drums made it obvious that they were being beaten by untrained hands. As they got closer, Winter realized that they weren’t drums, but the footsteps of the people. There was a tall figure, clothed in bluish white. Winter strained her eyes to look at the figure. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was a figure of herself. “But, why? It’s not time yet. Why are they coming so soon?”

By now, they were close enough for her to make out the words. Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну!*

They were chasing her away. But, she wasn’t perturbed. It was still snowing. She was still in control. She stretched her long arms and relaxed. People can shout all they want. She wasn’t going anywhere.

As her eyelids came close to each other, the sudden movement pierced them apart. She watched in horror, as the bear moved his arm around his body to scratch his back. It fell on Spring. She woke up, and wiped the dried tears from her cheeks. That wasn’t necessary. The happiness bubbling from her would have washed them away anyway.

“You’re up! You’re up!” She went up and down jumping in joy. And as she jumped, Winter noticed horrorstruck, that a tuft of grass reared its head from under Spring’s feet.

“No! It can’t be!” Winter snapped her fingers. This time, the sound walked alone, without the accompaniment of snow.

The shouts were really close now. The piled up snow sweated as it ran away from their path. It looked longingly at Winter let out a last cry of help. One of the shouters slipped, but was quickly back on his feet. Winter felt helpless.

“How could this be? How could I be chased away before my time? It’s all because of her. She brought them here. She woke the bear up. Let me…”

Winter did not complete saying what she wanted to be allowed to do. As she moved towards Spring, she buried herself headfirst into the soft fur of the bear. He stood on his hindlegs, seven foot tall. Winter looked up at his eyes. He didn’t look angry that she wanted to attack Spring. He just pointed behind her. She turned around. The crowd had arrived. A man and a woman, dressed in the brightest colors, their dresses complementing each other, were going in opposite directions drawing a big circle with the sticks they held.

Two more had lifted the branch Winter had been sitting on and stood it upright. They had also tied the effigy of Winter to it. One of them, a lady, slender as a fruit-laden twig, stately as an oak, walked in with a large jar in her hands.

“Honey!” Spring ran out from behind the bar and took the jar from her. She ran back to the bear who picked her in his left hand and brought her to his chest. She dipped her soft hands into the jar, coated them with honey and took it to the bear for him to lick it clean. This was his breakfast, as he broke his long period of fasting and sleep.

It was over. Even Winter knew it. She looked at the bear to confirm. He was unperturbed; his eyes closed as he relished the honey that Spring fed him. She looked back at the crowd. They continued to chant, “Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну!” *

Winter moved away from the bear, from the crowd, from Spring and walked forlorn into the forest. It was time. She was powerless now. The sun would be out soon, scorching her out. She would have to wait till he was done, for her to get back. He was already peeking from between the clouds. The heat from the fire the crowd had lit was also reaching her. Winter took refuge under the shade of the leafless trees until she walked so deep into the forest, nobody could see her.

The crowd set the effigy on fire. They sang and danced and lit their stoves to bake blinny**. It was the time of celebration. Winter was gone. Spring was here. What was there to worry about? As they shaped the snow into balls and castles, Spring went amongst them, laughing as they laughed, dancing with those who stood without a partner, playing with the kids in their sweaters and caps and bringing warmth into the lives of all who stood there.

She later took the bear’s hand and walked with him across the forest, stirring the trees and waking up the grass. They will bloom now. Winter was gone. Spring was here. It was time for Maslenitsa.

*- Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну – Leave, Winter and send Spring

** - Blinny – Pancake

I'll Revert

2016-02-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: All characters and events mentioned in this post, even those based on real people, are entirely fictional. Any similarity to people, living, dead, or somewhere in between, is purely fictional and shall be considered to be the product of the fertile imagination of the reader.

“I’ll revert at the earliest.”

Lately, this statement has been bumping into me more and more. Every time I read this, I struggle to suppress the GIF forming inside my head, of a human suddenly sprouting hair from all over his body, his spine bending, tailbone growing out long, in short, turning into a primate, the last common ancestor we shared with the Chimpanzee.

I’m sure the statement was not made with that GIF in mind. What the speaker perhaps intended to convey was that he would reply at the earliest. His earnestness is beyond doubt, of course. But let’s see what “revert” actually means.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “revert” means, “Return to (a previous state, practice, topic, etc.)”. So when a human being decides to revert, and that too at the earliest, well, you can understand the GIF in my head.

And then there’s the “I’ll revert back”. Now go back to the GIF. Only this time, the man is transforming into a primate, stops the transformation midway and then loses all the hair, straightens his spine and becomes human again. Or think about your school days, when your PT Master would issue two subsequent orders of “About Turn” bringing you back to looking at his angry face again. That’s what “revert back” does to me. It’s a Nolan-esque abomination that puts you on a recursive loop, see what I did there? Recursion itself implies that it’s an endless loop, so a recursive loop is a meta term for describing recursion or loops.

So, “revert back” places you on a recursive roller coaster ride, where your co-passenger is the other abomination, “repeat again”. “Repeat” means to say/do something again. How would you “repeat again”? By getting into an infinite loop, where every time you finish doing the task, you decide to repeat it and then repeat it “again”?

But we digress. We need to revert to “revert”. There. That’s one way to use “revert”. One of the correct ways.

All these are passé. The greatest of all, the greatest and perhaps most noble reverting that I have seen anyone want to achieve was the “I’ll revert to you”. If you go with the conventional meaning of “revert”, this statement presumes that I was an earlier version of the other person, (a humble Windows XP to the advanced Windows 10, if you may) and that this person is willing to go back to being me. But that’s not all of it. In legal context, “revert” is used to imply that the rights or ownership of a commodity will return to the previous owner. Now, let’s go back to “I’ll revert to you”. Is the person claiming that he will go back to being my property? Am I a slave-lord? Is this even legal? And if it isn’t, will that person be guilty of abetting the crime of slavery? I get all these questions when I read the apparently harmless, but obviously ominous “I’ll revert to you”.

Sometimes, all this makes me wonder when this may have started. I mean, when did we, as a civilization decide that it was ok to appropriate the word “revert” and force it to take the place of the perfectly useful “reply”? What’s wrong with “reply”? It’s easy, not a lot of characters to confuse the spelling, and everyone knows what it means. Hey, it even starts with an “r”, just like “revert”, so why not use it?

I think there must have been some cataclysmic event, like the one that drove the dinosaurs to extinction, but in this case, pushed “revert” into our vocabulary in place of the simpler “reply”. I have been trying to trace this event, so that we can collectively err… revert to the day and time when we were no longer using “revert” when we wanted to say “reply”. Until then, I guess, people will continue to do this.

The Tertiary Character

2016-01-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

I found him sitting on the road beam of the bridge staring at white lines that divided one side of traffic from the other. The lines seemed to have caught his fancy. His eyes moved slowly from left to right until they reached the end of the bridge. Once they hit the corner, they darted back to the beginning as though he were reading a novel that was written on the white lines. From time to time, he would scratch his head over the bucket cap he was wearing, and then start moving his eyes again. His unkempt beard penetrated his overcoat partially covering the holes on it. I did not know if I was being rude by staring at him, but for some reason, I was transfixed.

“Alright, you’ve said enough.” He suddenly turned to me and said.

“Excuse me!”

“Yeah, you. You’ve described me enough.”

“I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t mean to bother you. I’ll be on my way.”

“No, no. It’s not time for you to leave now. You are supposed to
be sitting here by my side. But don’t say too much about me.”

That was a little disturbing. Not only did this loafer tell me that it was not time for me to leave, he was also telling me what I was supposed to do. By then, he had gone back to moving his eyes again. Now that he had stopped giving orders, I wanted to sit there and find out what he was doing.

“If I may, Sir, what are you doing?”

He seemed to have not heard.

“Sir, who are you?”

“A more appropriate question would be, what am I?”

This was strange. But I decided to play along.

“Alright, Sir. What are you?”

“I’m a tertiary character in your story.”

“In my story?”

“Yes, I come in when the action doesn’t seem to be moving. Right now, for instance. What have you been doing since the morning?”

“Nothing much. It was a beautiful day, so I decided to take a walk. I’ve been walking for an hour now.”

“And you would have continued to walk down the road till the afternoon had you not seen me sitting here.”

“Perhaps, but how does that matter?”

“I should tell you, but I don’t know how. I think I have overshot my limit already.”

He started counting the fingers on his left hand while looking at the road.

“What are you counting?”

“It’s a good thing that you saw me counting. You see that girl in the distance?”

I saw in the direction he pointed. Sure enough, two hundred meters away, there was a girl on the other side of the bridge, looking at the water under us. Did I walk past her? How did I not notice?

“You did not notice her because she came just now. Which is also why you saw me sitting here. But I think I have said too much. Let me see how much I have left.”

He started counting again. I did not know what to do. I looked at the girl again. She took something out of the pocket of her jeans and threw it in the water, wiping her eyes with the other hand.

“I only have a few words left. I will have to be brief. You see, she’s the secondary character in your story. You are supposed to meet her on this bridge. But somehow, you walked faster than you should have and would have missed her had it not been for me. As a tertiary character, my job is to keep you here long enough and push the story forward without using up too many words. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. You used up words that were supposed to be mine.”

I must have looked confused. He waved his hand almost as if he was physically brushing my confusion away.

“Don’t worry about all this. She is going to jump into the river. I know that you are an Olympian swimmer. Jump in and save her. She is very hurt. Comfort her. I’ll be off then. See you, or perhaps, not see you again.”

Jingle Bells

2015-12-29T08:50:00.003-08:00

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Atnas. Count Atnas. You really should pay attention.”

“I was. That’s a weird name. Never heard something like it before.”

“Well, I didn’t choose it. Like my lean frame, I inherited it.”

“How is it that I’ve never heard of you before?”

“Well, what can I say? Not many have. They direct their diatribes at the unknown. But that makes me better at what I do.”
“And what do you do?”

“To put it simply, in a manner you would understand, I take away things from people.”

“Omg! You’re a thief!”

“That’s one of the ways of putting it. Although, I’d go easy on me if I were you. I only take things away from grownups.”

“Oh, so we should consider you merciful because you restrict your thievery to adults?”

“See, to begin with, let’s stop with calling it “thievery”. That’s a tad too harsh. What I render is a service, something that benefits humanity as a whole. The fact that I often get cursed for it should be considered in my favour and bring me sympathy. Unfortunately, it never does.”

“Why should we sympathise with a... a...”

“No. Not a thief. Let me explain it to you. Remember the time when you lost your headphones and then spent the next week or so looking for them?”

“Yes, of course I remember. Those were my favourite Sennheiser HD 650s. I did plenty of research before I get them. The best musical experience I had ever had.”

“So you spent a week looking for them after they went missing.”

“Yes. But how do you know? Wait a minute, you stole them from me, didn’t you?”

“Calm down. We’ll get to that in a bit. But think about it. What happened after the one week? Did you find them?”

“No. I looked everywhere I could think of. But I couldn’t find them. It was close to the end of the month. So I did not have the money to go buy another one of the same model.”

“So?”
“So, I went and got a pair of headphones for 300 rupees. See? These.”

“This happened three months ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’ve had two months of salary, but didn’t spend it on headphones again. Why?”

“Well, you know… I started using these. I was quite upset initially. The quality was no match for the Sennheisers. There was too much background noise and the bass wasn’t precise. At higher volumes, the music sounded tinny.”

“Uh huh.”

“But then, you know, I went on this road trip. Used these throughout the trip. They kinda grew on me, I guess. They were lighter and easy to carry around. I realized that the earmuffs on the Sennheisers packed my ears into a nylon box. The itchiness I felt after using them was gone. These are great. So I never went back to the Sennheisers.”

“So, now you know that you never needed them in the first place.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say that the Sennheisers had to be taken away from you for you to realize that you never needed them. And also that there were other options which you may not have chosen at first sight, but once they became the only choice you had, you ended up liking them.”

“Err…. You mean…”

“Yes. But don’t worry. You’re not alone. A lot of us are like that. We carry around stuff we don’t need, simply because it appealed to us at one point of time and we thought it was the best there was. We also keep with us things that we don’t want, but tell ourselves that it will come in handy some day. But when the day comes, we don’t even remember that this was with us all along. Let me ask you something. How many times have you carefully placed articles in your browser tabs, Twitter favorites or Pocket?”

“Several times. My browser still has over 20 tabs, mostly articles that I will read soon.”

“Take a random guess. When was the first tab in the window saved there?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. A few months, I guess.”

“Eight to be precise. It was a news item that you wanted to read that night. But you couldn’t and saved it for that weekend. But by the weekend, you had found newer, more interesting items that you told yourself that you’ll read. Three more tabs were added and the first one, like an ignored puppy, slowly moved to the left corner of your screen. You still have it there, opening it every time your browser opens, but newer items catch your attention and you keep piling on tabs, promising yourself every time your browser window looks like the roofs of a semi-detached housing unit, that you’ll clear the tabs out. But it never happens.”

“But those are interesting links. When I see them, I think I’ll like reading them. I think it’s important to know what they’re talking about. Like see this thing on the new mobile processor that I ran into…”

“Yes, you opened it and left it there. That “new” mobile processor has a successor in the market already. Your tab has already become the previous generation. Do you think it is still important to read that?”

“Well, no.”

“A few months ago, your laptop crashed.”

“Yes, I got my documents from the hard drive.”

“What happened to the 40 tabs you had on your browser window?”

“I lost them.”

“That knowledge you never received, has it affected your life majorly?”

“Erm… no. But where are you going with this?”

“When someone like you behaves in this manner, Count Atnas gets into the picture. I take away from you, what you think you can’t live without, but actually don’t need. I take it from me so that you may understand that you never needed it in the first place.”

“But, isn’t that bad? You ruin people’s lives.”

“No, I don’t. I actually make it better for them. You see, as a man realizes with time, that his life isn’t majorly affected by material possessions that he accumulated on a whim, he learns to live with much less. He learns to move on and makes little fuss when something like this happens. It’s a thankless job, that I do, but it’s an essential one. It may be a cliché, but I actually make the world a better place. Now, if it weren’t for guys like that fat old man on his sleigh…”

“Wait a minute. Are you talking about Santa Claus?”

“Yes, him. Him deceiving kids with a bag full of flashy, new gifts.”

“But he makes them happy. They wait eagerly for Christmas tonight to see what gifts he brings them.”

“Don’t be naïve. Do you want a 6-year old kid to look forward to the visit of an old man because he’s going to bring a brand new toy train? Now what if you were the old man? You want to talk to your grandson, play with him, tell him stories about the time you went fishing, and want to see the joy in his eyes. But when you go, he watches your right hand to see how big the box is that you’ve brought him. The box is seized and is unwrapped between jumps of joy. The train comes out, and poof, the boy’s gone. How would you feel about that?”

“If you are going to put it that way, well… I’ll feel miserable, I guess.”

“And that’s what this Santa Claus does. He brings gifts to kids and then leaves secretly, giving them the idea that the grandfather is a gift provider and nothing else. They write long letters every year to Santa, saying they want this and that, never-ending lists, I tell you. Those kids grow up to become adults, like you, filling their life with things they don’t need. When they don’t get what they want, they go about breaking everything they have. I find that most funny. How will destroying what you need and have, get you what you don’t need? But it’s a mentality built upon impressionable minds. Santa has been majorly responsible for this.”

