Ghanshyam Says

Hello again

2011-03-19T03:53:00.002+05:30

A lot has happened over the last few months. I've moved jobs, and moved from Chennai to Pune. I spent two weeks in Pune before leaving again on assignment.

Those two weeks were enough for me to begin to make friends and become a regular at Skips (sensational scrambled eggs, the world's best mango smoothie and tuna sandwiches with bits of apple in them, all of it conceptualised, cooked and served to you by this lady you’ll start calling ‘aunty’ within five minutes of meeting her for the first time) and this other place near office that introduced me to the concept of the bajri wada (or bajra wadi).

And this assignment has kept me in Delhi long enough for me to have become a regular at Changezi Chicken (home of the eponymous dish consisting of bits of slow-cooked chicken in a tangy, thick gravy that contains a host of mystery ingredients – they’re mysterious because I haven't asked anyone or googled, and don't want to for fear of mundanising [yes, that word now exists] the thing) and one of the 316787 (I don’t know the exact number – it’s on the blackboard) people who have wept joyously over (and into) a bowl of khao suey at The Kitchen, and for me to call this hotel room home in Daryaganj ‘home’ in unguarded moments.

Home, of course, is a place redolent of vazhaithandu vadhakkified with thenga and turmeric and I'm not sure if it's paitham paruppu or ulutham paruppu, tempered with mustard seeds and one magical slit green chilli that makes all the difference.

Me? I care too much

2010-09-06T18:24:00.006+05:30

In the last couple of months, I have played a lot of football. Not very well, of course. Were we to split teams the way we did as kids, by having two unofficial captains take their pick one after the other, I’d definitely be among the last players chosen. Probably the last.
I’m spared this ignominy, but not the constant reminders of my lowly stature once we kick off. An opponent nutmegs me derisively, a teammate shakes his head with a mixture of disbelief and pity after I mis-control a ball played to my feet, and refuses to pass to me for the rest of the game.
I have little inborn sporting ability - ball sense, hand-eye co-ordination, anticipation, athleticism. Having played a lot of it as a kid, I became a decent enough cricketer to open the batting in unorganised tennis-ball games (and the odd inter-department match in college). This may not sound like much, but had my batting technique remained at the level of my footballing technique, I’d have been one of the kids who batted in the tail and didn’t bowl at all.
With football, which I played little of growing up, it’s different. I often feel I don’t belong, even among portly, chain-smoking chaps a decade older than me.
A lot of bad footballers are in it for a laugh. Me? I care too much. I can’t even countenance the idea of playing in goal, where I won’t be expected to be any good anyway, and where I’d be looked at gratefully for relieving someone else of the need to perform this unwanted task. No, I want to be in the thick of the action. I want to exert my influence on the game. I cannot shut up.
I point at people, point at where I’d like them to be. I holler on about fanciful ideas like playing a high back-line or using the width of the pitch. I yell at teammates to track back, even when I know that I, possessing the turning radius of a beached whale and the first touch of a combine harvester, have no business telling them what to do.
I am ignored. And, I guess, endured. Laughed at when I’m not around, if people talk about me at all.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be good at football. To make the ball bend to your will. To have gotten rid of the fear of having the ball at your feet. To be able to look up and look around the field with the ball at your feet, and make instinctive decisions about what to do with it, unmindful of all the players closing you down, narrowing your field of vision, getting in your face.
I haven’t achieved this state even in my dreams. The only football dreams I have had involve the game bypassing me entirely as I stand frozen in the middle of the pitch, feet flailing about helplessly, failing even once to connect with the ball. I make out indistinct, angry shouts, which I suppose issue from my teammates, and then nothing, as panic shuts down my hearing.

That's how I feel with the ball at my feet (Soccer on motorbikes on the football pitch of Crystal Palace in London, England 1923. Photo: Nationaal Archief, Flickr)

And because I’m so bad, I remember each of my unexpected successes vividly.
First goal? I am about 11 or 12; I’m playing with my classmates. The ball stops next to me, for some reason, and I have my back to the goal, which is about ten yards away. I turn around, and smack the ball blindly, as hard as I can, and it sort of sneaks between the unsuspecting keeper (who only had to stretch out his left arm a bit to palm it wide) and the near post.
I can explain to you, with aid of a badly drawn diagram, how I once made the most delicate chipped pass over the last defender (in a game of beach football with no goalkeeper) that a teammate ran on to and stroked home gleefully. It was so unexpected that no one believed I intended it. You only have my word - delivered in a whiny, earnestly schoolboyish tone - against the scornful rebuttals of those who witnessed it, if they remember at all.
Why would they? They probably don’t remember their own transcendental moments the way I do. I can remind T of that ludicrous lob he scored with on the school ground in seventh standard, or A of the through-ball he played to B a couple of years ago, with me looking on from outside, unable to play thanks to a twisted ankle. If I ever see him again - I’ve only met this friend of a friend twice, seven years ago - I’ll ask S to demonstrate the kicking technique he used when he smacked in one of those long-range goals that sends Andy Gray tumbling off his chair.
They’ll look at me pityingly and wonder what I’m going on about. For them, it’s a game they happen to be good at. Me? I care too much. I want to be player-manager and implement in our weekly kickabouts the 3-3-1-3 formation Louis van Gaal used at Ajax.

Don't let it end

2010-06-24T02:09:00.003+05:30

I remember perusing at work one day a press release that revealed, among other results from an under-14 tennis tournament, that M. Rohit had defeated R. Mohit (or vice-versa). The scoreline I do not remember. The game may have been tight, or one-sided in the extreme.

I imagined at the time that these two boys would grow up forever facing each other in finals of tennis tournaments, and that their lives would culminate in an epic match that would simply refuse to end.

Nicolas Mahut and John Isner may not possess the duality of M. Rohit and R. Mohit, but are nevertheless tied at 59-all in the fifth set of a first round match on court number 18 at Wimbledon. Play has been suspended for the day. The six-hour final set is already longer than any other match in tennis history.

What happens if this game never ends? Will Wimbledon come to a standstill forever because someone is stuck in eternal wait for a second-round opponent?

A Moment in Time

2010-05-04T16:24:00.005+05:30

After the first wave of responses to their photo project, the editors at the New York Times Lens Blog noted that
"Another impulse discernible among the early submissions was domesticity. Rather than looking for broadly symbolic visual emblems, readers concentrated on showing their worlds (and maybe a few more cats, dogs, tulips and coffee cups than we hoped to see, if truth be told)."
Well, that's what happens when you ask people to shoot pictures on a Sunday.
I, however, was at work that evening, from about six to eleven thirty (yes, such is my life). At around 8.20, I walked out of office and onto Anna Salai, and ended up shooting this ice cream cart.
I eagerly await the moment when the picture mosaic goes up on the NYT website. They promise "an interactive display that will allow you to sort them geographically and thematically."
Should be awesome.

The Carnatic conundrum

2010-04-05T14:53:00.010+05:30

Yesterday evening, I was at a concert: Prasanna (guitar), Victor Wooten (bass guitar), Karthik (ghatam) and Bangalore Amrit (kanjira). I loved it. So did the rest of the audience, to judge by their reactions to Prasanna and Wooten's frenetic fretwork, and particularly how they cheered and whistled when Karthik and Amrit engaged in a percussion duel much like a Carnatic tani avartanam.

This caused a question to pop into my head. If they liked that so much, why don't I see them (young people, many carrying guitars which they'd carried to a workshop by Wooten in the afternoon) attending Carnatic concerts in big groups?

What Karthik and Amrit did was pretty much what every percussion duo or trio (one of the best tani avartanams I ever saw was a three-way thing pitting mridangam, ghatam and morsing at an Aruna Sairam concert in December 2008) does at the end of the centrepiece of every Carnatic concert.

Ironically, a significant section of the mostly silver- or salt-and-pepper-haired crowd that attends these concerts walks out for a snack when the tani avartanam begins; in short, they show far less understanding of and appreciation for the percussionists' talents than the younger crowd at the Wooten-Prasanna show did.

So why?

I got a partial answer just after the concert ended, when I was discussing the experience with a friend, who's from another department of the newspaper I work for. She said she'd enjoyed the show, but thought Prasanna hogged the limelight.

"I had come to watch Victor Wooten," she said. "I don't think I'd ever attend a Prasanna concert."

"Why not? You should check out one of his Carnatic performances sometime," I said.

"No, I don't really like Carnatic music that much."

How much Carnatic music had she heard in her life?

Her answer? The instrumental music they play at the canteen and the elevators at the office. It's feeble stuff, flute or violin renditions of done-to-death compositions, with little or no percussive backing and as representative of Carnatic music as a monophonic Fur Elise ringtone is to Beethoven's lifetime output.

Based on that sample, she'd decided she didn't like Carnatic music. If that was my only exposure to Carnatic music, there's no way I'd want to listen either.

A lot of people carry in their heads this notion that Carnatic music is somehow forbidding, serious, sombre, slow. It's completely untrue. It's usually (when handled by accomplished artistes) full of witty repartee between singer/lead musician and accompanists, or between accompanists, and the people on stage spend a lot of time smiling at each other or making appreciative gestures, trading musical inside jokes. A well-delivered concert usually spans the entire emotional spectrum - much like the Wooten/Prasanna/Karthik/Amrit show.

And I say this as someone whose Carnatic training lasted less than a month, when I was in the first standard. The lady downstairs, who taught me and this other kid the rudiments, frequently yelled at us when we played cricket outside her window and once even confiscated my bat; how could I possibly learn music from someone like that? What I mean to say is, if I can enjoy Carnatic music, so can anyone with an open mind and the barest ear for music.

Here's Benjamin Zander, saying much the same thing, far more coherently: how anyone can enjoy classical music:

Oh, and do read this as well. It asks the question of what role music plays in our lives, and whether our priorities are all wrong, and is an utterly brilliant piece of journalism. Thanks to Sruthi for mailing me the link.

Armrest

2010-02-02T18:23:00.003+05:30

Today, the right armrest of my office chair is at a higher level than the left armrest.

I don't know how this happened, but it's created a curious situation.

You see, this chair swivels. And I swivel a lot. And now, each time I swivel to my left, the right armrest hovers above the right CTRL key of my keyboard.

I lean forward when I read stuff on the computer. Under the present circumstances, this causes the armrest to press the CTRL key.

And when I'm reading stuff, I scroll. You do that too, I'd imagine. Only, you don't press CTRL while you scroll.

Holding CTRL when you scroll causes the text size to either increase or decrease, depending on the direction of the scrolling. This, in short, has been happening all day.

Pinch me

2010-01-29T23:23:00.001+05:30

Not literally, of course. Do, however, check this out. I am delighted beyond anything I can say right now.

Oh, and clicking on the link will finally reveal to you the name that I hide from behind this Ghanshyam facade.

The doorframe's lament

2010-01-15T18:52:00.008+05:30

The sadness of the doorframe

is voiced
neither through colour

(blue-grey)

nor finish

(an uneven gloss)

nor the creak of hinges.

But today,
I hear

its lament,

its unwilling
compliance

in framing rectangles

of the corridor's banal shufflings

and scamperings,

its comings and goings

which today

you will not relieve

with an entrance.

Written on an extremely slow day at work. Excuse the corniness.

Life in my cubicle

2009-12-21T17:26:00.002+05:30

Reflected in the glass of my cubicle are two ZooZoos (which, appallingly, have a Wikipedia page of their own). As I typed that, another joined them to make three in all. I dislike ZooZoos. Clearly, the dude who sits in the cubicle next to mine, from whose computer screen the glass of my cubicle reflects the ZooZoos, doesn't share my lack of affection for the paunchy little things and their annoying speech-patterns.

Not that I have anything against paunches. I cannot afford to, for it would trap me in an unending maelstrom of self-loathing.

Also reflected in the glass of my cubicle are images from the India-Sri Lanka one day international at Cuttack. The positioning and alignment of my cubicle means that a majority of the cricket (and indeed all television) I watch while at office is laterally inverted. Which is great for the idle pondering of the role handedness plays in our aesthetic appreciation of sport, but not when you want to watch for an extended time-period.

