The Sentimental Turnip

O Lame Picks

2006-05-03T01:23:00.000+05:30

Korup Tweener was president of the IOC, and in addition, a worried man. This would have surprised anyone who had been keeping up with the news.

As Korup had planned, LaserFriedEyes had jumped at the opportunity to sponsor the 20/20 Timbuktu Olympics. He negotiated a handsome 3% royalty of future eye-correction-procedures done by LFE in return. LFE had been sold on the 20/20 sponsorship plan - he chuckled to think they had not SEEN it themselves. LFE went on to suggest the slash in the year and a respelling of the Olympics to LympidOptics but Korup had firmly resisted. He might be slightly venial, accepting a slash here and a cut there, but he was a man of ideals. The specific ideal here was that 3% was diddly squat for a full-blown renaming. He suggested 10%, but that would have a big cut and LFE, only believed in small, carefully controlled cuts.

He should have been singing this morning, but something was amiss. Count on the bloody athletes to mess up a supremely exquisite deal. If only he could have had sports without those silly sportsmen.

Every venture of his life brought him to a similar conclusion.

He had built a hotel, which took reservations over every possible communication channel. It took them over the phone, email, grapevine and carrier pigeon. He even built a site on the totallymeganet, which had replaced the dysfunctional retro curiosity called the internet.

The hotel was a gleaming hunk of smooth granite carved out of a single rock, dazzling with diamond chandeliers and fountains of wine. Korup’s office had a private indoor beach, with its own sun. He used it for surfing, beach-side drink-swilling, and arousing jealousy in his fifth grade classmates. Fifth-grade had been the last year the educational system had endured him before sobbing quietly in a corner and shooting itself in the head. The hotel had six practice racetracks for his chauffeurs, twenty frolicking areas for his masseuses, a nine-level garage and a five-dimensional hall for private parties. The hotel had been booked up for twenty years before construction. The only thing the hotel had lacked was rooms.

The irritatingly demanding customers had whined and complained and shouted. When even that failed to get any action, they shot at him. It was enough to put a hardworking businessmen off his fourth drink. If only his customers just paid up instead of wanting to stay in the rooms, the hotel would have been an outstanding success.

After that, he wrote a book on his teenage adventures as an amateur mac-and-cheese and PB&J sandwich chef. He applied the adjective "amateur" later, for which he qualified only on the basis of having been fired from every restaurant he worked at before the first payday.

The book was advertised heavily and received tons of acclaim from those critics whose children had been recently kidnapped. They agreed unanimously that it was "an awesome top-quality book, Nobel material. Also Oscar and knighthood material, a thrill-packed fantastic page-turner actually. Really, believe us. Buy the book. Please! For Bobby." It had not sold a single copy. The huge pile of printed copies had threatened to collapse and petrify under its own weight into a new mountain range.

He got around the problem by mugging people into buying the book. All over the world, people reported being held up by burly men with guns who thrust copies of "A tale of two pastes and pasta: pastimes of my past" in their bags despite all their pleas and cries for mercy. The muggers then demanded $13.75 and returned precise change when presented with $20 bills, before running away in embarrassment and pining in street corners for their previous honorable, if low-paying, careers in noose quality assurance, pet psychiatry and sewage stirring.

"People are the problem," he summarized to himself. Customers, readers and sportsmen - all people, damn them. He brought himself back to the present.

2020 had broken a record. Every single one of the medalists (including those in rhythmic solitaire and synchronized tech support) had tested positive for banned substances. Partly, it was because so many substances had been banned in recent years. Before the Olympics, there had been a flurry of news reports about new drugs and there had been talk of adding them to the list of banned substances.

Damn drugs! There were the classical ones to increase muscle mass, reduce fat content and weight. There were now drugs to smooth the skin and make all hair fall for that aerodynamic body. There was a drug that made a swimmer shoot out his sweat in jets all over his body instead of passively leaking it. There was a drug that increased typing speed, so athletes could write all their emails faster and concentrate on reaching peak form. Every single one had been banned.

Actually, Korup had no problem with the drugs. He just had a problem with people making noises about the issue and upsetting him just when he was starting to enjoy his job, the perks and the bribery.

Korup had defeated Pers Ist Enbagar in the elections and that rankled. Today, Pers was waving a report stating that the cost of testing was more than the cost of the Olympics. The committee reacted to this bombshell with outraged snores. Someone in the press-box poked them with the telescopic lenses of their zoom cameras. Once the committee had digested the information and their lunches, they went to dinner. Just before leaving, they also decided that rather than testing, all three medalists would simply be declared positive on the evidence of their victories and the medals would be handed to the next three athletes.

