A Single Soul Deliberates

“One More Wicket Down” was the phrase we used to convey our annoyance when an eligible bachelor of our group got hitched. What started out as a trickle - a couple of them probably unable to resist pressure from their parents, got ensnared pretty early and were proud(?) parents just a year later – has ended up as a deluge of people taking the wedding plunge over the last few months. When I met a couple of my closest friends a few days ago, I realized that we three were the only remaining bachelors in an extended group which boasted of many stalwarts of misogamy who have since cast aside their erstwhile ideals for the unparalleled pleasures of a conjugal life. It is not as if I haven’t had to confront queries as to when I would jump on to the marriage bandwagon, but of late it has become a tad too irritatingly frequent.

For someone who grew up as an inveterate misogynist, I have long since resigned to the fact that I have to yield to my post-adolescence corporal desires. It is not too difficult to douse these feelings in other ways especially in avant-garde cities like Bangalore or Mumbai but the hazardous down-sides of such a jaunt not to speak of the complexity and the deceit involved has held me back to a great extent. The big realization probably dawned when the connubial obligations of my friends began to have an effect on our personal relationships when we could no longer do all the things we used to as a group prior to their marriages and many of the plans made were vetoed by their better halves. It was somewhere along the line that I understood that I needed to look for a relationship myself, more serious than a few young men sitting down and berating their bosses over a beer. The realization did dawn on time, but the trouble had only just begun for the feminine mind was as alien to me as any extraterrestrial’s and my rigid, brahminical upbringing provided me with no clues to deal with it.

I have always grudgingly admired those who have panache with the fairer sex though I have at the same time commiserated with those females who fell for their charms losing many a thing the least of which was their faith in him. And when I did try to emulate them, it was my upbringing and a sense of righteousness that held me back from going for the Home Run. The women in my life have mostly remained just friends and good ones at that and just as I thought that I was ready to make a commitment, an unseen hand has always prevented me from doing so. The reasons for not going the whole distance have been both silly and serious and even though I’ve always known that there is no such thing as a perfect woman, Pandora’s last-released blooper, Hope, has had me in a tangle, wanting more when I fully know that what I offer in return isn’t much.

Dour-Darshan

How exciting would it be to watch a closely fought India-Australia cricket match on TV? Not if it turns out as one-sided as the present Future Cup series or if the match is being shown on Doordarshan. The most irksome thing on DD is the extended commercial break during the overs. The break starts somewhere just after the batsmen has played or missed the last delivery, when the ball is still in play. Never mind if a boundary was scored off it, we’re never going to see the umpire indicate a boundary because, for all Doordarshan’s pledge of public service (for which they went to court demanding free feeds of all cricket matches played in India), the bottom line is money. In the break between the overs, Doordarshan squeezes in three or four Ads at the expense of live cricket while other private channels show a couple of Ads and present the total scoreboard of the batting team or the bowling figures of the bowling team, or even give a piece of trivia about the game. By the time, Doordarshan finishes its break and resumes live coverage, the batsman is walking out with his gloves in his hand or the people are cheering loudly for what was either a four or six and you, with no clue as to what has transpired, are left fuming at this absurdity. The best part is that the DD commentators, sitting in the studio and not in the stadium, also do not have an idea of what has happened and are just as clueless.

It is a good thing that Doordarshan receives live feeds from other private channels who have paid a staggering amount to win the rights because Doordarshan is totally inept at broadcasting any kind of live programme, forget a live sports event. I still remember those days when they had the monopoly over cricket telecast in India; they used to cover a one-day match with about four cameras operated by what I’m pretty sure must have been some primates with no comprehension of the game. A flick off the legs by the batsman to fine leg, and the camera would be focusing on the long-on boundary in search of the ball; and for a ball that had been stopped in the covers, the camera would continue on to the boundary, search a while for the ball and then return to show the fielding team celebrating for the batsman would have been run out while you were being shown the image of the cover boundary.

