Donning the Cowboy hat

On August 14th 2006 I landed in cowboy country, Texas. From above, I had seen the arid landmass, the tawny pastures, with a few horses galloping across under the uber-bright sunshine. If it was a spaghetti western I was watching the scene would have been a delight. It was not though, and there was no Gary Cooper to save the day. I had chosen this place out of all places in North America to come to study, to invest the last bullion in my parents' coffer. I tell you it had looked less dismal from half a world away.

The American Airlines flight (with its Arsenic and Old Lace-style air hostesses) landed in the massive Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) airport and kept taxiing in circles and ox-bows till I felt like Abhimanyu entering the Chakravyuha. As I exited the airplane, human sizes seemed to have gone up a scale. My 6ft 2in frame barely escaped the Lilliput-tag. My girth however couldn't, and I still looked small. There were godzilla-sized humans all over the place; males, females, blacks, whites (with patches of red that made them look angry. Little did I know that I was seeing the real rednecks). I looked around but could not spot a single shotgun, leather belt carrying bullets, or a pair of boots with metal spurs attached at the heels, as Mr.Leone had promised in his movies. I was not complaining though since my hands were full already, literally, with my baggage.

A saviour named Karthik from the University's Indian Association had promised to rescue me from the airport. I scanned through angry, polite, suspicious and condescending faces but could not find a brown one that could go by that name. So I eventually picked my bags, belly-full with sachets of garam masala, paanch foron, haldi, a pressure cooker, pots, pans and other useless items that everyone back home had sworn would not be available in the godforsaken land of the Yankees.

I waited with two 30kg bags like Claudia Cardinale for her husband. True to the plot, the husband never arrived! So, I eventually fell in line to take my own trolley so that at least my dear luggage could rest. On my turn I realized that the trolleys did not come for free. I had a couple of 20 dollar bills, but not the "quarters" that the machine would take. Behind me, Uncle Sam was frowning at this poor Indian farmer who had probably come here to rid his son of his daily bread. Buhind im the owld laidee was verrry verry aingree 'cus this brownie lad dint kno nothin! So, there I was in my first Mexican standoff!

People (including Indians) often think that Indians are not brave. That is not true. You just have to push them to the corner and choke them till they have nowhere to run and no air to breathe. It just takes a bit longer to shake the inertia of fear out of their system. I turned back to Uncle Sam and asked, "Can I borrow a few quarters from you?". Americans are an independent breed and do not understand the share-and-prosper attitude like us. They do not share cars, backyards, kitchen utensils, or apartments for convenience. Uncle Sam replied queryingly, "What was that?". That was the first time I encountered that expression (Since then, I have learnt how common it is and have pre-emptively used it on people at the first opportunity). It has such a you-stupid-fool-what-language-are-you-talking-in undertone that it demoralizes you first and eventually makes you forget the topic and concentrate on your fake American English accent. I twisted my tongue to grotesque angles to talk like the old man. I spoke the English language with the worst pronunciations I had ever spoken in my life. That somehow seemed to work. He gave me the much needed quarters.

Outside, the place was the sun's anvil (that expression is out of the Lawrence of Arabia movie). There was no Clint Eastwood wrapped in a Mexican shawl on a well-fed steed waiting for me. However there was Karthik with his white Toyota. Don't ask me how I knew it was him. I just knew. He drove me to the University in silence, with a chivalric air of Don Quixote saving one of his ladies from captivity. I made a few feeble efforts to befriend him with inquiries about graduate courses, campus jobs, grocery stores, and grading systems, but to no avail. I think the combination of the sweltering heat and a querying desi-boy was getting to him. I kept my mouth shut and breathed the warm air in.

The roads in Texas are much wider compared to other states in the US. I did not know this then. I marveled at the six-lane highways and the speed at which everyone drove. I was amazed to see respectable-looking people driving what looked like TATA 407 mini-trucks. I was informed by Mr. Quixote that they are called "pick-up" trucks, and I should not be surprised to see my professor drive to school in one of them. He kept repeating "school" till I deciphered that the University is also referred to as graduate "school". On reaching the graduate school campus Mr. Quixote became a little more chirpy (I think his earlier silence was probably just due to the tension while driving on the highway). He educated me on traffic rules (primarily to acknowledge the importance to the life of a petty pedestrian), on the concept of yield, and on not trying to be a pilot car to an ambulance.

