I think...therefore I am

"Ghare Baire" (The home and the world) : Tagore - a re-look after nearly 100 years

2014-05-24T17:35:00.002+05:30

"Ghare Baire" (Home and the World) is a novel written by Tagore in 1916. True to his usual style, Tagore had used a narrative structure to discuss or debate on certain issues (a form which he had also used in several other novels like "Jogajog", "Char Adhyay" and "Shesher Kobita"). Nevertheless, he managed to create a novel which, even on the strength of "pure storytelling" succeeds brilliantly.

The form of the story is multiple self-narrative. The chapters are alternately narrated by the three main protagonists - Nikhilesh, Sandeep and Bimala. This becomes exceptionally effective in this case as their respective personalities and point of views are presented well. This also avoids the narrator taking any "sides" as such and the reader is left to form his own opinion about what is right and wrong.
The historical backdrop of the story is partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905. This triggered a widespread protest - the so called 'Swadeshi" movement which started on it's own and then got merged into the Indian National Congress movement. Tagore and many more were participants in the initial phases of this movement. The movement, simply put, focused on self reliance - developing own products and rejecting the imported British products - the initial phase of the Khadi movement of Mahatma Gandhi. Many things culminated out of the Swadeshi movement including starting of own "Engineering" colleges, small scale industries etc.
As is usually the case, the initial "voluntary" movement started taking a different turn when it started becoming an actively political movement. While in the initial phases, people used to voluntarily quit imported merchandise and start using local merchandise, later on this was forced upon by the Swadeshi volunteers. The argument put forward by the Swadeshi's was that in order to really hit out at the imperialist forces, it is necessary that the protests are "large scale" and everyone has to participate. So even when some people are reluctant to join in, it is the duty of the more "politically aware" Swadeshis to "force it" upon them because this is, in fact, for the greater good of them. The end will justify the means and for the greater good, a few evils have to be accepted and tolerated.
Ghare Baire is actually a book about this conflict - of whether it is acceptable to do things which are morally incorrect but serves a greater goal. And if so, who decides what is correct in the longer run and is in fact the "greater good". Sandeep is the symbol of this school of thinking - who believes that evil has to be fought with evil and greater good for a larger number of people justifies individuals being sacrificed. Nikhilesh symbolizes the other end of the spectrum - which is more of a moralistic viewpoint which says that a wrong cannot become right because the end result is promising. And Bimala is the symbol of the common man (or woman) who moves from an essentially conservative sense of good and evil to the "end justifies the means" school of thinking and eventually comes back to her original beliefs. The important balance that Tagore has maintained is that none of three has been portrayed as "wrong" - there are no "villains" in the conventional sense of the word. There are also other characters into this - the idealist school teacher (Mashtarmoshai), the innocent student Amulya and the conservative, petty sister-in-law.
The apparent story-line is also an interesting parallel - about Bimala who moves out of the "parda" of a conservative Bengali household ("Ghare") to outside ("Baire"). In the process, she is attracted towards the charismatic Sandeep instead of her apparently hidebound low key Nikhilesh but realizes her mistake later. Amulya - who, in a short while, had become like her son or younger brother had to die in the process - which is also like the death of "innocence" in the novel.
The conclusion of the novel is intentionally kept obscure. Amulya dies but what happens to Nikhilesh? Did he die in the riot that was started due to the actions of Sandeep (and indirectly supported by Bimala) ? The novel says that he is severely injured but it is not sure whether he is dead or not. In my opinion, this is the masterstroke of this novel.
At the very beginning of the novel, which starts with Bimala's narration, she talks about her marriage. Nikhilesh had two elder brothers - both of whom had died relatively young - within a few years after their respective marriages. Both the wives were extremely pretty but were rumoured to have been promiscuous. Nikhilesh's family members had come to the conclusion that their sons have died because of the "sin" of their wives and therefore had chosen a girl who was not pretty in the conventional sense but will be faithful and sincere. How exactly they could have judged whether the girl will remain faithful after marriage was unknown but it seemed to have done the trick as Nikhlesh had a long and happy married life with Bimala. That is - till the arrival of the Swadeshi movement at their doorsteps, spearheaded by the charismatic Sandeep - Nikhilesh's school friend.
In my eyes, by not stating whether Nikhilesh died or not, Tagore had thrown back the question to us - was Bimala a sinner or not? If she is indeed a sinner (as she had fallen in love with Sandeep - to put it very crudely), then are we to conclude that the entire nation which had accepted Sandeep's theory of "end justifies the means" are also sinners? And if so, can we blame Bimala, who had a sheltered life, for succumbing to the charms of Sandeep, when a much larger and more educated / illustrious crowd also seem to have fallen prey to the violent thinking of Swadeshi?
It is because of this dilemma, this non-conclusive end, this element of contradiction that this books transcends from being a historical novel or a novel about a woman's dilemma. It remains relevant even today for the same reasons why Dostoevsky remains relevant to us. It forces us to look at ourselves and makes us wonder if we are indeed eligible to throw the first stone to the sinner.

Face off with a barber

2013-09-15T22:56:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I paid a visit to the barber. Not by choice - the prospect of submitting myself to gentlemen who seem to have long whiskers, a wicked smiles and sharp razors always cause a downpour of unmanly sentiments all over me. But I am a man who can take the rough with the smooth and once in every two months or when my daughter starts reciting poems about some unfortunate bloke had owls, hens, larks and a wren living in his beard, whichever is earlier, I pop over to the nearly saloon for a haircut.

As I entered my regular saloon, it was obvious that this simple unpretentious place had had a major face lift. The overall decor seemed more stylized with John Abraham and Salman Khan looming large on every wall. The number of mirrors have quadrupled which now reflects images of Mr. Abraham or Mr Khan at every angle and reminds you of the last fight sequence from Enter the Dragon. The cheerful happy-go-lucky barbers are now attired in some black formal looking uniform which seemed to have dampened their spirits considerably. I tried to locate my regular barber, a cheerful forever-smiling fellow who is well aware of my no-nonsense haircut ("short at the back, side, short-medium in front and don't try any special style") but gave up as the kaleidoscopic view of the bollywood stars seemed to overpower everything. Eventually I selected a timid looking fellow, took a seat and closed my eyes, thereby surrendering myself to fate.

Once the ordeal was over and I was satisfied that I need not visit this or similar institutions for a considerably period, the timid barber came up with, what he described as a "package offer". Men of world are already familiar with how these stuffs work - if you buy so-and-so, then some useless thingummy will be provided to you free of cost. In this case, the bloke offered to make the haircut free provided I opt for something called "face massage" which they have just started (i.e post the revamp of the saloon).

I pondered. I always ponder when the word "free" arrives at the horizon. In my formative years, I grew up with my cousin brother who had indoctrinated me into a philosophy of "free food", which basically meant that whenever you get to eat at someone else's expense, you must eat till the stomach muscles are near their elastic deformation limits. This reverence towards "free" stuffs was followed even my mother, who had endeavored to create a full 12 piece set of perfectly ghastly looking quarter plates, each of which were given free on consuming 10 packets of Maggi instant noodles. My mother, being extremely finicky about her crockery set, never actually used these plates but it was the principal of the matter which was important.

"It is really good for your face sir", said the fellow. "You should go for a papaya face pack sir - it will suit you."

I pondered further. Though I can hardly be described as a "metro-sexual male", my knowledgeable friends have made me aware that the latest trend is to apply fruits, vegetables and yogurts on your face instead of shoving them down the oesophagus. Eating them will probably become a passe very soon. This barber seem to be well acquainted with the latest trends in fashion (and food).

"Wouldn't the pumpkin face pack be more appropriate - considering that I have a face like a pumpkin?", I asked, trying to make light of the situation.

"Oh no, sir!" said the fellow. He seemed shocked and scandalized with my suggestion. "May be you start with a simple herbal face massage. I'll call my senior."

Presently the senior barber arrived. He gave me a piercing glance which lasted for several seconds and the pronounced - "You have a black head."

I felt somewhat offended. I am not racist by any means and have no aspiration of possessing a milk-and-peach complexion. Nevertheless, one expects a certain amount of finesse and diplomacy from others. So I drew myself up (to the extent possible while sitting in a barber's chair), raised my eyebrows and gave him a cold stare.

"Excuse me.." - I started but was soon cut off rudely by the senior barber. "In fact, there are many black heads", said the specialist, ignoring my stern glance with the aplomb of cowboy. Clint Eastwood couldn't have handled it better.

"Pardon me, but I seemed to see only one head on my shoulder." said I, trying the most sarcastic tone I could muster. "And I am certainly not a reincarnation of Ravana."

"Uh", said the specialist. "I mean the black heads - those black marks on your face. Never mind, I will take care of that soon enough".

Before I could really give an opinion on this, he grabbed my face at a speed which would have put Rocky Marciano to shame and tied a kind of thick headband along my hairline - the kind of stuffs action heroes like Rambo occasionally wear. The only difference is that it looks good on them but made me look like a horror from outer space. And before I could object to this, my face was smeared with some kind of coarse semisolid stuff and I was forced to close my eyes.

The little kid sitting next to me (had been brought for a haircut by his father; poor soul) gave out a piercing cry, which, I am inclined to believe, can be ascribed to this new Darth Vader-ish look on my face.

After this, I was subjected to a multiple cycle process which consists of
a) vigorous rubbing on the face with some coarse substance (which seemed to last for ever)
b) wiping the face with an equally coarse spongy stuff
c) spraying water on my eyes through a large size water pistol, thereby preventing me from opening my eyes (which, on second thoughts, might have been a saving grace)

The above three steps seemed to go on like an infinite do-loop with the next door kid's continuous wail providing a somewhat monotonous background score. Just when I as getting used to this cyclic torture, there was an assault on my nose with a sharp instrument. I whelped in excruciating pain and tried to jump out of the chair but the specialist, evidently, was used to handling un-cooperative customers with a heavy hand. I could barely move my face and could do precious little except listening to satisfied grunts from this specialist (who, by then I was convinced, is an illegal grandson of Joseph Mengel).

I tried to raise my voice but was firmly told by this hell hound of a specialist that unless these blackheads are removed, they will become white heads. The gravity in his voice seemed to suggest that once this happens, the space-time continuum of the universe will be irrevocably disturbed. I had, by then, resigned to my fate. Even the kid next to me had stopped crying and resorted to a feeble whimper.

Eventually the assaults stopped and I could feel the gentle touch of water and a soft towel on my face. I opened my eyes and found the specialist beaming at me with the self satisfied look of big game hunter.

"Have a look, Sir!" said the man. "You will love it."

I looked at the mirror.

My face looked exactly the same as before.

Thank god for that!

A dance, bollywood and something more

2012-10-03T23:25:00.000+05:30

Till yesterday, any unsuspecting guest walking into our house would have witnessed a somewhat bizarre scene:

1) A once popular bollywood number "Maiya Yashoda, yeh tera kanhaiya" from an insufferably saccharine-infested movie called "Hum Saath Saath Hai" is being played on a laptop.

2) A 7 year old kid is dancing to this song, with each of her dance movements dripping with overwhelming emotions. And in-between these heart-wrenched expressions, she is also stealing a surreptitious glance at her mother.

3) The mother sitting at a remote corner with pursed lips and knitted brows and looking into another laptop with a utmost concentration. Arjun, the legendary warrior from Mahabharata, had managed such immense concentration only twice - once, as an apprentice to Drona, he shot a wooden bird and second when he shot through a wheel into a fish to win a bride (Draupadi). Later, of course, he had to share this bride with four brothers - but that is a different story.

4) The father sitting at another corner with a stoic face and a mortified "why-o-why" or "what-have-I-done" expression.

The overall atmosphere is turbo-charged with subtle (or not so subtle) undercurrents and supreme tension - the kind one sees in the last 15 minutes of any spaghetti western (a la "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly").
What led to this situation ?

The whole thing started with our daughter joining a dance school in our neighbourhood to learn Kathak. This was not an easy choice for my wife, who agreed to let her learn dancing provided it is a classical dance.

For people who do not know my wife, the missus is a thoroughbred pure blood "convent educated" person with a strong sense of what is "appropriate" and what is not. Her attitude towards dance is somewhat similar to Hitler's attitude towards the Jews or Anna Hazare's attitude towards alcohol. Dance, if it is to be learnt at all, has to be in its purest form - i.e either Indian Classical dance forms or Western ballets. Tango or foxtrot or any other such dances are a strict no-no and the absolute lowest on my missus's scale stands the "Bollywood" dance. Thus, any dance that is allowed in our house is always having a liberal dose of "Ta"s and "Tat"s and 'Dighda digha digha thai"s thrown in.
Since the daughter was learning Kathak, a classical Indian dance form and never practicing her dance at home in any case, the home front was in a state of equilibrium. Unfortunately this delicate balance of peace got rudely shattered when the dance school decided to host a small dance program. My daughter got selected in one of the dances. And the song to which they dance is...you got it - the aforementioned song from HSSH. We were duly called by the dance teacher and instructed that we must push our daughter to practice dancing to this song at home.
The sense of "appropriateness" of my wife was severely challenged. Missus, being a contentious mother, had to agree that the daughter would practice "bollywood dance" at our home ("oh tempora, oh mores") as the same has been demanded by a figure of authority - namely the dance teacher. At the same time, she was tormented by her deep rooted apathy and revulsion for the bollywood dances - which led to occasional outbursts about the conduct of the dance school, the lack of culture of the dance teacher and the lack of judgement of the father. But more often, it was just a silent pursed-lip moment of forbearance.
The D-day arrived - and we, a threesome family of an overdressed daughter, a knitted-brow-i-am-ready-to-kill mother and a resigned-to-fate father trotted to the dance school to witness this dance show. The videos of this dance is available as it had been recorded by us. I, however, dare not upload this on youtube as this could be the last straw which breaks the camels back. I do not fancy opening the morning news paper to discover that there is a news article on about a mysterious serial killer woman who murders dance teachers in Gurgaon with a blunt instrument every second saturday.
I did the next best thing. I wrote a blog about this!!

What do you think about this post? Do leave a comment...

Afternoon tea...and something more

2012-09-09T16:17:00.003+05:30

Tea, for me, is always associated with the train travels during our holidays and waking up at the early morning chant of the tea vendors - "chai garam.....garram chai". Soon, an extremely hot a brownish fluid with a lot of milk, sugar and tea dust (with some miniscule quantity floating on the surface) will be served in an earthen pot (bhaanr), which will then have to be held precariously by the edge and drunk with a lot of slurpy noise. As the juggernaut chugs it's way into Bihar and then UP, this delicacy will start having some more additives put into it - stuffs like cardamom (Elaichi), clove (Lavang) and cinnamon (Daal-chini) and the taste and fragrance getting overpowered by these additives.

My next strong association with tea is with the Mumbai "cutting" - which literally means one cup tea "cut" into two. One recollects a lovely music video called "Ek cutting chai" (link attached)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8PM85Cuhrg. This "cutting" personifies the Mumbai street food and mood - the immensely satisfying casualness (bindaas) with which the Mumbaikar drinks a "cutting" while munching a "Vada pao" ("zyada garlic chutney maarke bosss") while waiting for the next local at the train station.

While these teas are full of zest and gusto and work rather well as the morning "pick-up" drink, the tea drunk by the "purist" tea-lovers belong to an entirely different world. This is a world of fine china crockery, delicate and intricately painted teapots and the golden gleam and fragrance of a sublime fluid called tea. A world, where tea would necessarily have to be served in teapots, covered by tea-cozies, accompanied by scones or cucumber sandwiches and after the first cup, a stronger second cup ("Only half a cup, my dear - just to wash down the food and leave the right taste on the tongue") would be called for. And while these ladies and gentlemen would be sipping their second cup, the oblique evening light would come in through the stained glass windows and suspend this moment in time.

Over the years, I have been gradually moving away from my old favourite coffee and found a new love in tea. My increased age has not really contributed much to my wisdom but has certainly refined my epicurean sensibilities, allowing me to now enjoy the light Darjeeling Tea, brewed to perfection with a subtle mix of of colour, flavour and taste - and consumed without milk and sugar. I also started enjoying the Earl Grey tea - another classic - the tea with a lovely fragrance. I was, therefore, an eager participant in the tea tasting event which was being organised by some my wife's friends.

Technically this was a tea tasting event organised by some members of a foodie group called "Chef at Large" or CaL. My wife also belongs to this "for-whom-food-is-the-supreme-god" group and by extension, I got invited to this event. The event was anchored by Anamika Singh, a member of CaL and a friend of my wife. Anamika is a thoroughbred tea commissionaire, being a tea estate owner's daughter who has spent her formative years in Darjeeling. She now partly looks after her father's tea estate at Kangra (Manjhee Valley http://www.manjheevalley.com/index.html) and has her own brand of "blended" tea sold under the name "Anandini Himalaya Tea".

Anamika started with some basic clarifications on tea. The so called "herbal tea", it seems is not tea at all as it does not contain any tea leaves. The technical term for this is Tisane. Then comes the second category called the Infusions or blends which is tea with some other herbs or flowers into it (which, by the way, is what Anamika specializes in). And the third category is the classical tea which only contains tea leaves.

