A trip around Jaipur

The Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation (RTDC) arranges daily guided tours of Jaipur city and nearby places for a sum of Rs. 170. After being assured that it was the best way to see the sights of Jaipur city by both the Park Plaza staff & some locallites, we decided to take the tour.

The nearest RTDC office being at Gangaur hotel off Mirza Ismail Rd., we reported there by 08:15 a.m for a tour that was supposed to start from 09:00 a.m.A 33-seater bus, probably considered a luxury bus in Rajasthan, compared to all the other heaps of junk that ply around the Jaipur city, was our mode of transport. Our RTDC guide was Mr. O.P.Verma, who made up for his rather poor English with his wit in Hindi along with some curt replies to the tourists' queries. Mr. Verma started almost every sentence with a history of Jaipur's rulers but his parroting of certain trivia soon became monotonous.

The Birla Mandir, a beautiful marble temple, not far from where we were staying was the start of the tour. Twenty minutes was all we got for our tour of the temple. Adjacent to the temple is a hill-top fort, the Moti Doongri, the residence of Maharani Gayatri Devi.

The Albert Hall, a museum close to Birla Mandir, is closed for renovation at present.

Hawa Mahal, the ubiquitous symbol of the Pink City, turned out to be rather disappointing. Even the RTDC guide wasn't too keen on explaining about it, saying only that it had a lot of rooms from where Rajput ladies would watch processions. Since the Hawa Mahal is situated in a busy area of the old city, there's no place for parking and we had to be satisfied with only seeing it from inside the bus.

Just behind the Hawa mahal is the Jantar-mantar. Jantar-Mantar, the final of the five designed, the most famous, first one, being in Delhi, was really amazing. The fact that our ancestors could calculate the time to an accuracy of 2 seconds many centuries ago is just breathtaking. The intricate instruments designed to study astronomy .definitely does make me feel proud of my heritage.

Adjacent to the Jantar-mantar is the City Palace. The present head of the royal family, Brigadier Sawai Bhavani Singh stays there. A part of this palace has been converted into a museum but, photography is not permitted there. The clothes used by the royal family members are displayed here but the best part of the museum is the arms section. The ceiling of the arms room is painted with pure gold and the different weapons, some of them multipurpose really are worth seeing. There is a third room that contains the art collections of the Jaipur kings.

The drive to Nahargarh Fort, a distance of 18 kms, is quite scenic at times. On the way, is the Jal mahal, a 5 floor palace situated in the middle of a lake. Only the topmost is over water, the others being under water. Since it is being converted into a hotel, it is closed for public.

The Nahargarh fort was built by Sawai Jai Singh and named after a prince whose spirit was supposed to haunt the place...

..... To be continued

Dus Kahaniyaan - Review

Once in a few months Hindi Film Industry comes up with a Dus Kahaniyaan, an anamoly in the typical song and dance routine. I was never a big fan of Sanjay Gupta, having barely endured his films such as Kaante, but I really appreciate his efforts in producing such a movie as this. I half-expected to see an anthology film almost as bad as Darna Mana Hai or a Darna Zaroori Hai, assuring myself that atleast two of the ten films wouldn't be disappointing. When I came out however, I had the gratified feeling of having read a Dahl or a Saki's short story collection.

Matrimony was a good opener, Mandira Bedi playing the cheating house-wife who makes a startling discovery. There was a bit of an editing glitch in the story and I'm not sure whether it was in the original print or only in the print at INOX Vaibhav, in Jaipur.

High on the Highway, was a big letdown. It would have probably been better if the director Hansel Mehta had downplayed the drugs a bit. I is quite difficult to have any sympathy for someone high on drugs, walking on the highway and getting assaulted or raped or even murdered. It is almost as if they were asking for it.

Pooranmasi was a like paying a quick visit to the good old days of Doordarshan serials and tele-films. Set in rural North India, it is a reminder of how narrow our mindsets can be.