The 2024 Olympics, were quite painful to watch. In every race, the contestants rushed to the finish line and stopped ten feet away. They then spent hours jostling and pushing the other contestants. Once three had been tossed across, there would be a mad sprint to get to the fourth to sixth places. This ridiculous situation was adversely affecting the dignity of sports and more importantly, television ratings and advertising revenues.

By 2028, there was a lot of athletic espionage to try to figure out the top few competitors in each race and the best strategies to end up fourth. Athletics became more about poker and the other person's psychology than about simply running fast. This was a welcome diversion to everyone but the purists, who are not worth listening to anyway.

Hysterically successful movies were made about this new genre. They involved a character who said, "My name is Pawn. Games Pawn," followed by elaborate explanations about being born of a mutually embarrassing union between the Goddess of Sports and one of the sixteen minor Gods of Chess. The movies consisted of weak puns and silly villains who explained all their plans before failing.

Several game theorists were able to get a job helping with the spying and they arrived at the final solution. In every event, three light and obscure competitors were allowed to waltz through the heats into the finals along with three former shot-putters. When the event began, the shot-putters threw the three flyweights across the finish line. The rest of the competition proceeded as in the good old days.

After a few races, the shot-putters went on strike. Their jobs were then outsourced to comic-book heroes because they could get themselves across the finish line first themselves. It made perfect sense that they should win everything and also that they should be disqualified for being superheroes.

Their PR folks realized the opportunity to advertise on the yards of their clothing. Even Tarzan succumbed to peer pressure and switched to trousers. He successively added a shirt, a cape, a mask and public humiliation when his chimpanzee Cheetah blasted him on Jay Leno for being a sell-out.

Around 2032, someone suggested that the IOC remove the ridiculous ban and let the athletes compete on a combination of hard work and research rather than on the mere genetic accident of athletic talent. This sounded compelling to the drowsy IOC members between their dreams of power, pelf and pineapples. Guest speakers from sneaker companies, sports banks, and cereal bar makers helped them overcome slight flaws in the argument by explaining how this was in line with the spirit of the CorpOlympic motto, "Just do outsourced IT, CitiUSA, Altius, Fortified-with-vitamins".

A motion was passed when the committee regathered after the bathroom break - since Altius reminded people of mountaineering, which had no connection to the modern Olympics, and there was no one offering a trillion dollars to keep it, it was dropped from the motto.

The committee members retired to their lives of public luxury with the satisfaction of a job done, whether well or not. And everyone lived happily ever from that day because they could safely take all the Prozac they wanted without having to worry about anything at all.

The elephant tracker

2004-10-05T13:09:00.001+05:30

We went to Mudumalai wildlife sanctuary with some friends this week. Our stay was at Bear Mountain resort which has some lovely views of the mountains in the area. The staff was very enthusiastic and took us on a great short trek. The only drawback was the rest of the clientele which was a bit loud. Well, there was one more drawback, but let me tell you the better things first.

On the drive from Bangalore to Mudumalai we passed through Bandipur. We were thrilled to see a bunch of shining eyes staring as we drove in the night. It turned out to be deer gazing boldly at the passing cars. In the next few hours, we saw many more of the spotted variety standing alone. We even saw big herds of twenty or so of them at some points, almost adjacent to the highway.

Closer to the resort, we noticed a huge, dark shadow about fifteen feet from the highway. My friend reversed the car to check it out. It turned out to be a bison peacefully enjoying the moonlit night and a midnight chew of its cud. We spent ten minutes there till it picked its head up to start evaluating our car and then gave a meaningful glance up at its horns. At that point we realized it was getting pretty late and drove away.

All through the night, we kept seeing many hares, frogs and mice crossing the road, illuminated by our headlights in the act. All in all, the jungle was simply crowded and overflowing with noisy, active life.

On the return drive, we drove in the day and saw lots of langur. We encountered a deer with huge branched antlers right on the road - it came up to our car in the hopes of food when we stopped. We resisted the temptation to feed it, the good citizens that we are.

While we stayed in the resort, we told the owner we wanted to take a jungle safari to spot some elephants. He advised us to take our own car (it can go offroad) into the jungle with a guide instead of going for the normal jungle safari. Shiva was the guide he introduced to us and the tall, muscular fellow completely looked the part of the competent jungle guide, in tune with the rhythms of nature and the language of the forest.

He shook hands gravely with us and told us, "One request sir. Total silence in the car please, no offence." He motioned with his fingers to his lips.

"I will watch," he said, pointing to his eyes. We were glad to be in the hands of a jungle guide who watched with both his eyes.

"... for animals," he added after about 3 minutes as we were walking to the car. Our joy was unbounded.

"It is good your car is grey and splattered with mud from the rain - it will blend in. I am wearing grey so the elephants think I am one of them. When we are deep in the interior, I will call to them and they will come." He pulled an imaginary twine with his fingers in the "tu kacche dhaage se khincha chala ayega" style that heroines use in Indian movies to demonstrate how thoroughly they have henpecked their prospective grooms.

