God Must Be Crazy

OR Crazy Must Be God.

This post is a week overdue. Between reading and travelling and shopping, I don’t get much time to come online. Yay for that.

So I was a tad pissed two weeks back. Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood were performing in Bangalore, and entry was by ‘Invite Only’… only, the invites weren’t quite open to public. Adding salt to my wounds was that my friends in Calcutta snagged tickets for the same show… it was only in Bangalore that there was some kirrick happening which made the show more of a private party.

And then Amma pointed to an ad in the paper about Crazy Mohan performing his play Chocolate Krishna at Chowdiah on Sunday. I called the number in the ad. They said they had tickets available, which I immediately blocked. After I’d made doubly, triply, quadruply sure that I have the tickets (the lady on the other end got rather flustered just telling me my tickets weren’t going anywhere), I said ‘Gah! Who needs Colin and Brad when I have Crazy Mohan and Maadhu Balaji for six hours straight”. And grinned ear to ear.

Flashback a year. Crazy Mohan was performing Chocolate Krishna at Gayana Samaj. On a Sunday. Gayana Samaj’s phone number was out of order. And the website to book tickets was malfunctioning. And, most importantly, I was stuck debugging code until 11 pm on Saturday night. I’d missed that performance. And felt very bad.

Flashback twenty-odd years. I was a toddler. The entire clan was out for a movie, me in Amma’s arms. That was the first-ever movie I’d watched. I didn’t really follow anything, given that I barely had learned to speak… but I laugh at those jokes even today. Kamal Haasan in four roles. Mentally-ill industrialist. Sneaky secretaries. Cases of mistaken identity, aaL-maarattam. Confusion. Madness. Chaos. In other words, CrazyMohan-ness. Loved it.

Flashback fifteen-odd years. This time, it’s my sister who’s the first-time moviegoer. Kamal Haasan again, this time in two roles. Lovelorn landlords, lovelorn industrialists. Sneaky secretaries. Sticky-fingered household help. Drunk makeup artistes. Iyer-ness. In sum, CrazyMohan-ness. Totally loved it.

For the uninitiated, Crazy Mohan (Sometimes credited as ‘Gracy’ Mohan, in true Tamizh tradition of muddling up ‘ka’/'ga and ‘cha’/'ja’ and ‘tha/dha’) is a scriptwriter in the Tamil film industry. He has to his credit a lot of films like Arunachalam, Little John, Magalir Mattum and Indran Chandran, but he is known best for his comedies starring Kamal Haasan – Thenali, Michael Madana Kaamarajan, Panchatantiram, Sathi Leelavathi, Avvai Shanmughi… basically every damn movie which when relayed on TV stops all fights for the remote between my sister and I.

With his group Crazy Creations, he stages plays, which someone like me who’s living outside of Tamil Nadu knows about only because the stories get adapted and relayed on TV… they used to make for rather popular TV shows.

So when they were promoting Chocolate Krishna on Coffee with Anu, we all watched with rapt attention. A rather fun bunch of people, sharing anecdotes about each other. And then an interview of Mr. Mohan himself.

I didn’t know till then that he was an engineer too. Back then, when I was still wondering about what to do in life and whether engineering, even of the software sort suited me, it struck a chord with me. [And no, the fact that Chetan Bhagat is an engineer doesn't do anything to me].

So you sort of get why I was all excited about going to this live performance…. this was someone I’d been worshipping since my first taste of celluloid. The reasons stretch to more than just that he was a funny engineer. I’ll come to those a while later.

Malleswaram is on an average day full of people in Iyengar naamam and Hebbar Iyengar Tamizh [this is a tongue which uses the grammatical structure and sentence endings of Tamil, with most of the vocabulary being Kannada. Like "En magan-ku kaayle bandhudtu" or "Paath-kond vaa ma, neeru challidum"], but today was exceptional. More Tambrahms than you would find at the Srirangam temple on Vaikunta Ekadashi.

And for good reason. From what I’ve seen, Tambrahms form an integral part of Crazy Mohan’s fanbase. Not only is it because of the sort of language he uses, or the subjects he picks, but also because he is one of the very, very few scriptwriters who portrays Tambrahms as actual people. Most others choose to vilify us, highlight and lampoon and parody our customs, language and social structure, mostly going to the extent of highly exaggerating and manufacturing the ills of our community. Crazy Mohan on the other hand portrays us as People. People with the usual ups and downs and quirks and lovableness. For once, we don’t have to see a Tambrahm on screen as a vile bastard poisoning the villain’s mind, or a wicked witch looking down upon (and/or torturing) people of ‘lower’ castes, or sneakily eating meat. And hence, if there’s a Rangachari or Swaminathan in a movie where Crazy Mohan’s the scriptwriter, we can be more than confident of it being a portrayal we are comfortable with, not one where we look away bashfully when others look quizzically at us, wondering if all non-Brahm women who marry into Tambrahm households are routinely tortured, or if we all routinely practice untouchability with the household help.

It is however not just casteism that drives us all to set aside a Saturday afternoon whenever a film of his releases. Atleast not me…. his brand of humour with vile puns and wordplay is something I myself practice, possibly as a side-effect of watching his movies religiously for years and years.

But unlike me, he doesn’t stop with that. A typical Crazy Mohan story will have atleast a dozen convolutions, two dozen absurd situations which you will totally not buy if it was any other movie, and layers and layers of jokes a new one of which you’ll unravel with every time you watch the movie. And watch it repeatedly you will… the whole experience is extremely feel-good.

No other scriptwriter can convince you that three grown men will be in contention for a wizened lady well past her prime. No other scriptwriter can subtly put it across with dollops of humour that you need to put your wife above your friends. No other scriptwriter can make the saga of a husband jealous of his wife’s male friend (due to, of course, mistaken identities and two-three people with the same names) so funny that you cruelly want to watch him fall flat on his face when he discovers that his wife is not actually cheating on him; it’s just that the male friend’s girlfriend has the same name as his wife.

The most absurd lines sound so in-place and in-character in his scripts. Like when someone says “This is my son Uppili”, the other guy awkwardly asks “So… you married Uppili’s mother”. Or when someone enthusiastically says “Maadhu, Janaki writes a lot of Letters to the Editor… have you read any of them?”, and Maadhu replies with an earnest “I don’t read letters meant for others”, you are more inclined to laugh than to dismiss the exchange as lame.

And the best part is all the humour is all-inclusive. Never once do you feel any of the humour is at the expense of any person or groups of people. Or something you have to be above a certain age to fully appreciate. No double-meaning, no bait-and-switch… though that’d be so easy to do to draw some laughs. He actually takes the trouble to go back to the basics to provide some laughs.

Due to which a lot of his themes are very recurrent. A lot of his jokes are, too. When I got back from watching Chocolate Krishna and looked on Youtube for more of his stuff, I came across many different episodes with the same jokes as I’d heard that evening. The basic stories he works on too are reused often, with minor tweaks and edits here and there.

I’m not complaining, though. It’s nice to watch the same old Marriage Made in Saloon or Maadhu+2 refurbished. We all know the basic story, so we set those worries aside and concentrate on the jokes they slip in, the way the plot is adapted for changing times, and the minor tweaks they make that pleasantly surprise us.

One thing I deeply admire Crazy Mohan for is his ability to deal with even the most serious subjects and tragicky endings with a lighthearted style. I remember this one story where two doppelgangers vie for the affections of the same woman. The tragic ending was that this lady falls victim to a terminal illness when both the men say they’ll ‘sacrifice’ her for the other and she dies alone. While this would ordinarily have been depressing coming at the end of a story full of funny antics at outdoing the other, with Crazy Mohan’s treatment it took on a rather hilarious tone – the disease she suffers from is a ‘headache in the foot’ or something similar, and the two doppelgangers pretending to be the other. He however gave a ‘happy ending’, where there turns out to be a doppelganger of the lady too!

That was a minor episode for TV…. but Avvai Shanmughi was a take on divorce, Sathi Leelavathi about extra-marital affairs… remember the deep dialogues between Kamal Haasan and Heera Rajagopal where he gently points out that her boyfriend treats her as just a ‘keep’, he never takes her out to public places or official or family gatherings… and asks if she really wants to go on living like this.

The thing is, he never dwells on those bits for too long… it’s the sort of thing you’ll think about if you want to. And ignore it and laugh if you aren’t in the mood to. Not in-your-face, not provocative. Just a feel-good experience for everyone.

Back to Chocolate Krishna, the plot here wasn’t as convoluted and tangled as his usual plotlines. You could say it was low on story. He didn’t however scrimp on jokes. It was, as promised, 100 jokes in 100 minutes. Which were all so tautly woven into the plot that it makes ill sense to try reproduce those here. In any Crazy Mohan play, there is one scene where half the people there know what’s happening and the the other half don’t, and those in the know are trying to not be found out, which leads to a scene full of pun and wordplay. There was one such scene here too, but compared to his repertoire, it left a lot to be desired. But it was not any less funny, mind you.

All in all, Chocolate Krishna is certainly not one of Crazy Creations’ best work. It however is great to see them back and touring, giving us all a teaser of possibly awesomer work coming up next.

I sadly couldn’t stay on for another three hours to watch their Jurassic Baby…. quite possible that was their awesomer work.

However – this is the best part – I did get to speak to some of the cast, most notably Neelakantan – the old man who plays all the grandfather and astrologer roles. I told him I rather enjoy his clueless-looking performances in movies and on TV, and he talked to me like he would to a grandchild, even saying “Vaa kozhandhai…”… god, it’s rather long since someone said that to me!

And, even better, I did get to speak to Crazy Mohan. Rather a friendly person… he posed for like a zillion photographs with fans. I of course did a brilliant job of carrying along only my useless mobile camera, and didn’t even have a sheet of paper to ask for an autograph on. I think I was one of the very few who did more than just pose for pics with him… he’s rather a delight to talk to, though apparently he’s quite a shy and serious person in real life. I told him about the longtimeFan-ness and the *respect* that I automatically accord with all my heart to any engineer who writes brilliantly, which I mainly reserve for him and the late Sujatha, mainly coz I try to write too, and attempt at humour which is a pale imitation of his, but my ability to come up with strong stories and/or translate a solid story idea into something readable leaves a lot to be desired. He said I could write to him…. (which of course I had no time to do over the past week).

