Hil Station

306...

2010-03-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

...days since I last wrote. Anything. I haven't really been here, truth be told. Not 'me' anyway. Things changed for a bit. The hair got a little whiter. The beard a trifle shaggier. A beer belly threatened with a brief appearance (so I started whisky. Much neater, trust me). The Arctic Monkeys got a little less cool. The Gunners made the top of the league. The odometer chalked up another ten thousand miles. A wedding came and went [:)]. Tons of books, a couple of movies (mostly terrible), endless smoke breaks, a few walks in the sparse Delhi rain, a couple of all night benders, Fifa 10, countless CPU clock cycles... 306 days.

But... (poor stats PJ alert) like all good mean reverting functions ... I'm back. For as long as it lasts and for what it's worth.

Comme man!!!

Along these many paths

2009-05-20T05:37:00.000-07:00

Hold my hand, won't you?
And sift through these memories:
Of iced raspberry dollies on a fiery summer's day.
Glide through them, like the little paper boats we set free on rivulets of rain
Making their lonely sojourns to shores and climes distant and unknown.
Rummage in backpacks brimming with
Peacocks, cards on rainy days, greeting cards, last bench delights and
Glasses misted by steaming mugs of coffee.

Gaze with me at the sea, now -
Rivulets replaced by the gentle murmur of the waves
Sharing their timeless secret with the whispering wind.
From our vantage across the lonely street
Under watchful light of the yellow cross-road lamp
Or up on the windy rooftops of old dormitories
Stuffed with broken drawing boards and stubbed pencils,
Salt and rain mingle in the air with stale cigarette smoke.

Or tread softly through narrow eucalyptus-lined paths
Snaking through brush, ant-hills and whispering teaks in darkness and silence.
Walk through the night until tomorrow we return
To a world of cramped arcades, rushed hours and ironed shirts
Where paper boats and windy rooftops seem strangely incongruous.
Relive the magic of those nights of improbable hopes
Where the wildest promises sometimes came true,
If only for a while.

But only till we woke up to watch as they slipped away,
Wisps of dreams glowing briefly before fading
Like the last surge of the flame
Before the inevitability of the extinguishing breath.
Where do they go?
Beyond the impenetrable gates of reality
In all their forbidding splendor -
The dark color of a neem tree after the rain.

A campaign you won't see Tata backing

2009-05-12T21:41:00.001-07:00

Dear Random Facebook Friend,

So tell me. Did you vote?

I'm not particularly interested, really. But I'm sure you'll tell me anyway. Through your slick media campaigns, maybe through a radio show, maybe you'll get Bipasha Basu on-screen to grab my attention or maybe you'll just inundate me with random Facebook messages about how you've exercised your franchise. Well good for you and I'm sorry I don't look more excited.

What's with the whole voting shebang anyway? What makes you feel like I care? Stop sending me random Facebook messages because you voted. Free speech be damned.

And before you can screw up your face and cry "Arm-chair critic", here's why. You did not exercise a franchise. You did not make a statement. You performed a fundamental duty through your exercise of a fundamental right.

I've talked about this before - while we have been taught that the individual’s greatest freedom in a democratic state is the right to vote, there is another freedom that is perhaps as significant as the right to vote. It is the right to refuse.

When your only choice is the lesser among evils, why exercise the power of choice at all when you can refuse? Who would you rather choose? The mass murderer, the mob-boss, the Hindu fanatic, the lunatic leftist or the bumbling puppet?

Seriously. Choose to not care. Choose to abstain.

I did.

Love,
Sahil

Late night work Haikus

2009-03-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

I.

Festival of colours
Begins in black, blue and red
Font size fourteen

II.

Festival of colours
Ends in black, blue and red
Font size fourteen

Recruitment Haiku - I

2009-03-03T05:46:00.000-08:00

Hot air in the hall
Young men in dark suits and ties
Speak of unemployment

Excel man

2009-02-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

Its nine o clock on a Friday,
The regular crowd shuffles out.
There's a CTL sitting next to me
I'm not sure what he's talking about.

He says, boy, can you make me an excel sheet?
I'm not really sure how it goes...
But it's cross-linked and its neat, and I knew it complete
When I last wore an AC's clothes.

La la la, de de da
La la, de de da... da da

Chorus:
Make me a model, you're the Excel man
Make me a model tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for an SCM
So you've got to stay here all night...

Now GB in the bay is a friend of mine,
He shows me formulas for free...
And he's quick with a pivot or even a Vlookup,
But home is where he'd rather be.
He says, Hil, I believe this is killing me.
As the smile ran away from his face
Well I'm sure that I could be a movie star
If I could get out of this place.

Oh, la la la, de de da
La la, de de da da da

Now Tandon is a true-blue masochist,
Who never had time for a life.
And he's talkin' with KC who's still an AC
And probably will have to be for life.

And the pantry-boys are practising foosball
As the ACs in the background groaned.
Yes, they're sharing a cold dinner from Below 8
But its better than eating alone.

Chorus:
Make me a model, you're the Excel man
Make me a model tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for an SCM
So you've got to stay here all night...

Its getting really late for a Friday
So the CTL gives me a smile
'Cause he knows that it's me that he's going to have to see,
To get the precious Excel file.
And the foosball, it sounds like a carnival
And God, I feel like a beer!
The last guys are done, they're off for some fun,
And laugh at my still being here.

Oh, la la la, de de da
La la, de de da da da

There and back again

2009-02-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

So it's official. It's been over six months since anything of note appeared here. Between you and me, writing's like the economy. Cycles of words - a year, maybe more, of industrious writing - Alles ist gut. Out of nowhere, when you least expect it, though, six sudden months of cooling off. And then the words come back. Slowly to begin with and then in gushing rapids of ideas bursting through the dams of silence.

There and back again.

...But things will never be the same again, will they? Much has come and gone in those six months - a friendship, a job, some weight, a few strands of white hair, well-meant resolutions.. a life - calm on the surface at least, turns upside down in six months. A public blog goes private, and then goes public again. Maybe I should call this the Private Equity blog. Never mind - poor joke.

Move on.

Welcome back.

I would rather be steel

2008-08-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

I would rather be steel
Than cast iron.

Cast iron:
Pound it, beat it,
Batter it, heat it –
Un-dented, undaunted,
Impassive, silver stares and
Perfect, unblemished countenance of
The dull grey of the sea
Before storms.

But
Stretch. Crush.
Hard, unyielding, oblivious,
Brittle...
Stubborn in its futile resistance
To inevitable fracture.

Steel, though:
Pound it, beat it,
Batter it, heat it –
Look, a dent! There, a scratch!
Spotted by cruel fate.
But
Stretch. Crush.
Through cruel cycles
Of tension and compression
It yields.
Bending but never breaking.
Pliant. In search of
New equilibrium.

Make me a frame of hard cast iron, then,
That I should bear my fifty years well
In time.
But for my heart, give me
The toughness of steel.
Let it stretch each day,
And bend.
Be rent and bear scars
But never break.

Yes. In my heart
I will be steel.
And you, my forge.

Said the wise man to me..

2008-07-12T01:53:00.000-07:00

"Happiness, boy, is where you find it."

We are the champions, Ole Ole Ole!

2008-06-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.goal.com/en-india/Articolo.aspx?ContenutoId=757386

P.S: Scroll to the bottom of the article even if you don't read it.

The Gurgaon Weekend - II

2008-06-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

After successfully sinking my Ahmedabad plans last weekend through a freak ticket mishap, I decided to switch locations and push off to Mumbai this weekend. After enduring fifteen agonizing minutes of muzak, yours truly, in an uncharacteristic display of foresight and excited planning reserved tickets four days in advance. The perfect weekend glistened in my mind through updates, meetings and data-hunts as I pictured two lovely evenings at Hawaiian Shack with ye olde gang and late beer-brunches at Leopold. Gurgaon was fast becoming a distant memory.

Friday evening. It was all planned out. The car would be waiting at 7. I would climb in with laptop and clothes, drive to the airport by 7:30, check in and get on to SG121 to Mumbai at 21:15. "Guys, let's do a quick 15 minute update before we leave", said my consultant as we huddled into an empty meeting room at 6:40 that evening. All good, I thought to myself, basking in the warmth of the beer to come later that night. 7:40. Panic attack. The meeting was still on and I had forgotten to print my ticket. Horror. 7:52. I was running furiously down five flights of stairs to the parking lot, explaining to the driver on the way that we had precisely 28 minutes to make it to the airport. I could not miss this flight.

8:20. The airport. We made it. Having learnt from past experience, I deftly skipped my way through the hordes of aimless loiterers around the entry past the guard and pushed my way to the nearest Spice Jet counter. Two minutes later I was walking through security check with a shiny boarding pass and a broad smile. Relief.

8:35. My stylish lounging on one of the patently uncomfortable granite-colored chairs that populate Indian airports was interrupted. "All passengers on Spice Jet flight SG121 to Mumbai..", began the electronic voice in a bored monotone. I was on my feet, ready to be the first passenger to board. "We regret to inform you that the flight has been forced to land in Jaipur because of heavy air-traffic at Delhi airport. Estimated departure now stands at 00:10 hours." They had obviously mixed up two flights. After all, I wasn't flying to Jaipur, was I? I chuckled to myself, gently remonstrating the Indian aviation industry for its obvious incompetence and strode up to the Spice Jet terminal which was, at that moment, besieged with what closely resembled a group of very angry people. One man was waving his arms vigourously and somewhat dangerously about, nearly catching me in the eye. I decided I didn't like him. The great unwashed, I thought to myself, somewhat irritated by this very Gujjar-esque demonstration. Finding an alternative route to the desk, I thrust my boarding pass at the nearest Spice Jet official waiting to be ushered past the hordes into the placid confines of the aircraft.

"Sir, we have already announced this. Your flight is delayed by three hours", said the man, harriedly handing my boarding pass back to me. "No, you don't understand", I explained to him (very patiently, I feel compelled to add), "I'm flying to Mumbai."

