Why Light Up!

While the smoke of the crackers, already filling the air we are supposed to breathe, gave me a rash on my face and irritation in my eyes I spotted something which turned out to be rather amusing. My sister and I had taken my son for his night stroll and were scanning an obnoxious pile of waste left behind by people who had been lighting crackers in the compound some time back. As we agreed that we lived in concrete jungles surrounded by educated illiterates, we spotted a window grille that looked like it had been spat upon at by a monster. By a monster that spits out strings of lights.

What followed was ten minutes of bemused inspection of the lights that had been put up by people in our colony. We do this every year and every year it is equally amusing, if not more. The lights are splattered on random window grilles. However, what is amusing is the pattern in which they are splattered. It seems as if somebody who is artistically challenged has tried his hand at arranging the light strings and has, quite obviously, failed. As a matter of fact, he does this every year and the results are consistent. There are apparent attempts to create symmetric 'U' shapes and 'W' shapes; and it is evident that those attempts were left midway. The poor lights dangling aimlessly are proof enough. There are some who have put up lights very beautifully, in the shape of a diya or just something that does not prick your eye, besides the crackers' left over smoke. But the majority disappoints. 

One window had vertical strings of lights - in all possible garish colours - that looked like a sketch book of a toddler. Only, the toddler had glowing crayons. There was one window which had a very neat right angle of red bulbs; the angles moving east and south. That was all. A window close by had giant bulbs put up in the most eccentric manner possible. Words fail me when I think of it. One household had taken out the light strings which they had put up in the loft last year after Diwali, and they came out all entangled this year. So they decided to put them up exactly like that on their window. Such an appealing sight!

One particular window had fallen short of lights, whereas one had so many that there was not enough space to accommodate them. In addition to the atrocious patterns, some lights glow in such horrible hues that you want to cry. I don't see why it is so difficult to put up something as simple as a string of lights in a manner that atleast doesn't hurt the eye, if not soothes it. I wonder if the people who've put up these lighted caricatures have even seen what their houses look like from the outside. When you take the trouble to purchase these pieces of wonder made in China and also put them up so that your windows draw attention during the festival, why not ensure that the attention drawn is not because somebody sustained an asthma attack by excessive laughter after looking at your window but because you have really done a decent job putting up those blighted lights. I drop it here now. My sense of aesthetics and creativity, both, have already fled; and OCD symptoms are increasing rapidly. The irony is that sight of lights becomes unbearable during the festival of lights.

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My Tryst With Quadrupeds - Vol. V : Roger

While I was in school, the summer vacations were the most awaited. I would visit my grandparents every year, and so would my cousins. It would be a crazy fortnight. A sudden tour through some old photographs brought to mind one summer where we had a unique experience.

I was in Lucknow, and the house was in utter chaos. My maternal uncle and hi wife had gone to the next block to get some tandoori chicken packed for dinner. In the process they had spotted a white Spitz, in a collar, being pursued by the street dog mafia and his minions. They rescued the little guy and tried to find out if anybody knew where his home was, but that was to no avail. They did not have the heart to abandon him, and weren't sure of getting him home because we already had two pet dogs, and my grandma's consent was a must. So the little fellow was lodged at a friend's place for the night. Later, my grandma agreed to give the little boy a home until we found his owners, or perhaps forever.

What came home the next morning was a bunch of cotton wool so adorable that all of us fell in love with it at first sight. Our pets - Tina and Snooty - took an immediate dislike to this new four legged person in the house. Tina, a Pomeranian, was the older one and considered the house to be her property, so much so that she would even brush aside Snooty - she is most likely a Great Pyrenees - who was the younger one and thrice Tina's size. Tina walked away with her nose held high, but Snooty came upto this new creature under the guise of curiosity, which was partly true. I was holding the Spitz in my arms and Snooty began, what appeared to be, sniffing at him. A few seconds later, I felt a set of sharp teeth digging into my belly and realised that Snooty was biting the little dog in my arms. I immediately held him higher, far from her reach but she was not to be dissuaded so easily. Eventually I had to take him upstairs into our room and shut the door to keep Snooty away.

