Of This And That

Oh, We Poor Match-makers!

2007-02-20T06:27:00.000-08:00

I was at a conference. Soft drinks were served in their original bottles with straws provided to … Oops, I almost said ‘match’, and been hopelessly wrong. For the length of the straws didn’t match at all. The bottle shapes had been altered to appear anorexically slender and tall – so a hand could be put around their waist -- and I must say that were quite elegant too, even appearing to show they carried more of the liquid than the original ones. Indeed, may be in the new shaped containers, there was less drink than before.

The straws supplied had been made for use with the earlier shorter, relatively squatter, bottles. As a result, the older straws when inserted just went right down into the newer bottles right into the amber liquid! So perhaps, along with the straws, there should have been provided also a mini-kit to retrieve them when they went down into the drink.

Should not makers of new design bottles have informed the straw-makers before-hand and got them to provide the right new lengths to match, so that customers didn’t feel frustrated, angry, cheated?

Shouldn’t the same principle of coordination apply when we come up with wide bodied cars and our roads just do not have enough width for them to pass each other without unintended rough contact?

As cities climb vertically thanks to feverish building activity, and there are larger and larger numbers of inhabitants claiming use of the same limited quantum of available public amenities such as water, waste disposal facilities, parking space and so on, can tempers keep from fraying?

Are we poor match-makers, or just not match-makers at all?

Think.

Singur and the Men in Blue.

2007-02-17T14:50:00.000-08:00

What do farmland holders of Singur in West Bengal and cricketers sporting our national colour have in common? Not much of a riddle-me-re; both lose their plots!

Let’s not get into Singur, where the pot has been stirred up enough and more. Let’s look at the Rajkot one-dayer which our men in blue contrived to lose after having been in a position to command all the shots that count.

Rahul Dravid read the conditions right when he put Sri Lanka in upon winning the toss. And the visitors were three down and then four down for very few runs.

Then came Sangakkara to haul his side out of major trouble looming ahead. His century is one of the best we have seen in recent times, and full marks to him for overcoming adversity first with tenacity, and then with bold aggression with partners at the other end seeing to it that he was not left stranded all alone in quick time.

India needed 258 to win the match and go one up in the series. Given that the ground is not as vast as the Eden Gardens, and that the outfield was fast, surely that was not an impossible task even after Robin Uthappa and Dravid had lost their wickets. Incomparable Tendulkar, in company with the returned to form and favour Saurav Ganguly, raised a partnership worth more than a hundred, and even after both departed, there were Dhoni and Dinesh Karthik occupying the crease with ease. India had six wickets in hand and the number of balls available was well in excess of the runs needed to win the tie.

Both the young men batted with energy and purpose, keeping the required run rate within control. But the weight of complacency that wickets were in hand seemed to cramp them of a sudden Both are fine stroke players not afraid to loft the ball over the fielders and into the stands chockful of eager spectators. But our men inexplicably content to keep away from risk, even when there came balls screaming to be smashed soaring high for a safe four or six. Meanwhile, balls were being defended, and the run rate climbed calling for desperate methods that were launched too late. And when the partnership of Dhoni and Karthik was broken, the match was truly lost for India.

What is the use of hugging the treasure of wickets in hand if they cannot be converted into winning runs, before the allotted overs run out?

The Indian team seems to be suffering from writer’s block – either not being able to devise a worthwhile plot, or unable to carry it to fruition! Some connection, may be, with Writers’ Building in Kolkatta?

Linguifusion!

2007-02-10T05:55:00.001-08:00

Happened to look up references to the Sphinx, the sand-worn sculpture in the Egyptian desert, with the body of a lion and a face that seems human. Paul Theroux says in one of his books that native Egyptians point it out to tourists calling it ‘Safinkees’. That could be their way of pronouncing Sphinx, just as Hindi speakers refer to English as ‘Angrezi’.
A theory goes that the Greeks found it and named it in their own way, but that the locals called the fearful thing Abu-el-Houl, meaning Father of Terror. Well that is one Abu whose tribe you wouldn’t want to increase, unless you subscribe to terror and its methods, of which the world now is not in particularly short supply – go ye east, west, north, or south.
It is said that the sculpture just as famous as the pyramids represents the Sun as God, since the royals of Egypt not only worshipped the Sun but claimed direct descent from the star that lights our days. The lion of course is King of all the beasts.
What then about the human face? And what is the origin of the Greek name Sphinx?
We go again to Theroux, and he says that the creature is Ra Herakhti, or the Sun, and it bears the face of one Khafre, who ruled Egypt when the sculpture was made and erected facing east,
the direction of dawn. Since the face was made to bear a close likeness to the living Pharaoh’s visage by a team of sculptors working under a skillful master – the people called it the ‘Living Image’ of their ruler, and in their language Living Image was rendered as Sesheb Ankh.
This was perhaps too much for the Greeks to pronounce, and they got the approximation Sphinx suitable to their own tongue.
Residents of Chennai in India may recall that there used to be a bus stop near Triplicane called just ‘BB’. Not for the sultry siren Brigitte Bardot, or the very staid British Broadcasting, but for ‘Barber’s Bridge’. And, indeed, there was a bridge there.
But what was the association with ‘barber’? A strange tale unfolds. The bridge apparently was named Hamilton’s Bridge. Local folk in course of time, aided by the cursory shouts of busy bus conductors, came to call it “Ambattan Bridge” which in Tamizh came to be translated as Ambattan Varavathi. Reversing the process, Ambattan Varavathi became in English Barber’s Bridge. And so came about the abbreviation BB!
As cultures and languages come into contact, stranger things can happen, and pretty fast.