"If you see herds of forty elephants, do not panic. You only have to be afraid of lone male elephants," he informed us. Then he reassured us with a wry smile, "But not today. Don't fear - Shiva is with you."

We were spellbound. This was truly a man of the jungle, a stately Tarzan-cum-Mowgli of Mudumalai, a magnificent creature who spoke to the brutes of the forest even though he dwelled in the cities of men. I gazed in admiration and respect as I remembered stories of Native Indian (the tomahawk and peace pipe variety) scouts and trackers who could follow a man's trail for weeks and weeks. "We Indians (the Taj Mahal and Sambar variety) are no less than anyone," I thought with a patriotic lump in my throat. There may have been an emotional tear in the corner of my eye also, but I wiped it away before anyone noticed.

Shiva took us along the highway without bothering to go off it even once to any interior road. "Confidence," we marveled to ourselves. We spent about 2 hours in the jungle with him and did not see a single animal - not an elephant, not a deer, not a hare, not a squirrel, not a frog, not a mosquito. I am not exaggerating.

As soon as we dropped him off, we saw a few deer and lagurs.

The need for improving stereotypes

2004-09-16T10:44:00.000+05:30

This article was found in the correspondence of Colonel Copper Beckham Twiner with the love of his life, Lady Patricia Spicekicker. The Col. Twiner was mentally and spiritually faithful to her till the end of his days. However, the four year separation from Lady Posh, as her friends called her, resulted in a number of physical and legal acts of disloyalty, during his posting to India with the East India Company from 1836 to 1840. The Colonel may be identified by clairvoyant readers of these chronicles as the illustrious ancestor of Korup Tweener. Actually, he was about as illustrious and admired as that stupid fellow whom Drew Barrymore married, what's his name... yeah, Tom Green, but Mr Tweener is buying us a burger (AND ketchup) during our negotations with him for an interview, so anything goes. Anyway, here is the letter.

My dear little Posh,

I continue to pine for you in the hot arid lands of Hindoostan. However, duty (and the shareholders of the East India Company, to be followed in twenty years by Her Majesty's government) beckon your darling Beckham and I must steel myself to bring education and light to the heathen of this benighted land by massacring and hanging as many of them as possible. It is an arduous task that I have set myself, but it needs doing and we Twiners have never shirked the burden of our race or the opportunity for quick advancement.

If you had marked my preceding words closely (and you better), you would have noticed that I made a prediction about what is to happen in 1858. The faculty of foresight is something I have been working on with my fourth wife, Kathin Krittika, who is excellent at divination. She has assured me that you would not be angry at the news of our marriage. I am afraid I may have injured your pride somewhat again, but I must assure you that only the utmost expediency of acquiring her powers of prediction precipitated this marriage.

While I pour my heart out in every mail to you and do not desist from expressing the depth of my despair at this enforced parting, I have also always attempted to elucidate and educate you about various matters that I believe should be of interest to an enlightened young lady of your mental calibre. In today's monograph, I will attempt to shew to you the limitations of the stereotypes we hold dear these days, as has been demonstrated to me by the time I have spent in Hindoostan. Please feel free to publish the rest of this as an extract in a respected scientific publication of your choice IN MY NAME. Alternatively, you may publish in the tabloid (they are going to be invented soon, says Krittika) of your choice and SEND ME THE MONEY.

It has come to my attention that a number of stereotypes have been held about the natives of various countries of the world and about various religions of the world. I have noticed very similar stereotypes held in Hindoostan about the natives of various regions of this colony. This suggests to me that our stereotypes are rather limited in power and have to be constantly reused when faced with peoples that we have not known before. This is a lamentable situation and I will propose some measures to deal with it later. In the next few paragraphs, I present some illustrations.

Example 1: The fellows of this country are supposed to be lazy intellectuals who care about aesthetics and can talk for days and days about matters of literature and art. They think their one big city is the jewel of the world and that their language and cuisine are the only ones with any merit. They have had a lot of strong leaders in their recent history, who have taken recourse to violence for their political ends. They are good-for-nothing socialists who don't want to do an honest day's work. The remarkable thing is that there exists a state in India, whose natives are looked upon in the same light by the rest of India. (Editor's note: We will not risk naming the country and state that the Col has in mind because, frankly, we are in this business just to make money [Owner's note: You ain't making any!], not to rake up controversy. We will leave it to the readers to take guesses.)

Example 2: The people of this country are seen as loud-mouthed, demanding braggarts who think the rest of the world should learn THEIR language. They are hard workers which has made them prosperous, but they have no culture or sophistication. Because they have the money, they attract a lot of immigrant labour from other countries. They tend to pay a lot of attention to perception and looks and make constant fun of us Europeans for our funny teeth and what they think are bad looks. Remarkably, there exists a state in India about which the rest of India feels exactly the same way.

