Gajee -- the plagiarist

2011-04-13T17:58:00.001+05:30

2011-04-13T17:57:00.001+05:30

2011-02-24T12:30:00.000+05:30

2011-01-21T09:32:00.000+05:30

2010-12-16T10:26:00.001+05:30

2010-04-20T15:44:00.000+05:30

2010-04-20T15:41:00.001+05:30

2010-01-28T17:09:00.000+05:30

2009-10-21T15:08:00.003+05:30

I have maintained this since as long as I can remember.....exams are a test of one's memory....nothing else.....

2009-10-12T09:43:00.000+05:30

2009-10-12T09:42:00.000+05:30

2009-06-30T09:01:00.000+05:30

Myriad Identities

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/10463/myriad-identities.html

2008-10-23T09:53:00.002+05:30

A, b, f of swear words

Nina C George

Swear words are considered hip notwithstanding their crassness. Metrolife attempts to understand the psyche of people who use them

Swearing, verbally and non-verbally, is a wide practice. Never mind their offensiveness and sheer crassness, people still swear, with words or gestures. In fact, swearing has become the lynchpin in showing that one is hip and wears one's attitude in the propah way.

While the lexicon of swear words are various inflections of the a.., b...... and f... words, the middle finger is unparalleled when it comes to non-verbal swearing. Swearing appears to have become an accepted mode of communication among the young. Ask school-going children, even they say they got them all naturally.

"When I am upset or angry, swear words are what come to me first. I can't really say how many times I use it. I think it's ok to use it as long as I don't offend anybody," says Rakesh, a 24-year-old communications professional.

Twenty-something Sudharshan Rao, a college-goer says he too uses these words more often than required but is gender conscious. He says he refrains from using them in the presence of women in particular. "It's a done thing with guy friends especially when during no-holds barred discussions," he says.

Women, however, are more toned down when it comes to loosely using words, openly using them rather. Bhavana, an interior designer in the City thinks it’s "vulgar and inappropriate" to use such words. She observes that swear words are used especially on the roads. "It's disgusting when people use them. It just shows their poor background and upbringing," she says.

Media motormouths — the TV admen, TV show hosts, VJs and DJs — are the biggest propagators of swear words and gestures. Prakash Pillai, National Creative director of CMM says, "Ad guys use it to connect to their audience. They find it easier to connect with the target audience quick with street lingo and slang and naturally a few swear words are thrown in."

But psychiatrists believe that much of our behaviour is learnt from role models in our environs. These models are not only parents, teachers, and peers, but also include those whom we see on TV or in movies, and those about whom we read in magazines and books. "The influence of different models is directly related to their importance to the individual. Thus, one might expect pop music or TV show behaviour to have a greater influence on adolescent behaviour than parents," reasons Dr Chittaranjan Andrade, Professor and Head, Department of Psychopharmacology, NIMHANS.
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The young, the adolescents in particular, want to shock, he points out and adds that to this extent, swearing may be considered hip, or as a form of behaviour that signals membership in a group.

Unmindful law

Swear words are not an offence under the law of the land. A top police official said that if someone swears at you or makes an abusive gesture, it is not punishable, that is you can't register a complaint with the police. You simply have to bear it. "If your life has been threatened then a complaint could be registered but oral abuse is not punishable under the purview of the law," he explained.

Author speak

I think the Fs and Bs have gone beyond abuse. They are part of one's every day vocabulary. The tone they are used in matters a great deal. They could be friendly or abusive. Either way, it's a done thing and I see nothing wrong in it.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

I think it is sheer laziness and a limited vocabulary that lends to an increasing usage of swear words. One would rather say ‘shit’ than merely wear an expression of disgust. It is also considered ’trendy’. But I must say that it conveys more of a lethargic mind.

Shashi Deshpande

2008-06-23T09:14:00.003+05:30

Connecting the dots

Ramnath Narayanswamy

This book takes into account culture and language and explores the tension between the local and the global.

This is an eminently readable book, dealing with issues that are topical, sensitive and relevant: the extinction of local languages, (in this case, Kannada), cultures and ways of being associated with both.

What I liked about the work was the author’s treatment of the issues he considers important; while he is sympathetic, he does not fall into either extremes. He does not for example, espouse an exclusivist chauvinism and nor does he suggest that the Kannada language must inevitably be victimised by the process of globalisation.

Instead, he suggests a renewed conscious and deliberate effort to embed cosmopolitanism. Although he does not state it explicitly, he does suggest that this offensive should be sponsored by neither state nor capital, but be driven by social innovation (meaning civil society), a suggestion that I believe merits serious public discussion: “Only this expanded vision”, he writes, “will ensure that our cultures and languages live vibrant, interactive lives in a globalised world and not a clipped and compromised existence of an artifact. There is the looming danger of our homes becoming museums for our mother tongues.”

And yet it is important, as Jeremy Seabrook points out in his excellent introduction to the volume, to appreciate the fact that culture evolves organically and cannot be preserved: “It may be that the champions of declining or marginal languages in the world— even if they hold to as humane and hopeful a formulation as Sugata’s version of cosmopolitanism— may be overtaken by events.

“Cultures cannot be ‘preserved’ in the formaldehyde of piety: this is reminiscent of those set-piece displays by the Soviet Union of carefully choreographed folk and regional culture, utterly devoid of spontaneity and life. Cultures are organic. They pursue their own growth, development and decay, and may go down before those, which are more powerful or are promoted with greater vigour. But there is no reason to give them up.
“Quite the contrary. It is the spur and the stimulus, not only to conserve and cherish what is beautiful in the human heritage, but also infuse it with whatever new life a combination of love and energy can provide.”
The subject of culture is a deeply contested space, irrespective of whether this is local or global. Divided into five sections, the book is a collection of essays written by the author over a period of twelve years that have been updated or expanded by the author for publication.

They include such themes as language and literature, land and water, people, extensions and what the author prefers to describe as ‘endnotes’ that take the form of observations and recommendations to incubate a ‘cosmopolitan stream’ in the wake of globalisation. They span a wide variety of themes that have been dealt in a nuanced manner.

Not everybody will endorse the negative image of the Bangalore IT industry portrayed in the book even if these views come from eminent litterateurs or scientists who lament the disappearance of ‘la belle epoque’ and squarely blame the IT industry for all the woes of a modernising city.

Instead, I agree with Subroto Bagchi, who views this disconnect as a result of a highly avoidable misunderstanding: “The geeks have failed to communicate. They have remained isolated from the larger social system.

Unlike doctors and journalists and actors and policemen who could tell you what they did, the geeks did not communicate the fact that the code they wrote made the ventilator in the ICU work, brought down the cost of the ultra-sound machine or was actually behind the fall in cellphone prices that made communication affordable to dabbahwallah and the vegetable vendor.”

Sugatha Srinivasaraju, Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue, The Anxieties of a Local Culture, Navakarnataka, Bangalore, 2008. Pp. 228. Price: Rs. 200

2008-06-09T09:22:00.000+05:30

Frenzied Light
Meena Kandasamy

Love, I can’t be a candle
For I know it is an ancient lie.
The candle is for the solemn,
And for those who yearn a slow
And settled tenderness. Not for us.
It is for those who can bear to leave
A mass of their waste, the dregs of their glory.
O, it is for the selfish who seek to burn through a medium.

Love, I will promise you a substitute.
I could be that piece of holy camphor
So safely locked away from prying hands.
And dearest, when I burn for you, that single time
Nothing shall remain of me, or of you, except that flash
Of memory. Our blending shall be so sublime, so intense, so total.

Come, consume me,
Devastate me love, if you ever will,
But with a force that I will forever remember.

http://www.thanalonline.com/Issues/01/meena_frenzied.htm

2008-06-09T09:20:00.000+05:30

IN A LIGHTER VEIN: Swalpa connect maadi...

Windows for Asses

Today is the day. I can feel it in my bones. And all my drives and all my versions. Today is the day I teach the CPU who the boss is.

Not for nothing have I sat up practically all night devouring ‘Computers for Dimwits’ and ‘Windows for Asses’ studiously ignoring the implicit insults to my intellect. After all, the human brain took 2,000 million years to evolve into the multi-tasking maestro that it is now. And for it to be phased by a mere nouveau-smart chip of electronic mumbo jumbo is something that should make us rise up in protest. In fact they should with immediate effect mark in the calendars of the world a ‘Putting-your-CPU-in-its-place Day’.

But to come back to one woman’s heroic efforts at defending the honour of mankind: With my head reeling with empowering terminology like hertz ,megabytes, formatting,I gird my loins, square my shoulders and put the power on with a sharp decisive snap.The light blinks on. I type in my password without a second’s hesitation in a manner that brooks no defiance. So must Alexander have shouted ‘Move on’ to his troops languishing on banks of the Indus.

The screen blinks, and blinks out. Oldest trick in the book. I twiggle some wires. I twaggle the mouse and make it do a tap dance. My finger stomp on the power button.The CPU decides to cede the battle. It blinks on and slips into my e-mail without waiting for password. A small victory. I overlook it.

Next I set about entering a long involved letter to my bank manager. Us tycoons need to be in constant touch with bank managers and stockbrokers and venture capitalists. Midway through a detailed enquiry about credits and balances, the letter vanishes. Just like that without a trace. Like a ship in the Bermuda Triangle. ‘Count up to 10’, I tell myself slowly. It’s important not to get flustered. I hope, I tell the CPU roundly that it gives you indigestion. Then I start the letter again: Dear Mr Shenoy….Only this time the CPU tries to show off its multi-lingual capability.The letter is being written in Hungarian. Delete, delete.I start again.This time the CPU switches to Turkish Wrdddtby. Wundt kndttff. A simple rule of war is never let the enemy know when you are getting rattled. So with great élan I continue to write the letter in Turkish even throwing in an enquiry about the health of his mother.

Suddenly a sinister warning pops up: Sintering device dreadlock system needs garbunkling Huh? If some sintering whatchamacallit needs garbunckling let it go garbunkle itself. I stab delete delete a few thousand times. Nothing happens. Now the battle isnt covert anymore.

The CPU types out a line with no provocation whatsoever: Don't play games with me I am smarter than you are. I squirm I wilt. I try to locate the fighting spirit that made one grand-uncle fight off three armed dacoits with a hookah pipe. Then I decide that discretion is the better part of valour I yell ‘System Support’ on the top of my voice. The screen goes blank.Somehere deep inside the wired up innards I can hear a suspicious chuckling sound
What chuckling Ma’am? says the systems support guy, looking at me strangely, I can’t hear anything.

2008-05-30T18:36:00.001+05:30

My lover speaks of rape
by Meena Kandasamy

Flaming green of a morning that awaits rain
And my lover speaks of rape through silences,
Swallowed words and the shadowed tones
Of voice. Quivering, I fill in his blanks.
Green turns to unsightly teal of hospital beds
And he is softer than feathers, but I fly away
To shield myself from the retch of the burns
Ward, the shrill sounds of dying declarations,
The floral pink-white sad skins of dowry deaths.

Open eyes, open hands, his open all-clear soul . . .

Colorless noon filters in through bluish glass
And coffee keeps him company. She chatters
Away telling her own, every woman’s story;
He listens, like for the first time. Tragedy in
Bridal red remains a fresh, flushing bruise across
Brown-yellow skinscapes, vibrant but made
Muted through years of silent, waiting skin.
I am absent. They talk of everyday assault that
Turns blue, violet and black in high-color symphony.

hands, his open all-clear soul . . .

Blues blend to an unforgiving metropolitan black
And loneliness seems safer than a gentle night
In his arms. I return from the self-defence lessons:
Mistrust is the black-belted, loose white mechanism
Of survival against this groping world and I am
A convert too. Yet, in the way of all life, he could try
And take root, as I resist, and yield later, like the earth.

