The Blog Less Read

The winter on the edge of forever

2012-01-29T00:00:00.123+05:30

My second Terry Pratchett - "Thief of Time," if you care to know - much like the first, gave me this irresistible urge to write something. Maybe it's all those behind-the-scenes peeks at mythology and the way he uses them to hold an affectionate mirror up to our idiosyncrasies. Did you know, for instance, that there were originally Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Pestilence, War, Famine, Death... and Ronnie. But he left before the group became famous. The same sad old story of trashed hotel rooms and creative differences, apparently. Anyway, on to our thought for the day:-

"... the smallest possible unit of time must exist, mustn't it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn't have a length then the present couldn't exist at all. There would be no time for it to be present in."

It stands to reason, then, that there are the in-betweens, the links between the present and the later, the cracks between the now and the then, the bridges between the forward defensive and the yawn. Of course, we must be designed to be oblivious, mostly, to these - if motion judder from 24 fps sources can annoy us so, what would it be like to feel the Tick of the Universe? But then, there are seven billion of us, and countless gazillion ticks every day, and probability theory eventually weighs in. And those are the tales of forever.

When I moved to Delhi, I was going to a place where I did not know a soul. And since stuff like finding common ground, or taking a few steps in the other's shoes, or even the willingness to acknowledge that the thing standing in front of me is genetically 99.99% similar to me, are not exactly my strong points, my "friends" count managed to get only a marginal leg up all through my stay there. There was simply no one I needed to be in time with.

Which brings me to work - deadlines and office hours and peak traffic hours and what not. And people whose society was a clock's second hand with a needle tied to its tip, scraping away at my spine. Deadlines, no matter how unrealistic, had to be met, or there were tedious arguments to be had. Office hours, I pretty much ignored, but peak traffic hours are not to be dismissed lightly. And you very well can't ask your manager to sod off just because, in your opinion, the only thing the two of you have in common is an org chart and "so wouldn't it make sense if we cut down on this face-time business, and just stick to email?" In short, a life of that "discipline" thing that seems to be the most visible attribute of one who is a subject of the Kingdom of Time and proud of it.

Naturally, I snapped. I had just enjoyed an ethereal vacation in Arunachal, Assam and Shillong, and a heady cocktail of movies and old friends in Pune, and was just back in the office, bang in the middle of the most awful bout of contrast-induced gloom, when a couple of management folks picked absolutely the wrong time to pick a fight (in fairness, there was no way they could have known), and I quit.

Now, I've said it before and I say it again: Delhi is a city of many wonders, and it will be to my eternal regret that I didn't explore more of it when I was there. So, what did I do with all the free time at my disposal? Cram every minute of it with backpacks and peopling and metro rides and trips to parts of town unknown and long walks historical? All of those were in my plans as I walked out the office, texting "I'm out! I'm out!" but somehow...

You see, for the first time in my life, I didn't know what lay next. I mean, yeah, I knew I'd have to find another job when the money started to run down, but I had enough for a few months, and besides, there were arrangements I could make to stretch that to a couple of years of no work at all. So, unlike school when I knew with paralysing certainty when the next term would begin; unlike college when, even before I had collected my marks cards, I knew the precise date and time my employed life would begin; unlike every vacation since, when an out-of-office message would inform the desperate (and who else would hope to get work done out of me?) when I'd be back at my desk and would you please contact so-and-so for anything urgent in the meanwhile, there was no "later" to dread. All there was was the now and so much of it.

So, did I cut loose? Did I paint the town red and wake up with my head propped up against a dune, a dozen empty bottles at my feet, my car up against a cactus tree, a handy oasis to my left? Well, it turns out, I was never really straining at the leash - that awful feeling of suffocation was just the world trying to get me to hurry up.

What I learnt, though, is that if you ever want to spend some time being gloriously lonely - the sort of loneliness that is sweet and life-affirming; the sort that lets you whinge that there are none with whom you can just be; when you're all alone and you lament that there are none to turn to, none to be accountable to, none to be responsible for, none to feel guilty over: not the bad sort of loneliness where you're surrounded by friends and acquaintances, all of whom have a legitimate claim to your time, the kind of loneliness that ends with either your brains on the ceiling, or worse, a wedding... - where was I? Oh yeah, if you ever want to feel that most worthy of all human feelings, you must do so in winter, in a city.

The country isn't a place to be lonely - you go there when you want to do things: exercise, commune with nature, plant cabbages, etc. A city, on the other hand, is the proper place for it - where you're in the midst of millions, where at any point in time there's a dozen people an arm's length away and you choose to have nothing to do with them, where you build walls all around, with the enemy hordes inches away. When you played "forts" as a kid, was it any fun building them in the midst of nowhere, without a soul in sight? No, that was just plain boring; you needed the enemy near you, you needed to feel snug in the few inches of safety your walls bought you, cocooned from the danger all around.

Those were the days I'd wake up around noon, have a leisurely breakfast at the coffee shop down the road, and watch Time disintegrate around me. This was a world without before or after or causality. The nearest cinema was a short walk away; and the countless movies in there, the World Cup, the several hours in the bookstore next door, the walks in the winter evenings, all booted and trench-coated up - the only hint of regret being that I wished I knew how to wear a hat properly, and that if the one I'd bought wasn't a couple of sizes too small, then I could've at least had a go at getting it right... There is no order I can place to any of them when I try and remember them now. I would enjoy a meandering conversation over breakfast, while curled up in a blanket on my cavernous sofa, a Raymond Chandler holding me rapt, while wandering around in the night air, hands deep in my coat, studying the patterns I made in the mist.

Summer wouldn't have been the same. There's something oppressive about the heat that makes winter, despite all the miseries it can inflict, a better companion - with the temperature a couple of degrees above zero, my little fort with its warm, yellow light and my books and my movies attractively lit by the side of the sofa...

But this isn't really a story of forever, more of a detour around the edge of it. For, a day had to come when I'd snap out of it. I don't know what made me do it, though. Most likely it was my bank balance rapidly approaching the red line... And right there's the tragedy of flesh and blood - so few of us are Bertie Woosters and even of those virtually none can be alone.

P.S. - The title is only inspired by Star Trek, not stolen from it. Completely different things. One contemptible, the other an affectionate tribute.

If she weighs the same as a duck...

2011-12-02T02:00:00.031+05:30

Wim Wenders: "Sometimes I feel that only people who're able to be alone are also able to be with other people. And people who're not able to be alone are a burden in any relationship because they eat the other person up - because they need somebody, and that need can be a terrible thing."*

Which makes perfect sense.

So, logically,

If you're truly able to be alone, and if you didn't need someone, then why would you want to be with someone?** Inertia is the second law of motion, and you've hit the perfect stride. You shall remain immovably alone, and you wouldn't have it any other way. It's elementary, my dear reader.

Which leads us to,

The people who do get into relationships are the ones who've never really learnt to be alone.

And therefore,

Beneath the facade of every happy relationship, there are two cannibals eating each other up. And if they do learn to be alone, that's when they split up. Logically.

Now, if only I could be so collected and clinical when next my grandmother pesters me on the subject.

xxx

*From a coolly thought-provoking interview with him on the DVD of "Alice In The Cities."

**This might just be the underlying philosophy behind that laconic "by choice, man."

The Malabar Op breaks the fourth wall

2011-11-20T02:00:00.025+05:30

"There's something very strange about all this," said the devious mastermind, just after he'd been fingered by the Op for plunging his fruit fork into the Adam's Apple of the Maharaja of Thrikkakara's favourite nephew. And the priceless 400-year-old tablecloth took the brunt of the deluge. The denouement had gone smoothly in the Maharaja's drawing room, and the collective gasp from those assembled when the Op dramatically unveiled the culprit was satisfying indeed. But... the curious emptiness that hung over it all was rather a dampener.

"Look at me," he continued, "7 PhDs; mastery of history, art and culture; fluent in 13 languages... and here I am foiled by a chap who couldn't solve a crossword if he put 6 months into it. Do you really think all this is real?"

Op: "Wh-what do you mean?"

Villain: "All this! You! Me! These caricatures standing around! Look at yourself. It's summer in Kerala - I thought I'd melt when the power went out a while back - what's with the trench coat? You're quite obviously a rip-off of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. And one more and more veering toward parody, I'm afraid. Chandler, for instance, hated little Belgian men and their little grey cells, and look what we have here. Your last case read like a couple too many drinks and a wandering conversation at lunch. Amusing enough for a scrawl on a page, but far too silly for His own voice. Enter the intrepid Malabar Op. An empty shell. A conveyor for Someone Else's whimsies."

Bystander 3: "I do feel a bit thinly sketched out. Who am I? What motivates me? Why am I in love with that pill?"

Villain: "Romantic interest, obviously."

Op: "Wait. I think, therefore I..."

Villain: "Yeah, right. The real question is, how far up does this go? Is it noir all the way up? Of course, there are several problems with infinite recursion, chief of them being the limitations of the stack."

The Op disappeared, leaving behind an uncomfortable silence. When he re-emerged, he was wearing Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, a Hawaiian shirt, and silly sunglasses.

He shook his fist up at the ceiling.

"Now, look here! I'm through being your patsy. Call me when you can convince me that you care. That you suffer as much as I do. It's unlikely you'll reap any rewards for it, but it is in how you take care of what you have, of what you create, that your mettle comes through. It takes love over gold and mind over matter, to do what you do that you must; when the things that you hold can fall and be shattered or run through your fingers like dust.

"Or... if you think that short dialogue-heavy snippets are more your scene, write that screenplay. Sell everything you've got. Pawn the life insurance. And premier me at Cannes. You're young. Go back to your day job, if it doesn't work out.

"But if I must be a part-time scribble on a lazy evening in that comfortable life of yours, why not have me ride off into the sunset with Grace Kelly, or in one of those sleazy stories with easy dames that all the other private eyes seem to get into all the time? What would it matter to you? But I think I know how it does matter. You wanted creatures with your own fuck-ups in a horrid, violent world geared towards entropy. It shows your insecurities. The rule book is just for show, isn't it? To tell yourself that you tried all you could. I don't know about you artists, but any engineer worth his salt strives for perfection. And yet you made me in your stinking image... just so that you could have an excuse. To tell yourself that your own mistakes couldn't be helped. That they're natural. How sad is that?

"Well, think about it. In the meantime, you can keep your Eden. All of it. All the dust and the shadows and the loneliness. I'm off to the beach."

He shook his fist up at me once more, and disappeared through the door.

The Malabar Op helps the girls out

2011-10-29T13:00:00.002+05:30

This was one of the easier ones... at least in terms of getting the report out. The frightful headache it gave me, though, is the sort you'd get if you found yourself on the wrong side of the fourth wall of a Bunuel film.

It began innocently enough. A runner-up to Miss Bangalore (I forget which year) found herself waiting for 45 minutes opposite an empty chair at Sunny's. And after a fourth gulp (one gulp per glass; a departure from her usual dainty sips) decided that enough was enough and hoofed it for the wide-open spaces. The pretty project manager, used to all her underlings working seventeen hours a day for a mere flutter of her eyelashes, was miffed beyond description on leaving the office early one Friday evening, only to find herself staring at rude graffiti for the better part of an hour. She even had to take a cab home - a first for her. And then there was the girl-next-door, from the college-down-the-road, who'd spent all of Saturday afternoon setting her hair into the perfect curls and picking out shoes to go with her brand-new dress, only to sob the evening quietly away, while watching back-to-back showings of "Gossip Girl" on cable.

This was just the beginning, and it soon became something of an epidemic. The most beautiful girls in the city, stood up, day after day after day. Nothing like this had ever been heard of. There are no folk songs, nothing on scrolls in any languages known to us, Gutenberg's thingy never churned out anything remotely similar, nor are there cave etchings indicating this to be a known occurrence to our distant ancestors. Plenty of gripping stuff about spears through elephants' heads and stuff, yes, but no cavegirl standing alone by a primeval swamp, all decked up, and puzzled annoyance on her face.

And all this by one man. Neither nameless nor faceless. But whose motivations remained unknown.

This was revolutionary; the beginning of a new era, a sledge-hammer shift in the battle-of-the-sexes. This was Roger Bannister running the four-minute mile. This was Hillary and Norgay conquering Everest. And just like the fate of the mile, just like the empty beer bottles strewn about the summit of the world, just like, as the joke goes, "the invention of the steam-boat caused a network of rivers to spring up," their hitherto unchallenged ascendancy was soon to be at an end... or so feared the shadowy Association for Woman's Supremacy over the Male Doofus. But they wouldn't go down without a fight. If they could understand this bizarre new phenomenon, perhaps they could conquer it.

And so, when they hired me, they all had just one question they wanted answered, "Why?" (Or "Por qué?" in the case of the one Spanish exchange student.)

Now, give me the number of fingers a chap has on his left hand and his five favourite movies, and that's all the info I need to find him anywhere in the world; much less this case where not only was his name and photograph given to me, but also his Facebook profile complete with "location" info. So, the scene shifts abruptly to the very end of the case, where the fearless Op and the slightly drunk target find themselves seated across each other over mildly alcoholic drinks.

"If you wanted your answer in two words, those'd be Chaos Theory."
"What?"
"Chaos Theory."
"I heard you the first time. What the... on earth, I mean... we must all watch our profanity... is Chaos Theory?"
"You don't know? I was just reading about it. Mighty interesting stuff. Check the Butterfly Effect out, too, if you get the time. Mind you, I haven't read the whole essay, so I can't guarantee that it's Chaos Theory exactly that I want here; but it doesn't matter. It's all about the craft of storytelling, you see? Begin with something bombastic to get the attention of the audience, and half your work's done. Beethoven did it, too. There's a name for this technique. It's... ah... it's right on the tip of my tongue..."

"Could I interrupt you there for a second? What's the temperature right about now?"
"Eh? Mid-thirties, probably... mid-to-high thirties, yeah. Why?"
"Bear with me. And we're sitting here very much in the sun, under an umbrella made of jelly-fish, yes?"
"So far as I can make out. But..."
"Just one moment more. Does a man who sits in conditions as these, wearing a trench-coat and a hat - ok, maybe the hat's reasonable - seem like the sort of guy who'd be interested in a discussion on theories literary? Forget the build up. Just get on with it."
"Oh, all right," he seemed disappointed. "Do you know what my view of the world is?"
"I'm dying to find out."
"Think of a giant pool table with seven billion balls on it pinging about in perpetual motion. It's a really clever analogy, if you pause but a second to think of it. The balls disappearing down the pockets could be construed as a metaphor for death, and..."

I didn't actually hit him on the side of the head with my glass, but I came mighty close.

"Oh, all right. So, here we are, each of us a ball moving crazily fast on this table, right? Now, even if these balls are ones that can see, think and change their courses through force of will, how much control do they really have? There's billions of balls out there on the table, each of them moving so very fast - if there's one untouchable in the world, it's this speed... uncontrollable. All they're trying to do is avoid the pockets, but what with the crazy speed, and the other seven billion balls crashing into them all the time, and the hazards of the table itself - this is a table that has been kept out in the sun and the rain, and hasn't been brushed or the cloth changed in millions of years - things are really, really difficult. I'm talking just in terms of survival here.

"Now, to add one layer of impossibility on top, what if most balls had this urge to spend the rest of their days moving in tandem with another ball (mostly of a different colour, but not always)? They'd practically have to be fused together, and then they'd be all out of shape - coefficients of friction, too, are almost always different for each ball - and their lives'd be all laboured movements. Nah, nah, nah. What we all want is to have our loves by our side without any of those pesky shackles.

"But how long would it last? How long before the fragile bonds of love are shattered by the randomness of the universe and our own divergent paths? Probability Theory tells us: not very long. Sure, I'm as human as the next... well, whatever... My ideal too is to win this lottery, to win this one-in-a-trillion relationship. But where I differ from the average Joe is that I know my Maths. I'm a realist. I choose to live life based on the probable. You used to be a programmer, right? Would you ever design a system around its exception handling? And there's the irony. People spend vast amounts of time planning their whole lives out, when they don't even know what dreams they'd be having that night. Wouldn't they be happier if they just cut loose and drifted?

"Anyway, where I'm good, where I'm really good - apart from cutting loose and drifting - is in my judgement of the short term. Look, it's relatively easy to set sights on trivialities - things like your career, the ideal home-theatre system, your dream vacation. But those are dead things, things without minds or motion of their own. Sure, the variables in the world make them demanding conquests, too, but with care and work, there's at least an even chance of achieving them. But if your goal be a dance in perpetuity with another of those balls, who has an answer? I'd imagine you'd need a computer the size of the Milky Way to process all that data. But for the short-term, my skills are second to none.

