By a strange coincidence, all the teams in the IPL 2 semi-finals are from cities I have spent the most time during my professional career. And by an even stranger coincidence, the two finalists are my two most favourite cities. But which is my absolute favourite among these two?
Bangalore has pubs opening every week, which shut within a year. Hyderabad has eateries that are decades old and still packing it in. Bangalore has a new airport halfway down to Beijing. Hyderabad has a new airport halfway down to Seattle. Hyderabad has Paradise. Bangalore has Koshy's. Bangalore has Infosys. Hyderabad had Satyam. Hyderabad has Chocolate Mousse at Melting Moments. Bangalore has Death by Chocolate at The Corner House. Bangalore has Bheema's. Hyderabad has Chutneys. Hyderabad has Walden. Bangalore has Strand Book Stall. Bangalore doesn't have Vishwanath any more. Hyderabad doesn't have Azharuddin any more. Hyderabad has Hussain Sagar Lake. Bangalore has Lalbagh. Bangalore has Pepsi. Hyderabad has Thums Up. Hyderabad has Hi Tec City. Bangalore has Electronic City. Bangalore has Bheja Masala at Empire. Hyderabad has Kaleji Fry at Daawat. Hyderabad has Mainland China at Banjara Hills. Bangalore has Mainland China at Church Street. Bangalore has Brigade Road. Hyderabad has Banjara Road No. 1.
So, is it Bangalore or Hyderabad? I guess it will still have to be Calcutta.
(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, on 16th May 2009)
“My landlords think I’m getting married next month,” a friend of mine whined, “I thought I’d be here for one year and move back to Mumbai, but this recession’s hit, yaar, and I can’t find another job!”
“Resurrect your grandfather and kill him again,” I suggested wisely, “you get another year that way.”
When one has moved from Chennai to Delhi, the first thing that hits one as one leaves the airport is the auto. A Delhi commuter would take that sentence quite literally, but even if one is lucky enough to be physically unharmed, it impacts the iris so hard one could risk colour blindness. To someone used to black-hooded mustard autos, there’s something about lemon-hooded green autos that seems to indicate they’re being sick over themselves. When one has travelled in one, one can empathise with the motion-sickness.
The second thing that falls around one is the impenetrable blanket of language. The air is thick with Hindi, and people like me wade through it with broken sentences recalled from the CBSE Class VI to VIII Third Language syllabus.
The third thing that strikes one is that no one wants to rent out a house to one person. They all want ‘families’.
The last two epiphanies hit me simultaneously, when I found myself trying to communicate with a broker who spoke no English. Thankfully, he eavesdropped on a phone conversation I had with my mother, and told me in thrilled tones that he was Malayali and could understand Tamil. The converse being true, we got into quick secret negotiations as my prospective landlady squinted, “aap log Saauth Indian ho, kya?”
The broker then entered quick secret negotiations with her in Hindi, and then looked at me with a mildly crestfallen expression and said in Malayalam, “they only want a family. Maybe, if you don’t mind a suggestion, you can tell them you’re getting engaged and your husband will join you in a year once you get married. By then, we can find another house.”
So that was how I moved into a five-room house with a terrace and balcony. My parents were asked to encourage the myth when they visited, a duty they carried out after I painted a dire picture of being left homeless in an alien city that spoke an alien language. A couple of months later, I showed my landlords a diamond ring and turned the right shades of red. When they asked for a picture, I told them South Indians considered it unlucky for couples to pose together before marriage. I also sent my fiancé off to the United States to do an MBA, and left my landlords suitably impressed.
Inspired by my story, several of my friends have used the same tactic, but unfortunately, not with the same aplomb. A male friend of mine has resurrected and killed four sets of grandparents, got his fiancée into an accident from which she will take a year to recuperate and found convenient shanis in his horoscope.
Another carried the experiment too far, and even introduced her boyfriend to her landlords. When the relationship soured, and her landlords began enquiring about the absence of “woh”, she solicited my advice and was asked to send him off to do an MBA at Harvard.