Flies in a Dream.

2007-02-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

In the middle of night, I woke up for no reason whatever. Vividly I remembered a scene from a fading dream. A photograph in plain black and white: it showed a dead soldier lying face down on the ground, his helmet covering his head towards which the camera was aimed. The abandoned look of his body suggested the soul had departed from it quite some time back.

I went to the toilet and returned to bed. But sleep would not come, and the image of the photograph persisted. Now I seemed to see flies hovering over the body. Out of nowhere, these words came to me, "The war is over for this soldier." And I heard the sound of the buzzing flies.

Yes, the war he had been engaged in, and other wars in other fields, would go on. For that fallen soldier however, so still in death with only the flies buzzing around as signs of life, it was all over and done with.

I tried to dismiss the image and still my thoughts, but my mind refused to be silenced. What had that man been thinking of before the fatal bullet felled him? Of his wife, his home, of what madness had brought him into strange and very dangerous places? Of the duty he was doing for his nation? Of might happen to him when the Grim Ruthless Reaper any moment claimed his life? Of Heaven, Hell, or whatever else, assuming there is a future after death? Had he suffered before the end came, and wondered how he had caused similar suffering to others designated as the enemy he was rightfully entitled to maim and kill? My mind meandered pointlessly over such questions before sleep caught up with me again. Only the sound of the flies buzzed as a lullaby.

Next morning the whole thing was gone, like a slate wiped clean.

But the writing showed again, when the morning after dawned. A friend rang me up to ask if I knew the sad news.

"What?"

"Sharan passed away suddenly. I thought you would have heard. He was alone in the house, and must have suffered a cardiac arrest. His wife was travelling afar, their only daughter is in the US. There was no one in the house."

"I am terribly sorry. I have no words."

"The worst of it is that with the doors locked, nobody suspected anything was amiss. They thought he had just gone on a trip. Until milk sachets and newspapers piled up unclaimed by the front door. And a smell began to pervade and spread. You know, then they had to break their way in. They found Sharan, with flies everywhere buzzing around the body."

Sharan had been a very good friend of ours. For him the war was over. I wondered if my dream in the middle of the night had been some kind of a message.

Have some of you had similar experiences to share?

O HO, and let blood and champagne flow!

2007-01-23T15:45:00.000-08:00

O HO is here, and merry cheers to all the successful entrepreneurs and their brokers.

What is O HO? Outsourcing of human organs! It's here in India, and that is, well, almost official. And that's a sign that India is going to become rich!

Who doesn't want India to be rich? We all do, don't we? The poor want to be less poor, the middle class to climb a rung up the ladder, the rich want to become super-rich, the wealthy to become super wealthy, and so on, in quest of getting into lists that name the rarest of the rare and rank them in plutocratic order.

Why do foreign manufacturers come to India? Because India is poor and there are vast numbers of workers available here practically dirt-cheap, and foreign investors can make vast profits when they operate here, than if they stayed home to do their business, or ventured into countries that are not poor.

Ah, there you have the paradox, India has a chance of getting rich as mentioned above, precisely because we are riddled by continuing poverty, growing worse as population and illiteracy scale by the day higher and higher reaches.

Not only human labour, but human bodies too are cheap to buy here in India Think of a farmer burdened by overwhelming debt, or a fisherman whose earnings catapult perilously below unable to complete with foreign trawlers hauling in their loot in Indian waters. The noose, a bottle of pesticide, a quick jump on the path of a rushing train. Such solutions have been taken by many.

But better ones are at hand, according to the spate of recent reports, starting with the horrors of Nithari, nestling next to NOIDA, neighbouring our national capital, where the rich and powerful comfortably reside in palatial comfort.