"Case in point: did you notice that when I came back from the rest-room, I glanced at that girl on the next table?"
"No."
"Well, I did. And I got a glance in return. And I knew even before I got up from the table that it would be so. I was merely following a script already laid out in my head. Now, how could I have been so sure?"
"That obnoxious, flowery shirt you're wearing?"

"It's a gift, I tell you. It's like I know every detail, or better put, every possibility for my immediate future - for, let's say, about 3 hours. The only way to be truly successful in this world of ours is to possess this nimbleness of brain... and have short, intense bursts of energy to draw on, to seize on those openings, those alignments, that last but a fraction of a second. It's very exhausting, and it's hard to keep up - which is why I take short vacations to Europe once every couple months... Ah, I can see from your eyes that you're beginning to understand.

"A lot can change from the moment you ask a girl out, to when you're just about to pick her up. They're often in two different eras. The universe has changed like crazy in the in-between. And now, not even my ability to gather up energy and focus it like a laser can help anymore. It's dead, whatever we could've had, and there's no going back. What's the point in a date, if you find yourself gazing three hours into the future and see bleakness and boredom? For a chap who's all into true love and forever and things, maybe he could take the hit, maybe he could tell himself that with time he could win her over; but given my short-to-medium-term worldview..."

There was silence for a bit.

"Oh, and one more thing. You do realise that with the analogy involving the pool table and the balls in perpetual motion, I was taking artistic liberties?" He seemed anxious. "Because, you see, perpetual-motion machines are purely hypothetical, and would, in practice, violate the second law of thermodyna..."

I stood up.

"Just one other question."
"Shoot."
"In the short-term vision you've surely had of this moment, did you picture yourself getting stuck with the bill?"

Case closed.

Hump Theory

2011-09-04T00:00:00.031+05:30

It was a dark and stormy night. The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees. The moon was something equally compelling. And the road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor. Exactly the sort of setting for a highwayman to go riding, riding, riding, right up to the old inn door, where Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter, waits, plaiting a dark-red love-knot into her long black hair.

There wasn't much traffic on the road, on this the highway from Mysore to Bangalore. At the end of a three-day weekend, you would expect the hundreds of thousands that had bolted from Bangalore with a fervent desire to be somewhere... anywhere... else to be welcomed back with a warm log-jam. But here we were on an empty road. Strange.

And it had been a strange day. A little earlier, on the way back from Coorg, having missed a turn in the pouring rain, we found ourselves in the Brahmagiri Wildlife Sanctuary, home to "Lion-tailed Macaque, Elephant, Gaur, Tiger, Jungle Cat, Leopard Cat, Wild Dog, Sloth Bear, Wild Pig, Sambar, Spotted Deer, Nilgiri Langur, Slender Loris, Bonnet Macaque, Common Langur, Barking Deer, Mouse Deer, Malabar Giant Squirrel, Giant Flying Squirrel, Nilgiri Marten, Common Otter, Brown Mongoose, Civets, Porcupine, Pangolin, Python, Cobra, King Cobra, Emerald Dove, Black Bulbul and Malabar Trogon," with the orange low-fuel indicator blinking more and more urgently in the dark of the rain-drenched forest.

Emerging out into the late-afternoon sunshine, we found ourselves in Kannur, Kerala, and not Mysore - two somewhat different places not usually mistaken for each other. The last fumes of petrol took us to a fuel bunk where the attendant was not only kind enough to tell us where we went astray (we would have to retrace our way back through Brahmagiri), but also pointed out the silver lining in that petrol is five bucks a litre cheaper in Kerala than in Karnataka.

As we zipped by on the Mysore-Bangalore highway, congratulating ourselves on picking a day and a time when we could whizz along with hardly a car in sight, we came upon, quite unexpectedly, an enormous traffic jam. It seemed to us that there were now hundreds - maybe thousands - of vehicles on the road. We crawled for twenty minutes, all the while scratching our chins with a good deal of puzzlement. And then, just like that, like Keyser Soze even, the jam was gone - it vanished like it had never been, and we were back to meeting five vehicles in fifteen minutes. There had been no intersections, no towns, no accidents, no anything to create the pileup.

From then on, the cycle repeated with baffling regularity. Phases of 100 kph+ cruises followed by 5 kph- crawls - with both phenomena unaccounted for. Where do all these vehicles come from? And where do they disappear to? There were three of us in the car - two programmers and a bio-scientist-something-or-the-other - highly trained to observe patterns and propound theories from said observations. But we were still at a loss. There had been no roads leading to (or out of) the highway before, at, or after the pileup spots to account for the flux. We considered medical-experiments-performing aliens picking up cars, and then dropping them back on the road at spots fixed as per intergalactic carjacking norms. But that, somehow, didn't grip.

It was then that we hit upon the clinching observation - there had been a hump (less imaginatively known as a speed-breaker) involved in each of those pileups. Thus, through inductive reasoning, Hump Theory was born. In short, the increase in the number of vehicles at any point on a no-reason-why-there-should-be-a-jam highway, from a point just before it, is directly proportional to the product of the distance between the two points and the height of the nearest hump ahead, and inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance from the second point to the hump.

That is,

V ∝ d x h / ∛r

Which translates to,

V = T x d x h / ∛r

where T is a traffic constant. Truth be told, it isn't so much a constant as a variable that depends on asphalt conditions, how badly the majority of the drivers on the road want to use the rest-room, whether they have interesting company, how happy they're with the music they've brought along, and a variety of other factors complex enough for us to want to bin the idea of defining it. Be our guest, though.

The lack of cars post-hump could be explained simply by the vehicles engaging their Warp Drives when clear of first gear. Once we hit upon the value of T for that evening, we could predict with enormous precision the distance to the nearest hump, plus its height, merely by noting the increase in vehicles in our vicinity. Not that it made our lives easier or anything... but it was good to know.

Could someone else take up the challenge of explaining why inter-city highways are designed such that they need humps every dozen kilometres or so? And even if you must have them, what for one whim or the other, why so in spots that do not particularly demand a snail's pace? Perhaps the planners were once abducted by aliens, and experimented on, thereby altering their neural pathways? Or maybe those are cow-crossings?

The Malabar Op goes to the movies: The Final Reel

2011-08-13T00:00:00.132+05:30

The story so far...

The Setup

the bits in the middle

And now...

I must've watched 20 films in those 6 days.

There was "The Storm in my Heart," a film about two uncompromising loners, who try to make seaworthy a rickety old boat that hasn't seen the seas for decades. Their goal is a foolhardy voyage along the Norwegian coast, to the older man's girlfriend - to reclaim a love as old as the boat itself. "l travel around the world, and write about it afterwards. There are two ways to do it, you know. The easy way: when you buy plane tickets, and come home when the money's gone. And the hard way: you walk out the door, without money, without plans, away from it all."

Then there was "The Medal of Honour," a Romanian film about a taciturn, crusty old man who's lived what he tells himself is a worthy life - one of honour and achievement - but he knows that no one respects him; not his wife, not his son. He gets a chance to regain some respect for himself when he's awarded a medal for the one worthwhile thing he may have done decades ago... but he barely remembers any of it, and others have different versions of that deed. Rather hard to watch, this one.

There were a few lighter ones, too. "Fight, Zatoichi, Fight" was a no-holds-barred action flick about a blind swordsman taking care of a baby while fighting off hordes of evil henchmen with the other hand. Even a film like "Little Rose," an underwhelming film about government persecution in Poland, had moments like this: "Books are not there to be read at once. First, they are beautiful objects. Second, they are like friends."

And then there was my favourite, "4 Minutes." It begins with the camera rising high over a red-bricked prison, taking it in from a bird's eye-view - a shot sinister and beautiful at the same time. The movie's about terrible memories and sins that won't wash away. And escape through great music. What purpose is there to life, if not to fulfill our talents, it asks.

As the week ticked closer to an end, I knew I couldn't put it off any longer. No sooner had we walked out of the final screening on the penultimate day of the festival - a screening of the Javier Bardem starrer "Biutiful" - than I reached into Sally's purse and pulled out the ruby.

"I believe this is not yours?" I asked quietly.
She didn't try to take it back... just gazed at me with infinite sadness. "And is it yours?"
"I've been hired to retrieve it."
"Do you know what it is?"
"Nope."
"It persists emotions."
"Sorry?"

"Film-makers... storytellers... they're the supreme Gods. These are people who know how small the creator of our world must be. And since they can do something about it, they pour all their creativity, all their passion, into a spool of film - one that has their universe in it; where they sculpt in time, where it plays according to their rules."

"Erm, yes?"

"With ideas so powerful that they sneak past our defenses and speak directly to the dark rooms of our souls. Tell me something. When Maetel told our little hero that she would be nothing more than an illusion of a young boy's heart, a phantom of his youth, what illusions from your own youth did you remember?"

"I don't understand."

"I think you do. Hard to get rid of them, yes?"

"All right. Fine. A film got to me. Where does this thing here fit in?"

"There's the sad part. The moment the projector's turned off, the moment we step back out into sunlight, our world starts to take over. That ruby there can change all that. You've experienced a bit of it yourself."

"What a load of poppycock. Disappearing into a reel is no way to live. Isn't it one of these movies of yours that had this to say: 'It's these cards, and the movies and the pop songs, they're to blame for all the lies and the heartache, everything.'"

"Are they? There are mediocre films, just like there are of everything else. But only the ones by the craftsmen really speak to you. The rest... well... all they do is magnify your own lies."

"Convenient. And what if your craftsman's idea of a bit of fun is to scoop out your neighbour's insides?"

"So difficult for me to judge on matters good and evil. Besides, there's the film, and there's you. I quit my job the day after I watched "The Kings of the Road." It spoke to me of people who live life all alone - on the road - spending years on a highway drifting between towns. Lives without meaning or shackles. And it struck me that that is the way of the world. Full of coincidences, and with no real purpose. Of brief, wondrous meetings; but also quicker farewells. We've convinced ourselves of the opposite. How unnatural is our world of unthinking allegiances - to flags, to anthems, to plans, to order, to morals, to each other. But that was me. The boy I watched it with wanted to know whether the screen had frozen up. See? There's the film, and there's you. All that the ruby does is to make you truer to yourself."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Give it back to me. Your client has rather different views to mine. Hers is a world of responsibility and achievement and billing rates. People being true to themselves would destroy that world, would shatter the name plates outside office doors. You've tasted a bit of what the ruby has to offer. It could do so much more for you... and for others."

"Look, there are rules I live by. I can't betray a client. What use are principles, if you're going to be selective about them? You either follow them all the time, or you have none at all. I can't abide a world without a Code."

"A code is for men without souls. If you really cared, you'd just do what feels right."

"I am sorry."

As I turned and walked back, I pulled the coat tight around me... and I don't remember whom I wore my hat like - if I wore it at all; I had to buy a new one the next day. Where could I have left it?

Case closed.

The Malabar Op goes to the movies: the bits in the middle

2011-07-31T00:00:00.024+05:30

The story so far...

The Setup

And now...

INOX Cinemas. The place brought back so many memories. There was a time when I used to work in the building next door. As they had limited car parking, I parked here quite a bit. For just 20 bucks a day. I glanced nostalgically around the basement.

I set about gathering information through my extensive network. I arranged to meet the hacker at the McDonald's nearby. How long would it take to hack into the PIFF database and get me the co-ordinates on this Sally dame?

"Oh, I already know where she is."
"You do?"
"Yup."
"How come?"
"After years of hacking, I'm now telepathically wired into the web - a flick of my neurons is all I need to get into any system."
"Oh yeah?" Private eyes don't like having the Mickey taken out of them. "And?"
"She's at that table over there, wearing the delegate pass with 'Sally' printed on it."

Conversation having dwindled a fair bit anyway, I excused myself. Malabar Ops are usually pretty smooth with the ladies, but Sally seemed just a touch out of my league. I decided to wait for an opening. Which came soon enough. I'd just ambled out of Blue Nile (not the river; it's a restaurant rather famous for chicken biryani) when I saw her arguing with a watchman. Breaks down like this:-

INOX, being a multiplex, has plenty of parking, but it tends to get a wee bit crowded, and has rather tight entrances and exits. Sally, being a new driver, and, further, having taken out her dad's expensive car, was just a tiny bit averse to denting it. Luckily for her, dads who can afford to buy expensive cars can also usually afford memberships in expensive clubs in the middle of the city. Said club was down the road from INOX. "Why don't I just park here and walk down?" she wondered very reasonably.

Watchman at the club stops her just inside the entrance. Asks her for her pass. She roots around in the dashboard. Then in her purse. She tries turning her pockets inside out. No luck. Watchman tut-tuts and tells her that he couldn't possibly let her in. She could've argued with him, and told him to escort her to the reception, where they'd no doubt be able to verify her membership; but being a pacifist, she decides to just forget the whole business and risk the dents at INOX.

And this is where the story gets complex. Her car's already inside the gates, you see, which means that the easiest way to leave would be to use the "out" gate. But the out gate's further down the road, and she would have to drive through the premises to reach the exit. The watchman objects to this on the grounds that allowing a pass-lacker to drive inside the compound would be a violation of several of the club's by-laws. Which left her with turning the car around and leaving via the "in" gate. Except that, it being the entrance, he couldn't allow a car to drive out of it, due to several other by-laws which expressly forbid that sort of thing. This would seem to have left them at an impasse.

Not to the watchman. He proposes a solution. Why don't she reverse the car out of the entrance? Apparently, the by-laws only state that a car's bonnet be closer than the boot to the club's fountain - the actual direction it moves in was left uninked, and therefore, open to interpretation. Sally, though, voices reservations about backing her car out into one of the busiest streets in the locality. And there the argument raged, centred chiefly around the themes of "what's written in the club by-laws" vs "desire to remain out of the hospital."

And in I stepped with customary Malabar Op calmness. I took the watchman aside, taking care to highlight my bulging biceps, and told him, with a few words out of customary Malabar Op vocabulary, about what would happen to him if he didn't stop being a prick right about then. Which he did. Sally was all gratitude, and we got talking, and I told her I was at the PIFF, too, and she asked me if I wanted to join her for a screening of Galaxy Express 999, Japanese anime, later in the day. It was in E-Square, a fair distance away, but she offered me a ride.

Sally was one of those new drivers for whom no obstacle is worth avoiding at less than 80 kph, and with no more than 3 inches to spare. I couldn't help a few involuntary spasms through the ride, as though my foot were searching for a brake pedal on the passenger side, but I also managed to hear bits and pieces of what she had to say. She's not usually too much of a talker, but seemed to have a fair bit to say on this occasion, and what was more, seemed gently reproachful. It concerned my attitude regarding the watchman. She felt I wasn't very nice to him.

"Of course I wasn't very nice! He started it."
"Well..."
"Well what?"
"He was just doing his job."
"No, he wasn't. His job is to make sure no ones pees on the cars parked there and such like. He was just being a prick. Most likely, the sole amusement in his miserable little life is raising the hackles of those who cross his path."
"Is that what you think?"
"That is what I know."
"Hmm... Well, my father has this driver. I used to get annoyed with him because I felt he was intransigent just for the heck of it. There is one way to do everything, and that is the only way it shall be done. It took me a long time to figure out that all he was doing was what we all aspire to - introduce a little order and certainty into his life. It isn't spite. It's just vulnerability. And you might've seen that, and you might've handled the situation differently, if you weren't so very dead sure of his motivations."

We were now entering the realm of the a-little-over-my-head, and I just grunted a grunt or two, and said nothing. The way I saw it, there was nothing wrong with the watchman a pile-driver or two wouldn't fix.

The movie was watchable. It was about this little boy travelling around the galaxy in a magical train that took him from star to star in his search for the man who killed his mother. It was whizzing along, entertaining me, as movies tend to do, when towards the end, after the boy had had his vengeance, the time came for bidding farewell to his companion - the beautiful Princess Maetel - the woman he's in love with. "For now on, I will be a woman who lives only in your memories. I will be nothing more than an illusion of a young boy's heart, a phantom of your youth."

A blue light shone at my left, maybe from Sally's purse (but how could that be?), and I felt a surge of emotion hit me. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. And I couldn't get those damn lines out of my head. It refused to go, circling round and round in my head for weeks on end.