My sister, cousins and I just took the Spitz as our own and decided he would stay with our grandparents from now on. In the meanwhile, the grown ups were upto their antics which leaves adult life devoid of innocent adventure. Soon after we tried convincing our mothers to let us carry him with us to Bombay or Bangalore - totally subject to who's mother agreed, if at all. I named him Roger. We made him a bed which was both comfortable as well as away from Snooty's reach. She would prowl in the corridor awaiting the slightest chance to pounce upon him. The trouble arose when we tried to feed him. He just refused to eat. We tried all possible combinations and varieties of food, but he just wouldn't eat. This got everybody worried. We were to learn a few days later that he ate curd. That was the only thing we did not try feeding him.

My uncle had already passed word around in the colony about the missing home of the dog in our custody. He also sent a message to the vet. Dr Mathur was the only vet in the vicinity and the chances were high that he would know the whereabouts of Roger. Nothing happened for the next couple of days. We tried feeding him tit bits, but he would soon starve that way. In the afternoon a burly man called at the gate. He had the vet's reference and said he wished to see the dog we had with us. After the preliminary interrogation we were asked to bring Roger to the lawn where this burly man waited. It turned out he was his trainer and Roger leaped with joy when he saw this man. All the children, including me, were hoping against hope that Roger would stay. But we had found his owners and he had to leave. The trainer told us he was called Isaac by the people at his house.

I still remember how difficult it was to say good bye to Roger. It was a teary farewell. At that moment we could have done just about anything to have him stay a little longer. Isaac's family was relieved to find him safe, and to express their gratitude they invited us for tea. We were only too happy to go over. When we met him I wanted to smuggle him out somehow; but that was not to be. His family called him Isaac, we kept addressing him as Roger. We played with that ball of fur for a while and, with a longing in our hearts, left for good. That silly thing called attachment!

~

The Written Therapy

“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
~
 Maya Angelou

It gives me peace and contentment alike.

In times of grief, those of sorrow and despair;

When I'm hit hard and have nowhere to go,

It puts to rest a mind in turmoil, a spirit disgruntled, a heart in pain.

It is a friend, a philosopher, a guide;

A solace, a haven - the hand that writes.

That moment of rapture, that euphoric rush,

That minute of joy, and mirthful blithe.

When tears of joy may moisten my eyes,

A feeling so special that moves my heart,

When words fail my tongue, it is here that I find respite.

And in all humility I bow to the power that empowers me to write.

To give shape to my thoughts, words to my feelings;
To take me far from the madding crowd, yet bring me closer to people;
To ease me of my discomfort, to become a vent;
To strengthen my ability, to hone my talent.
To kill my loneliness, and keep me company,
For all this and a lot lot more, is why I write.

~

Chakravyuh - Provoking Thoughts

Prakash Jha has gone a few notches higher than his already respectable standards in film making with his latest production, Chakravyuh. The movie is very well conceived and executed. It deals with the issue of growing Naxal terror in India. It throws light on the prevailing situation of Naxal activities and also gives a background of the entire movement. Chakravyuh is a tight knit movie and crisply covers a wide range of incidents, including the macabre episode of Dantewada, to give the audience a holistic view of the entire issue.

The movie boldly portrays the flaws in the system that gave rise to the movement in the first place and shows how the greed and malice of the politicos and businessmen have created a Brobdingnagian monstrosity that threatens the internal peace and order of our country. It is a classic example of a homegrown tumour which is growing at unbelievable pace. The story is so boldly told,  I'm surprised how the movie made it past the bureaucracy of the Censor Board.

The dialogues, screenplay and locations are near perfect. Abhay Deol clearly steals the show. Anjali Patil plays a convincing Naxal Area Commander. Manoj Bajpai and Om Puri have rather cut down, yet significant, roles as compared to their previous contributions to Jha's movies. Arjun Rampal and Esha Gupta, though not very great actors, are pivotal characters in the story and definitely add the glamour factor, which was not really a requisite in this movie; Arjun Rampal, however, looks as mesmerising as a Greek God.