“So, you’re saying Santa pampers kids to the point that they can’t handle rejection. As in, he makes kids feel that they can get anything they want as long as they can throw bad enough a tantrum. And when they grow up, they become like…”

“Yes, like you.”

“But, by the time they, we, become adults, the mentality gets too strongly implemented, right? How do we change after that?”
“Now, that’s where I save the day. I take things away from you, your Sennheiser headphones, your browser tabs, things you will never need but have been accumulating, because you wanted it and won’t take no for an answer. Ideas that Santa has given you.”

“Hahaha! Nice explanation, Atnas, very nice. What a way to justify your thievery! What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, you take things from everyone, right?”

“Only grownups.”

“Yeah, yeah. Do you need all those things you take? Why do you want them? I’m sure you too would simply accumulate them and never look back, because you’re too busy stealing, sorry, taking newer things.”

“Haha. You see this rucksack I’m carrying?”

“Yes, this is where you keep all the loot, is it?”

“Something like that. Now look closely. This rucksack has a large hole. Not large enough to make it unusable, but quite large. There is a short wall that separates the hole from the compartment I put things into. As that compartment fills up, things fall over the wall into the compartment with the hole and out of the rucksack. They find their way to people to whom they will be a novelty and therefore, usable. I never carry too much at any time. Once the novelty wears off, I take it from them and put into the rucksack, so they may once again go to those who would need them.”

“Hmmm… I don’t know, man, Atnas. You seem to be making sense. But I don’t know. Do you think people can change? Do you think we can get rid of our dependency on things?”

“Haven’t you already? Are you going to buy those Sennheisers again?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure, I mean, I guess not. I need to think about it. Not about the headphones, of course. About what you said.”

“Good. I’ll leave you to your thoughts. See you around then.”

“Hey, something fell out of your rucksack. I guess you’re carrying too many things in there, Atnas. Wait, are these my Sennheisers?”

“Atnas, stop. Where are you going? I don’t need these. You can keep them.”

“They’ve found their way to you. If you don’t need them, you’ll find someone who will. I leave them to you. Goodbye.”

Conversations with the Other Side

2015-12-19T22:00:00.004-08:00

“So, you died.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like? I mean dying.”

“Well it depends.”

“On what? On how you die?”

“More on how you lived.”

“As in?”

“It doesn’t matter how you die, stabbed, shot, drowned, kidney failure, liver failure, cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage, car crash, third degree burns, none of it matters. How you feel death depends on how you lived.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You begin to feel it in your extremes. Not just the tips of your toes and fingers. In the thin end of each hair that sprouts from your skin, you feel it coming. It approaches you like an army of ants, joined leg to leg, moving up on you as a blanket that creeps in. You begin to sweat, because you know it’s happening. How do you know? You’ve never died before. How do you recognize the feeling? From a previous birth? I don’t know. But I knew it was happening. I started to sweat. My blood was rushing farther away, abandoning the parts that the blanket of death had already covered. My joints put up a valiant fight, twitching and trying to shake it off. But they got tired too, and the blanket covered them. My eyes wanted to stay open, but the fatigue of an entire lifetime was pulling them shut. The heart slows down knowing that it no longer has to pump blood to the ends of the body that the blanket had already taken over.”

“And this is irrespective of how you die, you say? I mean this is what would happen, whether I’m stabbed with a knife, or if cancer is eating me from the inside.”

“Yes. You won’t know all of it though. Not everyone would. And that’s where it’s important to know how you lived.”

“Go on.”

“The blanket covers more and more of you and the eyes begin to blink slower and slower, staying shut more than open. The turbulence that had been raging inside you spirals inward and begins to settle. You may even feel calmer, the breathing is slower now, deeper perhaps. There is no more sound to hear, nothing more to see, nothing from the outside world will now disturb you. For all it cares, you have been cut off, for lightening the burden. “Dead” weight, you see. And when the bonds of the present are no longer part of your future, your past swims in to fill the void.”

“And…”

“Yes, this is where it matters how you lived. You know every time they portray death in art, you never see its face, it’s always shrouded in darkness, under a hood or something like that?”

“Mostly, yes. But not always. Sometimes, it’s…”

“Yes, sometimes it has a skull for a face. A skull over which you could wrap the skin of your strongest memories, place your fondest eyes, or the moving lips of the voice you hated to hear. That is your choice. The face, the face of your death, is shaped by your own hands. When you look up at Death, the shroud falls, the darkness is driven away, and the skull is filled with flesh. The bony hands stretch to reach you. Your legs are no longer twitching. No use. Your breathing is still, except for occasional gasps, the cough of a dead engine that doesn’t know yet that it’s dead.”

“And then what happens? How does it matter how I lived?”

“Well, when Death reaches out for you, how you lived, decides whether it takes your hand and walks with you, or grabs you by the neck and drags you with it. That depends on how you lived. That’s the only thing that matters.”

What's in a Last Name

2015-07-20T10:18:00.002-07:00

PART I

Have you seen a guy roaming around the streets, unshaven, in ragged tatters for clothes and sleeping on park benches?

No. Stop right there. That’s not me. That’s a guy without money. I’m a guy without a last name, which contrary to what you may think, is an intangible form of wealth.

I hail from the southern part of the Indian peninsula, almost the tip of it, if you want to be specific. Where I come from, people have been living for centuries and millennia, without the need for a last name. People were born, people procreated, more people were born and the racket continued without anyone coming and asking us what our last names were.

Suddenly, some of us decided to migrate abroad, to the United States and elsewhere. That meant passports. That meant forms which had a column the smartest of us couldn’t complete because they wanted to know what our last name was. The consulate did not seem to agree with our views on the redundancy of a last name.
We came back, dejected, devastated. That night, at a roadside restaurant, the frenzied discussion was all about this.

“Machan, what’s a last name da?” asked Vijaykumar, with his mouth full of Dosa.

“What’s in a last name?” misquoted Ramesh who was known for his puns and would later become a celebrity on Twitter.

“Dei, hit that fellow. Some of us here are struggling for survival and he’s making bad jokes as always.”

After a gentle nudge from Swamy, Ramesh kept quiet.

Vijaykumar repeated, “What IS a last name? They never asked you for one at school, right?”

Krishna cleared his throat. His father was in the Railways. He had spent some time in places like Delhi and Bombay (collectively called “North India”) and was considered to be an authority on all things wheat and Hindi.

We all turned our attention to Krishna. “Yaar, see.” We chose to ignore the “Yaar” which we considered to be some kind of infection Krishna had picked up.

Krishna continued.

“I have seen North Indian names split into two parts. They call the second part as the last name or surname. It comes from father to son, like Male Pattern Baldness, you know.”

“OH, like we use initials?”

“No, no. Initials are the first letter of our father’s names, which means that you and your son would have different initials, provided you put some imagination into naming your kids. But surnames remain the same, over generations, over centuries, sometimes.”

“Oh! Interesting” Vijaykumar said, drawing out the “interesting” on an unnaturally stubborn piece of Dosa.

“But what’s the point of having one? You are called by your first name and that should be enough to identify you, right?” This was Karthik, who shared his name with a flock of Karthiks and never seemed to have a problem with it. The others though, would refer to him as the “short” Karthik, as opposed to the “tall” Karthik and the “thin” Karthik and the “C” Karthik who spelled his name as “Karthick”.

“Ok, fine. I don’t see any point to this. Let’s assume that we all need surnames or last names, whatever they are. It could be a conspiracy that the West has imposed upon us, but I really don’t see any harm in having one. I have always been happy that I had a short name. A long name would have been a pain when you are filling up forms. But it looks like it’s more of a pain to not have a last name. I think we should start thinking about what names we want to have.”

Swamy was a practical kind of a guy. He categorized anything that involved effort as a pain but had the accuracy of a monsoon mosquito in picking out the least painful path of action.

“Swamy is right. We can’t deliberate upon this while scarce visas are being distributed to those privileged to have been born with a last name.”

“So do we get to choose what last names we take? Because, I didn’t have much of a choice with my first name.”

As the others-proclaimed (I presume this is an opposite of self-proclaimed, which seems to be the norm these days) nerd of the group, it was my duty to speak up.

“I think we should learn a little more about this last names/surnames business before we make our decision.”

As is the norm with meetings everywhere, be it the boardrooms of corporate giants, or the standing eatery Karthik Tiffin Center (This was an outlet run by another Karthik, whom we never had the good fortune of meeting), anyone making a sensible suggestion is immediately made in charge of working on it and producing positive results. This simple cause-effect relation has led to muted mouths in many a meeting. Forced alliteration notwithstanding, I took upon myself the onerous task of delving deep into the bowels of knowledge, also known as Wikipedia.

I will summarize my findings here. Turns out, Krishna was only partially right. In some places, the surname was inherited from the mother, like Harry Potter’s eyes, as Rowling drilled into all of us. And some places, perhaps to ensure gender equality, went the distance to have the surnames of both the parents hyphenated , and added to the child’s name, in the process denying the child the chance to write his complete name in the few given boxes on any form.
In England, some people were too busy or too lazy to come up with a name, so they chose the profession they were in at that time. Thus we had the butchers and the butlers, among others. This was a little unfortunate as the 20th descendant in the family of Butchers could testify. He was a vegan and was the butt of bad jokes on his food preferences. Talking of butt, we move to the next type of surnames in England, based on your body parts. Basically, if you were called names in your childhood, based on how you looked, you picked the least nasty of them and made it your surname. So, if you were a Longbottom, well, you get the idea. The Youngs and the Browns and the Whites were in the same category. Some people decided to choose the easiest way possible and added a “son” to their father’s name, thereby affirming their inheritance. The name of the brand you grew up hearing, “Johnson and Johnson” were actually “John’s sons” but chose to refer to themselves in this weird fashion.

I conveyed my findings to the group over some delicious chilli bajji. Swamy was the first to respond, although his response of “SSSSS” was variously interpreted as a reaction to the spicy chilli, or the irritation of having to think up a name or an attempt to say his newly created last name.

The first assured sign of success came from Vijaykumar who decided unilaterally that henceforth he would be known as “Vijay Kumar” and all his descendants, even if they were Kumaris (girls) would have the last name “Kumar”. Ramesh chose this moment to suggest that if Vijay Kumar named his daughter “Kumari”, she would be called “Kumari Kumar”. Vijay threw the oil-stained newspaper at him. Ramesh dodged it and said he would discuss the issue with his grandfather. The latter was known for his creativity, going by the tales he spun about himself. Ramesh would later be enlightened that he hailed from the Srivatsa gotra and might as well use it as his surname. Swamy decided to honor his father Subramaniam by taking up his name as his last name. We decided to celebrate the birth of these new names by ordering another round of bajjis for everyone and telling the bhajji anna that he should consider getting a last name for himself.

The success with the last name was not replicated at the American consulate. They had forgotten to tell us that a last name was only one of the requirements. So we returned again, dejected and devastated but with a last name. At least, those of us who went to the Consulate. I did not. So, until that point of time, I continued to thrive with a single name, proudly flaunting my obstinacy to my friends. But that would change.

PART II

Have you ever seen a guy, roaming around, pursing his lips and running his fingers through the lips of his purse, every time he has to use the metro? That’s not a guy without money. It’s me, a guy without a last name.

As you may recall, my problems started thousands of years ago, when my ancestors decided to not complicate their lives with the requirement of a last name. And so we went around with names that could be written down on a small leaf and tied to the rest of our wardrobe. And even after we moved to wearing dresses made of cloth, our penchant with single names had continued. Not that no one asked us to change. The resistance had been strong. After all, do we know if Socrates was a Sabharwal or a Sadovnikov? Or why none of the cities Alexander founded had his last name? Similarly, I told myself, the truly great do not use, or rather do not need, last names.

A few of my friends had, in a manner of speaking, gifted to themselves new last names. But my obstinacy (and frankly, the absence of a compulsion to visit the American Consulate, having not entered the hallowed premises of an institute whose abbreviated name started with two “I”s) prevented me from giving myself a last name. Vijaykumar, who later became Vijay Kumar, suggested that I follow his path and become Jey Sundhar. But that appeared lazy and frankly, purposeless to me. I had even got a passport without a last name which was, for a brief while, the source of universal envy. But trouble started after I moved to Russia.

In Russia, everyone had a last name, everyone. And sometimes, their last name was more unique than the first name, considering that I had met several Alexeys and Dimitrys, but no two people having the same last name.
I continued to flaunt around the fact that I had gotten so far (geographically, I mean) without submitting myself to the tyranny of the last name. Until I faced an even bigger problem than being denied a passport. I was denied a student pass on the Moscow Metro.

The Moscow Metro calculates fares based on the number of trips and not the number of stations. So, it was quite expensive if you travelled just a few stations. The teachers, from whom I was learning Russian, told me that I was eligible for a student pass and could get one if I applied.

The application process was right out of the bureaucratic planet of Douglas Adams. You had to get a form from the university, fill it up and submit it back at the university. The university sent it to the corresponding government department, and then you both waited, the university and you, I mean. After you waited long enough for a random passerby to call you a happy couple, the form returned. If it didn’t have any comments on it, you submitted it back at the metro station from which you had taken the original form. This is very important. Moscow may have several metro stations, but the forms are held at only a few, and you always submitted it back to the same station and in fact the same clerk you took the form from.

After submission you waited again, but this time, you have to periodically call on the clerk to see if your form and along with it, the student pass had come. Thus having laid the foundations of a good international friendship, we found to our dismay, we being the station clerk and me, that my form was not accepted. You don’t have a “Familia”, she patiently explained to me. No, no. I have a lovely family back home, parents and what not, I told her. “Nyyyyet, nyet nyet. This is not family, this is familia. A last name. You need a last name.”
I sat down with my teacher and we brooded about this, over a pack of French fries with nostalgia of Karthik Tiffin Center drifting in. “Why don’t you have a last name?” I explained the history of my people to her. She seemed fascinated.
“An entire civilization, thousands of years of history, and you people don’t have a last name?” “Civilizations are not built on last names. They are built on steamed rice served on a banana leaf.”
I got a pat on my cheek. Anyway, we digress.

Eventually, she convinced me that I should get a last name. Now, this was a problem. I, the guy who had adamantly refused to get a last name, and even refused a visa (not that it was offered to me, but hey, why should you be offered something to refuse it? I even refused the post of the President once) should I surrender to the tyranny of the last name?
“Get one, it’ll be fun.”
“I will think about it.”
“I have thought about it and I have decided to get a last name.” I told her one day as I went to recharge my metro balance.
“Does it have anything to do with this being the end of the month?” she asked with a grin.
“Well... But it will not be just any last name. It will be a name that conjures catastrophe, triggers terror and strikes fear in the hearts of people who ask me for it.”
“Now, what would that be?”
I did not tell her. But I had made up my mind. When I visualized the effect an “effective” last name would have in the heart of the hearer, I had seen the earth shaking, trees swaying, volcanoes erupting... volcanoes, wait that’s it. What was the name of that Icelandic volcano that caused chaos to air traffic and other things and became the only Icelandic word other than Reykjavik whose spelling you remembered? Yes, that’s it. Eyjafjallajokull. Now spell that out slowly in your minds.

“E Y J A F J A L L A J O K U L L”
Do you feel your heart beats skipping their rhythm in fear? Do you feel your breath going uneven, ready to run away from the scene where the name is even mentioned in a whisper? Yes, yes. That’s it. That’s the effect I want my new last name to have.

