A Guinness Record

Yesterday in suburban Mulund where the local residents had formed a neighbourhood watch to nab thieves, a few kids spread the news that they had seen a robber on top of a tree. Within no time, a crowd, including local cops, gathered at the spot craning their necks to catch a sight of and hopefully catch the robber.


Not surprising. What's surprising is the number of people who turned up - Over 5000. Looks like this city is not just over-populated, it is also under-employed.


And here's the killer - There was no robber in the tree. 


Last week, a day before Republic Day, there was another crowd that gathered in one part of Maharashtra. No, not the hordes that thronged (word that means, 'a wronged thong'), malls to shop till their bags burst. Not the hordes that thronged railway stations and airports to enjoy the (self-created) extended weekend.


This crowd had a purpose: To create the new Guinness World Record for the maximum number of people singing a national anthem together. The event was conceptualised and executed by Lokmat, Maharashtra's leading Marathi newspaper. The numbers added up to over 50,000 and most of them were children. (Ten times more than those involved in the sport of robber-spotting; so there's hope I guess.) Here's the video.

Nice, I say.


But one question: Did you stand up while they sang?

Slient Night, Fiery Night.

It was 1995. I was young. (Okay, okay, I was 27, but when you reach my age, 27 is young.) Roaming upcountry Maharashtra for a photography shoot, we found ourselves at Gaganbavda, a place near Kolhapur where the ghats peak before they curve gently down into Konkan. It was evening and there was a nip in the September air, the kind that makes you yearn for hot coffee and a soft blanket. We had to spend the night there, wake up at the crack of dawn and catch the light needed for a perfect photograph. The only hotel there had a long corridor with a row of rooms that held the promise of mosquitoes, bed bugs and bathrooms that smelled of body fluids secreted since 1947. We decided to check out the local PWD bungalow and got lucky.

So far so not fiery.

For dinner, there weren't two options. The only hotel in Gaganbavda had the only restaurant too. Looking at a lone lizard on the wall stalking a thousand insects in the dining hall, we decided to pack the local food - zunka-bhakar and some daal-rice and threw in some egg omelettes, just in case.

By ten, after having fortified ourselves with some whisky, we were ready for dinner. It was quiet outside. All of Gaganbavda's residents had pulled blankets over their heads and were doing what people do under blankets on a cold night. The only sound was the racket in the other part of the bungalow - College boys on a picnic. Decibel level of a pack of dogs chasing a cat notwithstanding, their noise was reassuring; we had all watched movies of what happens to city folks who check into deserted bungalows with rickety caretakers who are three hundred years old.

We unpacked dinner. And all noise faded away. The zunka, the daal and even the omelettes were a strange red in colour. The colour of dried blood. I, being accustomed to the cuisine of Kolhapur, was the only one who had been rendered speechless because my mouth had watered at the sight of so much chilli powder. The rest were simply stunned into silence. For them, chilli was an additive to be used occasionally in food and Kolhapur was a district in the sugar belt of Maharashtra. As I attacked my food with gusto (or maybe ‘gut’so is a better word), the rest looked on. Seeing that I had neither fainted nor were my eyes streaming, they put the morsels of red into their mouths.

To date when a child refuses to sleep in Gaganbavda, its mother tells the story of a September night when four dragons ran around the streets breathing fire from their nostrils and mouths. 

Calling a skirt a skirt

I came across this in a column by NK who is the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine (definition: more ads, less editorial; more pictures, less words; more glam, no slam).

‘We thrive on BS and blowing sunshine up each other’s skirts. (Replace “skirt’” with the English word for derrière and you will know what I want to say.)’

Huh?!

Okay lady, we understand you are the E-in-C of a fashion mag and hence your French is probably better than your English, and your finishing school (defined as a school where they lay mighty stress on dental hygiene while teaching you to cover your mouth when you laugh), upbringing mandates that you appear polite while being rude, but this is the 21st century - or did I get my calendar wrong?

Then again, I wonder if the E-in-C of a French fashion mag had to write the same thing would she use ‘arse’ and request us to replace it with ‘derrière’?

I also wonder if NK has kids and if she does, did she teach her children to say, “Mom, I am done with my merde so can you wipe my derrière, sil vous plait?” Yeah, the classes wipe while the unwashed masses wash.