He looked at me as if I'd gone mad. "Sir. Your. Flight. Is. Delayed. By. Three. Hours.". He mouthed each word carefully, all the while monitoring my expressions which must have gone from patience to benevolent irritation to disbelief to utter shock to numbness, before turning his attention to another passenger.

I don't know how long I stood there before finally making my way back to my little uncomfortable corner of the waiting area. I could see aircrafts out of the glass doors parked less than one hundred meters away, with queues of passengers slowly snaking their way in and preparing to fly off to God knows where. Despite being broken in spirit, I resolved that I would wait.

Two and a half hours later I left the airport, having claimed a full refund on my ticket to Mumbai. They charged me seven hundred and fifty rupees to cancel the return ticket, however, despite my long discourse on how a return ticket from Mumbai couldn't possibly be of any use if I couldn't fly to Mumbai at all; a tour-de-force of reason and logic.

Epilogue: I stood outside Delhi airport for half an hour with a dying mobile phone, one hundred and ten rupees and The Bell Jar (my scheduled in-flight entertainment) for company, continuously spurning the advances of lecherous rickshaw drivers and ignoring nagging cabbies who insisted on taking me to Noida for some inexplicable reason, before finally being picked up.

"Kya sir. Phir se waapis jaa rahe ho?", laughed the driver as I clambered in. I stared at him for a moment, speechless, lost in thought, before finally bursting into a fit of uncontrolled laughter.

God has spoken. Gurgaon is my destiny.

Such is life.

Words-II

2008-06-17T23:36:00.000-07:00

Floating swarms of
Words:
Mocking, entangling
Dream and thought
In puzzles of construction,
Tense and rhyme.

Inextricable depths of confusion
About
Adverbs and spelling,
Pronouncing and pronunciation.
And above all
Meaning-
Effervescent, chimerical.

The distance to comprehension:
Arduous,
Always incomplete.
The distance
From you to me is
The distance of worlds.

The distance of words,
Insurmountable and
Ultimately heartbreaking.
For how inalienably irrelevant
Are the words
We never speak.

Words - I

2008-06-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

The distance between fiery, tempestuous ardor and impassive, stoic apathy.. passionate hope and indifferent despair.. devotion and denial.. resolution and abandonment.. abjectness and exaltedness.. misery and mirth.. arrogance and humility.. conviction and doubt.. beauty and baseness.. affection and aversion.. is merely a word.

The Gurgaon Weekend - I

2008-06-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

Two weeks into the working world and life in formal clothes and I am pleased to say, things are on course on nearly all fronts. Nearly being the operative word, however, since I work in Gurgaon, and outside of office, the most exciting thing to do is drive up the Mehrauli-Gurgaon highway, from Gujjar to Gujjar, as Watsan so eloquently put it, amidst piles of burning tires and unfinished construction.

Anyway. Cut to Friday evening 5 PM. Acting on mentorly advice from Watsan ('Saar.. get a life.. go home'), yours truly proceeded to book tickets to Ahmedabad. A cursory inspection led to the shocking discovery that a round trip home would set me back by fifteen thousand rupees. Owing to superior decision making abilities yours truly performed a light-speed, ultra-complex cost-benefit analysis and called the local travel agent in Ahmedabad who, in five minutes, picked up a round-trip ticket for eight thousand rupees and emailed the aforementioned ticket to a much pleased me. At eight forty, I would leave Gurgaon far, far behind. So far so good.

At 6:30 there was no sign of the cab. I waited patiently. 6:45. I confess I tapped my foot a little. 6:55. I was smoking. 7:00. Contemplating alcohol. 7:05. The car finally shows up and we rush to Lamba house so I could pick up shirts that needed washing. 7:20. Packed and ready. Freedom. The car refuses to start. Dead battery. This is brilliant, I mutter, while desperately pushing the car in the company of a security guard. 7:45. We zoom through the toll gate towards Delhi and civilization. Yippee.

7:55. The domestic airport. The car drops me off next to a large group of Sardars. Assuming that they're all in the line to enter the airport, I queue up impatiently. 8:00. The Sardars are just laughing and hanging around. I walk up to the nearest one. 'Uncle ye andar jaane ki line hai kya?'. 'Nahin beta.. Beta London jaa raha hai use chhodne aaye hain.' Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. I should've known. 10 Sardars could only have convened for one purpose. Immigration. I rush in through another entry past a slightly confused security guard and literally run to the Go Air terminal, thrusting my ticket at them.

Thirty long seconds later I notice the Go Air staff is looking at me shiftily. Is anything wrong?, I ask anxiously. Sir you're scheduled to arrive on this flight tonight from Ahmedabad, the man ventures, somewhat apologetically. I stare incredulously at the ticket as it slowly sinks in. Departure: Ahmedabad. The words scream out at me from the page.

Postscript: I left the airport, standing quietly at a BP pump with a bag full of dirty clothes and a laptop for twenty minutes so the driver could backtrack to the airport. It didn't help that there were two hundred and twenty three rupees in my wallet and my mobile switched off moodily. And then it began to rain.

This has to be the most expensive laundry trip ever, I thought. And then the madness took over and when the driver arrived, I was still sitting in a small private puddle and laughing.

What can I say. Sometimes God just wants you to be in Gurgaon.

On the inability to express

2008-06-04T19:59:00.000-07:00

..you gave me the will to sing your praise but made me mute..

~ Antonio Salieri

Second Year in Ten Moments

2008-05-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

10. A mid-summer night's dream. Cold, sweater-less, downing six-packs of the Stella Artois variety at Covent Garden with Baveja, Gandu, Arnav and DB while the old guitarist on the square played us Dire Straits on demand. Ah, London town! Where the descent into decadence began.

9. Breaking the habit. Of daily 2 A.M. chai-suttas at Athica's. Coming back with Rachana and Pai two months after graduating to a smiling Athica's guy announcing 'Saar account closed' only to push two Milds and two steaming chais at us flashing that mad, Mallu, go-on-I-know-you-guys grin we'd all come to know so well.

8. The end of the world as we know it. The graduation speed-ball. Yogesh Patwari, he called out and that was when, in the slow welling up of the silence that followed the spontaneous cheers, we realized it was finally all over.

7. Going under. Lethargic perusal of John Hull and last year's papers on Financial Derivatives in H-115 amidst half a screening of Gunda, a million chais and blind faith in the power of relative grading, with our examination prospects appropriately summed up by SK as Rachana, Gautam and I looked on in somewhat subdued amusement, "Dude. Rapax feeling are there."

6. Hil and Tree's psychedelic breakfast. Aviating with comrade Hradayesh Kumar post aforementioned Derivatives end-term. Eight peace-filled joints later, arriving at NC and Athica's and consuming two aloo-parathas, a masala-dosa, two fruit buns, two glasses of chai, a cheese Maggi, a one-kilo fruit-cake and a muffin. Each. Showing up at the MBFI end-term the next day smelling of substance abuse, reading the repeat question on bond valuation very carefully, giving up and writing 1063 for the answer. Getting it right.

5. You talkin' to me? A table-tennis match at IIM Calcutta, bunched next to the table with about five hundred of the local shitheads, Daga, Tree and Vetri for company. B*******d himmat hai to ek ek kar ke bolo, says Daga. Kaun bola?, says local shithead followed by roar of approval from generally vacuous crowd. Main bola maa ke l*****n, kya ukhaad loge?, roars Daga in response. Stunned silence ensues.

4. With a little help from my friends. Acquanting myself with the intricate patterns on the floor tiles in Daga's room with Daga, Pabari, Thatha and Gautam outside and three beers, two glasses of wine, two shots of tequila, a glass of Old Monk, two stiff pegs of Blender's Pride and a quarter of a khamba of vodka inside.

3. Brothers in arms. The millions of hours spent on the Tsepak court with SK and the millions of hours spent off it analyzing, dissecting and debating the grand obsession of our lives. I still maintain, my friend, that on those perfect, inspired days we were the best 'er is, the best 'er was and the best 'er ever will be.

2. Before sunrise. The unforgettable BRacket, GTalk and H-Mezz discussions that lasted all the way to 5 in the morning about grades, gossip, movies, music, God, existence, purpose, meaning and whether mosquitoes have eyes. 'twas the best of times.

1. And nothing else matters. H-Mezz and Company. The roll of honour. Trade Mukul, Patil, Daga, Pabbo, Battery, Darth, Thatha, SK, Rowdy, Nandi, Kandy, Induj, Andrew, Vinz, Biyer, Rachana, Papai, Kedia, Bakshi, Dada, A^2, Swati and ShettyDon. And last of all.. my love.. my love.. Baveja you're my love (to be sung with exaggerated emotion to the tune of some shady Hindi song with Salman Khan and Lara Dutta).

Goodbye Bawana

2008-05-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

The first thing that strikes me as we get off the bus at Bawana is the riot of colour. A small group of women passes by chattering busily, hauling buckets of water in blindingly bright purple, orange and lime green saris with psychedelic peacock-feather and polka dot patterns. Amidst the dust and ramshackle brick and mortar shops - against this backdrop of solemn ochres and greys, the community seems to suddenly explode around us in a supernova of shades and sounds that wouldn't have looked out of place at a Pink Floyd concert. As we find our way to the Community Center through the town's tiny alleys, a ragged band of five year olds decides to investigate. "Hi!", they scream at us happily while embarrassed mothers futilely chase after them, quickly hiding behind their colourful pallus as we stop to smile. Word seems to be getting around quickly as people queue up along the streets we pass through.

Most people simply squat on their doorsteps or stand at the street corners silently sizing us up, taking in our shiny yellow miner helmets, mineral water bottles and volunteer badges, so incongruous in this industrial slum forty kilometers out of Delhi in the middle of a blazing summer. "Angrez aaye hain", announces an elderly gentleman in a faded kurta to a small gathering around his kirana shop through stained lips and teeth the colour of rust, no doubt a result of the mouthful of tobacco he chews patiently on in an affable, bovine sort of way; and word gets around.. angrez aaye hain. Forty kilometers out of Delhi and we are now foreigners in our own country.