"Wait, wait, wait" - we said. "What is tea, if you were to define it? "

Tea, as per the classical definition, is a plant which originated in China. This, again, has two varieties - the small leaf one (Camellia Sinensis) and the broad leaf one (Camellia Assamica). The broad leaf one is usually processed through the CTC route, while the other one is uses the conventional production method and does the rolling at the final stages of production. The CTC (Crush Tear and Curl) route generates the grainy tea (what we bongs used to call as "dust tea") and is commonly used in tea bags. While the CTC tea would brew a strong tea which will taste well with milk and sugar (and probably ginger also - the classical "Adrak-wali chai"), the connoisseurs swear by the traditional long leaf version.

I finally got to know the difference between Black tea (traditional tea, completely oxidized), White tea (which is actually made from tea buds), Green tea (tea with minimum amount of oxidation) and Oolong tea (halfway between black and green). My erstwhile favorite "Earl Grey" got categorized under "blended tea" as this is basically a mix of black tea and Bergamot oil. Then comes the finer classification of "First Flush" (tea plucked between February and April) and "Second Flush" (tea plucked in Autumn). And last but not the least - we were introduced to a tea which is not the Darjeeling long leaf or the Assam CTC but the Kangra Valley tea - superb in its flavour and taste and poses a serious threat to the Darjeeling long leaf tea.

Anamika made us taste three of her blends. The first was a blend of first flush tea with lavender and lemon grass. The second was green tea with chamomile and rose hip. The third was again a green tea with Rhododendron and Himalayan Tulsi. I personally found the first one to be very "rich" while the second one to be incredibly refreshing and "lively" (if I may use this word to describe a tea). All three had the beautiful golden glow and a tinge of floral scent which blended beautifully with the tea. The process of tasting was quite similar to wine tasting in France - with teas being served in shot glasses and viewed & smelt before actually sipping it.

We were also taught how to make good tea. This involves boiling the water to 98 deg C (in layman's terms, this means stop boiling the water the moment the smoke starts coming out), putting tea leaves in the tea pot first and then pouring water on it (yes - the age old debate of "water-over-tea-leaves" or "tea-leaves-added-to-boiling-water" has finally been resolved), covering it with a tea-cozy , allowing it to infuse for 4 minutes and then strain and serve. We were warned that this 98 deg C also varies between different varieties of tea. And the extremely popular tea-maker's measurement thumb rule (one teaspoon per head and one for the pot) was thrown out of the window. As per Anamika, the number of spoons of tea is approximately half the number of cups or could be equal to the number of cups (again depending on the type of tea).

In the course of her talk, Anamika was also passing around samples of her tea on nice flat open containers so that we get to see and smell the teas. She also dissected a solitary defenseless teabag and revealed it's innermost secrets - an act which reminded me of my messy biology practical days. We all took a solemn pledge never to touch a tea bag in our lives - a promise, I suspect, only few of us have been able to keep.

The event ended with the usual round of applause for the anchor and an unusual assortment of extremely sumptuous lot of food brought in by the participants. One has to acknowledge - there are certain distinct advantages of having hardcore foodies as participants !

Bruschetta : Shamim Chaudhury

Photo - courtesy Kajal Pradhan Lamba

Water melon salad : Shamim Chaudhury

Photo : courtesy Kajal Pradhan Lamba

PS : We had also ordered for some blends as well as first flush on Anamika which we got last night - nicely packaged with "operating instructions" attached to the packets. One cup of this champagne of tea gave me enough inspiration to get off by back and finish this blog. Cheerio!

Some more references to Anandini Himalaya Tea :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8vnH2X1-FE

Kolkata Biriyani : Drool till you die

2012-05-18T19:58:00.000+05:30

If there is a single word that invariably causes a tsunami of saliva within my mouth, this would have to be "Biriyani". Irrespective of the time of the day, condition of my stomach or my general state of existance, a mere mention of Biriyani is enough to make me react like Pavlovian dog.
Before I proceed further, let me clarify one important point. For me, Biriyani means the one and only Kolkata Biriyani. I also like the Lukhnow style (Awadhi style) biriyani but the Kolkata Biriyani remains, in my mind, the real and only single malt among the Biriyanis. Wikipedia may list some 23 types of Biriyani but for me, barring Kolkata and Awadhi, rest might as well not exist.
I have to admit that many zealous friends have tried to convince me to try out other forms of Biriyanis - the Mumbai biriyani for example. I am eternally grateful to these well meaning friends; without them I would have never realised how infinitely superior the Kolkata Biriyani is.
Take, for example, the Lucky's Biriyani at Bandra. This is, arguably, the single most hideous stuff I have ever consumed in my life. It is best described as a kind of spice rice with spicy mutton curry mixed in a non-homogeneous mixture which raises the inner surface temperature of our oesophagus to Farenheit 451 or higher. Lucky's probably derives it's name from the popular saying "You gotta be lucky to survive Lucky's".
I was also lured into trying my luck at the Noor Ali near Hazi Ali (who claims to serve the authentic "Pakistani" Biriyani), an experiment which has permanently damaged a few of my taste buds and some cells of my large intestine. Noor Ali Biriyani also has a delayed action. It makes sure that you remember them the next day morning as well. The only good thing about this place is that it is very close to Hazi Ali which means you can probably say your last prayers in one of the Sufi Durgahs and also have some excellent fruit juice .
Even the much acclaimed Moti Mahal as well as Delhi Durbar (Colaba) Biriyanis were strictly "just passable" stuff. The Delhi Durbar Biriyani comes closest to the Kolkata Biriyani as it smells like the Kolkata Biriyani and is probably okay if you only intend to smell your food. Unfortunately, and that's about the beginning and end of it. Compared to this, the names of those wonderful joints of Kolkata - Shiraz, Amminia, Rehmania, Zishaan....aah - one feels sated just by uttering these names.

As far as I can recollect, my love affair with Biriyani started at Aminia. They used to sell something called "Aminia Special" those days - which was a slightly larger portion of Biriyani with some fancy garnishing including a boiled egg. One could smell the aroma of their Biriyani even from the opposite side of the road and you required a certain dexterity of limbs and fixity of purpose to enter this ever crowded joint. And every meal must conclude with their famous phirnee - which will be so well set that you could turn the container upside-down and watch the stuff defying Newton!
Aminia was soon dislodged from it's throne by Shiraz and Rahmania and they jointly held this spot for many years. Both had their die-hard followers (almost like the East Bengal / Mohun Bagan rivalry) and no objective conclusion was ever reached by anyone about which is superior. The popular verdict was - if one wants to eat at the restaurant, Shiraz is better while for takeaway, Rehmania would score higher. Some also used to argue that the side dishes at Shiraz are much better in comparison to Rehmania, a statement I tend to agree with. Shiraz had (and probably still has) a boneless mutton preparation called "Pasinda" which is to die for. In between, another shop came up in the same area (in fact bang opposite of Shiraz) called Tandoor Mahal which also was making excellent Biriyani. Grapevine had it that Tandoor Mahal's owner was the son-in-law of the owner of Shiraz and therefore many used to consider it to be an extension of Shiraz and not really a separate restaurant. I believe that this has now been taken over by Shiraz and is called the "Shiraz Golden Restaurant".

Parallel to these "mainstream" Kolkata Biriyani's, we had some "doosra"s which were equally enjoyable. Ambar, with it's "Nargisi Biriyani" immediately comes to the mind. This mouthwatering Biriyani had tiny bits of chicken or mutton balls mixed into the rice. As a restaurant, this was also much more sophisticated and classy compared to Shiraz / Rehmania and also more expensive. They also had a takeaway counter called "Sagar" which used to serve conventional Biriyani. Sagar was also one of the firsts to start serving Biriyani in Bengali weddings, thereby destroying the traditional Bengali marriage dinner menu forever!
Last time when I was in Kolkata, I tried the latest "flavour of the season" restaurant - Arsalan. This has got (as far as I know) two joints - one located off Free School Street and the other at Park Circus. I was forced to acknowledge that Arsalan is at least as good, if not better than Shiraz. There is also a new chain of take-away Biriyani joint called Alibaba who have also started serving "Biriyani made with Saffola" for the health conscious (bloody hell!!).
Legend has it that Biriyani, though originally an Iranian cuisine, had evolved to its present form under Noor Jahan, who prescribed this food for her soldiers. Whether this is historically correct is not known but the development of Kolkata Biriyani from the Awadhi Biriyani is a well established historic fact. It seems that when our "Satranj ki Khilari" nawab of Awadh (Lukhnow) was deposed by the British and send to Kolkata, he brought this delightful dish with him. In exile, the impoverished Nawab Wajid Ali Shah could not afford enough meat for the copious quantity of Biriyani that was cooked for his entourage, boiled potatos were added in the Biriyani as substitute for meat - something which has become the signature line of Kolkata Biriyani.
The Awadhi Biriyani that I have tried in Bangalore as well as in Delhi/Gurgaon are excellent - The Nawab's at Super Mart I, Gurgaon being one of my favourites. It is a small unimpressive looking shop which regularly dishes out extremely impressive dishes including Biriyani. I also tried out the Biriyani at Kareem's near the Jama Masjid and was extremely disappointed by it. It was had a very confusing taste and did not confirm to any particular genre. I am yet to try out the stuff in Delhi proper - particularly at CR Park, where, I am certain, there must be restaurants selling the Kolkata Biriyani.
I am also not a great fan of Hyderabadi Biriyani. I had tasted it at "Paradise" in Hyderabad, which is supposed to be the most authentic Hyderabadi Biriyani joint. Though I thoroughly enjoyed it but would certainly not rank it at par with the Kolkata Biriyanis. It also is usually spicier that the Awadhi / Kolkata Biriyani which also tends to be a discouraging factor for me.
I got to put a full stop now as I have some doubts as to whether my laptop is designed to be drooled upon to this extent. Time to say "enough is enough", order out Mutton Biriyani with Chaap-i-Akbar and pour a stiff one while I wait. Cheers!

Books I read in 2011

2012-04-21T23:20:00.001+05:30

The timing of this review is somewhat like Microsoft - who launched Windows 95 in November 2005 and Ms Office 2007 in Jan 2008. I am now in the esteemed company of Bill as I am writing about the books I read in 2011 when we are four months into 2012. Despite this resemblance in timing, there exists some economic disparity between me and Bill - which, is grossly unfair. But then, I always suspected that life is not really fair.

This time I decided to write about the books I read last year. Though I don't have the qualifications to write such reviews (except being an avid and indiscriminate reader), but like every self-respecting "intellectual' bong, I have an opinion on everything, books included. So why should books (or rather the authors) be left alone? Only an engineer's prudence has made me write about these books from a purely personal perspective - about what I liked (or disliked) about these books. This allows enough leeway to wriggle out of situations lest someone accuses me of not being "intellectual" or "knowledgeable" enough. So, here's a list of the significant books that I read last year, in a random order.

1) Immortals of Meluha : Amish

I came across this book by a chance encounter. I was at Kolkata on my birthday last year for a business meeting and Sujata, my school friend, dragged me to her home to have breakfast with her. She didn't have time to buy a gift for me and handed me this book which she had originally bought for her. I finished the book in or around 48 hrs - stopping occasionally only to push a few stuffs down the oesophagus or to catch a few winks. Rest of the time, I was glued to the book.

Amish has started with a presumption that the present day "Gods" were, in fact, humans with extra-ordinary talent and with the passage of time, people had elevated them to "god-hood". The book is set vaguely in the times of Indus Valley civilization (which Amish calls as Meluha) and the central character is pot-smoking devil-may-care hero called Shiva. Shiva has still not got elevated to "god-hood" and is a mortal of immense mental and physical strength and a simplistic clarity of vision. All the mythological characters like Sati, Daksha, Brihaspati etc are interwoven exceedingly well into the plot.

What I loved about the book is the smartness with which Amish has been able to handle the contradictions in our mythology. For example, our mythologies often talk about "Amrita", the nectar of immortality, which came during Samudra-Manthan using Mandar Parbat. "Amrita" is replaced here with "Somras" (also referred in our mythologies as an alcoholic drink) which is "manufactured" in a factory at Mandar Parbat. Even better is how Amish establishes Meluha as the Kingdom founded by Ram (and hence "Ram Rajya") and is therefore the ideal Kingdom. The contradiction of Sati (who is the daughter of King Daksha) and Parvati (daughter of the mountains or Parvat) both being Shiva's wives in two different births has also been handled with aplomb (by naming the Army Chief of King Daksha as "Parvateshwar" and making him the godfather of Sati).

The only short-coming of this book is the language. Amish does not seem to have the command of language to sustain the drama in the book. Occasionally his expressions seem pedestrian and dilutes the plot / situation. Had Amish been able to handle this, the book have been extra-ordinary.

A word of caution : this is a work of fiction - not an interpretation or explanation of Indian mythological history. Hence all the scenarios set by Amish are not necessarily historical facts or interpretations accepted by historians. It's a good read that tickles the brain and makes you wonder whether this could have been the case. Leave it at that - and you will enjoy the book immensely.

Rating 4.5/5

2) Secret of the Nagas : Amish

I bought this book from the Reliance book store on the first day of this book launch. This is the sequel to the "Immortals of Meluha" and takes off exactly where the first one had stopped. The thrill of the first novel has been well retained in the second book.

Amish handles another contradiction quite well - of Kali as well as Parvati both being wives of Shiva. Also he has introduced Ganesh and Kartik into this novel and the entire plot has been woven so well that everything falls into their rightful place. I loved the Parashuram in this novel as well as the journey through Dandakaranya into the Naga capital. In fact, the concept of "Nagas" being the clan of deformed humans shunned by the society who have created their own kingdom is itself praise-worthy. And the twist at the end was also well handled.

One waits eagerly for the third and concluding part of the trilogy - "The Oath of the Vayuputras". Hope it comes out soon.

Rating : 4/5

3) The Corridor : A graphic novel by Sarnath Banerjee

This is my first encounter with a graphic novel - thanks to my friend Durba, who decided to give me this "non-occasion" gift while we were rummaging through books at Arobindo Market bookshop. A refreshing concept that worked exceedingly well with the present storyline. The plot (or whatever you can describe as plot) is actually an attempt to depict the fragmented and detached urban generation through a series of bizarre incidents. The book is full of tongue-n-cheek humour, which, by virtue of the format of the book, makes it crisp and compact.
The focal point of the novel is one Mr. Jehangir Rangoonwala - a second hand book seller by profession whose bookshop creates the entry point of colourful collage of people we meet in the book. We come across Profession DVD Murty, HOD of Forensic at Saftarjung Hostipal and an avid poetry reader, who, after being completely stoned in the middle of CP, makes the supreme pronouncement about the Universal death rate "One death per person". Or Digital Dutta, the Marxist IT professional, who lives in his head - where he has played guitar with Django Reinhard, solved equations for Heisenberg and has even been the mixed doubles partner of Chris Evert Lloyds. There is love affair of the narrator and Kali, (with prophetic realisations like "Women are not goddesses or bitches; often they are both" or Shintu's escapades in Daryagunj to sort out his sex life (with Sande Ka Tel - a pale yellow extract from the bile of rare lizards; available for only Rs 1000/- - cash or Visa). Or the story of .....err - no more. Go get the book - and read it!!
Rating : 4/5

4) Raiders from the North : Alex Rutherford

A historic thriller based on the life of Babur and is the first part of the "Empire of the Moghul" quintet. This was recommended by my friend Amit and usually his recommendations are at least worth a read. This book reconfirmed my faith in his judgement.
This book is a lovely interplay of drama and history written in lucid English. The book also covers Babur's life before he came to India - the initial years at Farghana and Samarkhand, his struggle and repeated defeats and finally his evolution into a man. All of a sudden, Babur becomes something more than a cut-out hero from my old history book; he is now a flesh-and-blood person I can relate to. Also significant is the depiction of the politics and life in those days especially in the Moghul courtyard.
A trivia : Alex Rutherford is the pen name of a husband-wife team of Diana and Michael Preston. This is the first time I encountered one pen name being used by two persons (unless you count those Ellery Queen novels where multiple authors seem to have written books under the same name).
Overall judgement : A must read for all those who are fond of Historic Novels.
Rating : 4/5

5) Brothers in Arms : Alex Rutherford

This is the second part of the Empire of the Moghul series and is reasonably well written. After the fiery page-turner lifespan of Babur, Humayun's age is more of the internal struggles of Humayun. Humayun's attraction towards opium, his "astronomical carpet" with planets and stars drawn on them and his eternal naiveness creates an interesting character. Unfortunately after the blood and iron Babur, Humayun is a weakling who fails to keep your attention for long. He is definitely the least interesting character amongst the Great Moghuls fumbled through his life before stumbling down the staircase to an inglorious end.
Read it if you are a die hard fan of historical novels or you are passionate about the Moghul history.
Rating : 3/5

6) The Interpretation of Murder : Jed Rubenfeld

This is one of the best thrillers I have read in a long long time. It is set in 1909 when Sigmund Freud visited New York along with Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi. A girl is murdered in New York and there is an attempt to murder a second girl who miraculously escapes. The second girl, however suffers from trauma which has led to a loss of memory. Sigmund Freud is invited to examine this case and he passes it on to one of his american disciples (Dr Younger). Dr Younger starts investigating the case using Freud's psycho-analysis techniques. This is thus a crime thriller based on the Freudian theories and their application. Brilliantly conceived, lovely language and intricate plot - this is as good as it gets in terms of a thriller.