Meanwhile, when my landlords ask me about “woh”, I wear the expression of the longing lover and tell them how much I miss “woh”, and how I won’t see him for another year.
(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, 2nd May 2009)
One of my uncles, who has certified himself as the wisest of his parents’ offspring, often tells me life begins to turn a full circle when one turns forty. So you either begin to count backwards from the age of forty-one or you begin with the tabula rasa of a zero-year-old. Over the years, I have come to believe the aspect of life for which this axiom holds most true is fitness.
My own experiments with fitness have been varied, and have had equally eccentric results. There was a time when my grandmother considered me to be in the pink of health, and I used to struggle sideways through open doors. Then there was a time when my little brother would lift me high into the air and refuse to put me down till I gave him money. (At that time, my grandmother said concentration camps would have rejected me because their work was done anyway, and reminded me wistfully of the happy days when I used to struggle sideways through doors.) The epiphany about fitness came to me at some point in the middle of this journey.
Weighing close to eighty kilograms, I once went to a gym to see if I could bring myself to use the contraptions there to better myself. The members of the gym could be divided into two categories – women in their mid-fifties who made me feel like the sveltest creature to have hit the earth since Ginger Rogers, and teenagers who clearly weighed about twenty kilograms more than I did, and looked self-conscious enough to make me feel confident. My alliance with the gym was broken that day.
A woman I had once worked with told me recently that she and her sixteen-year-old daughter had joined belly-dancing classes. Her daughter had insisted they join different batches, and her husband kept his eyes averted every time the two of them walked in, afraid he would catch a glimpse of pink spandex in place of a cotton sari.“We never had all this when I was growing up, you know,” she said, “these kids are so lucky! I’m not going to miss out on this now!”
It was while I was pondering the question of what brought on this burst of fitness-consciousness in one’s middle age, when one would think one is entitled to sit back and attribute one’s lack of fitness to age, and wax poetic about how one had put tubelights to shame when one was younger, that I had my personal Revelation. The residential complex I stay in had an excuse for a park, with excuses for paved paths. It was on one of these excuses that I saw two women storming along in synthetic salwar-kameez with the dupatta tied around the waist, and white canvas shoes.
“Five rounds,” one of them said, as they passed me, “now I can have this pizza-shizza Sahil keeps ordering.”
“My tenant said they get tired of it by the time they’re in their twenties,” panted the other, “so we can stop all this in some four-five years.”
(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, 11th April 2009)
First it happened in the movies. And then we all drew inspiration from it. I think ‘Size does Matter’ can be blamed for the phenomenon that hit the Indian movie industry in the nineties:
Only God can Judge Him
The Ultimate Weapon
Man of Action
Come, fall in love…
A Love...that broke all relationships
A Thief…who Stole my Heart
He is not a Man
But while the horrendous taglines of the nineties-and-their-spillover-into-the-millennium could be attributed, like all the other ills of Indian society, to Westernisation, one wonders to what one can attribute the inundation of status messages that carry bulletins on the uninteresting lives of all one’s acquaintances. Thanks to social networking sites and email chat, an idiosyncrasy seems to be turning into an epidemic. From film reviews to synecdoche to self-certified aphorisms, the taglines have festered across genres.
My dislike for status messages, however, has ebbed now that the slowdown has hit. Used in shameless excess, this medium of communication can be a low-cost marketing tool, as well as an incredible money-saver. This perception can be attributed to two brands of acquaintances of mine, who perhaps not coincidentally, fall into the categories that do need to pull their purse-strings particularly tight.
The first to make use of these were The Performing Artistes – musicians, theatre personalities and dancers. Instead of printing out cards and pamphlets, they’ve made the events they’re starring in, their status messages.
“Museum Theatre. 6:30 p.m. 17th February. Be there for the performance of Yadda-Yadda-Yadda, only one day.”