Just after the movie was done, I ran into Mrs Vegetarian, my last client. She recommended I watch Takeshi Kitano's "Boiling Point." She painted a fantastic picture of glorious, nihilistic violence in poetic slo-mo, set against the brutal backdrop of the Japanese gangland. What I actually got to see was a man washing his ass in the ocean, and a display of emotional equilibrium from the film makers on par with that of a 10-year-old who'd just been beaten up in a classroom fight he'd started. Confronting Mrs Vegetarian outside the hall, I demanded an explanation.

"You hated it? Good. I've been wanting to get back at you ever since you charged me a pot of money for 'investigating' those two idiot colleagues of mine. You told me there was nothing between them, and yet, last I heard, they'd left for Bangalore together where they're shacked up in the same apartment."

She sashayed away.

At just about this time, the phone rang again.

"Dude, this is PK. Can you come to MG Road?"

Half an hour later, I had an uncertain look as he extended two chicken-and-cheese rolls toward Sally and me.

"I want you to try this. The best rolls in the city." He had a puppy-dog look in his eyes.

Ghosts of case files past turning up in numbers reminiscent of zombies in a George Romero flick had to mean something. There is no such thing as coincidence.

I took the roll and munched thoughtfully. And still the princess's words refused to vacate the premises. It was all very strange.

The Malabar Op goes to the movies: The Setup, involving The Dame, The Burg & The Hound

2011-06-26T22:00:00.012+05:30

I stared at my manager's head with a vague distaste. I wasn't listening to a word he was saying, but I know to a cert what he was going on about. I'd heard it all before and the plot's never gripped me enough for repeat performances. What held my gaze, though, was his head: small and dark and shaped like a coconut. It had a thin covering of hair on top, very similar to and as light as the spread of coir on a de-husked coconut.

Coconuts are known for their versatility of use: the name Kerala, for instance, is derived from it, and even in far-away lands such as the one where they speak Malay, it's called the "tree of a thousand uses." The shell and the husk alone, since that's what brought us on to this topic, can be used to make anything from hoofbeats, to musical instruments, to shirt buttons, to fuel. Coconut water, if drunk from the right coconut and if you believe Harry Belafonte, is good for your daughter, makes you strong as a lion because of all the iron, and is ideal with rum when you're feeling a little glum; and the white, fleshy coating on the inside, subject to the same restrictions as the liquid, tastes like a slice of heaven.

But those are coconuts. My manager, on the other hand... When he reached the point where he was telling me how, in his book, I was all sorts of unpleasant things, I couldn't help but express amazement at this accomplishment literary, given that the last time I checked, he couldn't put together three sentences in an email without some sort of a blooper. This terminated the interview, and I was free to go back to my desk and brood. I wanted to throw up - preferably on his keyboard. I'd just thought of an excuse to go back to his desk, and had even conjured up an imaginative segue to the barfing when, as so often happens every now and then - but usually only when you're in the shower - the phone rang.

A clipped, snotty voice was on the other end...

"Listen, I came across this Facebook page for a private investigator just now... the Malabar Op or something. Are you him?"
"Yes," I said, trying not to betray too much interest: it helps with monetary negotiations.
"I've never seen a seedier ad."
I let that one fly.
"Well, what do you charge?"
"One thousand o..."
"That's way too much."
"Well, what'd you have in mind, then?"
"We'll come to that. First, can you give me any references?"
"Sorry, no. I've not been very long in the business. I do it part-time, so far. But I've read every Hammett and Chandler ever written, and I model myself on Russell Crowe from L.A. Confidential."
"And what do you with the other part of your time?"
"I'm a programmer."

:click:

The phone rang again in a couple of days' time. This time she sounded a little less haughty, a little defeated.

"I suppose beggars can't be choosers," she sighed. "How soon can you make it to Pune?"
"As soon as you book the airline ticket," I assured her.

xxx

Ah, Pune. I knew the burg well. Yes, I did. Once. A long time ago. But that was then. This was now (or, rather, a later then than the first then there).

Despite the pouring rain, it was a little too hot for my trench coat, and I had to drape it over my arm stylishly as soon as I was out of the terminal. A black cab was waiting for me. The driver was a short, thickset grouch in his late 30s. He didn't have an umbrella, which made me regret the decision to take off the coat. Oh well, life is a sum of the choices we make. A clap of thunder, a thud of the door, a growl of the engine, and we were off.

The house was the farthest one on a little lane that leads away from all civilisation. It starts out charmingly enough, but gets woodier and has less and less houses the further you go down it. And there at the very end was a house all alone, as if the others on the lane were shrinking away from it. Even the pack of barking dogs running after the car stopped, as if they'd hit an invisible barrier. Trees crowded around it, but these weren't the sort of trees you'd read about in a Robert Frost poem, but something rather more sinister - it is undoubtedly what the forest looked like to Hansel and Gretel after the little idiots lost their trail of breadcrumbs, and probably what Red Riding Hood thought of the woods after she made her acquaintance with the wolf. So there it was, the little house at the edge of Fangorn - to careless glances as pleasant a house as anyone could hope for - and I fidgeted uneasily.

xxx

It was a house with furniture. No, wait... that doesn't sound right. I've never managed to learn the names of pieces of furniture, colours, the names of different types of windows, curtains, etc; so these sort of descriptions are very difficult for me. Picture in your mind's eye a richly furnished room, but altogether on the dark side - as if light were somehow banished from there. And yet, a room that hints not at opulence or decadence, but the exact opposite... in a very evil, tightly-controlled way - like hair done up in a bun with not a strand out of place. Done? Well, that's exactly the sort of furnishing her house had.

A match, a scratch, a quick flame, a silhouette, and a puff of smoke. I could sense her gaze raking into me, every tiny movement and tic magnified and filed. I suppressed a nervous giggle.

"So... this is what my 7000 bucks of airfare has dragged in..."
I bristled. "Look here, I got back from the North East not two weeks ago, having solved an intricate puzzle to the satisfaction of all, and I really don't need to take this kind of shit from anyone... If you don't like what you see, Missy, I'm just as happy to go right back out that door."
"And once you go right back out that door, do you walk all the way back to Delhi?" drawled the voice through the smoke.
"Ah... Well...There, you see... since I'm here at your behest... it's only fair that you..."
"A blue ruby of mine has been stolen."
"Oh, too bad. Sympathies. I hate it when that happens."
"I think the thief is going to be at the piff."
"At the sniff, you mean?"
"What does 'at the sniff' mean, jackass?"
"Well at least all three are proper words, unlike your sentence which scores just two out of three," said I defensively.
"The PIFF - the Pune International Film Festival."
"What makes you think that the thief is going to be there?" I asked, interested. "Have you watched Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale?"
"What? Look, I'm trying to talk as slowly and use as few syllables as possible here. I don't need fucking Bogart. All I need is a sap who'll do as he's told. On the table there is a delegate pass for the festival... which starts tomorrow, by the way. Look for a girl named Sally. Find out where she's hidden the ruby and get it back to me."
"I don't understand. If you know who took it, why don't you just... Oh, all right. Whatever. As regards my fee..."
"Your fee will be exactly what I choose to pay you after you retrieve my property. In the meantime, you shall stay here."

xxx

My room was on the ground floor, right next to the kitchen. The three rotis, half a bowl of dal and the two pieces of chicken I had for dinner didn't quite sate me (private eyes as a rule work up a healthy appetite due to all the martial arts training), and I toyed with the idea of topping up the tank, so to speak. Granted, her parents, the poor things, had slipped an extra roti or two onto my plate from their ration when she wasn't looking, but...

I crept quietly out my room, and was groping for a light in the passageway when I saw two pale-yellow points of light gleaming at me. Now, I've come across a lot of evil in my life. I've seen everything from the polish of Hannibal Lecter, Pavanai and Harry Lime to the malevolence of Eddie Dane, Anton Chigurh and Frank. But never have I seen anything drip evil from every pore like this dog did. I suppose zoologists would classify it as a Golden Retriever, but really, it was the size of a genetically modified lion that had been hitting the gym for 60 hours a week. It didn't make a noise... just a few leisurely steps in my direction, until it was inches from my face, mouth open, teeth gleaming and daring me to take a forward step... any step, in fact, other than back into my room.

I coughed apologetically, then remembered that he was just a dog after all, but smiled weakly anyway, all the while walking backwards gingerly, mumbled goodnight, and closed the door behind me. "I can think. I can wait. I can fast," quoth Siddhartha. Well, anything he can do, I can do better.

In admiration of the scientific mind

2011-06-19T00:00:00.046+05:30

I wanted a break from my weekend routine of flat hunting. So I watched Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Earth: 1, Flying Saucers: 0 - if anyone wants to know the final score). Unfortunately the film turned out to be a little too awful* for a place in my list of "counterpoint to 2001: A Space Odyssey" films, but it did have this one extraordinary scene.

A scientist and his wife/secretary are driving down a desert highway toward their top-secret rocket-launching facility. On the way, the scientist is recording memos on... is it a stenograph machine? (He speaks into it, apparently expecting it to record his speech.) Just then a flying saucer pops up behind their car - very much like the helicopter tailing Jamie Lee Curtis and her boyfriend in True Lies.

But unlike that helicopter, the saucer lurches forward like a drunk, three-legged dog making for his food bowl. Having passed the car, it then screeches to a halt, and executes the most shambolic reverse I've ever seen, lurching and wobbling and nearly taking the roof of the car with it. It then rises up vertically, does a booty shake, and accelerates away in a manner reminiscent not so much of the USS Enterprise engaging its warp drive, as much as Woody Allen accidentally engaging forward instead of reverse in Annie Hall.

All this leaves the newly wedded couple understandably flustered, particularly as the movie has just started and flying saucers haven't yet become anywhere near as omnipresent as from a little later on. So it's a while before they can manage conversation. Which, when it does appear, goes like this,

Wife: Russ, it was a saucer. A flying saucer?
Russ: Well, we saw what appeared to be a flying saucer. That's all we can say.
Wife: We saw it. We heard it. Both of us. What more do we need to know?
Russ: Well, we have to have time to think... to evaluate this... before we sound off.
Wife: Let me have a light. :after a light: Of course, it wasn't a saucer at all. I just shake like this all the time.
Russ: :sigh:

Later, while playing back the tape,

Wife: Russ, the saucer sound. It's on the tape! You forgot to turn it off! I remember now. I turned it off afterwards!
Russ: :grudgingly: Well, that's one piece of concrete evidence.

Isn't that just magnificent? He manages to keep this rationalism through most of the movie, slipping into empiricism (and a little smugness) only very briefly, and that too only when having to convince someone in a hurry, "Both Carol and I are subject to the same atmospheric disturbances (???!!!) that may have affected other observers, but there is a qualitative difference, when you're a scientist."

xxx

*It seems to have been quite influential, though, and the likes of Independence Day and Mars Attacks! have extensive references to it. Not to forget lines like "When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don't meet him with tea and cookies."

A Satisfied Mind

2011-06-12T00:00:00.389+05:30

Money can't buy back your youth when you're old
Or a friend when you're lonely
Or a love that's grown cold.
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

What rubbish. Lack of money won't get you any of those either. And if you disagree, may I have your excess wealth, please?

All I ask for is just enough to walk into the gorgeous house - no more than a 10-minute amble from city centre, a stone's throw from a Metro station (just in case), and sandwiched between a cinema with reclining seats that plays noir on Tuesday evenings and the restaurant that would make God wish he had metabolism; but yet just at the foot of a winding road up a hill with lots of trees, wild grass, perennial cloudy, breezy afternoons, and overlooking acres and acres of army grasslands that will not for a hundred years have anything built on them - and flick a thick wad of cash, Bugsy style, at the startled owner before asking him to clear out. If it were a commercial movie, the credits would come right up because there wouldn't be much money in filming a chap spending the rest of his days doing "no work at all, except perhaps an occasional poem recommending the young man with life opening before him, with all its splendid possibilities, to light a pipe and shove his feet upon the mantelpiece." Except the pipe. Filthy habit, that.

The popular image of the rich & lonely old crank, followed with indecent haste by the moral that money can't buy happiness is an argument about as intelligent as claiming that the appeal of fast cars is that they help you keep appointments. As Al Pacino pointed out in a deleted scene from a well-known gangster flick, "You shouldn't be embarrassed by your wealth. This contempt for money is just another trick of the rich to keep the poor without it." Remember, money is the root of all evil, and as an older Pacino argues in a different film: amorality is fun.

Most people who fit the Scrooge stereotype, or who've made their own money, are probably ambitious, driven folk who're in it for the money only to the extent that it's a barometer to power, achievement and other thingies that a journeyman like me could only hazard guesses at. They wouldn't know how to enjoy their money any more than I would know how to make pots and pots of it. Why don't people move past the eye-grabbing images of the descend of Michael Corleone into darkness and look at the countless examples of filthy rich people living the happiest lives imaginable? Most bookstores have entire racks devoted to Wodehouse, and yet I've never seen Bertie Wooster offered as an exemplar counterpoint to all this fallacious stereotyping and unfair binning of money...

There's this Norwegian movie, The Storm in my Heart, about unfathomable men driven by passions they cannot understand or tame. It has a bit of dialogue that goes like this: there are two types of travellers - those who book airplane tickets and hotel rooms and who return when their money runs out, and a second group who walk out the door with no money in their pockets and who go where the road leads them. But isn't there a third sort? There are those who drift through life with no ties to anyone or anything, except a bottomless bank account, a healthy, if unsentimental, appreciation of beauty, and a plain refusal either to be tied down or to rough it. They are the meek and they're blessed because they've inherited their wealth, not made it themselves.

P.S. - Is there anything in the world more depressing than house hunting on a budget (any budget)?

Sayonara Delhi

2011-05-10T09:00:00.020+05:30

You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to know.
...
Take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

What the chap being addressed went on to do with his youth, I don't know; but I suspect all I've been doing with mine is finding new ways of violating SRP, forgetting all interests and passions, and becoming more and more of an automaton. It might seem obvious that if I'd taken the time to think things through, I would've spent far less time in the office; after all, if I were to list everything I've got, or even my dreams, how many of those would be found at work? But after years of indoctrination, you tend to go with the herd on matters of "responsibility," on earning a living, on being a productive member of society and all that shit. And then lines don't get drawn, questions such as "Shouldn't I be trying that, too?" get asked less and less, and before you know it you've forgotten much of Bande à part, but remember word-for-word the last six email exchanges with your manager. In short, all 20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, I'm sorry to report that I wasn't clear-thinking enough.

What I'm getting at is that when I took the flight out of Delhi, there was a fair bit of regret, of the sort I didn't have when I left Pune - I loved Delhi but didn't sample even a third of what it had to offer. There are reservations certainly, chiefly involving people and the weather, but of all the things a city should be judged by, people are probably the least important - not least because we're generally obnoxious across cultural and geographical boundaries, with the differences usually being a matter of subtlety. If I were to list all the things I like about Delhi, though...

Here's a city with roads that are pedestrian friendly and, further, is beautiful enough for you to want to walk around it; where the Metro could take you from practically anywhere and deposit you right at the heart of, say, Old Delhi. Who'd think it possible that beneath all those relics of the centuries past, seemingly crammed together with not an inch to spare, and the mind-numbing crowd and the heat, there lies spotless clean, air-conditioned tubes that could deposit you within 20 minutes to a different sort of market-place, with buildings of no more than two stories, cobblestone walkways, movie-themed restaurants, drinks with straws in them, and a rather less frenetic pace on the whole?

Then there are the roads itself: hell holes on occasion at rush hour, but also a pleasure to drive on, with sights to match by them. I remember the first time I took a drive around India Gate, the Parliament and Rashtrapati Bhavan. I kept trying to tell myself that it's very shallow to be over-awed by them, to look beyond symbols, but I couldn't help it - here is a nation's capital. The diversity on offer at Delhi, the hundred different places you could go to, is unmatched by any other city I've lived in. Why, for instance, would you pay thousands for a concert when you could enjoy music for free just a couple of feet from the musicians, with food from the heavens waiting for you right outside?

None of which is to imply that Delhi's any sort of a perfect paradise. It's a city of extremes and is just as easy to hate as to love. When I was considering moving to Delhi, I was warned that I wouldn't like it very much - that the people are difficult, the weather horrible, and the crime high. Some of which is true: in McLeod Ganj, there were these chaps who'd stopped their car right in the middle of its busiest intersection and were out dancing to music blaring through its open doors (all four of them)... and arguing with a traffic cop. You'd think that anyone in that position would find a conversation with a cop decidedly one-sided, but no, these chaps were at it with gusto. The license plate showed them as folks from Delhi, naturally. Is stuff like this where the comparisons to Ankh-Morpork come from?