We are given strict instructions at the Community Center by our host and program coordinator from Habitat. "Please refrain from interacting with any of the locals. Do not accept edibles, do not offer any gifts and avoid speaking with them to the extent possible." While the reasons underlying our instructions are clear - health hazards and misunderstood friendliness apart, our hosts' message is clear. Look, but don't touch.

Our first task for the day at the build-site is the dismantling of an existing kachcha house before digging and laying the foundation for the Habitat brick-and-mortar design. Armed with rubber gloves, helmets, pick-axes, hammers and knives it takes the eight of us less than an hour to take down the ramshackle bamboo and plastic structure. The owner supervises proudly from a charpoy across the minuscule street. His new home, a part of which we will build, through Habitat, to save the cost of hired labour, will still cost him nearly twenty thousand rupees. It is a little more than one hundred and fifty square feet in size. The neighbours look on in silence from their bamboo and plastic hut. They cannot afford the luxury of bricks just yet.

By the time we make our way back to the Community Center for lunch, things begin to settle down. Bawana is used to us now. The excitement of the morning fades slowly and we slowly register the less romantic sights and smells of the slum's daily routines. The streets are lined on both sides by open drains full of a viscous, stagnating sludge that gives the appearance of being mildly radioactive. The putrid stench of the human and animal faeces mixing with mud, water, stale food and grime that make up this sludge is nauseating. On several streets we notice overflowing drains and watch, somewhat awestruck, as people walk nonchalantly in bare feet while we make mental notes to fumigate or burn our soiled shoes at the earliest. In some parts women form clusters, bathing children, washing utensils and clothes. A little further upstream a five year old relieves himself while a goat stares impassively, awaiting its turn. There is a strange sense of equality in this entire squalid arrangement.

As the afternoon progresses Bawana descends into a state of utter torpor. Young men loll about in shaded carts chewing thoughtfully on twigs and tobacco, the twittering hordes of children have disappeared and the women sit listlessly in their doorways watching us go by. "What do these people do for a living?", I ask our guide, struck by this total lack of activity. "Nothing", he replies, as he tells me their story. Bawana's people once had better lives, he explains. They lived on the banks of the Jamuna until it was decided by the powers that be that their land would house the Commonwealth Games village. As squatters they were, predictably, evicted. While the men worked as rickshaw drivers, handymen and owners of kirana stores, and the women as domestic help, before being shunted out to Bawana, now, forty kilometers from Delhi and false guarantees of employment, the jobs have disappeared. Worse yet, their new land is on lease to them from the state for a period of thirty years, but the Government, in an act of Machiavellian cunning, retains the right to evict them prior to the expiry of the lease. In plainspeak, when (and not if) Delhi expands beyond Rithala towards Bawana, the slum will be razed and, as squatters, these people will be forced to leave again. It is merely a matter of time and they know it as well. It is India's Bawanas that bear the costs for its Delhis.

You see, like all other things in the giant machine that is India, there is a real, socio-political need for our poor. It is easier by far for the local politician to hand out free clothes and colour televisions every few years, than to provide the most elementary education, basic healthcare or suitable employment, and simultaneously important for our municipal councils and city legislators to clear our slums, never mind where to, as part of our India Poised campaigns and intelligent living-room discussions on GDP growth. God forbid that these people might, through effective employment programs and through access to education, healthcare and food (ignoring the fact that these constitute, broadly, the rationale for Government in the first place), one day buy their own colour TVs or build their own homes! What would we hand out to them, then?

The sickening reality is that there are thousands of Bawanas scattered across the country that are hidden artistically by our India Shining programs, light years away from the retail boom, low-cost aviation and the one-lakh car. Gandhi was wrong. India doesn't live in its villages. In the absence of reform and with geographic dispersion blotting out the possibility of organized revolt, India dies in its villages. Quietly, alone. Failed by the lofty ideals of the democratic socialist state, welfare economics and Keynesian intervention, and at the mercy of a cruel Friedman-esque free market determined by the infinite demand and woefully limited supply of pity.

To be continued.

Weighty Issues

2008-05-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

Having successfully scuttled all important vacation plans using a potent combination of clearly put-on concern, blatant blackmail and even physical force, the Mother Superior finally decreed that my newfound joblessness (entirely her doing and, as a consequence, conveniently ignored) could not be allowed to stand in our little, industrious household. What will your employers think, she complained one day, when they see you like this - unshaven, unwashed, waifish, playing computer games all day. Despite my sincere assurances that Bain and Company would be least bothered about such trivialities as my waistline or my shirt-size, the decision, I could clearly see, had been made. I have registered you at the gym, I was duly informed the next day (she moves fast, that woman), and told the gym-master (her exact words) that you want to increase your weight.

Venturing that my weight was nothing a few nice pints of KF Strong everyday wouldn't cure went down poorly, needless to say. As did the little joke about how natural selection favored larger brains as opposed to larger biceps and how she would obviously agree with me if she'd only read Darwin instead of that apparently inexhaustible stock of Mills and Boons. A quick thwack and a few hours later I found myself, dressed in neatly pressed shorts, dry-fit t-shirt, gleaming white socks and shiny new shoes outside the local gym.

The gym, I discovered, was full of intriguing machines with shiny handles, levers and pulley arrangements that I immediately began to replace with little tension arrows and vector diagrams in my head. The pleasant engineering flashback was shattered, though, by the sudden, incongruous appearance of the gym instructor who, I am convinced, merits the briefest digression. Without stressing on the finer details, the man looked like a cross between Lex Luger and Duane Allman. Even his moustache somehow conveyed the impression of being alarmingly muscular; the sort of badass moustache that straightaway tells you that the wearer is a Pantera fan (cccf. Maddox on Dawn of the Dead). I had an instant vision of this glorious paragon of facial hair being used for momentous tasks in its spare time - like those little Chinese men who park aeroplanes with their teeth or lift large blocks of stone with their ears and so on. A truly inspirational moustache. But enough of this already.

The gym instructor after a quick, rather condescending sizing up of his latest cadet purposefully strode to the nearest treadmill and began to furiously manipulate its gleaming rows of buttons and switches, before indicating with a quick nod that it was time for the games to begin. While obediently mounting, I asked him how long the little jogging session would last with my best conspiratorial smile. Oh we'll see, he said nonchalantly, setting the machine at 12 kilometers per hour and leaving me running for my life, before walking off towards another huffing, puffing charge further down the room. To calm my by now panic-stricken mind, I reasoned that millions of people did this every day and if I died, the gym instructor would go to jail, and by that logic alone, this could hardly be life threatening. Twenty agonizing minutes later I realized I was wrong. Oxygen!, screamed the brain, while I stumbled dizzily around the room, all palpitations and buzzing ears.

Scarcely had I recovered when he appeared again, all smiles, like a bad smell that won't go away, ushering me towards what looked to my fevered, oxygen-starved mind like something out of a bondage video. Chest press, he announced happily, setting the weights at, God help me, 50 pounds, while I watched in helpless shock; too weak, by now, to protest with any conviction. The next forty minutes were spent acquainting myself with a vast range of machines and passed in a pain-filled haze of dark thoughts that perhaps, it would be tasteful not to describe in depth.

You might feel a little pain in your arms tonight, advised the instructor as I packed up, adding for good measure that this was apparently perfectly normal and that only by coming every day and keeping up this routine would these aches stop. Why can't I just do cocaine, I wondered, while coldly informing him that I was quite unsure of feeling anything at all in my arms, thank you, given that they were now hanging uselessly off my shoulders.

So.. don't you feel much healthier?, enquires the ever-inquisitive matriarch over dinner. She evidently doesn't believe in sleeping dogs and tactfulness and all that, no sir.

Tell me, I reply, enunciating each word with exaggerated care, if this routine is supposed to make me healthy (note emphasis on word healthy), why is it that I can't feel my arms, my back smells of Moov and I'm already on my third Crocin for the evening? A reasonable question, surely.

You'll be just fine, she says, cutting me off mid-sentence, clearly having not heard a word of my brilliantly articulated complaint, especially after you restart your tennis classes every morning at six. It's such a healthy lifestyle.

What can I say. I give up.

Epilogue
Weight at 60.4 kilos, confirmed by the digital weighing machine in the gym. Is now officially the heaviest I've ever been. Oh joy.

Memories within memories

2008-05-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's inexplicably cool for six a.m, I wonder, trundling out of bed into this atypical Ahmedabad morning. The streets are empty save for a lazy stray draped halfway around a dented dustbin who languidly acknowledges my presence with head raised half-way like a sleepy periscope. A mild breeze blows across the Louis Kahn plaza and ruffles the cypresses at the fringes of the lawn. There is a peculiar, breathtaking majesty about the plaza - it is home to faculty offices and classrooms flanking the mammoth Vikram Sarabhai library, the holy triumvirate resplendent in the institute's trademark red-brick, softened today by the honey-like glow of the viscous morning sunlight filtering in through the cypresses and the breeze that reflects off little blades of grass till it feels like I'm standing in a field of light. A pair of peacocks in the football field solemnly patrol the lonely goalposts - awaiting an elusive peahen who I often observe lurking in the nearby lake - and a squad of cacophonous mynas heralds the morning.

Captured between the anxious peacocks is the laughter and the spirit of a thousand voices that once ran between those goalposts. The wondrous stirring inspired by first visits to the plaza, the rush of pride while showing it off to other awestruck first-timers and a welling up of long forgotten memories of carom matches and rem-sessions, animated deliberations on the finer aspects of Sherman Motors - as old as the institute itself - on the parapets of the classroom complex, friendships forged over cups of steaming, sickeningly sweet chai and a quick smoke on the lawns, the swinging, delirious masses that are the andaaz-e-Chaos, the distant sounds of ramp parties and hapless screams of people being dunked, maska-bun across the road, Rambhai's, the five short steps up to the podium on that last day as a member of a graduating class armed with belief, steadied by hope and destined for greatness, under the stars and in the august company of these buildings that encompass the very soul of the institute.

