A game, no more

While I was reclining on my couch (metaphorically, for the past two decades) witnessing the cadence of the most thrilling to the very humiliating moments of my country's premier sport, Rahul Dravid played out an entire career, and retired. And, with that single stroke ended my journey which began with a juvenile craze that once became a fervent passion and eventually tempered to an almost geriatric understanding that Cricket is just a game.

Yes, it is just a game; But one that threads together my adolescent years. Without it, the memories lay strewn, tattered and unconnected. Without it, those classrooms seem like interrogation rooms; the school corridors like haunted alleys; friends and teammates like faceless strangers. Without it my teenage years are devoid of an identity of their own.

In '96 while the promising greenhorns in the national team were struggling to establish a name for themselves, I was doing so too (or so I had thought) in my own way. The class team had Aritra, Sreekanto, Debarshi, Partha, Partho, and myself (stereotypical Bengali nomenclature as you would expect in a school located in the heart of Bengal). But in our heads we were McGrath, Ganguly, Dravid, Klusener and Azhar. Ironically, we had never touched the leather ball. All our repertoire remained restricted to the naivety of the tennis ball. But just as a wooden sword in a gladiator's hand fails to diminish his valiance so did the tennis ball in reducing the bravado in our fledgling minds. We had our own demons to fight against though. There was no "pitch" to play on. So we laid plans to level a patch of land in the front lawn of a friend's house. There wasn't money enough to spend on cricket balls, so we planned to buy nets that would prevent the ball from landing all too often in a nearby gutter. Days and hours for practice were chalked out on the penultimate pages of every notebook. We kept planning as the years passed, as the classroom courses of history geography, physics,chemistry and mathematics whizzed by.

As the national team kept galloping and occasionally stumbling over obstacles on and off the field, so did we. The delicate balance between gleefully spending hours in the cricket field and returning home to cajole a guilty conscience to study kept my adolescent mind busy. Exams came an went like milestones along a highway. With them came the agony of a mediocre result and the ensuing ecstasy of a hiatus to breathe free. Strange is the world in which an adolescent mind dwells. Sometimes, parents seem the worst enemies; Neighbours, even the few well-wishing ones seem like utter nuisance; And relatives seem at times like Dr. Jekyll and at other times like Mr. Hyde. I had cricket, to sail through those years of insanity. I just kept playing it, watching it on TV, and revisiting the catches I had taken and the strokes I had played in my prolonged dreams. It shielded me till i opened the Pandora's box of adulthood.

The national team had matured, and so had I. No longer was Ganguly being cursed for his refusal to carry drinks. No longer was Dravid's slow batting being questioned. Nor was my future a talking point among semi-literates housewives (who had moved on to better gossips). The national team was travelling well overseas, and so was I (the proverbial shaat shomudra tero nodi). I was not afraid of the exams anymore. They came and went as before like bouncers from a bowling machine that I had learned to duck under. The pitches were alien and greener, but the national team was standing tall. I played occasional cricket in college, but it did not have that fervent feel. I missed my team, as much as I missed the teenage me. I kept watching the national team though, fighting tooth and nail (as I did much the same to grab a seat in an overcrowded TV room in the hostel). Like everyone in a country obsessed with the game, I appended my desire, ambition, expectation and frustration with the boys in blue (and on occasion in whites). The cheers and curses sounded hoarser though. The voice-box was indicating that time has run itself out.

What has followed is the inevitable slide. Those greenhorns, who have become the stalwarts and the pall bearers of the very game are eventually putting down their gauntlet, one after the other. I keep watching the game, like an octogenarian gazing at the television set not registering the events transpiring before the hazel eyes. I think i understand now why a generation still talks about Sobers, Vishwanath, Kanhai or Marshall despite witnessing the likes of Lara, Sachin and Wasim more recently. That Rahul Dravid would walk away one day was inevitable. But that he, along with the rest of his pack has gifted a basket of grandfather-tales to our entire generation is absolutely amazing and warrants celebration!

The Moon and Sixpence

How does one evaluate oneself? How does one answer the question; why am I what I am? I believe that in my case the answer lies in the exploration of my past and delving deep into the chain of heuristic experiences (voluntary or involuntary) that have made me what I am to this day.

For a single child brought up in the intensive unit of parental care I think an oversimplified approach would be to evaluate the job my parents did in bringing me up, however conceited the idea may sound. Parenting is a behemoth task, and I am aware of being grossly under-qualified to evaluate it, especially when I am the product. However, for someone who thrives in doubt about ones own faculties/abilities/qualities, it is a smart idea; And, like most smart ideas there is a paucity of courage in it. It is like one of the numerous "Gandhi vs Bose" or "Jew vs Arab" pseudo-elitist discussions that one keeps hearing where people often cite examples that in reality invalidate the very point they are trying to make. Here, I may end up doing the same. So beware! The black sheep intends to blame the shepherd just as an asymmetric clay pot blames its clumsiness on the hands of the potter.

I believe myself to be phlegmatic. Definition: Not easily excited to action or display of emotion. Despite a seemingly moribund air about the word there is a certain aura attached to it that I am fond of. There is something warrior-like about the word despite its sense of ennui. Being phlegmatic helps me filter out the several discordant harmonics in life and concentrate on the fundamental tone. I have found it handy before examinations and interviews (irrespective of the outcome). I find it handy in a crowd where there is a struggle for oneupmanship, or in a group where one must rudder the flow of discussion while others go awry. I find it to be a balm whenever life throws a headache, or a heartache. One place where I have not found it has been on the cricket field, and there I have paid by failing miserably as a batsman despite having the talent. Being phlegmatic has had its downside too. I have run the risk of being a recluse in a group of friends. My silence has sounded ruder than a yell to people. It has been mistaken as "disinterest" when I have probably been the only one patiently listening. It is nonetheless an invisible cloak that I adorn to safeguard my individuality.

Its root cause may be that I have been a lone child in a family where reading is a primary avocation and emotions are expressed in trickles rather than deluges. More often that not I can remember my mother lying prostrate reading the bi-weekly edition of desh (a Bengali magazine) after completing the household chores even as the city enjoyed its summer siesta. I can remember my father (i.e. in the very little time that we have both been together at home) reading the newspaper or a novel with rapt attention with a hand behind his head as if to form the head-rest of an imaginary arm-chair. A mediocre work was always discussed and advised on, but never extolled. That has helped me tacitly evaluate myself and set a benchmark for my choice of things. So if I do not get overexcited by an average movie, song, game or conversation it is because my mind sets a higher-than-average threshold of titillation. A three hour game of tennis definitely makes me content about my ability, but fails to evince a rant about it to my friends.

