God's got a twisted sense of humour...

2011-04-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

The Outsider

He stood outside peering through the window. He saw himself amidst them. Throwing his head back he laughed out aloud, laughing alongside them, he raised his glass as they did theirs and he drank to their health. They spoke among themselves of this, that and sundry as he lingered like a ghost, haunting the borders of their friendship. The familiar stranger caught passing, fluttering laughter or glances by the wings and hid them like secrets in the dark cave of his cupped hand, their littlest gestures he treasured, yet they flowed out freely and fluidly like golden yellow grains of sand. They knew he lingered yet he was not their kind, his gestures were too scant or too many, theirs, always heavy with care. Yet he stood outside the ring alone waiting for a hand, an outsider forever he was and as an outside forever he must stand.

Everytime Calcutta has crushed my heart, tiny bits and crumbs of it has scattered here and there, in every silent by-lane of North Calcutta, in the clamorous gullys and amidst heaps of trumeric in Gariahat, in every adda, kaku or mashir round-the-corner cha-er dokan, every road dug up for pointless repair, in every traffic signal, I am leaving behind bits of my heart in every garland that adorns the picture of the dying hero in movie theatres, in Shiraz's biryani, in Puchkas, in the 'Chintu's Chiness Dragon fast food stalls', in Pestry shops and in the 'Ma Tara Medical Stores'...

That there can be found beauty in depredation, a certain meaning in chaos, coolness in unforgiving heat, friends, opinions and advice in the most unexpeced places, Calcutta teaches one like no other. Here, I have learnt to fall in love with women with beautiful eyes, with Tagore's songs in their breath and waft of jasmine and camphor in their hair, Mahalaya's sonorous incantations, of Dhaak and Kashor jubilating every heart and the slanting golden-orange sunrays of winter afternoons when pigeons sweeten the languorous hours with their subtle clamour.

This city has taught me, to find a corner for myself in the most alien of environs. So, even though I sometimes feel like an outsider, a probashi in my own city, in its sheer materialness, it is home. I live here.

Although in the forseeable future Pune is going to be my new home, well, new and old, it is in this dust ridden, sickeningly humid, bombed out looking, heap of a city where walls are adorned by Shiv, Durga and Kali, every verandah nurtures the prospect of a beautiful face and where every alleyway smells ofTelebhaja, where my heart will forever reside.

2010-04-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

My maiden at Eden

On the Sunday that was 13th of March 2010, Eden Gardens not only bore testament to Kolkata’s unremitting support for their home team, the Kolkata Knight Riders but also set a new benchmark for the Bangali’s resilience to searing summer-afternoon heat and the city’s famously obdurate humidity.

As our car devoured the great Red Road leading to one of the most politically significant corners of the city housing the Raj Bhavan, Writer’s Building, the High Court, the Mohan Bagan football club premises (The Bangali’s somewhat equate football with their passion for Leftist governance therefore the distinguished mention among places of political importance), All India Radio office and the Eden Gardens, all scooped within a 3-4 Kilometer radius from the Tribunal; indications of a sporting event being held in the city became palpable.
Cotton hats held tightly in place by ribbons fastened underneath the chin, grown men hurried towards the stadium tugging their little ones behind them, who also had miniature cotton hats on their miniature heads. Whole families, grandparents, fathers, mothers, daughters and sons marched on either side of Red Road’s smooth asphalt heading towards Eden Gardens for the second Indian Premier League 20-20 cricket match pitting KKR against liquor maven, Vijay Mallaya’s Royal Challengers Bangalore.

I like to view The Indian Premier League as a fat, rich man visiting a poverty-stricken village. Everybody wanted to be associated with him, to do favors for him, to ingratiate themselves with him, they would travel impossible distances to see him and to propitiate his cash-rich kindheartedness and soon he would have his own little cabal of followers, yes-men whom he would happily exploit later to stuff his coffers.

Expectedly the traffic grew thicker and subsequently impenetrable as we neared the stadium and after attempting numerous permutations of trying to find the least crowded route and the best parking space our driver gave up and disembarked us at a walk-able distance from Entrance no. 11, our designated entry and drove off to find suitable parking space and a smoke.

Outside, we were just two heads in an ocean of thousands; like fungi pullulating on a piece of damp wood in a stagnant pond. I saw people as far as my eyes could take me. Heads with long, stretchable balloons tied around them, heads with Vodafone ZooZoo caps, heads with shiny, frilly paper hats meant for birthday parties, heads with inordinate amounts of hair, heads with no hair, heads with cotton hats and still more heads with cotton hats. Painted faces and purple-gold stippled the galaxy of crazed homo sapiens pouring in from every direction and route available.
They formed huge bottlenecks near the entrances enumerated by boards, hanging from above, flashing bold numbers in black. The Kolkata Police personnel were visibly having a hellish time. Standing lined up alongside the entrances to make sure the queues were straight and their constituents obedient, many of them got pushed around violently and sometimes cussed under collective breaths, affording a frustrated Bangali or two the opportunity of a lifetime to vent their resentment towards the law enforcing bullies unleashing as much violence on them as the overwhelming crowd pushing from behind could make available.
With dada out in the field today let’s see who contains the Bangali, I sniggered to myself when suddenly dad grabbed my hand and yanked me near him forcefully and almost immediately a huge KKR flag swooshed before me passing exactly through where I was standing, cutting through the air sibilantly!

It was a couple of youngsters, KKR’s acolytes on a motorcycle, two of KKR’s throngs, hordes of unsung and woefully insignificant foot soldiers, clad in purple and gold. They swayed the massive flag from one side to another and zoomed past the queues wailing out the team’s war cry, the passion inducing, “Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo Re” literally translated as, “We shall do, we shall fight, we shall win”; obviously not as peppy as it would sound in the Bangali tongue.

Nevertheless, dad and I managed to meander our way through the gates and over to the security counter about 30 meters from the entrance to the seating facility and as we entered a dull thump of speakers started to assail our eardrums. It only mean one thing, there was a DJ in the Stadium! Now, the security check, simply involved a famished looking boy running his hands all over your body, starting from the face, all the way down to your privates and finally stopping at your feet. No one checked me for cameras or other electronic pocket-equipment. Careless. Yet, I felt sickened at the thought of blaming the poor guy seeing the sheer thousands more he would have to molest after us.

We couldn’t avail Club house tickets like my father always did but we were able to manage the next best available, to my knowledge, the Rs 1200/- tickets. It so turned out that our seats weren’t “right at the front, just behind the fence’’ at Section - G as dad had earlier speculated. Our search began to take us all the way to the back, further and further away from the fence and under the shaded area. With every step ascended, our heart sank a little till we finally spotted our two little seats at the farthest row of the Section. Disappointing. Now, although we were far at the back, surprisingly the view of the field was remarkably clear and the shade was a bonus!

I was on my way to experiencing an IPL cricket match at a Stadium for the first time in my life! What a moment for a couch-potato!

Both teams practiced and limbered up on two opposite ends of the field. Covered in velvety, green grass, the spotless outfield had three pitches in the middle (the one in the middle, covered by a Tarpaulin sheet being the main one), also multitasking as an implied partition which both teams seemed to respect very much.

To my left were the boys in purple, the hometown heroes, KKR and to my right, the RCs, looking dapper in their bright red uniforms. In my opinion, this season’s KKR uniform is a tad tacky. It always was, ridiculously shiny and loud, in complete contrast to their performance on field. Although this year’s purple and gold proved to be a bit of a relief to the eyes, the previous uniform resembled the liveries an 18th century knight. ????I don’t have anything against gold on black or purple but I do not fancy seeing the combination on anything except for sarees and designer pens. Period.

The view was nothing short of breathtaking! If you have ever witnessed a carnival in progress from a slightly higher plane you will know precisely what I am trying to get at. Never before had I seen anything that measured up even closely to this. The music set the mood for the evening as dance numbers boomed and echoed across all four corners of the stadium from monster sized speakers. There were giant screens along the entire periphery of the field, some showed popular commercials and some highlights from previous matches.

A loud voice echoed across the stadium announcing the names of contest winners, sponsors and general safety measures to be taken when inside. The MC of course, did his bit to raise a notch higher, passions already running high among the crowd, “Joddin ache Dada, ke debe badha?” (As long as there is Dada, who can stop us?). Almost immediately a cacophony of pipes, horns and trumpets sounded from every corner of the crowd in acknowledgment, a loud, reassuring reciprocation to a mere mention of Dada’s name. Dada, the magical trick-word, aroused passions, buoyed hopes of a dazzling performance and promised to bring back the elusive glory to the Knights. People danced to the beat of drummers thumping away powerfully at big marching drums strapped on to their shoulders, there was colour, lights, firecrackers, paper rockets zig zagging from one seat to another, confetti. “Look, our boys!”, dad said to me; the crowd suddenly exploded in a deafening tumult and roared. Thousands of flags fluttered as the KKRs jogged gracefully up to the fence lines, their legs falling and retreating in perfect synchronization with each other’s. Every camera in our Section followed the men led by Saurav Ganguly as they finished their last lap and slowly headed back to the pavilion.

As if to compensate their departure, out came from nowhere, the Cheerleaders! And it was then that the Bangali almost entirely lost it…

The thumping of the speakers came close to becoming unbearable as these voluptuous belles, each befitting a lifeguard’s role in Baywatch pranced out in groups amidst earsplitting applause from all corners, running gracefully along the boundary, encircling the stadium and entrancing the Bangali. Although their attire now showed palpable signs of generous tailoring to suit Indian standards of ‘decency’ and ‘civility’, two virtues we Indians are richly endowed with and would lay down the lives of our countrymen protecting, quality is a virtue that cannot be concealed and these girls overflowed with it. What would the Bangali not give just to have a photograph taken with one of these dancers, what would he not forsake to shake a leg with these pom-pom sporting, blond nymphs, what would a Bangali not sacrifice just to stand next to one of these ethereal beings??

The Toss ensued shortly, declaring KKR as the winner who chose to bowl. It was a bowling wicket alright. An indication to which became apparent during Ishant Sharma’s bowling practice that we had the absolute pleasure of watching. His long tresses trailing behind him, the Goliath of a man hurtled down the runway like a speeding comet and reached the bowling crease within the bat of an eyelid. Like a Cobra poising its hood before a lethal strike, he rose high up in the air and landing back softly on the ground heaved the ball towards the wicket with all the force that six feet something frame could draw together. Almost immediately the wicket on the other end of the crease exploded with all three stumps bouncing off in different directions and bales spinning in the air like ejected cartridges from a machine gun, the interesting bit was, I never saw the ball, just a whizzing blur. Now, I wouldn’t want to be standing on the other end facing that!

Pre match interviews were quickly wrapped up as the crowds were getting impatient and typical Bangali sentiments rich with expletives started filling the air.

The screens that till now kept flashing images of Shahrukh Khan, Katrina Kaif talking to important people and other Club house ornamentations amidst camera flashes, journalists, etc; suddenly began showing the KKR players pouring out into the field and assuming respective field positions. Dada marched out, eyes blinking, talking to Owais Shah, looking thoughtful as always as the crowds greeted their Messiah with another wave of deafening cacophony, flags, confetti, pipes, drums et all. The MC blathered all the adjectives his limited Bengali could afford him in welcoming KKR and Dada on to the field but was almost muted by the tumult. Seconds later, appeared heading for the batting pitch, were the two RC openers swinging their arms and jogging on their way. They were cheered for too, I just couldn’t hear it!

Suddenly everything went dead still, it almost seemed like someone had turned a giant volume knob somewhere. The batsmen were in position and so were the fielders, Ishant Sharma stood silently like a towering giant, heaving, waiting, the gleaming new Kookaburra sphere safely ensconced between his fingers in a fast-bowl grip.

The screens went blank for a second or two and immediately thereafter came to life showing the Umpire signaling Sharma. With an earsplitting bang, off went firecrackers blowing humongous and billowy clouds of silver and gold confetti into the air as Sharma commenced his hurtle of death down the runway. And so with it began my first IPL 20-20 experience!

Now, everything was rosy till the game actually began, what is interesting are the events which followed, which in a way also happens to be largely the intended subject of this blog entry.

Much has been said about Kolkatans at the Eden and what great sports they can be, they handle losses real well and refuse to leave without a burning, searing impression. But this time around there was a generous distribution of Biriyani chomping Kolkata Police personnel among the people to make sure that no such frivolities took place. Completely ignorant of the many unattended boxes and bags scattered around, our “Pooleesh-men” slouched on their shaded, back of the stadium seats, discolored napkins spread on the necks, demolishing mega size boxes of Biriyani.

I was just taking my mind off them when a bunch of teenagers rushed in from somewhere and noisily occupied the seats in front of us. Not only were they completely inebriated but all of them wore those longish ZooZoo hats. These annoying inflatable hats consist of a rubbery, tubular balloon meant to be worn around the head with a big, grinning ZooZoo over the forehead, a simple contraption capable of completely blocking out the view ahead of anybody seated behind the wearer. As if that weren’t enough they wouldn’t stop chattering and jumping on each other for no reason, which literally cut us off from the entire cricket match because now, not only could we not see, we couldn’t hear anything either. Dad and I joined forces with a gentleman seated next to us in sternly asking them to choose other seats as they were disturbing us. Instead, these hoodlums took their ZooZoo hats off and resumed their annoying prattle.

“Give us a Mexican Wave now..” echoed the MC’s booming voice and what a spectacular sight it was to watch the wave originate from the farthest end of the stadium where everybody, old and young, men and women alike rose up from their seats arms raised to make the wave. When it rushed at us, I did too. Dad just sat there sulking; “How did we end up with these seats? How did these bumkins get into this section, cant I even watch the match peacefully without asking people to sit down all the time, is this what I paid for..?” I convinced my father that it was a stadium and such things were expected, “It’s all a part of the experience!”, I said, slurping my Coke.

The RCs by now were limping on their way to not a winning but a face saving score which I speculated wouldn’t cross 110-115 by any means, wickets had fallen like nine pins and their batting had taken somewhat of a lackadaisical disposition. Ganguly, like the chief conspirator always shuttled between mid on and mid off, staying close to his bowlers and whispering into their ears every now and then. Jaques Kallis who had initially raised hopes for the RC by striking a boundary or two bandied the ball around a few times before getting dismissed and the other batsmen above and below him on the roll began following suit quickly. With their hero down the RC’s batting turned even more lackluster. In deep contrast to that was the mood in the stands….jubilant! That only meant that dad and I had to forsake our seats and start standing up just to get a clear view of the field. People just wouldn’t sit. Excited teenagers stood atop their seats at every boundary and gyrated their posteriors vulgarly to the music. We weighed our options; we could either keep standing up and sitting down with the crowd , that way we could at least see what is going on in the field or remain seated and be canopied by gyrating buttocks from all sides. Next boundary, we stood!

The first innings were over before schedule and there were around twenty minutes for KKR to come out to bat. The DJ pushed his music to overdrive, the MC commenced his nonsense and out came hopping, skipping and jumping the Cheerleaders and with them the IPL mascots; big, fluffy tigers called Hoogli. I imagined poor Bangalis trundling inside those heavy, tiger costumes, laboriously prancing and lolloping around in the heat, cursing the whole venture, swearing by the very succulence of the podda-ilish, what a confoundedly lousy job!

The RCs had managed a paltry 135 during their 20 overs and the public couldn’t wait for the second half to start, to watch Dada dear and his boys chew the heads off Mallaya’s RC. Dad and I quickly discarded our seats and raced downstairs to the lower areas, there were many unoccupied seats there and our aim was to get two corner ones, free from the prancing, screaming monkeys, two of whom, I saw, had already occupied our discarded seats above. It was safe as the match was already half way through and no one would check our tickets at that juncture, besides we would get a better, closer view of the field. The crowd there looked decent, at least not the type to act like lab monkeys on a testosterone overdose every time a four or six was hit!

The second innings had already begun under the day-like brightness of the floodlights when I reached our new spot with fresh supplies of chilled Coke and a couple of paper hats for dad and myself. We were no longer under the shade. Although it was post 5.30 pm and we didn’t really need those hats, I thought we should do our bit to blend in, be a part of the IPL fever, represent a more respectable, dignified audience who being very much a part of the revelry wouldn’t at any cost lose composure and discard self respect at the tiniest provocation and I was sure the hats would do it.

Our new location was a good 10 rows away from the fence. A TV camera propped up by a crane and manned by a camera man standing on the field, hovered over us like a bespectacled professor keeping a close eye on his students at an examination. It bothered me. I have always been rather ill at ease with things and more so, people hovering over me, keeping a close eye, observing and making copious notes of my behavior, my mannerisms.

Nevertheless, my reverie was broken when a loud crack assailed my eardrums; it was the percussive outcome of a Kookaburra ball meeting ninety eight centimeters and two kilos of pure willow. The harder the smack, the sharper the crack. The percussionist here, Hodge had executed a powerful lofty drive sending the ball shooting at an unfathomable pace hundreds of feet far into the evening sky like a missile. All of us strained our eyes and craned our necks to spot it but the floodlights made it impossible to do so, it reappeared again in our visual horizons as a miniscule white dot hurtling down from the gossamer tropospheric echelons over Eden Gardens, disrupting the flight path of a pair of eagles that scattered away in the sky, utterly bewildered by the speeding white comet, the Kookaburra ball began plummeting towards the stands assuring six runs to KKR’s scorecard. What a phenomenal knock! And as feared, the Bangali lost it again! Dad and I were complacent though, “there is good crowd here, they won’t get rowdy!”, dad told me. No sooner had he said that, Eden erupted and we were standing again!

An elbow butted in from the side and knocked off my coke and a thin boy of about fifteen whose elbow it was I presumed, leapt atop the seat like a frog and began jumping up and down noisily holding up a huge ‘Knight Riders’ banner between both his hands and he was not the only one to be doing so, Eden exploded with a uproar comparable to the proportions of a thermonuclear detonation to celebrate the ball’s homecoming from its great cosmic sojourn, firecrackers went off and there was confetti everywhere, the crowds were blanketed by fluttering flags and banners, THUMP..THUMP…THUMP…THUMP went the speakers, the MC began blabbering, out came the dancing beauties and the peripheral screens flashed funny exclamations. What a party!

The carousing had died down a little when I turned towards the culprit who had knocked off my Coke. He wasn’t there in the first place when we had taken those seats. I realized he had come down leaping over the rows behind us and had managed to noiselessly creep into our’s and of all other places had chosen the seat next to mine. I had no mood to chide the cretin for the Coke and neither did he apologize. He just sat there gaunt and proud, a bespectacled nerd, as thin as a reed with a faint, developing forestation above his upper lip and an oversized mobile phone hanging from a strap around his neck, a rolled up KKR banner in one hand and a half eaten sandwich in the other. A stereotypical marvel!

By now, knowing fully well which direction the match was heading for the KKR batsmen started taking it easy. The started missing a few balls here and there and ran tardily across the wickets. This was not acceptable to the Bangali and no sooner had Tiwari missed hitting a ball, “ Ei Bari ja!” (“Go home!”), “Kaavarta puro phanka, Kaavarta maar!!” (“The Cover is completely unguarded, hit it in the Cover!”), “Ei maar na!” (In exasperation, “Oh please, hit it!”) and other expressions of dismay started becoming audible.

The Knight Riders however were brought to a safe disposition with Hodge and Manoj Tiwari going on to score their respective 50s and Dada still duking it out. Now, it was his turn to disturb the peace by beautifully cover-driving the ball straight to the boundary for a four. Amidst the din; “Maa Maa Maa, akhon score holo eksho dui, aaro choutirish raan jetar jonno, tumi TV-te dekhchho to?!” (Mommy Mommy Mommy the present score is 102, 34 more runs to win, I hope you’re following it on the TV!!), the nerd said on his Walkie Talkie. Soon, there was another four, “Maaa Dada Char merechhe!” (Mommy Dada hit a four), thereafter, two runs, “Maa Maa Maa, duu raan, duu raan”, (Mommy Mommy two runs, two runs), I was just reaching the end of my tether when as if by divine intervention, on came a three minute Strategic Break.

As the peripheral screens showed the countdown I notice something odd. The seats around us had started filling up gradually and the very crowd we were running away from was slowly closing in on us. By then two very different, somewhat queer people came and parked themselves right in front of us. Both had unusually done up hair, definitely not something one would expect to find at a stadium. Their hairstyle reminded me of actresses from the 70s’ Eastman color Hindi movies era, hair bundled on top of the heads in a huge, flawless bun with thick spiraling strands bouncing up and down in front of the face. On the other hand those shoulders looked incredibly masculine and their voices, deep. One of them raised an arm for some reason and it was then that I noticed it, hair! Lots of it! Eunuchs! The only two Eunuchs at Eden Gardens and they sat right in front of dad and I and again, our view was blocked by two humongous mountains of hair! I looked up at the sky but there was no heaven over Kolkata.

The crowd began chanting… “Five…four….three...two…one!” Strategic break being over the game resumed. A snack vendor scurried past our row like a house-rat. He was trying to sell his wares and avoid been spotted by the Police, he bent as low as his backbone permitted and was in a great hurry. He had almost gone past us but the transmitters on nerd boy’s head spotted him right away; “Daadaa, daaadaaa, daadaa…Bhel Puri…Bhel Puri!” (Too annoying to translate!), he hollered, “Dada Badam dao badam, lonka dio na” (Hey, add lots of nuts, no chillies!); his plate passed through us, hand to hand from one end of the row to where His Majesty sat. He gazed at it for a bit, then with a disdainful expression and to my utter exasperation said, “O ma, sauce koi? Sauce dao sauce, Sauce Koi, daoni keno!” (How come there’s no sauce, gimme sauce, why is there no sauce, why didn’t you give me?!), the plate went back again from whence it came, passing from one hand to another all the way to the furious vendor who jerked a bottle of ketchup all over it and again placed the plate on the human conveyor belt. The payment also went to him the same way much to our chagrin and that of the others in the row.

With the consequentiality of the game being more or less known, the entertainment hungry Bangali waited impatiently for boundary hits as it was then that the young Cheerleaders would show up and once they did, there was no stopping these people;

Young and old alike stood boldly facing the Cheerleaders. Pot bellies, wobbling, arthritic knees, spectacles with magnifying glasses fitted in them, broken teeth, all swayed and jerked to the music. This section of the audience privileged enough to have obtained front-seat tickets cavorted with twice the conviviality and thrice the energy of the rest of the crowd.

The middle aged men resorted to a dance form I have keenly observed over the years as THE stereotypical ‘pot-bellied-middle-aged-man’s-dance’; a sort of ‘bastardized bhangra meets Shantiniketan’ approach you’ll observe at uncle & aunty parties after Ghazals give way to Hindi music and the whiskey begins to benumb senses, infusing the attendants with enough lightheartedness to abandon all inhibitions and with it their self respect. It is an interesting dance form which has, in fact, little to do with the tempo or rhythm of the music, it involves the dancer holding both his hands up in the air, slowly pushing them up and kicking his legs about gently, giving the billowing belly the leeway to swing and wobble like it were alive and had a name!

There’s another amusing dichotomy I noticed among the younger crowd at Eden. While the rather well-supplied, 50 Cent fed youngsters did what seemed as the Gangsta Rap moves; standing atop their seats they swayed from side to side with their legs wide apart, one hand on the crotch and the other in the air, replete with a bandana and shiny, long necklaces! The other somewhat less privileged youngsters with their bizarre, badly misplaced sense of style (often provoking embarrassing misunderstandings) , tight t-shirts, curly hair, painted nails and fake, blonde streaks interrupting an otherwise normal, black mane, swayed their arms and curled their wrists gently resembling sea weed in strong current. While with strange, feminine grace these youngsters expressed their pleasure at the lolloping, white skinned beauties, the former, the gangsta rappers decided to take over the reigns. One particularly enthusiastic guy stood on his seat and assiduously pointed his finger at the Cheerleaders gesturing at them as though he were taking dance classes, as though he was instructing them… “Comeonnowgirls, one, two, threefourfive, six, seven, eightnineten!”

With 18 more runs left to be fetched from 10 balls, the peripheral screens began showing a thumping heart symbolizing, quite unnecessarily though, a nervous finality. A dull mottle of red and pink, the appendage throbbed with a sound of “Dhuk Dhuk Dhuk”, cutting clearly through the now hushed crowd. They took the thumping seriously, it was time to chomp nails and blink eyes when a huge six by Dada set the ball rolling again. The sea weeds swayed; the gangsta rappers grabbed their crotches harder and began belting out dance instructions and the giant mounds of hair in front of us wobbled in delight.

Dad and I were standing again! Next ball, Dada was happily walking back to the pavilion swinging his bat to and fro.

I had noticed her soft, black hair through the wired fences before but couldn’t catch a proper glimpse of her face. I was not anxious initially but her facial contours, that kept playing hide and seek with me through her hair was increasingly becoming a diversion and I often felt tempted to look her way. Each time the wind blew into her face, it displaced some of her hair and fragments of her features started revealing themselves to me. High cheekbones gave way to a smooth, angular descent before ending in a pout, delicate lips, childlike, baby-pink, un-colored and un-spoilt by artificial, chemical hues promised prospects far dislodged from mediocrity. But I hadn’t felt the full impact of her radiant presence until she rose up from her seat, it was that the entire extent of her youthful resplendence unfurled before me like a rose in bloom. As she sashayed down the stairs towards the drinks counter I noticed her lissome body, a penumbral shape of a young woman somewhere between late teens and a generously bestowed adulthood, a flawless form of hand-drawing-like perfection, every stroke, shade, soft curve, a rare, fitting tribute to the ineffable artistic genius nature often reveals itself to be.