Push the example further and you can safely assume that the only language spoken in the bedroom is French. “Oui! Oui!! Oui!!!” That is, when the lady can find her tongue.

And further in the same column, this:

‘If you are blunt to a fault, you often share the same tag as a dog of the female persuasion.’

A dog of the female persuasion?! Did the lady mean ‘bitch?’ Or did she mean a dog who has been persuaded to turn gay? And was she referring to the gay community with a word that starts with a ‘b’ and rhymes with ‘itch’?

Well, it does take all kinds to make the world come to a grinding halt.

But back to the column. The irony of the column is that it is about the virtues of being equally honest in your praise and criticism. Of not being afraid of being called a gay dog for speaking your mind.

The column appeared in last Sunday’s Indian Express supplement, The Eye. No, I cannot mention the writer’s name. You will have to excuse my French for that; it isn’t good enough to translate the name from Punjabi.

Crawlers - The Sequel

Remember the joy of watching pirated movies on local cable?

If you don't, you are obviously underage, so go away! This is no place for a kid who is legally allowed to vote but can't order a beer.

Back to the joys of movies on local cable. The video quality was grainy, so grainy that Dev Anand in the 1980s looked like Dev Anand in the 60s, or 90s depending on the print.
Not all movies that came on cable were pirated though. But legal or not, the grainy nature of the video, as if the magnetic tape of the video cassette had been scrubbed with a wire brush, was a constant. The scratchy picture didn’t bother much, the thrill of watching the latest movie without buying a ticket in black was compensation enough.

What bothered us most was what happened at the bottom of the screen, especially since the standard screen those days was a generous 21-inch that fitted snugly into a wall cabinet containing trophies won at school competitions and various articles called ‘show pieces’ that had entered the house disguised as gifts at weddings or souvenirs bought on trips to exotic locations like Matheran.

The bottom of the screen, to use a bad pun, was the pits. It was filled with creepy, crawly words that advertised all the businesses in the neighbourhood – sari shops, jewellers, sari shops, tuition classes, sari shops, the occasional chemist shop and sari shops. With clarity that seemed amazing in comparison to the picture above, they ran merrily from one end of the screen to the other, jumping, dancing, pirouetting and doing cartwheels. They covered the legs of the hero as he walked into the frame, made the fallen villain invisible and supported the heaving bosom of an about-to-be-violated heroine. She got saved of course. Probably because a particularly colourful logo of a sari shop reminded the villain of the traumatic hours he had spent in one buying a sari for his wife.

Not that the commercial breaks in the telecast were any better. They were full of ads shot with a hand-held video camera bought as spare parts and put together by a plumber for brands of – refer list of crawlers above. We preferred them to the crawlers of course; the breaks were long enough for the entire family to visit the bathroom and stop to wash hands on the way back.

Cut to present day. Local cable is dying. Not dead, my friends who know these things tell me, 80% of India, the shining one, still watches its TV thanks to the local cablewallah. But TV is so my age. The today thing is youtube. It is what the vote-enabled, alcohol-disabled generation is watching. From movies to music videos to cricket to slapped politicians, if it is a video, it has to be on the net. The logic now is, ‘If it gets hits, it’s a hit.’

And therein lies the sequel to Crawlers. Log on to youtube today and click to check out a video. And there they are – the crawlers – disguised as pop-ups at the bottom of the screen. Usually, the video quality is not grainy; it is pixelated. Which is a ‘today’ word for scrubbed with a wire brush. Well, there is a little cross sign at the corner on the top right that gives you the choice to turn it into a pop-down. But heck, at the heart, it is the same thing – A Crawler.

Like someone said long before video was invented; the more the things change, the more the same they remain. 

About me

This article on the net is titled, 'A Surprise Delight'. I found it on the blog of a fellow writer, K.D. Norris, from Bennington, Vermont, USA.


It couldn't have been more aptly titled as I found out when I stumbled up on it.


Posting this link is a tad self-congratulatory, but heck, if you are here because you don't mind reading what I write, I presume you will not mind reading what someone has written about my writing.

Steve Jobs. On second thoughts.

A child is born out of wedlock. (I have always wondered why is called that - wedlock.) The mother puts it up for adoption but the first couple rejects it because they want a girl. The second in queue adopts him, promising his mother they will give him a college education.

The boy grows up and is sent to college but he drops out soon. He starts his own company and designs a path-breaking personal computer.

