Exams - The real story

There is something about exams that renders you less human. Especially the exams that we used to write during that period of learning by rote, which went by the name of high school education. It was something everyone of us dreaded, it just made the preceding days less cheerful.

For me the impending exams meant taking on the stress of the examination but not studying for it. The plans began 15 days in advance.

“Ok. 15 days to go, 3 days per subject. Maths will include Trigonometry this time. To mug up those problems would require an extra day. Slash 1 day off Social Science; you always have the day before the exam. SO 4 days for Maths and 2 days for Social Science. Wait a minute!!! Isn’t Physics supposed to have ‘Refraction’ this time. The way Mrs D has taught us this time one may require 5 light years just to understand why the darned beam of light bends when it wanders into water (Light years is a unit of distance, you remember guiltily). Ok 4 days of Physics and let Sanskrit suffer. Whenever in doubt in Sanskrit, put in a few extra ‘Aham’s and ‘gachhami’s”.

“Hmmm. 12 days to go. Havent touched a thing. How can you touch anything when that Social Science text book is a lullaby in between brown covers. And anyways I had overestimated. Why do you require 3 days for 1 subject. That way by the final exam I will require 9 days for each subject. ‘Paranoia’, that’s the word. Ok, 2 days deleted from Maths and 1 from Science. Will give 1 back to Sanskrit.S nowadays releases marks as if he is releasing prisoners. And let English cop it.”

And thus the days pass on. Every passing day reduces by net one day required to prepare from one of the subjects. And no substantial progress happens studies wise, needless to say. The moment I read something through for 5 minutes, a 25 minute TV break is taken to compensate for the effort. And yeah it would be time for lunch after which I decide to study for 3 hours, hmmm, make it 3.5, have been rather lazy nowadays. One needs that kick up the backside once in a while.
I have my lunch and immediately duly sleep. Doctors say that a good sleep after meals refreshes the mind. We should take care of our health. Exams are temporary, health is permanent.
Wake up 2 hours later and decide that now since the mind is refreshed let me study for 4 hours. 15 minutes of turning pages and I hear my friends calling for cricket. I look at the book and look at those glistening bats in their hands, and there ever was only one winner. 2 hours of cricket more, I come back exhausted, guilty and angry. Enough, I say, if there is a time called 12 in the night there would be a guy called ‘Yours truly’ who would be burning the midnight lamp. With that terrible oath, I take a bath and start turning the pages again. In between I steal a glance JUST to confirm if it is time for dinner. As the time approaches 8 pm the glances become more frequent till the point you decide that enough of studies, will watch TV for 5 minutes, have dinner and put my heart and soul into it. I watch TV for 30 minutes, mother interrupts me for dinner and I reluctantly go in to have it. Reluctance, because that takes away my last excuse. I have dinner, decide that I will watch TV for only 5 more minutes and then start studying. I watch TV for an hour more and get back to the study table where my Maths text book is awaiting me with open arms, smirking and at times I suspect laughing at my misery.
I do 2 problems and the weariness because of cricket starts creeping up my legs. I resist but it has already advanced uptil my belly. I am horrified. I look at those 5 text books lying in front of me, I look at my watch, I look at the calendar, I look at everything that needs to be looked at, to no avail. By this time I am neck deep and I run towards the wash basin to wash the monster off. I am too late. It has gripped me by my hair and tossed me onto the bed. I promise to myself that I will wake up in 5 minutes and anyways we have 5 more days. The last statement turns out to be the clincher.

I wake up at 8.30 am next morning.

“Ok, 5 more days to go. 1 day each for every exam and we have a day off for every exam as well. So still 2 days per exam. Why do I need to be tense with so much time? Finish off the big ones first in the next 3 days (‘finish off’, optimism is a strange animal). So Maths, Science and Social Science cleaned up first thing. Then 1 day for Sanskrit and the last day for English which would be the first exam anyways”

I play, sleep and eat next 4 days. Last day I decide to finish at least 1 chapter of Maths That takes up almost 3 quarters of the day which leaves me with a time of 4 pm and the English exam to study for.
Our school believed in the ‘halaal’ format of sacrificing. So we always had the easier exams first. First 2 exams, English and Sanskrit which I duly breeze through. Then come the Big 3. With zero preparation beforehand I start off the day at 7 am and struggle through a jigsaw of problems and formula and paragraphs to mug up. I finish 60% on an average and speed read through the next 40%. Which effectively means I would somehow get an even 70/100 if everything goes well.

I take the school bus for the next day and find everyone looking furiously into their textbooks as if about to excavate some hidden treasures.

Me: Kucch padha kya?
Y : Arre, Kahaan yaar! I had to attend one marriage yesterday. Hardly went through half of the portion.

I am delighted. At least I will have company at the bottom of the heap.

Me: Tune?
X : Mat pooch yaar! Had fever till evening. God knows what I will do today.