As I type, a colleague yells, "The Sri Lankans are falling apart!" and then, "Kandamby gaali." (Gaali is a Tamil word that approximately means 'finished'. Thilina Kandamby is a left-handed Sri Lankan middle-order batsman who bats right-handed on the glass of my cubicle.)

My cubicle is partly glass, and partly the kind of laminate found in all cubicles, or at least the ones I have seen. In between, there's also a rectangular piece of softwood, ostensibly meant to function as a notice board. In the other cubicles in my office, this piece of softwood is covered with blue cloth. Mine's bare. This wasn't the case until about a month after I joined, when I arrived to see that the blue cloth had been ripped off, along with the picture of Hanuman pinned to it.

The picture of Hanuman, and the cubicle, had belonged before I arrived to the Deputy Sports Editor of the newspaper I work for. The cubicle now belongs to me, while the picture of Hanuman has returned to its rightful owner, who now sits in a cubicle diagonally opposite mine.

The occupant of the cubicle diagonally opposite mine is still the Deputy Sports Editor. His cubicle, however, does not have upon its exterior a brass plaque that reads 'Deputy Sports Editor'. Mine does.

Which is mildly embarrassing, because whoever walks into the office with the purpose of speaking to someone at or near the apex of its hierarchical pyramid stops at the door for a while, attempting to find in my entirely blameless visage a sign of deputy-sports-editor-hood, before making his or her uncertain way to my cubicle, only to be directed to the glowering occupant of the one diagonally opposite mine.

Not unridiculous

2009-11-25T18:12:00.004+05:30

I need a haircut. It is beyond long overdue. Currently, my hair is at that stage of its life-cycle where it's begun to infiltrate my ears.

I do not like the irritating tickle of hair in my ears. It is, I think, the number one cause of headaches in humans.

Right now, I don't have a headache. This state of affairs, however, is dangerously impermanent.

Apart from infiltrating my ears, my hair's also begun to curl at the ends. But not uniformly.

If you criss-cross the top of my head with latitudes and longitudes, and if the dudes who came up with the Divine Ratio assign values to each co-ordinate point based on the aesthetic desirability of curly hair upon that point, the curliness of each hair on my head would be inversely proportional to its positional aesthetic value. Behind my ears, above the nape of my neck, and basically encompassing the latitude on my head that would roughly correspond to the Tropic of Cancer, are located the curliest strands of hair. Which, frankly, would look ridiculous on anyone. Framing an otherwise not-unridiculous face such as mine, it's even worse.

Am I a philistine?

2009-10-13T20:21:00.116+05:30

The other day, a friend, a long-haired dude who has since shaved his head, a chap with a collection of hard drives full of movies and music, played a song on his laptop.

"You'll love it," he said.

Or maybe he didn't say anything, but that doesn't matter.

So he played this song. It was, I can now tell you, having asked this other friend who was around at the same time, and googled the line he remembered, Beautiful World by Colin Hay.

I like to go out beyond the white breakers
where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea

The tune was pleasant enough, the dude singing it had a nice voice, but my enthusiasm for it was only tepid. I said as much to my two friends.

"Listen to the lyrics properly da. It's awesome," one or both of them said.

And there in essence was my problem. More accurately the problem with me.

I'm incapable of appreciating songs whose appeal is primarily lyric-based. This I think is connected to my inability to really get poetry. I get funny stuff, like Ogden Nash, but that's about it. Unless you count something like this, the only lines of poetry I've ever stuck on a status message:

Like rattle of dry seeds in pods the warm crowd gently clapped,
The boys who came to watch their gods, the tired old men who napped.

And I surmise that I appreciate this poem (Cricket at Worcester, John Arlott) purely because it describes a cricket scene, i.e., something that's likely to strike an emotional chord anyway. And heck, it tells me clearly what it's talking about.

Unlike, say, this:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without no seams nor needlework, then she'll be a true love of mine

I heard this (Scarborough Fair, Simon and Garfunkel) thanks to another friend, a colleague at work who did crazy things with the internet settings to enable access to streaming video, found the song on YouTube and handed me a pair of headphones.

"The lyrics are awesome, right?" he asked me.

I nodded with a beatific smile, not because I thought the lyrics awesome (Honestly, I have no idea what the two dudes are going on about) but because I loved the song for the tune, and how the two voices, one high, one low, in perfect harmony, made me bask in some un-nameable emotion.

Beautiful World somehow didn't manage it, which perhaps isn't the song's failure but mine.

Read here what Mike Marqusee wrote rather more eloquently on a not entirely dissimilar theme.

Pilfered tennis balls

2009-10-12T19:07:00.005+05:30

Perusing pilfered tennis balls should, you would imagine, induce in the peruser a wave of complex emotions, ranging from the urge to perform a celebratory jig to a desire to confess in a flood of tears and repentance. Not so in my case, however. All I feel now as I stare at the furry sphere on my floor is resentment.

I pilfered this ball about two months ago, from the cubicle of a reporter who works in the same newspaper as I, but a different department. "You're sure I can steal it?" I asked my friend, who works in the tennis ball dude's department. "Sure," she replied. The tennis ball dude, as you might imagine, wasn't around.

But all the conspiratorial thrill I felt when I dropped the ball in my bag evaporated when I lobbed it at the wall back in my room. For instead of zipping past the outside edge of my hesitantly thrusting bat upon bouncing on the floor, it (the ball) dribbled under its (the bat's) worn oil-hole.

For two months now, it has mocked me with its yellow leer and obstinate refusal to rise above my ankle, even when I've attempted to fling it out of my sight.

It's the very definition of irony, for the first, and only other, tennis ball I pilfered, back when I was in school, was tennis ball perfection, and remained in my possession about forty seven seconds, before my second backfoot punch sent it bouncing out of my balcony grille and bounding enthusiastically in a north-easterly direction, towards a happier place and, I'm sure, a better batsperson.

Transience

2009-09-12T23:22:00.003+05:30

This world, and all the intriguing little thingies it contains, could do with a little more permanence.

Take for instance these things, which look in this picture like the most unremarkable kind of plasticky loopy objects imaginable - which is precisely what they are.

It wasn't always so, however.

At a party I went to a few weeks ago, I was handed something out of a cylindrical box, a thing that to my eyes looked like a straw.

"Bend it," I was told.

I bent it.

And suddenly, the thing, having lost its straightness, now gained glowiness. Upon fastening its ends to a little flexible plastic tube, I had on my wrist a glow-in-the-dark bangle! Very soon, I had two!

You can imagine all the childlike wrist-wriggling that ensued - not just mine, but of all the others at the party similarly entranced. Especially enthusiastic, and even triumphant, I thought, was the wriggling of wrists circled in blue light. I admit now that I coveted the blue bangles. Mine, perfect in every other way, weren't blue, but green and orange.

The next day, the bangles glowed only feebly; the day after, not even that. They still sit in my shelf, ignored sometimes, looked at wistfully other times. My mum asked me the other day if she could use them to keep the curtains from flapping about.

I wonder what the others did with theirs. Especially the blue ones. Do they still glow?

Why do we love sport?

2009-08-21T01:04:00.009+05:30

Yesterday, I sat on a red plastic chair under a row of trees next to the tennis court at Loyola college and watched an inter-collegiate doubles final. On the far side of the court, the hockey team practiced on the hockey ground, to one side of which rose the steeple of Loyola church.
Against this backdrop, the quality of tennis wasn't great. Talent flickered intermittently, a crosscourt return winner here, a wristy half-volley there. Mostly though, the match was strewn with errors. Volleys failed to clear the tape, returns sailed beyond the baseline, one serve hit the perimeter fencing on the full.
For all that, this was a contest, and the players were deadly serious. One disputed line call took, or seemed to take, ten minutes to resolve, and the players plodded earnestly through excruciatingly drawn-out games full of misplaced first serves. Every game seemed to reach deuce. At one point in the second set, even the chirping of birds in the branches above grew restless.
When the third set began, everyone who had so far watched idly, chatting, sensed this heightened intensity and grew silent. The hockey players gathered at the far side of the court, leaving the playing of one sport behind to witness another.
This was much like periods in so much of the tennis-ball cricket I've played, on the streets, in backyards, on baking afternoons in dusty playgrounds, periods where nothing matters but bat and ball, runs and wickets. Charged particles fill the air - you don't necessarily have to pad up in an Ashes Test, or stand amidst the thousands holding up scarves or setting off flares in a Champions League final to feel them.

Walk when you talk

2009-08-19T01:35:00.003+05:30

Whenever I take a bite out of a burger or a submarine sandwich, I cause the stuff inside to slide out the other end. I cannot twirl spaghetti or noodles with a fork without the stuff unravelling before I raise the thing to my mouth. I'm incapable of taming mozzarella. One of my shirts has a sambhar stain on it, another a toothpaste smear.
I once saw a friend do something I could never do. He reclined on his bed and brushed his teeth slowly, with measured brush strokes, for a serious length of time, without the tiniest drop of foam dribbling down his chin.
I could have given the chap a standing ovation.
One day in the Chemistry Lab in school, I held a test tube in one hand, a filter in the other, stuck the filter into the test tube, and let go with the wrong hand.
I seldom carried stationery to school. Whatever little notes I took down, and all the doodling I did, I did with borrowed pens. A lot of people, even close friends, eventually stopped lending me their pens, because I always returned them with their clips broken. I couldn't - I still can't - help fiddling with pen clips.
I cannot paint with watercolours. I use too much water, apply too much pressure with my brush, and end up leaving a silt-like deposit of bluish-brown papier mache on the paper's top surface. I haven't tried oils or acrylic or egg tempera or whatever, so I can't say with certainty that I'll suck at those too.
During the fixed-line-phone-only era, I presciently walked when I talked. It didn't do me, or the phone, any good.

Such is life

2009-06-29T01:19:00.009+05:30

In a shelf not far from where I sit is a notebook. Its cover says Sketch Book 100 Pages.
In another shelf, not far from the shelf in which the notebook lies, is a box. The box contains pencils, six in total, of different graphite-to-clay ratios. A sharpener – Twin Sharpener, the box says – came free with the box of pencils. The Twin Sharpener is actually two sharpeners, of different diameters, in one.
I haven’t put the notebook, the pencils, or the sharpener to use, yet.
Someday I will.
Someday, I shall pick up a pencil, most likely the HB, and with its sharp end make a pattern, a rudimentary curve, upon a page of the Sketch Book. That curve may cause other curves to materialise, or it may not.
It may instead cause me to look around frantically for an eraser. An eraser may exist in this house, maybe in a shelf not far from the shelf the Sketch Book lies in. Or it may not.
On the day the HB pencil and the Sketch Book come in contact with each other, no eraser will be found. What will happen is this – in vain I will search for an eraser, and upon finding none attempt on a new page to create a satisfactory rudimentary curve, fail, and put the Sketch Book back in its shelf, after tearing out the pages with the unsatisfactory rudimentary curves on them, crumpling them, and tossing them in the bin.
The sharpener and the five other pencils in the box will have served no purpose.
All night the visions of a completed sketch will dance in my brain, teasing, tormenting.
The next day, I will find an eraser, in a shelf not far from the Sketch Book and the box of pencils, a shelf whose every inch I would have probed the previous day. Faber Castell, it will say, or maybe Natraj. Or it may say nothing, and look and smell like a slice of cartoon lemon instead.
By then, the visions that had swirled on the page the previous day, orbiting the unsatisfactory rudimentary curve, will have departed the retina of my mind’s eye, forever, or till the next time the eraser disappears.