Rating : 5/5

7) Come, tell me how you live : Agatha Christie

My wife almost force-fed this book to me and I am eternally grateful for that. Seldom have I read a more cheerful and bright book. The book is full of sunshine and brightness and a general feeling of warmth and joy - the kind you feel when you enter a bakery and smell the freshly baked cakes!
This is a travelogue cum auto-biography of Agatha Christie. She had joined her husband Max Mallowan in a number of archaeological expeditions in Syria and Iraq and this is a chronicle of these travels. It is full of funny anecdotes written in perfect British English. The stiff-upper-lip brand of humour reminds you of Wodehouse and from time to time, you feel like closing the book and laughing to yourself.
Like the first night at Amunda :
"No sooner have the lamps been extinguished than mice in their scores - I really believe in their hundreds - emerge from the holes in the walls and the floor. They run gaily over our beds, squeaking as they run. Mice across one's face, mice tweaking your hair, mice! mice! mice! I switch on a torch. Horrible! The walls are covered with strange pale crawling cockroach like creatures. A mouse is sitting on the foot of my bed attending to his whiskers!
Max utters soothing words.
Just go to sleep, he says. Once you are asleep, none of these things will worry you.
Excellent advise,but not easy to act upon! One has first to get to sleep, and with mice taking healthy exercise and having their field sports all over you, that is hardly possible. Or it is not possible for me. Max seems able to do it all right!"
The episode ended with the narrator threatening to leave by the next available train and eventually sleeping out under the clear sky.
This is the kind of book which you would like to keep in your bookshelf to cheer you up on depressed days - a thoroughly "feel-good" book.

Rating : 5/5

8) Snowman : Jo Nesbo

I picked up this book from my favourite bookshop "Quills and Canvas" in the Galleria Market. I had entered this shop at the end of a gruelling week in a brain-dead state and asked the shop-owner for a decent thriller - a nice whudunit or a body-at-the-end-of-every-second-page type. She recommended this and I must say I enjoyed it thoroughly.
It is a thriller by the Norwegian Author Jo Nesbo featuring his unorthodox, alcoholic "loose cannon" cop hero Harry Hole. This is, in fact, a part of the Harry Hole series but there is little reference to the other books and therefore each book can be read as a stand alone novel.
The book starts with a dramatic start where, on a typical November night in Oslo, a young boy wakes up to find his mother missing. As he starts searching for her, he discovers wet footprints on the stairs which lead down to the garden. In the garden, amidst the fresh snow, is a snowman with his mother's pink scarf around his neck. It soon becomes the chase for a serial murderer who strikes when the snow falls and his signature is a snowman.
On the whole, it's a good thriller for people who enjoy this genre of literature.
Rating : 4/5
PS : Jo Nesbo is now being promoted as Steig Larson's Norwegian equivalent. Nesbo is good but let's not get carried away - Steig Larson is a class apart!!

9) An Autobiography : Agatha Christie

This was also my wife's recommendation, though this time she didn't have to push it much. After reading "Come, tell me, how you live", I was more than eager to read this one. This is written in the same vein as "Come, tell me, how you live" and is also quite enjoyable. This is, perhaps, not as cheerful as the previous one but gives a nice look into the early 20th century England.
It is full of anecdotes which are described in a charming voice. One almost feels like having a chat with an elderly witty old relative (I suppose she was elderly and doubtlessly witty when she wrote this book) while reading the book. It is a book to be savoured - to be read slowly, smiling through the experience and feeling very contended at the end of it.
For example her description of introduction of mixed bathing :
"The first thing mixed bathing entailed was wearing far more clothing than before. Even French ladies had always bathed in stockings, so that no sinful bare legs could be observed. I have no doubt that, with natural french chic, they managed to cover themselves from their necks to their wrists, and with lovely thin stockings outlining their beautiful legs, looked far more sinfully alluring than if they had worn a good old short-skirted British bathing dress of frilled alpaca."
The book is full of many charming descriptions like this and is definitely a must read for people who love the language.
Rating : 4.5/5

10) I'd tell you that I love you, but then I'd have to kill you :

This is a young adult book (YA book to generation Y) which I wanted to read ever since I read the review. I found the name intriguing and the fact that it rates among top ten YA books of past 5 years aroused my curiosity. Finally I gifted the book to my friend's teenage daughter - but not before quickly reading the same.
It is a book by Ally Carter and is a part of the Gallagher Girls series. The protagonist is a 15 year old girl (Cammie) who stays in a board school - but wait - it's not an ordinary boarding school, it's a boarding school for spies. Thus their coursework is about gadgets and covert operations and learning 14 languages et al - a kind of "Spy' equivalent of Harry Potter. The girl then falls in love with a town boy, to whom she cannot reveal her actual identity (and hence the funny title of the book).
Overall it's a fun novel though it occasionally gets too "girly" for my comfort (I was flummoxed when they were disputing about lip-gloss vs lipstick as I was clueless about their relative merits and demerits). Nevertheless, as a YA book, it is certainly recommended.
Rating : 3.5/5

11) The curious incident of the dog in the night time : Mark Haddon

I was persuaded very strongly by my friend Durba to buy this book. Later I came to know that it is, in fact, a rather well known book that had got the best Commonwealth Writer's award as well as the Whitbread book of the year.
The book is written as a first person narrative of a 15 year old child who is an autistic child (probably suffering from Asperger Syndrome). The child is also a mathematical genius who decides to become an amateur crime investigator who investigates the murder of his neighbour's dog. Soon the investigation sky-rockets into something completely different.
The book is extremely stylishly written with a narrative style that an autistic child would probably use. The chapter numbers are also not in sequence but as per the prime numbers as a mathematics-obsessed autistic child would probably do. It is not a particularly easy book to read but certainly worth the effort.
Rating : 4/5

12) The Avenger

This is an out-and-out Forsyth novel with all the usual characteristics : a relatively slow build-up, exceptional plot, superb suspense and a twist in the tail. Added to it, the Forsyth's adherence to details and background makes it a fascinating read.
The protagonist is Cal Dexter a.k.a Avenger, an ex-vietnam soldier who has an alternative side to his declared profession of a lawyer. He is one who brings justice to people who are untouchable due to diplomatic connections or political power. In this novel, he hunts down a war criminal of the Bosnian war through a maze of espionage, terrorism and counter-terrorism in a banana republic. Added to it is Dexter's clash with Paul Devereux, the number 2 in CIA who is determined to stop Dexter from killing the war criminal for reasons of his own.
Rating : 4/5

I had read some more but are probably not worth mentioning. One also has to keep in mind that any further additions would probably push publishing this blog by another 2 months so better to publish it as it is!!

The curious case of the wet towel on the bed during the morning hours

2012-02-18T11:00:00.000+05:30

My cousin had put a post on her facebook status on Valentine's day :

" Another morning, hot coffee, morning squabbles, breakfast, another wet towel on the bed, a hug, a goodbye at the door...life is beautiful, Valentine's Day or not."

Undoubtedly a nice FB status. This, however, triggered a completely different stream of thought in me about something else - namely - Wet towel on the bed.

It seems that guys all over the world, after having their bath, tend to leave their wet towels on the bed instead of putting it in the bathroom or in the balcony. There is no exact statistics available to determine the exact percentage of men who do this as well as the frequency of occurrence.

Why do guys (me included) keep wet towels on the bed? I am convinced that some wannabe psychoanalyst will soon come up with a theory which links this to the freudian slip or a complicated interplay of id, ego and super-ego which causes this subconscious-driven dumping of wet towel on the bed. The psycho-analyst would probably also claim that the wet bed remind men of their bed-wetting days and thereby signifies their eternal craving for childhood days. May be the really creative ones might extend the logic to say that the wives of these men (for ease of reference, we shall henceforth refer them as "Men with a Wet Towel" or MWT) scold them so much that this also reminds them of their boyhood days. The possibilities are infinite.

Sadly, I lack such grandiose of vision to come up with such elaborate working of subconscious. I only try to analyse the problem with an engineer's perspective.

I believe that houses are primarily build for the purpose of staying and by extension, keeping stuffs, home decor etc etc (those two etceteras, if uncontrolled, has the potential to burn a very substantial hole in your pocket). People have not really done a thorough "time-and-motion" study to evaluate how people will move within the house and in what sequence would he or she need the equipment required to perform the task in hand. Also there has not been any tolerance built into the system to account for the difference between the brain functioning of men and women (men use one hemisphere while women use both; men think in sequence and are activity oriented while women are better at multi-tasking and overall picture et al). This case of the omnipresent wet towel is an example of this.

Let's try to plot the whole sequence of how the wet towel gets dumped on the bed :

1) The guy (standard urban male specimen)comes out of the bathroom. He is scantily attired and scrubbing his hair vigorously. (Girls - stop drooling please. This is a normal bloke with an "A-cut figure", drooping shoulders and an enormous pot-belly - not an holographic image of George Clooney).

2) After he has thoroughly dried his hair by vigorously rubbing it with his towel, he looks for a place to dump the towel. The immediate options are

2.1 : Go back into the bathroom wearing slippers and make the bathroom floor dirty

2.2 : Go back into the bathroom without wearing slippers and then leave wet foot-prints all over the bedroom

Options 2.1 or 2.2 are both likely to cause some more-than-usual commotion in the house with several "why can't you"s and "How can you"s hurled at him like Kalashnikov bullets. One also has to keep in mind that since the aforementioned male specimen has rubbed his head vigorously and thereby somewhat dis-oriented. Under this dishevelled and dis-oriented situation, this otherwise diplomatic urban man may utter a few words which are not the most judicious ones to utter to his counterpart. Needless to mention, this would increase the chaos and the general decibel level in the atmosphere. And when the aforementioned gentleman has, somehow, managed to get ready for office and is leaving home, he might meet his friendly neighbour who decides to give him a benign smile and sympathetic "tschk, tschk". The neighbour would then be vastly surprised when this usually peaceful guy decides to hit him on the head with his laptop bag.

2.3 : Go to the balcony and put it on the wire-rope-frame thingy one uses to hang the clothes. This also is not as simple as it looks as these thingy's are usually full of clothes with different degrees of dampness arranged to form a complex collage which Jackson Pollock would have appreciated.

One can't think too long also over here due to

2.3.1 : Possible complain from the neighbour about indecent exposure and generally polluting the landscape by being an eye-sore (refer point 1 above; the guy is not a George Clooney / Brad Pitt / Bruce Willis lookalike).

2.3.2 : The early morning winds in Delhi are like the in-swingers Imran Khan used to deliver in the eighties - smooth like the movement of a knife through butter and designed to cause maximum damage.

[Note : 2.3.2 is applicable only in some selected areas of Northern India and in some selective months]

2.4 : Lump it into the laundry bag. This which will cause the bag and its contents to develop a strangely powerful smell like the corsican cheese - guaranteed to knock the living daylights out of anyone who opens this bag

2.5 : Hang it on the back of a chair. This is a good alternative excepting that all chair backs are usually occupied by a jacket / trouser / jeans / pyjama / some other piece of men's clothing which could not find its way to the wardrobe.

Hence the wet towel finding its way to the bed is an act of a guy who has run out of alternatives. One would expect that the entire household would be sympathetic to the situation and not blame the MWT. Statistics shows that this is seldom the case and the MWTs are usually met with a cold stare rather than a friendly smile.

All this can be avoided by designing the house properly. The possibilities are mind boggling like

a) Having a monorail from the bedroom to the bathroom where one can hang the towel. And then shift it to the bathroom by the same contraption. One can make it techno-tacky by putting a humidity sensor which senses when the towel is dry and then shifts it to the bathroom.

b) Provide a two way duct with a motorized damper to selectively push back some hot air into the room. The inlet duct can be designed in such a way that the frame acts like a towel rack.

c) A withdraw-able bar behind the fridge which slides out to take the towel and then slides in to rest it on the heat exchanger coils.

"If you plan not to go to the office, I recommend that you get dressed and sit somewhere instead of dreaming of god-knows-what-or-whom wearing the towel !!" My reverie / deep thought process was broken by this rude rubbing from reality. The possibility of a Smart home which will forever rescue the MWT from perpetual gloom disappeared into the horizon like the morning fog.

Life goes on....and that is life!!

A Complete Washout : Washing Machine reloaded!!

2012-01-22T11:20:00.001+05:30

People who had read my previous post are aware of the sinister story of my whining washing machine (Siemens WM-10-16).

After 3 weeks of eager wait and several phone calls, the Siemens service engineer arrived at our house. But wait - we have to start from the beginning i.e the service centre.

I called up the Siemens service centre diligently. With three weeks practice, I had become rather proficient in doing this. For the uninformed, this is more complicated than it sounds.

The call centre has two numbers, both are almost always busy. The trick is to continuously keep dialling them - something like an advanced version of "Fastest Finger First". So I store one number on my mobile and the other on my land line and keep on dialling them simultaneously with my both hands. On the 16th or 17th attempt, I usually succeed.

This time, on the 15th ring, a bored-voiced lady with a typical Delhi-ite English picked up and informed me that my earlier service call number 5936 has been "upgraded" to 6016 and henceforth I should refer only to this service call. That sounded bizarre - I always thought the software companies usually do such things. Nevertheless, I prodded on and wanted to know about the "actual" status of this service call. To this, I was told that the famous gasket (which has to be imported from Germany after placing a call request on Bangalore and a purchase order on Mumbai) - the root cause which has made the machine inoperative for past three weeks, has finally arrived and has been handed over to the service engineer. The lady also told me that the name of the service engineer is Mr. Harit and I should make a note of this. On requesting for the service engineer's phone number, I was told that it is against the service policy of Siemens to give the mobile number of the service engineer. On asking as to when Mr. Harit would arrive, I was told that this is left to the discretion of the concerned engineer and the service centre has no control over this. At this point, I asked rather pointedly about what do they expect me to do with the name of the service engineer. I gave several suggestions like chanting his name in front of the idols that my wife worships everyday or recite his name in a sing song manner to my daughter as she falls asleep but the lady at the other end of the phone could not give a satisfactory reply. She merely murmured that she thought that his name would gladden my heart. I thanked her profusely for this supreme service and kept down the phone.

Then the man came. It was a cold afternoon and there was a thin layer of fog still lingering in the Gurgaon atmosphere. His arrival, nevertheless, was like a bright sunshine in our flat and the smile my wife gave to him was probably the same on or at least from the same series which she used during our first year of marriage. This happy moment was short lived as Mr. Harit, upon seeing the machine was taken aback and he immediately called up the service centre and started conferring with someone senior in a secretive hushed tone. After several minutes of muffled discussion, Mr. Harit informed us that the problem, in fact is far more severe than merely a gasket. It definitely involves changing the drum but would probably need a step-by-step root cause analysis, which, unfortunately, has not been done. He, therefore reinstalled the machine without fixing the gasket and urged us to continue running the machine before it completely breaks down. At this point, Mr. Harit will arrive again and make a detailed analysis and order out the necessary parts.

One has to grant the consistency of a German machine. Barely had Mr. Harit left our house, the machine started misbehaving. On the first day, it did the job but with a noise which would have shamed a turbo-charged jet engine. On the second day, it refused to spin and dry the clothes but chose to entertain us with a tap-dance and move away from its original position. On the third day, it simply refused to wash and thereby resumed to its state of complete inoperativeness.

Again a round of rapid-fire speed dial and bingo - on the 21st attempt, I was through. The summary of my desultory conversation with the same Delhi-ite lassie can be summarised as below:

1. The drum is damaged and needs replacement.

2. This would cost 9k + taxes + service charge

3. The official delivery time is 3 weeks. This has to be calibrated with reality as the official delivery period of a gasket is 10 days but it took 3 weeks to deliver.

4. This will not ensure that the machine is restored to its former glory as the "root-cause analysis" is yet to be done.

Thus the last of my ties with Siemens will disappear tomorrow. It took us 15 minutes to decide on buying a new machine, 15 minutes to check the net, 1 hour to drive down to the nearest shop and buy a new machine. This time, the specification was simple

a) the machine should be movable

b) the service centre and engineers should be accessible

c) the engineer who comes to install it should not talk about centrifugal forces and cosine component of the gravitational force that it exerts on our floor.

There were several ones which fitted the bill and we picked up the one we felt was least intimidating.

Let's hope this one will not be a complete washout like the last one!

Life, Washing Machine and other tragedies

2011-12-29T17:08:00.003+05:30

Forgive me folks if I tend to rave and rant more than usual in this post. A cataclysmic calamity of gargantuan proportion has descended on the Dey household. As the year comes to a close, a deep darkness engulfs us and threatens to disrupt our otherwise nonchalant lifestyle in the most irreparable manner. We are shells of our former selves, walking in a state of philosophical detachment from life itself. Our washing machine is down since past 12 days!!!

