Plainly Plantains!

Guys,

My chat with Dexter about women and our similarly dismal failures with them has left me more frustrated and depressed than ever. I hereby decide to make public my coinage; our wing, the Plainly Plantains' theme jingle:

One for all and All for One,
We are each plainly a plantain!

The more times I chant this out vociferously, I more I feel like some great martyr wounded in the battlefield, the strength of all his greatness holding him alive in his dying moments...

I have come to love the effect it is creating on me! Ergo, I proclaim and exhort you to shout along:

One for all and All for One,
We are each plainly a plantain!

Yours,
Me

It gives me great pleasure to proclaim to you all that, with the above mail to the group, I have unanimously elected myself as the honorary President of our newly formed club - Plainly Plantains. For those staggering under the newly coined name indicative of a not-so-newfangled ideology which unfailingly captures the imagination of every ineligible bachelor at least once during his bachelorhood, a direct transliteration into a injudicious Hindi-English blend would help! I shall refrain from further obfuscation and not withhold the suspense any longer; for those still grappling with the curious alliteration, it is an injudicious transliteration of 'Only the Kela', popular among the BITSian and some non-BITSian circles.

I must say that the 'Kela' has quite a history. It is something that transcends the ephemeral, extending as it does far into the cosmos, well beyond you or me. The Kela must have had its genesis along with the genesis of man. It existed before you or me and will continue to exist long after we are gone. It will exist as long as wannabe-debonairs like me do! To continually remind us hopefuls of our rich pedigree (the lack of it, of course)! Well, I am not quite sure how the coinage came to mean, rather indiscreetly, a comical snub; the pride-goes-after-a-fall kind of thing. Probably somebody, to his acute consternation, defied gravity for a brief while courtesy a banana peel, before the earth refound her affection for him by pulling him back to her by his collar! All the acrobatics courtesy the peel of a 'kela'. Well, I should think that more than the fall itself, the 'kela' must have implicitly referred to the chin that was worn high which entailed the carelessness and the mishap, not to forget the ridicule. This is the best possible reason that I can attribute to a kela being called so, late in the evening at 5:51 PM!

Well, why ever on earth a kela refers to whatever it does, I am proud to say that I have been one of Life's more favourite sons whenever He has had a plentitude of 'kelas' waiting to be distributed amongst mankind. More so when the kelas have involved women. Life has always had this curious affection for me; I just have to think about making some kind of an advance with a woman, and He appears before me, waiting eagerly with a replenished stock, a basketful of kelas. I have such a regular diet of kelas in the past; I am finding it extremely difficult these days to survive on staple food! Ah! How many women! How many kelas! I am a fish out of water these days; a kela without a peel! In fact, my yearning and unbridled affection for it has made me embark on my autobiography 'Plaintive Platitudes for Plainly a Plantain'! When my wingies also seemed to subscribe, rather vehemently I should add, to views and delusions very similar to mine, I had little hesitation in proclaiming the genesis of our elitist group, Plainly Plantains!

Make no mistake. There are no two ways about it. Plainly Plantains is strictly elitist. To gain admission into Plainly Plantains, scores of conditions have to be met. Firstly, one should have an AGPA of less than 5 from an accredited Ladies Club (again, for those groping with AGPA, it is merely a cumulative Attractiveness Grade Point Average). There is absolutely no compromise on that. Next, one should have a minimum of three references to recommend one's case. To qualify the statement further, the references should strictly be women who have dumped the candidate in the past. A further caveat: the women should have had an opportunity to contend with the candidate's grotesqueness for at least six months before eventually dumping him. The candidate should also pen down a Statement of Depress indicating his chronic depression and disenchantment with life. The more acute the depression is, the better are the chances of admission. Should I even say that Plainly Plantains will always have it's doors firmly shut for the fairer sex. It is exclusively for derelict males. Once the candidate has passed this acid test, he will formally be sworn in to the brotherhood of Plainly Plantains with all the pomp and splendour, with a toast that will celebrate the addition of a new comrade to the brotherhood:

One for all and All for One,
We are each plainly a plantain!

- posted by Dileepan @ 4:04:00 am

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Memories of Siddhartha

... He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And in days to come, when Siddhartha would become a god, when he would join the glorious, then Govinda wanted to follow him as his friend, his companion, his servant, his spear-carrier, his shadow...


I had my back to the wall when I first met him. He had his back to the wall too. He grinned at me when I trudged out of my place, crestfallen, to join him beside the blackboard and stand in attention in punishmnent. With my back to the wall. "Hi, I am Siddhartha, the Great!" he cheerily extended out his hand. And thus we extended our hands to a friendship that was born out of a fourth-standard classroom adversity. "Face the wall and kneel down for the rest of the hour", my Maths teacher's voice boomed, resonating through the walls of the classroom, cutting short a newly formed two-membered cabal planning a coup in their rendezvous beside the blackboard. "You stand on this side of the board, and you on the other side." she thundered in the vernacular, "And if the two of you talk again after all the mischief you have done, I shall have you caned and excoriated." My head hung down in shock and ignominous humiliation. The rest of the class was staring at us. I turned and knelt down, facing the wall. And I did not dare look at him for another ten minutes while I quietly suffered in humiliation. It struck me that I had wanted to ask him where he lived, and whether he would come to my house this evening to play cricket on the streets. I had played well enough the previous evening to feel confident enough about an exhibition of my skills with my willow to a newfound friend. I looked at him. There he was kneeling down, arms folded behind the trunk. And grinning at me. He gesticulated me to come closer to him with a shrug of one shoulder. We inched towards each other even as our knees hurt, even as he intently gazed at me with a sense of purpose... "Shall we lick the blackboard clean? It looks very dirty with all the chalk dust. If we make it spotlessly black, Miss will be very happy with us. And then she will never scold us!"...