Example 3: The fellows of this community are thought to be hard-as-nails businessmen who will extract their pound of flesh when it is due, whatever the consequences to anyone else. They are thought to be penny-pinching moneylenders and impossibly cruel. While they originated from one small section of desert land, they have spread all over the world and now control major industries in almost all countries. There is a community in India, who is thought of in exactly the same way.

Example 4: The people of this country are supposed to be very stupid. Everyone else makes jokes about their lack of intellect. There exists exactly such a community in Hindoostan.

I only have four examples here, but this should be enough to convince any logical person. While the younger and idealistic (which means "stupid") set of readers may conclude from this that we should do away with stereotypes and simply judge every man or woman on individual merit, that is obviously ludicrous. What is required is a greater diversity in our stereotypes so we can continue to judge people quickly and entertain ourselves by making jokes about them.

--
I remain, as always, your faithful lover,
Colonel Copper Beckham Twiner

By a stroke of good fortune, we also found Lady Posh's reply to this letter and it follows below.

When the hell will you grow up, Twiner? I was never in love with you and never even knew of your existence until you started writing me letters from the safe distance that India provides you. I have been married for the last year to Lord Nuncle Spearshaker. He is looking forward enormously to your return to the British Isles, so that he may thrash you himself.

PS: In my previous requests to you to stop writing to me, I have told you about the romantic sonnets he pens and his refinement and delicacy. I realize now that this may have given you an inaccurate picture. Please allow me to correct that - he weighs 250 pounds and crushes irons rails between his fingers to keep them in good health and prevent the onset of writing-related stress injuries.

PPS: As for your stupid theories, who the hell cares?

The slacker ninja chef

2004-09-03T07:59:00.002+05:30

The previous story has catapulted Korup to a legend of mythically inconsequential proportions and he has been receiving imaginary fan mail by the non-existent shipful.

There has been wild speculation about the whereabouts of this character in the present time and expeditions have been planned to meticulous detail to locate the fellow wherever he may be, only to be canceled at the last minute because of utter pointlessness. However, since we here at The Sentimental Turnip are not constrained by any notions of rhyme or reason, we went the whole hog and located Korup Tweener.

Here is the schocking truth that will make you sit up and yawn. Dare you believe it?

The president of the IOC in 2020, the wildly popular, the much-admired, envied, ridiculed, loved, hated and ignored, the sensational Korup Tweener, the man called "the dude" by a small number and called "who?" by the rest is, in 2004, merely a mac-and-cheese and peanut-butter-and-jelly-sanwich-maker. He prefers to refer to himself as a cordon bleu mac-and-cheese arrangeur, but we know that, in addition to being all of the above, he is a pompous and pretentious moron.

We delved a bit more into his past. He has never been able to keep a job more than a month and was at a loose end in May. Last week, he tapped into the old boys network of Farthunder High where he graduated from fifth-grade with honours and the accompaniment of cherry bombs. The grapevine informed him that his friend, confidante, alter-ego and fellow awesome-dude from the fifth-grade, Ashkent Erik, was on the lookout for a chef to prepare mac-and-cheese at his newly acquired restaurant.

Korup did not have a better old boys network to tap into because his school and he had had a mutual no-hard-feelings divorce after he completed grade five. The school had attempted to teach Korup negative numbers in grade six. He had realized that this new knowledge could only help him to tally losses and was therefore useless from a business perspective.

From that day, he had refused to believe in negative numbers in the same way that other people refuse to believe in ghosts, and this attitude had finally led to irreconcilable differences (get it? get it? get it? we are awesome - yay for us!), followed by an audit and the parting of ways.

As he learned from his friends in successive years that they were being taught irrational numbers, and then imaginary numbers, Korup had patted himself on the back with a self-praising back-patter on getting out of that hotbed of insanity called Education and its specific manifestation in Farthunder High.

We arrived at the restaurant and glanced around. It had a medieval-Disney-Shakespeare fastfood theme and was called MacDuck. On one wall was a giant poster of shorts-clad mice jousting in tights and armour with seven gentlemen of below-average height. From the opposite wall, a bald man with an obscenely ostentatious collar mulled over various options in a thought bubble beside his head, "To see or not to see. To free or arrest thee. Use Brie or use Chutney. Give me Liberty or Give me Lakhani." A greenish statue with a thorny crown looked on coquettishly at him from one side, while Patrick Henry glared at him in perpetual outrage at the almost-plagiarism.

Into the MacDuck, Korup had inveigled himself using his friendship with Erik and gotten promoted to the title of le grande pinata in a few short weeks. This didn't mean anything, because a chef was allowed to write any title on his paper hat, but Korup still allowed himself some pride at having thought of it.

