Crossroads Galore: Part 2

What I really found missing in the last post is a character profile of the main player – that would be me – in this tale of asinine stupidity. Your’s truly, as I like to call myself affectionately at the time of debacles, thinks that he is a celebrity traveling in vintage Europe whenever he is traveling in a train in India. Cashless travel is thus a way of life to him. And this cocktail of assumptions becomes even more intoxicating on a day when he has already had quite a rollicking dose of ‘attempted-and-failed’ travel, like on the Tuesday in question. If you get the drift, when I was seeing that new train standing on the promised land of platform number 4, I was cashless. Real, hard cash I mean to denote to be bereft of, apart from the customary couple of hundred’s bills in the wallet. In a strange enthusiasm which clouds your mind when you are panicky and you happen to come across anything that will take you out of the panic state, we(me and the law student cum businessman guy, hereafter referred to as ‘Guy’) boarded the train on platform 4. Of course it helped that the train, Gondwana Express, stopped at both Bhopal and Jabalpur on its way to some obscure destination in Maharashtra, making me and the Guy real lucky people.
Once in, we sprawled on the first available, as-of-now free berths, and, ‘gizmo freaks’ that we were, logged into our laptops, visited irctc.co.in to cancel our ticket in the missed train, and get a new reservation done in the current one. Truly the ambassadors of a new, emergent, & technologically driven India, weren’t we?! Well, almost. E-tickets, unlike the normal ones collected at the ticket counters, can’t be cancelled after a train departs and they can’t be booked after chart preparation of the current train. So, after all the excitement we caused in our fellow passengers, as is caused by any ambassadors of a new, emergent & technologically driven India - identified solely by their laptop usage - we sullenly closed our machines and let out typical system-is-rotten sighs. The public gaze, earlier fixated on us filled with amazement, slowly turned into one filled with sympathy as it became apparent that we were traveling without ticket.
Now traveling without ticket, as you must be aware, isn’t the colossal sin that it used to be. An on-the-spot ticket dispatcher , not a TTE, is present on most of the long distance routes and sells you the tickets at an amount he arrives at by adding up a lot of variables which include a fine amount & the fare based on the distance desired to be traveled. That the train-commuting denizens of this penurious country, who are also its true representatives by the virtue of them being poor, would be quite laboured to pay the hefty amount, is paid scant regard to while arriving at the final figure of payment for the above mentioned transaction. Penury is of course a virtue, and you are obviously subject to state benefits if you happen to be somewhere between a pauper and a BPL(below poverty line), but ignorance and indiscretion are subject to formal state discouragement(as it should be in a society that firmly aims to tread the path of reason), this discouragement showed primarily by the swelled ticket amount. That the nation is in a state of kakistocracy since time immemorial is obviously not subject to such frivolous and opportunist line of reasoning though. Ah, how I tend to digress!
Coming back to the situation, we were then summarily introduced to the ticket dispatcher(TD), who gave us the final amount of our tickets’ cost, which neatly shot off our current cash reserves by a margin of about Rs 700. We then indulged in some frantic and actually romantic efforts to convince our man that we would pay the remaining amount after getting down at our destinations, to obviously no avail. He however pointed out to us the importance of a need of camaraderie & trust amongst fellow passengers, ending his note with a hint to borrow the money from a couple of men sitting on the yonder seat. In a space of 30 odd minutes, we were reduced from a burger-munching, cola-sipping state to beggardom. Well, beg we did, telling the men that we were merely borrowing the amount, with a promise of repayment at Beena station which boasts of an ATM on the platform itself, as informed our wise TD. Beena is the last station before the train’s arrival at Bhopal, which the train reaches at 12:00 AM in the night, with Bhopal being reached by 2:00 AM. The lenders were surprisingly generous with their money, as human compassion won over materialism in what should be a lesson in marketing for prospective borrowers. The tickets were bought, and we settled, once again, for a ‘comfortable’ journey back home.
Meanwhile, I witnessed the following conversation happening between a typically & hopelessly overweight constable(OC) of the GRP and a hapless passenger(HP).
OC: “Sat Sri Akaal Sardaarji!”
HP: “Sat Sri Akaal Saab.”
OC: ”Coming from? Going to?”
HP: ”Coming from Delhi, going to Nagpur.”
OC: “You look like a tough man. What work do you do?”
HP: “Well, I run a small machine workshop.”
OC(sitting down): “Machines! Interesting! What kind of machines Sardaarji?”
HP: “Mostly power related. Generators, inverters, etc.”
