On a sunny afternoon

He walks up to a stall and looks at the drinks on offer. Drinks of all sorts – green drinks, pink drinks, yellow drinks; milky drinks, watery drinks, pulpy drinks – look back languidly through those plastic vats. He can see himself, reflected in a different colour in each one.

He asks for teh tarik, a frothy condensed-milk version of his usual chai, and is asked to wait. He chooses a table and takes a stool, setting his rucksack down on the stool opposite. He unfolds a map of the city and tries to figure out where he has ended up. He often gets lost.

He hears voices nearby. A Chinese family – grandma and kids – have taken the next table. The table is meant for four, and since there are five of them, the grandmother chooses to stand while the little children establish themselves and clamour for food.

He takes his bag and places it on the floor, and asks the old woman to sit at his table. She is pleased. She thanks him, her wizened features crinkling into a delightful smile. He nods (he's not a very expressive sort, you understand) and returns to his map.

His tea arrives presently. “Teh tarik”, the woman smiles. He smiles back this time, and sips the happy liquid, and loses himself in thought. Tea always does that to him.

He feels a tug at his sleeve. The woman is saying something, and she is holding a small polythene bag. It contains bread-and-butter sandwiches. She points to her grandchildren, indicating that they have already helped themselves and that he should, too. He refuses, placing his palm on his tummy to indicate that he is full, and then wonders if it might be inappropriate by Chinese custom to decline an offer of food. He hopes that they make allowances for foreigners. But the woman does not seem offended, merely amused. He is relieved.

He presently finishes his teh tarik and leaves the foodcourt. He waves goodbye. She waves back.

“Aate jaate khoobsurat awara sadkon pe, kabhi kabhi, ittefaq se, kitne anjaan log mil jaate hain ..” Kishoreda tells him via the iPod. He agrees.

In which the One Solves a Problem

Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea,
And dines on the following day.

- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

It has come to one’s attention that one requires considerably more sleep than the average person. Ten-hour stretches, for the One, are practically de rigueur. The occasional eleven-hour marathon is savoured, and filed away in the memory for reminiscence purposes. Twelve is heaven.

The problem, actually, is not that one sleeps so much. The problem is when. The lateness of the hour that one goes to sleep, people, is surpassed only by the lateness of the hour that one wakes up.

But there was this brief period when one became an Early Riser, yes, a fugitive glimmer of Hope in the drowsy blur that this life has been. That was when one went to the Netherlands a while ago. For a week, everything was wonderful. One would wake up at hours of the extremely wee kind, gaze at the rising sun, think all sorts of profound sunrise-related thoughts, and then set off on a Brisk Morning Walk. And then one would return, positively wallowing in inspiration, bright-eyed, and raring, yes, raring to face the day. And, in the evening, one would be fast asleep by eight or nine. The folks back home began to believe that there was some hope yet for the One.

But they, in their usual optimism, had not bargained for the superbly adaptive nature of one’s body clock. A fortnight, and one was sleeping at Dutch hours that were, if anything, even unearthlier than the ol’ Singaporean ones.

Nevertheless, the experience helped one find a Solution. Yes. The Solution is to keep travelling westwards, moving on when the body clock adjusts. So from Singapore one flies to, say, Bombay where 3 am is only 12:30 am*, which is an entirely okay sort of time to crash. After a week or so (as the bedtime gradually approaches 3 am IST), one proceeds to Dubai, and a week after that to London, and then New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu. Then we cross the date line to find ourselves in Sydney, and then we’re back in Singapore. And then we start all over again, perhaps along different latitudes this time round. We lose days somewhere, of course **, but then we always did have too much time on our hands.

And if anybody is wondering how one plans perpetually to fund such Foggean travel one shall subject them to the Withering Look, for one does not like practical details getting in the way of Great Plans.


* One accepts, of course, that Indian Standard Time is the One True Time and that one is being rather pretentious hurrying along a couple of hours ahead.

** That’s one aspect of the time-difference thing that one cannot quite comprehend, but one is assured that it happens.

Bloofargo*

You make your way to the university library after a harrying day at the office**. You find the book you want after a prolonged and difficult search. (Libraries these days have computerized catalogue searches, but that is exactly the point.) Then, and only then, do you realise that you’ve forgotten your library card. You return to the Abode*** at an unearthly hour and in some dismay, and crash without even checking on the Blog.