"What the hell is this?!", the Maths teacher screamed in shock, absolutely furious. "So this is what you both do when you are punished. Call your parents tomorrow, you rogues. The two of you will henceforth stand out of my class for the next one month." ...


... He loved Siddhartha's eye and sweet voice, he loved his walk and the perfect decency of his movements, he loved everything Siddhartha did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling...


The time, I notice, is 4:39 PM...

... "Hey, what is the time?"

"Siddhartha, will you believe it! It is 12:39! This is the fourth day in a row when you have asked me the time and I have told you the exact four digits!"

That was the day when two Sixth standard boys who met up for lunch pledged their solidarity to the number 39, and resolved with a lump in their throats that they would think of each other whenever their watches showed the four digits of time for sixty seconds of moments that had been hallowed in the sands of the Vidya Mandir auditorium. The allegiance to the numbers and each other was made in fields of childish fancy. A solemn pledge; a pledge that lay buried in those very sands two days later when the childish minds leapt on to other fields. Forgotten...

...My timepiece's alarm still reads 12:39 PM.


... "If you only," spoke Govinda, "wouldn't speak such terrible words, Siddhartha!" ... Govinda stopped on the path, rose his hands, and spoke: "If you, Siddhartha, only would not bother your friend with this kind of talk! Truly, your words stir up fear in my heart..."


"I have noticed these days that you grab every opportunity to belittle me with your jokes. If I may seek to find out the cause of this behaviour."

"Siddhartha, It is merely a retaliation of the condescension that you subject me to. I think it is merely my reaction to the insinuation that you subject me to. I feel genuinely hurt because you are so good at it that you manage to pull it off everytime. And I keep shrinking in my own estimate."

"Oh! So you feel that I really mean all that I say when I rile you? I think you need to be able to take sportively the jokes that are cracked at you."

"Siddhartha, it does not behoove you to say something like that. I know that you do do not wish me anything bad. And you know too that I have always wished you well. You also know that, many a time, I have been the first person to laugh at myself. But there is a threshold that one needs remain within. I think you have begun to cross the threshold beyond which I cannot take, hard as I may try. I only react when I am instigated to a point beyond which I cannot take."

"But I wonder why, of late, your insinuations have become too frequent and too piquant for comfort."

"Oh! You think so?! I also wonder why! Siddhartha, the answer to that lies in your question."

(After a pause)

"See, I really think the problem lies with you. I have thought long and hard about it. I even reckoned initially that there may have been mistakes on my part."

"To hell with you and your supremacist bigoted mind."

Thus ended one of the biggest spat that occurred in a grove in Yercaad, leaving a bitter taste in both our tongues; at least in my tongue. The tongue that felt bitten by the very canines so near. The bite stung more than usual. And three rivulets of blood trickled down the side of my tongue even as I spoke those last words. Yes, the bite stung more than ever because it was Siddhartha who cajoled me into making the trip. A trip that four of us friends had undertaken. As a celebration of twelve long years of camaraderie and genuine goodwill. The strange thing was, even though the feud had been very dramatic and intense (to me, at least), both of us knew all along that neither would bear each other any kind of resentment or ill-will. Only the actions needed retrospection, not the intentions. Anyway, the heated exchange had drawn too much out of me. My temples were splitting in pain after the nervous exertion. I got myself a mango drink and slunk under a tree tired, tense and unhappy. In the context of friendships, the spat is a very minor one. And it was. This was merely a brush of momentary rushes of bloods; merely words that were strung up in a heated argument. And this did not leave the scar on the left side of my chest that I you see today. The scars were created a few moments later. When I drearily staggered back to join the other three. When the words pierced the tympanum of my ears. When I realised that intents were piercing my ear and not words. When one of the two spectators to the onslaught of words said, "Siddhartha, forget it. We know his ego only too well. you can never change certain things." When the left side of my chest ripped open. When history streamed out of my heart as blood. When I ejected out of my heart the history of two conniving people with finesse in my life. When I deleted their annals chronicled in my life in such great detail. The scars were created.

In retrospect, I should not have made the trip at all. Or probably, it happened for good. I obtained an unequivocal measure of two of my friends. Siddhartha has remained as hallowed in my life as ever. Both of us know till date that there was no ill-will. The others have faded out; blurred into the obscurity of the background vision of a possibly myopic eye. And the scars remain. Fresh...