But set that off against the other stuff above, and add in the little things - like the fact that there are never any power cuts (most likely at the expense of the places around Delhi, admittedly); that the girls there are so much prettier than elsewhere (save for Arunachal perhaps); that you feel less like an outsider there than in a city like Pune; that it has so much variety close to its borders (from the desert to the mountains) - and then you have a city that deserves a fairer deal than it usually gets from folks from the South... or the West... or the East.

xxx

Before Delhi, the worst weather I've ever driven in is a bit of torrential rain. But that pales in comparison to a drive in the fog. The first time I thought I experienced it, I was petrified. I stuck to the lane on the extreme left - at about 20 kph. No one else seemed deterred, though. The rest of the highway was whizzing along as if it were just some kind of a light mist... which it was. My first drive in real fog is indescribable. I couldn't see more than 3 inches ahead, and the only hope of not driving into something hard or deep was to follow some other vehicle's tail-lights. In a city that usually works on the maxim "every moving vehicle is required to overtake every other moving vehicle, irrespective of whether it has just overtaken you," the politeness on view had to be seen to be believed. It was all "After you, sir; no, no, I insist." Very embarrassing.

And then there was the mini-duststorm, that one time, just before a mid-summer downpour. It lent a sepia tone to the evening sky that made it look like a frame from The Godfather - but tending towards orange, to add oodles of comfort. You could sense the violence outside, but the safety of the car's interiors made that pleasurable. Further, the car seemed to float on a carpet of dust. You'd think the fog would give that impression too, but it has a dreadful stillness about it that takes away the Aladdin's-carpet feel. It was all so very lovely that I was just telling myself how fun the drive is, and how nice it is that there is no rain to spoil the whole thing, when a lightning bolt hit a tower not too far away, and the heavens opened up, and I went over a pothole the size of a lunar crater, and every bone in my body jarred loose.

xxx

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade talks about this case where he tracked down a missing man. (Disclaimer: I'm quoting from memory, as my books are all packed up and in transit, so the wording may differ a fair bit from the Hammett version.) The chap was apparently an upper-class sort, with a high-maintenance wife and snotty kids. And one day, when he stepped out to have lunch, a beam fell about an inch to his right. He was all shook up, and began contemplating the fragility of his life and such like, decided that major changes were in order, and ended up skipping out on his family. When Spade caught up with him a few years later, he was again a well-to-do chap with a lifestyle much like earlier, a similar wife and two little brats. The moral of the story being that he had adjusted himself to beams falling out of the sky, and then when they stopped falling, he adjusted himself back to them not falling from the sky. Or, to quote Simon & Garfunkel, "It's not unusual, no it isn't strange, that after changes upon changes, we're more or less the same."

Just saying.

McLeod Ganj

2011-04-26T14:00:00.001+05:30

Inertia defines software engineers - they grow like fungus on swivel chairs and do not budge until someone either lays them off or offers them higher pay on a different swivel chair. Asking them to do a bit of travelling normally gets you the goggle eyes and a querulous, "Do you know what our release schedule for this month is like?" Even so, you'd think that one of this tribe would have sense enough to do a bit of exploring when living in Delhi - especially given its proximity to the Himalayas. But not me. It was only in the last week of my one-and-a-half years here that I decided to head for the slopes. And that, too, because I happened to fortuitously get in touch with an old friend who was planning a trip to McLeod Ganj with her friends. I leeched on, naturally.

The cast of characters:-

a) My friend, who, having lived a sheltered life in the hills of Rishikesh, has not yet learnt that most basic of all rules of city living: do not piss off a waiter until he has deposited the last of your orders on the table. It is fascinating, though, to see her find new ways of aggravating even the gentle Tibetan waiters meal after meal. The rest of us had to take extra care to not try anything from any dish ordered by her.

b) A's friend from college, and now in HR. No sooner did I hear the words "HR" than I kept a wary eye on her for the remainder of the trip for any signs of horns or a tail, but she kept those well hidden under a sweet and patient demeanour. She did admit, though, in one of her less guarded moments that she models herself on Catbert.

c) Another of A's college friends, and married to B. Is a guy, so will not get much mention here, except that the two apparently had a wedding very reminiscent of the ending of The Graduate.

d) The sci-fi nerd. Spent much time boasting about her travels to everywhere I hadn't been to. Considers herself a treasury of all human knowledge and is very confident about everything she says - so much so, in fact, that winning a copy of Sourcery off her, when she stuck to her claim that it was Adrien Brody who starred in The Librarian trilogy, was as easy as stealing a single off Munaf Patel.

e) I think I was the only normal one.

We hired one of those big car types that seats five people relatively comfortably and were off on Thursday night. The highway to Chandigarh is undergoing construction of some sort, and large sections of the highway beyond Chandigarh towards Dharamshala had apparently gone AWOL in the wee hours of Good Friday. And so it was that we reached the guest house only by noon. On the way, having forgotten to take Avomine, I spent some time doubled over by the road-side, taking in the crisp Himalayan air, and offering the asphalt my breakfast in return. Avomine now taken, the rest of the ride found me in a stupor, and I don't remember much of it; except that the snow caps of the mountains didn't seem to be the soft-looking snow I'd seen in photographs and from a distance, but more of a hard, shiny white - much like a Colgate ad - and suggesting a bit of translucence, too. Or maybe that was just the Avomine...

We had done extensive research on the restaurants to visit, prior to our trip, and none of our choices disappointed. We disagreed on pretty much everything except food. The only hint of trouble during mealtimes was when one of us would dip his or her spoon in the neighbour's plate, only to be warned off with a "mine, all mine" hiss. In between meals we did a bit of shopping and were occasionally treated to breathtaking vistas - like the side of a hill, on the far side of a valley, lit up by the lights of McLeod Ganj, on one particular lonely walk up to a restaurant.

We really did eat quite a lot - it was pretty much the only thing we did there - and we didn't stop eating till Sunday afternoon, which is when we turned the car Delhi-ward. The place is frequented by a lot of Westerners: now these chaps invented pollution, colonialism, the slave trade, and gave us a couple of World Wars, but on the plus side, they also gave us Zooey Deschanel, Dire Straits (I discovered an awesome live performance of Romeo & Juliet in C's iPod), and pastries. Plus, the fuckers know how to eat breakfast: no pohas or idlis for them. Many of you know me as one who lives life in moderation, practically monk-like, but I will have you know that on Sunday, I had a "Farmer's breakfast" for starters, followed up with a lemon cheese cake, a chocolate pancake, a cheese & onion quiche, a glass of watermelon juice, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of fresh lime soda (sweet) - and all that just for breakfast. Only the thought of the drive back, and the memories of what had happened to me on the drive up, kept me from really getting into the spirit of things.

Anyway, that's how we spent our two days there. In between, we felt a little guilty that we were in the midst of the Lesser Himalayas and had not done any trekking; so we found a spot where there was a set of steps leading up into the mountains, beside a waterfall. We climbed and climbed and climbed. And just when we thought our rib-cages would crack, the steps stopped and we found ourselves at the Shiva Cafe, complete with soft cushions, a spring with ice-cold water, and food and drink. We blinked our eyes a couple of times, not quite believing them, but it was no mirage. We asked the chaps who ran the place whether they served anything alcoholic, but that was pushing our luck - we had to settle for lemonade and Minute Maids. Still the mattresses were boon enough, and some of us read and the others dozed lightly in the warm afternoon sun. And that was the extent of our exploration of the Himalayas.

McLeod Ganj is also the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, and we therefore visited the Dalai Lama's monastery. We were told that we couldn't meet Mr Lama, as he is travelling, but were welcome to look around the monastery. Which we did. And that was the extent of the widening of our cultural horizons (if you discount the time we spent gawking at the photographs some cafe owners had put up of Richard Gere posing with them).

And before we knew it, it was time to head home. The ride home was fairly nondescript, except that us two guys were dumped in the seats farthest back, and by the time we stopped for dinner at a dhaba in Chandigarh to reacquaint ourselves with Indian food, our legs felt like they wouldn't ever again fully straighten up. And I was all the grouchier because a post I'd just published, through which I'd hoped to garner a few "you will roast in hell for all eternity"s, did not manage so much as a pbfffssst... But really, the food more than made up for all of it. Ever tried brain fry?

Let me now break from tradition and offer you some advice. If you are ever to hit that spot in your lives where you wish to quit your job and get a few months of vegetating in, without your wallet taking too much of a hit, consider a stay in the lonelier reaches of Dharamshala. You'd have to hike a bit to get there, but once you do, you'd get accommodation for around 150 bucks a day, which, as any city-dweller knows, is definitely a deal. You can stay there for months. Plus, as far as food is concerned, if you remember the meal I described a few paragraphs back, the bill came to about 850 bucks for that one - and this despite four other people hogging as much as I did, and the restaurant being very much in the town. Contrast this with the 6000 we paid for some starters and drinks in Delhi, just before we began the trip, and... what're you still doing here? Get packing!

P.S. - Make sure you carry Moby Dick. And whenever you reach one of those bits where Melville goes on about how captivating the seas are and how the whole of the human race yearns for the seas, substitute "mountains" for "seas," and the book seems to work so much better all of a sudden.

Is Tendulkar really that controversial God person?

2011-04-24T00:00:00.473+05:30

Part II, or the much more impressive "finale," of my two-post Tendulkar series. But unlike Part I, or the also-very-impressive-sounding-but-wildly-inaccurate "overture," I'll get right down to it. No scene-setting. Brisk and businesslike, it will be.

Since the late nineties, allusions to Tendulkar's divinity have been bountiful. The subject matter for today's post is this disturbing tendency several wise people, me included, have noticed in the change in tone of these from the playful to the earnest. Apart from the unsavoury sight of normally sober people calling a sportsman "God" with passionate fervour; apart from the fact that the appeal of sport lies not in some deity performing the inevitable but in fallible men and women, under the scrutiny of millions, defying probabilities and expectations; apart from the fact that these references aren't even being used for purposes that has my approval, such as mocking the aggravatingly religious; what irritates me most is that it demonstrates further how everything human about Tendulkar is being stripped away, how he's being reduced to a symbol.

Besides, aren't we selling him a little short here?

Tendulkar has never struck me as the sort who'd unleash plagues of locusts on the Egyptians or kill first-borns on a genocidal scale because of differences with the local Pharaoh. Nor, given the methodical way he goes about his business, is he likely to moan that everything's just so screwed up, go for a reformat, and then rely on a truly hare-brained species-recovery plan*. No wars in his name, either: the English are unlikely to launch crusades to reclaim Bombay, nor was he the one who allegedly told Bush to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. His name has been used neither as an excuse for terrorism nor for the subjugation of women. Never have his followers shamed a nation by bringing down a centuries-old mosque to make space for a shrine in his name, nor has anyone been burnt to death (along with their little children) just because they tried to convert Tendulkar fans into Lara ones.

The thing is, Tendulkar's no jealous God. He's quite happy for you to be both his fan as well as a Lara one; in fact, many Tendulkar fans do indeed have other cricketers before him, with not a word of complaint from the Little Master. He hasn't, to my knowledge, dissuaded anyone from coveting the neighbour's pretty wife - all he asks is that you move your feet decisively, and that you keep your head still and your elbow high (all of which are grounded not in some obscure code of "moral" behaviour, but in the laws of physics). He has no known problems with condoms or abortions, nor does he demand any particular fashion or dietary restrictions of you - except perhaps "go easy on those biryanis during an innings break" or "spring for an abdomen guard that does not require dozens of adjustments on live TV."

He even adopts and improves on some of the nifty stuff from popular religions. Why show the other cheek, for instance, when you can just offer the full face to begin with? Through his various charities, he's fed a hell of a lot more than 5000. He's been forsaken by his followers, pronounced dead**, and then experienced a glorious rebirth. He's carried the cross of insane, unfair expectations for 21 years with not one reproving word. And he also, with the same perfect grace, subjects himself to interruptions when having a quiet breakfast with a friend, to oblige a stranger who asks him to speak to her cricket-mad friend on the phone (a true story: I was her cricket-mad friend). On one of the rare occasions he's made a political remark, it was to speak out against divisiveness - very un-God-like.

There's much more evidence that he's the anti-God. Every innings of his is a plea to cricket fans everywhere to shirk studies, work and their families, to leave aside all thought of what is right and what ought to be for what is. Also, he'd never draw a giant, no-no-type X on the juicy-half-volley length right outside the off-stump, on pain of banishment from Eden Gardens; for he wouldn't let one go himself without an attempt at an exquisite caress through the covers. The promise of eternal bliss is a poor substitute for life's pleasures - which is why his career has been one that's stretched out the nows and staved off the laters: that mastery over Time is not just for giving himself an age to get into position, but for all who watch, conferring on us all an eternity carved out in the present.

There's a part of me, for instance, still stuck in one particular instant - no more than half a second, in standard time - of 2003***, when a backfoot drive off Akram ensnared me and countless other millions. I already have my heaven, my promised land; what more can any religion offer me? As that particular Tendulkar bubble joins the other thousands he alone has set afloat in the river of time, are we unjustified in asking whether this universe of ours might also not be one such bubble created by a Tendulkar equivalent (a much less perfect specimen than Sachin, of course, given our trouble-ridden world) of another dimension playing a backfoot-drive equivalent off an Akram equivalent? Are we getting a headache? I am.

*How many sysadmins do you know whose data-backup plan in its entirety is "save the first two files of every folder"?

**The link to that "Endulkar" caption of yours (circa 2006 - I hear you've switched to the Almighty bandwagon these days) is awfully hard to find, Times of India.

***At 3:31 of this video.

P.S. - Happy birthday, Sachin.

Hogfather, and the debate on religion

2011-04-20T00:00:00.004+05:30

Disclaimer: I've never been the most voracious of readers, so anything I write on books should be taken with a slightly bigger pinch of salt than usual.

A friend made me read my first Terry Pratchett with, "He may well be a modern Wodehouse." And that read turned out to be "Hogfather." No other book has had me so absorbed in it since my boyhood reading of "The Call of the Wild." For one, the world-view it presents seems to match mine pretty much exactly - it's as if Pratchett peeked inside my head and not only understood every vague feeling and unfinished thought, but then went on to build the wittiest, most imaginative story around it. In terms of inventiveness only Tolkien comes close, but even his considerable talents appear as slow as Ent-speech when juxtaposed with the effortless sparks that fly off every other paragraph here.

Since I'm not yet ready to topple from P1 the dozens of Wodehouses I've read over the years, I still maintain that Pelham Grenville makes me laugh more, and, further, is the most prolific character-creator I've come across. But even he hasn't managed to do for me what Pratchett has with just this one book - take a mist of a thought that has been wisping around in my head, frustratingly inexpressible, evading all attempts at pinning down; and then crystallise it into black ink on white paper, appositive phrases and relative clauses in full bloom, and complete with dotted "i"s and crossed "t"s.

Case in point:-

The amount of belief in the world must be subject to an upper limit. Creatures have appeared that were once believed in. They disappeared because they were not believed in - people were believing in something else, right? It follows that if a major focus of belief is removed, there will be spare belief.*

Isn't that just the perfect summing up of religion? We spend so much time taking positions on religion, on its goodness and badness and the relative degrees of the same, that we lose sight of something fundamental: taking a position on religion is rather like taking a position on thirst. Religion isn't something that exists distinct from humanity, it's just a manifestation of a part of our humanness - as quintessential as is wrinkly skin on spending too much time in the shower, or a boner in the morning.**

Assume religion didn't exist (ignoring that this is kind of like saying "assume we didn't have lungs"). Even if we didn't have lungs, we would still need something to oxygena... err... do the stuff that lungs do. And if your counter-argument is, "Well, what if we didn't need oxygen too?" then a response to that is, "What then would blood do?" and this goes on until we end up with a completely different creature, biologically. Uh... I don't think that was quite what I was shooting for. Lungs do something useful, and I don't mean to imply that religion is useful. Let's try another one...

The Internationale opines: "If these ravens, these vultures disappeared one of these days, the sun will shine forever." To which Orwell replied, with unimpeachable logic, that if they did disappear, we'd merely have other creatures take their place and do just what the ravens and the vultures did; ravening and vulturing is something that will be done - it's not like we had this perfect society going and they landed from Mars to ruin our utopia, was it? Studying the whys and wherefores of our propensity to religion is a different matter, but all this arguing about whether we need more religion, or less of it, seems like an exercise in futility: we have exactly as much religion as we deserve, or put another way, as we're built for.