Too good.

And the pattern is repeated throughout with everyone moaning and groaning about their lack of preparation and immediately delving back deep into there books. I too take out my book smug in the knowledge that I am better off than most at least.
Book in hand I attend the assembly, and we all troop into the classrooms where we are supposed to write the exams roll number wise. One of the advantages of your name being Arun Prakash is that you can watch the reaction of the Pratyush Aakash’s and Tanvir Abid’s of the world on getting the question paper. You see, the roll numbers were in the ascending order of surnames. So the initial roll numbers always got the question paper first.
There faces betray nothing by the way and I will have to bear it like a man when I get it. I get the question paper, my jaws drop and I get that empty feeling in the stomach. Madame D has wrought her wrath and it’s a stone cold stunner. Next 3 hours pass in listless writing and biting and staring. And you see people all around taking supplementary sheets by the dozen including Y and X. Traitors! What is there to write so much in this anyway. After about 2 hours of struggle I give up and get ready for the afternoon assembly. Others join me an hour later.

Me: Kaisa gaya
Y : Bakwaas tha yaar. Couldn’t understand a thing
X : Same here. Mrs D should be hung from the basket ball ring tied around her knees. Pakka fail ho jaaoonga

I brighten up. At least I wont fail. I brushed aside the issue of so many supplementary papers. Must have left lines in between, I think. Anyways both of them have massive handwritings.

All the exams follow a similar pattern. Y has all his relatives getting married off. X is a chronic patient. And in the bus I am the topper.

However deep down I know I haven’t done too well and I am not looking forward to the results. That does not stop the results from being announced though. The teacher taking up the subject would come with the corrected answer papers to be showed to the students. With the stern warning that no updation of the marks would be encouraged. Only calculation mistakes would be taken into consideration. Everyone goes through there own marks and compares it with his closest competitor. I get 56/100 in Maths. Y and X get 80 odd. I am devastated.
The teacher asks for the answer sheets to be returned. And every person returning the answer sheet bargaining for some increase in marks if possible

‘Ma’am, at least 2 marks for steps’
‘Ma’am, I only missed the intermediate step and you have cut 2.5 marks for it’
‘I have written ‘Hence,proved’. Shouldn’t I get .5 for that’

And so on and so forth.

I don’t have anything much to say. I hope against hope that there is a calculation mistake. There are none. She is not a Maths teacher for nothing.

I quietly return the paper. I postpone telling my marks at home. Mother gets suspicious when I suddenly get very polite, come to temple for Pooja and do all household work without questioning. I even miss my cricket to go to New Market to buy vegetables.
I finally tell the marks 5 days later and get an earful for it. By maintaining an adequate expression of gloom I get them to sign my report card and submit it to my class teacher.

You mug, you get through. You dont, you rot. And thus India prepares an entire generation to face the world.

An open letter to Maai Baap

Dear GOD,

I heard that the Senator of Nebraska, United States has sued you. Well, I think he knows that it doesn’t work this way. But I am sure that justice would take lesser time than what the judiciary in India takes. But that is besides the point really.

The Senator has accused you in a burst of antediluvian alliterations of "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like."

That’s unfair on you, isn’t it? I am positive that when you initiate these calamities there must be a bigger plan in the cosmic nature of things. I am sure the lives that you have taken away have been put to better use, so to speak. And I am sure that you don’t play dice, as more beautiful minds than mine have confirmed. As the CEO of this cosmos wide enterprise, I am sure you see the bigger picture better.

My only concern is why did you have to come to earth in 20 different forms? When you know that logically there can be only one YOU (power sharing does not sound a divine enough concept), why did you have to spread the myth that you have multiple releases with multiple versions? Why couldn’t you restrict your entry to a single space and time and let the stories about you spread across different spaces and times?

I think you know what this has done to the world that you have created so lovingly. Muslims say that there God is the real McCoy and anyone who does not believe so is an infidel. Hindus say that there faith is the bigger, stronger, much improved version and rest all is hogwash. Christians believe their’s is the only God, and the non believers can be converted to this only faith.

Though you have blessed us humans with some intelligence, you haven’t blessed us with a sense of proportion to go along with it. So we tend to think in terms of black or white, their’s or ours, big or small, this or that. We were intelligent enough to devise a word called ‘and’, but we were not wise enough to use it. So when people talked about ‘our faith’ or ‘their faith’ they dint realize that they were talking about the same stuff. The same sets of people never talk about ‘our sun or their sun’ and ‘our sky or their sky’. However when it concerns YOU, they tend to become possessive…. and binary.

Why are you allowing your name to be dragged in multiple slush? Why cant you come and clear it once and for all that you don’t have an alter ego? And tell everyone that what the muezzin at the mosque is pointing his hands skywards to and the pundit in the temple is folding his hands before is the same fellow… indeed the ONLY fellow. Why cant you go for an Arabian sortie and tell those misguided folks in the middle east that it is a waste of precious blood and not so precious RDX, fighting over YOU. Why cant you come over, sip a Koffee with Karan and tell those cretins in saffron that the God who resided in Babri Masjid was not much different from the king who ruled Ayodhya.This world is too small for so much hatred in your name.