Strangers in the Night was the best of the lot. The twist in the tale at the end was such that the entire movie hall was speechless when it was revealed.

Zahir, inspite of the message it tried to convey, turned out to be a comedy. The end was totally unpredictable but, you feel like laughing at Manoj Bajpai's character instead of feeling sorry for him.

Lovedale, was a feel good film. The twist in the tale here didn't live upto the mark. There was the element of supernatural here in the story, but, there was nothing scary about it.

Sex on the Beach, was ridiculous. Tarina Patel's cleavage was more watchable than her acting. As for Dino Morea's acting skills, I'm still wondering if they were as hidden as Tarina Patel's real intentions in the movie were. I certainly couldn't find them in the twenty-odd minutes of the plot.

Rice Plate, was an excellent effort. Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah stole the show. I'm very sure that I've read the original story somewhere before, but the Indianised adaptation was good. I wonder why the person with a deep-rooted prejudice against Muslims had to be shown as a South-Indian Brahmin lady. Shabana Azmi, takes a taxi to Bandra station to go to Pune. Since when did the trains to Pune go via Bandra station?

Gubbare, was one of the few stories which had a totally predictable end. In fact, I was let down by the ending. It was also one of the few stories that had a Hindi title.

Rise & Fall, a gangster story, typical of Sanjay Gupta was a better effort from him this time round. If Sanjay Gupta keeps his gangster stories as short, maybe his films will do better at the box-office.

A different Jaipur

My first visit to Jaipur was many years ago when the bus I was travelling from Delhi's ISBT to Jodhpur, stopped for a couple of hours at the pink city. Jaipur then, came across as a typical North Indian small city, full of loud people with their colourful, but mostly unwashed turbans, and their sun-tanned skin, crouching on the ground & smoking their beedis, unmindful of all the din caused the papad vendors and the vehicle horns sounding all around. Jaipur bus stand reeked of an odour that was a heady mixture of the various eatable vendors hawking their wares and a faint stench of urine and I was glad when the bus finally moved on.
















1) An View of Jaipur's city centre.
2) The Tonk Road flyover at Gandhinagar.

This time however, since lady luck having been kind to me, I found myself being driven from the Sanganer Airport to Park Plaza in the centre of the city. As the cab drove across Tonk road and Prithviraj road, I saw a totally different view of Jaipur. The wide roads, green avenues and some wonderfully designed buildings had me wondering if this was the same city whose bus stand I’d passed through many years before. Jaipur has not missed the development bus but, somehow has struggled to find ways to cling on to the ways of the old. The various bazaars that dot the old city still, are a reminder of how the present Rajasthani still juggles culture and tradition with modernity. The sight of pretty young girls driving their scooterettes through the narrow by lanes of a Bapu bazaar or a Tripolia Bazaar may be the result of urbanisation but the veils/chunaris behind which they hide their faces speaks volumes of their reluctance to totally break free.

The Hypocrisy (Hippocratic) Oath

Why are we loath to put up with any sort of unethical conduct in matters concerning medical health when we openly promulgate such behaviour elsewhere? It is probably only because that we cannot accept that the person who has our life in his/her hands could be unscrupulous to the point that our best interests may have been be compromised. Any medical treatment nowadays is a series of procedures that in trying to eliminate your apprehensions also fills up the hospital’s coffers. It is not uncommon for a succession of treatments and tests to be prescribed for what has been already diagnosed ab-initio, but, we concur with these because it is our health and life that we do not want to risk. But, when the Hippocratic Oath, by which the doctors swear to treat the patients to the best of their ability, is thrown by the wayside for the sake of ready money, it just cannot be accepted anymore.

