cynicism2euphoria

The attempt to secure an Engineering seat

2012-01-11T22:39:00.001+05:30

The June of 1982. Engineering and Medicine were the only two options boys and girls in Gulbarga district considered after their 12th(PUC, PDC whatever). No other career avenues occurred to them. Thinking back, very few students from Wadi or Shahabad even aspired to take up Medicine as a career. Securing a job in the ACC factory was the priority, and a simple ITI or a Diploma or, if you were extremely ambitious, an engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering was what one aspired for. Engineering colleges in those days were few and far between. The mushrooming of private engineering colleges was a nascent phenomenon which started in Karnataka and spread to Maharashtra. But in the early 80s Karnataka had something like five government engineering colleges and close to 20 private engineering colleges. Most of the private engineering colleges operated from sheds with asbestos roofs like the Raichur Engineering College. The HKE Society’s Engineering College in Gulbarga was fairly well off by private engineering college standards. HKES by the way stands for Hyderabad Karnatak Education Society. The four northern districts of Karnataka, Gulbarga, Raichur, Bidar and Bellary along with the northern districts of Andhra Pradesh like Medak, Rangareddy etc. were considered to be an integrated cultural unit with similar culinary, linguistic and sartorial traditions. The culinary traditions of Hyderabad Karnatak area is elaborated in the post http://cynicism2euphoria.blogspot.com/2009/08/some-north-karnataka-recipes.html.

The HKE Society was run by the Lingayats who overtly conducted the affairs of Institutions like the Sharanabasaveshwara Group of Colleges and covertly ran the affairs of the HKE Society. More about the Lingayats and the Sharanabasaveshwara Institutions later. The HKES Engineering College is now called The Poojya Doddappa Appa (PDA) College of Engineering.

It was on a June morning that I and my father boarded the Bargal, with my PDC Certificates with the hope that I could secure a seat in engineering in the HKES Engineering College. I understand that it rains heavily ,and Gulbarga goes green and verdant these days during the mid summer months, but in those days the rains were far and few between and June was a hot and sunny month. The ticket from Wadi to Gulbarga, I remember was a paltry(by today’s standards) one rupee and fifty five paise. But then, my father drew a salary of Rs. 753 per month too. We therefore reached Gulbarga at a cost of three rupees and ten paise. Ten paise coins in those days were made of alnico and had a wavy border.

Surprisingly the Bargal was on time that day, and we reached Gulbarga station by 8.45 am. We had enough time to have a breakfast of huge bondas and idlis liberally covered with dilute coconut chutney at the newly opened Janata Café at the Aiwan-e-Shahi Road, followed by coffee. We had to reach the Engineering College only at 1030 am. My beard was just sprouting, and I had not yet thought of shaving. We reached the college gates and I had my first glimpse of a Fighter aircraft that was displayed prominently in the front of building. It was an unimpressive building built of grey limestone blocks and mortar. The Principal of the College that time was SV Mallapur, a dark balding gentleman. My father and I were led into the Principal’s chamber where sat the Principal, with the redoubtable Shankar Rao Chincholikar who was the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I learnt later that Chincholikar had a Java motorcycle, whose engine he had modified to run on kerosene oil. He rode this invention of his around the college, exhuming noxious fumes. The kerosene engine created deposits of carbon in its insides, which Chincholikar used the First Year BE (Mechanical Engineering) students to clean.
Be that as it may be, the interview with Mallpur, Chincholikar and the other professors present, did not go as well as presumed. After a cursory perusal of my certificates, the Principal demanded a 25000 rupees donation to the college, which on negotiations came down to Rs. 20000/-. Considering that my father was earning a mere Rs. 750 per month at that time, this was more than two times his annual salary. Neither he nor I took this seriously and having paid our respects to the HKE professors, left.

After dining at the Timapuri Circle Kamat, we took 9 Dn Bombay-Madras Mail to Wadi , during which journey my father told me that I had better take up a B. Sc. Degree course in the Sharanabasvehswara College of Science. I acquiesced. In fact I was so enamoured of the Organic Chemistry that Cyriac taught, that I was more inclined to do a Masters in Organic Chemistry rather than in manual pursuits like Engineering. That day the 9 Dn Mail reached Wadi on time at 11.50 AM and we were home for a lunch of keerai molagoottal, vendakka kichadi and rice.

Back in Wadi and face to face with a Telugu Proverb

2011-07-20T12:22:00.004+05:30

This was narrated to me by my friend Nissankara Bhargava, presently Exhibition Officer at Visvesvaraya Industrial and technological Museum, Bengaluru. There appears to be a folk festival in some village in Andhra called Kanchukotsavam, the festival of blouses. On a particular day of the year, womenfolk of the village go to the river bank, take of their blouses and throw them into the river in spate. The menfolk, who used to wait downstream jumped into the river the moment they saw the blouses floating downstream and grabbed what came into their hands. One for each. They then went back to the women. The man with a blouse belonging to a particular woman got to spend the day (night rather) with her. Good fun and change of bed for all.

One such kanchukotsavam day, as the womenfolk were waiting with bated breaths and bared breasts, all women got their share of goodies while one particularly dumb husband – one like me- seemed to have grabbed his own spouse’s blouse. As she saw him coming towards her she gave vent to her frustration with a phrase which has since become a proverb in Telugu, meaning “Gosh! The same husband even on the festival day!” meaning nothing worth talking about even on a special occasion. “Panduga rojulo kooda paata magudena” May it be said that my homecoming to Wadi evoked similar frustration in the absence of familiar faces and circumstances. Everything had changed. Srinath now was the centre of attraction of the Family. I was a new entrant in the household I possessed and held on my palms. No old friends. Nothing. It was the first time that the truth of passing time changing the space time coordinates of a place was brought home to me so forcefully. I was a new man in Wadi. I had left a favourite child and had returned a new man. I was as much a stranger in Wadi as I was at Moovattupuzha. Happy homecoming, but same old circumstances.

And finally like the singer in TV programmes, I shout, to all of you who are reading this "come on come on comment, lets all comment together" Else gentle readers, I stop writing altogether. Or is that what you want?

Final Part of my life in Kerala - Cyriac and JP

2011-07-20T11:59:00.002+05:30

What with my homesickness and culture change, as also with my preoccupations with other activities like music and things, my marks in the first PDC went spiraling down so much so that I just about passed the maths paper. It was not something I could take easily, nor was it something that I blamed myself for. I blamed everything other than myself – the system, homesickness, gods, ill health - for this debacle. There is a Ganapathy Kshetram (temple) and a Noottettupadi (108 stepped) Sivakshetram in kavumpady which were not as well known as the Puzhakkara kavu and the Ramangalam siva temple. I used to be a regular visitor to these temples and after my first PDC debacle cut down on my visits to just two of the famous shrines.

Tutions were something that were frowned upon in Wadi. They were for students whose IQs were in the dangerously low zone of 40-50 and not for geniuses like me. Like a gym going stud who effortlessly runs 100 meters in 12 seconds, just being diagnosed with diabetes, I learnt that IQ, like blood glucose levels tend to rise and fall. Thus having fallen to the level or a moron, I resorted to tuitions. Of course equally lion hearted geniuses like Pradeep and another friend Ajay, were already into tuitions. So I enrolled myself under the venerable JP (god knows what JP stood for) for Maths tuitions and with the lovable Cyriac for Chemistry. Physics I thought I could deal with, myself.

JP was a white bearded old man of indeterminable age with long white hair who taught maths effortlessly. He functioned from a first floor room in Thodupuzha road. He advertised his skills with the catchphrase “Phys an angel of JP an angel of Maths”. Though he taught effortlessly the learning was not as effortless. Sines and cosines danced like slim snakes slithering in and out of comprehension. And god alone (and perhaps JP) knew what surds were. But I plodded on. Enough to get a decent score in second PDC.

Cyriac was another thing of course. He was a fair chubby bachelor, struggling to find a job and we had fun learning chemistry from him and being young, he connected well with us. Pradeep attended the chemistry tuitions with me. He functioned from a rented house in Piravom Road. The way he taught organic chemistry, I fell in love with it. It costed me less that 100 rupees per month altogether. We spent hours with Cyriac synthesizing alcohols and aldehydes on paper. Eventually Cyriac married one of our Nirmala college lecturers Valsa. The joy of learning came back eventually but not to the extent one experienced at MCC. Suffice it to say that with all my handicaps I topped in chemistry in second PDC scoring 136/150. My total score was 78% rendering me ineligible for any decent engineering college.

By the time I ended second PDC it was fairly certain that I would leave Moovattupuzha forever and come back to the familiar climes of Gulbarga for further education. So two years after I left Wadi, I came back, bag and baggage, to Wadi, but totally changed. I left an innocent boy and came back as a worldly wise adolescent, with a moustache to boot. That ended my brief sojourn out of Wadi. But Wadi had changed too. None of my old friends were around. No JC, no Santhanam, and achingly no Janaki. All gone. Poof!

Note: There were hundreds of other characters in Moovattupuzha whose lives intertwined with me in one way or the other whom I have not mentioned here, but they deserve special mention for shaping my personality to a large extent. Ajay, Rajkumar Kunnel, Rajalakshmi the class beauty, Nawas PP. Radhakrishnan, a lot of relatives and scores more. Andariki na vandanaalu.

Part V of my life in Kerala

2011-04-16T11:35:00.001+05:30

Rains in Kerala are a phenomenon. It is the gateway to the South west monsoons on which most of India depends for is its survival. It is more than just a climatic phenomenon, it has over the years acquired the status of a climactic phenomenon. The earth, parched during the torrid summer months, eagerly waits like a loving female for the climactic drenching to occur and like clockwork, precisely on the morning of the 28^th of May every year, the people of Kerala wake up to dark brooding skies and the downpour starts soon thereafter. The green landscape of Kerala becomes further verdant during these four months till September and all sorts of vegetation sprout up. All the quaint little rivers of Kerala are in spate and considering their relatively short lengths and proximity to the sea as also to the tapering topography of the state, they are drained much faster unlike the long lasting floods of the monotonous and brutal plains of northern India.

Anchu Muri Madhom being on the banks of one of these rivers, also experiences these floods almost every year. They bring with them all kinds of washed in reptiles and arthropods like snakes and scorpions, which are left behind when the deluge recedes. When it rains it pours. Water falls down in sheets. People wore rubber hawai chappals and carried umbrellas everywhere. The ubiquitous red KSRTC buses, cramped with corrugated rubberized windows made the interiors into cauldrons. But when the rains ended by September the whole landscape was a silky green, freshly washed. The sun shone back and it was time for Onam, the festival celebrated to welcome back Maveli – the Malayalam version of Mahabali, the sixth dwarf incarnation of Lord Vishnu - Vamana, who ruled Kerala once. Maveli, though an arrogant demon was a benevolent monarch for his people and was cheated by Vamana into being buried under the earth, though not before the monarch extracted a promise from Vamana that he will visit his beloved kingdom on the anniversary of his death every year.

The people of Kerala eagerly await this day on the Tiruvonam star of the Malayalam month of Chingom (August September) every year for it also marks the end of the torrential south west monsoons. Onam vacations are long in Kerala and it was during these vacations in 1980, that I got a ticket to return back to Wadi for a brief sojourn. As the verdant greenery of Kerala gave way to the red hot earth of Tamil Nadu and the redder and hotter earth of Andhra Pradesh, the train entered the familiar black soil of northern Karnataka in Raichur. What a contrast! But what a relief!! I am back in familiar territory – one of dust and searing heat, one of love and brusque etiquette, one that evoked pleasant memories from childhood. Kerala these days is called the God’s own Country, but Wadi was not that. It was My own Country. And forever My own Country will be dearer to me than God’s. I can only marvel at Kerala but in my Wadi I had my rights. It was like going back to your hutment from a five star hotel. Home after all is home.

