Kerala pictures

Away in Kerala

Sorry folks.  Am away in Kerala. For those of you who think about my writing as awesome here are some pics that are like balm on sore eyes. Kidding!

A New Government; a New Dispensation

So the democratic process electing a new parliament has ground to a halt. The process of determining the next government will soon begin. But have you thought of how distanced we, the people, are from the governing process? True, right to information has unearthed a lot of things. On the whole, looking at it from an academic distance, what do we see? The politicians need us only for electing them. After that, it's pretty much their own turf, they can decide what they want to do. 

A government run by proxy is the worst form of government. I hear the congress was run by it's president than the prime minister. Also, there is talk of the cabinet of the potential future prime minister being decided by the RSS. Do we need such governments run by proxies? Such governments have their risks: decisions are not made at appropriate time, often wrong decisions are meted out. There is also the monster of some favourite influencing the decision. 

Ah, ahem, now comes the question of diplomacy and projecting our leader to the world. How will Modi - a small-time businessman - appear in the company of Obama and Cameroon? Can he speak English with sophistication? Whatever I have heard him speak appears shallow, uninspiring. What will be his sartorial preferences? How will be conduct himself in world fora? 

You need all that to be a leader of a nation, and much more. Empty rhetoric will not compensate for realpolitik. 

Hm, all we can do is wait and watch.

The Jackfruit Tree I Planted... and Why Jackfruits Are So Important to Mallus!

Sometime in my childhood, I wanted to be a farmer and would go around our property in Kerala with a hoe and plant trees and look after a cow that was gifted to me by my mother. And then I had planted this jackfruit (it's also called breadfruit in some cultures) tree in our property. Actually, I took a plant that had germinated from under a jackfruit tree and re-planted it, and then watered it. The tree did very well and grew. Today that tree has sprouted many branches and my brother Joseph John sent me this photo, which shows, well, a lot of fruits. 

Erm, what I am waffling, eh, proceeding to announce here is the joy of seeing something bear fruit. This does warm the cockles because other endeavours of mine are forever languishing: a novel, a collection of short stories, a book on Kerala. Well, they are taking their time, while the jackfruit tree has spread its wings in many directions. Secretly, in my heart, what I am wishing is: why hasn't my other projects taken off? Where am I going wrong? Of course, health issues and medical system have taken a toll, but do I give up so soon, without closure? I don't know. 

I need to... need to.... Okay I will leave it at that.

In Kerala a jackfruit is put to different uses (as every Malayali knows), as I said to Facebook friend and guitarist Lindsay Legane:

We eat it as a fruit

We make a sauted delicacy of its seeds

We fry it in coconut oil

We steam it 

We make a curry out of it

We eat it raw

So on and so forth....

Well, so many We's in the above for my liking. I will let it stand. That's because we Mallus are an egotistic people when it comes to our fruits and our eats. He... he...!

So, people, never ask a Mallu if he misses jackfruit. He may well double up his lungi into an improvised short pant and prepare to climb a jackfruit tree. And sure as hell he won't come down for hours until he finishes his "chakka" on the "plavu."

Here's the Wikipedia article on Jackfruit, if it interests you.

About Employers and Suchlike...

Absence can make the heart grow fonder. So, dear reader, I am assuming my absence would have made you fonder about this space. Or, am I dreaming, or something? Well, be that as it may

​,​

I have kept aside (rather, swept aside

​)​

other concerns to pen a few words here today.

Sonny's leaving for the U.S.A. was a shock for both me and wifey. Didn't expect it to happen so soon. We miss him. We thought the company would give him some more time for the rona dhona (crying and wringing) and packing. No. Corporations are very demanding these days, which says something about the job market. Don't ask me what. So the actual rona dhona is happening now: on a little application called Whatsapp. Our first question to him is Have you eaten? If yes, what? It seems he has met some good people in the U.S. and are staying at their house, a beautiful bungalow with two garages and a drive. These are only things we can imagine here, but there it is common, or, so I guess.

And, then there are health issues. I think the whole concept of western medicine - as it exists in India - is a sham.

​Seriously.​

Yesterday I went to get some tests done and the girl there couldn't spell my name.

She kept writing my name wrongly and I had to correct her.​

Now, suppose, she mixes my name for someone else's? Such things do happen in laboratories, don't they? That makes me a believer more and more of Indian medicine. Oh, why couldn't I do Yoga, meditation, and walking a few years ago - as I do now - and stayed clear of my health issues. But then I was too much in awe of life and wanted to live as if each day counted. I was a sucker for the promises of my employers, wanting to do great things in the corporate world. Did I succeed?