And you make your way to the library again the next evening, library card securely in wallet, and search for the book again, and try to check it out, only to find that your membership has expired. At any other time this discovery would be heartening, for it means that the university finally (finally) admits that you’ve completed your course, but at this particular moment it is rather unwelcome. You are told that books cannot be borrowed by an Ex-Member (the very lowest form of library-life, if the look on the matron’s face is anything to go by), and then you are given several important-looking forms that you shall have to fill out if you wish to climb the evolutionary ladder and become a Regular Member (as opposed to a Student Member, which you proudly were until the dawn of that fateful day). You return to the Abode at an unearthly hour and in some dismay, and steel yourself for the form-filling activities that are undoubtedly going to take up most of the weekend.

And then, out of sheer spite, you choose to blog about it.


* this title is, of course, incomprehensible to the reader. Said reader may take solace in the fact that it is equally incomprehensible to the One.

** the library and the office, naturally, are at opposite ends of the city. Country, even.

*** the Abode and the library, naturally, are also at opposite ends of the city.


Update:

And then the blog goes missing. Again. Bad, bad bloggy.

This has been a most trying week. One is not amused at all.

Learning to text

Lend thy ears, for matters now
Of much importance we address.
Yes, this fine evening we’ll see how
One learned to send an SMS.

The day was dull, the skies were grey
And it was hot, to some degree.
One's walking down from point A (say)
To a place that we shall call point B.

There was a tea-place on the way
(On Ashram Road, one does recall)
And standing there, like every day,
Was Rameshbhai, who owned the stall.

As one waited for a cup
Of steaming hot masala chai,
One thought one might call Mom up
One thought of giving it a try.

(For one possessed in days of yore
A gadget one could call one’s own.
One carried and one did adore
One’s old and trusty mobile phone.)

One undertook this complex feat
Sweat pouring down this furrowed brow.
For (it must've been the heat)
One could not quite remember how.

How on earth was one to type
Numbers that made her cellphone ring?
(And thus began one’s general gripe
With every freaking gadget-thing.)

One was now in much dismay,
One had no further wish to live.
One’s expression, you might say
Was sufficiently expressive.

One was truly at a loss
A nervous breakdown had begun
But Rameshbhai, he walked across
And sat down right beside the One.

"You need to learn these things", he said
"Your skills we shall proceed to hone
But wait, before we go ahead,
How long have you, boy, had this phone?"

"Oh, maybe a year", one told him,
"Fourteen months, to be exact.
One called a friend once, on a whim.
(And yes, one does have friends, in fact.)"

"Learn to text, boy, helps a lot
It costs less than a call would, too."
(He was, as you might have thought,
A fine and businesslike Gujju.)

"Technology is vast, my boy,
But I shall be your trusty guide.
(Without intending to annoy - )
You can read, right?" he verified.

"Press this button, and you’ll see
A blank screen and a cursor too
That much I can guarantee;
But thereafter it’s up to you."

"Think of what you want to say
And write it out nice and concise.
Say what you wish to convey
And if you can’t, just write it twice."

He spoke (one thanked the Gods above)
On various relevant techniques.
Then he lent one his copy of
'SMSese in Seven Weeks'.

And tears of unbridled joy,
They freely flowed down from one’s eyes.
The Almighty, he doth deploy
A worthy angel in disguise.

"Ah, marvellous! Callooh! Callay!
‘Tis magical!" One cried out loud;
"One learnt something new today
The folks are gonna be so proud!"

That glorious evening did the trick.
One’s resumé now does profess,
"Well- travelled, and dynamic,
And conversant with SMS."

Parenthetically speaking

One is an ardent advocate of increasing the ambit of bracket-usage. One illustrates the advantages offered by this age-old precedence-clarification device.

Remember the Mary Poppins joke that goes

Bert : I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.
Uncle Albert : What’s the name of his other leg?

A brief examination of the joke reveals the ambiguity that is being exploited here. We do not know if Bert is referring to a man with a wooden leg or to a wooden leg named Smith. This could probably be expressed succinctly in an axiom of the “subordinate clauses may not be interrupted by nonessential appositives” kind, but one slept through grammar classes at school. And through most other classes too, but that is irrelevant here.

Folks would point out that changing “man with a wooden leg” to “wooden-legged man” avoids the confusion. And they would be subjected to a withering look from the One*, because that sort of thing just wouldn’t work if you were talking about a chap with, say, a polka-dot bandanna.

But observe what happens when we use the new, lunula-enhanced version of the language:

Bert : I know a (man with a wooden leg) named Smith.
Uncle Albert : Er .. okay.

See? Problem solved. And it’s extensible too ..

Bert : I know a (man who wears a polka-dot bandanna and a cool Emraan Hashmi-style bomber jacket) named Smith.
Uncle Albert : Umm .. okay.