Once you do this, you can always go back and pull those levers for earthquakes and floods and watch the fun prime time.

Thanks and Regards,
A believer

Traffic travails of a traumatized traveler

So where were you when India won the T 20 WC. The answer of the average Bangalorean would be – In a traffic jam.

Its impossible that you stay in Bangalore, you commute to office, you blog and you haven’t yet written about the JAM. So here goes.

I firmly believe that civilization will tend to come to a full circle in whatever it does. The early man started off wearing nothing but a smile. Now, if you do a regression analysis of the sartorial tastes of a typical Bollywood starlet over the last few years, you may find that few years down the line, there idea of a dress would be a few threads poised tantalisingly. And I get this feeling that if the Cro Magnon was asked to walk from Bannerughatta Road to E-city he would have taken approximately the same time as it takes now with all the Volvos and Pulsars.

The typical day of a commuter starts off with a JUMP off the bed. The jump when he sees the time is 7 when he actually expected it to be 6.30 (to be fair to Father Time, it was exactly that half an hour back). 7 means that he will be ready only for the 7.30 bus which would reach BTM at around 7.45 where a humongous mass of commuters (who presumably did there own variety of the JUMP at 7) would greet him with horns, screams and a few expletives (Nothing scatters traffic better than a well chosen, well directed, well rendered insult).

Once at BTM, the bus will cannon into action for the CRAWL. It is called the “great BTM crawl”. And as it crawls you will see the man on his bicycle whizz past and the old man with the walking stick vroom past you as your bus adjusts itself to the pace of the bus in front (which would be around .05 metres per hour). The cause of the Jam can be many. It may be because 8 buses 10 feet wide standing side by side try to squeeze past a 30 feet wide opening on the road. The maths does not work out. So you have an overdose of it. You will have 20 such rows lined behind the original mess. Add a sprinkling of cars, a dash of 2 wheelers and lo and behold you have the perfect JAM.

Another reason can be the breakdown of a vehicle. If it’s a heavy vehicle , it will mean that all other vehicles will have to skirt around it, effectively narrowing the road uptil that point. No one would want to go right behind that vehicle and then do the turnaround jig.

So what we will have in the end is lots of time to kill inside the bus. And lots of frustration to take out when out of it.

Unfortunately BTM is not the only place you have it. Hosur Road also has a toned down version of the same especially near Bomanahalli junction. And that happens ironically because they are building a flyover there to reduce the traffic jam. “But what about the BTM mess” is the question that will be uppermost in the habitual irritant’s mind. Well, the BTM mess will remain until someone decides to build a flyover there which will then prepone the traffic to Bannerughatta road and jayanagar. Until a bright fellow decides to build a flyover there and so on. So Bangalore will one day become one big flyover with roads on ground, in air, in the gutters till it chokes.

I hope I get my onsite trip before that.

What could be the solution like? In the long term may be the solution would be not how to accommodate the increasing traffic but how to reduce the existing one. A small step albeit unintentionally has been taken by having the airport outside the city at Devanahalli. That should set the mess in Airport Road right by some amount. Another step is developing the areas around Bangalore so that these multinationals find another place to breed. Or for the companies to enforce commuting through company buses a little more strictly. Its quite irritating to sit in a bus and find one entire car having only a single occupant drive past you.

It’s a part of the city’s growing up and I guess Bangalore is equipped to handle it better than others.

Clueless in Kokkothamangalam!!!

One of my favourite destinations whenever I am in Kerala is my dad’s village. Its called Kokkothamangalam. Even Wikimapia zoomed to its maximum could see it only as a hazy blur.

Kokkothamangalam is a pretty complicated name for a small place. And as ever there is something about names and Kerala. The folk there can have names as cryptic as Jiji, Shibu, Joji, Liju etc. basically anything with 2 syllables. But the names of the places can make your tongue explore areas of the mouth you never knew existed – Parappanangaadi, Kadappakada, Kalamassery, Pathanamthitta et al.

One of the first things that strike you about the place is the stunning variety of flora around. You have every shade of green imaginable gawking at you, and for someone who has spent a lot of time in northern India, like me, it can be overwhelmingly beautiful. Unfortunately, trees are not the only things gawking at you. You see, it’s the kind of village where everyone knows everyone else and his granny. So the moment they see someone who is not familiar they make sure that they stare at them long enough out of sheer curiosity as if the act of staring itself would aid there memory. And you embarrassed, instinctively check if the zip is in place!

The village folk are simple, untouched by the grossness of the cities. And they don’t find it embarrassing to ask personal details about you. What is just harmless information gathering would look like unnecessary intrusiveness to us. It’s a mistrust born out of a lifetime in cities.