Our futuristic feature from last week has grabbed this manic attention-seeker from his life of idyllic and cheesy obscurity and placed him at the helm of fabulous (Dictionary meaning: fictitious) intrigues and wild affairs of derring-do and chivalry with no beginning to them.

We are trying to convince Korup to take out time from his busy schedule of plotting raids of the wine cellar and the mock chastity belt that hot short waitress, Tipayi had been saddled with, to answer fan mail and dispense some of his limited gyan to our readers.

Mr Korup is asking for a burger and fries for his time but we are trying to restrict his demands to the burger since we are craving some fried carbs ourselves. Unlike other members of the press who enjoy expense accounts and houris to pander to their every whim, we have to pay for our lunch ourselves, so a little fries-related graft in job-related expenses is quite acceptable, we feel.

A breakthrough in negotiations is expected in a week and we will get back to you next Saturday with reports from this rather boring and unexciting event.

Made in Bhopal

2004-08-21T16:46:00.002+05:30

The first thing I remember about Bhopal was appearing for an entrance exam. This is a uniquely Indian concept where you write an exam spanning multiple subjects over a day or more to be selected for a seat at an engineering or medical course or for the Indian civil services.

This particular exam was for entrance to the fifth standard of the Central School. We were being tested on English, Mathematics and Science. When a normal person sets questions to decide who to admit to the fifth class, he sets them on the material from the fourth class. If he is really ~~lazy~~ efficient, he reuses the final exams given to the fourth class.

That would be normal, which may be good enough for some small one-horse town. This is Bhopal, the big city with the associated razzmatazz, pizzazz and all that jazz. Out here, we strive for more than normal. We got the final exam of the fifth class.

With exams in Mathematics and Science, you could consider extrapolating from the knowledge of fourth class material and being able to answer a few questions. But how do you answer "Why was Rumpelstiltskin angry when the queen guessed his name correctly?" which is a verbatim quote from the English paper. I did not know. Thinking back, they could just have left out English and saved everyone concerned 3 hours because everyone must have got a zero there.

However, nine-year olds are probably impervious to adult irrationality. For them, it is an axiom, a self-evident truth. We merrily scribbled away. What I remember clearly is writing five sentences in answer without having a clue about whether Rumpelstiltskin was a man, a vegetable or some kind of small garden rodent. The examiners may have given some points for effort, because I got through. This was 1984, the Orwellian year.

After living in Bhopal for three months, we moved to Coimbatore in September. It was there that we received news of the horrific results of the December 3 gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Dominique Lapierre has written a book on the tragedy that consumed 8,000 lives that very day and left about 120,000 permanently affected. The site http://www.bhopal.net (disturbing image here) provides links about the case and is organizing activism to bring some approximation of justice to the victims. Many years later, the Babri Masjid would be demolised on Dec 6 in 1992. Ever since then, the first week of December always makes me jumpy and anxious with vague dread.

I returned to Bhopal in 1987. There were two Central Schools in the city and this time I managed to get into the better regarded "Maida Mill" one. It was so called because it was close to the central flour (maida is Hindi for flour) mill.

This literal-mindedness seems to extend to all kinds of naming in Bhopal. There is one predominant route that mini-buses take in the city and the localities are named after the stops on the route. They are called "paanch number" (#5), "cheh number" (#6), etc all the way upto #12. Yeah, it is unimaginative but it is extensible... sort of. When the riders demanded that the mini-buses stop between #6 and #7 because there were now lots of people staying between the two, guess what the name for the area around the new stop became. "Saade cheh" (6.5), of course. In breaking news, I hear there are a "savaa cheh" (6.25) and a "paune saat" (6.75) too now.

This naming scheme avoids the whole controversy (and repainting of signs) that other state capitals have to go through every few years, as "Lord Curzon Colony" becomes "Mahatma Gandhi Colony" and then flips through "Ambedkar Colony", "Veer Savarkar Colony" and "Mirza Ismail Colony" as various parties form governments in the state. The other neat side-effect of the numeric naming is that you can approximate the distance between two locations by subtracting their numbers.

The Maida Mill school is where I grew up as a teenager and graduated from high school. But the first two weeks there were pretty rough. Not many people talked to me. I was a shy guy and the rest of the kids seemed to have known each other for ages and ages, having gone to that very school for the last eight years. They did not make any extra effort to welcome newcomers.

The Monday of the third week, a really huge classmate came up to me and told me he had heard that I was "good at studies". This sort of opening usually leads to admiration, adulation and compliments. All three are fairly embarrassing to an awkward teenager, especially one who is already slightly socially unsettled. I waved my hand to brush them aside before they came. As I was smiling and raising my arm, he put his hand on my shoulder and suggested in a politely menacing tone that I not report anyone whom I saw cheating in any exams.

Umm...