I’m still grinning widely at that memory. And will do so for a long time to come. It’s not everyday that you get to meet your idol. I’m sure I wouldn’t be so starry-eyed if I lived in Chennai and got to see his work more regularly, but the point is I’m not, and the rarity makes this whole deal all the more special for me.

On an aside… Crazy Mohan cracks kadi jokes… if he was a Gandhian, he’d be cracking khadi jokes.

Oh, and one of the jokes in the play – “What’s the difference between a Muni/Rishi and a Saamiyar?” “Kaat-la irundha Muni-var. Cot-la irundha saamiyar”. LOL-ness only.

Telling ‘em where to get off – A software engineer’s guide to finding a seat on a BMTC bus

I am back to my old life as one of the numerous Saaftware folks in Bangalore, if only for a short while. Yes, that signals the return of all the BMTC rave/rant blogposts.

When I had just restarted the rounds on BMTC, I found I was getting tired an awful lot, and there seemed to be too many catty Isha_123 types who elbowed me out in the rat race to find seats… even given their general propensity to anorexic proportions, the average Isha is way, way more strongly built than Wanderlust after a month of swimming and yoga. And Irvine and OCTA have turned me soft. I have turned much more polite. I say please and thank you every few minutes. The general friendliness in a small town like Irvine have just made me forget that others aren’t used to making eye-contact and conversation with random people. All that makes it harder to nudge my way into any available seat and giving a ‘Take that, witch’ look to the also-rans.

But a week of this, and I quickly re-learned all that that used to come intuitively to me not long ago. And with this guide, you can too. So that you don’t necessarily have to undergo the coupla weeks of two hours on your feet every day with a gargantuan laptop on your shoulder to learn the tricks necessary to a windowseat on the Volvo.

So firstly, it turns out it’s rather important where you, the gone-soft software engineer position yourself in the crowded bus. Rush hours really mean rush hours; once you lodge yourself, it’s hard to shift.

And where do you position yourself? Right next to someone who’s most likely to get off the earliest, of course.

And how do you know who’s getting off where? Allow me to show you.

**Warning: This post might effectively be considered racial/regional/otherDemographic profiling, so do not read if you find terms like Vellakaran and Amit_123 offensive **

• Laptop check: This is the first, basic check you’ll have to make. If you are a softie, you’ll probably be travelling to one of the hazaar tech parks in the Garden City. You want to make sure that the seat you’re standing next to will not be vacated only when you’ll also be getting off. The first sign of another software engineer is a Laptop. Because no other sane person totes these unwieldy contraptions on buses otherwise. (Unless of course you own one of those sleek Macbooks which fits into your handbag, but if you own a Macbook, you wouldn’t be travelling by BMTC; Apple cleaned out its offices in EGL within a month or something, I heard). So steer clear of the seated folks with anything that looks like a laptop bag.
• Gender check: If you’re a lady, you should first scan all the ladies’ seats. On a good day, you’ll find a man seated in a seat reserved for women. Your search ends. You don’t have to do any further checks on where the man gets off; you tell him where to get off here
  Sadly, there’s no seat reservation on Volvos. Which is one of the perks of travelling by non-Volvo buses. And the other is….
• Age check: Check for older folks. They are most likely NOT saaftware. And are less inclined to make long bus journeys in peak timings. They will probably be getting off within city limits and in older areas – they are most probably visiting other senior citizens in BTM Layout or Madivala or HSR Layout, and will not stay on the bus till Marathalli or Bagmane. Also to be considered are parameters like flowers in hair (for women), amount of oil in hair (for both men and women), and greyness in hair. Be polite to them, and they themselves will ensure that you get their seat when they get up.
  Also of note are little children. Pint-sized kids going to school in large gangs. Some of these can easily be lifted and placed on your lap, even by a pint-sized person like yours truly. Sure, you run the risk of being called Aunty or Uncle, but I’d rather be the vibrant Aunty than the tired Akka.
  Most passengers on Volvos tend to be Saaftware, and it becomes hard to spot the Pankaja Aunties and Sathyanarayana Uncles and the Chinnus and Putties in the sea of Amits, Ishas, and of course, Rameshes and Geethas. There are however plenty such folks on non-Volvos. Volvos suck, right?
• Skin Colour check: Face it, you will most likely not find a Vellakaaran or African or South-east Asian on a bus. The ones you will think are south-east Asian will be North-east Indian for the most part [Aside: There was this Korean at my workplace who kept getting asked about IIT-Guwahati and Mizoram and Nagaland too often ]. But on the occasion you do find an authentic foreigner on the bus, check for the tourist attractions on the route. If there are none, they are probably headed to Saaftware land. Avoid. Because you are expected to be polite to them; Athithi Devo Bhava, etc. You can also put on your best pseud accent and talk to them about the colours and heat and dust in India.
  On the other hand, if they are the naturalized Indian sorts – Bindi, gold bangles, plaited hair, Indian clothes – they have probably grown to love the ‘chaos of India’. You are allowed to be pushy. Same with the ones who’ve come looking for their destiny and purpose in life.
  On the third hand, there was this white man on the bus who seemed rather unhinged… he was eating his ticket. Be kind to such folks.
  On a more practical level, these folks could be headed to either the British Council or Max Mueller Bhavan or Alliance Française.
• Clothes check: You reach here when you’re past the Age check. You have a bunch of people who look to be of similar ages – 18-35. How do you decide who gets off where?
  If it’s a woman in formals or semi-formals, rest assured it’s an Isha (going by empirical evidence). Isha = softie. Or, hell, (semi-)formals = softie… who else wears those ghastly things anyway. Collars are a pain in the neck. You want to avoid other Softies; they’ll most likely get off where you do.
  A woman in a saree is a delight to behold for reasons other than aesthetic appeal. I can go all Kamala Aunty and say kids these days have no respect for culture, tradition and India, they don’t even wear sarees, look at my generation, we all wore sarees to college only, but for the fact that I’m one of those kids, and we didn’t wear sarees in college except on one or two special days, when it took us a zillion pins and hours of effort to pleat those things into submission. Getting back to the woman who does brave all the effort, she is normally in one of those jobs which requires her to look intimidating and professional at the same time. One of those can be Hooch Queen, but those types probably travel in a Sumo, not a bus. Another is senior HR, but those ladies drive to work, and get to work early (to stare down latecomers), no rush hour for them. The most delightful however is school teacher, or front desk employee, for they most probably do not work in a softie place.
  Also delightful is biochemist and nurse. They’ll get off at CMH or St. Johns.
  Not delightful, however, is betelnut-chewing vegetable seller. They will most probably get off at ‘lashtaap’.
  Brightly coloured multi-hued clothes, an abundance of denim, along with messy hair and xeroxed notes in hand should put a smile on your face. These are college students. They travel in packs. Which means the entire front two rows will be empty once the ‘College’ stop comes.
  Nuns and Moulvis are easy to predict too – the nearest ‘Church’ or ‘Maseedi’ stop. You will not find Hindu priests in buses; they are madi.
  Salwar-Kameez on the other hand is too pervasive across all job descriptions.
• Gesture Check: If someone begins fidgeting with their belongings, they’ll most probably get off soon.
  However, avoid sleeping people, or people with their laptops open. They KNOW they won’t be getting off for a while.
  As also gossiping-chatting ladies, especially the middle-aged ones in sarees. These are the ones going all the way across town for someone’s Sathyanarayana Pooje or housewarming, and they will not be getting off for a long, long while. They come fully prepared with company and loads to gossip about. Entertain yourself listening to their conversation (does not apply to Amit/Isha… but then you are probably entertaining others with your own phone conversation where you are sharing your salient observations about Bangalore with pals from your regions).
• Software Company Check: Yeah, you avoid softies with all your life,  but then what if you avoid that laptop-toting guy, and it turns out he works at CGI and gets off at Silk Board, two stops away? You’ll kick yourself, that’s what, and say “Priya, your methods suck!”. Fear not. I haven’t missed that. This is a necessary step for anyone travelling by Volvo.
  Check ID cards. It might look creepy, but you soon can master the art of sneaking glances. Even the strap of the tag will do. The dude with “Life at iFlex Turns Me On” (yeah, they really have that) on the neck will not be getting off until Bagmane.
  Check laptop brands. Lenovo and Dell mean they’ll get off at EGL. Mostly. HP however can mean a variety of places.
  Check Tshirts. Usually it’s the Yahoo and Google folks who flaunt those.
  Eavesdrop on conversations. If they mention “Manyata Office” AND “Bannerghatta Road Office”, it could only mean they are from IBM. “Nice HR people at Bannerghatta Road” means they are from NetApp. This bit is an Art, and you get better only by practice. Do not feel shy to listen to others’ conversations. If someone’s whining about office in a public place, they deserve all that that comes to them.
• Language Check: I find this rule useful while travelling in East Bangalore. Anyone speaking Tamil normally gets off in Old Madras Road.
• Other General Advice: Given all the Volvo rants, it seems miserable to travel by those buses. The rates are more, and the assurance of finding a seat is much lesser than a non-Volvo. This however is true only on the routes on the Ring Road. If you are lucky enough to work in the heart of the city, Volvos rock. Otherwise, you are better off travelling by some other bus.
  Except if you want to look presentable the moment you enter office. Non-volvos are more sweaty, which will easily mess your makeup or render it useless. Ironed clothes have no hope here. Oh, and you’d pick a Volvo if you like your oxygen.
  Remember the stuff your Science teacher in school said, that went went like “Wear a white shirt and go roam around [Insert name of big city] and it’ll come back black” to illustrate the pollution problems in cities? Well, he might have been kidding in his day, but that really happens now.
• Caveats: There will always be that laptop-toting amit_123 who will get off at Basavanagudi. That ancient man might just get off at Marathalli because he’s buying a shirt in those hazaar Factory outlets. Those two nuns will probably get off at the Last Stop; they got in at ‘Church’ stop. And all these rules reverse for the evening rush hour.

This guide is by no means complete. And I don’t always follow these rules myself. But I find a marked success in finding seats when I consciously follow these rules than if I just squeeze into the first available space.

I have left out the rules for the trip back home not just coz I’m sleepy at this time, but also as ‘an exercise for the reader’. It is, as this nice BMTC post by Thejaswi Udupa says, the best way to ‘learn’ a city.