What is most noteworthy about Chakravyuh is that it places forth the bare facts from the perspectives of all parties involved. To a thinking mind, it gives enough food for thought. This movie will not be a box office success as most sensible movies are not, but personally I'd call it a must watch. A laudable job by Prakash Jha and the cast & crew.

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Navrai Majhi

If I get a chance to prepare the playlist for somebody's wedding sangeet, one sure entry would be Navrai Majhi - the English Vinglish rendition. I have taken some fancy to that track. I like the way it is composed. It retains the traditional feeling with the Marathi lyrics and granny's voice; and blends in smoothly the modern touch that the Hindi lyrics and the accented verse give it. The shehnai and dhol in between bring in the complete wedding feeling. The words are meaningful and create a kaleidoscope of emotions - a father's sentiments at the thought of seeing off his daughter, the excitement during a wedding, the blessings, the speculations, the hopes, and the expectations. All of this so nicely contained in four and a half minutes.

~

Escalator Antics

I went to watch a movie the other day with my mother and sister. On our way out, I spotted an interesting dessert counter placed very strategically. It was meant to attract everybody's attention as they walked out of the theatre, and so it did mine too. My sweet tooth got the better of me and we all sat down on a bench nearby to savour kulfis. After I was done, I behaved like a brat and insisted on having another one. I felt like a complete brat when my sister went and got me another kulfi. I'm the elder sibling, hello! Nevertheless, I am glad I sat there for another round of kulfi. For if I hadn't, I'd have missed a very amusing set of incidents.

Now visualise this. The bench I sat on, faced the escalators. A couple of bites into the kulfi I spot a man ascending the escalator with his toddler. The child was a replica of the father, only with a ridiculous amount of very curly hair on his head. The father's hairline had long receded. While I fixated on the similarity of the child with his father and imagined how he'd look when he grew up with all that hair the duo reached the landing. The father walked nonchalantly and his son even more. As if he had come up with a plan, the child promptly turned towards the descending escalator and moved on. The father kept walking till a few seconds and then casually glanced around only to find his son on his way down the escalator. All his nonchalance evaporated into thin air as he ran panic stricken after his child. A couple of seconds later I spot a boy in housekeeping uniform bent over the moving railing following the father and son. He had bent over with a duster and by virtue of the automatic movement was cleaning the sides and in-betweens of the railings. He looked like a corpse taking a ride up and down.

Halfway through my kulfi I see a couple ascending the escalators, again with a toddler! The couple was engrossed in some discussion. The child was on his own. He seemed to be enjoying the tow. Children seem to enjoy just about anything anyway. As the trio reached the floor, the parents were still in the midst of a discussion that seemed to be of utmost importance to the future of the world. Involuntarily they stepped off the escalator but forgot about their son. He did not know the tricks involved in using these devices of modern world, and is he to be blamed? So he just kept moving with the escalator belt and got launched off it on to the floor when it was time. It seemed as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The amazing thing was that he landed safely, and the garrulous parents, oblivious of the stunt, went on. As I turned my attention to my kulfi again, the housekeeping boy was back; still bent over, but coming upwards this time. It was a task for me not to guffaw! I finished the kulfi quickly and we finally went down. The housekeeping boy crossed us on the other escalator for a second, this time bent over on the other side with his duster. 

Some dress on the window of some shop had caught our attention, so we decided to browse a little. As I looked through a shelf of garments I suddenly realised that the shop had glass walls and I was facing THOSE escalators again; and before I knew what was going on, I see a little girl - bringing in some gender diversity in the prevalent madness - walking up an escalator that was moving downward. She did this in a very systematic way and looked like a pro. The next second I see a little boy doing the exact opposite on the next escalator. They seem to have worked up a synchronisation and as they reached the same spot on their respective escalators they began to chat. They probably had a script ready too. There was no adult in sight. Their parents seem to have abandoned them or perhaps these children had abandoned them - which could be a greater possibility given their smartness and theatrics. By the time we came out of the store the escalator kids had moved on to a different level in their game. They were now leaning on the railings and moving upward or downward sideways. They also kept changing sides very often to keep the game interesting enough. The only obstruction in their game was the housekeeping boy who was relentlessly bent over, still.

