One of the nicest things about growing up in Calcutta was, I think, the fact that there was almost no festival that didn't belong to one, that one couldn't celebrate. Pujo, Christmas, Easter, Diwali... all were celebrated with equal enthusiasm - either as occasions to enjoy the warmth of family and friends, or as opportunities to overdose on the city's carnival atmosphere: Ferris wheels in corner parks, fish fry and biriyani at food stalls lining the streets, midnight mass at St. Paul's cathedral, huge warm bricks of fruitcake, walking down Lansdowne Road at 3:00 a.m. on New Year's Eve, being passed by cars full of extremely happy people serenading one with new year wishes (or, in some cases, when they had imbibed a little too much alcohol and gotten confused about the date, yuletide greetings). Calcutta took every festival and inhabited it. Every religious festival was an opportunity for everyone interested to get involved and enjoy themselves.
Which is why I find it strange that in the US, it is politically incorrect to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Apparently, some people might be offended by a misplaced greeting, be it ever so warm and well-meant. When you greet someone here, you can, at best, wish them a happy new year, and if you really want to be correct, your greetings stockpile is limited to a bland "Season's Greetings".
But to hell with political correctness. To all, a Merry Christmas. May you enjoy the season with brownies and samosas (as I did every year, after the school nativity play). May you catch the Christmas special on TV, with that little boy with the awesome voice singing "O Holy Night", and may you sing along loudly and tunelessly. May you have fruitcake after inedible fruitcake delivered to your home. May you revive yourself with friends and laughter, wine and feasting, and not be sick afterwards. And may you be big enough to celebrate festivals even when you don't observe them.
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
Monday, December 25, 2006
Friday, November 10, 2006
Joy
My first memory of dry leaves in winter is from a walk in the woods around Khajiyar when I was four.
I was holding Baba's hand - I probably had to reach up for it, his arm hanging down, mine reaching up higher than my head. The woods were shaded brown and ochre, and peaceful, my first memory of communing with nature. The leaves and pine needles, yellow and crumbling, rustled and crackled and crunched under our feet with a satisfying scrtsssstchhhhhh sound as we walked. I remember - I still remember - that momentous feeling - the feeling you get when something wonderful happens, or is about to, or when something touches and awes you, even when you have little comprehension of what it is. "Pa tule h(n)ato", Baba told me. I used to drag my feet (still do, sometimes) and he was trying to break me of the habit. I breathed in the smell of pine - pine cones and broken pine needles lying everywhere. Occasionally, sunlight pierced through to the ground, dappling it in shade and shadow. We crossed felled logs, Baba striding casually over them, me scrambling.
Where was everyone else? Ma, and Dada, and Didi, and Bui? I know they were all on this trip, but for those minutes, I have no recollection of where they were. All that existed was the wonder of a wood - an actual wood - and the smell, and the cool air, and the crackling leaves, and holding onto my father's hand.
Why am I suddenly thinking of this? Well, I suppose, because the leaves are lying thick on the ground, and gusting across the street and onto my balcony. Because the smell of pine is almost overpowering in some places. And because, for some reason, my memories are suddenly emerging from long-ago places and dusting themselves off and creeping towards the sunlight.
On days when my mind is crowded with long-ago-and-far-away thoughts, I sometimes wonder why we don't all implode under the weight of every moment we've lived through, every conversation and touch and smile we've shared, every story intertwined with our lives, every rare, wondrous moment when we've suddenly stared at the sky and felt the thrill, the sheer random luck, of being alive, here and now.
I was holding Baba's hand - I probably had to reach up for it, his arm hanging down, mine reaching up higher than my head. The woods were shaded brown and ochre, and peaceful, my first memory of communing with nature. The leaves and pine needles, yellow and crumbling, rustled and crackled and crunched under our feet with a satisfying scrtsssstchhhhhh sound as we walked. I remember - I still remember - that momentous feeling - the feeling you get when something wonderful happens, or is about to, or when something touches and awes you, even when you have little comprehension of what it is. "Pa tule h(n)ato", Baba told me. I used to drag my feet (still do, sometimes) and he was trying to break me of the habit. I breathed in the smell of pine - pine cones and broken pine needles lying everywhere. Occasionally, sunlight pierced through to the ground, dappling it in shade and shadow. We crossed felled logs, Baba striding casually over them, me scrambling.
Where was everyone else? Ma, and Dada, and Didi, and Bui? I know they were all on this trip, but for those minutes, I have no recollection of where they were. All that existed was the wonder of a wood - an actual wood - and the smell, and the cool air, and the crackling leaves, and holding onto my father's hand.
Why am I suddenly thinking of this? Well, I suppose, because the leaves are lying thick on the ground, and gusting across the street and onto my balcony. Because the smell of pine is almost overpowering in some places. And because, for some reason, my memories are suddenly emerging from long-ago places and dusting themselves off and creeping towards the sunlight.
On days when my mind is crowded with long-ago-and-far-away thoughts, I sometimes wonder why we don't all implode under the weight of every moment we've lived through, every conversation and touch and smile we've shared, every story intertwined with our lives, every rare, wondrous moment when we've suddenly stared at the sky and felt the thrill, the sheer random luck, of being alive, here and now.
Friday, July 21, 2006
It Is A Lovely Weather...
After days of stifling heat and humidity, the deluge has begun.
Complete with darkling skies, thunder, sheets of rain and that strange grey light that accompanies Indian monsoons. And only yesterday, I was trying to explain to a colleague the beauty, the absolute wonder, of the monsoon. Thank you, universe, for listening.
My flat is not made for rain-spotting. No grilled balconies where the spray comes glancing in, which is half the fun. But through the time I was growing up, I had a balcony to sit in. Cosily wrapped in a ragged "kantha", sitting in an "easy chair", with a mug of steaming tea and a couple of books balanced on the arms, I could watch the heavens burst open. A book would lie open (and forgotten) on my lap, and my senses would swell with the smell of wet red earth, as I watched the rain streak in dirty lines down the sides of once-white houses. Little puddles would form in the "maat" in front of our house, and swell to rivulets that would wind their way through the mud. Occasionally, a hapless cyclist, desperately trying to shield himself with the aid of a garish green plastic sheet, would go by, leaving deep squelchy ruts in his wake, and the rivulets would wind through these. Shivering crows would take shelter in the eaves of the balcony, or in trees.
And the sound! Everything else was drowned out by the companionable pattering of rain interspersed with bouts of rrrrrolling thunder and cracks of lightning. And you could just sit there and watch... and watch... and watch... and let your thoughts drift and your train of thought run away into far-away lands.
As a seasoned rain-spotter (no, I'm not sorry!), I knew when the rain was going to begin, and when it was going to end. And once the clouds had spent their fury, and the rain slowed down to a the occasional big fat drop, all the neighbourhood dogs - and the kids - would come out, to jump around in the mud and run around screaming, exulting. The air would have cooled, the skies grown a little lighter, and there would still be the occasional rumble of thunder, like the muted sound of someone's indigestion, promising more rain to come.
Not strange at all, I suppose, that of the thousands of songs that I learnt through years of singing classes in school, the one that sticks in my brain the most has a line that goes, "it's kind of nice when rain falls."
*******************************
Update:
I wrote that last bit while I was still safely ensconced inside office.
Then I stepped outside. Traffic lined up for miles. My usual roads home awash with water, the rain pounding down so hard that even at the fastest wiper speed I could barely 
see. Driving through ocean-sized puddles that my temporarily-opaque windscreen had rendered invisible, making sheets of water rise from the wheels like the parting of the Red Sea. Crawling through foot-deep puddles and patting the wheel of the car reassuringly, murmuring, "Come on, Bootle, don't let me down now," looking at all the cars that had got stuck and praying it wouldn't happen to me. The world outside looked like this:
But I got home, finally, and opened my door to the rain, and stood in the doorway for a while, cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands and watching the rain, and all was right with the world again.
Complete with darkling skies, thunder, sheets of rain and that strange grey light that accompanies Indian monsoons. And only yesterday, I was trying to explain to a colleague the beauty, the absolute wonder, of the monsoon. Thank you, universe, for listening.
My flat is not made for rain-spotting. No grilled balconies where the spray comes glancing in, which is half the fun. But through the time I was growing up, I had a balcony to sit in. Cosily wrapped in a ragged "kantha", sitting in an "easy chair", with a mug of steaming tea and a couple of books balanced on the arms, I could watch the heavens burst open. A book would lie open (and forgotten) on my lap, and my senses would swell with the smell of wet red earth, as I watched the rain streak in dirty lines down the sides of once-white houses. Little puddles would form in the "maat" in front of our house, and swell to rivulets that would wind their way through the mud. Occasionally, a hapless cyclist, desperately trying to shield himself with the aid of a garish green plastic sheet, would go by, leaving deep squelchy ruts in his wake, and the rivulets would wind through these. Shivering crows would take shelter in the eaves of the balcony, or in trees.
And the sound! Everything else was drowned out by the companionable pattering of rain interspersed with bouts of rrrrrolling thunder and cracks of lightning. And you could just sit there and watch... and watch... and watch... and let your thoughts drift and your train of thought run away into far-away lands.
As a seasoned rain-spotter (no, I'm not sorry!), I knew when the rain was going to begin, and when it was going to end. And once the clouds had spent their fury, and the rain slowed down to a the occasional big fat drop, all the neighbourhood dogs - and the kids - would come out, to jump around in the mud and run around screaming, exulting. The air would have cooled, the skies grown a little lighter, and there would still be the occasional rumble of thunder, like the muted sound of someone's indigestion, promising more rain to come.
Not strange at all, I suppose, that of the thousands of songs that I learnt through years of singing classes in school, the one that sticks in my brain the most has a line that goes, "it's kind of nice when rain falls."
*******************************
Update:
I wrote that last bit while I was still safely ensconced inside office.