Yes, I realize I sound racist, regionalist, lackingScruples and just generally rude while profiling folks and elbowing them out, but that’s what rush hour does to you. It’s a rat race and you are still a rat when you win it, but atleast you’re a more comfortable, relaxed and satisfied rat.

Plus, average bus travel in the city is not thus; it’s a lot more civilized, and you tend to meet a lot of interesting people, if you get out of your xenophobia and gen ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ mode. People are way more polite. Hell, even I’m polite when it doesn’t come to finding a place to sit – you ask me random stuff – bus routes, autorickshaw-fu fundae, restaurants, housing – I’ll tell you, even if I’m hanging on for dear life on a bus. And that can be generalized to the rest of the residents of my beautiful city.

As for regional stereotypes, they don’t arise out of nowhere. Statistically, it’s more likely that a North Indian heads to a software company than to Max Mueller Bhavan or St. John’s. And of a gang of Tamil-speaking college girls getting off at Old Madras Road than at Richmond Circle (in the evening). If you trained a classifier to do these things, it’d do the same based on the evidence… it chooses the ‘best bet’ based on all the historical data it is trained on. Our minds are no different. You needn’t go to the extent of changing the alphabet to “Indian-Americans, E, F, G, H….X,Y,Z” (via twitter) to be politically correct.

Here’s wishing you much fun on your bus trips around the city.

Like they say, ‘Use BMTC, save trees/fuel/Earth’.

Just Arbit

There are a lot of women like Olive Oyl who paint their nails red and run very weird. There are also a lot of men like Bluto who like women like Olive Oyl. They like to pick up fights from time to time. Wome like Olive Oyl like men like Popeye who can eat spinach and beat up me like Bluto and go Toot! Toot! There are also others like Wimpy who keep munching burgers. Swea Pea is an annoying little thing.

Im bugged of running this in my brain for the past one hour. Thank God! The power is back!

I am also very bored.

PS: Is Popeye, Olive Oyl’s Boyfriend?

Maid In India

(Title from this pic).

So I wake up this morning to my mother firing the maid. It wasn’t pretty.When the young woman put forth her best “What did I do wrong?” face, my mother systematically listed out her set of faults, but none more than her unprofessionalism – mentioning she’ll be gone for only a day, and then not turning up for a week, and not answering her phone when she called to find out if anything was wrong. Consistently. And yet drawing her full salary for the month. What, money grows on trees? And the uncertainty of waiting for you to sweep and swab the house is too much for me; I’d rather just sweep and swab myself, which I can plan out better when I know for sure you won’t be coming. Good luck with everything in the future.

And over the past few months, a few friends and I have been going back and forth over this article in The Hindu about maids ‘slogging and slaving’, yet “getting a pittance”.

Now, I’ve been raised to consider everyone as an equal, including household help. Which for my family, meant that they would have to work as hard and smart as we do if they wanted to have a life like ours. No pity, no “aiyo paavam”. My mother’s aunt, a former schoolteacher, is responsible for many a literate housemaid and housemaid’s kids. My grandfather badgered many a housemaid to have small savings in the post office. And so on and so forth. Household help is not weak people to be helped. They are people to be empowered.

I don’t know where the hell the whole ‘helpless household help’ idea stems from. The maids who I’ve seen… both in my house as well as in many others – have been anything but. An extreme case was this lady who asked my grandfather for a hefty loan, and when he refused, said “Your children are all successful, you have enough for your retirement. And yet you say you don’t have money to give me? How cheap of you!”. Most of the rest, while not having as much of a sense of entitlement, have managed to educate their kids rather well, buy land and houses, and in another extreme case, made enough to buy a house that she lets out for Kannada film shootings. They’ve also managed to graduate to nanny positions [The reason I say 'graduate' is because you need to have a set of extremely good recos of being clean, trustworthy and professional before anyone entrusts their offspring in your hands, even if they are going to be around watching you like a hawk], or get permanent employment in schools as ayahs.

And how did they get there? They made best use of the middle-class environment they worked in. They had little to worry about their children [no necessity of finding a daycare when their kids were too young to go to school], as they could bring their kids to work with only positive consequences. Their employers were the sorts who give a lot of importance to education, and ensured that their kids stayed in school, and sometimes even received help with their studies. And working in houses meant all your work was over by afternoon, after which you could manage to have a family life. Unlike slogging for hours together in a garment factory.

They made sure they got to work on time, didn’t take inordinately long leaves to visit their hometown, and ensuring they got in a reliable replacement whenever they did go for their sister’s wedding. They weren’t completely unsloppy – if you’re swabbing a dozen houses every single day, it’s hard to be consistent, especially when the home you’re cleaning is not yours – but they were less sloppier than the rest of the competition.

They ensured that they put away money in banks, away from the hands of drunk husbands or greedy relatives. They didn’t stand around and gossip or fester family intrigues, even if they worked in Malashree’s house (where the temptation to gossip would be insanely high). They made sure they didn’t blow away all their earnings on a visit to their hometown. They made sure they didn’t have too many debts.

They made sure their behaviour was in line with middle-class morality. After all, who wants to employ a woman who has three children with different fathers, one of whom she is not sure of? (true story). And they didn’t steal…. who’d want to hire a maid whose presence makes your best innerwear, trinkets and cutlery go missing?

It’s certainly not an easy task to do all of this. But then what is? The jobs my parents do isn’t easy for them either. Why, even the job(s) I have held haven’t been easy. There are software engineers who’ve spent exactly one week in a year with their folks back home. There are single mothers who sacrifice sleep to ensure they are a good employee as well as a good mother. There are nurses who disregard their own health to take care of their patients. There are women who put their marriages and kids on hold just so that they can educate their younger siblings. [All true stories]. So why should the life of a maidservant be any different?

Especially since if you are in the unskilled services business, where supply exceeds demand. Qualifications required to join the business are minimal. There is a deluge of people doing this as either a primary or secondary source of income. The only way you can distinguish yourself is through your performance. And the only way is to move upwards to the middle class is by doing those things that have helped the middle class become what they are – saving, living frugally, budgeting and emphasizing education.

And heck, you don’t even have any exclusive knowledge about your work. The women you work for know your job better than you do. Their roving eyes will spot any speck of dirt you have missed. They don’t hire you for status or because they don’t know to do the dishes or cook – who in the middle class can afford to blow a few hundred rupees on household help just like that. They hire you because they have day jobs, or because their hands are too full with children, or because they are too frequently unwell to do the sweeping and swabbing and cooking and cleaning themselves. Heck, they’d prefer it if they did all those jobs themselves; it’s too painful to keep yelling at someone else to do things the way you want them to be done.

The world is not divided into ‘Fortunates’ and ‘Unfortunates’. The more and more we view household help as people to be helped, the more and more we are hurting them by keeping them in a state of wanting help, and not helping themselves. This Mai-Baap sort of attitude only serves to reaffirm their beliefs of themselves being illiterate and stupid and unprofessional. It is only fair to consider them as just people doing a job with dignity, and expect them to behave so, while giving them the respect they deserve.

Like a conversation at hostel – A:  “Hey, tell me if that lady comes… I want to ask her to sweep and mop my room”  B: “Why don’t you do it yourself?” A: “I would… but my mom’s coming and I want it done professionally”.

And…. for more cheerful takes on the maid scene, check out Cynic’s posts. Here and Here. And the rest of her blog too… this lady sure does have an interesting perspective on things, and writes so swell too.

Four Stars for Raavan

It was a good idea to release Mani Ratnam’s latest flick Raavan in the rainy season. The rain and all the water adds a sort of surround effect to the scenic shots in the movie.

I watched the movie on the day of release, though missed the first half hour due to traffic jam and unhelpful rickshaw drivers in Mumbai. I thought it was fab.

Reading so many bad reviews and criticism about Abhishek Bachchan’s acting, I’m wondering if there is anything wrong with me or if my taste in movies has gone to dogs.

Tell me, is Ramayana a rule book, setting moral standards to people? Is it there to give definition to the whole of Rama as good. Raavana as bad. Sita as the perfect wife? (however hard it is to define such vague terms). How much do you really question the action of each character in the epic? Do we ever think that Valmiki might have just taken a break from his japa and the like and said “Hey! I’m bored, Let me write a story!”

Let’s say you read the whole of Ramayana as a story, in the same breath as say, Huckleberry Finn abridged version from a shelf of other classic abridge versions. All the Nava Rasas are squeezed from the pulp and juice distributed to the whole population of Dombivli. If you can add different Rasas in different proportion and completely mix it, you might actually set the reader thinking that Pap, Finn’s father as the “good guy” of the book. Maybe all your ingrained moral values might push you to think otherwise and hence hate it. But it’s worth a try. For art’s sake.

That, I think is precisely what Mani Ratnam has tried to do to Ramayana here. And that is why I hold the movie so highly. Starting from the point where Rama accused Sita and working backwards, trying to figure out if there may be a more human reason for his action (apart from God left his body after his work of killing Raavana was over), Mani Ratnam has tried to prove that if you tried to interpret each action in the rind differently, Raavana might have a better case in front of people. And the only Sita, with her better will power and better judgement can develop a soft corner for him. For her, Rama is still her beloved god, but Raavana’s actions are justified too. He tries to potray Raavana’s crimes as vengeance, more like his only weapon against the more powerful, more influential rule of Rama. His leadership is justified in the eyes of those who follow him. In the end, it is powerplay and the play of strong feelings, to possess the woman that they both are madly in love with.

As usual, Mani Ratnam, uses his visual prowess and better cinematography to woo the audience. But then he fails to deliver, where the authenticity of the ways of people where he claims the story takes place comes. Particularly, Beera’s ways of speaking, the change from Hindi to Bhojpuri is not very well shown. Better people than the super couple could have conveyed the story better. But then, Ash looks as beautiful as ever and Abhishek is still the gunda-mawali from Yuva. I guess, Mani Ratnam mischieviously tries to break them apart onscreen, only to keep their couple-ness intact by the end of the movie.

Overall, I would say it was worth that one watch, not anymore.

Thirty-Eight Hours

My phone ringing when it was going through security check. Getting unnerved by the stony-faced security officer. Chatting up an old Indian couple who couldn’t for the hell of them figure out how to use the payphones.