Well, how can you succeed when you have to meet the following foolish demands:

The MD wants a new website of the company in just four days
The in-house magazine should read like a combination of Penthouse and Playboy
Each advertisement should have five, yes five, different concept for the MD to choose from
Everything should be approved by the chairman or the MD
You have to sit beside the office copier and do your best thinking
All they - the VP and above -

​do ​

is drink tea, hold meetings and go home, you have to sit and do the poop scooping
An office of a 100 people has two toilets and 4 urinals. Sometimes even these facilities have to be shared with the neighbour's office staff.

(The MD and Chairman have their own.)​ 

If you want to crap the best option is the nearby star hotel, into which you walk with all the dignity you can muster, given the situation.
et cetera, et cetera.

Enough bitching about employers. The liberties they take

​ ​

in India​

are undocumented.

​More of this to come.​

The Nest is Suddenly Empty

Not been here for a long time. Not that I am lazy, but that something drastic was going on in our lives, meaning wifey's and mine. Sonny was told to pack bags and be in the Yoonited States within a week. And the desperation started: for luggage, for suits, for warm clothing, for jackets, for foreign exchange, for sundry other toiletries. And, of course, masalas and pickles. These days travelling to a foreign country involves all these.

Then his flight was cancelled and he was given accommodation in a city five-star hotel. This hotel even has a bathrobe for residents, I discovered. I have never worn a bathrobe in my life and none of the five-star hotels I lived in provided one. From the hotel room I could look straight into a slum and see life at its worst before me. Naked children running around, mothers sitting on doorways, the roofs cluttered with plastic sheets, the open gutters thick with sewage. Oh God! What would those firangs who stay at the hotel think? Do they sit in their bathrobes watching the naked children being bathed in the open? The staff at the hotel were suitably obsequious and "namaste-ed" us everywhere we went, and I didn't disappoint them, meaning, to say, I responded with a regal wave of acknowledgement. Do they know about the poverty that I saw from their window? I don't know.

And then sonny flew away and we were devastated. The nest is empty. It's as if our lives had become barren and decrepit. The house sounded strangely hollow, the buzz had ceased, his bike lay derelict, it's thrum and boom - announcing his arrival - replaced by silence. The soft patter of feet up and down the stairs was gone and we didn't know what had laid our lives bare. Wifey felt it more as he was very close to her, and she indulged her only son's every wish: his clothes immaculately washed and ironed, his food peppered with the right amount of masalas, his requests for sweets fulfilled. 

I didn't know it could be this damaging. So, I tried to make it a bit bearable for wifey, telling her a few jokes to make her laugh, and explaining what I read in the papers, now that I am nearly unemployed. We know we have to depend on each other now, for vast periods of time. So, now I realise what it would have been for my own parents. But, for my parents there was a different kind of engagement; they fought a lot. 

Now though we chat on Whatsapp quite a lot, I don't know what's going on in my son's life. He says the streets are empty in the small town in which he is based. There are no people and no animal life around. Hehe. He would have been more at home if there were a few stray dogs and cows on the roads and feverishly rushing people. I said, yes, there people live in their houses and when they go out they drive themselves. When they need something they go to a mall and pick up food and pack their refrigerators with them. No wonder all of them are so fat. But they are an ethical and industrious people. Over here men stand outside their homes in their drawstring chuddies quite a lot, to catch the wind, as they say. Over there if they want to catch the wind they go to the beach. Hm. Life's a beach. Or, so they think. 

We have to content with silent mornings, nights, and our own attempts at survival. Wifey has her school - where she is principal - and, she has mountains of work to be done there. As for me I have nothing, except this blog, perhaps, which nobody reads. 

Life goes on. Doesn't it? 

A Missing Aeroplane in the Indian Ocean and Other Musings....

Some things just upset me. Like this one: a jet plane from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing veers away and is not seen again for more than two weeks. Information comes very slowly over the media: much tom-tomed (yes, that's the word) as on-the-spot reportage and live coverage. I think of the relatives of people on board, their desperation, their stoicism, their occasional outbursts. Is this the modern world we live in? Is this the technological advancement we have made - making soldiers, most likely to be soldiers, looking out of windows to spot some tell-tale sign of the jet. Has the suicide/terror angle been investigated? Is this some kind of modern Hara-kiri?

Well, no one knows.

India said it will join the search and quite forgot about it. Well, um, it happened in our back yard, the Indian Ocean and we forgot about it. How else do you explain the virtual blanking out of India from the references by the experts. "!@#$%^&* unka plane gaya hai, hamara kya jata hai," they must have said in hushed voices. But there were Indians on board and Indian planes should have been sent for the search in the Indian Ocean. Of course, a great public relations opportunity of making use of a much international aeronautical disaster to display our advancements and achievements was lost. An Indian plane should have reported that it has spotted debris. We owed it to the world and the families of the compatriots on board. Largely situational albeit a significant positioning as a power of consequence in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand China offered to snoop around in our territorial waters (the ingenious Chinese know their diplomacy and war tactics much better).