Then I stepped outside. Traffic lined up for miles. My usual roads home awash with water, the rain pounding down so hard that even at the fastest wiper speed I could barely 
see. Driving through ocean-sized puddles that my temporarily-opaque windscreen had rendered invisible, making sheets of water rise from the wheels like the parting of the Red Sea. Crawling through foot-deep puddles and patting the wheel of the car reassuringly, murmuring, "Come on, Bootle, don't let me down now," looking at all the cars that had got stuck and praying it wouldn't happen to me. The world outside looked like this:
But I got home, finally, and opened my door to the rain, and stood in the doorway for a while, cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands and watching the rain, and all was right with the world again.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Yule-tide Greetings
When I was about 7 years old, my cousins and I discovered the art of card-making. Instant thrill! We could finally wish everyone we knew (about 3 people) with a personalised card, hand-made to their specifications. A hand-made card said, in the nicest possible way, “I'm thinking of you”. It also said that we had too much time on our hands and not enough entertainment... We didn’t discriminate: everyone got their own card. Mostly the kind of card that’s sure to give you a paper cut - badly cut, created by folding a sheet of chart paper and running a knife down the creases. Crooked cards, that stood only with support from other cards, and that never, in all the years we persevered, fit any envelope.
Diwali inspired flames, leaping from red and gold diyas on muddy brown earthen plates. Not-quite-believable sparklers and tubris (anars) spat sparks all over the white paper, and chorkis spun across the landscape, narrowly avoiding upsetting the diyas and causing carnage. Lacking the capability for accurate representation, we decided to settle for flamboyance: our flames made up in colour - red, orange, yellow, blue, green - what they lacked in credibility.
There were no cards for Pujo (we knew better than that, and scornfully corrected non-Bengali classmates who had the gall to wish us “Happy Pujo”). Pujo was new clothes and “thakur dekha” - going from pandal to pandal to see the different protimas and murthis (earthen images of the goddess Durga, her 4 offspring, her vahan and the asur she’d killed. The asur always looked defiant, even with his chest cut open and spurting blood. Durga herself always looked serene and peaceful, and it always impressed me that after having battled for so long, she didn’t look scarred and bloody, that her expression never reflected the wrath of god. But that was as far as my spiritual wondering went. Pujo was less about religion and more about that particular colour of light, when the sunlight turned to sunshine; about riding endlessly on Ferris wheels in fairs after a cursory pronam to the protima occupying the same park. (Many years later, it would be about wandering around the city all night, eating indiscriminately from food-stalls, commenting on the resemblance of the asurs to the demons of the day - at various points, the asurs in Calcutta pandals looked like Saddam Hussain, the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, etc.)
But the approach of December was when the home-made paper card industry really boomed. All month, we’d be busy drawing crooked, cactus-like holly leaves and berries, none of which we’d ever actually seen. Attempts to draw Yule-logs blazing merrily in fireplaces were beyond our artistic abilities and died a natural death. But on occasion, and only for very special people, we would persevere with an almost completely inaccurate “Christmas tree”. This always took weeks and many drafts to create, dusted with what we fondly imagined looked like lightly fallen snow (but what, in fact, looked like some strange and virulent form of white fungus that was slowly engulfing large sections of the branches) and decorated with enough round, shiny ornaments hanging from the branches to make the tree collapse. (It never occurred to us that a tree was unlikely to be covered with snow and ornaments at the same time.) The piles of wrapped presents under the tree was where we really went to town – hideous wrapping paper and red ribbons emerged from our hours of effort, making us almost salivate with vicarious glee. “The kids” - younger siblings - got cards with torturously mis-shapen Santas creeping through the snow, reeling under the weight of huge sacks bigger than themselves. Occasionally, Santa would be sitting in a mysterious vehicle that looked like a chair with runners, but turned out, after much examination and huge leaps of imagination, to be a sled. A magical, self-propelled sled (in the manner of the Knight Rider), because reindeer, too, were beyond our ken (Irish for "can do").
I can’t remember the last time I even sent someone a card… or made one for them, though, in my mind, it still ranks up there (with the making of mixed tapes) as a way of showing abiding affection. It’s been a while since I’ve sat on sheets of chart-paper strewn around the floor, surrounded by scissors and crayons and rulers. And I suddenly wondered if I could still, at a pinch, draw a semi-believable Christmas tree and gifts. So here you go – this one’s for you. Merry Christmas. :)
By the way, the strange thing behind one of the presents is a puppy – something I asked "Santa" for every single Christmas, until “he” finally caved in under the unrelenting pressure of my “I have been a good girl this year” letters, stopped worrying about pee on the carpet and fur everywhere, and got me one.
Diwali inspired flames, leaping from red and gold diyas on muddy brown earthen plates. Not-quite-believable sparklers and tubris (anars) spat sparks all over the white paper, and chorkis spun across the landscape, narrowly avoiding upsetting the diyas and causing carnage. Lacking the capability for accurate representation, we decided to settle for flamboyance: our flames made up in colour - red, orange, yellow, blue, green - what they lacked in credibility.
There were no cards for Pujo (we knew better than that, and scornfully corrected non-Bengali classmates who had the gall to wish us “Happy Pujo”). Pujo was new clothes and “thakur dekha” - going from pandal to pandal to see the different protimas and murthis (earthen images of the goddess Durga, her 4 offspring, her vahan and the asur she’d killed. The asur always looked defiant, even with his chest cut open and spurting blood. Durga herself always looked serene and peaceful, and it always impressed me that after having battled for so long, she didn’t look scarred and bloody, that her expression never reflected the wrath of god. But that was as far as my spiritual wondering went. Pujo was less about religion and more about that particular colour of light, when the sunlight turned to sunshine; about riding endlessly on Ferris wheels in fairs after a cursory pronam to the protima occupying the same park. (Many years later, it would be about wandering around the city all night, eating indiscriminately from food-stalls, commenting on the resemblance of the asurs to the demons of the day - at various points, the asurs in Calcutta pandals looked like Saddam Hussain, the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, etc.)
But the approach of December was when the home-made paper card industry really boomed. All month, we’d be busy drawing crooked, cactus-like holly leaves and berries, none of which we’d ever actually seen. Attempts to draw Yule-logs blazing merrily in fireplaces were beyond our artistic abilities and died a natural death. But on occasion, and only for very special people, we would persevere with an almost completely inaccurate “Christmas tree”. This always took weeks and many drafts to create, dusted with what we fondly imagined looked like lightly fallen snow (but what, in fact, looked like some strange and virulent form of white fungus that was slowly engulfing large sections of the branches) and decorated with enough round, shiny ornaments hanging from the branches to make the tree collapse. (It never occurred to us that a tree was unlikely to be covered with snow and ornaments at the same time.) The piles of wrapped presents under the tree was where we really went to town – hideous wrapping paper and red ribbons emerged from our hours of effort, making us almost salivate with vicarious glee. “The kids” - younger siblings - got cards with torturously mis-shapen Santas creeping through the snow, reeling under the weight of huge sacks bigger than themselves. Occasionally, Santa would be sitting in a mysterious vehicle that looked like a chair with runners, but turned out, after much examination and huge leaps of imagination, to be a sled. A magical, self-propelled sled (in the manner of the Knight Rider), because reindeer, too, were beyond our ken (Irish for "can do").
I can’t remember the last time I even sent someone a card… or made one for them, though, in my mind, it still ranks up there (with the making of mixed tapes) as a way of showing abiding affection. It’s been a while since I’ve sat on sheets of chart-paper strewn around the floor, surrounded by scissors and crayons and rulers. And I suddenly wondered if I could still, at a pinch, draw a semi-believable Christmas tree and gifts. So here you go – this one’s for you. Merry Christmas. :)
By the way, the strange thing behind one of the presents is a puppy – something I asked "Santa" for every single Christmas, until “he” finally caved in under the unrelenting pressure of my “I have been a good girl this year” letters, stopped worrying about pee on the carpet and fur everywhere, and got me one.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Secret World
Sitting at the office, working on a humongous project, I plug in my ear-phones and slide in a CD I haven't heard for a while. (Secret World Live, in case you were wondering.) It's been a while since I could concentrate on work with music playing in the background - the habit I carelessly took for granted through school and college seems to have rusted out.
Today's an exception though. For some reason, the concentration is unflagging.
Perhaps because some albums, particular pieces of music, bring up sharp, distinct memories, strong enough to assault you. Memories that make you take five minutes off from work to remember and laugh, send a quick email to people associated with the picture in your mind, and then return peacefully to work.
This particular album is one of those... the first time I heard Peter Gabriel was at my friend T's house. T was a year senior to me in college, and given that I attended college once in a blue moon (at my viva, I was asked, "are you sure you belong to this class?" - and I can tell you it was tempting to say, "No, sorry, my mistake," and walk right out of there - which, in light of the carnage that followed, might have been the intelligent thing to do), it was a wonder that we became friends... but we did. Right from my first day at college, when he singled me out from the others being subjected to somwewhat un-inspired ragging, to make me treat him to a coffee and smoke.
T lived reasonably close to college, and on winter afternoons, when the desire for some good music pushed the desire not to attend classes over the tip of the scales, we'd go back to his place to listen to generations of rock, drink hot, sweet tea, sneak smokes on his balcony (conveniently hidden from view by large-leafed trees) and talk about life. (Mostly, since he had an inconveniently good memory, we'd discuss my exploits, which he'd drag up at every opportunity, and I'd rue the day I'd ever told him about... but that's another story.)
T and I haven't met too often since we left college - we've been playing the "gechho dada" game for too long. So, when I was in Bombay, T was in Cal. When T moved to Bombay, I moved to Kozhikode. When I finally moved back to Bombay, T moved back to Cal. And so on.