... when he heard these words and read the decision in the motionless face of his friend, unstoppable like the arrow shot from the bow. Soon and with the first glance, Govinda realized: Now it is beginning, now Siddhartha is taking his own way, now his fate is beginning to sprout, and with his, my own...


We met up on Saturday evening in the beach and spent an hour during which both of us spoke little. A silent Shraddhanjali to the fourteen years that lie buried in our backyards. Ghosts of which have remained to haunt me at night. And day. Though the thought itself is very Victorian and fulfilling, realism and objectivity would probably attribute the silence to something else. Lack of a common ground. It dawned on me then that we were slowly drifting apart. He is too perceptive an individual to not realise it. But he has maintained a dignified silence. It is his greatness. He seems to have measured out his life in immaculate coffee spoons, a la Prufrock. Ergo he knows this is an obligation slated out for him by his childhood. And he complies by allowing himself to languish in my mediocrity for sometime. Yes, coming back to what I was saying, we are drifting apart. It seems inexorably inevitable. A cul-de-sac, so to speak. And the finality with which the situation looms is frightening. It has left me shaken. And deeply perturbed. I was nothing but an abject parasite, thiriving on his knowledge and vision. If the host and the parasite are separated, what does the host lose but the parasite?! And the parasite moves on, gasping for stale air, to embark on a quest for a new host; he knows it is ultimately a pointless odyssey - the next sojourn is bound to end the same way...


(TO BE CONTD.)

NOTE: All the italicized passages are from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

- posted by Dileepan @ 3:12:00 am

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Lawyer at Large

This was a mail that I received from my uncle yesterday that contains a link to a compilation of Pre-1947 Asian authors in which my Great-Grandfather's works are also catalogued:

Indo-Anglian Literature: Lala on the Net

Click on this hyperlink and check both under "Drama" and "Fiction
works by individual authors" .... look for Nagarajan, Krishnaswamy:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/Southasia/guides/pre1947.html
Please share with other members of our family.

I think growing up we knew we were living with a legend!

Love
(Signed)

This has made me as proud as a peacock in the rain. With due respects to all the people who have helped me become a better writer and thinker, I daresay that had I had the chance to interact with my Great-Grandfather, I am sure my literary interests would have been better moulded. I have chanced to read quite a few of his works - his short-stories and his autobiography. I can recollect having marvelled at his mastery of the language then; his erudition still sometimes has me in thralls. After reading almost all his works, I think I will do well to say that he was one of the very few who wrote the English language like the fastidious Britisher without attempting to sound British in his thoughts and retaining his innate Indianness. His writings, to me, exhibit that kind of poise and honesty.

This is an excerpt of a mail that I had written to one of my English Professors last summer:

Dear Sir,

I write to you with more gusto than usual for this holiday has been extremely eventful. Even as I returned home, I stumbled upon my cousin who was leaving the very night. The meeting proved to be serendipitous for I was able to wrest out of her my great-grandfather's autobiography. He was a lawyer at Pudukkottai, a district abutting Trichirapoly (which is in South India, famous as an industrial centre for BHEL). He was, I have chanced to hear from many a relative - distant and near, a lawyer with a facile tongue, and his popularity, the faithful vehemently adhere till today, was on comparable terms with the Maharajah of Pudukkottai. Right from my childhood, eulogistic tales of his have been thrust upon me and I am only hoping, against my better senses, that they have not swept me off my feet.

But, I was more attracted to his natural propensity and his felicity of the English language. One of the more fortunate few to have studied under British pedagogues, he appears to have taken after them quite naturally in thoughts and demeanours. The other day I went through his autobiography, written in three parts. It is an original manuscript - meticulously typewritten and off-white with time's imprints. Being one of a literary bent, I daresay, even the very smell of the old parchments and the scripts of the Olevetti typewriter (now obsolete, with the advent of the computer) have held me in thralls.

Though it is only evident that he has written this with the ambition of giving vent to his literary presumptions, to give him his due, he has also mentioned that he hopes that this book will serve to open all his descendants to their legacy. And I am glad that I read this manuscript and I shall consider myself beholden to getting the manuscript published.

- posted by Dileepan @ 10:06:00 pm

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VVS Laxman should not be in the playing eleven of the Indian ODI cricket team for the following reasons:

1. Though he is a good timer of the ball, he is not innovative enough to consistently get past the circle in the offside. As a result, early on in his innings, he hits too many balls straight to the fielder, though he times them well. Even during his century knocks in Australia, one got the feeling that he was struggling to pick up the tempo of the innings towards the end.

2. In addition to his languid, non-innovative style, he is a bad runner between the wickets.

3. He does not allow Rahul Dravid, who has adapted well enough to ODIs to be reckoned as one of the greats of the current era, to come in early enough when the tempo is set by Sachin and Sehwag and get things going.

4. Inductively, he denies Yuvraj Singh and Mohammed Kaif time in the middle.

5. He denies Badani, a player better suited to the ODI format, a place in the eleven.

6. He is one of the poorer fielders of the Indian team. He is purportedly an excellent slip fielder, but he has dropped far too many catches in the past for me to agree with the opinion.