And within these swirling mists of memory, a little boy who grew up. Who grew up in six years away with a suddenness born of a newfound belief in reason and skepticism and, in acerbic moments of humor and, perhaps, realization, joked about life as an endless sequences of IIMs, forgetting that there is some magic in the world.

Only to discover it again here, this morning.

Yes. This is where it all began.

If Only

2008-05-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

Or.. What the heart of the young man really said to the preacher

It isn't the answer, my friend,
But the question, my love,
That's blowin' in the wind..

Ten songs

2008-05-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

That would define my last hour.

Broken Hearts are for Assholes (Frank Zappa)
'Broken hearts are for assholes.. Are you an asshole too?'

Hey Jude (The Beatles)
'Well don't you know that its a fool who plays it cool, By making his world a little colder?'

Eanie Meany (Jim Noir)
'If you don't give my football back, I'm gonna get my dad on you.'

Killing in the name of (Rage Against the Machine)
'Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.'

Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix)
'Butterflies and zebras.. And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about.. Riding with the wind.'

Reelin' in the Years (Steely Dan)
'The things that pass for knowledge, I cant understand'

We looked like giants (Death Cab for Cutie)
'Do you remember the JAMC? And reading aloud from magazines
I don't know about you but I swear on my name they could smell it on me
I've never been too good with secrets. No...'

Punk rock princess (Something Corporate)
'Maybe when the room is empty, Maybe when the bottle's full.
Maybe when the door gets broke down, Love can break in.'

Gravedigger (Dave Matthews Band)
'Gravedigger, When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow? So that I can feel the rain'

More human than human (White Zombie)
'I want more life, Fucker I aint done.'

Looking back I know I'm going to wonder what this says about me. Shucks.

Myself Sheep

2008-05-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

Random notes: Part of another project, temporarily shelved thanks to the hostility of wordpress towards my connection. I admit this may not be the best rhyme scheme, perhaps an AABB would've sounded nicer. The attempt was to write this in the iambic pentameter. Predictably, I failed abjectly. Hence the easier tetrameter.

An Ode to Sheep

A sheep is quite a lovely pet
To have around the home all day.
It never will get in your way
With niggling worries for the vet.

A sheep is quite a quiet chap.
He’s not a whining, grunting hog,
Or like a growling, barking dog
That bores you with its yippety-yap.

And finally, for the best thing:
One sheep is sheep and so are four
Or even five or six, what's more!
Which makes for quite easy spelling.

In sum, a useful beast to keep;
Gives bales of fluffy, snow-white wool.
And when the weather’s somewhat cool
You will be thankful for your sheep.

Remembering the Russians

2008-05-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

It is the writer, among all artists, who is the outsider's window to an otherwise alien people, by being an accurate reflection of and record-keeper for society's beliefs and values, its hopes and dreams and its individual and collective triumphs and losses.

And so, Steinbeck is Tom Joad, the resolute orchard-worker of the Depression years, Kafka is K, the stoic who persists unwaveringly with unclear objectives in an unfamiliar world dominated by inaccessible authority and Hemingway is Lady Brett of the Lost Generation, muddling along in a rootless, gloomy world in the years following the War.

And yet, it would be excessively and fatally simplistic to insinuate, even through the novel, that society is a well-behaved, homogeneous collective. So while Dickens' Oliver Twist introduces us to the seamy, squalid underbelly of London's suburbs, Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and Psmith, both affable London gentlemen waltz us through such hallowed British institutions as the Drones Club and the Shropshire Cricket Club.

Last night, though, while idly looking at the Russian section of the shelf and passing the names of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol and Solzhenitsyn, I wondered. Unlike their foreign counterparts, there is remarkable consensus of opinion among the Russians in terms of their bleak descriptions of Russian life and the general decadence and unhappiness of affairs. Whether it is Anna Karenina's desperate, failed attempts to find love, Yuri Zhivago's inability to deal with affairs he believes beyond his control, Ivan Denisovitch's quiet acceptance of the machinations of the totalitarian state or Dr. Andrei Yefimych's gradual detachment from the vulgarity of peasant life around him and lack of empathy, the underlying motif is clear. The state has failed. Society has failed. Indeed, hope has failed.

It is the writer whose job, no.. duty it is to be a voice of protest for a society steeped in injustice and a custodian of hope for a better future. But what of states that produce writers without hope?

'We all come out from Gogol's Overcoat.'
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Perhaps. But how I wish, for myself and for the Russians, that Dostoyevsky had chosen Shropshire instead.

Back in Black

2008-05-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

So I haven't been doing the weekly reading roundup for a while, for a couple of reasons to be honest. To start with, in a fit of indulgence and morbid curiosity, yours truly spent two whole days in bemused perusal of 'The Great Indian Dream' by Dr. Arindam Chaudhuri, '..the intellectual litterateur of the decade..' (The Hindustan Times) and was duly mortified.

The book is a higgledy-piggledy melting pot of influences, with Chaudhuri quoting everyone from Joseph Stiglitz to Che Guevara through his 250 page whine, even citing research by Trilochan Mishra of IIM Ahmedabad along the way (never mind that he's actually Trilochan Shastry). What can I say. For Mr. Chaudhuri is a meticulous man.

So anyway. The best part of it all is that after all his well-publicized IIM bashing, the intellectual literrateur's solution to the misery of the Indian public sector is (and I quote): "Can't the public sector also employ graduates from the IIM (sic) or other such business schools to put in place some efficient management leadership and commitment?" I'll take that as a personal compliment, thank you.

In other news, having attracted stern stares from suspicious stewardesses aboard various flights while reading and re-reading this for giggling quite unreasonably, I now officially decree that Gerald Durrell's 'Birds, Beasts and Relatives' is the funniest book I have ever read. It could also be because I'm a certified sucker for stories of country boys with dogs (cccf. William) but never mind that. Sample this.

...'Now, now, dear,' said Mother, 'let Gerry explain.'
'Explain?' said Larry. 'Explain? How do you explain a bloody great bear in the drawing-room?'
I said that the bear belonged to a gypsy who had a talking head.
'What do you mean, a talking head?' asked Margo.
I said that it was a disembodied head that talked...

I rest my case.

Also, I finally worked up enough courage to read Graham Greene. Now one of the reasons I've steered cleer of Greene is simply because I keep hearing how Shashi Tharoor is an 'Indian Graham Greene' and personally, I think he's just a really poxy guy. Having done some sly research, though, and in light of information that Mr. G was an extraordinarily well-traveled gentleman and wrote extensively about these travels, the little Pico Iyer part of me decided to reverse my unfair judgment and selected 'Stamboul Train.

Set on the Orient Express, Mr. G, while talking about train journeys and counting power lines racing backwards through a train window, introduces a shrewd businessman, a poor dancing girl, a communist defector, an on-the-run thief and a lesbian journalist to talk about (in my opinion) identity and choice. In sum, to set the record straight - Shashi Tharoor may be our dandiest UN ambassador, wherever-educated and whatever-else, but he is certainly not Graham Greene.

Last up was Jeffrey Archer's latest, Prisoner of Birth. Now here's the confusing thing about Archer. For a man who writes fairly kickass short-stories, his books are just dustbin material. He's done the whole Boston Brahmin thing a zillion times to date, and frankly, Jeff, I'm sick of the Kanes (yes, the ones that talk only to the Talbots, who talk only to God) and the Cartwrights and the Davenports.

True to form, in PoB, Daniel Cartwright is a hardworking, upright citizen from the East End (evidently, the Cartwright founders spread their seed far and wide) who falls foul of four West End Brahmins called Craig, Mortimer, Payne and (surprise, surprise) Davenport (theatrical aside: sounds suspiciously like a law firm, no?) who get him falsely imprisoned for murdering his own to-be brother in law (who, in reality, Craig murders during a drunken bar-brawl). So far so Boston Legal.

Now the old boys' club, satisfied with their evilness forget that every schoolkid worth his salt reads The Count of Monte Cristo, including Danny Cartwright from Clement Atlee Comprehensive in the East End. Mr. Archer conveniently forgets this too, and proceeds to recreate, with incredibly little imagination, a 21st century version of Dumas' original that stretches on for 450 excruciating pages as Cartwright goes about exacting revenge on our unfortunate villains. Absolutely puerile.

So that sums up a placid April, reading-wise. In other April news:

Great movies seen: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Ingmar Bergman's Through a glass, darkly, Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Anand Patwardhan's Raam ke Naam and Ashwani Dheer's 123.
So-so movies seen: Khuda ke liye
Horrible movies seen: First half of Krazzy 4, Tashan and Race.

New IPL heroes: The Chennai Super Kings, who will never be beaten by the Royal Challengers of Bangalore (unlike the Mohali Kings) because it'll take a team of Super Royal Challengers to do that. Hardy har. I will henceforth be referred to as Chennai Shingham.

Joke of the month: Another old rehash. Ask me if I'm a tree. No seriously. Go ahead.

And finally,

What's on the bookshelf now: Richard Feynman's QED: The strange theory of light and matter, Nabokov's Dozen (12 short stories by Vladimir Nabokov) and Sarnath Banerjee's The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers. Updates to follow.

Also, before collective criticism for grouping 123 with the likes of Bergman erupts, I assure you an Ebert-esque review shall follow. Till then, chop chop!

Picking my way

2008-04-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

..through some of the many random thoughts that I harbour and note down for no good reason, to boot, I came across this.