Part IV of my life in Kerala

2010-12-19T23:42:00.002+05:30

Opposite to Anchu Muri Madhom was a house in which lived Manohar Dattatreya Deo a Marathi Bank Manager at the Union Bank with his family. From my previous post it may be deduced that Manohar was his name and Dattatreya his father’s name and Deo, the surname. The Deos, Manohar and Vijaya had two sons Pradeep and Arun. Pradeep was of my age and was also a student of Nirmala College, in the second group morning session. He aspired to be a doctor. Being from Wadi, I developed a natural affinity to Pradeep who became eventually a close friend. Arun was two years younger. Unfortunately, I recently learnt that Arun passed away at the age of 42 in September 2010. These people who originally hailed from Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, were the scions of a respected business family D V Deo and Sons, of Mattancheri, Kochi, manufacturers and exporters of essential aromatic oils.

Pradeep was learning to play the Mridangam from one Panangad Chandran, and was familiar with Carnatic classical music. They had a record player and he had a stack of records featuring masters like Chembai, Ariyakkudi, MS Subbulakshmi and the like. He had a great fascination for Palakkad Mani Iyer, the Mridangam Maestro, and had many legends to share. At his home in the evenings I learnt to appreciate the nuances of carnatic music. It was my first exposure to this treasure trove of culture. Incidentally it was around this time that the epic movie Shankarabharanam, directed by K.Vishvanath and featuring Somayajulu was released and it became quite a success. I watched it several times in Latha Theatre.

Pradeep was proud of forcing me to listen to the records and pointing out to me the fine distinctions that differentiated Adi Taalam from the roopaka taalam. He was more enthusiastic about percussion than about melody, though we did learn to identify Kalyani from Mohanam, Sree from Madhyamavati etc. While Pradeep was inclined towards heavy dignified Ragas like shankarabharanam and Kalyani, I preferred soulful ones like Sree, madhyamavati, sahana, kanada, Darbar and the like. There was at that time a gentleman called Sundaresan, who was also very keen on carnatic music and who also was an astrologer in Moovattupuzha, who in a white shirt and Mundu visited the Puzhakkara Kavu daily. There was at that time a cultural organization called the MELA or the Moovattupuzha Enlightened Lovers of Art, which organized cultural events like Kathakali performances and as a part of MELA, under the leadership of Sundaresan, we boys started an organization called the Shatkala Sangeeta Sabha to bring carnatic music to Moovattupuzha. The inaugural concert was by Dr. M Balamurali Krishna who sang a detailed Shanmukhapriya exposition followed by his own composition, “sada tava paada” during the concert. He was accompanied by his wife Abhayambika on the Tampura and by local percussionist Panangad Chandran, Pradeep’s teacher on the Mridangam. Though Chandran was not of the class of Dr.Balamurali Krishna, the concert was a roaring success and I had the good fortune to be alongside Balamurali during the concert.

Eventually I was enamoured of carnatic music, and though I could not sing, I became adept at recognizing and appreciating ragas, and learnt the basic theory of music on my own. An incident I remember was, when I and Pradeep traveled overnight to Vaikom by bus to listen to Madurai Somasundaram during the Vaikkathashtami concert of 1982 and reaching Vaikom well past midnight, listening to the concert till 4 AM, and leaving back to Moovattupuzha. I have been a fan of carnatic music ever since, and I owe Pradeep for that. It is another story that Pradeep fell to the lures of western pop music later in life.

It was also at this time that I became interested in astrology. Most of the theory was self taught. I gathered enough courage to make predictions and lo and behold many came true! I continued this practice for a long time later till about a few years back and my record of success in astrological predictions was well above par, in fact a roaring success. My services were sought after by the high and mighty and as a matter of fact I landed my first job owing to the predictions I made for one of the Managers of ACC, Wadi. I also learnt the elements of Palmistry and Numerology to supplement my knowledge of astrology. It was only later that I realized that I was naturally gifted with the ‘divine’ skills that astrologers learn – 1) to make vague predictions crouched in astrological terms, 2) to glean information out of the supplicant and then present it back to them in a packaged form and 3) to suggest remedies which are useful and harmless albeit not related to the problem. Things like stating ‘you must have performed below par in atleast one exam between 3rd October 1978 and 12th July 1986’ and having elicited an answer of yes or no (formula 2), saying that ‘you have a danger of failing in your exams this year owing to your Mercury being in the combusted mode because of its 2 degree proximity to the Sun in your horoscope and Saturn being placed in your fourth house, which happens to be Virgo the house of Mercury, the karaka of knowledge - by gochara (formula 1), if you study really hard and chant this particular incatation to Saraswati thrice every morning and offer white flowers and rice to a swan, you might avert failure(formula 3). More about the art of making accurate astrological predictions later.

A third thing I got interested in and pursued at that time was vedic mantras. I used to wake up very early (4 AM – too early by my standards) and listen to records of Rudram, Chamakam, Sookthas and the like and memorise them. Since Balan Mama did not have a record player, Vanaja Mami took me to the house of one Saroja Mami who had the player and the records and I mustered enough interest and enthusiasm to learn these mantras.

Part III of my life in Kerala

2010-12-19T19:18:00.009+05:30

The river as already mentioned was the lifeline of Moovattupuzha. Early in the morning, the women left for the river in groups. What we call a ghat in northern India is called a Kadavu in Kerala. Anchu Muri Madhom was adjacent to a Kadavu, called the Thondu Kadavu. Before bathing, the women washed clothes which they carry with them in buckets. After the bath they proceeded back home. The washing and bathing was accompanied by much gossip and mirth. They were all back by 7 AM after which it was time to get the breakfast ready. Elderly people had baths at home using hot water. Cooking was in mud ovens with firewood, coconut shells and husk for fuel. Water was drawn from a well and it was during my stay in there in the early 80’s that piped water came to Anchu Muri Madhom. It was a novelty there though we have had it in the ACC quarters at Wadi ever since I could remember. After cooking breakfast the women went to the Puzhakkara Kavu Bhagawati temple. They served breakfast after returning.

The College I attended was called the Nirmala College. It was run by Christian missionaries. I was surprised by the number of institutions that the Christian missionaries were running in Moovattupuzha. From a maternity home where kids could be born, through child care centres, pre primary schools, high school, college, there were even old age homes, where these kids could spend their old age and finally, with even a cemetery, the Nirmala group of institutions could well take care of a human through life and thereafter.

The College ran courses from Pre degree level (Classes 11^th and 12^th were conducted in Colleges and degrees were awarded by Universities those days in Kerala) to post Graduate levels in Arts, Science and Commerce. There were four groups in the Pre degree level (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th Groups) each in two shifts – morning and evening. The first group which I took up, included Physics, Chemistry and Maths. The second Group taught Biology, Physics and Chemistry, the 3^rd was the Arts group and the 4^th was the commerce group. I was in the second shift, from 1 PM to 5:30 PM. The group was coded MS2. There were about 80 students in MS2. Since the classes were after 1 PM, I could leave for college after lunch. The college was on a hillock on the Thodupuzha road and was about 4 kilometers from Anchu Muri Madhom, which was normally covered by walk, though a bus ride cost just 10 paise. College politics was active in campuses in Kerala those days and the two rival groups were student wings of the Congress and the Communists. There were clashes often and strikes called “Samaram”, which meant a holiday. Our Principal was a Father called Dr. Mathew Thottiyil, a Ph.D in Chemistry.

The teaching was tolerable and the lecturers were well informed. There were rather remote, unlike school teachers, and did not mix a lot with the students. This is something that students out of schools realize as soon as they take up college in India. Often the relation is less personal and warm than school teachers were. When I mention Mathew Thottiyil, I must digress a little to talk about Kerala family names.

Surnames are arrived at in different ways in India. In north India, especially the so called cow belt, these names derive from castes mostly. Yadav, Aggarwal, Jain etc. In Bengal there are caste/sub-division- among- caste based surnames like Mukhopadhyaya,(a Brahmin, and a chief priest) Mitra( a non Brahmin and a kayastha), Sen ( a non Brahmin and a Baid) etc. Bengal also has what are called titles, like Roychoudhury, Sarkar etc., primarily given by the British. Where the caste was not high up in the hierarchy, people preferred to use titles, if they had one. Some high castes like the Tagores, who were Brahmins to begin with, used titles too, instead ofsurnames. Often a Bengali name can be represented by the formula N.Kumar.S where N was the given name, and S the surname, just as in Punjab, especially among the Sikhs the name could be represented by N.Singh.S. Punjabils have surnames like Ahluwalia, Chawla, Kapoor, Chopra etc. which are used both by the Hindus and the Sikhs, with the difference that the Hindus did not use Singh. Maharashtra had another unique method. The given name followed by the father’s name (in its entirety - unlike a patronymal form like in Russia) and a surname formed from the name of the village they originated from. A typical name would be Shrikant Sitaram Rahalkar, where the guy is Shrikant, his father Sitaram, and Rahalkar would indicate that the person came from the Rahal village and constitutes the surname. Incidentally higher castes like Brahmins had surnames ending in Kar and others had names ending in “e”. So two people originating from say Tendul could be Tendulkar or Tendule depending on their caste. There are caste based names like Deshpande, Kulkarni, Patil etc. too in Maharastra.

In Kashmir, surnames usually depend on caste or profession and are universally used by Hindus and Muslims. Thus, typically Hindu surnames like Pandit or Guru can be used by a Muslim like in Mohammad Usman Pandit or Abdul Ahsan Guru. This discussion on surnames merits an entire article, but on to Kerala surnames.

In Kerala, the practice of using the house name before or after the given name is prevalent. For example Thomas Valiyapurackal could be a valid name, where Thomas is the given name while Valiyapurackal is the house name. The houses usually were named depending on some characteristic of the house. A house located to the north of some significant location was called the Vadakke Veedu (northern house) and the inhabitants were called ‘something or the other’ Vadakkeveettil. This applied uniformly to all religious denominations so that surnames didn’t denote either caste of religion. There can technically be a Jameel Puliyanchottil, or a Jacob Puliyanchottil or a Janardhanan Puliyanchottil. The given names themselves, these days, like Sibi, Jiji, Mobin, Shaji etc. are often not indicative of the religion, and could be Hindu or Christian. Muslims normally have a Muslim first name. There again were caste names like Nair, Menon, Panikkar etc. More about this later.

Part II of my life in Kerala

2010-12-11T20:59:00.001+05:30

Those were the days. Soon my parents and Thangi left for Wadi with Madhu. I started my first sojourn in life away from the only family I knew, in a town to which I was a mere visitor earlier. Moovattupuzha was a small town. It had two centres of power, Kacherithazham (the court complex) and postaapisumpadi (the post office). The whole town was centered around the river. We had the Kavumpadi and the Kizhakkekkara on the opposite sides of the river. Atleast in the early 1980, Iyers mostly occupied Kavumpady and Muslims the Kizhakkekkara. The Kizhakkekkara area was called the chantha – or the market - and housed a cinema theatre the Apsara. There were two other theatres Latha and Lakshmi. Latha was on Thodupuzha road and Lakshmi n Velloorkunnam. There being no TV, cinema was the only means of entertainment then. The Malayalam heroes then were Premnasir, Madhu and a young one called Jayan. Mohanlal and Mammooty were yet to come on the scene. Jayan died in a helicopter accident while shooting and there was a lot of grief all around.