“YMCA Grounds. Our last performance, guys. See you Saturday.”
“Ten D…Party Time. 7:30 p.m.”
“Vani Mahal. First floor. Performing with my guru. Thursday, 4:30 p.m.”
One of them, whose friends and acquaintances know there’s only one forum that will humour him, has taken to just putting down the time of his performances these days.
The other cash-strapped category using this are Corny Couples, who’ve decided to cut their phone bills. So you log in, and find people with random lines like “Really pissed off with you!”, while the other half of the couple writes “Sowwwy” or something equally maudlin. Then the first half’s status message changes to something like “Not listening!”
Now, the question that’s been plaguing me for a while is why people feel the compulsion to use status messages rather than simply chat and spare everyone else the public display of altercation. Especially when someone’s got a status message along the lines of “I hate you!” which makes one politely enquire whether the message refers to the word ‘you’, the misspelt name of someone of Oriental origin, or the world at large, only to be told it is part of a private conversation. You could probably blame it on reality television, some of whose stars have been contemplating the legality of having their deaths filmed. Or you could wax poetic about the tabloid culture, and how the paparazzi drive has inspired couples to start emailing links to their private honeymoon pictures, to everyone unfortunate enough to be on their list of contacts.
Having given up on the cause, I’m now hoping the domino effect will one day seep into Annoying Telemarketers, who seem to have a cosmic connection with one’s sleep pattern. It’s incredible how you’ve just settled into a dream where you’ve got superpowers to be woken up by a bright voice selling you insurance, DVD rentals or credit cards. I long for the day when these people will tack themselves on to your contacts and live happily ever after with status messages reading, “I’m statusing from Galaxy Life Insurance. Would you like to purchase a policy?” or “Good morning, ma’am! How’re you today? I guess you like to watch movies and all? I’m calling from…”
(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, on March 28, 2009)
The clamp she was driving at my eyes was disturbingly similar to the one in A Clockwork Orange.
“What’s that?” I asked in a panic, as it was fixed somewhere on my eyelid. Floating in my mind was a horrific cross between stories of Nazi concentration camps where the eyelids of Holocaust victims were snipped off, and memories of an ophthalmologist turning my eyelids inside out during what I know will be my last ever eye examination.
“Eyelash curler,” came the calm response.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had already started playing in my head and the lady doing my makeup for the rare occasion I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet, turned into the nurse from Stanley Kubrick’s classic.
But that was not to be my biggest discovery of the day. When I got back to interaction with humanity that didn’t remind me of blemishes in the collective conscious of the world, my first question was posed to some men I had relative faith in, to be as in the dark and therefore as amused by my trauma as I was in hindsight.
“Can you believe such a thing as an eyelash curler exists?” I asked.
“Hanh, yeah…I’ve heard of it,” one replied, uninterested, “so…yeah…”
“I’ve seen one,” another said.
I looked at the third, half expecting him to say, “I’ve used one.”
“You’ve never seen one before?” he enquired, with the sort of look I would sport if someone asked me who Diego Maradona was.
Well, nearly as bad.
The incident was a natural follow-up to a trend I should have spotted earlier. Just a few weeks earlier, someone I know was staring intently at my hair. Having been brought up by a father who took a couple of days to notice I had got my hip-length hair cut up to the shoulders when I was in college, I assumed the person in question was trying to figure out what was different about my face.
“I’ve straightened my hair,” I explained, helpfully.
“Yeah…I know,” this guy, who got married a couple of years ago, said, with a frown, “you’ve blow-dried it straight, no, not used an iron? Because…” and he rotated a hand near about his ear to express himself better, “…it’s sort of beginning to curl up at the ends.”
“Dude! Marriage has turned you gay!” I said, in disgust.
I firmly believe, ever since the Star Wars song in Anjali left me with a lifelong fear of ghosts, that incidents that scare one temporarily must be thrashed out with someone else before they leave their mark on one’s philosophies of life.
