Omellete-paav in the hills...

Sorting through largely meaningless stuff on the Times of India centrefolds the other day, I came across a piece that said that Beyonce Knowles bought an island for about 3 billion US dollars for a personal holiday. I am no big fan of Beyonce (though I love “Beautiful Liar”), and I don’t even understand just how big that sum of money is. But the news got me thinking. I felt the sentiment that presumably would have led Beyonce to make this purchase nestles in many of us – to tear away from the humdrum and juggernaut of daily life, take a step back and to be able to reflect on life with a studied peace of mind, without the rush of life’s flow to flush us away.

Life is a busy enterprise. Every day dawns with the possibilities of new acquaintances, unanticipated experiences, soaring joys, crushing sorrows, fights, reconciliations, disclosures, discoveries, and a whole lot of surprise packages and/or routine deliveries. While we, in the spirit of living life to the fullest, try to take it all in as it comes, we sometimes tend to lose the essence of the moments that go past us, because we are too busy flowing with life. Get up in the morning, go to work, attend meetings, meet friend for lunch, go out with family in the evening, call parents after dinner, watch Dhoni hit winning sixes on television, read some pages of the latest novel, call it a day… not typical but a possible template. Swim with the flow, swim with the flow…

But how wonderful and refreshing, once in a while, it would be to swim to the banks, stand on the edge and just study the ripples and cascades in the flow. To analyze and assimilate. To reason and reflect. To learn and live. Imagine waking up at dawn in the lap of the hills, taking a leisurely walk around a mist-covered lake, sitting on a cold-damp wooden bench at the edge of the hill, sipping steaming milk-tea with omellete-paav (crisp rusk-cookies for the vegans), beyond the blinking light of the Blackberry and with the yawning valley as your confidante. There’s a lot you can think about in such a state of mind.

Your family. Your bedrock of existence. Your parents who train you for life and also give you pocket-money to go alongwith it. Your sister who dotes on you and takes more pride in your achievements than you do. Your brother who cries as a child as his toys are given to you but gives you his favourite Casio wristwatch as a present on the eve of your first board examination. Your spouse who takes diet lessons so that you can keep your cholesterol in check. And then there are the ever loving and giving grandparents, uncles and aunts who would always see you as an extension of their life and as a beacon of their principles. We owe our existences to the love, devotion and diligence of these personages. As we move forward in life and carve a niche of our own in this world, we knowingly or unknowingly tend to shift our focus away from them. We go for higher studies abroad and then make professional careers there, while our family continues to live back home. We take promotions and postings which advance our career goals but which mean we cannot always live with our parents and/or wife & kids. We work for long hours and even bring work back home because we are responsible professionals, but we tend to forget that we also need to be responsible offsprings, parents, husbands/wives, grandchildren and nephews/nieces. It is true that all those who love us also want us to be successful. But is success of any significance if you cannot share it with the people who have made you capable of being successful? It is an extremely difficult decision to make, but it definitely requires some focused thought and retrospection.

The love of your life. The person who rejoices in your smallest joys. The person with whom you can share your deepest fears. The hand you want to hold whenever you need to be loved. The shoulder you can cry on whenever life gets tough. Someone who senses the pain behind your smile and the joy behind your tears. Someone who understands things you can’t explain even to your family. Some people are lucky to find such soulmates very early in life, some have to labour a little harder but finally find their destination, while some remain travellers all their lives. In many cases, we fail to understand why we are loved and why we are not, which creates a lot of problems. In some cases, we realize the existence of love for somebody but fail to express or reciprocate it because we are unsure of feelings on both sides or fear losing a friend at the cost of trying to find our love. And in other cases, we fail to break the shackles of family, tradition, society, expectations and misgivings and thus give up on what we assume to be pure love. In other cases, we find and actualize mutual love but later fall prey to conflicts and demands of personal aspirations and changing environments. Love, without a shred of doubt, is life. Thus, when it comes to love, tremendous reserves of maturity, restraint and reasoning need to be harnessed before taking any decision. Thought processes need to be attuned to keeping love alive.

