FACEBOOK

FACEBOOK

One day, at least one day,

            I want to open my Facebook homepage, without anybody uploading       photographs of 

·        Hindu deities,

·        Sai Baba,

·        Their own nocturnal trysts;

Without anybody gushing about

·        Narendra Modi,

·        Rahul Gandhi,

·        Arvind Kejriwal,

·        Nitish Kumar;

Without a request for

·        Clicking on a photo to see magic,

·        Liking a jingoistic rant,

·        Be proud to be an Indian,

·        Forwarding a miracle report;

                                        Or,

Anyone making profound statements, like

·        Friendship is –blah blah blah…

·        Why am I bored today,

·        Why am I not bored today.

That would be the day.

 If you like this statement, please forward it to at least 10 friends and you will be blessed by Lord Ganesha within 7 days.

consortium meetings

Consortium meetings

I am sitting in my hundredth consortium meeting and scribbling this blog to fight a serious attack of boredom which is overwhelming my whole being. Consortium meetings have their own group dynamics which needs to be followed meticulously and carefully.

            The less important people i.e. senior officers of smaller banks, who are conscious of their lower status in the pecking order but resent it, come late to prove a point that they also are important. They are, however, careful not to be so late that the meeting would start off without them. They keep sending messages to their minions, who arrive early to reserve important seats for their bosses, about their whereabouts.

            These worthies keep striving to keep their inflated egos airborne by asking for green tea when everyone is having juice or vice versa. They spurn cookies and ask for roasted (not fried) almonds (not cashew nuts) and throw a minor tantrum if these are too salty.

            These gentlemen always dress garishly; and prefer suits with loud stripes and psychedelic ties. After the meeting kicks off, the Company bore, normally the CFO, launches into a 50 page power point presentation starting with the company’s genesis as a mom and pop shop in 1918. By slide 2, everyone whips out his blackberry and starts playing BRICKS seriously (Bricks is the only game which comes free with the blackberry). Then, the ritual of picking up the cell phone and walking out while furiously whispering into it, and returning in the same manner, starts. The movement of people in and out of the meeting hall closely resembles the ten hats of an expert juggler in the circus. Then the presentation mercifully ends and the serious discussion starts. As the company officials would already have taken care to speak to Individual bankers, the consensus is quickly and smoothly achieved. The pompous ass tries feebly to disagree on some minor trivia but is disdainfully ignored by everyone. The leader concludes the meeting succinctly and then the serious business of wining and dining starts.

Time for me to mutter my well-rehearsed excuse and make my exit before the garishly dressed boor launches into his limited stock of dirty jokes.

GUNDI

GUNDI

In local parlance, Gundi is a girl who is a bully and a tomboy who has scant respect for authority. ‘A’ is growing into a real Gundi. She is very particular about the genre of music she listens to, the toys she plays with, the food she is given and the company she keeps. She wants to dress up and go out every evening with one of her progenitors. She yells at her parents when she is bored, when she is hungry, when she is sleepy or when she feels like changing her attire. She cranes her neck to see what her parents are up to and  coughs discreetly but insistently if they are engrossed with each other and ignore her for long (i.e. for more than a minute); and starts bawling if they still ignore her.  She, however,  has enough sense to be at her best behaviour when there are visitors; or when the family is visiting some friends or is out shopping. She also smiles sweetly whenever a camera is aimed in her direction, but seldom otherwise. But let us give her some more time, she may mellow with age. Ahana  is just  5 months young.

grandparenting

Grandparenting

It’s a great feeling being a grandfather. Holding the new-born of your progeny in your hands opens the floodgates not only in your tear ducts, but also on the cache of long forgotten memories of the infancy of your own child which submerge you completely. You remember vividly how your own child looked at that age and how the grandchild looks exactly the same but still totally different. You also reminisce how your own child was an angel whereas the latest addition to the clan never seems to stop bawling. Soon enough, however, you realise that it may not really be so. Fact is, on one hand your tolerance for sleep deprivation has waned considerably, in inverse proportion to the spreading midriff and the receding hairline; on the other, your anxiety levels have risen steeply. So initially, every groan and every howl of the tyke may fill you with deep concern bordering on panic.  You, however, slowly adjust to the altered sleep patterns, frequents bouts of the child’s crying and inverted priorities. Going for the morning walk gives way to cuddling and humming to the little devil, who seems to come into her own only at 4 in the morning. The baby’s bath becomes the most important event of the day. Watching a one month old whooping in joy at the sight of the bathtub is the greatest joy in the life of four adults. If the child can go through the entire bathing ritual without crying, we keep talking about it ad nauseum till the child excels herself with a better performance.

