Jolada Rotti and tappala palya: Food fit for an astrologer

Well days passed in a daze at Jain Hostel. I do not remember a lot. Gulbarga was at that time a dusty mofussil town. There were Khanavalis, typical north Karnataka Lingayat eateries, which served rotis made of Jowar flour, sajji roti, which has almost zero gluten. The rotis literally came apart in your hands and did not have anything to call a taste or a flavour. They were eaten typically with eggplant curry (badnikai playa) and what is called kaal and saaru. These are two ways in which lentils were prepared, Kaalu being thick (sukhi sabzi as they say) made of alsandi and things like that and saaru was liquid. There were chutneys to go with it. Typically we had groundnut chutney and black sesame chutney. Thinking back, they tasted divine, but at that time, I was not very happy. There were huge round steel plates which you washed with water before using and then had your food served. The food was spicy but wholesone. Those days it cost 180 Rupees for two meals a day per month. Sundays were special. We had sweet, curds etc. On amavasya or new moon days, we had pooran poli or holige. All in all it was good. The Khanavalis were invariably named after Lord Shiva. We had our meals at the Jain Hostel mess, but for sometime it was closed and I got intimate with north Karnataka cuisine.

Breakfast in the morning was sometimes poori subzi sometimes susla sometimes mirchi bajji. Tea to go along. We walked for a small distance from the hostel and there was a Babu hotel on Jewargi Road run by a person who went by the homonym Babu. He was a Muslim youth and we finished our breakfast there before the day started. Now if you ask me what I did during the day, I would be at a loss, because, we did nothing after the breakfast. We came back to the room, gossiped, slept and went for lunch, came back, gossiped, slept and went out for long walks. Saikrishna, who was junior to me by four years in school and who was the brother of D.M.Murali who was our classmate, became a very close friend. We went about 5 kilometers south along Jewargi Road and back, talking about all kinds of things. We were practically inseparable during those times, though he was not my roommate. My roommates were varied. Earlier there was one Fat Patil, who must have been atleast 10 years elder to me from Aland. He was doing B.Pharm. Then I had Arvind Agarwal, two years junior to me in school. I also had the hero or the person who was the ganglord of the hostel, the person who was given the rights to rag newcomers, Sanjay Biyani as a roommate for sometime. The guy actually called me “scientist” and respected me, though why he called me scientist, I have no idea. I practised astrology at that time, and since most students at the Jaoin Hostel were rich spoilt brats, I scarcely had any problems predicting their future. “You will fail in 3 papers this semester”, I told one. “You will fail in five” I told another. I always gave the highest numbers to Biyani and he worked hard to keep upto my predictions and I do not know if he got away from Gulbarga with a degree at all. The reasons I gave to each was different. To one I said, “Your Mercury is burnt. It is within a few degrees of the sun in your horoscope” or else, “Your lord of 9^th is associated with Saturn” or “your moon is occluded by Rahu”. In short using the students in Jain Hostel, I became a very expert astrologer. I learnt how to predict believably. Though like Feynmann, I told people that I am bluffing, they believed me intensely and my predictions were 100% true. Not a single hostelmate was immune to the lures of my predictions and even people from the other hostel of Gulbarga on this side of the Railway line, the Maulana Azad Memorial Hostel came to me for predictions. I was also therefore bestowed with the moniker of Swamiji. I therefore wonder how I did not come to meet my future boss Mr. Shivaprasad Khened, though I had predicted the future of almost everyone known to him by then. To those of the Maulana Azad Hostel, I gave different predictions. “Within two years, you will go to the US”, “By 1986 you will be in a big city almost 600 kilometers to the south of this place”(that being Bangalore – and I wonder at the stupidity of those who scored 90% in papers like Network Analysis and Synthesis but believed that there is some particular, as yet unnamed big city 600 kms south that will accommodate them in the future).

It is always important for an astrologer to keep his ears to the ground, as James Hadley Chase would say. Know your client. Start with, “You are basically a very good and kind person, but people often misunderstand you” That statement is invariably right. Then go on to establish your credentials by saying “between the ages of 6 and 14(or 13 or 17 or whatever), I see blood on the region between your neck and groin”. The person invariably helps you out saying, “My God, you are a saint! How did you know? I had an appendicitis operation when I was 11”. “There!” I would say, “that means Mars and Venus. Meaning middle East. 11 you said, and what are you now? 21? At the age of 31, certainly before 23^rd July, you will be in the Middle East, as a senior executive. I see heavy machinery very clearly. Yellow. What is your branch BTW?” I already know he is doing mechanical engineering and that most heavy machinery are painted yellow. Thus was how I became a saint. It would take months to write the techniques of prediction, so I stop here.