And then there is fun and enjoyment. As I said before, life has enough cards up its sleeve to keep us guessing all the time. But that should not desist us from breaking away from the mundane routine of everyday life and giving the child in us a chance to surface again. It does not come in the way of being responsible individuals or professionals, it actually bolsters it. Whenever you get time (in fact, you will have to carve out time), head for the nearest market and down some pani-pooris at the thela at the chowk. Call friends or family home and organize a cookout. Play a game of gully cricket with the colony boys. Run out in the rain and feel the drops on your face wash out your anxieties. Smile whenever you can. Give life a chance and you will be a better man.

These are thoughts that live in me but are not always actualized. But I guess they may/should live in most/all of us. Hope all of these see the light of day, sooner or later.

Life & death...

“Death fixes forever the relation existing between the departed spirit and the survivors upon earth.”

The phenomenon of death is profound. Medically, death is just like night falling after day, a routine logical phenomenon. Spiritually, life and death are like night and day, one following the other in eternal cycles until absolution. But, in everyday life, in the context of the social matrix that frames our existence, death of a person brings with it a lot of unique effects and responses in the world that person leaves behind. And though death is thought to be a dark event, which it is in many ways, death can have a silver lining too.


As far as the person renouncing physical existence is concerned, death can have different connotations. If a person lives a full, virtuous, successful & healthy life and dies a natural death with minimum suffering, it is a befitting end to a life well-lived. But, as it is correctly said, a person who has attended to all the responsibilities and obligations to the best of his/her ability is sure to live on in the minds of people he/she has touched, even though things may not have been rosy during his/her lifetime. Death, thus, proves to be just a semi-colon rather than being a full stop.


It is often remarked, mostly sarcastically, that death has a curious ability to paint a person in a saintly aura – “bada achha admit tha...” But death does indeed lead people to look back on the life of the deceased and try to take lessons and inspirations in a way they never did when the person was alive. There are devoted patriarchs who spend their lives trying to reconcile and keep together their immediate or extended families they have nurtured with care and effort, while the family members keep bickering on various issues of vanity, property and the like. During their lifetime, the patriarchs are termed as nosy and time-warped people. However, their death, in some cases atleast, serves as a catalyst that brings the family together, even if for a brief period of time. The intense recognition of the permanent loss can galvanize a lot of faultlines. And if that happens, the person is most certainly still alive even after death.


Death also tends to open the floodgates of nostalgia. From my own experiences, as the tears begin to dry out and the embers of the pyre begin to turn into ash, all the memories of the departed souls – of times good and bad, of celebration and acrimony, of achievement & deprivation, of elation & heartbreak – come flowing through the mind. The eyes swell up again in a bittersweet emotion and the person is alive all over again. In a life of hectic everyday demands, such times stop the clock for an ephemeral moment, and help us in remembering what we are neglecting or leaving behind, knowingly or unknowingly. Equally importantly, it reaffirms to us the values and principles the departed stood for and, if we respected and loved and cared for that person, it forces us to vow to uphold those principles and values forever. This is what makes the person immortal, the guiding light.


Of course, when a person you love is physically gone, a void is created that can never ever be filled again. But, firstly, death is inevitable and it is bound to find its mark someday; you only wish it does so elegantly. Secondly, if you put your best foot forward to continue what the person endeavoured to do in his/her life, you will forever find a guiding and loving spirit taking you home.

“To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.”

Taxi wallah blog

They are ubiquitous in Mumbai’s fabric. They are as intrinsic to the Mumbai landscape as the Marine Drive, the chowpatty and the Ganesh festival. They are, in a sense, the movers and shakers of this maximum city that keeps running from dawn to dusk in a seemingly eternal cycle. You cannot miss them, you cannot ignore them and, of course, you cannot do without them. They are the taxi-cabs of Mumbai.