I believe and enjoy things that are original. I detest movie remakes(across cultures, languages, and timelines), song remakes, plagiarized books, hackneyed jokes, copied phrases (passed on as ones own), copied styles(again across cultures, languages, and timelines) and mostly, copied ideologies. In this age of technology it is almost too easy to spot a lie but strangely difficult to discern it. For example, it does not take much time to see that the movie Sholay (despite its cult following and colossal standing in Indian cinema) is not an original movie. Nor are the bunch of Spaghetti Westerns from which it was partly stolen; but a handful of movies brilliantly envisioned by a director sitting far east in the land of the rising sun. This discovery does not make me hate Sholay, or the Westerns. However it saddens me that the original is seldom acknowledged its due. I am the type that places Irving and Mallory over Hillary and Norgay. I enjoy Bhupen Hazarika's Ganga as much as I enjoy Paul Robeson's Ol' Man River but only after I have known which precedes which and where the original originated.

This affinity for the "original" comes solely from the teachings of my mother. Ever since I was little boy, I have written my own essays, however unimaginative they may have sounded then while ma had kept a watchful eye on the grammar. She ensured that "guide books","test papers" and "notes" were never a part of my baggage (perhaps that is why I carried a lighter weight on my shoulders always). I have failed miserably in "copying" assignments to submit them "on-time" and have paid a heavy penalty in the form of corporal punishment, remarks, and reprimands. I have inevitably developed a compelling urge to stop mid-way whenever it turned out that the path I intended to traverse had already been traveled. Sometimes I feel like a woodpecker who invariably chooses a teak trunk to peck a hole.

I believe myself to be agnostic. Definition: A person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study. I respect god with my limited understanding of what the word actually means. But i like to read about Socrates, Galileo, Buddha, Newton, Keller, Archimedes and others who have had a greater impact on mankind and the world as a whole than god. Why then do I visit the Dakshineswar Kali temple or the Belur Math ever so often? Stories have fascinated me ever since I was a child. And if those stories had characters who have been real in life, the urge to associate myself with the places where they dwelt or the things that they built/used have been overpowering. So, I prefer a quiet corner of the temple yard where i can sit and wonder how a semi-literate man could have had such an impact on the elites of an entire generation, and continue to do so after a century of his death. I prefer to ruminate on myriad subjects as the clamour of shandhya aarati fills the air. I prefer such behaviour over standing in queue for an hour to have a glimpse of the idol.

As a child I have visited many places of worship with my father. The temples of Bishnupur where we have sat together on torrid afternoons hearing the cuckoo sing or the kingfisher wail from high above. Or witnessed a squirrel making a ball to cushion a newly discovered home among the temple's million crevices. At the Jagannath temple in Puri we have together witnessed a courageous devotee climb the gargantuan structure with bare hands and feet to change the saffron flag on a full moon night. On my father's shoulders I have stood to look beyond the crowd. Never have I felt the urge to fall in that crowd and bow in obeisance to the idol to feel the presence of god. That feeling has come to me easily, and my father always made sure it was not through the illusion of a ritual. I have visited churches and mosques later in life without his shoulders to stand on. And here too, I have not felt the need of a ritual to find myself in the presence of a powerful yet less-understood force.

I love humour especially when it is sardonic. When I was in the sixth standard, my class teacher caught me at a mischief. After a polite reprimand, she had said to me, "Saptarshi, you have a good sense of humour." That was when I first heard the word "humour". It has played an essential role in my life. In my spare time, I plot to ridicule everyone around me, including myself. I like to plan it well, and catch an innocent prey napping. I especially like the pompous ones who have their nose in the cloud and are unable to see the cow-dung they are about to tread on. They are the best! Once again, I inherit it from my father. Sometimes I feel if we were of the same age what a team we would have made! Do not mistake me to be insensitive. I care for the people I make fun of. I care especially to find their threshold of tolerance. It is around that threshold that one must keep prodding until the bubble bursts and the celebrations start! To laugh, one just has to look around to see a world full of funny people. At times I wonder why there was only one Sukumar Roy! The man just looked around, wrote what he saw, had a good laugh, and left! Sometimes the line between genius and ordinary is so thin that one can easily mistake one for the other.

I believe that I am irresponsible. It is something I regularly feel and fight with. It comes naturally to me and is perhaps a direct consequence of having responsible and duty-bond parents. Whenever a responsibility has come my way it has failed to reach me, because it has been already dealt with, not by me. I find that in my solitary world I am fairly responsible ( at least for myself). But In the presence of a wife or a parent I pass it on like a hot potato. I am not good with grocery bills, electric bills, gas bills, phone bills or even dollar bills. I can barely distinguish one from the other. I feel my brain cringe at the mention of the stock market and cannot bring myself to develop interest in the art of making money. All the while I stay not only fully aware of my lack of love for the lucre but also my lack of resolve to shun the comfort that it brings along. I am also socially irresponsible. I do not reply to emails (I however will reply to mails if someone cares to write me one), I do not reply to phone calls, I seldom reply to Facebook comments and "likes". However I remember each one of the emails, call, comments and likes and attach more importance (than an average human) to them by ruminating time and again over why I did not reply. Occasionally, I feel this surge within to redeem myself. It is then that I reply to a six-month old email, or a month old comment, long after their relevance have been lost in time. It is a folly I live with in harmony.

I believe I have opinions that I voice only to myself. I believe it is one of those genetic strains that has skipped a generation since both my parents have strong opinions and have no inhibitions in voicing them. I however am different. I do not care to spend words on an audience that is unwilling to listen. It makes me look hypocritical. If I strongly believe something, why do I not voice it? This behavior originated from several heuristic experience through which I learned that more often than not opinionated people eat their own words. I am a firm believer in the Shakespearean adage, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." So even when I am sure that something is bad, I am open to counter-arguments that may prove it to be otherwise. Hence the behaviour.