OC: “So, they are big?”
HP(flummoxed): “Hain ji?”
OC(extending his arms): “ Big, BIG? Are they large in size?”
HP: “Yes Sir, they definitely are.”
OC: “So it implies that your workshop is also big!”(by now his arms had reached their maximum natural limit. Belly protruding, arms stretched. He was quite a sight)
HP: “Yes Sir. By God’s grace, we somehow manage.”
OC: “Yeah, God’s grace shines on a lucky few. BIG machines, BIG workshop. So obviously you must be earning BIG money as well!”
HP(shifting uncomfortably): “Well, as I said, we manage somehow.”
OC(punching HP in the arm): “C’mon Sardaarji! You can tell me! I’m not going to order a tax raid at your place”(laughed uncontrollably for 2 mins after this)
HP: “Yeah its good, if you wanted to hear that”
OC: “Now Sardaarji, being so rich, won’t you like to help a poor constable of the railway police, who is deployed 24x7 to ensure your safety?”(OC’s expression at this point of time was more pained than that of Somalian children, minus their impoverished bodies, of course)
(HP now looked like a man suddenly enlightened.)
HP: “How much Sirji?”
OC: “Arrey, I just want to have some chai-paani. 100-200, whatever you can dispense with.”
HP quietly took out a Rs 100 bill and handed it over to our enterprising cop, who merrily got up and walked off. And that, folks, is the most bizarre transaction of ‘convenience money’ that I have witnessed over the years. The Guy, simmering with all the anger that his 22 years could muster, with the anger quite conveniently coming up after the cop had left, swore a couple of choicest abuses at him. One other guy lamented the system, not too long after he had bribed the TTE to get a confirmed seat. I, meanwhile, yawned at the spectacle, and dozed off.
We arrived at Beena by midnight, i.e. at the right time. This train, as I mentioned earlier, went to both Bhopal & Jabalpur. At Beena, it divided itself into two parts, with one going to Bhopal & the other one to Jabalpur. The stoppage was supposed to be of 30 minutes. I was jerked awake by the Guy who promptly reminded me to get the borrowed money from the ATM. I, quite drowsily, ambled off the train, leaving my luggage with the Guy, in anticipation that he would wait for me, and thus quite idiotically forgot that in order to proceed for Jabalpur, he had shift to that part of the train which was supposed to go towards the same. So off I went to the ATM, off the Guy went to the other part of the train, and in the ensuing time, apparently, off went my handbag, firmly clutched in the hands of a thief. I became aware of this third movement after coming back after withdrawing the required money and paying up our benefactor.
Now, how does your average Indian reacts to crime & injustice? Iconic ones don the role of a gut wrenching, sweat dripping, muscle flexing role of a fighter. Their deeds are immortalized in cinema, like those of Shankar - played by our very own ‘Gunmaster G9’ - in Gunda( I have always believed that Gunda was based on a true story, with the depicted surrealism always getting linked somewhere with stark realism of its time). The weaklings run away, crying foul. But the average guy? Especially when the crime, theft here, has occurred on a train that is supposed to break into parts which are going elsewhere? Well, one can rake his/her mind to search for that right reaction, not me. Because, ahem, for that to happen, I have to be average. Cutting short the suspense, I, after finding my bag to be absent, imagined that it, for some godforsaken reason – security, perhaps - would have been taken by the Guy, and hence, got out of the train again to search him out in his part of the train. Forever a believer in the inner goodness of man, theft was obviously an out of question proposition to me. Well, find him I did, sans my bag of course. And by the time I reached back to my compartment, or rather the area on the platform which housed my compartment, all I found was fresh air. The train was there, chugging off into the darkness, with its tail light disappearing. The philosophizing part of the preceding post I forcefully clobbered this time.
So, effectively, there went my train number 3 for the journey.
And even that is not all folks. Due to a sheer lack of knowledge of the geography of Madhya Pradesh(this despite spending close to a quarter of a century there), I chose to hop on into the part of Gondwana Express going to Jabalpur with the now-my-great-friend Mr. Guy, in my quest to reach Bhopal, when maps, railway time-tables, and idiots-of-the-first-order(as succinctly put by Dad) know that Beena is only 2 hours of railway time away from Bhopal. This last error in judgement is however outshined by the ones preceding it, and therefore may not come across as too glaring. But the GRP cop ensured that it did; read the epilogue please.
(I reached Jabalpur at 7 in the morning. Guy’s family showed tremendous hospitality in putting up with me for 2 hours and cooking a sumptuous breakfast for me. It took a couple of trains, with a change at Itarsi, to finally reach Bhopal at 5:00 PM on Tuesday a good 46 hours after I had set out on this travesty of a journey. I now wonder how could the term ‘journey’ be ever used as a metaphor in philosophy!)