From now on, I shall be known as EYJAFJALLAJOKULL. Thou shall know me and learn to fear me.

**********

Where is Everybody?

2015-07-15T13:53:00.003-07:00

Imagine living in a neighborhood, a really cramped neighborhood. You don’t have any friends and are bored of the people you are living with. But hey, your neighborhood is cramped, so maybe there’s someone out there. So, you look outside your window, but all you see are windows of houses taller than yours and roofs of houses shorter than yours. You want to meet new people, but haven’t seen even a shadow in any of the windows.
As time passes by, you grow more and more desperate and begin to write notes that read like the spam popups on certain websites, “Hi! How are you? I live here. Wanna come over?” But you get no response. You pick up small objects from your house and begin to throw them randomly at windows and walls, hoping to see a face, any face, even an angry one. But, nope, nothing. Zilch. “Where is everybody?”
And one day, as you stand under the shower, watching the water run down the grilled mouth of the drain, it hits you. “Maybe there is nobody out there! Maybe I am all alone.” It’s a scary thought. In all the expanse of this cramped neighborhood, you are alone. Absolutely alone. There’s no one else. Nobody to reply with a “Hello” if you mutter, or even yell a “Hi”. You stop the shower. But you’re still sweating.
You open that window of yours and put your towel out to dry. As your sweat cools, you begin to think. “How could there be no one out there? What happened to all the people who lived in these houses? Or did no one live here ever since they were built? Are those houses so bad? My house is good. In fact, it’s perfect. I get just the right amount of sunlight. It’s never too hot or too cold here, and everything is close by. In fact, this neighborhood is a realtor’s dream. I have lived here for such a long time, but I’ve not seen a single soul in any of the other houses. What is the problem?”
Your logical mind lets you arrive at a series of theories, all of which sound convincing. First of which, of course is the most obvious. There’s nobody out there. You. Just you. All alone. In the entire neighborhood.
That sounds too heady and too scary at the same time. But we know that there are all these houses in the neighborhood. How can they ALL be empty? Something else must have happened or must be happening. What is it?
The next theory is that the other houses have people. Of course. But the people are too young or too short to rise to the level of the windows and communicate with you. So, even if they have seen your messages, and are trying to respond, they are not able to respond to it in a manner that you can see and understand.
The biggest roadblock to this theory is that the other houses are as old as and in some cases, much older than your house. So, the people there must be at least as advanced in growth as you, if not more.
So, we come to the next theory. There were people in the other houses, they did grow, but they died before they grew tall enough. Something must be wrong in their houses that shortened their lifetimes. Some strange disease that spreads within the walls of the houses and kills all the residents. Some strange malaise that is triggered with time by the houses themselves, and therefore is contained to the houses. But this has happened individually in all the houses. A kind of a great cloak that smothers clans in their houses, separating the ephemeral ones from the relatively eternal ones. Is that a…great… filter?
At this stage, you’re scared again. Because, the thought of the great filter has sweated out all curiosity of the others from your mind. You are now extremely worried. If it is a great filter, and if it has ended lives in all the houses in the neighborhood, and if you are the only one left, how long do you have left?
Here we end the extended analogy I drew in order to simplify the Fermi paradox. The paradox is that we have high estimates of the probability of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilization, but we do not have any contact with, or evidence of such civilizations. Like living in a crowded neighborhood and yet, not actually seeing any neighbors.
So, let’s continue with the assumption that we are special, hell, not special, we’re unique in the true sense of the word. There’s only one tiny planet in an unremarkable solar system that has got complex life, ours. So, how did this happen? What happened to the Great Filter? Well, there are a few possibilities.
We already crossed the Great Filter
1. This possibility is based on the premise that the Great Filter is mostly in the beginning. Life on earth is an outcome of a complex set of factors that had to be present and function at just the right level for life to start. The click, that lightning strike, the second at which the primordial carbon chose to “breathe”, we have tried to recreate it in labs and failed. This implies that the probability of life on a planet is so close to zero that we are the only ones out there.
2. The Great Filter is in the beginning, but not so early. Life started in a lot of planets, as it did on earth, as simple prokaryotes. But these simple prokaryotes either never found the right conditions or the need to transition into complex eukaryote structures. If this is the case, then the universe is full of life, but most of it is similar to the bacteria we have on earth. There’s no way the bacteria-like lifeforms are going to reply to the signals we have sent from the earth.
While we’re on the Great Filter, some of the other theories are that the evolution of man was the Great Filter. But, no. The Great Filter, by definition, has to be “Great”. You remember the dinosaurs? The earth may have, according to the most accepted theory, been hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago wiping out the largest creatures ever to walk on land. But life survived and continued. So, that’s not necessarily a Great Filter and neither is human evolution.
So, according to this possibility, we have already crossed the Great Filter when life started on Earth, or when it became Eukaryotic. The only way now is up, to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter is not Happening:
This possibility is based on the premise that, like humans, the universe itself has gotten “civilized” and does not go about ending civilizations with gamma ray bursts on planets. We have observed these things happening on distant galaxies (but because of the distance, we know that some of these events happened even before humans evolved, or even before life started on earth). If this were the case, then the universe has decided to keep the current civilizations intact, and among them, we’re perhaps the most advanced. And once again, until the universe decides otherwise, we’re destined to become as great as we can be.
The Great Filter…is coming… or we’re heading towards it
Well, in matters of the universe, not all is…err… sunshine. This possibility suggests that all civilizations evolve to a certain level of advancement, perhaps to where we are, and then something happens, like the cataclysms suggested before. Or (and this seems more possible, looking at where we are now) civilizations reach such a degree of advancement where their rationale gives them the power to capture and destroy planets, but their inherent craziness uses the same power to destroy their own planet. The End.
There’s another side to the Fermi paradox that goes along the lines of “There’s somebody out there. But they don’t want to talk to you”. But, that’s perhaps for another day.
Getting back to why I feel that the Pluto flyby is important for the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter, as long as we remain a one-planet civilization, we’re vulnerable to the cataclysms such as Gamma ray bursts, or perhaps the transition of the sun into a Red Giant towards the end of its life. Honestly, there is a long time for that to happen, but no harm thinking about it now.
Based on the Kardashev scale and a complex calculation devised by Carl Sagan (again, perhaps for another day), we’re a Type 0.72 civilization. To be truly invulnerable to planet and even solar system-level cataclysms, we need to become a Type 3 civilization and have complete mastery over the resources of our entire galaxy. Closer to reality, we believe we need another 100-200 years to have mastery over the resources of our own planet and we haven’t been able to even imagine how to harness the energy of our host star, the sun.
But fear not, friends.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Or before the Great Filter kills you and me.

KAZAN : Kremlin and Beyond

2015-07-05T12:04:00.002-07:00

When I got out to “roam around” Kazan at 7pm, the city looked like it had been lit by a thousand incandescent bulbs, each of their light bubbles licking up the borders of the next to form one giant bubble that swallowed up the city. It was June 20, the evening before the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. So, the sun was still shining.

I picked up a map from the hotel reception and was poring over it. The receptionist told me that the Kazan Kremlin was not to be missed. I smiled at the fact that in Kazan, like in other parts of the world, places that were once centers of power, were now centers of attraction. What people once feared, now they took selfies with.

The Kazan Kremlin, like other Kremlins scattered around Russia, was a fortress. Most old cities of Russia had a Kremlin. Sometime in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies, most Kremlins were torn down, perhaps with the realization that war wasn’t going to happen, or that if war came, the Kremlin offered no significant protection. Only a dozen or so survive. This made the Kazan Kremlin even more of a rarity than it would have otherwise been. I decided to head there first.

Squinting my eyes as I got out (the sun was still shining), I walked down the road that Saturday evening. The road quickly began to rise up. The two dimensional map had not been able to explain this projection. But then, I have always liked walking uphill. It made me feel alive.

Even if the heart was merely pumping the same blood, a little more frantically, I felt as though new blood was flowing through my legs. As I turned a curve on the road, the Kremlin became visible to me. At first sight, it couldn’t have been more different from the Moscow Kremlin. It was white and the walls were definitely not as high. The insides too were very different. But I did not know that then.As I walked up towards the Kremlin, I realised that it sat on top of a small hill that looked like an upturned copper cauldron (one of the stories behind the name Kazan). The hill would have provided a good vantage point for the rulers to look upon the city.

The most striking thing when you reach the Kremlin is the monument to Musa Chalil, a poet and resistance fighter of the Soviet Union. Musa stands with his arms pulled back by strong barbed chains that have also bound his legs. But the upturned face and the look of defiance that the sculptor managed to capture on stone, gives you the feeling that any minute now, with a tug of his powerful shoulders, Musa would break the chains and taste the freedom he craves for. I’m almost reminded of Sivaji Ganesan from Manohara

waiting to rip his chains apart.

After a picture, I move into the Kremlin itself through the Spasskaya Tower. After a walk around the abandoned monastery and the history museum, I come face to face with the newest building inside the Kremlin, the Qol Sharif Mosque.

The mosque is named after the Imam who served there and died defending Kazan from the Russian forces in 1552. The mosque was destroyed during the invasion, but it is speculated that its design elements may have inspired the Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. The new mosque was inaugurated in 2005 and can hold 6000 worshippers. With the mouths of its tent like blue dome, the mosque would look like a blue lotus blooming on the Kazanka River if seen from a distance. I stepped back a few steps to cover the magnificence of the mosque within the frame. Another few steps and my back would have hit the Sooyumbike Tower. Which would have been quite unfortunate because the tower is already leaning.

The Sooyumbike Tower is the Russian answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa (although the former has been stabilised and no longer leans). There is no clarity on the exact date of its construction, although there is a popular legend that Ivan the Terrible built it within a week. The legend says that Ivan was smitten by the beauty of the Tatar queen Sooyumbike and built the tower as she demanded. But once it was finished, the queen jumped from it killing herself. The legend is untrue but makes for an interesting story. Consensus now leans (no pun intended) towards the Tower being a pre-Russian construction, by the Khans as similar structures were built in Central Asia by other Khans.

Next to the tower stands a grand arch that must have been the entrance to the palace of the Khans. The arch now looks down on a glass covered enclosure below the ground. These are the graves of the Khan rulers of Kazan (the last of whom was Sooyumbike). An attempt to click the graves resulted in my reflection on the glass getting on the camera, mildly scaring me.

Going further, the Kremlin ends with a curve to the right. At the curve is the Tainitskaya or Secret Tower. The tower itself is not a secret, and is quite visible. It held a secret passageway to a spring well, which came in quite handy during sieges.

From the Tainitskaya tower, the walls curve to the right to the Palace of the President. Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation. The head of the Republic is the President who lives inside the Kremlin. Next to the Presidential palace is the Annunciation Cathedral which was built on the site of the mosque of the Khans. The walls, ceiling and even the pillars of the church are painted with stunning frescoes, with imagery of Orthodox Christianity.

After taking a few pictures of all the monuments, I considered my Kremlin tour finished and decided to explore the rest of the city. After all, the city is more than the old fort from which it was ruled. But about that in another post, perhaps.

***********

Signing off with a few more sights from quaint Kazan!!

A HIKE BY THE RIVER

2015-06-22T13:45:00.003-07:00

A river is a beautiful thing. As it flows from the mountains into the plains, it leaves behind the soft sand that it scraped with its many feet, onto the feet of the people who come to it for water. The sand is carried on by the many legs of these people, giving rise to cities, cultures and civilizations.

Moskva River

It’s a little surreal when you think about the fact that all that we see around us was once nothing more than what was carried by muddy legs after a bath in the river.

So, this Sunday (which is perhaps the last calm weekend we’ll have before the BRICS storm hits us!) I decided to dip my legs into the river that gave birth to the city that I live in. The Moscow river (called Moskva in Russian), yes, the city gets its name from it. Our hike group took the train to Mozhaysk, a city located upstream of Moscow and got down at the Polushkino station.

Hike group

From there, we entered a coniferous forest (most railway lines out of Moscow run through the forests that surround the city, so several stations are actually platforms that rise out of the muddy terrain). The hike was supposed to be 21km and was planned to last a little under 5 hours.

The forests around Moscow are quite interesting. I had noticed this on earlier hikes too. It’s not like there’s this stretch of land awash with green that looks like overgrown broccoli (or brown and white if flew over in the winter) with no signs of civilization.

The canopy above...the cover below...

No, these forests are more like clusters of trees inundated by fields with grass up to the knees. Nothing else, just grass. I mean back home, if you spotted an empty plot of land in the morning and came back with your cricket bat, stumps and the like, you would be sure to run into a board that says, “Udayam Nagar welcomes you. Riverside residences, 20 minutes from the city” Yeah, 20 minutes if you hopped onto a jet that was already at cruising speed. And here, land, rolling out till it rolled away because of the curvature of the earth. At this point, I was bubbling with property development plans. But my hike mates told me that these are actually fields of fertile land that was under cultivation not too long ago, and will soon be, as part of the regular cycle.

We continued walking into the forest, moving wild branches and hopping over fallen trees. One of the others pointed to the fallen trees and told me about the problem they were facing. A few species of

Bugged!

invasive worms were corroding the branches of the trees and killing them. Even despite the winter, he had never seen so many trees fallen. The forest canopy was less crowded than it should be, and the sun hit us quite hard.

After an hour or so, we came to a bridge. It was a footbridge, one of those that swayed like Donald Trump’s hair against a tornado. So, we had the first half of the group walk on it, while we waited, ready to jump into the water if anyone fell. But once, I got on the bridge, I realized that it was like one of those amusement park rides. While you were on the bridge, you didn’t feel it

Bridging the banks...

that much. So, I stopped for a picture at a place where none of the planks were missing. This was my first sight of the Moscow river outside the city. It was a completely different color, in fact, a completely different river.

It flowed gently and was quite shallow where the bridge was. The water was so clear that even from the bridge we could see water-plants with their heads bent in the direction of the city, almost as if trying to catch a glimpse of the Kremlin. The southern bank rose slightly, but the northern bank was relatively flat.

Weeds...Under a glass floor?!

We crossed over to the northern bank and continued to walk along the course of the river until the temptation was too much and we dropped our backpacks and jumped into the cool waters.

Dip! Dip! Dip!!

After the hike leader signaled twice that it was time to leave and switched to stronger signals such as hoisting his backpack and walking away fast, we ran out of the river to join him.

We moved back into the forest and I ran into this charming fellow who would probably not be so charming if I got any closer. “It’s not as long as the snakes in India, but is quite poisonous” I was told. So a distant shot with zoom was to be the legacy of our meeting.


Hii there..from a distance!!

All along the river, less than two hundred meters from the water, the Dachas(the Russian word for a country-house) were ubiquitous. It must be quite something to live that close to the river, at least during the summer weekends.

Wake up to the sound of the water smiling at the sun and produce some Vitamin D through that skin. And as the sun warms up,

“Mama, I am hungry. When do we have lunch?”
“Just a minute, darling. Papa is hopeful he’ll catch a fish anytime soon. Let’s get the grill heated, shall we?”

and that's a wrap...