While the suburban trains occupy the pride of place in the connectivity media available in Mumbai for obvious reasons (sigh), the yellow-black cabs are your messiahs if you want to avoid the ruthless ecosystem of the local trains, or if you just want to take a leisurely drive with your spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend or someone like that. Traditionally typified by the archaic sedan – the Premier Padmini – the cabs have now partly graduated to more contemporary cousins like the Santro, Alto, Eeco and WagonR. The taxi meters have also found digital alternatives to the “Don’t tech me” Meter-Down blackboxes. However, though the cabs all look similar on the outside, they have a world of their own once you get inside, done up to the whims and fancy of their owners. So, while some are rickety, dusty and have coir fibres bulging through gaping holes in the upholstery, others look like the sets of Tamil movies – gaudy seat covers, fluorescent tubelights, big woofer speakers for the audio system, festoons of all kinds, photos of movestars; I have even come across a cab with a mini chandelier hanging in the middle of the cab! Heady fare, I tell you…

But more interesting and intriguing than the cabs themselves are the characters that drive these cabs. As Saif Khan explained in “Hum Tum”, every time you hail a cab your life intertwines with that of the driver’s for a brief interval of time. And, if you look closely, each driver has a story to tell – verbally or otherwise. Some drivers are diffident woody characters who wouldn’t do anything else except drive the cab and telling you how much to pay at the end. Some are on the other end of the spectrum, humming songs, picking up stray bits of conversation now and then, whether you like it or not (it goes like, “Arre sahab, aapka shirt ekdum rapchick hai, aap fashion street se liya hoenga, udhar sab mast maal milta hai…”) and inciting the mothers and sisters of every driver who dares to overtake them. Most of the drivers are from the part of India the Shiv Sena hates, and you can make that out from the typical slow, deliberate, musical accent they speak in.

The cab drivers have a tough life in many respects, spending about 18 hours a day sitting cramped behind the wheel, driving around people of all types to all corners of the city, through traffic, heat and sweat, all for a loaf of bread. All this hardship often finds expression in the personality of the cab drivers. There’ll be old men who’d tell you all about their exploitative owner and his antics, even though you didn’t ask. There’ll be policy makers who’ll tell you all the places the government needs to build flyovers or diversions urgently (and they’ll be right most of the time). There’ll be haggard fellows who’ll recount all the routes they had driven to on that particular day, cursing the Gujarati who left without paying the full fare and the cop who fined him for driving without a seatbelt. Then there’ll be men with flowing beards & skullcaps who’ll rue the fact that Mumbai is now ghettoized and far-removed from communal harmony. Some’ll have a flair for the language, and when asked, “arre bhaiya Thane chaloge?” will reply with, “arre sahab aap margdarshan karenge to chaand par bhi chale jayenge”. One particular man, on coming to know that I had lived in his hometown Varanasi, treated me to a cutting-chaai and omellette paav and said he missed home in this unforgiving city. The kaleidoscope is endless, and you do get to know Mumbai better through the eyes of these people.

Well, I am sure that if you are a Mumbaikar or have visited Mumbai, you would have taken a ride on one of these taxi-cabs. And if you have, you have a high probability of having a colourful memory of the ride. After all, Mumbai wouldn’t be the same without these yellow-black sentinels, ready to take you to your destination like Aladin’s carpet with a clink of the meter.

Mama & music, freak & freakonomics ...

True to nature, I have successfully passed close to nine months without blogging, and some would say that’s enough gestation time to produce a human being, leave alone a small piece of writing. So, here I am, back with a collection of random thoughts:

The best and brightest thing that happened to me in this inter-blog period is that I became the mama (maternal uncle) of a chubby cheerful boy in September. As is pretty well-known, a new-born brings unparalleled joy and warmth in the family (in most cases, that is, given that it is also pretty well-known that society still houses and nurtures some ungodly convictions). But the real and overwhelming magnitude of emotions that well up when you hold the little bundle in your hands for the first time and look at the two curious unfettered eyes peering at you though the cloth-wrap is something that can only be experienced first-hand. The baby has since grown rapidly, and has now graduated from the sleep-cry-drink milk-sleep sequence to the more elaborate sleep-eat-drink-shout-play-cackle-cry-eat-drink-play-sleep routine. Going by the mischievous smile that he sports when he is not hungry or in need of a nappy change, his mom and dad are preparing for tougher days when he starts to crawl and walk around the house with all the curiosity in the world. For me, one of the most fulfilling moments has been singing a lullaby to him and watching him slowly drift into an innocent sleep in my arms.