T's not much of a talker on the phone either, so we haven't spoken much over the years. But each time we've met, after we've shared a drink and a smoke and updated each other on our lives and the new music we've discovered, T's managed to dredge up, from the depths of my chequered past, incidents that even I don't remember, incidents that I've then spent years erasing from my memory.
Today's an exception though. For some reason, the concentration is unflagging.
Perhaps because some albums, particular pieces of music, bring up sharp, distinct memories, strong enough to assault you. Memories that make you take five minutes off from work to remember and laugh, send a quick email to people associated with the picture in your mind, and then return peacefully to work.
This particular album is one of those... the first time I heard Peter Gabriel was at my friend T's house. T was a year senior to me in college, and given that I attended college once in a blue moon (at my viva, I was asked, "are you sure you belong to this class?" - and I can tell you it was tempting to say, "No, sorry, my mistake," and walk right out of there - which, in light of the carnage that followed, might have been the intelligent thing to do), it was a wonder that we became friends... but we did. Right from my first day at college, when he singled me out from the others being subjected to somwewhat un-inspired ragging, to make me treat him to a coffee and smoke.
T lived reasonably close to college, and on winter afternoons, when the desire for some good music pushed the desire not to attend classes over the tip of the scales, we'd go back to his place to listen to generations of rock, drink hot, sweet tea, sneak smokes on his balcony (conveniently hidden from view by large-leafed trees) and talk about life. (Mostly, since he had an inconveniently good memory, we'd discuss my exploits, which he'd drag up at every opportunity, and I'd rue the day I'd ever told him about... but that's another story.)
T and I haven't met too often since we left college - we've been playing the "gechho dada" game for too long. So, when I was in Bombay, T was in Cal. When T moved to Bombay, I moved to Kozhikode. When I finally moved back to Bombay, T moved back to Cal. And so on.
T's not much of a talker on the phone either, so we haven't spoken much over the years. But each time we've met, after we've shared a drink and a smoke and updated each other on our lives and the new music we've discovered, T's managed to dredge up, from the depths of my chequered past, incidents that even I don't remember, incidents that I've then spent years erasing from my memory.
Until I meet T again, that is. Even when they remember things about you that you'd rather not - or, who knows, perhaps precisely for that reason - thank god for old friends.
Monday, October 17, 2005
And In Other News Tonight...
Shubho Bijoya (a trifle late, but I'm not fond enough of worms to be the early bird).
The spammers have found me. Apologies, but this blog has no option. Spam-protection in the form of word verification is now enabled here.
A wonderful, restful week at home, with home food and dogs and peaceful afternoons and my room filled with green leaf sunshine. That particular shade of sunshine. This is what I know, I kept thinking, a city I can negotiate in my sleep, old hangouts and friends and conversation that range over the impossibly important and to the completely inane. Cups and cups of coffee and tea; phuchka (distinct from and far superior to both gol gappas and pani puris) from the phuchka-walla outside my house who greets me fondly each time I return. Pujor abhawa - a sense of mild festivity and goodwill towards all in the air, and children in spanking new clothes walking down the road, foodstalls selling fish fry and kochuri and radhabollobi and ghugni on street corners and in parks, ferris wheels and hurdy-gurdies and Chicken a la Kiev at Mocambo with catching-up conversation glinting in the lamplight, and warm doggie fur against my leg as I sleep, and warm breath on my face as one of the doggies tries to stare me into waking at 5 in the morning.
No wonder, then, that email and blogging were ignored and put aside for later while I wallowed in peace.
But we're back now, and making resolutions and doing things. This blog will come to those, in due time. For now, though, the rutted roads and darn traffic of Bangalore are already driving this blog to road rage. And this blog has some paperwork to do as well.
Ah'll be beck.
The spammers have found me. Apologies, but this blog has no option. Spam-protection in the form of word verification is now enabled here.
A wonderful, restful week at home, with home food and dogs and peaceful afternoons and my room filled with green leaf sunshine. That particular shade of sunshine. This is what I know, I kept thinking, a city I can negotiate in my sleep, old hangouts and friends and conversation that range over the impossibly important and to the completely inane. Cups and cups of coffee and tea; phuchka (distinct from and far superior to both gol gappas and pani puris) from the phuchka-walla outside my house who greets me fondly each time I return. Pujor abhawa - a sense of mild festivity and goodwill towards all in the air, and children in spanking new clothes walking down the road, foodstalls selling fish fry and kochuri and radhabollobi and ghugni on street corners and in parks, ferris wheels and hurdy-gurdies and Chicken a la Kiev at Mocambo with catching-up conversation glinting in the lamplight, and warm doggie fur against my leg as I sleep, and warm breath on my face as one of the doggies tries to stare me into waking at 5 in the morning.
No wonder, then, that email and blogging were ignored and put aside for later while I wallowed in peace.
But we're back now, and making resolutions and doing things. This blog will come to those, in due time. For now, though, the rutted roads and darn traffic of Bangalore are already driving this blog to road rage. And this blog has some paperwork to do as well.
Ah'll be beck.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Seeing Red
See the red planet! The closest we've ever seen it. The closest Mars has ever been to the Earth in recorded history. Closer than it'll be in the forseeable future. Let's call this "The International Doorstep Astronomy Week". Night sightings. Daytime sightings. A big red orb hanging in space. Opening up debate about the Zone of Life theory again... See Mars, as big as the moon (actually, it's a whole lot bigger, but you know what I mean). It's like a bloody fiesta.
I just have one question: WHERE THE !@#!% is it?
I've been looking, I really have, and I'm yet to see it, and it's already past 27th August (the day on which it was supposed to have been closest to Earth). Would someone please point me in the right direction?
I have a dirty suspicion, though, that I'm not actually going to get to see it. Years later, people will ask me, "how could you not have seen it? The whole world saw it." And I'll say, "Ummm." Really. These things happen to me.
Years and years and years ago, when Halley's Comet was doing it's once-in-70-something-years fly-by visit, we decided that those who planned ahead and prepared and got to a good sighting spot, saw. So in we piled, family and extended friends, into a couple of cars. Aluminium folding chairs in the boot (yes, it's a boot, not a trunk), gallons of coffee in flasks (and, possibly, jerry-cans). Stomachs full of food (luchi and alur dom, I suspect), and hearts filled with adventure and a sense of momentousness, off we drove to Diamond Harbour. And over the course of a long night, we waited and watched, and played word-games and I-spy (note to G: and some of us worked out 2 to the power 52, manually, something for which we will some day get our own back at the people that made us do it). Unfortunately, nobody spied the malevolent comet. Really. So I've got to wait for another 50 odd years for another shot at that.
So please, I'd really like to see Mars - up close and personal. If you have any information about where it is, please write in and tell me. I'll pay for the information. And oh, btw, it looks something like this:
Photograph courtesy space.com
Monday, August 15, 2005
Cozy-ness
It's thundering and lightning-ing outside. A bad-weather front that was not supposed to touch the coast has indeed struck the coast, and New York City was treated today to a deluge, a real storm. During which I was stuck at Penn Station, waiting for the North-East Corridor Line to be made functional again, and thinking to myself, nothing really changes... had I been in Bombay, I might have been stuck at Churchgate, waiting for the Western Line to be made functional again after heavy rain and flooding.
But now I'm back, and cozily sitting in my room, and thinking of the godawful workday I have tomorrow. And still smiling, because I picked up a couple of very exciting books from the Strand Bookstore today. "Over the Edge of the World" - the story of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, by Laurence Bergreen, and "Mercator - The Man Who Mapped The Planet" by Nicholas Crane.
And also because, this time while I was there, I saw signs for Bourbon Street and Bleecker Street. It's fascinating when street names from songs suddenly appear in front of your eyes, unbidden. Bleecker Street didn't look bleak, and the moon wasn't over Bourbon Street (it was a dark and stormy night...) but I still grinned like an idiot when I saw them.
Tomorrow will mark the first time I'll be working on the 15th of August. It'll be strange not to attend a flag-hoisting ceremony somewhere, sing the national anthem - I can't remember a time when I haven't. I'll miss the cars going by with little paper flags stuck in their bonnets, kids waving them around everywhere, shops selling flag pins to stick into blazers and collars. So distance does matter, after all.
Here's to all the flags that get stuck at half-mast, those that refuse to unfurl properly and that have to be taken down and re-hoisted... and the burst of pride one feels (even if one is a global citizen) each time one sees the flag open out and ripple in the wind.
But now I'm back, and cozily sitting in my room, and thinking of the godawful workday I have tomorrow. And still smiling, because I picked up a couple of very exciting books from the Strand Bookstore today. "Over the Edge of the World" - the story of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, by Laurence Bergreen, and "Mercator - The Man Who Mapped The Planet" by Nicholas Crane.
And also because, this time while I was there, I saw signs for Bourbon Street and Bleecker Street. It's fascinating when street names from songs suddenly appear in front of your eyes, unbidden. Bleecker Street didn't look bleak, and the moon wasn't over Bourbon Street (it was a dark and stormy night...) but I still grinned like an idiot when I saw them.
Tomorrow will mark the first time I'll be working on the 15th of August. It'll be strange not to attend a flag-hoisting ceremony somewhere, sing the national anthem - I can't remember a time when I haven't. I'll miss the cars going by with little paper flags stuck in their bonnets, kids waving them around everywhere, shops selling flag pins to stick into blazers and collars. So distance does matter, after all.
Here's to all the flags that get stuck at half-mast, those that refuse to unfurl properly and that have to be taken down and re-hoisted... and the burst of pride one feels (even if one is a global citizen) each time one sees the flag open out and ripple in the wind.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Looking Back
I keep minimising everything else on my screen to take a look at this image...
Campus. Not being there takes a lot of getting used to.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Vignettes, zimbly.