After a short break for lunch and another dip in the river, we realized that it was almost time for the last train back to Moscow. Twenty minutes and two and a half kilometers. Some of us decided to jog so they could be home for dinner. The others tightened their backpack straps and walked faster. We entered the charming town of Tuchkovo with ten minutes to go for the train.

so long...till the next one

Tuchkovo is a slightly distant suburb of Moscow and has quite a history of its own. Named after three brothers who fought for the country, it is slightly more than a set of restaurants and grocery shops and a railway station, perhaps a Russian version of Malgudi. I had one eye on the clock and one to look around the town. We reached the station with five minutes to spare. The crowded train that entered reminded us of the drudgery of the week that lay ahead. The next hike will have to wait.

********

On Senses and Nostalgia

2015-06-10T10:26:00.003-07:00

It’s the 11th of May. It’s a cloudy Monday afternoon, the last day of the Victory Day weekend in Russia. Yesterday, I watched individuals and entire families march on the Tverskaya Ulitsa holding placards with the pictures of the ones they lost in the Second World War. It was a sight to behold, more majestic and stirring than even the sight of an Armata T-14 rolling down the wide road. The march went on for several hours, without the slightest sign of commotion or chaos. But that too is over, as is the weekend. Tomorrow, everyone will be back to their daily grind, cursing the traffic and smiling at their bosses.

To me, today has been a relatively less hectic day, with the President of India having departed this morning. After a week, I’m at home in the afternoon, with utter disregard to the clock. I do what I always do when the clock is irrelevant. I look at my singular source of envy, the moving clouds. Moving around, without a care or ambition to worry about, or a target to follow, simply letting the wind take them everywhere, and if things got too serious, just pour it all down and be free again. It looks like it would rain soon.

I’m reminded of December Sundays at home. Tamil Nadu gets its share of rainfall when the rest of India has replaced its raincoats with sweaters. Even then, the rain cloud is a powerful middleman. Conscious of its power, it dangles the tantalising promise of rain and yet, threatening to take it away if the wind blew too strong. It takes a different level of Nirvana to console yourself that if it isn’t you, someone else would get the rain. But until you attain that, you satisfy yourself with the cosy warmth of impending rain announced by air pockets of petrichor, reaching your nostrils.

We often talk about the five senses, as if they were five separate entities, working independently of one another. But a recollection from our memory isn’t stored that way, is it? When the smell of petrichor reaches my nostrils, I’m reminded not only of rains at home, but also of the staccato sounds of my father’s hammer as he sent the last nail into the stool or writing table that he was making, or the glare of sunlight reflected off the freshly painted stool, the wavy vapours of paint that acquire almost a corporeal shape to penetrate your nostrils, bringing with them, the smell of cut onions, potatoes and chilli, dipped in Bajji Maavu. But before the vapors tingle the olfactory nerves and take the information of impending rain and Bajji (the latter has more certainty) to your brain, the ears are busy gathering the particle noises of spitter-spatter, of oil being heated.

All this intertwined with the anxious wait for the Sunday evening movie on DD-5, the Tamil telecast of Doordarshan. The antenna and the old Crown TV agreed among themselves to arrange channels according to the name of the stations. So DD-5 was set on number 5 on a TV that could show a sum total of twelve channels. Not that there were that many out there either. This was before Sun TV and the Satellite TV age. Anyway, we thanked DD-5 for the only movie of the week back then, unless you went to theatres, which not many of us did. In fact, I lived a hundred meters from a theatre and restricted myself to enjoying several Oli Chithirams or Audio-only movies from the comfort of the moonlit terrace.

DD-5 had a peculiar choice of movies. Rarely would there be a movie that got released after I was born. You can’t telecast a movie within five years of its release, I was told, though I’m yet to verify the administrative position on that.

It was always movies that were released when my father was in his teens. So, most of the movies I watched back then, be it Thiruvarutchelvar, Thirumal Perumai or Manaalane Mangaiyin Baaiyam, it was always on DD-5. When the AVM logo appeared in the distance and the camera slowly closed in until all you could see were the letters “AVM” and the word “Productions”, or when the semi-clad Gemini twins came in trumpeting, the sputtering oil on the kitchen stove would receive its first stock of onions dipped in batter.

By the time the credits came, to show the Music Director and Lyricists, the first plate would find its way to me. I often blame my inability to recall the name of Music Directors, on an inherent urge to pick the least hot Bajji and taste it. By the time my tongue began to water, half out of taste and half to suppress the heat, the movie would have started with a flute playing in the distance.

The Bajjis would become the moving commodity on the conveyor belt that connected the plate to my mouth. Before onion was over and potatoes started to fry in the oil, the Gods would have tormented Sivaji or Gemini Ganesan would have acquired a new curse for an unintentional misdemeanour. So, the smell of frying potatoes is often connected in my head with a lament of a song in TMS’ voice. A bored look out of the window would show raindrops falling from the toothed edges of the Hibiscus leaves, almost as if the leaves themselves were shedding tears at the current anguish of the protagonist.

The semi darkness of the house, accompanied by the fear over a possible power cut if the rain was heavy, often pushed me to cheer Sivaji and Gemini, to quickly find solutions to their problems, so that if the power went off, or if DD-5 decided to entertain us with its “Thadangalukku Varundhugirom”(We regret this interruption)slides, we’d at least be assured that the protagonist was alive and well.

But then, when these unintended interruptions happened, they were well synchronised with the gaps between two plates of Bajji. Until recent re-watchings, thanks to YouTube, I had never really known how most of these movies ended, though the trend in those days was to always end the movie on a happy note. But how can you be sure unless you watched? Either a power cut, or the drenched matchsticks of the antenna catching a cold would play truant, or I’d have dozed off after the Bajji.

When mother eventually woke me up for dinner, I’d be too sleepy to ask her how the story ended. And the next day was Monday, with school looming ahead too ominously to worry about the movie that got over one way or the other. Eventually, I would forget about the movie. Or so I thought. Apparently not.

A cloudy afternoon at the end of the weekend in Moscow, conjures not just the smell of petrichor, but also of rainwater dripping from Hibiscus leaves, the aroma of fried Bajis, the songs of TMS And the stories they told, the pain of the nail heads as Father’s hammer struck them into yielding wood, and even the anxiety associated with periodically looking up at the ceiling to see if the fan was slowing down due to “Voltage drops”.

Like the slimy trail of a snail, life leaves an imprint as it drags on. The snail does not look back or use the trail to return home for the night. But when we look back at the imprint we left behind, the memories are no longer a dull beige trail. They are a bright rainbow, each colour a memory acquired by a different sense, portraying a deceptive illusion of being distinct. The smell is separate from the sound, and the sound from the sight, and the sight from the sizzling taste on the tongue.

Yet, when you look closer, the lines blur, the borders fade, the colours merge with one another, forming one whole memory, that would be incomplete without any of them. As the rainbow of recollection passes through the prism of nostalgia, its blurring lines blend into yellow-white sunlight. Sunlight that falls on you like a dried dhoti that was carried off by the wind and abandoned to the earth. The lingering scent of the detergent it was washed with is oddly comforting. The arms and legs move inwards to the comfort of its warmth.

The blanket of nostalgia is, to us, a mirror to the moments when the limelight was on us. Rarely do we remember moments from our past when we were not the heroes or absolute horrors on the scene. We continue to live in the reflected recollection of this mirror, so we may not be lost to the darkness of the present that surrounds us. A light that penetrates the darkness, a light away from the unspeaking walls and the flameless stove, a light that takes us back to hammer sounds, hibiscus leaves, DD-5 movies and Bajji-filled evenings.

Moscow Kremlin - A fortress, a national identity.

2015-04-13T08:39:00.002-07:00

Dimitry Troubetskoy stood on the watchtower on the southern wall of the Kremlin. He took a deep breath and let the chilly October air enter his lungs. The sun had set early today, but Dimitry could see the full moon reflected off the empty bottle of Vodka next to the soldier on the Eastern Wall. Moskva river flowed joyously below him. The river resonated with his feelings. Tonight, Dimitry Troubetskoy was a happy man. Moskva was now a free city. He had played a decisive role in defeating the Polish forces who had occupied the Kremlin. The siege had lasted long, and it seemed like it would never end. But, Dimitry had managed to capture the provisions the Poles had, resulting in a famine and surrender.

He looked at the sky and bowed his head. His eyelids drew together and listened to the gentle rhythm of the river. It comforted him to know that the river played with her children and was not trampled upon by outsiders.

Four hundred years later, as I entered the Kremlin complex, I thought I felt Dimitry Troubetskoy’s presence. His watchful eyes lingered over, examined and deemed me harmless. I was allowed to enter the hallowed grounds which Dimitry Troubetskoy and Dimitry Pozharsky had wrested back from the occupying Polish forces.

The Moscow Kremlin is a fort and as the root of the word (Latin “fortis” meaning strong”) indicates, was built to strongly defend the people and territory it represented. Although artifacts and historical records indicate that fortifications in the region existed in some form as early as the 11th century, the cornerstone of the Kremlin, as a stone fortress, was laid by Dimitry Donskoi. The fortress was completed in 1367 and Moscow withstood two sieges by Algirdas of Lithuania and a siege by Khan Tokhtamysh. These successes, among others, helped Donskoi double the territory of the Principality of Moscow. He also challenged the domination of the Mongols and retook most of Russia from them.

The Kremlin sits in Moscow, an irregular triangle 2235 meters long, somewhat like a gigantic brick-red set square out of a school-going kid’s geometry box. But the walls weren’t always red. The first stone Kremlin, which replaced the wooden fortress, was built of white limestone in 1366-68. It was so iconic that even after the fortress was reconstructed in 1495, the walls continued to be painted white until as late as the 19th Century. Moscow itself was called “белокаменной” or “white stoned”.

Throughout its lifetime, the Kremlin has been a microcosm of Russia, in the sense that what happened to the Kremlin indicated to what was happening in Russian politics.

With the construction of cathedrals and palaces, the Kremlin began to serve as the residence of the Tsars. When the last Tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Feodor Ivanovitch died in 1598, he left a vacuum on the throne and the beginning of a phase that in Russian history is known as the Time of Troubles (Смутное время). This period reached a climax with the occupation of the Kremlin by the Polish forces from 1610-12. It was only with the liberation of the Kremlin by Dimitry Pozharsky and Dimitry Troubetskoy that the troubled times ended and the rule of the Romanov dynasty started.

If you were a time-traveler fascinated about Russian history and went back 300 years in time to Moscow, to meet the greatest Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, you would be disappointed. Because, by this time, the Kremlin and Moscow had lost their importance as the seat of power to the newly built city of St.Petersburg.

The Kremlin would still be used for coronation ceremonies, but that would be the limit of its political importance. Like most things in history, Peter the Great has an Indian connection, but that’s a separate post for another day.

When Napoleon invaded Russia, he moved in to capture Moscow, which had already been abandoned by the Russian population on the orders of the Governor Rostopchin. Napoleon and his forces occupied the Kremlin. Towards the end of his largely fruitless siege, Napoleon ordered the Kremlin blown up. But as luck would have it, most of the fuses were damaged by rain and a large portion of the Kremlin survived the damage.

During his reign, Nicholas I had some of the Italian designed churches and palaces torn down and rebuilt by the architect Konstantin Thon. The demolished Kremlin Armoury was also rebuilt in 1851.

After the Russian Revolution, the Kremlin once again became the seat of power, as Lenin made it his residence. Stalin removed all the relics of the Tsarist regime and so, the two headed eagles on the top of the towers were replaced with pentagonal ruby stars.

During the Second World War, Moscow faced heavy bombing, but the Kremlin was barely affected. The walls had been painted (Russians prefer to say “masked”) with doors and windows to resemble houses. The green towers were painted over and there were temporary wooden structures to resemble roofs of houses. The iconic Kremlin stars (each weighing a ton) were covered and crosses over the domes of churches were removed. All of Kremlin was made to resemble a civilian settlement and thus, escaped the bombing.

After the war, the Kremlin continued to be closed to foreign tourists. It took Nikita Khruschev’s efforts to de-Stalinize most of Russia’s internal and external policies. Along with that, the Kremlin was also opened to foreign visitors in 1955. The Thaw, (Оттепель) as it was called, took its name from a sensational Ilya Ehrenburg novel.

This trend of de-Stalinization continued to the extent that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union the letters “CCCR”, meaning “USSR” that adorned the façade of the Grand Kremlin Palace were replaced with the two-headed eagle that appears on the Russian coat-of-arms.

The Kremlin has continued to be the seat of the government of Russia. Its walls have played host to successive Presidents, being more hospitable to some, than to others. The Kremlin is an inalienable part of Russian identity now, in that it is used as an umbrella term to refer to the highest offices of the country. In fact, even the official website of the President of Russia is kremlin.ru.

As I entered the Kremlin for the first time, I felt all this history wash over me. I felt that I was invited to see the last one thousand years of Russian political life as the net of history had captured it.

Hopefully, this is just the first in a short series of posts on the Kremlin. In subsequent posts, I intend to talk about the individual monuments inside the Kremlin. Stay tuned.

Maslenitsa: Dasvidaniya Winter

2015-02-23T02:06:00.002-08:00

Bruce Lee once said, “Be like water”. I think he formulated this profound aphorism while practising to walk during a cold winter. The water that falls from the sky does not always reach the earth as water. It lives a life as it passes through the different layers of our atmosphere, reaching us as rain, sleet or snow.

Water is one of the most formidable of opponents. It is least distracted and lies still. It changes and moulds itself into various shapes and forms. If you drop a small stone into a puddle, the puddle graciously accepts it by folding itself into ripples. But if you were to step strong on it, it will respond by splashing itself on you.

Water takes on a new paradigm during winter. There is the pure, immaculate snow, untouched and chaste. It will respond kindly to gentle hands and oblige to become a snowman or a palace. But to a audacious foot that steps on it, the snow exposes its effective weapons, in the form of a sheet of glassy ice. As you confidently stride crushing lively snowflakes of yesterday under your heavy boots, the spirit waits lurking, right under the deceptively solid layer of snow that absorbs your feet submissively. Right about the moment when your confidence gets the better of your judgement, the ice reveals itself pulling the foot you just moved. You frantically try to use the other foot to regain your balance, but the ice has more hands to pull your legs. In a frantic moment compressed into microseconds, your movements resemble a talented dancer, before you fall, along with your pride. If you were lucky enough, the fall would be borne by your gluteus muscles (Colloquially referred to as the “butt”) cushioned well by adipose tissue.

The long prologue aside (what did you think, I fell? Of course not.), the point of this post is not about the deceptive properties of ice. The ice and its deception is a part of the long winter Russia faces. But when that winter ends, (at least in the calendar) Russians celebrate it with a blast, almost literally. The celebrations have a long history in the Pagan tradition of Russia and predate Christianity, although now the dates coincide with the last week before the Great Lent.

Maslenitsa, or Carnival as it translates, is a festival to mark the end of winter. Winter is personified as a huge straw man and is placed at the center of the celebration grounds. The crowd forms a circle and goes around the statue, chanting verses that command winter to go away. The circle spirals inward as people move faster and closer and gets to the foot of the straw man. There is a loud chorus shouting that would melt the snow if it had ears. After that, the straw man is set on fire, while the crowd gleefully celebrates the end of the cold, depressing winter.

This is what Wikipedia has to say on Maslenitsa.

“The mascot of the celebration is usually a brightly dressed straw effigy of Maslenitsa, formerly known as Kostroma. As the culmination of the celebration, on Sunday evening, Lady Maslenitsa is stripped of her finery and put to the flames of a bonfire. Any remaining blintzes are also thrown on the fire and Lady Maslenitsa's ashes are buried in the snow (to "fertilize the crops").”