Readers who are less adept at grasping the intricacies of life may say "So What?" or "Tschk, tschk" or something equally banal. These are the blokes who are either unmarried or are possibly brain-dead from being battered during the early days of marital life into a vegetative lifeform. Nevertheless, I will try to explain the enormity of the damage in excruciating details so that it is clear even to these guys.

This washing machine, which is one of the pillars on which our delicately balanced marital life rests, is one of those fully automatic front loading stuffs from Siemens. We had bought this when I was still working in Siemens and this "loyalty towards the hand that feeds our household" stuff led to an impressive miscalculation on my part. The fact that this machine came with a three speed selection option (an option, which, ever since we bought the stuff, has never been used by us) also appealed to my technology driven inner self and therefore we displaying an abundance of nerve and blatant disregard for logic, chose to buy this machine.

We should have realized what we are in for when the installation guy had come to install this machine. This guy spent a good one hour trying to align the machine exactly 90 degree with the floor. Not his fault of course, as the builder of our house, sadly, was not aware of the exacting standards demanded by the Siemens A10-16 and had, left some waviness on the floor, a slant towards one side (possible with the mundane reason that water should flow along the slope into the drain) and had used ceramic tiles, whose co-efficient of friction was not what the doctor (read Siemens) had ordered for. At some point of this installation process, it wasfurther revealed that the entire house is not "exactly" perpendicular to the ground but at an angle of 89.95 degree. The last revelation was a crushing blow to the delicate sensibility of the poor fellow and only our strong motivation to have the machine installed forced him to actually install it. The fellow did it but one could see that his heart was not into it. He spoke rather brokenly about how the centrifugal force of the rotating drum of the machine will clash with the cosine component of the gravitational force of earth and how this will permanently traumatize the emotional balance of the machine. While leaving, this broken man implored us not to move the machine, in fact, preferably not to touch it at all, as A10-16 is known to be as prudish about unwanted touches as a village nun of the Catholic church might be.

After moving to Gurgaon, the Siemens guy who had come to re-install the machine was not a supreme perfectionist like his predecessor. His idea of aligning was completely devoid of any tools whatsoever and based on "eye-judgement". Probably this mistreatment caused our otherwise quiet A10-16 to become vocal and demand attention of the service personnel quite often. And in the last of these visits, the service engineer informed us that the gasket of the machine has failed, rendering it to an unusable state.

Before you, my dear reader, come up with the above mentioned banality of "So what?" once again, let me inform you that the state-of-the-art gasket of the piece-of-art machine in question is manufactured in Germany. And for some incredibly complex logistics issue far beyond the mental ability of mere mortals like us, the Delhi service centre has to place an order on Siemens Service centre in Mumbai, who, in turn, has to place an order on Germany. To make matters worse, Siemens has formed some kind of a JV/Collaboration with Bosch and as a result of this, the Bangalore office also has to be "somehow" involved. And all this happening on 20th of December means that one can forget about this machine for next 3 weeks as any self-respecting German company does not work from 22nd December till 7th of January, officially or otherwise.

This realization, of course, meant that this is an SOS situation. An immediate spot-check with the house maid as well as other maids in the society revealed that they have all but forgotten this skill set. Almost all Gurgaon household have a washing machine and to find a maid in Gurgaon who still washes clothes would probably socially ostracize the said household as well as the maid.
The next logical step was to look for a dhobi. One would have thought that after movies like Dhobi Ghat, these people would have gained a certain respectability and would be easily visible. On the contrary, this species also seemed to have disappeared from Gurgaon. I looked for laundry shops all around the place, only to discover that all these blokes have re-invented themselves into "dry-cleaners" and washed off their hands from the wet business. The people who press clothes (what are they called? Not Iron Man - I hope!!) also are specialized fellows and as one of them told me "Hum to sirf saaf kapde pe hi kaam karte hyay" (I only work on clean clothes). Finally one of them surreptitiously advised me to quietly pay a visit to the local market and look for shops which has two water tanks on top and a constant flow of water through their drains!!
Next morning found me roaming the recesses of the local Wazirabad market - looking for buildings with double tank on top and whitish soapy water gushing out of the nearby drain. This search led me to a small shop on the second floor, accessible only by a steep rung ladder. As I reached the second floor, I found a relatively large room with constantly flowing soap water, a huge dump of clothes on the floor and two young guys holding hands and jumping on it. To facilitate this, an FM radio was kept on, which, paradoxically, was playing "tu hi meri fantasy" at that very instant. After the initial awkwardness, these friendly blokes revealed that this, indeed, is a laundry and they would be happy to wash our clothes (which, by now, is enough to fill the entire dickey of my car) except..... Except? Excepting for the fact that due to some logistics issue, they are barred from taking orders directly and I need to go to their front office, which, as fate would have it, is approximately 10 km away from this spot. I left hurriedly to reach this alleged front office - only to discover that it is another of those dry cleaners who also runs an undercover business of washing clothes the regular way.
Now we are driving down every second day to this dry (wet) cleaner with a bagful of clothes. Sentiments about my former company cannot be described as warm by any stretch of imagination and mean statements are being hurled at me for being associated with the said company for sixteen years.
Life!!

A Winter's Tale : Delhi Winters

2011-12-03T20:43:00.001+05:30

The first rays of sun had to stretch itself to pass through the thick "snowish" fog of the early hours in Delhi. After a great deal of refraction, diffusion, absorption and all that jazz, the filtered watered-down light could finally reach our balcony and illuminate the pink Petunias and Carnations. The morning breeze had a distinct edge as it took its first nick on my bristled cheek. The Kashmiri shawl, erstwhile kept as a fashion statement seemed to be an absolute necessity today. I peeped down from the balcony and noted that our rigorous bunch of health freaks (buggers whose early morning antiques cause guilt-pangs in my ever-increasing pot-belly) have all donned thick woolens, lending a very asexual snowman-like look to them.

My coffee cup had gone cold and I wondered whether this weather justifies a second cup of caffeine so early in the day, when I felt a human presence behind me. I turned around to discover the missus of the house with some additional features ; a nose like Rudolf, a voice like Rani Mukherjee and a forlorn look like Meena Kumari. The diagnosis was simple; the Delhi winters have arrived.

For the less informed ones - we don't use thermometers to detect temperature at our place. Fancy concepts like "wind chill factor" have little or no appeal to us. Instead, all three of us in the house are like thermal weather-cocks - having thermal sensitivity tuned to detect every degree C variation with an alarming accuracy.

Take my case. My nose is so famously tuned to dT/dt (for people who are less mathematically inclined - rate of change of temperature w.r.t time) that every variation of temperature causes me to get into a bout of rapid-fire sneezing. This usually is followed by the outer cuticle of the nose becoming hard and brittle while the inner recesses of the nose, remaining moist. The overall effect is somewhat like a well-made cheese omlette - well cooked from outside but slightly running in the inside. Once the temperature stabilizes, all these bouts of machine-gun firing ceases and I just have a mild headache - the intensity of which determines the ambient temperature. Simple, isn't it?

With my wife, things work rather differently. Despite having plenty of warm clothing, she refuses to wear them under the pretext of "what will I then wear when it becomes even more cold". Then her body temperature seem to follow some sort of a sharp saw-tooth waveform - suddenly becomes extremely warm and then drops down to shivering cold in a matter of minutes though the ambient temperature fluctuates in a much more regularized manner. This usually causes her to have influenza and renders her unfit for a few days. People who know her will find this strange as she is known to weather much more painful stuffs like migraine, gastritis and high fevers easily and continue working even under this situation. Influenza, apparently, attacks her like those guerrilla troops with an utter disregard to Geneva conventions and leads to a complete collapse. This seemed to be the present case.

As a dutiful husband, I made a logical recommendation : let's go to a doctor. This was met with utter contempt and complete disregard "Visit a doctor for common cold?" . Second step was to recommend some house-medications like vapour treatment which was also rejected under the clause "yesterday I tried it and see what is my state today". Instead, my wife posted her status in the facebook. And voila - a volley of suggestions landed into our doorsteps from the cyberspace. The suggestions ranged from simple ones like "wear a sock" and "take a hot compress" till more complicated ones like "use a nebulizer". We tried all of them with varied degree of results. I also added my two bits into it by making "Rum Toddy" and making my wife drink it. This seemed to temporarily ease her breathing troubles but had some serious side-effects like wanting to watch a movie called "Namaste London". People who have seen this flick will know what am talking about. For people who haven't seen it - preserve it for a cold desperate day.

It is now 10 pm. Being a Saturday night, the cars have become infrequent and the outside road quiet. The street-side dogs have also become peaceful, probably after a hectic day of barking at the cars. And my wife read out the latest Facebook suggestion : "Go see a doctor tomorrow".

We looked at each other and promptly fixed up an appointment with a doctor at 11 am tomorrow.

The famed Delhi winter has really really arrived now.

Why men should say No!

2011-11-27T18:36:00.001+05:30

This time I have chosen to write on a subject that is of social significance; an issue that I feel strongly about- namely, Gender Based Violence (GBV). For some time I have been following a Facebook group called “Let’s Talk” and their campaign which is known as “Must Bol”. This group of young Turks are doing a great job, and it was, therefore, an honour to get an invite to write on their Blogathon: Men say No!

GBV issues are multi-dimensional in nature, owing to the diverse range of causes and manifestation that tend to vary across countries, cultures, and socio- economic strata. I have tried basing this article in context of Urban Indian Middle socio-economic class – the brand ambassadors of the so-called “India Shining” group. Why do these people allow such things to happen to their women? Why are they so passive about a problem that has acquired such great proportions that one cannot feign to ignore anymore?

Why men do not say ‘No’?

In all probability, many men still think GBV to be a problem predominantly faced by women, and therefore it is “their fight which they have to fight”. At a superficial glance, one has to admit that there is a certain degree of rationale behind this thinking. Many would equate this issue of gender-based violence with other issues like gender inequality / woman’s liberation, etc – causes that are fought by women-centric organisations across the globe. So one tends to associate Gender Based Violence (GBV) also with similar problems, and prefers to leave the women to champion this cause as well. GBV and its associated problems are, however, somewhat complex and more involved. Let's take a bird's eye view to the problem

Solution type: Internal or External?

In general, any problem can be addressed either internally or externally, and the effectiveness of the two methods varies depending on two aspects: nature of the problem and the role of the adversary within the problem. In most of the sociological problems, any one of the two aforementioned aspects plays a major role, while the other one ends up playing the second fiddle. Very few problems can be solved with a mono-dimensional approach. For example, if we try to reduce drinking amongst the working class to improve their quality of life, a major thrust has to come externally in terms of campaigns, restrictions, regulations etc. This has to be supplemented by internal pressures from the family, children, peer group, friends etc. Thus, a combination of both is necessary, though the drive has to be from the external forces.

If we look at Gender discrimination at workplaces, this also has a predominantly external approach. Men have dominated the workplace scenario until now, and it will be sheer foolishness if one expects them to give away their dominant position so easily. However, things have now changed to a certain extent, and the main reason for this is the constant barrage of attacks from the women groups. Organisations have reluctantly being forced to remove regulations which bar women from joining them and later have grudgingly accepted that quite a number of women deserve to be above the “glass ceiling” – the invisible barrier which prevents women from rising beyond a certain level in an organisation.

If we put this in a simplistic step by step approach, it would look somewhat like this :

Step 1 : Organizations accepting women into responsible positions – [External : created by awareness campaigns, litigations, constitutional rights etc]

Step 2 : Women performing at par or sometimes better than their men peers – [External : as women are still not accepted completely]

Step 3 : Superiors acknowledging that Women can deliver at least as good as other men. Also accepting that having women in management can provide certain paradigm shift into management thinking [Internal]

GBV : External or Internal approach ?

In contrast to the above examples, GBV has a completely different dimension. In this case, men are committing the crimes against women actively (not just passively ignoring their rights), and quite a number of these remain unreported. There are several reasons for this lack of reporting, the major ones being:

§ Social Stigma: A woman violated by someone is often perceived a ‘loose woman’ and ‘she was asking for it’. Often this also acts like an ice-breaker in a reverse manner i.e ‘now that she has anyway been deflowered, she will probably not mind a roll in the hay’ kind of a psychology

§ Sense of shame / guilt by the offended

§ Often perpetrator of this crime is a man of social / family position – the husband, the boss, the father of a close friend

No wonder quite a number of women prefer to suffer quietly. This, in turn, emboldens the criminal even further as he realises that he can get away with this.

GBV also has a dimension that the crime being committed is atrocious. Unlike Gender discrimination in workplace, which, at its worst, is a case of being “unfair” and “discriminatory”, GBV is about invading another person’s private space and committing a hideous crime. Quite often, it is something that happens within the house – within closed doors and within the closed family. And for this reason, this battle cannot be merely an external conflict. It has to be fought internally – with the perpetrators (the men, in this case) themselves turning back and saying, “we would allow this to happen any more”.

How do we make men say no?

How do we do this internally? How do we make men say “No” so such crimes? As usual, there are no easy recipes to this. It might be worthwhile to look at some scenarios, which exist:

1) Break social sanctions: There is an “indirect” sanction amongst men about situations when such behaviours are tolerated. Typical examples are:

1.1) Army: It is a common practice that when an army invades another country, the victorious army indulges in ruthless activities, including sexual exploitation of women belonging to the vanquished party. Such practice date back into history and seems to be a well-established military practice even in the modern era. Be it the Cossacks during the First World War, the Japanese during Second World War or the Pakistani army in 1971, all have indulged in this practice rather openly. Our own Indian army is also accused of having used this “weapon” in the northeast. It, therefore, is logical to think that this kind of behaviour has a certain acceptance amongst army chiefs for it to have continued over the ages.

1.2) Community centric: There are certain communities where this is an accepted form of punishment against the “loose” woman. This communities view of somewhat similar to Constable Michael Sanguinetti (of “Slutwalk” fame)’s view point – which is, if a woman dresses like a slut, she is asking for it. Usually these societies have a strong “machismo” complex and such violence against women seem to confirm to this image.

1.3) Emotion-driven: Quite a number of people seem to sympathize with the husband / boyfriend who loves his wife / fiancée so much that he ends up hitting her or violating her – quite like a modern day Othello.

The first step could be to break these acceptance norms amongst men. This has to be done tactfully, because almost no-body will be honest enough to acknowledge existence of such a mind-set in the first place.

2) Creating consciousness amongst men is another important step, and it is important enough for them to stick out their neck when necessary.

This will be a great challenge as the urban upper-middle class is an upwardly-mobile bunch of epicurean cynics (me included) who strictly follow the golden rule called WGOMF (“What Goes Of My Father” – literal translation of “Mera baapka kya jata hai”). To shake them up into some actual action will require massive effort – something akin to the Anna Hazare movement against corruption. The parallel is interesting as the Anna Hazare movement was predominantly a movement of the urban middle class – which seems to suggest that this class of people may not be completely dead yet !!

What do we want men to do?

Very simple things! We are not looking for crusaders. I believe our women can take care of themselves without “knights-in-shining-armours” lurking in the background. We expect:

- Awareness amongst male members in the society (especially young men). This can be done through talking, mails, chats or even Facebook posts.

- be supportive to women who are experiencing such a situation. Women are often subjected to harassments in public places. In such situation, women are generally advised to speak out / protest / shout. Please join them in their protests

- instead of being a passive observer, try to call in help from whichever quarter possible.

There will, of course, be a handful who will take it up more seriously and take this up at a different level by being part of a cause or a movement through different organisations.

This Blog is part of the Men Say No Blogathon, encouraging men to take up action against the violence faced by women.

More entries to the Blogathon can be read at www.mustbol.in/blogathon. Join further conversation on facebook.com/delhiyouth & twitter.com/mustbol

Schools in Gurgaon : a review

2011-11-05T20:12:00.000+05:30

This blog is somewhat different from my usual "all style and no content" blogs. This is a result of the research I was forced to do when I changed my daughter's school. Some of the things written in this blog are experiences shared by like-minded people though most of them are impressions formed by me during my visits to various schools.
I thought of writing this down as we have a huge inflow of professionals moving into Gurgaon from various parts of the world. One of the first things they start looking for is a good school for their children. Hopefully, this blog will be of some help to them.
As per me, the schools in Gurgaon can be categorised into three categories

A) Alternative school (Also known as Progressive schools) :
These are the schools who follow a completely different methodology of teaching. Usually these schools will first stress on teaching orally and students are taught to write at a much later stage. Often these schools will not teach alphabets in their usual sequence but in context to how they are used in the children's perception. Thus they will probably teach "B" ahead of "A" as they would then try to teach the child how to spell "BALL". These schools also believe in not giving any homework and keeping a very low stress level on the children.
Typical characteristics of these schools are
1) Completely different teaching approach at the primary level. Does not follow the NCERT method at all.
2) Teaching is often project-based or experience-based instead of text book based.
3) Usually has a setup for the children with special needs (with separate teaching staffs for them).
4) Merges into regular NCERT / CBSE or ICSE format after class 8.
5) Has plenty of outdoor activities like summer camps etc

There is some debate about this form of schools. The concern points raised by many parents are

their teaching methodology is excellent for young students but not so good for older children. Hence when the students reach Class 8 and is introduced to the conventional NCERT syllabus, most of the students don't fare well.
a child finds it extremely difficult to adjust into any other main stream school (in case one needs to change the school)
unconventional way of teaching - hence finding teachers and retaining them is a challenge.