Epilogue
"Sirji, tell me seriously. You seriously want to file this FIR, or shall I give you the number of a very good psychiatrist? I think your son needs counseling.”

Crossroads Galore - Part 1

Analyze this. Yours truly, while aiming to travel from Delhi to Bhopal, missed 3 trains in 28 hours; took 44 hours to complete a journey that should ideally have taken 10; survived on a couple of sandwiches, equal number of cold drinks & an amazingly inedible Railways 'thaali', coupled with a Good-Samaritan sponsored utthapam during the ordeal; had zero cash for about 11 hours in which he resorted to begging to uplift his economic status; lost(or rather gifted, as suggested by a sarcastic cop of the GRP) luggage that included ‘sheerly worthless’(suggested again by the same cop) items like branded shirts, trousers, joggers and- hold your breath femme fatales(though I wish you actually did)- about 50 photographs of yours truly.

Zoom back to a chilly Monday night on the roads of Delhi. I, with my unparalleled wisdom, thought that 2 hours is enough time to reach Hazrat Nizamuddin station from Noida via Green Park. Now, any Delhite wouldn’t find anything particularly wrong with this assumption, unless he/she knows that this 2 hour window lay in the infamous rush hours of Delhi traffic. Add to this the fact that I had already missed a flight in Delhi owing to the same traffic an year before during the same rush hours, and so, ideally, I should have been wiser, which, as it turned out, is something that should be a life time goal for me. But nevertheless, the journey began smoothly enough with the rickshaw driver crooning classic Kishore Kumar numbers, laced with sudden genitalia describing outbursts at erratic drivers, with the blaring speakers of the vehicle complimenting his, ahem, unique voice, while I enjoyed the night view of Delhi, peeping out of the rickshaw like Tarzan visiting a city for the first time. When the lights whiz by, you don’t exactly get to know the speed, and to make it worse, it was me. Rest is legendary stuff as, after hitting Green Park at 8:40 PM, we(the rickshaw driver & me) still tried to make a dash for H. Nizamuddin, in a bid to outshine Schumi or, lately, Rossi. Which we obviously could not, though it was heartening to note that we were only 10 minutes late, a delay about which I boasted almost pompously about in a later encounter with Dad, about which I would talk, quite naturally, later.
“What touches me most about missing flights and trains is the philosophical angle to it. The disappearing lights of the locomotive signify the adage – “so near, yet so far”, they give you a reality check as to how your cherished goals leave your side even as you watch them go, they also signify the lullaby of life and the ultimate truth that you leave everything behind…….” –
(the intention now is to create a loud, jarring moment here which denotes that my phone rang, but it was on vibrate mode, and the ‘jarring moment’ is thus better understood than expressed, so…anyways, lets just leave this crap)
“Hello?”
“Boarded?”
“No Dad, actually I missed….”
“(pause)…Quite so expected when you are concerned!”
“Ya, I mean I just missed by 10 mins. Remember, you too missed it once?”
“Yes I did. So?”
“So nothing…I’ll just call up when I manage a contingency boarding”
“No boy, I’ll list out to you the earliest options which you have….blah blah”
“Fine Dad, I’ll see what can be done and call you back.”

Can/could notwithstanding, what was wanted to be done was to find a comfortable reservation for the next morning, and sleep off the ensuing time, given the mental fatigue that is common if you spend a full day at work doing, well, nothing. So I did the same, and logged off comfortably from the current ‘adventurous’ day, after getting the reservation done for a train due to depart at 2:17 PM from Delhi to Bhopal(New Delhi – Jabalpur Superfast) the next day, oblivious of what lay ahead.

Next day, I strolled into the Hazrat Nizammuddin station again, almost whistling Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be wild’ – ‘almost’ because I have always believed that it would be quite bizarre to do so actually, movies notwithstanding - taking an intelligent margin of 17 minutes. Not one of those who get all worked up and act silly after a minor mistake, I introduced a sexy swagger with a cocked-sideways-gaze while walking up to the ‘Enquiry Window’ and enquired about the platform at which the specific train was supposed to come. “4” came the reply from the utterly bored human sitting across the window. Hence I marched to the platform number 4, found a train with the words ‘New Delhi – Jabalpur’ & ‘Superfast’ written on it, confirmed the train with a fellow passenger and perched myself on the allotted coach and seat number. All seemed perfect. The luggage was tucked in. The fellow passenger was a law student cum business man – an interesting case for fruitful conversation, given the fact that I had rapturously laughed at a lot of lawyer & businessmen jokes recently. The weather too was perfect and I looked forward to reaching Bhopal by 12 AM in the night.

Only, the train just didn’t start.

Not at 2:17 PM, not at 2:30 PM, not at 3:00 PM.
While we shifted nervously on our arse a couple of times while looking at our watch during our very engaging conversation- which covered almost everything from Laptop power issues to the Chennai lawyers going berserk over their ‘brethren’ in Sri Lanka- we didn’t exactly panic until a family came in and started settling themselves in the adjoining seats, casually mentioning that they came a tad too early before departure. By that time, during our conversation, we had scoffed at a couple of bachelors sitting around, asking whether they had reservations or were just freelancing on railways and had smirked at their miserable existences when they had sought to confirm the train name, which was, incidentally, different from what we were assuming it to be. The family angle brought a lot of credibility to the now grounding theory of ‘wrong-train’. We rushed out to check the train name and lo behold, this was actually a certain Mahakaushal Express, which indeed goes from New Delhi to Jabalpur, at a super fast pace, but does NOT stop at Bhopal in between.

And it was standing on platform number 5.

Yes, yours truly mistook platform 5 for 4, & thus got into the wrong train which was incidentally going towards Jabalpur, and watched the right train leave the platform over the edges of a lively but ultimately futile conversation.
So effectively, train number 2 missed.
Now, my eyes drifted to the original Promised land – platform 4. There was another train standing there as I watched, now with a strange & sudden fear of trains on the ascendancy.
(to be continued)

Fawk'es' eyes!

There has been this tendency with the conspirator, this extra special orientation, towards realizing the threat probability to everything. So, as a kid, he used to look for loopholes in a shop’s security in case of a theft, when others starry-eyed the toys. The conspirator always used to wonder about how in the heavens name would the short, potbellied shopkeeper, in all his engrossedness with his account book, would come to know about the unprotected, hanging GI-Joe being quietly plucked off its lowly abode by the conspirator - for whom even the counter wall separating the Joe from the shopkeeper’s vision was well a metaphor for the Himalayas. This question lingered on until he came to know about RFID tagging, of course; but by then, the possibility of an implementation had obviously become negligible, it being inversely proportional to the conspirator’s ever increasing height.