Well, we wait, we wait for what? For Godot? For some news from Australia, China, Malaysia, even Thailand. No, not India.

The Man in Light Bulb Is No More! R.I.P. Khushwant Singh

I saw him at Tata Litlive, a frail old Sardarji, talking to someone at the Experimental Theatre where he was going to receive a lifetime achievement award. I wanted to go and introduce myself. But what do I introduce myself as? As a writer I don’t anything substantial to talk about, all I have is a bunch of short stories, poems, a blog, and a novel permanently in a state of suspended animation. Well, er, hum. Here is a man of substance, considerable amounts of it, charm, wit, and achievement and I was overwhelmed. That is to say I didn’t muster the courage to speak to him. And, damn! I bungled that opportunity, which will never come again. I thought writers like him are immortal, they don’t just die. So, no worries, maybe, after the novel is published I could introduce myself and give him a copy of my magnum opus.

 

Alas and Alack, that’s not to be! The sardarji in a light bulb is no more. Mario’s cartoon of him, pictured him in a light bulb. Why I don’t know, because Mario is also no more. It could be that he wrote at night, or, it could be that ideas for his columns spring to mind like a light bulb, a sixty watt one. Writers are such mysterious creatures.

 

My first acquaintance with his writing was through the Illustrated Weekly of India which he edited. My dad would bring the magazine home from office and immediately all the neighbours would want to read it. (Actually they wanted to ogle at the semi-nude pictures.) It contained salacious bits of information no newspaper dared to print in those days. He would not spare the holy cows of society. He satirized Amrita Sher-Gill’s paintings, he rubbished Godmen like Rajnish, he spoke boldly against Bhindranwale. Nobody was above his acerbic wit, he spared no one: neither self-styled gurus or punch-drunk divas. Sometimes you hated him for his frank criticisms; sometimes you loved him for demolishing an icon. His style was simple and he gave his journalists full freedom. I have read his articles and columns but not his novels. I mean to, soon. This is a loss that must be recorded in letters of black in our literary history.

 

As I am writing this I receive a call from a friend who worked with him in the Times group. He says he used to come to office in a tee-shirt and mostly his pheta would be either blue or yellow in colour, and that he was jovial with the staff. This is quite a departure from the norm because those were the days of casteism in the editorial echelons. Forget editors, not even assistant editors would drag their stiff asses to the copy desk to see how a story was going. But he changed it all and we got a new crop of editors – Akbar, Karkaria, Nair, D’Monte – all who believed in his style of running a publication.

 

Rest in peace Khushwant Singh, man in a light bulb!

Working Hardly on the Novel - Love Writing; Hate Editing

Sorry for not being in this space for some time. It's that I am reading the novel on my Kindle and have noticed a lot of printer's devils - hm, the abominable creature's guts - in them, which I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

I love writing. But it's the editing that I hate, no, detest with all my being. While writing keeps you entertained and innovating, it's the editing that kills. I have edited the novel four (repeat four) times and I guess there is one more editing to go. 

So there goes me, a doddering old idiot, a tottering fool, a cranky and bankrupt writer back to another editing. I should have gone back to painting which would have been more lucrative. Ho, hm. 

Wish me luck, because, sorry folks, it's going to take a while.

Honoured to Be Felicitated by David Sassoon Library

I have only served in two managing committees so far: the church committee and David Sassoon Reading Room and Library (see pic), the iconic library in Kala Ghoda where the literature section of the venerable Kala Ghoda Festival takes place.

The David Sassoon Library

The Certificate of appreciation

While my service to the church is understood and appreciated, I was pleasantly surprised when Adv. Vivek Ajgaokar, President, David Sassoon Library (DSL) decided to felicitate me along with other who have rendered service to it. Ergo, the neatly gilded certificate was conferred to me at a function in the refurbished library in the presence of dignitaries, an MLA, judges, lawyers, and sundry others.

Accepting this in my own humble way (IMHO), I said a few words about the library and how I came to be associated with it. (I confess I didn't do much good for the library except select some good books for it.) Which went thusly:

I was appointed editor of the Bombay Management Association's journal AMBIT by none other than Mr. M.B.Bhaskare, former MD of Greaves Cotton. The association is situated in Army & Navy Building, where Westside is at present. Actually Westside used to be the atrium of Army & Navy Building. And further, in actual fact, this atrium was the entrance to the Army & Navy Stores back in the halcyon days.

Ah, how the memory wanders over these stray threads of my past. Those were humongous times spent reading in the DSL and watching shows of Hussain, Raza, Monet and Picasso at the Jehangir Art Gallery and the NGMA, National Gallery of Modern Art for those who came late.

Thanks DSL and Adv. Vivek Ajgaokar for this honour.