Why I am what I am is a question one asks in a constant endeavour to discover oneself. Today, I may not have spelunker-ed anything new about myself, but I am modestly content with the effort. As I said, I hate being lost in the crowd. It would be sad if I moved forward in life with my eyes set on the Moon and never saw the Sixpence lying at my feet.

The Metropolis

My first tryst with this city was more than a decade ago. It was a nascent metropolis then. With every road representing a tunnel formed by a canopy of trees on either sides, it seemed as if Sher Shah's dream of the Grand Trunk Road was finally being realized here. The individual houses, characterized by the mask of a demon's face (usually atop the main entrance), a solar tank on the terrace, and a stairway gracing the outside of the house seemed to be in perfect harmony with their ambiance. The city was a burgeoning metro that had not yet graduated in terms of cunning, complexity, and ruthlessness. The autowallahs, despite the bloodline of their profession did not have the guile that characterized their cousins in the other metros. All you needed to provide was the destination name, and your man-in-khaki would turn the meter on, and take you on a pleasant ride. The food you ate was simple yet unadulterated, much like the people you were likely to meet during a random walk across the city. They did their daily work, but also found time to help you, even if you did not speak their language. Even the gods seemed to bless the city with pleasant weather; A slight yet refreshing chill in the morning, a lukewarm afternoon and an ephemeral drizzle before the end of the day to condition the rise in mercury; Like the icing on a cake.

This was a city that had no metro-rails, no trams, no mono-rails, few construction sites, a single circular-design bus terminus, and a pygmy of a railway station (when compared to Howrah or The Victoria Terminus). It was perhaps an idyllic town amidst the wilderness at the time when its cousins (Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras) were already anointed either as a financial or administrative or military capital of the country by one or several erstwhile empires. Yet, it was striving to raise its green horn among these colossus of cities to claim its rightful place on the country's map.

Somewhere down the line, that desire not to be left out transformed into a passion and eventually a necessity. For better or for worse is a question that I cannot answer (since I haven't spent enough time with her off late). But Bangalore fought a mighty battle to be counted. A decade ago she was a little girl with her hair massaged lavishly in coconut oil, made up in braids and entwined with red ribbons and a strand of mallige. Today she wears a different coiffure, more in line with the occidental taste. Even if by chance you spot her without the Ray-Ban, the maskara will not let you peep into her eyes. She has discarded the old-fashioned pallu and has adorned the checkered Monte Carlo scarf. She is not afraid of the "whistles" any more, but dismisses them as compliments from mortals who suffer from a dearth of expression. The timidity has given way to a certain boldness that stands precariously on the border of being brash. But she does not care. She has taken the cultural swing by its horn and learnt to time a perfect Mexican wave.

Today, the locust-like increase in the number of multiplexes, office complexes, housing complexes, and a plethora of other complexes along with the numerous roads, boulevards and flyovers are a prima facie testimony that the city is fighting well against its aging adversaries, at least on the "infrastructure" front. The overweening billboards are replete with ambitious promises of a Home-Sweet-Home amidst the garden of Eden, for every Adam and Eve who cares to look up. The out-of-vogue individual home-owner too has not fallen far behind. He has draped every tree trunk and electric pole with advertisements that read "1BHK - 8000, 2BHK - 12000, 3BHK - 18000". The city has opened up to let in the Pied-Piper's mice. She has become the Promised Land (where milk and honey flows albeit at an exorbitant price) primarily for a stream of humanity who belong not to the biblical Jewish faith, but to a more modern clan called "IT". The little girl sure has transformed into a shrewd saleswoman. She has marketed herself well.

Today, the young women and men who tread her have a purpose in every footstep. The previously ubiquitous "chappal" has relinquished its popularity to the Nike and Marie Claire. Every T-shirt has an emblem of Armani, or LeeCooper or UCB on it, no matter how "country-made" the caption on its front may seem (I saw a "LeeCooper" which read "I can give headache to an Aspirin"). One secretly desires to voluntarily work for one of these T-shirt makers and provide them ones indigenous two-liners. Surely the idea of cottage industry isn't dead yet. Spike (the bull dog in the Tom and Jerry show) can now die in peace for his namesake now resides on (not "in") every teenager's head.

When you have a million mouths; They will eat. Bangalore knows that. She has strewn her roadsides with food stall aplenty. But, rarely will you find one that sells the traditional dosa, uthappam or kesari bath. No, she is too smart to know what sells among the Pied-Piper's minions. She will hold the Afghan, Punjabi, Bengali, Hyderabadi and other delicacies at the passer-by and stop him on his path every day, till ( like Pavlov's dog) one day he learns to stop by himself and crave for the dishes. It is a trick she has learnt well. As someone once said, "Its nothing personal, its strictly business".

Change to her has come with a compromise. Her honest men-in-khaki have learnt to shed the gentleman in them. They now resemble more a taxiwallah from Kolkata who can smell a tourist from a mile away and refuse to use the meter. They now "quote" a price when you quote a destination. You can dream of a "pleasant ride" still, but in a Meru Cab at five times the price. The canopy over her roads have become less verdant and the typical city-smog has hijacked the once clean atmosphere. The sea of red and amber lights along with the discord of horns on her roads are reminiscent of the infamous traffic-jams of Kolkata. However, through all the transition she has managed to maintain sanity. The innumerable parks that once earned her the Garden City tag; The roads that are kept clean by the timely sweeping of a diligent man; The coconut and maize vendor as you turn a street corner; The smell of coffee; The sight of Palash and African Tulip waiting patiently for a discerning eye. Together they have kept the redolence of the city intact. Bengaluru today is like an old friend who has transformed over the years. Yet her dimpled smile reminds one of the carefree days gone by.

A volte-face that mattered

A sinuous road culminates at the apex of the hillock. It is said that a great emperor once stood on top of it and looked down at the meandering river Daya that had turned crimson with blood. The sight is purported to have transformed the man. A testimony to that legend lies at the base of the hillock etched in stone (in the ancient Pali script).

Two millenniums and two centuries later, the idyllic river still flows albeit belying the morbid sight it once witnessed. A herd of buffaloes lie prostrate on its bank, basking in the sun that beats hard on the anvil of Utkal. The benign calm of the place is eerily deafening, like the introduction of Death in The Seventh Seal. The warm air flowing over the expanse of the region rushes through the nostril, fills the lungs and forces a gasp out of the bystander; As if to say that perusing such a sight only befits a lion-hearted monarch and not a lesser mortal. The land, whose allurement once caused the war (that cost a "million" lives) now gives life in the form of lush green farming fields, as if in an act of penance.