Life is too full of contradictions. Continuously shifting beliefs.. no.. opinions, I imagine, would be a better word. Beliefs are too strongly held. So opinions. The ones with all the illusory certitude that comes from faulty reason and far-too-quick judgment. I wonder about the biases - these fundamental aversions.. the unavoidable tics.. the little highs - where do they come from? Sometimes, when I'm feeling optimistic, I call them my little expressions of individuality and reason that change is all good. That's right. Make them sound better than they are. On other days I'm thinking - deep down somewhere, I'm probably just really superficial. Damn. Reality bites.

The death of a priest

2008-04-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

Edit: Many thanks to Rachana for the ending line. No. This wasn't meant to be a story or anything as ambitious. Just a water color in words, perhaps.

..in the distance, as the sun made its slow descent across the desert sky a lone figure rode quietly up to the church. Tall, gaunt, unshaven - a specter, for all purposes, come to seek shelter in the home of the Lord. The dying light caught the steeple in a brilliant flash, for just one moment, before settling down around the landscape in a sea of ochre and orange. Sand and sky.

The stranger drew up slowly, tethering his horse to the church's ramshackle, once-white picket fence, now the color of teeth stained by too many years of tobacco. That he was a quiet, methodical man was evident in his slow, deliberate movements and his easly, loping gait up to the great door. He knocked softly. Twice.

No answer. Pushing open the door softly, almost thoughtfully, he made his way in. After the landscape's bold oranges, the dimly lit church with the last vestiges of the sunset filtering in through the stained glass windows was strangely soothing.

A soft voice intoned slowly from the confessional. The priest, it appeared, was in the midst of one of his private deliberations with the Father. It was a bad time. And yet, what had to be done, had to be done. His instructions had been clear - leave no settlers behind. He walked slowly to the pit. At the sound of his footsteps, the intonations slowly died down.

"..think about what you do, child", remonstrated the priest softly, not even looking up. "It is the Father's will that thou shalt not kill, and you risk his vengeance at great peril."

He considered this a long moment, the silence palpable and oozing into the dark corners of the church. There was a moment of doubt, perhaps, though just for the briefest instant. It was impossible to tell.

"Perhaps", he whispered softly to the priest, as he raised the barrel of his .45. "Perhaps", he repeated, almost sadly. A wistful smile.

"But God will forgive me. It is his trade."

He fired.

One PJ only

2008-04-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

On GTalk a short while ago.

Ajith:
ya
what u doin in nagpur rite now

Hil:
my granny had an operation da so i am sitting here
and i have become punjabi
you know why?
:D

Ajith:
say say
am sure it will be interesting

Hil:
because i am relax singh
:D

Ajith:
straaaaaaaaaang bullshit

Ah. The joys of recycled third standard PJs.

Edit: Somehow it's only Pai dearest who falls for this each time. I wonder why.

Yossarian lives!

2008-04-14T22:07:00.001-07:00

Edit: I noticed, at Nagpur airport, exactly eight copies of Joseph Heller's 'Catch 22', and, remembering this review, decided to put it up. To the few readers who have already been subjected to my Catch 22 fanboy gushings, my apologies.

Catch 22 is a book that demands to be read. It is a product of disillusioned, tired times – and in that respect alone it deserves praise. As a savagely comic indictment of the mechanics of politics and war, it stands among modern American literature’s, and, in fact, all of modern literature’s, finest efforts. Set on a fictional Italian island, Pianosa, the book has a plot that loops back on itself time and again through different chapters describing events through the eyes of different characters – and the book is populated with more characters than the reader always knows what to do with. The protagonist, though, is Captain John Yossarian, an American bombardier of dubious descent, who claims to be of Assyrian stock. He has a singular aim that sustains him through the war: staying alive.

“It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it - lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them. That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance."

As the story proceeds, Yossarian’s Herculean efforts to avoid becoming another casualty of the War range from the subversive (by shifting bombing lines on a map to misdirect his squadron) to cowardice (by refusing to fly any more bomber missions) to what seems to be sheer madness (sitting naked on a tree during a squadron-mate’s funeral as a mark of protest). And it is this single thread that binds the patchy narrative of the novel into a cohesive story of one man’s struggle against a flawed system and Catch 22. Catch 22, as the story progresses, becomes an object for Yossarian to, at first, fear, and gradually, as a sort of twisted logic makes itself evident to him and to the reader, something to hate, to defy and to ridicule. The Catch 22 premise is simple. A squadron-member would be exempt from flying missions if he could be proved to be crazy. However, any squadron member who requests to be grounded would indicate a concern for his safety in the face of real and immediate dangers – clearly a function of a rational mind – and would hence be required to fly.

Joseph Heller’s use of paradoxes throughout the narrative reveals the sinister, insidious machinations of society and its systems. For example, during a squadron-member’s court martial, Heller writes: “The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with”. The apparent absurdity of these statements constantly undermines the reader’s ability to understand the motives of Heller’s characters or the powers they deal with. We learn, slowly, though, that Catch 22 is an invisible, maybe even non-existent, but omnipresent system that through this same shroud of mystery cannot be challenged or overthrown. It is this systemic madness; this logical irrationality; this potent combination of ‘specious legal justification with brute force’ that Catch 22 is about.

Besides being, broadly, an ‘anti-war’ story, Catch 22 explores several sub-plots such as the individual against the collective, the boundaries of rationality, irrationality and rational irrationality, heroes and anti-heroes, capitalism and the economics of war, the paradoxes of our times, red-tape, religion, life and death, justice, greed and integrity. Towards the middle of the story, as Yossarian’s friends and colleagues succumb one by one to the vagaries of Catch 22, we realize that the ‘enemy’ is not merely German bombers or anti-aircraft gunners but the bureaucracy that sends men to war daily, treating them as no more than meaningless statistics in an obscure government report. Witness the ‘dead man’ in Yossarian’s tent who dies on a mission before he even has time to register his name at the base. Heller’s huge roster includes other memorable characters like Colonel Cathcart, whose principal quest as part of the war is to somehow be photographed by the Saturday Evening Post. As part of this, he continuously volunteers the squadron under his command for increasingly dangerous missions, and as a publicity stunt, initiates the practice of prayers during briefing sessions. Interestingly, he also rejects the idea when he learns (much to his dismay) that enlisted men pray to the same God as commanding officers. Another titanic power struggle involves Generals Peckem and Dreedle, as Peckem attempts to claim every bomber squadron in the Air Force for himself. The sinister intelligence officer, Captain Black, inaugurates a Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade that forces all officers to sign loyalty oaths at the drop of a hat, failing which they would be branded Communist. Apart from these principal characters, Heller has a huge ensemble cast that includes Major Major (who agrees to meet his squadron members only when he is not in office – another example of Heller’s chillingly efficient use of the paradox), a plethora of incompetent officers, an Italian prostitute, a madcap mess manager, a confused chaplain and muddleheaded agents of the CID.

Another of Heller’s targets is capitalism, represented by the resourceful mess officer, Milo Minderbinder. As the war progresses and Milo realizes the vast business opportunities of the situation, he forms a syndicate that begins to take over world markets for food-stuffs and other essentials and sells them at exorbitant rates to the army mess halls. His deals make him a celebrated figure across the world – the Mayor of Sicily, Vice-Shah of Oran, Caliph of Baghdad and Iman of Damascus, for example, and he soon diversifies by creating a mercenary army that, at one point, attacks his own air-base at Pianosa for a fee. At one point, when he is unable to offload vast quantities of Egyptian cotton that he has purchased and his attempts to pass it off as chocolate covered cotton in his mess hall fails, he finally convinces the Government to take it off his hands with the explanation that: “If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian cotton speculating industry."

While it is easy to see the relevance of Catch 22 in modern American literature, its extension to a society as distantly removed as ours is also immediately as clear. How different are Milo Minderbinder and Colonel Cathcart from the thieving politicians of our times, for example? Is our infamous fodder scam not every bit as ridiculous as Milo’s cotton scam? What is the difference between Captain Black’s Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and the enduring crusade of the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement to divide the nation into those who worship Ram and those who do not? Are the offices of power any more accessible to the common man in India than Major Major is to his squadron?

This, in my opinion, is what sets Catch 22 apart from other important works of satire and other expressions of anti-war sentiment. It has all of the horror of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, all of Vonnegut’s dry sarcasm and psychological unrealism from ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ and it surpasses, in my opinion, in sheer morbidity, its descriptions of a psychotic dystopia as envisioned by Anthony Burgess in ‘A clockwork orange’ or George Orwell in ‘1984’ and, in fact, by an entire generation of science fiction writers, in its sheer moral bleakness. For this is not science fiction. It is reality.

Yes. Catch 22 is a funny book. It’s funny in the macabre sort of way that would make a zombie laugh. But this is not an easy book to read. It is an exercise in reading. It taunts the reader. It is maddening. It enjoys being difficult. It took me four attempts to read, and more than a month. It involves taking a long, hard look at the way we live our lives and questions all that we hold to be absolute truth. It makes us realize that we live in hard, desperate times where the boundaries between comedy and tragedy; between real horror and fantasy; indeed, between the choices that decide life and death are increasingly unclear. These are times of incredible cruelty. Of celebrated incompetence. Of deceit. Of intolerance. Of greed. And above all – of a deliberate, cold inhumanity.

And yet – this is a book that is also about hope. About a stubborn piece of rock that refuses to give in to the forces that surround it. Yossarian is selfish – true. He is a coward, he is deceitful, he is a congenital pessimist and he is hardly your archetypal hero. But what he also is, is a sublime expression of the integrity of the individual. He is our answer to the Nazi State and the right-wing Hindutva fanatic. He reminds us that our standards are absolute – and can never be set relative to those defined by a collective simply because we happen to be part of the same society. He represents what will die the day we do so. He is not morally dead. He is, perhaps, the most morally vibrant hero of post-War literature.