Looking at the long line of infants and young children boarding the flight and praying hard that it doesn’t turn out just like a good friend of mine had predicted and I spend nineteen hours without sleep just due to crying children.

Looking to turn off my mobile during takeoff and finding it missing.

Unsuccessfully trying to find out the name of a Sri Lankan co-passenger who worked in LA and was a citizen of Singapore. Man, after the first non-attempt (“I’m Priya… and you?” “Pleased to meet you, ma’am”), it became like a game.

Unsuccessfully trying to engage the Mormon Japanese teacher from Utah in a conversation about the similarities between Japanese and Hindi/Kannada grammars, and when that failed, about Miyazaki movies as a tool for teaching Japanese.

Forgetting to disembark at Tokyo-Narita because I was in a state of half-sleep. Going to the wrong gate. Saved by yet another Indian couple.

Falling asleep at meal-times on the flight. Due to which there’d be no vegetarian meal when I did wake up hungry. And dear god, grilled cucumbers do not make a MEAL!! Nor do inadequately spiced and seasoned instant noodles.

Watching Exam, and missing out an important part of the climax because the girl next to me was airsick and shaking and shivering. If you’ve watched it, please please explain the ending to me. Please.

Crying children at airports. One of them was beating her fists on the floor. I didn’t know kids did that in real life.

Tramping around Singapore with my entire handbaggage, inclusive of laptop. I didn’t realize how much my shoulders were taking it until I came home and slept.

Someone paying my bus fare for me just because I’m a tourist who spoke Tamil.

Parents tensing up coz I was in a foreign country without a phone in the middle of the night and hadn’t called yet. They were about to message my friends there on LinkedIn.

Finding out that I’ve lost the ability to speak in keywords. Y’know, like “No Meat. No Seafood. What’s there?” or “Five dollar no. Costly. Only two dollar”. It’s a really important ability to have in places where English is not very common. Especially if you’re otherwise inclined to long flowery language that confuses people.

Hiding your pack of gum in your inner pockets just coz you’ve grown up hearing that Singapore is a clean, clean country where they’ll jail you for chewing gum. And then walking through Little India to see this guy wash his hands and gargle and rinse and spit onto the street! Shaking your head with dismay because you found that the river there is brown.

Being lectured by a cabbie about how Singapore is better than India. And about how I should have bought tons of keychains in Chinatown for S$5 and distributed it to all and sundry back home so that they are all happy I get them something. Daemn… didn’t think of that.

Finding a dozen ripoffs of Komala Vilas restaurant. All on the same street. Just like you have Dan Brown, Dale Brown, Dane Browne, you have Komala’s, Komala Vishesh, Komalavalli’s…

Apparently mobiles are called Hand Phones in Singapore. Just so that we don’t confuse them with headphones or earphones.

Random guy at a mall starts off some weird chant, and all other young people there join in to yell, dance, and make weird gestures, and then get back to doing whatever they were doing, like nothing had happened.

Wandering into an art gallery of some sort, where the major exhibits were about Depression. Freaking out, and asking the janitor what the hell this place was. (I only got some vague reply in a language I didn’t understand).

Wondering if the fat dude in the oversized clothes was Yogi B (the Malay-Tamil rapper), and lamely asking “Er…. you’re Malaysian?” (He was Sri Lankan).

Wandering into the fire engine museum, where the curator kept going on about fire drills and how hard it was to put fires out forty years ago, when I kept murmuring I wanted to leave.

Hearing “Mind The Gap!” in four languages, including Tamil. Staring with disbelief at “State Bank of India, Little India Branch”.

Meeting longlost friends and namesakes. Staying up all night talking. Hearing “You’ve not changed at all!”, and saying “Yeah, I’m still in your room gossiping and not letting you fall asleep”.

Bumping into a former employer.

Coming home.

A day on Netflix

This might sound really sad, but my introduction to Netflix was through the Netflix Prize. In my defence, I wasn’t all that much into movies back when the contest was announced. And heck, the NITK LAN when I was around could easily beat any Netflix in terms of average quality of content hosted.  And not that much into data mining either [the Netflix Prize was a contest where you had to devise a system which would predict ratings for movies you hadn't seen yet based on what you had rated, and not just that, you had to perform 10% better than Netflix's recommendation engine, and you would get a million dollars]. I didn’t know enough to compete back then. And now, there’s not going to be another Netflix contest [which essentially will mean a shot at a million dollars and/or bragging rights] thanks to some IITM-UTAustin-Stanford guy (Indian! Everyone, put your claws together for one of our very own!).

So anyway, now that I knew what Netflix was, I took amazingly long to visit the site. Yesterday I did. And the deal seemed rather OK – Trial run for two weeks, which I had to cancel before the two weeks were up, else I’d get billed for the month. And unlimited movies to watch online. Great, no?

Totally. I watched more movies yesterday than I normally watch in a week. It felt….. surreal. The max record I know of is Dha’s record of 9 movies in a day (Info gleaned from Smriti testimonials… is it an Urban Legend?). Anyway, these are the ones I watched yesterday.

• Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: I totally totally liked SRK in this one. He doesn’t talk in his usual manner in the movie at all… whoa. Movie isn’t great, obviously. But the ending credits more than made up for it – Surinder-ji presenting his and Taani-ji’s Japan snaps.
• Welcome To Sajjanpur: Nice timepass movie. A little cliched in places, but overall, a good watch. Shreyas Talpade is totally lovable in this flick.
• Luck, By Chance: Ok, I didn’t watch this off Netflix, but I watched it yesterday, so it makes it to this list. I liked the opening credits quite some. I don’t know why, but I’ve always liked videos of people posing for photographs. I rather liked Rishi Kapoor and Juhi Chawla in it. Dimple Kapadia seemed too contrived to me, and I can’t stand Isha Sharvani’s giggle. I liked Farhan Akhtar’s understated manipulativeness, thankgod it was not the rubbing-hands-evil-glint routine.
• Blackadder Goes Forth – I’ve watched this before, and I can rattle off each dialogue before it’s uttered, but it’s brilliance, just plain brilliance.
• Hey, Arnold! (Season 3) – I used to watch this show long long ago, sporadically. It turns out that I appreciate this show better when I watch it right after coming back from school than now when I try watching the entire season at a stretch.
• The Proposal – I had watched Did You Hear About The Morgans a few months back. Man, what’s it about Hollywood and getting New Yorkers to live in some rural area due to a set of unforseen circumstances? It’s not sweet, it’s not cute, the granny is not as adorable as other Hollywood grannies, nor is the family, certainly not as adorable as the family in While You Were Sleeping. Random chickflick. Unless you really have no choice, don’t watch this one.
• Julie And Julia – Given that I’m going through a phase where I’m craving for short term goals and structure in life, AND that I blog, AND that I sort of like cooking, this one hit close to home. If you want to use your blog to set and fulfill short-term goals, and attempt to become a better person in the process, this movie’s for you. Also if you seek relief from the daily humdrum by making yourself a nice meal at the end of the day. Of course, I’ve ended up doing neither; I constantly waver between “Cooking is stress” and “Cooking is stress-relief”. Still, not a bad movie. It shows a blogger getting a book deal, so… well…
• District 9 – Aliens! Racism! Xenophobia! One of Us becoming One of Them! Those things didn’t really make much of an impact on me. What did, however, was the possibility of a senti sequel where Wikus is old, there’s a plot to remove Wikus’s then-assistant who’s now a good bigshot, Christopher is dead, and Christopher’s son comes back….. And I’d really have liked to see something about the Alien culture and all that. It’s a good watch, I’d say, and Sharlto Copley does do a good job of the whole thing. It’s good to see aliens being portrayed in a way different from the established norm in film industries worldwide.
• Monsoon Wedding – I’ve seen this often on TV and blogged about it too. Oh, it turns out that the girl who plays the 10-year-old is Naina Lal Kidwai’s daughter.

I should also state here that I began watching Shakespeare In Love, and Happenstance, and quit coz they weren’t riveting enough.

So did I beat Dha’s record? No, considering I didn’t really watch the entire season of Hey, Arnold. And even if I did, I’d probably be tied.

I’m not going to be doing this anytime in the future.  Having so many movies at your disposal and limited time to watch them isn’t my cup of tea. Of course, it’d be much better if I took it in smaller doses…. there are lessons you learn from watching Arunachalam. I’ll be going home for the summer, and as part of closing a lot of things down,  I’ve cancelled my Netflix account.

And I’m not really ruing that. There aren’t that many movies and TV shows you can watch online right now. Most of the ones I wanted to watch – the entire run of Whose Line and A Bit of Fry And Laurie and all the flicks from Studio Ghibli – are not available to watch online. Why, even the rather popular flick which I haven’t yet watched and whose name I will not reveal for fear of being crucified or lynched was not available to watch online. Rather a disappointment, that way.

Plus, a good number of the films I want to watch are Tamil or Kannada or Hindi. I sadly couldn’t find Manithanin Marupakkam, which I vaguely remember watching many years ago on Sun TV and being very intrigued by it. A lot of the movies I want to watch are like that – I’d've watched fifteen  minutes of it before changing the channel many years ago, after which the clips keep coming back to me, and I decide I just have to watch this… often, those fifteen minutes have nothing to do with the general tone of the movie and I’m often disappointed, but not for lack of trying.

Still, a sort-of magical day when I could totally drown in a world of make-believe.

Oh, and how could I forget…. the ratings. I rated just around 60 movies, and already, the predictions for the ratings I’d give other movies were BANG ON!! Really, amazingly accurate. Down to the decimal point. Except when it predicted I’d give two-and-a-half stars for Avvai Shanmughi.
The one thing that strikes me about this is that the movies I’d give five stars to aren’t the ones I’d really prefer to watch at any given time. I like my mindless, useless chickflicks for a one-time watch. I find some Awesome movies totally depressing.
Maybe an alternative small task would be to predict which movies are a one-time watch, and which ones I’d like to rewatch?

Memory Lapse

Long time back, about ten or twelve years ago, I saw this song on Door Darshan. I think. One of those sunday morning old movie song programs.  Nutan and Dev Anand sing a very pretty tune, as they climb down the stairs of Qutub Minar. At that time I had thought it to be a very good idea to film inside Qutub Minar.

While I have listened to Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare Pukar, a gadzillion times after that, on my computer that is, it never occurred to me that it was the same one.