Open eyes, open hands, his open all-clear soul . . .
Has he learnt to live my life? Has he learnt never to harm?

http://www.thanalonline.com/Issues/01/Meena.htm
http://meenu.wordpress.com/
http://www.kalakahani.co.uk/meenakandasamy.html

2008-05-26T09:10:00.003+05:30

IN A LIGHTER VEIN: Swalpa connect maadi...

To BIA or not to BIA

By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

When you realize the nothingness of it all, you will have arrived possibly at the new airport. Since being is not being, even if the airport is, it is not...

Now that the new airport has turned us all into a city of chronic worriers, a lot of people I know are seeking spiritual help in getting answers to the questions riddling their lives with tension. The famed flying Guru Bialaswamy has advocated a form Aavial (not to be confused with the dish avial) Spirituality to help tackle the widespread stress. Here are some Compulsively Asked Questions (CAQS) about the new airport, and the answers:

CAQ: How long will it take to reach the new airport from where I live?

GB: My child, time does not exist except in your mind. So when you say how long, you are talking relativity. It all depends upon which relative you are going to visit. If it’s your in laws, time will stretch into infinity. If it is friends, time will condense. It also depends upon whether you are travelling by auto, bus, car, or astrally. Astral is the fastest. And cheapest …..with great frequent flyer discounts and upgrades. But then if you can go astral why go to BIAL at all?

CAQ: Will my body survive the potholes on the way?

GB: The body is finite and will soon turn to dust. It’s the eternal soul you have to worry about. Ask the voice inside if your soul will survive the ride. A couple of spinal injuries may lay you up for six months, but what is six months compared to the infinity of the soul? All life is a journey and potholes are ordained by your karma and the Corporation.

CAQ: What do I do if I want to go to the toilet rather desperately on the way?

GB:. Going to BIA is a journey of spiritual growth. You will have to exercise great restraint over every wayward instinct. Rise above the urges of the gross body. Otherwise, just refrain from eating or drinking anything twelve hours before you set out. Carry adult diapers with you.

CAQS: How will the pilots know it’s time to change track and land at BIA instead of HAL?

GB: How do the trees know when it’s time to flower? How do birds know when it’s time to lay an egg? How does your head know when it’s time to go bald? Knowing is not a function of the conscious mind. The pilots will know it in their unconscious, when they must land at the new runway. Remember, just as you are not the doer, the pilot is not the flyer. His higher self flies on autopilot while he takes a nap after the booze up the night before.

CAQ: Is it considered bigamy for a city like Bengaluru to have two airports?

These are man-made laws for the smooth functioning of society. In the eyes of the Divine you can have as many airports as you want without creating permanent confusion among the passengers. But then the chaos will lead to creativity and the Creator as surely as bean eating in Bengaluru leads to a lot of gas.

CAQ: Is there a new airport at all or is it all media hype?

GB: My son, all of the world is Maya. It’s an illusion created by our fevered minds.

There is no you, no me, no world, no cars, no road, no airlines and no airport. Your mind has created it all from nothing. When you realize the nothingness of it all, you will have arrived…possibly at the new airport. Since being is not being, even if the airport is, it is not.

2008-03-31T08:37:00.007+05:30

2008-02-13T15:16:00.001+05:30

http://www.anitanair.net/humour/humour1.htm

by anita nair.

I passed on all counts ;)

2008-02-08T09:29:00.002+05:30

License to Kill!

Author: Peter Colaco

http://www.mid-day.com/web/guest/opinion/columns/article?_EXT_5_articleId=421861&_EXT_5_groupId=14

Wiggle, waggle & win

Author: Prahlad Nanjappa

http://www.mid-day.com/web/guest/opinion/columns/article?_EXT_5_articleId=331858&_EXT_5_groupId=14

2008-02-06T11:48:00.001+05:30

Bangloreans do it better

Author: Prahlad Nanjappa Date: 07 Dec 2007

Bangloreans do it better

Bang-Galore! The charm of Bangalore lies in the simple minds, warm hearts and humane processes that surprisingly still exist in the heaving city

I’m glad I’m Bangalorean. Last week, I was stuck in the famed (or infamed) Mumbai traffic. When suddenly a siren wailed out the advancement of an ambulance on its way to hospital.

Nobody, not a single sausage of a person, budged an inch. In fact, nobody even tried sidling out of the way. The traffic cops kept waving the cars out of the ambulance’s way. But, it stayed well and truly stuck in line, siren notwithstanding.

On the other hand, I was in the tiny lane that used to be MG Road last evening. There were no traffic cops in sight (and how surprising is that!) When suddenly an ambulance wailed by. Everybody, but everybody, in the chaos of the higgledy-piggledly no-lane traffic that we’re famed for — sidled out, drew back, sped ahead — and generally let the van go through. Except for one guy (a blue Tavera, and yes I know the number, but I shall reserve that for future reference) who continued to hog the road. And was roundly, and loudly, abused by everyone present.

Just one of the small reasons I love Bangalore. That’s what makes this city, that has so many drawbacks the best place to live in. We might not have the best public transport system. We might not have the best government (oops, sorry, what government!). Our municipal bodies seem to be crumbling faster than the tree cover. And our cops are notoriously inefficient.

But then, we do have a heart still. Whether it’s those software engineers who work with street kids, those millionaires who give up everything to come back and work on improving our civic amenities, or that friend of mine who now lives in a village, educating the locals, with dance and theater — or whether it’s just being decent enough to move out of the way when there’s an ambulance behind you.

On the other hand, though, I have these neighbours who’ve been re-doing their apartment.
For six months, there’s been banging and clanging and cement falling and tiles piled up in my building. Sure, it’s well within their rights to do up their entire apartment, but for the rest of us in the building, it’s been hell.

I’ve decided, when and if I ever cobble together enough money to do up my house, I’m going to hire one guy, to bang at their door morning, noon and night — just as a housewarming gift — and to share some of my good fortune, in that warm, generous Bangalorean spirit, I have in abundance.

I’m glad I’m Bangalorean. And the chaotic traffic, the crumbling buildings, the vanishing trees, and the land-grabbing politicians aside, I can still stand up proudly and say, I love this city.
For the people — Or despite them!

2008-02-05T12:38:00.000+05:30

Ah! The pleasures of life

Author: Prahlad Nanjappa Date: 25 Jan 2008

Working Out: Working out at a gym with an instructor can be quite a nightmare

He’s all of five feet two inches tall in his air pumped sneakers. But he’s all bulging, testosteroned, steely muscle. And right now, he’s got this sadistic expression on his face, even as his triceps or pectorals or clavicles or whatever it is they call them, ripple menacingly as he snakes towards me.

My instincts kick in. And I look frantically for the nearest exit only to discover that I’m up against a blank wall.

I peer around feverishly for help. For a Samaritan, who will step in between this ogre and me. For anyone who will aid me in warding off this lethal maniac.

But everyone is busy with his or her own routine. Oblivious to my hapless, choked-off screams for an SOS.

And then Santosh unleashes himself on me. “Come on! No resting!” he snarls. “What man, add some more weights, what you’re lifting is for a weakling!” he sneers.

In some mad, wild and unguarded moment, I signed up for a personal trainer at the gym down the road. I had visions of walking into a club in 28-inch waist denims and a tee that had 28 size biceps bursting at the seams.

Right now, two weeks into working out with Santosh, all I dearly yearn for, is to go back into my blissful slobby state. When the alarm doesn’t shrill me into a world of pounding, grunting men. And when I didn’t have to drag my sorry carcass onto a treadmill that, well, treads faster than my racing, unused-to-exercise pulse.

One day, I did try shutting off my alarm, and turning over for some uninterrupted quality time communing with my eiderdown pillow. But 10 minutes into the comfortable silence I was sharing, there was a pounding on my door.

And who do I see standing outside, but the face of my nightmares! Ready to drag me all the way to that hellhole chamber of torture.

Every time I move a muscle now, it screams in agony. Together, muscles I had never even been introduced to, make a cacophony of shrill protest.

Every time I sneak a guilty bite into a rich, luscious chocolate bar, I look around furtively to see whether Santosh has slimed in to snatch those hard-earned calories away from me. Every time, someone asks me out for a beer, I imagine myself pushing an extra 10 pounds the next morning — and I shake my head regretfully.

From my drowning world, I have only one message for all you lucky people out there: Go sip that extra lager. Buy that choco-drenched, sinful dessert. And stay true to the solidarity of overweight, paunchy happy people.

You’ll never know what you’re missing. Until you have a Santosh in your life.

I’ve got to run now (well, not run, more hobble). Got to catch my eight hours before I go back to the Iron Curtain.

2008-01-17T14:46:00.000+05:30

IN A LIGHTER VEIN: Swalpa connect maadi...

Yennjoy like Yennything

By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

Decide what that yennithing is that you enjoy the most. Then yennjoy everything like yennithing. And learn to live with the hangover...

There was a time when Bangalore trundled along happily to an unseen drummer who played a slow funereal beat. Even went to sleep for a bit between one beat and another. It gave the city its ambience of contentment, replete with the shutters down of the afternoon siesta. The Spirit of Bangalore when it was bestirred enough from its slumber , said look - ma - no- stress and promptly went back to sleep.

Because Bangalore believed in the SAM mantra:. Swalpa Adjust Madi. For a problem free ,hassle free existence. You gave a little, took a little, the other party did the same and all lived happily together adjusting away every time life threw a googly.

When public sector employees took 6 of a family on a scooter to the drive-in to a Sunday morning of crisp dosas by the foot and coffee by the yard, the policemen looked the other way. A tipsy auto driver dented your fender, or a traffic light fooled you by turning red when you were halfway ,it was simply a matter of Adjust Madying. The tailor made your outfit tight enough to strangle your gut All he needed to do was smile "Swalpa Adjust Madi Amma "And Amma started planning this starvation diet for the next two weeks.

Not enough money for coffee all round?. Adjust Madi. And the coffee materialized with one brimming cup and two empties for a one by three.

It lasted until the outsourcing guys looked through their global telescopes and spotted this easy ambling sort of place where even the dhobies spoke English. And most people slept right through the day. Nights could be made productive.

It was a change waiting to happen. It lead to the tidal wave of outsourcing And the influx of thousands of nerdy geeks with windows blinking in their eyes, and strange mouse obsessions, came pelting into the city. Adjust went flying out of Bill Gates windows as surely as lost data in a crash.

Today Bangalore marches , when it has not taken a spill in a smirking pothole, to an entirely new beat. A new mantra has been consecrated and sworn to as the spirit of this city.

Yennjoy like Yennything. And don't bother to ask what that yennithing stands for. I do not know. Hopefully it is not something censorable. Just yennjoy at all costs. The pubs, the habbas, the shows, the malls, the parties, the plays, all the hectic hyperventilation going on.

The arrivista Bangalore rushes around to a hyper beat from the invisible grandson of the erstwhile invisible drummer. Grandson drummer is like a woodpecker on speed. To Yennjoy like Yennithing, the arrivistas work hard, play hard, drink hard, shop hard, party hardand cop out hard.

And Adjust as a philosophy does not cut any ice. In fact one irate American caller went so far as to ask his peaceable counterpart to take his adust madi and adjust it rather violently in a painful non adjusting art of his anatomy.

Today YLY makes Bangalore gallup. Because life is short. Because stress is the bogeyman waiting to get you.

Because if you don't run you will be stampeded out of the scene.

So go on. Decide what that yennithing is that you enjoy the most. Then yennjoy everything like yennithing.
And learn to live with the hangover.

2008-01-17T14:21:00.000+05:30

Dual face of Moscow

By Megan K Stack

In the end, I was just another face in the crowd, watching, and then moving along...

The old woman’s back was so hunched she couldn’t get her chin off her chest. Wrapped in layers of ratty sweaters, she stood against a tile wall, one hand extended. Elderly Russians are everywhere in the subway tunnels beneath Moscow, begging for pocket change. Still, looking at her, I felt a stab of melancholy.

Then four mean-looking teenagers in scarred leather jackets rushed past her. They muttered to one another, turned back and surrounded her.