Rain

2009-06-04T13:34:00.011+05:30

"Join Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad" read the sign on the wall. I was in a bus; the bus was in Kodambakkam; we had just crossed Meenakshi College. Thankfully for the impressionable youth of the city, the chaps who had scrawled this on the wall had overlooked the fact that this wall wasn't perhaps the most ideal wall for the purpose. For the wall - only about two feet high - bounded a transformer with DANGER painted in red across the grey of its steel shell. A pat on the back for the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board for doing its bit in the fight against far-right political outfits and their youth wings.
This was among the various sensory stimuli I was treated to on my bus journey from Vadapalani bus stand to my office - a distance of about eight kilometers that lasted just over two hours on this day in history. Before that, the auto journey that took me three kilometers from my place to Vadapalani consumed 45 minutes.
The trip lasted as long as it did because Arcot Road was the only navigable stretch of arterial road in the western part of the city, and buses and other vehicles that usually don't use this road were diverted into it. Other roads to its north and south were knee-deep in water from four days of rain that came in the wake of Cyclone Nisha's retreat - or advance, I'm not sure which - while the water on Arcot Road was merely shin-deep.
Strangely, after crossing the Kodambakkam bridge, all the other vehicles that had clogged up road-space alongside the bus I was on for an hour and a half seemed to disappear, and the horizon became visible again, after which the bus began to discover velocities it had given up as impossible - speeds of 15 and 20 kilometers an hour. Each time we turned left or right, I was thrown back and forth, centrifugal - or is it centripetal? - force causing vertical grab-poles* to jam into my right elbow, while simultaneously elongating my left arm clawing desperately at the parallel bars* on the bus's ceiling, threatening two hyper-extended arms at the end of the ride.
*How I wish I knew the technical terms for MTC bus design elements.
At the beginning of my journey, it had looked like it was going to be a typical post-rain Chennai afternoon. Bright sunshine, an expanse of blue sky punctuated by the odd, low-slung grey-tending-to-white cloud, and humongous humidity. Despite perspiring slightly, I was feeling good, for I thought one day of sunshine would bring a semblance of normalcy to the roads, and allow me to bring my bike back from the office in the evening, with only my rolled-up jeans suggesting anything in the realm of the abnormal.
As I got off the bus, however, the blue had faded to a deepish grey, the light was low, and a drizzle had begun. Oh well.
If it will do any good, I introduce into this text these wonderful verses:

Rain rain go away, Come again another day. Little Johnny wants to play; Rain, rain, go to Spain, Never show your face again!

I was made to understand that it was Little Tommy who wanted to play, but in Wikipedia I trust. And the Spain bit I had no clue about whatsoever.
According to the people at Wikipedia,

"Rain Rain Go Away" is a short children's rhyme. As with many nursery rhymes the origin and meaning of this rhyme is open for debate, but one theory dates it back to the reign of Elizabeth I of England. The invasion of the Spanish Armada was, in part, defeated by the stormy weather (which scattered the Armada fleet). A song, based on the rhyme, was co-written by Gloria Shayne Baker and Noel Regney, who were married at the time. Baker wrote the lyrics to the song, while Regney composed the music. Rain Rain Go Away was initially recorded by Bobby Vinton.

Bet you didn't know that.
Another thing you didn't know: The bus I travelled on today was an M17, but an M17 that in the past had been a 12B. How do I know? Well, Sathish, Prabha, Mukilan, Pradeep, Kumaravel, Vinoth and Rajan told me. Their names were scrawled below the words '12B guys' behind the last row of seats on the bus. On a journey of such temporal length, you tend to memorise, in order, lists of names that are only seven long.
But wait. Does this automatically suggest that it was a 12B in which the 12B guys were travelling at the time they declared their allegiance to the 12B? Were they perhaps recording for posterity that the 12B guys were, due to unavoidable circumstances, travelling in an M17?
By the way, the M17 isn't the same as the 17M. A couple of dudes who got on, and were told by the conductor to get off at the next stop and get onto a 17M, seemed to have made that assumption.
I wrote this late last November, sitting at the office after my epic bus journey.

Tomatoes

2009-05-21T23:35:00.012+05:30

Tomatoes. I love them.
But this hasn't always been the case.
Take for example this nightmare I had when I was a kid. It wasn't a nightmare really, but a picture that played endlessly, over and over in my subconscious - or is it unconscious? - mind. It involved a chef wearing spotless chef's whites, a spotless chef's hat and an impossibly wide grin (imagine a slightly eerie version of Martin Yan, the host of the now sadly absent-from-Indian-TV cooking show Yan Can Cook), holding in one hand a humungous, all-purpose Chinese Chef's Knife...
...which moved slowly to and fro, slicing thinly an especially cheerful-looking specimen of the tomato family that oozed juice as the knife cut through its membranes, tissues and whatever else tomatoes contain. This description, I can sense, communicates none of the nameless dread that enveloped me then as I watched, unable to tear my eyes away, unaware that it was all just a dream.
At the time, I hated tomatoes. It wasn't the flavour - I didn't mind them pureed to within a micron of their lives - but the texture that so repulsed me and unfailingly brought forth the gag reflex as I accidentally ingested a piece that had somehow failed to lose all its structural integrity.
Suddenly, I don't know when exactly, I began to like tomatoes, in any form - raw, sliced thinly, thickly, diced into cubes tiny or chunky, carved expertly but unnecessarily into flower-like shapes. Even partially cooked, not entirely pureed tomatoes.
What I draw the line at is ketchup. Not ketchup per se - it's okay to dip the sharp end of a samosa or a point on the outer curve of a vada in a bit of ketchup - but the dousing, courtesy a red squeezy bottle, of such quantities of the ooze as to render the taste of whatever's being doused entirely negligible. Once, I even saw a friend of mine - heck, I sat next to him as he did the dastardly deed - draw squiggly patterns on a pizza with ketchup. How, I ask, did civilisation come to this?

Aglets

2009-03-11T17:01:00.002+05:30

Aglets. I bet you don't know what aglets are. I didn't either, until I was told what they are, by the same dude who told me what the philtrum is, on the same day. The aglet, he informed me, is the little thingy on the end of your shoelaces.
He didn't use those exact words, but if he did, he'd have been wrong. For my shoelaces that day would surely have long lost their aglets, through wear, tear, and my refusal to tie them properly.
Today, however, I wear shoes with laces that loudly assert their agletedness whenever they come undone, with a faint, but not so faint as to be un-discernible, tinkle. For my aglets are made of brass, or some similarly metallic substance. And they've remained steadfastly fastened to the end of my laces, partly because they're bonded on by some combination of superglue and opposite-charge attraction - in comparison to the faint-hearted transparent plastic aglets rolled around the laces of my school shoes - but mostly because I now redo my laces whenever they come undone.
That's partly because they look kinda nifty and I don't want to lose them, but mostly because of the tinkle.
The aglet that tinkles most lasts longest. My first contribution to the universe-sized fund of meaningless sayings. If this ever becomes popular, and gets recited in a hundred and seventy two countries in twenty thousand languages, I imagine that whoever reads about the dude who coined it - me - would imagine I had a beard.
(This is a response to Rajesh Madhini's response to my previous post)

More handkerchief nostalgia

2009-03-05T17:55:00.005+05:30

When I was a kid, my laces were always undone. I was always told that I'd trip on them and break my fall by breaking my nose. It never happened.
I did once trip and fall and land on my jaw, however. One of my teeth broke.
But that wasn't due to a shoelace coming undone. What happened was, I was tripped from behind by a chap when he and I and a bunch of other chaps were playing football, on a basketball court, with a tennis ball.
Ah, the memories. Tasting blood, getting up, shaking off the dust from my person, reassuring my friends that I was okay to carry on, scoring a goal about five minutes later - a low shot driven into the bottom corner from the edge of the basketball D - going back home in a friend's car, feeling a mild sense of something not quite feeling right, putting food on my plate - lemon rice - putting a spoonful in my mouth, looking down to find a tooth on the plate.
Even now, I wear a false tooth. It's one of those false teeth which have a large bit that fits snugly into your upper-palate, a false tooth that you can pull out of your mouth when you brush your teeth, and apply the brush to separately. It was supposed to be temporarily in place until I went back to the dentist to get a permanent one fixed - permanently - in my mouth. I never got round to doing that. My dad - on one of his visits to the dentist - asked him if it's okay, and the dentist said it's okay.
Between losing my tooth and getting a false tooth, there was a gap of one day. And it was a weekday. And I went to school and freaked everyone out for a while before feeling embarrassed and speaking with my hanky clutched to my face.
There was another day in school when my hanky spent a lot of time clutched to my face, in a stationary, non-wiping-nose manner. That day, a zit appeared in probably the worst place for a zit to appear, right below the nose, on what's known as - and a friend of mine revealed this to me during one of those trivia-swapping sessions - the philtrum.
Trust me, you do not want a zit in your philtrum.

Scab

2008-09-24T00:27:00.004+05:30

I pulled a scab off my shin today. I have no idea how the scab got there, but my shins are notoriously good at scraping themselves unintentionally on protuberant objects. This scab was on my left shin, and not cricket-induced; I haven't played at the Madhini's for ages.
It was most likely caused by my bike’s footrest or some other bike’s footrest in a parking lot, or the helmet lock left in the ‘up’ position by mistake as I threw my leg over to get on the bike, or my computer table. Next to it, incidentally, is where I sat as I pulled the scab off, causing rivulets of blood to flow down my shin, until my handkerchief soaked it all up.
I gave up writing this the day I began, and now, while I don’t remember pulling the scab off, I do remember writing about it; strange.
My handkerchief has soaked up blood on another recent occasion – a few months back, actually, when Rajesh Madhini whacked a straight drive into my nose. It was a tennis ball, mercifully. And in my last blog post, it soaked up coffee.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve carried a hanky around. You’re likelier to see one clutched tightly in my hand as I walk around in my uncoordinated way than not; seldom do they stay in my pocket very long. I also drop them a lot. I have had handkerchiefs trodden on by rampaging feet at football games; that even happened to my spectacles once, in the seventh or eighth standard.
Until about three months ago, I wore spectacles with pink frames. I’m colour blind, you see. And I didn’t have my mum or dad around while ordering the frames. I thought – dude, those brown ones are nicely inconspicuous, just the way you like them.
I like inconspicuousness. I even like the word inconspicuousness. This is the first time I’ve used it, in speech or in writing.
A couple of days back, I used the word aghast in a snooker report I wrote. I don’t know where that popped out from. “At 42-57 in the fifth, Sethi potted the blue at the top right, but watched aghast as the cue ball stopped with black bisecting its line on pink.”
Was he really aghast? I don’t know.
I played table tennis today – the third time in three months, at the Ergo office, only place at The Hindu where table tennis tables exist. The last time I played table tennis regularly was four years ago, or was it five?
It was at Rajesh and Pavan Madhini’s place. Where else?
The table earlier belonged in a house of their relatives, or family friends; I’ve never been sure. They let the Madhinis take it away, since no one was playing at that house any longer, or something of the sort. Pavan and I spent a whole day at that place, thinking of how best to relocate it to their place, a few streets away. We finally managed it; I don’t remember how. I do remember that in the time we were waiting, an old Telugu movie was being watched, and it had N.T. Rama Rao playing Krishna.
I haven’t ever watched a Telugu movie fully, from beginning to end. I have watched chunks, little and big, of a few, all at the Madhini’s. Where else?

Why you should always carry two hankies

2008-08-18T22:02:00.003+05:30

This was 4:30-ish. I was with a bunch of people at Saravana Bhavan (the one ACJ students flock to, in the Shanti theatre complex on Mount Road), and, inexplicably, decided to forgo my customary large watermelon juice (without ice) for a coffee.

The coffee changed direction somewhere in the region of my epiglottis when I happened to burst into laughter. As I held my blue hanky to my face, unable to arrest the coffee’s progress up my nasal passage, Lakshmi – who had made the remark that started it all – was apologising profusely, and Amruta almost collided with a man sitting on a table diagonally opposite ours in an effort to avoid being splattered.

She – and the rest – didn’t get splattered. I managed to get off my chair, turn around, and run to the wash basin – at a mercifully short distance from our table – all the while clutching my hanky against my nose and mouth.

As I spat the liquid into the basin, I heard laughter from the direction of our table while not being able to see too much through watery eyes, and all I could smell was the decoction and – mostly – milk floating around my nostrils.

Smell is a very direct sense. Smellers smell smellees because volatile odour molecules from the smellee bind to hair-like cilia attached to neurons in the nostrils of the smeller. That's right kids, it’s not some passive, formless signal that your nose picks up from that (insert appropriately abhorrent-smelling substance), but molecules possessing mass and physical form floating off the surface of the thing, sticking to hairs in your nostril.

And in my case, it wasn’t merely volatile molecules of milk, but large, viscous droplets clinging to my cilia like Cliffhanger.