One agrees this might be a little inconvenient during a conversation (I know a open bracket man with a wooden leg close bracket …) but the speaker could make air-brackets with his hands, much like the air-quotes that seem to be rather popular these days amongst the hep set. And look how scientific it is. No misunderstandings. Much time saved, much money saved.

It seems one has come up with a patently patentable idea and destroyed a perfectly good joke. It’s nice to be productive for a change.


* Which is almost as alarming as one’s normal expression, one assures you.

Hopin', sesame

One was informed recently that the password one had been using to access a certain intranet was due to expire. In accordance with recently-implemented policy, the new password was required to

1) Be at least eight characters long.
2) Be different from the previous twelve passwords.
3) Contain at least three of the following : a) uppercase letters, b) lowercase letters, c) numbers, d) non-alphanumeric characters.

One wishes to protest. One finds these rules overly draconian, clearly intended to terrorize all but the most doughty of intellects. No telling how low these system administrator types can stoop – next they’ll be asking for palindromes, or original pangrams, or perfect villanelles. And one Draws the Line at being made to waste precious (and limited) brainpower on such matters, given that one’s passwords thus far have consisted of one’s name followed, to confound even the most devious of hackers, by the surname.

The fact that password-choosing is well on its way to becoming an exercise in creative writing would not bother one so much if it had not been for the need to remember passwords. Yes. One has realised that a password actually needs to be retained in the ol’ memory for extended periods of time, failing which many hassles ensue. Such insight has not, however, prevented such hassles from ensuing, and ensuing repeatedly, in the course of this brief but eventful existence.*

See, one usually keys in the username with a flourish .. and then, pfft (zppk? grrch?). Everything goes blank.

At this point one proceeds to follow a complicated but well-established procedure that involves delving deep into the nooks and crannies of this tangled mind, negotiating one’s way through a lifetime of cerebral (and not-so-cerebral) detritus in the hope of finding that elusive thingybob. This, despite the immense mental effort involved, does not usually give useful results, and one is left with no choice but to look for the system administrator. Who is invariably on holiday.

We need voice authentication. Iris recognition. DNA fingerprinting. Anything but passwords.


* One cannot, at this point, remember what one had for lunch yesterday (or even whether one had lunch yesterday) so asking one to remember a random string like MeghnaNaidu123 is, you would agree, a bit much. Especially when it needs to be changed to MeghnaNaidu124 in a couple of months.

Worse libre

Thought of writing
A poem today.
A modern sort of poem, you know.
Free verse, they call it.
You write it
just like you would write prose
Except you can be
even less coherent.
Then you break your lines
Arbitrarily, like
so;
Add a few
important words
Let’s see .. dreams, yes, dreams
Teardrops and infinity, maybe
And, of course, love.
(Couldn’t leave that one out, could we.)
And you’re not to worry
About rhythm or
rhyme
Different is avant-garde, after all.
And then, especially if you’re Asian
You talk about home
If you mix up your languages, better still
More exotic, you see.
Critical acclaim is assured.

There. Hey,
this is easy.
Let’s try
Abstract art next.

On data, or the lack thereof

Blogger, it seems, has been acting up lately. Comments have gone missing. Posts have gone missing. And, for a few hours a couple of days ago, one’s entire blog went missing.

“This document contains no data”, a little alert-box would cheerfully inform the millions (and millions) who undoubtedly tried to access this glorious webpage that morning (or afternoon, or evening, or whatever). One was, of course, amongst said multitudes. And one was Quite Dismayed, if truth be told. No data? No information, perhaps, but no data? A quarter of a million characters one has typed out, yes, a quarter of a million, over tens of thousands of lines, and it says no data?

Tragic it is, truly tragic. Reams and reams of pristine prose (and the occasional poem too, let us not forget) at the mercy of a fickle service provider. Ah, the sheer injustice of it all. That too after all the care one takes of this site. One checks on it every day, one tweaks the template regularly, one has even memorized the URL. One goes so far as to feel a paternal affection for it at times. And Blogger has the gall, the Gall, to chheenofy it from the One.

One seriously considered moving to one’s own domain, but that apparently requires a) money and b) technological knowledge, neither of which one can claim to possess in significant quantity.

Such is life.

Charming, tiptop, beautiful beautiful ..

Some may remember how the rapid growth of satellite television in India in the early nineties resulted in the proliferation of numerous nondescript channels dedicated to repeatedly broadcasting, of all things, film trailers.