Every time a conversation about old hindi songs popped up, I have asked which song that was with Qutub Minar in it. This has happened with more than a dozen people. Every time the answer has been “What song?” or “Oh! that? Oh Damn! I dont remember it” or “Qutub Minar? nice”.

Today on a lark, I searched for “dev anand qutub minar” and there it was, staring at me!

Hail Google!

Enjay!

Irredeemable – A Review of Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch

This Post Contains Spoilers.

After Logik’s comment on my previous post, I decided to watch Paanch. It was one of those movies I’ve always wanted to watch, but not finding a copy online in the past put the idea out of my head. I didn’t want to watch it because I expected it to be awesomeness personified; it was more of curiosity – it wasn’t allowed to be released, and recently, I’d watched Anurag Kashyap’s movie for Star Bestsellers – Last Train to Mahakali, which starred Kay Kay Menon, and was rather impressed.

The movie starts off as expected – trippy opening credits – chaotic visuals of Mumbai(?) streets from a vehicle, as shot from a moving vehicle. And then the whole dope and rock n’ roll bit.

The story moves slowly. Until the Kidnapping.

There are five main characters, as the title suggests. It’s mainly told from the point of view of Murgi (Aditya Srivastava), who doesn’t have much to do in the movie until the end. The screen is occupied more by the cowardly Pondy, and the explosive, Satanic, edgy, pure evil Luke (which, midway through the movie, I wonder if it’s a shortened version of Lucifer. One of Kay Kay Menon’s best performances, I’ll say.), and the extremely loyal Joy. And in the second half, by the street-smart money-minded promiscuous Shiuli (Tejaswini Kolhapure).

Nothing redeeming about any of them. They are portrayed as being all about vices, no single endearing characteristic about any of them. No backstories that justify their behaviour. In another movie, you would have Shiuli’s promiscuity being explained by showing a flashback of her parents’ divorce, or being abused, or some such. But not here. The characters are unapologetically what they are.

Long story short, they have a band. And they need money for a demo tape. One of their friends suggests they ‘kidnap’ him and ask his father for ransom. And in one of his many fits of rage, Luke beats him to death. The police get suspicious. Luke gets edgier. Pondy gets cowardlier. They decide to rob the friend’s father. He walks in on them cleaning out his money. They kill him. His policeman pal finds out and confronts them. He is killed too, as is the constable with him. Soon, all four of them get frustrated with everything. They drown Luke. They turn themselves in.

So far, so good. If not sympathize or identify with the characters, you grok them, their motivations, their every next move. They are not deep, or with multiple layers, but that’s the whole point. The movie seems so far like a delicious study of anger, of frustration, of inflicting psychological pain, of forgetting all about right and wrong, of forgetting all about consequences. It is delectably trippy. It doesn’t tell a story so far; it presents to you a collection of fascinating characters together, like a social experiment or something – some points almost bring to mind the Stanford Prison Experiment.  Nothing is explicitly said – it’s there for you to see, in the graffiti, in the way they speak, in their body language, in the bloodied dolls with severed heads in Luke’s room.

And at this point, Anurag Kashyap slips. Trips. And makes this your regular movie.

Spoiler Alert
So it turns out Luke is not dead, and it was all a plan hatched by Murgi (yes, pun intended, you can laugh), Luke and Shiuli. And then the cunning woman pits them against each other, and everyone ends up dead and she decamps with the cash, becomes a popstar.
End Spoiler.

That killed it for me. That really did. The meandering first three-quarters of the movie prepared me for an ending, where, possibly, everyone dies, or where some die and the rest live on…. but not one where people take advantage of each other. If that was to be the highlight, it could have been done in so many other colourful, entertaining, psychedelic ways, keeping with the rest of the movie. There could have been such an undercurrent throughout the movie, if not through Shiuli, through some other character. You begin to feel the last quarter of the movie was ghost-directed by the spotboy or something.

And why was this banned? Because it showed the bad guy coming out smelling of roses? Flimsy. I think Dhoom probably had more sex and violence than this flick.

My verdict: It has its moments. Good dialogues [There's this one bit where Murgi and Pondy try their hand at waiting tables, and there's this frustrating customer who gives a long list of specs about his omelette. To which Murgi says "Murgi ka naam Champa hai, chalega?"] , great acting [As a friend said, Kay Kay has enough in him to have Mogambo running scared]. And the music, one of Vishal Bharadwaj’s best. All the songs are good to listen to, especially the jazzish Kaisa Hai Sheher by Dominique.  Along with the visuals, it all comes together to make a trippy watch.  A lot of promise, sadly shattered by the incongruent dénouement. Recommended watch. Out of Paanch, I’ll give it Teen. But only because I don’t give full ratings to any movie, and hence everything is suitably downgraded.

PS: The only version of Paanch that is out is a pirated version of the preview copy. Don’t feel too bad about watching that… Anurag Kashyap himself doesn’t much mind. Check out this byte from him: here.

dénouement

Paanch

No, not the most-watched yet-unreleased movie by Anurag Kashyap starring Tejaswini Kolhapure and Kay Kay Menon.

It’s time for the annual self-congratulatory pat on the back, for not giving up on this venture for 365 additional days. Yes, The NITK Numbskulls Page completes another year of its existence, and yes, as the title suggests, this page has been going strong for half a decade now. For perspective, I have a cousin younger than that. And if I had begun work on my doctoral dissertation when I started this blog, I might have possibly been graduating or been cursing myself for not. Five years can change a stripling out of school to a full-fledged medical doctor. In five years, you can build a site to be as popular as Youtube. If I had been convicted of certain crimes when I started this blog, I might have been free today.

So while not being so dramatic, five years have certainly made me a different person; I can’t be eighteen forever. I used to be aimless, clueless, and without a plan back then. Now too, I’m aimless, clueless, and without a concrete plan, only more informedly educatedly so. My grammar is better, I’m less lenient with people who are wrong on the Internet, I’m less tolerant of a lot of things. Surprisingly, I’m also more idealistic now as compared to before, less cynical, and don’t fight all the battles that come my way.

I don’t know what more to say which I have not said on this day over the past four years. I wish I could write a flippant ‘I’m turning five!” post where I crack my choicest jokes and make it look effortless, but I guess I take this page more seriously than I should. As the years go by, I feel this place grow closer and closer to my heart. It has been the focal point of my entire online existence for this period. It has been where I have corrected my tending towards smsLingo. It has been where I have expressed myself fully, completely. I have met many delightful people just through this blog.

This page has aided me in my journey of self-discovery. (But heck, what has not?)

So what has our fifth year wrought? Sea-changes in life and living, for sure.  Being plagiarized by Bangalore Mirror. Twice. And being flagged by some new WordPress spamfiltering algo as Spam. And when I blogged about it, Matt of WordPress fame commented on it. My posts have been more personal, less about movies and music and books, or so I feel. I haven’t given this blog as much time this year as I did last year, and am glad I’m using my time more productively. Sort of, atleast. For example, I just hastily scribbled this post to get back to coding, while in previous years I did spend an hour writing it and feeling all the nostalgia.

Weirdly, it was being plagiarized that made me wonder what writing here meant to me. Even two years back, I’d've been game to my content being published elsewhere. Now it’s not just privacy concerns and control-over-content concerns that make me more possessive about my content. I am disillusioned when it comes to the media now than then. And I know the extent of energy and thought I put into each word here that I can simply not see someone else reap the benefits of my hard work. And there’s more of that self-important drivel where that came from, but I’ll let it pass.

My other attempts at blogging haven’t gone so well, neither in terms of reach or content. Which leads me to believe that blogging success comes only from lavishing time on a blog.

Where am I going with this? Well, there’s this novel I’ve always wanted to write. Except that I am horrible with fiction. Maybe I’ll be bold enough to present my babystep short stories here, get feedback, and then maybe gain enough confidence to put in effort at something longer?

Till then, I’m content keeping this place what it is – thought receptacle, insanity preventer, good listener and shining example to convince myself I am not that distracted, I mean, I can’t be, I can keep things going for five years and more, right?

And readers. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, thanks for sharing, thanks for noticing when my blog disappeared off the Internet, thanks for all the support when I blogged about being plagiarized.

And as always, I thank Goddess Saraswati for all that bestowed on me and pray for more of the same thing, or maybe something different… oh, I needn’t bother… She knows what’s best for me.

Hotels and Hospitality

For quite some time now, I have been complaining about the utter lack of swanky hotels in Mysore to my Dad. No ambiance, if tried very badly done. Waiters don’t know that starters are to be served before the main course. Some don’t even have the concept of starters. No one gives you finger bowls after a meal. I don’t want to go on about the state or the placement of the washing area. The menu cards are centuries old, some soaked on old coffee or wet with water. Heck, its better to ask the waiter “Whats there?”.

I’ve gotten used to entering names and waiting in queues for a table. The waiter pulling chairs, and handing over napkins after folding them in a triangle. Neatly made menu cards, sometimes leather bound placed in front of me.  All of them immaculately dressed. Music to set the mood and good decor. The order taking guy comes takes it and goes, the others serve food and some others come and take away the plates when done. The second guy comes and sets the plates for the next course. All this is done like clockwork. Each table is an island in its own way. Orders of one not affecting anything in the other table. The bill comes in a leather bound folder. Cards get swapped. And I leave, sometimes the waiter pulling the chair back for me. Overall it feels like an evening well spent.

Today, I entered an average hotel in Mysore cursing my dad for not finding a better one. It was an old house convert. Looked very unclean, with rickety chairs (The chairs don’t match the tables!). None of the tables were empty, so we ended up sharing the table. The guy who brought water, spilt it on the table, and took a while to clean. The waiter told us the whole menu. He knew it by heart. I ordered a set masala dosa. My dad, a south Indian thali. My dosa came on a humble banana leaf placed on a steel plate. He brought my dad only a part of the thali saying that he would serve it hot when he came to it. The appalam late, so it wouldn’t get wet on the rasam. He kept asking if we wanted more, of anything, if the consistency was good, like my aunt at her place would. No fuss, nothing. He was even endearing to the cleaning boy when the chap took away our plates, that he could have done it later. In the end it was a very humble bill.