Moving to other stuff, it is but natural to talk of the cricket World Cup. We are after all a country which worships cricket and erects temples in honour of our cricket players. But given all the hoopla and whipped-up frenzy regarding the tournament, it has turned out to be pretty insipid fare, the reasons for which may be the overkill of cricket and the disappointing performance of the team that has been turned into a veritable deity by the Indian media. But a particular aspect of the tournament has been a disappointment for me – the theme song. There are a few sides to this. Firstly, the song in itself is nothing great, and coming from such versatile and able musicians is a let-down. Even the Commonwealth Games anthem was sleepy fare, and it is sad that a country that boasts of such accomplished and talented musicians and has such a rich heritage of music has nothing special to offer the world in one of the biggest showcases provided to it. Waka waka was a song with a distinct flavor of the host nation but with international appeal and an incredibly zesty touch to it. But, in my opinion, both “Let’s go” and “De Ghuma Ke” have missed the mark, especially disappointing coming from such stalwarts of international acclaim as Rehman and S-E-L. Even the alternate anthems have been few in number and equally unappealing (Compare this with the numerous anthems that went around during the Football WC, the best-known of them being “Waving the Flag”.). Secondly, it is somewhat tough for me to understand why an anthem for a tournament being co-hosted by 3 countries on a world stage should be a typical Hindi filmy soundtrack. With leading exponents of fusion available in India, it would have been great to have an anthem that reflected the music flavours of all the hosts. Also, given that all the 3 countries have great music to offer to the world, maybe a joint composition by artistes of all the 3 countries would have really been great.

Now on to another global phenomenon. I first came across Colonel Muammar Gaddafi many years back when I read the novel “The Fifth Horseman” by Collins & Lapierre. The novel has Gaddafi holding Washington DC to ransom by setting up a powerful bomb in the city. As much as that novel was fictional in nature, the specter of Gaddafi has stuck with me – a firebrand defiant & dictatorial leader with overflowing vitriol against the West and the economic muscle to back it up. There is one thing common to people like Hitler, Saddam, Gaddafi, Osama – and that is the fact that for all the fiendish atrocities that these people are blamed for, they are all products of ruthless policies of personal gain that the First World countries have pursued over the years. And stuck in the crossfire of cold blooded business-minded policy and vendetta are the common people who have to pay for this with their peace of mind and much worse in many cases, generation after generation in country after country. And as Operation Odessey Dawn brings in a string of Hornets and B-2s and Tomahawks and Gaddafi expectedly digging in, more innocent lives are sure to be lost.

Now onto something refreshing. A book I recently finished reading is called “Superfreaknomics” by Steve Levitt, an economist who has gained fame for his distinctly queer but intriguing fields of research and Steve Dubner, a journalist who has worked closely with Levitt. “Superfreakonomics” is a sequel to “Freakonomics”, and both the books use in-depth research and undeniable logic and compelling arguments to reach some startling and funny deductions about various earthly phenomena. In a lucid manner and with a whacky sense of humour, they tell you that a prostitute is more likely to end up having sex with a policeman than being arrested by him, that you are more likely to be killed walking drunk than driving drunk and that if you are a terrorist, you are less likely to be caught if you buy a life insurance. The book is educational as it is funny, and I strongly advise people who love non-fiction to go for this book (if you haven’t already) as I rush to grab my copy of “Freakonomics”.

I guess I’m done for now. Let me know what you feel …. And do something that makes me blog more often, please!!