The general lack of things to do in those days meant that one let oneself be subjected, at that impressionable age, to a continuous medley of aforesaid trailers. Trailers which were, naturally, full of phillum-songs. The effects, not surprisingly, linger to this very day. When one encounters blogposts that recall old advertisement-jingles and reminiscences like this one by heh heh, a few carefully-suppressed memories barge their way out of the subconscious and beg for an audience.

So let us discuss one particularly compelling phillum-song memory today, if only to achieve a sort of catharsis. For, as the Planthrin Borgess said, disturbing memories should not be bottled up within – they must be confronted.*

‘Tis the heady summer of ‘95. The young One is spending a vacation at the grandparental home, which happens to be located near a drive-in theatre. ‘Tis eleven o’clock at night, and the young One, having watched enough WWF for the day, prepares to curl up with a few Mandrake comics. Suddenly, he hears faint but bloodcurdling wails emanating from the aforementioned theatre. He listens, scared but fascinated.

A man’s voice, declaiming with much vigour:

We want girl, beautiful beautiful,
Charming, tiptop, beautiful, beautiful ..


And then a shrill, doubtless feminine retort:

We want boy, handsome handsome,
Dashing He-Man, Superman, Phantom ..


The young One covers his ears. He plugs them with cotton wool. He shuts the window. He burrows into the pillow. But nothing seems to help. He can still hear it. He considers drowning out the sound by playing something louder, but people are sleeping. He is in a most woeful predicament. He can do nothing but wait for it to finish.

And every night, at a few minutes past eleven, the young One is subjected to the aforementioned lyrics. By the end of the week, these lines are indelibly etched into his tender psyche. The young One is scarred for life.

The years pass. The young One becomes a Big Boy. He leaves the comforts of the beloved Desh and journeys to strange lands, meeting new people, seeing new sights, thinking new thoughts. But wherever he may go, every once in a while, when he least expects it, the lines return to haunt him. “Charming, tiptop, beautiful beautiful .. Dashing He-Man, Superman, Phantom ..”

And that, gentle reader, is the end of that particular phillum-song memory. One hopes that catharsis has been achieved. If the song does not haunt one any more, if the nightmares do not recur, one shall be thankful. ‘Nuff said.

* One does not have the faintest idea who the Planthrin Borgess might be, but then neither do you.

Update :

It seems people do not believe that such a song has ever been sung in Bollywood. While one is suitably outraged at the implication that this blog takes liberties with the truth (perish the thought!), one shall now go about the delicate business of Clearing One’s Good Name.

The lines in the post are from a song entitled Saawan Ka Mahina, Shaadi Bina Mushkil Hai Jeena. Phillum Hulchul. One cannot find the song on the web, unfortunately, but the reader might recall another song from the same film (a marginally better one) that went Pehli Dafaa Is Dil Mein Bhi Hulchul Si Hone Lagi.

So there.


Update the second :

S. (May She Blog For Ever) has given us this link. The gentle reader shall click on it and play the song in question.

The Techie Decalogue

It was with High Hopes and Noble Intentions that one chose to train oneself for the exalted profession of Engineering. One thought it would be mostly about warp drives and lightsabers and telling robots what to do (“A robot must not disturb the One during a game of Minesweeper or, through inaction, allow the One to be disturbed during said game”). It actually seems to involve mundane and extremely unglamorous things like debugging core dumps and writing system specifications, neither of which one has really got the hang of.

See, six years of concerted study have taught one remarkably little except for the fact that a penchant for computer games and science fiction cannot see a chap through. One finds oneself in the unenviable position of being a Techie Who Knows Nothing Of Things Technological (TWKNOTT).

Today one shall spare a thought for fellow TWKNOTTs. A few pointers (no pun intended) will, one hopes, go a long way towards making their lives easier. One delivers, O people, the Ten Commandments of TWKNOTT-dom:

1) When the in-house ubergeek (and there is always an in-house ubergeek – he’s the one who spends his weekends writing device drivers and was probably born hacking away at the Linux kernel) mutters something about how that newfangled filesystem doesn’t work too well with the Allegro library, thou shalt silently nod in agreement.

2) Thou shalt occasionally remark, in reply to aforementioned ubergeek, that thou hast heard rumours that the aforementioned filesystem doesn’t take too kindly to UPnP either. If feeling particularly enthusiastic (or if it is a Friday afternoon), thou shalt add that it is only possible to verify these matters by running simulations using the Parallel Virtual Machine. Over the Secure Shell. With private-key encryption.

3) Thou shalt liberally pepper conversations with the words “robustness” and “scalability”. They’re powerful concepts, those two, and may be used in connection with many different things, like hardware, software, organizational structure, and the secretary’s new lipstick.