Her soft skin gave off an opalescent glow in the effulgent overhead lights and spangles of bright light dazzled from the tops of her thin shoulders like diamonds as she delicately raised both arms and with thin, long fingers and restored behind her delicately carved ears the wind blown hair from her face. She could not have possibly learnt that gait from anywhere or anybody and I could not imagine she would be the type to emulate those white skinned carcasses that cat-walked down ramps on Fashion TV but there was something definitely extraordinary about that walk. It was not much of a walk, really. Calling it one would wrongfully deny her grace, justice; it was more like an elegant dance, one that exuded overwhelming sensuality. Her fragile arms swung elegantly ahead and behind her hips as she walked, dainty step after step and her elbows danced freely with long forearms hanging gracefully there from. The clusters of hair hanging in front of her face rested in clumps over her shoulders and jumped gently every time she took a step and her large earrings dangled. They dangled, close to her cheeks, like they were best of friends with her cheekbones, why wouldn’t they?

Slowly and gracefully she disappeared inside and I was still gaping at the doorway long after she was gone when all of a sudden I awoke from my time-warp. The Cacophony and din of my real-world surroundings came rushing painfully back to my head and filled up the empty spaces like high tide at a rocky shore.

“ 3 more runs to go, 7 balls, don’t leave now stupid, we’ll be off pretty soon anyway, might as well see the boys through it!”, dad said as I was getting up to go downstairs. He made sense, as people had already lined up in long, serpentine queues making their way outside the stadium and it would be madness trying to get downstairs now. The object of my awestruck-ness had somehow managed to take her lithe self through the sweaty, hairy crowds but it was futile for me to try to look for her. She was lost. Lost like a fresh, minty breath in a giant, dark mouth. Like the Biriyani chomping policeman’s?

As for the hypocrites, whose enthusiasm popped as soon as the victory of their home team had become a certainty, started pouring out of the stadium by the hundreds. My father and I decided to sit till the winning score was secured and soon a blazing four struck by Owais Saha hammered the last nail in RC’s coffin. We felt the need to hang around till the last blow on RC was struck. We owed it to our Knights. Surprisingly there was hardly any din this time. Where were the pipes, where were the drums, the horns, flags? The winning run was secured wasn’t it?

Money’s worth had been redeemed and KKR had showed its big fun trick, Dada had saved the day with his 23 and so nobody wanted to hang around anymore. The award-ceremony didn’t matter a dime and nobody seemed to give it any more consideration then they would to a rodent’s posterior. The Cheerleaders with their flowing, golden hair were nowhere to be seen and the big, fluffy Hooglies lay deflated, propped up against the walls across the boundary and their inhabitants sat spread-legged on the field panting, gasping, trying to devour as much oxygen as their orifices could imbibe. I think I saw one of them retch, from inhaling for too long the fetid smell of their own perspiration.

The geek was gone, we didn’t see him go. He must have left the same way he came, bounding and leaping over the rows behind us. He left behind his half-eaten plate of Bhel Puri for his buzzing and whirring little friends who had already started making circles over it. The mounds of hair in front of us rose; gaudy dresses and hairy arms; looking back at us the both of them pouted their lips and one put his thick finger on the edge of his lower lip. They said something to each other in baritone whispers and then waddled away. The Gangsta rappers, distraught that their blonde, voluptuous, pom-pom sporting students on the field had been ushered away were now preparing to leave and so were the sea-weed, one of them started playing a popular Hindi film song from his huge and elaborately detailed Chinese made cell phone and for one last time did his waving-sea-weed-ocean-hydra move, grinning from ear to ear, only his white teeth visible under that explosion of curly gel-greased hair with shiny-blonde streaks.

Making sure the award ceremony had ended my father and I started our descent down the stairs, down to the refreshment floor, through the security check and further out into the open, out of Eden Gardens. I turned around to take one last look at the crowd that snaked out of Eden Garden’s belly. Deflated Zoozoos, crumpled clothes, wet armpits, disheveled hair and babies sleeping on their mother’s shoulders, all sauntered out into the evening air. I wondered if she was around. No, she wasn’t. She was gone and my heart sank a little.

The sound of hooves and gallops filled the air as a number of mounted policemen closed in tightly along the queues to prevent the crowd from entering the High Court premises which were almost next door to the Garden. The horses, with their crusted tails and muddy bottoms caused swift crinkles and ripples on their skins to keep out annoying flies that kept buzzing around the dried excrement and watched silently as the foot soldiers, the lesser Knights began pouring out into the night lamp-lit streets, heading home in the hundreds, back to their regular de-Knighted lives where missed busses, perspiration stains, flies, low pay, pot-holed roads, sleazy politics, slums, power and water shortage and not cheerleaders, confetti, pipes and fluffy tigers, were the reality.

A horse neighed and lowered its hairy, glistening neck to gnaw on something on the ground revealing a large hoarding. It showed Shah Rukh Khan in a dramatic poise with KKR Cricketers radiating out in every direction from behind him in a spangled explosion of purple and gold. It appeared as though they were reposing on a chariot that spurted stars and glowing orbs in the purple sky. The great corporate chariot whence mavens, barons, movie stars, millionaires, billionaires, gazillionaires and if there exists a kind beyond that, drove the populace, whipping them into coughing up ridiculous sums of money they could ill-afford, to buy a few hours of their product, a mini carnival-esque cricket match. These foot soldiers probably will never realize that while the real game transpired within the confines of board rooms and conference halls where billions changed hands and talent, new and old, measured, auctioned and sold; on the field there was no point being heartbroken every time their beloved teams lost by narrow margins, committed annoying mistakes, missed simple catches, scored ducks or ran tardily across wickets. The pain didn’t matter to anybody, neither the ones inside the boardrooms nor the ones outside, on the field.

IPL primarily remains that fat rich profligate man visiting a poverty-stricken village seeking propitiation of its people only to milk them later on of their own money.

2010-01-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

THE INNER PULSE

(This is a little something I had written ages back for an online rock magazine called http://www.indianrockbands.com/; on browzing through it the other day I stumbled across this write up and decided to put it up for my readers here on blogger.com.

It talks in details about man's inherent sense of rhythm and the emergence and relevance of hand drumming all over the world. You wouldnt find the exact same article on the website as I have made a few grammatical and factual corrections here, nevertheless, in essence it remains the same.)

Those who have been brought up in one of the many traditional and musically inclined Indian joint families can surely identify with the indubitable fact that music, in whichever form it may be running down their respective family lineages, is and will always be a fundamental basis on which the family heritage survives. In India as well as in various other cultures, percussion, besides other forms of music have for years been such a channel through with rich tradition has been passed down from one generation to the next.

For centuries countless pairs of hands have been fashioned and perfected in order to master the art of laying down rhythms on resonant surfaces, the one important truth it has established is that, it is the hands that come first and then the surface on which it plays. Both are of paramount significance when we are talking about drumming. My point here is not the instruments or the tradition, not even the musicians, it is the two surfaces that create pure magic when they come together, the skins.

The following is a brief journey that’ll attempt to explore the importance of hand rhythms, their deep rooting in tradition and how they stand for man’s inner pulse;

Music, as I’ve always maintained, comes straight from one’s own inner self, it’s the manifestation of man’s undying hunger to express, therefore for the primitive man, drumming on a surface with his bare, naked palms came the closest to expressing what was hidden deep beneath. Physical contact with the instrument was needed to transfer thoughts into it, so it could proclaim in it’s own distinct lingo what its master had in mind. With the realization later on, that such hand drums could be used as outstanding sources of rhythm for backing up other musicians, the relevance of hand percussion started uncovering itself.

Even today more than half the world’s drums are played by hands. Traditionally one’s palms have been considered the best beaters for most drums save for the few others that had such skins and such build that needed and responded better to sticking, this resulted in various striking, finger rolling, muffling and slapping techniques to evolve gradually. Such techniques, very precisely, made the most of the various tonalities of a hand drum thereby attributing an intricate and detailed sound to any rhythm pattern. Such techniques are used widely today and many have been innovated upon and fashioned to suit the changing musical perspectives.

One shall notice that a rhythm played on a drum with the fingers and the palms have an altogether different feel to it, but it sounds totally different when laid down on the same instrument with sticks or mallets. This happens due to the difference in the surface area of a palm and that of the striking section of the mallet, i.e. the head. That’s why most hand drums sound differently on being played on by mallets and come out with their natural sounds when played on with the hands. This is the nature of hand drumming and this is where it’s power lies.
Most hand drums are of two kinds, the single surfaced or ‘headed’ ones and the double headed ones. Of the two surfaces of a double headed drum, one is normally the Base surface, on which the baser accents are played and the other one is the Treble surface on which, mostly finger rolling or slapping is used in order to construct a full beat pattern.

The Indian Tablas, for example are considered to be one of the most expressive instruments apart from the Iranian Tombaks. These are actually two separate, single-headed drums; with a black dot on each head called the Gab or Shyahi placed exactly at the center of the drumhead. These Gabs give the drums their distinct sound. The wooden pegs on the edges can be hammered and tightened to improve the tone. Most of these tones have traditional names such as, “ta”, “ki”, “Na” etc are called “bols” and can be sung or recited by the player. The range of the Tablas is basically two octaves. The Dholak, Dhol, Mridangam, Pakhawaj, on the other hand are two-headed hand drums played with the fingers. The Kanjira is another small, single headed lizard skin drum known for its raw base tone, has only one little zil or Jingle on its sides. The Ghatam, on the other hand, is a clay pot on which slapping techniques and finger dribbling is employed in order to bring out that characteristic ‘clattering’ sound, the mouth of the Ghatam can be covered with cupped hands in order to produce woofing base accents.

The Iranian Duffs, similar to the Arabic Riqs are traditional frame drums that have very similar playing techniques yet they are fundamentally different. In case of the former, rings are attached to the inner surface of the drum in order to give it a distinct raw sound, whereas the latter, has zils attached to it, like the Kanjira and it of course sounds different. Most small frame drums are gripped by either the right or the left hand from the bottom with the skin facing away from the player and the comparatively larger ones such as the Irish Bodhrans or the Tars are held under the arms or between the legs and can be played with a brush and hand combination.
Glen Velez, the Frame Drum maestro’s contribution to Frame Drumming has brought these traditional instruments to the forefront and into popular music today. He invented a drum set constituting only Frame Drums and was the first musician to master the brush and hand combo technique. Almost every country has it’s own set of Frame Drums, we’ve heard about the Indian ones, few of the other lesser known yet extremely time-honored and classy instruments are the Spanish Adufe (a double headed drum), the Brazilian Pandeiro, the Italian Tamburello and the Ghaval from Azerbaijan. Frame Drums with thin skins are finger sensitive and a variety of finger drumming techniques can be used on them but the ones with a thicker membrane need sticking. Fingernails, fingertips and sometimes knuckles can also be effectively used to make very high-pitched tones on few sections of the drum such as the drum shell or near the edges.

Arabic drumming is primarily based on three important tones i.e. ‘Doum, tak and kah’; but Persian drumming is slightly different from this as they use ‘snapping techniques’ to make high pitched sounds and don’t use the ‘Kah’.
The Middle Eastern Doumbeks or Tonbaks/Tombaks are another separate category of goblet shaped drums made of Ceramic or metal, held between the legs or underneath an arm and played with both palms in a ‘circular fashion’, in this technique the base of the palm and the fingers are mostly used in a cyclic motion to play rhythms on the drum surface. These methods of course have slight variations and differ from drum to drum.

Africa is another ‘world power’ as far as rhythm is concerned. Unlike the Middle Eastern system of rhythm that has a lot of similarities with the Indian one, one will find a lot of distinctions between the African rhythm system and that of India or the Middle East. The three basic tones in West African drumming are ‘Gun’,
‘Go’ and ‘Pa’, there are more, which only advanced players can produce from their drums. Few of the major drums of African origin are the Djembes, Kpanlogos, Bougarabous, Ashikos, Udu drums (similar to Ghatams), Talking drums, Bata drums, Djun Djuns and the stool drums. All of these are meant to be played with the hands (except for the Djun Djuns which can be also played by mallets) and are great for playing in Drum Circles, as they are loud, crisp and have an amazing reverberating effect. The African drumming methods stress more on striking the drumhead with the palm and the use of the fingers is limited, it also stresses heavily on power. The Talking Drum on the other hand is a unique contraption, as the ropes running down its body are to be squeezed by the player, holding the drum underneath his arms in order to change the pitch while playing. The depth to which music is embedded in Africa is revealed by a simple proverb of theirs, which says, ‘A village without music is a dead village’.

The Brazilian and Afro Cuban hand-drumming systems yet again are, parallel in many respects; The Congas and Bongos are the drumming mainstay in these regions and are also widely used all around the world for various kinds of music. The Bongos are very sweet sounding instruments and are played softly with the fingers, their Moroccan counterparts are made of Ceramic and have their bottoms sealed instead of opened. In the Caribbean, of the two Bongo drums, the smaller one is called the ‘Macho’ and the larger one, the ‘Hembra’. The late Carlos E. Landaeta came up with the first 5-key Bongo drums and research is on whether the Bongos can be traced back to ancient Africa. The Congas are often played in sets of 2 and 3 and are all differently pitched. From high to low these drums are called the ‘Tumba’, ‘Conga’ and ‘Qiunto’. These drums are played with palm heels and tips of the hands and of course, they differ from one playing style to the other. The Bongos are by and large played with the Congas as they compliment each other really well.

As for instruments purely of Brazilian origin that are hand played, we have the ‘Cuica’, which is a ‘Friction drum’. The player firmly rubs a wooden post attached to the center of the head inside the drum cavity with a cloth, to create an exceptional ‘chattering’ sound. Another instrument used for the most popular form of music in Brazil, the ‘Samba’ or the ‘Bossa Nova’ is the ‘Pandeiro’, the Pandeiro is similar to the Tambourine as it has a row of jingles attached to its sides and is played like a Frame Drum. Various other ‘Agogo Bells’ are also used widely but since they have a hard metallic surface, they usually need to be played on by sticks.

Hand percussion does not end with drums; there is a spectrum of different sound effects, including a variety of shakers, juju shakers, bells, bar chimes, Caxixis, Ghana bells, Castanets, Claves, Steel drums, Kalimbas and Jam blocks out there that can be used with the hands to produce brilliant, trance like sound effects for a percussion gig.

On a lighter note, one can self improvise by trying using sticks on hand drums or even drumming on various articles around the house like tables, vessels, buckets, empty plastic bottles and plastic containers filled with grains, used as a shaker; like various percussionists were known to have been doing when young!!! It’s real fun and in the process one can actually discover a lot of new tones and effects coming from these different and out of the ordinary sound sources.

Talking about odd sound sources, I guess its nothing new to see percussionists today drumming on their cheeks with their fingers to create a sound similar to wood blocks!!

This kind of experimentation with sound, where the body takes center stage has been christened ‘BODY PERCUSSION’. Further, a few ‘beyond the edge’ percussionists are known to have recorded and even played live on stage, sound samples by slapping their thighs, snapping, or even stomping their feet on various surfaces!!!!
Apparently the above ‘stomping’ and ‘slapping’ may not have anything to do with what I started off on i.e. the kinship between hand percussion and ones musical legacy but don’t you think it does take us back to one fact, and that is human beings still rely profoundly on their bodies to make music. Even after so many decades of technology invading the music scenario, by whose virtue almost all musical instruments today have wires going in and out of them and can be made to sound so unrealistic, man still recognizes this essential, natural chemistry between his own body and the music that naturally flows out of it; he still feels the need to be one with the surface he contacts in order to tap this music.

This natural impulse is somethin our predecessors, the apes, nomads or whatever they were called have bequeathed us; it is their legacy, their heritage, their religion, a religion called rhythm.

2009-12-22T06:47:00.001-08:00

The Hero’s daughter

Sitting on the cold wooden bench with none but the dark night for company, she watched the wagons drive by…
With nothing but daddy’s woolen coat she armed herself against the wind
alone she waited under the cold, dark night sky

Wide eyed she searched among all those who alighted,
none but strangers caught her sight
Hope had reached the end of its tether, yet she held on
held on with all her might

Daddy had promised he’d come home for Christmas,
daddy would come home for good
He would come back after the war was won
he had promised his little darling he would.

She waited for him all night long
she waited for him till winter was gone
She waited under the scorching summer sun
she waited for her daddy, she knew he would come.

But long was the battle won, for long the nation freed
Why wasn’t daddy home yet? His job was done indeed
They said daddy was a hero, they told tales of his gallantry
With none but a legion of hundred men he had set the nation free

With slender arms folded she prayed to the One above
“Keep daddy safe from the bullets” she implored, “keep him safe and keep him sound”
But a faint foreboding grew deep in her, like a serpent sinister and fierce
She feared she would never see daddy again, he was far, far from near

Then, one fine morning came a knock on her door, as lively and loud as can be….
“That’s him!!!” she said and ran outside but nowhere to be seen was he
There stood an officer with a letter and a folded flag and tears in his eyes hath he
“A parting shot from a fallen enemy soldier…” and not a word more said he

“Our motherland weeps for her slain child and her children, for a great hero fallen…”
“Our Captain, our champion has left us forever, oh what misfortune has befallen..”

That night as the nation rejoiced its newfound freedom and children danced in the rain
The hero’s daughter lay in bed clutching daddy’s woolen coat on her way to meet daddy again.

2009-10-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

Charlene…

I must have been barely four, maybe five when I first saw her…

For me Kindergarten was never much fun, neither were the next thirteen-fourteen odd years of my school life spent feverishly in the pursuit of education. The world of alphabets, letters, numbers, colours and toys remained alien to me till the very last day I spent at Little Angles Kindergarten. While other kids played with plastic-blocks, play-clay or rode the merry-go-round, I would roam the gardens alone talking to myself, spinning my own tales. I loved to daydream and tell stories to an invisible audience and I imagined them listening to me, enthralled, captivated.
I never picked a fight and neither did I ever protest about getting bullied by the bigger children, never was my name associated with any mischief or for that matter, it’s perpetrators and I never made a loud noise. In a lot of ways I still remain the same.

Then came the day I saw her for the first time. I remember being unable to take my bespectacled eyes off her. She stood among her friends, waiting for her turn at the swing. Clearly the prettiest and tallest of the lot, her long black hair flowing freely resembled the beautiful waters of a waterfall flowing over black rocks in the dark night and she had the prettiest eyes in the whole world. I stood there staring stupidly at her like she was some heavenly creature that had accidentally fallen straight out of the skies; she was what fairytales were made of!

I remember, from that day on, my enthusiasm at the prospect of going to Kindergarten was piqued, much to the amazement of my parents who would usually have a hard time dragging me out of bed and getting me to bathe. They never realised that my sole purpose, my reason for waking up during those wee hours of the morning, enduring hideously large mugs of malt-laden beverages, then riding off to school with dad with a heavy water-bottle and ID card dangling from my neck, was only so I could hide behind the thick shrubbery in the playground during tiffin-break and watch Charlene play with her friends.
She was clearly the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

Little Angels School allowed its students to celebrate their birthdays in class. As toddlers, we were allowed to bring cake, candy and gifts for everyone. So every other day we would walk back home with pocketfuls of candy while the birthday boy/girl always went home with heaps of presents.
One morning during play break, while I stood in line for the merry-go-round I overheard one of the kids say that the following day was Charlene’s Birthday and she had promised to bring a clown to school! The second half of the sentence failed to register;
…………It was Charlene’s birthday! And I wanted to give her a present!

That afternoon after classes broke I raced back home without stopping by the ice-cream vendor or the sticker-guy. I can’t remember having ever run so fast. I did not know what to gift her but I was desperate and there wasn’t enough time. There was no chance mom would take me out to buy a present and she would definitely not understand if I told her I wanted to buy it for Charlene. We couldn’t afford it. With dad looking for a job and mom still finishing her post graduation, money was an issue. We had cut expenses down to necessities and buying gifts for others was a luxury we could ill afford. Amusingly, I understood that we had problems with the ‘buying’ part but never quite knew why that was so.

Once home, I sprinted to my room and dived underneath my bed landing on the floor with a 'wump'.
A dumping ground for all my material possessions, the floor beneath my little bed had a modest heap of rubbish constituting handed down toys, a sizeable number of toy-guns and a few items of everyday use that would'nt enjoy the privilege of being called toys by luckier kids. I took a good look at all of them assessing their chances of making it as the perfect present for Charlene, sadly, none made it. What use would a girl as pretty as her would have of a handful of dismembered Gi-Joes, a fraction of He-Man’s brood, a teddy bear with an eye gouged out, half a car, a few marbles and a spoon?

And then I saw it…

On top of my table, amidst the books and colour pencils lay my box of Green Apple sketching pencils. Mom had specifically instructed me to use them sparingly and only for sketching class because of how costly they were. I had obediently managed to use ten pencils over a period of more than a month and there was only one left in the box.
I wasn’t sure when I’d get the next box but nothing was quite as valuable as my Charlene, so laying all my apprehensions to rest I picked up the box and pulled out the last remnant of my status symbol.

I will never forget the next day at Kindergarten. None of us at class could wait for the lunch bell to go off, Charlene’s clown had already arrived and waiting by the doorway! Although I too was excited about the clown, he wasn’t priority.

After about half an hour of the clown’s torturous romp he was politely asked to call it a day by our class teacher who had clearly had enough of his unfunny tomfoolery. Charlene sat amidst her friends giggling and playing with what seemed like small gifts she had received during the day. I realised, she would soon get busy with the cake, I had to act fast, before the party began!

I pulled the pencil out of my bag and drawing a deep breath started to march towards her direction.
She sat right underneath a window and I noticed how beautifully the sun rays fell on her hair. The golden beams formed blindingly bright spangles of light on her hair. Everybody and everything around her ceased to matter, a limbo set in on everything around us and I lost all my inhibitions, the ID card dangling from my neck swung merrily as I gripped the pencil tightly and starting marching towards where she sat.
Before I knew it, I was standing amidst a small group of giggling Kindergarten girls chatting animatedly, playing with their dolls. All activity around me froze as little faces, wide eyed, looked up at me. I walked up to Charlene.

The first few seconds were traumatic. I had never realised that all my bravado would fizzle out the moment I would face her. Shaking, I slowly put out my hand and produced the pencil before her. I didn’t say a word, I couldn’t, I was choking.

I never expected the reaction I would elicit from Charlene; she seemed to understand the purpose of my visit and the herculean labour I had to endure for it. Taking the pencil from my hand she smiled sweetly. Planting a kiss on my cheek she said “Thank you”. The ground tilted around my feet and I felt my head swirl. I cannot recollect the subsequent events of the day.
Nevertheless, from that day on I became friends with Charlene. We studied, played and were together right up till first standard after which she suddenly stopped coming to school. That was the last I saw of her. I remember crying to mom and pleading with her to find out what happened to Charlene but it was all in vain. I never saw her again. I missed her for a very long time thereafter, but gradually Charlene melted away in the chasm of my memory and there she stayed for all these years till the other day I was suddenly reminded of her when I came across a box of Green Apple pencils at a stationary store!

Smiling to myself I picked up a box, paid for it and headed back home.

2009-08-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Neena

He stopped dead in his tracks, there she was, the crowded vegetable market was the last place in the world he had expected to see her at, yet there she was…!

It could only be her..

She bent attentively over a heap of lemon and chillies and sorted them with an outstretched forefinger, slender and unadorned. As she picked one lemon at a time and put it with great care inside a small cloth bag hanging precariously from her shoulder, the plastic bangles around her thin wrists jangled. She tied her hair in a messy pony tail and wore a dull cotton salwar. He could catch glimpses of her face from amidst her hair, he had noticed how hollow her cheeks looked.

She was younger than him by about two years; very pretty and sprightly, yet today she looked old and weary. The last time he had seen her was more than fifteen years back yet surprisingly enough it didn’t take him long to identify her amidst the crowded bazaar’s hustle and bustle.
She still retained most of her features. One of his sister’s good friends, she was a rather cheerful and extremely talkative young woman but it was with utmost surprise that he observed how astonishingly different she looked now. She looked grown up, worn-out, afflicted with an untimely maturity.

He hesitated to walk up to her and say hello but there was no telling how she would react. What would he do if she failed to recognise him? What would he do if she did? Would she remember?

As she sat on her hunches haggling with a shopkeeper he noticed a particular refinement in the accent with which she spoke Hindi, quite amusingly though, she failed to conceal it. Her attempts at making her pronunciations as pedestrian as possible amused him even more. Neena was such a delightful mismatch amidst the hordes of sweaty vegetable vendors and Sunday morning shoppers.

“Neena…!”

“NEENA…!”

At his second beckoning she turned around and looked up at him wide eyed. She unplugged her walkman and staring into his eyes stood up slowly. He could tell she was trying hard to summon up as much recollection about him as possible and he could tell she was struggling with it. Deciding to save her from any further embarrassment he said;

“I am Ram, Nayantara’s elder brother, remember?”

Almost as if in a flash her expression altered and her eyes lit up. With a quivering voice, she exclaimed;

“Oh Ram……how have you been? It’s been……”

“About fifteen years” he interjected, smiling, continuing on his mission to aid her in her struggle down the memory lane.

“Yes Ram, fifteen years, fifteen years is such a long time and gosh you look so different…!”, she chuckled.

“Yeah, I keep getting that a lot and I could say the same about you, so what’s up Neena, never expected to see you here of all people, how is everyone at home?”

“Well, one can never tell where one drifts off to with time, I am doing okay, what’s new with you?”

“I am doing good too, not much of a shopper, dad is inside choosing the fish for today’s lunch and here I am talking to you…..!”

He looked into her eyes and an old, familiar feeling, hidden underneath a decade and a half’s worth of pain and memories began welling up inside him. His Neena stood right there in front of him and he couldn’t decide how to react, what an idiot he was. He wished he could freeze the moment, forget about time, place and consequence and just hold her, hold her close and he could have bet she knew about it and had possibly felt the same way, only, fifteen years back. Breaking the pause Ram asked;

“So Neena, how is everything at home? How are your parents? I hope they’re doing good!”

Neena looked away. She immediately lowered her bag, picked up a handful of chillies and lemon randomly and stuffed them in her bag as if in a great hurry and then pulling out a ten rupee note she paid the vendor and began walking towards the market exit. Ram followed her.

“Neena…Neena what’s wrong?!”

“Nothing, I need to get going now, there’s much work to be done around the house!”

“Tell me please!”