You marvel at the steady progress made by the child every day.  Every shake of the clenched fist and every kick of the legs seem like an act of extraordinary intelligence, every look is full of prescience and the child is soon declared extremely precocious. And if she happens to respond to your silly cooing and clucking sounds on more than one out of 10 occasions, she is an absolute genius. Everyone in the family feels that the child smiles only for him/her and all the adults start behaving most childishly to attract the child’s attention.

            Some things have, however, changed beyond recognition. My daughter (the new mom) is always on the prowl with a bottle of hand sanitizer and douses your hands liberally with it before you can lay a finger on her daughter. Extra stretchable diapers, wipes and the baby’s party dress for the naming ceremony (with matching mitts, booties, bib and a rose bedecked head band) and many other interesting things are ordered on line by the mother while she is feeding the girl on a strap-on cushion. The new mom is also surfing the net often to decide on the right time to start her tummy crunches and cardio workouts. Grandma’s remedies and wisdom have been completed supplanted by the internet. So no gripe water for the baby’s colic pains, no mugli-ghutty, no talcum powder and no water for 6 months. I shudder to think what will happen when the child starts crawling about, putting things in her mouth and playing with her toys.

            Gotta go. As usual, the baby has done her thing at the least opportune time; when the grand mother is having her bath, the new mom is having her first meal of the day and this is that rare occasion when the baby is not girdled with a water absorbent nappy. The baby is howling in anger. The cradle is full of crap all over. I don’t see any sign of the ubiquitous baby wipes. I pick up the baby and carry her to the wash basin. Alas! Some things never change.

DADA

DADA

Dada, our father who passed away at the ripe old age of 90 recently, belonged to the old school when PDA was a strict no-no.  So I have to really rack my brains to reminisce about some tender moments spent with him in my childhood days.

I do remember those early winter mornings, when I used to climb into his quilt and listen to the story of “Androcles and the Lion”. While narrating it for the nth time (for some reason, I always found this story fascinating) he used to nuzzle me with his perennial stubble, which was not a very unpleasant sensation. I still remember the coarseness and the tingle on my cheeks which must have been tender those days.

He was a selfless RSS worker (it took me years of adult life to accept this resignedly), hence he was always saddled with the most thankless tasks by the pompous asses who ruled the roost. He used to bicycle to distant “Shakhas”   (branches of RSS which conducted the daily drill and games), trying valiantly to keep them alive. As a child of 5 or 6, I had no option but to accompany him on these expeditions. In cold winter evenings, I used to ride the danda (the top horizontal bar of the frame) of his old bicycle (among other things, one of its pedals used to be always broken), always sleepy on my return journeys and often shivering with cold. Sensing my discomfort, he used to stop midway, take off his pullover, (knitted from cheap wool by my mother during her free periods in the government school where she used to teach) and drape it around my frail shoulders. I can still feel the heat of his body (generated from vigorous cycling) conducted through the pullover, dispelling the chill from my bones like magic.

Even in those good old days, it was not safe to leave the bicycles outside overnight. The locks could be picked in no time. So dada had to carry the bicycle up the stairs every night to park it in the balcony of our first floor flat. I remember one little game we often played to my great delight. While sleepily riding the danda of his bicycle on my return rides, when we used to reach home, I used to pretend to be sleepier than I actually was and refused to get off the bicycle when he had to carry it upstairs. The strong man that he was, from years of “Surya Namaskaras” (a yoga exercise), he could easily carry the bicycle upstairs with yours truely precariously perched atop, to my great delight and excitement.