4) Whenever a fellow techie describes what he is doing, thou shalt ask him what layer of the OSI model he works at. This question is almost universally applicable, and you’ll sound pretty clever asking it.

5) If someone utters an incomprehensible acronym-with-numeric-suffix, thou shalt retort with acronym-with-larger-numeric-suffix. For example, if talk turns to MPEG-2, thou shalt immediately speak of the more advanced MPEG-4. If someone then dares to move to MPEG-7, you may raise him all the way up to MPEG-21 (which is so advanced it hasn’t even been developed yet). Thereafter thou shalt start with H.263. And then thou mayst go pretty much as far as thy heart desires.

6) Thou shalt refer to “levels of abstraction” at least twice in every conversation (more if it’s an interview). This, again, is a powerful term, so you need not worry much about where you use it.

7) Whenever thou hast no clue how to solve a certain problem, thou shalt reveal to fellow workers (in a suitably low tone) that the problem is so difficult you’re thinking of using a neural network. This shall suitably impress everyone, and you can always tell them later that it didn’t work because the damn thing wasn’t intelligent enough.

8) Thou shalt regularly perpetrate extremely bad techie puns – these are actually well received by other techies. Thou mayst begin with something basic, something along the lines of

Q. How did the operating system know how to execute the shell script?
A. The interpreter mentioned it in parsing.

9) If having tea with desi techies, thou shalt give in to temptation and disseminate substandard Sholay jokes based upon the unsuspecting Samba suite.

10) Thou shalt account for the fact that the person you are talking to might be a TWKNOTT too. If such is indeed the case, the two of you may merrily undertake the task of preparing additional tips for fellow TWKNOTTs.

Second star to the right … and straight on till morning

It is a balmy Singapore afternoon. One is walking around town, occasionally consulting a tattered old streetmap, occasionally slipping into a café or a bookstore, but mostly just wandering. At one point, as one peers at the map to decide whether it would be better to walk straight along Orchard Road or to go south for a riverside stroll, an elderly couple approach and ask where one wishes to go. One cannot refuse their help, for that would seem ungrateful. So one tells them that one wishes to be at the riverside, and listens patiently as they kindly proceed to give detailed directions.

Let us, at this point, cut to a busy Amsterdam street just over six months ago (we shall not use fancy dissolves or fade-out/fade-in effects. That’s just so Bollywood.) One is walking around town, occasionally consulting a tattered old streetmap, occasionally slipping into a café or a bookstore, but mostly just wandering. At one point, as one peers at the map to decide whether it would be better to walk straight along to the museums or to proceed to places-that-cannot-be-mentioned-on-PG-rated-blog (purely, one hastens to clarify, for .. er .. sightseeing), a rather intimidating biker-type dude approaches and asks where one wishes to go. One cannot refuse his help, for that would seem ungrateful. So one tells him that one wishes to be at the van Gogh museum*, and listens patiently as he kindly proceeds to give detailed directions.

And there lies the problem. You see, one does not need directions – for the whole point of having a map is that it allows one to find one’s own way around. One cannot understand why folks assume that the merest glance at it implies that one is lost. It’s come to the point where one has to hide in phone booths and behind bus-stop shelters and sometimes in McDonald’s restrooms to unfold the map and steal a quick look at it without being interrupted.

And so we come to the crux of the matter. One wishes to make a personal appeal on this blog. If you, gentle reader, ever see a geeky sort of chap (mid-twenties, dark hair, dark eyes, underweight) walking around your hometown, occasionally consulting a dog-eared streetmap and perpetually wearing a faintly bewildered expression, please do not offer to help him. He is doing just fine by himself. Merci much.

*In retrospect, one thinks it would’ve been possible to hitch a ride if one had wanted to go to the places-that-cannot-be-mentioned-on-PG-rated-blog.

Sounds like twentysomething spirit

One has finally shaken off the Vogonic influences. Let us proceed with regular programming. One was pondering the implications of this post, in which the Urban Junkie discusses the dubiousness of onomatopoeic representation.

One has a problem with onomatopoeia. The fact remains that, if one focuses hard enough, one can make any sound sound like almost anything. (That sentence should be edited. But one shall not bother.) Like the trick with the picture of the candlestick and the two faces, it’s all in the mind.

One pretends that the rain goes pitter-patter, but one could equally pretend that it recites logarithmic tables to three decimal places. Brooks are known to gurgle and to babble, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that they’re gossiping or singing or vociferously debating the meaning of existence. (Incidentally, one is quite sure of having heard a pair of noisy airplane engines patiently narrate the complete text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And one swears that the 8:54 from Borivali to Churchgate goes “Thackeray-Thackeray”.)