What I smelled wasn’t the not unpleasant smell of milk in a glass, but this:

If you, like me, live in a part of the world where milk is delivered to your doorstep every morning in plastic packets, pick one up tomorrow morning and smell your hands. You won’t thank me for this, but it’s the only way I can get the olfactoriness of it all across.

I began typing this two months back, while still an ACJ student. I finished it today, and well, let’s just say it’s a weird tribute to the Shanti Theatre Saravana Bhavan for all the great times we had there.

Wall cricket, and my non-maavu bat

2008-06-16T01:12:00.004+05:30

I played cricket today. Against the wall.

Not ‘The Wall’, I hasten to add. Much as I’d love to have one of my dibbly-dobbly off-cutters sneak through that most unbreachable of defenses, and cart his seldom-seen off-breaks to all points on the compass, the wall I faced up to was one of brick, mortar, white paint and a switchboard put in place by someone with no knowledge of wall cricket. It’s hard to hit a good length if impediments exist on the wall. Pulling short balls was a no-no too, with a grandmother asleep at forward short leg.

The bat I employed was my ancient SG Super Cover. I bought this when I was in the fifth standard. It was then a size 5.

Through years of tapping on concrete and tarmac, and flinging over fences in moments of pique and angst, it has shrunk to a size 3.18 or thereabouts. The sticker says ‘English Willow’ and while it most certainly is an English Willow, it's an English Willow covered with parchment – which is a little short on street-cred, because parchment bats look like well-fed maavu bats. Maavu in Tamil means dough, or batter. Maavu bats are the ones that come – or used to, in pre-Beyblade days – free with Boost at some points in time, and Bournvita at other points in time. Most un-English my willow looks, but maavu it most certainly isn’t.

Mukul Kesavan (read in full here) once said of the parchment bat:

“… there was another kind of bat, which we treated like a dead thing, like an instrument merely: the parchment bat. This was a ready-to-use bat that didn't have to be seasoned: it came with its blade wrapped at intervals in three-inch wide bands of thread and the whole sheathed in a thick membrane. The only reasons to buy it (besides the labour saved on seasoning) were that it was cheaper than a willow bat and seen as more durable because the membrane (probably some kind of intestinal skin) and the bands of thread kept its blade from chipping. But no one bought parchment bats if they could help it, because they were hideous to look at …”

A parchment bat – with over half the membrane peeled off, leaving dull, coarse wood exposed – is perfectly suited to studiously smothering tennis balls bowled with the hand not holding the bat. The wall – usually, but not always – makes off-breaks and chinamen spin away from, and leg breaks and orthodox lefties toward, the (right handed) batsman.

In the past I’d imagine I was playing for India, usually making my test debut. There was this improbable phase in my life when I was a huge fan of Shiv Sundar Das – remember him? – and I’d open the batting with him, and we'd put on a gazillion runs before he fell – someone had to – and then Dravid would walk in, and so on. The unwritten rules I followed through all my test debuts were – always score a century, and always carry your bat.

There were other times when I would not be me, but someone else, and try to bat like them. I distinctly remember the Mark-Waugh-ness coursing through my veins as I gently sent a hip-high ball speeding through mid wicket some years ago.

I couldn’t recapture that today, thanks to my grandmother at short leg.

Trials, tribulations and twists

2008-05-29T23:11:00.015+05:30

My ankle throbs as I type. Okay, the throbbing stopped in the morning, but what the hell, that was a good opening sentence.

It was a crater that did it, a dent on the surface of the PNT ground in Anna Nagar, as I made an overlapping run down the left flank. One moment, I was calling for the person with the ball at his feet – I forget who exactly – to pass the damn thing to me, the next I was hobbling back towards Pommie in goal.

“This time, it’s the left ankle,” I said with a grimace.

I’ve twisted my right ankle three times.

The first time was at Soma (Somasundaram ground, in T Nagar, behind North Usman Road), when we were kicking the ball back and forth before the match actually began. I landed heavily – I can’t land any other way, built as I am – as I passed to some chap with the outside of my foot, my foot crumpling underneath the rest of me as I fell.

I sat on the ground for a long time, and felt rather faint.

Later that night, my ankle was strapped up in crepe bandages and a painkiller stuck up my backside. The X-rays didn’t show up any damage, even though my ankle had swelled like a bhatura just before the finger-poke.

The next time was at Soma again, a week or so after the first time, when I clumsily stuck my just-recovered foot out to tackle someone flying down the right wing, and ended up landing awkwardly again. This time, I regained my balance as I fell, and it didn’t hurt so much; until the next day.

The third time was at PNT, and this time, I played on after it happened, hobbling about uselessly and getting in everyone's way.

This most recent twist, the left ankle, didn’t hurt after the first couple of minutes. I managed to run around as usual (which equates to a cross between a dodo and an orca, according to The Wats, who has a way with metaphors, or alliterations, or transferred epithets, or whatever else) and made a couple of interceptions, a couple of memorable passes – the best of which went to a chap on the other team who called opportunistically for it – and a few nifty off-the-ball runs which nobody, including my teammates, spotted.

Playing football after nearly a year; it was pretty darn – for lack of a better adjective – awesome. Considering I begin work on Monday, I’m unsure when the next time will be. And I haven’t played cricket for a long time either. Just as I imagined a week-long orgy of underarm matches, Rajesh Madhini tells me his doctor’s barred him from playing sport for two months – thanks to fluid in his knee or the lack of it, I’m not sure which.

At this point, I’d like to end with a little verse about knees and ankles, but since I don’t know any, I request someone else to come up with one, or pilfer someone else’s, and call it their own.

The selectors were right, in hindsight

2008-04-21T01:20:00.008+05:30

That hoarding went up when Ajay Jadeja was not picked in the test squad touring South Africa in 1996-97. Back then, he was my favourite cricketer, the man who came in at the death during the one-dayers and played nerveless, wristy strokes with the batting equivalent of a lazy drawl.

His stance was one-of-a-kind. Most batsmen tap their bats as the bowlers run in. Jadeja, chewing gum as he crouched low, did this with exaggerated motions of loose wrist and elbow, the bat going up and over his shoulder and back down again repeatedly.

Initially, he’d play with soft hands, dropping the ball square on either side of the wicket and turning the strike over, or, if he hit to a sweeper, walk between wickets, chatting with opponents as he did so.

He had the gift of timing, displayed in on-the-up drives through the covers with a diagonal bat-swing, and glides to the leg-side off his toes, as he sauntered across the crease. He often went the other way, giving himself room to slice the ball behind point.

What made him a delight to watch, however, was his six-hitting. He lofted with neither the power and authority of Tendulkar, or the whippy wrists of Azhar or the full, regal follow-through of Ganguly. He seemed merely to chip the ball, having skipped down the track to get to the pitch, and the cameras hurried to follow its parabolic arc. He hit sixes off spinners and fast bowlers, down the ground, over midwicket, and even behind point off full-length deliveries, with insouciant ease.

While facing genuine pace and swing bowlers in tests, with slips backing them up, his jauntiness seemed to disappear, to be replaced by loose, indecisive play. He played just 15 tests, scattered intermittently among his 196 ODIs.

Amul’s opinion of India’s selectors was shared by a 9-year-old boy in 1996. That boy modelled his street/terrace/backyard cricket stance on Ajay Jadeja, chewed a lot of Big Fun bubble gum, and collected the cricket cards, with pictures in front and – usually, ODI – statistics in the back, which came free with the gum.

Jadeja progressed from being a bronze card in early 1996 to a gold card in late 1999. The year after that he was banned due to his alleged nexus with bookies.

I don’t know if Big Fun bubble-gum is still available, or the cards that came with it. The gum was excessively sugary, and the cards full of inappropriate splashes of garish colour; a lot like limited-overs cricket.

I now truly enjoy only test cricket, and find the shorter versions repetitive and tiresome. However, I have to acknowledge that a one-day specialist making his debut, running 20 yards from mid-off and diving full-length to dismiss Allan Border at the 1992 World Cup, kick-started my love for the game.

Ghanshyam and Radhey Shyam

2008-02-15T22:50:00.005+05:30

Ghanshyam was slurping a considerable quantity of noodles up his pursed lips. The noise was getting on Radhey Shyam’s not very tolerant nerves, as he tried to come up with a solution to a tedious calculus problem.
Ghanshyam had no such worries. What he possessed, that Radhey Shyam did not, was the knowledge that no effort on his part would help him solve the differential equation that had been taxing the latter for so long.
Slurp he therefore did – with much enthusiasm too, for he was a boy with a healthy appetite, and a healthier disregard for classroom lunch hour etiquette.
Nearing the bottom of his lunchbox, Ghanshyam’s slurping was reaching a crescendo. To this he added the accompanying scrape of his fork against the insides of his lunchbox. This, decided Radhey Shyam, was the point where looks of exasperation would have to give way to a more direct approach.
The soupier kind of noodle was the kind of noodle Ghanshyam liked most. The last of the soupy liquid, and a single strand of noodle, was all that was left of his lunch, and he tilted his box at an angle to get to its contents easier. Radhey Shyam, with deft use of his right wrist, ensured that the noodle got to Ghanshyam before he could get to it.
Ghanshyam was no exception to the rule that people dislike soupy noodles on their shirtfronts.
There were thirty one students in the classroom at the time this incident took place. No two agree about what exactly happened after this point.
Every version, however, ends with Radhey Shyam’s calculus textbook being rudely interrupted in its Frisbee-like flight across the classroom by the sudden appearance of Mrs. Chitalkar’s bewigged head in its path.
This, I’m sure you’ll all agree, is just about the perfect way to begin a lasting friendship. And for the better part of fifteen years since, Ghanshyam and Radhey Shyam have been the most inseparable of chums, and best man at each others’ weddings.

I wrote this around a year back, and edited it today. This brings back memories of the time Vin and I wanted to illustrate and write, respectively, a graphic novel. It involved Ghanshyam, a water gun, aliens, and Anna Nagar. I actually wrote three disjointed chapters of that, and Vin drew one very detailed panel of a marketplace. Maybe I'll put up an 'excerpt' from that sometime, with that one illustration... Vinny's moved on since - to making graphic novels with real guns.

Merciless editing creates space for blog post

2008-02-13T19:34:00.009+05:30

Sculpture faces one inescapable hurdle – gravity. Dennis Lillee’s statue in front of the MCG would be a bronze facsimile of his pre-delivery-stride leap if only its right foot didn’t rest on a shiny cone. Flaming hair frames moustachioed face, which looks over left shoulder at the target 22 yards, a landing, and a long stride away. It’s not hard to imagine the statue coming to life: right foot landing lightly, left foot rising, coming down, and arms whirling in perfectly synchronous motion to give the ball thrust, direction and swerve, and then, just as the follow through ends, turning around, going down on its haunches, spreading its arms wide, and imploring the umpire to point heavenwards.
That was supposed to be the intro for my interview with Dennis Lillee (Yes, you read right - I spoke to the man himself, at the MRF Pace Foundation) for Digantik (ACJ's ezine). It didn't have a thing to do with the content of the interview, however, so it went flying off that page and onto this one. The actual interview is here.

Has Ghanshyam nothing to say?

2008-02-03T00:34:00.000+05:30

It’s been a while. Two months and eight days, to be precise.

Looking at my shoutbox, I spy three consecutive comments from Vin that read, in chronological order:

New blog post man. Type!!!
Dei, update!
I give up, man. I give up.... bugger

I suspect that Vin wasn’t the first reader of this blog to give up. In fact, I’d commend the lad for coming back repeatedly despite knowing that a new post would be as likely a sight as… well, some very unlikely sight… think of one yourself, for crying out loud!

As you can see, my ability to conjure up similes has evaporated.

Is my blog nearing its sell-by-date? Or is it merely in a period of transition? Will it, like a something, rise from the other thing, and take its place in that thing whose name is on the tip of my tongue?

Has Ghanshyam nothing to say?

Is this a sign that the real Ghanshyam Nairs of this world are not amused by my appropriation of their name? Is the collective angst of the real Ghanshyam community tearing to pieces selective portions of the fabric of space-time, rendering me unable to blog?

Will I always be a pseudo-Ghanshyam; a wannabe-Ghanshyam?