On fulfilling this tryst with history the traveler now walks down the circutous path to where the rock edict lies, at the foot of the hillock. A monolithic elephant (left in its semi-sculpted state) stands sentinel, guarding the edict for two thousand years. Time shows in the eroded tusks and the tired eyes. A dozen rules on morality and benevolence are etched in the stone below. It is the closest to the proverbial "writing on the wall" that I have witnessed in my life. This is not Belshazzar's court; Neither were the inscriptions written by the hand of god. And it wasn't certainly deciphered by Daniel. That these could be the rules charted by the same man who caused the Daya to turn scarlet is beyond the comprehension of a lesser man.


There have been ruthless conquerors like Alexander, Chengis Khan and Julius Caesar. And there have been supreme givers like Mahavira and Buddha. But perhaps none who transitioned from a ruthless ruler to a supreme giver in one lifetime, like Asoka!

As I mull over, I realize how difficult it must have been to change oneself, so late in life, and after much "success". The depth of self introspection required to realize ones own flaws (amidst the "glory" of this success) and the subsequent determination to be able to alter oneself for the better, is unfathomable. Asoka could have left his legacy at Kalinga. History would have remembered him as a great emperor still, like Alexander, Akbar, Caesar and others. Shahrukh would have still made the movie despite being deprived of the melodramatic ending. True, there would have been no Dharmashoka, but the rest of history would have remained unaltered.

Like Asoka, perhaps most humans with even a semi-fertile brain hear the "guilty" verdict often in the courtroom of our head. A student hears it when he cheats in class, the teacher when he answers incorrectly to camouflage his ignorance, the policeman as he accepts a bribe, and a politician as he reads a hollow speech. A "foreign-returned" condescending soul hears it when he complains of filth in his motherland. A writer when he sells plagiarized work, an auctioneer when he sells a fake, et al. I hear it for all the morally incorrect things that I do and the duties that I shirk off as "not mine". To hear that verdict in our little heads is not so much a rare human faculty as is the ability thereafter to walk the path of redemption.

The Asokan edicts evince a complete understanding of the magnitude of the emperor's own guilt (which in his case arose from the taking of innumerable lives) and a subsequent effort to redeem himself. They mostly evince the man's disgust of his own gory "success". Asoka's is a perpetual example to all present day corporate honchos and political heads (as well as to the rest of us with moral/social responsibilities) that standing at the apex does not absolve one of an immoral path traversed to reach there. There is glory not in ensconcing oneself on the mound of dead, but in the ability to accept ones guilt and do a volte-face in pursuit of being a better human.

Of travel and travail

A train journey has always enthralled me with its kaleidoscopic experience. The leisurely moving landscapes, the golden wheat fields interspersed by greener ones; The more hurried string of coconut trees, the motley orchards, the blur of wild shrubs along the railway tracks, the occasional village urchin waving a tattered cloth, the metal rails of the adjacent track, the air garnished by the pungent aroma of diesel, and the distant hoot that heralds the passing of the giant serpent. Together they have left an indelible mark.

I have spent hours sticking my face close to the window grill into the abysmal darkness of the amavasya night or at the haloed aura of a full-moon one. The beauty of the clouds and the sun rays peeping through them (as witnessed from an aircraft window) although spectacular has never been able to replace this experience.

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since I made my last substantial journey in 2005, from Kolkata to Bangalore. The ticket was a paltry Rs 450 then. That it provided a berth in a 3-tier Sleeper Class coach and covered a distance of 2000 kms made the amount seem "paltry". Also, the 50% concession on the ticket price provided those invaluable alms to the hollow pocket of a student returning home for vacation. This pocket-money was invaluable for my sustenance of the journey just like a warm coat would have been to one of Napoleon's soldiers returning from Russia, .

A few things have changed since that time. An addition of Rs 58 to the fare, a couple of bed lamps embedded on the side walls beside each berth, and two 3-pin plug points for the convenience of passengers in the coup. The number of vendors selling puri-sabzi at Bhuvaneshwar station however has dwindled to almost nil. The plastic cups in which pineapple juice used to be sold at the Vijayawada Junction have halved in size, and doubled in price. Also, the juice tastes less of pineapple and more of the ubiquitous "Rail Neer" now. Lastly, the Indian Railway employees have reincarnated in their red black and white checkered uniforms shedding their erstwhile navy blue ones.

Other things have remained gladly the same. The distant hooting of the diesel engine, the breakneck speed and the shaking berths at the advent of the wee hours, the beeline of impatient travelers wishing to get down as the train approaches a station, and scampering to get back inside as it departs from one. The taste of coffee has thankfully remained true to its original self. So have the idli-vada and the dry coconut chutney that so many of my Bengali friends loathed. The latrines have "maintained" their standards and still require the passenger to know the right time during the journey to use them. I have traditionally used them only after the train departed from Vijaywada or Vishakhapatnam, strongly believing that these two are the only stations where the latrines are cleaned and the water tanks refilled.

I was making this trip with my wife. I have narrated many a story about my train journeys to her before, and this was my chance to have her experience the thrills and the perils of undertaking one. Therefore, one must pardon my demeanour at discovering the two pairs of eyes ogling in our direction as if to suggest the screening of a riveting movie.

The middle-aged man and the boy in his early twenties were sitting on the berth facing us. Now, I do not suffer from colour-bias, but the complexion of the two men suggested that they may have taken a fresh dip in a bucket of tar. This made their eyes and teeth seem outstandingly bright. At first, I felt a tad irritated by their constant smile, but soon dismissed it as an aberration caused by the contrast in the colour of the skin and the teeth. The man could be best described as a sooted version of Santosh Dutta (I almost waited with bated breath for him to pounce on a khukri and exclaim eta amaar!). The boy was thinner, more talkative and often used a Bengali dialect that I found difficulty in comprehending. He seemed an impatient sort and liked bossing around the older man. I suppressed a compelling urge to straighten him.