Also, when the conspirator, in his grown up, but still uncanny self, stumbled on into the John Woo way of Indian airports, it was revelation time. He found, after doing so, that he could transport a pocketful of crude firecracker bombs in his backpack through the security checks of the national carrier, all the way to its destination. The motive behind the coup was innocent enough – the conspirator didn’t want to miss out on his Diwali celebrations, his first and hopefully the last in Andamans - but that is outside the scope of this discussion; if at all this be considered to be a discussion (It is expected that the conspirator’s young and tender age & innocuous intention will be excused). And if that was not sufficient enough, the conspirator found that he could reach as deep as the international terminal waiting area entry gate, without, repeat without, his handbag being frisked, let alone even glanced at. The handbag could have contained anything from something as harmless as Reader’s Digest to, well, use your imagination. All this analysis has been done while assuming, for obvious reasons, that the conspirator was not ‘frisked’ by any intangible sensor rays enroute to the waiting area. Its a situation that may perhaps go untested forever, unless he decides, at at a later point in time, to explore the interiors of a Tihar cell.

The last pin in the straw came when, after being enlightened ad infinitum about the grandiose & political importance of the European Union and its headquarters at the Berlaymont building in Brussels while travelling towards the same in a Belgian metro, the conspirator found, to his utter shock, that the train stops right below the huge EU edifice, and that the stairs towards the ground level(from the underground level of the metro station) lead directly to the entrance of the building through an alley flanked by its support pillars. Mind you, to the entrance of the building, not to the entrance of a compound surrounding the building. In fact, there was no compound, as a compound area is usually characterized by a surrounding wall, which, in the case of the European Union headquarters, was absent! Lo behold, there was a structure, which supposedly houses ALL of the European political elite and their attached machinery, at a stones throw from the conspirator without a S of security, or a P of the famed Belgian politie. He could conveniently go to the nearest support pillar, place a bag not containing Reader's Digests alongside, and walk away whistling, in a trademark John Woo fashion(sans the cigarette, of course), with the building going up in flames at his back. Makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it, Mr José Manuel Durão Barros?
But don't you worry Mr. Barros, he is no Guy Fawkes, you are certainly not King James I and there is a difference of seven letters between the words Belgium & England- with the difference being obviously more than linguistic.
Talking of the politie, or 'our esteemed contemporaries of the government enforcement staff' as Erle Stan Gardner called them, they happen to be be one of the most missed species by the conspirator here in Europe. Well, 'missed' may not be the right term as their absense has given the conspirator an opportunity to get into an overdrive with his element major time. That restaurant could be bluffed, that signal can be trespassed, this house could be broken into - the list is endless. After the Berlaymont surprise, only one question had come to his mind - How could Poirot hail from Belgium, of all places?
Now he knows. Practice makes a man perfect, and one needs incidents to practice the art of detection. Lots of them actually. And there is no better 'incident' incubator, than the vast, unpoliced Belgian/European hinterland.
And the only fitting reply that Europe can give to him for all the above crap is getting him arrested for criminal suggestion within 5 minutes of his publishing this post, the probability of which is........... :-)

Of writing woes, bad finishes & an unbridled romanticism!

Two unfinished posts, or drafts, on my post list & about half a dozen unfinished ideas on the hard drive made me take this decision. The decision to put overthought in the dustbin and write straight from the gut over here. I have been a terrible finisher always. And if writing unfinished poems(yup, did that back as a kid - even bordered on the mushy genre occasionally!) and articles was not enough, I have been one lousy finisher in the material affairs as well. Having struck only once in the 7 interviews I faced in my life - that 'once' being responsible for the laptop on which I type this and also for a very sumptuous meal which I had an hour back, I have always had a very hazy idea of what-it-takes. So even a childish phrase as 'pulling your pants up'(as is advised to be done in climaxes)- in my context- becomes nothing short of a herculean feat.
In my romantic delirium, into which I fall a lot while doing a lot of useless activities like writing (& listmus*), I have even contemplated about writing something about writing. You would be amused to know that I got stuck at this idea because I, while writing about it, thought about writing something about writing as a further sub-plot. That made it something like writing about writing about writing, which, as I later assessed, was not exactly what you would call a healthy activity if your mind is the host; thereby making me abandon it totally. The explanation that I gave to my heart for doing something so ghastly? 'The world is not yet ready for it ol' chap! We'll together write a masterpiece someday, and we would include it as a sub-plot in it.' Boy! was he happy!
Then there was this urge to write about the Jaipur blasts. But then, there were already plenty of them around, with their big, lofty thoughts. I, surprisingly, love to write about lofty thoughts, while I hate to confront them myself. Perhaps my heart desires all the loftiness in the world to emanate solely from me, and having to share its dreams with the other sources seems to put it off. Perhaps that is the reason (my love for loftiness, that is) why I, in a moment of intense admiration for Latin phrases, decided to choose the URL for this space as absolutumdominum. But wait a second, shouldn't the 'n' be followed by an 'i' there? Yes it should be, but the original was already taken, and I quite safely assumed the people around me to suck badly in Latin. Hell, they suck in Hindi, forget about Latin!("Guys, 'Shaurya' ka matlab hota hai bravery!" - courtesy, an anchor of MTV Wassup. Got a sleepless night due to a stomach ache that followed the guffaws.)
And boy, they did suck. No one, amongst an enormous, jaw-dropping audience (which consisted of roughly 5 visitors in the first few months) could tell out the glitch. I too, pretending to have forgotten counting beyond 5 as a counter-measure against an extremely low blogger popularity - okay you have it, an extremely low internet popularity (and I'm not going beyond that!) - decided to let it stay, until one day, the romantic delirium returned with one helluva quote, which screamed for itself to be made the headline of the blog -
'Connoisseurs of Latin maybe a touch disappointed about the missing 'i'; but let me assure you, that 'I' has been stolen to be sprinkled over every nook and corner of this space!'
I was bowled over by myself with this one, and it took some time to regain the footing as the pendulum keeps coming back in such instances. It hits you, you smile, and soon it returns, hitting you again. The cycle continues, and takes some time to subside - and with it subsides your smile of self-admiration!
During these moments of intense contemplations, which are usually the moments of romantic deliriums, another queer thought had struck my head. It was again influenced with the extremely low level of visibility that this space enjoys. Well, the thought was about - to put it simply and while maintaining a straight face- a post-apocalyptic scenario in which all the literature of the world has been destroyed. Every single letter totally erased from everywhere. All traces of written text, symbolic or graphical, totally wiped out. Only one piece remains. Yes, you guessed it right - this blog!( This is my space, remember, so the one that remains can never be yours!). What would happen then? I would be a legend, father of literature for the future generations. The greatest writer ever, because, frankly, I'll be the only writer ever - in the eyes of the future generations at least .
Wow! what sweet revenge would that be! On the other hand, it could be a very disheartening experience if the advertisements on or to this page still walk away with the Nobel for literature. (Shivers!)
As I said, just a thought!
Anyways, I think thats enough deliriums for an insomniac for now.
Insomnia and romanticism somehow don't go well together!