She looked at him as though she wanted to ask him what difference it made to him how her parents were and why at all was he bothered. Where was he all these years? With great difficulty Neena withheld an outburst and contained her tears. Ram waited.

“Papa is no more with us!”

The lump in her throat made it almost impossible for her to speak and she knew she would not be able to hold for long.

“The business wound up because of law suits and we lost our home soon after, one morning we found him in his bedroom…..” tears welled up in her eyes and she began to choke badly;

As shocked as he was, he knew the worst was on its way;

“Rat poison…” was all she could say before she broke down completely.

The words hit Ram with twenty times the force of a speeding train and he stood there, frozen. The mid-day heat burnt his skin and made it impossible to stand inside the stuffy bazaar.
He looked at the frail girl standing before him dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, fighting a brutal battle to control herself, the cloth bag had long slid down her shoulder and now lay near her feet with it’s contents strewn around. Ram bent down to pick up the lemon and chillies and Neena hastily wiped her eyes and joined him.
Suddenly everything about the Neena he saw before him began to make perfect sense and he stood looking at her picking up the last lemon from the ground and dusting it.

“How’s aunty dealing with it?”

“Oh…..”, her voice even more quivery, “……..it hardly made a difference to her, she stopped recognising us, I mean, papa and I about two years back when she suffered her third stroke, it had a permanent damaging effect on her brain. Now she cant move a muscle….I give her a bath every morning, cook for her, feed her, wash the clothes, do the dishes and sweep the house…its all on my shoulders now Ram..”

A smile was something Ram had least expected from her after this but when she did, he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He advanced towards her to embrace her, to assure her that she was not alone, that he had come, that destiny hadn’t crossed their paths again for nothing, she hesitated, stepping back immediately she looked around uncomfortably. Adjusting her cloth bag she said, “Raghav is waiting outside in the car, I need to get going now.”

“Raghav?”

“Yes, Raghav, we met last year at JU. He is pursuing the same Mass Communication course as I am. He is why I am alive Ram, he really keeps me happy. He is waiting outside at the parking lot.”

“Well…we…”

“I knew Ram, I always did, I saw it in your eyes all the time but it would’ve never worked between us, it wouldn’t have lasted very long, don’t ask me why but I knew it wouldn’t…..it was nice meeting you Ram, fifteen years is a long time...and you’re a big boy now!” , she said ruffling his hair.
“I should get going now…don’t miss me Ram, its not worth the heartache...what’s gone, is gone, things aren’t all that bad in my world now!”

Ram didn’t know what to say, although he stood there feeling miserable and wishing he hadn’t met her at all in the first place, his sadness was suddenly replaced by a strange feeling of confusion with Neena’s last sentences. What she said didn’t seem to make sense at all, neither did her great desperation to leave, yet he stood there smiling wryly at her as she waved her hand smiling sweetly at him. He waved back.

“Take care Neena, be in touch..!”

She didn’t look back at him.

Almost immediately, Ram’s father appeared out of nowhere with a Hilsha in each hand. Grinning widely he raised them up in the air for half the bazaar to see; “Call your mom and tell her to forget about the Chicken Chettinad, there shall be an Ilish-fest all through this week…!”

Before getting into the car Ram looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of Neena and her boyfriend, they couldn’t have left the market place yet considering the crowd that had built up in the paltry parking space. He stood on his toes and craned his neck to see as far as possible but she was nowhere to be seen. They were gone. Surprising, one would need to grow wings to get out of that parking lot that soon. Nevertheless, with a heavy heart, Ram got inside the car.

“Baba, remember the Balsaras….Neena Balsara….Nayan’s friend?”

“Hmmm I do….why do you ask?”

“Nothing, been a long time, I suppose you know about her dad and her mom…”

“Yeah…sad….very sad….theirs was a happy family. Remember the time you and Nayan would go cycling with Neena?…such a sweet girl she used to be…but such a tragedy…both mother and daughter…”

“They are all alone now dad, you can imagine how difficult it must be for them…”

“What do you mean they are all alone…?”

“Obviously, since Mr. Balsara is no more……!!”

“Have you any idea what you are talking about..? Has no one told you? Hasn’t Nayan told you anything about what happened to the Balsaras..?”

“No dad, she didn’t even tell me about Neena’s father in the first place…but what is it that I missed?”

His father rolled his eyes and sighed….

“Ram, a couple of days after Vijay was discovered lying in his room dead, frothing in the mouth because of the rat poison he had consumed, Neena and her ailing mother disappeared. A lot of people say both mother and daughter had gone into hiding because of the constant harassment by the police and relatives, some even say both mother and daughter went mad, anyhow, they were nowhere to be seen for days until one night a police constable discovered two bodies floating around in the Corporation tank. It was poor Neena and Mrs. Balsara….poor Mrs. Balsara was literally crippled, it’s a mystery how she jumped into the tank. The issue was hushed up and soon the Balsaras were forgotten….”

The hair on Ram’s neck felt like pin pricks and even his father could notice the goosebumps on his skin as he sat horror-struck and wide eyed. It looked almost as if he had suffered a seizure.

“What’s the matter Ram?”, asked his father glimpsing at him while keeping an eye on the road, “Take it easy son, things like these happen all the time, be strong, learn to take them head on…lets go home soon and I’ll ask mommy to make us some nice coffee”

But coffe was the last thing on Ram's mind. He was looking outside with an expression of utter bafflement and fear, he suddenly turned pallor and his face turned a faint shade of blue. A thin film of perspiration appeared on his forehead and his face slowly contorted as he began to whimper. Alarmed, his father immediately pulled over. He grabbed Ram and shook him desperately, trying to get him to talk but Ram just sat there, his gaze fixed at something outside and he sobbed inconsolably. He convulsed like a terrified little cat and his teeth chattered as his eyes remained fixed with great focus at an isolated old banyan tree at a distance. He was looking at something, something that was scaring him a great deal, something he had never imagined he would ever be ill fated enough to see. His father looked in the tree's direction.

From amidst the thick leaf cover, branches and the long dangling roots of the old Banyan, frothing from the mouth like a mad dog, perched a young girl, her neck outstretched like a hyena and her filthy, unkempt hair hung all over her face. A tattered cloth bag with its contents, chillies and lime hung from one of the lower branches of the tree and dangled in the wind. She heaved, breathing angrily and thin, transparent strands of drool descended over her salwar from the edges of her lips. From amidst those leaf strewn, filthy, knotted strands of hair he saw her milky white eyes and in them he saw fury, the unearthly madness of a wayward specter.

A little way ahead of them, a speeding truck suddenly skidded and fell over on its side and hurtled towards the car in which a father and son sat whimpering like children, staring at an old, deserted Banyan tree.

2009-07-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

The plightful Stag

S.T.A.G.; these four letters have haunted my social life ever since I turned old enough for the word to start gaining relevance in my life.

The very first time I was made privy to this chilling bit of reality was in my second year of college when after having been denied entry to a club for of not having an ‘arm-candy’ by my side I ventured out in the cold looking for single women, the objective being solely to gain entry to the disco as a couple. Once inside I would let the good lady go….yes, just let her off.
I eventually ended up finding a girl who seemed to have no qualms about holding my hand tight and marching right upto the bouncer at the door. Had it not been for my college senior that night who managed, right at the nook of time, to show up like brave Sir Galahad, I probably would have ended up with bone injuries to the skull and multiple lacerations all over the body as the concerned girl happened to be that very bouncer’s candy. As to why she agreed to come along with me remains a question. Sadism has its faces. I paid thrice the entrée fee and spent the rest of the night sulking by the bar with just about enough money left to buy myself a diet Coke.

We are an ostracised lot and highly misunderstood too. We are loathed and loved by pub and disco owners for equally germane reasons, loathed, because among other reasons, we ‘misbehave’ with women under the influence of alcohol or whatever it is we may be drinking and loved because we are always made to pay double, sometimes triple the entry charge everywhere we go! Thick would be his head who thought men-folk who show up at a disco with a significant other are safe customers and would never look at other women, leave alone indulging in alcohol induced misbehaviour and thicker would be his head who introduced this concept in restaurants!

Last week a few of my guy friends and I were sent out of a restaurant with an assertive, “Sorry Sir, no stags allowed inside!”
The month before that a friend and I had to balance our bottoms on uncomfortable bar-stools at a pub cum restaurant as the cosy lounge sofas were for ‘couples only’. Not only was I appalled, I was livid and I would have left the place immediately had I not needed that drink. I wonder what the homo fraternity would make of this? What stunt would a gay couple have to pull to prove to the lunkhead standing guard at the door that the two of them weren’t actually stags, without embarrassing themselves?

And what is with the nomenclature? How about we start calling single women ‘Hinds’ and debar them from entering any pub or restaurant unless they pay a fantastic amount of money? How about we paint them with the same generalised accusations that stags face every night and watch how they deal with the music?

There are more chances of hen growing teeth than Hinds being asked to pay, more so, denied free entry.

The world loves single women as much as it hates single men.

2009-05-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

Gods got a twisted sense of humour...

The worlds oldest woman, Sakhan Dosova lived in Kazhakhstan. She survived for years in terrible living conditions because of poverty. When she turned 130, the Kazakh Government gave her a flat as a celebratory gift. She slipped in the bathroom of her new flat, broke her hip and died.

2009-05-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

An evening by the pool with James 'Bund'

(Babu da: If you are reading this I know you will sooner or later want to kill me but this is just to let you know that it is not my slightest intention to hurt or ridicule you, I love you and this is how I choose to show it!

Other readers: Seriously graphic content ahead, reader discretion advised, read on an empty stomach)

It must have been poor Babu’s turn when the angel at the ‘Hygiene-Sense’ department high up in heaven, deserted his post and went for a piss break, leaving the conveyor belt switched on. Babu passed right through, completely unsensitised and desanitised.

What many people don’t know about Babu is that, as a baby he was once picked up by a pack of wolves who had mistaken him for one of their cubs. He was dragged away into the dark woods where he survived for months among his new-found hairy friends until he was rescued. The ordeal took its toll and left a number of characteristic peculiarities in him which can be seen, felt, heard and smelled till date!

For the uninitiated, raise your glasses to the one and only Nilesh ‘Babu’ Sinha!

I have had the fortuity of knowing Nilesh and being associated with him as a brother, friend and junior in college for the last 5 odd years. What makes Nilesh appreciably different is the fact that there are an equal number of reasons to dislike him as there are to like him. Aside from being somewhat of a walking-talking brain, the man is pure genius with words, be it spoken or written. Enough has been said about his caustic tongue and his peculiar tendency to resort to Oriental martial art-esque poses (complete with sound effects) while throwing insults at people is legendary.
Nilesh is extremely kind hearted and has about fifteen and a half billion odd pet bacteria, microbes, germs and other micro organism in his clothes, in the words of a wise one, “Babu has an entire ecosystem existing in his socks alone!”

He has been seen barking at stray-dogs in the dark and deserted lanes of Noida in the dead of the night, there is video footage of him howling at the moon and what can we say, our man has a powerful fetish for women that strongly resemble retired Pakistani cricket players and Frankenstein himself, throw in a stray X-Chromosome or two and the faintest of likeliness to the feminine species and our man is ready for sweet-lovin’!
All said and done a great number of women did manage to look beyond Nilesh’s trademark blue shirt, black trousers (sometimes unwashed for months), muddy chappals and that endearing pong that sent many a victim scampering for fresh air, and recognise his blade-sharp intellect. This of course lead to a number of embarrassing sex scandals involving Nilesh, the particulars of which he would insist on describing to us, complete with noisy details that would set off disturbing images and even more disturbing thoughts in our young minds. To add to the bizarreness of it all he was extremely particular about using flavoured rubber protection. In his own words, “there are taste-buds everywhere!”

Perhaps all this explains his fixation with the name, James ‘Bund’ (Bund- pronounced; ‘Boond’, meaning; the female genitalia). Yes, it is extremely difficult to imagine what Martin Campbell, Terence Young and the likes saw in Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan!

I vividly remember an evening I had spent with Nilesh at the club that he used to frequent for swimming, truth be told, Karan and I tagged along hoping to check out girls. Those days Nilesh was on an aggressive weight loss mission. Having realised that as much as a mere pound or two more would probably necessitate the use of a size-D bra Nilesh was hell bent on shedding those pounds and he went about it zealously.
Inside the changing room while we looked around for girls Nilesh shed his clothes rapidly. Disappointed at the sight of shapeless and ridiculously hairy Sardarjis in colourful underwear Karan and I turned to Nilesh, we stood watching transfixed as the Michelin mascot himself stood before us in tiny black swimming-trunks. A set of teeth appeared from amidst his facial forestation and one eyebrow went right up as Nilesh in his deep voice said, “Whaddaya think lads?”
As he jogged towards the pool his belly jiggled gleefully in perfect rhythmic consonance with the upper half of his body and his torso resembled a fat man’s face with a wobbling mouth and bouncing eyes. Displacing much water and making much noise our man made his entry into the deep blue depths of the pool and plummeted right underneath; he almost crashed into the bottom of the pool when by some inexplicable force of gravity, rather the lack of it, he managed to make a perfect rebound and slowly headed back to the surface. As Karan and I gaped speechless, dripping from head to toe, Shamu soared above the surface of the water grabbing hold of the handle-bars and said……

“Whaddaya think lads?”

It was amazing how gracefully and deftly Nilesh managed to do his laps, each stroke followed the previous one after a considerable amount of time as he gunned back and forth huffing and puffing. Quite admirably after about an eternity our man managed to complete all his laps, as he proudly took the steps off the pool his grace reminded me of Ursula Andress emerging out of the sea in a bikini. A mind numbingly terrifying thought suddenly crossed my mind and the lovely Ursula Andress was replaced by an image of Nilesh emerging out of the pool in a bikini swishing and swaying his long hair and the fat man’s face and eyes wobbling in ultra-slow motion……

“Whaddaya think lads?”

I nearly suffered a seizure when thankfully the clouds cleared and my eyes opened up, Nilesh stood right in front grinning, the water had made his black trunks roll further down threatening a sudden disclosure any minute.

As Nilesh, Karan and I tottered back to the changing room chatting, I put my arm around Nilesh. I knew he would never realise how much I would miss him after he’d graduate and leave and the time was coming soon. I tried not to think of it. There were other urgent matters to take care of, like telling Nilesh that his trunks had now rolled way down and a few Sardars behind us were laughing at his exposed butt crack.

2009-03-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

I absolutely dislike this Template and I'd like to change it immediately but...its too much work!
What was I thinking when I chose it?....yuck!

2009-03-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

“I don’t think I can do this Bikram!....I think I am gonna throw up….and my hands are so shaky…!
Iceman gave me one of his forced smiles and waddled away. The poor guy was in no less of a nervous breakdown-ish situation himself to dole out any courage. His teeth chattered and his voice was quivery. Our man on the rhythm guitar hadn’t taken his instrument off his shoulders all morning, I think he carried it to the bathroom too.
Jeetu was nowhere to be seen and neither was Sam. They must’ve wandered of somewhere with Lenold, although I hoped both the guys wouldn’t go and blow their vocal depths up in swirls of smoke, the chances were far from bleak. Both my vocalists needed to save that vocal pitch for the day.
Karan sat in a corner talking to the girls and Mayukh worked with the soundmen near the rings.
The fourth swig of whiskey backstage was clearly a bad idea. Although the freeze of the early February mornings in Pune made it more of a requirement than just ‘a rock thing’, we needed the buzz and what could do the job better than neat whiskey on an empty stomach? As the massive crowd roared outside, I paced up and down the backstage area going over all the cues and fills in my head over and over again, over and over again, I had to give this one gig my two hundred percent and if possible, three hundred and fifty percent!! Funnily, no matter how many times I rubbed by fingers against my jeans, they continued to be cold and frozen, both traits fatal for drummers, I couldn’t grip properly and my wrists locked.
“Firecrakers!” exclaimed Karan as loud reports echoed into the early morning sky outside indicating that the event had finally commenced. We watched as a group of dancers shot onto the stage one by one waving gold and silver pom-poms, the grandeur, the colour, the noise was absolutely intoxicating, captivating!
Our show being the main event for the evening wouldn’t start for another hour or so, as per plans a few speeches and dance performances were lined up before we’d get to take the stage, the sponsors had to be pleased. I saw it as a massive relief. I was in no state to go and start whacking away at those skins right away in front of all those people.
Speech after speech followed, followed by dreadfully elaborate dance performances and cheesy displays by sponsors. We sat in the pitch darkness at the wings nervous, waiting, watching.

And all of a sudden, it was time!

My stomach turned to water as all of us stood up facing the doorway leading into the stage; this was it!
A faint ray of light from outisde fell on the floor illuminating the threshold. As Jeetu and Sam appeared out of nowhere and bounded ahead, Iceman and Lenold exchanged last notes on chords and riffs, Karan, lost in his own thoughts walked slowly towards the doorway, head hung low. I walked by his side, drumsticks in one hand and my heart in the other. None of us spoke a word to each other.
Here I was at the brink of what could potentially be the biggest manifestation of our collective aspirations, the one objective we had cherished for years, nurtured and protected from numerous nay-sayers, circumstances, fate, criticism and our biggest nemesis, our own dissenting selves. The minute I walked out through the doorway crossing the threshold that divided the stage from the backstage area I felt like being sucked into a vacuum chamber of sorts. The massive crowd of a few hundreds roared as bright beams of light blinded us completely, my ears blocked out and all I could hear was a faint buzz in my head, the air was full of whistles, balloons and confetti. It was astounding how different the temperatures were just across the wall that divided the backstage and the stage area, it was freaking hot on stage and the lights made it worse! A few more loud bangs went off here and there and in the bat of an eyelid there we were facing a massive throng of raised hands, signboards and faces. An ocean of human beings.

As we headed for our individual weapons, I saw mine. She reclined on a raised platform placed right in the middle of the stage waiting, still and quiet, waiting to be stroked, to be turned on, to be brought to life. Canopied by a virtual encyclopaedia of gleaming golden metal she resembled a behemoth mechanised chariot, a massive amassment of detailed percussive paraphernalia comprising of metal, wood and skin. A brute bearing the power of a thousand horses yet the felinity and beauty of a jaguar.

Iceman plugged in his guitar and played around with the strings holding his plectrum between his teeth and Lenny made last minute adjustments to his distortion pedals. We took our positions like soldiers behind trenches waiting for the approaching enemy, as the warm rays of the morning sun emerged from behind the hills and washed up against the stage, an eerie silence fell among the crowd.
Almost as if heralding the new day, the warm sunshine, an electric guitar cried out loud sending echoes resonating into the morning sky and chills down my spine. Immediately like a hurricane after a prolonged lull, the crowd acknowledged Lenny’s statement with an applause of explosive nature. Iceman looked up into the sky one last time. As I raised my sticks high up in the air, I shut my eyes, memories trailed in leaving my heart bursting with a mad mix of emotions; exhilaration, trepidation, passion and unremitting love, this was going to be it, this WAS it!
As Jeetu and Sam grabbed their mikes, streaks of pyrotechnic fireworks rocketed across each other from either side of the stage with deafening reports, I grit my teeth and brought down my arms on the cymbals with all the physical might I could summon, then a series of bright, recurring flashes…. 24/B and the High-Bhais…Symbiosis garage…The Mag 7…Aarambh 1…Aarambh 2…Not Just Jazz…Battle of the Bands…Ehsaas...Laanat….the verandah in my old and now demolished house, There were violins in the air…NCC…the jams at Barista…Apache…the World Youth Aids Day gig...mom’s face!!

“Rono wake up…you’re getting late for work…get out of bed RIGHT NOW…its such a beautiful Monday outside, mummy has nice Quaker Oats and bananas for breakfast..now GET UP you lazybones..!"
I rolled out of bed like an overweight, disgruntled sea lion and tottered towards the bathroom. It was going to be a very bad day!

2009-03-05T11:14:00.000-08:00

I asked her if she liked rock n roll and she said (verbatim); "What??!! Rock??!!...that shouting music?!"

I never called her again...!

2009-01-15T07:53:00.000-08:00

Revisiting Pune...

So it’s been two days since I’ve gotten back to work at my chamber at Old P.O.Street, Kolkata and I still can’t concentrate. Life strolls by but I am yet to get up and put my running shoes on. Isn’t it funny how time slows down when you want it to jog and jogs when you want it to slow down?

The last two weeks trail blazed past like a rocket ship, everything happened at 100X speed and all of a sudden in a flash the lull is back. I know more than well that the next ten months shall take ages to pass yet I have started my countdown. The countdown to my next visit to Pune.
It just seems like the other day that I landed at Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport, Mumbai a good one hour late. Hurrying through the massive airport pushing my trolley and trying to balance a Latte at the same time, I wondered if Karan Singh who had benevolently offered to come down all the way from his house in the city to pick me up, was getting pissed waiting. The afterthought that he might not even have started for the Airport from his house in the first place was subsequently confirmed when I gave him a call.
Sitting on my luggage trolley near the Departure exit point I sipped my Latte waiting for the Freak to show up. The anticipation was chocking me. I was in Bombay finally and in a few hours I’d be in Pune!! The next one hour saw considerable confusion and Karan and I kept looking for each other, running around in circles clueless-ly, directional miscommunication!
And then at last I found him, a bobbing mass of hair covering about 65% of his face and right underneath, a pair of oversized sunglasses covering another good 30%, the Freak had arrived! The man noticed my manic waving when he was exactly at conversational distance from me.
After a lousy breakfast of ‘fruit sandwich’ at one Balaji Restaurant located right next to the Airport and highly recommended by Karan, we boarded our bus to Pune. The agony of the four and half hour trip precipitated by an excruciatingly terrible movie being shown in the bus and the Freak’s constant chatter about the women in his life, new and old, began to ease when the outskirts of our city started coming into sight. The both of us were slightly put off at the sight of two desolate patches of land where ‘Tinku-Da-Dhaba’ and ‘Veer-Da-Dhaba’ once stood. We’d have to think of some other place to get sloshed at.

Jeetu’s spanking new, black Mahindra Classic rumbled in almost running over the Freak and me. Karan couldn’t have enough of hugging Jeetu and squeezing his cheeks as we steered through the Law College Road traffic heading in break neck speed for the NCC. I couldn’t help but notice the palpable change the city had seen since the last time I’d visited. The Commonwealth Games had caused the Government to wake up and build new flyovers everywhere, there were colourful flags and pictures and drawings of ‘Jigar’, the mascot for the Games on every wall.
Our good old NCC, as it became apparent to us as we climbed down the stairs, had also seen its share of change. A set of cardboard walls encapsulated a ‘smoking-zone’ from the ‘thank you for not smoking’ area. The spirit of NCC was murdered!

Sameer sat inside quietly alongside Shakunt blowing rings of smoke from his mouth.

The evening of 19th of December at Apache, FC Road is significant for me in more ways than one. Jeetu dropped a 10,000 lb bomb of a shocker on us by proclaiming a major decision of his life, well, at least it was shocking enough to make me down an entire mug of chilled Barman’s Red in a gulp, which saw me wheelchair-ing off to the Hospital in the next two days. Shakunt dropped an even deadlier one by declaring that he had given up drinking; my brain was too frozen by then for another bottoms up. Good old Sam was as happy as ever making faces and Mayukh da scouted the Menu for starters.
Later that night, there was more booze at Sam’s where eventually we all crashed, sozzled out of our minds. I don’t think I can remember the last time I passed out singing. Bikram left for the Andamans later that day for a vacation with his folks. I thought that was the last time I’d be seeing him as far as my trip was concerned.

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting Sanchari. I had met her online and gotten acquainted with her through her excellent blog, luckily for her, neither Babu nor Bikram were around that day. I was amazed at the way she moulded in with us that afternoon at NCC considering we’re not the easiest set of folks to gel with.
To get in our good books one must learn to tolerate us first, one has to permeate Babu da’s (if and when he is around) mindless, oft fabulously innovative and well meant insults, Jeetu’s motor mouth and Sam’s mischief-by-the-minute policy, not to mention Bikram’s chilling sarcasm, Karan’s guerilla shayari attacks and Mayukh da’s built-in gyaan dispensary. And last but not the least, a lot of our victims haven’t quite yet come across our close eigth associate, Shakunt Saumitra; my blog shall see an interesting update the day he sets his teeth on his first victim. I am usually the quiet guy in the corner collecting substance for his next blog.

During the long drive in Jeetu’s jeep later that evening we instinctively started singing, the same old songs we’ve sung for years, songs which we never seemed to get tired of, screaming our gullets out at people. During the course of the drive our man, Saluja nearly punctured Anupama’s thighs with his elbow thinking they were Karan’s and Sam who rode alongside us gave Shakunt the scare of his life. Later that night I wanted to call up my boss and ask him for an extension of the leave he’d allowed me, I didn’t want to leave. Little did I realise fate wouldn’t leave me with much of a choice.
The next morning Mayukh Da’s roommate rode me to Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital. I could barely walk and my legs gave away near the stairways when thankfully, a nurse noticed the state I was in and immediately had a wheelchair brought to me and off I headed to the ICU. Before I could make sense of what was going on, three nurses were fussing over me. I was pinned to a bed with an oxygen mask strapped to my face and a Nebulizer fitted to it. A heart monitor lead stuck to my finger like a clip and there were needles going into my arms every five minutes.
An ‘injection valve’- at least that’s what they called it, projected out of my right wrist like a space ray-gun or something like that, through which, all throughout the day and two days after that intravenous medication kept flowing into my veins.
During my stay at the Hospital dad informed me that he’d bought a flight ticket for me back to Kolkata for the 1st of January, ’09, mom wouldn’t let me stay a day longer in Pune; a cool six grands vapourized from my bank account like a drop of ether but sadly, there was more to go!
I have always wanted to go to a hospital all my five years in the city but it felt weird that I could actually manage it after leaving the city.
Late afternoon of the 26th I walked out of the hospital poorer by about another six precious thousand rupees, lighter by a kilo or two, my bank account reeled with about 17 grands gone in 7-8 days time but who cared, I was extremely happy; I was gonna spend the 31st in Pune with the guys! Well, before I go on to another aspect, I’d like to express my appreciation and gratitude to Sam, Mayukh and Shax for having extended selfless support to me during my days at the hospital and for bringing over those excellent Shawarmas from Casa LoLo.
The next 24 hours saw a shave, a monstrous lunch, an equally gigantic dinner, a much needed bath, a brush and a change of clothes and a dilemma! Jeetu sent a common SMS to all of us from Aurangabad suggesting that we all head for Mahabaleshwar with Smita Aunty and other relatives for the New Years. There was a ‘slight’ or might I say ‘teeny weeny’ hitch in the form of a further expenditure of 3 grands per head for the party!