My stomach clenched in panic. But then I realised what I was seeing. These kids, who slouched and stank of cigarettes and beer, were digging furiously through their pockets, handing the old woman every coin they could scrape together.

Since moving to Moscow last year, Ive been schooled in the stark realities of Russian society by daily rides to language classes and the office on the Metro. The sprawl of tracks and tunnels seems to offer a direct line into Moscow’s soul — a place of faded elegance and hopeless cynicism, debauchery and destitution, barely contained brutality and touches of kindness.

Up above, wild Moscow rages along, lawless and mad, cold and rich. Down below, the trains are roaring through the dark, miss this one and the next will be right behind it.

The Metro is where you’ll find the people who are just scraping by in the shadow of oil wealth and the ones who already have fallen through the cracks. It’s the haunt of stray dogs and lovesick teenagers, homeless alcoholics and wounded veterans, tourists and bone-weary commuters.

When I first got to Moscow, it was the heat of summer and the press of bodies on the Metro almost turned me into a teetotalist. I couldn’t bear the stink of the drunks on the trains, sweating out vodka, their clammy skin clinging to mine like plastic. Empty bottles of beer rolled and clattered underfoot.

Then I would see young men spring gallantly to their feet to offer their seats to old women, or the way Russians buried their noses in books as the trains screamed through the tunnels, and decide it wasn’t such a bad place after all.

But I couldn’t get over the cold faces of all those strangers, sketches of anxiety and woe lit in the greenish glow of the massive fluorescent lights, so gothic they’re almost beautiful. “When you take that escalator down and look at those faces, get hit with all of that anxiety, all of the worry, it’s incredible,” one of my Russian colleagues said.

One day I was riding out to the university for a Russian class. It was around noon on a Saturday, and the city was shaking itself out of sleep as a few early snowflakes skittered down from the steely sky. The Metro car was almost empty.

I sat staring at a young woman across the way. She must have been up all night. Her hair had been styled, she looked delicate and well dressed. Her head sagged on her neck as if she were nodding on heroin. Her eyes, heavy with last night’s makeup, drooped shut. Her chin dropped to her chest.

She crashed onto the floor, and the jolt woke her long enough for her to haul herself back onto the bench, where she promptly fell back into her dreams. The stout young mother at her side scooped up her little boy and moved across the aisle, lips set in disapproval.

The young woman fell onto the floor again, this time landing on the feet of the old man at her side. He shook his foot free, irritably. She resumed her place on the bench.

By now everybody in the carriage was staring at the girl but impassively. A pair of tough-looking men were watching her like wolves. Anybody could have scooped her off the subway car, taken her away, done anything.

Who had abandoned her here? How long had she been rattling through the tunnels, waiting to sober up? I glanced at the men again. They were whispering to one another, laughing a little, running their eyes over her slumped body.

Then my stop came up, so I stood and got off. In the end, I was just another face in the crowd, watching, and then moving along.

Los Angeles Times

2008-01-17T14:19:00.000+05:30

Enter, the elephant

Mini Krishnan feels that Indian languages have constantly been shortchanged and the power of translation as a unifying force is grossly underrated.

Salman Rushdie once said that Commonwealth Literature was a chimera, a shapeless and unnatural animal that looked out of place on the meadows of World Literature. A few years later in 1997, he was invited to edit a volume of writing representing half a century of writing from India. In the introduction to this book, Rushdie stated that there was nothing in any of our regional languages, available in translation to match what Indians had achieved in English since Independence.

How did he know? He had read some translations. How many? No one knows. Who were his advisors? Again, no clear answer.

With the 60th anniversary of our Independence behind us, I thought I might make a suggestion that if translations into English from Indian-language literatures needs a symbol, it should be the Indian elephant: complex, wondrous, unique, powerful. Seemingly slow but capable of covering vast tracts of terrain; will respond to sensitive handling; can be dangerous if mishandled; sometimes used in circuses with tragic results. Endangered? Probably, but we shall see how best to counter the poaching.

For a very long time, it has been the fate of Indian writing in the regional languages to be ignored because influential cultural camps are either ignorant or unwilling to recognise a significant body of work.

To add to this, there is a fragmentation amongst the writers themselves as they are unable to band together by reading one anothers’ works. So, because the regional self is such a deep footprint, the identity of an Indian has essentially been that of an Oriya, a Maharashtrian, a Bengali or a Kannadiga. Since it is the rare person who has the time to study five or six languages and then approach the texts in them, how does one build a stronger national identity?

One way would be to structure a linguistic power-grid, a national library through translation into English which will also conveniently and secondarily become part of the universal library; because, even in a non-literary context, no one needs to be reminded that we live in a world of continuous communication in different languages and that linkages are possible only through the act of translation.

Why should we do this?

At the heart of the translation endeavour is an evangelical zeal to enlarge the readership of a work or writer who is invisible outside his/her language island. Translation is making better known, what deserves to be widely recognised. This fact assumes a special importance in our country with a population of about a billion because India is home to one-third of Asia’s illiterates.

We have one of the world’s oldest languages, some of the world’s oldest mystical traditions and texts, a vast and elaborate past but— millions of Indians will never hold a pen, buy a book or have a discussion about book-knowledge. This places a huge social and ethical burden on the rest of us. It becomes our collective and primary national duty to examine very carefully what is being passed on as stored knowledge to the next generation because it is going to shape their consciousness and influence their decisions. The reality of India which lies outside our classrooms and seminars has to be brought into our study halls; and in order for it to be meaningful and relevant to developing the mind and building the self, what we teach has to be culturally rooted.
Multilingualism is a great wealth. Look at India’s linguistic landscape! No other country has five language families… the Indo-Aryan, the Dravidian, the Austro-Asiatic, the Tibeto-Burman and the Andamanese. But the linguistic map of India boils with inequalities.

Though some 400 languages are spoken, the Census documents only 114. Of these,only 18 enjoy official recognition. Of these 18, some correspond to geographical boundaries, enjoy distinct advantages in ‘linguistic states’ and are referred to as regional languages. There are hundreds of other languages but they lack the infrastructure needed to be noticed: there are no schools where these languages are the media of instruction, they have no printing presses, no publishing tradition.

English invasion

A foreign influence, especially if promoted by a ruling class, always disturbs the native hierarchies and traditions which then have to find new ways— often not consciously— to regroup and survive. This is what happened when English, the uninvited visitor-language, gained prominence in India. The goal of colonial translators was clearly imperial. Two hundred years ago the British in India stopped funding Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit studies and put the scholars of those languages to work on translating Indian religious, philosophical and legal texts into English.
The Orientalists of the late 18th Century under William Jones set up what was almost a factory of translation, which by the time it was noticed and admired, went into a decline because the Crown took over the East India Company and suppressed all things Indian. It took the German transcendantalists and the institutionalising of English studies in India to bring on the next wave of translations into the English language… and this time it was by Indians.

Translation is empowering because it enables a cultural understanding of different language worlds. It is the cement of multilingualism which nimbly crosses many bridges and promotes insights into the national psyche. The literary face of India, a composite of more languages than there are on the huge continent of Africa, can be integrated by the English language nativised and playing the role of a super visa-tongue.

The rise of nativisim both politically and post-colonially could be harmoniously blended into a national effort by English playing a literary supporting role. While creative, original writing in English has already done well for itself and has an admiring non-Indian readership, we could use the strengths this visitor-turned-permanent-resident-language to the benefit of our writers in the regional languages. It is also extremely interesting to watch two social language-shapes emerging— English by Indian writers, and the English employed to translate the experience of Indian literary writing.

Just as we are beginning to learn the value of conserving our heritage buildings, crafts and forests, it is time we conserved our languages and the genius of India that lies in them. An important aspect of this change can and must begin in our classrooms. Every generation wonders what literature and culture it should be teaching its young, how to teach it and why these things should be taught at all. It is up to the present generation of teachers in Indian colleges and universities to design ways of reclaiming our national identity and restoring national pride in our literary heritage.

(The author is Editor-Translations, OUP (India) & Member, Consulting Panel, National Translation Mission)

2007-08-02T09:02:00.000+05:30

IN A LIGHTER VEIN: Swalpa connect madi...

Hindi-Chini sigh sigh!

By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

My Uncle who loved Chinese food only slightly less than he loved his daughter always said, "Go to a Chinese restaurant where there are Chinese people eating and they have Chinese waiters." Tough call.

I seldom found Chinese people eating in Chinese restaurants. And the waiters for some reason are all from Manipur pretending to be Chinese by scrunching up their eyes to a slit, like the soldiers in old Indian war films. At least the food was authentic. So I thought. Till now.

It’s been a completely disillusioning exercise to know that the food Indians love to put away in huge quantities is as Chinese as I am Ukrainian. It took a visit to the heartland of the country to come face to face with the fact.

Inside China, poor deprived souls, they've never tasted the sheer joy of sinking their teeth into the crisps outside of the succulent golden fried prawn or had a soul inspiring whiff of the aroma arising from sweet corn crabmeat soup.

My heart bleeds for them. Breathes there a Chinese with soul so elevated that he has actually tasted the tongue tingling pleasure of fish in mustard sauce? Poor lost souls.

The chinese in china eat stir fried, more stir fried, even more stir fried. And stir fried yet again, leaving it to the continuous supply of green tea to tackle the overload of calories. And they eat something called bok choy.

It is the only choy that I baulk at. For your education and edification, bok choy is the cabbage that nature never ought to have created in the first place. Or having made the mistake, had it attacked by swarms of locusts and decimated from earth for ever.

They have sea food of course except that its like nothing as innocent as a shrimp or a crab. It is a series of bearded, antennaed, boggle eyed, squiggly disreputable creatures which no self respecting sea worth its salt, ought to harbour.

Some have a hundred legs too many Some have eyes on their horns to stare you into quivering submission. Or they are so slimy that you wish they had stayed in the hold of theTitantic and not emerged at all. And the fish is as malevolent as a rabid dog on Bangalore streets.

It comes stuffed complete with glaring beady eyes and gnashing teeth challenging you to take a chopstick to it. Thanks but no thanks. I prefer my adversaries without scales and fins. I don't want this generally known, but a stuffed fish gave me nightmares for three nights in Shanghai.

So what is it that Indians love to plough through in dimly restaurants with names that sound like bells with cracks in them complete with red lanterns and a sprinkling of the mandatory dragon ? Eureka ! It’s Indian Chinese - as Indian as Hinglish is a language that owes very little to the queens tongue.

This cuisine is all ours, born and bred within our coastline by Chinese refugees who set out to conquer the Indian palate armed with hefty lashings of ginger-garlic and a token five spice for authenticity.

So bring on the golden fried prawns and Schezwan rice that Schezwan knows not of. And the steaming bowl of sweet corn crabmeat soup and let gobi manjuri make a statement for the Hindi Chini sigh sigh cuisine. Can we export it to China?

2007-05-23T12:43:00.000+05:30

IN A LIGHTER VEIN: Swalpa connect madi...

School of life
By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

"Take our ministers - not one of them has been through college. Take Sonia Gandhi..no one knows what she has passed. I tell you its not important. Why even Azim Premji is a drop- out from Stanford."

On my early morning walk past a local school, I saw a queue of men women and small children. Snaking its way down the long road, round the block and back again. And they all looked like they hadn't slept the whole night. The toddlers with them were all yawning widely.

"The school opens at nine am why are you here this early?" I asked a parent I knew who was doing his best to stay awake.