Bangalore is cloudy, with a grey mist hiding the sun even at 6:00 p.m., when it's annoyingly hot and sunny in Mumbai. In another city, this would be gloomy. Here, it just is, and you bask in it.
Big yellow sign-boards of concrete, resting on two columns and with a temple-architecture top and black squiggly kannada script, stand at the corners of well-ploughed streets.
A prominent hoarding tells reckless young bikers, sternly, "You have only one head. Wear a helmet. Courtesy Bangalore Police." Sage advice. The roads here are twisted with traffic, badly maintained ruts of red mud and dust over which helmet-less boys play a modern-day version of hopscotch with their bikes, swerving in and out through the overwhelming, crawling, stinking traffic, play-acting at being characters in a video game.
Last weekend, I went to Koramangala - to an area that is less than a 5-minute walk from where I used to live a few years ago. And it's unrecognisable. All the open grounds have been taken out, and apartments and banks of concrete and steel and glass put in. I'm appalled, but had Forum been around when I was staying there, at least going to the movies would have been easier.
The surge in population and traffic have an inverse relationship to the road surface area. Going anywhere inspires sheer dread. The bus to work bumps and grinds down roads that could second as a Himalayan-biking track. No question of sleeping on the way there, but the body adapts and dozes, and wakes up just as we take the last right turn, just as I would always wake up just as the train approached Churchgate in the morning. Mercurial.
Through the grey, smoky, impenetrable haze of a mal-nutritioned city shooting up without being able to balance its growth, its hard to find positives to focus on. Perhaps because the positives I seek in coming "back" somewhere are so tied up with my own past... "This is where I used to live and look what they've done to it."
What they've done is this: They've removed the trees and mown down the houses; injected tall buildings and covered up the fields; removed my friends and brought in strangers. And in the process, razed my memories to dust.
Viva la progress, viva la change.
Big yellow sign-boards of concrete, resting on two columns and with a temple-architecture top and black squiggly kannada script, stand at the corners of well-ploughed streets.
A prominent hoarding tells reckless young bikers, sternly, "You have only one head. Wear a helmet. Courtesy Bangalore Police." Sage advice. The roads here are twisted with traffic, badly maintained ruts of red mud and dust over which helmet-less boys play a modern-day version of hopscotch with their bikes, swerving in and out through the overwhelming, crawling, stinking traffic, play-acting at being characters in a video game.
Last weekend, I went to Koramangala - to an area that is less than a 5-minute walk from where I used to live a few years ago. And it's unrecognisable. All the open grounds have been taken out, and apartments and banks of concrete and steel and glass put in. I'm appalled, but had Forum been around when I was staying there, at least going to the movies would have been easier.
The surge in population and traffic have an inverse relationship to the road surface area. Going anywhere inspires sheer dread. The bus to work bumps and grinds down roads that could second as a Himalayan-biking track. No question of sleeping on the way there, but the body adapts and dozes, and wakes up just as we take the last right turn, just as I would always wake up just as the train approached Churchgate in the morning. Mercurial.
Through the grey, smoky, impenetrable haze of a mal-nutritioned city shooting up without being able to balance its growth, its hard to find positives to focus on. Perhaps because the positives I seek in coming "back" somewhere are so tied up with my own past... "This is where I used to live and look what they've done to it."
What they've done is this: They've removed the trees and mown down the houses; injected tall buildings and covered up the fields; removed my friends and brought in strangers. And in the process, razed my memories to dust.
Viva la progress, viva la change.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
bibli·ophi·lism
Context:
Maverick. He got me.
Background:
bib·li·o·phile
also bib·li·o·phil (-fl) or bib·li·oph·i·list (bbl-f-lst) n.
~ A lover of books.
~ A collector of books.
bibli·ophi·lism n. bibli·ophi·listic adj.
So here goes.
Books I own:
Quanta mean nothing. It's the flavour that counts.
To create frog's book cupboard, start with a solid grounding of Little Women... The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh... All the Mowgli Stories, the classics... muchos Enid Blyton (end to end)... William... Jules Verne and HG Wells... Satyajit Ray... Tolkien... Gerald Durrell... Tales from Long Ago.
Add juice of Alistair Maclean, Louis L'amour, Michael Crichton, Ken Follett, Ludlum. Fold and pour in essence of Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvouir, Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, Steinbeck, Updike.
Generously add Agatha Christie, Paul Auster, Peter Hoeg and Muchael Cunningham; Garcia Marquez, Blake and Neruda, Antoine de St. Exupery, Richard Bach, Grahame Greene, Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee.
Sprinkle chopped Ian McEwan, Pico Iyer, Alexander Frater, Paul Theroux and add a pinch of Roald Dahl and Saki.
Garnish with Watterson, Goscinny and Uderzo, Rowling, Fielding and Hornby and store in bottles away from light and dust to take out and sun twice a year. Pore over when putting back. For best results, open and sniff on long cool afternoons with the sun shaded behind curtains at windows opening onto green leaf sunshine, or in the still night when the house slumbers deep and a sleepy dog cocks one ear at the sound of the cupboard door being opened and settles in for a long night of it.
Still want numbers?
Last few books I bought:
Clearly, the last few memorable books I've bought
1. Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
2. Couples - John Updike
3. Leviathan
4. Agatha Christie - Autobiography
Last book that was gifted to me:
The IDEO book
Last book(s) I've read:
1. Maximum City
2. My Family and Other Animals (for the umpteenth time)
3. High Fidelity
4. Cause Celeb
5. Bodily Harm
6. Euclid's Window - The story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace
7. Impossibility - The Science of Limits and The Limits of Science (again)
Five books that mean something to me:
1. Congo (For reasons I can't fathom. And even on the 100th reading, it's un-put-downable)
2. To Kill A Mockingbird.
3. Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow.
4. Little Women
5. 100 Years of Solitude
6. Winnie-the-Pooh
6. Agatha Christie - Autobiography
7. A Home at the End of the World
(I know, I know, I can't count...)
Books I plan to read soon
1. If, on a winter's night...
2. Siddhartha
And finally, people I hope will respond to the clarion call:
Kraz
Yesbob
Boogerballs
Pranav
Mobius Tripping
Meanwhile, a parting thought.
The universe is not made from atoms, but from stories.
Maverick. He got me.
Background:
bib·li·o·phile
also bib·li·o·phil (-fl) or bib·li·oph·i·list (bbl-f-lst) n.
~ A lover of books.
~ A collector of books.
bibli·ophi·lism n. bibli·ophi·listic adj.
So here goes.
Books I own:
Quanta mean nothing. It's the flavour that counts.
To create frog's book cupboard, start with a solid grounding of Little Women... The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh... All the Mowgli Stories, the classics... muchos Enid Blyton (end to end)... William... Jules Verne and HG Wells... Satyajit Ray... Tolkien... Gerald Durrell... Tales from Long Ago.
Add juice of Alistair Maclean, Louis L'amour, Michael Crichton, Ken Follett, Ludlum. Fold and pour in essence of Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvouir, Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, Steinbeck, Updike.
Generously add Agatha Christie, Paul Auster, Peter Hoeg and Muchael Cunningham; Garcia Marquez, Blake and Neruda, Antoine de St. Exupery, Richard Bach, Grahame Greene, Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee.
Sprinkle chopped Ian McEwan, Pico Iyer, Alexander Frater, Paul Theroux and add a pinch of Roald Dahl and Saki.
Garnish with Watterson, Goscinny and Uderzo, Rowling, Fielding and Hornby and store in bottles away from light and dust to take out and sun twice a year. Pore over when putting back. For best results, open and sniff on long cool afternoons with the sun shaded behind curtains at windows opening onto green leaf sunshine, or in the still night when the house slumbers deep and a sleepy dog cocks one ear at the sound of the cupboard door being opened and settles in for a long night of it.
Still want numbers?
Last few books I bought:
Clearly, the last few memorable books I've bought
1. Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
2. Couples - John Updike
3. Leviathan
4. Agatha Christie - Autobiography
Last book that was gifted to me:
The IDEO book
Last book(s) I've read:
1. Maximum City
2. My Family and Other Animals (for the umpteenth time)
3. High Fidelity
4. Cause Celeb
5. Bodily Harm
6. Euclid's Window - The story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace
7. Impossibility - The Science of Limits and The Limits of Science (again)
Five books that mean something to me:
1. Congo (For reasons I can't fathom. And even on the 100th reading, it's un-put-downable)
2. To Kill A Mockingbird.
3. Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow.
4. Little Women
5. 100 Years of Solitude
6. Winnie-the-Pooh
6. Agatha Christie - Autobiography
7. A Home at the End of the World
(I know, I know, I can't count...)
Books I plan to read soon
1. If, on a winter's night...
2. Siddhartha
And finally, people I hope will respond to the clarion call:
Kraz
Yesbob
Boogerballs
Pranav
Mobius Tripping
Meanwhile, a parting thought.
The universe is not made from atoms, but from stories.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Why I Want To Go Back To College
a. Taking the day off for "women's problems"
- College: you can just ditch going to college for the day.
- Work: you need to think of an excuse to tell male boss why you need the rest of the day off, or else you spend the day smiling brightly at dumb CXO who has neither class nor brain and who deserves to be put in the blender except for the fact that it'd be a waste of a good blender.
- College: you can just ditch going to college for the day(see 'a'). Or walk in / out when you please, scheduling your attendance around movie timings.
- Work: You work to buy the DVD player you can watch movies on when you finally have the time to watch them, having missed them at the big halls (that are no longer showing them) by reason of having been too busy with work.
- College: You can sit at the back of the class, put your book on your table or against your knees (as you lean back against the wall with your feet on the desk) and read. As long as you look up once in a while and nod intelligently, most profs won't suspect a thing.