Such quasi-synesthetic propensities could be ascribed, of course, to one’s general weirdness. But it seems that the problem is not unique to this individual. The Americans maintain that dogs go “bow-wow” while the English say that it’s actually a more dignified “woof-woof”. In China, they apparently prefer “wang-wang”. For onomatopoeia, it seems, is no more than an auditory Rorschach test. The subject, presented with a largely neutral stimulus, hears what he wishes to hear.

The fickleness of it all is proven by the observation that filmi hearts, having followed for decades their characteristic dhak-dhak and dhadak-dhadak patterns, now tend to go mmm.

Pilgrim's progress

One debated, one demurred
How should it be revealed online?
In poetry, or prose perhaps
Or both of them, in intertwine?

One might’ve done a weepy post
So full of longing and despair
And written little paeans to
Each windmill, every tulip there.

One could’ve done a Hindi song
One could’ve gone the filmi way
Discussed musafir zindagis
(But then one does that everyday.)

One might’ve tried to go descriptive
Pepped things up with foreign lore
Quoted different Dutch poets,
Gone heavy on the metaphor.

One thought long and hard, one did
Then one decided to be brief
So one shall spare thee, gentle reader!
(Reader heaves sigh of relief.)

So one shall tell it like it is:
One ain’t where one was before.
One shall tell it straight and true:
One now resides in Singapore.

Water, water everywhere ..

One can never quite get used to drinking water straight from the kitchen tap, even after years of living in phoren lands where it is the Done Thing. It just seems wrong somehow. Theoretically acceptable but disconcerting in practice, like Meghna Kothari’s snake-dance in Bride and Prejudice.

One appreciates fully that the liquid in those pipes is unlikely to harm an individual who has devoted a large part of his existence to consuming items of questionable edibility at roadside outlets of questionable legality back home. At the same time, one cannot help remembering with a certain nostalgia the ritual of filling the paani-bottles every other morning. An oddly comforting if tedious rite involving family and Filter.

Our Filter, you see, was more than a domestic appliance. He was an institution, an avuncular presence, a member of the family. Much of the credit for the good health of the denizens of the home was given to him, that grand old Guardian of the Waters, Nemesis of Unhygienic Micro-Organisms, Ruthless Exterminator of Potentially Parivaar-Threatening Vermin. Wary NRI cousins would proudly be told to drink their Rasna without fear, for the water in their glasses was surely purer than driven snow. Doctors would be ordered to rule out water-borne diseases before they made their diagnosis, for it was inconceivable that germs could escape the Filter’s watchful eye.

A few years ago the Filter was replaced with a modern water-purifier gizmo. One has always been suspicious of this new intruder. Inflicting “chemical treatment” upon the family jal-supply hardly seems appropriate, given that people are going to drink the stuff. And reverse-osmosis sounds like something either too evil or too explicit to be discussed on a PG-rated blog*. But who can argue with Science?

In any case, one’s fridge here is stocked with a row of old Coke bottles, each filled to the brim with pristine, cloth-filtered water. No telling what strange phoren impurities these pipes might harbour.


* One just decided that this blog shall be PG-rated. One does not think there are any children in the audience, but if you happen to be below thirteen one advises you to fetch your parents so the good folks can warn you how not to turn out.

Dear Sinter ..

The blogosphere, it appears, is embracing the festive season with much warmth. Everyone's in on it, all the way from meghalomania to 2x3x7. So, on this fine twenty-fifth, one shall depart from custom to post something that can be described, at least by those of an accommodating nature, as relevant. Yes. One shall divulge, to anyone who cares to listen, how Christmas is celebrated in this part of the world.

Christmas in the Netherlands isn’t about gifts. It’s about spending a quiet time at home, with the family. With large, profusely-decorated Christmas trees, good food and soft music. It’s about togetherness and goodwill, not about crass commercialism.

But wait, says the gentle reader. What about Santa Claus? How are Dutch kids persuaded to behave themselves? How do they learn the nuances of letter-writing and the art of presenting themselves in the best possible light without sounding unduly boastful? And, pray, what happens to their old stockings?

These concerns, if felt, are largely unfounded. For Holland has its own gift-giving patriarch. His name is Sint Nikolaas, generally shortened to Sinterklaas. And he .. er .. wraps up the gift-giving on the fifth of December. One presumes that this gives the children enough time to vivisect their newly-acquired trinkets and finish their candy, so they can focus on putting their best foot forward when distant relatives* show up at Yuletide.