My intentions were honourable, to this end, when I told a friend, “dude, this guy I know – he got married like two years ago – could make out my hair was straightened with a hairdryer and not a…a…straightening…uh…straightener…”
“Hair iron,” he said, patiently, and then waved an arm in the air by way of explanation, “girlfriend.”
Once, a friend of mine, frustrated after a metro ride during which the women asserted their rights to push and prod him when he slipped into their reserved seats, told me he believes a new movement, Menism or something with a better name, would crop up to rein in women’s advantages. Having been forced to study the history of the several waves of feminism, I know I’m right in sensing a similar pattern. First, men fight to enter female-dominated arenas like the kitchen, and make themselves known as the Jamie Olivers of the world. Then, they figure out more about make-up than at least one woman. Soon, we might come across a crowd of them burning their underwear at a public square, and then we’ll know Menism-or-something-with-a-better-name is here.
Ever since Vodafone invented the TV version of stick-men, we have all gone gaga over Zoozoos. While I liked them, I did not realise how impactful they were till my son started to watch them unblinkingly! The only way I can watch IPL over Tom & Jerry if every ad break has a Zoozoo ad! Which it usually has...
So, I was pondering this lazy Sunday about other Zoozoos!
One of the earliest Zoozoos that I can remember is from Jewel Thief. As Tanuja and her friends pout in a blue covertible, Dev Anand slouches and slants with a fishing rod and sings "Yeh dil na hota bechara, kadam na hote awara, jo khubsoorat koi apna humsafar hota..." Of course, this beautiful song starts with a trademark Kishore Kumar yodel and Zoozoo Hmmmmm... Zoozoozoozoozoo... Teereeteeeee... Teereeteeeee... Teereeteeeeeeeeeeee - and you can hear it here.
I always thought that this song also had a lot of Zoozoos but on close hearing, they turn out to be Hnoo hnoos and Mmoo mmoos.
If the Zoozoos ever become the sponsors of Kolkata Knight Riders, then they would not remain Zoozoo any longer. They would become Juju! And a prescient Bengali band called Chandrabindoo foresaw this possibility several years back when they composed a song called Juju, in the eponymous album.
For the uninitiated, Juju is the fear factor brought in by Bengali mothers and governesses to rein in their wayward wards. "Sweater na porley Juju dhorey niye jabey" (Juju will catch you if you don't wear a sweater) is one sentence that is a common refrain across the state. And the cute part about Juju-s is that they are ageless. For Sourav, a Juju is an Australian coach. For Pranab-babu, Juju is Jawrdaari. For Ratan Tata, Juju is West Bengal's next Chief Minister!
I had previously described - in considerable detail - one of Mithun's magnum opii. And the piece de resistance of that film was this song, which went Zoo Zoo zubi zubi zubi. And as you hear the Bappi Lahiri masterpiece here, don't get put off the garbled words in the initial frames. This is not a SRK film you are watching here. The Prabhuji chalisa is available completely (in 16 parts) on YouTube - dubbed in Russian!
Remember... In the pantheons of Bollywood divinity, there are two kinds of Gods. There are ordinary Gods and there is Mithun Chakraborty.
Apart from these Zoozoos, there are so many more Zoos.
There's Zooni - a (forthcoming) film by Muzaffar Ali, which he has been making since Umrao Jaan. The story of a Kashmiri poetess was supposed to star Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna many moons ago. Now, they can try to persuade Twinkle to come out of retirement and Rahul Khanna to come out of whatever he's been in.
There must be so many more. So, which is your favourite Zoozoo?
An uncharacteristically serious post. Frivolous people (Nilendu, that means you!) would do well to avoid.
The good people at Penguin give out free copies of their Indian Classics series, if you write a review/discussion for their blog. I got a copy of and wrote on Bhishma Sahni's classic, made famous by Govind Nihalini's television mini-series.