- Work: Lock yourself into the toilet and read the book you're carrying in your purse. And if you have only one toilet for the entire female population of your office, you can't do this for too long either.
d. Timings
- College: From any-time-you-want-to-walk-in to any-time-you-wish-to-leave. Usually, a couple of hours a day (averaged out, clearly, since there are so many days on which you don't attend because of "women's problems" or because there's a good movie on, or a good book to read in bed, or a great sale somewhere... or something).
- Work: bloody concentration camp. In at 9, but never out at 5.
e. Duties / Responsibilities
- College: Socialise with batchmates, beg them to give you their notes, even take your exams for you in exchange for 0.075% of the rest of your life's earnings (which you - and they - are convinced will never add up to much). Drink a couple of cups of cheap tea and bum a smoke off a slightly more affluent friend.
- Work: Sign-in. Smile at assorted CXOs. Pretend to like it. Fiddle with computer. Send up prayers for the Internet. Visit imdb.com, salon.com, and various friends' blogs. Pretend to visit work-related sites. Keep a few of these on your favourite's list for emergency cover-ups. Drink cups and cups of free tea.
f. Juniors
- College: Rag them. Make them fetch and carry for you. Raise hell when they make mistakes. Make them treat you to cups of cheap tea to show them who's boss.
- Work: Show them the ropes. Take responsibility for their mistakes. Take them out for expensive lunch to show them that boss can also bond.
g. Personal space
- College: 400 kids on a 40 acre campus. Red brick brings out the effect of space.
- Work: 4000 employees sitting on each other's laps in a 0.1 acre 1-storey building. Red brick closes in on one.
h. Food
- College: Expensive - 20 bucks for gourmet specials like cutlets (made from chicken parts that would otherwise be thrown away); 15 bucks for chicken soup for the soul on days when the air is pregnant with philosophical discussion.
- Work: They've never heard of cutlets. And you aren't supposed to have a soul.
i. Friends
- College: 10. You do everything together. You go from canteen to canteen together (on those hours of those days that you're actually in college), settling in each one like a swarm of locusts until you exceed your credit limit and have to move. You could be a political movement in your own right, if only you were interested. Instead, you prefer idle discussion about Marx and Engels, Keynes and Smith.
- Work: None. Instead, you have 2 colleagues with whom you have a hurried lunch and discuss work before returning to surf imdb.com and pretending to hunt for critical functional information on the Internet (may it be the mother of a hundred sons).
j. Language
- College: Intellectual jargon. Your speech abounds with words like fundamentalist structuralism and non-parametrism. And (this is important) you know exactly what they mean. So do the people you say them to.
- Work: Management jargon. Your speech abounds with terms like paradigm, engagement, transformation and integrated hyper-metropic fiscal neutrality. And neither you nor the people you say them to have any idea what you mean. Or what they mean. But you have these conversations anyway, and then you all go back to googling.
Monday, March 21, 2005
The Home-Coming Bridge
Ever since I can remember, I've associated going home from a journey with leaning out of the train or peering desparately through the window to get a glimpse - just one magical darshan - of The Bridge. Straddling the river, the often-crowded and usually-filthy connection between west and east, journey and home.
These days, money's cheaper than time, and I don't take a train home often. Flying has none of the magical possibilities with which a journey should abound, but gets me there quicker and lets me spend more time there.
And even if I don't actually see it each time I go home, I know the bridge still rears up at the entrance to the city, greeting home-comers like a rather dignified cat - pleased to see them, yet maintaining the impression of being completely indifferent to their presence.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
A Life Gone By
My grandparents lived upstairs from us - 1 floor up - in an old-new house in the centre of the city. So much in the city that if we kept the windows open during the day, all the dust from the city blew in and settled inside the house, and we walked about in a layer of grime half an inch thick. Our house was on the main road, and if you stood on the verandah, you could count the cars going by (for every white car that went by, you got extra points). Or add up the numbers on their number plates to see who got the highest numbers. The noise was deafening - especially in those days, with that impossible traffic. So impossible that I have distinct memories of the family getting in the car one evening, trying to reverse the car out of the house (onto the main road), and eventually giving up after sitting in the car for two hours, driving the few feet back into the garage and going back upstairs, to where the noise and dust of the traffic still got us, but at least we could sit under the fan. Or shut out the world outside (starkly lit by fluorescent tubes, replaced over the years by sodium vapour lamps, soft and luminous) and watch my parents dance to Valentino Tangos or Burt Kaempfurt or Fausto Pappetti.
My grandfather was tall and dark and handsome (really). He had silvery white hair, and white teeth that laughed out of his dark face. He drank gin with bitters (Angostura), and smoked several fascinating pipes, stuffing them with tobacco out of a soft green pouch. By the time I knew him, he had long retired. He surfaced at 5:00 a.m., almost before the sun, and drank his tea, while my grandmother did her morning puja. When she finished, and she'd drunk her tea, he did the "bazaar", then returned home to have breakfast - tea, toast, butter, jam, cheese, fruits. Whenever I had breakfast with them, he cut my toast (pink with lightly spread jam) into tiny pieces - more fun to eat.
Every afternoon, after their siesta, my grandparents would drink afternoon tea (with Britannia Marie biscuits) in their verandah (1 floor above our's), where they had made their peace with the noise of traffic that often prevented them from hearing people at the door. If I went up in the afternoons, I would have to hammer on the verandah door leading off from the dark cool landing, sometimes for up to 15 minutes before they heard me and let me into the cool-warmth of the balcony, afternoon sun sloping through the grills, my grandmother slowly perspiring flakes of Ponds dreamflower talc like snow against her white skin.
Of course, I bonded primarily with my grandfather. He was more fun. He took me swimming. We walked together to the park every day, where he waited and watched while I quarrelled with other kids to take rides on the huge elephant-trunk slide and see how high I could take the swing, then bought us groundnuts (roasted in their shells, that you had to snap open to reach the warm red-brown nuts) and chocolate on the walk home. I sat on his lap all evening, watching TV with them (we didn't have a TV at home, 1 floor down). He got me my first dog - a puppy that someone picked off the road - and kept it for me when my parents refused to let it into the house.
My grandmother was another story altogether. She wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes to about 5 times their normal size. And against her short and generous build, and unbelievably white skin, they seemed a hundred times more frightening. She scowled and scolded a lot more, she frowned over huge boiling pots in the kitchen (eventually producing the world's most delicious dishes) and told me not to "sit like that" and "do that" and constantly reminded me of what ladies should and shouldn't do (and mostly, what I did wasn't ladylike). She pushed me to the end of my short temper, and didn't allow my beloved dog into her puja room (but didn't god make him too?). But in the soporific heat-drugged afternoons, after her hectic mornings of directing the cooking and putting away the bazaar and scolding and scowling and frowning, she sat on the sofa reading, her starched cotton sari limp from the heat and her sweat and smelling faintly of talcum powder. And when I deigned to lie on the sofa, head on her lap, she told me stories - about avatars and rakshasas and gods and kings. Greek and Roman mythology, I read in Tales From Long Ago. Indian mythology, I heard from her, begging her to tell me that particular story again and again and again, drifting off to sleep in the familiarity of the words, the genial comfort of her lap, to be awoken for afternoon tea at 4:30.
My grandfather was tall, dark, handsome; my grandmother - short, fair and once, quite a stunner. I can close my eyes and see them still, sitting there in the cane chairs (that once were rusty-red, until someone had them painted a hideous sky blue), in the still afternoon, drinking their tea and watching as the world goes by, the traffic roaring by their windows (three floors up from the road), the dust settling more and more firmly around them.
The house now seems empty without them. For days after my grandmother passed away - just over a year after my grandfather - we felt like peas rattling around in an empty can, intentionally increasing decibel level to fill up the unfillable emptiness their absence left behind, moping over a pair of spectacles, an expression captured on film, the contents of of a dressing table as familar to me as the palm of my hand. A briefcase, a stool, the view from the verandah, and inside my head, my grandparents drinking their tea in the noise and thrust of an ever-lasting summer afternoon.
My grandfather was tall and dark and handsome (really). He had silvery white hair, and white teeth that laughed out of his dark face. He drank gin with bitters (Angostura), and smoked several fascinating pipes, stuffing them with tobacco out of a soft green pouch. By the time I knew him, he had long retired. He surfaced at 5:00 a.m., almost before the sun, and drank his tea, while my grandmother did her morning puja. When she finished, and she'd drunk her tea, he did the "bazaar", then returned home to have breakfast - tea, toast, butter, jam, cheese, fruits. Whenever I had breakfast with them, he cut my toast (pink with lightly spread jam) into tiny pieces - more fun to eat.
Every afternoon, after their siesta, my grandparents would drink afternoon tea (with Britannia Marie biscuits) in their verandah (1 floor above our's), where they had made their peace with the noise of traffic that often prevented them from hearing people at the door. If I went up in the afternoons, I would have to hammer on the verandah door leading off from the dark cool landing, sometimes for up to 15 minutes before they heard me and let me into the cool-warmth of the balcony, afternoon sun sloping through the grills, my grandmother slowly perspiring flakes of Ponds dreamflower talc like snow against her white skin.
Of course, I bonded primarily with my grandfather. He was more fun. He took me swimming. We walked together to the park every day, where he waited and watched while I quarrelled with other kids to take rides on the huge elephant-trunk slide and see how high I could take the swing, then bought us groundnuts (roasted in their shells, that you had to snap open to reach the warm red-brown nuts) and chocolate on the walk home. I sat on his lap all evening, watching TV with them (we didn't have a TV at home, 1 floor down). He got me my first dog - a puppy that someone picked off the road - and kept it for me when my parents refused to let it into the house.