Some one in the hotel business once told me that a set of tables are assigned to a particular waiter, and that that is their territory. I was also told that a certain strict hierarchy exists. If you give feed back less than average in the end, the waiters are taken to task (And hence not to give bad feedback). I don’t know if such rules exist in this place. But it surely felt like home and it was the best dosa I have had in a very long time.

Smile

It seems to be ages since there was a cheerful post on this page.

We’ve changed the theme here for the sake of it. Rubric was nice and elegant, and I really love the pen next to the title, but we got extremely, extremely bored of the same look. So here’s a new theme. It’s called The Journalist. It’s not rubric, but this was the one I hated the least.

Anyway, the title is yet another Queen reference – Smile was the name of the first incarnation of Queen. And I’ve said this a zillion times before and will say it again, Queen Rules.

Speaking to my cousins who are in their late teens, I realize I’ve become some sort of relic in their eyes.

I adore Carnatic music. It’s been ages since I listened to any music which is not older than me – Jethro Tull, Queen, Beatles, Bee Gees, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar, AC/DC, The Doors, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong – it turns out, either stopped performing before I was born (due to death, sometimes due to old age), or had their best times back then… I’m also hopelessly out of touch with the latest music, and despise the new filmstars. And my favourite radio station here is USC’s western classical channel – which music to them apparently sounds like Tom-and-Jerry music. Oh, and I don’t like the newer versions of Tom and Jerry. I also can’t see the point of Facebook. I watch Desperate Housewives like I’m an addict. I can’t follow SMS lingo. I am a spelling Nazi. And, the worst crime of ‘em all, I don’t like pizza now (I’ve grown sick of too much pizza. Yes, that happens).  *Sigh* So much for hip-olderCousin-ness. I think my mother’s older cousins are way hipper than me in my cousins’ eyes.

Thankfully geekness counts for something with some of my cousins who ask for help with game development in Python. So far it’s been basic Python STL stuff, but I guess when they discover that the only libraries I use are PyBrain and SciPy, and that I have no clue about game development libraries for Python, it’s going to be a long fall from grace – from the higher echelons of geeky-coolness down to “This is my akka, she’s a nerd”-ness. Especially since they are fast outpacing me in the domain of being able to pull out e-versions of the latest and the greatest in literature from seemingly nowhere. Hmm… maybe I should buy an iPad to get back to being cool.

I’ve been rather addicted to 30 Rock of late. There’s something so unapologetically irreverent and cheerful about it.

Leechblock keeps me off Google Reader, Youtube and a dozen other sites for most of my day, thank god for that. So what do I do? Find new sites to be addicted to. Thankfully these ones don’t have me in a vice-like grip yet.
Topping the list is Fizy.com. It’s thankfully not blocked in the USA anymore. You can look for music online, and make playlists which you can save. You can also share permalinks to songs on Twitter, Facebook, and a few other places. The only sad part is that it isn’t good for phonetic search. So ‘Pyar’ and ‘Pyaar’ are considered two different words.
However, Guruji.com/music totally rocks in that department. Tragically, they are having their offices raided and things just because the websites they search through sometimes host mp3s illegally. They are one Indian web startup I really have grown to love, and they had better not be coming down; it’s going to scare off more entrepreneurs. Totally not what the country needs.

And check out avaxhome.ws if you want ebooks. Rather a good repository. I’m now so used to it that the other day, I was at the student center, when I saw a woman whip out a book with some really curious title that reeked of conspiracy and thrill, and as if out of instinct, I pulled that book out of the website. Of course, I promptly deleted it from my hard drive and made a note to tell the librarian about the book so that I can legally borrow it .

And do you want $8000? Check out Yahoo’s Learning To Rank Challenge: http://learningtorankchallenge.yahoo.com/. There’s still a month left. It is a rather fun contest, it turns out.

One of my favourite bloggers has taken the plunge into writing books now. So many of them doing this now…. I’m struck by an idea. Will it be a good idea to aggregate blogposts into a book? Topicwise? Current-ness of the writing is not an issue, assume that posts will be picked in such a way that even if you read them ten years later, they’d still read current. So tell me. Is this an idea that’ll work? Has it been done before? Let me know in the comments section.Thanks.

And… smile! It makes everyone wonder what you are upto.

I wonder…

I used to admire people who seemed to have a concrete goal in life. But then, I now realize the futility of specific goals in the longterm.

I take decisions only after thorough deliberation, hell lot of thought. And then promptly forget the reasoning that went into any decision. And when the going gets not-so-good, I wonder over and over again just WHY I took a specific decision, and doubt my sanity, my sensibility, my existence…and wonder if I should switch gears or what.

In the past, I have been too lazy to switch gears, and that has served me well; my initial reasoning was good, it turned out. Now however, I am at a crossroad or so it seems… and I’m not that lazy, and I even think I ‘know better’ now.

Time, if utilized well, can change the game… but there’s really no saying.

The grass is always greener on the other side, and the best perspective seems to be got by sitting on the fence.

Oh, well, I’m probably just plain lazy that I want the easier way out. I never sink a well until my hair’s on fire.

I’m sure the day will come when I’ll look at this post and laugh. I sure hope it comes soon enough.

Why this da?

Dear Mahesh,

I’m darned if I know why the heck you did yourself in. Really. I pride myself on being resilient, just because I’m from NITK. You being from IITM I’m sure you’re much more resilient to pressure and disappointments. Balls to non-elitism and all that, the college you’re from matters, we all know that. Your really can’t have come so fucking far without either of those, I’m sure.

So what was that beyond all the usual humdrum that hurt you so bad? It really bothers me. I am not willing to believe all the tripe people talk about ‘You never know what is wrong with people’ and endless speculation on whether you had a good relationship with your parents (or not), and your mental stability… you struck me as being beyond all this, however little I knew of you. You aren’t an impulsive guy, as we see from the way you even planned your death. Man, how did you, how could you go through all that with a calm demeanor? Most others would ask ‘Did he not think of his parents before he did this?’. You don’t strike me as the type who wouldn’t. Which is why your death distresses me all the more. What provoked you beyond all this da?

Though I’ve known you only for the past six-seven months off and on, and in mostly pun-filled conversations, I feel shattered by your death. It’s probably because I’m so used to seeing you on any damn online community I frequent, some of the blogs I read regularly… you were always there! Right from the first community I joined in Orkut in 2005, I’ve been seeing your blue-with-white-’I Was Here!’ profile pic everywhere I’ve been online. Hindu crossie, Punning, Blackadder, every damn place I frequented. I fucking cringe now whenever someone or the other tries to read extra meaning into the ‘I was here!”.

And then when all that ceased, Paronomasia. I can’t tell you how much I like that googlegroup I created. It wasn’t just another thing to me. It was solace in my boring professional life… A year and a half back, I used to be racked with tension all the time, and just reading you people posting back and forth brightened my whole day. I am so not exaggerating here, swear to god. And you were one of the highest contributors. While the quality of your puns amazed me, I just felt ‘oh, he’s just like me!’, which I never did really feel about anyone else who posted there. I’m not playing up the whole online thing, I really am not! I had no idea how much of my life I spent online that I’d feel so bad you were gone.

And then I got my UCI admit. No one I mailed off the univ website ever responded, and no one I knew had any friend there who responded. And then I remembered that while cybersnooping you, I had come across the fact that you were at UCI. I’m really really thankful for all your advice, it really helped. And that you weren’t unnerved by my snooping.

I suppose no one knows better than you what it means to have the whole damn world not understand the jokes you make. For various reasons I won’t go into, I place great weight on my sense of humour, and it really pains me if I’m among people who just don’t get it. I feel desolate if I’m stuck in such a place, and can’t wait to move on to the next place I’m meant to go to. Such a place was UCI, for the most part. I come straight from a group of people who’ve gotten used to my sense of humour, to people who can’t comprehend it, and ask “Why do you have to make a smart-ass comment in every second sentence?”. I do that because it comes naturally to me. I don’t try, I don’t fucking try one bit. When anyone says “There’s no chicken in chicken sandwich”, my reflex is to say “You won’t find mysore in mysore pak”, no two ways about that, and when people burst into giggles for that like they’ve never heard anything like that before, I feel very sad about myself, I’m not kidding. And so I was so darned glad you were there. Solace it was, talking to you, about some synagogue we suspected was named spamalot, making chinglish puns, and your telling me the correct way to pronounce paronomasia. It was all light on the outside, and mostly interrupted by my various deadlines, but you have no idea how much that meant to me. I am at my best not a very social person, more of a loner, and it is these little-little things I find happiness in, in discovering that someone else around you has the same line of thought as you do. I live my whole life thinking there’s something slightly different about me – don’t we all – and when I meet someone who’s much the same, only more hardworking and more brilliant and more fun, it’s natural that I begin to look up to you.

And life is so fucking short Mahesh. I so wish I’d gotten to know you better. I’d gotten so used to your always being wherever I went, in the background, that I cannot even begin to comprehend that you are finally gone. What is it like, Mahesh? What happens when you die, when you disappear off the face of the earth? Do you just leave? Does asphyxiation hurt? Why the heck did you pick asphyxiation? How did you bring yourself to do it?

I’ll say all the usual things… you will be missed, rest in peace… but the fact remains that you’re not coming back, and that’s unnerved me, especially since you are so fucking young. For the first time in my life I’ve felt that a death was too close to me for comfort – it’s always been people not my age, and when they were, I never did know them personally. And suicide, da. From someone who I consider ‘just  like me, only more hardworking, brilliant, smart, fun, better in all possible ways’…. you can imagine how unnerving it is.

I’m not romanticizing your death, and suicide never is and never will be a solution, but I can’t judge you and say outright that you were a fool to do what you did either. I’m fine I assert and this is not the end of my sense of humour or anything, but everytime I come across wordplay, I’ll remember you.

Yours,
Pun-pannra-ponnu (as you once called me and had me wonder HOW I didn’t think of that before).

Saturn, your friend.

Author’s Note: I’m perfectly fine. I’m not emotionally disturbed. Please don’t get worried. I’m out of my ‘bad’ phase for more than a year now, and this is more like ‘Lessons learnt and not to be forgotten’, than some emotional rant. If it helps, this was written in cold blood, not in an emotionally charged state.

I’m not an expert in Astrology. Or even an intermediate, for that matter.