I remember with love, a word he never actually uttered with us, the tingle of his stubble on my cheeks, the warmth of his pullover around my shoulders and the wild excitement of getting carried atop his bicycle over the staircase. 

RITUALS

RITUALS

We continued our morning walks after moving to the central Mumbai suburb of Sion. But somehow it was not the same. Instead of the picturesque environs of “Sagar Upvan”, we had to do with the bye lanes of Sion East, which were full of second grade schools and colleges of various hues. The children were always milling around on the roads. One school had their students dressed in whites for the sports day and they were pretending to play various games ranging from cricket to football, on the narrow sidewalk, already crowded with morning walkers, maids, milkmen and the newspaper delivery boys. I thought it was pathetic. The girls studying in the junior college nearby were clad in the cheaper versions of the dresses worn by bollywood starlets in their latest movies. (The maids wore the cheaper replicas of the dresses made popular by the actresses on popular soaps). The boys were always rushing sleepily to their classes while chattering excitedly all along. The stray dogs always thought that they owned the place and fought and shat all over indiscriminately. All things considered, morning walk ceased to be the pleasure of yore and became more of a chore.

          Then somebody introduced me to the dilapidated apology of a garden on the Sion fort, not far away from our apartment complex. We had to climb 85 stairs to reach the garden. There were another 70 odd stairs if one wanted to reach the top of the keep. Otherwise, people walked on the walkway which went around the castle. It was far from clean and quite slushy in the rains. But slightly better than the roads and devoid of the obnoxious morning traffic dominated by empty cabs, speeding needlessly. The garden had a laughter club, a clapping club, a karate club and the ubiquitous gully cricketers. Some middle-aged women were busy doing grotesque contortions which they must be thinking as exercise. One dapper looking old man played ‘ring’, (a rubber tube in round form, an ancient version of the Frisbee without the excitement, played in the style of badminton), with two ladies. I wonder wherever they still find the ring.

          We soon got into the groove and sort of adjusted to the poor man’s jogger’s park. I soon became very good at breath control. Every corner, every secluded spot, which was not occupied by the ubiquitous lovers, reeked of urine. So you either had to hold your breath or exhale while passing these places.

          When I was diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and advised to get some sunshine whenever possible, I started climbing to the top of the castle and sat in the sun for a while doing my breathing exercises and believe me I was the most normal human being in that keep of broken walls. I found a good unbroken spot on the parapet wall where I could sit cross legged, do Pranayama and soak in the sun. But to my utter dismay, somebody had spilled some lentils (Daal) there. So it was totally uninhabitable. I had to settle for the second best spot where I had to sit with feet dangling over the parapet wall. Whenever the lentils started to dry, somebody would renew the deposit without fail. I had a good mind to tick off the guy who was doing this to me. Finally I did see him once. He caught my attention because he was being followed by a cackle of crows cawing excitedly. He opened the polythene bag he was carrying and deposited the remnants of his yesterday’s dinner on the same spot. The crows swooped in cawing hungrily. To my horror, the guy kept sitting cross legged among all the noisy crows, looking at them with glazed eyes. Then I knew that this was a hopeless case and if I so much as whimpered in protest against his rape of a perfectly sittable parapet wall, he would kill me.  Reason? His eyes were full of religious fervour and his look betrayed that he was making an offering to his ancestors via these crows (in Hindu religion, the offerings to the crows are expected to be directly transferred to the ancestors). 

          I felt he must have treated his progenitors real bad to be required to do this every day without fail. I remembered some of the prayers I had memorised in my childhood. One prayer ends like this:” If you recite this once, your greatest sins will be washed away; if you recite this twice, all the riches of the world will be yours and if you recite this thrice, your greatest enemy will be destroyed”. Another prayer ends thus: “If you recite this prayer in the morning, the sins of the previous evening will be washed away; if you recite it in the evening, the sins committed during the day will be washed away and if you recite it morning and evening, all your sins will be washed away”. These prayers definitely do not advocate that you commit sins so that you get the opportunity to say the prayer and absolve yourself from their after effects. But we tend to interpret these things to our own advantage. Religion does not teach us to sin but we find it convenient to assuage our conscience with prayers and rituals and use this as a licence to do anything during the day. Recite a powerful prayer in the evening and hey presto, you are as pure as morning dew again. The more you sin during the day, the more bizarre the rituals in the evening. I could go on and on, but this is the time when I feed grass to the white cow every evening, so ciao for now.