To look on the bright side of the situation, I had not suffered any admiration-related embarrassment. On the dim side, however, I was about to suffer some stupidity-related beating because I told him I would be sure to report everyone I saw in the act. I used to be offensively honest that way. The situation would have turned ugly if the bell had not rung for the games period at that precise moment.

"Games" is a sacred zone of the time-table in school and not one minute of it is to be wasted, even on something interesting like fighting. This is a time-honored protocol that has been observed since the days of the Mahabharata ("I will smash my club on your evil skull, vile cousin!... Hey, it's games. Wanna play chaupad?"). Traditionalists that we both were, we penciled in appointments for fisticuffs in 70 minutes on our schedules and ran off to the field.

The class was playing soccer that day. We divided up into two teams. Mr. Huge was the goalkeeper for the opposite team. I have only a faint recollection of how this came about but I scored the only two goals of that match. Let us gloss over the fact that they were also the only two goals I scored in my life, because they succeeded in absolving me of my sin of being "good at studies".

The chap came up to me later and said, "Great, man. Fantastic. Listen, about earlier," he paused, "I don't want you to misunderstand what I said before. I never cheat myself. I just wanted you to know there are dangerous characters in the class who do. I just think you should be careful when dealing with them," gesturing generally towards the rest of the class. These dangerous dudes must have been really skilled at the art of deception and camouflaging how deadly they were. Most were half his size and fidgeted nervously as he pointed at them.

Thankfully, there was more to that class than the bullies and the bullied and I made friendships more easily since that day, even after it was widely realized that I had been out of my sporting form on that particular day. A number of my best friends today are classmates from those days.

My city for a sidewalk

2004-08-14T16:47:00.000+05:30

Walking never hurt anyone, so I thought I would walk the one mile to work. "never hurt anyone"... I smile now at the charmingly naive idealism of my youth (this was only four months ago, but you know what I mean). Let's get the setup straight. I live at the northern boundary of Cambridge Layout and have to commute to M.G.Road. There are just two turns and two significant crossings on the route. One of the crossings is Trinity circle and the other (which takes even longer to navigate) is simply the crossing from the left side of the road to the right in front of my office!

Come, let's take a walk. As you come out of my apartment complex, things are fairly calm. The path inside the complex is shared by pedestrians and vehicles, but people are usually courteous here. There are the occasional quantum mechanical drivers who believe you are simply a probabilistic waveform that they can pass through without any consequence to you or to them, but inside the complex, even they rein themselves in, probably because their children play in the same area.

So you quietly enter the main road. There is the odd sleeping dog on the pavement sometimes but they are not at their valorous best in the mornings and are quick to run off if they hear you. But it is best to watch out for them because a dog that you have stepped on might (quite justifiably) take umbrage in a nasty and extremely dental manner. At that point, their motto is "bite first and ask questions (or bark) later".

There is another reason for watching your feet as you walk instead of looking up at the beautiful blooms on the trees that line Bangalore roads. Those trees have trunks and the trunks have roots that extend quite a way sideways. The footpaths are built with the utmost care to the tree's convenience and so "Pedestrian Beware" if you don't want to end up tripping on one of them. But that is a minor reason to watch where you walk.

The real reason is this. A lot of the footpaths seem to be built over drains. This by itself is not the problem except when combined with the hypermathematics of footpath construction. Let's do a quiz. If you have to pave a 1000 ft length with slabs of granite 2 feet wide, how many slabs would you need?

If you answered 500, allow me to retort with "Good thing you are not in the footpath business. Your ignorance is showing." The correct answer is 428. This is because even a 2 feet slab has a soul, and like anything with a soul it has a 2 inch wide aura around it. If you stick the slabs right next to each other, the auras collide and the slabs cannot breathe. And THAT is how you would have built it, you evil monster!

The net result is that you have to be careful not to step into the gaps between the stones. Also, do not assume the gaps are of a uniform width, because then you would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and, in addition, break your foot. Sometimes, entire slabs are missing - this is done to demonstrate the efficiency of the drainage system underneath to the taxpayers.

The last remaining dimensional variable on the footpath is height and as you guessed (you are getting the hang of this, aren't you?) the slabs are not laid flat. They all have different thicknesses, and are laid on at any random angle to the ground. This gives you all the benefits of hiking without having to drive 50 km from the city first.

As you get to the road in front of what used to be Lido theater, you see the other intruder on the footpath - a giant transformer which leaves about 1 foot of 10 for the pedestrian. This is immediately followed by a five foot deep pit. Whoever dug it has been responsible enough to mark it off with a traffic barrier on one side. As for the people that may approach it from the other side in the night (the barrier is helpfully invisible in the dark), well, Let Them Eat Cake.

In this long litany, I must praise the one good thing about this route - there are no shops on the footpath.