Time was whisking by. My wife and I were busy admiring the beauty of the farmlands as the train rushed through the wheat fields of northern Andhra Pradesh. Not being reared in an agrarian family and harbouring only a minimal knowledge about farming I was finding it difficult to answer my wife's queries about the type of crop, vegetables, reaping seasons et al. The boy heard her, sprang to his feet and with a spark in his eyes started explaining the types of crops to her. Soon we could distinguish the onion fields from the okra, and the tomato plantations from the chili. The man joined in and explained that the haystacks in the center of the fields were residue from machine-threshing of the strands of wheat. He lamented that in southern India they use machines to thresh wheat whereas in Bengal it is still done manually. Their knowledge impressed the ignorant middle-class in us and made them a little more tolerable.

As the train stopped at Vishakhapatnam for the change of engine, a sea of humanity filled the station. Shouts of "anda biryani", and "idli-vada" filled the air that was already saturated by the myriad sounds of children crying, mother's yelling and men bellowing. I joined the crowd and inhaled my share of the ether. My wife never left her seat. She was guarding our belongings like an Emperor penguin guards its chicks during the Antarctic winter. Long ago when we were in college she had once slept in a train and had woken up to find her bag missing. It is another story how she managed to retrieve it (after intense negotiation over phone) from the thief. But since then she has vowed not to abandon her belongings while in transit. As I stood alone looking for a pattern in the random movements of the passenger, out of the crowd came a dark finger and poked straight at my ribs! It was Santosh Dutta (my mind by then had already conferred him the name). I had apparently functioned as a human lighthouse and saved him from being lost in the crowd. On discovering me he had ensured that he would end up in the right coach when the train decided to leave the station.

When a man finds something he fears he may have lost, the release of angst sometimes makes him act funny. Such was the case with my friend. He was offering me tea and biscuit for no apparent reason. When I declined he asked about my whereabouts (in an effort to strike an amiable conversation). Not being a particularly suspicious man I gave him the details. I also told him that in case he wondered why my wife speaks broken Bengali, it is because she is not a Bengali by birth. Then I explained to him what "Konkani" means and where this section of humans dwell, because that is where my wife comes from. Although inquisitive, I found the man rather congenial.

We were back in the train. The night was approaching fast. The dim incandescent lamps illuminated the coup and one could see ones own countenance in the glass window. A few street lamps whisked by suggesting that the train was passing through a semi-urban area. After having a fairly sumptuous meal for dinner (the quality of which I found to have improved), my wife shifted to the middle berth to read something she was carrying for the journey. I was lying supine on the lower berth gazing at the ceiling fan. It said "Himalaya" at its center. I remembered the name. Another of the things that have not changed in Indian Railways. I noticed that the odd couple (Santosh Dutta and his stooge) were preparing to get down. The whites of their eyes were scanning in the dark to ensure that they did not leave any stray luggage behind.

As a passing query I asked my man, kothai jachhen aapnara? Anticipating a conversation he settled cross-legged on his berth and replied, Kaaatpadi Jaanction. The place rang a distant bell in my mind, but I could not comprehend why. Then he landed the blow directly in my solar plexus. It wasn't a physical one, but it hurt more. He said he makes this journey every month, with his stooge, who happens to be his nephew by relation. The reason; The boy suffers from blood cancer and requires blood transfusion every month. Hence, destination Vellore, hence Katpadi junction. He blurted out the reason of his travel in a matter-of-fact way, all the while flashing his teeth as if to make a mockery of any response I could muster. It was 11 pm. And the train would not reach Katpadi till 1 am at night. But, these seasoned pilgrims knew better than to lie down and close their eyes. They kept looking at each other in the dark, as I purged all my predicaments in the fire of their eyes. I recalled all the little worries that I have not been brave enough to bear with a smile. They were still smiling at me, and each time they did so my mind strained hard to maintain composure, to hold back that tear drop from a free fall. I looked out at the darkness. It was my only ally for the moment.

I stayed awake for the next two hours to bid them goodbye. As the train left Katpadi, I could see two shadows outside the window. Santosh Dutta was patiently standing. The young man was animatedly describing which way to go to his uncle. He exuded the same arrogance, the same irritation with the world that i had witnessed when I first say him. But this time, I bore no malice.

Much ado about happiness

I was once given a farewell card by a friend. It said "Happiness is not a destination to reach, but a road to travel". On prima facie the proverb sounds correct, but, I have often wondered if it is true. If one is always happy (as in "a road to travel") will one value happiness anymore? Once it becomes part of the diurnal cycle will it not be akin to every other brand of emotion, banal and hackneyed? Also, what is so wrong about happiness being a destination? One can then look forward to it, and once there, savour it.

I have often believed that happiness is a state of mind. It is that state of ones' mind in which one wishes to stay a little while longer than usual. Years ago, I read in my physics lessons that an atom (or was it a particle) always desires to be in its lowest energy state. It stays "happy" in that state, and if altered, will eternally persevere to reach that state. It is like a constant "destination" that the atom tries to reach. Think about it. We are all like that atom persevering to be "happy". Only, man's definition of happiness keeps changing with time unlike that of an atom. Now, would you consider a path with constantly changing destinations a "road"? I do not know. Therein lies the intrigue of the word,"happy".

When I ponder about what I understand by "happy", they are the moments in life which I would like to volunteer to revisit, not forced to. The refreshing mango juice at the Vijayawada train station (enroute from Kolkata to Madras); The odd ride on a van-rickshaw from Digha to Talshari via the idyllic countryside; The first experience of the Colosseum-like atmosphere of Eden Gardens; The impromptu Goa trip in that tempo-traveler; The dip in the stream behind the college where buffaloes bathed are some of those random memories that I can instantly garner and label as "happy". As anomalous as they may seem to the idea of happiness, they are the ones that have etched fond memories in my subconscious. And fond memories have an odd way of lingering like the smell of mutton curry in your fingers long after you have come home from that Bengali wedding.They make me happy.

This definition of happiness has a certain predicament though. It can only be felt once the moment has passed! While I can be happy at this moment thinking about something pleasant that happened to me in the past, I have no way of being happy by virtue of something that is happening in the present. In essence i may be falling behind in the race for the pursuit of happiness. I sometimes think that perhaps my inability to exude an impulsive reaction hinders me from being instantly "happy" even when there is something conspicuously delightful. It is this lack of spontaniety that constrains me from proclaiming a "WOW" on seeing a decent photograph by an amateur photographer. It is again the reason for a stifled reaction on seeing a decent work of painting, eating a decently palatable dish, wearing a decent dress, or meeting a decent human.