The next few days were spent recuperating from the illness, I went into a massive health drive, ate only Dal-rice and boiled eggs for meals, the binge drinking gave way into a rare peg or two every now and then and cigarettes became a rarity. Then came the night when Karan, Shakunt, Mayukh and I went out for a drive and some beer and kebabs with Lalit, Karan’s old buddy. We ended up at this prominently lit Dhaba called ‘BAVDHAN CHAUPATI (a romantic spot….)’! the music blaring from this otherwise spaced out and breezy eatery was least said, bad enough to, after a point, impel any drunk to get up, walk to the edge of the hill where the Dhaba was unfortunately located and jump off.
One peculiar characteristic of most eateries around Pune serving Chinese food is that they have these little chink cooks and waiters, whether it is a sad attempt to render an Oriental feel to the restaurant or that there are just too many of these folks coming down from the North-East looking for jobs and it so happens that all they know is rustling up Chicken Shanghai Fried Rice or Egg Chicken noodles in the bat of an eyelid, is not clear but this Dhaba too had its fair share of little chinks tottering around.
I ended up getting ultra-sozzled after downing about a quart of Vodka and we were rolling all over the place over a certain culinary speciality of the Dhaba named, ‘Chicken Loppy Pops’, an obvious spelling faux pas but the alcohol made it difficult to maintain a straight face at that one, difference was, I kept repeating “Loppy pop, loppy pop….” deliriously inside the car and poor Lalit had to bear the brunt of driving us around. Later we ended up at Kiva’s with Anupama for more booze and rock n roll.
Another high point of the trip that cannot escape a mention are the developments in the Pashu system of legislation. As undemocratic and controversial as can be, few new principles saw formulation, namely; ‘Abhinay’ which means that if you get struck once because of cracking a lousy one and you react too much you get hit AGAIN! ‘Self Pashu’, for a change, something I’ve been vigorously trying to push through; meaning that if you are audacious enough to give yourself a Pashu you get hit by another member of the Mag 7 thrice! And finally a ray of democracy, the Grand Ayatollah being himself made subject to Pashastras if he cracks a horrible one.
One of the ill practices that I’d urge the Mag 7 to abstain from is spreading the spirit of Pashu outside the limits of the group. The Pashu systems of laws and punishments are applicable to the Mag7 and Associates only.
Come 30th of December and Jeetendra Singh Saluja showed up bright and early near CAFÉ COSTA in his black Mahindra Classic. I had no idea that it was the last time I’d be seeing him before leaving. He departed early with Sam after a coffee at COSTA and Mayukh and I headed over to Shax’s place where Karan would join us to watch Dil Chahta Hai. Till the very last minute that night I was pretty sure of going to Mahabaleshwar with Jeetu; Sam, Mayukh and Karan had also pretty much mentally prepared themselves for the trip but we weren’t able to get in touch with Bikram who was supposed to be returning from his long vacation at the Andamans that very night, we needed his decision. Then ensued an hour long of dramatic debating, lots of cross-communication, a wee little bit of miscommunication, frantic phone calls and sms-s, a long deep breath and a decision.

Early morning on 31st I was informed that Sam and Jeetu had already left for Mahabaleshwar. So it wasn’t going be the 6 of us spending New Years together after all.
All three of my penultimate/final days at Pune have been very interesting. The day I was leaving Pune for good sometime in May, 2008 I made sure I had breakfast at Good Luck, then came my trip in June when I guess I ate at Goodluck before catching my flight back to Kolkata and there we were at Café Good Luck once again, Mayukh, his roommates, Karan and I, wiping food off the table like we hadn’t seen food in days. The waiter broke a sweat running up and down from the kitchen to our table and back swearing under his breath in Marathi. The way those massive Bun Cheese Omlettes kept disappearing off Mayukh’s plate would have Ripley’s folks on the next flight to Pune. I must’ve alone devoured a quantity enough to feed a small village for a week, but it was Good Luck, where else would I get to stuff my face with Bun Cheese Omlettes, Bun Butter Cheese Omlettes, Bun Butter Cheeses, Bun Cheeses, Bun Butters, Bun Omlettes, Cheese Omlettes, Masala Omlettes, Cheese Omlettes, Double-Cheese Omlettes, just Omlettes and all other culinary permutations and combinations that tasted so freaking good?.....throw in the Bread Puddings and Fruit Funnys too! I looked up from my plate to wipe my forehead when I saw Bikram walking towards us; “Guys am back and I have news!”

As Bikram sat cross legged composing his song, polishing the edge his nails every now and then I was getting increasingly impatient to go to Furtados. Every second was so precious. My time in the city was running out, it was afternoon already and I still had so many things to do. I couldn’t afford to laze around. I was getting desperate.
The next couple of hours saw Karan Singh getting lost in the world of Grand Pianos raising a loud cacophony; Bikram trying to play all the guitars the store had at the same time and Mayukh, pulling a string here, beating a drum there. I reposed behind a beautiful orange-yellow, fade-finish Mapex Pro M struggling to play the simplest of grooves.
If you can imagine how an impoverished, starving child would behave if he were given a table full of his favourite dishes, everything from the first dish to the last, all for him to eat in all of 5 minutes…you would know our plight, that evening at Furtados I saw that little kid in Karan, Bikram and myself. We made so much noise that the security guys came in to check out what all the din was about; for those few minutes the three of us were torn between the desperate yearning to jam, seated at three extreme ends of the same store and our selfish, personal desires to make the most of those few minutes with the instruments we loved. The irony was painful.

I walked out of Furtados that evening with some Latin Percussion Salsa blocks and sundry drum gear, kicking myself that I couldn’t gather up the courage to go and speak to Talvin Singh’s drum technician who had also shown up at the store to buy some hardware for the world renowned percussionist’s performance in the city that evening.
Bikram, Karan and I got dropped off at Lalit’s place where we’d planned the New Years party to be held that night, after a brief pig out at Burger King.
Lalit’s story of ‘Vaasad’, the smelly guy had us rolling all over the place.
I tried to take a walk out of Lalit’s house and give a call to our travel agent and ask him if there were flight tickets available for the 2nd of January and if I could postpone my departure by a day. His phone never connected.

11.40 pm, 31st of December, 2008 froze my bones and possibly the marrow in them too! As Bikram’s motorcycle got off the main road and on to a sandy stretch on which Lalit’s house was situated, I breathed a sigh of respite, I was desperate to get off the bike and run to someplace warm. The ride from Mayukh’s place to Lalit’s in Baner was a freezer and I clung on to Bikram as tightly as possible throughout the journey to keep out the chill as much as possible. As Lalit’s house came into vision the faint thumping of distant morning trance assailed our ears. The house wasn’t exactly lit up very garishly, there were a few cars parked outside suggesting that a few guests had poured in already and a clear, thin strain of smoke rose from behind the fences high up into the night sky bringing about the comforting thought that some good soul was working on setting up a bonfire. Mayukh and Bikram were busy parking when I pulled out both the bottles of vodka we were carrying and looked at them, our contribution towards the party. Although I had sworn to down an entire Khamba that night if not more, I was getting increasingly itchy about the kind of people there’d be at the party, all of the other guys were only known to Karan and Lalit. I’d never really fancied spending New Years among complete strangers. Well, at least a few of my guys were gonna be around.

11.50 pm, the bonfire blazed with full gusto and the resplendent flames reached as high as about six feet. Although the morning trance, being supervised and DeeJayd by some guy, didn’t quite match the mood for the simple reason that it was after all night time, the atmosphere as a whole was quite cozy and nice. As the hour approached Karan, his college mates, Lalit, Mayukh, Bikram, the other strangers and I eventually closed in towards the bonfire and surrounded it.
In the next few minutes every one wished each other a happy and prosperous new year numerous times….as different watches told different times, whenever someone’s watch struck twelve he’d leap screaming, “Happy New Year…Happy New Year!” and the rest of us would follow suit. The sky lit up with firecrackers and I stood looking up, praying that 2009 should go well and go quick.

A couple of hours into the night and the music was blasting. Empty bottles of booze and plastic glasses reverberated on top of the table next to the DJ’s laptop, the crowd, quite expectedly, by then had gradually divided into little groups all around Lalit’s front yard and the DJ, stoned out of his wits kept making peculiar experiments with the music alone in a corner. Mayukh, presumably quite tipsy sat all alone facing the bonfire lost in his own thoughts while Karan hung with his college mates. Bikram and I slunk against Lalit’s car talking. During my visit I’d met Bikram so scarcely and besides, I knew I’d be leaving in the matter of a few hours so I wanted to make the most of the opportunity and speak my heart out.

During the course of the night the four of us kept separating and regrouping repeatedly and Karan tried his best to make the rest of us feel at home. I added my own colour to things by being the first guy in the party to start puking. Earlier that night, I had treated myself to a few large joints of an old, forgotten, herbal indulgence and had committed the gravest mistake of continuing to drink thereafter. Karan seemed extra enthusiastic about obtaining joints for me from here and there while he quite impressively abstained from it.

A certain individual whom I’d like to refer to as “flowerpot” made a theatrical and brilliantly comical entry half way through the party and began dirty dancing with all the men, making sure to give each of them individual attention. Lalit who was sporting sunglasses and marching up and down like a soldier to the music, wobbled up to me and said, “She’s giving everybody an erection and running away!”

I could barely stand straight after all the vomiting. Things were made worse by the loud woofers and sub-woofers that played sonic havoc on my empty stomach and before I knew it, it was five in the morning and time to go.
Karan decided to stay back so we shook hands and Bikram, Mayukh and I rode off into the darkness hoping too many cops wouldn’t be around. In the next half and hour we got back home un-arrested and I passed out.

All of the Iceman’s exits have been very typical, no drama, a quick goodbye and he rides off silently. He did the same on the morning of the 1st. Jeetu and Sam were inaccessible by phone for a good part of the morning so there was no point trying to call them anymore and I had already said my goodbyes to Karan the previous night.
Before boarding the auto I hugged Mayukh and thanked all his roommates for having put up with me for so many days and seen me through my days of sickness.

As the aircraft took to the evening sky, I strained my neck to catch a last glimpse of Pune far down below, as it rapidly transformed from a bustling city to a geographic landmass of high mountains and meandering rivers within seconds.
Warm rays of the evening sun penetrated the window pane and landed on my lap reassuringly and I laid my head back to rest. I felt a little weak, all these days I never realised that I was still recovering. I pulled out my iPOD and turned it on.
As the display came on, I smiled.
It showed, “Hum Kis Gali Ja Rahe Hai” by Aatif Aslam as the last played song, I immediately remembered that it was the last song I had heard before my flight landed in Bombay on the 19th of December! I chuckled at the sheer co-incidence of things; was the flight really taking me home?

“Hum Kis Gali Ja Rahe Hain…Hum Kis Gali Ja Rahe Hai…Apnaa koi thikanaa nahi!

2008-12-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

TodayI refused love again ...!
If life's acidic sense of irony could be measured in pennies I'd be a Gazillinonaire!
But never call me a hypocrite, I've ruined far too many things in an attempt not to be one..!

2008-11-19T05:51:00.000-08:00

Head completely turned in my direction; she stared from across the room, transfixed.
I couldn’t look away either. She was beautiful.
I gloated in pride; I thought; “Its official, I am hot!”
I didn’t feel the slightest bit of discomfort when I discovered that it had almost been for an hour that her beautiful head was turned in my direction. I thought; “Well, I guess if she’s that desperate its worth giving it a shot!”
As I rose up to go offer her a drink and strike up a chat, a guy showed up from somewhere looking positively perplexed and sad. He looked at me and smiled an apologetic smile. As I stood there in the middle of the bar puzzled at his disposition, he turned to her, grabbed her pretty face with both hands and jerked it back to position.
So as I marched back to my table signalling the waiter for another order, I swore never to have anything to do with women with vertebral disorder.

2008-08-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

"The bottle has been vacated and needs to be refurbished" said my colleague Jeevan Ballav Panda as I asked him to hand me a bottle of water today morning;

".....with reference to our past experiences, we must ask Shambhu to restore supply of fresh water in our chamber hereinafter unconditionally, I am tired of having to pay him that additional remuneration (tip) every time he brings us bottles of water, it is totally unfair and frivolous, furthermore, I have reason to believe that he talks about us behind our backs!"

I was enlightened that like Jeevan, the madness was getting the better me too when I replied mechanically, "paying him Rs 5-10/- doesn't hurt and let him talk, unlike the others he doesn't have malafide intent!"

2008-08-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

Am I on the right tree?...

Well, here I am in office, it has been pouring outside since early morning and here I am INUNDATED with work; one of the cruellest predicaments known to the average, office-going Joe; rains and work aren’t exactly the most encouraging of combinations…

Work in the form of fleshy stacks of pre-pre-historic case-books and files with little chips of rotten paper peeping out from everywhere lay before me, their covers looked horribly worn out and the hand-typed words on them, obliterated beyond recognition.

I’d like to think of these as obese, old men and the torn bits of peeping paper as their lolling tongues; how perfectly these leviathans reflected my state of being, exhausted, old and panting!!
Yet the cruel pace at which more and more files kept flying out of boss’s cabin and appearing on my desk could give any cash-dispensing machine a run for its cash!

Well then why am I writing this and not working? Good question, just common phenomena seen in a few people; when work overwhelms one tends to freeze and go into a prolonged stand-by mode. I am one such “office philosopher”; when the work is too much, let the steam out, start writing.

The subject of this post is a squirrel. One that hesitates but eventually goes for the kill and then screws up. The thing gave me a real shot of life; I can still see him through my window, propped up on the muddy ground, shaggy haired and dirty, looking out at the street.

I first spotted him trying to climb onto an extremely long rope stretched out and tied between two trees quite far away from each other. Balancing himself nervously he scurried along a little distance on the rope, paused, turned around and ran back to the tree. Appearing again a little while later, he scurried a little further, a longer distance this time but stopping again, he turned around and scooted back to the tree, quite apparently scared of the altitude he was in and unsure whether he could cover all that distance after all.
I kept observing him coming forth and going back for quite sometime waiting for an act of bravado, an inspiring example of the will and the way, of the brave and his triumph, of persistence and reward; but our furry hero kept pacing up and shooting back to the branch equally fast.

After quite a while, a side of the rodent’s face peeped out from between the leaves. I thought I saw a glint of determination in his eyes this time, our man was desperate and quite surely this time around he pounced on the rope immediately and started racing towards his destination with lightening speed. As I watched with gaping awe, the squirrel, displaying a dazzling permutation of endeavour, will and natural balancing abilities sped like a fire ball on the rope and reached almost half way between the two trees…and then it happened. The instantaneousness of it was almost cruel; the fur ball slipped and down he went! It must have taken him a less than a few seconds before he plunged into the muddy ground with a soft ‘plop’.
Our man remained there for sometime, utterly shaken and dishevelled.

His messy, mud stained fur sticking out in all directions, he reposed amidst the muck like a beaten soldier. Still as a cadaver, he sat there looking out at the hustle and bustle of human civilization. I sat watching his tiny, lone, tousled silhouette against the busy hustle-bustle on Old Post Office Street; the contrast sent a chill down my spine.

I saw the other side of the coin today; I saw the beaten and the down. The endeavourer yet the failed, a proviso to the age-old notion of ‘try, try and try again till you succeed!’ Do these proverbs do nothing but encourage our minds to escape, to run away from the thought of failure or the inevitable? This is of course not to say that failure is actually inevitable, but how big a role does fate have to play in our lives? Seated at my desk I wonder if all the work I am doing is ever going to be of any real use to me if destiny makes all the decisions, was I born to fill out files or was I born to be a dreamer. You achieve if you dream.

If I ever felt that the tree I were on, was not the one I was meant to be on, and if I tried crossing over to another, undergoing great risks, would I end up deep in the mud one day all alone, staring out at the world rolling by?

After some time the rodent seemed to decide on moving on, he quickly crept up the tree and disappeared inside a hole in the tree-bark.

I’ll try looking for him tomorrow again. I admit, I am a little anxious. Maybe a little desperate. I hope that he keeps trying to get to that other tree. If he finds his tree, I am sure I'll find mine too.

2008-08-09T00:43:00.000-07:00

My work-in-progress compilation of Bus-art (Subject: Spidey)….

Presenting the ultimate Bong avatars of the webbed hero, your friendly neighbourhood- the ‘Bhodro’-not quite in shape-Bangali Spidermen!!

The artistry in these masterpieces is significant as the artists seem to have kept in mind the proportions of the everyday Bengali while painting them; also, these paintings seem to be subtly conveying that a Spiderman lives in every Bengali...

Theres lots more to come!

2008-05-20T23:11:00.001-07:00

Botu’s Puja

His friends in Rashmoni Ashram were quite jealous when Botu told them that his mother would be coming to take him home for Durga Puja. Most of them were orphans who have been growing up with Botu in this Ashram for destitute children.

Maya had been planning this for weeks. Her 5-year old Botu must be missing her. She still remembered how he clung to her when she met him last.

“I must give him some time this Puja”, she thought.
She had always been a tough one. Short, dark, with a nonchalant gait, she was considered quarrelsome by her friends. A tenacious fighter, she struggled for survival when Botu’s father died four years ago in an accident at Behala Chowrasta. As a helper in a truck he couldn’t leave much behind for Maya to take care of his one year old son and an ailing mother.

Maya fitted into her new role of a provider for the family quite well. But what she was earning as a domestic help in two houses was hardly enough to support little Botu and her mother-in-law. She had to find a solution.

Getting Botu into Rashmoni Ashram was Ashadi’s idea; “Your son will get two square meals a day and some education too”, she argued! “You can see him or take him home occasionally”.
Ashadi worked in the Primary Health Centre at Amtala. She helped Botu in getting admitted to the Ashram. Maya was very grateful to her.

Leaving Botu with their mother-in-law in their village home, she left on Panchami day for her work, Botu wouldn’t leave her, for him the Pujas had already started. He cried and finally sulked. But Maya had to go. She would be free two days later, on Asthami day to come back to her son. Her employers had promised to give her three days off after ‘Saptami’.

Kamala was sure she had heard her neighbor talking about Ma Durga coming riding an elephant that year. But the incessant rains told a different story. “Ma must be coming on a boat” she wondered. It had been pouring from the morning and Botu was getting restless for his mother. Kamala wondered how long she could keep her grandson engaged within the four walls?

“When will Ma bring my new dress?”, “It is already Saptami?” “She promised to take me out to the Mela”. “Why don’t you take me out and buy me candy floss?”
Botu’s constant crying and demands were making things worse for Kamala. She had her own worries. She had nothing to cook nor did she have any money left. In her own way she had also been desperately waiting for Maya to come. She needed her badly. “But it is only one more day” she consoled herself, “she should be here by tomorrow”.

“It is one more day” Botu thought too. He has to visit the Puja pandal tomorrow. The mike had been blaring away. “How I am stuck inside!” Botu gets angry. “Ma must take me to the Mela”
-Botu gets excited at the thought of visiting the village fair at Amtala. He had an eye on a toy car he saw in the shop. He would ask his mother to buy it.
Gradually, the day made way for noon and Botu was getting impatient.

“Give me money. I will buy candy floss. It is not raining any more”.

“Don’t go out alone. You’ll get everything when your mother comes tomorrow”- Kamala pleaded.

“No, you have to buy me, now”, Botu got adamant.

Tears rolled down his small cheeks. Kamala decided to be less indulgent; after all she had to keep the child in control till the next day.

“Stop crying and lie down beside me” she said sternly.

Botu’s cheeks were still flooded with tears. He developed hiccups due to the constant crying. Kamala couldn’t wait any longer. She lay down for her afternoon nap.

“Do not go out of the house. The pond outside is flooded and we have no fences”, she warned Botu before lying down.

It was too late before they could fish his little body out of the pond. The whole neighborhood had assembled in the small hut.

“How did this happen?” Didn’t you lock the door?” We had warned you to fix the fences!”
Kamala was still wailing, beating her chest. She tried to hit her head against the wall but the neighbors held her back. Botu would never have to return to Rashmoni Ashram anymore.

In the meantime, the mild autumn breeze embraces Botu on his way to see Saptami Puja. It’s a nice feeling. The white fluffy clouds, the distant sound of drums beating, the strings of light illuminating the sky- you could breathe festivity in the air. There is no one to stop him today. He is free to buy the toy car and all the candy floss he wants. He does not have to wait one more day. At last Botu’s Puja has begun.

(This short story is inspired by a real life incident that took place in our family many years back, Maya worked for us as a domestic aid for months; This story is, to some extent, special to me, as long back when I’d first begun writing I had written an original ‘Botu’s Puja’ for my school magazine with a lot of help from dad, who himself is a brilliant writer. I could never find the original script, but herein I’ve tried to re-narrate the entire episode with as much clarity as my memory could aid me with…
Pardon my free usage of terms, names and events typical to the Bengali culture, you are free to leave a comment mentioning anything that you're having trouble understanding and I shall get back to you).

2008-05-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Of distorted sense of priorities and classic national hypocrisies…
(A much beaten path yet, my two pennies worth…)

(Scraps of news from the front page of ‘Anandabazar Patrika’; 1st May, 2008)

The following is just one day’s front page reports from one of the many newspapers circulated in this nation.

Howrah, West Bengal; 30th April, ’08;
‘70 year old Kadamprasad could just about manage to run a few steps following the bus, he had just been hastily shoved off from, before clutching his chest and collapsing on the dusty ground. All the old man wanted was his bag that he had forgotten in the bus; the sight of an elderly man struggling to chase the bus, yelling wasn’t commiserating enough for the bus conductor to stop or the people around to try and do something to help. As people around him stood watching, old Kadamprasad sat under the punishing sun crying for help as his pain got worse. Everybody heard him but none came forward with aid till gradually the man passed away slouching against a wall. His body remained where it was for about 3 hours during which two police departments argued about jurisdiction and as to who would take responsibility of the body, robbing Kadamprasad any dignity even after death.’

Somewhere 40 kilometers from Mathura, U.P.; 30th April, ’08;
‘A six year old ‘lower caste’ girl was thrown into a pile of glowering hot ash inflicting over 50% burns all over her body; she now battles for her life in some hospital in Mathura. Her crime; walking through a path constructed exclusively for the ‘high caste’ population in that settlement. Even after an FIR was lodged, the police showed much lethargy in arresting the accused and finally were compelled to do so after the matter began getting serious.’

Jhargram, 30th April, ’08;
‘Suspected Maoist rebels attacked a central bank branch, killing two policemen and making away with their rifles.’

Kolkata, 30th April, ’08;
Didi orders ‘Manusher Mohajot’ (teaming up people) against CPIM...another 'Bandh'?!

Leaf through the rest of the pages of this Bengali daily and make efforts to read through some of the articles and you’ll see issues so grave in West Bengal alone that you’ll realize how unsafe it is even to step out of your house, you never know, one minute you’re out on the streets and the next, you’re a sticky lump of goo underneath some bus. In Kolkata, to this day, your chances of getting run over by a bus are higher than being struck by lightening or let’s say, being stung to death by killer ants swimming underwater !(Obviously, analogies arent my strength). Power and water shortage are a way of life here. National issues come much later.
What ticks me off is a few people’s obsession with the IPL cheerleaders and the related issues regarding morality and the alleged ‘erosion of Indian culture’ by the same when there clearly are bigger issues in this nation to address. This, yet another display of suffocating hypocrisy by the so-called religious purists in this country, doesn’t make sense anymore, don’t the guys ever get tired!?
I am, for obvious reasons, going to abstain from being specific, but I cant help saying that if people can watch the likes of Rakhi Sawant cavorting around on screen wearing barely anything, exposing so much cleavage that the whole purpose of wearing clothes at all gets obliterated, and not have the slightest bit of issues with it whatsoever, what’s so mortally wrong with a few girls dancing around with pom-poms in the stadium, wearing short skirts and baring their navels? After all its only their navels they’re baring!!

They distract cricketers? Well, then why have Chennai Super Kings been winning match after match and the Kolkata Knight Riders getting flogged all over the place? Are the Super Kings immune to the irresistible charms of the pom-pom nymphets or is it that the men at Kolkata Knight Riders are so hopelessly desperate that they’d deliberately attempt to hit sixes all the time, so it’s a win-win situation, if it’s a six, the girls dance, if they're caught out, the girls still dance!

They corrupt children in the crowd? If my knowledge on such things is anything to go by, trust me, children today are equipped to the teeth with ‘such’ know-how, many thanks to the internet and of course, the idiot box.

They corrupt and offend the religious minded? Well, religion or culture has never exactly trashed or adjudicated man’s attraction towards the opposite sex as being necessarily bad, it’s perfectly natural!

There is enough on our own plates to be shameful about and there’s a lot to set right in our own neighborhood; can’t these individuals who, for years, have displayed with pride their blatant double standards and pseudo self righteousness by banning TV channels and tearing down billboards in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘morals’ for a change, forget about these outdated and inanimate theories and work towards making the power situation better or eradication of poverty or create jobs etc? Or can’t they just be quiet and enjoy the IPL tournament like most peaceful people want to do?
Most economically important coastal areas in this nation is still severely susceptible to floods, the nations in the brink of a food crisis, the law against Sati isn’t getting amended due to ‘technicalities’, people still get kicked around, being called "Outsiders" and "invaders" in their own country and hundreds like Kadamprasad die on the streets everyday due to the inhumane ness of people. We’ll earn the right to criticize the ills and immoralities of globalization only when we match global standards, after all, morals never fed the hungry.

