Subtler Nuances of Life

The Intrepid Malayalee goes travelling

2012-01-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

You see a person in a train, whom you can't place. You doubt whether he is a Malayalee because he does not have the usual walrus moustache, the oily hair or the malayalee accent.
Well when you notice that he has got into the train at 3 am in the night and has set his mobile alarm for 6 am in the morning, and having slept for just 3 hours still goes to the basin to wash his teeth for an infinite period of time, a homespun towel draped across his shoulders, you can be sure then that he belongs to the malayalee tribe. As Douglas Adam quotes in the HitchHiker's guide to the galaxy
<quote>
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
</quote>
It may not be for these reasons that the malayalee carries his threadbare towel (homespun, because it is easy to clean it by just wringing it), but all the same it is a malayalee trademark - a symbol of hygiene.
In fact most labourers in Kerala can be found with a red towel wrapped across their head as they go about their menial tasks and when he comes home the first thing he will do is wring the sweat and water out of the "toowal" and have a long renovating bath with the costliest herbal soap available in the market.
Mark these actions. You can bet he was brought up in the best of malayalee tradition.
To a malayalee sleep is sacrosant. He will never disturb his body clock, come what may, I think even if there were to be a mild earthquake.
Another malayalee trait is the habit of constantly worrying. If he reaches a bus stop and has just missed a bus by five minutes, he will spent ages fretting about it. And he can be even verbal about it. "If I was just five minutes early..." to all who care to listen!
This is in sharp contrast to the laid back attitude of rural north india. Time does not flow, it stops. If a bus is missed, of course there will be another bus coming, even though it might be after a good six hours!
I am posting a flowchart that shows what we must worry about, and when nothing can be gained by crying over split milk. But that goes against the malayalee mindset!

Good Old Y.M.C.A. Days

2011-12-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

The YMCA, Nagpur, in the late 1980's was a cool place to live in. Bang in the heart of Nagpur city, it encompassed a space large enough to cover two football fields. It was here that I spent two years while I completed my post-matriculation.
The original British built structure that faced the main road was rented off to small businesses and it shielded us, living in a newer structure, from the city traffic and noise, to do our own thing. Nagpur was in those days considered the third greenest city in India, and you had to visit the YMCA to indeed experience the fact that there could actually be a vast stretch of shady wooded land in the middle of this hot sweltering city; a part of the city's colonial legacy. We woke up each morning not to the honks of traffic on the road but to the trills of songbirds.
The inmates were mostly Bengali, Keralites, Manipuri and Africans, and a few engineering students from North India and Andhra Pradesh.
We inmates knew each other on a first name basis and shared jokes, vibes, fights and banter; and the food of course.
The YMCA warden in those days was a shady guy with a distinctly Marwadi name, though a Christian. And he went about his ways in a business like fashion that lived up to his name.
In those days, when a two-wheeler was a luxury, this chap had a Maruti van, a Kinetic Honda, a Bajaj socoter in addition to his trusty Ambassador car. His son, and I studied at the same college, and I could often spot this spoilt brat come to College in his Maruti van, bunk all his classes, and party with his friends. But then he was in the commerce stream which was what rich kids of rich businessmen did those days, while I was into Science and had to mark my attendance each day, lest I miss my Calculus lectures and have to sit with my books extra time.
Of course we had our fraternity with our counterparts in the YWCA which was just behind our building but the approach to which was a full circle across the central junction in Nagpur. One of my Manipuri friends had a sister staying at the YWCA and whenever he got a chance he would pester me to accompany him to meet his dear sister, though I suspect this "sister" was not of the actual blood kind!
I saw gradual changes coming to the YMCA in the second year of my stay. The entire area in front of the British built facade was built over and turned into a lavish wedding reception hall and lawn. Not a bad idea, we thought. And when the food at the mess got too boring, we would sneak our way to the reception hall at night and have a feast at the unsuspecting groom's expense!
In the middle of the second year I moved over to another hostel, on the outskirts of town. And it was then that the entire YMCA land was sold off for an ultra-modern medical college and hospital to come up. Nobody staying in Nagpur is unaware of the Lata Mangeshkar College of Medicine and Hospital, named after the great singer. Well, the very ground on which we played football, where the Manipuri's roasted their pork in mustard oil, the Africans cut their hair in punk style, was now teeming with construction workers, and in just a couple of years mighty buildings replaced the YMCA Men's Hostel. What happened to the YMCA then? The present day YMCA Hostel in Nagpur is a small building which might be able to house just 1/10th of the original capacity it had.
What happened? we wondered. How come this blatant commercialization by an institution that was supposed to do social service? There were rumors that the warden had made a good commission selling off YMCA land for commercial purposes, and every person on the YMCA managing board, including those at the very top, had their share of it too.
Those days corruption was fashionable, and the sooner you made money selling off land that was not yours, smaller the chances of getting caught.

North Bridge is Falling Down!

2011-08-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

I have an unusual fad. From as far back as my college days, I remember going to the railway station at the dead of night to have a cuppa tea. What began as a break from late night study during college days turned out to be a habit. Those days my nightly cycle rides to Nagpur Central Railway Station was not only to enjoy the cool serene night air but also to enjoy the exotic tea served at a corner tea stall. The tea was laced with cardamom and you just didn't swallow it, but swirled it around your mouth like some wine taster tasting his favorite choice. Another reason was that the railway station was the only place which had some semblance of night life, the only place where you could get tea at 1 at night.
The habit lingered and I still find myself making a short trip to the railway station in the late evenings or early morning, this time on my two wheeler; to have that cuppa tea, this time at Kochi Town railway station. And yes, railway stations are the only places with night life in Kochi too.
My job at the gig where I worked some years back ended at 2 am or 3 am at night since I was supposed to work in tandem with my US counterpart. So on Friday nights I was dropped off at the North Railway station by the company cab so that I could catch my night train to Kottayam on my way home. And I had the chance of savoring the tea at tea stalls in front of Ernakulam North railway station, though I wouldn't say the tea is very exotic.
Ernakulam North has a very important landmark - the North Overbridge. Life teems not only on it, but below it too, and the North Railway Station is a stone's throw away from it. I would say my favorite landmark in Kochi is the North Bridge, an arterial bridge over the North-South railway tracks. Before I caught my night train home, if I got the time, I browsed the internet at an all-night internet parlor just below the North bridge. Ernakulam North Railway Station and it's North Bridge was my favorite haunt in Kochi.
The North Bridge is going to be pulled down shortly since it is deemed as being too old, having being built along with it's counterpart, the South Over Bridge, in the early 1960's. This reconstruction work is going to throw Kochi into near chaos as many native to Kochi know. The North Bridge links two very congested and busy parts of Ernakulam (Kochi). It's so important to the city that the bridge won't be pulled down before some dry runs on traffic management, and widening of alternate roads happen. Kochi will be missing one of it's very important landmarks for some time, once the North Bridge is pulled down to make way for it's successor.