Dr.Agarwal’s Eye Hospital at 15, Eagle Street, Langford Town, Hosur Road, Bangalore, is supposed to be a renowned eye hospital, though its predecessor in Chennai is the more renowned of the two. My mother badly needed to have a cataract surgery done and we had decided to do it at Nethradhama, Jayanagar, which is the closest eye hospital to my home, until the Nethradhama authorities said that they do not accept the Bajaj-Allianz insurance that I have. So, based purely on geographic distance, we decided to go to Dr.Agarwal’s Eye Hospital on Hosur Road which was the next nearest. As soon as you enter it, you wonder if it was really a hospital. It is run from a house with hardly any staff – two doctors, Dr. Soumya & another whose name I couldn’t get, but, she was addressed as what seemed to me to be Dr. Garima, two nurses, a lab technician and a ward-boy who doubles up as the receptionist. After paying Rs. 300 as the admission fees, we were directed to the waiting room, which was actually the hall of the house. Dr. Sunita Agarwal’s medals are displayed here and so are some newspaper articles of her and her stem cell research. I should have got my first clue then and there itself when all I could see there at 11 a.m was just one more patient, compared to the hustle and bustle of patients that Nethradhama and later Narayana Nethralaya was.

My mother’s eyes were initially tested by what I’m pretty sure was the lab technician and not a doctor – the local slang in the Kannada and Tamil she spoke giving her away. After that we were directed to Dr. Garima who hardly ever spoke and after subjecting my mother to the other various tests, she said that the head nurse would clear our doubts. The head nurse was herself a senior citizen, speaking both Kannada and Tamil with a Malayalam accent and interspersing Malayalam words in both. She told us about how my mother’s eyes were totally dry, painting a grim picture of how harmful dry eyes were and how badly we needed to have a silicon plug installed in each eye at the cost of Rs. 4000 per plug to prevent dryness and no, that wouldn’t be covered under the insurance but it was absolutely necessary! As for the cataract surgery, she said that each eye would cost Rs. 20,000 inclusive of an imported lens, however if we needed a ring to support the lens inside the eye (if the optical muscles were too weak to support the lens), we needed to pay an extra few thousand for the ring and no, it was not covered under insurance. Post, operation, we needed to undergo three sittings of Retinal Diode therapy, once in ten days, the purpose of which was to strengthen the eye muscles, each sitting costing Rs. 2000 each and no, that too was not covered under insurance. She then, told us to wait for Dr. Sunita Agarwal, who was expected at around 1 pm and who would give us the dates for the surgery.

It was during that one hour waiting period, that I realised what a con job Agarwal’s Eye Hospital was pulling off. I talked to the one other patient, an old lady accompanied by her daughter. She had already had the surgery done in one eye about two months ago and had come there for the Diode therapy. Agarwal’s was still not clear about when her other eye would be operated upon. She advised us not to go for the stem cell therapy. Then a young couple came in, with the lady telling the nurse that she had headaches. She was diagnosed with some power after a check-up and then the head nurse started her sermon about Silicon plugs. The young couple were unconvinced and left with only the prescription for the glasses.

Sunita Agarwal ambled in around that time and I swear she reeked of cigarette smell. She hurriedly saw our reports, spoke to the two doctors and wrote a few more points on the report and left, leaving us to speak to the head nurse again. Post her lunch, Dr. Garima, did a few more checks and she had garlic and masala stench on her breath and her hands. She told us that my mother had a slight squint in her eyes (after 57 years of nobody discovering it!) and it could be corrected with treatment and no, it was not covered under insurance. The old nurse came to us again and said that Sunita Agarwal had prescribed us Stem cell injections and it would cost us Rs. 40,000 but it was very good for an early recovery and no, it was not covered under insurance. After we expressed out reservations about it, and after I cut short her sermon about stem cells saying that I knew what they were and that they were unethical, she agreed that it was something Sunita Agarwal prescribed to all patients and very few actually had them. She told us to come the very next day for the surgery. I reminded her that my mother was diabetic, but, she said that it was a minor operation and a sugar check was not needed. She told us that a BP check would be done the next day prior to the surgery and that was enough. When we asked for the file containing the reports, she refused to give them to us. I asked her if the doctors don’t speak to the patients, she mumbled something about language issues when I clearly had heard Dr. Soumya talking in Kannada on her mobile phone. I asked her about the recovery time after surgery, she said that if we wanted, we could have both eyes operated at the same time, when I knew that this was wrong.