* listening to music

The Vagaries of a Senile Mind!

There is a certain visual imagery associated with most of the intangible forms that we come across or think about in a lifetime. What that might be for the particular forms differs from person to person. Like the word 'Envy' comes about as written in green & wrapped in ivy in my mind whenever I think of it; 'Olympics' always bring about a track & field event's image, the font colour of ‘Ice’ is always white, ‘Angry’ written on a text pad somehow always looks angry, and so on & so forth. But the manifestation of number '25' for me, oddly enough, is not shackled to such mundane avatars. Envisage a Twentieth Century Fox movie’s opening graphic, replace the luminescent studio name by ‘25’, add some firecrackers to the background, and increase the glitter quotient of the whole spectacle by infinity.
Yes, THAT grand.
This romance with ‘25’ started perhaps when there was a bash at my place to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of my ol’ folks. That’s when I got to know that completion of 25 years of togetherness is SOME thing, the numeral 25 being the key in the sentence, rather than the word ‘togetherness’. Mind this - had it been 24 or 26, the celebration would have been dampened, and the statement’s worthiness would have reduced to that of a news report in Dainik Sandhya Prakash claiming itself to be a cryptic message from an alien civilization. The interest waned for a while when I got obsessively interested in cricket statistics - especially the batting averages - and has waxed ad nauseam since I turned 25 three weeks back!
Suddenly there was a difference in me, over a period of 24 hours, as if I had jumped across a major crevice in time space (which I obviously had, except for the exaggerating ‘major’). The hair seemed grayer, the shoulders seemed slouched, & the skin seemed saggier (the word ‘seemed’ was zeroed upon after a later, more relaxed examination). If the physical transitions are any indicator of the colossal aftereffects that followed this event, the mental ones were even more telling. An uncomfortable thought that the two hands of every clock around the world were joining hands in a conspiracy against me at precisely 12’oclock during the night of 13th September made me panicky. As the Sun crept across the globe on that fateful night, I could envisage those zillions of clock parts in millions of clocks working in tandem in order to rob me off my {X: X is equal to a thing which you lose when you turn 25 – and it is not YOUTH, you teeth barer!}.
25 is an interesting age to be at. It is where you start becoming unquestionable. After years of asserting your independence of opinion, it is here when you finally start getting your due. You are THERE- with that ‘Adult’ tag firmly in place now. The interesting part? You don’t want it now! Why? Because it doesn’t matter, and what does matter now is, again, heartbreakingly, out of your grasp. When you were a kid, as Kevin Arnold said in ‘The Wonder Years’, you were a bit of everything. You wanted to be that everyone who fascinated you. Before I knew it, I wanted to be a scientist, a fighter pilot, a computer engineer, a computer hacker(even before I knew what that meant), a cop, an intergalactic voyager(under the guise of a NASA astronaut, of course),a rockstar, and last, but not the least – an international sportsperson! As being any of these was quite improbable at that young age, I settled down cozily to dream of a fairy tale future – which included rescuing the world thrice from invading aliens, developing the world’s deadliest & longest-ranged ICBMs, revising anything Newtonian, playing electric guitar to the biggest sold-out audience ever, & hitting 6 sixes in a row in cricket. The play was written, the stage was set, and the only thing that I had to do now was to set a time for the show to begin. So I chose 25 – the age when you are supposed to be big and burly and spitting off even the minutest traces of adolescence (selection criteria – “gosh! People are married off in that age!”). By that age, I was supposed to be at least one of those great figures mentioned above. The ‘sportsperson’ dream ended while growing up and watching contemporaries making it; the pilot dream ended in one Pilot Aptitude & Battery Test, the rockstar dream ended in oodles of lethargy, and the causes of the rest of the debacles are unmentionable in a civilized discussion. Our childhood dreams, I often think, are like a pendulum’s swing – they start with a huge sweep between two very different and even contradictory ambitions (what else should a desire to be an astronaut and a rockstar be termed?) - covering a wide range of wants in between, and, with the passage of time, get smaller, slower and more & more limited as that sweep does, and end eventually with a stillness which signifies our one and only unipolar ambition in the end – to live, somehow. This ‘end’ in my case, it seemed to me, had come with this birthday. Hence, the dismay!
Well, my chagrin notwithstanding, the Sun did creep, the clockwork did tick, and before I knew it, there I was, hands flung in air, eyes redefining the term ‘deliria’, and chest thrust forward – more due to a push, rather than a self-thrust - breaking that ribbon which has ‘Gotcha’ written over it! (That, again, is a visual imagery associated with the event)- with the identity of the addressee for the word ‘Gotcha’ being a matter of high & wide speculation.
It is the beauty of this eventuality that saved me.
Because, in any case - whether the age ‘got’ me, or I ‘got’ the age - the finality was that I was over that threshold. And this threshold is like a hill top or a plateau you encounter in midst of a long and tiring journey. You climb it, stretch your arms, breathe in fresh air, look around, and then look back at the long way that you have traveled to come this far. You see that smooth initial portion of the road that you started your journey on – believing it to be one hell of a joyride all the way; you see that little thorn ridden patch of the road that ended your honeymoon but which you could still navigate through, unscathed in the end; you see those rollercoaster like sections of the road, full of crests & troughs which you journeyed through with a lurch in your stomach, and a twinkle in the eye; you see those hairpin bends which made you slow down in spite of you prior breakneck speeds - this slowing down being attributed usually to fear, and sometimes to respect; you see those wreckages of cars you passed by - silently swearing that you would never let this happen to yours, only to end up narrowly missing a crash; you see those lifts that you gave to strangers – and how close you came to being robbed by them; you see those torrential rains which made going on hell for you, but you still admired the cleansing they did for your then-dirty car! And then, when you see all that, you realize that the drive was indeed a joyride all the way, that honeymoon actually never got over, because in the end, and on that hill top, you were still there, with your very own car, your very own road, and more starry eyed for the path ahead than you were when you started it all!
So, I finally did what should have been done – wiped that brow, snapped those fingers, and got on with that drive!