We have been taught time and again that the individual’s greatest freedom in a democratic state is the right to vote. Yossarian reminds us that there is another freedom that is perhaps as significant as the right to vote. It is the right to refuse. And it is this right that finds its voice – in fact, this is the voice of a generation that Heller has exquisitely captured – in the twisted, tangled, mad tale that is Catch 22.

Babies are demons: Based on a true story

2008-04-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Babies are evil,
Babies are vile.
Oh! They look simple but
They're quite full of guile.

They kick and they bite
And scream with much might!
They drool and they're wily
And altogether slimy.

Flinging and flailing,
And whining and wailing;
Bawling and crawling
And frankly, appalling.

Whoever says babies are bundles of joy
Certainly never had a little baby boy
Mistake his head for a warm, fragrant loo
To decorate with tiny bits of little baby poo.

Taking stock..

2008-04-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

..of my eighteen continuous years of education, ten random lessons really worth learning were:

..that people are defined by their willingness to speak up against folly, prejudice and injustice and that there is no excuse for the ones who don't.

..there is merit in arguing heatedly about everything. Yes. Even about whether mosquitos have eyes. It builds the ability to reason, and more importantly, perhaps, the ability to listen carefully and most importantly, perhaps, the ability to filter bullshit.

..the best friendships are the ones that survive these heated arguments. Yes. Even shouting matches at three in the morning on cold railway platforms. And no. There is no such thing as a Hindu state.

..some of the most enjoyable friendships require a complete reversal of judgment. Even shameless death-level CP putters who freeride and land up at your one-bedroom flat only to kick you out of your own bed onto the sofa are sometimes worth it.

..heroes surround us in the most unexpected places, and with inexhaustible patience, a quick word and quiet smiles remind us that the way ahead is long.

..there are times when you just have to push back. The sheer joy of watching the Grindhouse movies in your room on a Monday afternoon while desperate wing-mates struggle with a pop-quiz on option pricing is unmatched.

..there are no wrong decisions. Or right ones, for that matter. There are simply choices, and the choice that closes a window always opens a hatch.

..you must prioritize. But your friends and your football team come first.

..it is perfectly acceptable to be nineteen all your life. To divide your day into musical phases, read science fiction and actually wonder about superpowers and worlds ruled by robots, wear oversize t-shirts and never have a plan for the future, even if it means traveling some paths you never meant to and sometimes, never wanted to.

..in the end, it'll all work out. Keep the faith.

Return of the Reviewer

2008-04-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my greater maturity, decreased mobility and other similar, often undesirable infirmities brought on by old age, this, my first real vacation in four years, I decided, would be dedicated to quiet perusal of the overwhelming mountains of books painstakingly accumulated through diligent tri-annual visits to Flora Fountain and Landmark. And as it always has for nearly four years, my friend who once corrupted me by suggesting that I read this, it all begins with Gibbon. Every night, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire stares maliciously at me out of its muddy brown cover, inviting me, tauntingly, to renew my associations with Galerius, Tacitus, Constantius, Arcadius and their ilk. And I am trying. I really am. With color-coded notes, cross-references, endless wiki-searches and more. And still only a hundred and fifty pages into the dratted thing. Some day I will overcome.

The tenuous relationship with Gibbon notwithstanding, the vacation has been extraordinarily rewarding, reading-wise. For starters, I finally finished four of the five books in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Now dedicated fans seem to think GRRM is quite the cat's whiskers but I refuse to be convinced, even though A Song of.. is immensely entertaining. GRRM keeps killing off important characters with impunity, and while this is unexpected (even shocking) at the start, things slowly become more predictable by the fourth book and also, the grotesquely large cast ensures that individually, each character ends up being simply a woefully inadequate, muddling caricature of sorts. Tolkien is still my undisputed master of fantasy.

Next up was The Complete Star Wars, the six books being based on George Lucas' screenplays for the movies. The six Star Wars stories appear to operate on a simple premise - the unending battle between good and evil, represented by the two sides of The Force; the Sith and the Jedi. There are more failings than I would care to point out, and events are often so incredibly contrived that one laughs in sheer despair, but what makes the series truly endearing is an unforgettable set of quirky characters; oddballs all, from the wise Jedi master Obi Wan to the continuously bungling Jar Jar Binks, and a studious avoidance of preaching of any sort. There are, fortunately, no moral stands in the Star Wars world - as Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi hero transforms into Darth Vader, a ridiculously dressed but suitably villanous villain, before finally redeeming himself in the final act. Yoda might be wont to say, "Experience it, you must".

In keeping with the recent fantasy fetish, Neil Gaiman's American Gods was next on my reading list; a strange cocktail of zombies, legions of Gods (largely Norse), mythology and Americana among other things. In a nutshell, America has forgotten its old Gods, raising new ones -not very imaginatively called Pollution, Media and the Internet, for instance. The old Gods are rallied by a mysterious Wednesday (Odin) and his sidekick, a fairly shady hero called Shadow in a last desperate stand. Except that Shadow realizes right at the end that even Gods can deceive, and the whole thing is a two-man con setup by Odin and Loki. As dark and brooding as Sandman, as funny as Good Omens and every bit as kickass as Anansi Boys. Gaiman are.

As a furious airport read, also picked up Matthew Reilly's Ice Station, which was highly recommended by a friend, and even compared favorably to Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. So the plot is something like this - at a distant US outpost in Antarctica, researchers have just discovered what seems to be an alien spacecraft. Something kills the team of researchers, though, and a team of US Marines led by Lt. Shane Schofield is sent in to investigate. The French and the British are interested too, though, and Schofield's own unit has been compromised by the ICG, and is being eliminated slowly. Schofield, on his way to exposing the secret of the ICG and protecting the alien spacecraft (which is not alien at all, incidentally) kills a crack team of French commandos, sinks a French submarine, survives a killer whale attack with his bare hands, obliterates twenty SAS commandos with a nitrogen charge, escapes a nuclear bomb and finally flies the spacecraft from 3000 feet below the ice surface to a nearby US aircraft carrier. All in one day. Phew. Talk about a hard day's work.

Saved up the best for the last though, with Joseph Heller's Portrait of an artist, as an old man. His last book, and perhaps his funniest - and this is the man who wrote Catch 22, Closing Time and Something Happened - the book is a semi-autobiographical account of a frustrated writer, Eugene Pota (Heller himself), who shot to fame with his first book and was never able to match it subsequently. In a bid to go out in a blaze of glory, he considers, for his last book, ideas as diverse as a modern version of Tom Sawyer, Hera's frustrations with the philandering Zeus and even a sexual biography of his wife. Astoundingly funny, the book is full of genuine fall-out-of-your-seat passages and for someone who often attempts to write and fails with nearly equal frequency, touches home with each chapter. Sadly, Heller died shortly after finishing this book. All I have to say is "Thank you, Mr. Heller".

So that about rounds it up. Interesting new acquisitions include Noam Chomsky's Reasons of State, John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, an anthology of English poetry from 1940-60, Sweet Bird of Youth and other plays by Tennessee Williams, Gerald Durrell's Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Daphne Du Maurier's The Loving Spirit. Updates as and when I get done. Happy vacationing all!

Summer Song

2008-04-02T00:03:00.000-07:00

There was a time, not so long ago, when I once looked forward to vacations. Searing, dusty Ahmedabad summer afternoons filled with two-a-side cricket matches in the back lawn with one-tip-one-hand catching. Summer camps above Manali, complete with freezing dips in the Beas, ice-masks and pick-axes at the heady heights of fourteen thousand feet that always felt like Everest at the ripe age of twelve. Annual pilgrimages to Shanku's water park, the 24 hour journey on the Howrah Express to mutton chops in Nagpur, the intolerable smell of fresh ghee being mass produced in Aji's always busy Hyderabad kitchen; and as I grew up, long sessions of snooker, hours spent smashing badminton shuttles at the unsmiling coach at Sports Club and impromptu jams in Vineet's basement. The unspoken delights of ice-creams that always melted too fast, swimming pools, soppy movies, unlimited access to video games, scraped knees and happy hearts. Yes. Summer always had potential.

Unsent

2008-03-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've written for as long as I can remember. Embarrassing poems, detective stories where the butler always did it (and usually by page four - I like my short stories short), schoolboy essays, letters, movie reviews and opinions on everything from food to free will. Four blogs have played host to these periodic outbursts of verbosity, eventually fading away into nothingness every time the words dried up; relegated to some obscure, god-forsaken corner of virtual memory.

Somehow I continue to write, hopeful as ever; all good intentions and witticisms, only to shut shop as soon as my limited influences become too obvious to be ignored, my interests predictable, and as soon as the perverse fear of a misplaced word begins to outweigh the force of the thought it represents. And yet, like the moth drawn to the flame that consumes it, I write.

Perhaps I never told you. But I have written for you as well. You do not know who you are. In all likelihood, you never will. I could not tell you. Let it be known, though, that I have waited. That I have bandied my deepest fears, my wildest hopes and my shallowest joys with you, whom I hardly know. That in another time and another place, I was you and you were me, reader, and that in discovering you, I discover myself.

All that you can't leave behind

2008-02-25T12:29:00.000-08:00

"Graduation is like a speedball."

It's strange how I always seem to be able to draw a parallel between anything and drugs. But anyway. That's a story for another time. This thought hits me in the middle of a fevered, last-minute preparation session for the last end-term exam of IIM life. On the one hand is an unbelievable sense of relief at the thought of never having to read four articles on agency theory all saying the same thing and cross-referencing each other to boot. None of us really needs this all-nighter to be perfectly honest. And still, we sit grimly in the room staring at questions we've done perfectly three times already. "Just in case", we reassure ourselves, smiling only when our fourth-time answer matches our third answer, and, incidentally, our first and second answers as well.

"Maybe we're way off-track and all our answers are wrong", I venture. More grim silence as this is absorbed. Perhaps it isn't the answer that matters at all, though. Maybe all we're trying to do is hang on to this one night for as long as we can. Nothing special about this night, really. A standard exam night. The standard 3 AM trip to Athica's for discussions on capital structure choices over a steaming glass of far too sweet tea followed by a return to the books, endless notes and old question papers that will last well into the morning.