"My wife and I have been here since 4 'o clock last Saturday. And these people next to us, have been camping here for the last eight days with a tiffin carrier coming from their home.. they take turns to go to the toilet in the mall"
"I know admissions to schools are difficult but surely not that difficult - they are so many more schools these days".
"They also want so much more money! This one wants only a few lakhs that is why we are all here waiting for the final interview".
One father was coaching his sleepy two year old to recite King Lear from Shakespeare,
Another set of parents were prodding their 3 year old to repeat the Theory of Relativity.
One mother was shouting at a 2 year old for having forgotten the chemical formula for rdx.
"You never know what they will be asked in the interview. It is best to be prepared" said a father studying Calculus to teach his 18-month-old son..
"Surely all they need to know is the alphabet"
"Ha! Education has changed since you were a child. The competition is cutthroat. To even get my son into the school we have to prepare him to get atleast 99% in the entrance exam which follows the CET syllabus"
"I don't understand …you want your child to get into school to learn but before that you have to teach it all to merely get him in?"
"Madam ", he said patiently" the school has limited seats and they need a reason to reject the applications. Can I afford to have my child's application rejected ?".
One father said "Ive been on a sabbatical for the last six months to coach my son in molecular biology …you see its not my subject so I had to take evening classes for two years to be able to coach him and now he is an expert….aren't you Bobby"? Bobby nodded seriously.
"I am very impressed . But aren't you stressing out the poor mite? He should be making mud pies and catching grasshoppers in a bottle"
"There is time enough for all that when he retires. Now he has to work hard!"
" But what happens to c hildhood and playing with puppies and chasing butterflies?"
" But it is necessary in today's world to first get into a good school and then a good college for a career - for that you have to start young"
"Look you may not know this, but the most successful people in the world are drop outs from a formal education system……. after all life is the best school there is.".
" Can you give some names of successful people who have dropped out and learned from life? "he smiled humouring me..
"Take our ministers - not one of them has been through college. Take Sonia Gandhi…..no one knows what she has passed. I tell you its not important. Why even Azim Premji is a drop- out from Stanford."
" You are missing the point," he said, patiently
"Me? Missing what point?"
" You see Bobby has to first get into a school to be a school drop-out ".
"Of course, I didn't see it that way. So Bobby you too want to be a school drop- out?"
"Naah", said Bobby,". I want to join circus"

2007-04-10T11:20:00.000+05:30

A breathtaking way with words
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH

Margo Lanagan is a words-person who has laboured long and persistently at the craft of languaging stories.

Black Juice; Margo Lanagan , Viva Books Pvt. Ltd , Rs.160.

ONLY rarely does the writing inside books actually warrant the fulsome praise lavished on it by blurb and shout lines; as far as Margo Lanagan's Black Juice is concerned, "breathtaking", "dazzling", "wonderful" "exceptional" don't exaggerate.
Lanagan's way with words is breathtaking; she spells them into magic, she cajoles them into chores, she commands them into soldiery, she sings them, she speaks them, she dances them, and they in turn cast an unfaltering spell over the reader. It is impossible not to recognise Margo Lanagan as a words-person who has laboured long, intent and persistently at the craft of languaging stories.
Complex and nuanced
The 10 stories in Black Juice range over an expanse of human imagining so vast but so complex, nuanced and well stirred that they cannot be frozen into genre or type. It's like living, you walk several landscapes at the same time: this worldly and otherworldly.
So in Black Juice we see places and situations in which people are real-like and fantastical at the same time, these are people like you and I: Ikky, being punished for murder, and her family of mother and siblings; Dot, the musician and his mother and sister; Pa and Nan and their grandson. Except that Ikky's punishment for axing her husband in a fit of anger is to be made to sink slowly into a tar pit, bit by bit, while her siblings `sing her down', watched by crowds, watched over by her family; Dot the musician plays an accordion, except that for him and the little community he lives in, the accordion is a World of Many inhabited by Anneh, Robbreh and Viljastramaratan, magic beings, who the musician has to know how to coax and cajole into appearing and singing and dancing as the accordion's music, and the grandfather sends his grandson off to bring back an angel to cure his wife!!
The opening story in the collection, "Singing my Sister Down", is possibly the most well crafted, it has some pleasing word picturing. Look for instance, at this: "It stirred Ikky awake from her hung-headed shame; she lifted up and even laughed, and I saw her hips move in the last chorus, side to side." Or this, "I got up and started across the tar, and it was as if I cast magic ahead of me, silence-making magic, for as I walked — and it was good to be walking, not sitting — musics petered out, and laughter stopped, and dancers stood still, and there were eyes at me, all along the dark banks, strange eyes and familiar both."
It is evident that Margo Lanagan has sponged in a great deal not just about the magicks, stories, spells and geographies of Australia, but also about the witchery of words and the landscapes of word-making for she treks through language with a sure compass, a strong pair of well-clad feet and an ungiving rope.
Lanagan is a creative-writing teacher's delight; she concocts words into unusual, new, different uses that do their work to great effect. Worlds come together in Lanagan's stories that we have got used to putting into separate containers in our now-stories - fantasy stories in magic boxes, real-like stories into real-like boxes — going from one to the other ticketed with frameworks, measures and the like.
Lanagan's stories are like earlier-time stories, when all stories were one story, and if you travelled in them, you never knew where you were going, or how: you could, suddenly, fall through a hole in the earth to a world down below or turn a corner and enter an enchanted field, you could be taken to see real men and women at work or you could be called upon to work magic yourself. And it is this sort of world that Margo Lanagan's stories inhabit.
A celebration
Apart from the sheer pleasure of reading good writing, hard-worked, smoothed and roughed till taut to strum at the least touch, Black Juice makes you re-member parts of knowing that we keep under ice, frozen for easy passage through this well-organised world which demands we be one thing at a time. Black Juice is a celebration of the manyness of all things — this world, its people, human wording, storeying and living.
Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney and this is one of three short story collections, which have won awards including the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, Aurealis Best Young Adult Fiction and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Young

2006-11-13T11:42:00.000+05:30

The inane language
By Deepa Mohan

Opposites in English language aren’t consistent in their inconsistencies.

One of the problems that faced me as I learnt the English language was the contrariness of words and their opposites. I was fine with “interesting” being the opposite of “uninteresting” (I hope this piece of mine is the former and not the latter) and “amoral” being the opposite of “moral”.

But then I started getting into hot water. I found that I was quite inept at getting the correct words to signify the opposite of some terms, and needed to get more ept. I realised that being nonchalant wouldn’t work; I had to become chalant.

The more I read, the more disconcerted I was. How to concert myself? I wondered. If I made a mistake, and corrected myself, was I making a take? Facing these questions, I was disgruntled and decided to get gruntled quickly before I lost my peace of mind. I derived one term from another, but realised that if I went back to the original term, I was not riving it. The inconsistency of the language disgusted me, and I wanted to be consistent and gusted. I was going to return from somewhere, did I have to turn to go there in the first place?

If I stopped using demeaning phrases about people, and used complimentary ones, would I be meaning them? If the language rang an alarm bell in my head, how to quieten it and make it larm?

When something went missing, and I found it, it didn’t become sing, though. When I had one of something, I had a unit, but when I got more, I didn’t get an it, only several. When I left the house, I was no longer indoors, but I wasn’t doors either. When I entered a building, I was making an ingress; when I came out, I wasn’t making a gress. Worse, “another” meant practically the same as “other”, though “aerobic” and “anaerobic” were opposites. These differences were so inane, why couldn't English be more ane?

And so it goes, still. Words and their opposites have me in a right royal tizzy, and I am hoping that the opposite of “interesting” is not “teresting”.....and that my friends don’t stop their conversations and become versationalists!

As I read over this, words such as “dismayed”, “ungulate”, “conservation” and “angry” popped up behind my eyes. I though of a gulate which was mayed when servationists were foiled in their attempt to spoil Nature, it took a lot to get it gry again.

If this gets rejected, it would be infair, misjust and akind. I must not be disappointed, but appointed.

2006-11-13T11:33:00.000+05:30

Three things in a relationship

By Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Three things are essential in any relationship: right perception, right observation and right expression.

What is the secret of a relationship? How does a relationship develop? First is the attraction. You are attracted to a person. But if you get what you are attracted to very easily, the charm disappears quickly – it dies out very fast. But if it is just a little bit difficult to have what you are attracted to, then you develop a love for it. Have you experienced this...?

You fall in love, after that what happens? After a while, the soap opera begins. Because you love someone; you give yourself completely to that relationship; you start putting demands on that relationship. The moment this starts, the love diminishes. All the thrill, joy, everything just seems to fade away. Then you say, “Oh! I have made a mistake.” Now there’s a struggle and pain to get out of the relationship. And after you have got out of it, you get into another, and another...The same story is repeated.

Everybody wants to know how to make a relationship long lasting. Do you want to know the secret about relationships? Three things are essential in any relationship: right perception, right observation and right expression. Often, people say that nobody understands them. Instead of saying, “No one understands me,” you can say that you have not expressed yourself properly. If you speak Russian to a Spaniard, he will definitely not understand you. To express yourself properly, you need the right perception. Right perception can happen when you see yourself by getting into the shoes of the other person.

But right perception alone is not enough; you also need right observation. The way you react when you perceive something is important. How do you feel inside? Observing your own mind is essential. This observation within you: observation of sensation, observation of tendencies and observation of patterns form the second aspect of relationship. After you observe yourself and perceive the other, it is the right expression. Expressing ourselves in the right manner is important. The whole of life is a lesson in just these three things: perception, observation, and expression. Every mistake you make is really not a mistake; it’s a learning process of the three vital aspects of life. Love is essential in relationships – it’s not about attraction alone. In attraction, there’s aggressiveness; in love, there is submission. Though attraction forms the first step you cannot stand on the first step for too long. You have to move on to the next pedestal. That is love.

When you’re centered, and when you let go of your feverishness, then your charm is long lasting. The nearer a person comes to you, the more charm there will be in the relationship.

2006-10-30T20:01:00.000+05:30

LIKE A FLOWING RIVER

The following is a beautiful passage from one of the chapters in the book
LIKE A FLOWING RIVER
by PAULO COELHO

A warrior of light often finds that certain moments repeat themselves. He is often faced by the same problems and situations, and seeing these difficult situations return, he grows depressed, thinking that he is incapable of making any progress in life.

"I've been through all this before," he says to his heart.

"Yes, you have been through all this before," replies his heart. "But you have never been beyond it."

Then the warrior realises that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he has not yet learned.

2006-10-09T21:03:00.000+05:30

Laloo ispik at Harvard

By sadiqa peerbhoy

Here is the supposed text of Laloo’s speech at Harvard and the interpretation of the same by the Management Dons, who I am told hung on to every word emerging from the pan-chewing mouth of the Master.

Laloo: Every cow is there to be milked. If for some reason a cow cannot be milked, it must be made to produce calves once a year to justify its mooing.

Harvard Interpretation: Employees must be given a clear cut job definition and vectors of lateral growth to perform to productivity norms with KRA audits and a 360 degrees evaluation of productivity paradigms on par with industry verticals.

Laloo: Some cows prefer grass and some thrive on fodder. But unless every drop of milk is milked, the cow will become sick. In my experiences a sick cow is very expensive in vet fees. So we are simply to treating it with Isabgol.

Harvard Interpretation: The variances and the econometrics of strategic planning must take cognitive cognizance of parameters of exponential analysis into the cycle of productivity. In ancient India, the practice was called Isabgol and used extensively for incremental productivity.

Laloo: In our country cows are worshipped as Ma and they become a part of the family. One member of my family is married to a very good looking cow.

Harvard Interpretation: The paradigm models of dynamix output and input variances are largely associated with contractual environmental sustainability of profit and loss management. Transactional balances must help to steady attrition rates.

Laloo: Fursssht a good farmer understands that a cow is giving milk according to its capacity. Some time more is coming, some time less. But if the fodder is of the correct mix more will come.

Harvard Interpretation: Productivity is a factor of the ratio of inverse and obtuse coefficients of the product cycle and the psychometrics and demographics of the bovine universe.

Laloo: If a farmer is providing good thick milk to customers at the market price per litre eggaxtly what the neighboring farmers are charging - otherwise why customer will not go to Amul?

Harvard Interpretation: Sustainability of quality norms is a dynamic vinification of abstruse parameters of variances in building a strong customer loyalty module and implementing a it at all levels. With TQM and VHF and SWOT analysis of contingencies.

Laloo: Eef you are giving good milk to customers whyfore they are going to other cowsheds?