My grandmother was another story altogether. She wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes to about 5 times their normal size. And against her short and generous build, and unbelievably white skin, they seemed a hundred times more frightening. She scowled and scolded a lot more, she frowned over huge boiling pots in the kitchen (eventually producing the world's most delicious dishes) and told me not to "sit like that" and "do that" and constantly reminded me of what ladies should and shouldn't do (and mostly, what I did wasn't ladylike). She pushed me to the end of my short temper, and didn't allow my beloved dog into her puja room (but didn't god make him too?). But in the soporific heat-drugged afternoons, after her hectic mornings of directing the cooking and putting away the bazaar and scolding and scowling and frowning, she sat on the sofa reading, her starched cotton sari limp from the heat and her sweat and smelling faintly of talcum powder. And when I deigned to lie on the sofa, head on her lap, she told me stories - about avatars and rakshasas and gods and kings. Greek and Roman mythology, I read in Tales From Long Ago. Indian mythology, I heard from her, begging her to tell me that particular story again and again and again, drifting off to sleep in the familiarity of the words, the genial comfort of her lap, to be awoken for afternoon tea at 4:30.
My grandfather was tall, dark, handsome; my grandmother - short, fair and once, quite a stunner. I can close my eyes and see them still, sitting there in the cane chairs (that once were rusty-red, until someone had them painted a hideous sky blue), in the still afternoon, drinking their tea and watching as the world goes by, the traffic roaring by their windows (three floors up from the road), the dust settling more and more firmly around them.
The house now seems empty without them. For days after my grandmother passed away - just over a year after my grandfather - we felt like peas rattling around in an empty can, intentionally increasing decibel level to fill up the unfillable emptiness their absence left behind, moping over a pair of spectacles, an expression captured on film, the contents of of a dressing table as familar to me as the palm of my hand. A briefcase, a stool, the view from the verandah, and inside my head, my grandparents drinking their tea in the noise and thrust of an ever-lasting summer afternoon.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Happiness is
A steaming mug of coffee (milk, no sugar) early in the morning, while the dew's still steaming up from leaves and daylight's still fresh and tentative...
Waking up on winter mornings to find a big, warm dog curled up in the crook of my knee. When I yawn and stretch, she also stretches, watching me out the corner of her eye for any sudden movement. If I sit up, she pushes me back down again, big paws on my shoulders, doggy weight settling on my chest as she studiously licks away my sleep. If I just turn over and snuggle back under the covers, she snuggles closer and goes back to chasing the birds in her dreams...
Meeting an old old old friend, losing all track of time and chatting till four in the a.m., waking up bleary but deeply satisfied, drugged with "do-you-remembers"...
Agatha Christie's autobiography (that woman is phenomenal).
The last few steps, coming in from the cold into the warmth and glow of home, my space.
Calling a friend when you're feeling blue... and ending the conversation laughing so hard that you pee...
The way my father's eyes gleam when he tells a joke...
Talking to home, hearing about the doggies' latest exploit and how they're still climbing onto the bed in the morning and waking my parents up...
That feeling of total faith in oneself and the world that comes upon me when I least expect and most need it - the feeling of "Oh. Well, that's alright then..." (Thank you, Douglas Adams)
A pat on the back at work after. (Means more than I like to admit!)
A day off, with sunshine windows, good books and pepper-tea...
A Saturday afternoon off to browse around book shops...
Happy new year. Here's to fame and fortune, peace and quiet, and everything in between.
Waking up on winter mornings to find a big, warm dog curled up in the crook of my knee. When I yawn and stretch, she also stretches, watching me out the corner of her eye for any sudden movement. If I sit up, she pushes me back down again, big paws on my shoulders, doggy weight settling on my chest as she studiously licks away my sleep. If I just turn over and snuggle back under the covers, she snuggles closer and goes back to chasing the birds in her dreams...
Meeting an old old old friend, losing all track of time and chatting till four in the a.m., waking up bleary but deeply satisfied, drugged with "do-you-remembers"...
Agatha Christie's autobiography (that woman is phenomenal).
The last few steps, coming in from the cold into the warmth and glow of home, my space.
Calling a friend when you're feeling blue... and ending the conversation laughing so hard that you pee...
The way my father's eyes gleam when he tells a joke...
Talking to home, hearing about the doggies' latest exploit and how they're still climbing onto the bed in the morning and waking my parents up...
That feeling of total faith in oneself and the world that comes upon me when I least expect and most need it - the feeling of "Oh. Well, that's alright then..." (Thank you, Douglas Adams)
A pat on the back at work after. (Means more than I like to admit!)
A day off, with sunshine windows, good books and pepper-tea...
A Saturday afternoon off to browse around book shops...
Happy new year. Here's to fame and fortune, peace and quiet, and everything in between.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The Cleaning Bug
It's the weekend again! Vive Maharashtra and her mid-week elections. And her civic-minded Government, that believes it ought to be a holiday, in order to provide all citizens with the opportunity to vote without shirking work. Vive vive vive!
Safe in the thought that tomorrow is a blessed holiday, I decide to take the time this evening to clean up my workspace. Blasting music and dancing around are therpeutic on their own, and if you're cleaning up something to boot - well, it's a magical world! So anyway, here I am, executing little pirouettes and twirls shredding paper and shoving things in the dustbin.
The office takes on a different aspect after and before hours. The emptier it is, the nicer it is, somehow. You can blast your music, do your own thing, and almost imagine that whatever work you're doing is making a difference to someone's life somewhere. Almost. And of course, you can blast Mission Impossible at work, and pretend to be Tom Cruise.
But coming back to cleaning and its wonders: If you don't enjoy cleaning, then you're clearly not a junk-person, like I am. All I have to do is open one drawer, and out pop a hundred different things, lost and forgotten, full of musty smells and memories, enough to completely derail the cleaning effort while I pore over them and get my fill...
Personal memorabilia... souvenirs carefully preserved over the years, till I no longer know why I preserved them, but am still loathe to throw away, in case they once meant something to me (yes, people, even though I no longer know why I've kept them). For instance, on several rounds of spring cleaning, I've come across a box, among my belongings, which contains programmes from several Nativity evenings in school. Understandable, since, over the course of a long career on the stage, I've played everything from the good sheep (pig, actually) in the field on the Holy Night to the good shepherd who saw them, to the Star in the east. Some memorabilia is definitely called for - I'm just glad I didn't save crumbs from the ceremonial brownies and samosas we used to be given at the end of the evening. But along with these programmes, I've also found some old chocolate wrappers. Cadbury's Crackle, if memory serves me right. For the life of me, I can't remember why I've kept them. Was it the first crackle I ever ate? In which case, why didn't I preserve other firsts? Did someone "special" give it to me? No clue, but on any of the three times I found the wrapper, did I throw it away? Of course not!
Or old photographs... they pop up in the most unexpected places, and instead of cleaning, I end up sipping my coffee and looking through them. I'm convinced that we show each other photographs only so that we have an excuse to look at them again themselves - there is nothing quite so fascinating, so endlessly interesting, as photographs of one's own life and times. Lives summed up by dog-eared pieces of stiff paper, fading and sepia-toned. And the retrospective revelations - this is who I was then, stupid, young, full of idealistic illusions, gullible... and this photograph was taken by so-and-so, at such-and-such place, and oh how lovely it was to gather there every Sunday... Every picture a world in itself, dragging you into orbit around it, leaving spring cleaning forgotten, duster and rag lying in a heap on the floor.
Then there are old letters and cards... carefully preserved, in a large bag, some tied together with ribbons, some hurriedly squashed and held together with a rubber band (now melted)...
Sometimes, even till you've forgotten who these people are whose letters you've preserved, or what incident they're referring to. Old letters always make for some hilarious reading - and some wistful moments too. But this is the happy sort of nostalgia - the kind that makes you smile and cry simultaneously, and think fondly of people misplaced in the mists of your past.
And books... nothing is as wonderful as taking out a cupboard-full of books to air and sun and dust (wait, this is not the wonderful part, this is the manual labour part)... and then putting them back in. Each time you do this, you can rearrange, redesign the grand scheme according to which your books are filed. If earlier, it was by genre (fiction, academia, non-fiction, humour, comics...), this time, you can do it solely by author's name. Firstname or last. Or chronologically - and here again, permutations and combinations - the order in which you read them, or in which they were written, or in which you obtained them (even if you didn't read them then...) The possibilities are endless. Happy afternoons of activity.
For those who know them, there are wonders untold to cleaning. Therapeutic properties (I'm patenting this), the wonder and mystery of old things found, and of course, the constant danger of wild animals appearing from the mess in the corner of your room that you haven't touched for 5 months.
And inevitably, somewhere along the course of the cleaning, you end up just gazing out the window at green-leaf-sunshine forever, without really seeing them, letting your thoughts wander. With a gently steaming cup of coffee at hand, half-forgotten, duster and rags and mop lying in a huddle on the floor, your hands black and grimy from the cleaning...
Which reminds me, the shredder's waiting...
Safe in the thought that tomorrow is a blessed holiday, I decide to take the time this evening to clean up my workspace. Blasting music and dancing around are therpeutic on their own, and if you're cleaning up something to boot - well, it's a magical world! So anyway, here I am, executing little pirouettes and twirls shredding paper and shoving things in the dustbin.
The office takes on a different aspect after and before hours. The emptier it is, the nicer it is, somehow. You can blast your music, do your own thing, and almost imagine that whatever work you're doing is making a difference to someone's life somewhere. Almost. And of course, you can blast Mission Impossible at work, and pretend to be Tom Cruise.
But coming back to cleaning and its wonders: If you don't enjoy cleaning, then you're clearly not a junk-person, like I am. All I have to do is open one drawer, and out pop a hundred different things, lost and forgotten, full of musty smells and memories, enough to completely derail the cleaning effort while I pore over them and get my fill...