Will I ever again type a sentence that doesn’t end with a question mark?

An Ode to the Word Processor

2007-11-25T22:01:00.001+05:30

Staring into a blank Microsoft Word screen, letting my mind wander through realms of profound thought induced by boredom and typing words down with no clue as to what words will follow - pressing the backspace key at regular intervals - is a sequence of events that usually results in me answering ‘no’ to the ‘Do you want to save changes?’ question. Sometimes, however, some strange metaphysical process takes place, and I put down a paragraph of something readable. The keyboard picks up a nice, steady rhythm, and thought begins to flow coherently.
The word processor is a boon to the chronic backspacer. There is so much joy in seeing the jagged ‘spelling and grammar’ line appearing below words like backspacer - words invented on the go. Writing on paper, usually in a depressing scrawl, crossing out words, phrases, and entire sentences, gives rise to the sort of angst that leads to paper being ripped out of notebooks, crumpled, and thrown on the nearest happy-looking person. This angst is at its angstiest when essays in examinations begin to look like what a four-year-old would do if asked to draw barbed wire. A point comes when inelegant sentences are left alone; when all one wants to do is drown one’s sorrows in lime juice. It isn’t just the chap who writes exams who resents pen and paper, but the chap at the other end as well, who has seven million samples of atrocious handwriting to transliterate into English in his head every day. One can imagine him sitting in a funnel-shaped valley formed by mountains of paper, picking up one after another, scrutinizing each in the light of a single incandescent bulb hanging from a dangerously low ceiling, and at regular intervals posing, to no one in particular, rhetorical questions, the commonest being – ‘Why me?’
The shrinking proportion of epic tragedies and tragic epics in bestseller lists worldwide must have something to do with the ubiquitousness of word processors. Lord Ganesh, for all his ability to remove obstacles, must have faced one himself while writing with a piece of broken-off tusk. Add to this the need for Ganesh to write, and for Ved Vyas to dictate, without pausing. Do all of the above - minus the tusk if you don’t happen to possess one, with a friend playing out Ved Vyas’s part - and you’ll see how easy it is to come up with an epic spanning generations of unhappy people fighting their own relatives. Word processors prevent the finer understanding of the nuances of human emotion.
If Mr. Matthew had typed out his Gospel with the aid of a word processor, Herod would have been a kindly old king with a twinkle in his eye, a patron of fancy dress competitions and a distributor of boiled confectionery to all the participants.

I wrote this in the first term as an assignment for Mr. V Ramnarayan, one of the greatest off-break bowlers never to play for India, columnist, blogger and wielder of the pen (or word processor) that wrote Mosquitoes and Other Jolly Rovers. Here's a sample of his writing.

Eureka demystified

2007-10-01T00:11:00.002+05:30

Thousands of years ago, someone’s back itched. His name was Yajñopavīta Sastrigal. Why his parents named him that will remain a mystery, but we aren’t going into the why. We are going, instead, into the what-happened-to-him-and-how-he-reacted. What happened to him, as has already been mentioned earlier, was that his back itched. This was a problem that had plagued the fellow all his life, so much so that he wondered day and night why a point hadn’t come when the itch would become so normal that he’d forget the state of non-itchiness entirely and not feel anything anymore. Wondering didn’t help at all. Neither did prickly heat powder, since he had had the misfortune of being born a few millennia too early.

What he did, in a moment of unbelievable clarity of thinking, was to say “Ayyo Rekha!!!” – Rekha being his wife’s name – so loudly that it was heard all the way to Syracuse, where one Mr. Archimedes was having a blissful bath.

“Ayyo Rekha!!!” Yajñopavīta Sastrigal hollered, “Nool kanda konduvayen,” which, translated roughly into English, would read – “Bring me a spool of thread, pronto!”

Yajñopavīta Sastrigal then proceeded to tie three pieces of coarse thread – all thread was coarse back then – together, and put it over his left shoulder, in a manner that caused it to encircle his upper body diagonally. Grabbing hold of this with both hands placed sufficiently far apart on the thread, he moved it back and forth, along his spine. He had boldly scratched where no man had been double-jointed enough to scratch before.

Very soon, others – whose backs sometimes itched, too – started sporting the thread. Some men thought it was too sissy to give an itch so much importance and disdained the practice. The thread wearing bunch obviously didn’t appreciate being called sissy. They claimed that the thread, which by now had taken on the name Yajñopavītam, after its inventor, had other nifty features too.

They said, for instance, that anyone who wore the thing would be effectively twice-born. The three threads represented the goddesses of mind, word and deed, and the knot tying it all together was the formless Brahman, the all-pervading supreme spirit of the universe.

The non-thready bunch was unimpressed, but the thready bunch was so captivated by its own marketing that they evolved complex rituals that their sons, and their sons’ sons had to undergo before taking on the great responsibilities that come with being able to scratch one’s own back. Women amused themselves by inventing other, less metaphysical things like the dosa, and weren’t affected by this great ferment.

My ancestors happened to be from among the thready lot, which meant that I experienced the uncertain emotions of being born twice.

What it has also meant, however, is that I sometimes wear an insecure look on my face, and glance around furtively, before sticking my right hand into my shirt to tug at that piece of thread, and return it to its highly transient perch on top of my left shoulder. Whatever magical properties it may possess, the Yajñopavītam, or the Poonal, as it’s known in Tamil, simply cannot stay put on a shoulder. It is built to slide down the left arm, and incapacitate that limb until the wearer performs that inelegant and very disturbing manoeuvre described above. I did that, for about the seventeenth time, on Friday, and pop went the top button of my shirt. Why didn’t Mr. Yajñopavīta Sastrigal just grin and bear it?

Why call a spade a simulacrum of post-modernist consciousness in the cerebral cortex?

2007-08-01T00:14:00.001+05:30

The following are examples of extremely profound statements made by the students of the 2004-07 batch of the Department of Visual Communication, DG Vaishnav College, Chennai, chosen at random from a humongously humongous cornucopia of profundity:

A: Dude, I think you stepped on my toe.
B: Dude, that’s your index finger!

X: Dude... do you know what Ramanujam was famous for?
Y: Of course da... Raman Effect!

How do I draw an imaginary line?

Does anyone have a helicopter? I need to race with time.

I am a children!

Dude... I kicked the dumbbell by mistake.

It is equal to inversely proportional.

How many megapickles?

Oye? That was a sky-fi movie?

Am I amoebic?

Who’s going to tick bookets?

Is she your nephew?

We should have been a bunch of girls studying viscom in MOP.

TUP, TUP, TUP! DISHOOM!! DISHOOM!!

Those days, sadly, are behind me. I’m now a student at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai; and well, I have been so forcibly removed from my still recent past that my ears are bombarded daily by words and phrases such as bourgeoisie (the spell check sure helps), sub judice, habeas corpus (well, I knew this word even in the seventh standard, through Perry Mason, but I’m still not sure what on Earth it means), gamut, gambit, simulacrum, existentialism, temporal collective consciousness, post-modernism, structuralism (I’m told this has a post-prefixed cousin as well), Schrödinger’s cat, hegemony and a whole gamut (whoops, there it is again) of evil sounding French and Latin words.

We watched a Chinese film one Saturday (with subtitles, thank God; I’m sure we have some guys in class who can speak two hundred and thirteen languages fluently), and at the end of it all, I found myself in the middle of a discussion about the visual metaphors used by the director to do some rather exciting sounding stuff that when perceived by someone does something to a whole lot of different nodes in the left brain of that someone, which creates a conflict between one thing and another thing: one of which began with a G, if I remember right… anyway, what emerged out of it all was that it was a rather good movie, for most part, and we’ll screen a French Nouvelle Vague film next Saturday.

Mor Kali

2007-07-06T00:09:00.001+05:30

Mor Kali is a thick, greasy, white substance with deep red tinges here and there, interrupted by small black dots at reasonably regular intervals. You can put it in your mouth, and people with unspoilt, unpretentious tastebuds generally do so a second time, and then a third, and so on. The red comes from dried red chillies, and most of the flavour as well. South Indian cooking is seldom overloaded with too many conflicting flavours, and mor kali is one of the best examples of keeping one predominant flavour, and complementing it with other ingredients.

How does one go about making this stuff?

Firstly, you take a couple of cups of rice flour, and twice that amount of buttermilk. Put them together. Add some salt as well.

In a separate receptacle, splutter some mustard seeds, asafoetida, a handful of dried red chillies and curry leaves in a generous amount of oil.

Put exhibit A and B together, and stir. And then stir some more. And on and on until you end up with something that looks like it will stick to a spoon and refuse to come off, until it hits your mouth.

This should taste quite strongly, but not overpoweringly, of the dried chilli, while retaining the sourness of the buttermilk. The curry leaves and asafoetida should have also made their presence felt.

You can put this on a greased plate, and cut into interesting shapes; or you can put dollops of the stuff on your plate with a greased concave ladle.

It’s one of those things I never tire of eating, until I’m bloody stuffed, that is. Once you’re done eating, you may find cleaning the plate a bother, since this stuff has a tendency to absorb plenty of oil during the cooking process. My mum has been cheating lately, and making this in the microwave, with frighteningly small quantities of oil, but I have to say it tastes just the same.

You can also make another version of this dish, with javvarsi (sago – look up wikipedia if you’re still not sure). I like this even more than the rice flour version, and it looks awesome, with these translucent chewy pearls gleaming amidst chunks of dried chilli and the deep green of fried curry leaves, with mustard seeds dotting the landscape. It glides down your throat, and leaves a nice warm glow on its way down.

Try cooking this stuff sometime, but don’t blame me if the proportions go awry. My mum has perfected this stuff through years of throwing in how much ever she pleases of whatever it is that she’s throwing in. She says the above quantities will result in two well fed adult humans, add or subtract a couple based on appetites and so on. Happy kottifying!

The Boss!!!

2007-06-15T23:24:00.002+05:30

It is often said that it takes a certain something, referred to, by the people who know these things, as the X-factor, to go from mere stardom to superstardom. With Rajnikanth, however, there is no such unknown quantity. What he has, in abundant measure, is the unique ability to keep his mouth open at a precise aperture regardless of whether he’s walking, talking, chewing gum, dancing (his signature step appears easy, but that’s only until you attempt it – one hand on head, one on hip, and perfect synchronous motion in two parallel arcs) or dodging a bullet and shooting one (to be split into two by means of a strategically placed dagger held at the muzzle, to deal with multiple large men of dubious morals) at the same time. No ordinary mortal can maintain such a delicate distance between upper and lower lip like thalaivar can. Particularly impressive is the nonchalant ease with which he keeps the viewer’s eyes riveted on his mouth even with the added visual treat of peroxide blonde hair.

Extremely long, self indulgent post you may want to read if you're as jobless as I am

2007-06-01T14:15:00.001+05:30

A great test match has twists, turns, topspinners and elements of tragedy. All these ingredients were thrown together for five enthralling days at the Madhinis’ front driveway and one of history’s finest contests came to a dramatic conclusion on the evening of the 30^th. When I said five days, I meant it took five days for the drama to play itself out, with play only being possible on the first and final days, due to unavailability of players on the second, third and fourth days.

The match started off with two players on either side, with Mundhra and I losing the toss to the Madhinis, who, as is inevitable, chose to bat first.

A word on how our test matches are played; one batsman bats at a time, no one is at the other end, since two guys running around in opposite directions in narrow spaces is known to cause collisions. The batting team usually provides the wicketkeeper, in two-on-two matches. This ensures no one is sitting around making witty comments, but when there are more than two people on one side, there is intense competition among the two members of the batting side not at the crease to take up a comfortable position on Raju’s thunderbird. That means there are three players fielding at any given time – the bowler, the wicketkeeper, and the other guy on the fielding side; who is placed close-in or deep on the boundary gate depending on the skill level of the batsman and the bowler, the state of the match, and so on. There are always plenty of bikes around to help the fielding side along the way, but too many can be a hindrance to bowling around the wicket, unless you don’t mind sharp blows to the knuckles. The bikes square on the leg side invite the wristy turn to leg and the gently trotted single as the fielders squeeze themselves between them, performing miraculous contortions to avoid the bumpy bits, and extricate the ball.