The Indians seem to be playing by reputation here. Let me clarify that I am not being arrantly dismissive about him; he is a class act in the Tests. The point is: the Indian team has too much batting talent and potential for its own liking. Just as Yuvraj Singh and Mohammed Kaif, despite oozing with talent and possessing a sound temperament, are not able to make it to the tests due to the lack of any vacancy in a solid batting line-up, someone will have to give way to the players better suited to the ODI format. In this case, it will have to be Laxman, unfortunately for him. I think the think tank should be progressive enough to take cognisance of this fact and select their best 'ODI' team disregarding past reputation and pressure from the public.

- posted by Dileepan @ 2:02:00 am

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MG Road

I just cannot do it. I cannot be in Bangalore and not write about MG Road, its arterial road. MG Road is the hub of Bangalore's ethos. MG Road embodies the spirit of Bangalore. MG Road is ubiquitous. Ask anyone what he did last Saturday evening, and he will succinctly tell you, "I had been to MG road". And you are not expected to inquire further on the matter-of-factly statement. It is a pre-empted truism, sententious in itself, and obviates the need for any kind of explanation. And the fellow will not brook any more prodding on the topic. I learnt it the hard way! I was myself guilty once of indiscreetly posing a second question, "What did you in MG Road?" To which he religiously repeated, a little annoyed, "I had just gone over to MG Road." Puzzled, I blurted out the ineluctable follow-up, "Doing what?" The fellow suspiciously leered at me as though I were some overly intrusive gossipmonger trying to malign his private life. I tried to put on display one of my most innocent expressions. After an uncomfortable pause lasting around ten seconds, "Well, shopping." Before I could react to the dismissively curt answer, he was off, out of earshot.

People familiar with Bangalore wouldn’t require any telling about MG Road and the inscrutable magnetic charm it holds for the youth and visitors: the conglomeration of teeming cultural multitudes, the toweringly imposing shopping malls, Gangarams and the roadside bookshops where you got all books for precisely seventy five rupees regardless of size and popularity, Cauvery, the antique shop, which endeared itself to the people more because of the antiquated frozen picture of people waiting outside in an eternal wait, Foodworld, which catered to the palates of the youth while also providing other provisions, and the quaintly ethnic and impressively exotic restaurants. It is only customary for every steadfast Bangalorean and non-Bangalorean in Bangalore to chart out elaborate weekend plans of shopping in MG Road. From buying trinkets for lampshades to Kancheevaram silk sarees for sweetly cajoling women of the family, one sought refuge under MG Road.

Hence, hard as I tried, I could not fathom why the fellow seemed really piqued by my earnest queries. If he was indeed shopping in MG Road, it cannot be too much a bad thing. Possibly the poor bloke might have gone hard up after a long shopping streak. His penury may have naturally entailed the irascibility. Or probably he was fleeced in some shop. Or had some distasteful experience which caused him the acute resentment. It took me a long time for me to figure out. It was experience that taught me never to pose that query to anyone. For MG Road is supposed to be an outing in itself. Well, one needs to have no purpose to visit MG Road. As I found out myself later, the otiose fellow had merely walked through the stretch of MG Road like many others of his kind. I found it out myself all right. After a rather bizarre experience. Ah, bizarre is the word. All – men folk and womenfolk alike – walked aimlessly across the two-kilometre stretch. Well, perhaps their dreamy desultory gaze was an indication not of aimlessness but of intense philosophical retrospection and a crucial appraisal of their life. But they all walked. A couple of times to and a couple of times fro. The men all flaunted attitude; they looked to ‘ooze machismo’, so to speak. And the women were all decked up, radiating fashion's most ostentatious blaze, ready to walk! And everyone walked past each other, exchanging bashful ogles! And at the end of it all walked back home, extremely fulfilled with their progress in this walk of life! You can return from MG Road with a bagful of queer observations, each one of them idiosyncratic to the place. For instance, you noticed that always the couples walking on the platform virtually clung on to each other. If they did not cling on to each other, the man took great care to gently clasp the girl's hand. Let me clarify here that I am not one who prods up issues related to an individual’s privacy. But when a conspicuous public display of mutual affection is thrust upon my faculties, I find myself unable to restrain a slight insinuation and I beg forgiveness for it. The reason for this intimacy in public though, I have never been able to fathom and I am reasonably sure that I may never be able to do so. Probably MG Road heightened their mutual affection. Or their insecurity. Or probably the straight MG road overawed them so much that they often got lost in the labyrinthine straightness! And they needed to clasp dearly to each other to reassure themselves that they were treading the right path.

And upon all their grand Satyagraha by foot, people seldom bought anything. It was criminal to buy anything. If you did, you were sure to be left with a hole in your purse and heart! The prices were as high as the number of people walking through the two-kilometre stretch! And so people entered shops, examined all their likes and dislikes, quietly walked out, deeply appreciative of the shop's display, walked for half a kilometre more and bought a replica of the object of their scrutiny, if available, from the shops on the pavement!