The last but not least reason why I hate watching a match on Doordarshan is the commentary. It is bad that they don’t have competent English commentators but what they try to pass off as Hindi commentary is utterly repulsive. The pre, mid and post match analysis programme (quite aptly called the “Fourth Umpire”, for it is as worthless as a fourth umpire is in a match), with a wannabe bimbo, Anjum Chopra, thrown in, in an attempt to spice up things, reminds me of eulogy at a funeral where the speakers are forced to say some good things about the dead man who was a rascal and who probably fornicated with their daughters. If Atul Wassan and Chetan Sharma’s cricketing acumen was less, their commentating skills are non-existent. Along with Arun Lal, Dilip Doshi and Nayan Mongia, they could drive a cricket lover to bludgeon himself with a broken stump. From trying to improvise with Hindi versions of English aphorisms like “Catches Win Matches” which got metamorphosised into “Pakdo Catch, Jeeto Match”, a "choti gendh" for a short-pitched ball or with the tried and tested Hinglish statements like “Mid-off ke upar se lofted drive lagaaya hai, Behtereen Shot” or the appalling "Ball ne tappa khaaya aur batsman ne chakma khaaya", their stupid opinions starting with "Mere Khayaal se, Arun..." and time and again showing that they are stuck in a time warp by their lack of knowledge of the intricacies of the modern game, they take the fun out of watching cricket on the telly.

Man or a Mahatma?

Man or a Mahatma?

The right answer is "Who Cares?" but as I report to work on a day, when the whole of India takes a day off from work in the memory of a man who is now more hated than admired, I can’t help but reminisce about how I’ve always been fed beliefs about Gandhi’s follies rather than a portrayal of the sacrifices he did undergo.

Being raised by a right-wing, conservative dad guaranteed that I grew up being fed on a belief that Gandhi needed to be killed. Even before I read about Gandhi’s efforts for our freedom from my history text books, I had a fair idea of his follies like his support to the British during World War 2, his opposition to partition and his insistence that India pay Rs. 55 crores to Pakistan. Studying at a school named after Sardar Patel also meant that there was a definite preconceived notion against Gandhi even in the way our history was taught at my school. Gandhi has always been a derogatory term in my friends’ circle. It stands for someone who isn’t street-smart and is submissive. The cheapest seats at a theatre were nick-named “Gandhi-class”.

Lage Raho Munnabhai changed my perception of Gandhi just a wee bit. I did enjoy the movie like countless others did but I didn’t agree with the view that Gandhigiri could work. Gandhi’s perseverance with Ahimsa probably did postpone India’s freedom by a few years and his dissemination of Socialism has put India by a few decades. Gandhi, contrary to popular belief, was never secular. He was no different from the politicians of today who play vote-bank politics even going to the extent of not speaking a single word condemning the killing of innocent Sikhs and Hindus by the thousands in the then newly-created Pakistan.

But today I am thankful to him. Not for the freedom I’m enjoying but the traffic-free roads due to the holiday declared for his birthday.

A Road Trip

I had to travel to Belagondanapalli, a small hamlet on Hosur-Thally road, about 40 odd kilometers from Bangalore, on an official trip. Though that area is one of the business hubs of Tamil Nadu, I had been cautioned against expecting any semblance of city life. The other city-slickers like me were vehement in their comparison of that place to anything from a barren desert to an overgrown jungle. So, it was with an air of zilch expectations that I started out on this trip in an Indica, with a rather nervous driver, who had the bizarre habit of backing out of an overtaking manoeuvre when it was about 80% completed.

Driving down Sarjapur road (to avoid the traffic on Hosur road), I realised how small a city Bangalore was. We were just a few kilometres from Koramangala, the image of modern-day Bangalore and which wouldn’t have been out of place in any big city of the world with its malls and hip crowd, and all we could see were open fields and grape plantations with an odd marble and granite dealers exhibiting their wares by the roadside. Only the sky-scraping apartment complexes coming up hither and thither betrayed the fact that we were not far from the IT hub of Bangalore. At Sarjapur, we took a right turn to take the Attibele road and it was an apposite time to switch off the air-conditioning and draw in the windows for the atmosphere her was as pristine as I’ve ever seen. An enroute temple in the shape of a mace, dedicated to Lord Hanuman, caught my attention and my friend caught it on his camera phone. Just minutes after Attibele, we crossed over into Tamil Nadu without even a perfunctory check at the border and immediately were greeted by posters and banners of the “Rising Sun” and the “Two Leaves”, a reminder of how politics dominates the scene there.

Belagondanapalli didn’t disappoint me. It was a small rural community, with a few shops and houses. We stopped for breakfast at what we had nicknamed “The Taj Hosur”, which was nothing more than a few tables and stools under a tiled roof. The breakfast was good and cheap, as is expected in most of Tamil Nadu. Even though I would have liked to traverse the fields and chat up with the locals, my work kept me busy for most of the day and on subsequent trips over the next few days to that place, I couldn’t help wondering if I could ever live in such a place, away from the hustle and bustle of city life and decided to give it a try a few decades down the line, after I retire.