The schools in this category are

Heritage School (Sector 62) : Pioneer in this form of teaching. Uniformly acclaimed as excellent among the progressive schools. Off late, there has been some report about the standard of the school having deteriorated. Also the students seem to find it difficult to merge into the NCERT based syllabus after Class 8 and consequently, there is a trend of students leaving Heritage after Class 5.
Rating : 4/5
Board : CBSE
Shikshantar (South City I) : Excellent school in Progressive format. Seem to have a better balance between the progressive form and conventional form. Mid term admissions are not very easy.
Rating : 4.5/5
Board : CBSE
Matri Kiran (Sohna Road) : New school started last year (is now till Class 3). The principal is the former principal of Shikshantar. The secondary section will be at Hero Honda Chowk.
Rating : not known.
Board : ICSE

B) International Schools :
The name can be deceptive as most of the schools these days have added "World" or "International" as their middle name. I am classifying those schools as "International" which have the following features
1) Will follow a modern form of teaching (may not be entirely progressive but a close second to this)
2) Will not have excessive academic pressure on the child (in line with international practices). Usually these schools will have less or no homework and parents are discouraged from teaching the child separately.
3) Will have SMART class rooms for all standards and all classes
4) Will have elaborate sports facilities (usually including a few exclusive facilities like Horse Riding, Golf etc)
5) Will have external faculties / institutions coming in for added value (like British council, external Theatre workshop, elocution classes etc)
6) Usually will also have options of other boards (IGCSE, OB etc)
7) If often accused to be a bit too flashy.

The following are the schools which fall in this category

Ridge Valley International School (Near Galleria Market) : New school backed by the India Today Learn India movement. Focuses majorly on self learning / project based learning. Expensive (approx 45k per quarter)
Rating : 4/5
Board : CBSE
Lotus Valley International School (South City II) : New school (presently upto Class 8). Excellent facilities and innovative teaching methodologies. Tie up with several external institutions (British Council, Cambridge Education, Maxmuller Bhavan etc). Also has in-house councillors which is a great help for "problem" children. Already have an established school in Noida which is considered a premium school. Rating : 4/5.Board : CBSE
Pathways : New school. Good setup. Has separate section for Special Needs children. Extremely expensive (approx 70k per quarter). Predominantly focuses on Expats and NRIs (the admission form asks whether you earn in Indian Rupees or Foreign currencies!!!)
Rating : 3/5
Board : IGCSE (Cambridge)
Scottish High : One of the first true "international" school in Gurgaon. Well established and well known. They also have the best student:teacher ratio (15:1) among all the international schools. Off-late have heard a few negative remarks about this including some pretty damning stuffs on mouthshut.com. Expensive (approx 45k per quarter).
Rating : 3.5/5
Board : ICSE
Banyan Tree : Feedback on Internet is quite high. Did not check personally. Also heard that it is rather expensive.
Rating : 3.5/5 (based on Internet)
Board : ICSE
American Excelsior : Feedback on Internet is quite high. Did not check personallyRating : 3.5/5 (based on Internet)Board : IGCSE (Cambridge)
Shiv Nadar : Just started. Has classes upto Class 5. Quite expensive (approx 45k per quarter). Still trying to find firm footings for itself - especially for the higher classes.

There are a few others on which I have no feedback like

K.R.Mangalam World School
G.D.Goenka World School
Euro International
Indus World School

C) Conventional Schools

The feature of these schools are as under

1) Will follow the NCERT prescribed norms. Within this, the good schools with use techniques which are modern and more child-friendly.

2) Academic pressure will be high. It is expected that the parent will also actively teach the child from an early age.
3) Good schools may have SMART class rooms (though this is usually not common)
4) Good schools will have elaborate sports facilities (though conventional ones like football, cricket, basketball etc)

For such schools, it is recommended that one takes careful feedback from students / parents as often what they promise and what they deliver is starkly different.
Grade 1 : Ratings between 3 to 5

Sun City : Rated very high. Teaching style and staffs are extremely good. Good setup and nice balance between education and co-curriculars.
NB : Is known to ask for donations and/or part of the entry fees in cash. I have personally not experienced this but a close friend had this experience.
Rating : 4.5/5
Board : CBSE
Sri Ram International : Could not even enter the reception after trying thrice. I believe one has to admit the child in nursery itself or will have to be a celebrity to even enter the school. Usually the interview will be conducted by the school "darwaan" and you will be shooed off with a flea in the ear.
Rating : 3/5
Board : ICSE
Shallom Hills
New school. Modern style of teaching; child friendly.
NB : Even for Class 1 children, they ask for an entrance test (carefully veiled under a phrase "bench-marking") while they themselves don't have exams till Class 5.
Rating : 4/5
Board : CBSE
Delhi Public School Sector 45 : Standard good school. Academic pressure is on the higher side.
Rating : 3.5/5
Board : CBSE
Amity International Sector 43 and Sector 46 : Standard good school. Nice infrastructure (in Sector 46), large playground. The student : teacher ratio is a bit on the higher side.
NB : Even for Class 1 children, they ask for an entrance test.
Rating 3/5
Board : CBSE
Salwan Public School : Standard good school. Nice infrastructure. Uses good tools and modern methodology.
Rating 3.5/5
Board : CBSE
DAV Public School : Standard good school. Focusses mainly on academics and lacks other supports.
Rating 3/5
Board : CBSE

Grade 2 : Ratings below 3

Ryan International - Sector 40
Delhi Public School - Shushant Lok / Sector 29
Delhi Public School - Maruti Kunj / Sector 28
Summer Fields
Tagore International (now called Rabindranath World School): Excessive academic pressure. Old fashioned method of teaching. Has a reputation of hitting children regularly.
Rating : 1/5
Blue Bells

There are many more schools in category 3 on which I have no feedback. A list of some of these are

Presidium Galleria / Mother's Pride
Presidium Sector 57
Alpine Convent School
Salwan School
Manav Rachna

It would be nice to get some feedback or review on these schools.

I got plenty of help from some Internet sites which the readers may also find interesting. These are :
- http://livingingurgaon.blogspot.com
- http://www.parentree.in
- http://www.gurgaonscoop.com
And finally, there is no point in writing this blog unless we have discussions on this. I would sincerely urge all parents having school going kids to put their opinions as comments to this blog. This would certainly help the parents in Gurgaon who are in the hunt for a good school.

Note : Comments on this blog has been closed.

Trying to be a new age father

2011-10-31T21:06:00.000+05:30

Parenthood has become incredibly complicated these days. It must have been rather tiresome even in the olden days but at least they were not bound by these new-found theories about how to take care of the kid. In good old days, if the kid was a brat, you called him (or her) a brat and whaled the tar out of the little fellow. Nobody gave a damn about whether it was going to traumatize the kid and leave an indelible scar on the tender mind or, for that matter, tender bum of the child. On top of it, there was also the golden rule of "children should be seldom be seen and rarely heard" which took care of the rest.

Those happy days are, sadly, things of the past. These days you are supposed to "interact" and "instill values" into the child but ensure that her "delicate mental framework is not shattered by the traumatic parental pressure". I had been strictly following this by not trying to instill any of my values into my child (and therefore ensuring that the right values are picked up by my kiddo) but I decided to make an exception a few days back.

In one of my daughter's school forms, there was a field where I had to fill in how many hours I spend reading to my child. After filling this up, out of sheer guilt conscience, I decided to be a "new age good parent" and read a bedtime story to my child. Let me present you a "blow by blow account" of what happened :

Me : Three little pigs. Once there were three pigs who wanted to stay alone.
D'ter : What does alone mean?
Me: Staying without anybody else.
D'ter : But they are three of them - so how can they be alone ?
Me : Hmmmm - I think they meant staying without their parents
D'ter : Then the parents are also alone
Me : Yeah (aside : lucky bastards). Let's continue. The three pigs built three houses.
D'ter : Why did they built three houses? They could have stayed together in one house.
Me : They eventually did that because of the wolf.
D'ter : What did the wolf do?
Me : He blew the house down.
D'ter : Because they had build three houses?
Me : No. Actually the wolf wanted to eat the pigs. He asked the pig whether he can come in. And the Pig said "Not by the hair of my chini-chin-chin"
D'ter : Why did the pig say "chini-chin-chin" ?
Me : Because it is funny !
D'ter : Why is it funny?
Me : This word. It doesn't really mean any thing.
D'ter : What is funny about that? If you say things which doesn't mean anything, is that funny?
Me : Yeah - sometimes
D'ter : Dad - you don't know anything!! If you say things which nobody understands, people will make fun of you ("aapka mazak urayenge")

So it continued till finally, we reached the end of the story. Sadly, this "good parent thingy" did not work out well. Most of the queries of the daughter could not be answered to her satisfaction and at the end, she concluded that anyway, the first two houses built by the pigs should have been given to the old women and children who stay on the pavements. So, the wolf, in fact, did a good thing by blowing them apart and is the real hero of the story.

May be I should start writing a whole new set of "Politically correct fairy tales" instead of trying to be a new age dad!!!

Maggi : My comfort food

2011-06-28T23:31:00.001+05:30

After wearying out the readers with the detailed development of my new house, let me move on to something which almost everybody likes. This blog is about the universal favorite instant noodle called "Maggi".

As a kid, I don't recall being passionate about noodles. In those days, it was not very common to have them. Noodles were either cooked by some "avant garde" type relative (usually as an aftermath of a cooking class) or brought from the legendary Kolkata Chinese restaurant called "Peiping" (on Park Street). Peiping was famous for its "Chow chow" (not to be confused with the ill-temper Chinese dog) - which is basically noodles with plenty of vegetables and some gravy and the entire household seem to go gaga over it. I was the solitary voice of dissent, who protested against this Chinese aggression but was summarily silenced by the women in power. My grandmother used to be somewhat sympathetic while my mother used to dismiss it with her characteristic "motherly" one liner - "He's just being difficult". As was customary in those days, I was usually given the choice of "Take it or stay hungry".

In 1983, a company called Food Specialties Ltd, along with Nestle, came up with a new product called "Maggi" - a type of instant noodles. We, of course, couldn't care less about these trivias excepting the all important fact that they came to our school and, as a part of their promotional campaign, gave every one of us a packet of noodles for free. In those days, such aggressive marketing strategies were unheard of and more so in Kolkata, the so called "hide-bound" metropolis. I proudly took it home and much to my everybody's surprise, fell in love with it. It was, truly, a love at first bite.

From that instant onwards, Maggi has become a part of my lifestyle. Just like the converts show greater passion that the original believers, I became a Maggi-lover with a vengeance. Our household patronized Maggi as if we are majority shareholders in this company and we have three family members in their board. To give you some statistics :

Maggi was offering a small steel plate for every 12 empty wrappers of Maggi. In a period of 6 months, my mother managed to collect about 12 such plates at which point Maggi withdrew the offer and completely broke her heart. Which means in 6 X 30 = 180 days, we had consumed 12 X 12 = 144 packets of Maggi - a hit rate of 80%.

I still recall that Maggi used to come in three flavours, namely Masala, Chicken and Capsika. Capsica was extremely popular, closely followed by Masala. Masala and Chicken flavours have defied all management theories like Product Life Cycle (PLC) and BCG Matrix and are still extremely popular. Soon other flavors like Tomato, Curry etc and some "heath conscious flavours like "Multigrain", "Atta" etc have evolved. About two years back, they also entered the market of Cup Noodles which, hither to was the forte of Nissin. In between, they also faced some competition from Top Ramen - who came up with Smoodles (smooth noodles) which were nice (especially their curry flavour) but somehow they could not dethrone Maggi for long.

In my bachelor days in Pune, Maggi was one of our main stay as far as cooking was concerned. On more adventurous days, we used to add "Chorikos" - the fire brand Goan Sausage into it and avoid adding the Maggi tastemaker into it. We usually used to add cheese / cheese spread into it to somewhat reduce the firepower of the Goan sausages. This delicacy - almost the high-water mark of my culinary career, continued with me for several years till my decrepit alimentary system refused to absorb this any more. Forcing it down the esophagus these days either causes severe acidity or puts the rear side on fire, the next day morning.

I loved the Maggi advertisements all along. I think one of the first ones was where the kids come home and shout "Mummy, bhookh lagi hay" and the mother beams benevolently and says "Just two minutes". As a kid, I often wondered why my mother's reaction invariably was to scowl and shout back "Go to the bathroom, wash your face and hand etc etc" instead of smiling in such beatific manner.
Recently, my friend reminded me of another old favorite of mine

Even their latest one about the cup noodles - "Just add garam paani, aur shuru ho ja jaani" - targeting the new generation of trekkers - is also quite catchy .

A few years back, I was in IIM Bangalore for a short term management course specially designed for Business Managers. As is usual in such courses, we were given enough assignments to ensure that we never go to sleep till 2 am in the night. After the first couple of nights, we started feeling hungry at around 1 am (an old failing, I always felt hungry when I used to study as a kid). On the 3rd or 4th night, we decided to explore the campus to see if any edibles are available. And wonder of wonders - we discovered a small shop selling Maggi 2 minutes noodles, nicely cooked and garnished with scrambled eggs and stir fried vegetables. For the next 5 weeks, this shop was frequented at 1 am by a group of six 35+ mid level executives from an MNC. Malicious aspersions were cast on our moral characters because of these nocturnal visits (this shop, incidentally, was located rather close to the Ladies hostel) but our loyalty towards Maggi was far beyond such dastardly allegations.

Hope this brand survives the test and taste of time and continues to be a gastronomical delight for one and all.

Back to the basics : initial days at the new flat

2011-06-11T21:48:00.003+05:30

For the selected few, who had been waiting with bated breath to know whether we survived the shift to our new "khandahar".....I mean new house, we did!! More importantly, our marriage also survived this terrible ordeal.
The last statement should not be taken lightly. Confinement into a limited space, an omnipresent 1 mm dust on all open surfaces, greater than 100 decibel noise level in the house and incessant invasion into our privacy by the workers was proving to be quite a toll on our mental condition. The whole thing was making me wonder whether this, finally, might become the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. I was visualizing that one of these days, missus will quietly walk into the room and say those ominous four words - "We need to talk". Thankfully, this impending doom has somehow been averted (probably because we were staying in one room only and there was no possibility of physically "walking into the room") and at the moment peace springs eternal. This, of course, is the status as on 11-June-2011, 2147 hrs and cannot be extrapolated for any futuristic predictions.
Let me describe the first 3 days of our stay at the new house to give you a feel of how things were.
Day 1 :

Jumped around the movers and packers to get things packed in an organised manner (failed miserably; they did whatever they wanted in whichever sequence they felt is right and left us with a large number of unmarked boxes). Moved to the new house to discover that not a single room is in a livable condition (even by stretching our imagination beyond its elastic limits). Much heated verbal exchange took place, which predominantly consisted of asking the gentlemen in charge of renovating the new house to get off their back side and show some results. At around 8 pm, we finally got one room to ourselves, with an attached bathroom and a power socket to connect the refrigerator. Subsequent investigations revealed that the bathroom doesn't have any light or any facilities to hang clothes/ towel.

Cooking was out of question - hence walked down to investigate the colony. Discovered Mr. Bindra's "Authentic Chinese and South Indian Dhaba" whose menu consists of Idli, Masala Dosa, Chana Masala and Aloo Paratha (Phoolka on demand). Despite the short menu, the food was sumptuous and we were too hungry or too tired to care.

Life's Lesson # 1 : All Izzz Well.

Day 2 :

Woke up in the morning to discover that the tea kettle has hidden itself in some obscure crate located at the most inaccessible part of the house. Managed to savage a saucepan and two extremely small "road-side quality" cups (bought during by my initial days at Gurgaon and I have not heard the last about my aesthetic sense or the utter lack of it from my missus) and made some tea. Tea strainer was not available, hence left the last 15% of the tea in the cup and used it for tea leaf reading. The tea leaves told me that life is gonna be difficult for next 2 weeks. As if I didn't know this!!

Life's Lesson # 2 : Learn to appreciate the simple things in life (like tea strainer)

We locked ourselves in the sole room which was at our disposal. The rest of the rooms were occupied by the painter, the carpenter, the tile fellow (why is he not called a "tiler" ? Must take this up with appropriate authorities; seems like a case of not respecting dignity of labour et al) and two visiting faculties - the electrician and the plumber. Sometime in the course of the day, the internet broadband service provider arrived and immediately had heated arguments with the electrician. After the dust settled, the wiring was, somehow, done to the satisfaction of both the parties.

Life's Lesson # 3 : When there are too many cooks, pretend to be deaf-dumb-blind and a half-witted-ill-tempered moron. It won't solve your problems but will make you happy.