But it is simply the best way to enjoy a weekend here. Especially if you are a quibbling teetotaller like me! For such a person the length of MG Road provides all the highs of spirit. MG Road is a leveller on a plateau. MG Road is omniscient. The enlightenment has come upon me these days. I have been blessed with the vision of the fellow that I once queried when I was a naive duffer. These days I reply zealously and immediately, with a sense of contentment, to anybody who enquires about my weekend, "Oh! I had gone to MG Road to do some shopping!"

- posted by Dileepan @ 4:31:00 am

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Unspoken Words...

They remain unsaid. The carefully rehearsed words that may have changed the course of my life, had they been spoken in consummate consciousness and realisation. The words that had taken form from hasty hallucinatory prognostications of triumph; from the seeds of hope that had been gratuitously planted. Words that were floating below my palate and gliding slowly to the tip of my tongue, repeatedly sliding over one another, carefully rearranging themselves, bedizening themselves so as to be decorated with a fineness of form, waiting to brandish themselves to the world in all their grandeur, waiting to be spoken out...

The Professor from Texas A&M who had promised me financial support - promised, I daresay, is the wrong word for it was merely a figment of some presumptuous presuppositions - rather offered to consider me for financial support, has sent me a terse two-liner: "I cannot offer you financial support. Nor can I promise you anything when you reach TAMU." After I read the mail I peered out of the window, emotionally emaciated. The person outside inhaled his cigarette, and forced out the smoke spasmodically. The smoke permeated the rarefied atmosphere, meandered hand in hand, danced round in circles, Even as it struck one that the circles were going to string up garlands, the half strung garlands gently attenuated to mere thin strands, and the circles diffused and diffused until the intricately woven white drapery of circles became the blue tapestry of the background sky.

And all the ballerinas of words that were gently pirouetting in the tip of the tongue collapsed into the mouth that was half-opened in shock, were forced into the stomach by the gale of truth that gushed in, and finally were ground to nothingness. And all the words, so carefully rehearsed to be flaunted out to Vibrancy, Dexter and a lot many more, remain in the deepest recesses of the mind, in a comatose sleep. Believing that they will be summoned again for a reason. And they remain, refusing to die... Unspoken...

- posted by Dileepan @ 3:04:00 am

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I am pleasantly surprised to find that some people actually like my page. I only hope that my writings continue to interest the readers. Thank you, Georg, for your kind comments!

- posted by Dileepan @ 2:33:00 am

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Good Music and Bad Music

I am egregiously known for my taste. Or the lack of it! That is because I happen to like many things that most others of my age or vicinity do not. And I do not find myself particularly inclined towards art that is acclaimed and hyped by the media. And we argue endlessly about it. This disparity in tastes thrusts its ugly head in most when the tirade shifts to music, music being the most common ground for all.

I do not completely deny it. There are times when, in spite of my cognitive faculties suggesting otherwise, I subject my tympanum to a lot of hackneyed, sometimes cacophonous, beats and tunes. And I enjoy unreservedly the battering that my ear-drums get. At times, almost half my cognitive responses are tuned to the reactions of other living room TV watching friends to it (We are eight friends in a single flat of the apartment)! This is some kind of perverse sadism that I have allowed myself to cultivate since my childhood. Nothing pleases me more when the other fellow starts gnawing away half his pillow in absolute horror and mortification, and another fellow begins carefully emptying his lemonade in the living room to trip another and cause a din and hence vent out on me his chagrin. That is when I take recourse to the next step of modus operandi; I increase the volume by five units. It is then that people actually begin to go beserk. The pillow eater realises that the pillow has ceased to taste so relishingly sweet; he tears the pillow apart and begins to howl like one with a severe stomach ache. And the lemonade spiller has found that the spilling is not so effective after all; people have become extremely eagle-eyed these days. And there is not a hint of pandemonium. So he begins to get hysterical (That is an anatomic impossibility. But believe me, hysterical is the word!). He showers on the ground all the chips and clutches his chest and begins to expectorate wildly on the ground. And this time he partially succeeds in drawing attention. By this time, the racuous melody has reached its crescendo. The ensuing drama is hilarious. The remaining members pounce on him and start pumping his chest. The poor fellow, who was merely faking up a tantrum is genuinely assaulted now. He bellows out Hiawatha's warcry, scatters the manhandlers, and staggers back to the bedroom, clutching his chest in genuine pain. The surrounding rustics are puzzled, but have managed to figure out that serious danger has been averted thanks to their nimble minds and feet. And by then, the song has ended. The pillow eater is dejected; his lovely pillow is in shreds. The living room is a mess; a living hell! The best reaction was from a fellow who,even as he sensed the impending danger, rushed to the closet and began to bawl out his favourite tunes out loudly, so that you didnt know which was worse! That had been his own time-tested mode of retaliation. At the end of all this bacchanalia, I casually remark, "Why such a fuss about a stupid song! If I had known that the song would entail such a mess, I would have never put it in the first place!" I change the channel and quietly smuggle myself to the bedroom without looking at anyone in the eye.