Reviewing books published under the ‘Penguin India Classic’ can be fraught with a lot of risks. Especially since the novel at hand has been published to tremendous reception three decades back, translated into English by the author himself to great success, filmed into a critically acclaimed television series by a renowned director and generally acknowledged as one of the seminal works on Partition.
What follows is not a ‘review’ of Bhishma Sahni’s Tamas but more of my observations after reading the classic for the first time.
Kites (and vultures) shall fly (over this town)… This recurring line from the book – Kites shall fly – was the alternative title of an earlier English translation of Tamas. Indeed, it is this deep sense of foreboding that permeates almost two-thirds of the book – where there is hardly any depiction of violence.
The ‘expectation’ of a Partition story is the recounting of the orgy of violence that is enacted by the two communities. Authors have often been rather graphic in this respect (probably to bring about a sense of revulsion among the readers). Saadat Hassan Manto’s short stories and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan are two such examples that come to mind.
Tamas, on the other hand, does the exact opposite. For the majority of the story, there are only stray acts of inconsequential violence that make up the narrative. And to accentuate the impending acts of hatred, neighbours of different communities recount their several years of living in harmony. People who have spent their entire lives together remember most details as they succumb to baser instincts.
In this respect, Tamas resembles the Bengali classic Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) written by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (author of Pather Panchali) and filmed by Satyajit Ray. That novel ends with the first death of the Great Bengal Famine (a horrific event, that left literally thousands people dead from starvation) and the narrative is built around the cast of characters in a small Bengal village living in the shadow of an imminent food crisis.
In some ways, Tamas is also the exact antithesis of Manto’s short stories. Most of those short stories never stretched beyond a page or two and had an act of swift – but imaginative (for the want of a better word) – violence at its center like a tableau. Tamas – on the other hand – builds tension through the unlikely route of a conversation between the British Deputy Commissioner and his wife, which tries to explain why the Government should not interfere in the ‘religious matters’ of the Indian people.
Another thing Tamas does exceptionally well is the decoding of the psychology of riots.
A riot is the outcome of an attempt by an ethnic group to ‘take revenge’. A large number of people who form a rioting mob are doing so for the first time and through a series of stray events, Sahni does a sketch of the rioters’ minds brilliantly.
One has to identify with distant deaths as one’s own.
Rumours of killings in far-off villages spread – with embellishments on each hearing – among the young and excitable. This creates a supposedly moral energy and that leads to a mission for vendetta.
One has to distance oneself from the victims to remove the emotion.
With the Partition riots happening in small towns of Northwestern India, this was particularly tricky because the people baying for each other’s blood knew each other too well for comfort.
In one particularly ironic incident, a Sikh couple seeks refuge in a Muslim household. The womenfolk – unsure of the reaction of the absent men – hide them in a barn, from where the Sikh couple sees the men return. They have returned from the riots, with the spoils. And the heavy trunk they have collected is actually from the Sikh couple’s home. When they are trying to break the lock, the Sikh gentleman reveals himself and offers the key. Suddenly, the tables are turned and the head of the refuge-providing household is shamed by his deed. Shamed enough to let the Sikh couple leave unharmed. Though not enough to return the trunk.
Tamas derives its reputation – like most classics – from the timelessness of its message.
Neighbours go at each other’s throats, because a ‘leader’ asks them to. Cultural similarities are ignored at their insistence. Political leaders take advantage of mob mentality, always for material gains. And government turns a blind eye.
Despite knowing fully well that a token gesture would put an end to the bloodletting, the British administration follows the book to let the populace sort out their religious differences and paves way for the impending transfer of power.
Six decades on, politicians and government have merged into one apocalyptic body and now wreak the same unspeakable havoc on the people, described so vividly in Tamas. We, the populace – unfortunately – have not learnt anything from history and continue to do the dirty work on ourselves.
As the British Deputy Commissioner says in a prophetic moment – “Most people have no knowledge of their history. They only live it.”