A few years later, the CEO and board of his company make him resign as the company is not doing well.

The board re-hires him. He designs and launches successful product after product to the extent that for a brief while his company is the largest in terms of net worth.

In 2004, he is diagnosed of cancer and makes an incredible come back after surgery.

Seven years later he succumbs to cancer. The world mourns.

The next time you see a loser, please be considerate and give him or her a second chance. It might make the world of a difference. Or, even a difference to the world.

Anna Hazare & being a damp squib

Let me begin with a honest confession (not to be confused with signed confessions given at police stations and retracted twenty years later when your case comes up for hearing).

I am a pessimist. That is, where an optimist sees a blue sky, I see a dry spell and receding ground water tables. The sky is half-full for me, always.

I am also aware, painfully so, that anything negative said or written about Anna Hazare today will have those who support his crusade (I am not sure if that’s the right word because the one crusade I remember from history was rather bigoted and violent), up in arms against those saying/writing it. I am just pinning my hope on the fact that Anna is hailed as the Modern Gandhi (actually Post-modern Gandhi because the Modern Gandhi position has been taken up by Munnabhai. Trivial aside: If Munna is Gandhi, does it make Circuit, Nehru?), and his supporters will stick to the path of non-violence and desist from breaking any bones.

So here goes, with a deep breath, prayer to non-violence and a salute to pessimism.

Lokpal – The very concept is a joke, pal.

I am not a lawyer nor am I a constitutional guru, but correct me if I am wrong, in theory in this country nobody is above law. (This of course presumes there is only one missionary position and the law can’t be f*d from below.) Of course, you can’t drag an elected representative to court but you can sack him or her first and then do the needful. But I could be wrong.

To go on a tangent to prove a point, take the wonderful skywalks built all around Mumbai. They are built for commuters who are forced to risk their lives in the chaos of traffic outside each railway station. But what’s the reason for chaos? No footpaths to walk on. Why? The hawkers have occupied it illegally. The roads are dangerous because the auto rickshaws are parked or cruising indiscriminately and private cars are double-parked illegally too. So what’s the solution? Skywalk. And not kicking encroachments out, or kicking the butts of auto and car drivers. The skywalk is like putting a cushioned toilet seat to cure loose motions – it relieves the sore cheeks but the motions continue.

We have a constitution, the Indian Penal Code, a judiciary, police, anti-corruption bureau, CBI (known in certain circles as Congress Bureau of Intimidation), various committees to probe (not solve), various crimes, economic offences wing, RAW (the name says it all), and god knows how many offshoots that are all supposed to prevent crime, corruption and obscene dances by adults and enforce law and order and pub closure times.

To me the Lokpal is a skywalk in disguise. Or a cushioned toilet seat, if you prefer that kind of humour. We want a Lokpal because none of the above works.

The current Anna Hazare movement is for a strong and powerful Lokpal. One whose purview (defined as the noise made by cat who likes the view), includes the Prime Minister of India. Let’s say we get that. Then what? Even a kid who is not old enough to wipe his own snot (butt if you prefer), knows the Prime Minister of India is a designation and not a role. A puppet whose strings are tied to the aprons of a dynasty (defined as nasty people who don’t die), which, even in the face of an all-powerful Lokpal will say, “Take the PM, kiss my snot; we will find another PM (short form of Puppet Minister).”

Then again, think some more and ask, “Who will appoint the Lokpal?” The same nasty bunch! It’s like having the world’s number one test cricket team with limping players.

Now, for a moment let’s suspend disbelief, and imagine that Anna Hazare’s movement succeeds in toppling the current government. The Loksabha is dissolved and we have general elections. Who forms the next government? The opposition? Do we have one? So we are back to square one – The Dynasty (Motto: Power is my right. Emergency is my heritage.).

I was there my friends, when we all marched to Gateway of India to light candles and protest 26/11. What a movement it was. What a moment it was. The educated youth was there. The rich SoBoites were there. Ministers got sacked. The city got its own commando force. The police got armoured vehicles and amphibian boats to patrol the roads and sea. Railway stations got metal detectors. Then, we got elections and the usual voter turnout and the same government.

Then, on 13/7/2011, we got three bomb blasts.

But what to do, I am a pessimist. A damp squib. Sorry Anna Hazare. I would have appreciated your fast had I not been eternally hungry. For a little grain of hope.