PS - Pray to your Lord Almighty that you are not around when I turn 50!

Cooling Illeya!

That during rounds of post-ethanolic discussions with co-conspirators, a lot of beautiful and unadulterated thoughts diffuse, is a no brainer. But, when the thoughts tend to encompass burning social issues like the relevance of heat in an average Chennaiite's day, and, regretfully, night - a jaw dropping display of human agony & helplessness emanates from the faces of the tortured souls. Usually everybody - and that includes the normally sedate ones - howl, at the top of their voices, and with such conviction that would give any dog enough belief to file a copyright protection suit. But sometimes, the conspirators get into a more creative mood. Like suggesting taglines for the 'Welcome to Chennai' boards on the serpentine highways that lead unsuspecting souls to this 'melting pot'(no, thats not being said in the usual literary sense, but in a more literal sense). A tag line which may have a global appeal, but which may strike a personal chord. Which could, in a couple of words, bring out the spirit of the city. Which could make the dwellers smile - either wistfully, as in the conspirators' case, or nostalgically, as in the locals' case. And thus, after tremendous contemplations & deliberations, the conspirators finally come out with the most apt one.
"Cooling illeya boss!" - replies the irate general store owner - while scratching his belly, when queried about the lukewarm status of a 'cold'-drink bottle he has recently uncorked. Notwithstanding the fact that the bottle in question has been, thankfully for the eye of the customer, withdrawn from a cooler that supposedly brings down the temperature level of liquids to near-zero levels.
"Cooling illeya boss!" - replies the irate liquor salesman - while scratching his belly, when queried about the warm status of a beer bottle - usually being one of the many international brands of beer that Chennai has produced - Vorion 6000, Kalyani, Bullet, etc - which he has withdrawn from, you guessed it right, a cooler. That he gives a puzzled look when asked about the availability of KF Strong - similar to the look that is given by liquor salesmen in Bhopal when asked about the availability of Budweiser - is a different issue altogether.
The list goes on, with people of different capacities & customs spending their regular days chanting this phrase and scratching their bellies. God must have recovered from a severe bout of hypothermia when he was about to create this city. So he made heat a religion here. He created the four seasons here as - hot, damn hot, sweltering hot, & warm - in that order from Jan to Dec. And whatever that was left outside the scope of climate, like the human brain, he filled up with an unwavering thermic faith. A faith so strong that even the technological innovations like refrigerators & air conditioners couldn't break. To keep up with the changing times, some enterprising folks like those mentioned above did adopt these inventions, but found a brilliant way out - they kept the coolants shut. Hence the lukewarm cold-drink & the warm beer.
Indeed, heat manifests itself in various antics of Chennaiites. For instance, the plates in a restaurant to which a few fellow conspirators once went to, were warm. The reason for them being so, was, apparently, not environmental - as the restaurant was air conditioned, but was a result of a manual deliberation. The reason, of course, was incomprehensible to us non-believers. This was after the conspirators had refused a tempting offer to drink boiling Black Knight beer at a place cooled by table fans. Also, the fact that in addition to having the regular tap, most water-'coolers' here have an extra tap to pour out warm water too. A conspirator once suggested that commodities which have to be served cold, like icecreams(thankfully!), should come with a statutory warning especially for Chennai - "Consume with caution/Keep out of reach of subjects with a weak heart". An insignia portraying a frostbite would serve as a perfect deterrent for the faint hearted but still-maverick gourmands.
Another specialty of this place, which is also a brilliant attempt by the residents to preserve tradition and prevent cross mingling of cultures, is the custom of inequitable distribution of heat. This is one custom which makes the city mindblowingly different from the 'other world' - as they call it. So, your finger bowl will necessarily hold cold water, while the drinking water in the accompanying jug would be sure to set the mercury levels rising. Your 'Hot' Dog will be invariably cold, while the dishware, for some godforsaken reason, will be hot. 'Heating up the wrong things' - as it is called in the conspirators' theory, but truly being a custom that goes a long way to show this city's utter thermic devotion and its penchant for isolation.
Sweat inspiring stuff, this!
I'll wind up with writing a definition for this beautiful phrase, hoping that Oxford may consider it one day.
cooling illeya [kool-ing il-ā-yuh] adjective
Phrase describing lack of cold in an object that should otherwise be served cold; an unnatural state of being, involving the dimension of temperature
ORIGIN : 'cool' - Victorian English; 'illeya' - Tamil (meaning - 'do not have')
REMARKS : The adjunct 'Cool' used here may not be considered in any way as being of American English origin. The phrase, though, may be used as an antonym for the word 'Cool' as it appears in American English.