Personal memorabilia... souvenirs carefully preserved over the years, till I no longer know why I preserved them, but am still loathe to throw away, in case they once meant something to me (yes, people, even though I no longer know why I've kept them). For instance, on several rounds of spring cleaning, I've come across a box, among my belongings, which contains programmes from several Nativity evenings in school. Understandable, since, over the course of a long career on the stage, I've played everything from the good sheep (pig, actually) in the field on the Holy Night to the good shepherd who saw them, to the Star in the east. Some memorabilia is definitely called for - I'm just glad I didn't save crumbs from the ceremonial brownies and samosas we used to be given at the end of the evening. But along with these programmes, I've also found some old chocolate wrappers. Cadbury's Crackle, if memory serves me right. For the life of me, I can't remember why I've kept them. Was it the first crackle I ever ate? In which case, why didn't I preserve other firsts? Did someone "special" give it to me? No clue, but on any of the three times I found the wrapper, did I throw it away? Of course not!
Or old photographs... they pop up in the most unexpected places, and instead of cleaning, I end up sipping my coffee and looking through them. I'm convinced that we show each other photographs only so that we have an excuse to look at them again themselves - there is nothing quite so fascinating, so endlessly interesting, as photographs of one's own life and times. Lives summed up by dog-eared pieces of stiff paper, fading and sepia-toned. And the retrospective revelations - this is who I was then, stupid, young, full of idealistic illusions, gullible... and this photograph was taken by so-and-so, at such-and-such place, and oh how lovely it was to gather there every Sunday... Every picture a world in itself, dragging you into orbit around it, leaving spring cleaning forgotten, duster and rag lying in a heap on the floor.
Then there are old letters and cards... carefully preserved, in a large bag, some tied together with ribbons, some hurriedly squashed and held together with a rubber band (now melted)...
Sometimes, even till you've forgotten who these people are whose letters you've preserved, or what incident they're referring to. Old letters always make for some hilarious reading - and some wistful moments too. But this is the happy sort of nostalgia - the kind that makes you smile and cry simultaneously, and think fondly of people misplaced in the mists of your past.
And books... nothing is as wonderful as taking out a cupboard-full of books to air and sun and dust (wait, this is not the wonderful part, this is the manual labour part)... and then putting them back in. Each time you do this, you can rearrange, redesign the grand scheme according to which your books are filed. If earlier, it was by genre (fiction, academia, non-fiction, humour, comics...), this time, you can do it solely by author's name. Firstname or last. Or chronologically - and here again, permutations and combinations - the order in which you read them, or in which they were written, or in which you obtained them (even if you didn't read them then...) The possibilities are endless. Happy afternoons of activity.
For those who know them, there are wonders untold to cleaning. Therapeutic properties (I'm patenting this), the wonder and mystery of old things found, and of course, the constant danger of wild animals appearing from the mess in the corner of your room that you haven't touched for 5 months.
And inevitably, somewhere along the course of the cleaning, you end up just gazing out the window at green-leaf-sunshine forever, without really seeing them, letting your thoughts wander. With a gently steaming cup of coffee at hand, half-forgotten, duster and rags and mop lying in a huddle on the floor, your hands black and grimy from the cleaning...
Which reminds me, the shredder's waiting...
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
It's Raining. It's Pouring.
Rain!!! Floods!!! City fathers debating where to dump the flood waters!!!
Takes me back years, to flooding in Cal.
One of the cool things about growing up in Cal (for me, at least), was that we lived really close to school - a stone's throw (for an Olympian discuss medalist). The upshot was that each time school closed due to rain (at least once each monsoon), we'd actually have gone all the way up to school, holding our schoolbags up out of the water and wading through a river of thigh-deep water on the roads, battling tidal waves caused by passing buses and trucks, and frequently losing balance and sitting down in the muck!
Having done all this, and got to school, we'd then find that it had been declared closed. Of course, those who had actually managed to reach school could stay, and have a day off (strange, very strange, to spend a day goofing off at school without your entire class there, let me tell you), but we usually chose to wade back home. Needless to say, home being so close to school, the "we" that left for school from my house multiplied manifold on the way back - we'd arrive back home surrounded by stranded friends and cousins - all dripping, all laughing hysterically and all in various stages of infection from the god-alone-knows-what-unhygienic-muck in the flood waters.
And did we, on reaching home, immediately change into warm dry clothes and warm ourselves around hot tea? Of course not - where's your sense of adventure?! We'd all keep traipsing out again in the rain - to buy provisions to feed the army, smokes for my dad, to catch the dogs (who would, by then, be having a blast in the rain, and would be dripping and mucky), and so on. By the time we changed for the final time, it would be afternoon, and lunch - a delicious, mouth-watering lunch of khichdi and ghee - would be ready. And for those who have never experienced it (people from Rajasthan come to mind), there is nothing- nothing - nicer than coming in from the wind and rain, with that exhilarated feeling, changing into warm, dry clothes, and sitting around and eating khichdi.
Every monsoon, for years and years, there would be at least one rain day like this, when the real world would come to a standstill, surrounded by swirling water (and, possibly, several people's body fluids). And every time, we followed more or less the same routine. (Minor changes took place with age - as we got older, we were sent out to buy alcohol for the adults too, and still later, we were offered some of it, but the theme remained the same.)
And in case you think that Bombay doesn't offer the same options - think again. All you need to do is lift a bunch of Calcuttans out of Cal, and set them down in Mumbai on a rain day - and voila! You're all set!
So - you from Cal? Want to share some khichdi on an exhilarating, stormy, rainy day? Come right over. And bring your own booze - I'm not stepping out again.
Takes me back years, to flooding in Cal.
One of the cool things about growing up in Cal (for me, at least), was that we lived really close to school - a stone's throw (for an Olympian discuss medalist). The upshot was that each time school closed due to rain (at least once each monsoon), we'd actually have gone all the way up to school, holding our schoolbags up out of the water and wading through a river of thigh-deep water on the roads, battling tidal waves caused by passing buses and trucks, and frequently losing balance and sitting down in the muck!
Having done all this, and got to school, we'd then find that it had been declared closed. Of course, those who had actually managed to reach school could stay, and have a day off (strange, very strange, to spend a day goofing off at school without your entire class there, let me tell you), but we usually chose to wade back home. Needless to say, home being so close to school, the "we" that left for school from my house multiplied manifold on the way back - we'd arrive back home surrounded by stranded friends and cousins - all dripping, all laughing hysterically and all in various stages of infection from the god-alone-knows-what-unhygienic-muck in the flood waters.
And did we, on reaching home, immediately change into warm dry clothes and warm ourselves around hot tea? Of course not - where's your sense of adventure?! We'd all keep traipsing out again in the rain - to buy provisions to feed the army, smokes for my dad, to catch the dogs (who would, by then, be having a blast in the rain, and would be dripping and mucky), and so on. By the time we changed for the final time, it would be afternoon, and lunch - a delicious, mouth-watering lunch of khichdi and ghee - would be ready. And for those who have never experienced it (people from Rajasthan come to mind), there is nothing- nothing - nicer than coming in from the wind and rain, with that exhilarated feeling, changing into warm, dry clothes, and sitting around and eating khichdi.
Every monsoon, for years and years, there would be at least one rain day like this, when the real world would come to a standstill, surrounded by swirling water (and, possibly, several people's body fluids). And every time, we followed more or less the same routine. (Minor changes took place with age - as we got older, we were sent out to buy alcohol for the adults too, and still later, we were offered some of it, but the theme remained the same.)
And in case you think that Bombay doesn't offer the same options - think again. All you need to do is lift a bunch of Calcuttans out of Cal, and set them down in Mumbai on a rain day - and voila! You're all set!
So - you from Cal? Want to share some khichdi on an exhilarating, stormy, rainy day? Come right over. And bring your own booze - I'm not stepping out again.
Friday, July 02, 2004
It's Late in the Evening...
Another heady Friday night. It's almost 9:00 and I'm still in office. But, but, but, not for long.
Tonight's the night we relive our AIESEC days. Of course, we've all come a long way since the time we lived on cheap beer and no food. We can now afford to drink much more, to drink better stuff and to dance all night at a disco instead of to dancing to MTV in our own house. Best of all, we can now travel by cab instead of lying on Marine Drive, waiting for the first train in the morning to go back home.
So here's the scene. Before Malli leaves the city sometime next week, tonight, we will go to all our old haunts. Tonight, nobody is allowed to say, "But I'm working tomorrow."
First stop: Gokul's. The first time I went to Gokul's, I treated it as one of the hotspots of Bombay and wrote about it to everyone... till my brother wrote back saying it was a noted gay pick up joint... at which point, I quietly retracted all statements about going there regularly. Strategically placed next to Bade Miyan's, the freakiest roll shop outside of Calcutta, Gokul's is a place we could afford in d.a. (Days of AIESEC), and where we didn't much care about the seedy old men thronging the place.
In the Days of AIESEC, we used to occasionally (read: whenever we had money) go get smashed at Gokul's. Then we would roll out and across the road to Bade Miyan's, where we would sit on the curb(there were hardly ever any chairs available) and eat baida roti and sheekh kabab rolls. Immediately, our drunkenness would abate somewhat, at which point we could head back into Gokuls. (This would have been a wonderful infinite loop, return to step one types, had it not been for the fact that even Gokul had to close its doors for some hours. And, of course, the fact that we'd have already used up our meagre resources!)
By which time we would have missed the last train back, so we would spend the night on Marine Drive and make it back by the first train in the morning. (And for those uninitiated into the mysteries of those Mumbai transportational wonders - even that first train at 4:00 a.m. is crowded.)
So tonight's gonna be another of those nights... Thank god for small mercies... that even with progress (read: moolah), we can still go back to Gokul's, and enjoy the seedy atmosphere, the boiled eggs and tiny pieces of cheese cubes skewered on toothpicks that are Gokul's choice of "snakes". That we realise that enjoyment is in the soul, not in the surroundings, and that if Bade Miyan was a 5 star restaurant, it wouldn't be any more attractive than it is now... And, most of all, that we'll be able to take a cab back, and not have to spend the night on Marine Drive. Fun as some things are, they're SO much better in one's memory than when they're relived.