As a cultural outsider, whose city welcomes 20 degrees centigrade with bright sweaters, I found the idea of Maslenitsa very interesting. Being in Moscow, I did not want to lose this opportunity. So, I googled and found out about one of the biggest Maslenitsa gatherings in Moscow (I found out later that it was “around” Moscow). In fact, it was a camping ground outside the city, the exact location of which was known to regular campers and hikers. I decided to “hike” with a group, after all, what could go wrong, right? Maybe they will walk a kilometre or two, and get to the camping site. I later found out that the hike was to be around 15km long and would start at 8 in the morning. Now, this was a shock. But hey, your brave friend does not go back on his decision. So, I went. In the freezing morning hours of a Sunday morning, when the Sun is still asleep, I went to the meeting point and joined the group.

It is a request from the group that the exact location of the grounds remain a secret, so I shall not tell you which train I took and which station I got down at. After travelling for a while, we got down at a station, tightened our backpacks, and started to walk. We walked, and walked. Peter Jackson’s greatest success is not the number of Oscars his movies got, but rather the fact that every time you hike or trek, you see yourself in a scene from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We walked through a forest, where some trees still maintained their greenery through the winter and were eagerly looking forward to spring. We crushed snow under our boots and skated through the ice (without slipping, of course).

After about an hour of brisk walk, at which stage I estimated that we had crossed about 10km (I later found out that we had done less than 7), we took a break by a glade that was downstream from a small dam. We shared the food and drinks we had brought. I was convinced by intense persuasion from my fellow hikers to take an amiably colored drink, which they said was made of honey with very little alcohol content. It tasted divine, almost like a strongly made tea sweetened with honey.

We continued our walk and crossed the dam, where I found this charming chap. He seemed to say, “When the water flows, it flows. But when it freezes, I put a stool there and ponder over life”.

After we crossed the dam, we stumbled upon a monument to the villagers from the village who had given up their lives for the motherland in the Second World War.

At this point, the hike leader told us that we were running late and may not be able to reach the grounds at noon, as planned. We labored on, trudging through the snow, cutting across the curved path to form straighter, shorter paths. Finally, we reached the venue a little after noon. The events were about to begin.

All around me I saw people dressed in vibrant colors. Oranges and yellows and greens flowed through the place as though spring was already there. But I had no time to look around and admire. A girl who had apparently time-traveled from the 13^th century, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to join the crowd gathered at the bear den, where she and the others would wake up the sleeping bear.

Normally the mention of the word bear, sleeping or otherwise, would have sent me running, but I was err...cough cough, encouraged to go to the cave.

I lent my voice to the chorus that sang songs to wake up the bear. While I didn’t get much of the Russian song, I surreptitiously inserted random verses from the Rig Veda to fit the tune. It worked and the bear got up from his lumber. And spring was here. But winter was still around. We had to chase her away. With fire.

Fire, to a culture that survives -20 degrees, is as valuable as oxygen. It gives both heat and light, the two things that life needs, yet is deprived of in the winter. When the sun betrays the Russians by handing them over to the cruel clutches of winter, a fire is like carrying your own private, more loyal sun in your hearth.

So when the day comes to say goodbye to the winter, the Russians do not wait for the sun to appear and assist them in the process. They channel the heat of their resilient spirit and set winter on fire. The straw man burned and fell apart one limb at a time.

There was a loud cheer from the crowd as each part fell. The crowd went berserk when the head fell. It was quite a delight to watch the joy on their faces, even in an era of artificial heating in homes and cars. But the fun wasn’t over yet. There were enough games, music and dance to keep everyone happy. There was tug of war, which I took part in.

There was a 15 foot tall castle whose walls were made of ice. Scaling this castle while people threw snowballs at you was the game. I succeeded at this with some help from the people who were already on top. There were slides and gigantic swings for the kids to play.

There was the mother of all ice bucket challenges, where players stripped to their underwear (temperatures, even after burning winter, were sub-zero) and tried to climb a 30-foot tall pole. As far as I saw, none succeeded. The main reason was that after a while your hands freeze and you cannot grip the pole anymore.

There were other ice sculptures such as this one, which provided ample opport -unity for pictures.

There was also a makeshift setup for making pancakes(called bliny) which are as much a part of Maslenitsa as the fire is. Round and yellow, the pancake symbolises the sun, but the symbolism was lost to my digestive system which gobbled them up by the dozen.

And so, with that the festival came to an end for most people. There was a train to Moscow arriving at the platform in twenty minutes and the crowd hastened towards the station which was 2 km away. I joined the crowd and realised that I would not be able to make it at that pace. With a flurry of mumbled Izvinites (Excuse me) and Spasibas (thank you), I rushed towards the station and got to within 5 minutes to find a platform as crowded as the grounds had been. I asked my fellow walker where the ticket counter was and the fellow nonchalantly told me that it was without charge. Was this a festival concession, the Russian government offered? I did not know. But by this time, the train arrived and we all got into it. I spoke to a couple of co-passengers and discovered to my horror that the Russian government was not a charity organisation. But then, they were considerate enough to have a ticket counter at the exit, so those innocent, wayward souls like me could buy the ticket.

As I dragged my tired feet back home, I was filled with images of joy and laughter from the Festival. Winter may not have left us yet, but spring has definitely arrived.

An Interview with FoE.in

2015-02-03T06:19:00.003-08:00

Disclaimer: I have been thinking about writing a post on the background of freedom of expression and censorship in India. There was an outrage on social media and elsewhere that the right wing Hindutva government was clamping down on civil liberties. It struck me as odd that this was the first time a government had suppressed freedom of expression. So, I decided to dig deeper into this censorship muddle and see where its roots lay. This post is an outcome of that. The views are completely personal.

“Warning Bells for Freedom of Expression in Modi’s India?”
“Dark Moment for Indian Free Speech After Prominent Journalist Gets Threatened”
“Can you hear sounds of Fascist jack-boots in India?”

India (and more specifically, its media) seems to have suddenly woken up to a morning where Freedom of Expression was covered by the dark clouds of censorship. Since radio shows were the new rage, instead of polemicizing on the subject, we decided to have a heartfelt, informed discussion. You know, a “Mann ki Baat” of sorts. And who better to talk about the subject than the subject himself.

Yes, for our show, we have invited our subject, Freedom of Expression in India. He prefers to call himself FoE.in, these days.

Interviewer (I): Dude, why are you limping? And why are you all covered in blood? What happened to you?

FoE.in: Oh, it’s nothing. All in a day’s work.

I: This is what you get in a day’s work? Do you work at a Toll Booth on the Gurgaon Expressway or what?

FoE.in: Ha Ha! Keep making jokes that and you’ll end up just like me.

I: No, but seriously what happened to you, man?

FoE.in: Nothing. Someone wrote something which someone else took offence to and I got beaten up in the process. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine if I get some respite from those that take offence. Shall we get on with the interview? I fear we may not have much time before your studio is attacked by some mob or the other.

I: Don’t worry, my friend. We’re a TV Studio. Whenever we sense that an attack is coming, we merely turn on our Breaking News ticker and get our speakers to full volume. The sheer noise keeps all vermin at bay.

FoE.in: Hmm. If you say so. I should thank you for giving me this opportunity. I may be the FoE.in, but it’s not every day that I am given the chance to freely express myself.

I: Ah! Let’s start from there. Tell our audience about yourself.

FoE.in: I am the Freedom of Expression. I am the right by which you can communicate your thoughts and ideas to anyone who is willing to receive them. In the Indian context, I was kept caged when the country was ruled by a colonial government, to prevent me from causing any threat to what they called “public order”.

I: That is par for the course. The British weren’t the most liked among colonial masters. They didn’t want anyone shooting off his mouth against them. So, with the independence of the country, you must have also been freed, right?

FoE.in: That’s what I thought. I was quite hopeful when those wise men sat down to write the Constitution. They were themselves the victims of suppression by the British Raj. So, you would expect them to fight tooth and nail for the freedom of expression. And they did. The Constitution guaranteed freedom of expression as a Fundamental Right, in its Article 19.

I: Oh that’s good to hear. So you were finally able to breathe freely.

FoE.in: Almost. The paragon of Indian liberalism, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru took me gently out of my cage. He was about to set me off, like he had done to countless doves. But, just as I was about to fly, I felt a rough hand on my left wing.

I: Oh! What happened? Was it an extremist force?

FoE.in: That’s what I thought. But when I turned behind, I saw Nehruji’s hands breaking my left wing and leg before I could fly. He had moved a motion in the Indian Parliament to amend the Constitution. Less than a year after it was adopted, the Constitution was amended to include what was then called “Reasonable restrictions”. Instead of stopping him, most others in the Parliament, including Dr. Ambedkar supported the motion. It gave birth to the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution, which among other things restricted Freedom of Expression.

I: Wait a minute! So you’re saying that the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression but then takes it away by imposing reasonable restrictions?

FoE.in: (Nervously looks around) Well, I wouldn’t say that it takes it away. I mean, I wasn’t caged again, just kept on a leash, I guess.

I: How long a leash?

FoE.in: The First Amendment to the Indian Constitution brought in a changed clause to Article 19. Article 19(2) gives the state the power to “to impose “reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”.

I: Sounds fair enough. Some of us believe that you were allowed to run amok for about a year after independence. I mean, people cannot go around saying all kinds of nasty stuff, right? There has to be some kind of restraint.
FoE.in: Hmmm (smiles). What kind of restraint?

I: Well, I don’t know. Some kind. Like there should be certain things people shouldn’t be allowed to say.

FoE.in: And who decides what adults can or cannot say? You? Your parents? Your boss? Your religious leaders? The society at large? The government?

I: Err... the government, I suppose.

FoE.in: You mean, mature, grownup adults who have a right to vote and elect their government to power will then have to submit to its whims and fancies on what they can or cannot say?

I: Of course. We elect the government investing our faith in its wisdom. Let them be the gatekeepers of what we can or cannot say. We elect it so that we may be governed.

FoE.in: You do realise that we live in a democracy, right? Where criticism of the government is not just necessary, but mandatory for the health and vitality of the democracy?

I: Yes, of course.

FoE.in: So, if we were to go by your notion that the government should be the gatekeeper of what you can or cannot say, what if you wanted to criticise an act of the government?

I: The government should allow it.

FoE.in: Ha ha! Don’t be naive. Do you think they would? Let me point again to history. In 1949, the Urdu poet Majrooh Sultanpuri, famous for his lyrics in Bollywood movies, wrote a poem criticising newly independent India’s decision to join the Commonwealth. He called Nehru as “Commonwealth ka daas”. He refused to apologise when asked to do so, and was promptly imprisoned for two years. Probably one of the first victims of those “reasonable restrictions”. There were many more in the years that followed. A little later, a ruthless emergency was imposed when newspapers carried an obituary to Democracy. More recently, India’s ranking fell 10 places to 122 in the Press Freedom Index of 2010. Google received 93 requests in 2013 to take down content that was critical of the government.

I: That’s horrible. So are you saying that the government cannot be given the power to decide the limits of freedom of expression?

FoE.in: No. Rather they shouldn’t be. The cornerstone of a democracy is the guaranteed freedom of expression. Without the freedom to criticise an elected government, a democracy becomes meaningless. And this is the main reason why a government, any government, should not be the arbiter on what can or cannot be called reasonable restrictions.

I: I see. It becomes a clear case of conflict of interest, if a government has to decide if a critique of its working can be viewed by the voting population.

FoE.in: Yet, that is what has happened. By placing this power in the hands of the government and allowing it to curtail our freedom of expression using “reasonable restrictions”, we have made ourselves the subjects of a nanny state which gets to decide what we can or cannot read, hear or watch. In an implicit admission of our own immaturity as a population, we have given the scissors of censorship to the government to cut arbitrarily what and how much of it we see.

I: Hey, no. I cannot agree with you there. Look at our movies. They reek of obscenity. Maybe, we need a more responsible censor, and not the kind you talk about.
FoE.in: Repeating what I said, we are a mature democracy. A population considered old and rational enough to vote should also be trusted upon to choose what they would and would not want to watch. What we need instead is a certification board; to tell us which movie content is suitable for kids and which isn’t. Those with delicate sensitivities will thus be warned and can keep away from content that they do not want to be an audience to.

I: Really? Keep your ideology back in your cage. First create an audience that can respond maturely to whatever is being said to them. Promise me an audience that will be tolerant to insults towards what they have faithfully guarded for generations, what they derive hope from. Promise me that this anger already created by political parties will abate just because there are posters in different colours.

FoE.in: This audience is not going to drop from the sky. It has to evolve and the only way for it to evolve is by repeatedly challenging the limits of what is considered acceptable. And that can happen only when there is protection to artists from vandals and goons.

I: If that was so simple a scenario, why do we have the government banning things right, left and centre?

FoE.in: Put yourself in the place of a judge. There is a new book out in the market, that some feel hurts their sentiments. There are incidents of violence and mass demonstrations against the book that lead to loss of life and property. Who is guilty of violence? The author or the protesters?

I: Obviously, the protesters.

FoE.in: Good. Now think for a minute. What is easier? To resolve the law and order crisis by arresting the violent protesters or to ban the book and silence the author?

I: I see what you mean. It is definitely easier to silence one man who does nothing but write books.

FoE.in: Exactly. If the judge were to have this power of discretion in his hands, then that is what he would do. And this is what renders our “delicate” sensitivities even more delicate and prone to unbalanced coaxing. In fact, every time the government uses its power to ban something, it encourages these delicate sensitivities to react with violence.
What if that power no longer existed? What if there was no legal regime that backed the decision to ban a book?

I: I see. So you’re saying that once you bring in a law that supports arbitrary action under vague terms like “reasonable restrictions”, you can no longer stop those with the power to use that law from abusing it.

FoE.in: Yes. And it gets worse. The minute you appease one group of protesters by agreeing to their demands, you immediately set up a bad precedent and imply that if the protests were violent enough, the demand to curtail freedom of expression would be met. And once you meet the demands of one group, the others feel cheated. The more radical voices among them start getting louder. Word gets around that their demands were not met because they were not violent enough. You kickstart a vicious cycle of competitive intolerance, where each side wants to be the most thin-skinned one and thereby extract concessions from the State. This thin-skinnedness becomes a political tactic and parties are formed, not with manifestos, but with the commitment to exploit this thin-skinnedness and command political strength.
Group A does this. Group B sees that A does it and gets away with it, so B now takes it a step further. A and C see B doing it and take it another step further.

If I should not paint a cartoon of Mohammad, how can you caricature Saraswati? If Rushdie is to be banned, so should Doniger be. Thus goes the rhetoric pushing you into a slippery spiral of intolerance, violence to back that intolerance, and state complicity in both ignoring and even initiating that violence.

This violence gets its own form of vindication, a state sanction, if the state accedes to their demands. For instance, we know about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. We all went “Je Suis Charlie”. What happened then? A German newspaper reprinted the cartoons and was firebombed. A few Indian newspapers that reprinted the cartoons, LiveMint, the Hindustan Times apologised and took the cartoons down from their website. The Hindu went one step further. They apologised for printing an image of people carrying copies of Charlie Hebdo. This was not even a failed commitment to free speech. This was against the tenets of journalism, where you refuse to report something because doing so invites violence. When I see the story of Shireen Dalvi, India’s only woman Urdu editor, I am left speechless. She has been on the run ever since the newspaper published the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo. Dalvi gave a written apology but FIRs continue to be registered against her.
Now how long before other identity groups take notice of this and realise that they can get their demands too if they are violent enough? We have handed violence the power of veto where you can silence anyone and get the state to issue diktats that fulfil your demands.