I am almost never instantly "WOW"ed by any of the above. However, that does not mean that I never feel a superlative reaction. However, it is usually much later when something (or someone) WOW-worthy has been revisited by the mind several times and has passed the test of quality. You may say that I like to chew the cud. I am bovine in a sense that I like gazing all day at the meadows but cannot bring myself to exclaim "WOW" at the taste of grass.

Speaking about "WOW", how often does one really feel wowed, I wonder. If "WOWS" were meant for all things "decent" what reaction should one reserve for things that are truly astounding. Say, the Pieta, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Parthenon, the Taj, the creme de la creme of mankind's achievement? The few wows in my life have been, the Jog (when I stood at its abyssmal depth), the Kanchenjunga (as i spotted it momentarily through a shroud of cloud), the Starry Night (comprising the brush strokes of a troubled genius), and the Konark temple (or what remains of it). Each of them has inevitably evoked a sense of how small I am in mind soul and skill. And that has made me exclaim, Wow !

I believe that as with all things "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"; So with happiness there is no rigid definition, but just a concept that one is free to mould by one's own rules. Since, the above paragraphs of incoherent rambling has brought me back to the starting line, I will conclude that happiness may not after all be a destination to reach. Whether it is a road to travel, I leave to the wise minds of the readers to construe. As for me, niether makes a difference as I have comprehensively proved that I do not understand either.

The Murder of the Dead

There was once a man who worked all his life to make a dwelling out of his meager saving. He had a good wife, a good son (or perhaps two, or even more), and a good life. Then one day his wife decided to take leave of her self and his son(s) decided to jump out of the well into the ocean. Then one day the real-estate agents came by like Death Eaters, took the old man by his cot and put him in a rented apartment ("temporarily, off course", they said). They brought down the dwelling faster than the twin towers and erected in its place, a multi-storied cluster of flats. The old man spent the rest of his life in one of these hole-in-the-wall "flats", looking tremulously down from the 10th storey at the ground which he once so wished would belong to him.

Every time I fly over the skyline of Kolkata, this stereotypical story flashes by my eyes as i see the Lego-like multi-storied buildings viciously sprouting among old individual houses, those almost counting their days like hapless chickens in a butcher's shop. Having lived in a similar "multi-storied complex" for fifteen years in a place which supposedly belonged to a once-profitable-now-defunct cotton factory, I cannot wash my hands off this collective crime of our generation.

It is perhaps practical to be nonchalant about the whole saga and sanctimoniously proclaim that "old order giveth way to the new"; But, in the indifference we evince, are we not murdering the very dreams of which we were once a part? How many parents/grandparents do we know who build these individual "dwellings" not keeping their progenies in mind? Were we not part of their dreams? Then why do we so ruthlessly murder the dreams we were part of? The answer to that may be profitable to the way our generation is planning to lead their lives.

Look around, and you will see a generation that is smothering the dreams of its previous one while it harbours its dreams on the next. The same generation that is bulldozing the "dwellings" to make "flats" is expecting the next one to live happily with them in those flats. The irony is so stark that if you let the bygone generation speak they will come running out of their photo frames and say, "Don't do it son, don't repeat the mistake we made!"

That the past has to perish to make way for the present is the eternal truth. But does demolishing the past so ruthlessly and callously make us any better than any of the barbaric invaders of yore, who repeatedly ravaged India and stripped it off its myriad wealth and defaced its architectural beauties? Is the demolition of ones ancestral home any less than the defacing of the Sun temple at Konark, or the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha?

As a riposte to the above thought, one can argue that the greatest conquerers (from the Romans to the Mughals) who qualify as creators of many global architectural masterpieces were those who were also destroyers of the history of the places they conquered. So, it may not be necessary for one to have respect for history or heritage to make their own. So why is it important to preserve an old man's "dwelling" after he is gone?

I believe that the reason the conquerers treaded so heavily over the places they travelled was that the history that they destroyed was not created by their forbears in the first place. It was someone else's legacy. Someone not related by blood to them. On the other hand the many dwellings that are bursting like popcorns to give way to a mushroom of multi-storied flats are initiated by a generation that is directly related by flesh and blood to the generation of the stereotypical old man. The terminator of the old man's pagoda is none other than the son who jumped out of the well into the ocean. A classic case of, Et tu Brute.. Then fall Caeser.

In a fragmenting world where a relation is more a stroke of fate and less a genetic strain one must take care to preserve ones roots. Else we run the risk of becoming beautiful orchids in a horticulture garden with no primary tree trunk to lean on. I remember my ancestral house that lies in ruins today. The most intriguing part of the house (that catered to a child's fantasy i.e.) was the garden behind it. As a young boy, I remember fighting a squadron of mosquitoes to visit it. The two coconut trees that marked the end of the property; The jackfruit tree whose base my grandmother protected with innumerous twigs and nettle bushes, the Gandharaj tree that precariously and ironically stood next to the sewerage tank; the papaya tree; the lemon trees; all stand testimony to my childhood. That I have fought many Ram-Ravana, Bhim-Duryodhan battles with bows and arrows made of coconut leaves and a "Goda" made of cheap non-recyclable plastic in this place is no less significant to my existence than my "educational degree" or my "work experience".

Sometimes a noble thought is as important as a noble action. I try to convince my argumentative self that I am different from the good son who leapt out of the well. The hypothesis though, remains to be proved.

..But I go on forever

The Ganges has never failed to evoke a certain element of pathos in me ever since I was a little boy. Despite its monotony, it has never been a bore. On the contrary, it has evoked questions that often go unheeded as the conveyor of daily drudgery keeps rolling. These questions have ranged from naive ones like, how deep is it in the middle? to more philosophical ones as I have grown in age and thought.

My earliest memories of this aorta of northern India are from the long walks papa and I took from our dwelling in the quarters of a jute mill campus to the wooden jetty that overhung precariously over its muddy bank. I can see myself hop-and-skip down the behemoth wooden staircase of the British-era staff quarters on a Saturday afternoon for a jaunt to the jetty. En route to the jetty, one had to walk through a stretch of pebbled streets garnished with flower bushes on the sides to reach the periphery of the campus and enter the factory site.