Is this as good as it gets? I'm afraid so.

Paradoxically, that's exactly what sets this night apart: its utter lack of anything remarkable. Shrouded in its hackneyed everyday-ness, it reminds me of everything and everyone I'm going to miss come next month. By the time we get back, there's a heavy cloak of silence no-one is willing to breach. Maybe we're all thinking the same thoughts. Then again, maybe not. Either way, the solitude is appreciated.

The silence in the hostel is stifling when I get back. As I struggle with the difference between optional and mandatory convertibles, Winamp decides to do some soul-searching, shuffling through Trent Reznor, the Drop Kick Murphys and Fleetwood Mac before finally settling into Shankar Mahadevan's melancholy 'Maa'. All pretence at academic endeavor given up, I tune out

The speedball high is long gone by now and for the first time in my life I have this desperate wish that there'd be infinitely many more exams to trap me and these last few hours for all time. By the time I snap it's nearly 7 in the morning and I've been listening to Maa for almost two hours. Time to start the final run-up to the final exam of the final term of what might be my final tryst with academics for the next few years at the very least. Total downer.

On the upside, though, I will have breakfast for the first time in weeks.

Something Corporate this way comes

2008-02-17T01:30:00.000-08:00

Seven days to go. Feels weird sometimes. In another week we won't be waking up to Daga's daily ablutions, sitting nervously in lectures on Advanced Corporate Finance wondering if there's an in-class quiz or having 3 AM discussions at Athica's over cheese-maggi and a steaming cup of double-chai.

The times/they are/a changin'.

Twelve people asked me last night what I plan to do a week from now. I try to sound sure. Try to sound confident, upbeat even. The more I talk to them - future investment bankers, fund managers, consultants all - the more I realize that deep down they want me.. no.. need me to sound sure too. To confirm, through my certainty, that all our choices aren't simply shallow compromises. And though I went through the motions twelve times I'm as confused as ever.

"You're a banker through and through boss. I know you.", says a friend. He's slightly inebriated, I'll grant, but he means it. I know he does. He's told me a hundred times since our first day on campus.

"Tu Bain types ka banda hai." says another soon-to-be consultant.

"Write", advised an old friend with whom I once discussed the joys of traipsing through icy Russian wastes over SMS. Those were the days.

Banker, consultant, writer - the more I listen to the people I'm with the more I feel like a pretender. And what when I'm found out?

Well, who are you?/Who are you?/Who, who, who, who?

So here's the plan I have for now.

1. Catalyst Ventures. What do we do? We fund businesses that need less than a crore to get their operations going. Do we have the fund? Yes. Do we do consulting? Yes. How long have we been doing it? Five months. How many clients do we have? Six and counting.

Where's this going? The country's first and largest seed fund by 2010 and recruitment at the alma-mater on Day Zero by 2011.

2. The India trip is on. Three months, one person, second-class train compartments, rickety buses, the entire Indian border. Yes. Starting at Mangalore, south to Kanyakumari, back north to Calcutta, through the North-East, across Bihar and UP to Delhi, all the way to Ladakh, down to Rajasthan and the Pakistan border, west to Dwarka, on to Mumbai and finally back to Mangalore through Goa. Why? Wanderlust and the book. Move over Paul Theroux.

3. At some point in the not-so-distant but not-so-near future either, I'm going to return to school. Berkeley and Sproul Hall it will be. What will you do? I don't know. When? I don't know.

As always, I have no clue where any of this is going, or if it's going anywhere at all. But what the hell.

You will still be here tomorrow/But your dreams may not.

The 5000 word review

2008-01-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a month now since I started this book review thing every ten days or so. One of the interesting things I've realized is that three sentences usually suffice for a complete review, brevity being the soul of wit and so on. That's a hundred words or less, usually, depending on whether I decide to cheat with compound sentences or not.

Imagine my happiness, then, at discovering a book review component to an otherwise humdrum career growth course I've managed to get myself into. This was before I realized I needed a word count of five thousand, and might have to read a famous person's biography. Now to any self-respecting CAT-admitted IIM student, this can only mean picking (with six sigma accuracy) one out of Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca or Lance Armstrong. Fortunately they disallowed fiction, or I'm sure (with eight sigma accuracy) that we'd see the usual hordes of reviews of The Alchemist or scarily enough, the usual misintrepretation of The Fountainhead. Horror.

So anyway. Yours truly, in a move of characteristic dickery picked Charles Cross' Room Full of Mirrors, a Jimi Hendrix biography. With his biography of Kurt Cobain (Heavier than Heaven), Charles Cross seems to now have become the definitive expert on left-handed guitarists born in Seattle to broken families, who died at the age of twenty-seven. Whatever. RFoM traces Hendrix's perennially troubled personal and professional lives. Cross' interviews are detailed, and he has a remarkable ability to higlight the startling schizophrenia that made Hendrix the superstar so different from Hendrix the musician. Total high point: Hendrix picking up Sgt. Pepper's three days after the album released and playing it back his own way to Brian Epstein and The Beatles at a farewell concert in London.

Pity the instructors aren't likely to appreciate the sheer, ball-shattering potential that a Miles Davis-Jimi Hendrix collaboration could've had, or the awesomeness of a guy who, at one point, played to a crowd that included Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend. Seriously good shite. C are there, however. Oh well.

The week actually began with me proudly showing off Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, based on the Philip K Dick novel to Gautam and SK. Half an hour into the movie while I was busy raving about the Waking Life type visuals, SK began to let out a couple of stentorian snores and Gautam seemed to suddenly have found something astronomically interesting at a distant spot on the far wall. Philistines. Needless to say, an indignant retreat was beaten, and I retired to H-115 with the novel.

A Scanner Darkly has a tortuous plot that revolves around society being debilitated by drug abuse and a mysterious character (played by Keanu Reeves in the movie) who is an undercover policeman called Fred tailing a drug-peddler called Bob Arctor (also Keanu Reeves, and, in fact, also Fred). The entire plot is as convoluted and topsy-turvy throughout, and remains largely unclear all the way to the last chapter. The book is one of the darkest I've read for quite some time, and in a Requiem for a Dream-esque ending, PKD reserves no redemptions for any of his characters.

Also finished PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the following night, the book that inspired Bladerunner. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, the book deals with a bounty-hunter, Rick Deckard and his hunt for six stray humanoid robots. Deckard's motivation is simply to earn enough money to buy himself a real animal in a world ravaged by nuclear fallout where animals are rare enough to be a status symbol. Interestingly, the movie and the book are completely divergent in their plots, and where the movie ends with Rutger Hauer's fantastic 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe' dialogue and is largely about the replicants' desperate desire for life, the book itself is about Deckard and his desperate search for meaning in a violent, lonely world.

Ended the week with Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Oddly enough, Milan Kundera didn't turn out to be the slightly pseud Haryanvi I thought he sounded like, but a Czech author instead. The book itself is centered around two love stories and deals with marriage, infidelity, chance, choice, integrity and national identity, all of which weave in and out of each other continuously in Kundera's almost philosophical prose.

So another decent fortnight, all things said and done. Next week promises to be interesting with Douglas Adams' The long, dark tea-time of the soul and Neil Gaiman's American Gods lined up first thing. Time for the weekly Advanced Corporate Finance surprise quiz now. Must pretend to be surprised. Later all.

For Varun: Sepia Overdose

2008-01-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

We were hit by a storm. The sort that blows rooftops away, lifts unwitting cows a hundred feet into the air or picks up police cars in Virginia and lets them off in Maryland. We'd been caught unprepared and had found makeshift shelter in a nook in a tunnel perpendicular to the wind. Things flew past our little hole at full speed. There were times we couldn't figure out what things. And then I saw the dog, not ten feet away. The little fellow was fighting a losing battle against the force of the wind, being blown sideways through the tunnel as he tried to scramble towards us, and safety. I shouted to him and waved frantically, hoping he'd notice, but the wind blew my voice away. Must've looked funny to him. I shuffled out as far as I could, without leaving our little hole, to see if I could get a hold on him and reel him in. Just as B. hung on to my legs from behind and my arms ventured out into the storm, reaching for the dog, he looked me straight in the eye - that way that dogs do, head cocked to one side, like they're sizing you up and can see right into your soul - and gave up.

I woke up with a nasty pain just below my ribs like I'd been punched in the gut and hurried out for a glass of water. I've had this dream for as long as I can remember. Each time, in my opinion, it's been driven by a desperate, deep-seated fear of loss - sometimes it's a dog that gets blown away, other times it's a faceless man, sometimes it's a known face, and on some occasions it's even been me.

Last night was no different, except that I was awake when the dream hit. I'd spent most of the day wondering about Varun and hoping against hope that the transplant would work. It didn't. It still hasn't sunk in. Probably never will.

Spent two minutes on the phone with Ashwin. "We grew up with this guy", he says. What can I say? We did. We traveled on bus route 42 for five damn years together. Played cricket, basketball and badminton every evening with him. Watched Anupama Verma at Chaos with the same incredulous expressions and gave her a 10 on 10 for her legs. Shared the same JEE dreams for two years. These things just aren't supposed to happen. They're not, they're not, they're fucking just not supposed to happen.

All night I remembered what he wrote on his blog once. Something to the tune of "When I die I don't want anyone to mope around. I want them to get piss drunk and have a huge party. That's the only way to respect death."

Fuck you man. Fuck you. If the dead are in the stars and I ever see a shooting star that isn't going straight, I'll know it's you and that you're drunk off your ass, probably showing The Big Man a good time. I know you're going to live it up wherever you are, while we can only drink alone with a handful of memories and the ghosts of a past we'd all but forgotten.