~

(nir)Aadhaar

Yesterday I spent around an hour and a half just to complete the enrollment formalities - iris scan, finger print scans, photograph etc. - in order to initiate the process of obtaining an Aadhaar card for myself. There is a makeshift Aadhaar centre set up in the club of my apartment for the residents' convenience. Given that I had no distance to travel, no incomplete forms, no missing documents and, most importantly, only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, just what explains the hour and a half spent for something that ideally should take not more than 5-7 minutes?

The delay was caused because of a series of events. There was an elderly lady in the queue when I reached the counter. She was being made to place her fingertips to record her fingerprints. The machine records the percentage of clarity, and a minimum something is essential for the record to be valid. After several attempts, the lady had to finally give up and her application was processed with just 5 or 6 fingers' prints. There was some similar problem during her iris scan. The scanners were so talked about before the Aadhaar movement had begun. Unfortunately, they are not sophisticated enough and thus not sensitive enough to scan the prints of those whose bodies have borne the wear and tear of time. The gentleman just ahead of me was mocking all this, saying the lady's old age had wiped off her finger prints and made her iris un-scan-able. It was annoying after a while but it was no point asking him to stop and think if this happened to his own mother, because the lady was, in fact, his mother.

The Aadhaar process is infested with numerous loop holes which can be easily amended and eventually make the process flawless and much less time consuming. To begin with, the software that has been designed to record data is not compatible with Indian names and titles. One can type one's name correctly in English, but be prepared to find it distorted or misspelled in Hindi. My surname will appear in a way that I myself will not be able to pronounce. I can, in fact, type in Devanagari script without any difficulty here on my blog. Why was it such a huge task to design a proper software, I fail to fathom. Besides, my surname is not something which is unheard of that it becomes so difficult to type correctly. I'm not so miffed just because it was my surname in question. A lady named Amrita spent 15 minutes trying to get her name spelled correctly in Hindi. This is neither an understandable nor excusable error in India. The enrollment form that we fill out initially is not required at all. We might as well feed in all pertinent data online and then verify it at the time of processing alongwith our identity proof. It is a sheer waste of paper. The receipt that we get is printed on normal A4 sheets and then torn in half manually; one is retained by the enrollment in-charge and the other given to you. Why couldn't they be provided with perforated sheets? The enrollment in-charge struggles with a foot ruler to tear of the receipts in two halves. The finger print and iris scanner are not too sensitive, as illustrated by the elderly lady's case. The photograph is taken just for the heck of it. You may not look like yourself at all. The icing on the cake is the fact that will take anything from 3-10 months or probably more for the card to arrive. 

I am not too sure what purpose the card will solve. I felt a surge of insecurity creeping in as my bio metrics were recorded. I wouldn't know if someone misused them. I have not got my bank account synchronised with it. From a much hyped programme with a humungous fund earmarked for it, that had the likes of Nandan Nilekani and Wipro Technologies associated with it, I expected something better.

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Doctor Calling!

This one goes out to all those people who believe in self medication, and/or not going to the doctor at all in order to seek remedies for common or uncommon maladies. There is a reason why medicine is a separate and dense branch of study, which further breaks out into multiple sub-branches so as to cover, in detail, every aspect of the human anatomy. We may have a lot granny's homemade cures for a lot of things, and they are effective too. The trouble begins when we start experimenting with medicines instead of kitchen ingredients.

I do not place blind faith any medical practitioner per se, and it is always a wise thing to take a second, probably even a  third opinion regarding a given medical condition; but self medication is a very unsafe practice. Sadly, a very common one too. I have known a few instances where people have adopted this fallacy, and eventually said goodbye to the world. Makes me wonder, was it really worth it? Life is a precious gift. Do not treat it so callously. A lot of people take it as a strike on their ego to have to visit a doctor for something which is not life threatening. The fatal consequences of self medication arise out of inappropriate drugs administered for seemingly harmless issues.