Though I have this stray streak of sadism, I listen to bad music most of the time not because of the music itself but more because of the thoughts that the music carries along with it; a whiff of reminiscent air. For instance, the song that the TV speakers blared when I had set my sights on this seductive (though a little squat) girl was one of the worst pieces churned out of Bollywood's mills. But romance had lent it a dfferent tune, a different tint. The way the hero ogled at the heroine through the corner of the eye and her coy mock reprisal reminded me of my own Romeo stunts! By Jove! There was romance in my life! And what better way to celebrate it than a little background tune! And every time I heard the tune, it nauseated me with the romance that could have been the most romantic romance in the annals of history, but was never to be. And I became effusively maudlin and allowed the music to percolate into every pore of the body. And queasily whined in gratuitous nostalgia when the music was over. And indulged in some self-gratulatory exhortations for managing to maintain my equanimity and spirits in life despite the tragedies that have befallen me!

I am sure, I am not the only one. When the rustic next door switches on his tape recorder, the dog outside my house begins to howl and tears away to his house, turns it's back on the house entrance, raises its back leg, and urinates very carefully on the walls of the gate. And then throws a barking fit. The fellow enjoys his music oblivious of all the commotion and when the music is over, looks out shudderingly at the mad dog and decides that the only safe dogs are those that are dead!

There are scores of such people who have made the others rush to the closet with their music. To each his own. The next time anybody takes it upon himself to educate me on my bad taste, I am going to take it in the right stride and make an effort to cultivate a fineness in taste. I am going to buy a trumpet and start to play it all day long, till people become convinced that my taste is, after all, not so bad at all!

- posted by Dileepan @ 2:15:00 am

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The Humorist

Following is an email I received from a Professor of Texas A&M University in response to my request for an RAship and financial support:

Hello Jack of all Jacks:

Thanks for your interest in Industrial Distribution. I read your resume
and found it most interesting that you have written short stories
in English. The protocol that I follow in awarding assistants to
graduate students is to first have an oral face-face interview.
Presently, the assistantships that I have are filled, but a vacancy may
occur in the near future. When you arrive in College Station, please
contact me and we can arrange for an oral interview.

Regards,

(Signed)

The fellow is a humorist, plain and simple! I knew it the moment I read his mail. My views have radically changed since I chanced to read the mail. First, I have come to believe from his mail that the mere fact that I indite short stories in English interests Professors more than my academic record, creditable though it may be! More importantly, it is the fact that I, despite being an Indian student, write short stories in English; not in Zulu or Pali. How thrilling it is for me to realise my infinite capabilities in a language completely alien to me!

The mind-boggling retrospection has had serious affectations on my impression of myself. I have thought over it for a whole night and have decided to take the issue by the scruff of the neck. My Resume, from today, shall begin thus:

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
A Senior year Engineering Student who is an accomplished author of Short-
Stories in English (and not any tribal language like Zulu). Incidentally,
possessing a creditable academic record and hobbying in Manufacturing
Systems and CAD/CAM systems.

The remaining part of my resume will be a simple couple of lines!

ACADEMIC HONOURS/ ACHIEVEMENTS & RESEARCH WORK/PROJECTS
For more information on the genre, style and calibre of my writing, please
see: http://panvista.blogspot.com

EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
1. B.E (Hons.) Mechanical at BITS, Pilani

Ah! What a wondrous feeling to be able to complete my Resume in a couple of lines! If only anyone had so much hinted the suggestion that this was possible, my friend Dexter would have commanded him to turn away and kicked him on the backside with his left boot. Resumes are supposed to be those things which everyone gets down to draft with the impression that he has few accomplishments worthy of mention, but ends up drafting out a dozen of sheets. By the time he has finished drafting his resume, he has grown so much in stature that he is a pioneer in his field. He had all along been asinine enough not to realise his strengths! Now he has so much to say about himself that it is virtually impossible to shrink his resume to 3 pages! And he wonders, probably these Professors do not want to feel challenged by the academic potential of the students. How can anybody ever complete his resume in 3 pages? Unless he has floundered his entire college life by straying on the streets like a vagabond. And he scratches his chin with his pen and his eyes wander on to the 'COMPUTER SKILLS' column:

COMPUTER SKILLS
1. MS-DOS
2. Windows 95
3. Windows 98
4. Windows NT
5. Windows XP
6. MS Word
7. MS Excel
8. Logo
9. BASIC

It sets alight a raging debate in his mind: is it absolutely essential for him to put MS-Word? After all, the Professor will have enough sense to figure out that the resume was typed out in Word. Oh! But there may be people who will have given it to a typist to get it typed! Obviously, Professors will be shrewd enough to take cognisance of his expertise in MS-Word in the light of these cases. And, he must look to edge out these people... And so MS-WORD stays to fight another day. And after a thorough appraisal and scores of similar such raging self-conflicts, he manages to reduce his resume from a staggering 13 pages to an impressive five-and-a-half pages. At the end of the Herculean effort, he is transformed into the extremely motivated individual that had set foot in this world to revolutionise modern research... Of course, it was sacrilege to even dream of completing your resume within three sides of paper, leave alone a solitary leaf; it meant that you had little to write about and was a sure reject candidate. But today, I have realised it is possible courtesy a Godly Professor. I humbly bow my head in obeisance to the great soul that has bestowed on me this divine afflatus.