In it glory days the less-abused Ganges provided an untrammeled mean of transportation. Raw material and finished goods were regularly transported between the mills and the outside market via the Ganges. The long wooden jetties standing on solid iron framework with a couple of cranes at its end provided the means for the jute bales to be loaded from the factory site in massive barges. These barges would then be driven by innocuous-looking yet powerful wooden steamers along the river to their destination. With time, the road network developed while the Ganges kept choking on the disposals that humanity had to offer to it. I presume that somewhere down the line the powers-that-be turned their faces away from the Ganges and looked to transport their wealth by road. Now, the crestfallen Ganges has thousands of defunct, dilapidated and treacherously-stable jetties pierced into its belly like an anaconda acupunctured by innumerable needles along its sides.

The jetty I visited as a child was in a slightly better condition. The walk through the jute factory to reach it was an exciting one. All along you could hear the deafening noise of the machinery. The jute fibers filled the air like snow flakes in a New York winter. These fibres though were harmful for children like me who suffered from asthma and had a tendency to breathe through their mouths. Along the path we would come across security guards, supervisors and factory workers. In old factories in Bengal, there is a custom (which i believe to be a vestige of the British era) of saluting if one comes across a manager and one happens to be a guard or a worker himself. I always waited for these gestures from the guards when I walked with papa. He usually reciprocated a salute with a modest nod; but, to a child's fantasy it fostered the feeling of a Simba walking alongside a Mufasa through the African safari.

As one approached the jetty, the concrete road gave way to the wooden planks. The planks creaked at the weight of a human feet. The smaller the feet the lesser the creak. I usually hopped with all my might to make the creak happen. As I reached the end, the two gargantuan cranes stood on either sides as sentinels warning me of the might and fury of the Ganges.

On its banks I saw the first bee-eater, making a lasso in the air; the first boatman swaying with his bamboo to make a perfect crescendo; the first carcass with a solitary crow riding on it; the first high tide that set a hapless boat to roller-coast over the water; and many more firsts that have since been washed away from memory.

I remember the night when we crossed the Ganges in a boat from Jagatdal to Chandernagore to see the Jagatdhatri puja. Against the cacophony and the luminosity of its bank ( which has been a characteristic of this place during this festival) the Ganges looked almost Styx-like in its darkness. Only the periodic splashing of the oar disturbed the calm. Years later, on a night that India won the Hero-Cup final at the Eden Gardens, I witnessed this calm being rudely awakened by the constant son et lumiere of "chocolate bombs" and "rockets" (surplus stockpiles from the previous Diwali, stashed away precisely for such occasions).

The Ganges has had a unique influence on my thoughts each time i have stood by it. I have felt fear on the full moon night in 1993 when its water came knocking at our door. That the Farakka Barrage had decided to open its sluice gates to save the villages upstream from being flooded was know to us. What was not known was how different the Ganges looks when it is 50 meters away from your house as opposed to when it has submerged three of the four steps that lead to your house. I remember staring at the brown water in the midst of the night as it toyed with the flower pots that had sat obediently on the steps very recently.

On another purnima, just after the entire community had drenched itself in a motley of colours, the river graciously allowed the colours to be washed off and sanity to prevail at her shores. At that moment it had been the perfect host graciously inviting humanity to enjoy its privilege. And at this moment, I had felt pure joy.

Years later, when I took my first flight out of Kolkata, my state of mind had been oscillating between emotions of apprehension, sorrow, and joy. Just as the flight was airborne, it did the customary tilt and I had a glimpse of the Ganges. From the height it looked no more its behemoth self. It looked rather like a sinewy mass of water negotiating its way through the metropolis. It also symbolized a part of me that I was leaving behind forever. Till then I had known it deep within, but it needed the evening sun to ricochet over the river into my eyes to see it.

Last year I visited her again. This time i went with ma and mashi to immerse Didima's mortal remains in her bosom. She accepted it with the grace with which she has accepted so many others before. I stood there for a while in the cold water, coming to terms with the inevitable. I tied yet another memory with the Ganges and came home.

This year I visited her again. To immerse something else in her bosom. It happened to be a paraphernalia of objects from my marriage last year. She accepted these too just like the year before. I stood there and wondered as to what evokes the gamut of emotions every time I stand by this perennial mass of floating water. I wonder whether there have there been others before who have felt the same. Then I realized that what I just did was a ritual that I blindly followed. Just like a million others before me. The first man (or woman) who conjured this ritual must have had a reason. He or she must have felt something seeing the Ganges that induced such a ritual. It is that something that I cannot explain. Nor do I wish to.

All I know is that the Ganges lets me realize how it feels to feel something. And to be able to feel i believe is a basic human faculty. I am glad it is perennially there and I am glad that I keep returning to it, notwithstanding the reason.

When Picasso is reduced to a typo !

I write today as a person who reads considerably more than an average Indian my age (I am 29 for those eager to know). That this is where I stand, shamefully proud, with arms akimbo on the reader's scale is a disgrace to me and my generation. Yes, to those few eyebrows that I have been successful in raising (from the untrammeled attention on your Facebook page), Congratulations! You are welcome to enter the attic of a cynic who believes that not all is hunky dory in our corner of the world.

It is true that our generation today has access to some of the world's finest inventions... cars, flights, flatscreen LEDs, laptops, iphones pods pads et al. It is also true that we are making extensive use of these fine inventions. As Newton once said; We are standing on the shoulders of giants... But I somehow doubt that we are seeing more than the giants themselves. These inventions that we wear so proudly on ourselves like medals, are ironically, prizes that belong to the generation that precede ours. It is to them that the glory belongs. It is to us to ensure that we do not make a Frankenstein out of them. I fear that like overindulged parents who dote on their children till they make perfect monkeys out of them, our previous generation too racked their brains and brawn to make great inventions available to us. Sadly, their efforts, though noble may inadvertently be responsible for making monkeys out of us.

We now have the tools necessary to take civilization forward, but lack the very depth in human attributes like the knowledge of surrounding, the utilization of our abilities (sans gadgets), and the urge to remove the veil of obfuscation to see the truth that lies behind it. We are like a dog who has lost its sense of smell, a bat without its sense of sound, a hawk without vision, a lion without fangs. Simply using advanced technology does not power a generation to be more knowledgeable than a generation that did not have access to the same level of technology!