Now like in the rest of India, movies in Moovattupuzha too were released on Friday. Every Friday morning, a cart with triangular cross section, bearing movie posters on either sides and drawn by a man, accompanied by another who beat drums walked the streets of Moovattupuzha. This was for information and publicity of the public. The movie tickets were low priced like 2 Rupees for second class, 3 for first class and 5 for balcony etc. I was introduced to Malayalam cinema and they were all invariably good. Unlike the love romance genre or the gory violence of Bollywood movies these had social messages. They felt real. Actors like Nedumudi Venu brought a lot of realism to movies. Later in Coimbatore, I learnt Malayalam movies had a different connotation in other parts of the country. But I have hardly seen one such movie while in Kerala. In fact they remain some of the best movies to be made in India. Charting a middle path avoiding the gaudy, overacting themes of Tamil movies and Hindi movies of those times and also from the overpowering reality of Bengali movies they blended realism with entertainment in a healthy ratio. Since TVs were yet to invade living rooms, apart from radio and books these provided wholesome entertainment.

Often I accompanied my uncle Balan Mama and Vanaja Mami to these movies. Sometimes I went alone. A few words about Balan Mama and Mami. Balan Mama was the last son and indeed the last child of my maternal grandparents. The eldest son/child, Ponnanna, left home early and was employed with a British company Pierce Lesley and Company at Cochin. He had set up a separate establishment and after the daughters got married off one by one, and as my grandparents aged, Balan Mama became the head of the family. He was a Government of Kerala employee who retired as the Assistant Registrar of Cooperative societies. He was not a man of many words. He was silent to the extent of being dour. The main Anchu Muri Madhom had two portions. The three rooms on the left were rented out to one Subramania Iyer of Trikkariyoor. Subramania Iyer and his wife Kaveri had two children, Rajan and Vanaja. Vanaja grew up at Anchu Muri Madhom. Balan Mama took a fancy to Vanaja Mami, though given the character of Balan Mama this seems strange to imagine. Vanaja Mami on the other hand was a vivacious girl. Eventually they got married and had two kids, Sreeram and Lakshmi.

Most sisters of Balan Mama were married off into ordinary families and they stayed in some godforsaken places and invariably some of their kids, my cousins came and stayed in Anchu Muri Madhom for their higher education. I was one of them. To the credit of Vanaja Mami, she endeared herself to all these cousins of mine and was friendly in a comradely sort of way. Maybe it was because she was of an intermediate generation. She tried her best to treat her husband’s nephews and nieces very much like her own kids. Like my own mother who spent a majority of her life under the overpowering influence of Thangi, my maternal grandmother too functioned under an overpowering mother in law and hence she was a shadowy woman. Vanaja Mami was therefore the face of the family amongst outsiders.

Part I of my life in Kerala

2010-10-10T22:04:00.003+05:30

Now Kerala was a different place altogether as I said. Moovattupuzha was in what is known as the Kochi Tiruvitankoor area and was in the plains. Kerala sweeps dizzyingly from the hilltops to the seashore in a matter of 80 kilometers along its width and Moottupuzha lay somewhere in the middle. Wikipedia, the all knowing one, tells us “Muvattupuzha was part of the Vadakkumkoor Kingdom until it was captured by the Travancore Kingdom, now merged into the state of Kerala. Old documents show that the lands of Muvattupuzha belonged to ‘Edappally Swaroopam’, but were later transferred to ‘Manas’ (Brahmin Families) St. Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, who introduced Christianity to India, is believed to have visited Muvattupuzha and converted several families to Christian faith.”

Moovattupuzha literally means the river of three streams. Three streams apparently meet at Moovattupuzha and become one. People there even celebrate the river as a triveni sangamam like the Allahabad sangam. Unlike many great rivers of the Indo Gangetic plains, the streams that constitute Moovattupuzha and the final river itself meander a lot as you can see on any map, and hence one is not really sure whether one is on the west bank or the east, north bank or the south. But fortunately for us, people in Moovattupuzha talk about “thekku puram” or the southern side and “vadakku puram” or the northern side to indicate directions rather than use terms like “Bittu ke dookan ki taraf” or “Ram Mandir ke taraf” that we see in Delhi. I therefore deduce that Anchu Muri Madhom, the ancestral house of my mother was located on the western banks of Moovattupuzha.

It was located in an area called the Kavumpady, meaning the steps of the Kavu, which traditionally is a shrine dedicated to the Goddess Bhagawati, who is a consort of Lord Shiva and is the sister of Lord Vishnu. Please click onto my post dated 24/08/2006 for more details. There are innumerable Kavus in Kerala and one needs to visit them to imbibe the atmosphere that surrounds them. I have visited most temples in India and the feelings that one gets in Kavus of Kerala can be matched only by the feelings that one gets in the Dzongs of Bhutan. A surreal 15th century feeling, that permeates the bones of even a diehard atheist and fills him with awe.

It was a diametrically opposite life for me. I had to speak in Malayalam instead of Wadi Hindi. Wear Mundu with the freedom to walk around topless in the neighbourhood instead of shorts and shirts as in Wadi. No rotis, just red boiled rice. Lots and lots of coconuts, heroes like Jayan and Premnasir to substitute for Amitabh Bachhan and Shatrughan Sinha, and most importantly, for an adolescent, beautiful girls. The girls of Kerala win the bronze, with Telugu girls winning the silver and the gold goes to ………hold your breaths there like you do in TV reality shows, ……Bengali girls!!!.

I leave Wadi behind

2010-07-12T00:21:00.001+05:30

My parents were married on the 6th of June 1963 and as far as I know, my father had not visited my mother’s maternal home even once since then. All our visits to Moovattupuzha involved just me and my mother. Soon after the results of my SSLC exams were declared, it was decided that I be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol every Brahmin boy carried to his grave at Guruvayoor on 25th April 1980. This necessitated a visit to Kerala by all concerned and we booked tickets by the 81 Down Jayanthi Janata Express which left Wadi at 5:15 AM every morning towards Kerala. The tickets for the 1200 kilometer journey was Rs.55/- per person (the cost of 750 grams of tomatoes this evening at Mayur Vihar in Delhi) by second class.

The brief sleep of three hours the night before we left for Kerala, like that of Calphurnia, Julius Ceasar’s wife, or that of the wife of Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov in Tolstoy’s immortal story “God sees the Truth but waits” which NRB was fond of telling, was plagued by nightmares and I was not to know that I was to be left behind by the only family I knew and that I would not come back soon from Kerala. It was to be an uprooting which plagues me to this day.

We were ready and got on the ACC Jeep at 4 AM. Soon we were at Wadi station awaiting the train. At that ungodly hour all train doors of all compartments were tightly closed and a lot of banging and shouting brought a bleary eyed TTE to the door. Since the train stopped there for hardly five minutes, and we had a lot of luggage we barely managed to get into the coach. The train took off and soon we were passing Nalwar and then Yadgir on towards Raichur. After a blistering Andhra summer day in the train, we reached Trichur again at an ungodly hour and took a taxi to Guruvayoor reaching the holy place at 6 AM the next morning. We put up at the Amrita Lodge

My Uncle Balan Mama and his wife Vanaja Mami arrived soon after and so did a sprinkling of some other assorted relatives. The thread ceremony was consummated at the house of a priest and after a lunch, the relatives left. We left a few days later to Perumbavoor enroute to Koovappady, Thangi’s maternal home enroute to Moovattupuzha. The south west monsoons were approaching the Kerala coast and the God’s own country - which it was not in those days – was verdant with strange vegetations of all kinds – the kinds never seen in north Karnataka. One saw special flowers and seeds about which one had only heard and seen diagrams of in NRB’s biology classes. It was cooler and nature was bountiful. I had an opportunity to see and talk to patriarchs like Manian Mama about whom one had only heard before. I saw food cooked in firewood ovens and water drawn from wells. Vegetables here came from backyard gardens and not from the market. It was not the Lambadis who brought milk from unseen sources, but it was the domestic cow which gave it. The food was a little different in taste and flavour too, and after the barren wastes of Wadi to which I was accustomed, these verdant greens provided a lovely splendour. I was shown the school which my father had attended and other landmarks about which I had heard ad nauseum at STRT 31/8 from a nostalgic Thangi. We spent a week in Koovappadi. It was another world altogether, a world in which I was to be trapped for a long time to come, a final and absolute departure from Wadi, the only home I knew - forever.

Last days at MCC and a romantic inclination

2010-07-11T23:44:00.002+05:30

The Board exams of 10th Standard were fast approaching. There were special classes galore to complete the syllabus in time. After three years, the first of which was spent in creating a foothold in Shahabad society, and the second in consolidating, the third was a time when we from Wadi were fairly established and were blooming. While during 1977-78 (incidentally it was in June 1977 that I got my glasses for myopia with a strength of -4.5 dioptres for each eye) we felt like outsiders and often longed to go back home, in 1979-80, we wanted to stay back in Shahabad and MCC forever. By February, we got out old diaries, in which we sought autographs from all. Most wrote clichéd phrases and some wrote brilliant ones. NRB wrote in my diary “He knows enough who knows how to learn”. How true!

I must now mention at least in passing about a romantic inclination – purely on my part -that developed during my 9th and 10th standards. It wasn’t very overpowering but it gives rise to pleasant memories even to this day. There were many of us who associated themselves with girls and boasted about it. With my powerful glasses, I was already branded a nerd. I was dubbed the Principal. Only of late, when everyone my age wears glasses, has the opinion that I, the wearer of glasses, might be more academically inclined, has declined. But back then, I was considered a sort of Rishyashringa, with scant sexual leanings. This blight of a reputation continued through my productive - or shall I call them my reproductive years – years, accentuated by my weak, non atheletic looks (I weighed a paltry 35 kgs then with patchy facial hair and pimples) to my detriment. Seeing that it worked to my advantage, I worked on my nerdy image by carrying around encyclopediae and actually reading them and making notes.

Janaki’s parents arrived at Wadi in 1976. They had four children, Suryanarayana, Janaki, Bhavani and Arunakanti. Suri was a friend to whom I will be eternally grateful for pointing me towards science. Had I shaped up better and - ahem- won a Nobel for instance, I would have acknowledged his influence in my acceptance speech. I read a lot of books under his direction, like Gamow’s 1.2.3 Infinity and the like. I started on Wodehouse. He had a decent collection of books and naturally, I was a regular visitor to their home. Suri being the eldest, and a son to boot, was the star child of their home and Arunakanti the youngest, was a pet. Janaki was a little gawky back then, but age is a great leveler, especially among adolescent girls. She was beginning to look very attractive indeed to me. To be honest she was very friendly but she did nothing to encourage my fantasies but as the lead actors in Ishquiya sing, “Dil to bachha hai ji, thoda kacha hai ji”, I was rather enamoured of this gawky, outgoing beauty of Janaki.

Those were heady times. I was one of the favoured students of the sisters of MCC, and had a good home. I was poised to do well in the 10th Standard Boards. The threat of Gita Menon as a competitor had receded and though Ramprasad was one step ahead of me, I was sure of becoming a matriculate with distinction. Combined with the warmth I felt towards Janaki, as I said these were heady times. What was to come was of little concern. The thought that very soon we will be scattered like a handful of mustard seeds all over India and may not see each other again in our lives didn’t even occur. I wouldn’t still go so far as to call it a besottement, but the feelings I harboured for Janaki drove me to excel and we had many an argument of the intellectual kind. The less sophisticated but braver ones like Santhanam and to some extent JC, took concrete steps towards persons of the opposite sex that they fancied but not me. I took the intellectual route which was to prove to be my weakness for years to come. However, lest I offend sensibilities of many concerned, I am not writing more on this, but God bless us all, now it is out and on the records that I harboured very soft and warm feelings for Janaki starting 1977.