Back home, I searched on the net and consulted my friend who is a doctor (but not an ophthalmologist). I found that Diode therapy was something done for damaged eyes and silicon plugs were totally optional and my doctor friend warned me against having the surgery done at Dr.Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, saying that all they did was daylight robbery. I called up my insurance company the next day and got the approval for my mother’s surgery at Dr.Agarwal’s Eye Hospital cancelled. My mother had her surgery done at Narayana Nethralaya, Rajajinagar and she’s had no problems ever since and I have the satisfaction of not having been conned.

I find it difficult to blame Dr.Agarwal’s Eye Hospital. They have their business to run but it sure is difficult to digest the fact that they were playing around with the life and health of someone close to me. Medical ethics are supposed to be of utmost importance to a doctor but I think Sunita Agarwal must have bunked that class in her medical school.

The Other Side of the Coin

I’m certainly not a right-winged Hindu fundamentalist but, I have no sympathy for the late Rizwanur Rahman. It is just that I cannot pity anyone who gets ensnared in any sort of a complicated situation brought about by that silly notion called “Love”. The media and the ideological youth have, needless to say, made a martyr of someone who didn’t do anything to deserve the accolades he’s getting after his death.

I’ve always wondered why we have such a fascination and anticipation for love triumphing against all odds. Maybe it is the effect of watching too many Bollywood movies glorifying “love”. Why can’t we accept that the odds can even out once in a while and the universal “bad guys’, the parents who disagree with their children’s love, also have their own point of view that may have an iota of prudence to it. “He has sacrificed his life for love and country. Its our turn to show it was not futile” – says the first post of a web site dedicated to Rizwanur. Would Rizwanur have sacrificed his life willingly for his love even if he had a prior inkling of the fame he has since achieved? Why do we then keep at it that he sacrificed his life for his love? I also fail to understand the connection between welfare of the country and his death. Do they mean to say that Rizwanur’s death is the next Jalianwala Bagh in the freedom struggle for love? Why does love require a sacrifice to establish its stamp of greatness and why does love make an educated man or woman lose their marbles so that they can’t take in the good from the bad or make judgements that may prove fatal?

The whole matter being sub-judice, it would be iniquitous to brand Ashok Todi as a murderer. It would also be totally unfair to completely ignore his side of the story. Any man wouldn’t want to see his daughter marry below his social standing and for a man said to be worth in excess of Rs.200 crores, who surely must have brought up his daughter in a comfortable if not lavish lifestyle, the mere idea of her marrying a socially insignificant person like Rizwanur would have been sacrilegious to say the least and he did try to wean him away from her with promises and threats. Why blame Todi, for I’m certain that all these “soldiers of love” crying for Rizwanur today, would do the same if they are in Todi’s position tomorrow. Rizwanur knew about the influence his father-in-law had in the corridors of power, but still went ahead with the marriage which makes it hard to believe that he was not just a gold-digger. Had Rizwanur had the sense to listen to his mind over his heart, he would have lived. Should I blame the person who knowingly & willingly put his hand into a snake-pit or should I blame the snake for biting him?

If Rizwanur had been just beaten up, or if Todi had been a Bengali this incident would have been relegated to some obscure column of the newspaper. Had Rizwanur not been from the minority community, would this episode have been politicised? Rizwanur had agreed to convert to Hinduism. Then, why is he hailed as a hero and a champion of the minority community who stood up for what he believed? Is this incident just a sad reminder of the generation gap between parents and their offspring? There are too many hypothetical questions. But, there is one thing I’m glad about - for obvious reasons - that, this incident did not happen in Gujarat.

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