The Hanuman Temple, shaped like a Mace.

Sunset over the fields

The "Taj Hosur"

She's the reason I was there

My Mobile Saga

I’ve been using my present mobile for more than four years, what would amount to sacrilege among the present Gen-X who trade their handsets for a latest one almost every six months or so. I’ve decided finally that it is time I traded in my mobile handset for a new one with all those amazing features I don’t really need at present, but, may be needed in the future, most of them being weird acronyms like EDGE, HSCSD, GPRS, and WLAN etc.

I bought (actually my old man gifted the handset to me) my first mobile phone many years ago when the telecom revolution in India was still in its infancy. I was working in Mumbai and my parents in Bangalore insisted that I be in regular contact with them. The mobile handset was a Siemens C-25, purchased in Bangalore and the connection in Mumbai was Orange, which charged about Rs. 4 per minute for an outgoing call and more than Rs.2 per minute for an incoming call, contrasting with the Rs. 0.99 per minute outgoing and free incoming that I’m charged today. It was kind of cool to have a mobile phone during those days when they were still a luxury and I plead guilty to the charges of ostentatiously flaunting it around. Soon, I discovered two major shortcomings in the phone. It didn’t have an internal clock and I couldn’t tell if the missed call I had on my phone was a few minutes or a few days old. I had to erase the call lists regularly to avoid this ambiguity. Since it lacked a clock, it didn’t have an alarm function and I had to rely on an alarm clock to wake for those early morning shifts. Also, I never got the name of the person sending me an SMS – the phone only displayed the person’s number. After using this phone for well over a year, I decided to trade it for what was my dream mobile of that time, the Nokia 3310.

I never did buy the Nokia 3310, even though I did use my friend’s 3310 handset for some time. I rather hesitatingly went for an almost unheard of mobile phone at that time, Mitsubishi’s Trium Mars, much cheaper than the Nokia 3310, a decision which I have never regretted. All I wanted in my mobile was an alarm and good SMS capabilities but, Trium gave me much more. I now had a phone memory to store contacts in addition to my SIM memory; it had games (especially PUSH), a T9 dictionary to help compose messages, multiple language options and the best feature – a speaker phone. Even though the battery life was rather poor, I found its software much advanced than that of Nokia (For example, Trium had the call details for own network as well as the roaming networks separately). It didn’t have downloadable ringtones, picture message features and had a rather awkwardly protruding antenna, but I absolutely adored this phone. After almost 2 years of satisfactory use, it was peer pressure more than anything else that made me go for Nokia though I did have problems with the phone continuing to ring even after the answer button had been pressed. However, considering that this problem started after I dropped this phone from a height of about 30 feet from a cherry-picker, I shouldn’t be complaining.

The mobile phone market had exploded by then and almost everybody had a mobile phone. The markets were flooded with cheap handsets and using a phone with an external protruding antenna was totally uncool. Orange had still not become Hutch and therefore still retained its reputation. It was the golden period of free SMS in Mumbai and Trium had a grave problem of being able to store only 20 messages. This forced me to choose between messages from special persons and messages that were otherwise important. I also couldn’t play all those catchy ringtones others were playing. Though camera phones were the in-thing, most of the Nokia ones were obscenely expensive. So, I settled on Nokia 6610, the main attractions being a colour display, a very large text message memory and FM radio. This is the phone I’ve had ever since. There are minor niggles like the infra-red being practically useless and an almost non-existent internal memory for ringtones and pictures but, there are other priceless attributes like the Profiles which has enabled me to sit through meetings without embarrassing moments, it is much lighter and handy than my previous phone, has a decent battery life (though I’ve changed the battery once last year after 3 years of usage) and it has a four-way scroll button which I was used to in the Trium. GPRS enabled me to check my mails but Orange’s steep pricing made me cancel the subscription and stick to Internet Cafés.