One morning Sr.Angelita came in with the application forms for the Boards and for the first time I accurately deduced my date of birth as 18th September 1964, which I duly filled in in the form. The exams soon came and were held in March 1980 in the Government High School in Shahabad. It was the last exam for which I was fully prepared and hence attempted without any fear. I scored decent marks and for the records, I secured the 16th position in Karnataka State in the results that were announced in May 1980 scoring 496 out of 600.

Am I being an escapist?

2010-03-06T14:23:00.002+05:30

When I began this blog, I probably did it because I wanted to be a child again, 6 years, 10 years, 14 years old. Because I once again wanted to think that a 10 paise candy is better than money, because you can eat candy and not worry about food poisoning and diabetes. Because I wanted to go to a roadside stall in Shahabad and still believe it is a 5 star restaurant. I want to go outside without a suit, in chappals without worrying how I looked. I wanted to go back to the days when music came out of the vocal chords of people and not out of MP3 players.

I remember when I was innocent, and I thought that everyone was happy because I was. I wanted to distance myself from the complexities of life, and once again become excited over the small things. I wanted to ride my bike which my father couldn’t afford to buy for me all the way to the park, without worrying that I will get breathless or run over.

I wanted to live simple again, I didn't want my days to be full of fears and tensions, and how to survive a few more days during the month when there is no money left in my bank. I want to believe in the power of laughter, of a hug, a handshake, of a kind word, of truth, justice or peace. I wanted once again to believe in the human race. Do any of you feel that way? Is that an escapist attitude?

A fortnight in Finland

2010-03-01T12:35:00.003+05:30

“Finland’s landscapes are a glorious variation on the themes of forest and water, where the comforts of modern life are never far away. Yet each region has its distinct character, from the wilds of Lapland to the inspiring lakes of the East and the archipelagos of the South-West. Finland is full of interesting contrasts, such as the four seasons, the midnight sun and the long winter nights and the different cultural heritages of the Eastern and Western parts of the country” is how the website visitfinland.com, the official website of the Tourism Department of the Government of Finland describes the Country. And during a visit to Finland, I discovered this was to a large extent true. What is more, it combines the good points of many Western European Nations while avoiding the bad, thereby making it an idyllic location.

Finnair, the official carrier of Finland, operates direct flight from Delhi and Mumbai regularly to the Capital of Finland, Helsinki. I took the flight from Delhi, from where the flight operates all seven days a week in the early hours of 17th of August 2009. The distance from Delhi to Helsinki is about 5200 miles. At Delhi airport, I was rather surprised to find the flight is fully booked most of the days because I thought places like London or Frankfurt or Paris would be destinations more sought after by Indians. Also while there are many more people from such countries coming to India, I have seen very few Finns in India. While talking to some of my co passengers, mostly Indians, I discovered that they were using Helsinki as a transit destination, planning to take Finnair flights from Helsinki to Heathrow, Frankfurt and the like, because that works out cheaper! A Sikh gentleman based in Birmingham told me that he has done it more than twenty times and has never once ventured out of the Helsinki Vantaa Airport. He doesn’t know what he has missed. And that is the secret of crowded flights to Helsinki.

The flight itself was pleasant, with the crew decidedly competent (as I discovered when a frail blonde girl fainted soon after take off) but unlike the sweet beauties that one is accustomed to see on Indian flights, the Finnair crew was decidedly matronly though brisk and efficient. I was served something which I was assured was vegetarian and a miniscule bottle of red wine, after which I went to sleep.

The Helsinki airport is at Vantaa, located to the north of the Capital Helsinki. The distance between Delhi and Helsinki-Vantaa is roughly 5300 kilometers and is covered in slightly over six hours. The flight takes off at 1:00 AM local time and reaches Vantaa at 6:00 AM local time after flying over six hours. Helsinki in summer is two hours and thirty minute behind IST (and that makes a ‘late to bed, late to rise’ guys like me normal). The crew is courteous, efficient and has some Indians among them. Since it is a night flight, not much food and drinks are served but the return flight is much better.

It was rather bleak and gloomy at 6:00 AM when we landed at the Helsinki Vantaa airport early on the morning of 17th August. It was supposedly midsummer in Finland, but for a Delhiite it seemed like the 28th of December rather than the 17th of August. 12 degrees Celsius and drizzling and cloudy at 10 AM. Disembarkation, customs and immigration were quick and easy, probably because I had impeccable documents. No buses at Helsinki Vantaa Airport, just aerobridges. Outside the Airport, it took just a minute to engage a taxi. All taxis in Helsinki are equipped with the latest GPS monitors and touch screens, with a radio connection and WiFi enabled, so that they can accept credit card payments. Vehicles drive down the right as in the US, and the vehicles are all left hand drives. I, who normally likes to sit on the front with the driver, invariably rushed and took my place near the left front door, and was invariably met with the question “Would you prefer to drive?”, before realizing my mistake. By the time I sheepishly made my way to the other side someone else had already occupied the coveted seat, and both the window seats on the back too. Nevertheless, after the auto rides in Delhi, such rides came as a pleasant surprise. The only note of warning is that whenever you hear the price of anything, repeat anything, in Euros never mentally convert it into rupee equivalent, for if you do, you will be able to do nothing in Finland. For records, the six kilometer taxi ride from the Airport to the hotel cost me over 2500 rupees.

We were booked in at Hotelli Tikkurila, a Spartan hostel in the town of Tikkurila. The taxi ride took about 15 minutes. By the time we arrived it was drizzling, and gloomy, and the time was 8:00 AM (10:30 AM in India). And at 8:00 AM on a Sunday, in a northern European city, even if it happened to be a national capital, there was hardly anyone out on the streets. The drive was similar to a drive out of Delhi airport what with flyovers, underpasses, white on green roadsigns and the like and the landscape was stark, with granite jutting out of the ground, but green with conifers nevertheless.

The roadsigns were a revelation though. We in India are very familiar with bilingual, trilingual and even multilingual roadsigns – even Delhi has roadsigns in four languages, but in Finland, where Swedish happens to be the second language, every road sign is in Finnish and Swedish. ‘Perfectly fine’ you may say, but then, each town’s name, each square and street name was totally different in Finnish and Swedish! It is like calling Pandit Nehru Marg as ‘Learned person from a family that lived beside the canal Road’ in English or Kamala Nehru Marg as “Lotus from beside the canal Road’. Helsinki itself was called Helsingfors in Swedish. All my education about proper nouns being non translatable went down the drain during that fortnight in Finland.

And like the Mullah ka daud, my post about Finland too ends in Wadi. Except for the opulence, greenery, weather and cleanliness, a typical small town in Finland like Tikkurila reminded one of Wadi in 1970.

Barber shop wisdom

2010-01-24T23:10:00.000+05:30

There is a shloka in the Valmiki Ramayana, in which it is said: Dasharatha’s hairs were turning grey in the side of his temples. The grey hairs near the sides leant into his ears and whispered, ‘you are getting old, crown Rama as the King and retire to the forest for your vanaprasthashrama’, whereafter Dasharatha decided to anoint Rama.

I was realising something when I was getting my hairs cut this evening. As kids, we were afraid of getting our hairs cut. We feared the barbers scissors. Our fathers stood nearby, cajoling and encouraging us, and saying that it will be over soon. The large cloth wrapped around our puny shoulders, were showered with cut hair, black and healthy and straight. To me it used to happen at Saibanna’s Modern saloon at Wadi.

Time passed. It was Gulbarga, then Moovattupuzha and Coimbatore and Calcutta. The hairs were getting snipped regularly at monthly intervals and fell on the shroud. The hairs were sparser and there were a few that were grey. But they were few.

On to Delhi. Fast forward a few decades. The hairs were falling down as before but the ratio of grey to black was increasing. Today there was a lot of grey. More grey than black and they were not as straight and stiff as before. Lots of grey hair. We are growing older. As we plod through life, a visit to the barber’s shop tells us more about passing time than anything else does. The black hair days can never come back. Time passes. We pass away. It is time for our kids to take over the world.

An Aside to the Srinath Saga

2010-01-10T00:27:00.001+05:30

Long before Srinath was born, Thangi woke up one night around 4 AM to use the bathroom. Returning to her bed in the dark, half asleep, she sat on the floor rather heavily thinking it was the edge of her bed. She found she couldn’t get up. The ensuing chaos resulted in our finding that she had damaged her hip and had to be seriously attended to orthopedically. Wadi had doctors for cold and cough and even Gulbarga was primitive back then, though it had reputed orthopaedicians like the Shah brothers by 1987, when I required the services of one. It was not that Gulbarga couldn’t handle the case but at 37 kilometers from Wadi it was farther than Yadgir and the Yadgir Hospital was more reputed than MRMC, Gulbarga. so it was to Yadgir that we eventually went.

The ACC doctor was called in by 6 AM, and it became clear that she was to be shifted to the Yadgir Mission Hospital for treatment. It was formally called the Holston Hospital and was run by Christian missionaries. By 8 AM Thangi was laid on a bed in the back of a truck and we drove along the rickety road to Yadgir, to the south of Wadi. By noon we had covered the 15 odd kilometers to Yadgir, and reached the hospital. It was new and spanking in my eyes and like ACC in Wadi, it was an Institution which ran the town of Yadgir like a monolith. The doctors were rather well trained and were original Christians of the higher echelons, while the nurses and others were converted first generation Christians. They had a school and other such facilities and the senior doctors were treated like royalty.

It was to the care of one Dr. Levy (whom Thangi stubbornly refered to as Dr. Ravi) that Thangi was entrusted. Dr.Levy was a kind and dignified gentleman about 45 years of age. He gravely pronounced that there has to be surgery and that the hip and the Femur were both cracked. Babu had to travel to MRMC, Gulbarga to get prosthetic and other medical supplies for the operation. The operation was a success though it crippled Thangi forever. For recuperation, we all had to stay at Yadgir for over a month and I more or less missed my Class Six exams. While at Yadgir, being Dr, Levy’s patients we were treated very well indeed. We had carried our kerosene primus stove and vessels for cooking there, and during the Annual day celebrations in the Mission school there, I accompanied Dr. Levy as his guest, and it was all a jolly good affair.

Back in Wadi, the plaster on Thangi’s leg were removed by the ACC hospital doctor and it took almost eight months before Thangi was on her feet though she was not the same anymore.

The advent of Srinath Part II

2010-01-09T23:42:00.002+05:30

The year 1980 was a blur of events. I was in Class Ten. Class Ten was a special year back then. It was the end of schooling and kids who had stayed together for 12 years since they were – well, kids - went their ways. There were the Board exams. The teen years compounded the issue. Emotional times. To top it, I was fairly important in the school with the majority recognizing that I had some special academic qualities. My aim then was to become a vice chancellor of a University and friends called me Principal. It was a heady feeling. When the other boys went about chasing girls who behaved with the utmost prissiness, I was more of a nerd. I read encyclopedias, Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse (a legacy of PVR Suryanarayana), George Orwell and the like. At home Srinath was growing up. I hadn’t really seen a baby at close quarters before that. He wasn’t a fussy baby and grew decently without much mess. I liked him a lot and remember crushing a stick of sugarcane and extract juice for him with a pestle at home.