2008-04-24T01:31:00.000-07:00

The crow…

It had been a couple of weeks since my grand mom left us all for the abode above, she was known as the authoritative woman of the family, strict and tremendously particular about administering household matters, the servants and especially the kitchen front. Although she lived in a separate apartment independently, she made sure things in her house and ours were done exactly as she wanted and her large hearted gestures were welcome and well known among the servants and other household aids. 'Thamma' as we called her, loved food and topping her list of likes were fish and sweets, particularly 'rossogolla's.

Quite expectedly, my parents kept worrying about her declining health yet ever so healthy appetite for sweets and despite all the warnings from doctors and after numerous visits to the hospital(which of course were not ONLY because of her sweet intake), thamma refused to surrender her desires. It was a distressing sight watching her reluctantly dig into bowls of mashed, boiled veggies in the hospital and I did see her cry at times.
Two weeks after she left us, the 'Shraddha' ceremony which was nearing its closing stages brought with it a wave of relatives from dad’s side and with them came sweets, more sweets! For two whole days people kept coming, paying their last regards and dropping off a box of sweets before leaving. After having fed every relative, every neighbor, every shop owner in the locality, every servant, every driver, every beggar, every urchin, every domestic animal in sight and after donating a car full of food to the school for underprivileged kids nearby, we still were left with a 160 litre refrigerator crammed with sweets!
The morning after the Shraddha ceremony’s conclusion mom was cleaning the kitchen when she discovered that a few rossogollas kept away in a vessel had collected a green coating of fungus. She picked one up and placed it on the kitchen window-sill for the crows and disposed the rest. The minute the sweet dropped from mom’s fingers a crow swooped in from somewhere, picked it up and flew away.
Having finished her work she headed downstairs to Thamma’s apartment, accompanied by a servant to clean it up.
This is according to mom’s account of what happened there, seconded vehemently by the servant; while mom wiped the kitchen wash basin near the window, a big crow landed outside the window. It had what looked like a rossogolla between its beaks. Gently, it bent down and placed the sweet on the ground and then flapping its wings, it took off.
Clearly, the bird wouldn’t eat it.
Mom looked closely; it was the very same moldy rossogolla that she had placed outside our kitchen window for the crows! Quite possibly it could also have been the very same crow that picked it up from there!
For weeks thereafter this queer incident became food for a great deal of deliberation in the family and every discussion meandered towards one common conclusion, an uneasy one, one that hinted at the theory of life after death and that of incarnations. But pray, a crow!!?

Since that day mom has always served fresh eatables to the birds cause, you never know!

2008-04-16T03:22:00.000-07:00

LIVE: From the NETHERSTATION

Another day goes by, what a waste…!

I lay on my bed one unbelievably hot summer night….tonight! and stared at the ceiling fan up above. It spun and wobbled so joyfully it almost seemed as though the thing had a life of it’s own, I wondered at times, if it would dislodge from the hook and fall straight on my face. Considering the way my life has been proceeding I would be happy if it actually did. The weird part was, I couldn’t even feel so much as a faint draft of the ‘Cold thunderstorm’ that the fan assured. I perspired like a derby prize winner, my bed felt like a flat bed of rock somewhere out in the middle of the Thar and my temper soared dangerously... !

The idiot box blared in my parent’s room….women wailed, men hollered, babies cried, guns roared, cars revved and some more women wailed and some more men hollered and some more babies cried and some more guns roared and some more cars revved and lots of people laughed raucously at another one of those so-lame-I-could-go-buy- a-gun-and-make-a-thanksgiving-dinner-outta-my-brains jokes on yet another one of those stand-up comedy shows on yet another one of those television channels…sheesh!
The earsplitting decibel level made me want to tear my armpit hair out one by one and all my pleas for a slight diminution in the volume stood hilariously ineffectual against the Goliath of a din that blasted out of that room. My parent’s are ruthlessly protective about their ‘TV time’…No hanky panky there!!

My eyes sailed to the little space, a passage of sorts, between the balcony and my bed. Those precious few square feet that housed my drum kit till about a year back are now just an empty patch. All those arguments about that little bit of space and how my ‘dabba’s and ‘plate’s blocked a free and comfortable way to the balcony and the final, melodramatic expulsion of my ‘dabba’s and ‘plate’s which now repose proudly in the musical room of some local school for the needy, reaped a rich reward of an empty patch on which now, stands a chair!
For long have I dreamt of that red TAMA Starclassic…MY red TAMA Starclassic with shiny rims and water-clear skins, with a Gibraltar drum-rack going around it, propping up Crashes, Splashes, Trashes and Chinas, a PEARL Piccolo and Iron Cobra chain-powered double pedals. I don’t even know when I’ll have the money to buy a ‘desi’ kit to at least keep the practice going. Right now I am worse than a beginner.

I tried picking up the book I spent 2/3rd my monthly-allowance buying, to study for that job-interview I am not even sure I’ve gotten a chance to sit for and maybe also for the 4th interview I am going to be sitting with the same law-firm, don’t even know when that’s coming up and my boss ignores my calls. One look at that enormous mass of infinitesimally tiny letters filling up entire pages from corner to corner, no paragraphs, no gaps, no headers and hardly any full-stops murdered even my slightest desire to learn and that trickle of sweat rolling down my chin helped matters hugely!
Anyhow, I spent the entire day wiping myself dry, cursing the municipality and worrying about my job-interview.
And of course…my usage of the internet on the home PC has been banned after dad discovered a little bit of porn in my laptop last week! Therefore last night I walked for a good half an hour to get to the ‘closest’ cyber café to check my mail while dad sat at home checking his.

The most exciting addition to the party throughout today was the load shedding that went on to stay for a marathon 18 hours from early morning! And thereafter when the lights did come back the A/C conked.
Its exactly 11.49 pm right now, it’s around 38 degrees outside and the humidity is close to 80%, the television is still blaring in the next room, the voltage is dwindling again, ‘didi’ is planning another Bangla-Bandh soon and I am typing this desperately to avoid jabbing a knife into someone’s eye!

2008-04-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

The father and daughter ...

We seldom realise it but life, as we know it, makes it a point to teach us it's most valuable lessons at the strangest of times and situations. And often, when we least expect it.

And it makes sure that we remember our lesson, so profound and intensely powerful are life's examples.

This happened a few years back when I was travelling to my uncle's house in Burdwan, a rural district in West Bengal. I sat alone in my car sulking at an argument I had had with my parents the previous day. It was a rather unimportant matter; the choice of cell phones. I wanted to purchase a rather expensive handset, something to the tune of about twenty five thousand rupees and my father insisted that I save the money and buy something relatively cheaper. He insisted that I save while I insisted rudely on spending while I had the money. I had completely failed to see his side of the argument and walked out on him in a huff.
Midway through the trip something pierced one of the tyres and our car slowed down, jerking and wobbling along the way. My driver managed take the car off the road and parked it near a small settlement of huts and food stalls. There was also a tyre-repair workshop nearby. Impatient and annoyed, I scanned the rural scene outside. I spotted a cycle rickshaw at a certain distance from us, parked underneath a large Banyan tree. And in it, I saw them;

He sat precariously, balancing himself on the tattered passenger’s seat of the rickety cycle-rickshaw. It had gaping tears in it through which purged swathes of yellow sponge. His legs stretched out and rested on the little driver's seat in front; a small, triangular piece of hard leather with smooth, round edges, pinned in place by a series of nails with shiny, metallic heads running all along it's sides. His hair was a disheveled and dirty mess. A stubble enveloped his thin jowl and chin and rose to surround his pair of gaping lips, his arms crossed each other on his emaciated chest looking like a pair of fragile twigs placed playfully across each other by a little child. They were bone shaped and veiny. With a bewildered look on his face he stared up at the sky from underneath the Banyan tree.

She sat next to him, small and insignificant, filthy and un-bathed, possibly hungry and unloved, a picture of neglect and destitution. Dressed in a dusty and torn yellow frock presumably handed to her by some sympathetic samaritan she dangled her little plump legs happily. Smiling to herself,she sang moving her tiny, crow's nest of a head from side to side, singing to an audience of passerbys and tea-stall customers who couldn't care less about the performance and went about their lives with indifferent passivity.

In her tiny hand she nestled a little bowl made of stitched ‘Sal’ leaves. It contained a hard and stale ‘puri’ and a few pieces of fried potatoes acquired from the cheap tea shack cum food stand nearby. Humming to herself she reached inside the fragile utensil with a tiny, careful hand and tore out a piece of that bread. Smiling sweetly, she reached out to her father to feed him. He hesitated initially but relented when she made a pleading face. Parting his lips he accepted the food and looking down at his daughter smiled at her a sad smile.
As his jaws laboured feebly, masticating the contents of his mouth the little human being next to him giggled in glee and asked her father in Bengali, “Bapi, aar khabe..?” ("daddy, do you want some more??")With his eyes fixed at the sky, the man lied; “na ma, amar pet bhora, tui kha!” ("no honey, am full, you eat...")!

So sat father and daughter sharing their miserable meal, food, stale and hard yet condimented with generosity and sacrifice. Love radiated through their wretchedness and outshone everything else. Suddenly the dirty and dishevelled weren't dirty and dishevelled any more, the miserable wasn't miserable any more and their stark poverty was reduced to merely an insignificant blot in their refulgence. It engulfed my insides with an almost overpowering assault of shame and guilt and I cried. I was ashamed of my profligacy, ashamed that I was so small and the rickshaw-walla and his daughter, so immense.
The car tyre being repaired my driver rushed back inside, pulled out the keys and proceeded to start the engine. As the car jerked back to life, I turned and looked at the two of them and kept my eyes on them. Soon they turned into tiny specks and gradually disappeared into the far horizon.

God's ways are strange but through his oft imperceptible methods He manages to show us the light. He showed me that day that one's family was one's greatest asset, one's most treasurable wealth and absolutely nothing came close to matching it's relevance in one's life. I was stupid to have fought with my father over something to trivial when there were people out there with graver problems who knew how to smile and survive in the face of unsurmountable odds.

2008-04-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

Just another 24 hours…

I sat up wide awake on my bed and looked directly into the pitch-black darkness of the summer night brimming outside my window. It was a late 2.30 am of the 28th day of March, of the year 2008 and for some reason my eyes weren’t influenced by as much as a speck of sleep. It could possibly have been the unbearably high temperature, it could also have been the excessive vodka that I had indulged myself to the previous night with the guys, but there was no sleep…none at all. A sickeningly rotten pain lurched in my stomach walls and I felt a lump in my throat.

It was deafeningly quiet and not even the crickets sang outside. Sitting up, I glanced around my room, from corner to corner, it looked so much cleaner now. There were 2 cupboards, one with expletives and the choicest abuses etched on it and the other, that always made a deep guttural sound, similar to a gastronomic discharge, when opened; a study table and a chair; not to mention, a bulging heap of clothes in the middle of the room, books and magazines scattered around, bottles, drum sticks, sundry articles, CDs and underwear, on top of my chair, on top of the cupboards, underneath my table…underwear everywhere!

I saw Shreya di, Rachita, Babu da n I going out for those late night walks and cold coffee from Zaika…how we laughed and scampered away when our landlord peeked outside his window to see what that din was all about..

I saw Avishek n Deba sit in each other’s company, getting lost amidst the depths of thick smoke and philosophy…philosophy inspired by the former, Satadeep rushed authoritatively towards the mirror to make sure that hairstyle was perfect, whether those glasses sat perfectly on his nose and took Anirban aside for last minute advices on dating, I saw Anirban n Arunima cuddle and exchange sweet nothings….

Bajju barged in, in his underwear, clutching his cell phone, talking to someone important, followed by Prad who sailed in, his belly leading the way, one hand put out, asking for a cigarette or a light…I saw Aravind struggle to light his first cigarette and Prasad taking a run-up before piling-on Avishek…
I saw the landlord, Mr. Patil scream at us for making too much noise and letting girls into the apartment.

I saw Yudi appealing to his mom on the phone, wanting to go for that one last party before the exams, the exams that began from the very next day…and Addy Mehta lifting that heavy barbell with one arm and discussing the Indian Penal Code with me at the same time.

I saw Da, Mayukh da, Sam, Jeetu, Karan and myself singing loudly with the nonchalance and abandon attributable only to madmen, I saw Babu da waddle in and out of my bathroom complaining how clean it was…

I saw the little boy, ‘Sajal’ who’d come by every afternoon carrying lunch for Deba and Avishek bragging loudly about the fights that he had gotten used to getting into…
I saw those little, un-healthily frequent ‘booze parties’ that the 5 residents of 24/B, Kapila Housing Society, Gokhalenagar, Pune used to find excuses to organize…

I saw the girls from the next-door PG screaming out my name and challenging me to play Holi with them….

I saw, seated amidst a haze of cigarette-smoke in the NCC, the Magnificent 7 making plans for Ehsaas, singing, taking ‘case’, planning gigs, composing songs, making lots and lots of noise....

Then I saw myself and almost immediately with a ‘pop’....the ghosts were gone…!!

It was 4.00 am outside, a couple of crows whizzed past kawing loudly….on my bed again in the middle of what can be described best as a bare, desolate wasteland, I looked around, empty walls, empty spaces, empty patches, the last piece of furniture sold, the last bag packed, ready to leave Pune, ready to leave all of it behind, shut it tight and forget all about it. The injustice was excruciating.
At that specific point in time I realized that the greatest mistake I’d made living in Pune was taking the ample time I had in hand for granted. I oh so took it all for granted and now, it was time alone that I could kill for, just one more day.

Just 24 more hours and I’d have time enough to go meet the old man from the temple who always blessed me before my exams and in spite of my prolonged absences from the temple, would say; “Sai Baba is always with you!”. I could never meet him before I left.

24 more hours and I’d finally, after all these long years, somehow conjure the courage to go and tell her how much I’d loved her. Tell her about the battles I’d fought for her in my imagination, how I’d kissed her lips and gazed into her eyes without a care in the universe. I’d tell her that I held her hand all these years without her knowing it, I’d tell her that I’d prayed for her and how I’d stood soaking in the rain one day, underneath a tree, far far away, just to catch a glimpse of her getting inside that rickshaw and make off after classes. I’d tell her that, the real reason behind having organized that outing for a lunch and movie, in our first year of college was actually so I could spend sometime with her. I’d narrate to her about all the pain I’d been through all these years just because I couldn’t tell her how I felt, I’d tell her how I cried when I came to know of her predicament of late, I’d tell her I had no problems when she was so rude to me. I’d tell her that I’d rock n roll in Kashmir just for her. I’d tell her that I still loved her.

Just 24 more hours and I would almost make Da go buy that Bass guitar and start practicing for our future gigs, a grand Ehsaas reunion, subsequent recording and stardom!!. One more day, I’d tell Mayukh da how valued he is to us and how I miss him and his little scooter, I’d tell Jeetu that I’d trust my life, my family with him and Sam (after slapping him for not writing me those DVDs) that I’d have liked to see him before getting inside that train, I’d like to have thanked Karan Singh for those long conversations we had had during those rainy nights of 2006 and for showing interest and faith in my abilities. One more day and I ‘d tell Babu da once again that he was such a dude in my eyes. 24 more hours and I’d be able to spend some more time with Smita aunty…talk to Prachi and Asmita and tell them I thought they’re the sweetest girls I’d ever met in my life.

24 more hours and I’d whizz past Lonavla, Khandala, Khadakwasla, Mahabaleshwar, Mulshi in a rocket, a bottle of vodka in tow, 24 hours and I’d race into T.Oaks, down a few pitchers of Barman’s red and make off for a late-night flick at E Square.
24 hours and I’d have gotten drunk with Shashwat and Swati and gone ahead and gotten into some major trouble with the cops...again!!
24 hours and I would’ve made sure we’d jammed one last time at Barista and prayed that we get kicked out from there...just one more time.
24 more hours and I’d have had that one last booze party with the guys at 24/B…
24 hours and I’d scream out to the entire city how damnably desperate I was to relive my last 5 years, in another 24 hours I'd desperately look for ways to stay back!

5.30 am…faint beams of sunlight shot out from behind the thick clouds that had gathered in the northern sky, outside, Pune was still asleep. Deba who was dead asleep nearby, turned to his right after what seemed like ages and breathed heavily. Avishek was already gone a couple of days back. Anirban and Satadeep slept in the next room.
I walked out into the balconyand a cool breeze washed up against my face and all of a sudden I felt alive. I was looking at a beautiful dawn for the first time after so many years, something I’d completely forgotten about all this time; a dawn in Pune…the city that I loved so much, the city that taught me so much, the city that I was to leave forever in a few hours time. I dressed up and put on my sneakers for one last climb on the Taekdi and breakfast thereafter at Goodluck.

2008-04-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Presenting a set of interesting photos I'd clicked sometime back in Pune...just random stuff!

I'd like to know the subjects they teach in that University...I'd really like to know.

2008-04-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

"Ki deen eshe galo

Shobar hatey hello...

Behala-r Jam-e poro

Taratalla cholo!"

...I think I get what he means???

(Clicked this from the front seat of my car, the rickshaw was at a considerable distance, bless the camera in my Motorola V3i ).

2008-04-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

Well folks...the unthinkable has finally happened...my pet roach, Papa has found a mate!!
NatGeo would've paid me top cash for this but alas, for Papa's sake...
we'll keep this one private..

2008-01-12T22:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a miniscule compilation from the many websites almost 10 pages of Google search has to offer about 'drummer humour';
Here we go;

1) How do you know a drummer’s at the door? The knocking speeds up and he never knows when to come in.

2) What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer.

3) How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. They have a machine that does that now.

4) What do you call a drummer who just broke up with his girlfriend? Homeless.

5) How can you tell a drum riser is level? Drool comes out of both sides of the drummer’s mouth.

6) What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch information into the machine once.

7) How does a guitarist park in the handicapped space? He leaves drumsticks on the dashboard.

8) What’s the difference between a drummer and a vacuum cleaner? You need to plug the vacuum in before it starts to suck.

9) How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ten. One to hold the bulb in place and nine to drink until the room spins around.

10) What do drummers say once they get their new gig? “Would you like fries with that?”

11) Why do drummers have 1/2 ounce more brains than horses? So they don’t embarrass themselves during the parade.

12) How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Five. One to screw, and four to discuss how Neil Peart would have done it better.

13) How do you get a drummer to play an accelerando? Ask him to play in 4/4 at a steady 120 bpm.

14) Why do bands have roadies? To translate for the drummer.

15) What did the drummer get on his IQ test? Drool.

16) What’s the difference between a drummer and a savings bond? A savings bond will mature and earn money.

17) How do you get a drummer off your porch? Pay for the pizza.

18) JOHNNY: “Mom, I want to be a drummer when I grow up.”
MOM: “Well, you can’t do both.”

19) What has an asshole and three legs? A drum stool.

20) What do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted.

21) How is a drum solo like a sneeze? You can tell it’s coming, but there isn’t anything you can do about it.

22) How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one, so long as his roadie gets the ladder, sets it up, finds the bulb, and puts it in the socket for him.

23) Did you hear about the bassist who locked his keys in his car? He had to break a window to get the drummer out.

24) Why are orchestral intermissions limited to 20 minutes? So they don’t have to retrain the drummers.

25) A guy walks in and asks the clerk at the desk for some picks and strings. “You must be a drummer, right?” the clerk says. “Yeah, how’d you know?” the drummer asks. “Because this is a travel agency.”

26) What do you call a beautiful woman on the arm of a drummer? A tattoo.

27) The latest drum machines are so realistic, they show up for practice 20 minutes late.

28) What’s the difference between a drumline and shoes in the dryer? Nothing.

29) Did you hear about the drummer who graduated high school? Me neither.

30) What do you call a drummer with half a brain? Overqualified.

31) What do you call a kid with a set of drums? The poster child for birth control.

32) How do you make a drummer’s car more aerodynamic? Take the pizza sign off it.

33) What did the drummer say to the guitarist? “Do you want me to play too fast or too slow?”

34) What does a drummer NEVER say to a guitarist? “Hey, do you want to play one of my songs?”

35) What does a drummer use for contraception? His personality.

36) A beautiful maiden found a frog who told her that if she kissed him, he would turn into a famous drummer and make them both rich forever. The maiden stuffed the frog in her pocket instead. “Hey”, the frog said. “What are you doing?”
“I know a talking frog is worth more than a drummer any day”, she answered.

37) Two salesmen are sitting in a bar. The first salesman says to the other “I bet I can relate to people so well that I can start a conversation with anyone in this bar.”
“OK” the second salesman replies. “You’re on.”
The first salesman goes up to a guy in a business suit and asks him what his IQ is. The guy in the business suit reveals that his IQ is 170. The salesman proceeds to engage in a discussion about world politics, literature, and science.
The salesman then goes up to a guy wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap and asks him what his IQ is. This guy reveals that his IQ is 100. The salesman then spends 15 minutes talking about sports, cars, and women.
The salesman finally walks up to a guy pounding shots and asks him what his IQ is. This guy admits that his IQ is only 50. The salesman asks him if he prefers Zildjian or Sabian.

*'sigh'*

2008-01-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

(Heres a little somewhat of a poem I typed one night, two weeks back, sufficiently high on Vodka shots. It took me the next morning to correct the many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors I'd made the previous night in my state of inebriation....whatever sense you make of it is your own interpretation, as for me this somewhat of a poem was done and through with when the lines rhymed!)

Words

The words won’t flow out tonight, dear Lord…my mind feels numb….
My eyes feel weighty, and my heart…deaf and dumb
The quill between my fingers lies dead, motionless as wood
The papers lie scattered around like dead fighters in a skirmish would

Known yet unknown is the feeling inside
that to no one, to no one can I confide…
none will ever understand, they hardly ever do
To whom do I profess, whom do I confess to…?
that confused I am, afraid to unfold
a wound throbbing deep inside my chest
so excruciating and oh so cold.

Why do I seek the words tonight oh Lord, why do I crave to write..?
Why can I not speak out my mind and put up a brave fight..?
Is prose my only strength, is the pen my only might..?
Why am I afraid to break the restrains, why is it that within myself I hide..?

You’re not afraid son, neither are you weak
It is merely affection and affection alone that you seek.
If it is through prose alone that you speak your heart out best…
then let your pen speak your heart’s behest..
Be not afraid of lettering your feelings, be not afraid to spell what is true..
Be not tormented if the artist appears to have burnt out in you…
In art lies the greatest tranquility, in art I reside
In prose lies your greatest muscle, through prose you shall confide…
So go forth unafraid and do profess your eternal love for her…
but do so as a poet, poets seldom cower.

2007-09-04T05:48:00.000-07:00

Why…Why Me?

I know….I know….another megalomaniacal, seemingly self-pity pumped harangue of elephantine proportions but here’s some food for thought;

When was the last time your ass caught fire and burnt like Troy because some stupid firecracker blew up hurting no one else but you?
When was the last time you contracted an eye disease so rare that according to records it was last heard of more than a decade and a half back……..somewhere in Europe!
When was the last time you were tacitly asked out by a woman and having misheard what she’d said cause it was too noisy, you replied by saying something so bizarre she decided to avoid you like plague thereafter.
When was the last time you were mistaken as being homosexual and stopped on your way to be asked affectionately where the nearest gay lounge was?
When was the last time your mouth got so badly singed cause you ate the wrong thing at the wrong place, purchased from THE wrong person at a WRONG price, and for the ensuing week, ate with your head tilted so low to one side that your brains would pour outta your ear?
When was the last time your mom lovingly reminded you how your little sister used to beat you up cause about a couple of decades back you were smaller than her and loved trying on her dresses?
When was the last time you stepped out of your house and someone from above spat a warm concoction of saliva and toothpaste on your head, not once but twice??
When was the last time your sister broke the window pane and you got slapped? cause well, your parents obviously won’t hit a little two year old!
When was the last time you stuttered so much that by the time you finished telling the cabbie where you wanted to be taken( after an adequate amount of thigh-slapping, foot-stomping and nostril flaring), he’d called you a few filthy names, collected another passenger and made off with a scowl on his face?
AND when as the last time you hand gestured to a pretty girl to call you and she thought you meant, you’d call her and you both waited for each other to call till she left town?

If you still don’t think I’ve enough justification….feel free to read my other write-ups!!

‘Why….Why me?’ A question, the answer to which I’ve demanded from the Philosopher lounging somewhere beyond the clouds time and again, but absolutely to no avail. He just sits up there, throws his head back and laughs out loud.
It’s known that s**t’ happens but it does in careful moderation. Good experiences are balanced with bad ones, happy times are balanced with unhappy ones, what goes around definitely does come around and all that jazz and to add to things, an over-sensitive Karma, like a disgruntled ex makes damn well sure you pay doubly for all the undue liberties you take. But very often things go out of hand and Karma seems to have gone bananas putting you through circumstances you’d rather die than endure.

But Karma? Is there really any such thing as that?

I believe Lord picks a few among us as ‘subjects’ to secretly play practical jokes on. Of Course, Life’s Lonely Up There And He Needs His Entertainment. Thus, to execute this clownery He very intelligently has employed Karma as his appliance and scapegoat (as Karmas where the buck always ends) and one such supreme mooncalf of a ‘subject’ is yours truly.

In what is to follow I shall recount four of the finest instances from a whole galaxy of them, that least said, are so bizarre it’s hard to think of anything else one would have on his mind if not a “Why….Why me?”

FESTIVE FIASCO

That Diwali evening I shall never forget, I must’ve been nine or ten back then, racing upstairs to our terrace clutching a small bag of firecrackers I called out to all my friends from the adjacent terraces to come join me. So they did, about fifteen boys and girls more or less of the same age as mine. There was already quite a congregation at the terrace, a newly wedded couple, cant recollect their names, old Mr. and Mrs. Maitra, Mehra uncle and his daughter, Mrs. Gomes and her little daughter, they were all there.
Firecracker after firecracker took off, exploded, circled on the ground, hissed and huffed and within a couple of long hours or so the elders started suggesting a wrap up.
A lot of stomping and wailing followed after which we were allowed another half an hour to finish off the last remnants of our ammunition. Suddenly, the new bride in the crowd playfully broke away from her spouse and began demanding a cracker or two from us. One of us handed her one of those round, big, clay ‘flowerpots’. I was always extremely afraid of those things because of their tendency to explode almost always during the closure of their colorful display and hid behind my parents every time one was lit.