The sad part is that in all this, I, FoE.in, am the greatest victim.

I: I really feel sorry for you. We happen to have become a country where anything gets justified, if there is enough violence. But you talk about identity groups. What about the liberals of these identity groups? I mean, these groups, be it religion or caste, should have some moderate elements as well, right? What about them? Do they not support you?

FoE.in: That part is even more saddening. The moderate elements, most of the time in whispers, and sometimes in the open, condemn this violence. But almost all of the time, they tend to separate the identity group, let’s say religion, from the violence. They claim that the perpetrators are not the true representative of the religion. While that statement rightly says that the violence is the manifestation of the desperation of the minority and not the majority sentiment as a whole, what it also does is to grant the perpetrator his victory. He believes that he is the defender of his faith and does not care if he is not considered as the true representative of his faith. What matters is that his faith is defended from criticism and he has won. We think we are distancing the perpetrator from the religion, but we are also covering the religion from criticism, which is what the perpetrator wanted in the first place. So through violence, he may be seen as an outcaste. But he has made his point. The religion is now protected from criticism and there is a state sanction to it.

And once that starts, there is no looking back. There will always be an escalation of violence to demand concessions from the state. Where violence becomes a political tool to be used at will, anarchy ensues. The state withdraws itself while letting the mob become the authority on what is offensive and what isn’t. The truth is that everything is offensive to a large part of the population whose favourite pastime is getting offended. The more a state concedes, the more will be demanded from it. The more an artist agrees to bend under the pretext of responsible self-regulation, the more he will be made to crawl. Because, beating me up is always easier than defending me. Taking offense is always easier than creating art.

I: Let’s talk on the offence part a bit. You’ve stressed on the part that people tend to take major offence if their religious sensitivities are mocked.

FoE.in: Yes. That’s right. There are even special laws that allow the state to take action if the religious beliefs of a person are insulted.

I: Oh, is there? Like a blasphemy law, you mean?

FoE.in: Almost. India does not have a blasphemy law. And thank God for that. The closest it has is Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which punishes with fine and imprisonment up to 3 years speech, writings, or signs which ''with deliberate and malicious intention'' insult the religion or the religious beliefs of any class of citizens.

I: My God! Three years for making fun of religious beliefs sounds steep. Who wrote this law?

FoE.in: This law, as most of our Penal Code, comes to us from our colonial past. A famous case in Lahore, against the publisher of a book called “Rangila Rasul”. There were agitations by the local Muslim population against the references to Prophet Mohammad’s personal life in the book. The British authorities, in an attempt to restore order, prosecuted the author, but the Lahore High Court shot down the case saying it was not legally sustainable under the existing Section 153A. The British, in their penchant to have a legal basis to every action enacted 295A to prosecute such publishers in the future.

I: And what happened to the publisher of Rangila Rasul?

FoE.in: Oh, him? Poor chap was murdered in the court premises.

I: Barbaric times, they were.

FoE.in: Not completely. The Rangila Rasul case also showed us what could have, and in fact, should have been done if such works were written.

I: And what was that?

FoE.in: Irrespective of the mob violence and the legal action, a Muslim Qazi Maulana Sanaullah Amritsari wrote a work titled Muqaddas Rasool. He countered a piece of writing with another piece of writing. Pen fought pens. An example of a truly mature response if your belief is insulted.

I: This insult to religious beliefs, how big a nemesis is it to freedom of expression?

FoE.in: Big. Gigantic. If you were to categorise the calls for censorship based on the people demanding it, there would only be two categories. Government and private parties. Most calls from the government come in cases of criticism of its activity. And almost all calls from private parties cite religious beliefs as the reason.

I: Why do you think that is?

FoE.in: Simple. Religion is a rallying point. Even more so in the Indian context. It is easier to gather a crowd under the pretext of protecting something as amorphous and changing as religious beliefs, than it is to get people to protect the rights of others to challenge those beliefs. It is quite easy to insult religious beliefs, not because you are looking to do it, but because that idea is held close to the hearts of people, that even a genuine question about the idea comes across as an insult. Let’s think about this. How easy it is to insult the religion of people who believe that everything is God? You say that idol worship is bad, you have insulted one religion. You say that birth control is a right, you have insulted another and in either case, will be marched straight to prison. Any pamphlet of one religion could be an insult to the beliefs of people following another and vice versa. Atheists will, by their sheer existence, insult the religious beliefs of all believers. And if you were religious about being an atheist, all other believers would insult your beliefs.

I: Hahaha. That way, we’ll all be in prison for three years for insulting the religious beliefs of the others. But on a serious note, religion, as you said, is a topic close to people’s hearts. There should be some limits on the criticism of religion.

FoE.in: Religion is an idea. People have rights granted to them by the Constitution. Ideas don’t. You can take your idea as seriously as you want. But you do not have the right to protect that idea from being subject to criticism. What you do have the right is to counter that criticism with your opinion. Or to turn your face away from an idea you don’t like. In the marketplace of ideas, the better idea gains currency, while the lesser ones are discarded. You can violate the sanctity of another person’s idea with your criticism, but you do not have the right to resort to violence and physically harm him.

I: Ok, agreed that violence is wrong. Which is why we need laws for censorship. So that a legal mechanism exists and can be used to redress grievances. What is your problem with that?

FoE.in: My friend, would you rather be beaten to an inch of your life or be put behind bars for the rest of your life?

I: I...beating is a one off thing, jail... but, violence... I don’t know, man. I can’t make that choice.

FoE.in: Exactly. Yet, that’s the choice you offered me. Laws that curtail freedom of speech, or violence that suppresses freedom of speech have the same effect.

I: I kind of get the point you are making. But what about the minorities in India? This country was born after a bloody partition. If anyone is allowed to speak anything they want, the minorities will be vulnerable.

FoE.in: Quite the contrary. Freedom of expression makes the most sense for someone in a minority. Let me explain. Let’s assume that there’s an idea, a proposal rather, that a certain study found that an event had occurred at a certain location in history, and the majority public agreed with it, so did the government, but a single historian, like a lone wolf, objected to it and presented his own findings. Or let’s say the majority religious community wants to malign the minority. They dominate the narrative and ruthlessly suppress any counterpoints. What makes the minority more vulnerable; freedom of expression or reasonable restrictions?

I: Reasonable restrictions. Oh! I see. With something as vague as “reasonable restrictions” the majority, be it religious, or political, could stifle all criticism. The tyranny of majority will be guaranteed in perpetuity because all opposition is silenced. This in a way explains the penchant the majority have for censorship. But why do the religious minorities in India support it too? What’s in it for them?

FoE.in: My friend, this is something I’ve learnt after decades of being beaten up, set on fire, stabbed, shot at and what not. People just don’t like criticism. Whether it is Doniger’s Hindus, or Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, nobody seems to like criticism of their gods or religion. Even criticism of their leaders doesn’t go well with them. Biographies, books that have characters that resemble our leaders, be it Nehru or Thackeray, sometimes I feel such books should be published after giving me a warning, you know, like a fire alarm, so that I can go into hiding and not get beaten up.

But yeah, to answer your question, the majorities, the minorities, nobody wants their idyllic castle of ideas breached. They do not want criticism even if it is to encourage reform and progress. When leaders begin to be seen as no less than gods, any criticism of them becomes blasphemous too. This attains a whole new level when religion and politics mix and you have caste-based and religion-based parties set up. In that setup, any criticism of an anachronistic religious tenet is immediately countered with mass mobilization and violence.

When these become steps on the staircase to power, political one-upmanship manifests itself in the number of books you ban and the number of mouths you can silence. In India, when it comes to censorship, there is no Left, there is no Right, no saffron, white or green. Only a black drape that comes down from time to time on my battered and bruised body.

I: I have no words to console you, my friend. We have savagely wronged you and we are sorry. Tell us what can we do to protect our right to freedom of expression?

FoE.in: Thank you for the understanding. It is so rare to come these days.

Let’s begin with the government. The anachronistic colonial-era laws on censorship need to go. Whether it is 295A or Article 19(2), or the more recent 66A for the Internet, they all need to be debated upon. We are no longer a colony, nor are we a fledgling state that was widely expected to splinter and fall apart. We are a vibrant and mature democracy that can very well take care of itself.
Freedom of Expression should be subjected to only one restriction. An incitement to violence. The state needs to take necessary action if anyone, under the freedom of expression, calls for violence. Other than this, all other restrictions have to go. If that leads to a piece of writing or a movie that causes violence because it is critical, penalise the violent, not the author. Violence will be tolerated under no circumstances. All forms of freedom of expression are protected and any violence will be ruthlessly suppressed. The state has to send this message to the people, the leaders of identity politics that the people rally around, and the state itself, to which these leaders look to for their power and authority. The state has to protect those who challenge the boundaries of free expression, instead of shifting the onus to the artist to responsibly express himself.

Secondly, our liberals need to abandon their hypocrisy and double standards in their support to Freedom of Expression. The arguments of “Yes, but...” and “What about...” need to disappear. Even more importantly, the vain and hollow argument that we should be mindful of the sentiments of the people, should go. If someone claims to be offended by something, let him be. So what? That claim has no place in a mature democracy. Especially in one as diverse as India, where every single person is a minority unto himself, anything you say can offend someone or the other. Does that mean we silence ourselves under the pretence of responsible self-regulation? No. That is when we continue to express ourselves freely. The liberals need to stand up for freedom of expression of all art, not just the ones that they approve. A casteist interpretation of history maybe regressive in its content, but it is to be protected just as much as a Marxist interpretation of history. The former may be commented upon and critiqued and may well be off the shelf because it doesn’t sell. But not because someone felt offended and burnt copies of the book. Defend the glorious, but also defend the obnoxious just as much. That’s how you defend the cause of freedom of expression. More importantly, for every Charlie Hebdo and Perumal Murugan who is supported, a hundred other instances of censorship, like Shireen Dalvi’s, go under the radar. It is impractical to notice and oppose every instance of legal censorship. The solution here is to start voicing demands for a repeal of laws that allow for censorship, including the 66A. On the contrary, until liberal support for freedom of expression is selective and biased, I do not see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Lastly, our people. They are the most important part of the censorship story. Most censorship is done upon their demand or using them as the excuse. Before you run to file an FIR, or rush to burn books, you need to understand that you not only deny another person his right to free speech in the present but also deny yourselves that right in the future. What you did to another, will be done to you. If an idea close to your heart is questioned or criticised, rise in defence of that idea by countering the criticism, not by silencing the critic. It has to be impressed upon people, especially those fanatical about their ideas and ideologues, that the supremacy of an idea lies in debating and defeating its critics and not in silencing them. Suppression of a criticism exposes not only the weakness of an idea, but also the insecurity in those holding onto that idea.

Strong identification with a group gives people a sense of relevance, but that does not take away their responsibility to be a cooperative member of a diverse society with multiple groups. To the majority, freedom of expression grants them the means to express their opinion. To the minority, it is the only guarantee that their voices, even if less loud, will be heard. The society has to therefore, come together and build a new social contract around freedom of expression, to hold the state responsible, not if their sentiments are offended, but if their rights are denied, not if there is criticism, but if there is violence, not if someone speaks their mind, but if those voices are suppressed. There lies our path to becoming a truly mature society.

I: I couldn’t agree more with you, FoE.in. Thank you for your time and those words of wisdom. I do not know if anything you said is gonna happen. But today, we stand with you. We stand with the freedom of expression, come what may. Let’s raise our hands against tyranny, against suppression and censorship. Give me your hand, the one that is not hurt.

Cameraman: Sir, our studio has been broken into. They have torn apart our loudspeakers. We need to go. Now. The car is waiting.

I: FoE.in! We are leaving now, but don’t forget, we are always with you.

FoE.in: May I come with you in your car?

I: Oh! Sheesh! I’m afraid there’s not enough space. But you know your way around here. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Right?

FoE.in: Sigh! Some things never change. It was nice knowing you. See you.

Another home trip, Another return.

2015-01-18T09:42:00.001-08:00

Some days of life are like a passing train, beautiful in its transience. You stand at the railway gate, straddling your bike between your knees and wait impatiently for the train to pass, so that your life can go ahead. But sometimes, you lose yourself in the beauty of a hundred faces that you can see through the window, in the beauty of those faces becoming one with the speed of the train and therefore the face of the train itself. Train number 12606? Oh, that's Pallavan express. He's in his 40s, with the greys winning against the black hairs on his temple. His specs peer through the morning's newspaper, and his wet hair is adorned with flowers. The he is also a she, her forehead centered with a vermillion dot. And you admire the shapely nose those specs sit on. You wonder if she laughs like the echo of the train's rattling on the checkpost that stops you from joining her. You wait by, hoping that one day you will join her, to live those days you have always been wanting to live in.

And yet, before you know it, the train rattles past, the checkpost lifts and you are allowed to move on. Only that you no longer want to. Somewhere down the length of the train, somewhere where the fragrance of the day's flowers hit you, your hands had decided to hold on. The train of your days has gone by, but you don't know it. You stand at the checkpost, waiting, waiting for that meeting, for a hug from those bony hands, for a clutch-ridden drive, for those laughs, for those steaming idlis which melt solid ghee, to hear the musical vibrations in a voice you know so well, to make plans and have those plans stabbed by the sharp hands of the clock as the train departs.

You are no longer permitted to be on at the checkpost. The train has gone and so should you. You pedal on, cross over the tracks of memory and go over to the other side of life. Turning back, you see the dust left behind by the train lingering. You imagine it to be the cloud of an oncoming train, not the trail of one that has gone. "It is coming, it is coming", you tell yourself. Until a gentle prod from reality tells you that you have seen it already, you have been there already and that you were fortunate to have your wishes become memories.

It is time to pedal on, expectantly, but slowly. The next railway crossing is there, near or far, we do not know, but it is there. Waiting for us, to stand on the other side of the checkpost and watch the faces on the train become the face of the train and remain out of our reach until it becomes, but a dust trail on our memory.

My Unsuccessful Attempt at Winning a Nobel Prize

2014-12-07T21:14:00.001-08:00

Based on a True Story

I hereby move a proposal that kids not be taught or told moral stories in school.

Yes. This is not an impulsive proposal, but is the result of careful contemplation over the cause of a catastrophe. This is a firsthand account of how your friendly neighbourhood kid (i.e. me) was the poor victim of the diabolical implications of a moral studies class.

Let me explain.

It was a balmy Sunday morning. And as is the nature of Sunday mornings around the world, the kids loitered around the streets while the adults worshipped their favourite gods. In my house, this happened to be the television. We did not mind, as long as no one disturbed our enlightening discussions with orders to do the homework.

So we loitered around the streets, as Isaac Newton would have said, “diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.

The topic of discussion that day was gold. It was an aftermath of the moral studies class of the previous week. You may be wondering what gold had to do with moral studies. I can hear you asking “weren’t the two mutually exclusive?”

They weren’t. And so the discussion went on.

“Mahesh, you eat eggs, right?”

“Ya. Why?”

“Remember what the teacher told us about eggs on Friday?”

“Eggs? I don’t remember.”

