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.