The Insipidity of Order

About 20 beer, 6 vodka, 4 whisky and 2 rum bottles(empty, of course) and 10 cold drink/soda bottles(half empty, this time) + a heap of unwashed clothes that might actually qualify very well for use as a mop + a medieval cassette player along with a speaker set which creaks if u try to shift them by a millimeter - for a centimeter, the left one goes dead + 16 butts - of cigarettes, of course + 2 pairs of shoes & socks- with the shoes lying over socks, also a dried up liquid shoe polisher, with the 'dried up' tag signifying its last use date + a horde of CDs & DVDs which contain the same songs or videos redundantly ripped + a little electronica which includes a 64 Kbps line feed, a modem and my laptop power chord = my room's floor. As my eyeballs surge upwards with a mystic smirk, I scan my almirah(a walled one) which contains, in ascending order of height(dont read importance) - CAT memorabilia + an equally large horde of discs as the one lying on the floor, a screwdriver set(I got that so that I could open up and try to repair a pair of headphones gone horribly wrong - and actually because of a childhood fantasy of having the power to unscrew any damned nut!!) + a neatly folded set of clothes which is so because I NEVER wear anything out of it - covered, of course, by dust, plastic, ties and important papers + the penultimate(in ascending order, remember?) shelf playing the role of a 'safe' - chiefly because it can be easily accessed only by a six footer like me and partly because its only me who knows how to navigate safely to reach the base of the almirah after avoiding all the obstacles beneath, and thus housing some documents that may be needed for future reference, unexplainable coils of wire, medicines like crocin tablets and balms and basically anything that is needed urgently whenever needed. The almirah is topped by a moth & dirt-ridden compartment which, thankfully, is about 6 feet(diagonally) from my bed and this distance thus aids me heaps & bounds in sustaining my life. Continuing with the smirk, my vision takes a right turn and I start scanning my walls - well nothing really spectacular here too, except, of course, the occasional blemishes and golden duct tapes torn off whisky bottles' tops (for no apparent/logical reason whatsoever), apart from the usual cobweb decor adorning the corners. There are also the cloth hanging hooks, which, naturally, are used quite extensively as is the case in this room with any form of cloth holding which discourages neat foldings and encourages quick, efficient disposal of clothes once they are off your body - the other example being that heap lying on the floor. Apart from these bare necessities, there are also a couple of indulgences like a bed, a table & a chair, the last one being because its very uncomfortable to do stuff on the table while standing. The table, of course, is littered by the presence of a wine flask, more bottles, discs, an opener, a persian glass(well, a 'Made In India' Persian stemware, actually), 5 empty cigarette packets, and the laptop. Its surface is actually a miniature, but a similar version of the floor, with both scoring equally in entropy. The bed's mattress is ably assisted by a sheet of apparels lying just above it in providing comfort while relaxing and also in serving as a blanket in times of absence of the same. The smirk has now turned into a full fledged grin - the grin of a crusader taking pride in his achievements, as my visual sweep comes to an end. I think most of you, by now, must be lamenting my existence, trying to imagine yourself in my place and ending up shaking your heads in disgust; some probably even trying to sympathize with a person(read 'me') suffering from acute bouts of filthophilia. But there is absolutely no dilly dallying in my thoughts as mind ponders for a stand on the issue - I stand firmly by the interior decor of the room, and this is not because of any Bheeshma Pitamahesque patriotic devotion towards my room, but because it is I who is the proud designer of the same and the whole.....ummmm...situation.....is a product of careful & extensive self restraint & experimentation in pursuit of a higher ideal - Uncertainty. The quantum model was rejected decades ago, and I seriously dont understand why is it still advocated for use in our daily lives?? That what is employed in my room's design is an ultimate ode to a certain Mr. Heisenberg! If there isn't an object in the world whose position can be accurately determined, what is the use of futiling away a whole lifetime in pursuit of order - which is nothing but a structured & physical arrangement of tangible objects like those found in my room? Order can actually be proved to be irrelevant. Suppose, I become an orderly person and I keep placing my watch at a certain designated place, like a drawer. One fine day, I cant locate it. What options do I have - my being an 'orderly' mind, I'll keep coming back to the drawer, without having the capacity to think beyond, or rather, as they call it - the closed box approach, while, if being in a similar situation in my room, you have the whole damned room at your disposal - dig it, swoop it, do whatever you can - there exists a probability of it being present in this very room! Order extinguishes the flame of hope, disorder reiterates it. The 'pleasant surprise' element, which is a rarity these days, is also a distinguishing factor of disorder, and one comes to know about the pleasure of the same only when one stumbles upon that watch 3 weeks later in the same heap. Order is insipid, disorder is exciting!(See, even the exclamation mark is on disorder's side!(and again)). These are not the times of meticulous planning, gelled back hair, suave appearances or disc records; these are the times of impromptu action, jazzy hair & i-pods! And that is why I remain a hardcore disorder loyalist!
So what if I'm left with only 1.5 sq meters of floor area, spread over as a map of Africa - at least I have some zebras to chase!