But I do know that when Saturn turns out your ruling planet, you have nothing but seven and a half years of pure hell. Or rather, Mr. Murphy has a field day for that period of time. Everything that can go wrong does. You can never seem to say the right things to people – everyone seems to have morphed into your prospective mother-in-law, and takes offense at every word you utter – your boss, your friends, your in-laws, your parents… everyone. You cannot seem to remember any damn thing you study. There’s always something failing with your work – either business conditions are tanking badly, or things inevitably go wrong in spite of your taking the best care. Your children are disappointing you. Your better half falls short. Or your wedding is being postponed to seemingly never. You never have any peace of mind. You lose faith in life, God, everything you believed in.

But it isn’t bad luck. Saturn is the planet denoting hard work and effort. Saturn is just teaching you, during his reign, to learn to appreciate the power of hard and meticulous work. Which you will definitely not learn with Guru-bhala. Or with Mercury or Venus presiding over you, when you suddenly seem to get lucky with business dealings and the opposite sex. Or you shoplift like crazy and never seem to get caught once. Attractive people are suddenly laughing at your lamest jokes. Heck, with a life like that, would you even want to try being good at anything?

So when Saturn rules, you slog. You learn to have faith in nothing but your own hard work. You learn to double-check, triple-check, double-double-check everything you do. You become more careful. You sharpen you skills. You try your best to be the best there is. You put in  your hardest efforts into everything you do. You learn not to give up in the face of failure. You get so used to failure that after the first few times you actually become immune to it.

You take pride in your achievements, because you know they are all of your own doing. You begin to respect yourself. And others who see you put in your best efforts begin to respect you too…. no more ‘Oh, she got lucky’ nonsense.

Failure becomes your friend. You learn to pick up the pieces and move on quickly. You learn to analyze why you failed, what you could have done to avoid failing. After the initial bouts of escapism, you are able to look your failure in the eye.

And so when Jupiter moves in, or Venus does, you’re sharp enough to make the most of it. You play like you have nothing to lose. You have no more inhibitions because you are so used to playing to survive that higher fears don’t come to your mind at all. You are edgy, bold, sharp, swift, hungry AND lucky. So when things fall into place, you are able to make the best of the situation because you are used to making the most of worse.

Saturn teaches you to be thankful. You never take anything for granted anymore. Not people, not circumstances, not favours, not being able to slip into bed with nothing on your mind and sleep peacefully. And, you are able to be happy because it’s a different situation from being as unhappy as you were before. “Thank god things are better” is what runs in your mind, and keeps you happy.

You have a minimal amount of discontent you tend to have at all given times, be it the best of times or the worst of times. When everything’s going well, where do you put that discontent? That’s how you get spoilt brats who’ve never felt pain or hurt. That’s how you get petty high-class ladies’ circle politics. Without Saturn, it’s highly unlikely you’ll have peace of mind when the going is good.

Thanks to Saturn, you learn to be compassionate. Winners are less likely to be empathetic. When you’ve failed a few times, it’s easier for you to believe failure can happen to the best of us at times. You are more understanding of others, more sympathetic, and able to give better advice than those who haven’t seen a day of failure in their lives.

And Murphy’s law is not some preachy thing to say ‘Life is totally screwed-up’ or some such pessimistic thing. It is something that is used in design to make products and processes that are robust and not as prone to failure as they would be without acknowledgment that failure is possible. Murphy’s Law is not about the worst, but about planning for the worst.

Once again, this is not a treatise on astrology or astronomy. It’s more of a piece on how to deal with bad times, and the Saturn analogy seemed to be the best way to explain what I felt. I might not even be technically right about the whole thing, for all I know.

This is not an attempt at being preachy, or to defend astrology. There are various arguments for and against astrology and I don’t see the point of forcing my point of view on anyone else. This seems the most appropriate analogy to tell people it’s okay to fail, sometimes things go wrong, but this too shall pass. And then things will go right, but that too shall pass. It’s about how we make the most of our bad times, and how those ‘bad’ times are necessary to make us appreciate the good times all the more.

And occasionally, it’s easier to blame  your failure on bad timing, or the stars, to numb the pain while you pick up the pieces and move on, and then are able to look back at your mistakes more clearly as you are over the escapism.

I have been through a few such periods in my life. I suppose everyone has been through multiple such periods in their lives. And in retrospect, I find I cannot blame my circumstances in the past at all, because they have made me what I am, and I am happy and satisfied to be what I am now; I have few regrets, if any.

And this piece is just to remind me when I’m going through a bad phase, that it is not the end of the world, and that this too shall pass, and any bad time can only serve to make me stronger. And, as my mother keeps saying, “High Hills Grow Less; That which is lightly got is little valued”.  I put this on my blog because when I’m down and nearly out, I tend to look at past times, including past blogposts, hoping to reclaim a past self which was more optimistic.

And if this logic helps you in some way, I’m gladder for it.

Age is just a number. Just a number.

I had a very bad day. Very bad.

I might possibly have ruined my life. No, not in the inappropriate-boyfriend-physical-relations-single-teenaged-mother way. No, actually I haven’t ruined my life. My stupidity might have made me do the best thing I could have done ever. But at the moment, my stupidity looms large in front of my face, and it will be a while before I say yeah, okay, everything turns out for the best. And kindly do not do a ‘what happened?’ routine  in the comments section. Stress on ‘Kindly’.

Anyway, after the aforementioned life-ruining act of mine, I tried to make myself feel better by cooking a nice elaborate meal for myself. It turned out good. I didn’t feel much better.

So well, there’s one thing that never fails to get me up. Water. Of the swimming-pool sort.

Ten minutes later, I found myself at the Rec Center pool, doing breadths. There weren’t many others near where I was. There were two gossipy undergrads, a quiet-looking girl who did only Butterfly, a couple whose strokes were all in perfect synchronization, and this guy whose sheer height increased his swimming speed.

Turns out, my bad day had affected the way I swim as well. For the first time in what seems like years, I was swallowing mouthfuls of water, tired easily, got water into my ears each time I turned to take a breath during freestyle, and got water splashing on my face with each backstroke.  Give yourself a break, I told myself.

Soon the Butterfly girl left, and I took the pull-buoy she was using… I really needed to get back to not splashing  while I did a backstroke. Just then, this efficient-looking fiftyish lady dove in. ‘Are you using this lane?’ she asked me. Er… lane? What lane? I had been swimming all over the place. On an ordinary day, I’d've grinned and said something but today I just nodded. She took the lane next to mine, muttered something about people who swim out of lane. God, I hadn’t met any old lady like her since I entered this country… most I’d met were these old dears who needed help crossing the street, but steadfastly refused when you offered to take help. Either that, or they giggled and talked. Maybe about psychology, maybe about the current state of the economy, or maybe my ‘ethnic-looking earrings’. But never was one curt.

I was still examining the pull-buoy and contemplating distractedly, when this lady took off. One lap. Then another. Then another. No pauses, unlike me. I wanted to see if I could match her speed. I took off at about the same time she did, and didn’t float for a while like I normally did to see how far my lungs would take me, crawled in short, efficient strokes, and came up every fourth stroke for a breath. I reached at the same time she did, fully spent. While I tried to get water out of my ears, she had already somersaulted underwater and turned the other way. My, I used to be able to do that! I tried, and only ended up with more water in my ears.

I watched her swim away, in swift, smooth strokes. She had seemed pretty sharp and efficient and seemed like she ‘meant business’, but her swimming was anything but. She swam with the smoothness of a dolphin, her kicking  didn’t cause any splashing, nor did her crawl. She came up for breath oh so regularly, unlike me, who surfaced only when I felt out of oxygen.

I wanted to ask her for tips, but ohmigod, she swam without a pause. I would have been all admiration, if it hadn’t been for her curt tone when she spoke to me. I vaguely thought of her as one of those old women so bursting with energy that no one in her house survived beyond age thirty, because she stole all their youth and vigour. And so much need for efficiency that no one really wanted to.

I concentrated on getting my backstroke right for the next half an hour, and paid scarce attention to her, except to notice her stop once or twice.

And then two laps of backstroke without splashing. Yay.

And then there she was, starting on her backstroke, when I was beginning freestyle. Let’s race, granny. I gave her a few seconds’ headstart and then I took after her. This time I got there first. She turned, switching to freestyle again, and I struggled hard to keep up with her. She seemed to slack a little in the middle and I surged ahead, but just as we were getting near the edge, I was losing energy, and she came at full speed. And she wasn’t even trying, like me. I just about made it. Because I tried.

And then she paused.

“Come here often?” I asked. ‘Actually, I’ve been very ill lately. I stopped swimming for a month. I’m recuperating now”, she said. “Ohh, feeling better now, I hope?”, I asked.

“Yeah…. though, I seem to have lost my stamina, and my swimming is much slower now. Much slower”.

Facepalm.

Impressions

Your impression of people are mercurial.

It depends on the how you met, when you met, your mental state, their mental state. It depends on events that took place subsequently, how each event went, who were present there how influential they are to you and to the people around you. Then there is how close you are to each of them, and how that changes with time. There is also how often you meet, what kind of interactions you have. You can also bring your own mental makeup into the picture.

Now mix all these together, in no particular order, and in no particular quantity. Then you may get the reason for the particular impression. You may also get the impression that there is no reason at all. You could also trace the impression change with time, or any other aforementioned variable.

Impressions. They are not state functions.

An Open Request To Bangalore Mirror: Stop Lifting My Content.

I put in a lot of my life and soul into this blog. That is no secret.

I also put in a lot of personal content into this blog. They have in the past led to OMGWTF sort of situations with people who knew me who I didn’t know. My kidhood/teenage/adultLife experiences, some of them with a liberal amount of exaggeration, some of them rather embarrassing, are all chronicled here.

And hence it is very important that I control the content of this blog.

Which is totally, totally impossible these days.

Because the losers at Bangalore Mirror keep lifting my content left, right and center. And publish my work in that infernal rag of theirs.

They of course mention the URL of this page as a safeguard against plagiarism accusations.

But. They violate the Creative Commons License my blog is under. Because it requires that my consent be taken before my content is used for commercial purposes. Newspaper, even of the Mirror variety, qualifies as commercial.

I also try to make sure my blog entries are grammatically correct, and have no spelling mistakes whatever, and I put in my best effort to not misuse case. The Mirror, in spite of having people dedicated to this task, somehow manage to screw the grammar, punctuation and spellings up. Heck, they can’t even do a proper CtrlC-CtrlV.