I find the balance of knowledge slightly skewed when an engineer (termed a "Techie" in contemporary media parlance) can operate an iphone4S with blindfolded dexterity and grieve over the soul of its so-called creator (ignoring several equally fertile brains other than Steve's that made the contraption possible), and simultaneously remain ignorant of the name Nikolai Tesla! Mind you.. the same Electrical Engineer who admires Steve Jobs' contribution to his field does not know the name of Nikolai Tesla, arguably one of the founding fathers of the same field! It is tantamount to calling oneself a Computer Engineer without ever coming across the name of Charles Babbage. It is like biting an apple not knowing that its a fruit!

In the days when there were no Single Lens Reflex digital cameras and very few analogue ones around, my father taught me the basics of photography with the help of a pencil, a piece of paper, and three optical terms; shutter speed, aperture and focal length. He also lectured about 'depth-of-field' and 'depth-of-focus', definitions too complicated for a 5 year old to grasp. Today, it is difficult to find a person without a digital SLR, in fact it is a blasphemy if you have traveled on-site and haven't bought yourself one! However, I wonder whether there are really more people in our generation than my dad's who know what 'SLR' stands for and are aware of it's basic operation (despite the millions slinging from as many necks). A generation has craved for what you hold today in your hands friends. If nothing, at least spend an hour on Wikipedia to read what it is. You will do poor Daguerre a favour.

A friend of mine likes playing PS3 (for those who are from the Dark Ages and do not know what it means; PlayStation3 is a video game console by SONY). Another of the commendable inventions to have been lavished on our generation. My friend is playing a series called Unchartered2 wherein his avatar is trekking through the snow-capped Himalayas, running through monasteries, and bouncing over pagodas in search of hidden treasure. The place is incidentally named Shangri-La by the game's designer. Gives me solace to know that at least the designer(s) read James Hilton's Lost Horizon. I find it hard to convince my friend that Shangri-La is a fictional place mentioned in that novel and to my knowledge it is there that this name was first used; and, it was not the designer of Unchartered2 who invented this place! You see, the perils of not reading, because it is uncool!

With so much on our plate, all we have to do is eat. But sometimes it is necessary to peep in the kitchen to figure how the food eventually made it to the plate (Sagar, a vegetarian friend of mine in college always made a survey of the kitchen of a restaurant to ensure that they did not make the daal makhani in the same pan where once they cooked a delicious murgh masala :)). Else, we run the risk of not only being dumb ourselves, but, more frighteningly, breed a generation that believes that money is produced in ATMs and water in vending machines.

Soon, the name Nero will just be known as a CD-ROM burning software, Magellan the name of a GPS company, Picasso will be reduced to a typo for Picasa, Edison will be best known as a desi-town in New Jersey, Agni a name of some kind of missile, Bose a music-system, and so on.

The pain of reading though mostly unrewarding monetarily and greatly time-consuming can at times take a human mind to the depth of understanding without which the mind just sees and hears and feels things without really registering what it saw, heard or felt. That is why my father can walk through Mendeleev's periodic table and talk through Hemingway and ponder over Chekov as I fidget in my mind if 'Au' stands for gold or silver.

The cerebral plunge

One of the wonders of mother Nature is her ability to reduce ones quotidian worries to a ludicrous level when one is in her midst. I have felt my troubles being mocked at whenever I have stood under the night sky by the rock at the corner of the cricket field in Shimoga; especially the nights before the semester exams. The Big Dipper would stare down at me as if to ask, What is your problem, son? I have felt it moments before ducking under a head-high wave as a little boy on the shores of Puri, and as a grown lad on the shores of the Atlantic. The momentary experience of drowning has on each occasion allowed me to appreciate the next free breath. I have felt it while coming down the icy slope at breakneck speed, unsure if the wedge i formed with my ski blades would be enough to stop me in time. Today, I felt the same, gaping at the everlasting ribbons of white foam roaring down and disappearing into the mist beneath. The Niagara, has yet again convinced me of my nugatory existence in the larger scheme of things.

I sat by the spectacular site as the tiny ripples grew into waves and the waves systematically plunged to their death, and were reborn through the mist to start another journey. As I quietly stood, a thousand faces must have passed by; each a different hue, a different tongue, a different coiffure, a different living being, inconsequential in the canvas that my mind was staring at. I felt that if i jumped into the flowing mass of water right there, it would have made no difference to these moving faces except for a spectacle to stare at, maybe for a while. Which makes me ask myself; What is more important? To live a selfish existence whereby I can cater to all the desires that the flesh and mind is constantly subjected to, till the very end, chasing everything that can improve the livability of my life and thereby ensuring that I spend the entire span of my life just for myself; Or, to live a life that by example may influence other lives to deviate from the selfish existence, and in the process pick up a perpetual fight against human desires that constantly obfuscate an unselfish thought?

I tried but could not think of one human being who was known and revered just for having led a bon vivant for himself. Nothing else, but a good selfish life for himself. So, what is the intention of the millions who like me have come from a middle class existence, have duly become engineers, and are now one among the myriad faces gradually flowing towards the plunge. What mark are we going to leave mates? What will you and I be if the job, house, car, laptop, and other parasitic details were stripped off us and we were to stand stark naked under the Big Dipper which questioned, What good are you, son? What good is your life?

There is a little dwarf living in a decrepit dark room inside each of us. Let us call him anna hazare (Since an unknown entity can be better identified by a know entity. That is how the brain works). This guy wants to rid you of your selfish existence and make you fit to answer the Big Dipper's questions. But he stands no chance, for he is fighting Goliath. The Goliath in this case is not a biblical myth; it is real. It is the self obsessed you. It is you who finds a mascot in the outside world to fight corruption, but fails to listen to the dying dwarf, asking you to fight for a similar cause. Sadly his fight is not against a corrupt government or a dysfunctional establishment. It is against the frankenstein you created; yourselves.

The day I give more importance to the story about a persevering teacher in the rundown hinterlands of my country over the success story of a lecturer at MIT; the day a weekly donation follows my weekly paycheck; the day my writing influences other people to follow suit; the day i wake up convincing myself that an act of honesty isn't also an act of a simpleton; the day I can look myself in the mirror and convince the reflection that there is at least one other person apart from the two of us whom I could influence to help that poor dwarf win, will, also be the day when I can face the Big Dipper proudly, and say, yes i did good in life. And that is the day I shall not need a mascot, for I shall be my own mascot.

The most important questions in life are those that do not have answers. They keep you interested, till the end.