Passerby – engotta? (Where are you going?)

Me – Going to that mall opposite the airport. Coming?
Me (drawing a parabola of my lips) – Punathichira (that’s my dad’s place).

Passerby – Punathichirayil evide? ( Where in Punathichira?)

Me – Pardon me for the insolence but how the heck does that concern you?
Me – Mr Mukundan’s home (that’s my dad’s brother)

Passerby – Oooooo, Sheri! (Alright)

Me – Thanks for granting me the permission. The total absence of bureaucracy is appreciated.
Me – Sheri!

The worst part is when they actually know you and you don’t know them. And they would be hell bent on getting you to remember them.

Passerby – Aren’t you Prakashan’s son?

Me – Am I not supposed to be?
Me (lips drawing a sine wave this time) - Yes

Passerby – Remember me?

Me – With the amount of shrubbery on your face it would be better if you carry an ID card along.
Me – (sheepish smile) No

Passerby – Don’t you remember we went to Sabarimala together a few years back with your dad?

Me – Uh Oh, Aren’t you the fellow who drooled at the sight of every passing arrack shop?
Me – (Lips trace back a parabola) Yeah remember now. (Sigh!!!)

I am still unable to come to terms with this kind of bonhomie shown by people who are strangers to you for all practical purposes.

I tend to go there for short bursts of a few days. It’s a great place to be in for say 10 days, when you want to take a break from the race for career, wealth, relationships, happiness etc etc However, anytime beyond that and the inactivity gnaws at you. The rats that we are we have to get back to the race… Unfortunate!

Oops he did it again! - An ode to Akhtar

Its 7 in the evening, Bangalore is under a cloud cover, my manager has sent me a mail with some work just before I leave on a Friday, Shoaib Akhtar has been thrown out of the Pak team on disciplinary grounds and everything is fine with this world.

For the Shoaib part, this time for using an equipment he is ill equipped to handle. A bat. He aimed a cover drive at Asif’s thigh over a tiff it seems. You cant blame him for practising his batting though. It is that bad.
But he should have chosen his target a little more carefully IMHO. You know its round, its red and its made of leather.

Had he got a million for every act of indiscipline he has done, he would have been in the Forbes list by now. Most fast bowlers are dumb as per the stereotype. They may scream out against this branding (as any self respecting person should against any stereotyping), however, people like Shoaib just reinforce it. And he is a show pony to boot. Which is a ghastly combination in a game which involves the usage of the piece of muscle between the ears rather extensively.

Otherwise why oh why, should he take a furlong long run up when a shorter one would serve his purpose beautifully? Why should he put up that obviously fake accent when he has a fairly passable English? And why do we always see him barely clothed whenever we see him in a photograph in newspapers?

I think people like Shoaib are suffering from the ‘spotlights-on-me’ syndrome a mild version of which has affected our boy Sreesanth as well. They feel terribly inadequate if they wake up one morning and find not a single news item on them in the morning newspapers. Sad for such a talent (even with hyperextension and all that). High time he is kicked out from the game forever. We will miss the theatrics I know, but it is supposed to be a sport, right?

Layman’s guide to Boy’s hostel – Part 2

The story goes that before the the Electronic Voting Machines were introduced in India, it was tested in an IIT Chennai hostel. The modus operandi was that they air dropped the EVM into the hostel. And the rest was left to the budding engineer’s destructive testing abilities. A week in the hostel and when no one was able to find a way to change an already cast vote, the equipment was deemed ready to face the worst of the booth capturer in Bihar.

The most hapless souls of any boy’s hostel are the warden and watchman. It’s a shame to the Indian job market that such gut wrenching professions still exist. The watchman had a set of duties which you wish even George Bush the Lesser (as Arundhati Roy prefers to call him) is not inflicted with –

- Whenever there was a call from home to the only landline phone in the hostel (this is a period epic, set at a time when mobiles were as rare as landline phones are now), he had to scream his lungs out to call the relevant person’s name. And of course the relevant person chose just the time to visit the loo wholly unaware of the pandemonium outside. Every vocal excursion of the watchman was followed by a volley of, shall we say, unparliamentary verbals from the other hostellers directed at the watchman; for disturbing them from there sleep or video games or evening snacks or twilight strolls or night crickets or whatever they were doing.

- He was supposed to prevent the hostel inmates (I use the word deliberately) from coming in after 12 in the night. This meant that he had to keep his face perennially directed away from the gate after 12. What could the poor inmates do if the show started at 10 in the night? And these shows were serving the larger purpose of aiding them in growing into responsible ADULTs.