We had to go through plenty of this during Raju’s innings, and he rode his luck, with Mundhra in generous catching form, and went on to make a brisk 83, before I showed Mundhra how to wrap fingers around a tennis ball and hold on, taking the ball as it rose, at about chest height, standing at a deepish mid off. We were mighty relieved.

Pavan Madhini is an example of the ‘if-only’ sort of batsman. Few can strike a tennis ball so cleanly, and so morale-damagingly. He is built along physically intimidating lines; the Hayden-Pietersen-Symonds-Flintoff sort, with a little more around the waistline to boot. When he puts his front foot down the pitch, he makes bowlers step back for fear of toes being stepped upon.

The bat, after having described a gigantic arc, usually makes contact with the ball in the region of silly mid off’s solar plexus, and sometimes the ball goes along the ground. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the ball misses the bat entirely, and this is what happened, after he had struck a couple of lusty blows, and the sound of tennis ball hitting broken steel chair heralded the close of their first innings at 96. Mundhra had picked up both the wickets.

We needed 47 to avoid following on, and I went in to open the innings, something I’ve always loved doing. Give me a bat and someone bowling at me, and I’m the happiest person in the world. If I ever have a son or daughter, chances are I’ll be training him or her in my backyard to become a bowler, letting him or her bat occasionally so that he or she doesn’t refuse to play with me again, but mostly having my share of what is known in cricketing circles as OC gaaji, probably telling him or her that he or she has bowled a no ball if he or she gets me out.

My batting style can be described as upright, unhurried and well, elegant; I certainly don’t feel the ungainliness and disjointed wobbliness I feel at most other times while I’m batting. I score runs at a measured rate, with a wristy dab here and a gentle push there, almost exclusively off the back foot, unless it’s pitched right up. I proceeded to do this for a goodish length of time, during which Nair arrived and joined the Madhini side, giving Mundhra a much needed period of lying down on the Thunderbird with a pained expression on his face. A cleverly bowled slow leg break beat me in the air and I offered Raju a simple return catch, which he didn’t drop. My score, and that of my team, at that point, was 70. Mundhra added 8 runs to that and got himself bowled in the span of the next over from Pavan and they had a lead of 18.

Pavan started off for them in his usual cavalier fashion, and fell into the trap of driving early at a well tossed up delivery from me and as Mundhra held on to the chance, his relief was visible. Nair was bowled for a duck in the next over from Mundhra and the score stood at 14.

Rajesh Madhini has the advantage of not having to face himself while batting, and usually makes use of this to the fullest, racking up one ton after the other, always scoring at a brisk, relentless pace. Give him anything remotely pitched up and he’ll drive without restraining his follow through, managing to keep the ball along the ground and usually in the gap. You generally look to keep it tight and not try too many things; and hope that he’ll make an error of judgment somewhere. He was past 30 and looking very threatening when Mundhra decided he couldn’t take the heat any longer and Nair decided he had to leave.

Play resumed after three days; without Nair; with Raju looking like he meant business. I thought to myself that we had to get him out in the first couple of overs or be resigned to waiting for him to throw it away after putting our target into the realms of miracle.

I was left clutching at my head when he was beaten by an off break which narrowly missed leg stump; wondering when the next chance would come; but Mundhra got one to keep low and sneak through in his very next over. Raju had made 50, his team 64, and our target was 83.

Our innings began with Mundhra scoring 4 runs in 7 overs with dour defense and plenty of luck before he lost his patience and slogged at an enticing off break from the elder Madhini, missing completely.

The task ahead of me was difficult, not impossible, but anyone who’s seen how matches have gone in the long history of underarm tests will tell you that I have come close plenty of times under similar circumstances, but seldom close enough.

I told myself to not keep telling myself things and overcomplicate my thinking as I took guard, aware of the fact that runs were going to come at a trickle, and that I’d have to reckon with a close-in fielder at all times, especially with the number of bikes blocking off my favourite route to the boundary - the checked on drive ricocheting off the mid on wall into the gate.

The first few overs were very quiet, with an uncomfortable stillness hanging about the atmosphere; interrupted whenever Raju sprang into the jumble of bikes to rob me of single scoring opportunities, or when Pavan jeered our team for its scoring rate.

Raju is a quite exceptional bowler, coming off a diagonal three step run-up, bowling ripping leg breaks and off breaks without too much change in his wrist action. The amount of turn and bounce he gets increases the area on the pitch which he can pitch on without being clobbered, and as a result the pressure he puts on batsmen is unrelenting.

His not-so-little brother is one of those sneaky buggers who stretch the limits of acceptability when it comes to bowling actions, and he delivers a wide range of deliveries from various angles of release, which can be broadly classified under the forehand and the backhand. Most of his deliveries go straight after pitching, neither troubling the batsman too much nor offering him room to free the arms and pummel him like he deserves to be. His height and blatant defiance of our already relaxed laws on underarm actions allow him to bowl bouncers as well.

It was thus a thoroughly attritional battle, with no square boundaries to add value to my pulls, off which I could only get the occasional single.

The Madhini brothers kept going through over after over, and the target was slowly being whittled down. Their fielding was freakishly good for some strange reason, and full blooded drives were being stopped by thrusting out one hand into which the ball would remarkably stick. I passed my fifty and the singles started flowing a little more frequently.

I was getting into some sort of comfort zone, and I knew this meant I was going to do something injudicious, soon.

Pavan bowled an over of temptingly slow deliveries, and I made sure I patted each one back with exaggerated care.

I should have whacked the bugger, in hindsight, because in the very next over his brother got one to keep low and kiss the edge of the chair after hitting my right shin. I was 18 runs away from the target, and it hurt, badly. Unfortunately I think I’m getting used to it and I’m almost resigned to the fate of coming bloody close and not quite making it. Damn, I need counseling or something. Or one of those self help books I’ve ridiculed all my life. Or maybe write one. ‘Almost there – by Ghanshyam Nair’.

Do you want su-do-ku on the sidebar?

2007-05-24T17:16:00.000+05:30

Computers hang, crash and do things that no one with a conscience would do. The need to act antisocial pervades through every molecule of silicon and quite naturally, my computer decided to throw a temper tantrum of biblical proportions a couple of weeks back. My hard drive decided it would cease to function, just like that, without any warning; and I was left watching the ‘one or more of your disks need to be checked for consistency’ thing over and over again, like one of those weird time loop scenarios where you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again with no foreseeable change of scenery in sight.

Having to spend two weeks of my life without such glorious forms of entertainment as Google talking with people, asking them that most puzzling of life’s questions - ‘what’s up?’, bracing myself for the inevitable reply ‘nothing much…’ and so on, was not pleasant. To compound my misery, the Madhini brothers had gone off to scare the inhabitants of Malluland with their hairstyles and scar them for life, and there wouldn’t be any cricket either. There was also a gnawing fear that all my beautiful data would resist being recovered from that defunct hard drive, and I would have to painstakingly look for sources of free downloads of all those beautiful old songs all over again. The weather was acting like a fair weather friend, plunging me deeper into melancholy.

Everywhere else, everyone else seemed to my fevered imagination to be doing great things, forging ahead while I was sitting around cursing the weather and watching reruns of Hell’s Kitchen. I imagined I’d come back online, put a new post on my blog and find all my pals telling me disdainfully, with one raised eyebrow, that blogging is passé (I have friends who say stuff like that) and they’re all into flooping, or quorfing, or something of the sort.

Things turned out okay, however, and the latest innovation in blogville turns out to be putting su-do-ku on the sidebar, which, depending on the response I get from readers, I may or may not do. In response to this post, therefore, I request you all to let me know whether you want su-do-ku on my blog; or, if the case may be, not.

What do you call that thing chameleons do with their eyes?

2007-04-27T13:22:00.000+05:30

Ah… morning everyone. It has been a while since I’ve put stuff other than peripheral decoration on my blog. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that I had things on my mind; things like examinations, and how to look like I’m studying without actually doing so. My parents didn’t fall for it, and they never do; but there’s no harm trying. Filling in application forms, only one form actually, has also taken away another major chunk of my time; and filling this form involved 100 word essays and plenty of soul searching to find out how best I can sound earnest, sincere and totally focussed on life; which is not something that comes naturally to me. But all that is done, and until the next form filling deadline closes in, I shall try to do what every self respecting blogger does upon finishing college, which is to take a look back with one eye, a look ahead with another, and end up looking like a chameleon or some other reptile with eye muscles independent of each other; I’ll need to ask some of my aspiring biologist friends for the scientific term for it.

Three years of college, three times 365 days, minus all those holidays and suchlike (no, there wasn’t a leap year in that period) – it all went past a little too quick for me to make any sense of it. That clichéd sentence (thank you, Microsoft Word, for having put that curvy diagonal thing on top of the e for me) ‘It seems like yesterday when we were all standing around near those stairs (the three steps and the patio-like thing with a ramp below our department building upon which we have sat so often and got shouted at for doing so by those computer science faculty chaps even more often) for the first time, saying weird things like ‘I’m Karthik; but you can call me KK’’ (how does one do a quoted sentence inside another quoted sentence?) rings very true. We’ve had to cope with not being first year chaps anymore, then second year chaps; and now we are no longer students of the visual communication department of DG Vaishnav College, Arumbakkam, Chennai (I’m not too sure what the pin code is, so we’ll have to do without that). Being part of that place was, for the most part, a period in our lives full of laughter, swearing at each other in a friendly manner, watching tons of movies and playing, at various points in time, football, table tennis, hand tennis and that bizarre ball game ‘puncture’ in the studio; and cricket matches all over the place. All of this has taught us lessons our textbooks would never have been able to teach us, for the simple reason that we never had any. We have travelled; climbed reasonably high peaks on top of caves, trekked uphill and downhill; we have eaten copious amounts of anjeer kulfi, and danced around like crazed maniacs at the Kailash Kher concert in Pune. We played some more cricket, some more football. We have shot some decent films, some lousy documentaries and some awesome ads and had a thoroughly great time doing all that.

There won’t be too much more, if any, of all that anymore. I do not want to sound like I’m about to cry or get all emotional and aloof for two days, because that sort of thing happening doesn’t appear very likely; especially since we are still in the ‘Let’s go play footie on the beach!!! Turn up for cricky tomorrow morning, bum!!! Let’s watch 300 in the afternoon!!!' phase right now. There’ll be a couple of months of that, and then we’ll end up doing something with our lives, and then the inevitable thing will happen – a smooth transition into the next phase of life. It happened to me after school. I missed the place, but DG Vaishnav College, Arumbakkam, seemed like a coolish place as well.

That 50s and 60s show

2007-04-08T23:51:00.000+05:30

Ishaaron ishaaron mein dil lene waale… Youtube has loads of old Hindi song videos!!! Wonderful!!! Until now, I had been having amazing aural experiences every day, and now I’m having awesome visual experiences as well!!! Old songs have something that nothing made post-1969 has; I can’t really define it though. Take the above song, as an example. It’s got Shammi Kapoor in his more rotund, double chinned, technicolour avatar wearing saffron and moving around in strange patterns around trees jutting his neck at Sharmila Tagore’s face whenever there’s a two shot of them. Shammi Kapoor looked great in his black and white films like Tumsa Nahin Dekha, but not in Kashmir ki Kali, certainly not in this song. Sharmila Tagore… well, I’m not her biggest fan. But what happens when the above scene is played out with the song in the background? I suddenly want to jut my neck out at Sharmila Tagore, or whoever else is standing there, between tree number 37 and me, and I wouldn’t mind the saffron costume either, although I may shrink away from myself in horror once the song is done.

But while it plays, I will become part of it, and the gloriously silly world of romantic Hindi film (I shall not call it Bollywood) duets.

What makes the era of the 50s and 60s so great?

I guess that era was a freak of nature and the law of averages, when there was great talent in abundance, with geniosical music directors, geniosical (I love that word) lyricists and geniosically geniosical singers coming together in an explosion of beautiful, sweet (dare I say, geniosical?) music; the likes of which hasn’t been heard since, and never will be heard again.