The occasional blog, reloaded

As always, the lazy dog in me has ensured I don’t blog regularly. And so, this blog of mine follows a familiar pattern, my take on some recent and some not so recent happenings around the world.

To begin with, the court’s verdict on the Bhopal gas tragedy. As a dispassionate onlooker, I was really amused at the mudslinging that ensued between the political who-and-who after the verdict on how the head honcho of Union Carbide was allowed to leave the country and the rest of the related stuff. To me, India has time and again shown the world that it has the utmost potential of being a soft state, for whatever reasons, and this was just another episode. But as an Indian, I am aghast I could type the previous sentence without flinching. When a catastrophe of dimensions far beyond any industrial disaster in the history of mankind in terms of affected people takes place and all that the victims get is fraud, false promises and a judicial decision as weak as the Argentinean defense at South Africa 2010, something is really rotten somewhere. India as a state needs to take a cold hard look at itself, if possible with a dash of contempt and shame, and come up with a really tough statement some way or the other. There is really no point comparing the US stance against BP versus that of Union Carbide, as that would be like complaining about the sun rising in the east. The Kandahars and the Bhopals and the Mumbais are piling up on our existence, and it is really high time something changed.

Next up on my palate is the Football World Cup 2010. The atmosphere was really colourful, but the football was really colourless, except a few streaks of colour. The sad plight of teams like France, Italy, England and Argentina was certainly a letdown, and rubbing salt on the wounds were the crazy Jabulani, the oh-so-few goals, the underperforming giants like Ronaldo & Torres (it would be wrong to call Rooney a giant, any which way) and, of course, the ear-splitting vuvuzelas. To me the lesser names were the real heroes of this tournament, namely the teams like New Zealand, Ghana & Uruguay and players like Paston (the Kiwi goalie), Tsorvas (the Greek goalie), Neuer (the German goalie), Mueller & Ozil (no intro required), Gyan, Suarez and many others. (Yes, I have a little something for goalkeepers!) And Spain, they moulded the apple-a-day saying to suit them: a goal a match keeps everybody away.

Next up is the fateful Jnaneswari disaster and the CRPF massacre (and the ensuing massacres). A lot of analysis has been done on the issue of tackling the Maoists. Sweeping that aside, I would tend to agree with analysts like the legendary KPS Gill (and many other defense analysts) who stress on understanding the adversary better rather than charging at them blindly like raging bulls made of cotton. Instead of pushing in more and more CRPF cadres into battlefields to gain “area-dominance” and then calling for the Army and Navy when these cadres are butchered, is a wrong approach. It is being stressed that the trick is in training the CRPF adequately and properly in jungle warfare and guerilla tactics so that they don’t end up being lambs to the slaughter against the better-trained and well-entrenched Maoist cadres. The collateral damage that an Army or Air Force operation will cause could be extremely counter-productive.

Another very interesting piece of news which I came across could be good food for thought. While we beat our breasts with pride for our superior armed forces, a very alarming situation exists when we look at the field of procurement of defense equipment. And no, I am not just talking about the Bofors and the rotten politics. The problem is with the system itself. Defense procurement in India is a curious case of conflict where the buyer and the seller are the same. Very limited private partnership is allowed in this field, and the vendors are chosen by a board that includes high officials of the armed forces. So here you have a situation where orders for equipment, urgently needed by the armed forces, are being placed to selected vendors, who are already running woefully late on previous orders, by the armed forces themselves (as they have representation on the approving boards). The case of the Indian aircraft carrier to replace the Viraat is a classic example, if not the only one. For a country which is surrounded by hounds waiting to pounce, this is seriously disturbing.

That’s about it for the moment. Do get back to me with comments…

The brotherhodd of Anjj

It may not be not in the same league as the “Coffee House culture”, but its almost as colourful, stimulating and free-wheeling. And if course, there are the customary rounds of steaming beverages and wandering smoke rings. Life at IIT wouldn’t have been the same without the Anjj brotherhood!!