Day 3 :

Had to go to office. This proved to be an incredibly challenging venture as

a) All my shirts had been packed in huge thailis using the curtains. This, though rather convenient for the packers, is not quite the best arrangement for the shirt. The sharp crease lines of the shirts were smeared giving them a strangely crushed look.

b) The trousers, somehow, had escaped this ordeal but it was impossible to find the right shirt for the right trouser, forget about finding the right socks or the right shoes for them.

c) Only one pair of shoes were found - one which had a white streak on the front part - making it quite like the type Jeetendra used to wear.

d) No trouser belts - hence a distinct possibility that if I don't hold on to my trousers with a one handed death-grip, I may embarrass myself and the community around me by exposing more that what is written in my contract.

e) Couldn't find my shaving cream or kit. Went to office with a two-day stubble. In Delhi, this is just about the worst crime that you can commit barring making indecent passes at your boss's daughter.

Managed to survive in office. Nobody mistook me for a roadside beggar or Hrittik Roshan.

Life's lesson # 4 : You are too small a pebble to cause a ripple in the smiling pool of complacency called life!!

Had pizza for dinner. The Pizza almost didn't get delivered as our main door does not have a name plate / flat number / calling bell. Thankfully managed to catch a glimpse of a man in pizza delivery suit standing pensively at our doorsteps, trying to figure out what he should do next.

Life's Lesson # 5 : When everything fails, pizza works.

Life's Lesson # 6 : It works even better if you add an extra cheese topping.

This interesting journey of our lives is still continuing. The bloke who said "Life is about the journey and not the destination" evidently had never stayed in a house with 6 set of workmen working in the house and constantly complaining about each other.

Nevertheless, the end seem to be near and there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I am hoping for a Hindi filmy ending where finally everything becomes ok and all sorrows, if any, are packed and stored into some remote corner, never to be touched again.

On the verge of shifting base and getting mentally unhinged

2011-05-27T08:41:00.001+05:30

Two days from now, we are throwing our reasonably organised lives into a gargantuan mess by moving to a partially complete and scarcely livable house.

At this point, let me do it the "filmy" way by going for a flashback to update you on the recent events of my otherwise uninteresting life. This is probably unnecessary for the selected few who follow my life-cycle with considerable interest but since the head-count of these "selected few" is in single digit, it makes more sense to give a general update.

Three months back, on a cold winter morning, while sipping super-heated masala tea, we suddenly came to the conclusion that we should buy a flat in Gurgaon. I don't recollect the exact rationale, if any, behind this decision but I do remember that it was taken in our usual Quick-Gun-Murugan style - decided before you could say Jack Robinson!! Subsequently, this proved to be a wise decision, as our landlord is coming back to Gurgaon and we anyway would have been forced to move to another flat.

The next steps were, of course, somewhat more long drawn as it involved finding a suitable flat in Gurgaon, selling our Navi Mumbai flat, applying for loan, applying for NOC from the society and various other mundane stuffs. Arranging the finance was not easy and neither was completing these formalities which usually involves filling long complicated forms where they ask intimate questions like my grandmother's maiden name, colour of my first pet and the measurement of my left thigh.

We finished these formalities with about 10 days to spare i.e ten days before our landlord is going to arrive and take possession of his lawful abode. The next step is, of course, shifting to our new house.

This house that we have bought is not a locked up "Khandahar" of some well meaning gentleman. It is a well lived in flat and people were actually staying there till last month. Theoretically, it is possible to move into this flat without any renovation. We, in the eternal folly that has hounded mankind ever since they started building houses, chose to do "a few things" before we move in. And this single step was the beginning of a nerve-wrecking Odyssey that is likely to hound us for another month or so.

"A few things", we soon came to realize, is a large basket of ideas and can put even the Buckingham palace to shame. After many hours of contemplation, most of it consisting of looking at our bank balances and feeling miserable about it, we decided that we will get the flat painted, put new tiles on the floors and the sanitary fittings replaced. Simple and basic, isn’t it ? Not quite.

To replace the sanitary fittings, we had to break a few tiles of the bathroom. And by a deep rooted conspiracy of the tile manufacturers, any design of tile is available at best for 2 years. This automatically means, we have to replace the entire set of bathroom tiles. From there, the next logical step is also to replace the embedded pipes of the bathroom and then, of course, the electrical fittings also need to be changed and...you get the drift.

Long and short of it is that we now have the following set of people working simultaneously in our house :

- a plumber

- a masonry fellow (who also does the tile job)

- an electrician

- a carpenter

- a painter

- a welder

What made matters worse is the fact that all these aforementioned gentlemen have some peculiar characteristics which, under the present time-critical situation, is quite a hindrance in completing the project on time. A quick summary of these characteristics are as below :

a) Mr. Rajkumar, the painter is a loner who cannot work when other people are in the same room as he is. He also has difficulty in communicating what he wants and expects that you will, somehow, read into his sub-conscious psychological abyss and extract the relevant information. He also refuses to give his own opinion and prefers to take the stand "Jaise aap kahiyega (As you wish, sir"). This, occasionally, can push you to a stage when you would wish that you had a loaded Kalashnikov or Uzi sub-machine gun handy.

b) Mr. Nandan, the masonry worker feels that his work is not being appreciated and he is not getting the due respect for his job. For example, he resented bitterly when one of his precious tiles showed a slight scratch (less than 6 inch long). He complained in the most vociferous manner that this has happened due to the dastardly behavior of the carpenter, who, apparently is the miscreant. Other workers like the electrician et al tried to pacify him by stating that this sore spot will disappear if rubbed vigorously was met with contempt and disdain and fortified his belief that nobody appreciates his job. Left to himself, he would have broken up every tile of the floor and relaid them but alas, in these troubled times, nobody appreciates a true artist.

c) Mr. Prakash, the plumber, believes that it is his duty to forgive the follies of his fellow human beings in the true Christian spirit of "they know not what they do". This sentiment, unfortunately extends towards his employers as well and it is almost impossible to instruct him about how a job should be done. Forceful statements and high decibels does not work with him and the only way is to tentatively give a suggestion and then tip-toe around it in a delicate manner to craftily guide it towards the desired result. This is a time consuming process and also tests your diplomatic skills to their limits.

d) Mr. Baidyanath, the electrician, does not believe in schedules, dates and deadlines. Time, in his opinion, is just an instantaneous point in the infinite space-time continuum of the universe and it is therefore stupid to argue about why something, which was to be done yesterday, is still pending. He dons has a beatific smile when he fails to meet a commitment (a situation which occurs with an alarming regularity) and remains unperturbed by any verbal missile that you might throw at him.

So the D-day is alarmingly near and the progress is not what it should have been. For the past week, every dawn had been bringing in new hope for me and the dusk had been bringing back the broken fragments of this hope. I suspect that our entry into the house will be almost an archeological expedition where we have to wade our way through broken pieces of tiles, marbles and conduits, empty and partially full paint cans and a team of workmen recruited from the mad hatter’s tea party who have no intention of leaving us ever.

How I wish that I had the powers to say “Off with their heads” like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland!!

Yesterday, no more !!

2011-05-01T19:59:00.001+05:30

There are bad days and there are bad days. And there are those days when everything goes wrong. Yesterday seemed to be one of those.
It began with an ominous sign. Involuntarily, I woke up at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday. It was not provoked by one of those "some people laze around while I have to toil till my bones get pickled" stuff from my wife or my daughter deciding that my reclining enormous body mass is a good for practicing rock climbing. I woke up without any external stimulus and was in a pensive mood, not being able to figure out what was wring with me.

I made some tea (was a disaster as I was in a contemplative mood and therefore the timing had gone for a toss), roamed listlessly and then tried to make some breakfast (boiled the living daylights out of the instant porridge for my daughter) without any spectacular success.

I decided to spend some "quality" time with my daughter (for the less-informed ones : it is now considered fashionably metro-sexual to play some "kiddish" games with your daughter as long as you package it with some pithy advises like "your only competition is with yourself; keep trying" or "understand the hidden morality while you apply the crayons on your Barbie"). After several moments of careful pondering, I decided that golf would be a good bet.

Let me explain this a bit, lest you start imagining that I stay in one of those sprawling bungalow with an attached mini-golf course. Sprawling bungalow, forsooth !! Golf, for me and my daughter, is played in our 12' X 8' drawing room with a plastic golf club which, in reality, is a container for selling jelly beans. The ball is a tennis ball which had appeared on our balcony courtesy some wannabe Sachin Tendulkar trying to hit a sixer. An empty blue can, which, at some point of time, housed an "Indigo" USB stick acts as the golf hole. This is, in fact, the only part of the Indigo USB stick package which is serving any purpose; the USB stick itself had decided to die a happy death within 72 hrs of purchasing the same from a lissome air hostess of Indigo airlines with a brilliant smile (Life's lesson # 32 : Never buy a USB memory stick just because the air hostess has a lovely pair of legs. The sex appeal of the air hostess has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the device in question).

Coming back to the game of golf; my daughter beat me to it. There are several reasons to it like
a) She plays in a unique style wherein she uses the golf club like a hockey stick and drags the ball with it till it is about 10 cm from the hole (or Indigo can, if you want to be technical about it).
b) The plastic golf club swaggers like swagging walking sticks which the Hollywood villains of 1940s used to flaunt
c) Playing golf forces you to bend down, a process which causes excruciating pain in the lumbar region. Also the substantial layers of near-permanent fat around the midriff also causes some trouble in breathing.
After getting beaten thrice in a row, I decided to give it up. This "quality time" was getting on to my nerves and I decided that a return to the traditional tough father was in order. I decided that it is now study time for the kiddo.
Nowadays, there is something called EVS in their curriculum. The full form of EVS has been carefully concealed but from what I could gather, it is designed to teach general knowledge to children. I started with "sense organs" and tried to explain to my daughter that nose is for smell. She promptly pointed out that it is for making noises - the kind I make while I am sleeping. I let it pass, though made a careful note of it for taking up with the missus ("Where is she learning all these stuffs? No respect for parents...blah blah blah). Next were the eyes, wherein she commented that I keep them closed whenever I am at home as I am usually sleeping. She also masqueraded my alleged use of eyes and nose with an astonishing degree of accuracy.
She seemed to have a more than necessary grip on "sense organs", I decided to switch to "My family". Here I explained her "Father", "Mother", "Parents" etc and the progress was generally peaceful till we reached "siblings". Things started hot at this stage as incisive questions like why she does not have any siblings, how are children born, why we cannot get a sibling next day morning etc were asked. Things really started getting out of hand when she started asking whether the "guard" is a "brother" of the "maid" and why they always hold hands and wink at each other. Enough education for the day, I concluded. Let the "idiot-box nanny" with her unending series of Tom and Jerry take over.
It was nearing lunch time and nothing to eat in the house. I decided to drive down to a newly opened eatery and check it out. It is a joint called Big Mouth and has some very fancy stuffs like "Chammak Challo" (Lachcha Parantha with dal, curd, pickle), " Kuddi Panjaab Di" (Chawal with Rajma) and similar stuffs. The key offering seemed to be a dish called "Murgi Phansi Jaal Me" (which, simply put, is chicken curry and rice). I decided to play safe and bought a couple of kathi rolls. These were the weirdest rolls I had ever consumed - a thin semi-cooked roti wrapping mashed Chinese style non-veg stuffs and capsicums by the dozen.
In the evening, I tried another round of golf with the daughter - this time with a hockey stick and in the garage. The results were not dramatically different except that since I was outdoor, I felt as parched as a blotting paper. A dash to the refrigerator revealed that we are in the midst of a severe urban crisis, namely, lack of soft drink / beer / fruit juice in the house. Oh darn!
I was brave enough (and optimist enough) to think that I can salvage the situation by cooking dinner myself. I sometimes cook on holidays and I always find it to be relaxing. Today being today, I chose a safe dish - Pasta, something which I cook rather well on my normal days. Today, however, things were not quite the same. Despite adding mushrooms in copious quantities, spring onions, capsicum, origano, cheese, more cheese, more origano, can of tuna, boiled eggs, the result was a huge bowl of white bland tasty-as-cardboard pasta!! The dinner was as cheerful as a funeral dinner with daughter giving strange expressions while pushing the stuff down her esophagus and wife munching the stuff with a moody silence. I tried to make light of the situation with a great deal of small talk but this valiant effort on my side was met with Al Capone-ish looks from the feminine side of the family.
Finally, the night quietly flowed it. The daughter dozed off to a deep slumber, the wife was still busy on the net and I was feeling drained of all energy and wanted to have a quiet death. Just when I was closing my eyes, my wife spoke with a spine-chilling surety in her voice :
"Hope you have not used too many utensils and have not made the kitchen very dirty!! The maid might not come tomorrow".
I rolled over to the other side, hiding my face from my wife and trying not to think what her reaction would be when she enters the kitchen the next day morning. Amen!!

Delhi and Mumbai : a tale of two cities (2)

2011-04-18T23:21:00.004+05:30

To continue my earlier blog on the same subject...

The traffic of the two cities are also quite different. In fact, both the cities have left hand drive is just about the only thing that seem to be common.

Mumbai (or Bombay; I still prefer the old name) has a highly organised and disciplined traffic. At least it honestly tries to be. It has a strict lane discipline imposed on it and over the years, the same has largely been internalized by the drivers. Cutting a lane, is, therefore, considered a greater sin that cutting a throat (in certain parts of the city, the latter is likely to win you kudos and cheers). While this is quite an appreciable achievement, the effectiveness of this is often subdued by lack of adequate street signs and directions. One is, thus, often stuck in the right most lane and is forced to take a right turn despite it being the wrong turn (right is sometimes wrong, you see). It is impossible for someone to guess where the correct right turn is from a distance unless one has spent good part of his formative years munching "vada-pav" in that particular area.

Delhi has been wrongly accused of having no traffic rules or sense. This is, of course, purposefully maligning the city which has developed a completely unique traffic sense. Best is to list them down :

1) The bigger car has the right of the way.

2) Left is the overtaking lane and is also the fastest lane.

3) Right is definitely the slowest lane.

4) Being on a lane does not mean you have to follow it all the time.

5) It is a perfectly acceptable practice to drive between two lanes. In certain parts of the city, this is the only way.

6) If you need to cut the lane, do so boldly and blindly. Close your eyes, take your favorite god's name and just do it!! You would momentarily feel like passing through hyper space or like the Star-Trek opening lines "...to boldly go where no man has gone before"

7) You can commit the gravest of the mistakes and then smile sweetly and get away by saying "Kindly adjust ("adjust" to be pronounced as "edjust") . If you can prefix the same with an "Oye Paaji", you have really done it. Balle balle to you and whoever is in the car with you.

As you would realize, this peculiar school of driving can only succeed if people possess a certain outlook towards life. You need a kind of benign forgiveness and a smiling pool of complacency to take this in your stride. No wonder people of Delhi are generally more happy-go-lucky and likely to crack some inane jokes at the first instance. If you constantly live in a world which seems like a Govinda movie, you tend to push yourself into a rarefied stratosphere where commonplace things like a dent on the right fender or a scratch on the left rear wheelcap has little or no significance.

This brings up another aspect of life - humour. Mumbai, in general, is a humourless city. People are non-interfering and detached and usually maintain a self-complete (or should I call it self-sufficient) cheerfulness within them. It is not unusual to find people walking the malls, completely alone but not feeling lonely at all. Compared to this, Delhi has an all-embracing sense of humour, which, in its all putrid form, is forced upon you. It is impossible to ignore this, impossible to appreciate this and yet impossible to get angry with these simplistic people who belt out such mawkish jokes at the drop of a hat.

To give you an example :

I went to a small general purpose shop looking for a bottle of jam for my daughter. This shop was devoid of this. The shopkeeper, instead of saying that he doesn't have it, quipped "Jam nehi hay sahab, lekin Jams hay" (Jams - in case you are still wondering, refers to the Cadbury Gems which is popular amongst children). In case you are wondering - no I didn't reach for my Kalashnikov and make a clean job of the shop keeper. I just smiled and moved on.

So, most of the bollywood humours are, in fact, more suitable in Delhi than Mumbai and so are the bollywood dialogs. Thus, the "Virar ka chokra" brand of humour is more a "Janakpuri Ishtyle" than a Bombaiya brand. It also tends to grow on you and after a while, you start enjoying the utter ridiculousness and the existentialistic absurdity of the same.

All Izzz Well for the time being. And yours truly shall be back with another round of introspection after a while. Till then, Sionara!!

Statutory Warning about the movie "Born Free"

2011-04-12T01:12:00.003+05:30

Statutory Warning : It is dangerous to allow children below 8 years to watch the legendary movie “Born Free”. Watching this movie causes certain behavioural changes in the child which could be stressful to the parents, especially for the father. A synopsis of the same is attached below:

Symptom 1 : Roaming around the house with the tongue hanging out and panting continuously. This creates an illusion of having a 4 legged beast in the house which, unless one is really brave and couldn’t-care-less kind of a guy, is rather un-nerving. It also leads to your neighbour avoiding you fearing that your child suffers from hydro-phobia (this, in retrospect, is not such a bad thing sometimes).

Symptom 2 : Occasionally pouncing on the unsuspecting parent (usually the father) with a catlike flexibility and ferocity. The suddenness causes the parent spring into an active position from a reclining posture and consequently leads to excruciating pains in the lumber region and/or lower spine. Possibilities of a cardiac arrest or a near-permanent damage to the spinal column or both cannot be entirely ruled out.