One thing that comes to mind is a cast iron container in which one of us had to pound betel nuts with a pestle for Thangi to eat her Paan with. We called it Ural and olakkai. Thangi didn’t have teeth, and her supari had to be ground fine for her to chew it. Since she was an inveterate paan chewer, the pounding of supari was a regular if not daily feature at our house. The regular pounding in our first floor house was a source of constant irritation to those in the ground floor, Sister Irene Jaywanth and her two kids. Sister Jaywanth was a nurse in the ACC Hospital who had shifted from the mission hospital in Yadgir. Her husband Jaywanth was still with Mission Hospital Yadgir. Incidentally I had to spend about a month in Mission Hospital, Yadgir when I was in Class Six to repair a fracture Thangi incurred in her femur. Sister Irene came to 31/12 after Kaddu, about whom we read in a previous post. Arogyasamy had in the meanwhile retired and his house 31/11, opposite that of Sister Jaywanth was now the home of Francis, Arogyasami’s son, who had ultimately married his old love, our teacher of Class III, Fatima Miss.(Refer to my post on 24th July 2006). I often went to Shahabad on Sundays by Bargal to buy what was called Bhukna Supari, which was the leftover waste that was collected after supari was cut for regular paan chewers. It was cheap and served Thangi’s purpose adequately. Paan chewing was a habit I acquired from Thangi, which, added to tobacco, haunts me even today. The supari pounding pestle was the one I used to crush sugarcane for Srinath.

Originally Srinath’s face was oddly shaped. I remember his looking like a creature with an odd kind of long neck which seemed a separate entity of its own (he was called Kozhi Kittu, meaning Kittu who looks like a hen/cock, with a handy long neck by Thangi who had a propensity to call people by odd names; there were names like chaturthi, Ghatotkachan, Hidumban, Vamanan and the like for Babu's colleagues, the real names of whom I dare not even mention) and his face was shaped like what I thought was the popular jeera biscuit (hexagonal) available then. I liked to grab him by the neck occasionally and was soundly chastised by Babu for this once. This chastisement so hurt me that I refrained from handling Srinath thereafter. I hardly ever touch him even now and that chastisement may have been one subconscious reasons for this behaviour. And then again once when I was lifting Srinath, he doubled over backwards and I was terrified lest I had snapped his spine. Luckily for him, I obviously didn’t, and he seems to have more spine than I do even now. He had a saffron coloured Kurta and a lower garment of the same material which we called Jubba Jetti, of which he was very fond indeed. He hardly ever cried or made a nuisance of himself. Second borns have more tenacity as I see in Gayatri. I and Kartik get very emotional and touchy while I didn’t see Srinath ever being so concerned particularly about what people thought about him Gayatri seems just like that even now but time will tell how she shapes up.

The advent of Srinath Part I

2010-01-05T23:49:00.002+05:30

I simple need to take a break from Shahabad and Wadi and return to my home for a while at this point both to maintain the chronology of the storyline and to be faithful to my promise of this being a chronicle of my life and times. In the later part of 1978, when I was in class Nine, an event occurred, which became a turning point in my life and changed its course irreversibly. I learnt that I was soon to have a sibling.

Having been the only and the eldest son of my grandmother’s only and eldest son, I was on a pedestal since my birth. I do not know if I was irretrievably spoilt on that account or whether I acquired a sense of being someone special, or if I developed into a creature with a fragile albeit selfish ego. I leave it to others who have known me before and after 1979 to judge. But learning that one is to become an elder brother at the age of 15, changes something in you. It confuses you. It is like discovering that the Earth is not unique, and that there are other life bearing planets. I felt like the Church, which in the 15th century AD (what a coincidence! 15th year of my life and 15th century AD!!) had to contend with the increasing quantum of evidence that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe. During the early summer of 1979, Rajamani Periyappa arrived at Wadi one day to take my mother away to Moovattupuzha for her delivery. In the early hours of Wednesday the 20th of June 1979, my brother Srinath was born. In the absence of telephones, we received the news by telegram, that a boy child was born on the Aswathi day of Mithunam. It was a day of happiness and we waited for the newborn to arrive. It was eventually in September 1979 that Srinath, or Madhu as we call him arrived at Wadi. We had gone to the railway station in the ACC Willy’s Jeep to receive my mother and him and he looked very cute and cuddly indeed. The trip to the station was my last trip as a sole chosen one. The rickety Willy's Jeep making a U turn outside the railway station was somehow symbolic. My life has never been the same since. My grandmother remarked that he was much fairer than I was, when I was a baby and it was then that I realized that I was not possibly the special one. There were fairer kids than me. Srinath, the cute kid who came into my life when I was in Class Ten, is now past 30. He also blogs, and exceptionally well indeed on http://www.srinathonline.blogspot.com. Looking forward to his views on this on his blog. Will continue on this theme for a few more posts.

Three years in MCC and three Popes

2009-12-30T22:33:00.000+05:30

When I was reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown some years back, and when it came out as a movie this year, many people wondered at the amount of details that were given on the method of election of a Pope. As a matter of fact, when I was reading the novel, it all came back to me vividly. We had heard about this while we were at MCC. Like most things I heard people wonder about these days, I realized that it was MCC which told me these things first.

Pope Paul VI, who became Pope even before I was born, died on the 6th of August 1978 when we were just 3 months old in MCC. Like the mandatory framed photograph of Mahatma Gandhi in all police stations in India, all missionary schools had a framed photograph of Pope Paul the VI in the room of the Principal. And since this particular Pope had been around since 1963, his photograph was almost like that of Gandhiji or Jesus and one tended to believe that he was the permanent Pope. It was Sister Angel Mary who announced this sad news in the morning assembly. It was a great shock and loss to the Catholic world and to the extended family of Catholics like we from the MCC. Sr. Angel Mary also asked us to pray briefly and also told us a little about the Pope and his significance in Christendom. We also were told that a new Pope would be elected from amongst the cardinals eligible for election.

Joy of Joys!!! Very soon we had a new Pope. On August 26th, Cardinal Albino Luciani was anointed Pope John Paul the I. There was celebration in MCC and again Christendom had a Pope. In fact it was on this occasion that I remember being told about the black and white smoke plumes from the Vatican chimneys and their significance. Shahabad in those days, was not the www enabled global village. It was simply a plain village. A photograph could not immediately be obtained and framed. It would take atleast a month.

But we didn’t get a month. Tragedy struck again. Just a month later, on the 28th of September, Pope John Paul I too left for his heavenly abode. There was the announcement again and I remember some sisters weeping. The routine for electing a new pope began anew, and like the second occasion of any kind in the family, this was by now familiar. We read more about the process of election and since there was no TV or Internet then, we read from books in the library. And then again with the rising white smoke from the chimneys of the St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland was elected Supreme Pontiff. (Like Shri Ganga Singh Rautela, Director General of the National Council of Science Museums, for which I work) he was the first non Italian Pope in 450 years. His election filled in the void left by the demise of Pope John Paul the I. When he took up the Papal name of Ioannes Paulus PP. II, or Pope John Paul the II, there was some dismay because though Christians we were Indians and an element of superstition persisted. The first man to take up the name John Paul died within days of ascendancy and this name was considered ill omened or even foolhardy. Possibly this was the reason the sisters of MCC were in no hurry to get a framed photograph of the Pope for quite some time. Or maybe Sister Angelita who succeeded Sr. Angel Mary was a little too independent. I don’t remember a Papal photograph till I left MCC in 1980. But the Holy Father lived long enough to depart only very recently, after serving Christ for 27 long years

The formidable Urs

2009-12-30T09:39:00.004+05:30

Annual sports days were always part of the MCC school curriculum. We were classified into juniors, subjuniors, seniors and the like based solely on our weights. The 110 kilogram Jayachandran was then a measly 38 kilograms and I remember the figures because I being 40 Kilos barely qualified to be a junior, while Jayachandran went into the Sub junior category. Heavier guys like Xavier, tipping the scales at a massive 47 kilograms were seniors. I am now 82 Kgs. How lovely it would be to weigh 40 Kilos now!

It was in the winter of 1979 that the sisters of MCC decided that we should be celebrating the Annual Sports Day in a very professional manner like the opening ceremonies of modern day mega sporting events. There were to be group Hoopla dances and the like and yoga demonstrations. The venerable sisters, one doesn’t know from where, picked up a person called Urs from somewhere in south Karnataka, who was a dark wiry character retired from the Indian Army to train us for the big event.

One day after the school assembly, Urs was introduced and formally took over training. He taught us basic Yogic asanas and there were group drills. There were girls and boys practicing together and even those as uninclined in sporting activities as yours truly, were drafted in. Urs in the real Army tradition, liberally used harsh and bad words when a student didn’t perform to potential. He liberally used the word B*****od to girls and boys without gender bias. He pronounced it in a curious manner saying Baan for Behn. It was all mirth and fun for us boys while the girls giggled and squirmed.

Everything said and done, the annual event was a great success as they say and the time came to bid Urs goodbye. He was to board a bus from Shahabad to Gulbarga and then on to the depths of Kodagu or wherever, one morning in December 1979. There was a road running along the other side of MCC which went on to Gulbarga and we were waiting at the Bus stop, some of us seniors to see Urs off. A tractor with a trailer came chugging up from Shahbad side going towards Gulbarga with a lot of men and women sitting all over the tractor and the trailer. The driver was chugging merrily and when the tractor passed us, one woman who happened to be sitting on the connecting yoke between the tractor and the trailer dropped down between the wheels and the tractor went past. The woman escaped unhurt and got up walking towards the tractor which had stopped in response to the shouting and screaming of the occupants.

Urs was properly agitated and caught hold of the driver “B******d saala, tractor chalata ki helicopter chalata re? Kya be sochta?” he screamed and shook him by the collar. Everyone joined the melee and soon there was a crowd, during which time, the bus to Gulbarga came and went away without Urs. When the realisation that the bus has gone by, and there was no bus till the next day dawned, Urs abruptly abandoned his militancy, the tractor drove away and we came back to MCC. Urs left alone the next day with no escorts to see him off. The days of excitement were over and MCC went back to its academic ways.

The curious case of the Singamsettis

2009-12-27T02:42:00.002+05:30

I don’t particularly like to write this post but in the interests of recording historical events I need to. I sincerely hope I am not opening up old wounds or being insensitive.

During vacations we used to go to Shahabad on occasions. We started in the morning by Bargal and returned either in the afternoon by Mail or by evening Bargal. Being a close friend, Ramarao was one person whose house we visited often. Though they stayed in an SSQ, the ambience in their house was rather down to earth. We enjoyed playing and talking in the backyard, and since Rama’s father Singamsetti Poleswara Rao was the Technical Librarian of ABL, there were many books in their house, neatly bound and accessioned/cataloged for us to read. Unlike in other SSQs, there were no fancy servants serving chilled fruit juices in frosted glass tumblers, but Rama’s mom bringing in something more familiar like tea in cups. There was something ordinary to eat too.

Lunch was again a normal affair with typical middle class Telugu fare like rice with gun powder, the occasional pappu and kooralu, the inevitable avakaya and curds. It was filling and eaten in the manner of middle class TRT people. Rama had a much younger brother Lakshminarayana who was the omnipresent Bujji of Telugu households. Bujji was initially in the MCC, but for some reason, S P Rao took him off the school and educated him himself till class X. We wondered why, but S P Rao, with his bald head and short stocky features and a rather stern countenance like Mr.Pickwick, dissuaded us from questioning the wisdom of withdrawing a child from the redoubtable MCC and educating him at home in too much detail.