I suppose I could've presented this with just two paragraphs - one with the Pratchett quote and a green tick next to it, and the second with Weinberg's "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion," and a red cross beside it (expressing disagreement, if all the symbolism is getting a bit too much). But if I were to express only concise, original thoughts, all you'd see on hitting this URL is a blank page.

*It doesn't appear in exactly that format in the book - it unspools as dialogue.

**I wonder why the religious don't use this argument more often when confronted with a fire-breathing atheist, or indeed, why atheists don't use it more often when confronted with a religious fundamentalist?

The trouble with Sachin's numbers

2011-04-13T00:00:00.014+05:30

Part I of a two-part series, as promised here.

The backdrop: World Cup 2003. Tendulkar had been its top-scorer, and its player of the tournament, but the finals accentuated a feeling growing amongst supporters here that he "doesn't perform when the team needs him." It had been him who appealed to the fans for patience after a couple of lacklustre Indian performances had them baying for blood (a disastrous tour to New Zealand just prior to the World Cup not having helped the mood much), and it was he who then led the way with a couple of stirring performances, most famously against England and Pakistan, that saw India charge to the finals. And then, chasing 360 against McGrath and Lee, he fell for 4. It was clearly his failure that cost us the Cup.

And that was what prompted me to write an essay on Tendulkar, which was as much a defence of him as a celebration of his talents. And when I published it here on my blog, it was in 2008, just at the start of his astonishing second wind, when, for all money, it had looked like the genius had run its course.

The point is, therefore, that in the current climate where Tendulkar is untouchable, where Virat Kohli told a teary nation moments after winning the Cup: "Tendulkar has carried the burden of the nation for 21 years. It is time we carried him on our shoulders," this new post of mine is going to be a lot less defensive and prickly. It will instead merely voice a vague disquiet (my life is a collection of vague disquiets).

What does Tendulkar mean to us? No really, serious question. Up till 2003, we could've got away with the answer that he's nothing more than the nation's greatest artist, willow-wielder supreme, and therefore national treasure. But then, when the injuries took their toll and his numbers started to lose their lustre, we showed our ugly side, culminating with that sad day at the very stadium where, five years later, he would get his lap of honour. It's an extension of the "delicate sort of question" that people have started to ask: do Indians still love the actual game of cricket?

In the last 3 years, Tendulkar has got back his numbers. He's pulled so far ahead of Ricky Ponting that it's unlikely the Australian will ever catch up with him. Experts routinely say that he's batting as well as he's ever done; and, at the twilight of a magnificent career, the records are tumbling almost with every innings. There was the 35th ton with which he went past Gavaskar, the 40th Test ton, then the 50th, now his 100th international ton up ahead, also the 50th ODI ton, and of course the overtaking of Lara on the run-scorers list, the 14,000 Test runs, the 15,000th Test run soon to follow... It's got to the point where any innings he plays that isn't a century is considered a failure, like those two vital half-centuries against Australia and Pakistan in the knockouts: the sense of anti-climax was palpable.

There probably isn't a more effective way of burying the legend of Tendulkar than under this mountain of statistics. This centuries business, for instance. It means little more than the addition of an extra digit on the scoreboard. Some of his most memorable innings - be it from the spectator viewpoint, or in terms of value for the team - aren't three-figure knocks. I could name another half a dozen World Cup knocks of his that would blow the six centuries he has in the tourney out of the water. And yet we keep piling the pressure on him. Every innings he plays, every single one, is hyped as about some record or the other. Would it really surprise anyone if he had a melt-down a la Joe Pesci in "My Cousin Vinny"?

For contrast, let's look at Rohan Kanhai (picked for sentimental reasons). I've never seen the bloke bat, nor do I know a single statistic about him. But all I have to know about him is that he is one of brightest jewels in the West Indian school of batsmanship, purveyor of the falling sweep, and of whom Sunil Gavaskar not only wrote, "To say that he is the greatest batsman I have ever seen so far is to put it mildly," but also named his son after. The imagination takes care of the rest. So much more diverting than 99.94, that sort of stuff. That is the sort of legacy that Tendulkar, who introduced my generation to cricket, deserves; not a serving of numbers, bland and boring.

Tendulkar is no Jacques Kallis: walking proof that consistency is really the last refuge of the unimaginative. And the last three years are not the best of his career. No way. Not even close. Maybe his average is better than ever before, and maybe his strike rate is as good as it has ever been, and maybe Team India is winning more than ever. But there is more to batting than averages and strike rates and wins: there is the question of oomph. Sure, he's aged gracefully, his technique as solid as ever, his experience unmatched. But can you really expect a 38-year-old to have the same sizzle in his batting as that of a 25-year-old?

If he's Stanley Kubrick now, his genius tempered by thought, every shot seemingly practised a 100 times before, then the Tendulkar of the 90s was murderous, unpredictable, practically unhinged even; of whom Gavaskar said that no other batsman has ever before combined classical technique with raw aggression. This was a man against whom the accusation was often laid of throwing his wicket away, of having two shots to every ball, and then getting out playing the third. The Tendulkar you see now is treated with respect by his opponents. The Tendulkar of old made them quake in their boots.

Look at some of the clips of his centuries against South Africa in Cape Town and Bloemfontein, and against Australia in Chennai - the latter two being practically run-a-ball efforts. And couple that with the situations he played those in: the 169 in Cape Town was when India were reeling at 58 for 5, the 155 in Bloemfontein when at 68 for 4. The 155 in Chennai came from a relatively comfortable second-innings position of 44 for 2, but it came against the backdrop of the most-hyped battle of the decade: Tendulkar vs Warne, meeting for the first time in the subcontinent, and with Warne having already dismissed Tendulkar for 4 in the first innings. But if you were to watch any of those videos linked, does the savagery of his batting contain any inkling at all of the pressure he must be under? And he did it over and over, innings after innings.

Look at the movement of his feet, the quality of those backfoot drives, the numerous shots in the air, the sixes, the one-bounce fours. He has now cut down on the risks, keeps the ball more along the ground, and dabs and nudges a fair bit. Compare the way he played Steyn in South Africa with the way he played Donald and Warne in those videos. Look, this isn't a whinge. I'm glad he's adapted his game to prevent a decline like Viv Richards had in his twilight. It's a marvel that Tendulkar at 38, when his reflexes must be nowhere near what it was in his youth, was able to keep the deadliest fast bowler in a couple of decades at bay, when his teammates were being rolled over around him. But it was still the immovable object that presented itself to Steyn, and not the whirlwind that went about dismantling Donald and Warne. And that gale is how I'd like Tendulkar to be remembered.

There was once a bunch of 9-year-old kids who gave not a damn about whether India won or lost. They just wanted the opposition to take three quick Indian wickets, so that the little Number Five would walk in and go about his business. As they grew older, the inevitable corruption of their spirits happened and it became the done thing to wish for Indian victories, for team over individual glory. What I realise now is, I think I care more about the individual. A team going about collecting trophies, no matter how efficiently, does not have the same attraction for me as sublime skill at its rawest. When Tendulkar's gone and when Laxman follows him into retirement, there will be none left in that batting line-up I'd watch without reservation. Perhaps if Pujara fulfills his promise...

I watch less and less cricket these days, and the day is not far when I stop watching it altogether. The memories that top the list should a stranger tap me on the shoulder and, in answer to my enquiring eyebrow, break the silence with "Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?" will not be of Dhoni holding aloft the World Cup, or any number of trophies won in Australia or South Africa. It will be of Tendulkar in the 90s, caught in a floundering team, but all the more magnificent for it. Tendulkar the record breaker, Tendulkar the accumulator, has his place, but the real legend is someone else. The strokes he conjured: some of it from the textbook - like those backfoot drives and that straight drive of his - and some very unorthodox ones, like the upper cut and the paddle sweep... those, I'd never forget. I hope that when his career is remembered, it is the kid that comes first to mind; before the icon, before the record books, before the scalpel, there was the curly-haired bully and his cleaver. Tendulkar is so much more than just some numbers and Indian wins.

For auld lang syne, my dear. For days of auld lang syne.

Movie Turn-Ons, Part 4.6 (Cheesy Sci-Fi: Creature from the Black Lagoon)

2011-04-10T00:00:00.492+05:30

Are spoilers really possible at all in this sort of science fiction? Is there one amongst you who does not think that the creature will snuff it in the end? Oh, all right. There are spoilers ahead. Be warned!

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

The one thing you have to admire with these films, even more so than every other quality we've discussed so far, is their directness. They do not cloak their intent. Take this one. The viewer's left in no doubt that there's one Black Lagoon, containing one Creature, that will be the focus of attention. Compare and contrast this with, say, "Independence Day" (anyone settling into the cushions ready for some good, old-fashioned patriotism is going to have a bit of a jar when the tentacled alien throws Brent Spiner right at the camera), "Armageddon" (no, no, Father Léon Morin, save your cash for the needy; nothing remotely Biblical here), or "2012" (WTF?)

The movie starts with an impressive narrator declaring that in the beginning God created the Earth and the heavens. (Where'd he crash before he did this?) The Earth is now a hot molten mass, but cooling rapidly, he assures us. Clouds form... hardening surface... restless seas rise... life (miracle of) begins... "The record of life is written on the land, where fifteen million years later, in the upper reaches of the Amazon, we're still trying to read it."

The zoom works its way to the Amazon, where, by the banks of a tributary, a geological expedition headed by Dr Maia finds the fossil of a hand (with webbed fingers and nasty claws) sticking out of the rock like a bulb out of a socket. He asks for funding from Dr Williams, the head of a marine-biology institute, for further excavations. Aware of the publicity this could get him, Dr Williams is only too happy to fund. There is a brief interlude while the leading man (introduced below) makes a fine speech on the value of marine research. Apparently, a potentially amphibious creature like this (the gill-man, from now on) could give us clues on how nature booted us out from the seas and onto land. It is speculated that we could use this knowledge to adapt ourselves to alien environs, when the time comes.

Before we know it, Dr Maia, Dr Williams and his star ichthyologist, Dr Reed* (with girlfriend-cum-researcher, Miss Lawrence) find themselves in the Amazon. Dr Maia's camp, they find, is now a mess, his two assistants having been disemboweled by something with nasty claws. "Jaguars," they speculate. The digging for the rest of the fossil is not too successful, but there remains the hope that a part of the bank caved in, and the river carried the remains to the lagoon at the end of it, which, according to local legend, is a paradise - but one that none has ever returned from. On they sail.

At the lagoon, Doctors Reed and Williams dive down to the bed to collect rock samples to verify their theory. While everyone is analysing the samples, Miss Lawrence goes for a swim in her little swimsuit. The gill-man, lurking about under the water, is fascinated by her nifty moves ("a stylized representation of sexual intercourse," says one dude on the DVD extras; "a love dance," chimes in Julie Adams, the actress playing Miss Lawrence, much more succinctly) and develops a crush. That's the one fascinating thing about us that films have explored for long: our attitude to inter-species coupling. We may look askance at a man who has sex with pumpkins... or sheep; or at a woman who does so with turnips... or tadpoles... or is infatuated with the toe of a statue (even if a human statue). But the attractiveness of our women to the most menacing of other species, on the other hand, is a matter of pride to us.

The gill-man, in a careless moment, no doubt blinded by love, gets caught in the scientists' net. He manages to escape, but the scientists are now aware that there is rather more than a fossil to aim for. Dr Williams slowly sets himself up as one of those intense, ambitious types, so badly needed in a movie of this sort, who care more for the money and the fame than the science itself. He intends to take the gill-man back to civilisation. The others don't wholly approve of this, but since he writes the cheques... (In their more charitable moods, they do acknowledge that they wouldn't be able to go on with their digging, if Dr Williams wasn't around to dig up money for them.) One thing leads to another, and Dr Williams fires a harpoon at the gill-man; it's all-out war from now on end.

There are casualties on both sides, with the scientists perhaps suffering more than the gill-man. The gill-man is portrayed rather sympathetically. He has a soulful, fish-like face that makes us feel for him, and, as a crew member points out in the above-mentioned extras, it is the humans, after all, who have barged in on his territory and set about aggravating him: apart from the harpoon firing touched on earlier, the humans display a deplorable inclination towards pouring poison into the waters, throwing cigarette butts into it, etc. (To quote another snippet, the film seems to sympathise with a burgeoning environmentalism. "What're you doing to my world?" is what the interviewee feels the gill-man is thinking, as he watches the heroine throw a cigarette butt into the river.)

Anyway, just when the rest of the crew prevails on Dr Williams that maybe it is time to leave, they find that the gill-man, perhaps for reasons of love or maybe even revenge, has blocked the way out of the lagoon, and the boat is unable to push on through. This provides a platform for a few more diving sequences where the scientists attempt to de-block the river. In one of these, Dr Williams gets his comeuppance from the gill-man, and in another one, the gill-man finally gets a move-on and kidnaps Miss Lawrence. He carries our unconscious heroine into his lair, and proceeds to lay her down on a stone slab. And just as we lean forward with interest, our natural curiosity being whether it is scientific inquisitiveness that drives him, or something rather more Bunuelian, the obligatory rescue scene kicks in, and we lean back in disappointment.

The gill-man is shot full of holes, and sinks soulfully to the bottom of the lagoon. The end credits come up, and we're left with the choice of either moving on with our lives, or writing a review of the movie. As you can see, I've chosen the latter. Overall, not a bad way to spend a slow evening, but if pushed, I'd have to admit that of the four movies reviewed so far, this is perhaps my least favourite. Given the illustrious company, that's by no means an insult; the movie's definitely worth a viewing or two. It (shot in 3-D, by the way) was a huge hit in its time, making the gill-man one of the early successes of the movie-monster genre (and going on to appear in several sequels) - a pioneer in making the waters unsafe for us, two decades before The Shark popped up to carry on his legacy.

*Had you been watching the movie, instead of reading about it here, you would've recognised him as Putnam, from "It Came From Outer Space."

Coming up next: "Tarantula!"

World Cup Gripes

2011-04-03T00:00:00.603+05:30

As hinted at earlier, I've been in a phase of nirvana-esque placidity: of calm smiles, gentle words and very little activity. But because the World Cup happened to coincide with my realisation that I'm a Dudeist, there were times when I was jolted out of my complacency. Sport very rarely lets you maintain your equanimity - unless it be a Test match on a Sri Lankan featherbed. Since I've never been poetic enough to describe the highs, I'll just whinge, thank you.

1) Sidhu. Much has been written about the mediocrities of the commentary teams. But mediocrity, I can handle. The world is built on the stuff, and we're conditioned from childhood - in no small part by being made aware of our own mediocrities - to accept it, and to ignore it. The trouble with Sidhu is that he's inanity on a Citizen Kane scale. He preens, he hogs the mike, he shouts down those around him, and he seems to earnestly believe that his "Sidhuisms" are sayings of supreme wit and insight - every answer has to have a prologue, even if in no way related to the question asked.

Though I've met no one who admits to liking him, he must have his legions of admirers. I can think of no other reason why ESPN-Star, one of the few sober sports channels we had left, chose to have him on their team. Bhogle, for all his experience, has had little success with shutting him up, contenting himself with a pained expression on occasion. Ganguly and Simon Hughes, often finding themselves at Sidhu's right and left, prefer to hang their heads and grit their teeth. I kept my sanity by mostly keeping the TV on mute, but what happens when he's on at the same time as Tony Cozier, a commentator I love? Do I hurl a handy chair at the screen and run screaming from the room, or do I put up with that bottomless hole, the prince of the loud-mouthed egotists, the sultan of cringe, just to hear "the voice of Caribbean cricket"?

2) The obsession with numbers, personified by the tragic case of the deification of Jacques Kallis, and the still more tragic case of the reduction of Tendulkar into one number after the other - and the really, really much more tragic case of the lowering of him to the level of the Gods (coming soon; watch this space... or rather, the space above this).

3) West Indies. I grew up listening to awed talk of the great West Indian batsmen of yore; of Richards, Fredericks, Kanhai, Sobers, Headley and the like. Sad, therefore, to see this lot play as if the spinning ball is a nasty contravention of the spirit of the game.

3.92) South Africa. Unquestionably the best side of the tournament... on paper. Also, as per de Villiers, the "opposite of chokers." Uh-huh.