But somehow, I still get the feeling that the gentleman is not entirely convinced. Though he seems to be taken in by my writing capabilities, he still seems to doubt my speaking abilities; he wants an oral tete-a-tete! Here, I cannot blame him. For the number of people who say Loory for Lorry and Noo-ledge for Knowledge must have appalled him. I should make it a point to include in my Resume the fact that I can also speak English and say precisely Lorry as Lorry and Sorry as Sorry!

But, all said and done, he belongs to a breed that everyone craves to belong to at some point or the other. He is a humorist, plain and simple!

- posted by Dileepan @ 1:58:00 am

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A Call from the Wild

This was a mail that I had written to the group last July about Dexter. It does not behoove me to introduce Dexter to you all thus. He can surely complete a grander entree for he belongs to a rarer breed of people - the academically brilliant lot. It is simply unfair. But so's life :)

Guys,

Dexter and Ms. Silhouette make quite a picture in front of Ram Bhawan – nobody needs to be told that. In fact, I can virtually count the occasions on my fingers when I have not chanced to find Dexter giving vent to his debonair ostentations with the object of his affections in front of the Ram Bhawan gate, ending up giving the Chowki a run for his wages.

They made a brilliant canvas for a caricaturist. Together.

This evening Dexter, Quixote, and I were doing some GRE exercises at Dexter’s when he received a seemingly innocuous telephone call. Initially, Quixote and I harboured no suspicions. But Dexter's first words into the receiver (and the response, more importantly) seemed to have left him stunned in a mixture of surprise and shock. And he jerked his idiosyncratic jerk. It startled me and for a moment I even dared to speculate, against my better senses, whether the receiver had given him an electric shock! His face slowly turned a bright crimson and finally purple. Yes, there was no doubt about it now; it was her on the line! Even as he was cooing into the receiver sweet nothings to his inamorata, he must have felt abashed all of a sudden; he rushed into one of the corners of the room hoping that the conversation would escape our earshot. The ostrich, when attacked by poachers, slides its head alone into the bushes while exposing the rest of it, cosy in the thought that it has escaped the hunters’ eyes and oblivious to the imminent. Dexter’s fate seemed to be much the same. There he was, twiddling his thumbs (literally!) and scratching intricate designs on the ground with his toes, much the same way the bashful brides of Tamil Cinemas do when they descry the gaily bedecked groom and entourage on squadrons of elephants (unable to tell apart from the groom!)! It was quite a sight, seeing him caught between the pangs of not being able to pour his heart out and having to contend with two inane jackasses having a ball at his discomfiture. It was after some ribbing, after the receiver had been duly placed back, that he finally capitulated and admitted the identity of the caller, and wistfully whined that such occasions were rare. I must admit that I did feel sorry for him then, for three full seconds.

Well, I wonder why the calls should be rare, given the recent proliferation of gate-calls last semester. Probably she feels obliged to call Berr too when she calls Dexter, for they are three of a much vaunted trio! I can quite understand her predicament. Dexter alone is enough to give one a splitting headache; she has to contend with two of the same feather. Well, so it is probably fathomable that she thinks twice before calling; she has to call twice! Dexter presented quite a picture today; over the moon because she had called and flabbergasted because there were two goons laughing and eating his head off. But one thing that I shall avow with conviction about Dexter conversing with Ms. Silhouette over the phone:

He makes a brilliant caricature. Alone!

Yours,
Me.

- posted by Dileepan @ 8:51:00 pm

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This was a draft that I had saved, incomplete on March 2, 2004:

The past weekend saw my second homecoming since I have been in Bangalore. My indecision and improvident planning ensured that I shelled out quite a sum of money and travelled by Shatabdi. The travel itself couldnt have been more comfortable. The cushioned chair-car, snacks and food, the service and the little niggling guilt; my middle-class mind was quietly preponderating whether one really required this level of comfort to travel. No people thronging outside the window waiting to impregnate the asphixiating barricades of people whose heads alone are visible. No beggars, no children sweeping the floor and cadging for a rupee, no eunuchs; the travel was much different from my previous ones.

I was fortunate enough to meet up with Siddhartha. (Whenever I think of him, I see in my reflection Govinda of Herman Hesse's 'Siddhartha'). My post-justifying him is essential at this stage and I apologise for it; to introduce him will almost mean introducing myself to the readers and hence it will take up a whole new post. He was the support around which climbers of my childhood and youth luxuriously straggled... We met up on Saturday evening in the beach and spent an hour during which both of us spoke little. A silent shraddhanjali to the fourteen years that lie buried in our backyards. Ghosts of which have remained to haunt me at night. And day. Though the thought itself is very Victorian and fulfilling, realism and objectivity would probably attribute the silence to something else. Lack of a common ground. It dawned on me then that we were slowly drifting apart. He is too perceptive an individual to not realise it. But he has maintained a dignified silence. It is his greatness. He seems to have measured out his life in immaculate coffee spoons, a la Prufrock. Ergo he knows this is an obligation slated out for him by his childhood. And he complies by allowing himself to languish in my mediocrity for sometime. Yes, coming back to what I was saying, we are drifting apart. It seems inexorably inevitable. A cul-de-sac, so to speak. And the finality with which the situation looms is frightening. It has left me shaken. And deeply perturbed. I was nothing but an abject parasite, thiriving on his knowledge and vision. If the host and the parasite are separated, what does the host lose but the parasite?! And the parasite moves on, gasping for stale air, to embark on a quest for a new host; he knows it is ultimately a pointless odyssey - the next sojourn is bound to end the same way...