Anyhow, throughout that evening not a single one had blown up so I’d almost forgotten about the dangerous possibility.
She stood some ten feet away from me bending low over the large clay ball holding a sparkler over its head. I was busy trying to light a ‘Ground-Chakkar’ when glancing her way, I discovered what she was about to do. I almost choked with fear. Screaming out, I appealed to her to wait a while till I had enough time to run for cover. How was I supposed to know that she was hearing-impaired? As deaf as can be, she stared my way grinning away proudly, still holding the sparkler to the flowerpot. It was now or never. Abandoning the Chakkar I turned around and began sprinting across to one corner of the terrace where old Mr. and Mrs. Maitra stood, intending to go hide behind them when it all happened. It was all over in a split second’s time, before I could dive behind the old couple; with a loud KABLOOOIE! The flowerpot exploded sending razor-sharp shards of hot, glowing clay shooting in every direction.
I knew it was coming and immediately I felt a hard thrash on my left buttock and fell over. Within seconds a scorching, stinging pain erupted from the spot where the clay shrapnel as big as a tennis ball had got me and then, enlightenment! I’d charred my bottoms!!
Standing up, I began bawling my esophagus out! With about two dozen people consisting of boys, girls and elders as spectators I kicked off my trousers forcefully, still screaming, I began running around the terrace yelling like a maniac. According to dad, after circling the entire terrace about twice I scampered off home. The poor bride got a fearful shock of her lifetime and an insignificant little scratch across her chest on seeing which Banerjee uncle began jumping up and down in panicky shouting, “BUST IN BEST….BUST IN BEST!!”(Translation: “Burst in breast…Burst in breast!!!”). Meanwhile, at home I raced past mom, went straight into the bathroom and crashed my smoking bottom inside a bucket full of water and with a prolonged, effervescent hiss the pain subsided……….I shut my eyes.
Within minutes, the entire gleeful audience from the terrace down to Mrs. Gomes’s little daughter, had deposited themselves in our bedroom where mom had laid me on the bed. I lay on my front, underpants off with ‘Burnol’ smeared all over my cooked buttock. All my friends, male and female bent down low in unison to peek at my colorfully resplendent bottom relishing every minute of the experience, till dad came and shooed everyone away. Later next day I was informed that no one in the terrace last night was hit, but me. About twenty five people stood in the midst of a shrapnel-storm and the only one to get struck was ME, believe it or not. Why….Why me?
Next Diwali, a rocket I lit refused to take off and blew up on my face, never had I seen a rocket blow up on anybody’s face before. Why…Why me?

DEEP THROAT

There was a brief chapter in my early days when I used to be intensely passionate about cricket but could never manage to get good at it in spite of disciplined coaching at a local club. I was especially bad at fielding for which reason I was always assigned a position where the ball was least likely to stray. One day, my coach decided to be a little constructive and pompously announced that he’d assign me the position of a wicketkeeper. I’d never stood behind a wicket ever and was slightly apprehensive when coach advised me to keep my eyes on the ball always and be agile, which was precisely the problem as it was a bright, sunny day and I stood facing the sun. The glare blinded me and it was extremely difficult to look forward. To add to my woes, I could hardly see anything through my helmet as the safety-rims always got in the way. Anyhow, the match proceeded and I kept praying for the spin bowlers to take on, because when they did I’d be able to take my helmet off. After what seemed like an eternity, a few missed catches and cheeky boundaries behind the wicket the first spinner of the day was brought on. I immediately took my helmet off getting ready for a better job, crouching low I fixed my eyes on the bowler, the sun was getting hotter and the glare, torturous and all I could see was a black silhouette of the batsman. But why fear a spinner? I thought. Our spinner ran up and released. The ball emerged from his hand and in a flash disappeared in the bright glare!! The next glimpse I had of the ball when it was about half an inch away from my mouth. A cricket ball smashing against someone’s face is still believable but the same crashing inside someone’s mouth is hard to grasp. I lay flat on the grass, half the ball jutting out of my mouth and tears streaking down my sweaty face, for some reason my glasses had cracked too. The damages: a dangling tooth, another one swallowed, a mouth so excruciating to shut I’d rather gape forever, broken glasses, a throat full of mud, grass and muck and a familiar view of people standing in a circle, looking down at me. Soon, the hopes of improving the dangling tooth were also dashed when, two days after this unfortunate event, a cousin from the US and I wrestled on the bed after viewing a WWF Tag team tournament and a skull-crushing knock on my face sent the tooth rocketing out of the window. For the next few weeks I looked my endearing best with a twisted and cracked pair of spectacles and two front teeth missing.
The teeth did grow back, but for some weird reason I sometimes look in the mirror and see Bugs Bunny. Why…Why me?

PANIC! AT THE DISCO

I’d never ever stepped into a discotheque before joining college. The first time I did it wasn’t pretty cause a certain drink to which the bartender set a little fire burning nearly choked me to death, folks went wild with laughter.
On another evening I stood outside looking for a female partner to enter the disco as a couple, its cheaper that way. I managed to find one and she came along so easily I never suspected that something was seriously wrong there. Before long I was made to realize that the woman I stood with, with my right arm around her waist was the lawfully wedded wife of the proprietor of the discotheque. I ran for my life as that imbecile of a woman stood there grinning.
Yet again, on another occasion I went out with a bunch of my chums to this disc called ‘Screams’. Sporting my best clothes and an obnoxiously expensive yet borrowed cologne I looked pretty nice. At the disc I took off my glasses thinking I’d look really hot, dim-witted that I was. All I could see around were blurred figures and outlines and kept yapping with the middle-aged man seated on my left thinking it was the bartender, when suddenly this girl showed up from nowhere and asked me for a dance. I was still nodding like a zombie when I realized she’d made off for the crowded dance floor.
I followed groping in the darkness, running into people and tripping on feet barely able to see her. Before long her blurred outline merged with the others as she kept moving further inside and that was it, I’d lost her in the dense crowd. Putting my glasses back on, I pushed and shoved my way around the dance floor looking for her but she was gone…..I’d lost the first girl to have ever asked me for a dance!!
Why…Why me?

MY BALD DATE

There she stood waiting for me, looking like a thorough lady in a pretty dress, sunglasses and a rather huge, frilly hat in place. The hat looked slightly Seventeenth century-ish but that was all excused, she was MY date.
We walked for a while and then we sat ourselves down facing each other at a small restaurant when she took her glasses off. Without warning, the hat came off next and I so wished it never had! My legs gave way and I almost collapsed as she lost that hat, cause instead of a head there sat a scruffy coconut atop a perfectly shaped female neck. She had shaved her head neat. It was the latest fad, the ‘in-thing’, she said.
Why…Why me?
When was the last time your physics teacher refused to stop smacking you behind your head stating ‘inertia of motion’ as a reason?!
When was the last time you were young and naive enough not to realize the consequences of taking your sweet time pouring boiling hot beverage on your sleeping dad’s belly?
When was the last time while performing a dance at a school function before four hundred teachers and parents your head-band slipped down over your eyes and you danced blind for the next ten minutes, finally concluding the romp with a violent crash, falling off stage on your face sending the audience rolling all over….?
When was the last time………

Karma is watching boy, and she’s as bananas as ever, so think twice and think thrice before succumbing to that mean lure cause if you happen to be a ‘subject’ you’ve had it!

2007-08-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

Tales of the Sagacious Secretary

"Let him appear...just let him APPEAR...we'll see if he has the guts....I shall APPEAL........!!"

......hollered the bespectacled, crumpled old lady waving a spatula from her tiny tea-shack out to a rather petrified urchin who turned around and scampered away the immediate second her verbal tirade ceased.

The grand Old Post Office Street in Kolkata, the epientre of all legal activity in the city running along the banks of the Ganges, on which stands gaunt and proud the Kolkata High Court, sturdy and handsome with its typical pre-independence, 'Anglo' architecture and air, is quite literally a tiny universe in itself. On any given time of any day, apart from declared holidays of course, Old P.O. Street disappears under an enormous galaxy of human beings, hundreds of cars parked bumper to bumper in numerous parallel lines that zig-zag beyond visual limits, numerous little stalls and shacks offering typewriting services, notary sevices and a few, even legal advice, lots and lots of tiny stalls selling cigarettes, tea, juice and eatables and also a few restaurants and pharmacies. Apart from the High Court, Old PO Street has a number of old buildings originating from the pre-independence era which house some of India's top most law offices........yet something quite pleasently different, often unnoticed yet extremely significant about life in this lane aroused my deep interest and desire to explore.
During one of my internships with an extremely reputed law firm situated in one such building, on the opposite of 'Temple Towers' I couldn't help being intrigued and amused by a prominent existence of a healthy amount of humour, intentional, unintentional or sarcastic, that garnished everyday conversations between people working for a living in and around the High Court and it's adjacent law offices. Walking down Old P.O.Street, one shall experience a more-than-generous use of heavy legal parlance by everyday people there, used freely to assert or make clear a point and it did'nt really matter if it pertained to a legal business or not. The following narration accounts for a month's worth of 'overhearings'.

Ask if you can smoke inside a restaurant and you'll be told to 'plead' with the owner.
On various instances you'll hear about people 'appear-ing before' and even 'disappear-ing from' places....no stupid you dont need a magic wand!!
And of course, you can have your way with everyone if you just 'appeal' but if you 'argue' too much you're in for a 'penalty'.
It is Law firms on this grand old lane though that hold the real deal when it comes to wisecracks and hilariously sarcastic one-liners, quite interestingly the richest source of these are the non-legal staff i.e. stenographers, tea-boys, sundry errand-boys and finally, the secretaries. Being the 'downtrodden' or the 'trodden-upon', their expressions are often chillingly satirical.
Placed in a stuffy cubicle outside the boss's cabins I had the priviledge of mingling with the ground-level staff and thereby gathering an insight on their own little world. In every law office the immediate secretary to the boss enjoys a certain exalted status among the non-legal staff and is generally attributed with a certain degree of stoical sagacity, his sidekicks and generals being the stenographers, tea-boys, munimji's and other foot soldiers further lower in the hierarchy, a secretary is often regarded as the holder of inside information. He is, on one hand the spokesperson of the boss himself and on the other, the collective voice of the non-legal staff as well; quite a tight spot one would presume, but our man is a smooth operator. Being quite the 'narad-muni', neither the bosses nor clients, not even interns are spared of their scrutiny,examination, an inevitable subsequent criticism or the dreaded 'gyaan' session. Even judgements, petitions, legal documents and arguments are often critically evaluated and deliberated upon.

He is almost a superhero, that stupendous wisdom armed with a razor's edge wit and an equally sharp tongue, which he unremmitingly swishes and slashes every so often, accompanied by dollops of a "been there, done that so you're just a sissy.." attitude that coloured words spoken in completely smashed english (punctuated with shocking Bengali expletives), coupled with a hearty revolutionary spirit, a thorough knowledge of global politics and of course, by-the-minute answers to every pressing problem faced by the nation(phew!!) maketh the man that a sagacious secretary is; something between a born leader and a clown.

The state-of-affairs became quite transparent to me the day my boss's sagacious secretary muttered heavily under his breath, "bhodrolok Kudi patar petition dersho patai lekhechen...eeeeeeesh!!"("the gentleman has written a 20-page petition in 150 pages....geeeeeeeez!!"), under his breath while struggling with stacking fleshy bundles of paper together. My awe and respect for this gentleman shot through the roof one fine morning when I overheard him saying, "akhono matha ghamai-ni ami sir....chinta nei...rasta ami bar korboi...!!"( I haven't laboured my mind yet,my dear sir.......... I shall DEFINITELY find a way out of this....!") over the phone. Another day, another sage screamed out from his cubicle to another steno after having made sure his boss was out of earshot, " shotero baar interim order extend koralam.......aar ekbar bhabchi koriei di, ki bolo??"( "I had the interim order extended 17 times.....I might as well get it done once again...whatsay??"), just before my nervous system could react to that one, another blow.. "Judgesaheb case nite parchen-na.....ki je kori?.....shob adjourn kore deova uchit!! "( "The respected Judge-saheb is unable to deal with the cases....what do I do?.....he should adjourn all his cases!!") struck me. Confused and slightly frustrated that these babus and clerks knew more than myself, a final-year law student pursuing a rather expensive course at a well respected law college, trying to find my way around the legal world, I dawdled over to my cubicle. The possible sense and concealed passion in the saying, "Baangalke High Court dekhiyo na"("never bring up the High Court while dealing with a 'Bengali'") lay unfurled before me the very next day when I overheard the secretary of a senior lawyer boast to someone else, "ki chai?? Stay?? nishchoi paiyye debo!!!!( what do you want?? a Stay order?? I'll definitely have it done...!").

The air inside the building that housed my office set in a rather formal, somewhat stiff English feel. The intricate wood-work and architecture, the old elevator, those high walls, the smell of smoked tobacco and of course the inevitable and pleasent scent of old books espoucing the air give the place a historical appearance reflecting a high degree of British grandeur. But no old building in Kolkata is complete without the omnipresent legacy of the 'babu', his romance with the colour red, something which he so lovingly stains the walls of his city with, the colour that had promised so much yet gave so less . I meant, those paan-spittle stains gracing the walls, reached so high up I found it extremely difficult picturing how one might've been able to spew the contents of his mouth that high up on the wall!!
Pondering on the physics involved with projecting spittle so high up in the air, one fine morning as I clambered up the dark stairways leading to the floor where my office was situated, I noticed a young member of the non-legal staff doing something rather bold. Its a well known rule that nobody was to leave his/her cubicle during office hours except during lunch-break or on official duty and my firm was pretty strict about this particular regulation of theirs for obvious reasons. One brave Sir Galahad stood outside the office doors casually leaning his back against the window panes, holding a cell phone to his ear his highness jabbered away with someone loudly, blowing large smoke rings from his mouth during intervals. I stood there admiring his nonchalance and defiant pose. The boss was surely not in today.
My rather obvious assumption was confirmed in seconds as I made my way through the doors and into the little hall that housed various little officerooms; all the secretary babus, stenographers and even the tea-boys huddled around one particular table. Tea was ordered all around. The boss was at a conference and therefore the mice were at play. I joined in with the crowd. The sagacious secretary began, "Dhoro ekta gaadi 60-r speed-e jete jete break fail korlo......tokhon ki kore gaadi thamabe?"( Suppose a car is travelling at a speed of 60 when it's breaks fail, what would you do to stop it?").
A deliberation then commenced with mind-riddling permutations, combinations and fervid arguments on whether the gear-handle would break if moved to first-gear while the car was running or for that matter what would happen if the car were brought to reverse while it was still running, the conversation then raced further on through the faithfulness of the dear old Ambassador particularly to the Bengali community, the rash driving on Red Road, the Chief Minister's latest speech then quickly deviating to the Mohun Bagan line-up and fish prices for a short while after which, I kid you not, we were back to accidents again!!....the door slung open all of a sudden and in marched my boss, his appearance effecting various disappearances everywhere, the babus swiftly sprung back to their 'I-am-so-God-damn-busy-working' positions, pens began moving, the tetris and pac-mans disappeared from computer screens and keyboards began clattering. Bless his heart, my boss picked up a legal brief and walked out again. Without warning, his Secretary immediately turned to me and began, "Maarkaari-r sathe aar kono dhatu meshe kina?"("Does any other metal react with Mercury?"), taken aback I stuttered to explain the inadequacy of my knowledge of Chemistry before finishing which he remarked, "MESHE NA.....ALBAAT MESHE NA......dutoi dhongsho hoye jay!!" ("THEY DO NOT REACT.....both of them get DESTROYED!!") concluded the venerable sagacious secretary.

As the last day of my internship crawled lazily towards a conclusion, I slammed shut the book on Intellectual Property Law that I had just finished 'sleeping' over, wide eyed with utter disbelief that there actually existed a Mark based on a character of one of Ian Fleming's novels...........called 'PUSSY GALORE!!' and that someone had actually applied to have it registered for selling his goods by that name.
I strolled down Old P.O.Street looking for my driver amidst the thinning crowd, the bloke was nowhere to be seen. The sun turned a mellow shade of orange having already disappeared half way over the tree tops and a gentle breeze blew over the place now carrying a smell that foretold that rainfall was approaching soon, groups of people now stood surrounding little snack/tea stalls catching up on the days events and gossip, some hurried away sensing a shower in the offing. Within moments it grew dark and a light drizzle descended over Old P.O.Street pacing up life immediately, lawyers fled for cover holding files or briefs over their heads, people scampered around rushing inside shops, inside any place that offered a temporary shelter, some simply walked on not bothered. Deciding not to budge till my driver showed up I took refuge underneath a large parapet belonging to a book store.
Next to me stood two people immersed in a deeply intense conversation. They hadn't noticed my presence. A fiery debate ensued and a tiny crowd had gathered around them cramming themselves in whatever little space was left under the parapet, gaping intently at the two gentlemen. All of a sudden, causing an echoe across the much deserted Old P.O.Street and a highly unwelcome shiver down my spine, the sagacious secretary standing right next to me exclaimed, " But dear Mr. Mittir(Mitra), 'the EVIDENCE of the pudding is in it's eating!!'"
The drizzle had subsided considerably and my driver emerged from inside a tea-shack around the corner of the street scratching his pot-belly holding a paper bag stuffed with spiced puffed rice, grinning like a village idiot. Smiling, I quietly noted down my last observation underneath the parapet and headed off towards my car. Driving past a photocopy shop called 'EVIDENCE' I turned around to take a last look at the grand old High Court of Kolkata, my flight to Pune left early next day.

2007-05-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

TAGGED
http://etceteraetalandblah.blogspot.com/ (Cheshire Cat) tagged me....

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it:
there’s a small one in my heart....
2. What is on the walls in your room?
Phillip.H.Anselmo looking down and pointing a finger at me…and a black lizard rt behind him.
3. What does your phone look like?
Old, tired and dimming...
4. What music do you listen to?
I go through musical phases…the current ones of heavy metal so metal it is. Otherwise I enjoy classic rock, funk, soul, blues, ‘world music’ and a select bit of jazz.
5. What is your current desktop picture?
MOTORHEAD!!!!!
6. What do you want more than anything right now?
A chilled Vodka n Tonic water.
7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Of course, I’ll invite you all to mine…
8. What time were you born?
3rd November 1984. heard it was 11.20 pm, weighed a healthy 3 kilos...Indira Gandhi died that day.
9.Are your parents still together?
Yeah, so far.
10. What are you listening to?
’Desperado’ by Eagles, my Metal modes switched off for the time being!
11. The last person to make you cry?
Tom Hanks, finished watching FORREST GUMP a lil while back…
13. What is your favourite perfume/cologne?
Brute, and Davidoff Cool Waters for men.
14. What kind of hair/eye colour do you like on the opposite sex?
Hair: Should be long, curly/straight and flowy
Eyes: Large n deep.
15. Do you like pain killers?
I like ‘em with Coke or I take ‘em neat.
16. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
No, I did ask someone out once....but that was long back.
17. Fave pizza topping?
Shredded meat of all kinds and lots of cheese, chillies n anchovies; there was a pizza by this description, can’t recollect the name right now.
18. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
A large bowl of cold yogurt with sliced pieces of alphonso mangos, lichis and grapes in it and a tall glass of chilled orangeade with a drop of honey to go down with it.
19. Who was the last person you made mad?
I seem to have driven everybody I know mad at some point in my life….my Math teachers still under specialised treatment and my drum teachers dead.
20. Is anyone in love with you?
No.

I tag http://daunplugged.blogspot.com/ (Bix) and http://www.faithlessfreak.blogspot.com/ ( Devilshit)

2007-05-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

What is it I am so crazily in love with?
Is it my mental image of the individual seated behind those drums?
Is it the music that emanates from the instrument?
Is it the playing, the drummer's moves?
Is it the raw power that the instrument radiates?
Is it the adrenalin rush, the sweat?
Or, is it the visual grandeur of the instrument?
Is it all one big dream, a phase?....will it all be gone one day...my love...my passion?

2007-05-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Melodies of Madagascar ....

As I seated myself rather uncomfortably in one of the forward rows facing the stage inside the lounge cum auditorium of Princeton Club, Kolkata I observed that although the evening’s event had been advertised in The Telegraph and was therefore presumably open for anyone, the crowd inside, which mainly comprised of Indian and French members of the French Consulate, were tight and pretty cold to unknown faces. But then again, I’d traveled all this distance, literally argued with staff members of the club who wouldn’t allow non-members in on a Monday evening and battled my apprehension of unknown faces and places just to watch the concert, I wasn’t gonna give in easy. Later on it was discovered they weren’t ‘informed’ that the show was free, their saccharine sweetness surfacing after the little discovery, one security guard quite gracefully lead me into the auditorium himself.
Not many of us would be familiar with the existence of the fourth largest island in the world, located in the Indian Ocean called Madagascar, leave alone its culture and musical heritage. Neither was I, but last evening’s show featuring Regis Gizavo, a brilliant, Accordionist, composer and singer and David Mirandon, a long time associate of Gizavo, a brilliant drummer/ percussionist, was a mellifluous introduction to the island nation and it’s music. Gizavo sang his own compositions in Malagasy language playing the Accordion, an instrument I’d usually seen on television and once played live by street musicians in Hanover, Germany.
The Accordion has an almost incredible ability to soothe and put the listener in a trance and at the same time tempt one to break into a dance. Gizavo, who earlier in the evening reprimanded a noisy crowd in the background for their disrespect and lack of courtesy(mostly guzzling old expatriates from France) showed an absolute mastery over the instrument, deftly using the fingers on his left hand to manage the base patterns and those on his right hand to play the notes of the song. David Mirandon, on the other hand appeared to be the subtlest percussionist ever, placing two congas on either side of his base drum, behind the toms, Mirandon mostly used brushes, hot-rods, felt beaters and very often his bare hands to provide rhythmic assistance to Gizavo and what a perfectly amazing job he did! Every time the duo reached a musical crescendo it would arouse loud hoots and cheers from the crowd, which had considerably thickened by the time the duo were through with their third or fourth composition.
As I was strolled towards the club gates I was reminded of a recent A.R Rahman concert somewhere in the Middle East that I was closely following on TV the other day, an enormous crowd of some 20-30 thousand, what glitz, what glamour, women romping around everywhere, almost a tiny city of musicians on stage, every single famous singer appearing on stage and goofing up songs one after the other, the glitterati, special guests, confetti and what not….but where was the music? What happened to the music?
Bloody over-commercialization!! I couldn’t help wondering how fame and making it to the ‘big-league’ murders the musicianship in an artist, why Shivamani being such an able percussionist, having set up his entire cornucopia, his gamut of drums on stage shook shakers and tambourines throughout the AR Rahman concert making a complete idiot of himself, why do people have to rely on big shows to sell music, why do they have to lip sync, why do people judge music by the videos they show on MTV, why ?
As I exited Princeton, I sent up a little prayer to The Lord asking him to keep the two dazzling musicians I’d just heard from getting devoured by this unfortunate consequentiality called 'fame'.

DISCLAIMER(for oversensitive readers); I did not intend to insult any musician in the above essay(even if I sounded like I did....du-uh!!) and all opinions expressed above are based on my observations so shut up n read....

2007-04-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

Thou Shall NOT be gluttonous!!

I was made to realize the punitive muscle of the 7 deadly sins by a tiny occurrence last week. Being bored out of my wits of microwaving little red ants to kill time, I went out shopping with mom that morning. We shopped all morning without having so much as a morsel to eat, and hunger brings the desperate beast out in me…….a damn stupid one too. Sometime in the evening as our car passed by a ‘vada pav’ vendor here in New Alipore, my tongue watered like a cube of melting ice. I asked the car to be stopped and stepped out, mom suggested I hold it a little longer as we were getting closer to home and dinner would be ready in a matter of minutes, but no, I had to satiate the voracious monster of a stomach raving and ranting inside me. Not heeding her proposition I sprinted across to the vendor and ordered a vada pav. The prospect of eating a vada pav in Kolkata strengthened my reason to buy the snack only from that vendor in spite of there being several other stalls and shops around selling other things.
The ‘vada’s were ridiculously tiny and the vendor charged 12 rupees per vada pav, a good reason to walk away but I haggled with the man as to why such was the case, his reason seemed fair, “sahabji, people here don’t eat vada pavs so they don’t know what this is…therefore I can have my way”!
Disclosing to him that I’ve been living in the land of vadas and pavs for the last four years literally surviving on them during exams and financial famines didn’t help much as he shut me up instantly by telling me that he too was from Pune and wait for this……he had his house and shop next to the sea-coast there! A sea-coast in Pune?
Nevertheless I diverted my attention to a few passing ladies when he wrapped the little thing in paper and handed it to me, by then my painful starvation had reached its pinnacle and as I frantically began unwrapping what he took an immaculate minute and a half to wrap my sixth-sense suddenly jumped to action, like it normally does before a disaster, something told me I shouldn’t eat it. Too late! I’d paid him.
It was only a few seconds after I had placed somewhat of a kingly, rather beastly nibble into the little bundle that I wished I were dead. Tears streamed out of my eyes instantaneously, my ears went numb with a dull “weeeeeeeeee” sound and a chill shimmer shot up through my teeth to the very end of the nerves in my gums. That lump of potatoes was as searing as a little piece of glowering charcoal!! My vision went blurry as I opened my mouth and allowed a plume of smoke to escape, the “weeeeeeee” sound became louder and I realized I had singed my mouth. Whimpering, I ran across the road to mom while whatever was left of the snack lay on the pavement.
I end my span of a week-long liquid diet today, and from tomorrow it’ll be mashed boiled veggies for another week, that should afford enough time for nature to stick a fresh layer of skin in my mouth and get rid of the deep red coloration..and yeah the persisting “weeeeeee” from my ears!!
LESSONS:
# Thou shall not be Gluttonous
# Never microwave little red ants if you’re bored, Karma shall kick your ass.
# Never buy vada pavs in Kolkata…..NEVER!!!
# Steer clear of people who say they've lived near the Pune sea coast!!!!!!
# Finally, when your sixth sense pokes you in the ribs, pay heed!