Harvard Interpretation: A sustained customer relationship programme involves a large quotient of coefficient maintaining of the essential converses of quality which must be measured with the differentiating factors collateral with contractual brand loyalty and market dynamics of a growing world economy.

Laloo: Milk is milk and water is water. But blood is always thicker. Ask my daughter Misa.

Harvard Interpretation: A clear incrementalistic modular format in strategic product development must be based on infinite variables and defined by rigorous testing in controlled condition with ratios of tolerances below those of liquiforms allowed by the FDA. Further details in a dissertation on the subject is available with by Misa.

Laloo: If you can’t drink milk drink lassi. Both are good for your health.

Harvard Interpretation: Line extentions of a brand are imperative when there is a dip in the circular and linear viabilibity of the definitive liabilities of the brand recall, in a quantitative and qualitative perceptual analysis

Laloo Achha. To aap kabhi hamare Indian railway mein bhi aayein.

Harvard Interpretation: The exigencies that confront the Indian railways have been underlined and focused upon by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav in a historic case study that will enlighten and inspire every Harvard graduate in the ones to come. But just one question sir, what do cows have to do with it?

2006-09-28T13:47:00.001+05:30

An inner bath

By Amrit Sadhana

dECCAN hERALD

Laughter has been uplifted as a therapy the world over. Not so long ago, laughter was considered shallow and unintelligent; seriousness was highly valued as a social trait. With the changing attitude towards life, laughter is now accepted as a health-giving activity. So much so that there are laughter clubs everywhere and doctors even suggest them as stressbusters.

However, tears do not enjoy this status although their therapeutic value is much greater. Crying, the shedding of emotional tears is a human privilege. Despite the uniqueness of tears, there has been a sort of taboo on shedding them. Maybe because tears are associated with pain and grief and nobody wants to acknowledge their pain. Also, tears are thought to be the sign of weakness because it is only women and kids who let them roll freely when they are unhappy.

Three types of tears have been identified physiologically. Basal or continuous tears which lubricate the eye, reflex tears when chopping onions and emotional tears, which have psychological meaning. There is some evidence that the different types of tears have different chemical and hormonal compositions (Frey & Langseth 1985).

Osho is the first contemporary mystic who has introduced emotional tears as a therapy. He calls wholehearted crying “an inner bath.” Osho asks the modern man, "Why be afraid of tears? We have been taught not to cry, particularly men. With small children the mother will say, 'Don't be a sissy. Don't start crying. That is only for girls.' And the boy becomes hard. Look, men cannot cry. They have missed one of the most beautiful things in life. Nature has not made any difference between man and woman; man has as many tear glands as woman. Tears are needed. They are cleansing. But men think how to cry? What will people say? They will say, 'You, and crying? Your wife has died and you are crying? Be a man. Be brave. Bear it. Don't cry.'

"But you understand? If you don't cry, by and by your smile will be corrupted, because everything is joined together. If you cannot cry, you cannot laugh; if you don't allow your tears to flow naturally, you will not be able to allow your smiles to flow naturally. Everything will become unnatural, everything will become strained, everything will become a forced thing, you will move almost in a diseased way and you will never be at ease with yourself. Life consists of flowing."

If full-blooded crying would save a heart attack or growth of a cancer, why not go for it? Have a good cry!

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/sep272006/panorama1542342006926.asp

2006-09-21T13:08:00.000+05:30

Take a look at this...!!!...Holy Cow...!!!!

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

2006-09-21T12:58:00.000+05:30

Vada to Tada
By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

Now if only life worked like a film script, Sanjay Dutt would, to start with, get five years RI. The starkness of his cell will provide a strong backdrop for the sad song that is de rigeur.

But our hero cannot, of course, be allowed to languish for long in jail, so he digs a tunnel with his bare hands straight to Dubai after declaring to all and specially to Sundry, that he will only return after clearing his name and bringing the real culprits of the Mumbai blasts to book. A rousing song about doing or dying is essential here. And a few lines about waat laga-ing for the villains. (What lagaing…??? Only a novice not clued in to Munnabhai can ask that question.) This part of the movie sponsored by Waat paan masala.

In Dubai he discovers that the D Gang has moved on to Karachi. But Dubai as a locale is too exciting to let go. So he runs into a girl at Hotel Al Burj and sings a song about love in the desert to which camels (in harem pants) dance in a line. (What do you mean they do not have camels in Dubai!) But duty beckons and CBI with a posse of Pretty Young Things (PYTs) is hot on his trail. So he dons a disguise as Leopard Memon complete with leopard skin harem pants and enters Karachi.

Time for a love song and passionate love scenes intercut with the PYTs, from CBI closing in. Our Hero breaks into D Gang’s stronghold... only to be arrested. Because Lady Love is actually a D gang member set up to divert him with a sensuous item number clad in see through harem pants. Which of course our hero does not see through, figuratively speaking.

Leopard Memon languishes broken-hearted in a dungeon and weeps betrayal into his meagre food consisting of Medu Vada. And naturally, sings a song about his Vada to Tada (The pun on vada is completely intentional!)

Song attracts another lady incarcerated on the top floor, who sets about singing in tandem, to get yet another love situation going. Though why she sings about Vada to Tada is something best left to the viewers’ imagination. It turns out – she is Osama’s own flesh of flesh and blood of blood, neice who has rubbed him (Osama not Leop) the wrong way by asking him to have a bath. She swears to help Leop and rubs Leopard the right way, saying ‘I will I will’ repeatedly in case he thinks she won’t.

After felling forty minions, Leopard and Neice, escape and make a dramatic dash to the villain’s real hideout - Big Bhai who is tortured into revealing Osama’s cave with vault doors that only open to an item number by Neice in, (what else?) harem pants.

The triumphant two bring both the prisoners back to Mumbai to face the music (by Anu Malik). Sanjay goes on to make Son of Munnabhai only it’s now Kunnabhai with a K because the letter, is lucky for Bollywood. O’s neice who has had a crush on Bush all along, moves onto US as an illegal immigrant. Well, you cannot have everything and love too. Even in a Bollywood movie. Sanjay languishes heart broken. This portion of the movie is sponsored by the makers of Fevicol.

Oops! I forgot the great patriotic song that echoes all over India as Big Bhai and Osama are marched twelve years later into Tada Court. This is where Sanjay gets the opportunity to deliver the famous dialogue: “Mere paas”, he declares to all and sundry, looking Sundry in the eye “Ossa MAA hai”.

But since life does not run like a film script where everything turns out jhakkas, I hope Sanjay Dutt does not have to go to prison at all.

2006-09-21T12:54:00.000+05:30

Unforgettable auto ride
By Sharada Prahladrao

A nice and gentle auto driver makes the ride memorable despite bumpy roads

Auto rides are often bumpy. If there are no plastic sheets on the sides the rain hits you. Bikes zooming close by splash slush on the sari. Other vehicle drivers curse the auto, as it weaves through traffic ignoring the rules. But, no choice for an auto-dependent.

Undoubtedly, auto drivers rank among the rudest in the city. Say you want to go to Jayanagar, the auto driver responds, “I’m going to R T Nagar.” You start wondering if he’s the passenger.

“That's in the opposite direction”; “I'm not going there”; “It’s too far”; “Won’t get return passengers” — are the most frequent excuses. Some even dismiss you with a wave of the hand!

Of course there are a few good apples in the basket. An elderly auto driver began speaking in broken English. Noticing the astonished look on my face he told me that he’d done his MA in literature, “but it was a free seat and those days no one checked attendance,” he added with a toothless grin.

He said riding the auto has been his bread and butter for the last 52 years: “Now I own 4 autos, but the oldest I drive myself.”

Intrigued, I asked him about his children. His eldest son has gone to UK on a scholarship, his second son is a doctor and his daughter is an officer in the income tax department.

“Surely, you don’t have to work then?” I queried. “But what will I do at home?” was his counter reply.

He hailed from a poor family, but found an opportunity as an auto-driver. “But memsahib, I never cheated or took advantage of anyone’s kindness or weakness.”

A neighbour had to sell his house as he needed money desperately. The driver told him that he’ll pay Rs 1,000 (a princely sum those days) more than the last offer. “That’s how I got another site in that posh area,” he said.

Getting down, I told him to keep the change. He said, “I have to return what is due to you. God is keeping hisaab (account/tab) of me.” Then he got down and thanked me for having made his evening wonderful. Even a trained chauffeur in a BMW couldn’t have made me feel so special.

It took a wise, elderly auto driver to make me realise that auto drivers are like us — a cocktail of goodness, greed, ambition and the desire to make the world a better place for our children.

2006-09-21T12:49:00.000+05:30

The art of borrowing
By D A SAIT

Of all the professions available to those starting out in life to accumulate wealth the profession of borrowing is about the oldest and the safest. Try holding up a bank and you will find a bullet waiting for you. Try dabbling in high finance and set your sights on kickbacks on gun deals and you get a kick in the seat of the pants from the nation. Try borrowing, and about the only unpleasantness you need fear is the possibility of going about in a false beard for the rest of your life.

Borrowing comes in many forms, such as the borrowing of a cup of sugar or cooking oil from your neighbour and forgetting to return the same till the said neighbour is reduced to the necessity of performing ‘satyagraha’ in front of your door-step.

Going one step farther, there is the vast pasture-land of books waiting for the professional borrower. Here the skilled borrower with a glib tongue and familiarity with the works of noted authors should have no difficulty in inducing his victim to part with a couple of books at a till, by imperceptible degrees, the latter's collection has ceased to exist and a new collection has sprung up in the borrower's library. Among the other popular items comprising the borrower's repertoire are jerkins, raincoats and umbrellas.

Borrowed jerkins sometimes do return to the owner, but borrowed raincoats and umbrellas seldom do. If all the umbrellas visitors to my house have borrowed on the pretext of rain and never returned were placed end to end they would reach from Bangalore to Kanyakumari.

Borrowing money, however, is not as easy as borrowing books or umbrellas. Most people are allergic to the touch. There are those who wouldn't part with a fiver to please a dying grandmother. In fact to prise a fiver out of a curmudgeon of this sort you would have to forget the lesson learnt at your mother's knee and use chloroform. In all cases involving the touch you would have to pave the way, as it were, and lay the proper foundation as lawyers are so fond of saying. So you start by asking after the intended victim's family and when he, in a reciprocal spirit, asks after yours is the time to beat your chest and generally behave like King Lear in one of his doldrums. At this your victim, if he is wise, will smell a rat and run like a hare.

Borrowing is only half the battle. The other half consists in successfully dodging your creditor and keeping out of his path at all costs. Any borrower who as a child was any good at the game of hide-and-seek ought to be able to shake off a creditor with the greatest ease.

There is also the danger of your creditor calling at your house to collect his pound of flesh. This danger is easily averted by hiding in a cupboard or pretending to be a statue of yourself erected by friends and well-wishers.

The canny thing, of course, if the sum borrowed is calculated to stagger humanity, would be to leave the country, leaving no forwarding address.

2006-09-21T12:47:00.000+05:30

Sensitive Santro
BY SHARADA PRAHLADRAO

Although it may not be much to look at, its owners guard it jealously, with their lives

While manoeuvring the delicate, new Santro car in the basement parking he bumped into me. “Don’t bang the Santro,” he said. Of course my bruised thigh didn’t matter. After all I was a rogue elephant stalking parking lots. I gave him what I consider my dirty glare, but he nonchalantly got down and inspected his car. Before I could launch my tirade he said, “Can’t you be more careful?” Men and cars have an umbilical connection. They seem to feel more for their cars than for their spouses. They are sensitive to strange noises and immediately check the trouble spots or call up the showroom for expert advice. But if the wife grumbles and cribs, it is ignored.