Mrs. Rao was a typical Telugu housewife, who talked less and worked more. There are people who said she talked more than was good for her and somehow, though everything seemed hunky dory during our visits, there seemed to be an unperceived but palpable tension in the household – or was it our wisdom in hindsight?

Rama was sociability personified and he was intelligence, maturity and wisdom in a single package, and was looked upon by most of us, as a person who will travel far in academic circles. Lesser students looked upto him as an intellectual goliath, very much in the mould of another Telugu, P V R Suryanarayana, the brother of Janaki. To Ravi Rahalkar and those like him Rama was a giant, a veritable Rama to Ravi Rahalkar’s Lakshman.

After one vacation- I think it was Dussehra vacations - , when we went back to our classes, Rama was not to be seen and we heard that Rama’s mother had killed herself! Apparently she set fire to herself like Mrs. Narwate of Wadi had done earlier. Frankly we couldn’t understand it and expected Rama to be broken hearted. Soon Rama came back to school but was pretty chevalier in his attitude to the whole thing. Naturally a mother killing herself should have affected her elder son very deeply indeed especially when he was 14-15. But Rama blustered on. It was all a mystery to us. We heard whispered gossips pertaining to the goings on in the family and we chose to hush it all up. We continued as usual. We continued to visit Rama’s house even thereafter and I remember looking furtively for signs - like remnants of the fire or blackening of walls - of the incident in the kitchen. But there was nothing. The similar kind of food, the same unchanged Mr.S.P.Rao and Bujji. It came to our ears however, that most families shunned further contact with the Singamsettis, but we continued our associations. Rama continued to be a friend long thereafter and became maturer and maturer as days passed till he matured into an old man by the time we were in College.

The family was no doubt shattered, as is evident from the way Rama lives his life now. He was destined to be a software whizkid like so many other Telugu kids in the US now, but Rama, alas is doing something ordinary in Bangalore now. The mystery of Rama’s mother and the reason and means by which she met her untimely death remains a mystery, atleast to us from Wadi.

Staying Back overnight at Shahabad Part II

2009-12-25T20:50:00.000+05:30

Some days which were holidays we stayed back during the day too. The day was mostly spent in visiting friends, playing around with them, having lunch with them and reading. We had simple pursuits and the backyards of the SSQs were particularly interesting places. The guava trees in many houses like those in Ramarao’s house were ripe picking for us. Having stayed in TRTs all our lives, it was awesome visiting the interiors of the spacious SSQs and running around in their backyards.

We once were in Prasanna’s house. Prasanna’s dad Ramakrishnan was a lively person and very much into music. He sang with melody and enthusiasm. It was around this time that the Malayalam movie classic, Swathi Tirunal based of the poet-composer king was released. Prasanna’s dad sand for us some of the krithis of which “Kripaya Palaya Shourey” still lingers in memory. I learned to sing it and curiously fell into a superstition which persists to this day.

When there were power failures in Wadi those days – which was a rare event – I once happened to sing Kripaya Palaya and the lights came on. I did it once again and then several times and the lights came back on. Knowing fully well that it was silly, I decided that singing Kripaya Palaya is an antidote to power failures. Even today I do this when power fails. For quite some time it was a great wonder to me, when I landed up in Calcutta in 1991. Those were the days when 15 hour power failures - proudly baptized Load Shedding - , was the norm there. We used to stay at the hostel and I sang and sang – and lo and behold the power came on! It was only later that I realized that I had been singing for several hours. It was then that I realized the secret of Kripaya Palaya. Singing long enough brought back power not because you sang it, but because you sang till the power came back! In fact any action does this. This was a vivid way to realize the power of superstitions. You believe something happens when you do something, build a mindset around it and then make it happen by your actions.

Whatever that may be, Prasanna’s dad and his Swathi Tirunal kritis induced in me a lifelong love for carnatic classical music. The gentleman is no more but the seeds he sowed germinated and grew. It led me into more forays often erratic and in spurts, in the future and persists to this day.

Staying Back overnight at Shahabad Part I

2009-12-25T20:18:00.000+05:30

There were days when we stayed over at Shahabad overnight. It happened when we were in Class Ten. There were special classes, combined study and all the things that go in with an impending board examination. In those days, Class Ten was the most important milestone. It made you a matriculate. Classes 11 and 12 were done in colleges. They were variously called Pre University course or Pre Degree course, depending on where you were. Another thing that was different then was things like accountancy, commerce etc., were not considered career options atleast in Shahabad. It was either Engineering or Medicine. So as we went about preparing for the Class Ten exams, also called SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate), we, as I said had sometimes to stay back in Shahabad overnight, partially out of necessity but mostly out of a desire for adventure or as a desire to emphasise our grownupness.

We had seen Shahabad from 9 AM to 5 PM but later it was something we didn’t know anything about. The staying behind was in groups and we stuck to our own types. Boys with boys, girls with girls, south Indians – Madrasis I mean -with south Indians and so on. There were sub groups based on close friendships too. Often people like me and Jayachandran and Santhanam stayed with Ramprasad. Not that Santhanam was too keen on studies but he was there.

I was rather enamoured of Sreeragam, a raga in the Carnatic tradition at that time. It still is a great favourite. Prasad’s mother was fairly well trained in Carnatic music. Though my mother was too, it was to the extent of singing a few songs in the Navaratri Kolu, but Rqamprasad’s mother seemed to have been traditionally trained. I got from her the swarasthanas and sahitya of Endaro mahanubhavulu by Tyagaraja and learnt to sing it. Also at that time the popular Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan carried a serial story called Palangal by Sivasankari, which was and remains to be a classic narration. It flitted across decades to portray the life of a typical traditional Iyer woman across three generations. It still is one of my favourites recording the lifestyles in those days. I tried writing a story for Woman’s era in these lines at a later date when many of my articles were published, but I couldn’t do justice to it so skipped it.

Iyers invariably subscribed to Kumudam or Kalki or Kalaimagal or Vikatan wherever they may happen to live. Another curious habit with many of them was tearing out pages of serial stories like these and binding them as a complete book. Prasad’s mother had a bound copy of Palangal. I begged and borrowed it from her to reread it and very unfortunately, misplaced it after reading. I don’t think Prasad’s mother forgave me for a long long time for this misdemanour.

The moth eaten Autograph Diary

2009-11-03T00:02:00.001+05:30

As mentioned elsewhere, Sanskrit was our first language, English the Second and Hindi the third language in Tenth. One morning, just after we had filled up the Tenth Standard board examination forms (that was when I got two things – my date of birth and my signature, which have remained more or less intact to this day. It is strange to imagine that at that time we had the power to enter whatever reasonable date between 1st April 1964 and 31st March 1965 as our birthdates. I had, done fairly extensive research with a panchangam, an inland letter written by my maternal grandfather to my father in September 1964 and some deduction to arrive at the fact that 18th September 1964 as my birthdate.

Then one day Sr. Angelita dropped a bombshell. The Government of Karnataka had decreed that Kannada has to be a paper in Tenth. It was a gloomy day for us. The girls wept copiously and the boys sat glum. We didn’t know what to study. Fortunately the conundrum resolved itself soon and we finally wrote the Hindi paper.

And then began the ritual of collecting autographs. We begged our parents for a diary and circulated it around asking people to write. Over 120 kids from the high school and the teachers wrote words of humour and wisdom and signed the book. NRB wrote on my autograph diary, “He knows enough who knows how to learn”. How true!!! Sr. Angelita in her trademark green ink wrote “May God Bless you” and signed. Others wrote similar words. There was one master, an Anglo Indian who taught us the Guitar, a person with a very English name - Rodger Bronkhurst. He claimed to have arrived from Australia though he looked more like an Indian than even us Wadiites. Then there was Gangadhar, our librarian, who penned a verse in calligraphic Kannada script. In short, getting the Autograph Diary filled was our most important occupation during the months leading to the Board Exams. While on a recent impulsive trip to Coimbatore to see my aged parents, my brother there had decided to sell off old and moth eaten books, out of which I managed to salvage the autograph diary. Reading it gave a lot of satisfaction and solace. Rosy was there, so was Mohan, as was Anthony James. And they will remain with me till I have that book. Rosy had sketched a smiley face to embellish her words. Smile away guys, you have left all your pains behind for us to carry around. We will bear your crosses for the rest of our days, and tell the Lord to treat us with a little more humanity (or Godliness if you wish) while we are here.

Special Classes in Shahabad

2009-11-02T23:38:00.004+05:30

Class Ten was a period of great excitement as also hard work. We didn’t know it, rather did not realize it, that we were all to part, some of us forever, some like Mohan, Rosy and Anthony James. I haven’t seen these after then and most certainly am not likely to see them till I too pass on to another world. The others, thankfully are still in this world, and who knows what will happen when? Had we known then, we would possibly have tried to live our days together with greater bonding and love. But we did, we, of the batch of 1980 were very well bonded.

There were special classes. Since the bus from Wadi didn’t run on Sundays, we from Wadi took the early morning Bargal or Janata express to Shahabad. Would you believe it, the Bargal ticket was 35 paise from Wadi to Shahabad and the Janata ticket was 55 paise. Most of the time, we didn’t buy these tickets. Reaching Shahabad early on Sunday mornings, walk along the railway line and crossed a nala which had a 2 feet wide chequered sheet walkway on one side towards ACC colony. Invariably, the trains we arrived by crossed the nala while we were walking along it, or else we waited for the train to come rumbling and thudding. Standing a foot away from the running train on the walkway with a deep nala on the other side gave us a thrill which only 15 year olds can enjoy. There was a mixed sense of fear, excitement and expectation. It was like the ‘Khatron ka Khiladi’. Some closed their eyes and years savoring the thundering vibrations, while others savoured the thrill with all senses wide open.

We emerged out into the Bajaar area and then on to ACC colony and to MCC. ACC cinema theatre fell on the way. It was mostly NRB or MSD who had called for the special classes. They were three hour long sessions. I do not know how much kids these days get to savour such experiences, but we cherished them. The classes were par excellence. If they ended at 10, we tried to take back the Bombay Madras Mail (I guess it is called the Mumbai Chennai Mail now) and if it took longer, we lunched at the Nandavan and then walked back the same way to the Shahabad station.

The Nimbu Soda there was again a delicacy. Having squeezed a rind of lemon into a glass, the vendor poured soda into the glass and then came the fun. He put in a spoon of powder, which I assume was rock salt, cumin seed powder etc., which made the liquid fizze violently. We invariable asked the vendor to pun in more ‘masala’ just to see the fuzz again and again, ending up with a drink far more salty than a decent drink should be. There was a shop near the station which had a jukebox with several LP gramophone records. Drop in a 25 paise coin and push a button and an arm chose the appropriate record and placed the stylus on the chosen track whence the selected song was played. It was mechanical engineering personified. Watching the machine go through its maneuvours, was far more attractive than the song itself, and we punched buttons which made the levers perform the most amazing contortions possible.

Thus sated, we waited for the afternoon Pune Secunderabad Pasennger, which invariably arrived a few hours late. Reaching Wadi, we walked back to our homes for another meal and went out to play in the evening. Such are the memories which keep us alive these days when classmates are passing away in droves.