It is important to understand that there are some people out there who have dedicated their life to study the complexities that reside within our body. They are not just qualified on paper, but have also been thoroughly trained and have gained experience throughout the course of their work to treat what is not right in the human body. If you have any regard for yourself or for your near and dear ones, value your life. Do not self-medicate, and dissuade others who may do it. Also, do not let anybody prescribe medicines off hand to you. Nothing infuriates me more than people who impose their unqualified prescriptions on every one they set their eyes on. Every disease and ailment, and thus every medicine correpsonds differently to a set of symptoms and also affects different people differently. The after effects too differ in nature and magnitude. Just because you or someone you know were treated for some disease with a lot of exposure to various drugs, you do not qualify as a medical practitioner of any sort.

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At Home

Spontaneity seems to be the new permanent thing in my life. That explains a trip back home planned out of nowhere. This was an unusual week where I had almost no classes, so without a second thought I flew home. I was in time for the Navami Darshan, after two years. I have never been to Calcutta during pujo, or otherwise. From what I have heard and seen on TV, the city assumes an amazing form. However, for me, Bombay during Navratri is very special. Dandiya and Garba are more popular here than Durga Puja, but the city lights up brilliantly and it is a wonderful span of 9 days. Being Navami, the last day of the navratras, it seemed that the entire city was out on the roads. It took me nearly an hour to get home, which is double of what it takes usually.

Telepathy is a strange thing. My son - to the world he may be my pet dog, to me he is my child and much much more - had sensed something, as he does every time I return home. He had not left the sight of the door since the time I had left from my campus in Nagpur. After crawling through the traffic for so long, and in the meantime having fought thrice and laughed like a maniac all through the way with my kid sister in the car, I finally reached home. He could not wait for the door to be opened. If he could, he would have darted straight out of it. As my mother struggled with him to open the door, he came rushing straight into me and I also spotted our resident cat hopping with little concealed enthusiasm. She would never openly confess, though, that she was happy at my arrival. The next thing I knew was that my son was talking animatedly to me in his own language, which I justifiably claim to completely understand, and we were on the floor, face to face. I couldn't help welling up a little when my sister said that this was the happiest they'd seen him in a very long time. I just stood there and watched him going ballistic with our cat who also was in the prime of her excitement with all the activity. I had to sneak out a brief second to wish my mother who was beaming at the chaos. It was the best homecoming, as it is every time.
~

A-maddening Spiderman

For the first time ever I walked out of a movie - midway - today. Amazing Spiderman was screened tonight on my campus. A lot of people, including me, were quite upbeat about it. We planned to finish all our meetings before the screening began - yes, we have late night meetings here. That's our way of acting all important in a B-school (kidding!). Anyway, so dinner and meetings were hurried away and then began the much awaited movie. I had heard some trash reviews about it but I thought just how much could somebody spoil a Spiderman story. Guess it was too early to have my hopes pinned up optimistically. No surprise then that they fell flat on their faces!

After what seemed to be an hour and a half, I checked my watch and realised the nuances of the Theory of Relativity. Only 45 minutes had passed, and the movie seemed to slower down with each passing frame. In another minute I was told that the run time was 140 minutes. It is not in my basic nature to walk out of a movie in between. So I persuaded myself to sit through a little longer. In another six and a half minutes my patience gave way. The amateur special effects, the juvenile antics of the so-called Amazing Spiderman, and an absolutely disgusting lizard monster made it impossible for me to take it any more. Another annoying thing, Irrfan Khan (extra R inexplicable) stars in the movie as a villain. He added the comic factor. I do not know who directed that movie, I'm not even going to find out. But he did a wonderful job messing it up. Marvel should adopt a more thorough procedure before handing out the rights. They can surely do better.

I'd consider this movie, perhaps, at par with Saawariya. I had slept off in less than 15 minutes into that outlandish piece of motion art that Sanjay Leela Bhansali insisted on calling a masterpiece. I don't think I can handle the multiple nightmares. It's taken me an hour of crazy banter and three bars of ice cream to get over the trauma. I'm just glad I did not pay for it.

~