“You should start paying attention in class.” I deftly swerved to avoid Mahesh’s punch.

“Remember the Moral Studies class we had on Friday?”

“You mean the time we spent in class instead of playing Volleyball?”
Mahesh had a thing for volleyball. To say that he loved it would be an understatement, but if there was any large spherical object in range, you can expect Mahesh to pick it up with his left hand, swing his right hand like a pendulum and hit it to the farthest possible distance.

“Yes, that. They told us the story about a bird that laid eggs.”

“I thought all birds lay eggs, unless otherwise evolved.”

“Yes, very good. But this one laid golden eggs.”

“Ah. You’re talking about the goose that laid the golden eggs.”

“Oh! So, you remember.”

“Yes, I do. What’s your point?”

“No point as such. I’m just wondering if it’s biologically possible. And if it is, can it be replicated in mammals.”

“Mammals? You mean, like...”

“More specifically, domesticated ungulates.”

“Domesticated what?”

“Cows.” It deserves mention here that Mahesh did not share my proclivity for using biologically correct vocabulary. Neither did he share the proclivity for using the word “proclivity” in everyday conversations, but that’s another story.

“You mean to say that cows could have golden eggs?”

“Not eggs. Cows are mammals. So golden calves.”

“Hmmm...” the thought kept him engaged for a while. It took Lakshmi’s call to bring him out of his reverie.

Lakshmi, dear reader, was a fair, well endowed beautiful female of our neighbourhood. Her lustrous, dark hair was long enough to touch her legs. She was the cynosure of the entire neighbourhood and turned eyes wherever she went. She was also an ungulate, or to put it simply, a cow. And at this point, she called, or rather, mooed.

Mahesh looked at Lakshmi. She belonged to the friendly lady, Gauri, who brought us milk every day. I liked her. Every morning I would run to the gate behind mother. After she gave the half litre of milk to mother, she would fill the small tumbler I carried with me. A pat on the cheek and then she would go. After we encountered milkmen in our Mathematics textbooks, I started wondering if she was making a loss with the milk she was giving me for free. But we digress. Lakshmi was currently, scavenging for food in the neighbourhood, and mooing intermittently.

Mahesh turned to me. “What do you have in mind?” Now, there are guys who would back out of a mission at the slightest hint of risk, like jumping from your terrace to the next one. And there are guys, like Mahesh, who would carry any mission through to the end, even if it meant testing if the road sloped enough for the military uncle’s car to slide down by itself (Turned out it was).

“Alright. You know that Lakshmi has been getting fatter lately, right?”

“Yes.”

“I asked mother. She said that Lakshmi is pregnant and would be giving birth soon. To a calf.”

“Hmmm. And you want to find out if this calf would be golden.”

“Not find out. I want to ensure that it’s golden. Remember reading about the Nobel Prizes? I want to be the youngest to get one.”

“And how do you propose we can ensure this?”

“Ok. I’ve been reading about this. There’s this field called Genetics. This has something to do with a guy named Mendel. He did some experiments with peas. The results say that tall pea plants result in taller offsprings. So, to get a golden calf out of Lakshmi...”

“But Lakshmi isn’t a gold cow.”

Ah! This was the crux of the mission and Mahesh had pointed it out.

“Mahesh! Let’s go back to the story. Was the goose golden? No. Only its eggs were.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that we need to take steps to motivate Lakshmi to have a golden calf.”

He repeated, “But Lakshmi is not a gold cow.”

“Not yet. And that’s where we come in. We can ensure that Lakshmi thinks she is a gold cow and therefore is morally obliged to have a gold calf. I think the positive mental reinforcement can stimulate Lakshmi to make sure that she delivers a golden calf. And when she does...”

“We claim victory! Yaay! I see it now. But... do you think it would work? This positive mental reinforcement, thing?”

“Without a doubt. I’ve been reading up on it. There have been experiments, successful ones, on how positive reinforcement influences behaviour, making the test subjects think that they are better than they actually are and ends up making them actually better. Anyway, you don’t worry about the theory. I’ll take care of it. We need to get to the specifics. Lakshmi needs to begin thinking that she’s a gold cow.”

The object of all this discussion was quietly munching on the movie poster of “GoldenEye”. It was the re-release and dubbed version of the James Bond movie. Lakshmi had eaten the “Eye” and Pierce Brosnan was on the verge of entering her digestive tract. The two “00”s and the word “Golden” were hanging from her mouth. We took at as a divine sign that a Nobel Prize was in our destiny.

Mahesh got to work. He went about finding ways to procure the key ingredient for the mission. Gold paint.

A day later we had twenty tins of paint at our disposal. I was all admiration for Mahesh. In fact, in retrospect, I think Mahesh would have made a good Supply Chain manager for Apple. I asked him where he got it from.

“You know the place where they sell doors? On our way to school?”

I knew the place. We had once planned to play a game of dominoes by pushing one door and letting the entire chain fall. It didn’t come to pass, but Mahesh had taken the paint they use for door handles.

“It was smooth. Those tins were just sitting there and these fellows were busy sawing wood. I asked twice if I could take them. They didn’t respond. I took the silence as approval and brought them all.”

It was a small victory. I patted him on the back. The mission still lay ahead. We had to wait for the right moment. This came the following Friday. There was the temple festival and all the people went to pull the temple car. I wanted to too, but mother said that I was too small and would get trampled in the crowd. Suited me fine, I had the morning all to Lakshmi and myself. She stood in the shed, munching on dry hay. The shed was dark and slightly musty. It was smelling all cow. We decided to brave the smell.

The bucket they used to give her water was lying by the side. Mahesh and I arrived on the scene. I had brought a brush which my father used to dust off old furniture. Mahesh brought the gold tins with him. They were waiting like eager jewels staring at you from glass cases. We didn’t make them wait. One after the other, they all came out and the paint was poured into the bucket. The gooey coagulate was diluted with water. Lakshmi was calmly watching what was happening. It was quiet all around. Even if Lakshmi mooed, nobody would know. The sounds from the temple were loud enough.

Mahesh took a stick from the shed. Lakshmi opened one eye. He put the stick into the bucket. She relaxed and continued to chew the hay. The stick turned round and round as the glittering gold paint swallowed water and grew thinner. I added water whenever Mahesh asked me to. He seemed quite experienced in this sort of stuff. When he was satisfied that the mixture had reached the right texture, he asked me to bring the brush.

“Do you want to give her the hay or do you want to paint her?”

Lakshmi had strong legs, but not sharp teeth. I chose the hay.

“Thought so. That’s alright. I’ll paint her. Just keep feeding her and rub her forehead from time to time.”

This was a problem. Lakshmi had horns. They were not that sharp, still, one has one’s fears. But I did not complain.

I picked up a handful of hay and brought it to Lakshmi’s mouth. She opened it nonchalantly. She was used to being treated like royalty. I was a little startled as I felt her warm tongue on my fingers. Mahesh glared at me from where he sat. I dug in. I was not going to let him down.

He dipped the brush into the bucket. It came out, its black bristles glistening with gold. With his left hand running through the vibrations on Lakshmi’s stomach, he began to paint her body. He started with the spine. He kept talking, to cover his nerves I think, as he painted. He said if you paint the upper body, the paint would drip down to the legs and you wouldn’t have to touch them. I was done with the hay I had in hand and bent down to pick up some more, all the while not breaking eye contact with Lakshmi.

In ten minutes, Mahesh was done with the left side. He picked up the stool and the bucket and moved to the right. The shed was dark, but if any light had shined on her, Lakshmi would be shining like midday sun. Another ten minutes, another handful of hay, and Lakshmi was glowing. Mahesh wiped the sweat off his brow. The brushwork was done.

“It’s not done yet.” He dropped the brush and delicately dipped his right hand into the bucket. “I can’t put the brush on her face. The bristles may hurt her eyes. He took the hay from me. He fed her while gently rubbing the paint on her face. I took a walk around Lakshmi. The paint was cascading from her back onto her legs, covering her in gold. I had to admit, Mahesh was a master painter.

“Mahesh”

“Sshhhh. What?” He asked in a hushed tone. I sprang back as Lakshmi raised her leg slightly.

“Her tail.”

He had forgotten about her tail. He raised his hand and signalled that he’ll take care of it.

Lakshmi’s face was also golden by now. I wonder if she knew. The big eyes certainly couldn’t see that close. If she squinted a little bit, maybe she would know that her dark nose was surrounded by gold, providing a great contrast. Mahesh pointed the hay at me and I took it. Lakshmi opened her eyes to notice the change of guard. He collected the paint from his palm to his fingers and did a swish. The paint flowed down Lakshmi’s tail, covering her dark hair in gold. She was now a golden goddess.

Our job was done. The temple car would also be covered in similar gold paint, we thought. It was time to leave. Mahesh fished out something from his bag. A big mirror. He turned to me, “Didn’t you say this required positive mental reinforcement? How would Lakshmi know about her golden nature?” He put the mirror in front of her as I stood beaming at him. We packed up all residual signs of our presence, paint tins, brush etc. A silent high-five. Lakshmi would have a golden calf, and we’d stake our claim to the Nobel Prize once the calf was out. Not a word until then.
We exited in silence but victorious. The weekend would be spent in remarkable glory.

Or so we thought.

What followed was one episode of epic thulping. When the elders returned from the temple festival in the afternoon, smeared in turmeric and vermillion, they found a peaceful pair of kids watching TV. All hell broke loose as Gauri came running to our house. She did not come to our house in the evenings. So, when I saw her at the gate, I knew something was wrong. I slyly slithered towards the backdoor, jumped to the sunshade and from there to the terrace and crossed over to Mahesh’s place. He was not at home. I had no choice but to return. My silent retreat was blocked by father guarding the backdoor. I couldn’t quite read his face. Anger, surprise, pride, it was all mixed up.

Mother spoke, “What are you still looking at him for? Move. You! What did you do to Lakshmi?”

“Lakshmi! I... I didn’t do anything. What happened to her?”

“I will tell you what happened to her.”

At this point, my right ear was rudely yanked out of its comfortable socket. I still maintain that my right ear is slightly longer than my left because of the trauma of that day.

A thrashing was to follow. In between, I could hear Gauri asking my parents to stop. She said it wasn’t that big a thing and she’ll take care of it. She came just to inform, not complain. Mother relented. I looked at Gauri sympathetically. She pulled my cheeks and gave me a peck.

“You! It’s people like you who have ruined him. You pamper him so much that he goes around thinking that the entire world is his playground. All this mischief has to stop. Gauri! He will come over tomorrow and clean Lakshmi. You don’t have to do anything.” Mother was staring sternly at me. Father knew that things had cooled down and went back to his newspaper.

I went over the next day and saw Gauri scrubbing the paint from Lakshmi’s back. The water tank near the shed was empty. She smiled when she saw me, Gauri did, not Lakshmi. I merrily went to her. She gave me a tumbler of milk to drink as she finished scrubbing the rest of the paint.

I do not know to this day how when Gauri met her golden cow, her first guess was that I had done it. Perhaps my reputation in the neighbourhood was bad, owing to previous track record. As a true friend, I accepted full responsibility for the incident. Mahesh was sorry and grateful that I hadn’t snitched on him. It was my idea actually, so it was ok. What happened to the calf, you ask? Well, it was a male calf, born in pure white. When mother pointed this out to me, I argued that it was because they had scrubbed the paint off Lakshmi and removed the mirror too.

In between the thrashing that followed, I blamed her for denying me a shot at the Nobel Prize, a deserved honor that continues to elude me.

And yes, I hereby propose that kids not be taught or told moral stories in school.

Ya Niznayu

2014-11-22T10:55:00.003-08:00

"Ya Niznayu”

The words any student of Russian dreads. In a language class, when confronted with a swirling vortex of chaos unfurling in front of his eyes, a student tries to sort what he comes across. Almost like Dorothy (the girl who met the Wizard of Oz), the student tries to group a cow and a table together. “They both have four legs after all” he reasons. Sometimes, even under such broad parameters, a few (read, a lot many) things don’t fall under any grouping. It is then, that he questions his teacher. The question is a single word. “Why”, a word teachers love hearing because it gives them the opportunity to say,

“Ya Niznayu”

Before you, my dear reader, decides to skip this post because you don’t understand the abovementioned phrase, let me tell you, “Ya Nizhnayu” means “I don’t know”. When your teacher tells you that she doesn’t know why something is the way it is, boss, you’re in big trouble. Upon further prodding by a determined student, which I would like you to believe I was, she would go into a solemn silence. You know, like when Google does when you put in too many keywords and the server doesn’t know which one of the keywords is, to borrow a journalistic phrase, truly “key”. But then, the awkward silence would be followed by something even more dreadful.

“It is tradition.”

When you’re learning something, you don’t want to be told that you should or should not do something because it’s tradition. Even if it’s told to you in a Russian accent. For instance, how would it have been if someone had told young Galileo Galilee that it was not tradition to throw heavy objects from the top of a tower that is already leaning? Or to Einstein that it’s tradition to have the presentation of breakthrough science preceded by a haircut? You get the point.

A language that has six cases, each of which is more confusing than the previous one, and three genders (including for objects like house and door), which are determined not by any scientific principle of gender determination, but by seeing if the word ends in a consonant or a vowel, and three ways of indicating singular and plural, if you add to this, the “Chemical X” of tradition, you get the linguistic equivalent of an extremely tantrumatic Uranium 235 nucleus, that upon gentle prodding by a “Ya Niznayu” sets off a chain reaction, leading to chaos, confusion and the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear catastrophe.

The Russian language has a copious vocabulary that is constantly enriched, in a way not too different from how the memory cards of our phones have multiple copies of the same photo because we forwarded it to multiple recipients. Yes, not only are there several words to say something, each word is also conjugated and declinated based on the case, number and gender, thus giving birth to a vast universe with constantly morphing organisms. In fact, a word in a sentence is like a highly reactive chlorine atom caught in an organic chemistry equation. Its status changes continuously, based on its interaction with other words.

As I write this, I see around me a cluster of personal pronouns that, like a school of amoeba are changing shape faster than I can perceive. The inner optimist in me sees this as an advantage. If the language is spoken fast enough, I assure myself, people will still get what is being told, without being able to point out the flaws in it. Yes, that’s it. Winning strategy, right here. I’m going to use this weekend to find the guy who gave the voice for the memorable “Mutual funds are subject to...” And request him to give me lessons.

See you until then.

To you, Trichy

2014-08-16T09:07:00.005-07:00

It is starting to sink in. The last weekend spent at home before I leave for Russia. When you’re on the road at night with your windows open, the cold, harsh breeze slaps on your face. It is stopped briefly if another, larger vehicle overtakes you. I have often seen Trichy as the larger vehicle shielding me briefly while I recovered. A place where I could stop spinning like a wind vane in a storm and get my bearings right. A place where Time stopped briefly, so I could catch my breath and continue running. This break, however, seems like the calm before I start running a marathon. I do not know when the next break is.

It is time I counted my blessings. This is not the post of a soon-to-be NRI looking back at his years of idyllic bliss. This is not an attempt at melodrama. This is not even to tell people how happy an upbringing I have had or how better my city is than yours. No. None of that. This is for me to go back to in moments of need. This is the emotional equivalent of saving for a rainy day. In moments of loneliness, in moments of desolation, when the ground I stand on seems no longer interested in bearing the burden of my existence, I intend to go back to this and tell myself how blessed I have been. It is, in all respects, a personal diary. It is a record of the bad days I don’t want to forget and the good ones that I do want to remember. Having spent all my childhood in one town and most of it in one locality, the memories are linear and fresh. Random, lingering images throw me back to a memory in which the image was the backdrop. The signboard rooted firmly and manured regularly by goat droppings reminds me of the days I waited for the school bus. It still stands right opposite the bus stop.