- posted by Dileepan @ 1:15:00 am

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Colours

Golden rays slant across a new dawn
Bathing ecstatic skies in glowing pink.
The misty air tinted with variegated hues.
Strong jets of colours,
Sprayed in celebration of a harmony,
Piercing, for those few frozen moments,
Facades of social constructs;
Dissolving egos of the whimsical;
The malice of the embittered.
And washing them away.
But for a few frozen moments…

Holi.
Splashes of colours on an unfurling canvas,
Dispelling sorrows of a buried yesterday
And agonising waits for an uncertain tomorrow.
Where the past is lost
In the haze of a misty reflection
And the future, merely inchoate
Forms of nascent blotches.
Colours.
Imbuing all in the pervasive present;
An abstraction of timeless joy
Evolving in the ephemeral.
When in them each finds
His own shade of meaning.

The Private shoots a jet of red and smiles;
The red of today is clean of anguishes
Of a comrade beyond the barbed wire.
Children gambol in raw shades of innocence,
The leaves of their virginal books
Untouched by moths of time.
The young man showers the redness of love
And the girl blushes a dripping crimson.
The pained lover shoots out a vernal green;
The envies of yesterday are long truncated.
Though he can touch people with colours today
The pariah touches hearts with but colourless water;
Three silent drops of prayer;
Water that cleanses coloured shirts;
Coloured shirts of coloured souls.

And the young widow huddled in a dark recess
Looks out and sighs a forlorn muse,
“Life is still colourful, isn’t it?”
And her soft pink lips purse into a wry smile
With the rainbow’s sarcasm at passing showers
And stop the eye’s colourless salty stream.
For the rich daub of red on her forehead
Turned that day to the grey of ashes
Left of the flaming pyre of her dissolute man.
And the world robbed her of all colours but two
And the white hood of her white saree,
Now veils her world of endless black.

- posted by Dileepan @ 12:31:00 am

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Little Embers of Learning

Math classes…
Ciphering of the uneducated milkman;
Technology’s meteorological predictions…
Trooping of weather-wise ants;
The valour of immortalised noble martyrs…
The hypocrisy of people pawning separatists;
True love of near and dear…
The malice of a betrayal;
Faith holding strong many a family boat…
Cold icebergs of mistrust;
Burgeoning buds of aspiration…
The rough pruning hands of The Gardener.

…And we move on
Learning
All that we pine for
And all that we don’t…
Didactic sermons of life
Thrusting upon us an affliction –
An unequivocal objectivism
To devouring the good
And the bad
Perpetrated by human avarice –
A malaise we yearn to live with.
When knowledge tags along
The hypocrisy; a subtle finesse
Making us ‘worldly wise’.
And we crusade forth.
Revelling in our triumphs;
Drunk with the power of knowledge...
For in its potent cloak,
We seldom realise
The apathy lying draped
Waiting to show its taciturn face...
Roughed up by inexorable truths,
The heart has ceased to throb
At the other’s trauma
And the pain in a recess lingers…
The pain from the sting of a bee
That killed herself to hurt you –
Marking the many little embers of learning
In burnt fields of childlike innocence

- posted by Dileepan @ 3:32:00 am

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Look Ahead in Nostalgia!

My neighbour in office has now shifted to another cubicle. And I am alone. Not that the shift has made me feel alone. It has made me think. Two individuals needn't particularly like each other to miss each other. Sometimes we miss people in life merely by virtue of the fact that once they were a part of our daily life. And now they aren't. And some maudlin human minds like mine tend to daub the whole reflection with a little nostalgia and romance. And then we run our palms slowly through the stubbles of our chin and muse forlornly! And then the canvas bloats a little, daring to straggle beyond realms of reality; a little colour is added, a little emotion, a little nostalgia. And for an instant we dream of the day when our closest friend, guide and pillar of support moves out of our lives. Erasing all traces of footsteps from our pastures of youthful friendship. Leaving us intensely thankful to the Lord that we were fortunate to be a part of his great life. We are choked and dazed. We portend his future fame, popularity and greatness with conviction. And tearfully wish him well for the good man he is. We let out a wry philosophical smile. And suddenly we are old men, anecdotists with long unfurling beards white as snow, fondly reminiscing the intruder who was once our soul to our grandchildren in the evenings of our lives. And they listen awed by the chronicles of our lives; important leaflets in the annals of their lineage. And by the time the tale reaches its denouement, the permanence of everything under the sun is so deeply dented and challenged that the children begin to think that all the others around them are to die any moment now! When the story ends with a sigh, and clicks from young throats.

It is now that the exponentially extrapolated reverie comes to a grinding halt. You realise: Your neighbour in office has shifted to another cubicle. Two cubicles farther from his current place!

- posted by Dileepan @ 2:58:00 am

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