4) The ads. Apart from the glorious promo and the Super ZooZoo ads, there wasn't anything memorable at all. Idea showed the most promise by signing up 6 World-Cup-winning captains and displaying great topical awareness by making corruption the theme of the ads. But then they followed it up with a series of the lowest-IQ ads ever seen on TV. Get Idea, indeed. How about Get Clue? Also - and I'm looking at you, Royal Stag - I can't think of a sillier thing to do than "looking your opponent in the eye and telling him: I will make it large." You'd be lucky if your opponent didn't smack you on the forehead with a rolled-up newspaper.

5) Shahid Afridi. Gone are the days when I could blithely claim that I'd never support a Pakistani team that had him in it. I even secretly enjoyed Ian Chappell's over-the-top criticisms of him - his "wicket" celebration is ridiculous, isn't it? And then came the semi-finals. He watched his team-mates drop Tendulkar four times, three of them, three, off his own bowling, and then follow it up by consistently giving up wickets with bizarre shots every time they had the target in sight.

Any other captain - one playing the most important match of his career, to boot - would've been reduced to a wild-eyed, apoplectic blob of jelly. But he said hardly a word - even managing a smile on occasion. At the presentation he was grace personified and, still smiling, went on to offer a warm, congratulatory speech to the Indians. Don't you just hate it when people make you do an about-turn, from complete loathing to something near unconditional love?

6) The lost cliche opportunity. When Misbah dropped Tendulkar, I'd just about got an idea for a Facebook status on whether, for the second time in twelve years, the World Cup had been dropped at mid-wicket. But then Tendulkar went on to play one of the scratchiest innings I've ever seen him play - rivalling Nasser Hussain's century in that finals at Lord's - and the Pakistanis, for their part, went on to drop him so many more times that I was left in a daze. Which allowed someone else to sneak in with a "World Cup needs super glue after all those drops?" status update.

7) "Let's do it for Sachin." That turned out well in the end, admittedly, and no one deserves it more than him, but it's still not cricket to hear a whole nation and a good many members of the Indian side say stuff like that. The World Cup, you'd like to think, is the ultimate sporting symbol: of proven superiority over the cream of world cricket; of an achievement that will be remembered for as long as the sport is played. Something rather more than the sporting equivalent of a gold watch, or an honorary Oscar, is my point.

7.11) Euphoric first-morning-post-World-Cup-win gripe. Dhoni, after looking completely out of touch up till the finals, played a truly magnificent captain's knock last night. And we all love him. And we want to know everything about him, from his favourite chutney to where he stands vis-a-vis the pot when taking a leak. But we still don't want to see interviews of his in-laws. (Apologies if the other news channels are all restrained and dignified: I'm at a friend's place and all we get here is Headlines Today.)

8) My nerves. My childhood being spent following a team that never won anything, I'm used to watching cricket with a certain fatalism. I'd slept like a baby after India lost the semi-finals against Sri Lanka in 1996, and the finals against Australia in 2003, because I'd never really believed they were going to win it anyway. But things have changed. I don't know whether the matches were really that good (a neutral will have to tell me that), but the knockouts were so nerve-racking that I felt quite ill during parts of it. Against Australia, I opted for a shower and a long walk during India's chase; and against Pakistan, a 25-minute shower during India's innings and a 45-minute break, when an urge to get all my marks cards from college scanned hit me during Pakistan's chase, were the only things that kept me from collapsing to the floor.

9) Minnow bashing. They added a lot of colour to the tournament, and I, for one, have been converted. I'm sorry to hear that the next World Cup will have only 10 sides. There is an argument that their presence makes the teams for the knock-out stages predictable. The thing is, no more than 6 sides at any given edition have any real chance of winning it, anyway. Better to have a predictable line-up at the knockouts, than have an unpredictable one that'd guarantee predictable results, if you get my drift.

As to the argument that the league stages have no meaning, well, that's true, but what of it? Philosophers have long argued that life itself has no meaning and shit, so why should the league matches of the Cricket World Cup be any different? Besides, what's so bad about watching the world's best teams assembled together, even if the matches are meaningless in the broader context of the tournament - it's still cricket, right? Yes, they could schedule more than one match per day, and also make sure there isn't too much of a gap between "competitive" match-ups, but that's about it. Keep the minnows!

9.83) I must bid a mournful farewell to England bashing, too. Never again can I indulge in it, for never before has any side come so close to impersonating one of my favourite sportsmen - Goran Ivanisevic. They had half their squad return home with a series of complaints that included, of all things, depression. And they went down rather tamely in the quarter-finals. But still, for their exploits in the league stages, for tuning their performances to the exact frequency of their opponents (majestic against India and South Africa, and as pathetic against Ireland, the Netherlands and Bangladesh), for always keeping the spectators' interests at heart with six nail-biting contests on the trot, this team has to be the most exciting in the history of sport.

9.99) Ponting bashing. I was conscious of much sadness as he walked off the field after the loss to India. I'd never liked him, and was therefore surprised at the depth of my feeling. As things turned out, he didn't retire. So I doubt this will be as permanent as my farewell to minnow-and-England bashing; doubtless, he'll soon do something that'll make me start hating him all over again.

10) It has often been said that the people behind the scenes get little of the credit for anything. Little does the rest of the world know of my contribution to India's wins. I hit upon the formula quite by accident during the match against Australia. When India's batting, so long as the TV is on mute, we do ok. This was proved beyond doubt when, in the match against Pakistan, I briefly turned the sound on to find out what the kerfuffle between Ajmal and Harbhajan was. I forgot to turn the sound off, only for Bhajji to get stumped off the next ball.

I managed to further refine this during Pakistan's innings by figuring out that when India's fielding, if there's a partnership building, the best way to get things rolling is to go for a walk. And then, so long as I'm within 3 minutes of my flat, or within earshot of a webcast (passing by under someone's window does not count, if I cannot legibly hear the commentary), wickets fall regularly.

There, I too won the World Cup for Sachin, didn't I?

In which I express dismay at this tendency, much in evidence of late, toward the deification of Jacques Kallis

2011-03-27T00:00:00.054+05:30

I was compiling a list of World Cup gripes, and this was one among them. But it got too big, and I had to give it a post of its own.

It used to be that in Kallis, we had the one cricketer everyone had license to mock. He's always had the numbers to be considered the greatest all-rounder ever, but his fan club was about as big as the longest thoughtful silence ever recorded in a room with Navjot Sidhu in it. About the only time he got into a World XI (when those were such a fad a few months back) was when someone compiled the World's All-Time Dullest XI. Kallis was listed twice in there - once as batsman, once as bowler.

And all was well with the world... until India toured South Africa late last year. India have worked hard over the years to develop a reputation for developing others' reputations. We've done it for Saeed Anwar, for Gary Kirsten, for Andy Flower, and for Matthew Hayden. And now for Jacques Kallis. We grabbed him, skulking about the periphery of ridicule and mockery, and pushed him up into the rarefied heights of the legends. We did it by granting him his first double century in international cricket, and then with that second-innings century.

Yes, it was a great knock. Yes, he played through the pain barrier. Yes, but for it, South Africa would've conceded their first home defeat to India. But it was still an innings at home against India - whose only world-class fast bowler was half fit; whose two other fast bowlers were last seen being left out of the World Cup squad in favour of a plonker whose stock delivery is the short-and-wide ball at about 115 kph; and the less said about the consistency of their lead spinner, the better.

Things reached their nadir when someone - Pat Symcox, I think (a pre-choke smarmily cocky Symcox) - said, "This is a man who's taken 550 wickets across all forms of international cricket. Now, if that isn't indicative of him being the greatest player of all time, I don't know what is." I've already written about what I think of numbers. Is that why you watch sport? May I point you to book cricket instead? In this case, for instance, could not half those wickets be attributed to Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn putting the fear of God into opposition batsmen, and inducing them to flail at the first sign of a loose delivery? Would anyone really put those out-swingers 3 feet outside the off-stump anywhere near the top tier of South African fast bowling, let alone world cricket?

Then there's the question of his batting, his real claim to greatness. Before I proceed, let me qualify what I mean by greatness. We're all prone to laziness such as "Wow, now that was great chicken. *burp*" What is greatness for the scope of this post is the infinitesimal, the top four of any given time period. Is Kallis amongst the four greatest middle-order batsmen of all time? Done laughing? Let's move on.

Maybe that was too ambitious. All right then, would he make it into the middle order of the Best XI of his generation - the nineties and the noughties? Would you drop one of Tendulkar, Lara, Inzamam, or Ponting for him? Would you even pick him over geniuses who don't quite have the numbers to back up their talent - men like Laxman, Mark Waugh, de Silva or even Hooper? Fine, let's keep it to just South Africa. And let's also forget the past: let's chuck Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock right out the window. Of the current South African lineup, if you were asked to order de Villiers, Amla, Duminy and Kallis in order of whom you'd prefer to watch, which end would Kallis find himself at?

And, much as I hate to reference football, does he have the spark? Is he the talisman that changes a game on its head, the Atlas that carries a team? For huge chunks of their careers, Lara and Tendulkar carried a mediocre batting lineup. And yet, it was also during this phase that they stamped themselves on the game. Their performances then were not marked by anchoring roles or by grinding down the opposition. Their finest, their legacy, are the counter-attacks, the blazing knocks carved out on burning decks, millimetres from disaster, and yet played as if they cared not a whit. Even Ponting, with his genius fading, with his team crumbling around him, has managed to look the part - "the pure spirit of the game" never more apparent than it is now.

Kallis, for most of his career, has had a much better batting lineup around him than the two unquestionable greats of our time, but what are his memorable knocks? Rob Steen, in an article that purports to support Kallis's claim to greatness, lets slip that prior to his finest match as a batsman (the aforementioned performance against Sreesanth, Harbhajan, Ishant, and a half-fit Zaheer), the most memorable-cum-valuable innings he'd ever played was his seventh knock. That, too, was a dour, defensive innings that eked out a draw against the odds.

But what does it say of a batsmen when the high-points of his career are two such - separated by 13 years? In between, he's had a 111 off 275 balls, in a South African first innings total of 451 against Australia (a match the South Africans went on to lose), and that famous 85 off 260 balls in the second innings against England. A back-to-the-wall effort, perhaps? Nope, South Africa were racing toward a declaration, having managed a first-innings lead. That match ended in a draw.

Even if you judged him solely on his merits as a sheet anchor, would you put him over someone like Rahul Dravid, who has played a similar role for India at roughly the same time? Perhaps it's nationalism speaking, but for technique and that elusive class, I'd pick Dravid over Kallis. And also, Dravid's performances have arguably had greater weight for Indian cricket than Kallis's for South African cricket: he was the cornerstone of India's emergence, in the early noughties, as a Test team that could win outside the subcontinent.

Has Kallis raised his game, like greats are expected to, against the best team of his generation? Has he mastered all conditions, like the swing of England, perhaps? Has he made his mark on the biggest stage there is? It's not spectacular, but it's not bad either; but then, when he top-scored for South Africa in the 2007 World Cup, his slow scoring cost him his vice-captaincy. For a team not averse to the odd choke, what's his average in tournament finals like? For those who live by them, do the numbers linked to above indicate a player who pushes his way to the forefront when the heat is at its whitest?

And even if we were to discount the numbers, if we were to go searching for that talismanic figure in the South African lineup, would you plump for him? Their game-changers have always been their fast bowlers and maybe even their fielders. The names most identified with South African cricket post-isolation are Donald and Rhodes, with the current keeper of the flame being Steyn. If a batsman has the potential to take that mantle for himself, that would be AB de Villiers.

Ah, so you ask: What of the 254 he scored against Australia, that Bradman described as the finest exhibition of batting ever seen in Australia? Damn fine question. Except that it wasn't Kallis who did that. That was Sobers, a man who epitomises attacking cricket, the man Kallis is often compared to. Someone first picked in the West Indies team for his bowling (would Kallis make it into the South African lineup for the same?); who opened their bowling, and also bowled wrist spin and finger spin. Forget his batting. How many bowlers have we seen bowl both pace and spin? Ok, forget the fast bowling, too. How many spinners have we seen bowl both wrist spin as well as finger spin?

To the batting, then. Fred Trueman and Richie Benaud, just from the Wikipedia article - two rather good bowlers from that era - seem to have a high opinion of Sobers. He was listed here as the second best batsman of all time. It matters not whether you agree with the rating or not; the point is that it's not a ridiculous notion. Which means that even if Darrell Hair were the man chosen to officiate in the match against the Proxima Centauri XI, and if he, for some reason, found the leftie's action objectionable, Sobers'd still have a good chance of making Earth's Time Warp XI purely for his batting alone.

If Kallis were to be compared to men like Kapil Dev and Ian Botham, perhaps he'd be seen in a more favourable light. But even here, the issue's far from certain - both were far better bowlers than Kallis is, and have had famous moments with the bat. Botham has a whole series identified with him, and Kapil - who didn't take his batting nearly as seriously as he ought to have - played one of the memorable World Cup innings.

Lastly, has the man ever exuded happiness on the cricket field? Ok, we've not seen it in his play, but does his face demonstrate any joy at all in this partaking of the finest sport known to the human race? Even ignoring the hissy fits he used to throw in his younger days when he got dispatched to the boundary for one too many half-volleys outside the off-stump, his countenance has been described as that of a "pompous lump" - like that of a Siddhartha Gautama in an alternate universe, who, just on the cusp of enlightenment, is interrupted by someone wanting to know whether he needs a personal loan; thereby getting his face etched permanently into that Kallis-at-first-slip expression.

What it all boils down to is, if you had to pick the one cricketer across the ages to represent your sport, that you'd proudly point to, when the Martians landed and said "Take me to your finest cricketer," would you really want to point them toward a South African whose selling point is above average bowler, fine batsmen, and ooh lookee here, look at my stats? The thing about all this anointing of Jacques Kallis as the greatest cricketer ever, or even one of the greatest cricketers ever, is that it is a depressing celebration of mediocrity over genius, of numbers over skill. When you watch Kallis play, do you have to fight yourself to keep in a wave of almost incommunicable admiration, do you feel in your gut that you're watching one of the finest sportsmen of all time?

Think of all the reasons why you'd line up for hours outside a stadium, why you'd sit patiently in the scorching sun for 9 hours straight with scarcely any food or water. The heartbreaks, the indignation and, of course, the triumphs. Think, above all, of the magicians of the sport, both seen by you and only described to you. In short, forget the numbers, and think of all which draws you to the game. So, the question once more...

Is Jacques Kallis the game's greatest exponent?

Edit: I'd thought that there wouldn't be any videos of the 254. Turns out I was wrong. Here's two more from Sobers.

Divans of Foam, or: The Unemployed Youth's Guide to Blissful Irresponsibility

2011-03-06T00:00:00.018+05:30

1) Plan your unemployment. The "telling the management off and walking out the door with dignity and reserve" thing works only in the movies. Here in the real world, there are such things as notice periods. Nothing stops you from clumping out the meeting room with shoulders back and uppity demeanor, of course, but you're likely to get only so far as your desk. So, for instance, if the World Cup starts on February 18th, schedule your dust-up for January 18th, or some such.

2) The other thing to consider is the weather. When summer's at its worst or winter's at its most freezing, you may as well spend most of it in office. If you're going to be miserable anyway, get paid for it - and save on air conditioning, to boot. There are no limits, literally none, to what I can achieve in the springtime, said Uncle Fred. Why not direct all that industry inward, rather than waste it on some soulless corporation?

3) On the subject of industry, don't ever fall into the "discovering yourself" trap. If you do, at least be smart enough to see the "climbing Mt Everest / helping the poor / becoming a doctor" commercialisation by Hollywood for what it is. Movies are often nothing more than product placements for the powerful sports equipment / strength-of-the-human-spirit / medical school lobbies. You can discover as much about yourself by sitting on the same spot for two months straight, and not moving a muscle (save the ones required for working the remote), as by running from Kanyakumari to Khardung La. How did Buddha achieve nirvana, again?

4) Not to put too fine a point on the last paragraph, but society, for some reason, encourages productivity over sloth. The word sloth has an unpleasant ring to it, even, no? And so, you may justify - to your family and friends - your decision to quit your job with all sorts of excuses that sound distinctly unslothy. Which is all right, so long as you don't overdo it and deceive yourself. Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Meet no people. Read no books. Watch no movies. Take no walks. Eat no vegetables. Hah! Caught you there! Of course you should watch movies. What's life without films?