- His job description also included keeping his senses shut tight for some of the, shall I say, indiscretions of youth (political correctness can test your vocabulary like nothing else). So if an inmate comes and slaps him in drunken stupor, he has to guffaw and bear it. Or if a few inmates break the pipe to water tank to postpone the next day’s examination he has to keep his eyes wide shut. Or whenever there are a few words said against him questioning his parentage because he called out someone for phone, he has to pretend that he lost his sense of hearing for those 2.33 seconds. And if he smells liquor somewhere… well, he is trained into not smelling it.

The warden’s lot is not much better. Our warden (who used to teach whenever he was not getting a mouthful from the boys) used to stay cooped up inside his room in the hostel to come out only when he had a class. With good reason too. Boys’ hostel is not the place to exercise your fundamental rights, especially so, when you are dumb enough to complain against a few.

Though we all enjoyed our stay in the hostel, it was not the same for the support staff. It never can be a win-win, can it? Drunken revelry for one is sunken devilry for another!

Layman's guide to Boy's hostel – Part 1

There are 2 types of guys in this world – Guys who have stayed in hostels and the guys who have (you guessed it right) not. As a Chemistry professor will put it, a hosteller is easily identifiable by the following characteristics -

- Hostellers are not finicky about food. Give them a rubber bladder wrapped around thermocol and they will happily lap it up thinking it is Aloo bhajji . A few years of hostel food and your stomach linings can be used to make bullet proof jackets

- They don’t mind scratching there arm pits in public. Private hygiene would be in public domain if they have there way.

- They have an eye for pretty girls. Both the eyes in fact. While the eyes follow the girl, the mouth curses the bend that the girl has disappeared into, nose smells the perfume she took a bath with and the ears cock up to listen to any sneering that the other hostellers have on offer. It is multitasking at its puerile best.

- They have a healthy disrespect for the establishment. If you happen to talk to them, they will tell you about how their bosses are screwing their lives (by forcing them to work full day on a Friday), how the principal of the college deserves to be thrown to the crocodiles (for not giving 3 days off to celebrate Sant Ghasidas Jayanti), how there parents are being terribly unreasonable (by asking them to come home before 3 a.m in the morning.) and other such excesses.

- Hostellers cannot relieve themselves inside the confined claustrophobic environ of a loo. Show me a person who is letting mother earth have it and I will show you a hosteller.

“Engineering hostels maketh the man” as one of those queer Victorian poets should have said. An economist would call it a free for all market.

I have spent 6 years of my life in hostels. 4 years with my engg hostel and 2 years in the B-school one. The B-school hostels are a refined version of the engg ones simply because the management does not allow you to show your true colours as it were. In my hostel we were supposed to be back inside the blanket before 11.30 pm. My engg hostel authorities did not commit such gross acts of human rights violation and we made it count.

There is something in the air of hostels which makes people do things they would never do after that period of life.

Your shoes are not yours. They would be open to the general public on a first come first wear basis. Goes without saying that your shoes may not be used to your feet. If you are smart enough you will have a plan B and C. This means your feet will snuggle into someone else’s shoes. As per Law of Conservation of Mass every feet will have a shoe, just that the ownership will change from one form to another.

The same goes for shirts, soaps, toothpastes, (hold your breath!) underwears and any other contraption humans have devised to make there lives more comfortable. One of my friend’s new shirts traversed 21 backs before it could come to rest on his own. All 21 of them were kind enough not to wash it. You see, washing means 2 days of turnaround time (rinsing, drying, ironing et al) which is an opportunity cost for 2 backs.

Classes were an unnecessary inconvenience and were treated so. Since everyone woke up 15 minutes before the first class, there would be a traffic jam on the way to the loo and the 3 washbasins would have 30 suitors ready to wash the sins of the previous nights using a toothpaste. Bathing was an activity that could be compromised upon. Many were not too narrow minded about brushing their teeth as well. That eased the pressure on the bathrooms slightly.

You see, with great laziness comes great responsibilities.

When your formative years are such a cauldron, it is difficult not to come out burnt… and hardened.

Misplaced aggro

India wins the series and so typical of us in India, we are already into the game of finding faults with the match that was drawn. The armchair fans are disappointed that Dravid did not go for the kill (yawn!!!!). As Dravid replied “If I was on an armchair, even I would be disappointed”. The fellow has a studious sense of humour about him but he was not too far off the mark.

Aggression in cricket, as far as I am concerned is an over rated concept. People insist on it because it looks good. It provides us with the goose bumps and makes us look forward to it. But so much of the cricket’s folklores are built around those gritty, nail scraping, inelegant but priceless knocks. For every majestic 281 by Laxman, there is that ugly 180 by Dravid. Take out that 180 and you will find Laxman stranded at 80 not out with no one from the tail to stand by him.

Tell Tatenda Taibu to be aggressive with his ragtag group of men (to call it a team would be stretching the meaning of the word a tad too far) and u will find that he will create a newer record in the margin of losses every match. Aggression for a team is a function of the kind of players there are in it. You can afford to have 4 slips for Mcgrath because he will land it outside off stump on a coin if he wants, 6 times out of 6. If Mpumelelo Mbangwa is asked to bowl to such a field the captain must have had a fight with his wife in the morning.