That brings us to the two crossings, which take on an average about five minutes each to cross, but that is to be expected because of the heavy traffic and the erratic driving of the mix of traffic (10 kmph bicycles, 30 kmph autos, 70 kmph motorbikes).

What is not to be expected is motorbikes on the footpath trying to beat the jam. You smartly duck out of the way and here we are, at work. I won't blame you if the numerous advantages of the auto as a means of conveyance are starting to make a strong case for the evening commute.

You cannot go back home again

2004-08-07T16:48:00.000+05:30

My name is Peter. I was born in Goa, but my uncle from New York adopted me and I have lived in New York since the last eighteen years. This is a nice place, but I miss the homeland sometimes.

It is quite abysmally difficult to find a suitable job in India if you have very specialized skills . This used to be the reason for a lot of brain drain in the past few decades.

Fortunately, the IT/software sector is booming these days and many people who would have otherwise had to migrate to the USA simply to find work that is suitable to their qualifications AND reasonably stimulating to them, are now able to stay back in India. They might not necessarily have completely appropriate work but there exist many more high-paying jobs which are not thoroughly mortal for the brain cells.

However, coming to the very personal situation, I foresee that India will still not be able to provide opportunities for me for a few more decades. And by that time I will be past my prime and not able to contribute much. So, I had to move to New York. The pay stinks, but I at least I am in an exciting, swinging line of work and best of all, I don't have a boss.

I will be able to return the day India has developed to the point of having continuous sequences of skyscrapers along at least a few of the major streets in at least one reasonably big and crime-riddled city.

You see, out in India, I still cannot capitalize completely on the ability to fight crime by jumping really high and swinging from dynamically generated ropes composed of instantly solidified wristly secretions. I can jump from the Gateway of India, but there isn't any place close by to jump TO. And if you just jump from the ground back to the ground, you get no respect from the criminal classes. Those guys don't have the sense of romance in their soul to be able to imagine a hero if his means of transport is even mildly embarrassing. And in the crime-fighting business, if you ain't got respect, you ain't got nothing.

I miss her

2004-07-24T16:49:00.000+05:30

My name is Rikky. I like Spiderman, playing cricket and climbing the mango trees in Horilal's orchard and making howling noises to scare people when they walk on the roads below. Horilal does not own the orchard, he only guards it from children and thieves, but he likes me and lets me climb the tree because I don't steal any mangoes. I used to eat them, but I don't anymore. I am a Big Boy now because my date of birth is 12 April, 1997 and I became Seven Years Old four months ago. I also like to ride our blue car with Daddy because he is An Amazing Driver (he told me) and he can drive very fast even in bad traffic.

Daddy works for the Indian Space Research Organization. He makes satellites and missiles. I like satellites, because they keep going around the earth in orbit for a long time and when aliens come in spaceships, they can see my father's name on the satellite. Then they will come to earth and shake my hand and I will be an ~~international~~ intergalactic celebrity and when I go to the market, everyone will admire me and buy cold drinks for me and It Is An Honour (for them). Missiles just fall and explode, so they are not good. Also, people die.

This will make the families of those people sad and I don't like it. When I was a Small Boy, the older boys would not play cricket with me. I would tell Mummy and she would play with me. But she did not play very well and I had to teach her the proper grip and how to watch the ball and how to swing the bat. She tried hard but she just could not. Sometimes I gave her an easy ball because it is Good Sportsmanship. I cannot play cricket with her now. She does not live at our home anymore. She is with her parents.

Daddy cries sometimes because he feels alone. I want to tell him the accident was not his fault, but he does not listen to me at all these days. We had the accident two months ago and Mummy was in the hospital and I felt pain but I did not cry at all because I am a Brave Little Man.

Sara is my little sister and she was not in the car because she was at home. She smiles a lot, but she will be sad when she is Old Enough To Understand. I dont want her to know about the accident at all, but surely she will ask why her Mummy and Daddy are not together and then she will know.

So, I feel bad for her. When I feel like this, I climb the trees in Horilal's orchard and he doesn't shoo me away even when he sees me. Everyone else is scared of him, but he is my friend. He can do Prediction. Sometimes, he also climbs the tree and does Prediction that the next person walking underneath will get very scared. When someone comes, we both shake the tree and his Prediction Comes True and we laugh a lot.

I told Horilal I wanted to see Mummy again and he Predicted that I will see her in 48 years. 48 years is a long time, but I don't mind waiting that long because it means Mummy will live to the Ripe Old Age of 81.

City gone to the dogs

2004-07-03T16:50:00.000+05:30

I was returning from a friend's house around 11pm. People claim Bangalore has a hip and happening night life, but most of the city downs shutters by 10pm. I usually get an auto near his place but there was none today.

Well, I know that there is the Empire hotel about a km away, and that is the haunt of all the late night birds. Which naturally attracts the autos to it, so that they can ferry the tired reveller back home at twice the normal charges. So, I start the trek to Empire.