The white curtain with an image of Lord Ganesha shielded the east facing Xerox shop from the morning sun. Yellowed, and patched at places, Ganesha continues to protect the students making photocopies inside. It reminds me of the day I first met a teacher outside the school premises and was so excited that I yelled “Good Evening, Sir”, much to the amusement of the Xerox shop guy. Outside the shop, Ganesha watched as my teacher told me sternly that I was not required to wish him outside school premises and definitely not in that loud tone. As I stand across the road, Ganesha asks me if I still get the urge to wish my teachers if I come across them. I smile. I wonder if Ganesha will still be around the next time I come.

The lane I used to walk on to go to my school in 5^th Standard is now a paved road. The newest house and the only one to have a switch on the compound wall for its calling bell is now faded. Its mint coat resembles a palette of Copper Chloride. The calling bell switch has been disabled after a torrent of rain shortcircuited the wiring. I can no longer ring the bell and run away before the occupants come. I wonder what kids walking on the road do to keep themselves entertained. Have they also bought into the newer means of entertainment that keeps your head bowed and down? I don’t know. I partially relive the joy by pressing the now disabled switch, knowing that nothing would happen. The old man who is walking in the balcony of the house next door points me to the “To Let” board hanging from the porch and asks me if I’m interested. I shake my head and walk on.

Further down the lane is another house. We used to call it “Azhugachi Veedu”. A literal translation would be “House of Tears”. In a comic book fuelled alliterative binge, we renamed the house to “Crying Castle”. The family that lived there had an autistic child. Autism is a common household word today, thanks to the many movies on developmental disorders. But back then, we, including the elders, said the kid in the house was mad. “Mentally retarded”, the more posh among us said. Every day, as we walked to school, the kid would be in the verandah, bawling at us as we passed by. Not that he had anything against us. He was just bawling and we happened to pass by. I can no longer see or hear him.

I look back to see if the old man is still around. I see him getting out of his house and locking the gate. He now wears a white shirt over his vest. I walk towards him, and point to the house.

“For Sale, too”, he tells me.

“Do you happen to know the boy who used to live here?”

He puts a finger to his temple and makes a circular motion, a universal sign for someone who has lost their mind. I nod my head.

“Didn’t you know? He died. It’s been 9 years. The family moved to the US. The house has been on sale ever since.”

He sees the shock on my face. He reads the expression right and the reason wrong.

“Yes, I know. Shocking, right? That a house in this locality doesn’t find buyers? Now, that one was put on sale 2 weeks ago. It has 5 parties interested. The seller is holding out for a better price. But this one, people seem to think this one is cursed. Nobody wants to buy this. I am the local broker, you know. If you’re interested in buying a property, fresh or built, you can call me.”

He hands me his card. Another man who has found a way to make money out of freely available information. I take the card and walk towards the main road.

The building of a smaller school in the neighborhood has given way to a pharmacy chain. There goes the backdrop of the day I stood for an hour in the sun waiting for the school bus to take me to my 8^th Standard Zoology Practical examination. The school bus that never came. Typical of a schoolboy, my trouser pocket had a Rs.5 coin, for a crisis. I ran all the way back home, got money from my mother and took an auto to school. It did not occur to me that had I waited at the bus stop, a public bus would have dropped me 300 meters from school for Rs.3. I managed to reach on time. The practical examination had me examine the head of a cockroach and identify its mouth parts, maxilla, mandibles etc. and then make a diagrammatic representation (if cockroaches had courts, I’d be sued for misrepresentation).

How much of a town depends on its constituents? The roads, the buildings, the traffic intersections, the oddly clashing early morning bell sounds of the temple and the cycles of the milkman and newspaper guy, the inhabitants who bring life to the town in festival and flood.

How much does a town lose when each of this changes or disappears? Are towns Ships of Theseus with newer parts constantly replacing the older ones of their bodies? If so, how much does the town have to lose for it to no longer be even remotely related to what it started out as and be identified as a new one? Would my departure be another short-lived blimp in the town’s lifetime or the proverbial last straw that takes away from my town its identity?

Vanity dictates I settle for the latter. After all, it is a small town. How unimportant could I be? That’s the best part about small towns. Everyone is important. Everybody knows everybody else. The families, the fights, the dreams, the disappointments, right down to the kind of rheumatoid arthritis the uncle in the third lane is suffering from. Everything is known, everything is discussed threadbare. Stories are woven, like peacock feathers hidden in textbooks, with the expectation of newer plot elements in each time the book is opened.

The other good part about small towns is that they’re, well, small. If you were to attempt an “Around the Town before lunchtime” voyage, you would very well be home before lunchtime. Phineas Fogg, the London bred adventurer, never understood the concept of small towns and went around the world. But we digress. You may be delayed by the appearance of a vaguely familiar uncle who you last remember running away from because your sixer went straight through his window. But fret not. In a small town, the uncle would not only take you home for lunch, his wife would also try to add to her collection of gossip by showering you with questions faster than the idlis can stop you from answering them.

Trichy is a special kind of small town. Like most towns along the Kaveri river, it’s also a temple town. The Rockfort temple, Thiruvanaikovil temple and the peerless Srirangam temple ring its periphery. What this means for the small town Phineas Fogg is that there is abundant supply of food. You simply hop from temple to temple. From the delicious Sakkara Pongal that can bless you with diabetes and cholesterol with just one helping, to the creamy Thayir Sadham, this town gives you all. Pardon the gastronomic indulgence. But that comprises most of my childhood in this town.

I grew up in this town. When people refer to the townsfolk, oddly called Trichyites, they refer to me as well. At least, that’s how I want to feel. But I’ve not been a part of this town for a few years now. In and out, in ever widening circles of spiraling distance. A few years in Chennai and then a few in Delhi. Now, the spiral is widening again. I’m leaving the country. The town is gradually loosening its soil around my feet. May be I’m a liability now. Very unwanted. The truth is I’ve known it for a while. I’ve felt it more than known it.

In the time between two visits, your hometown, like a child, grows and changes face. You enter it, like a parent who has missed out on the child's upbringing and tries hard to catch up. The child has changed and so have you. Neither can recognize the other. And yet you try to connect, to embrace. But the city does not. It knows. You will now merely come and go like an occasional bout of flu. And like the flu, you are tolerated, not welcome.

Every time I return, the town has shown me a changed face. Well, maybe not at the first glance, but to those who have grown with it, even the slightest differences are a stark contrast. We tried discussing these changes, Trichy and I, but the discussion went nowhere. I know my place now. I no longer have a rightful claim. I merely plead, for the town to hold my spot, and not have me replaced in its ship. I do not know if it will.

I bend down to kiss the soil one last time before my feathers are spread. Dear Trichy, if I pass your skies, I ask only this much of you. Offer me a smile, a smile of recognition. When I show you off to my friends, do not be aloof. Do not pretend to not know me, nothing would devastate me more.

A Girl, a Mother and Geopolitics

2014-07-22T12:35:00.002-07:00

“Jack! Here, hold Sophie.”

The distinct accent of the young couple with the baby told flight attendant Victoria Yu that they were Australian. She knew from experience that Australians were regulars on this flight. They were mostly affluent tourists returning home after a holiday in Europe.

She checked the flight manifest. Over two-thirds of the passengers in the flight were from the Netherlands. This was natural considering that MH 71 was a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur. She also made a mental note that there were three infants on board, one of them in her section.

This was important. Passengers traveling with infants needed to be seated such that the other passengers did not complain. Tired travelers were not expected to be tolerant of babies.

Victoria would be attending to the passengers in Business Class. She was one of the senior attendants on board and was in fact among the most experienced attendants in Malaysia Airlines. She had joined as a young flight attendant ten years ago and had slowly grown up the ranks. She was also three months pregnant and was about to go on parental leave next week.

Victoria adjusted the upper part of her uniform, her kebaya on top of her stomach. Her lithe frame ensured that her baby bump did not protrude too much.

She inspected the business class section. The Australian couple was occupying the first row of seats on her left hand side. The baby was now back with her mother who had finally settled down.

“What an adorable girl! She must be 2 years old”, Victoria thought. The afternoon sun was shining through the windows and bouncing off the girl’s golden hair. “Sophie”, her father said when Victoria asked the girl for her name. Victoria asked the couple if they wanted something. They did not. They were busy trying to put Sophie to sleep.

Victoria returned to the entrance. There was a rush of passengers entering the aircraft and the attendants at the front were having a hard time distributing enough smiles. Based on the manifest, her section would accommodate a Dutch Senator and a handful of old doctors. It was going to be an interesting flight.

Victoria walked back to her station. She had made the mandatory checks. Seatbelts fastened, tray tables and seats upright. She also performed the flight safety demo to the passengers and suppressed a smile when she got to the part where she mentioned that a passenger should secure his own oxygen mask before trying to assist someone.

As she finished her demo, she looked at the rows of eyes looking at her. Some bored, some without an alternative and some, not looking at her but lost in their displays. Sophie was drifting in and out of sleep and her mother was throwing cautious glances around the cabin. Victoria looked at Sophie. She looked angelic. Victoria’s right hand instinctively ran over her stomach. She quickly adjusted her kebaya and sat down at her station and fastened her seatbelt.

The Captain was on the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onboard Flight MH 71 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur. We are currently third in line for take-off and are expected to be in the air in approximately seven minutes time. We ask that you please fasten your seatbelts at this time and secure all baggage underneath your seat or in the overhead compartments. We also ask that your seats and table trays are in the upright position for take-off. Please turn off all personal electronic devices, including laptops and cell phones. Smoking is prohibited for the duration of the flight. Thank you for choosing Malaysia Airlines. Enjoy your flight.”

Victoria heaved a sigh. These would be the last few minutes of relaxation she would get this afternoon. She had duties to perform as soon as the flight went up in the air and the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign was turned off. To serve food and beverages, to help aged passengers with their seatbelts and to sell airline merchandise to uninterested passengers. The aircraft was now taxiing down the runway. It picked up speed and took off. In a few minutes, the Captain was back on the microphone.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman.This is your Captain speaking. We are currently cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet at an airspeed of 400 miles per hour. We’re flying over Germany. The cabin crew will be coming around in about twenty minutes to offer you a light lunch and a drink, and the inflight movie will begin shortly after that. I'll talk to you again before we reach our destination. Until then, sit back, relax and enjoy the rest of the flight.”

Victoria drew the curtains of the Attendant’s section and powdered her face. She pulled out the meal trolley. Food that had been prepared almost half a day earlier and served with “Made Fresh!” stickers on it. Not that the passengers would know. Their sinuses were clogged and taste buds numbed due to the change in air pressure. She began serving vegetarian and non-vegetarian meals based on passenger request. Sophie was now asleep and her parents took a vegetarian meal each. She lodged the meal trolley in place and picked a handful of bottles to serve water to all those who had summoned her.

The relatively smaller size of the business class meant that Victoria had fewer requests. In a little over an hour, she was back to her station for a brief break. Time passed. Victoria was resting. The flight was now flying over Poland and the dull drone of the engines was faintly audible. She knew that the pilots must have had their meals, the pilot and co-pilot eating different meals to minimize the risk of food poisoning.

Although she knew them both professionally, the pilot was a close friend. They had both started at Malaysia Airlines around the same time and had grown together. He had built a reputation for being a crisis handler. She felt safe traveling in his flight.

Victoria was jolted awake by the sound of crying. Yes, it was Sophie. She was up and for some reason, unhappy. Her parents were trying to pacify her with offers alternating between chocolate and her father’s hair. She preferred the latter at the moment and was channeling her frustration onto it. Her mother feared that if not pacified soon, Sophie was going to make her father bald.

Victoria strode to the seat. The mother looked at her apologetically. The other passengers were beginning to throw disturbed glances in her direction. Some pushed their earplugs deeper inside and tried to get back to sleep. The Senator was smiling cautiously. One of the doctors was looking at Sophie with admiration.

Victoria knew this had to be sorted out fast. She looked at the mother and then at the father. They were trying their best. She went to her cabin and returned with a trinket the airline was selling as a souvenir. She tried to distract Sophie by waving it in front of her face. Sophie took it from her, looked at it closely, and threw it on her father. Obviously, he was responsible for whatever was bothering her. She turned around on her father’s lap, jabbed at the seat in front and started a fresh spurt of crying.

Victoria saw what the problem was. Sophie was pointing to the display. One of the movies on the inflight entertainment was a movie about a baby. The baby on screen was climbing skyscrapers, playing with gorillas, and giving his kidnappers a hard time. And all poor Sophie could do was sit on her mother’s lap and look at it while clouds were speeding past her. No wonder she was agitated. The noise was bothering other passengers. Victoria did not know what to do. She felt the aircraft gently rise. She knew what was happening. The pilot was doing a “Step climb”. He was gaining altitude and flying to thinner airspace in order to save fuel. As the flight burnt more and more fuel and got lighter, it was more economical to fly higher to reduce air resistance. Not many of the passengers would notice or know the importance of it. The passengers here would notice it even less with all their attention now focused on a bawling Sophie.

It was not only the passengers who were ignorant. So was Victoria. She did not know that the flight could not have flown at a lesser altitude even if the pilots had wanted. The flight had entered Ukraine airspace at 32,000 feet and was slowly ascending to 35,000 feet. Since July 14, the airspace above this part of Ukraine was closed below 32,000 feet for all aircraft. The unrest on the ground that necessitated these restrictions made the turbulence of the skies look far less menacing.

Sophie continued to cry completely ignoring all the effort that was on to calm her down. The bright afternoon sun that was making the pilots wear their sunglasses was peeping in through the few open windows of business class. Sophie pointed outside through one of the open windows. Victoria’a attention was drawn to it.

It was then that they all felt it. The aircraft started shaking. The seatbelt sign was back on. Victoria instructed that the passengers return to their seats, and waited for the Captain’s announcement. It came a moment later.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now crossing a pocket of turbulence. Please return…”

He never completed that line. The aircraft started shaking more and more violently. It got hotter and hotter. And before any of the passengers could fish out a tissue to wipe their sweat, there was a blinding flash of light and it felt like the aircraft was speared through its abdomen and was being roasted on a coal pit. And all of this occurred within seconds.

The caged air was now rapidly escaping the pressurized cabin through the rear of the aircraft that had been ripped apart. The Captain pleaded for order while his seat struggled to break free. But his voice never left him. The forces of physics conspired with each other to rip and burn the aircraft at the same time. The seatbelts had firmly bound the passengers to their seats. So the air which they had breathed until now, sucked them out with the seats, into its realm.

As she clutched tight onto the row of seats she was standing next to, Victoria felt herself being pulled with it. Reflexively, she pushed her stomach away from the seat and tried to hold onto the walls of the aircraft. It gave her another five seconds. The Senator was long gone. The doctors also departed one after the other. Her hand grip was failing. The last thing Victoria saw was the smile on Sophie’s face as her seat was ripped off its harness. The last thought she had was Sophie would have loved the rollercoaster ride in Kuala Lampur.