You can tell Sehwag to go and play his natural game because he has the Big 4 acting as props. You cant tell a Zimbabwean opener the same because the batting line up is one long tail. The former Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga, considered a great strategist, used to resort to around the wicket negative tactics whenever the batsmen were attacking. The reason being that his bowling line up read Murali and the rest. He just could not afford to let the match slip away quickly as the only wicket taking option was Murali.

Its all good to beat your chest and say that we will be aggressive but its not a bad idea to just look around and see if you have the men for it.

Sree.... Shanth!!!

I have been following the India-England series from the very first test. And I was very interested in the antics of Shantakumaran Sreesanth. And I guess he has achieved his objective that way – to get people interested in him.

You never see him not chatting on a cricket field. He chats with the batsman he is bowling to, chats with the bowler he is facing upto, he chats with the slip fielders who he may edge to any time, he chats with the umpires and if that’s not enough chatting for the day, he goes to the boundary ropes and shares his reflection on the day’s proceedings with the crowd. Its impossible for the cameras to miss him. Which is the complete antithesis of the stereotype of an Indian cricketer. The typical Indian cricketer, goes to the field, looks for the place in the field with maximum shade, does some limbering up when he has to bowl, and plays some wristy artistic shots when he has to bat and throws his wicket away trying to outdo himself. But he never is the in-your-face kind of bloke who would try and get all the cameras to pan on to him.

Sreesanth is unlike anything that has happened to Indian cricket over its history. He dances when he gets a wicket and follows it up with a ‘namaste’ to the batsman to rub it in, and he sledges the fast bowlers while batting. Some think its aggro, doctors call it hormones going wrong, others call it showmanship. It makes for good television but the bigger question is lost amidst the flashbulbs and cameras. Isn’t he supposed to win a match for his country when he moves into the field and marks his run up? Is he doing enough of that? Even if he is doing enough of that isn’t he going overboard with whatever he is doing?

Journalists always give the example of John Mcenroe who used to fire himself up by disputing a line call and believing the entire world was against him. What looked like antics had a method about it. He wanted to tap onto his reserves of adrenaline and try and bring some needle into the otherwise tough job of beating a top 50 opponent. With Sreesanth it doesn’t even seem to be that. He beats the batsman with a good ball followed by a word of what looks like (on television) advice. He gets hammered and he follows it up with advice at higher volume. If he is respectfully defended, he collects the ball and threatens to throw the wickets down taking the batsman’s head on the way. Whatever the poor batsman does Sree has a response which is entirely non cricketing in nature.

Again it makes for interesting television, I am not sure if it serves any purpose greater than that. He could as well come on to the field dressed as Santa Claus and do Mohiniattam. He will get enough media coverage to last a lifetime. But when a bowler's bowling figures look like 21 – 2 – 105 – 0, nothing looks that funny. Matches are won on the ground, with performance. The last column should at least have 2 for any bowler to call it a reasonable day. If this objective is lost when playing to the gallery, you can as well join boogie-woogie as a participant.

Hope he proves me wrong in the next test. The amount of talent he has its not an unreasonable hope.

Kuttay!!!!

You would have loved Sunnybhai had you met him. He was suave, sophisticated, well mannered, had a sense of humour and the never say die attitude that all Germans seem to be born with. He could walk with the kings and still not lose the common touch and Kipling could have had SunnyBhai in his mind when he said this. He was a dog made especially by the Gods.

Sunnybhai came into our lives when he was hardly a month old. “It’s a German Spitz”, one of his doctor’s said and we were all proud to have a foreigner home. He was brought up with Indian values, though, no beer or beef for him. A German Spitz looks exactly like a Pomeranian by the way, so the ignorant would come up and call it a ‘Pomerian’ and we, wounded pride and all corrected them by telling them about its German antecedents. Of course Sunnybhai cared two figs about his nationality. He could have as well been from Mars as long as he was getting his daily egg with milk.

The first challenge that we faced with Sunnybhai was what name to give him. I knew of a friend whose dog was called Jimmy. Jimmy as all cricket lovers would know was the pet name of Mohinder Amarnath. With a brilliant piece of lateral thinking I could not go beyond Sunil Gavaskar for my pet’s name. Other options did not sound too good (You cant call your dog Kapil Dev Nikhanj ). The name was seconded by my sister. You see, it went well with the image. I have seen people call there dogs Choco when the only thing brown about it would be the belt around its neck. ‘Sunny’ for an off white dog was, well, par for the course.