Varun Sinha
(December 1983 - January 2008)

A little night reading

2008-01-02T22:03:00.001-08:00

All quiet on the reading front this last week. Have been too busy sunning myself on north Goa's luscious beaches and trying not to look too awkward on dance floors in central Goa. As a true Mithunbhakt, I can now honestly say that "I am a disco dancer". I will hereby answer to the name CheetaHil.

Managed to lay my hands on Lee Child's Echo Burning, another in his hard-hitting Jack Reacher series. Hard-hitting in the sense that Jack Reacher flattens countless bad guys, including two guys who discover the multiple uses of snooker cues in a bar. Hardy har. The story is simple - Jack Reacher is drifting around Texas, beautiful woman in expensive car picks him up, claims to be in grave danger, Reacher kills half her town, she's fine again. And all this in a paltry 300 page, hour and a half read. Hot Damn! Instant gratification for the masses.

Next, finally got down to Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar. Followed Theroux on his travels from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central and back on trains like The Orient Express, The Khyber Mail, The Frontier Mail, The Rajdhani and the Trans-Siberian Express, some of which I remembered from history textbooks. The best part is Theroux's ability to make even a desultory journey on a Chennai local sound as exciting as a journey to the center of the Earth. The icing on the cake, personally, was the Howrah Mail leg, a train my parents and I fastidiously rode on for the better part of my childhood on our annual journey from Ahmedabad to Nagpur, and his description of the vegetarian special meal, that appears not to have changed in fifty years. Surreal stuff.

Began re-reading Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India as well, and realized I was nowhere near as impressed as I was the first time. Khilnani begins by chastising the failures of one-sided versions of Indian history (in all of four pages) and then proceeds with a middle-of-the-road, muddling version that is simply a long-winded, sesquipedalian ode to Nehru. I'll stick to Romila Thapar next time, thank you.

The high-point of the week, though, was journalist-writer Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, translated from the Spanish. I seem to have developed a peculiar fascination for authors who write in Spanish - Borges and Neruda being two prime examples. In this collection of articles from El Pais, Vargas Llosa is simply awesome - incredibly erudite, funny and strikingly passionate - whether writing about Spain's literary heroes in Shadows of Friends (a beautiful title I intend to use for a post of my own), his visit to Bob Marley's shrine, the paintings of Vermeer, the eccentricities of Octavio Paz or the pitfalls of capitalism. In one word - exquisite.

A slow week, all in all. Next week doesn't look too promising either, what with Advanced Corporate Finance, impending mid-terms and a book review. I'm still not sure I've managed to convince the instructors to let me study Jimi Hendrix for a course on Career Growth and Leadership. Oh well. On a more positive note, have acquired a fantastic set of reading material for future perusal courtesy Crossword's special offers and Richa's newfound liquidity. This includes Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso, an H.G. Wells omnibus (I'm finally going to read The island of Dr. Moreau), The Best of Bram Stoker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of my melancholy whores, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an obligatory Martin Cruz Smith set with Gorky Park and Nightwing, an English translation of Sankar's Chowringhee, and best of all, a hard-cover edition of Amitav Ghosh's Dancing in Cambodia, at large in Burma.

So Happy New Year to y'all, and happy reading. Until next week.

Coming of age

2008-01-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

I want to be fourteen again. To go back to school in a white half-shirt that would invariably begin to resemble the color of my cream pants by late afternoon. To jostle with busy looking people on the crowded back seats of rickety municipal buses, stand on the footboard, lean forward and stick my face into the searing wind of an Ahmedabad summer. To eat messy samosa chaat at the thela near Roopalee Cinema, whose A-rated morning shows were once an object of mystique and reverence. To bunk English lectures and practice volleyball with Vidit, Rohit, Ninad, Ankit and Devesh or sample the mutton kebabs at Famous, right across the road. To play those five-day test matches at the Vikram Sarabhai ground where Abhishek would bat for two days and score two-hundred runs while the rest of us would tirelessly attempt to get him out. To watch the IIM students at the basketball court with awe and bang into the pole while trying hopelessly inadequate slam dunks. To visit theaters in groups of fifteen and howl, clap, stomp and heckle at Johnny Lever jokes. To fly kites on Vidit's terrace on Uttarayan while his mother's delicious puri-chana, undhiyu and jalebis waited below. To hang around CG Road on New Year's on scooters we weren't licensed to drive and ogle wistfully at happy couples and groups of girls till the police arrived with lathis and drove us away. To go to keyboard class on Monday and Friday evenings and spend hours understanding the difference major sevenths and major elevenths. To be dusty, dirty, scruffy, raucous, politically incorrect, bawdy, uninhibited, wild and free again.

Of all the things I wanted to be at fourteen, twenty-three was not one of them.

Tonight

2007-12-16T14:23:00.000-08:00

Tonight I will write of sadness.
Of fears and darkness
In the farthest recesses of caverns
Long explored and abandoned.
Caverns shuttered, barricaded, razed,
Never to awaken to freedom.

Tonight I will write of sadness.
Of the many sounds of silence like
The sounds of thought on lonely walks,
Of the quiet courage of conviction in futility.
Of defiantly raised heads in last stands
And glory long faded and forgotten.

Of the finality of dying conversations,
Leaving guests, and the sad swish
Of curtains in vacant houses.
Embers of disappointment now
The ruined remnants of
The once mighty edifices of hope.

The week that was

2007-12-12T04:30:00.000-08:00

"So what've you been doing this last week at home?", she asks. We've reached that stage of the conversation already. Neither of us is much good when on the telephone, it must be admitted. So much for human technology, connecting people and all of that.

Long silence. Not surprisingly, I have no idea and ignorance is duly professed.

Longer silence. "I think it's time for a diary", comes the firm reply. I think so too. I've tried my hand at keeping diaries at various points of time over the last eight years, in fact. With relatively little success, it must be said. When I started out I thought I'd do a little Doogie Howser-ish diary with little gems of wisdom for life every night after I'd finished operating on the poor old man who needed a heart transplant or pulling bullets out of a dying gangster's intestines. Too bad life doesn't always work that way.

If there's nothing strange/in your neighborhood/Who you gonna call?

Witness previous diary entries.

12th May, 1999
R: 2, W: 0

When the only thing interesting that happens to you on a daily basis is two runs in a three-a-side gully cricket match you know it's time for the Batman costume, the pre-16 medical degree or the Nazi concentration camp.

Dear Diary. So long.

So anyway. "Last week", I tell her, "was reading week". And since that's the only exciting that happened last week, that's the only thing my diaries will record from now on.

The week began with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Isaac Asimov's Robots of Dawn. Quite kicked at having finally finished the entire Robots series. Foundation next. Had unpleasant dreams about R. Daneel Olivaw defusing thermonuclear devices on a Maori island in the 14th century. Made mental note to self about dropping confusing habit of reading two books simultaneously. On a serious note - Cloud Atlas was disappointing. Six stories supposedly weave in and out of each other, linked (weakly) by a comet shaped scar on the backs of the six protagonists - total MacGuffin. They also kept appearing, rather irritatingly, in each others' stories. Bollywood's tried this whole punar-janam, cross-reference too. They called it Jaani Dushman.

Went on and finished Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz. Call me a cynic, but for a Nobel laureate, the book sounded incredibly like an episode of Bidaai. Beautiful courtesan falls in love with arrogant Pharaoh who reliniquishes duties towards kingdom, gets everyone mad at him and gets killed by angry subjects. She consumes poison. All in the space of a hundred pages - sort of like a crash-course in Romeo and Juliet.

Finished Che by David Sandison. Will acquire life-size photograph from the grandfather and his Ajay Bhavan office during next Delhi trip. Saved the best for last, though. Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Continental Op. Sam Spade is simply the toughest, smartest, most badass private-eye in North America - Jack Reacher is a close second though. If I ever get down to writing that first novel or making that first film noir, this is how it's going to be. Sample this:

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second "you".

"People lose teeth talking lke that." Spade's voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. "If you want to hang around you'll be polite."

'Nuff said.

Next week
The complete Star Wars
Great French short stories (edited by Germaine Bree)
The Great Indian bazaar (Paul Theroux)
Crisis on Infinite Earths

Homecoming

2007-12-11T00:54:00.000-08:00

The neem tree is gone. A tall mango tree stands in its place, bringing with it an assortment of twittering birds, lazy cats in a Broadway-esque variety of colors and stripes, a stray langur and a squealing litter of half-breed pups. The round, permanently unstable dining table is gone, giving way to a far more sober, square (pun intended) ebony affair. The study, where I once grew up - home to the guitar, keyboard and tabla and site of the cacophonous jam sessions of our long abandoned band, doubling up as a library built from pain-staking collection of such rarities as a first-edition of Toru Dutt's "Ancient legends and ballads of Hindustan", an autographed copy of the poems of Nissim Ezekiel and hard-bound editions of the complete works of Anton Chekhov - now looks like it came out of some dystopian future with its assortment of computers, its six-sided asymmetry and a giant glass wall facing onto the lawns. Wireless internet, flat-screen TV, surround sound speakers - the house has come a long way from its dial-up internet, Buniyaad and AIR days. In ways no longer imperceptible, especially to one who has been away as long as have, these serve as reminders that the world as I once knew it and held to be sacrosanct, has changed.

"We of that time", as Neruda would say, "are no longer the same."

And yet, in the midst of this tumult, campus children still argue with harried security guards for the right to play at Louis Kahn Plaza, Kanubhai the mad carpenter and a veritable modern-day Michelangelo still hangs paintings at wild angles all over the house and Pushpaben's wafer-thin rotis continue to melt in my mouth while she worries about the IIMB mess and how I eat too little. And then I realize that the constancy I seek so desperately is in my father's stubborn insistence that Tendulkar be dropped from the Indian team, in quiet, efficient Prabhu picking me up at the airport and in the old electrician's smile. In the little moments that we so often ignore, that make up the stuff of greater, more abiding memories.

"The song", as Led Zeppelin would say, "remains the same."