4.5) Watch "Dazed and Confused." Over and over again. It's the perfect film for slackers everywhere - a funny, wise and literate celebration of inertia. The anti-"Chariots of Fire." The film is a riposte (no, not exactly a riposte, but more of a languorous, "I hear you, dude, but you gotta, you know, consider this, too, man") to all out there who goad us constantly to seek ways to improve, to those that exhort us to plan and to achieve. Relax, it says. Grab a beer. Slow down that pace, and drive leisurely down the highway to nowhere. You'll run out of gas one day, and it'll make no difference whether you travelled 20 miles or 2000.

5) Mix and match the films. Let's say you've been rationing, for the past few months, a collection of Jarmusch films, a few Melvilles, and also the complete Berlin Alexanderplatz set. And then spare time falls into your lap like deep-fried manna from the heavens, with a side order of tandoori chicken. The temptation, then, normally, is to work your way through the Jarmusch first, then the Melville, and finally the Fassbinder. The problem is, you do NOT want to watch all of Berlin Alexanderplatz in one go.

While undoubtedly a jewel, it's also unrelentingly dark and despairing. What with all the seemingly endless focus on guilt and punishment and loneliness, and chapter titles like "A hammer blow to the head can injure the soul," and "The outside and the inside and the secret of fear of the secret," your comfortable vegetating would turn into a horror of wide eyes, chin cupped in hands, cheeks scratched in agony, and tear-stained shirt. Watch the Germans brood and shriek, by all means, but punctuate it liberally with the quirkiness and cool surrealism of American independent cinema, add a smattering of stylish French nihilism, and coat it all with a touch of insouciant, misanthropic British humour - and that's as irresistible a cocktail as any for an aspiring vegetable.

6) Try and shower at least once in 9 days. Also, hitch your jaw up, if you notice a lot of drool around the chin area. Speaking of hitching, if you dread visiting your hometown because of relatives and neighbours inquiring about your matrimonial plans, and making unsolicited criticisms of your not having any, now is the time to go home. Not only do you get someone else to put you up for free, no one's going to want their daughter - or their friend's daughter - to get hooked up with an unemployed vagabond.

6.5) Spread the joy. Message your friends about the cool, the breeze, the sounds of the world bustling about outside. Tell them that Mondays are not so bad after all - especially if you wake up just before noon. They may be outwardly caustic in their replies, their terse replies a little at odds with your sunny outlook. No matter. Deep inside, they'd be grateful to you for reaffirming their faith in the general goodness of this world. Beneath the surface apoplexy (usually most evident when you thoughtfully point out their reddish eyes, and the darkish circles around the same, and enquire solicitously whether sleep deprivation's the cause) would be genuine gratitude.

7) Eat breakfast. It improves your energy levels and your general outlook drastically. This is not so important when you're running the rat race, but you should take your vegetating seriously. And eat well. Not "eat healthy," mind you. Drums of heaven, biryanis, masala dosas, momos, pastries, etc, etc, etc. The one difficulty I faced with breakfast is that Delhi is a little cold in the mornings in February and March. The thing to do, then, is to go to bed dressed. That way, you don't have to take off your nightclothes in the early-morning chill. You just jump straight out of bed and into the nearest restaurant.

8) Drink lots of water.

8.5) Refuse to enter into any discussions titled Your Plans For The Future, or General Faults I Perceive In Your Approach To Life.

9) Number the Slackandments, for easy reference. Keep them to a round figure like ten, if possible, when you become a subject-matter expert and decide to share your wisdom with the rest of God's creatures. If it's good enough for Jehovah...

10) When the money runs out, find a job.

The Malabar Op cracks the case

2011-02-10T02:00:00.009+05:30

The story so far...

The Malabar Op takes a case

The Malabar Op in Guwahati
The Malabar Op in Arunachal
The Malabar Op goes soft
The Malabar Op checks out the clouds

And now...

It was my last day there. My flight was in 2 hours. I hadn't yet typed out my report, but things didn't look too good for my client back in Pune. There was what you'd call an indefinable something between the two subjects, but I was fairly sure I could define it in no uncertain terms.

Strangely, though, there were other emotions wrestling with my soul. Private eyes are used to dealing with the rougher elements of society. And that, in a way, defines our world view. But this case had brought me in touch with a bunch that defines hospitality: from the small courtesies such as almost always speaking in English in our presence, to the not-so-small ones as rearranging their plans to the tune of several days just so that we tourists could see more of the North East. I like to think of myself as cold and unsentimental, but even I found it a little difficult to say goodbye.

And then there's this other matter: I didn't want to go back to Delhi. I didn't want to go back to a job where I was no more than a colour on a spreadsheet, a resource to be billed for; where the value of my work was not the code that I wrote, but merely the number of hours that could be marked against my name; where a well worded and formatted email has ten times the value of a bit of code that would make another as myself weep with joy; where carefully-prepared recognitions, each indistinguishable from the last, is your reward for a job that may or may not have been well done, but certainly appeared to be so to someone on a far shore.

What meaning does "do it right" have, when what you are judged for is "visibility"? What do you say when you're told that quality is defined only by the speed with which tasks are done, and not by any standards that mean anything to engineers? Could they be right, though? But if they are right, is that how I'd want to spend the next few years of my life? Coming back to first principles, why did I once choose to become a programmer?

While I was grappling with these thoughts, I saw Mohnish and PK heading into a restaurant. Something about the way they held themselves told me that this was a conversation I'd want to listen to. I managed to find a convenient potted plant to hide behind.

Mohnish: Dude... We've had our chance to make hay in the sack, and now is the time to... erm... let the sun... uh...

PK: Yeah. To everything, turn turn turn, there is a season. And ours is just too short. We're way different, you and I.
Mohnish: You like animals. So do I, but only on a plate. And our views on bamboo-shoot pork are too far apart ever to be reconciled.
PK: And you will never have a tail as long as a nightjar, nor a plumage like that of the male paradise flycatcher.
Mohnish: That's just, like, your opinion, man.
PK: Dude...
Mohnish: Anyway, it doesn't matter. Our families would never understand and it's complicated and, in any case, you and I, we both have our responsibilities. You have a voice calling to you from the depths of the jungle, and I have... in Pune...
PK: I want to die. If only I could die...
Mohnish: If you'd die, you'd forget me. I want to be remembered.

I sniffed quietly and wiped a tear off my cheek. With my other hand, I rooted about in my trench coat for a hanky. Why would anyone want to pay for international shipping to get "Brief Encounter," when a private eye's life is filled with billable moments enough for a hundred films?

But now, I had a decision to make. On the one hand was the Code I lived by. Take his Code away, and a private eye might as well become a project manager. If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is, its basis lies first in seriously devoting one's body and soul to his master. And for us private eyes, that's the client. To lie to her, or to cover up facts in my possession, that would be unthinkable.

And then again - as anyone who's ever called up his manager to inform him of the death of a favourite aunt on the eve of the World Cup quarterfinals knows - truth exists in several planes. From one plane, the version of the same truth on another plane can appear diametrically opposed, broadly speaking. The whole thing hinges on which plane you view it from; as a rule of thumb, it is best to view matters from the highest plane possible, though, of course, the planes upward are never-ending, much like the way the turtles on which our flat earth balances go on and on downward.

Round and round went the same questions in my head. Johnny Caspar put it best with, "I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics."

For you guys, reading this stuff is an evening's entertainment. If only you knew what I was going through. I was being torn apart. Beneath my impassive exterior, I was feeling like a part-time offspinner bowling at Sehwag and unable to get his length right. And there was no one I could turn to. Whom does the strong, silent type go to with his troubles? No one: there is no solitude greater than the samurai's - or the private eye's - unless perhaps it be that of a tiger in the jungle. This was something I'd have to work out for myself.

I had a soul to probe, a report to write, and expenses to claim. But, for now, I also had a flight to catch. I put my hat on as stylishly and with the same haunted expression that Gabriel Byrne had at the end of "Miller's Crossing," and strode briskly towards the terminal.

Case closed.

The Malabar Op checks out the clouds

2011-01-26T02:00:00.114+05:30

The story so far...

The Malabar Op takes a case
The Malabar Op in Guwahati
The Malabar Op in Arunachal
The Malabar Op goes soft

And now...

"hlp! cm 2 shillong pt."

I studied the SMS carefully. This could prove to be a new development in the case. Or it might not. But private eyes can't afford to overlook any lead, no matter how far-fetched. We know from bitter experience that things that appear unrelated at first sight tend to dovetail into the plot by page 250. I booked a cab for Shillong.

The fields that so captivated me during my ride in were now veiled by a fog tinted thickly with the orange of dusk. But I had no time for prettinesses. Wheels were turning in my head, those wheels turning other wheels, and they, in turn, working levers and complicated machinery and stuff, until wisps of smoke could be seen escaping my ears.

The cab driver, a loquacious man by Malabar Op standards (but then, who isn't?), pointed out a temple built in the centuries past by the Ahom kings. There's this tunnel, apparently, that starts beneath the temple and ends at nobody-knows-where - because no one who's ever gone in has come back out. This interested me enough to spare it a few wheels: a worthy challenge, but, on the whole, maybe more of a case for a Malabar Jones than a Malabar Op. I grunted an acknowledgment and returned to my case.

My work in Guwahati done (I probably should've told you that I had work there and what it was and all that, but these reports have a strict word limit), I continued on my way to Shillong. Shillong's less than a 100 kilometres from Guwahati, but the road up through the hills is heavily plied at night by trucks, making the going a little slow in places.

The border between Assam and Meghalaya is unusual. A highway divides the two states. To the left of the highway is Assam, and to the right - lined by wine shops, the tax structure for alcohol being very attractive - is Meghalaya. And that's why Assamese chickens cross the road. For the cheaper booze.

The road up into Shillong, when not blocked by trucks, is a lonely one. The full moon was pale yellow and had a smattering of clouds about it. The forest-covered hills were quiet in a moody, windy way. All that was left to complete the picture was for the car to break down and a wolf to start baying in the distance. But nothing of the sort happened. This isn't that kind of a case.

As we neared Shillong, we crossed a big lake. I remember being very struck by it, and jotting down a description in my notebook; but as I've misplaced it, all that's left for me to say is that I was... struck by it.

And then Shillong started. It's a city that cocks a snook at everything physics has to say; every brick is a triumph of man against nature. Perhaps it's how all hill stations are, but this is the first big one I've seen, and it was astonishing. Houses side by side, sometimes seemingly on top of each other, perched precariously on steep slopes, the hills swarming with pin points of light, mile after mile after mile.

One of my pet theories is that the best way to get to know a city is to simply listen to it. The rhythms of the conversation, the language, the things left unsaid, all this, it tells you all you need to know and more. Here's what I learnt about Shillong by overhearing just one such conversation.

Guy 1: "Yeah, so like I was telling you the other day, Shillong - called the Scotland of the East by our colonisers from long ago - is the capital of Meghalaya, which translates as 'the abode of the clouds.' It's a city nestled in the Shillong Plateau."

Guy 2: "And the reason we're waiting for a cab is that the bus service is practically non-existent. The cabs - mostly Maruti 800s, as these are vehicles with no power steering, and hence can be switched off on downward slopes to save fuel - are all shared; you can ask the driver not to pick up anyone else, though, by paying him extra."

Guy 1: "Absolutely. Also, because it's built on hills and everything, the roads are sort of narrow, and there are many one-ways. Finding a parking spot can be a bit of a nightmare, too. But the traffic is fairly disciplined."

Guy 2: "Hmm... We must not forget that the Khasis are one of the few matrilineal and matrilocal societies in India. For instance, most of the property passes to the youngest daughter."

Guy 1: "Exactly. And Christianity is the dominant religion. Which is why, even though the temperature's 6 degrees right now on this Christmas day, the blood in our veins runs hot from watching all the pretty girls dressed up all nicely for church. How do they stand the cold, though, in those short dresses? Look at this guy in trench coat and hat next to us: he looks like he's auditioning for a Havells ad, and I still bet he has thermal underwear on."

Guy 2: "Interesting. This has been such a nice conversation, and informative, too, for the casual bystander. We really should meet up more often. Anyway, why I wanted to meet you today was to tell you that there's been... ooh, there's a cab!"

At Shillong Point, I knew whom to look for. I'd deduced from the SMS that the sender was a dame in her 20s, pretty short, with medium-length straight hair. She'd most likely be a political-science teacher. I walked up and tapped her on the shoulder: "It took me a while, but I'm here for you now."

She stared at me expressionlessly for a moment: "Well, at least this is a new one."

I showed her the SMS.

"Are you aware that those things can also be used for purposes such as, for instance, checking whether you're the intended recipient of a fairly strange message?"

"Why would I think it wasn't intended for me? Trouble is my middle name," I replied woodenly.

She sighed, and turned away to lean over the railing again. A little time passed. Shillong looked quite lovely from that spot, framed against the far taller hills all around it. Presently, she said

"Do you do project work?"
"What do you mean?" I replied uncertainly.
"There's this exam I'm giving, and I'm supposed to write a 1000-word essay on Berlin Alexanderplatz. Know anything about it?"
"Oh, ah, that's not quite in my..."
"No matter. It was a long shot."
"Is there anybody I can beat it out from?" I asked hopefully.
"Well," she paused doubtfully, "there's this guy I know who bought the Criterion edition of those discs at an Amazon sale a few months back. But he wouldn't help. He hates my guts."
"Leave that to me. Where can I find him, and are you going to pay up front or after the job is done? I usually demand a retainer."
"How much did you have in mind?"
"How much do you have?"

And that is how I set out to find Jeem Thar, with 14 bucks and 75 paise jangling in my pocket. I'd never worked for so little ever before, but she had a way of fluttering her eyes that made my knees go weak. Mind you, a man in my profession gets a lot of eye fluttering from a lot of dames; but this was easily in the top five.

I've heard claims that Shillong's the only city in India that has a paved road leading to every residence. I wouldn't know - because I didn't tail Jeem to every house in Shillong - but all the ones I did walk on were paved. I especially enjoyed tailing him on the narrower streets, my standard-issue Op boots ringing smartly on the pavement, the close walls echoing the sound in a delightful surround effect.

And the roads were clean. There's nothing I hate more than keeping brisk pace with a suspect, and then having to hop on one foot, trying to scrape gum off. Not getting gum on his boots is vital to a private-eye - gum tends to muffle ringing footsteps, leading to low job-satisfaction levels.

Then there are the little roads that lead up and down, everywhere, that a private eye can duck into when he gets a little too enthusiastic with his footsteps and the suspect wheels sharply around. Private eyes love elevation changes. Especially when they allow him his ringing footsteps: thump, crack, thump.

The only negative was that a lot of Shillong's shops and restaurants are the small, tastefully furnished, personal types that most folks go gaga over, but makes us private eyes stick out like VVS Laxman at the IPL. But that apart, the place is just private-eye heaven, I tell you.

I cornered Jeem at Ward's Lake. I'd planned to pull him under some bushes and whack the info out of him, but probably because of massive deforestation, brightly coloured umbrellas are what the young of Shillong seem to prefer. Admittedly, umbrellas look a little odd in winter, but we Malabar Ops can rough it out with what's available when forced to. I dragged him under a vacant umbrella. To the rest of the world, we were a pair of rent-crossed lovers, but only the two of us would ever know how ferocious the battle really was. After about the sixth punch on his slightly pulpy belly, he started to spill the beans. In less than 15 minutes, I had all the words anyone would ever need on Berlin Alexanderplatz. I made him repeat it all in German just for the hell of it.

Handing the notes over later that evening, I gruffly asked her to wipe her tears off. It was nothing, I said. Just an honest day's work. I adjusted my hat in exactly the same way that Humphrey Bogart did in The Maltese Falcon, wore exactly the same smirk on my face, and walked toward the waiting cab, my ringing footsteps never having sounded better.

The Malabar Op goes soft

2011-01-03T02:00:00.254+05:30

The story so far...

The Malabar Op takes a case
The Malabar Op in Guwahati
The Malabar Op in Arunachal

And now...

The Malabar Op snoops around

There was bamboo-shoot pork, bamboo-shoot pickle, something else that's the world's hottest chili, eggs, freshwater fish, mutton, algae, sweet potatoes, small potatoes, normal potatoes, chicken, shrimp, rice, dal, cauliflower and lots, lots more on the lunch table. Maintaining my enviable fitness levels was clearly going to be a problem in Chowkham.