Absense of medication for heartbreaks...

Seems to be a very sorry state of affairs indeed nowadays. Yeah, too many love affairs ending up, inflicting a lot of pain on the poor hapless souls....looking at only two directions for mercy - God or the makers of Jack Daniels(downwards.........). Well the pain here can be best described as a spasmatic searing sensation, most often than not having an upwards orientation starting from stomach via ribcage while touching the periphery of human heart(in all its pumping glory) and proceeding towards brain and perhaps ending up as an electric storm and finally withering away in the limits of human aura, this being an ode to the law of conservation of energy.
Well, yes, that is a lot different from the conventional pains that we encounter in our everyday existence but that still doesn't deter me from crying out loud lamenting the absence of its cure! Science where art thou?? Mortals are suffering! You are supposed to explain everything, right?
Alright, even if we dismiss the physical aspect as being frivolous and ascribe everything to be mental, why aren't there institutions for "Love Rehabilitation" as they exist there for drug & alcohol abuse? Both form of abuses lead a person to an unknown, but a fabulous looking but highly unreal world!
Ala Merovingian in Matrix III - "It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity..."
Well, what to say, I just silently push my shoulder forward for the girls, who, by the way, don't even glance at it(shit!!!), and murmur tough nothings laced with agreeable contempt against girls with guys, who, by the way, don't have an ear for them. At those stupid moments, I just wish like hell for a panacea that could take its own course for emancipating these tortured souls from their even more gawddammit existences.
Some antidotes I just wish existed:
Love Serum:
Have a shot, zoom on any desirables, and may we falleth gracefully in love!!Ummm..??...I guess we can safely modify the modus operandi for guys, who can gleefully let the girls take the shot and then fall in front in an as circular picture perfect framesque manner as husbands/lovers do in Bollywood movies for karvachauth.
Pluses : Only a diamond can cut another diamond.
Minuses: Not sure about poisons though!

Heartbroken identification & subsidization:
Special cards could be issued to individuals certifying them to be "Heartbrokens" with perhaps a cracked heart as their insignia(yah it IS clichéd), after a careful scrutinization of their socio-amouric history and verification of the same by their friends and family. Ex's should be strictly barred from taking a part, or even taking a stand, and should be encouraged to remain mostly invisible during the time investigations are on. The subsidies list may include-
1. Free Booze
2. Free Booze
3. More Free Booze
Pluses : Would largely add to the peace and prosperity of the general populace as both perpetrators & bearers of sorrow would remain happily on cloud number nine.
Minuses : I would rather be biased :-)...... NONE!!

Voluntary amnesia inflictors/ MIB's Neutralizers:
Would definitely go down as mankind's greatest inventions, ever. Just click it, and in a flash,
you fuhget it....wha??!!!!
Pluses : Greatest boon for actual sufferers like me!
Minuses : Politicians would go on a rampage.

Hordes of Floyd/Blues/Kishore merchandise stored together:
A great way to, ah..not exactly kick ass, but yes, celebrate your single existence along with Bagpiper club soda(aka teen yaar). But please make sure the third one is not an already harassed soul like me!
Pluses : Nice way to temporary relief!
Minuses : Serious possibility of either your roommate or the person you are talking to over the phone going mad.

Well, the last one would definitely be a (Docs u listening??) heartbreak healing balm/syrup/tablet, whateva...
Also, if possible, why cant these souls watch epic movies like all the 'K' ones(including Kisna) to understand real love, and the trials and tribulations one has to go through in order to find it!
The solutions are endless, only have to find that at-your-mouth courage as I proceed to handle another worthless slob, oozing out so much water that may actually very easily classify him as a self watering broomstick when held upside down!