We bought a new cover for the car as it apparently needed sun protection. Before going out the cover has to be removed in a particular way and not just yanked out or it may get scratched. Accustomed as I was to driving a macho jeep I thought this would be child’s play. Small and easy to handle, it looked like a large, remote controlled toy. But for hubby it was not just a means of transport, he truly took care of it like a rare ostrich egg. “Don’t break the gear box,” he’d yell if there was even the slightest vibration. If any vehicle came too close he’d put his head out and let loose choice adjectives. Embarrassed I’d tell him to keep quiet. “But how dare he overtake from the left? If you don’t exert your right the Santro will get dented!”

So two factors kept me away from our car: the increasing traffic and the hubby’s increasing blood pressure. But when our 18-year-old son got his licence and drove overconfidently I felt it was high time I went in for a refresher course. Three lessons was all it took to get behind the wheel and drive gently. From out at sea hubby called to ask how it felt to be driving the Santro. “It’s easy to drive,” I said. “I told you,” was his quick reply. Actually it feels like I'm sitting in an egg and as soon as anyone bangs into it, I will pop my head out like a bald chicken!
Last week a branch fell on a cousin’s Santro causing immense damage. The Santro owners on our road had a discussion on where and how to park these fragile cars. They asked me to join in, but I politely declined. “When you go out where do you park?” “Wherever I find parking space.” A foolish answer to a foolish question.
But I was given a whole list of don’ts. Ranging from “don’t park under a tree” to “don’t park next to a motorcycle”, I heard them all. “If there are so many problems it is better to go by auto,” I said. My reply met with some appreciation.
I was locking the garage when a neighbour asked why the Santro is covered even when parked inside. I wish I could answer that one honestly. It’s like using a sun block cream at home. I can sit in the sun/rain without an umbrella, but not our sensitive Santro.

2006-09-21T12:45:00.000+05:30

Pay up, or bleed

BY ANIL CHINTAMANI

Notions of fair wages for services rendered vary according to the intensity of one’s needs.

A faucet leaks, a motor packs up or a door lock has jammed. A frantic hunt for a repairman follows. Invariably, the service person you rely on is out of town. His assistant is in town and at home too when you call but he cannot step out. He has contracted the ‘Madras eye’.

The phone book exasperates. The first number you try yields no response. You dial the second number several times and get the engaged tone every time. The next number elicits the shrill response that “this number does not exist”.
With difficulty, you locate and bring a repairer home and he fixes the fault. He then puts you in a fix.

“What’s the charge?” you ask.

“Neeve nodi kodi saar,” he replies. While in a literal translation it means ‘look and pay’, the words actually imply more. Consider the work, they say, the workmanship and how the technocrat has suspended other work to deal with your crisis, at your doorstep. Then pay accordingly.

Your efforts to pin him down to a figure fail but he amends his tune to the more practical, “Okay saar, you tell me, what you will pay.”

He is aghast when you state your ‘fair’ figure. “What saar, we charge that much in our shop just to change a bolt.”

“Then you tell me how much I should pay.”

The figure he quotes jolts the householder. The money that eventually changes hands makes neither man happy.

The repairman’s is not an isolated case. The auto driver delivers the familiar line “nodi kodi saar”, after he has deposited you at an address on the city’s outskirts, according to his reckoning. Why, even when you have paid all the legitimate charges, you can run into the “nodi kodi saar” wall. This can happen when the telecom men install your new telephone, or when the gas man delivers a fresh cylinder or the water supply man replaces a faulty meter.

Services rendered at the barber’s is not, generally, of an emergency nature. Still, at the end of a shave or hair-trim the barber turns coy when the customer pops the question, “How much?” Note that the sign detailing the tariff for different kinds of services has become obsolete.

The vague reply again is, “Kodi saar, paravaagilla.” The last word meaning ‘all right’ implies that the barber won’t mind a modest sum but he hopes the customer will be generous.

This is a tricky situation particularly for aged gentlemen, because the barber’s small, pointed scissors have plied deftly inside the nostrils and ears minutes ago, to snip bristles that tend to protrude from there. If the sum they pay the barber does not please him, he might choose to be a wee bit less deft the next time. Your blood or your money, which would you rather lose?

2006-09-21T12:41:00.000+05:30

Palm-top Jalarpet
By Anil Chintamani

If lines do foretell the number of wives or kids, the Nizam of Hyderabad might have been a giant

There is provision for one more, according to the astrologer. He speaks not of offspring or house but spouse.

In astrology and elsewhere, lines rule lives. Look at the way we attribute our penury and the neighbour’s prosperity to lines etched invisibly on the forehead. Lines spoken, written or drawn mean much to us. Take ‘I, Tarzan’, for example. The line of two words conjures up images of not merely a muscular hunk but also of strong vines in dense jungles, turbulent rivers, roaring waterfalls, clean air and above all, abundant wildlife.

Human life and not of the wild kind, is the astrologer’s concern. Most people approach the astrologer with misgivings and depart bemused. Even people who go there as neutral observers are sucked into the vortex of whorls and lines, as in my case.

The astrologer’s opening remarks on glancing at my right palm was, “What, this is like Jalarpet junction!” My impression of that station on the Bangalore–Chennai railway line is vague. I must admit, though, that the forest of lines in my palm causes me embarrassment.

He was now looking keenly at the edge of my palm close to the wrist and asked, nodding towards the person sitting next to me, “Is this your only spouse?”

Rattled, I took a minute to answer feebly, in the affirmative. He shook his head, either in disbelief or disappointment and passed his verdict that ‘there is provision for one more’. To my good fortune, the existing spouse paid little attention to his statement. I was there reluctantly, at her bidding, but she seemed willing to allow the astrologer to play cryptographer with my palm, sidelining her.

Shrewdly, he did not venture to divine the number of our offspring from the little indentations on the side of the palm. Perhaps his sharp memory had filed away the information we had furnished that we were childless.

Even amateur soothsayers seek to foretell the number of children from the marks on the edge of the palm. For the spouse count, they look towards the back of the head.

“Hey, look at this,” a relative might cry out, on grabbing a passing boy by the elbow at a gathering. “He has two whorls on his head. He is going to have two wives!”

I wonder whether anyone looked at the back of the head of someone called the Nizam of Hyderabad. As children, we used to hear our elders gossip that the Nizam’s household contained hundreds of wives. Did whorls cover his entire head?

Besides, the side of his palm might have had to be a mile-long to hold notches for all the offspring from his platoons of wives.

2006-09-21T12:37:00.000+05:30

Fuel and the flame
By D A Sait

Sometimes, love doesn’t wait for spring to happen. One hot summer day will do.

The bride and the groom stepped down the podium of the Kalyana Mantapa and were being introduced to friends and relatives in the auditorium. The groom was the son of a friend of mine and the bride... I took a closer look at her as I was being introduced, and then I stood transfixed. Oh God, it was That girl!

My mind went back to that scorching morning of March when this girl, sweat pouring down her face, had appeared at the entrance to this groom’s soft drinks parlour in Jayanagar. My memory for faces being exceptionally good, I had placed her instantly. And this boy, after failing to secure a job in the state government, had finally decided to fall back on his own initiative and start this soft drinks business with borrowed capital. He had very pleasing manners, a way with his customers, who flocked to his joint in droves. He began to make money hand over fist. He was the only son of a friend, a widower, whose only ambition in life was to see his son married to a decent girl. But the son was not in a hurry to oblige. He said he would only marry a girl who liked him for his own sake.

‘’But a girl can’t begin to like you until she is married to you,’’ said the father. ‘’Who knows,’’ was the son’s cryptic rejoinder.

I was seated a chair spread out in front of the shop that March morning when a teenaged, dark, pretty young thing in jeans and sleeveless shirt turned up pushing a Kinetic Honda in the scorching sun. For a few minutes she stood still, trying to catch her breath. She wiped the sweat off her face with a handkerchief and asked, “Can you direct me to the nearest petrol bunk?’’

“It's at least two kilometres away,’’ said the young man. “Oh, my God,’’ she cried. “How am I going to push this Honda that far?’’ He took one look at her shirt soaked in sweat and said, “You are not going to push it.’’

“What do you mean?’’ said the girl in surprise, for his words smacked of a liberty, coming from an absolute stranger. The boy pointed to his Yamaha parked in front of the shop and said, “I am going to draw petrol from my Yamaha and pour it into your Honda.’’ When he finished, she handed him twenty rupees and said, “Thank you so much.’’ He refused and said, “It was just a helping hand, as from one human being to another.’’

“But I can't have your petrol for nothing,’’ she protested. “To me the satisfaction of having helped somebody is more important than money.’’ “But we might never meet again,’’ said she. ‘’Who knows,’’ he murmured. ‘’Yes, who knows,’’ she echoed, and rode away.

Love is a strange phenomenon. The young man’s gesture seemed to have spoken to the depths in her, and presumably she had taken the trouble to meet him again. He had shared his petrol with her. And now he is sharing his life with her.

2006-09-21T12:36:00.000+05:30

A many ‘splintered’ thing in daily life

On the lower fringes of the middle class where houses are huddled close together, neighbourhood goodwill has to surmount many hurdles, realises ANIL CHINTAMANI.

The game of tennis is full of love. It starts with the utopian ‘love all’ and slumps inexplicably to the paltry ‘love 15.’ Unathletic men and women in the less affluent localities in our cities and towns feel constrained to play a similar game but without raquet or ball.

The game begins with ‘love all’ when a family occupies a vacant house in the locality. Hasn’t the Good Book said ‘love thy neighbour?’

Constraints that have cropped up in urban existence have rendered compliance with this exhortation stressful. Are amendments allowed, at least in parenthesis?
Because, as in tennis, the number of neighbours you can love can drop to a few very quickly. The muse who called love a many splendoured thing strictly had the romantic variety in mind.

Sloping roads often stand in the way of good neighbourliness in moderate localities. For some curious reason, housewives insist on splashing the narrow road too with water when they clean the doorstep every morning to draw rangoli. Water from one house defaces the rangoli of the neighbour ‘downstream.’

Makeshift bunds and channels created by the residents to check or divert such flow sometimes prove ineffective. Muttered curses turn into uttered protests and hysterical exchanges follow. Diplomatic exchanges then cease, sometimes for a few days or in extreme cases, for years.

Yellu bella during Sankranthi, obbattu during Ugadi and cakes during children’s birthdays no longer travel between houses. Invitations to receive arasina-kunkuma also dry up.

Printed invitations that arrive can spell trouble too. “Ha, this boy is a mere BA. I had suggested an alliance with an electronics engineer. But they did not pursue it seriously!” Resentment that smoulders thus may prevent the invitee from attending the wedding and sour relations further. Similarly, when offers of help with finding a maid-servant or a house for a newly married relative of the neighbours are spurned even for valid reasons, the sense of insult is strong. “I took them by auto and showed them such a nice house. The house they have taken is not at all nice. No ventilation at all. The kitchen is so narrow. It does not have even one shelf!”

The male counterparts are not guiltless either. An aged man, for example, throws buns at dogs while his younger neighbour throws bun-sized stones at the same dogs. Neither throws anything when the other is around. Polite small talk and surface courtesies continue. One knows that acute sensitivity to hunger drives the other to feed stray dogs. The other person knows that the dog eats the bun at his gate hops across to leave its scent mark on the neighbour’s scooter. The neighbour likes neither the scent nor the mark.

Love of dogs is so akin to love of children. Out of such love, one adult joins the youngsters on the road in tennis ball cricket. He shares the children’s shrieks of joy when a wicket falls or someone takes a catch. The same shrieks annoy the neighbour. The annoyance turns into veiled illwill between the two and relations turn cold.

Like feeding dogs, feeding children could erode relations too. “See, I told you not to give cake to Munna. Now they are saying that he has cold and fever because he ate your cake!”

The real issue here may not be the child’s well-being but resentment that the spouse is wasting money to pamper neighbours. “Will they come to our rescue when we are in distress? No one will even look towards you.” Opportune time to move the amendment: Love thy neighbour (if spouse permits).

Noisy dogs in the night and boisterous children in daytime might disturb sleeping children or old folks in other houses and cause misunderstanding, marring relations. Loud music, badly maintained two-wheeler arriving or departing late every night, screeching rolling shutters, clattering exhaust fan, frequent high-pitched whine of the mixer-grinder, irritants like these abound and place a strain on inter-household harmony.