Lording over this kingdom with a smile and a voice to melt hearts with terminally blocked arteries was Mohammad Rafi. It saddens me to think he’s not been posthumously given a Bharat Ratna, because that’s what he was, a jewel in India’s crown. There has been enough written about his songs, his career, the unfortunate period during which Lata Mangeshkar refused to sing duets with him, due to what now appears a silly dispute about royalty payments. Listening to all that glorious music makes me think the world then was filled with peace and harmony, with birds, trees and saffron costumed heroes frolicking in foggy (dry ice vapour, I guess) Kashmir. But that, I guess, wasn’t the case. Guru Dutt died under mysterious circumstances, suicide or an accidental overdose of sleeping pills taken to relieve depression. His wife Geeta Dutt, the voice behind the most wonderful lighthearted songs she’d glide effortlessly through – she died of cirrhosis of the liver, grief and ethanol contributing in equal measure.

Meena Kumari died from precisely the same thing; one would feel that was in tune with the tragic roles she did, but Geeta Dutt – inexplicable.

One hears very little from the people still alive from that era about their contemporaries; Asha Bhosle, who must have had a great time recording ‘ishaaron ishaaron’ with Rafi in OP Nayyar’s studio is still going strong, and has moved seamlessly through the generations. But one would think there could have been a little more credit given to the generation of people who moulded her, people like OP Nayyar, for whom she sang her best songs. There’s a little too much hype around RD Burman, and he was not a tenth as good as his old man. Naushad got spoken about only when Mughal-e-Azam was re-released in colour; and when he died.

But a part of me is thankful for all that, because the masterpieces of that era have generally remained untainted by remixing, which has been mostly focussed on the later, RD Burman dominated era. But I got a shock the other day, when I was in Giordano (getting myself a bag courtesy a gift voucher I won for second place in dumb C) in Ispahani centre, where I heard a remix of that wonderful Geeta Dutt song, Tadbeer se bigdi hui. A couple of songs from CID and Aar Paar have also met a similar fate.

One hopes that there’s a wave, no, a tsunami of nostalgia on the horizon; to bring back some of the glory of that wonderful, sadly bygone age. If not, there’s always youtube…

Sachin Tendulkar

2007-04-02T00:18:00.000+05:30

Sachin Tendulkar. I have no clue what emotions the name inspires among fifteen year olds today. Most of them would’ve been too young to watch his greatest years as they unfolded, and some of them would have started watching cricket seriously only during the last three or four years, during which period he has been a shadow of his former self. A few fifteen year old Indian boys may be wondering what all the fuss is about looking at how the media has reacted to what Ian Chappell has written in an article.

To people in their twenties, including those such as me who refuse to believe that they are no longer eighteen or nineteen, and that most of the Bangladesh team is younger than them; Sachin Tendulkar has been one constant presence in their lives, and someone who was supposed to be forever young. Sachin in my first year of serious watching, 1996, at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, was someone who would punch the ball through the covers while standing as tall as his diminutive frame would allow him to, right on his toes. In 1998, in the Chennai test against Australia, he’d slog sweep Warne mercilessly in a masterful third innings 155, and rock right back, his back foot dangerously close to disturbing the wicket, whenever Warne pitched marginally short and pull him devastatingly. The footwork, the precision, the calculated assault on a great bowler at the peak of his powers – it left everyone astounded. At the time, he was 25. He was in his tenth year as a test cricketer, and I was too young when he made centuries at Old Trafford, the SCG and the WACA as an eighteen year old. All of this made him a legend long before my generation even got round to imitating him on the streets.

He was then, before Rahul Dravid came of age, surrounded by decent batsmen not blessed with great techniques, and Mohammad Azharuddin would play one glorious knock now and then. He therefore ended up as a tragic hero in so many abject displays by Indian batsmen, most notably in Chennai, again, against Pakistan in 1999, when he steered India to within 16 runs of the target with a glorious 136 on a turner against Saqlain at his absolute peak, only to find the tailenders collapsing, like his back did midway through his innings. The Chepauk crowd showed its appreciation of a great test match by giving the Pakistan players a standing ovation as they did a victory lap, something that makes the hair stand up whenever I think of it, a great moment for sport.

He was blamed for not finishing it off, and this has been an albatross round his neck throughout his career.

The emergence of Dravid, Laxman, Sehwag and Ganguly as batsmen who could be counted upon to score runs under most circumstances should logically have lifted a great burden off Tendulkar’s shoulders, and made him bat with much greater freedom, and flamboyance. This, I suspect, would have happened had it not been for the endless injury problems that have plagued him. His back, shoulder, elbow and toe have collectively curtailed the natural flow of his game, and the feet no longer waltz into position, and the bat no longer flows through the arc it used to describe in executing the drive back past the bowler, probably the one stroke which stands out as what can be called his trademark; his feet skipping one step forward after the ball has been dispatched with a mere jab of a perfectly vertical bat.

What has stood out most in all my years of watching him bat, is the ease with which he handles every kind of bowling, making it look like he’s in no trouble whatsoever, until the ball he gets out. I have seen many perfect innings of fourteen and thirty eight from him, where every ball had met the middle of his bat, other than the ones he’d left alone.

Even when he’s not scoring quickly he makes it look like he knows what he’s doing, until he gets out and makes people wonder why he’d been padding away ball after ball from novice left arm spinners on a flat track.

This sort of thing has been happening a lot more frequently these days, and the consistency that marked him out as a special batsman is no longer there.

Does this mean that he should retire? Maybe from one day cricket alone, which there is too much of, and where he has little left to achieve?

Who can say? Certainly I don’t want to watch an Indian team line up without Sachin, although I realise he is much closer to the end of his career than its middle, and that he may not ever be the same again. Do we want to remember him for all those dismissals off the inside edge, going down on his knees to suggest the ball kept low?

I don’t know, and I would leave it to him (as if my opinion matters to him!) to decide what he’s going to do with his cricketing life. Maybe one last shot at captaincy? I don’t see why not; he’s usually brimming with ideas (as can be seen in his bowling, which probably merits another essay), has matured a lot since his first two terms, and it may offer him what he needs most at this moment, a challenge.

Whatever happens, I will always remember the glee on his face that greets some poor batsman’s downfall after he’s done him with a wrong ‘un, the helmet in one raised arm and the MRF in another after yet another hundred; and his inimitable voice as he gives another man of the match interview will play in my mind saying how ‘the ball was coming on to the bat nicely’.

I had a haircut!!! Woo Hoo!!!

2007-03-28T22:51:00.001+05:30

I got my hair cut today, and it feels brilliant having whatever little breeze there is in late March Chennai moving about lazily through parts of my head previously protected from the elements by unruly hair growing in patterns not dissimilar to the fibre of that other glorious creation of nature, the coconut.

Why then, I wonder, do some people want to grow their hair long? Friends of mine, most notably Mr. Rajesh Madhini (see image above), go around with so much excess baggage on their heads that I’m sure some of the grey stuff inside their heads must be quickening its rate of waving goodbye to this world (we are all born with a certain number of neurons in the brain; they do not reproduce, and throughout our lives their number diminishes) to allow the black stuff on the outside to flourish like the green stuff in the Amazon. This possibly explains why, generally, with notable exceptions (don’t ask me for examples); women aren’t as bright or as quick on the uptake as men. Before the flag waving, slogan shouting activist women out there start burning effigies of me, I apologise for what was certainly a politically incorrect statement. But I hasten to add, you lot would be a lot brighter in my eyes if you didn’t walk around willingly bearing the burden of more than a hundred thousand shoulder length hairs. But please do not take this opportunity to emulate my look; not everyone can carry it off the way I do.

Street Cricket

2007-03-21T22:09:00.000+05:30

There is a particular joy in playing cricket at an unorganised level, where you interact with individuals from vastly different backgrounds; each one of whom is a character in the truest sense of the term, possessing uniquely homespun technique. There is a freedom for individuals to experiment, respond naturally to different situations and make mistakes; something that is usually not found at more organised levels of the game. The result is usually hard fought cricket, with plenty of arguments, some of which turn ugly. That, however, is the environment where boys learn to respect differences, sort out issues themselves, and move on to the important business of playing the next match.

A tennis ball in the right hands can do terrifying things. Harmless looking lobs pitching a foot outside leg stump can uproot off stump (which can be anything reasonably off- stump-like) and result in arguments about whether the ball actually hit the stumps, whether the wicketkeeper disturbed the wicket; sometimes batsmen say they weren’t ready. Hitting the ball out of the gate in a certain friend’s house results in the batsman being declared out. I have known batsmen to do so with the cleanest of lofted drives right out of the sweetest part of the bat and say they weren’t ready.

A better argument would be the legitimacy of the bowler’s action. Underarm bowling can be defined in many different ways, and no two people agree upon the same definition. This is largely due to the fact that every bowler breaks some law in some manner. Bent elbows; arms being raised above hip, or sometimes shoulder height; right handed bowlers delivering the ball from a point near their left elbow – there are plenty of ways to get a tennis ball from one roughly drawn crease to another with one point of contact between ball and pitch somewhere in between.

Balls pitching twice are usually called dead ball, with rules changing from one street/apartment compound/backyard to another. The confusion always stems from the second pitch being behind the popping crease. This sort of delivery may or may not be a dead ball, and this sort of delivery has the nasty habit of beating batsmen and hitting the stumps. If only they played with straight bats…

If they all played with straight bats, however, there wouldn’t be any character left. Street cricket is an attractive spectator sport simply because it throws up great contests; which aren’t high quality skirmishes, but comedies of error. I was alarmed by the total lack of quality in a match between two teams of nine and ten year olds a few months back and I found myself thinking how much better my friends and I were at that age. Thinking about it now, though, we were probably as bad, if not worse. All that quality I remembered would have been what I had seen through ten year old eyes; and a ten year old mind would have made sense of what I saw using about five years of cricket knowledge as reference.

That was about the only match I’ve witnessed between kids of that age group in a very long time, and it saddens me to think of all the fun this generation is missing out on. Nobody plays on the streets, nobody sits on the walls, and nobody argues with the guy next door who confiscated the ball and refuses to return it. Some of those arguments were the greatest moments of my life, where the adrenaline would course through my veins, and I’d feel like the king of the entire street (which was a pretty big place for a small kid who wasn’t allowed to take his cycle out into neighbouring streets).

I vividly remember an argument I got into when I was a little older. This guy had chased us away from our pitch, and refused to let us play any longer. My friends had already started removing the stumps from the turf; and I was waging a lone, polite struggle against that chap, who was under the impression that we were out to break his beautiful windows. It went like this:

Me: We don’t intend any harm, sir.

Him: You better intend!!! You BETTER intend!!!

I’d have shown him plenty of intent, and possibly thrown in the meaning of the word as well, if my friends hadn’t disappeared from the spot.

There are too many such people around, all of whom occupy ground floor flats, and take long afternoon naps. The rapidly increasing population of this psychographic coupled with the rapidly dwindling population of kids who care enough for their piece of turf and the sport they play to actually resist being driven out, has probably brought the curtains down on street cricket, at least in the bigger cities with more affluent people. Every kid has a computer now; many have high-end gaming consoles as well. In the old days, a couple of us had 8-bit Nintendo consoles, and a whole bunch of kids would go to one person’s house, and we’d have loads of fun playing Mario, Contra and other simple, addictive games that turned up in plastic cartridges with a chip.

The only ten year olds (in the bigger cities, I reiterate) who play cricket or any other sport these days are the ones who are good at it; at an organised level, with coaches monitoring their every move. Parents don’t encourage their kids to go out and play, unless sport seems like a viable career option; viable career options for fifteen year olds!

There is too much homework, too many textbooks, too much talk of the big, bad, competitive world out there. Tenth and twelfth standard students suddenly stop singing, dancing, painting, playing the tabla and playing on the streets; and decide that the time has come for them to study. Examinations and record work become a priority; and some people reassure their children with this very amusing piece of advice:

‘Two years. Work hard for these two years, be serious; and you can enjoy life after that.’

How can someone who’s been robbed of his vitality during what should have been the most fulfilling phase of his life ever enjoy whatever is left of it? The fellows I saw going around with blank looks and textbooks in their twelfth standard are still doing just that. Their holidays were spent preparing for the next term, the next academic year; and once they’re out of college, they’ll be sitting on a desk somewhere, in front of a computer, putting together stuff other people did, making it look coherent and characterless. They’ll earn fat paychecks, yes, but none of that money will ever bring them the lost pleasures of their childhood, their children will go through the same process; and a generation of kids will grow up not knowing what it feels like to launch a tennis ball into Orbit Apartments.