Symptom 3 : Having achieved the desired result with Symptom 2, the child also might lick your face – something, which is definitely bad for the child’s alimentary system and disastrous for the parent’s mental framework. Especially if the father had just tried a new after shave and is feeling particularly nice about it.

Symptom 4 : Instead of Symptom 3, the child might also follow up symptom 2 with a long hysterical guffaw with associated hand gestures which are, to put it mildly, extremely insulting and infuriating. This can force the lifelong pacifist father to reach out for a hard and blunt instrument – an act which, in the court of law, would be ruled as child abuse due to the ignorance of the judges about the ill effects of this movie.

Symptom 5 : Will insist on clutching to his/her “lion soft toy” (which was neglected all these years) all the time. Normally this is bearable except when the child insists on feeding this contraption with dust-laden mare and complains that his/her ‘Elsa’ is refusing to eat. Pretending to act deaf will not yield the desired result as the child also develops a compulsive mental dis-order and will not let you go till you have also tried feeding ‘Elsa’.

Symptom 6 : Will threaten his/her mother that he/she will go away and then “mama” will cry. To make matters worse, she will also threaten that she will come back with three kids like Elsa did. At this point of time, you will be kicked out of your leisurely reverie and will be rendered speechless.

The above is, by no means, a complete analysis as the period of study/ evaluation was in-sufficient. Added to this is the fact that the observer, who also is the father, could not maintain the mandatory clinical detachment necessary for a scientific study. Not only were the aforementioned symptoms nerve-wrecking, it was compounded by the firm assertion by the mother of the child that things have gone so far due to indulgent treatment of the observer/ parent. Such blatantly unjust and malicious allegations also might cause the father to brood, sulk or generally become regressively philosophical about life.

Please spread this link to as many parents as possible. Let them not suffer like I have. I am trying to tie up with FB/ Twitter that for every 100 clicks, they will donate 1 $ which will be used to burn all prints of the blasted movie and make the world a better place for all parents.

Cheerio.

Delhi and Mumbai : A tale of two cities (1)

2011-04-01T23:46:00.005+05:30

Now that I have spent 8 months in Delhi and have actually started liking the place, it might no longer be such a major crime to draw parallels with my erstwhile home Mumbai, the city where I had spent the past eight years of my life.

Mumbai is a vibrant city with a strong sense of detachment. In a way, it is truly metropolitan as this detachment allows it to give similar treatment to it's own “Marathi Manoos” as well as the outsiders. It is, thus, a city in Maharashtra yet not a Maharashtrian city - just like Paris is an aberration to the traditional French culture. There is little that Mumbai can boast as “truly Maharashtrian” – even the “Pao Bhaji” and “Vada Pao”, the signature street food of Mumbai are not quite Maharashtrian.

Added to this, Mumbai has a strong “process orientation” about following a set of standard rules. Something like "the rules of the game" I am not talking only about the legal rules but also of certain commonly used practices. Quite like the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – a set of universal accounting principles which are followed by most of the farms world-wide), Mumbai seem to have its own unwritten GALP (Generally Accepted Livelyhood Practices) which everybody seem to follow. Thus the apparently maddening Mumbai locals also have some set rules and codes (including codes about how you should board the train at which station; the technique followed at Andheri Station will be vastly different from the technique followed at Virar Station). Once a person masters this GALP, he is as comfortable in Mumbai as any seasoned Mumbaikar.

The main principle of Mumbai is “live and let live” – a clinical isolation from ones surroundings. One lives truly like an island, with boats and bridges built strictly according to ones own rules. Added to this is a sense of urgency in one’s thought and action, a constant throbbing of pulse, rapid heart beat about getting the things done “asap” and getting over with it!! Mumbaikars like to work hard and play harder. They would work till 8 in office - then travel for an hour to attend a party lasting till the midnight and yet be in office at 8 am in the morning. It really makes you burn the candle at both ends but it certainly gives a lovely light and thus Mumbai, for most outsiders, is a “love at first sight”.

Delhi, in contrast, is a city which will not show its face to you on the first glance. A “Wham, bam, thank you, Mam” approach is not for Delhi – you need to court this old lady with rose petals,fragrances and poetries (or is it "shayeri"?) and all the tools of the trade. And then you would realizethe “pull” this city seem to exert on you and its vast and intricate web of connectivity.

Delhi is essentially “result oriented” and therefore somewhat dis-organised. When you approach a Delhi-ite to get a job done, you will be well advised to explain the person why you want this job to be done in excruciating details. Instructions / hierarchy / SOP have no relevance to a Delhi-ite. The focus is strictly on “why this should be done” instead of “how this should be done”. To give you an example, if you ask a banker in Delhi, how much cash can be withdrawn in a single transaction, you will usually get a counter-question “How much do you want?”. If you answer this question openly instead of considering it to be a personal affront, most of the times you will get what you want. If you approach this in a typical Mumbaikar way and insist that you want to know the “rule” and “how much am I entitled to” and “why should I tell you how much I want”, you will face a virtual stonewall stronger than the real one in China.

Another tradition of Delhi is it’s absolute adherence to the traditional Indian way of “Satyam Badet, Priyam Badet..” Even under the worst emergency, a Delhi-ite will invariably greet you politely, ask about your health, your wife's toothache, daughter's education and the wellbeing of the society in general before actually getting down to business. A lot of things will be left to “thik hai, dekh lenge” till the very end. Trying to put this into a highly organised structure is sheer foolishness as it will be going against the grain of the people. Added to this, Delhi also follows the principle of “still water runs deep”. Activities under crisis also would appear very normal at the superficial level. The code of civility will be maintained, the pace would appear to be the same and it is virtually impossible to push things externally. Yet the job will invariably “somehow” get done within the strictest deadline. You may imagine that this is a one-off case but when you see that this is happening in every time, you will have to appreciate that they seem to have an entirely different way of handling things.

Delhi is inherently laid back and encourages you to take life a little easily. It encourages a better quality of life where people can pursue their other interests. No wonder Delhi has a far greater number of book shops, fantastically stocked DVD shops, regular art exhibitions and other performing arts compared to Mumbai. And please, let us not even talk about the much revered “Kala Ghoda festival” of Mumbai compared to what one gets to see in Delhi. This, probably allows people to have better connectivity with each other. This strict code of civility and bonhomie forces a community feeling to be inbred amongst a Delhi-ite. It is practically impossible to maintain a stoic detachment from your surroundings, the outside society in general will invade into your life at a much deeper level than it would in Mumbai.

To conclude, Mumbai focuses on "being alive and staying alive" while Delhi emphasizes on the subtle difference between living and staying alive. It is not for me to give a fatwa about which is a better way and in any case, there cannot be any last word when we are comparing two parallel cultures. I, however, intend to put in some more observation on this subject (thus the mysterious 1 within the parenthesis in the title) in my forthcoming blogs. So quits for today and will be back soon (hopefully). Till then, cheerio!!

Ashoke Sen, my uncle

2010-12-31T00:06:00.005+05:30

My uncle, Mr. Ashoke Sen died on the 19^th of December 2010, in his home at Kolkata.

Ashoke Sen was a scholar in English Literature who graduated from the Bristol University, UK. On returning from UK, he hop-skip-jumped between several lucrative jobs in prestigious organizations, but couldn’t adjust himself to the disciplined regimentation of any of them. He even worked briefly as the editor of a magazine called Point Counter-Point, but this also seemed too much of a routine job for him. He finally quit working within the boundaries of an office administration, and started freelancing which suited his style of working. He wrote for the two well known newspapers, Telegraph and Statesman, initially book reviews, and later graduated to more expansive literary sphere.

During his initial years, uncle interviewed many well known personalities from the literary world, and published these interviews either directly or wrote articles based on these interviews. His interviews were refreshingly different from the usual run-of-the-mill interviews taken by professional journalists with their set of stereotyped questionnaires. Uncles interviews were conducted after immense preparations and had a lot of background information . What, however, gave his interviews their unique flavour was that these interviews were actually an exchange of literary thoughts between two academicians on an equal footing. They were radically different from mere documentation of the conversation between a celebrity and an eager-to-please journalist. I still remember the immensely readable interviews of Stephen Splendor and Lila Mazumdar.

Subsequently, he became a known name quite well known for his English and Bengali essay writings amongst the scholarly circles in Kolkata, and got involved in editing several Bengali anthologies. He had the natural advantage of being an incredibly avid reader with a phenomenal memory. His forte was his knowledge on old Bengali literature – especially Children’s literature. He was loosely attached to Shishu Sahitya Sansad – the agency responsible for promoting children’s literature in Bengali. He was a leading authority on Buddhadev Bose and his literature, a fact acknowledged by none other than Pratibha Bose (wife of Buddhadev Bose). He can truly be described as a Kolkata intellectual with a wide knowledge on films, theatres, music (Bengali as well as Western) and books but not the usual stereotype leftist-existentialist intellectual (the kind who swears by Kafka-Satre- Camus- Marx etc).

My uncle had a habit of reading anything and everything under the sun. He was not one who would accept someone else’s judgement about anything and would prefer to form his own judgement about everything. I recall one incident, when I, a the then smart-alec teenager, tried to impress him with my fledging knowledge on Existentialism and Albert Camus. It came as a rude shock when he started taking out books on these subjects including the legendary book of Kaufmann called “Existentialism”. Subsequently I rummaged through his library to discover that though he was not a great fan of Camus, he had at least 3-4 books of Camus. Likewise, my ramblings on Satre led to me getting a book on the development of Philosophy from Socrates and Satre, and then having to sit with him for a session on philosophical studies.

Uncle had an encyclopaedic knowledge on Bengali children’s literature. He could recall with ease, as to which the year a particular novel or a short story was published and in which particular edition of a “Puja Barshiki” – a capability which was exploited time and again by the various publishing houses. His favourite children’s authors were Shibram Chakrabarty, Hemendra Kumar Ray, Premendra Mitra, Buddhadev Bose and Kamakshiprasad. What was interesting was the fact that he did not like the conventional popular stories written by these authors but preferred some lesser known well written stories. For example, my uncle did not like “Harshavardhan and Govardhan” series written by Shibram Chakraborti– citing them as coarse low class humour which, according to him, Shibram had written for the masses. Uncle preferred a more subtle, sophisticated form of humour which was expressed better in Shibram’s lesser known stories like “Onko o Shahityer Jogphole (Fusion of Mathematics and Literature)”, “Kalantok Lal Phita (The Deadly Red Tapism)”, “Bibhutibhushon-er Shilalipi (The Stonehenge of Bibhutibhushan)” and “Patale Bochor Paanchek (Five years or so in Hell)”. Likewise, he preferred the Hemen Ray stories / novels like “Pretatyar protishodh”, “Bishalgarh-er Dushwashan”, and "Mrs Kumudini Chowdhury" over the more popular Jayanta-Manik or Bimal-Kumar series. In fact, he thoroughly disliked Jayanta-Manik whom he considered to be a poor copy of Sherlock Holmes series including the bumbling detective Sundarbabu (as Indian version of Lestrade). He advised me to read an obscure series of Hemen Ray – namely Hemanta – Robin, another detective duo, who had featured only in four books (Andhakarer Bondhu, Ratrir Jatri, Mukh aar Mukhosh and Bibhishoner Jagoron). On his advise. I also read and fell in love with the “Mamababu” series of Premendra Mitra (how many people remember that Premendra Mitra also wrote a detective series ?) and the “Chanchal” series of Buddhadev Bose (also a detective series). Other than the famous ones, Uncle also made me read some obscure novels or series of novels by authors who are now forgotten. I read “Sundarbane Saat Bachchar”, "Makorsha" (by Rajat Sen), "Chitragreeb" and "Juthapoti", the war series of Dhirendralal Dhar (Saroj-David series – remember), “Ajaykumar” of Monindralal Bose and "Durgom Pother Jatri".

His influence led me to extensive reading of children’s literature of the yesteryears including the Kanchenjangha and Prahelika series and we spent many a happy afternoon discussing merits and demerits of these children’s stories. In retrospect, I find it rather amusing that a Bristol educated literary personality, who was a leading intellectual in Kolkata, managed to have meaningful discussions with his class 6 nephew, about 30 years his junior on equal footing. This trait in him continued till the very end and consequently most of his friends were far younger than him.

Uncle had a passion for thoroughness and continuity. He seldom used to give any judgment on any author or film maker based on only one book or movie. I recall that he had to write a piece on Graham Greene, a usual run-of-the-mill article, and he bought the complete Graham Greene series just to prepare for this! Likewise he re-read all the Leela Majumdar novels before he took her interview (and me too – along with him; and in the process discovered a wonderful novel called “Tong Ling”, which, surprisingly, does not feature amongst her more famous works). He took me to the British Council for a film festival of Hitchcock but not before I had read “Hitch”, the landmark analysis of Hitchcock and the famous book written by Truffaunt on Hitchcock. I also recall a particular incident when he had discovered a factual mistake on Thakurbari in a magazine called “Sobjanta-Mojaru”. He made me correct it but before that, he made me read the books of Rani Chanda, Mohanlal Gangopadhyay and Abanindranath himself on this subject. Such exposure during the formative years has left a deep and indelible impression on me which probably accounts for my present day love for literature and films.

This thoroughness, of course, had some pitfalls. Quite often, he used to miss his deadlines - a trait which couldn't have made him popular with his editors. Also, when his analysis did not match the opinions expressed by other celebrities, he felt no qualms about ripping that person apart. I recall him criticizing Chidananda Dasgupta, (a legendary figure in film circle who was personally known to my uncle) for trying to put Ray’s Sakha Prasakha on the same pedestal as Charulata. He had no compulsion or inclination to be “politically correct,” and even his closest friends, from time to time were at the receiving end of his acerbic pen.

Uncle also had a remarkable ability of finding co-relations between stories and/or movies, possibly a sign of a good critic. It was refreshing to compare “Batashbari” of Leela Mazumdar and “the Enchanted Forest” of Enid Blyton; Jane Eyre and Rebecca with “Pakhi” by Leela Mazumdar (wonder how many people have read this novel); the multiple narrative style of “Ghare Baire” by Tagore with “Raat Bhore Brishti” of Buddhadev Bose (I also recollect him reminding me that there is a superficial similarity between the plots of “Ghare Baire” and “Raat Bhare Brishti” which is not of much significance). He also could spot the cross discipline similarities and co-relations – about how Dickens has influenced Bergman in “Fanny and Alexander” and how Buddhadev Bose’s “Bipanna Bishmay” is in fact an existential treatment of Jibananda’s legendary poetry “Aat Bachor Ager Ek Din”. He once pointed out to me that when Jibananda had written “Banolata Sen”, Bengali Poetry had also reached its 1000^th year – a fact which led me to rethink about the first line of this popular poem (“Hazar Bachhor ami poth hatitechi prithibir pothe”) and wonder whether this was indeed a romantic poem after all.

I am indebted to him for introducing me to one of the greatest authors of the post Tagore era – namely Buddhadev Bose. I was introduced to his writings through his short stories, some of which are possibly the best children’s short stories written in Bengali. “Meenu’r notun juto”, “Prothom Dukkho”, “Hridayranjan-er Sharbanash”, “Haran Jyatha o Sujitda”, “Baba”, are probably the finest examples of children’s short stories in the world, and it is indeed sad that the world will never get to read or even know about the existence of these great stories. Likewise, for adult novels, he made me read “Golap Keno Kaalo” – an incredibly stylized Bengali novel. As per his usual style, he did not push Buddhadev Bose’s hugely popular “Tithidore” onto me (though he acknowledged that it is a great novel) but made me read “Patal Theke Alaap”, “Jedin Phutlo Kamol”, “Bipanna Bishmay” and “Moulinath”. Then came the articles and analysises of Buddhadev – “An Acre of Green Grass”, “Hothat Alor Jholkani”, “Kobi Rabindranath”, “Sanga Nishshangata Rabindranath” and last but not the least “Mahabharat-er Kotha”. Uncle was a great fan of Buddhadev, and was personally very close to him and his family. Yet he never tried to influence me, or force me into loving this author. He, in the strictest sense, brought the horse near the water, leaving him to drink when thirsty.

How was Ashoke Sen as a person? On first glance, he was not a nice person to know. Withdrawn, non-communicative and somewhat serious, he was not an easy person to talk to initially. He lacked normal social skills and would insist in mixing only with people whom he considered to be intellectually at par with him. If, however, one took the effort to break his shell of apparent impregnability, he was a nice person to talk to. He would then come down from his high horse of intellectual superiority, and become a regular guy. He was, in fact, quite a gossip-monger, a fact which he always denied vehemently (of course, gossip being so ‘non-intellectual’ and cheap) and enjoyed sharing the juicy gossips about the le-creme-de-la-creme in the perfect British manner.

I always felt that he never really came out of his teens – an eternal enfant terrible at large. His being the eldest son of a prosperous family (and therefore pampered) and not having an immediate family (and therefore no direct responsibilities) also reinforced this attitude. Thus he had the mood swings, hyper-sensitivity as well as the self-centered, self-indulgent nature of a teenager. This, to many, was difficult to handle - an intellectual giant with the emotional quotient of a child. This led him to become rather lonely during the last phase of his life, when he craved for a normal conversation with the normal people around him but alas, it was probably too late by then.