Noiseless friction can be equally corrosive. The assault here is on the nose. The smell of meat and garlic is heavenly to the household cooking it and a stink when it wafts into the next house, sending its ‘pure vegetarian’ occupants there into a tizzy. Cigarettes have no meat in them so the vegetarian neighbour puffs away on his scroll of poison, sitting in his narrow balcony. The smoke and its acrid smell curl through the open windows of the non-smoking meat eater’s house.

Indirect protests are muttered, sometimes deliberately audibly, though both neighbours exchange taut smiles whenever they come face to face. So taut that love has no chance of slipping through to spread some warmth. All right, love thy neighbour, love all. The ‘love’ in tennis denotes zero. Should we let the zero rule our lives?

2006-09-21T12:34:00.000+05:30

Tower of Babel

By U S Iyer

The way you speak English does not matter as long as you communicate effectively what you mean

When I was told that the government of Karnataka would be seeking public opinion on introducing English from Std 1 in Kannada-medium schools, I thought it was a futile exercise or even an unnecessary one, because what we are aiming at through such a measure are communication skills and competitive efficiency when it comes to employment, which can be achieved even without a basic knowledge of English.

After teaching English for a short period at a reputed post-graduate college in the University of Kerala , and working for about three decades in various organisations in almost all parts of India , I joined a small proprietary concern in Bangalore .

On the first day of my joining this office, my first interaction was with a counter sales executive. He showed me a photo on the wall and told me that our boss’s father was ‘hanged’ there along with some Hindu deities.

He could communicate well and I knew what he meant. Even now he works in this office, drawing a good salary, but out of curiosity I wanted to find out how he had got a job here.

My colleague, the ‘accounts executive’, narrated the story. This man from Mandya had come for a job with a letter from a politician who our boss could not ignore. At the time of the interview, the boss had asked him several questions, none of which he could answer correctly. Out of desperation, he asked him what Mandya was famous for, so that the man would be able to give him a correct answer.

He quickly replied, “Coffee.” The boss could not control his temper and wanted him to spell the word at least. He took out a paper and wrote ‘KAUPHY’. He was appointed with immediate effect. The reason? The boss told others that he had chosen a person who had immense potential. Had he not coined a word that did not have even one alphabet contained in the word ‘coffee’, but could still communicate what he meant? The boss knew that he and this man were made for each other, as he would not have got a job anywhere else. He has now come up the ladder, having worked for nearly twenty years in this office, and is reported to be constructing a two-storeyed building in a posh locality.

Another employee — a Keralite — can metamorphose Malayalam into English and Kannada and is now No 1 in this office.

The Tower of Babel is irrelevant, so long as you can open up your mind and compete with the most sincere and honest ones who are forced to quit jobs out of frustration through disgusting working conditions.

2006-09-21T12:29:00.000+05:30

Fall, perfect and imperfect

By Anil Chintamani

An accident sends the mind spinning about the many falls punctuating one’s journey of life

All that falls from the heavens is not manna, mercy. Some of it is rain, some snow, on rare occasions meteor showers and even rarer occasions, fragments of crippled spacecraft. Let’s not discuss here, the things that fall pleasantly from trees, like blossoms, leaves and twigs or the unpleasant secretions of tree-dwellers.

Falls fall also into familiar and unfamiliar categories. Mention rainfall and even infants all over the world might look heavenward. Abundant rainfall accounts for spectacular waterfalls. Unlike rainfall, snowfall is not universal but everyone has some idea of what it is, thanks partly to movie or television visuals of Christmas ambience in the West. Also common in the West is ‘fall’ to denote autumn.

The swirling torrent of wind and rain swoops in from the sea and the instant it hits a landmass, meteorologists cry ‘landfall!’ The word only denotes the point of contact between the storm and land, as it happens often in the Caribbean region. For mysterious reasons, most hurricanes bear feminine names like Lucy or Linda.

In India, hardly any mystery surrounds a kind of fall with distinct feminine associations. In the past decade and more, narrow, three-metre lengths of cotton or synthetic cloth has become indispensable to wearers of the sari. Appropriately, the narrow band of cloth is called sari-falls. The attachment does not make the sari fall off the wearer. Instead it contributes to visions of the sari cascading from the waist like a gentle waterfall are acceptable. The male counterpart manages without such a band, as their suiting material can only lend the ‘perfect fall’ when transformed into trousers.

Whatever the clothing, just consider the variety of ways a person can fall. One can fall in status, spirit, performance, into bad company or bad ways, and fall from grace too. One can fall sick or foul with another. Life’s balance sheet is not known to show a shortfall of pitfalls. The world over, millions fall in love every day. Criminal elements take the fall if they are unable to find a fall guy. Gender injustice! Has any mystery writer ever alluded to a ‘fall girl?’

To friends and acquaintances, mystery surrounded my fall from a motor-cycle recently. “How did it happen?” they ask. “As there were too many vehicles on the road,” I wisecrack, “I tried to ride on the divider.” I wait for them to fall out of their chairs laughing. I’m crestfallen because no one has even chuckled.

2006-09-21T12:28:00.000+05:30

Mouse trap

By Nuggehalli Pankaja

Notwithstanding all my preparations for it, my new computer still managed to rattle me

At last my long cherished dream had been accomplished. The great day was fixed, coinciding with the fixing of my internet connection. But, the day before, my astrologer friend rang me up, saying, “Don’t you know that both two days before Amavasya as well as two days after, are not auspicious?”

How could I, who live by the rules and regulations of Rahu-ketu etc, forget that very important detail? Needless to say, another day, a very auspicious day, was fixed, along with the lucky time — in minutes and, aye, even seconds.

“If you happen to come before that scheduled time, even by a second, you will have to stand outside and wait,” I told the baffled dealer and the internet-man. “And, please also check whether your watches show the correct Indian Standard Time,” I added, pointedly.

On the date we had fixed, both of them arrived a good ten minutes early and actually stood outside, holding on to their paraphernalia, while I, with both my clock and my wrist watch-alarm clock set to the ‘All India news’ time, sat gazing at them like one mesmerised.

Computer installed, internet-connection given, they both vied with each other to launch me on an exploration of the world, but no — I had to perform a puja in the regular style, while they busied themselves with their mobile phones.

I chanted a few stotras too, with the that divine tune playing in the background, and inaugurated the connection by typing out ‘Ramanama’, until they cried out, “Madam, it is getting late for us, please.”

After just a couple of hours’ tuition, I was on my feet. TV disconnected, phone neglected and kitchen discarded, I submerged myself in computer travel, trying out all the functions, ignoring the windows and bypassing the instructions that appeared too frequently on the screen.

One day, I just could not get into my e-mail or even locate ‘Yahoo messenger’. Even Columbus would not have struggled so much to discover the new world. Frantic instructions came from my family, “Amma, what are you trying to prove? Just try this, that, etc, etc.”

I tried almost everything that came my way. The mouse, damn it, ran helter-skelter, like one possessed. Gosh, it seemed much easier to catch in the house rather than on the monitor.

Disgusted, I rang up both the criminals — the dealer and the internet-man — and blasted them profusely for landing me with such trash. I threatened to go to the consumer forum and complain to the ‘Stree-shakti’ for duping an old woman. Both of them came rushing home, glaring accusingly at each other.

One look at the recalcitrant instrument and both said softly, politely and simultaneously, “Madam, you are holding the mouse upside-down.”

2006-09-21T12:15:00.000+05:30

I fit the bill

By Dinesh Kumar

Being a husband usually means growls in the morning, swearing all day and coming home late

And perfectly too, with a 100 per cent scorecard. I am jumping the gun. I am talking here of Marie Correlli’s replaceability description of a husband. She says, “A husband can be substituted easily by acquiring three pets — a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon and the cat that comes home late at night.”

Following a Buddha like inside-out approach I go deep into myself and get in touch with my current reality and what do I see? I see a perfect score of 10 upon 10.

Yes, I growl at 4 in the morning when my bedding partner selfishly pulls the quilt, exposing my vitals to the freezing temperatures. That is not fair, I growl in protest. My growling accentuates proportionately depending on the decibel level of her snoring and reaches its peak when I am ordered to make the morning cuppa. I can be heard in the neighbourhood if the quality of the product served in the silver tray does not pass muster with expectations and remake is demanded.

The growling continues while I drink bottles after bottles of water and mugs after mugs of hot coffee and I have to leave for the office in the state of motionlessness.

As I reach the office, it does not take long for me to start swearing like a parrot when I have to wade through the mass of mud that goes by the name of a road in Peenya. I record at least a hundred swears a day while talking to my colleagues, during telephonic conversation with suppliers and on banging the phone after talking to an irate customer.

If Marie Corelli were to be present during my afternoons, she would be pleased as a punch with what she hears and what she believes.

Talking about coming back home at night, here is a sample of what usually happens. A friend would call me on my mobile and say something like this, “Hey what is up?” When I tell him that I am just taking a turn near the Bangalore Club on the way home, he makes a tempting suggestion of sharing a beer or two on the way home. Never to miss a golden opportunity, I accept the invitation. And then one thing (read mug) leads to another and the mood of the moment takes a vice like grip over us. The prospect of a cold dinner that waits on the dining table leaves me cold and when he asks me to join him for a dinner in a seven star setting, I grab the opportunity with both hands.

The dinner is followed by a couple of cognacs until one of us realises that it is well past midnight and finally I am home early morning like a cat, matching Marie Correli’s description.

And the cycle of growling, swearing, coming back late continues day after day. My days of husbandhood seem numbered because I heard my wife say this on the phone “Hello, Is this the pet shop? Well I am looking for a swearing parrot and a ……’’ I sneaked out of the room.

2006-09-21T12:11:00.000+05:30

Da FII Code
By Sadiqa Peerbhoy
dECCAN hERALD

What I saw yesterday was a cryptic “mouthshut.com” No doubt a sinister message. Does it mean the autorickshawalla knows something critical to the survival of the world?

I spotted my fifth autorickshaw carrying that message. Earlier they used the back to expose the driver’s personal philosophy of life. Or his philanthropic instincts (delivery cases free) or simply his terms of business (you frend my frend, bijnis time no frend).

But what I saw yesterday was a cryptic “mouthshut.com” No doubt a sinister message. Does it mean the autorickshawalla knows something critical to the survival of the world? Is he under oath with some ruthless organisation and cannot tell for fear of a tortuous death? Or is he a Narendra Modi admirer carrying a warning to Aamir Khan and other celebrities with an opinion to air?

Worries me. All this code stuff going around the world. This morning the vegetable vendor looked at me meaningfully and said: “You owe me Rs 9.99 paise”. It jolted me out of the complacence of a perfectly normal day. Was he trying to convey something over and beyond the price of tomatoes? Wasn’t nine nine nine, apart from Bata pricing, the devil’s own code?

Then there was the strangest SMS, “Call me” it said. No name. Just a number. I added it up. It came to 42. Then I subtracted the first five digits. It came to 24. I added up. It came to six. This had to be an encrypted message by some wayward mathematical genius of yore.

“I seem to have cracked a numerical code,” I told the husband, my voice quavering and my hands all a-tremble. “I know it has enormous repercussions on the civilised world.” He took one look at my phone. “That’s no code wode. It is your cousin’s number - probably wants to borrow money again.” Maybe they are using my cousin’s number as a front to get to me.

But to go back to the auto with its cryptic code. I abandoned all plans of going for a jaunt. This was a Call and I felt it in my bones.

I followed the auto stealthily. The driver, for mystifying reasons, kept making right turns. Never a left turn. Baffling…..! If I put all those right turns on a graph will it approximate to the jerky downslide of the Sensex? So far only an organisation called FII’s, have answers to the Sensex crisis.

Come to think of it, perhaps “mouthshut.com is the FII’s stern warning to the Finance Ministry. Talk no tax.