When we saw him for the first time, he was small enough to put his face inside my shoes and sleep. He had this thing for fresh air. But by the 5^th month he became too big for his shoes as it were. And his sleeping habits became a little more refined. Sunnybhai could not sleep without the pillow and he made that clear in no uncertain terms. You would be sleeping alone in the night and by the morning you would feel something white and fluffy besides you. The adjacent pillow would have been pre-populated (as techies love to say) and the dog would be sleeping like a log. There were constant admonitions by mummy over this habit of his. But Sunny bhai would make sure that he came back to ground when people were looking and back to the bed when people weren’t. For him ethics came a poor second to cold logic.

One of the downsides of being a canine is that humanity does not seem to appreciate the things that they love to do. For example, Sunnybhai’s idea of a morning well spent was to roll in cow dung. If he was let loose outside, he would make sure that he had the content of 3 cows on him before you could say “BULLSHIT”. The bath that followed was just a small price to pay for the fun. That forced us to take stringent measures and Sunnybhai was confined to home for the best part of the day except for the daily walk (with a chain around its neck, of course).

Sunnybhai could be brave. Especially when he was inside the house with the gate locked. I have seen him bark at animals way bigger than him. He had a mouthful for an elephant once, that passed by which sounded more in lines of “you-are-lucky-that-the-gate-is-locked”. None of the animals chose to respond back. Actually only the dogs responded to the tub thumping (Maybe because they understood whatever he said, and whatever he said was not very pleasant). I remember him starting off with a friendly tete-a-tete with a neighbourhood Pomeranian and it ended in a major scuffle. It took all of my negotiation skills to extricate Sunnybhai from the mess.

One of the great things of having a dog around in house is the amount of attention they shower on you. Especially when you are back home after a long time. Their eyes light up, the ears go down and their tail speaks a thousand words. And none of it is dependent on how you treat them.

This world can do with a few humans like that .

None of my business

A few days back I had a technical session on mmmm…. Forget it.

I happen to be someone who is supposed to understand the business side of things in an IT company. Which means that if my mother is cooking something, I only need to see whether I am getting the dal I was promised earlier in the day or if I still have to make do with the bitter gourd. It does not matter whether my mom is coming from office, if she has sufficient time to cook, whether the lentils are there at home and if there is someone at house who likes something else. When you have something so intellectually challenging to do the whole day you certainly turn inside your boots when you come to know that you are supposed to attend a technical session for an hour and half.

Its scary because you don’t know a penguinshit about whats going to be explained in the next 1.5 hours. So the person who was chosen to take the session reminisces about his experiences with context specific SLs and class action files. And how he bravely lifted a Lib jar to save a struts config. And how he had the presence of mind to upload an EJB before cruelly killing the server. You utilize this time to think about the deeper meaning of life. Of how to clear the darned 8^th level in the mobile game. Of how to chat on gmail without the PM getting to know about it. Of how to act as if you have a call and escape from the class room.

Then you find the techies looking at you giving one of those irritating “poor fellow – he is lost” smiles. And a few adventurous ones ask you if you have any doubts in it. You pray that all these guys sit once with you in a session on “Derivatives and Options” and you get to do all the sniggering. Of course the prayer will also have an addendum asking for none of them to ask any questions to you. Knowledge is power as long as there is no one asking questions.

It is very difficult to get any value out of these discourses. One good way of countering this is to look straight at the instructor and act as if you are damn interested and you would die if you don’t know whats coming next. This way you can polish your expressions for a bigger stage. The downside is that the person taking the session may take you for a scholar and may ask you to confirm whatever he is saying. In such situations, You can counter his “Don’t you think so?” by an “Ah! But… however… its Ok” using your eyebrows for maximum effect.

Or you can look absolutely bored. You look at the white board, then look at the person next to you, then play ‘Bounce’ on your mobile, then look at the white board again to see if there is anything new scribbled on it, then look out of the window, then look back to see if the techie sitting behind you is able to see what you are desperately trying to avoid and so on. Thank God for the eyes. If I was blind I would have to be all ears in a tech session which would be more than what I can chew.(sigh...)

Bande mein Tha dum!!

I know its not fashionable to say so nowadays. But I am a big fan of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And this post is going to be an unabashed, uninhibited eulogy of the fellow. So people who are desperate to be objective and don’t like to give him a demi god status can close their eyes and let this one go.

I guess its very easy to be objective about a person when we have not lived in the times that he had. It is very difficult to feel what the people felt at that time for him. Movies and books try to cross this objectivity divide. But even they fail because the ‘intellectuals’ would prefer to get into the technical aspect of film making and book writing rather than experience those moments by getting themselves involved in it.

Maybe that was why our generation needed a “Munnabhai” to try and explain what Gandhi had done for humanity because it never claimed to be a kind of movie which was supposed to cater to the ‘intellectuals’ (read critics).

I have at different points of time in my life had discussions with my friends about Gandhi and his ideology and have been surprised that some people manage to find a reason to hate him. I always thought this was more a product of the cynicism of the times or the yearning of some people to be contrarian for the sake of it. Or maybe I am too bull headed to appreciate the fact that people can have opinions which are not what is generally accepted.