2007-03-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

My Sweet Romance with Numbers
(Chapter I: ICSE)

Before I begin with this one, lemme tell you a little something I realized way back in school, God does really weird things. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he puts people through a cornucopia of painfully eccentric situations before finally dumping them again into a totally different state of affairs so they end up totally confused in life and know chickenfeed of what’s happening! Dudes either got no sense of humor or a real twisted one. I do not know why I was made to spend YEARS shredding my soul, getting my self dignity pummeled and sending my self confidence for a long vacation to Barbados in the pursuit of trying to make the tiniest sense of that mad subject of wild numerical calculations called Mathematics, if I finally had to end up with Law! Why Lord? Why me?

“YOU FLUNKED AGAIN?!!!” screamed my infuriated father waving what seemed like another one of those damned report cards standing at the doorstep, as I entered the house dead beat and in no mood for confrontation. Lugging a goliath of a bag, hair unkempt from hours of head-scratching, hungry, partially hypnotized, insulted, nervous and utterly frustrated from yet another Math tuition; standing in a corner I presented the image of a somewhat wild, subhuman creature loathed and unloved by the world. Gauging my precarious state of mind, dad somehow hid that vibrating knob of a fist behind him, “Vani! Give him some food!” he said and sighed. Oh that sigh! Worse than a thousand beatings, a million curses and a gazillion insults was that sighing. Laced with utmost haplessness and frustration, that sigh was something that cut me from inside, it was a voice from deep inside dad, something that told me how he felt and it broke me into a thousand pieces to realize that I had failed him, again and again and again and yet again!
Mom didn’t talk much; I ate my food quietly and stumbled away into my bedroom, but there was no peace there either, my little sister sat on her side pretending to study and the moment I appeared she said something under her breath that I couldn’t make out, frankly I didn’t want to either! Thus concluded another achingly usual day of my school life.

I lay down and my head suddenly swayed dangerously and spun like a misbalanced top about to collapse and all of sudden a collage of images appeared in my head in rapid succession, numerous somber pictures from happenings of the recent and distant past and others, I feared would come true some day!! I saw one of my Math tutors demanding exactly double the amount of what he charged others as fee from dad, to include me in his class, I saw my Math teacher at school hold up my copy before the entire class clutching it with only two fingers like as if she was holding a dissected reptile from the Biology lab, I saw my class teacher look up at me with an expression so pure with abhorrence as she pointed at the ‘Math’ section in my report card which was almost perpetually marked in red, I saw myself sitting for the same Math paper for the nth time and one day…..alongside my little sister!!, I saw mom unearth that hidden stash of weekly test report-sheets carefully buried away under my tablecloth, then I saw my class X Board exam report card screaming, ‘YOU’RE DOOMED!!!’ with a familiar red underline under my Math marks and I screamed……… It was 6.30 pm in the morning, time for studies, time for Math practice!

One could get a lion to chomp grass and maybe even smoke it if one tried hard enough, bringing Democracy to Cuba would seem way easier, even Gandhi could be brought back from the past to do a solo tap-dance gig and I bet even resurrecting the dead would be child’s play for some, but making a certain Mr. Ronojoy Basu pass in his math tests posed a challenge, a real thorny challenge, a grisly battle that decimated a million teachers and other ‘concerned’ individuals, draining them of their zest and zeal for life and robbing them naked of motivation to live or teach! Tutors came and tutors went, all of their formulas, ideas and so called ‘teaching techniques’ sent flying straight out of the window by my ‘number-numbness’, I still couldn’t do multiplications in my head and failed to see that those formulas and graphs actually had a ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ and were not playful sketches and scribbles of a mindless toddler!! I didn’t complain much about Statistics though particularly, dumb work, make dots and join them….job done!! No matter how bizarre the squiggle looked….that’s your answer….5 marks in!!
That’s how difficult my situation, rather influence was!! After limping my way up till class X my parents realized I needed superhuman help to clear the Boards and after looking around for a month and a half they did find one……a superhuman entity!

The man was over 75 years of age, seemingly feeble and bent with burdensome age but I kid you not, he was not our regular lonely old man! He was sturdy, maybe too strong for his age, extremely alert, highly self reliant and equally fowl mouthed, but my respect for him rooted from his absolute simplicity, a trait so strangely endearing, I seemed to like him in spite of all the thrashing and hollering he hauled at me. Mr Kalipada Das’s mental faculties at the right side of 75 were still intact and gleaming, and it wasn’t only his brain that retained the sharpness of the past, so did his tongue and he happily employed it to rebuke me time and again! And his physical agility…..was something to reckon with, perhaps for the one year he taught me, pounding me black and blue was the principal workout which he disciplined himself into doing regularly! Mr. Das was an ace in Chemistry and Math and Physics was child’s play to him, the very subjects he was entrusted to teach me. His homework for two days would be a quarter of the entire Math syllabus, although he’d made it very clear from the beginning that his major ‘tool’ would be practice, I hardly realized he’d go overboard with it! As I had expected and my parents feared, after the first two months our reverend old tiger threw up his hands in the air and said, “GONE CASE”! , “YOU boy are a LEGEND….please GET OUT!!” Then followed another series of visits by dad and mom to convince him to keep teaching me and not lose hope and that I was working hard and also that I might after all manage to pull it through!

I did actually work hard practicing Math, fearfully hard, so much so that the other subjects suffered. Within months my room started filling up with stacks and piles of ‘long exercise books’ and Class X Math practice books, there was not a single book left in the market un-purchased, not a single long exercise book left to be bought from the nearby stationary, and with the long, late night shifts reserved for dedicated Math practice the situation gradually started to look real nutty….I began solving quadratic equations in my sleep, I started inadvertently assigning various characters in English literature, ‘X’s and ‘Y’s!!, I always found myself picking my teeth with divider needles and actually enjoyed it!, one morning dad discovered little algebra formulas scrawled on the bathroom walls and the oddest of them all, I'd begun jabbering with myself...complete with expressions and gesticulations.... !! So none at all, other than young Mr. Basu could correctly, rather in a tad exaggerated manner, represent what normally became of Bengali teenagers a few months before the grand, much feared ICSE exams began!! Brrrrr!
One morning I was dragged out of bed by mom, she asked me to dress quickly for we were going to meet someone very special, someone old and august, someone who could foresee the future…..a great old soothsayer! Even before I could ask what had gotten into them I found myself seated in a rather dark room smelling of incense and burnt oil, the walls were faded and had pictures of Goddess Kali hanging from them with small, slithery reptiles peeping in and out from behind the frames. An old frail man sat before me staring hard into my pupils….his eyes were piercing and watery, something told me he was the man! He was the one with the answers to my misery, my curse! He was gonna save my life…..after a few minutes of intense staring and glaring and concentrated dexterous analysis of my future, beads of sweat began appearing on his majestic forehead, the great man started rubbing his eyes vigorously, “There’s something wrong….I can’t see anything in there…please excuse me it’s time for my dinner!”, he stood up and left. I thought I saw him run!!
As the months rolled by and the fearful ICSE drew closer the fervency intensified and people began showing signs of lunacy and it was quite evident too, more than the students it was the mothers who were going bonkers! My mom was quite normal I am sure, I don’t see anything zany with the huge, ugly pearl ring I was forced to wear because it was supposed to make me “do well” in Math and I definitely never ever complained about the insane quantities of Ladiesfinger or Okra (Bhendi) and Bhrammi sag I was forced to consume every single day for lunch!! But it was all for good…..at least I hoped.
At the tuition front the homework load remained the same, Mr Das made sure my entire syllabus was done with way before crunch-time, therefore by that time I had done every single problem in my Math book, down to the tiniest illustration not once, but many, many times over. I even knew the page numbers by heart. Even after this much inhumanly practice there still lingered a funny sense of bewilderment every time I saw a sum, I somehow knew I would goof up! It just wasn’t my thing! It just didn’t feel right. And the more I practiced, the more mistakes I made, terribly dumb ones and paid for it heavily too, by surrendering myself to Mr. Royal Bengal Tiger’s ‘experimental punishments!!’, in more clearer terms, pinching my midriff till I squealed like a piglet, tugging at my sideburns till there were no sideburns left, rubbing his knuckles on my scalp till I wailed out loud and of course finally, the classical skull pulverizing slaps!! Nevertheless, the man made sure I kept practicing on and on and on…….an bawling and yelping too!!!!!!

Finally, the day came…….…and went! I waddled in and out of the exam hall like a sozzled drunkard, dragging my belongings behind me, dazed and hellishly tired. After having left a good number of problems half done and the rest to dear God’s mercy I was well convinced that what I’d committed back there on my examination paper was exemplary case of mathematical hara-kiri!!
A month and a half passed thereafter and then came that one fateful morning I shall never forget all my life, I snored away to glory very early that morning when mom literally yanked me out of bed and slapped me back to senses, “Rono, Rono!! You marks are out on the internet, come and check……..quick!”, the words still hadn’t quite registered adequately when I semi-consciously scrambled to dad’s room dragging half the bedclothes still entangled around my legs after me……carrying my heart in my hands I entered dad’s room!!!!
He sat in front of the computer glaring at the screen, I didn’t make the slightest sound, tiptoeing my way I walked up to him and THEN in what would almost seem like a scene straight out of a Bollywood masala tear-jerker, dad looked at me and smiled!! “A 62 in Mathematics, you’re in son!!”,
It hadn’t quite settled in that I’d apparently pulled off something spectacular, I sat still for a while, it definitely wasn’t a dream and dad didn’t quite look like he was joking, I tore at the computer and scanned the webpage up and down, over and over again sticking my eyeballs to the screen…. and then what followed was the Rocky IV exultation, if you know what I am talking about!!
The other high points of the day were an 87% in English and a cracking 96% in Technical Drawing, my additional subject, the second highest in my school, another daunting up-hill climb I’ll tell you folks about later.
A few months later we were informed that old Mr. Das, my Royal Bengal Tiger, my superhuman entity, my tutor was no more. Mr. Das, the real hero of this story had accomplished the un-accomplishable but died! To me and my parents he shall always be the man who saw me through a very difficult phase in my life….and helped me emerge successfully.
Well, I had no idea of what was in store for me the subsequent two years; the first major battle was fought and won with the final one still impending. But yet, what kept up the ecstasy were the expressions I’d brought out in people’s faces……..zapped!!! Dude sitting up there DOES have a point after all!

2007-01-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

The Big Bong Theory

The above may not be the ideal nomenclature for this yet another harangue of mine but again, nothing may describe what is to follow better.
The term, Bong may literally be a shorter and cooler adaptation for the term, Bengali but for someone akin to me the word has much wider connotations. To me Bong would mean, ‘the new-age Bengali’, the culturally rich and liberal Bengali, a more considerate people who respect and believe in and subscribe to cultural-unity and oneness.
I am Bengali, in every sense of the term and whatever insight that may give you on the individual that I am. Although my mother hails from an orthodox Telugu family replete with their traditions, customs and strict rules pertaining to everything from dressing to cooking, my bringing up has had a stronger Bengali influence than the latter, and am absolutely proud of the fact that my life till now has been a collage of experiences so hilarious and interesting none of it would be possible had I been just Telugu or just Bong!
I shall now talk about a few peculiar, rather screwy characteristic traits we Bengalis reflect irrespective of age, education, place of stay, social strata, anything, its something I’ve been noticing for a while and dying to write on, am so sure so many will identify emphatically with what’s to come. A few of what’s mentioned below is ‘classically Bengali’, if you’re one of us you’ll know;

(1) I am sure I am not alone when I say I hate attending boring family get-togethers and religious gatherings but what I particularly hate is attending Bengali marriages in Kolkata, even the ones held at the classiest of places. Here are the reasons;
#At the venue there’s sure to be at least a hundred ‘grandma’s who’ll ask you at least a hundred times each how old you are; by the end of the tiring sermon you’re yourself confused!
#There’s sure to be at least a hundred ‘grandpa’s some of whom you must’ve definitely met at some previous gathering, wanting to know where you study and how many more years you have till graduation and you more often than never end up telling the same person for the fiftieth time where you study and how many years you have left. By the end of it, yes, you wish you were dead!
#And of course, there’ll be a gazillion ‘uncle’s who’d ask you over and over and over again about your plans after graduation, or if you are in school, how far your preparations for the Board exams have gone and after that a lecture on how important these formative years are, shall follow and if your lucky enough you shall also get hear about how worthy and virtuous his son/daughter is.
#And then, there’ll be ‘aunties’ badgering you with the same lame questions you’ve been subject to rigorously throughout the evening and every now and then, for no reason at all exclaim loudly with both hands on their cheeks, “Aaaaah!! How GROWN up you are” (Of course, I eat hence I grow, go observe your pet dog, imbecile!) or “How SMART you’ve become” or even “What does mummy feed you??”(Complan) and of course the, “How handsome you’ve become!” to which I don’t have much of a disapproval.
#Suppose, me and dad are standing in a corner chatting about something a certain ‘uncle’ will show up from nowhere, uninvited and ask my DAD, “So how’s your son, by the way what’s he studying now??”!!!!!! Funny, does he not see me standing there or is he scared that I might bite his face off if he asked me??
#Bengalis love to be photographed and what better occasion than a marriage could offer one so fine an opportunity? Bong marriages have as many as 2-3 photographers and cameramen and they usually employ old fashioned video cameras from the stone-age that need an extremely bright light to be projected on people to video record them. That scorching, roaring light is cast on you unexpectedly, when you’re eating, when you’re talking to people, when you’re enjoying a quiet moment in some inconspicuous corner far away from the raucous, bejeweled crowd and even when you least want to be video recorded i.e while emerging secretively from the washroom. No formalities here, if you’re attending a marriage you HAVE TO be videotaped and photographed for at least a million times!!
#Then, the most bugging of all…..coercion to overeat. The air in all Bengali marriages is thick with pleasantries like;
Mr. Ghosh: “No, you must eat three more rossogollas!!”
Mr. Dey: “Not at all, I’ve had enough, thank you”.
Mr. Ghosh: “Aare ki bolcchen……you must have at least three more…don’t feel shy…consider this your own daughter’s marriage….have at last two more…with love!”
Mr. Dey: “No really, Ghoshbabu I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes…..am already on pills, this is suicidal!!”
Mr. Ghosh: “Aaare, I will suggest a very good doctor to you, but for now, DO have two more rossogollas…..!
Mr. Dey: “BUT THIS’LL KILL ME….!!!”
Mr. Ghosh: “Let it!! You still MUST have 2 rossogollas… ke achish re?? Get Deybabu THREE of the juiciest rossogollas QUICK now!!
I, Ronojoy Basu in the capacity of a bothered Bengali marriage-party regular bona fidely certify the above conversations as true and absolutely to-the-point.
And finally, if you happen to be on the right side of twenty BEWARE, in any and every marriage you attend, the jobless grannies will start finding matches for you even without you or your parents knowing it and before you know it some photograph of yours has already become a part of someone’s family album!!

(2) Dad absolutely insists I follow him and mom to every party we’re invited to, even if I do not know the people I am visiting, something I despise wholeheartedly.
I could never relate to dad’s old buddies who’re always more interested in downing Scotch and spending the evening chatting with him and mom than sitting around discussing career stuff with me and I don’t blame them, therefore I often find myself seated, quite uncomfortably amidst his friends (as fate should have it, at most such meets I always somehow land up in the same sofa where 3 or 4 of dad’s friends whom I’ve not met forever are seated, and damn! It feels odd) not knowing where to look, or what to do, trying to finish that little glass of Coke as slowly as possible and every now and then producing those forced grins that give you a jaw-ache by the end of the day. Now comes the Bengali garnishing;

#The minute you enter the place, you have to touch so many people’s feet it becomes a painful ordeal! And mom whispers affirmatively into my ears, “Everybody!!!!”, but of course there’s confusion again, you can’t just grace those whom you know, there’ll be a handful of other elders too in the house who you think might feel offended, rather left out if not greeted in that particular way, and yes there’ll be more coming in too, therefore so as to save hearts and traditions from breaking you’d rather break your back wandering around the room, bending down and ‘pranam’ing everybody.
#The moment you inform an aunty or an uncle at the get-together that you are surviving outside Kolkata, that’s it, the next few minutes you shall spend answering a battery of finely selected questions high in intellectual value such as; “Where do u live in Pune, son?”, most of them having never had visited Pune before, “What do you eat in Pune?”, “How are the people in Pune, what do they eat?”, “Do you get fish in Pune?”, “Do you get sweets in Pune?”, “Are girls in Pune dark?”, “Why did you decide to travel that far, wasn’t the colleges in Kolkata good enough?”
But, the question that takes the cake was once asked by a certain person at some party, this gentleman, I don’t know who he was and neither am I inclined to, asked me; “Son, how lucrative is this, ‘Law thing’, and why Law when you could’ve taken up engineering or medicine, your dad is an engineer right??” Not knowing what to reply I sat staring at him.
And of course, in my personal experience, every time Pune is mentioned it quintessentially reminds the listener of some long lost distant relative who might’ve lived/still living there, and a long story of how that individual made it to the US follows.
#You must be on your guard and armed all the time cause any lame thing may be thrown at you anytime, any smart-alec comment will only lead you into more trouble and embarrassment and any attempt at making use of subtle humor shall meet with a cold reception and you wont know if they’ve got the joke and they won’t know how to conceal from you their failure at comprehending what you’ve said, therefore what follows is utter confusion and a frosty silence for a few seconds.
#At the party, if you happen to be seated with strangers for dinner, and if they happen to be Bengali, few things you’ve never experienced are about to take place;
You smile at them to break the ice, they look away.
Your cell phone starts ringing; all of them freeze their activities and stare at you and your phone, two or three of them will eventually shall start whispering and discussing among themselves the possible brand and price of your cell phone, without, of course showing any inclination of making you a part of the conversation.

(3) Train journeys can be quite lively and enlightening if there is a talkative Bengali ‘babu’ traveling along. These soda-glass adorning, ‘jhaal-muri ’chomping and extremely animated’ babus are repositories of information and can debate on anything under the sun, be it India’s foreign policy, Terrorism, poverty or hunger and often even the UN!!! They have an answer to almost everything, and they love speaking in Hindi…..with a heavy Bengali accent and expletives in Bengali!!
Now, the one and only occasion when one can see their true fierce passions surface is when particularly two topics are brought up, the CPIM government in West Bengal, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan; Communism and football!!…..lots of football!! Matches between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, being two supremely rival football teams in this part of the hemisphere, are well known for intensely impassioned competition and equally fevered exchanges on and off-field. But, here are a few things that sometimes mess up the experience and if it’s bad enough you’ve had it;
#Discussions on football or Mamata Banerjee can be quite infectious and our Babus can jabber on well through the night till dawn, to the intense ire of everybody else.
#They absolutely insist other unwilling Bengali co-passengers to join in.
#They hate us Bongs.
#The Hindi accented Bengali gets on everybody’s nerves but at times can be quite side-splitting too.
#Discussions on where steamed Hilsa originated from and who fried the first piece of Hilsa is of nano interest to me.
#Babus absolutely hate Marwaris, so if there’s one seated in some corner of the train, you can expect more exchanges than just snide remarks.
#Finally, these babus have an uncanny knack of getting into brawls and arguments with everybody.

(4) Finally, we Bengalis have an unbearably irritating habit of questioning the obvious;

‘Ki Korcho?’(What are you doing?), is one such rage arousing question, as if the one asking can’t you see what I might be doing? Such a question is considered quite legitimate and extremely necessary to ask even if the concerned person has been sitting next to you for the past two hours in the Library or at the park bench.
‘Ki Khaccho?’(What are you eating?) and ‘Kothay Jaccho?’(Where are you going? ……even if you’re in full school uniform sitting in your school bus), are two such extremely essential queries that can drive our Bong brethren worried sick.

But it doesn’t stop here, Bengali quirks and eccentricities are well known, suffered and enjoyed. We ARE a distinguished entertaining lot. Now, in this context I would attempt to straighten a few perspectives and break a few myths that exist about my Bengali brothers and sisters;
#West Bengal isn’t all about fish and sweets and every Bengali isn’t wildly passionate about the former, the same goes for sweets.
#The plump gentleman sitting next to you wearing thick, black rimmed glasses with neatly combed hair may not be Bengali.
#Our women do not ALWAYS roam in white-sarees with a red bordering!
#Our men do not ALWAYS carry on in the proverbial, Dhoti and Kurta with a sharp-tipped umbrella slung on one hand and an end of the dhoti held in the other.
#All of us do not have revolutionary tendencies.
#All our women aren’t fat.
#Not all of us run away from fights and scuffles, most of us love burning buses though, there are just too many of them in Kolkata!
#Not ALL of us hate Marwaris and Biharis, I love Kaju-Barfi.
#No, Koena Mitra or Bipasha Basu doesn’t stay next doors.
#I don’t know why Sourav Ganguly is performing badly.
#No, all of us don’t bitch.
#‘Basu’ and ‘Bose’ isn’t one and the same thing, and so are Rai, Ray and Roy.
#Not ALL talkative Bengalis are surnamed ‘Chatter’jee.
#We are definitely not a predominantly snooty or arrogant people.
#Neither Sushmita Sen nor anybody of her like is of any distant relation to me, and no, if you come to Kolkata I can’t help you meet them.
#All of us do not have a thick ‘Bangla’ accent.
#Not ALL of us have a thing for Punjabi women (I do though).
#Not every Bengali is nuts about football.
#Not all of us get de-virginised after marriage.
#And……..Do not call us all, ‘dada’.

Well, these are for those Bengali comrades of mine who live confined at home and have a ridiculously confused outlook of the world and love to exist with myths;
#Kashmir isn’t all about apples and terrorism and Maharashtra isn’t all about ‘lively dances’ and ‘Vada-pavs’.
#No! we, Bengalis aren’t essentially the one and only intellectual and dignified community in the country.
#Just cause I live in Bombay, it doesn’t mean I go jogging with different movie stars every morning or party with models every week-end.
#‘Tendu-Mendu’ is not how South Indian languages sound!
#I am not entirely sure if Ma Kali or Ma Durga are/were Bengali.
#No!! Eating fish doesn’t make you extraordinarily intelligent and is definitely not the secret behind the Bengali dexterity!
#Not all south Indian women are fat and dark……sheesh!!
#Communism is not the ONLY reason why China is prospering, take a look at the Soviet Union.
#Lots of milk and Ghee ALONE don’t make Punjabi men tall and fair.
#Tea doesn’t make you dark.
#Sporting a goatee ALONE doesn’t make you Muslim, the actual test is the turtle-neck test, go figure!
#Not every Bihari is an IAS officer!
#There is no compulsion to eat cakes on Christmas or Biriyani on Eid.
#All Afghan men do not ALWAYS have dry fruits in their pockets.
#And finally, NO, we Bengali men aren’t specially sought for by women everywhere….hard luck fellas!

This exploration of mine therefore might appear to give off a slight negative whiff but what the heck! Quirks are quirks! We all have ‘em. I’ve luckily had a fair share of experiencing Telugu quirks too but to do justice to the thoroughly exclusive ‘Bengali-ness’ of this composition I shall have to put up with the pain of refraining from discussing them here, it’s highly tempting though.
At the end of it all, I’d like to conclude that, among others, being overly and unrelentingly subject to such particularly odd cultural behavior and practices that too from two entirely different cultures, can have an unsafe and long-lasting effect on ones psyche and can often tend to make one highly obsessive and nervous (what many call being ‘goofy’), but fellas, I see it as a small side-effect of being BONG!

2006-12-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

Dilemmas of being a PILLION rider!!
(Dumb yet true!)

Looking around I see an entire population rolling around on wheels; motorized and ‘un’motorized, cycles of various colors and ‘CCs’, queer little things, those ‘scooties’, ‘mopeds’ and cars zipping by, choch-a-block-ing the streets of the city I’ve adopted as my home for the last 4 years for academic purposes, what cannot go without a mention is the raucous mass of human beings spilling over into the main road from the scant foot-paths and wading their way nonchalantly through the roaring and honking ocean of vehicles. Passing by, I notice the many malls, wada-pav sellers, juice vendors, the BARISTAs, the CCDs, the LEEs and the REEBOKs, the PYRAMIDS and the PANTALOONs, the PLANET Ms and the MUSIC WORLDs and then of course, the many shapely little things walking around in groups- all the stereotypes and essentials of the 'young' city, Pune..... and then all of a sudden, the nape of a dirty neck…..a cold slap on the face!!
Howdy! I am the pillion rider!!!

“You are sure to meet with an accident, son, Pune roads are unbelievably bad and people have no traffic sense and besides….you even fell off your tricycle so many times as a kid!”,
“Your stars don’t permit you to ride those which move on two wheels, if you disobey your celestial guardians, not even divine interference can keep him from a horrifying consequentiality!”(“Can I ‘ride’ those that move on two legs then??” should’ve been a reasonable doubt, wonder why it never occured to me back then?).
“Rono you are just way too scared and nervy to ride, trust me the day you set your bottoms on a bike seat……. you’re done, brother!!!”
“Over my dead body!!!! If you even think of getting our son a two-wheeler, I shall move to my maternal place….FOREVER!!” ...concluded my mother.
Such was the encouragement that emanated from the very thought or sight of me planted on a motorcycle or even….a bicycle! Therefore I have now survived for near about 4 years in the city where even the milkman has a Hero Honda, often traversing on foot and sometimes surrendering myself to the cunning ‘auto-walla’s who would be more than happy to take anyone for a leisurely ride and even graciously give a short tour of the entire city if one didn’t know his way around; these greedy,little gremlins often carry picked Meters and phony fare-cards so during my first few weeks in the city I was shelling out three-figure amounts for short trips to the market or the bank or even to the nearest movie theatre!
But also, I am not the only one. Many such ill-fated blokes in the city like me exist, who have even had to go on dates in an auto-rickshaw!! Funny, images of my first and only date should assail to my mind…….!
Yet, the scorching envy with which my eyes have followed each ‘dude’ sprawling luxuriously on their THUNDERBIRDs and BULLETs is sure to send each and every one of their petrol-guzzling chariots to the service station at least once, with serious engine issues, or so I can solemnly hope.
Nevertheless, this matter being so extremely sensitive as to send me spiraling away from the main subject matter of this essay, I shall now solely focus and expand on my experiences and expertise on the topic of ‘skilled pillion-riding!’ Yes, I have been so many people’s ‘bitch’ there’s a lot of venom to spew! So bear with me….
Here is a brief study of a few various reasons( among tonnes of others) why I hate pillion-ing;

FIRST; Whenever you're on a long ride with the guys you are never part of the excitement, the action….the sole purpose of the trip being the RIDING!!