At Nithari, young children were lured into a rich home and slaughtered for the sport and gain of the rich. But in many parts elsewhere in India, and maybe in the Nithari case too, financiers and organ-brokers network with select hospitals, to get poor people to part with their kidneys for promised payment of about Rs. 40,000 per kidney -- and even that amount is seldom paid. But the kidneys the poor have surgically been operated upon to part with are sold each for Rs. 40 lakhs each according to one estimate. Considering the vast number of cases of unvoluntary donors come to light so far, and the unnumbered many more that lie hidden, like the iceberg's mass beneath its visible tip, here we have probably the biggest success story yet to unfold for India, thanks to the tide of globalisation.

Money flows from rich countries into India, and if our population, particularly poor population, declines, what can be better for one and all?

The old story says that it rains alike on the rich and the poor, but more on the poor, because the rich have a smooth way of expropriating the poor's umbrellas. Now, not just umbrellas, but vital human organs as well, as the rain of wealth is prayed for by our nation.

Think.

Baiting the Bull and Nithari

2007-01-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

Who is the Animal and who the Man?

It was Kaanum Pongal Day, when people go out to see one another and spread and share cheer. It was also the day after Maattu-p-Pongal, the day on which humans show that they love and care for the animals that they share this world with, particularly cattle without which agriculture would not have advanced to where it is today.

On a road parallel to the famed Marina of Chennai, vehicles were locked tail to bumper and crawling at slower than the pace of a snail with a terrible hang-over. This is what enabled me to see across to the left. And I wish I had not seen what I did. A magnificent bull, beautifully built with long horns, was being cruelly driven forth by a man in a grey shirt and dhoti. A day after Maattu-p-Pongal it was, remember.

Somebody had left a lot of cooked rice uneaten on the pavement, and the hungry bull bent its head low to eat a bit of it, the poor thing. The man behind the animal would have none of it. What did he care how hungry the poor bull was! He slashed sharply with his whip across its back, and when the poor animal still tried to grab a bite from the mound of rice somebody not wanting it had left behind, he twisted the bull’s tail hard. The bull grunted in helpless dismay, and moved on. Hunger was preferable to this torment.

Where was the man taking the bull and what was he going to earn from using it? How could barely a couple of minutes have affected his ends if he had let the bull eat the food it so grievously needed?

As I wondered so, my thoughts jumped to the recent horrendous killings of children and adolescents of Nithari in Noida. Had any thought even fleetingly crossed the minds of the killers -- of the suffering they were inflicting on their victims, or were they thinking only of what they stood to gain from their deeds?

The man on the pavement in Chennai, tormenting the hungry bull, seemed no different to me, from the horror inflicters of Noida who went about merrily killing human beings for their own pleasure and gain.

Think, and shudder to anticipate. Have a happy New Year as best as you may!

Do you remember, do you anticipate?

2007-01-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

"I remember, I remember the house where I was born", do you?

If you don't, worry not. The words quoted must have come from someone with a super-memory. More probably, his parents had told him or her years later, "Look, this is where you were born in ...." So, what the person remembers is what was told to him, not the fact of the place of birth known personally at first hand.

Recently I happened to be, not where I’d been told I was born, but a place I personally remember I had visited and stayed in.

It was a house in a village in deep southern India, to which I had been taken to with my parents when I was coming up six years old. It was not a shining India then, nor incredible India as claimed now.

But it was a charming little place, with fields around, a rough earthen path to come into by, a couple of temples, and a variety of vegetables and fragrant flowers all grown within walking distance. A month back I went with my son and grandson, the latter coming up now six! Has the world changed? You bet it has!

Gone are the old paths and gardens. The roads are now paved and tarred. There was no electricity then; now wires criss-cross up above. Buses and lorries ply incessantly, raising dust and spreading smoke. Flowers and vegetables are taken to the nearest market, or a much farther one.

They have to be bought there and brought back to the village, if it can still be called that, what with everyone having a bike and cell-phone. The village has paid a price for turning modern. Instead of going to the river to bathe and fetching drinking water from it, residents get piped water supply, though erratically. Communication is not by word of mouth, or by post card. It is at the speed of light through the Internet.

To the surprise of all of us, we were able to locate the old house still, and down the narrow street there still stands the Perumal Temple, though in a sad dilapidated condition. From that temple, after the bell had pealed for evening worship, for the benefit of those who could not go to the shrine, the priest went house to house, distributing blessings and prasadam. We could not be sure if this practice still exists.

But it was a great feeling to see that old house, and sit on the pial (thinnai), meant for visitors and friends to gather together and chat. The box camera was about all that was known then. The picture you see alongside was taken digitally.

Comfort comes, but with it must charm go? Anticipate.

Photograph

2005-01-01T04:46:00.000-08:00