Photo Courtesy: Khurshed Irani

Some North Karnataka Recipes

2009-08-09T22:05:00.001+05:30

I have been stagnating badly for over a year now. No new posts. No communication with friends. No one even visits my blog. A new post afte ra long time. A tribute to Gulbarga district after a long time.
Karel Chutney (also called Gural podi) is a specialty in north Karnataka recipes especially in lingayat recipes. The chutney made with black til seeds is also very yummy. Far as I know the Black til we get in Gulbarga is not really til. It is a longer version.
Ingredients:
200 grams gural seeds, 4 medium size garlic bulbs, 1teaspoon cumin powder, 2 table spoons red chilli powder, 1 table spoon salt.
Process:
Clean and peel garlic cloves. Roast gural seeds in a shallow pan on low fire till they start making cracking noise and giving roasted smell.Mix all the ingredients and subject to grinding in a mixer grinder.Typically Served With:
The gural chutney along with curd tastes good with jowar roti, sajji roti, crisp jowar rotis and chapattis.
SHENGA CHUTNEY
Shenga chutney is something that goes well with any meal and can be stored for a long time. So on days when you don’t want to cook a variety, having this ready adds variety to any meal. Ofcourse not to mention the protein that one gets via the peanuts!
Ingredients:
200 g Rosted peanuts, 4 medium size garlic bulbs, 1teaspoon cumin powder, 2 table spoons red chilli powder, 1 table spoon salt, 1 tea spoon sugar.
Process:
Clean and peel garlic cloves.Mix all the ingredients and pound in the pounding device to obtain a sticky peanut chutney. You could also grind in the grinder which gives powdery form of chutney. In order to get slightly sticky form grind the mixture at low speed for short time of few seconds several times. Tips and Tricks:
For those of you in the US, you can get the salted roasted peanuts (planters) and use it to make peanut chutney in a grinder. It is extremely effective and easy .Typically Served With:
This chutney tasts good with chapattis, rotti, katak rotti, sajji rotti etc

Yengai – Stuffed Eggplant OR BADNIKKAI PALYA(served on Amavasya days with Jawari Roti - and puran poli - called holige hereunder or boli in tamil)
Ingredients:Cumin(Jeera) powder, Cooking Oil, fresh curry leaves, Dhania powder, Dry grated coconut, roasted, Sesame seeds, roasted ground peanuts, Asofoteda, Turmeric, Masale khara, Gural pudi, 4-6 Eggplants (small), Onions, Garlic, Jaggery, Tamarind paste, Cumin seeds, mustard seeds, cilantro.
Process:
For yengai, mix the following – jeera, dhania, dry coconut(grated), ground roasted peanuts, roasted sesame seeds, asofoteda, turmeric, some masale khara (chilly powder will do) or ground green chillies, gural powder (the black seeds powder).Stuff the eggplants with the above mixture and keep aside.Cut onions lengthwise and into three parts width wise (longer pieces). In a vessel, add oil, fresh curry leaves, mustard seeds, Cumin seeds (after mustard seeds crackle), hing and garlic pieces – cut or crushed in a paste.When the garlic pieces turn golden brown, put the onions.When the onions are transparent, put the remaining masala from above. Add some tamarind water, jaggery and salt to taste.Put the eggplants in there and cook on low heat.Garnish with cilantro.Tips:
Key is to pour quite a lot of oil.
You can also bake the above in an oven instead of cooking on low heat.
Typically Served With:
Chapatis, Rotti, Sajji Rotti, Katak Rotti, Holige, Bellad Byaali, Kadabu, Rice.
Mirchi Bhajji is another speciality of Gulbarga. For all the Gulbargiites out there, if you just say Mirchi bhajji from GUG canteen – the look on their faces is priceless!
Ingredients:
long green chillies that are not too spicy, cumin powder, salt, asapotida(hing), turmeric powder, besan (gram) flour, soda (sodium bi carbonate), veg oil.
Process:
Take about 12 chillies. Make longitudinal slit in the chillies. Mix jeera powder, hing and salt and stuff the mixture in the slits and keep aside. Take 2 cups besan flour. Add little cumin powder, salt, turmeric powder and 1 spoon baking soda to it. Mix and add water to make the batter – it should not be very thick or thin and have the consistency of idli batter. Keep oil for heating in a kadai, on low fire. Dip the stuffed chilli in the besan batter to cover it completely and fry in hot oil on low fire till golden brown. Typically Served With:
Serve hot with tomato sauce or coconut chutney or tamarind chutney though in GUG we had it with with a powder of cumin seeds and salt.

Parliamentary Democracy in MCC - Part II

2009-03-14T23:07:00.000+05:30

Ashok Ratnam played cricket. He was a tall, lanky and very dark Telugu, whose father looked after the ABL Stores. What with M.Sriniwas’s dad Mr.Seshasai, being in charge of Wadi ACC stores, I believed that only Telugus could look after Factory Stores, (very much like only the ‘kars’ being capable of making it to the National cricket team) Ashok Ratnam was a fast bowler. He suffered from acidity, and had a pack of Gelusil tablets in his pocket. He had a peculiar bowling action. Before the runup started, he puckered the fingers of his right hand, and touched them to his lips and his stomach alternately several times, with the ball in his other hand. It was said that this was to pacify his raging acidity. He was a delicate, though a rugged sportstar. Christopher on the other hand, had the sweet Caucasoid handsomeness of Anglo Brahmin Pedigree. He was also a cricketer, and he was an allrounder like Roger Binny. Wadi students however, were second rate, and mostly excluded from such entities as cricket teams. We merely sat and watched. As a matter of fact, Wadi students mostly sat and watched, whatever the event. But with me becoming a full fledged, first time cabinet member from Wadi, and surprisingly, Saji from Wadi poised to be the next Prime Minister of MCC, very much like Barack Obama of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, people from Wadi were beginning to make their presence felt in the upmarket ABL colony of Shahabad. This trend apparently continued, and now I hear students from Shahabad travel to Wadi for their education!

Well, the election was concluded on schedule and Christopher, the candidate blessed by the Headmistress, the redoubtable Sr. Angelita, lost by a slim margin. Ashok Ratnam became the Prime Minister of over 4,500 students of MCC and Christopher the DPM, as he was called. An equal number of supporters of Ashok Ratnam and Christopher were made Cabinet Ministers, of which I was one. I got the Literary Association Portfolio, of which I was the Deputy Minister, the previous year, under Rajeev Agarwal, the third of the renowned Agarwal brothers of ABL (more about them later). More importantly, I chose Janaki as the Deputy Minister for Literary Association that year. The Cabinet assumed charge with Sr. Angelita administering the oath of office soon thereafter, and we settled down to our studies since this was the year of the Board Exams, after which we would disperse and go on to College. (Yes, the +2 system was yet to be implemented and 11th and 12th classes were taught in colleges).

A Detour to discuss Rains in Wadi-Shahabad

2009-03-01T22:06:00.000+05:30

Frankly I was waiting for JC’s comments before I proceed. Now that he is in, let me continue. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, schools then closed for summer vacations precisely on the 10th of April every year after declaration of results and reopened on the 22nd of May. The monsoons started by the first week of June and continued till August end. Though the monsoons were not a very special season in North Karnataka because it was an essentially dry area and the farmers mainly subsisted on dryland crops, there was some excitement sometimes.

Rains were always special in Wadi-Shahabad-Gulbarga. It started in the afternoons mostly. As we stood in the balcony of our STRTs watching, the western horizon slowly darkened with the winds blowing over from that direction. Dark clouds gathered and there were a few lightnings followed by peals of thunder. What started as a drizzle, soon became a dense shower and lasted for about two hours. The first few rains of the season went into filling the huge cracks on the parched black soil, that the violent summer had inflicted. Thereafter episodes of rains ended with the whole area being flooded as the black clay was too dense to allow the water to percolate through. As people started walking through these puddles we were left with what we called “chikkad”, the rough equivalent of the Hindi “Keechad” or slush. Chikkad remained for about four months till October, by which time the ‘back to form’ sun dried it up.

The ‘excitement’ I mentioned in the earlier paragraph came about when the Kagna was flooded. The bridge across the Kagna which we had to cross to reach Shahabad was rather low and many a time the river reached upto the bottom of the bridge sometimes submerging the bridge. Drivers like Rasool were heroic enough to take the bus across the submerged bridge while the likes of Sudhakar were not. They took a circuitous route via Chitapur which took about four hours with the rains pouring outside. The darkness outside and the lights inside, with the late hours and rains adding to the adventure and romance of the journey, with some of us bursting into songs, narrating ghost stories, or sweet talking with the girl students, much to the annoyance and distraction of the already tense drivers were events that will not come again in this life or next. I am sure many people may have had similar experiences, but for us Wadi kids, these were experiences akin to a walk on the Moon on an Earthlit night. The Rains thus brought about a lot of fun, thrill and romance.

It was also the rains which brought out the frogs (or Rana Tigrina as NRB would call them). Since frogs were aplenty during this season, anatomy classes in biology, which involved the dissection of a frog was invariably scheduled for July- August. It was this dissection that prevented me from taking up biology and becoming a Physician later in life, but more about that later.

Parliamentary Democracy in MCC - Part I

2009-02-14T22:55:00.001+05:30

While SACS had a system of introducing its students to parliamentary democracy it was rudimentary. Like monitors of a class, the authorities nominated a student they thought fit as what they called SPL or School Pupils’ Leader. He or she was the top monitor of the school, but what the SPL did was negligible. We were introduced to real school level parliamentary democracy at MCC.

MCC had a full fledged election with all the accompanying fanfare. Like the US Presidential elections, two people – OK let me be stop being gender sensitive at this point; it was invariably two boys from the 10th Standard – were proposed by the school by unanimous choice, and sanctified the blessings of the sisters of Mt. Carmel, for the top post of the Prime Minister of MCC for the year. On Election Day, the high school students duly cast their votes and the results were declared soon thereafter. In what could be a lesson to the Indian Democracy, while the victorious candidate became the Prime Minister, the vanquished became the deputy prime minister. Each had a say in choosing their cabinet. And thus it was, that I became the deputy minister for literary association, with special charge of Library, holding literary events etc., in April 1978, while I was in 9th Standard, in the cabinet of Rapheal. The Cabinet was real and did meet occasionally and did some good work, but it was always under the benign but compulsive gaze of the incumbent Headmistress, very much like the Pakistani Cabinet under Musharraf.

The batch of 1979 eventually passed out and we were at the threshold of the summit. The clash for the post of Prime Minister for the year 1979-80 was between Christopher Anil Rao, for whom I campaigned, and Ashok Ratnam. Chris was a perfect balance between brain and brawn. He was the nephew (or was he a cousin?) of the Indian Test Cricket player Roger Binny and was simultaneously a good student. Ashok Ratnam was all brawn and was at the bottom of the academic table.

MSD

2009-02-14T21:50:00.000+05:30

Mysore S Devaraj or MSD was the other master who left an indelible impression on our minds. In some ways, especially physically and temperamentally, he was the exact antithesis of NRB. MSD taught us Physics and Mathematics. (By the way, it was in MCC that we learnt the habit of addressing people by their initials – NRB, MSD, KB etc. I was to learn that it is something that is practised widely. I am now Cr(NRI), meaning Curator N Ramdas Iyer). In some other ways, like commitment to teaching, professionalism, integrity, mastery of their subjects etc., MSD and NRB were very similar. MSD was a Brahmin and NRB a Lingayat and this is a critical difference in Northern Karnataka.