One action of his which always stands out is the one where he declares the Non Cooperative movement off after the Chauri Chaura incident. There are a number of ways in which you can look at it –

1.)You can call it the act of a miffed old man when he realizes that people are not following his dictats

2.)Or the one of a person who is playing to the gallery and wants all the attention to be directed on him all the time

3.)Or the act of a person who is writing an autobiography and is desperately short of content.

I would rather take it as the act of a person who believed in his idea; an idea which was working beautifully till that point of time. If it was all about showmanship he would have never taken the decision, simply because of the fact that there was more chance of him losing supporters because of this decision than gaining.

You may have differences of opinion on how he went about it but there is no way you can question the intent or attribute any other motive to it.

Unfortunately, people like Gandhi are always under the scanner and people enjoy attributing a negative motive to whatever they do. So if he mentions that he used to visit brothels when he was in South Africa (“My experiments with truth”), the immediate reaction from skeptics would be that the Buddha is showing off by trying to be too self righteous. And if he had not mentioned it in the autobiography and people came to know of it through an Aaj Tak spy cam, all hell will break loose of course.

Maybe it is difficult to accept the fact that people can so passionately believe in an idea that they don’t need to put up a face in public which is not their own. Or maybe our own mediocrity dissuades us from believing the fact that there can be people who do not have a personal agenda to everything they do.

As far as I am concerned, surely “Bande mein tha dum”.

Hmmmmppphhh.

Horded!!!

There are people who can get into a gathering and turn into the life and soul of the party in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, I play the corpse better.

I as a matter of principle never go into a party unless there is something for ‘paapi pate’ because there is nothing else of interest. If its a family gathering you will always be confronted by acquaintances who would die of asphyxiation if they don’t know where you are working and what is your ‘in hand’.

However, the subspecies that I dread is the nosey aunty brought on for introduction by my mother. She would be a middle aged, normal height, normal weighing lady and will answer to any of the following names – Jaisamma, Mariakutty, Jincymol etc. They follow the standard template of introduction –

Nosey relative – Joli ondo? (Do u have a job)

You (with a genuine plastic smile) – Yes

Nosey relative – In software?

You – yes

Nosey relative – In Bangalore?

You – Yes

Nosey relative – Which Company?

You – Yes… Er Infosys

Nosey relative – What salary?….

If only advanced technology could get me a robot which looks like me and could give these answers at predesignated intervals

By this time you would be holding on to the nearest pillar for support and yearningly looking at the masala dosa. Of course my mom would intervene by this time to ask about how Tijo is doing in his BCA course and I will slither out to the nearest soup serving stall.

The nosey aunty grows fangs and becomes infinitely more dangerous when she becomes a part of “The Horde”. The Horde, of course is a group of 5-10 NA’s and they move in groups of not less than 5. They can be found in the wild reaches of any party laughing merrily looking for the next guy to interview.

Mrs Bincymol (The Horde leader) – You have become darker from the last time I saw you.

You – (Plastic smile)

Mrs Kuttapan (The Horde opposition leader) – I don’t think so. I saw him last time when Nibu was in 8^th and he was fairer.

You – (Plastic smile)

Mrs Mary kutty – And you have put on a little weight. That’s why may be you are fairer

You – (Plastic smile)

This statement of course puts a new twist to the conservation, with ‘the Horde’ divided into 2 camps ‘The believers’(of the theory) and “Non Believers’. Through mutual agreements and disagreements they do finally arrive at a consensus on my weight and complexion. By that time of course I would be at the nearest pani puri stall having my mouthful.

There are different ways of avoiding the horde.

1.)Stay away from your mom during the entire period of the gathering. All mothers how much ever they love you do have a sadistic streak which they exhibit by inflicting the NA’s on us.

2.)If there is a group of more than 5 NA’s don’t go anywhere near them within a radius of 10 metres. If Your favourite aloo bhujji stall is near them ignore it for the next 5-10 minutes and attack them only when “the Horde’ has moved onto a safe distance. The aloo bhujjis can wait, ‘the Horde’ cant.

3.)Don’t go to the party at all. Sometimes the food is just not worth the trouble.

“Minding our own business is a lost art” –

M. K. Gandhi (Would have said it had he hung on for 60 more years)

Testing, testing

Tested...
First time I am posting a blog and funny to know that whatever I write from here on will be available to the entire world to draw its own conclusion from.
Am not sure if this will carry on beyond my stay in Bhopal but now that i am into it let me as well inflict it on the world.
I tried something similar during my college days. I tried to maintain a diary. The first post (or whatever an entry made in a diary is known as) was about how conservative parenting leads to an unimaginitive kid :)))). Thats just about how unimaginitive I can be. Hopefully, the inspiration keeps coming and I can churn out a few posts and few years down the line reflect on them.

Testing successful!!!