The campus bore the look of the Atacama desert. Not a soul was to be seen. It reminded me again of Gary Cooper and of High Noon. Mr. Quixote parked his car in a corner and we walked to one of the University's housing complexes. He took a print-out from his pocket. It was a list of fresh Indian imports for that semester. I spotted my name with a number next to it. We looked for that apartment no. and knocked at the wooden door. A red-eyed desi face popped out. I was glad. I had enough of the culture-exchange for a day. Disheveled hair (that had been gelled before last night's party), a pair of Abercombie shorts and a basketball vest (with the Longhorns symbol in front) characterized my friend. Soon four more pairs of red eyes appeared from the bedroom (I looked around but could not spot the Jack Daniels bottle). There apparently was a graduation party on the previous night and that was all they remembered. Laughter and crazy talk filled the room. I felt transported from the wild west to my undergrad hostel days in the heart of Karnataka. I felt at home. I said goodbye to Mr. Quixote and joined the crowd. After all, I did not need to be a Roman to survive in Rome. I had met my group of Gauls!

Silence Please !

Not long ago on a cold winter evening I was reclining in a bucket seat in the center of a mid-sized theatre watching a movie, silently! I had switched off my cellphone; less out of courtesy towards the 5 other occupants in the 100-seat hall and more out to my inability to spend brain-cycles exploring the smartness of my smart-phone while somewhere behind a pigeon-hole a 35mm reel kept rolling. So there I was, watching the underdog of underdogs, a silent, black and white movie produced three years after the juggernaut-genre of Avatar threatened to obliterate 21st century talkies!

It will not be a surprise if this movie title enters the English lexicon as a synonym for the word "anachronism". Imagine a director sitting amidst a cornucopia of technology so advanced that he barely needs humans to act, move or talk to make a movie. Then he sweeps away all that off his table and starts drawing silhouettes on his paper-pad and eventually makes a movie out of them. Just the idea of loving something that contemporary society terms outdated or extinct is not so uncommon. What is is the determination to give vent to the idea and put it up on a movie screen for the whole world to gape at and ignore, ridicule, and eventually acknowledge as extraordinary. The Artist is an example of just that, and more.

Ever wondered how difficult it might be to convey a story to the viewer in a silent movie(cannot call them the audience, since there is no audio)? Especially, to the blockbuster Bollywood crowd whose senses are lulled by the most uncomplicated of plots being spoon-fed through oversimplified and often redundant dialogues. Throughout this movie I realized something I had always known but had never felt before. When one of your sense organs become useless, the others strive to compensate to provide you the optimal experience. That is why a blind man has a sharper sense of smell and hearing while a deaf man's visual and nasal senses are more acute than those of an average being. This movie had some remarkable moments of suspense (Yes, without any nerve-wrecking sound track to warn viewers of an impending moment of importance) portrayed just through the facial expressions of the characters, background shots and simple camera movements. In one such moment, the director portrays the anxiety of a troubled mind through the constant barking of a dog as its master stands still holding a revolver to his mouth. Off course you don't hear the dog bark! You just see it barking. And then you see a screen that says... BANG! And what do you think happened? Yes, right; outside a vintage Rolls Royce had at the most opportune moment veered away from the road and crashed into a tree on the pavement. Again, you dint hear the "BANG"! You just saw it on your screen. The man puts his gun down and simply walks away with a smile(or was it a smirk at the viewer's expense?). You see, just the visual was enough to titillate the senses that one thought could not be awakened by a silent B/W movie in an era of 3D.

The plot of the movie is not indigenous and comes roughly out of the Sunset Boulevard story line. Here a silent movie mega-star is struggling among small fish to come to terms with the "talkies" and is severely handicapped by a bruised yet unbroken ego. Sort of like sinking the Bismark if you can imagine a battleship with human emotions! What sets the movie apart though is the last screenshot, where ironically the viewer hears two words coming out of the protagonist's mouth. Those two words stretch the 1.5 hour movie by as much, since the viewer now has to revisit the entire movie in a new perspective. How cool is that for a dumb show?

This post though isn't about exhorting the readers to go back in time and watch silent movies. There is a certain class of people who get their thrill watching Buster Keaton's General or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. They do not need any impetus. The rest I cannot influence with my rant here. The point here is the value of ones interests to oneself and the importance of pursuing that(those) interest(s) however anachronistic they may seem. If the above movie (which I am sure at its inception would have been a laughable concept) can become a reality, then why cannot we lesser mortals pursue the little dreams that as children we may have dared to dream?

Why can't a girl roller skate just because the community thinks that wheels are only for cars? Why can't she sing aloud anymore just because she's married now and singing has served its purpose already? Why can't history be a thing to like and photography be an optional course in schools? Why does one have to be an engineer first and then anyone else? Why does one have to have the same goals, aims, ambitions like the rest. A job, a spouse, a house, a kid, another job, another house, and a brain that eventually does not know what to do with any of those, including itself! Why does one not stop and think, for once?

As I silently scream words in this post and vent my ire at the keyboard, my wife sits in one corner of the drawing room softly humming the following lines... jodi tor daak shune keu na aashe tobe ekla cholo re advocating her new found love for the Bengali language. Maybe, in those lines lie the answer to my questions.

Note: This is NOT a review of the movie, The Artist, and I have referenced it only to drive to a certain point. It however will not be a waste of time if you watch it, to the end!

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!