One caught a glimpse of Sinterklaas when he came to town a few weeks ago. He is large and corpulent, and he has a flowing white beard and a red robe. But there the similarity to Santa ends. For he does not go ‘ho-ho-ho’, he does not carry a sack of sweets, and he is generally more dignified of apparel and bearing than is good ol’ Santa. He is not associated with reindeer, sleighs, elves, or the North Pole. Rather, he is supposed to come down from Spain each year (in a steamboat, no less) with his helper, Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), who gives out yummy goodies to the nice children and none to the bad.

It is, of course, no coincidence that Sinterklaas and Santa Claus sound very similar. The myth of Sinterklaas travelled with the Dutch settlers of the seventeenth century to the New World, to the city that was then New Amsterdam and is now the Big Apple, where it merged with the legend of the jolly old gentleman who goes by the name of Father Christmas in Britain to this very day **, and was then subjected to a variety of influences ranging from the Ghost of Christmas Present (Did Dickens intend the pun? Did he?) to Coca-Cola to give us the Santa we know and love.

Wishing all of you a wonderful holiday season and a great year ahead.


* One has often wondered if the children here feel the many and varied emotions that we of the Desh feel when it comes to distant relatives. One shall inquire forthwith and inform the gentle reader in due course.

** Father Christmas is now accepted to be the same figure as Santa, but it seems his genesis lies in ancient Anglo-Saxon myths that can be traced back, ironically, to pre-Christian times.

Lapsus calamitatum

The Padrino sat alone. He sipped his Amaretto di Saronno. Took a puff at his Cuban cigar. It was midnight, and he was at the Club. Right where he should be.

Vai così, he told himself. Good going.

She’d asked him if she could have their picture taken. Together, like, him and her in the same frame. Yeah. “Pretty please?” she’d said. In that cute voice, with that accent. Straight from the Queen’s mouth. An English rose, this gal. Perfect.

She’d asked him to wait while she went to fix her makeup. He sat right there, unblinking. Nonchalant. Debonair, even. A few minutes passed.

“Shall we?” A female voice piped up. Right in his ear.

She’d made him jump. Composure, he told himself. “Sì, of course,” he said. “Certamente.”

The waiter clicked the pictures. “Cheese!”. Formaggio. He hated formaggio.

They sat down again. She wanted to talk.

“You’ll keep these photos, won’t you?” Damn. Why’d she have to be so sentimental?

But this was important, this question. The sorta thing they warned you about back in Sicily. He needed to say somethin' grand. You know, somethin' profondo. Somethin' she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Somethin' she’d wanna jot down someplace.

But English wasn’t something he’d ever fancied too much. Not his thing. Not his thing at all. Never could manage pithy. Not in English.

Suddenly he remembered. The skinny Indian kid at the office. Yeah. He’d let the Padrino in on a secret – he’d said that it was possible to take an Italian word and use it in an English sentence to impress the bonnets off those Brit chicks. He’d even said .. let’s see, what had he said .. there are people in the English-speaking world who learn Italian for the express purpose of embellishing their conversations with the odd 'magnifico'. Or somethin’ like that.

The Padrino thought about it. He trusted the kid.

So he turned to the lady. He looked her in the eye. He took a deep breath.

Yes, we will print these pictures and we will keep them forever. As a legacy *he paused for effect* for our posteriors.

Till death do them part

A matrimonial advertisement on the site of a leading webmail provider informs one that Maya, 25, is a surgeon and basketball player who believes in a relationship that’s based on trust. Another site reveals that Smitha, also 25, is an associate editor who bakes delicious cakes. However, after a careful study of their photographs, one swears upon all that is dear to oneself that these two are in fact *adopts low Hitchcockian tone* the same individual. She must be really eager to get on with the nuptials.

In other news, the following has been spotted on Wikipedia's main page :

Did you know .. that Socks the cat belonged to Bill Clinton while President of the United States?

And, being in a particularly sadistic frame of mind right now, one shall subject the unsuspecting reader to the *drum-roll, trumpets etc* PJ of the week:

Q : What did Sanjay Dutt say when he met Hector Hugh Munro?
A. O Saki Saki re … Saki Saki .

Cutting corners

One is astounded to find that, outside the great Desh, almost nobody brews tea like it should be brewed. They instead dunk a dubious little tissue-paper bag supposedly full of tea-stuff into hot water and hope that something will happen. It does not. They might, in an effort to achieve a semblance of palatability, add milk and sugar to the concoction. After which, just to save face, they force themselves to drink it.