Since I never pass on tags, the name of this post is kind of rendered useless. How can I ask a Mom in Mogadishu or a Dad in Dar-es-Salaam to write 5 things they like about being a parent - without even knowing them???
I am very old-economy that way.
But the tag itself is quite cute and worth a try on Sunday morning. More so, since my son is hogging the remote and I am tired of playing Geo Challenge on Facebook (which explains the exotic cities named above).
What are the 5 things I love about being a father?
Hereditary traits
My father has a pout, which is not apparent now but shows up wonderfully in his kiddie pictures. My pout is visible only when I am sleeping. My son has that exact same pout.
My sister was the Queen of spoonerism (paan mein darza, gaai ka bogar and all that) when she was small. She grew out of it and we forgot. Till recently, my son wore his mom's dupatta as a cape and tried flying around the house screaming SUNERPAM!
And of course, I am being blamed for passing on my naughty genes to him.
Infinite Patience
Earlier in boarding queues, I used to spot how many babies were going to be in the flight and get psyched if there were too many. Now I am unperturbed since I can sleep through all their antics (unless some one pukes on me, which hasn't happened yet)! I can explain a million times a million kids how one should not flush before one has finished peeing and how one should never step into the commode bowl. Ever. I can also watch Owl, Piglet and Wabbit count 1-20 a million times. I can wait for anybody take several hours to swallow one spoonful of rice-and-egg. Except my colleagues in office are constantly cribbing that I have a bad temper. Wonder what they are talking about?
Unbelievable Sensations One of the most fun things I have done regularly in the last two-odd years is to place my son's hand on my cheek and let it be. The other fun thing is to place my nose in the nape of his neck and smell the baby powder. Not to mention wrestling and tickling him on the drawing-room rug as he goes berserk The latest addition to this list is when I run down the stairs with him in my arms, he holds me tightly and keeps kissing me, screaming all the while because he is scared that we may fall!
Reconnecting with Family
One of my uncles landed up at our place - quite out of the blue - for the first time in end-2006. I never knew he traveled to Delhi. He said that he came quite often since his head office was here and stayed in a guest house, quite close to our house. When I asked why he never landed up before, he sheepishly (but honestly!) admitted that he was very excited at having become a grand-uncle and came to see Joy. Our aunt in Muscat, uncle in Gurgaon, sister in Dubai, aunt in Pittsburgh, cousin in California, mother in Calcutta - every one calls to ask about our son! Except for my grandmother, who still asks about me first.
Joy of responsibility
When you realise that there one person on earth who is totally, completely, unequivocally dependent on you, it brings about a sense of responsibility like no other.
And nothing brings that home better than when you are dropping the kid to school and he doesn't want to. When the auntie tries to take him away, he clings on to you like his life depends on it. And the feeling of the slowly releasing grip of his baby fingers on your neck has to be the most difficult sensation you've had in a long time.
But I am told that being a grandparent is even more fun than being a parent. As my father says, "If I knew grandsons were so much fun, I would have had them earlier!"
After Billu ceased to be a B*****, Knight Riders have ceased to be from K******. SRK loves repeating himself. So what's wrong with that? Even history repeats itself. Apart from that, he has also claimed that he is not going to sell his team to anyone because of the 'emotional' investment he has made in the 'boys'. The last time he spoke with so much passion was when he called Sourav a 'dude' and said that nobody can replace him as captain! So, Kolkata (or is it Kathiawad?) can look forward to welcoming SaharaShree Suboroto Roy as the new owner of the franchise.
Forgive my rants... but when you have seven teams (out of eight) in a competition standing within one point of each other halfway down, you know you have a lousy second half because your team is the one sure of coming last!
So, I am reduced to wondering if anybody else will beat (K)KR's record of the lowest score in IPL and the biggest margin of defeat.
And by dropping the city, SRK has at least made it easier for us to quietly slink away to other teams.