Tonight's the night we relive our AIESEC days. Of course, we've all come a long way since the time we lived on cheap beer and no food. We can now afford to drink much more, to drink better stuff and to dance all night at a disco instead of to dancing to MTV in our own house. Best of all, we can now travel by cab instead of lying on Marine Drive, waiting for the first train in the morning to go back home.
So here's the scene. Before Malli leaves the city sometime next week, tonight, we will go to all our old haunts. Tonight, nobody is allowed to say, "But I'm working tomorrow."
First stop: Gokul's. The first time I went to Gokul's, I treated it as one of the hotspots of Bombay and wrote about it to everyone... till my brother wrote back saying it was a noted gay pick up joint... at which point, I quietly retracted all statements about going there regularly. Strategically placed next to Bade Miyan's, the freakiest roll shop outside of Calcutta, Gokul's is a place we could afford in d.a. (Days of AIESEC), and where we didn't much care about the seedy old men thronging the place.
In the Days of AIESEC, we used to occasionally (read: whenever we had money) go get smashed at Gokul's. Then we would roll out and across the road to Bade Miyan's, where we would sit on the curb(there were hardly ever any chairs available) and eat baida roti and sheekh kabab rolls. Immediately, our drunkenness would abate somewhat, at which point we could head back into Gokuls. (This would have been a wonderful infinite loop, return to step one types, had it not been for the fact that even Gokul had to close its doors for some hours. And, of course, the fact that we'd have already used up our meagre resources!)
By which time we would have missed the last train back, so we would spend the night on Marine Drive and make it back by the first train in the morning. (And for those uninitiated into the mysteries of those Mumbai transportational wonders - even that first train at 4:00 a.m. is crowded.)
So tonight's gonna be another of those nights... Thank god for small mercies... that even with progress (read: moolah), we can still go back to Gokul's, and enjoy the seedy atmosphere, the boiled eggs and tiny pieces of cheese cubes skewered on toothpicks that are Gokul's choice of "snakes". That we realise that enjoyment is in the soul, not in the surroundings, and that if Bade Miyan was a 5 star restaurant, it wouldn't be any more attractive than it is now... And, most of all, that we'll be able to take a cab back, and not have to spend the night on Marine Drive. Fun as some things are, they're SO much better in one's memory than when they're relived.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Burning the Midnight Oil (and how!)
It's been a while since I stayed at work till 2:00 in the a.m. A long long while. Having stayed today, I realise that of all the things I used to miss about work when I was doing my MBA, this was not one of them.
One by one over the course of the evening, my team-mates slunk out the door and out into the heady Friday night. (This is why "Stealth 101" should be a compulsory course at B School. More advanced courses could then be called "Sneaking Around 102" and finally, "Smooth Operator 102".)
Funny, actually. On the AIESEC in India MC, we used to spend nights on end in the office. 3 days in office without a break, and then 10 days at a conference - surviving on intravenous coffee and alcohol, and an hour of sleep a day, and gathering energy from the 20 odd cigarettes we'd smoke each day (there was never time to eat a decent meal - not to mention the fact that for the longest time, we starved from sheer bankruptcy!).
But here's the thing I miss most about the AIESEC MC office - we used to keep a sleeping bag, a sheet and a pillow in the office. Anytime we stayed late, or stayed over, or even felt sleepy post lunch, we would drag the ratty old things out, spread them out in the exact centre of the office (so that others working would have to keep jumping over us awkwardly) and drift off to dream land. THAT's what I truly miss.
One by one over the course of the evening, my team-mates slunk out the door and out into the heady Friday night. (This is why "Stealth 101" should be a compulsory course at B School. More advanced courses could then be called "Sneaking Around 102" and finally, "Smooth Operator 102".)
Funny, actually. On the AIESEC in India MC, we used to spend nights on end in the office. 3 days in office without a break, and then 10 days at a conference - surviving on intravenous coffee and alcohol, and an hour of sleep a day, and gathering energy from the 20 odd cigarettes we'd smoke each day (there was never time to eat a decent meal - not to mention the fact that for the longest time, we starved from sheer bankruptcy!).
But here's the thing I miss most about the AIESEC MC office - we used to keep a sleeping bag, a sheet and a pillow in the office. Anytime we stayed late, or stayed over, or even felt sleepy post lunch, we would drag the ratty old things out, spread them out in the exact centre of the office (so that others working would have to keep jumping over us awkwardly) and drift off to dream land. THAT's what I truly miss.
Monday, June 14, 2004
Mornings after
Can't tell you how it feels the morning after a drinking session like that. I'm feeling bleary and haggard.
Takes me back automatically to first year on the old campus at IIMK, where we would get smashed 2-3 times a week, out of sheer terror ("there's a MANAC quiz tomorrow, but nothing I can do will help me now, I'm doomed anyway, so I may as well drink" or out of despair ("There was a MANAC quiz today, in which my marks will go all the way down to the absolute zero, but there's no point in thinking about it now, so I may as well drink").
On each of these occasions, the drinking would happen at the main hostel (called, for some strange reason, the International Hostel), in Amit and Akalp's room. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, those of us who lived in other hostels would somehow wind our way out, carefully negotiating the steps and quadrangle we had to pass by hanging on to the wall for dear life (yes, this meant that we would go into rooms through doors that we passed, go all the way around the room, and come back out again, hanging on to the walls right through, but we took those as part of the obstacle course). Eventually, we would find our way out of IH, locate our bike keys somewhere in the recesses of our pockets, and (yes, I kid you not) clamber on to our respective bikes.
Then, a benevolent fate would intervene and ensure that we made it back to our own hostels in one piece, without killing each other or other people / animals on the road (not that there were many of these at those hours of the morning). The key thing to remember here is that the old campus was built just off a state highway, and a narrow road but with insanely fast traffic used to connect the various hostels - this is the road we would ride down in a sozzled state, without helmets and often without headlights. (I even remember getting a ride with someone whose headlights didn't work, and whose key kept falling out of the ignition, forcing us to go round and roung on a narrow road, looking for it.) Without brains is a given, I needn't even mention it.
Sometimes, just for fun, we would ride all the way to the CC (a good 3 KM), instead of going back to hostel. The only reason could have been fun, because we were certainly in no position to check our mail (I doubt we would have remembered our passwords, and if we did, we would have told them to each other, just for kicks).
Anyways, after a night like this, if god had been kind and the next day was a Sunday (no classes), there was of course no question of making it to breakfast. Typically, I would collapse in my room at 4 or 5 in the a.m., drunk beyond belief, and neither man nor beast could have woken me up before about 2:00 p.m., when I would wake up STARVING, and run to the mess before lunch finished... then back to sleep for the entire afternoon, and up, fit and fine, at 4.30 for 2 hours of sweaty, rigorous badminton, tea and conversations!
The point of this rambling post being that the morning after, I got up and came to work at normal time, and I wish I wish I wish I'd been back on campus, teleported back in time and space to those days when nothing really mattered (except that crazy OR case that had driven me to drink in the first place) and life was simple and easy.
Perhaps it's time to start thinking of doing an FPM, or some esoteric course from some random University in the US.
Takes me back automatically to first year on the old campus at IIMK, where we would get smashed 2-3 times a week, out of sheer terror ("there's a MANAC quiz tomorrow, but nothing I can do will help me now, I'm doomed anyway, so I may as well drink" or out of despair ("There was a MANAC quiz today, in which my marks will go all the way down to the absolute zero, but there's no point in thinking about it now, so I may as well drink").
On each of these occasions, the drinking would happen at the main hostel (called, for some strange reason, the International Hostel), in Amit and Akalp's room. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, those of us who lived in other hostels would somehow wind our way out, carefully negotiating the steps and quadrangle we had to pass by hanging on to the wall for dear life (yes, this meant that we would go into rooms through doors that we passed, go all the way around the room, and come back out again, hanging on to the walls right through, but we took those as part of the obstacle course). Eventually, we would find our way out of IH, locate our bike keys somewhere in the recesses of our pockets, and (yes, I kid you not) clamber on to our respective bikes.
Then, a benevolent fate would intervene and ensure that we made it back to our own hostels in one piece, without killing each other or other people / animals on the road (not that there were many of these at those hours of the morning). The key thing to remember here is that the old campus was built just off a state highway, and a narrow road but with insanely fast traffic used to connect the various hostels - this is the road we would ride down in a sozzled state, without helmets and often without headlights. (I even remember getting a ride with someone whose headlights didn't work, and whose key kept falling out of the ignition, forcing us to go round and roung on a narrow road, looking for it.) Without brains is a given, I needn't even mention it.
Sometimes, just for fun, we would ride all the way to the CC (a good 3 KM), instead of going back to hostel. The only reason could have been fun, because we were certainly in no position to check our mail (I doubt we would have remembered our passwords, and if we did, we would have told them to each other, just for kicks).
Anyways, after a night like this, if god had been kind and the next day was a Sunday (no classes), there was of course no question of making it to breakfast. Typically, I would collapse in my room at 4 or 5 in the a.m., drunk beyond belief, and neither man nor beast could have woken me up before about 2:00 p.m., when I would wake up STARVING, and run to the mess before lunch finished... then back to sleep for the entire afternoon, and up, fit and fine, at 4.30 for 2 hours of sweaty, rigorous badminton, tea and conversations!
The point of this rambling post being that the morning after, I got up and came to work at normal time, and I wish I wish I wish I'd been back on campus, teleported back in time and space to those days when nothing really mattered (except that crazy OR case that had driven me to drink in the first place) and life was simple and easy.
Perhaps it's time to start thinking of doing an FPM, or some esoteric course from some random University in the US.
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