Onion Oothappam

2007-03-08T23:00:00.000+05:30

What can a power cut do to elevate your onion oothappam experience into a higher plane? This is not a question I have pondered a great deal about, but I was given an opportunity to do so the other evening.
I’m a great fan of the dosa and its myriad forms. The onion oothappam is a sublimely beautiful thing, crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, with a smattering of molaga podi, if you like it, and finely diced onion embedded into its surface. The process of making one is fascinating to watch, and even more so, to listen to. This uninterrupted listening was made possible by the benevolent souls in the electricity board. No television, no television next door, and so on…
So there I sat, with an emergency lamp sitting next to my plate on the table; my back facing the kitchen where my mum weaved her magic. The batter went on the tawa, the ladle went over it repeatedly in a circular motion, and the whole thing sizzled away until, with a deft motion of her wrist, my mum turned it over. The sizzling became louder, and then a swift scraping noise as the oothappam slid off the tawa onto my plate.
I wasn’t watching her cook, but my ears were being treated to divine music.
As one disappeared down the gullet, another made its way onto my plate; and I began to reflect.
The best food is always found in an environment where there is no insecurity, where everyone knows everyone, and the setting doesn’t overwhelm the food. At home, therefore, the combination of consistently brilliant food and the knowledge that I can eat as clumsily as I want to and no one will mind makes the process of consuming food a real pleasure. I usually eat stretched out on the sofa, with a book in my hand, the remote on the armrest and the plate leaning at a dangerous angle that threatens the equilibrium of its contents. Sitting on an elegant high backed chair, with a frilly tablecloth sitting in front of you, laden with a selection of knives and forks so shiny you don’t want to put fingerprints on them, glasses with fluted stems waiting to upset the candles which seem to be there for the sole purpose of setting the tablecloth on fire; this sort of thing frankly makes me nervous. And the conversations around tables such as these are usually in hushed tones, and forced. The food itself is fussy, with elaborate care taken to make it look like a still life painting. Making food is an art, and it can be kept pure only if it’s allowed to be itself. This won’t happen if some chef too full of his own importance puts the chutney in a squeezy bottle and paints wiggly patterns all over a piece of oothappam cut in the shape of a butterfly with a very prominent proboscis. That chef doesn’t understand food. All he wants to do is to put his signature all over the place; like what I used to do all over my notebooks in school in the days when I used to be this guy with an inflated opinion of himself, seeking attention and seldom getting it.
When the chef begins to think he’s more important than what he’s putting on the plate, he loses sight of the fact that his customers primarily want to eat.
Actually, most of his customers turn up to soak in the ambience, the candlelight, the feeling of being treated like a spoilt crown prince who hasn’t learned to tie his shoelaces yet; eating isn’t quite the priority. That in turn causes the chef to indulge in impressionism, and this sort of thing attracts more of the ‘Look at me, I’ve got Swarovski on my shirt’ crowd. They’re stuck in a mindless vicious cycle.
They have no idea what they’re missing out on, the poor sods.
I laugh at them, a maniacal laugh, distorted slightly by the presence of copious quantities of oothappam in my mouth.

Skipping

2007-01-30T17:27:00.000+05:30

The other day I got myself a skipping rope... this jazzy red transparent thing, with black handgrips. I have no idea whether this thing will aid me in my ambition to look reasonably streamlined, but I can testify that it's a load of fun to twirl your wrists about and skip lightly on your toes, and hear the sonic boom as the rope goes past the speed of sound in its circular path around your momentarily airbone frame (that, provided the right sort of skipper is skipping, will make a great photograph, don't you think?).

The British Rope Skipping Association (first link google came up with) says:

Skipping is good for you, there are a number of health benefits including:

Improved cardio vascular fitness
Increased muscular strength
Better endurance
Improved body conditioning
Greater Flexibility
Improved coordination
Stronger bones

Skipping can also improve your skill:

Better timing and rhythm
Improved balance
Improved agility

Skipping may also bring additional benefits including:

Increase in social skills through meeting others
Opportunities to travel
Increase in self esteem through an easy to learn skill
Fun and educational
Opportunities to be creative

Not too sure how skipping can make me meet others, give me opportunities to travel and so on; but then again, I'm not ruling out any possibilities... if fate has it that skipping is gonna be the catalyst for major, and positive change in my life, then so be it!

Uncomfortably Large Man With Moustaches

2007-01-13T19:56:00.001+05:30

Do Porpoises Have Arms?

2007-01-12T20:53:00.000+05:30

The Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication, Pune, will be conducting its culturals from the nineteenth to the twenty first of January. The people at SIMC may have to do without the not inconsiderable prescence of the chaps from the Visual Communication department of DG Vaishnav just because of one incompetent buffoon at a counter in the Central station.
We needed to get a form stamped by someone at that counter. That someone was not to be found at the counter. The closing time for the counter was 1730 hours, and we were there at 1715 hours, IST. Unless these blokes were following time from a totally different time zone, we had every right to assume that we would get the form stamped, and get our tickets to Pune and back. Well, things don't work that way.
Finding nobody at the counter, I went to the door through which all the inner sanctums of the counters are accessed, and stood just outside, wanting to ask someone what to do next. A lady appeared, and I asked her. She said she was new there, and she didn't know. I cursed silently, and stood there, looking like someone with a runny nose who's just discovered his hanky lying underneath the feet of a horde of rampaging rhinoceri.
A surly, miserable looking man appeared out of nowhere, waving his arms about like a drowning porpoise (He may not have looked surly and miserable to me at that point in time, but subsequent events have clouded my ability to state events in an objective manner... and I'm not too sure whether porpoises have any arms to wave about). On closer inspection, he appeared to be saying something to me. He walked up to me, and told me to come back the next day at ten.
I'd got through about half of "But Sir, we need to book these tickets today..." when the surly, miserable man interrupted haughtily and said:
"We do not care about that."
... and shut the door in my face.
Now I do not know how one is supposed to react to that. I suppose people would disapprove of ramming the door open with the left fist, and saying 'fuck you!'.
Well, I did just that.
All I can say is, it was a spur of the moment thing, and all it would have done is make that buffoon firmer in his view that I was just a spoilt kid, too used to having things his own way. Any feeling of guilt (okay, I'm expecting finer emotions from someone unlikely to possess them, but that comes from a belief in the general goodness of the human race, and a feeling that there are way more good people in the world than bad ones) for his insensitive action of shutting that door in my face would have evaporated.
To all the chaps in Symbiosis waiting with bated breath to see us...
"Blame that surly, miserable @#$%^&* if we don't turn up."

The twelfth day of Christmas...

2006-11-26T18:15:00.000+05:30

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
Twelve Drummers Drumming
Eleven Pipers Piping
Ten Lords a Leaping
Nine Ladies Dancing
Eight Maids a Milking
Seven Swans a Swimming
Six Geese a Laying
Five Gold Rings
Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

Well, this is something we had to sing during our western music classes, back in the days when I wasn’t five feet tall yet. I loved those classes, but not this song. I mean, the lads were totally against this number, and you can plainly see why. The lasses seemed to sing this song with great gusto, and I suppose this was the first inkling us lads got regarding how materialistic the fairer sex really is…

Well, what put us off the most, I suppose, was the ‘true love’ thing… yuck!!! I mean, talk about true love to a fourth standard kid and that’s the reaction you’ll get.

True love seems like a pretty nice concept now, though… and I suppose I’d have thought the same back in the fourth as well, only I wasn’t dumb enough to admit it… something I failed to live up to in later years… heck, I was the butt of all the schoolboy humour in the seventh standard for saying something as stupid as:

“She’s a girl, she’s my friend… yeah, I suppose you could call her my girlfriend…”

Coming back to the issue at hand, western music classes were so great that we didn’t think of the loss when we moved into the sixth, and we found it being replaced by something called history. We had the greatest history teacher in the world; and we, or I at any rate, never really thought about western music classes anymore. But those songs still linger in the memory, and every now and again, I’m reminded of a stray line, or incident, which brings the upward curve to one’s lips…

I have one question though… just supposing my true love (who is a merely hypothetical construct here) gives me a partridge in a pear tree, or any of the other wonderful avian life-forms mentioned above… where in god’s name am I supposed to keep it? Does that mean that my bookshelf and cricket bat must make way for an annoying bird and god forbid, its family? I mean, I’m sure French hens are thought of very highly by hen collectors, but I ain’t one of ‘em!!!

The strange case of Ghanshyam and a frustrating brick wall.

2006-11-26T12:38:00.000+05:30

Ghanshyam loved crowded streets; narrow and claustrophobic preferably. Ranganathan Street fitted the bill perfectly.

Quite naturally, therefore, Ghanshyam decided to take a walk down the street reputed to offer ‘the lowest concentration of air per person per cubic metre’ in the whole world.

The effects of such an arduous journey upon the body and soul can vary from person to person.

On an average, 73 per cent of humanity would emerge unscathed apart from a well-trodden-upon pair of feet; half of whom would lose their wallets. The other half would be richer by a wallet each.

Of the remaining 27 per cent, half suffer minor physical injuries such as those inflicted by the tip of an injudiciously prodding umbrella; or minor bruises arising from four or five people falling simultaneously like a row of bicycles.

The remaining chunk of the pie chart can be further split into two groups – the chaps who shove and the fellows who get shoved.

Ghanshyam belonged to the last category.

On that historic day, events culminated in a massive shove that sent Ghanshyam falling nose first onto something that gave it a hairline fracture.

As a matter of fact, his mind was also fractured. His mind was split neatly down the middle, into two halves, each exactly like the other; and both exactly how his mind had been when it was a whole. A physical corollary would be somatic cell division, about which you may have read exhaustively in school.

Ghanshyam’s physical frame could support only one mind; so the other created a new physical frame for itself, on a planet which for want of a better name shall henceforth be known as PV40153.

This physical frame exactly resembled the one on Earth, except for the fact that it did not have a broken nose.

This physical entity (the inhabitant of the planet PV40153) will henceforth take on the name Ghanshyam.

The other one will be known as Ghanshyam the other.

Which is a bit unfair on the chap, I admit.

Ghanshyam the other woke up in a hospital with a bandaged nose.

Ghanshyam found himself in an eerie new land with two other chaps he wasn’t acquainted with. It was very bleak.

For some reason, just an infinitesimal instant prior to the fracture, his cell memory was infinitesimally frozen, and he had been born with one definite advantage over his clone; in that he had a nose in one piece.

Otherwise things looked very bleak.

This was due mainly to a thick fog that enveloped the landscape. It was a curious bluish green in colour, the sort of bluish green he had in the past imagined the colour of all the dry ice vapour in all the old black and white movies to be; that to others somehow looked just plain grey.

“It’s rather grey in here, isn’t it?”

Looking at the source of this comment, Ghanshyam perceived a short chap.

“No, it’s bluish green, a foggy bluish green.” Ghanshyam didn’t say.

Instead he asked his curious companion who he and his curious companion were.

I began writing this sometime last year, and I find myself unable to go past this point...

Writer's Block

2006-11-25T23:35:00.000+05:30

It’s no secret that people can’t just sit in front of a blank Microsoft Word window and zip off a page of geniosical (Microsoft Word does not recognise the word… it tells me I’m probably thinking of genealogical or gemological… well, it exists now, and I shall use it as and when I please) ‘holy cow!!! How did he/she do that?’ stuff. It’s hard enough to come up with a half decent first line. The secret, says Mr. Sean Connery, in the guise of Mr. William Forrester, is to type, and just keep typing.

‘Punch the bloody keys!!!’ he says. Or words to that effect… I don’t remember exactly.

In any case, doing that doesn’t seem to help either. Must have helped Mr. Forrester, I suppose. And what makes writer’s block loom most threateningly is this thing called ‘I wanna write but I don’t know what I wanna write’ syndrome. Which, at this point in time, is affecting me pretty bad.

What I need, therefore, is an idea. I request anyone who might be reading this to keep giving me ideas. Any sort of idea.