Finally the autorickshaw stopped at a coffee stall. An hour later, tired of waiting for the driver to emerge, I came away with my mind abuzz.

One look at a sulking Rufus with his randomly scattered black spots and it struck me. The spots which Rufus carries like proud medallions have to be an encrypted message from the ancient Greeks of Dalmatia. Or why does Rufus look more smug than any dog?

Let me see… at last count there were 36 big spots, 34 medium ones, and 39 small ones. Of late Rufus hasn’t been talking much. Seems like he is practicing mouthshut.com. Add up the hungover vegetable vendor with his 999, the numerical code of the sms sender, the sinister autorickshaws. And of course the DNA of Dalmation spots …… it all has got to add up somewhere. Just where? Watch this space.

Or wait till the FIIs decide to come back and save the Sensex from disaster.

2006-09-21T12:10:00.000+05:30

It’s Kaun Banega OBC in heaven

by Sadiqa Peerbhoy
dECCAN hERALD

God was very world weary. All that effort He put into creating a beautiful earth seemed to have come to naught. All this strife, all this fighting and killing. Unrest. Wars. Riots. Obviously something was seriously wrong and He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Add to it all that pressure of prayers. Give me this, that, job, lottery, loan, car... It was enough to give anyone a complete breakdown..

“What I need is a long vacation from this.“ He said wistfully. I think I’ll appoint a World Governing Committee drawn from the finest of each country to run the world while I zip off to the Bahamas and soak up the sun. “May be only mankind can figure out what went wrong with them.”

The Americans were the first to respond to the Divine call “Hillary Clinton is by far our best. But just send her back in time for the next presidential election. Or in case Bush gets assassinated”. The Italians elected Pavorotti. Because even if he wasn’t all that savvy in running the world, he could keep WGC in good humour by warbling, every time they hit a tight spot in negotiations. They would all agree quickly to silence him.

The Cubans wanted to send Fidel Castro because he flatly refuses to die and let them get on with it. China decided to send Mao’s grandson – a smart young man who had emigrated to San Francisco and made a killing importing cheap Chinese pavement goods to the US. Hopefully he would be able to open new markets for Chinese goods up there.

The Japanese decided to send someone whose name could not be pronounced but he would keep himself busy playing golf and bowing to fellow golfers and not have the time to interfere in the WGC.

Pakistan was very clear. We cannot spare Musharaff, they said. If he goes who will protect Dawood and Osaama all those Lashkar-e-whatevers? Maybe we can send Benazir, they said, but only if you promise not to send her back.

With India it became, as usual, a serious issue. Riots broke out everywhere. The army was on red alert. All politicians launched into polemics. And God was truly disgruntled. “What is wrong with these Indians? All I asked for was one Indian from a nation of 1.1 billion.” “Sire” said Personal Archangel “they found one but she turned out to be Italian and in any case the opposition is protesting”.

“Tell them to look some more!” said God. “Sire its an email from India. They want to send some politician called Devegowda but he keeps falling asleep when he is not saying no to everything progressive.”

“Forget it. Tell them-only the best. They cannot fob off their problems onto me.”

“There is some one called Arjun Singh on the hot line. He wants to know if we can extend the Indian quota to 10 people? “Is he crazy?” said God. “Even if there are so many of them all over the world, we certainly cannot have 10 Indians to one of every other nationality!”

“Sire, India insists on sending 30% OBC, 20% ST, 20% SC, 10% Minorities 10% Handicapped. And one Kashmiri.

That is when God really lost his cool.

That was the thunder, I think, that we heard last night.

2006-09-21T12:08:00.000+05:30

Revenge of chickens by Sadiqa Peerbhoy
dECCAN hERALD

The Old Hen, who had of late taken to brooding morosely in a corner of the coop, finally got up and ruffled all her feathers. She cackled to call a meeting of all the remaining chickens who were suffering from depression and had stopped laying altogether. Even the smallest sound these days sent them into a frenzy of nerves.

The chickens straggled slowly out of their corners looking fearfully at the back to see if there were any hatchetmen around. “Its time”, said the Old One, with all the wisdom of pain in her eyes”, that we planned our revenge on the human race for exterminating our species, so callously in the name of a vague unproven thing called Avian flu”.

It sent a buzz rippling through the ranks of the fearful birds. “What can we do”, they cried in alarm, “we can’t even bite them like the geese can.”

“That is why we need strategy”, said the Old One. “We will give the chicken species a bad name if we sit back and do nothing.”

The chickens who were now more chicken than ever before, started clacking in alarm. “Please. please, if we attract any more media attention, they will finish off the rest of us and that will be the END of chicken on earth. No more tandoori chicken, no more tangdi kabab – ever,” they sobbed.

The Old One who had survived it all, including the world’s raging appetite for Balti chicken, the tandoori phase, and the Avian flu holocaust, took her time till the buzz died down. “I propose that we launch a terrorist movement called Lashkar-e-Murghi, which will work underground.”

“Lashkar-e-Murghi,” said one skeptic cock-a-hoop cock, “sounds like a dish dreamed up by a five star chef from Lucknow”.

“What does Lashkar-e-Murghi have to do?” cackled one young chick frisking her feathers and visualising her brief byte on television as a spokesperson for the LEM.

“Nothing”, said the Old One. Nothing?! Nothing?!! - went the amazed reaction.

“We do nothing, except send a video tape now and again to claim responsibility for things we did not do”

That sent them cackling yet again!!. “What things? And why if we didn’t do it in the first place, should we own up to them?”

“Our Lashkar-e-Murghi just lays claim to every disaster to human race… let them figure out what to do about us. We will make a start with this new viral flu.”

“If we haven’t started it, how can we claim ownership?“ asked a sulky dissenting voice from the back.

“We send out a video tape saying that Lashkar-e-Murghi is responsible for this virus and we will call it Chickungunya - that is enough. People believe anything these days.”

“People will go off chickens and eggs again” said one chicken. “So what’s wrong with that? It will give us a chance to recoup and multiply our numbers again,” said a positive chicken.

The chickens all flapped their wings nervously “Chickungunya will be our revenge on the human race.. even if the mosquitoes did do all the work. Let’s get on with it and send a video tape to the media.”

That is how Chickungunya got its name. And baffled the doctors all the more, just when they had pinned it all neatly down to the mosquitoes. There was a celebration in chicken coops as Lashkar celebrated its first hit. Now it is believed that the mosquitoes are calling an emergency meeting to form a terrorist group called Al Machar that will reclaim the epidemic and re-name it ‘Mosquitogunya’. By which time it is hoped that, the BMP will clear all stagnant water, which is the root cause. Lest the people decide to call it Be-empeegunya!

2006-09-21T12:04:00.000+05:30

Underdog’s hero

By Sadiqa Peerbhoy

He did not get a secret nose job done after his second film and claim his nose was always straight. He did not go abroad for secret facelifts to look two decades younger and then wear large collared shirts to hide the scars. He did not care who saw his bald pate off screen.

He did not campaign for a political party. Or go out on floats urging his fans to vote for his cousin’s son’s nephew’s brother. Nor did he join a party to be made Chief Minister by cashing in on his popularity with his fans.

He did not get his publicist to pass around a whisper campaign about a rampant affair with an eighteen year old starlet to bolster his macho image. Or get talked about for his affairs, a couple of secret marriages and a posse of unacknowledged illegitimate children.

He did not abuse a girlfriend on the cell or make serial calls to an ex flame or get into fist fights at pubs and nights clubs. He did not stash black money away in secret Swiss bank accounts. He did not do live shows abroad to make even more money. He did not endorse mosquito coils, soaps, hair oil, panmasala, cold drinks, haldi, mirchi, detergents.

He was not appointed brand ambassador for an up market international brand of toothpicks or even tongue cleaners. He did not write or commission his biography and later deny he was ever consulted. He did not appear on a Simi Garewal show or embark on a verbal wrestle with Karan Thapar. He did not loose his cool with an interviewer on being questioned about the mismatch of colour between his hair and beard. And get her sacked by the chief sponsor of the show.

He did not sell the first person story of his abduction by Veerappan to the channels or the magazines. Nor did he spew venom against Veerappan for abducting him. Or star in a film spun out of the larger-than-lifeness of the real life drama.

He did not perpetuate rumours about the Hollywood directors headed by Steven Spielberg, queuing up outside his home waving obscene dollar signing amounts for a Hollywood role costarring Jennifer Lopez. He did not sing and dance at the Mittal’s wedding in Versailles.

He did not demand a posse of black cats and body guards to prove his VIP status. He did not cultivate the statutory birthright of every idol-- chamchas and hangers on. He did not flaunt his closeness to the Gandhis. And fall out with them over Bofors. He never stripped off his shirt to flex his biceps at glaze eyed fans.

He did not have a perfume named after him nor a line of jewellery. He did not allow the underworld to stash guns in his garage. No one used a secret camera to film him making a pass at an aspiring starlet. He did not go to a D Gang’ party and was never photographed standing next to Dawood or his kin. Or even watching a cricket match in Sharjah surrounded by D Gang. Nor was he mentioned in any Abu Salem confessions. And its funny how we never ever heard of him being threatened by the underworld. He did not have income tax arrears running into an unending string of zeros.

He did not ban the media for revealing family skeletons in his cupboard. It is doubtful if he had any. He did not share a love hate relationship with the journos and alternately fete them or threaten to bash them up.

For all the things Dr Raj Kumar did not do, as much as all the things he did – with humility, sensitivity, grace and dignity I think the HDK Government should erect his statue. Preferably one not pointing a finger at the horizon as all local icons are prone to doing, once dead and truly gone.

And once the statue is erected,. I hope the Government has the grace to unveil it.

Before the man’s legion of fans decide to do it themselves and bring the city to a standstill in a show of strength that would have embarrassed this humble Kannadiga role model to millions, if he were he alive to see it.

2006-09-21T12:01:00.000+05:30

ICU humour By Sharada Prahladrao

Making fun in dark moments not only makes them endurable but also enjoyable

Hospitals usually depress me. The smell of antiseptic, doctors speaking in hushed tones and anxious relatives hovering outside are enough to turn on the moody blues. But when he was rushed into the ICU after a heart attack the atmosphere changed. Strapped to various machines, he asked for his specs. “Why do you need your specs when you can’t even lift your hands to hold a book?” asked the puzzled Cardiologist. When the patient replied, “How will I see my dreams?” there was a momentary silence. Then the Cardiologist and nurses began chuckling.

For a few days he was in the ICU and it didn’t seem such a morbid, “no return” kind of place while he was there. When asked how he was feeling he’d say that he was in a semi-coma and the emergency doctor would get alarmed. Seeing the look on his face the patient would quickly add, “Don’t believe all that I say, I’m talking through my bypass!” His one-liners were soon circulating in the hospital.

When he was shifted to the ward I had gone there to spend a few hours with him. Every now and then blood samples were drawn and routine investigations were done. He called them the “smiling vampires.” He was told he was anaemic and his response was “after drawing all my blood it’s a wonder there’s any more left to test.” Many specialists would come to check up and then hover around waiting for some stimulating banter. The patient was not a great conversationalist, but his repartee was brilliant. The Urologist asked him in which subject he had specialised. He replied, “I’m not a medical doctor, I am a Geologist, an oil man dealing with the bowels of the earth.”

His room had the maximum number of visitors during the specified visiting hours. The security guards enquired if he was from some royal family. His retort went right over their heads when he said, “My only claim to royalty is for the books I have written.” Soon he was discharged from the hospital; all those who had attended upon him came to see him off and told him that he has to follow his diaetary instructions strictly, come for checkups etc. “If I don’t, that will be the end of me!” he said as a parting shot.

At home his wife laid down a list of dos and don’ts for him. So he called her Hunterwali.

Even in life’s difficult moments if one can find humour it is admirable. There is only one trait I would like to inherit from my father — his wit and ability to make others laugh.

2006-08-09T16:02:00.000+05:30

hi.....this is my first post...