Life there is pretty restful. The village by the riverside, the freezing waters as clean as can be, the woods and the fields with hardly a soul in sight, the Himalayas so very close by, the charm of the house itself, all of this, it sometimes makes a private eye forget that he has business at hand, and turns him into a tourist - and a vegetable of a tourist, at that.

The day begins early in the "land of the dawn-lit mountains." I've heard that the sunrise is as early as a little after 5 in the morning. The only person who can confirm that is PK, who would disappear into the early-morning mist to go birding. Due to a lack of witnesses, his exploits on these trips are largely shrouded in myth and mystery; but stories have filtered through of lows such as getting lost and wandering into army camps, and glorious highs such as the day he got to molest a Crested Serpent Eagle.

Aunt Frika (Mohnish has as many aunts as a character in a Wodehouse novel, and they all ask just two things of him: that he get a haircut and get married - in that order) would regale us at the breakfast table with stories of the floods in 2004. She told us how they watched, from their terrace, house after house disappearing into the river; of how all their help had to leave to take care of their families; of how they had no water or electricity for more than a week; of how they harvested rainwater, and the joys of bathing in them. Ujjal, sitting nearby, added gloomily that one day they too would lose their house as young rivers are rather unpredictable with their courses. After breakfast, she would buzz off determinedly bride-hunting for Mohnish (who'd sit in a corner blushing prettily).

The Malabar Op leads Mohnish across the Lohit

Mostly, it was a time for the finer things in life: sleeping late, hogging like (and on) pigs, avoiding any kind of excessive physical labour, etc. We would go orange plucking, have a look at the pagodas and the museums nearby, and buy handwoven bags and Khamti lungis from the pretty tailor in the village. This being winter, off-roading on the riverbed in Ujjal's Gypsy was also an option. The locals were very impressed when I led local-boy Mohnish across the treacherous currents of the Lohit.

The high-point was when we drove to Parashuram Kund. Legend has it that Lord Parashuram, for naughtinesses such as killing his mother, had an axe irremovably stuck to his arm. He travelled the length and breadth of the country as penance for his sin, but the axe wouldn't come off. It was only when he bathed in the waters here that it finally parted ways. This legend is all the more poignant to us Malabar Ops as the story goes that it's a blow from his axe that claimed the Malabar coast from the seas.

I suppose then that this place needs no further description than this: all it takes is one glimpse to convince you that there are no sins those blue-green waters cannot cleanse. We got a couple of nice pictures, but they do no justice to the sight of the river snaking its way through those hills, the foothills of the Himalayas: sheer, green and beautiful.

And just when I was in danger of completely forgetting about the case, came a walk by the river. PK to Mohnish: "Come with me tomorrow morning, my little piggy, and I'll show you the eighth wonder of the world."

I scratched my chin thoughtfully and followed.

P.S. - Photos courtesy PK.

The Malabar Op in Arunachal

2010-12-22T14:00:00.073+05:30

The story so far...

The Malabar Op takes a case

The Malabar Op in Guwahati

And now...

I stared grimly out the car window. We were moving slower than a glacier. If I'd wanted to get stuck in a traffic jam, no city in the world offers as much scope and variety as Delhi. I could've just stayed there and saved the bother of flying across the country. I sighed, and told Mohnish that he was sitting on my coat.

It was only when we left the traffic of Tinsukia behind that my bleak, world-weary private-eye heart began to melt. The mazy, congested streets straightened out into a highway straight as an arrow. The countryside opened up, the trees and people vanished, and to the right and the left enormous fields appeared. And then, ahead, the Himalayas, shrouded in swirling clouds. It looked so near that I thought 5 minutes more on the road would have us crashing into rock (it was, of course, a couple hundred kilometres away).

While Malabar Ops are essentially men of the city, they're also loners. When the rest of the world sits around their dinner tables, sharing their stories and their jokes, when their pulp fiction gives them company, a glass of wine by the side, when they're dancing and drinking the night away, when they hold each other, the freezing winter cold a thing of comfort and pleasure, dreaming their dreams of forever; the Malabar Op haunts the night, a man always in the now, his footsteps ringing in the dark alleys behind sleazy bars, his hands deep in his coat, his breath misting up in front of him, his gait languid, but his eyes watchful. Even when he does endure the morning light and the throng of crowded markets and railway stations, it's as if he watches a film from the rows farthest. Nothing escapes his gaze, and he feels and he knows, but he does not belong.

And so, the fields stretching out to infinity and the Himalayas ahead with their snow and their clouds, they speak to his soul. The vast expanses without anyone in sight, the ageless* mountains holding promise of a land without time, ambition or private sorrows; all of it makes the Malabar Op painfully aware that only an Arunachali can buy land there, and makes him ask his friend's mother whether she could hook him up with an Arunachali girl with plenty of land.

We stayed in Mohnish's ancestral home in Chowkham. Stepping out of the car, I saw his uncle Rajingda waiting for us - a dapper man in his 50s, with an unhurried air, a golf cap, a cigarette dangling at his lips, and a cool, level gaze. We gazed coolly at each other. His son Ujjal tells me that his Dad was quite the terror in his younger days and that a favourite unwind for father and son is to watch The Godfather together in the evenings. Ujjal looks after most of the family business now, and cuts quite the cold, formidable Michael Corleone figure in his Pajero and his sunglasses. He's proud of the work his family have done over the years and when he took us around the village, pointed out the things they have built or given land for. His grandfather, Chow Khamoon Gohain, was the first MP from the North East.

A little after 2 in the morning, I was woken up by the howling of something horrible. It was very cold. An uneasy feeling gripped the pit of my stomach. I took out my flashlight and decided to snoop around a little. The house was old, and also rather big - made almost entirely out of wood. Snooping around in someone else's house in the wee hours of the morning demands a certain amount of stealth, but, unused as I am to wooden floors, my first few steps sounded like a cautious Godzilla making for a pile of fish.

The house was shrouded in silence and darkness. I crossed the drawing room and started with the room across the passageway. The giant tusks by the idols glimmered palely. I shone my flashlight around. The room was as big as my flat in Delhi. There was nothing for me there. I turned around. Something jumped at me from the corner by the doorway. My heart leapt into my mouth and when I swallowed hard, instead of settling back inside my ribcage, it went down the wrong way. I coughed and spluttered. I walked backwards out the door and down the passageway in rather a hurry. There was nothing by the doorway that I could see except a Naga sword and a Khamti shield. I don't know why I thought something had jumped at me.

Many Arunachali houses, built as they are by the banks of rivers known to flood on occasions, are built on stilts. This one was no exception. I happened to be near an entrance to the house, which meant that there was a flight of steps leading down. Walking backwards as I was, I was made very aware of its existence only on my way down, my head bouncing off wood every other step. Moving with remarkable agility (all things considered), I started to pick myself off the landing. I had my second panic attack in less than 45 seconds when I glanced up and saw a hideous face leering at me. Turned out to be the handle of a walking stick. Why would anyone want that on the handle of a walking stick?

I saw another set of steps going up in front of me. It took me into a giant room filled with all sorts of old furniture. A private eye with more talent at describing interiors would probably have done a good job of painting you a mental image. I caught sight of a chair that I later learnt was sat on by the Dalai Lama. Sensing a shape above me, I turned around rather slower than the last time I'd sensed a shape, and glanced upward. It was just a crafted deer head. In order to have a better look at its antlers, I tilted my hat back and took a couple of steps back. I shouldn't have. I tripped over a chest (bought from Jew Town, Cochin, and quite beautiful to look at in daylight, really), and landed with a crash on my back. Flailing about, I knocked a vase down, and cracked the leg of a stand.

I felt like I'd been mugged by the Crazy 88. But my training kicked in instantly. I listened. Not a peep. In the last 5 minutes, I had made as much noise as a bunch of Indian close-in fielders about to get suspended by Mike Denness for excessive appealing. And yet, not a soul stirred. I decided that folk who could sleep through a racket like that couldn't have that much on their consciences. I limped painfully back to bed and sleep.

P.S. - Photos courtesy PK.

*He also points out that the Himalayas are hardly "ageless," and are, in fact, 70 million years old, which makes it a young pip, by mountain-range standards.

The Malabar Op in Guwahati

2010-12-15T02:00:00.009+05:30

The story so far...

The Malabar Op takes a case

And now...

The 7 AM cold was biting. I pulled the coat tight around me. I'd slept for all of two hours the previous night, and had every intention of sleeping through the two-and-a-hour flight. That resolution lasted for all the time it took for the snowcapped line of the Himalayas, stretching unbroken across the horizon, to make its appearance - this was my first glimpse, and there would be no further sleep. The pilot pointed out Mount Everest as we passed by, but the Himalayas are one of those ranges without bright-red labels on each peak, and I'm not sure that what I thought he thinks is the peak is the same as the one he thought we thought he thinks is Mount Everest.

Mohnish and PK, who were travelling from Pune, landed at Guwahati airport about half an hour after I did. Mohnish took one look at my bag, and asked me what the deal was. I told him: PK'd given me the impression that we'd have to wash our laundry by hand. Private eyes are tough, street-wise and ruggedly charming. They're good with guns and wisecracks. But not laundry. So I'd brought along 10 sets of clothing, 2 backup sets, a towel, a backup towel, a jacket, a backup sweater, slippers, and my Jean-Pierre Melville and Jim Jarmusch collections. Mohnish remarked, a tad more waspishly than was warranted, that there are, in fact, washing machines in the North East. PK giggled girlishly in the background. I let him have a cool, level stare.

Mohnish's cousin, Paul, picked us up from the airport. He stopped once on the way to show us the Brahmaputra. Very nice river. Dinner was at Mohnish's aunt's. She was an exceedingly pleasant and gracious host, and her daughter, a little on the quiet side, looks very much like Liv Tyler. So it'll surprise some of you that I'll be devoting blog inches not to either of them, but to Mohnish's uncle - a widely travelled man, who has apparently killed and eaten practically every species on earth.

His favourites (or perhaps least favourites) are pigs. He's machine gunned them in Bangladesh with an AK-47. He's rigged landmines to transform a formerly intact pig, with a family to care for, into little pieces of pork. And he's shot at them with tanks on the Indo-Pak border - prompting them to go "Oink! Oink! The Pakistanis are on the other side!" He even managed to get PK - who just 2 hours earlier had declined Paul's polite rum offering on the grounds that he'd be on an alcohol-free diet for the next 10 days - to partake of his stock of 16-year-old Fenny. 16-year-old Fenny, according to the two of them, is quite the modern miracle, as it proves that there are, in fact, Goans capable of laying off a bottle of Fenny for 16 whole years.

Of course, these trivialities didn't distract me from the business at hand. I kept a close eye on PK and Mohnish. Apart from the fact that they always seemed to want to sit together, there was, so far, nothing suspicious to report.

We had to wake up at 5 the next morning to catch the bus to Tinsukia. Being on the east of India, the day starts and ends very early here. My biological clock, regrettably, does not take the reasoned approach. It says "pooh" to science, and clings to IST like things in a Fevicol ad. If the watch says 5 AM, then irrespective of what the light-meter says, it goes into a sulk, protests against this travesty of all that is good and holy, and drags my whole body down with it. But then, you can't really argue with bus schedules either. It ought to have known that it was fighting a losing battle from the start.

And so, early next morning, Paul dropped us off at the bus-stand from where we would catch the Volvo to Tinsukia. He had been very helpful and kind (no force on earth could persuade me to wake up at 5:30 in the morning for someone else - but he did it with a smile); and so, when he happened to mention that he likes South Indian girls, I naturally offered to introduce him to a few if he ever found himself in South India. "Why don't you start by introducing yourself to South Indian girls?" PK remarked. I drew my hat over my eyes and went off to sleep.

Tinsukia's to the north-east of Assam, and very near the border with Arunachal Pradesh. The bus journey to Tinsukia from Guwahati takes a little over 10 hours, is of singular beauty, and might just be worthy of Tolkien-type descriptions. Apparently, there are paddy fields and houses with fields of mustard and green hills and tea estates and even a stretch where rhinos can be spotted. But I'd had 6 hours of sleep the previous two nights combined and I slept right through the ride. Sorry.

That evening, relaxing at Mohnish's mother's house with a cup of Assam tea (in Assam, they just call it "tea"), we made plans for the next day. Mohnish's brother would drive us over the border to Arunachal Pradesh, to their ancestral home. This time, we'd start at the more reasonable hour of noon. That settled, we prepared for bed. PK asked Mohnish for a foot massage. Mohnish stared at him. There was a whatchamacallit in the air. I furrowed my brow and took out my notebook.

The Malabar Op takes a case

2010-12-12T02:00:00.018+05:30

I had long since grown tired of what I did for a living. Of patching and spit-polishing islands of code in the thousands upon thousands of classes that no one else seemed to care for. With every passing day they got a little longer, a little uglier and a little more incomprehensible. And no one gave a damn; not even the ones who owned it. And so, out of this desire to do something that mattered - to help people, for a few bucks a day and expenses - the Malabar Op was born.

I wanted a one-room office with my name and the legend "Private Eye" on a dirty stained-glass door. I wanted to write of long, lonely hours in a dusty office with just my phone and a blue bottle fly for company. But then, I wasn't rich. I had no savings to speak of. I couldn't afford a suitably rundown office in a suitably ramshackle building in a suitably seedy part of Delhi. And even if I did, given that my day-job office was in the Gurgaon of a thousand gleaming glass buildings, the commute wouldn't be pretty.

I did the next best thing. I created a page on Facebook. I am the Malabar Op. I walk the mean streets tough and unafraid... but I care. I'm here to help, to set things right. And I'm discreet. Could you "like" my page, please?

Two weeks. The Gtalk icon on the desktop was smooth and oval and white. I had no messages, no inquiries. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted a vacation. I wanted a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and thermal underwear.

It wasn't Gtalk that would give me my first job. Early one Saturday morning, the doorbell rang. It was cold and wet and miserable. The sun hadn't been out for 3 days. It rained sometimes, and there was a fog out that was as heavy and thick as the blanket that enveloped me. I should be up and about, I told myself. The fog would lift soon. I shouldn't miss the few hours of relative bright, before the darkness crept in at what would still be afternoon in bright, sunny Cochin. "I've already put the garbage out. It's by the stairs," I yelled and snuggled back into my pillow. The bell rang again. I mumbled a meaningless curse, and opened the door.

Her hair might've moved gently in the wind, playing with misty tendrils of early-morning breeze... had it been one of those mornings. Sadly, it wasn't; there was just the dreary stillness of the fog. That's what you get if you try and make a cinematic entrance in mid December. I tried to look tough and unfathomable, with just the tiniest hint of reproach for the hurt of all those years ago - but tempered by a cynical, pessimistic knowledge of human nature - and also laid-back, wise and mysterious. But it's difficult to pull all that off in bad light, dressed just in thermal underwear.

"It's been a while."
"Yes."
"Well, are you just going to stand there? I'm cold. I didn't bring my boots. All these Delhi women are wearing boots."
"No, I... uh, won't you come in? Make yourself comfortable. I'll be right back."

I didn't have time for a shave or a shower, but I managed to find my coat and hat.

"What on earth's the matter with you?"
"I normally do my laundry on Saturday afternoons. You caught me at a rather inconvenient time."
"I see some slacks and t-shirts in that open cupboard over there..."
"Oh, those are deprecated."

I hadn't supposed that I'd ever meet her again. What could she want out of me now? The years brought back memories sharp and pungent. I felt like a pig in the Rann of Kutch that had just been fired at for pork by a T-55 tank.

"So, I hear you're going into the bedroom-peeping business?"
"Well, it's just something I thought I'd try out. And I don't do divorce wo..."
"Right, right. How's it going?"
"Not very well, so far."
"I figured as much. Listen, I may have a job for you."
"Oh?" I said warily.
"You remember Mohnish?"
"The chap with the pig fetish. Is he still in your project?"
"He's been spending a lot of time with PK recently. He's even taking him to Arunachal, when he's going on vacation in a couple of days' time."
"Ok...?"
"I want to know if this is more than just good, wholesome, fully-compliant-with-Section-377 (pre-July, 2009) male bonding. Maybe you could go along with them and find out."
"Why?"
"Let's call it a matter of the heart."
"What do you care? You just married a vegetarian."
"I didn't say it was a matter of my heart."
"Hmm..."
"What do you charge?"
"1250 bucks a day and expenses, plus 12.5% VAT. 5000 bucks retainer."
"How long would you take?"
"About two weeks."
"How do you figure that?"
"That's all the leave I have left. Sleuthing doesn't pay the bills, yet, you know."