I am turning into St Marks road which is about as downtown as Bangalore gets outside of M.G.Road. This wide street is usually crammed full of honking cars and autos and bikes and bicycles during the day. At 11:30pm, I see a bike pass only about every few minutes. It is lonely. And dark. It is also getting slightly cold... Not a good combination... However, there is nothing to worry. I tell myself, "This is a safe cit..."

BARK! I hear and I see

I count four dogs sleeping in the petrol pump. But one is awake. And he is barking. Which means there will soon be five. Ok, that was fast - there are. A dog can get from sleeping to what looks like 100 mph in 3 seconds. Any guesses about where they are headed?

I have had a long and acrimonious association with dogs. Ever since a black pup chased me (aged 4 3/4) from school to home, I have hated them. And they reciprocate enthusiastically. It doesn't look like these five are going to buck the trend.

In the daytime, you could just motion as if you were picking up a pebble and any stray dog with an iota of experience would run away from the anticipated hit on its flanks. But in the night they own the street. Actually, I have not heard of them attacking anyone except the rare child... and... intruders! Which is why some people in the residential areas of Bangalore actually like having the strays around. This bit of trivia does not help lift my sagging spirits.

Survey the ground... no sticks or stones. And words cannot hurt them. Why didn't I leave at ten? Why didn't I buy a car sooner? Why didn't I call from his home for the late night door-to-door city taxi? Why didn't I take a different street? Why can dogs run so fast? Why isn't anyone coming on the road so I could ask them for a lift and escape?

Well, here they are. Someone told me you can't outrun dogs and you certainly can't fight them. The only thing is to hold your ground, while being careful not to show them your teeth. I wonder if I should take off my belt and flog one of them and hope the others get the hint. Or maybe plant my foot on the neck of one and show the others who is boss. But no, that won't work - they are certain to attack once you initiate proceedings. And no one can fight off five dogs.

Thankfully, as madly as they are barking, these guys don't look like they want to bite or fight. They just want to stop me moving towards the pump. Fair enough guys, I am not staying, just need to move through it and to the other side. This land is your land. Of course, they don't believe me. A petrol pump with vast tracts of space to sleep on - they ain't letting me get my feet on this prime nighttime real estate. So, I will just have to walk back and take a parallel street.

But firstly, I am lazy even when I am slightly anxious for my safety and secondly, who knows there aren't any dogs there. Bangalore is practically overrun with them. This tense drama dissolves as a red Optra races on St Marks towards our stalemate.

There is something in the mind of the stray dog that just snaps when they see a fast car. It appears to be a cowardly aggressor to them, racing up to pick a fight and then running away scared when challenged. Another chance to notch up an easy victory over a seemingly fearsome adversary on their belts (pelts?) and impress the lady dogs about. They run off to scare the Optra away with their wild barking. By that time, I have crossed the pump and they trot off home in the satisfaction of a difficult quest completed to perfection - two intruders chased away in one night. That will certainly deserve a celebration at the garbage dump in the morning.

I reach the hotel without incident. These days I tuck into bed at ten.

Deseased (sic) chicken - Rs 38

2004-06-26T16:52:00.000+05:30

I passed a shop with a sign announcing "LIVE chicken Rs illegible" and "DESEASED chicken Rs 38". That is merely an observation. What possible causes might result in this sign?

One would certainly expect an aggressively profit-seeking poultry farmer to take a shot at unloading his DISEASED chicken on the public. You would applaud him for doing the decent thing and informing the customer about the condition of the goods. But I suspect that, lax as our public health authorities are, they would not allow this audacious advertisement of their apathy on a frequently used road. So let's discount this theory.

Live and DECEASED are certainly antonyms, so their juxtaposition would make sense. Except for the fact that the word DECEASED has vague overtones of respect. While all forms of life are to be highly regarded, respect for a chicken seems slightly out of place. Especially if you are going to... umm... as it were... eat it. This hypothesis seems incorrect too.

Then there is the boring possibility that the owner wanted to say DRESSED. I am not sure how appropriate the word DRESSED is to describe a chicken which has been divested of its... well... vestments. Seems more like UNdressed to me. Anyway, the owner probably told the signmaker to write LIVE and DRESSED. The signmaker probably forgot the second word once he got home and consulted his educated friend to find out the opposite of LIVE. The friend, assuming their had been a tragedy (of the human, not the gallinaceous kind) at a client of the signmaker, supplied the delicate word "deceased" and the signmaker, with his usual professional devotion to perfection, neglected to ask the spelling, and put down the approximately phonetic "deseased". The owner never visits the shop, but lets his nephew, who cannot read English, manage the shop. So there it stands.

Well, I certainly thought and wrote about this shop for half an hour, but just to be on the safe side, I don't think I will ever buy my chicken from him.