Now, I need a phone to access my mails and I’d also like to store music and have a decent camera. Bluetooth would also be preferable so that I can exchange music and videos with my friends. I have shortlisted the Sony-Ericsson P1i, the Nokia N-95 and the O2 Life for my next phone unless the Apple i-phone or the HTC TytnII comes to India. After a cursory comparison, the Sony-Ericsson P1i looks to be the best bet. Nokia N-95 is probably the most fully loaded phone in the Indian market as of now but I’m not comfortable with the slider design and I don’t mind not having a GPS or EDGE. As for the OS, I’m slightly inclined towards Symbian compared to the new Windows Mobile 6 (as in O2 and HTC). Though I would have preferred a full-fledged QWERTY keyboard instead of tilt buttons, I’m not that much into messaging and will use my computer to reply to mails. I’ve had just three phones in 7 years, and I’ve been lucky enough not to experience any serious problems like phones hanging or software getting corrupt. I’m now ready for a new phone and I’ll wait until the Diwali offers cause a drop in the present prices, by which time, I should have decided on the make.

Penny Wise...

Yesterday, I watched a movie called “Loins of Punjab”, an evening show at the PVR – a bungled up effort of what could have been a much better film with a rehashed storyline and slicker editing. Though the movie was entertaining for its duration of less than 100 minutes, my friends and I unanimously agreed that it was not worth the Rs.210 (special weekend rate for a seat which didn’t even recline) we spent on the ticket, not to mention the exorbitantly charged popcorn and Pepsi (and the parking charges for the vehicle, I quipped). It seems such a long time ago that a film ticket used to cost Rs.10 or Rs.15 in a decent theatre and the up-market ones hardly exceeded Rs.25, but, it was not so long ago. The better part of my college days were spent at various theatres around Bangalore, when Bangalore still was a city for the pensioners. The first genuine mall came up in the city less than five years ago and in these five years, that I have been away for the better part, it sure has changed for the worse.

“Disposable Incomes.” I do hate this phrase, the two words that have been cited as being responsible for much of the woes of any big city today. In Bangalore, the effect is only more noticeable due to the large IT crowd. I don’t work in an IT or IT-related company, and probably make more money annually than most of my IT friends. But, I am flabbergasted at the “easy come, easy go” approach of the IT horde towards money. My friends and neighbours whom I’ve seen growing up in middle-class families, not much different from mine, where both parents had to work to ensure a comfortable living, are now splurging like there’s no tomorrow. The call-centres, IT boom and the BPOs may have given them a financial freedom the previous generation never had but I don’t agree that it has made them financially any wiser than their parents. Of late, it has become a hobby of mine, watching the antics of this affluent pack in any coffee shop or multiplex, flaunting their nouveau-rich status akin to the plastic ID cards they sport. I have never been parsimonious and my fiscally arduous childhood has ensured that I can never be a spendthrift. It is one lesson that I did learn rather early in life and hope I never forget.

Every Vada Pav has its Day

The ubiquitous Vada Pav celebrates its own day today and the small piece of non-nutritious oily vada, full of trans-fat, crushed between two halves of a pav, coated with green chutney, accompanied by a fried green chilly and sometimes hot red chilly powder with a garlic flavour is in many ways emblematic of the city which has made it famous. All through my years in Mumbai and ever since, I have always wondered why Mumbaikars vouch by the not-so-special Vada Pav. The reasons I’ve got is that it is a poor man’s food (costs anywhere between three to five rupees), it symbolises the unity in diversity of Mumbai, that it is a wholesome (read stomach-filling) food etc. I do agree that it is a cheap snack but if Mumbaikars are filling their stomachs by eating Vada Pavs for lunch and dinner, we are looking at a catastrophical case of mass malnutrition.

The vada pav, though a tasty snack at times, never appealed to me in comparison with its “more affluent” cousins, the Missal Pav and the Pav Bhaji. Though they rate the same as the vada pav on the nutrition scale, if not worse, they make a more substantial meal and provide more pleasure to the taste-buds. Time and again, in Mumbai, I’ve heard how the Pav of Portuguese-origin is made mostly by Muslims in a Parsi or Irani bakery (and to think it is the Christians who are called Pav-wallas) to be consumed by a Hindu majority. Despite the fact that this makes for a nice analogy to the cultural divergence of the people who have made Mumbai what it is today, it still is a sad reminder of what Mumbai is today – a overblown population, most of them living in the hundreds of slums that dot the city, struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving and an expensive city which is pretty much the same case in any major Indian city, but is more conspicuous in Mumbai.

Though the "Vada Pav Day" is just another marketing gimmick by some clever enterprising restaurant, it brings about memories of my days in Mumbai, when a Vada Pav was a daily indulgence along with a cutting chai either under an umbrella in the pouring monsoon rain or sweating in the october heat. I am happy that I've finally gotten out of Mumbai and I hope that I would never have anything to do with that despicable city anymore.