It all started with the search for a place that served good “North Indian style” chaai, which for dummies is tea with extra sugar and milk and served in thick walled glass tumblers. (No regionalism involved here, its just a lifestyle choice!) The vending machine fare at Gurunath, for all the eye-candy charm of the place, wasn’t good enough and Tifany’s was OK but too far-off from the hostel zone. (Proximity was an issue because chaai for the lot of us was like antivirus software updates – regular editions were required for smooth functioning of our systems.) It was then that these outlets outside Krishna gate were discovered. The tumblers were in place, and the tea was definitely acceptable. The fact that you could light up in these places was a big plus. (The “electricity-powered” lighters that these places sported were unlike any I had seen anywhere before.) This initiated the trips to these chaai stalls, which soon settled into a regular, rarely disturbed pattern – after breakfast, after lunch, in the evening, after dinner, near midnight and any time in between whenever deemed necessary. Sipping tea, coffee or “Boost” and sitting on circular stools of moulded plastic or on the cemented steps of the shops, the tea-lovers club would have lively, boisterous and unbridled discussions on truly “arbit” topics – sometimes sensible, sometimes utterly insane. Politicians were abused, World Cup soccer history was revisited, professors were cursed (and their daughters blessed!), the Tata-Corus deal was analyzed, the future of renewable energy was pondered upon, the origins of prevalent expletives were unearthed, Himesh Reshammiya was consigned to ashes, the mating-cycle of the monkey was discussed, menus of extrapolated marriages hotly contested … you basically get the idea. As more and more chaai stalls were identified and sampled, they were given unique code names by the brotherhood – the one with the best tea (and the most frequented) was chaai anna (its officially called the Balan tea stall), the one adjacent to the Krishna gate was gate anna, the one which served special ginger-cardamom tea was SPL anna, the one opposite to a doctor’s clinic was doctor anna, and the late night vendor who operated from 10pm – 6am to cater to the TCS nightstaff was TCS anna. In due course of time, the tea-zone acquired a personal sense of belonging for the regulars (who called themselves the Anjj gang), and occasional visitors were deemed as guests and treated to free tea as a mark of courtesy. Standing at the fag end of my end of my IITM days, I realize that the chaai phenomenon has almost become a physical part of me which cannot be separated from me without a certain amount of pain.

Of course, apart from the regular goings-on of the tea-zone there were always some quirky happenings that add spice to the story. There was the case when one of us accidentally broke a tumbler and prepared for a tirade from the tea-stall owner. To our surprise, the man calmly walked upto us, flashed an open palm at us, mouthed the words “anjj rupa” and started cleaning away the shards of glass. We had no idea what that meant, until a Tamil-speaking guy explained that “anjj rupa (meaning five rupees)” was the penalty we had to pay for destroying the tumbler. That was that. This incident was the genesis of the name the tea-regulars acquired later on – the Anjj gang. Then there was this dogess (“bitch” really has very negative connotations in our mind) which grew fond of us when we fed her with biscuits every time we came for chaai. She would wriggle with joy whenever she spotted us coming, and would accompany us till the hostel gates every single night. Then there was the day one of us narrowly missed being drenched by a dash of water, splashed by a resident who was traumatized by the ruckus we created while we had tea. And of course, there was the regular haggling with the guards at the Krishna gate when we went to have our midnight tea at about 11:45pm. Eventually the guards realized we were harmless desperados and ceased accosting us. These, and many other moments, are endearing tea-moments of a lifetime.

A lifetime of ecstacy

Whichever way I look at it, i got more here than I had bargained for. Be it academics, friends, extra-curriculars, love, hate, fun .... the works. This video has come from somewhere in my heart (not sure if it's the bottom) and, in many ways, reflects the true story of my stint at IIT Madras. The amount of mileage we have clocked up as s class despite differences is truly something to cherish. At a personal level, of course, I have made some really good friends. I have also learnt a good deal about life and its meanderings, through pleasant and not-so-pleasant episodes. Hope you enjoy the video ...