At the end of the day, one cannot help but feel sorry him. His Peter-Pan psychology coupled with his self created barriers made him lonesome. Despite his immense talents, my uncle somehow could never find the right direction, and thus could never put his abilities to their fullest use. Like “Kach” of Mahabharata, he seemed to possess the knowledge, but besieged by some unbreakable curse which prevented him from putting his knowledge to use. His last journey to the frontier was therefore a lonely one, mourned by his family and friends, not only about who he was but also about what he could have been, had it been otherwise.

David and Goliath : WikiLeak and the aftermath

2010-12-12T21:41:00.004+05:30

"Endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The above line and the first amendment (freedom of speech) has been the cornerstone of liberal thinking for most of us. Though the policies of the United States have often not been fair (to put it extremely mildly), at least “open speech” and “communication” were areas, where even their worst critics didn’t have much to say. So we indeed had a country which allowed people to say anything – send hate mails, abusing religions of the minorities and say various "offensive" things.

Not any more.

The recent WikiLeak revelations about the Apache helicopters, the Iraq war logs, the Afganisthan war logs and the US government’s knee-jerk reaction made it apparent how fragile the US concept of “freedom of speech” really is. Sarah Palin, who is heavily tipped to be the next presidential candidate suggests that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be “hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda”. Assange had to practically go into hiding and finally was arrested in London for alleged sexual offences conducted in Sweden. At the very least, he will face an extremely long drawn extradition fight that would drag on for months.

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall…

The people accustomed to power games are rather good at disposing of fancy garments like ethics and morality. In the present case, they decided to do a “full monty” – and that too at a lightening pace. Those fancy axioms of “innocent till you are proven guilty” and “equal and fair treatment towards one and all” were summarily dumped with a vengeance. There were some rather quiet, strictly verbal “understanding” with some organizations like PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon etc which ensured that WikiLeak, and by extension Julian Assange had practically no access to their assets. Their bank accounts were frozen, revenue inflow and/or donations blocked and all other financial transactions blocked. Parallelly, at the sub-surface level, a silent “whispering” campaign was started with the target of socially ostracizing WikiLeak. Messages were sent to major schools including Boston University's School of Law, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs through their alumni cautioning students against commenting on or posting links to the WikiLeak documents on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. So not only was WikiLeak to be financially paralyzed, they were also to be made an outcast!!

In the process, the actual pertinent question about ethical journalism got covered under several layers of ashes and dust.

The way WikiLeak has exposed things throws up the all important question about finding the right balance in journalism. Who has a right to what? It we try to argue that we have a right to know everything the state is doing on our behalf, then the reverse will also become true and it will become rather difficult to argue about the right to privacy for the individual. This is the crux of the matter and should have been argued and finally the judiciary, in some form or the other, should have been brought into the game to draw the line. The government officials, however, decided to draw the line themselves and take actions on their own.

Quite often there are objectionable things published on the net - like criminal activities, fraud sites, child pornography, copyright offences etc, when the government has to do a very legitimate "notice and takedown" or a straightforward takedown. Incase of information which tend to compromise the national security of the country, there is an absence of a clear judicial process. This, however, should not become an excuse for the government to act in any way they please, thereby making a farce of the constitution and fundamental human rights. By not respecting the law, by not respecting the ethics and by trying to violate the first amendment, they have opened the door for others also to act in an irresponsible manner.

Violence begets violence. In this case, the violence was bloodless, strictly digital and happened in cyber space!

The strike back was led by a group of hacktivists (hackers cum activists) who call themselves “Anonymous” or “Anons” (short for Anonymous). They have came up with their own “manifesto” in an open letter: "We are not a terrorist organization as governments, demagogues, and the media would have you believe. At this time Anonymous is a consciousness focused on campaigning peacefully for Freedom of Speech. We ask the world to support us, not for our sake, but for your own,"

Within a span of two days, Anonymous has attacked, in sequence, the Swiss bank PostFinance (the bank holding Assange’s bank account and had stopped all transactions in this account), Online payment service provider Paypal (who had refused to accept payments to WikiLeak) and the credit card majors, Mastercard as well as Visa (credit card companies who have refused to accept or allow donations made to WikiLeaks). All these companies have experienced a kind of digital Armageddon of requests which has blocked their servers and causing a slowdown or complete stoppage. The Anonymous have also declared their next target – the online book retailer major Amazon.com (who did not allow WikiLeak to store their documents in the Amazon servers but is selling WikiLeak’s top secret United States diplomatic cables online).

What the Anons are doing is technically called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The DDoS uses the social networking sites to gather a substantial following and then provide these followers with small software programs which are designed to repeatedly send messages to the target site. If a large group of people do this simultaneously, and the attacks are carefully timed for maximum effect, the computer servers that host the websites are bound to crash for a period of time. This technique had been used by the Zapatista rebels of Mexico way back in 1994 with the help of a software company called Electronic Disturbance Theatre. The same company launched the first DDoS software called FloodNet in 1998 and today, this is the biggest artillery in the hands of the hacktivists worldwide.

How would people have reacted to such acts under normal circumstances? I believe most would have categorized such acts as cyber crimes or extremely immature irresponsible acts. In the present context, however, these acts have become protests against the totalitarian establishment. There is a certain romanticism which has also got attached to this ; a bunch of unorganized young computer geeks who have decided to stand up against the big bad wolf – a modern day tale of David and Goliath. This war is now a fight for the freedom of speech, a modern day saga of a freedom struggle where new phrases like “net neutrality” and “information is free” are its slogans and banners.

What the coming days would reveal is that it is far more difficult to contain the Djinni once it has come out of the bottle. These computer geeks, who are usually recluse and socially inept mavericks are experiencing their first taste of power. And nothing corrupts people more than unchecked power. We would have to wait and see whether these hacktivists limit themselves only to this or similar causes or start using their newly gained power to become the next terror on the net.

We are in the midst of the first Cyber world war which is going on between the establishment and the free spirited netizens. As a strong believer of freedom of speech, an ardent netizen and a romantic at heart myself, my sympathies are naturally with these techno-nerds who have taken the American bull by its horn. But what will happen after the twilight?

Only time will tell.

The shifting face of emotions

2010-10-10T16:31:00.011+05:30

Amongst all the changes that we encounter in our journey through life, the most difficult one to handle is the emotional changes that we have to undergo. More specifically, we tend to find it difficult to accept that our relations with someone close to our heart - be it colleague, a friend, a relative or someone more intimate has changed with time and this person has moved on.

What we sometimes fail to realise that human relationships, quite like the human beings themselves, also change with time. The emotions felt today, however deep and long lasting, is still transient and will change with time. This does not make these emotions any less valuable – just like the fleeting nature of the sunset does not rob away its glory. Even when the relationship has changed, the wondrous moments it had given us in our memory amongst many other magical moments - a walk on the wet grass on a summer morning, the smell of freshly baked cake that we tasted on a holiday or the single dew drop on a near perfect rose in our balcony.

Take for example, the relation between a mother and a daughter child. As time passes by, the initial closeness between the mother and the daughter tends to wane as the daughter develops into a separate individual. This, quite often, is shattering for the mother who keeps longing for the old closeness that they once shared. She cannot fathom why her daughter, who used to come home every day from school and tell her what happened at school in excruciating details , seem so withdrawn now. Why the daughter prefers to interact with her countless friends for hours together on the mobile but refuses to share her cries and whispers with the mother. The books that they read together suddenly seem "childish" to the daughter, the movies she saw with her mother while growing up are too "mushy" or "preachy", even the private jokes that they shared also seem stale and hackneyed. Most of the mothers find it difficult to handle this phase and often fail to maintain an emotionally satisfying relationship with their daughter in the later part of their lives.

Similar emotional upheavals are experienced by every person at some point in their lives. Usually people find it more difficult to handle when they are approaching their middle age and are deprived of the all pervading inner panacea called youth to help them out.

In our youth, we tend to be more in touch with our softer self. We believe in the magic of "raindrops on roses" and "whiskers in kittens" and the "bright copper kettles" at home which make the most amazing tea in the world. A good book leaves as breathless, a nice romantic movie leaves us weak in the knees and the entire world with its sunlit days and cheerful breeze tends to spread happiness all around. In this phase, we also make plenty of new friends even with the most unlikely person and often these casual friendships blossom into a heartfelt emotional bonding which both the parties cherish. As we grow old, we somehow lose this joie de vivre, this automatic ability to connect with people and life in general. It becomes difficult to find new friends to have meaningful conversations, to share our fears and uncertainties or just to have a casual banter over silly things to de-stress ourselves. We sometimes try to connect with our old friends and discover that the old magic is somehow missing. This usually leaves us grumpy, dissatisfied and generally peeved with life or forces us to become cynical hard-headed realists who refuse to see anything good in life.

How does one handle change in the middle age in that case? I don’t think there is any sure-shot formulae for it but I think if we accept the transcendental nature of life as well as our emotions and do not try to hold on to them, we can handle it better. Just like we cannot keep our beloveds alive for ever, however much we may wish to , our relationship with the world and its inhabitants cannot remain stagnant. Instead of mourning what we have lost, we should try to find happiness in what we have; and try to explore the new things that come into our lives. For this, perhaps, we have to be break the shell of our comfortable existance and be in touch with our inner self to discover what we really like. Much to our surprise, we will probably discover that the inner core also has changed and has found new sources of joy which we have been depriving it from. We have to discover the child within us and allow it to explore the world around and find out what really excites us today.

We will find that the rainbow still has enough shades to brighten our lives and the wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings will still steal a smile of two from our weather-torn shell-hardened cynical self.

Gurgaon Diaries - 2

2010-06-13T11:55:00.005+05:30

Gurgaon, I was told, is completely devoid of public transport system. The government is probably proud of it as well. Being from Navi Mumbai (Kharghar), I can well imagine this. My initial days at Kharghar, when I did not have a car, involved plenty of walking, wooing and cajoling auto-rickshaws to go my way and showing that famous horizontal thumb gesture indiscriminately to any passing vehicle. Gurgaon promised to transport me back in time to those days!!

As a first step, I asked for the nearest market place and was told that there exists a “well established” market called the “Hudda Market” about a km away. I walked down to this market and found it to be a dingy little place with a bunch of shops set up in a distinctly claustrophobic manner. It has only one proper eating joint inside and five medicine shops around it which seemed to cast some suspicion on the quality of food being dished out by this place. Other than this, this market also has an abnormally high number of Unisex saloons which also makes you doubt about their true purpose of existence. This market also has the only liquor shop of this area (which was surprisingly well stocked; the guy had Carlberg / Budweiser/ Tuborg/ Foster beers along with the usual Indian fare) very strategically located at the extremely corner of the market – immediately beside a small kabab-wala. A subsequent visit in the evening revealed that the kabab-wala sets up plastic chairs & tables in the small stretch beside the booze shop and serves kabab and booze over there. The kabab-wala has a decent choice of offerings with those typical glass-single-window-thela and multi-coloured kababs (I could find red, orange, yellow, brown, green colours) hanging on sheeks – ready to be served at a moment’s notice. One also has the comfort of sitting in open air, very close to the boundary wall of the market so that any sudden visit of the authorities in khaki can be handled by quickly jumping over the boundary wall and running cross country across the dark grounds surrounding the market. There would, of course, be a certain amount of danger of breaking your leg or getting bitten by the innumerable dogs that seem to infest the surroundings of this market but one must accept it as a part of the charm and excitement of visiting this place.

Though the official opening time is ten, it is only by eleven when you can see some activity in the shops. The shop keeper would come by that time, yawning away to glory and if you dare to question him about the reason for this delay, you would be given a long lecture which will start with “aise bhi kya jaldi hain..” and then move on to sentiments like how we do not have time to stand and stare any more. To be fair, these shops stay open till about 10:30 or 11:00 pm (the booze shop and his kabab partner till 1:00 am in the night) and one has to give some leeway on account of this.

Another interesting this about this market is the complete diversification the shop keepers seem to have achieved. There is a milk booth which also doubles up as a Xerox shop, an internet café (the only one in this area) which also functions as ladies tailor, a duplicate VCD shop which also sells stationeries and one of those unisex saloons also sell mobile handsets. The most unique one will have to be the shop which sells ladies undergarments and towels (and which happens to be the only shop selling both the items in this market). I had a rather embarrassing moment when I had to enter this shop to buy a towel (I had forgotten to pack one) and had to wade through a sea of women of different sizes and shapes who gave me very dirty looks.

Just when I was about to give up on this market, I discovered that there is a better version of this market available just behind this market. This was more of the present generation market – which has three supermarkets including the Aditya Birla group “More”, the “Grahneez” (a popular local supermarket chain) and “Mandi” – an exclusive fruits and vegetable market. These are the new generation air-conditioned shops with bar-coded materials on well lit displays and English speaking staffs – shops to which we have now got used to. I also discovered that there is a shop which sells an amazing range of frozen foods including Japanese foods, pork and beef cold cuts and diet ice -creams. And this new market also has a Pizza Hut and several small food joints – all of whom are ready to deliver at home.

One could easily notice that Gurgaon is like a small island amongst the traditional Haryana lifestyle; an island with wide roads, plush cars, educated executives and call-centre crowd maintaining an air of exclusivity within it. It is an upwardly mobile place with a somewhat cosmopolitan culture and expensive lifestyle. I expect that this probably would have created a rift with the local people, as I had seen in Kharghar. It is too early to comment – one needs to observe more.

Till then, let me feel at home – now that I have discovered that I have a Pizza Hut less than 1 km away!

Gurgaon Diaries - 1

2010-06-12T20:18:00.006+05:30

I landed up in Gurgaon on 2^nd June 2010, after an eight-year stay at my adopted hometown Mumbai. The welcome was not altogether pleasant as it was hot (37 deg C at 8:30 pm in the evening!!), my luggage was the last on the conveyor and I was tired. The tiredness was probably more mental than physical – caused by the psychological effort of moving out of my comfort zone, both in terms of location as well as job.

The hotel, a simple and unpretentious one in Gurgaon called “Bax” (god knows who chose the name), fortunately could provide me a room immediately and also promised that food will be available incase I wish to partake the same. The room was perfect except one near-fatal defect – namely, the air conditioning does not work. To be fair, it switches on, makes a great deal of noise, its flaps move when I press the appropriate switch on the remote and even it displays the temperature. It only refuses to cool down the room temperature!! I suppose some undemanding gentleman would accept this rather than be a terrible bother but at 37 deg C, I couldn’t care less. A quick visit to the reception and a brief eye-to-eye no-nonsense conversation with the receptionist ensured that I was immediately shifted to a different room with an ambiguous assurance that this new room has a “Split AC”. I was too tired to explain that I have no moral objection to window ACs, especially so since I happen to have two of them at my place; my requirement – and this I am rather tiresomely firm about - is that the AC should function. When I say function, I mean there should be a perceptible drop in room temperature once it is switched on. This new room with the “Split AC” which was so highly spoken about, unfortunately did not quite fulfill this demand of mine. For sure, it was better than the previous one but the improvement cannot really be described as substantial. On the other hand, this room had a television whose remote required strong fingers and a very purposeful mind as every button had to be pressed with extremely hard and that too several times. The effect was also somewhat unpredictable as often the channels changed on their own – some sort of a delayed effect of the remote being pressed 15 minutes back.

Having explored all possibilities with the AC and the TV, I picked up the menu card. A call to the room service revealed that only about 5% of the menu is actually available and that too would probably have a waiting period of at least an hour. I chose to have only plain curd – which seemed to be the safest bet amongst the available 5% menu and was promised that this would be delivered in less than an hour. This proved to be true excepting the fact that when the plain curd was delivered, they also delivered two plain parathas with it as "complimentary" . I had a long and desultory conversation with the room service and subsequently with the manager wherein I insisted that I wanted plain curd and just the curd – without any accompaniment of parathas, however tempting they might be; the room service chap maintaining that it is against their policies to serve “just a plain curd” to any of their guests. It seems that it is impossible for an honest and innocent man to have "just plain curd" in this hotel without severely offending the delicate sense of hospitality of the staff.

After this ratherbeventful night, I moved into my new flat on the next day. This part went through like a clock-work. The watchman, a friendly bloke called Mithilesh proved to be one of the most well organized gentlemen I have ever met. Within 5 minutes of me entering the flat, the newspaper-wala was fixed up, housemaid was arranged for, a plumber was sent to check whether there is any leakage and the telephone number of the nearest grocery store was handed over. The aforementioned gentleman, very helpfully, informed me that the grocery store does home delivery and also promised me to introduce to the nearest restaurant who also delivers food at home within a reasonable time. I was seriously contemplating on whether to offer him a job in my previous organization as the facility management head and finally decided not to do as it lead to his losing his entrepreneur spirit and eventually becoming another of those rule-abiding, moss-laden dimwitted nincompoops which only a large conservative organization can produce.

Thus ended my first day in Gurgaon; non-functioning AC, weirdly hospitable waiters and a quick-gun watchman. Let's see what the next days reveal.