Sick of Spam & Sick Spammers

Nupur Upadhyay has invited me to Desktopdating. I don't know what Desktopdating is and for that matter who the heck is this female fiend, Nupur Upadhyay? It just gets worst - with strangers “Tagging” me, unsolicited mails offering me Viagra and similar sounding substitutes at a discount, mails informing me that my “application” for a loan has been processed or that I had won something in a contest that I swear I never took part in, a more recent trend of marriage portals of a particular community inviting me to join in the hunt, friends inviting me to join some obscure sites with names like “Jaxtr” and “Glitchcast” or the more notorious “Facebook” or “My Space” and the usual dose of pornographic link sites and penis enlargement offers – it has become quite a chore of putting my inbox through a sieve to look for meaningful mails.

The next level of nuisance is now on my mobile phone. In addition to the pesky tele-marketers, I now have spam messages promoting loans and redundant offers, most of them from my own service provider, Hutch, now called as Vodaphone. If changing my mobile number wasn't such a pain in the neck involving the tedious process of informing all my friends, relatives, superiors, relatives and countless other service providers like my bank, I would have given Hutch (Vodaphone) the boot long ago. A sizable chunk of the tele-marketing calls and most of the spam messages I receive come from Hutch. Not only do they pester their customers with unwanted offers, their network coverage must be one of the worst and most of my friends concur with me on this. Hutch probably has the most stupid people on the customer support (though I’ve never talked to the customer support staff of other mobile service providers). When the National Do Not Call registry or some such thing came about, I saw the report in the newspaper asking Hutch subscribers to send a message “DND” to “111”. I promptly did, only to receive a message back saying this service was not available presently. At about 2 a.m, I called up their customer service and got through to a male with an IQ of a dodo. I explained my predicament only to be reminded that I have to send the same darned message to the same darned number. I somehow managed to convince him that it was not working on my number and got an assurance that within 48 hours, the calls and messages would stop. Weeks later, I’m still waiting for redemption from this menace. Hutch (Vodaphone) still sends me messages promoting caller tunes and other services and the others still call me up and I have made myself a promise that Hutch (Vodaphone)will not have the pleasure of annoying me for long.

60 years of Independence

We are celebrating 60 years of freedom; freedom from the British rule & I have finished my patriotic duty in the only ways I could, by wishing my friends through SMS and Orkut scraps and have even changed my display picture to a photo of NASDAQ draped in the Indian tri-colour. I have always regretted the fact that I was not born decades earlier when I could have contributed my mite for my country’s struggle for freedom, maybe by pulling down the Union Jack from the local government office and getting a few lathi blows in the bargain. I’ve grown up idolising the people who really fought for our freedom, not a Gandhi or a Nehru, but those nameless thousands of common people, a vast majority of them illiterate, who followed Gandhi as he walked for 23 days from Sabarmathi Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi to make salt leaving behind their daily routines, who selflessly picketed the local British government centres taking in the lathi blows, who gave up their present-days for India’s future, who spent years locked away in prisons so that we can call ourselves a free nation today and who, after India got a hard-fought freedom, rather gullibly but optimistically sided themselves with the Nehruvian class of socialism only to be cruelly betrayed.

Sixty years later on, Nehru’s mistakes have ensured that one tyrannical administration has been replaced by another that is also a highly dysfunctional one. Today, corruption and nepotism are the norms rather than the exceptions. A woman as India’s president, a woman as the leader of the country’s largest political party and a woman as the chief minister of India’s largest populous state have done nothing to further the cause of women’s rights when we have one of the worst rural health-care systems in the world and one of the highest rates of infant mortality. “Politics” today, is a dirty word, more obnoxious than any four-letter word and the “politician” is someone who ranks lower than a tapeworm in terms of people’s respect. Scams after scams have been unearthed and the guilty rich and powerful have exploited every existent and non-existent loophole in the law to avoid being prosecuted. But, today it is the same people, albeit a bit more literate, who are taking up the cudgels against another regime not much different from the one they fought sixty years ago. Whether it was a candle-light vigil to get justice in the Jessica Lal case, or the sting operations of a hyper-active media or the great efforts to get the right-to-information act passed in the parliament, I know that the persons who were my childhood heroes still live on in different avatars and as long as they live on, we still have the upper hand in this fresh freedom struggle and this time I can finally be a part of it.