Now despite all that has been said and all that has remained unsaid about one’s culinary skills in general, it might be pointed out in all humility that one is something of an authority on the art of brewing tea*. For one’s recipe is taken from no less a figure than Rameshbhai, that fine specimen of chaiwalla-hood, he of the redoubtable larri-galla that lies snugly in that little lane off Ashram Road in the Hometown. He sells, for the princely sum of three rupees**, the most mouthwatering cuppa ever. Steaming hot, with just that right hint of ginger and cardamom. And it is never to be drunk from the cup. No, we frown at such jejune practices. For the liquid is to be poured into the saucer and slurped with suitable sound effects. If you happen to be perched sideways on your two-wheeler, the experience is complete.

Admittedly one is but a poor parody of Rameshbhai when it comes to preparing the potent infusion. But one is still a force to be reckoned with. One has actually fed one’s brew to several friends here (one hears the gasps of surprise that greet the implication that one has a social life, but lets them pass) and it has been uniformly and heartily appreciated. Really. Unfortunately the individuals who have tried it are not regular tea-drinkers, so one has no real adherents yet. But one is hopeful that someday one shall get hold of a diehard tea fan and convert him from teabag-user to tea-brewer. Finally one has a Mission.

* It appears that “tea” is one really global appellation – the words for tea in most languages are very similar because they’re all derived from a single Chinese word. (The word is pronounced somewhat differently in different parts of China, hence the difference between tea and chai.) Of course you always wanted to know that. Or maybe you already did.

** The equivalent five eurocents wouldn’t even persuade a chap here to let you sniff his tea. His teabag tea.

Gujjus unite!

One is in a Bad Mood. In fact, one is in Intense Pain.

One is Dismayed, nay Crestfallen, to see that this veritable repository of phillum-related things has no information whatsoever on the ravishing Roma Manek. (For the uninitiated, Roma Manek is the (the) Madhuri Dixit of Gujarati cinema. Her eyes are said to be the colour of fresh undhiyu, and her nose is said to resemble a perfect little ganthiya. The very mention of her name is known to have persuaded NRI Gujjubhais to shut cornershop and head home.)

This, ladies and gentlemen, is part of a wider gripe regarding the under-representation of Gujaratis in cyberspace*. One’s Gujju chromosomes (all twenty-three of them) cry out – yes, they cry out in synchronized deoxyribonucleic protest. One refuses to believe that the sturdy Shahs of Surendranagar and the fine Patels of Patan have nothing to say about Matters. But the gentle reader does not hear them. No. The gentle reader is being drowned – aye, drowned – in a cacophony of voluble Bangla, in the staccato rhythms of rapidly-articulated Tamizh (note the zh .. one is very particular about such things, you know ..) and in the occasional outburst of Gultspeak. Come, O denizens of Saurashtra and Kathiawad, O natives of Kutch, O fellow Gujjus from all walks of life and all corners of the globe! It matters not whether you own a shop or a motel .. we are all one beeg phemily! Let us forge a blogospheric identity for ourselves! Let us impress upon people that we are a force to be reckoned with!

Er .. it makes good business sense, you know.


* which, in turn, is part of a wider gripe regarding the correct way to twirl a dandiya. But we shall let that pass for now.

'Tis the season of web-quizzes

“Know thyself” – inscribed at the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi

One figured that one was lagging somewhat in the nosce-ipsum department. The past few hours have been spent in an attempt to rectify matters - and a truly heady voyage of self-discovery it has been.

One now stands enlightened on critical issues like which Final Fantasy character one happens to be (Tidus the Great, if anyone cares), which rejected crayon best matches one’s personality (a brown one), which original Skittles colour one is (green), whether one is a nerd, a geek or a dork (a geek, evidently, although the differences in meaning are too subtle for one’s limited grasp) and whether one conforms to this young Californian lady’s notion of a boyfriend (at the end of a particularly gruelling quizathon chock-full of difficult questions like “Would you describe yourself as hot?” she declared that one was “okay”. Disturbing.)

One has been told that one is 70% weird and, intriguingly, 45% normal. And a “little” scary. In one’s previous life, it seems, one was a mute and mentally unbalanced mathematician. One seems to get raw deals every time.

One has been reliably informed that one will spawn 71,710 descendants over the next thirty-two generations, which is rather spiffing, and also that this places one at the lower end of the genetic-fitness spectrum, which is not. It is helpfully mentioned that the reason for the poor score is that one is the pious type and will not sacrifice scruples in a misguided quest to scatter his genes far and wide. Hah. It’s quite easy to fool these quizzes, you know. Let’s see ... what was that Californian chick’s name again …