SNAILS

SNAILS

We stayed in the posh southernmost  locality of Mumbai called ‘Colaba’ for two years. The view of the sea from my 13^th floor flat was absolutely breathtaking. We took great pride in telling all visitors that we had Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani for neighbours. Although I never saw either of them, I did, however, sometimes get a glimpse of some of Ratan Tata’s 26 dogs when they were being taken by the staff for a drive; and occasionally saw from afar the parties hosted by Mukesh Ambani in his terrace garden.

            The best part of the stay was the morning walks we took in the BPT (Bombay Port Trust) garden behind our building. Named “Sagar Upvan”, it was a paradise for walkers/joggers on the seashore. Well maintained walkway, with lots of neatly tagged shady trees, with detours going up and down, it also had two grassy knolls in the middle for yoga enthusiasts. There were some covered areas with benches for taking shelter if it rained and some benches on the seafront where you could sit and enjoy the view if there was no low tide and there were no crappings/crappers nearby. The park was devoid of the ubiquitous obnoxious bunch of noisy urchins who are usually found at such places making a total nuisance of themselves.

            The walkers were a curious bunch. Most of them were nattily clad in the latest sports attire and expensive sneakers. One gentleman had a funny way of swinging his arms as if he was trying to elbow his way through a milling crowd at VT station. One chap greeted everybody coming from the other side with a loud Hari Om! And one lady scurried about like a frightened mouse. There was a group of three desperate housewives who insisted on walking together side by side on the narrow walkway and walked so furiously with elbows flying around and gossiped so loudly that everyone got out of their way when they approached. That was their “power walk”. I found it mildly irritating and soon learned the trick of getting the better of them by looking sideways at a distant object when they approached, which forced them to check the offending elbow from swinging out when I crossed them. Some workaholics kept vigorously yelling away in their hands free cell phone devices all along. There was an occasional young mother with baby and Ayah in tow. There also were the love birds without whom no Mumbai public space is complete. I used to marvel at their devotion. You have to be really in love to get up in the wee hours of the morning, put on your Sunday best, slap on some make up and head for the nearest park for a lover’s tryst. Not to forget the occasional Adonis with a perfectly toned body, armed with the latest ipod, clad in the trendiest running gear and trainers and loping effortlessly through the melee of the morning walkers with a bottle of energy drink in hand, smelling of sweat mixed with expensive perfume.

            In rainy season, many trees were in bloom, the grassy knolls became wet, and the sea became much more majestic. Some walkers gave up, other diehard ones persisted. With the help of an umbrella, one could negotiate the stray showers, till Mumbai settled into serious rain. We normally continued our walks, with some other faithfuls, till the walkways became too slippery/ water logged.

The snails and leeches came out in large numbers and were at times found crawling around on the walkway also. The most heart rending sound I ever heard was the loud crunching sound of a careless walker stepping on a snail. I always flinched on hearing it but the careless share broker/businessman went on babbling on his cell phone as if nothing happened. Whenever I saw a snail crawling across the path, I wanted to pick it up and keep it in a safer place, but was too busy/lazy to do it. Then, inevitably, would come the next crunching sound and I would feel terrible again.

One day I saw an old gentleman carefully picking up fallen leaves, fruits and flowers from the track. I could easily understand the feeling behind it. He was trying to avoid these beautiful specimens of nature getting crushed on the walkway (which would have made it all squishy and slippery). I felt like kissing this guy who was quietly practising what I was not even thinking. Then I realised, it is not enough to have good, pious and noble thoughts unless/until you decide to do something about it. Grieving for crushed snails does not absolve me from the guilt of tacit complicity in their demise