PRO: Sit back, enjoy the breeze, the raindrops don’t strike your face twice as hard, the slush gets your friend’s trousers first and be the wimp!
CON: Being the wimp!

SECOND; You don’t know if that hot, little fox is staring at you or your rider friend.
PRO: Doesn’t make a difference, she’ll most definitely be taken.
CON: Even if she’s interested, it’s your friend and not his ‘burden’.

THIRD; You’re always the wuss who has to be ‘picked up’ and ‘dropped off’!
PRO: Good! it’s a free ride!
CON: Constant subjection to sentences like, “I’ll pick you up at six sharp! stand outside your flat”, “How will you go back home? Do I have to drop you off?”(WHAT!! Am I your date??), “Sit behind him, you’re too heavy!”….and the other guy goes, “no-no my shock absorbers are too weak!” and sometimes, “Shut it dude, don’t disturb me when I am riding!”

FOURTH; Your bike goes over a speed-breaker without braking, your n**s are crushed!!!
PRO: Ah well! They were of no REAL use anyway!
CON: WTF! YOUR N**S ARE CRUSHED!!!!!

FIFTH; You are always the sidekick who’s made to wait and guard the bike while your friend is away cashing-out or meeting an aunt.
PRO: Well you finally have ONE responsibility.
CON: Playing Sancho Panza can often be painfully detrimental to one’s self esteem!

SIXTH; Perched at the back you’re sure to be made the mule. Jackets, helmets, guitars, amplifiers, food, booze anything, often everything is dumped on you. Fair enough!
PRO: Often reminds me of a certain 10 armed Goddess and that how comfortable she might be in certain situations……what would she do if her armpits itched?
If its food and booze you’re dumped with, mooch away!! simple, they were getting too heavy to carry!
CON: Con? What con? Don’t Coat-hangers have self-esteem too?

SEVENTH; “Parking-ticket money?? The guy in the back pays, my hands are ‘full’”!
PRO: With all the change in your pockets gone you’ll probably weigh lighter on the weighing scale next time you’re checking.
CON: Crap! Can’t even afford a gum.

EIGHTH; Your imbecile of a friend decides to do a wheelie with you sitting behind and you cant refuse him.
PRO: Good! Now you know you’re stupid too.
CON: The first to go were your n**ts, now clear the road for your buns!

NINTH; If your rider friend is wearing a helmet, it’s YOUR head that’ll need protection every time his disc-brakes break into action!
PRO: Well, ‘head-banging’ gets a cool new expression!!
CON: Apart from the obvious, what a sight it shall make if you BOTH wear helmets!

TENTH; As for the grand conclusion I have reserved the most dreadfully embarrassing experience of all, something I’ve been subject to so many times , it’s when you’re riding with a girl……...as HER pillion!!!
PRO: You can put your arms around her and hope she keeps those sudden brakes going!
CON: You may just HAVE TO wear that helmet!

The message therefore stands crystal clear;
1) Whoever says sitting at the back reduces chances of getting injured in an accident is a raving madcap!
2) Well, taking that auto won’t hurt after all.
3) If you happen to be like the helpless little mule that I am DON’T ever date or go out with women who have their own transportation, it’ll only make you want to shrink to the size of a G.I. Joe
4) Putting on a sports abdomen-guard before embarking on some ‘bumpy’ pillion riding is highly recommended.
5) If your friend has gone across the road to cash-out or to irrigate the streets or whatever, having left his vehicle with you, get on it and pretend it’s yours!
6) And finally!!! Get your own means of transportation even if financing that would require you to take up contract killing……if that’s too difficult just go become an auto-walla, they have a better life!!

2006-12-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is unbelievable.......6 months after I gave it all up....shux!!!!

http://shop.grasscity.com/shop/grasscity/index.html

The vapourizer takes the cake....and the cream on top.........

maybe the CHERRY too...:-/

2006-12-01T01:11:00.000-08:00

3 weeks into Pune and I've begun hating it already, can't wake myself up before ten every morning and college is half empty.....
And I fkin hate being stared at by FAT chicks!!!! Urrrrrghhh!

2006-11-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

Meanie-me

It’s this time of every vacation that I start contracting the blues severely and it feels terrible, there being just one and a half more days left for these holidays of mine to end, I woke up today morning feeling utterly miserable and no less than a hopeless wreck. It is these times when everything you have done during these few days that’s even distantly wrong comes back and thwacks you on the face like a boomerang!
This entire month I’ve kept getting mad at my mother now and again for having nagged me relentlessly about my ‘unhealthy and unhygienic’ existence, she always has a problem with what I wear, how I eat, what I do throughout the day, how I spend my money, how many times I repeat my clothes and practically everything else that constitutes my way of living. Being woken up early in the morning to go buy groceries is something I have always despised and that is precisely what I’ve been asked to do on numerous occasions this vacation and I HAVE SULKED!! I’ve brooded like a selfish old man. The groceries would’ve been for my own consumption during the day and for nobody else.
Although, thankfully I have never been rude to either of my parents, but it hurts to have even sulked, I feel like a criminal.
Mom’s day begins at unearthly hours in the morning, with cooking lunch for His Highness, that being myself, getting my clothes washed in the machine and making breakfast for me. Then she hurries to school. All that effort just to compensate for my having to be alone at home for a few hours till she returns from school, more so cause I am on vacation!! And should I sulk if a little favor is ever asked of me? Is, telling her how great my vacation has been because of all that she has done for me and how much I appreciate all the hard work she has put in every single day to make sure that I live like a king, enough? I think not.
And now that the day has come to an end and I see her in bed, fast asleep due to exhaustion from the day’s work, I feel so sorry for her, feel so ashamed for having been moody, for having been such a complete loser, for not having been able to convincingly put across to her that it has actually been for her that life has been such a cakewalk for the lethargic sloth that I am.
Tomorrow and day-after are my last days at home before I board that train back to Pune, I promise, for these two days I will not be moody and I’ll not brood.

2006-11-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

The little verandah I grew up in....

A different sun rose every morning in Park Circus, CIT Road.
From my earliest recollections of those days, the scant images that materialize timidly to my mind are those of beautiful early mornings that I had spent with grandma or mom, standing in the little verandah of our little two-bed roomed rented apartment, waving out to dad or Jethu leaving for office. There was certainly something magical about that atmosphere, something immensely fulfilling. Maybe it is just the rosy, dreamy haze with which we tend to enfold the images of our earliest memories, making them appear more beautiful than they already might have been, but the unrelenting thought that there might have been after all something more to those sunny mornings makes me want to keep thinking about them. There’s a special feeling to it, it’s only me to whom it occurs and it is me alone who derives a certain comfort out of it, a strange comfort resulting out of an odd chemistry between happiness and poignancy.
I was brought up till the age of 4 or 5 in that old rented flat till we all, my dad, mom, grandma, grandpa, my baby sister and jethu, dad’s elder brother and my best friend decided to vacate it and shift out, for good.
Memories of that dark, tiny flat sit heavily on my mind and I often think about the many Saturday winter afternoons I’d spent squatting alone on the sun-warmed floor of the verandah, right next to the potted creepers, playing with my jarful or marbles and those colorful, tiny plastic animals that came free with the little boxes of ‘Tit-Bits’ mom used to get me from the marketplace very often, am not too sure if you’ll know or recollect what those were. Tit-Bits were my favorite, tiny, sugar coated candies. A box of Tit-Bits would come shaped as a joker with a mouth that could be opened by pushing up the red lolling tongue of the jester into a tiny slot glued below his nose, the sweeties then could be shaken and jerked out of the mouth.
But it wasn’t the candy that I desired, candy after candy would roll out of the joker’s mouth but that long awaited sight that would lighten me up with pure, unadulterated rapture was that of a tiny red, yellow or blue tail or head of a deer or a tiger stuck between two or three Tit-Bits near the mouth, ready to be liberated in a shake or two!! So whenever I got the slightest inkling that mom might venture out to the bazaar I’d run to her and hug her sari tightly with my tiny arms spread out as widely as possible and she’d instantly get the clue.
The other afternoons would be spent sleeping right next to my grandma, with all four of my limbs on top of her; I was so tiny I could hardly ever get my arms fully around her; she was a tad big too. I remember, in CIT Road, evenings would be heralded by a resonating namaaz read from a mosque situated just two houses after our’s. The namaaz used to be propagated through large speakers fixed atop the roof of the mosque and every evening our neighborhood would wake up to that slow and haunting recital, I always wondered what the words chanted in the namaaz meant…no one at home could tell me much! The namaaz, breaking out through the cool darkness of the evening and the eerie silence thereafter used to have an strange intoxicating effect on me and I would abandon all effort to try and get up, BUT obligations at home had to be heeded too, mom would drag me out of bed and wash all the afternoon siesta off my face and sit me down for the evening puja.
Evenings were what I used to look forward to eagerly for the reason that dad and Jethu would be back from work. Jethu ALWAYS bought something for me on his way back from work without fail, but what I especially looked forward to were those big chocolate bars called ‘Fudge’ that he used to buy me very often, they don’t sell it anymore these days. A bar of Fudge used to come with free stickers of He-Man and his beefy lot, and much to my mother’s displeasure most of them would finally end up adorning grandma’s expensive dressing-table mirror and what tantrums I used to throw if mom was ever seen, so much as even proceeding towards the mirror with a wet piece of cloth!
I often managed to tick Jethu off too, I remember this one evening when I’d created quite a stir in the house when myself, having caused a large tear in one of the pages of an expensive photography manual he had just purchased and brought home, leaped off the bed where it was kept and made off, on being asked where that ‘rippling’ sound had come from, I intelligently blamed my ‘bad’ stomach. I came so close to being walloped that night I can never thank my grandma enough for having managed to pull me out of that pickle. I realized that evening, that I was a free bird in the house as long as I had grandma backing me up.
The evenings in CIT road used to be somewhat special, while I practiced Math or handwriting with mom coming by from the kitchen every half an hour to check on me, Jethu would play soft ghazals on the stereo in the room adjacent to the verandah, sit by the verandah, chatting with dad over a smoke, sometimes there’d even be whiskey flowing, with mom replenishing the plate of snacks every now and then and myself hovering around, assisting and sometimes even outdoing dad and Jethu in consuming the contents of the plate, till mom would grab me by my ears and force me back to the other bedroom, back to my books. Grandpa would just sit in his room and grumble, “Urrgh…. the music!!!”
My Jethu used to be my best friend of sorts and I was as afraid of him. He was the one buying me all the Fudges and the Citras (a bottle of which I could never manage to finish, he would never even scold me for wasting it), and later on all the He-Mans and Gi-Joes had also come from him, Jethu would always take me out to wherever one could drag a toddler around and I hardly ever came back empty handed. The first movie I ever went out for was with him, we’d watched Indiana Jones together! Jethu was also the first one to buy me a bike and of course, introduce me to sausages!! It’s been eight years since I last met him. Mom so very often tells me that I have all his traits, the love for music and for food and that I somewhat even look like him.
No matter where the rest of my day was spent, at home assisting mom in ‘cooking’ (carrying spatulas, spoons and forks and laying them by the plates) or shopping or in Kindergarten, my early-mornings were always spent in that tiny, sun-washed verandah of ours, that’s where my day began. That has been the battlefield for so many of my skirmishes, mom chasing me around with breakfast desperate to send me off to school with a full tummy, the make-believe enemies I used to mow down with my Leo gun, the little cats I used to chase around and of course exploring the big, wooden box kept away in a corner.
That particular box used to be of enormous interest to me; made solely out of planks of wood it stood higher than me, stacked away in a corner with cobwebs growing all over it forming a fragile, translucent canopy off which the morning sunlight would sometimes reflect causing a strange and somewhat fascinating glitter, with ghosts of the past peeping out from the dark inside, through small gaps between the wooden planks making up the box and dark and ferociously ugly lizards scrambling in and around the box, it assumed a highly mysterious appearance. What could possibly be inside it? Why would mom warn me never to get near it? All that she had told me was, someone very bad was trapped inside! On many an occasion I had managed to scrape together all the nerve in me to go and try to open the box but the very sight of those slithery, hellishly hideous reptiles and the fear that some hairy, clawed, growling entity might leap out to assault me, quite effectively kept me miles away from it. I was very much at hand when one afternoon some coolies were brought to open up the box and empty the contents, grandma complained it was taking up too much space, hold you breath for what emerged from inside!!!……..
Boxfuls of old documents, a few of my grandpa’s old army daggers and a bunch of his thick army uniforms, so much for all the suspense and tales mom and grandma had woven around it to keep me off it.
No philosophy here but that old verandah acted as my eyes to the outside world, since I wasn’t allowed to venture out much, standing on my toes and peeping outside was a luxury I was allowed. Why men emerging from the mosque wore white caps was way beyond me and why a haggard, filthy looking man downstairs kept wishing strangers ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ and made funny gestures looking up at me also went over my skull, but it was all okay and fun!
Considering the amount of time I’d spent staring at the street across and even at the main road on the other side through which most of the heavy traffic passed, I had acquired a reasonably good idea of who passed on the streets and around what time, there was a rubber-tanning factory somewhere nearby, it gave off a peculiar smell everyday during a particular time, the smell, if not offensive wasn’t too inviting either and I knew exactly what time during the day that smell would start coming. That was the profundity of knowledge I had attained spending countless afternoons standing all alone in the little verandah and peeping outside from there.
It was also in that little space that, probably for the first time I had witnessed the true horrors of a massive fire, this one had a catastrophic potentiality, one morning an LPG gas transportation truck caught fire in the street right across our house, the cylinders immediately started blowing up one by one, the smell was unbearable and so were the deafening explosions, each gas cylinder blast sent chunks of metal shooting off everywhere, the firemen went berserk trying to bring the situation under control as cylinder after cylinder exploded sending roaring echoes everywhere, the flames rising from the truck went sky high disappearing in a plume of black smoke rising higher and higher, I’ve never, till date, ever seen a fire that big and I still do have the images fresh in my memory. I remember being in the verandah, in mom’s arms, seeing people run wildly everywhere screaming and rubbing their burning eyes, it was the gas! Even our eyes burnt but we still had to see, later we were dragged indoors. It was all very amusing to me in a strange way and I felt totally secured in mom’s arms.

A recent couple of years back mom and I paid a visit to our then- landlady, she’s old and ailing, we had been her tenants for very long, my grandma and her were good friends and she knew us well, she wanted to see us. Her house in CIT Road was located right behind our’s. In her house I discovered that the glass windows by the stairway leading up to the old lady’s room offered a clear view of what was left of our erstwhile residence, the part of the house that could be seen through those windows was the passage that connected the kitchen and the bathroom outside to the rest of the rooms inside. Mom kept climbing on but I stopped.
A short, chill flash of pain cut through my heart as my eyes caught the very visions I had grown up seeing, through the dirty and hardly transparent glass I saw a faint image of that very kitchen where mom and grandma had spent innumerable evenings cooking and chatting with Jethu tip-toeing in and out of it carrying something to go with his whiskey, the little room right next to it where dad, mom and I used to sleep, the very room where mom used to sit and teach me nursery rhymes during those long summer afternoons and tell me stories about her younger days and dad taught me and my baby sister how to bat, the very passage up and down which I used to race, being chased by either dad or Jethu or even my sister…..but that’s all these windows would permit! But I was desperate to see the verandah; unfortunately it was totally on another side!!!! I felt weak in the knees and staggered upstairs. Where was my verandah?
Amidst all the; “Oh how grown up you are!” and “It’s been so long…where do you study…how many more years left to go??….”and so on and so forth, my mind kept wandering away, there was only one thing on my mind, I craved and yearned to take one long, last look at my old little dwelling, my sweet little verandah, oh how I craved!
Gathering up enough courage I requested the old lady to let me out to her terrace so I could see our flat properly, she obliged immediately after I fulfilled her condition, that is, of devouring two extra rasgollas!
My being lead upstairs to the terrace triggered off a hushed conversation among the womenfolk in the house to the effect of, “Oh how sentimental the boy is….oh! Just look at him…he just couldn’t forget…after all who does?!”
The terrace was disappointing and all I could see was the roof of the house, something I’d never seen during the entirety of my stay there and am sure neither did dad or anybody else. Finally, after a long examination of directions and their corresponding windows in the house, I was lead into a room that had a lucid view of my tiny little flat.
This is where the final bludgeon fell on me. Our kitchen was broken up and renovated from the inside; the new owners had made it into some sort of a store room!! The little bedroom next to it was now a mass dining room and looked nothing like it did before! And the passage was renovated to make a hallway replete with carpets and chandeliers, a servant told me that the place had been turned into a hall for conducting Muslim weddings. But where was my verandah!? Why could I still not see it? Evidently, there was no window in the house that could show me my verandah.
While leaving as we passed by the old house I stopped the car and got out, the verandah looked just as it used to, from the outside, unpainted and with creepers growing all around the outer wall. A lump appeared in my throat as I realized I was standing in the very same spot where the haggard, old mad-man used to stand, about 10 years back, looking up and making faces at me. I looked around for him; he was nowhere to be seen. CIT road was a different place now; it wasn’t the CIT Road that I had left behind.
My little verandah kept drifting further and further away as we drove away, one moment it was there, the next moment it was gone.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!”, they say. Quite right, this beggar could’ve owned a stable as huge as those in English farms, drumming with Japanese Taiko drummers, kicking out Hugh Hefner and taking his place, owning an entire winery, driving my own Lexus, being named the next potential Booker-bagger after Kiran Desai, name the steed and my stable houses her.
No philosophy here again, but am so prepared to let them all go, let them leave me dream after dream, but only in exchange of one dying wish;
‘Take me back to where I came from, I don’t like this world cause it is too cold here. Let me go back to that very tiny, sun-warmed universe of mine where I belonged, all alone with that mysterious wooden box and the lizards, the small plastic animals and the creepers surrounding me, let innocence and love prevail in that world and in that microcosm of my childhood let me stand tip-toed, peeping out, waiting for a new sun to rise!”

2006-11-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

Looking back

Putting down in words one’s ruminations on life can sometimes be one of the toughest and most boring things to do, especially for a person like me.
I think too much!! No matter how insignificant something might be, or how formless it may be, I often find myself comfortably day dreaming and pondering upon such fleeting thoughts. To add to it am a bundle of contradictions and much to my own amusement I, more often than never find myself contradicting my own thoughts and opinions and arguing against my OWN SELF!! Wont quite work to my advantage as a lawyer, would it?
Therefore you see I have too many conclusions for one thought. And now if I am to pen down what I think about life or how life has been to me so far, there would be way too many conclusions and no doubt exists that wording all of it would be an epic task and finally, by the grand end of it, quite surely, I’ll end up disagreeing with myself upon every single line I’ve written and in a fit of irritation expunge what might’ve taken me hours to produce. Such a thing can be quite a pain in the backside when you have a particular fondness for writing. But nevertheless I shall proceed to describe how my life has been so far in this post, without of course meddling much with the philosophical aspects of things or by the end of it, there shall be no post at all!
This is going to be somewhat extensive………
My earliest recollections, as far back as my memory can stretch, are just blurred images and sounds, incongruous and broken; images like mom looking down at me, then grandma, then mom again, and then grandma again, then comes grandpa, uncles and aunts and then a fearfully dark and hairy face (quite presumably belonging to a servant, my lineage would obviously have had better complexion, it could also have been Rupa aunty!) stuffing a large spoonful of some gooey matter down my throat and then suddenly picking me up and started tossing me about in the air like a tandoori roti, singing loudly, I do clearly remember how dad was imitating her standing right behind her!!. I remember when she finally stopped, I looked up at her and……..
There’s the memory of the time, when an older me, marched straight into the kitchen one fine evening and grabbed a bottleful of kerosene thinking it was water and took generous swigs before realizing that water would never taste that offensive….the last thing my fainting eyes could perceive was mom charging at me screaming.
Then there’s also the memory of my first day at school, it was raining cats and dogs that morning and mom had walked me all the way down from home to school, we walked under one umbrella. ‘Little Angels’ was a nursery school and was quite reputed for being really strict, it was the first day of my life that I was to spend without mom, how I cried hugging her, no I wouldn’t let go of her. No matter how much the ayahs tried to drag me away first by cajoling then with force, I clung on to her sari…. finally I had to let her walk away on being promised a chocolate, which was of course never given to me. I don’t remember much of my nursery school days except the large and colorful wooden blocks, toys and number charts, inflated rubber clowns, the water bottles that were hung around our necks and the ID cards and a particular girl whose arrival at school I used to await with unabated breath. Don’t remember much of her…..
My ‘proper’ school life started in Dayanand Anglovedic School, Kolkata which I joined, I suppose when I was 4 and studied in till I was in my 5th standard, DAV was a long voyage of unpleasant experiences. It was in DAV that I was first slapped, struck hard across my face by my Principal, for ‘running in the corridor wildly!!’, then our Vice-Principal, for having been ‘naughty’ and finally our class teacher/math teacher for having failed in Math for the umpteenth time, Math, the subject, that pretty much shaped and defined my school life in the years to come!! It was in DAV that I actually started developing a slight stutter which developed into quite a predicament; I had to jerk my arms and shoulders to get words out much to the amusement of my classmates and even some of my teachers, am not using this post to spew out the pent up venom inside me but this one little incident I’ll never forget; once on being called out to read a passage from my book by my English teacher, I started jerking and stammering ridiculously in front of the entire class and amidst the huge uproar of laughter stood my English teacher IMITATING every desperate move of mine trying to express myself!!! She stood there making fun of me! Then she rebuked me for my infirmity before the entire class. Gosh I so wish I could give it back to that wretched soul!! That was DAV, Kolkata.
Vivekananda Mission School was where things sort of improved; I realized that I could make up for my lack of Mathematical faculty with my growing prowess in English and the latter became my only shield against constant ridicule and criticism for my inability to comprehend that ever-elusive subject pertaining to numbers.
It was during my Boards exams that I actually pulled off miracles of sorts to the utter bafflement of my teachers and colleagues, first there was the school second highest of 97% in Technical Drawing in my Xth standard exams, a subject that I’d taken up one year late and Second, passing in Math with reasonably good marks in my XII th standard exams, where most students considered ‘good’ in Math had flunked!!!
It was also in VMS that I learnt about the birds and the bees and why girls in our school never had pockets in their uniform shirts!
Home was always my safe sanctuary, and I enjoyed an extremely exalted position at home till my grandma was alive. Till the very day she was alive, ‘thamma’ used to make sure that I always had my pockets full and jingling and that no one ever said so much as a word to me or got anywhere near me if something went wrong. Not that my sister was discriminated against, she got her share too. How I wish she were still around. Home was a little bit too protective therefore, that I might have to be sent outside my hometown for college studies after school, was being considered by my parents right from the time I joined Standard XI.
Finally, in the June of 2003, I joined Symbiosis Law College and arrived in Pune! Pune was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to someone like me. From the ultra-conservative environ I was growing under with all its taboos, dogmas and superstitions; Pune was a shocking and most welcome change. It’s in Pune that I first realized what it felt like to be studying in a class full of people from different corners of the country, totally different in attitude, behavior and outlook, rather than a class full of neighbors! It was here that I first saw a REAL mini skirt, that too in college premises!! It was here that I realized that studies alone doesn’t make a man, that friends sometimes matter more than money and that social drinking doesn’t necessarily make you a ‘naughty boy’, something else does!! Pune caused so many ‘firsts’ in my life it’s actually creepy!! The first joint I ever lit, the first peg I ever downed, the first time I feel deeply in love, even the first time I got chased by a mongrel or a drunk, all happened in this blessed city !! Finally, Pune gave me Ehsaas, my first band!
At this grand finale of my 21 year old, somewhat stable ride through life, in spite of all my stupid self-contradictory notions, unrelenting confusion regarding almost everything, extreme laziness, impulsive idiocy, affinity for empty vessels and by-the-minute infatuations….. I feel have learnt a great deal!
Although it’s tough to put my finger on it, but I do feel somewhat matured now! It was facing life alone, having strong friends (…and weak ones) that helped me figure things out and set things straight.
I’ve learnt that things have a way of rectifying themselves only if you want them to, only if you want them to desperately enough. I’ve learnt to care two hoots about nay-sayers, wannabes and pretenders and follow my heart, to shed my inhibitions and sing out loud…..to keep fighting for what I think is right and what I think is mine, not to be ashamed to tell your parents how much you love them, to make my voice be heard, to be who I am and to be proud of being ME, to take a strong stand when needed, to know that I have lifted those drumsticks in the air only to bring them down hard on the skins, to make those cymbals shiver all around me and to pound on till the last drop of energy in my body burns out, to believe that it is entirely rightful stare at a pair of gorgeous bottoms IF you are standing BEHIND the possessor. Finally I’ve learnt that if you’re in love, let her know or you may lose her forever.
Am fighting, am fighting everyday against myself to make me a better person, believe me its tough. I recognize my inadequacies and also know what’s right but you see there lays an ocean of difference between what’s known and what’s done…but what the heck…I am 22 long years old and there’s lots and lots more to come…..

…….when she finally stopped I looked up at her and BARFED out all the slimy goo I was being fed, on her face! I was making a stand!