And I’m always respectful here. I don’t use abusive words at people. I even refer to Chetan Bhagat as Mr. Bhagat. In the Mirror however, it becomes a rude ‘Bhagat’.

I have previously taken offence at this sort of rude lifting of my content without my permission and even mailed an editor there. I got back an assurance that this won’t happen again:

Dear madam

Our editor Mr Sreenivas has drawn my attention to your objections to our publishing your blog entry which we carried in our newspaper on Oct 15. I appreciate the points you raised, regarding what is appropriate for a blog and what is appropriate for a newspaper. I must confess the fine distinction you made escaped us while choosing your blog entry, which we thought was witty and interesting. We wrongly assumed that what is already in the public domain of a blog is suited for the public domain of a newspaper; you correctly point out that a blogger may put it out in a blog precisely because he/she knows that not everyone related to him or her will read it. As for not seeking your permission, this lapse happened on our part because we assumed that Balanarayan had obtained your permission previously, and that would apply in general to what we chose to carry. We were wrong about that. I wish we had sought your permission first. We apologise for the the distress it has caused to you, and will ensure that we will henceforth seek your permission if we feel a particular entry is suitable for our column.

Thank you.
Subhash

The Balanarayan mentioned here is chuchap, who took my permission once before publishing my post a year or two ago in the Mirror (And who is currently not employed with Bangalore Mirror). And they say they assumed that I had given permission to lift my blog for posterity. Going by that token, shouldn’t they have stopped lifting my content when I expressed my displeasure at their doing so? They didn’t. They went on and flicked my Facebook post. Something I totally totally don’t want in a newspaper. And certainly not  in the Mirror for godsake.

And what stops these losers from ASKING? I have an About page, a contact form, and a comments section. Isn’t that sufficient for someone who wants to get in touch with me from getting in touch with me? How hard is it to write a comment, for godsake?

Initially when I started blogging, I didn’t much care about others lifting my content. Any publicity was good publicity, wasn’t it? But that was when I gave the printed word more respect than I do now. Now I don’t really much care about publicity, unless it’s getting me some work in machine learning. I don’t anymore have any writerly dreams to the extent I used to, because more important and exciting things grab my attention now. I do dream of taking a year off and writing that novel I’ve always wanted to put down to paper, but it’s not the most important ambition in my life at the moment. The only places I would work hard to get published in are places like this. I’m sorry, but my life has become infinitely more sadder that I don’t care about being published in a daily rag anymore.

Plus, I want more control over my content online. I can remove a post if someone says they’d rather not like it up on the Internet, and if I agree about it. I don’t want my words being under some third party’s control. Call me paranoid, but that’s how it is.

And heck, why am I even justifying myself. This is my blog. Rispect Mah Authoritah. Hang yourself before you even think of lifting my content.

PS: In other news, the 7.2 magnitude earthquake with its epicenter in Mexicali in Mexico was felt in Southerns California. I thought I was merely feeling dizzy due to an excellent lunch, when my roommate yelled out that it was an earthquake and we moved out of the house. It was pretty mild. We’re all safe. Though, Disneyland stopped its rides for a while.

When time did not stand still (but I did)

Expectations really change the way you perceive an experience. And I mean really.

A couple of years out of school, I sort of began losing touch with my schoolmates, me being at NITK, and they all in Bangalore, and their not being on Orkut. And then we had a reunion or two, which I attended expecting everyone to have undergone sea-changes and all. But no, the only shock I got was my diminutive fellow first bencher was now a venerable Petronas tower. No, actually, the bigger shock was that everyone seemed pretty much the same. My close friends were still my close friends. The class tensionParty was still the class tensionParty. The eternal star-crossed couple we giggled about was still the eternal star-crossed couple we giggled about. The class poet still wrote poetry about nature and beauty. And a friend I previously mentioned on this blog as Pink was still wearing the same top she was wearing when I saw her last.

As for those who couldn’t make it to the reunions, I kept meeting them off and on every now and then. They didn’t seem to have changed much, except maybe when they acquired fake accents and awesome degrees.

Even  our teachers treated us the same way when we ran into them once in a while. They still called us by our old nicknames, pulled our legs about the same old jokes (they remembered!)….

Our ragtag bunch of thirty-nine still seemed to be much the same, the eight years notwithstanding. And so it seemed too with my friends from school who were a year or two older or younger than me.

So I basically assumed that everyone I knew from school would be pretty much the same, no changes whatsoever. I obviously was setting myself up for a big shock. And how.

I think Facebook is the biggest time-sink there ever is, even including Reddit or Google Reader. And my saying that certainly is something. So I don’t know what I was thinking one fine day when I decided to look up my schoolmates on Facebook.

The sleek handsome head-boy was now a teetering-towards-middle-age doctor in Boston. The head-girl in that batch, that doe-eyed girl we all aspired to be like, was now a pleasantly plump homemaker in Leeds. Some topper dude was now a professional photographer…. aal izz well, I suppose. Many more of those much-older kids had (obviously) undergone a sea-change.

So, hell, let’s turn to the juniors, shall we? Those kids who used to wet their pants when we were responsible middle-schoolers.

Big mistake. The girls all looked like Heidi Klum, the boys like Justin Timberlake (You know you’re getting on in years when your pop culture references are so yesterday). Their photos oozed so much oomph, it was hard to believe that this was the same kid who used to cry all the time for his mommy, and who would be placated with a pineapple-flavoured lollipop.

So anyway, let’s check out the teachers, shall we? That timeless bunch who stay the same, batch after batch, who narrate the same jokes year after year (and every class will have someone with an older sibling who had told them the joke), including the ones that start with ‘Last year, you know…’.

They were all Farmville-crazy!

One of them wrote a blog which had horrible, horrible grammar. Thank god she was the one who taught chemistry, not the one who taught English. I swear to god I’d have thrown myself off a cliff with disillusionment if she was.

And one more of them, the one who wore those prim sarees which established her as Martinet supreme, who used to regularly upbraid high school girls for our short skirts and too-tight uniforms (she said we looked ugly, it didn’t suit us, and a variety of other things that a thirteen-year-old feels horrible, horrible about), and said segregation of the sexes was good…. she had uploaded a few photos of herself posing in front of various European monuments wearing various forms of tight, revealing clothes. And she looked ugly, it didn’t suit her.

After that, I haven’t logged into Facebook, and don’t feel like for some time to come.

Mind Dry Dot In – Coming soon to a stage near you.

Yes, I'm a fangirl too. How can I not be?

Arjun Sharma and Harish Kumar one day found that they could do more productive things with their time than reply to my boring posts. Which is sort of sad since their comments were really nice, funny and to the point.

They went on to make Youtube videos that are really nice, funny, and to the point.

I didn’t know that they did that until when I was killing time between NITK and my first job, and over a period of a week, had friends from Dusseldorf, San Diego, Los Angeles, Austin and College Park send me a link to some Youtube video, which was supposed to be howlarious. I ignored the links (I wasn’t on a very fast connection, and so I could hear them speak like they were Vajpayee… pauses and more pauses between two syllables), until one day I was bored out of my mind.

I ended up watching the video three more times, once because my mother who heard me laughing madly wanted to see what I was laughing about, and then my father, and then my sister. Their fan base seemed to be exponentially increasing. Nice, no?

And then there were these series of videos that demonstrated that they were awesome at parodies. With the in-house Advani-ji and URA and Tiger Prabhakar and CSP… not to forget SPB, Siddhartha Basu, and other towering personalities, they soon made me sit up and take notice. And at around the same time, I realized that these were the folks who used to comment here. More enthu, stemming from the ‘Hey, I know this celebrity… he lives near my house’ factor.

So this bunch of folks are staging yet another of their plays soon. I’ll be missing it, much like I missed their first performance… However as a loyal fangirl, I’ve watched the version 1.0 of this play, Nara-Simha Yudhdham, and I must say I rather liked it. This one promises to be even more funny, insightful and satirical.

Trademark Mindry.In, I’d say. Which stands for first-standard jokes from that irritating uncle at Shamlu-akka’s wedding, in an often satirical, or sophisticated context. Add to that mix Monty Python influences, and Blackadder references, and Fry-and-Laurie style straightMan-funnyMan settings, and there you go. But that’s not where their entire charm comes from…. it’s also that they say what they have to say in Kannada. For long, the only sort of Kannada humour I had been exposed to was Doddanna, Jaggesh, and probably Narasimha Raju and Dwarkish. And maybe innumerable jokes from teachers in my PU College (I went to a CBSE Gult-owned school, and you didn’t often speak Kannada there), but seedless kadlekai jokes weren’t very popular outside. (Nor are my creations I pass off as PJs, but we’ll let that pass for now). So it was quite refreshing to come across some haasya in the language I heard the second-most, that resembled humour in the language I heard the most.

This might sound chauvinistic or whatever, but I can’t imagine really really funny jokes in Hindi, mainly because my idea of humour in Hindi is limited to Bollywood, and for me the best Tamil humour is from Crazy Mohan. And that’s just because that’s the sort of humour I identify with… the sort that someone who follows the memes I follow, the news stories I’m interested in, the customs I practice, the situations I’m normally in, would identify with. Fry And Laurie and Python and Not The Nine O’ Clock News and a few others were my staple in English for precisely these reasons, as were Crazy Mohan’s movies in Tamil… and now, Mindry.in in Kannada. It is humour from folks who grew up in Bangalore, just like me, who spend Sunday evenings watching that talent show hosted by SP Balasubramanyam, who are amazed at the double usage of Sri in Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who use expressions like Whatafine, who watch all the funny stuff I watch, who teteer on the same side of the political center, who reminisce about the ’90s…

And who are like those pakkadmane hudugas (Guys next door, for the Canarically challenged) who are too modest to speak about themselves, no matter how awesome they are…. and hence here I am writing this plug for them. Come one, come all, do watch this play. There’s something in it for everyone… be it that lame PJ you used to crack up on at age seven, only now, it’s on stage and it’s in such an awesome context, or a sly Blackadder reference, or a homage to Floyd. Bring your Ajji, Ajja, Putta, Putti, Jimmy, Julie… and your Pakkadmane douv also – it’s family-friendly humour they are into, and these likeable lads are the sorts you can take home to your mother.