MSD being from Mysore, did not belong to Shahabad and hence was allotted a quarter in the ABL colony. This was very near MCC and he traveled the distance on foot or bicycle. He was just about five feet tall compared to NRB’s almost six feet. He resembled Sunil Gavaskar. In keeping with the times both masters wore their hair long, a sort of hippy cut, but while NRB sported a pencil line moustache, MSD was clean shaven.

MSD was precise in the lectures on Physics and Maths in the class. He was our class teacher in the 10th Standard. But he had a romantic streak in him as well. Occasionally he would spend a period telling us in graphic detail the story of Julius Caesar. At other times he would launch into a Mukesh number like “Jis gali me tera ghar na ho balma”. Mornings were strictly for serious study both with NRB and MSD. Post lunch sessions saw a lot of story telling and singing.

The way these people taught science brought home the fact that science is human too and that while science itself is rigorous, scientist are human beings. This is something which great scientists like Einstein and Feynman have always understood and advocated and what many pseudo scientists today tend to undermine. That my erstwhile top boss was of the firm belief that a scientist is one who essentially is non vegetarian, atheistic, objective to the extent of being mechanical, devoid of aesthetics and human values and who looked at people as a mixture of amino acids contained in a bag of skin, shows how far ahead of the times were MSD and NRB.

Meeting old friends

2008-06-21T22:32:00.002+05:30

I was at Coimbatore for over twenty days from the 21st of May to 14th of June, visiting my parents. A peaceful sojourn as usual. I took two days off to travel to Kerala by road, traveling to Moovattupuzha, and then to Ernakulam, and on to Guruvayoor via Kodungalloor, and to a quaint little village called Vellattoor and back to Coimbatore. It was monsoon time in Kerala and the views were mesmerizing. But I couldn’t help noticing that the Kerala of 2008, especially the stretch from Palakkad to Thrissur is not as green as it once was. Malayalis, take care – you have inherited something beyond compare. Do not turn it into another wasteland. Of course the other regions were as beautiful as ever but the evils of development seem to be creeping in.

At Ernakulam we naturally met up with the Jayachandrans. (or is it the Panickers? After the unfortunate passing away of JC’s dad, JC seems to have become the new Naicker – Panicker rather) JC is going from strength to strength both in terms of weight (he tells me that he weighs 125 kilograms and I feel like a size 0 Karishma Kapoor before him) and in financial terms. He has quit Chettinad Cements in protest against the rising inflation rates brought on by Palaniappan Chidambaram Chettiar, and is joining Dalmia Cements at Chennai soon, where he will be reunited with Brother Ramprasad and Sister Gomathy (remember the pledge we used to take at SACS? “All Indians are my brothers and sisters”). He called up Usha Ramachandran and fixed up a rendezvous for me with her. And thereafter started a journey.

We left Ernakulam at about 3 PM and traveled north along the west coast. The waters and the greens were a feast to the eyes and we reached Guruvayoor around 5 PM. En route I fixed up an appointment with Usha Ramachandran and got the directions to reach her place. After worshipping the Lord, we left at about 7 PM and traveled towards Thrissur. All was fine till we reached Kundankulam. Then came the confusion. We strayed, got lost and at 8:30 PM reached Usha’s house. We met a lot of drunks who vied with each other to direct us to Vellattoor. After a long drive which really started to worry me and our driver, we met up with a gentleman who turned out to be Usha’s Dad, whom I had never met before.

It was a very happy occasion seeing Usha after such a long time. Her husband is a gem of a man and I only hope I am half as good a husband to my wife as he is to her. She has a kid daughter and lives a happy life in the deep interior of Kerala. I envy her, her wonderful life, but pray to God Almighty that it continues and she lives long with her wonderful husband and daughter.

NRB

2008-03-07T21:01:00.000+05:30

Nagendra Revanasiddappa Beloor or NRB was our class teacher in 9th Standard. Beloor Master, from a traditional Lingayat family of Shahabad, was, to the best of my knowledge, born and brought up and educated in Shahabad and so he stayed in his own house in the Bajaar area. Their family owned a shop there too. He was a B.Sc from the Margol College, also in Shahabad, in what was called CBZ (Chemistry, Botany and Zoology). Owing to his Shahabad bringing up, he knew Hindi but to the best of my knowledge, he had not learnt Hindi as a subject formally. Beloor Master taught us Biology, Chemistry and Hindi.

He was thin and wiry, angular faced, with a thin black long moustache and rode a bicycle from his house to the school. He was considered to be an extremely strict taskmaster. But the standards he set for himself were far higher than the one he set for us. When he said that the “cell was the structural and functional unit of a living organism” we UNDERSTOOD it. That was that. No further explanations needed.

In the recent movie “Omkaara”, a western UP adaptation of Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy Othello, by Vishaal Bharadwaj, there is a scene where Dolly’s (Desdemona’s) father beckons Omi Shukla (Othello, the Moor) and tells him, “Bahubali, Aurat ke daria charitra ko mat bhoolna. Jo ladki apne baap ko thug sakti hai, who kisi aur ki sagi kya hogi?”. This is where the seeds of suspicion that metamorphosised into a death warrant for Dolly were sown in Omkara Shukla’s mind. I suggest you all read Othello and then watch Omkaara. It is an enriching experience to say the least.

Why I digressed was, to say that it was when Beloor Master taught one of his classes, or gave us one of his definitions, like that of a cell cited above, were the seeds of a deep and abiding love for science planted in me. It was sometime then, that I decided that I wanted to teach Science to the world, and not become an engineer or a doctor or anything else. I wanted to be a science teacher! Following that call, I reached where I am today, a non formal science educator.

Beloor Master was also a master story teller. He used to skip classes sometimes and tell us stories. One particularly interesting one was “God Sees the Truth but Waits” by Lev Tolstoy. It is still one of my favorite stories and a phrase which keeps me afloat during difficult times. NRB steered us through 9th standard into 10th where we were handed over to MSD or Mysore S Devaraj, who was a study in contrast to NRB but an equally great teacher. In the meanwhile Sr. Angel Mary retired and Sr. Angelita, a very tough nut, took over as headmistress of the MCC. NRB and MSD both had disagreements with Sr. Angelita but it only added to the wealth of knowledge that we received from all three. More later.

2008-02-13T21:05:00.003+05:30

Sai has sent some photographs of MCC and Khadeer Master which I am posting. Especially since I am seeing them after 28 years, the photographs of the corridors and the linkway between the nursery and main sections unleash a flood of memories, an emotional thunderstorm, like the kick of a mule on the on the back of your head so powerful it is almost erotic since a visit to the hallowed precincts still remains elusive. God bless Sai. Maybe this will get me defuddled(is there such a word?) enough to get me to write again.

Some more old photographs (courtesy Kiran)

2008-01-03T15:22:00.000+05:30

Weding of Sashi Pathy

Kiran, Raju Bhima, Javed and Ravi Khapate

Photographs of Gayatri growing up with Kartik and Wadi

2008-01-02T22:52:00.001+05:30

The Saga of Santhanam - Part I

2007-08-08T21:55:00.000+05:30

In my post dated July 11th 2007, I had mentioned a character called Santhanam to whom I would dedicate an entire post at an appropriate time. The time it seems has come. Let me tell you why. I got the phone number of Santhanam’s eldest brother Vasudevan from JC and called him up yesterday. Vasudevan’s wife picked up the telephone. I asked for Vasudevan and was in turn asked who I am. I replied in my most dignified voice that I was Ramdas Iyer, the Deputy Director of the National Science Centre, Delhi. Vasudevan then came on line. I asked, “Is it Mr. Vasudevan?” Rather than the expected “Yes”, again the question “Who is speaking?” I repeated my self introduction. I have called many old friends (I wouldn’t care to classify Vasudevan as a friend though) and some answer with warmth, some with suspicion. This was in the latter category I guessed. I wouldn’t repeat the whole conversation verbatim, but this was an occasion where I regretted my decision to place a call. The long and short of it was that Vasudevan let me know that he didn’t know where Santhanam was. “Thanks brother”. God bless Seshadri Mama who begot such sons, I understand he died “in 99 or 98 – I donno which” according to Vasudevan. May his soul rest in peace.

Now about Santhanam. He was actually Santhanagopalan. He was a very close friend. We called him “Menda” meaning sheep in Hyderabadi, because he had curly hair like a sheep’s fur. Both his mother and his father Seshadri mama (Pillaipalayam Kidambi Seshadridasan, he called himself – a typical Srirangam Iyengar) were excellent singers and all their kids, Mythili, Vasudevan, Jaya, Raju, Raghu, Kasturi and Santhanam had inherited their parents’ inclination for music. They sang well, both light music and classical. They participated in many competitions in the ACC club and won prizes. Jaya had a very nasal voice and her number “Bole re papi hara” was quite well known in Wadi. Mythili was a wasted wife, sent back to her paternal home by her in laws. Jaya didn’t marry at all as far as I know. Vasudevan, as the previous paragraph would have led you to suspect dissociated himself from the family very early in his life and settled down as timekeeper in ACC. Vasudevan never sang but probably inherited a love for music and was one of the first to acquire an HMV record player in those areas. When “Hum Kisise Kum (sorry, Kam – Kum is a spelling recently invented for ‘Cheeni Kum”) Nahin” was released, Vasudevan bought an LP record of the movie’s music and Santhanam proudly took us to Vasu’s house to listen to the songs. We used to have a ‘Kolu’ at home during Navaratri and Seshadri Mama invariably came after all the ladies had left and sang for about half an hour. His favourites were “Karpaga Valli Nin” and “ Shree Chakra Raja Simhaneshwari”

A problem with Seshadri Mama was that he was always in debt. It probably had to do with his many kids, or with his penchant for high living. He blew his salary by the 3rd of every month buying ghee and first grade rice and things. Then on he subsisted on borrowed money. Like his musical talent, his taste for high living was inherited by some of his kids, especially Santhanam. Santhanam hated school and adopted all methods to skip school. He used to leave home fully dressed in his uniform everyday and then hide somewhere for the whole day and then return home without attending school. I once remember him hiding in our terrace and my redoubtable grandmother Thangi catching him red handed. He said that he didn’t attend school because he wasn’t given food by his mother. Thangi fed him and took him to school. We later learnt that he had had a heavy breakfast at home. But this could not continue forever. Santhanam slipped in studies. He somehow passed his 7th and got admitted to 8th at MCC, but I don’t remember him clearing his Matriculation. Let’s continue later.

Inauguration of the Emerging Technologies Gallery

2007-07-21T19:06:00.000+05:30

Regarding the proposed Mid August meet in Hyderabad

2007-07-09T19:50:00.000+05:30

I had written a piece in my blog several months back where I had detailed the problems that I was facing in my office and had asked for advice from friends such as you who have known me for most of my life and who know this stage in the life of a person as well as I do. I asked for advice because I felt those of you who read this blog would understand the situation I am in better than anyone else I can think about. Fro example a guy like JC or Saikrishna would know more about me that say my parents or my wife. But sadly no remarks were forthcoming which made me stop writing the blog.

Last week, I received a mail from Xavier urging a meeting of MCCians of the 1980 batch. I replied. I was sounded out by JC today. I also told him my difficulties and that I would keep him informed. To a large extent I believe I was responsible for bringing together many of the batch of 1980 by starting the blog in July 2006 after meeting JC at Coimbatore in May 2006 and realizing what we were missing. I don’t know if you guys agree with that.

Today my job keeps me away from not just my batchmates of 1980 but even my newborn daughter, my young son, my wife, my aged parents and my brother. I therefore don’t know how I can make it to the Mid August meet at Hyderabad. If I don’t make it, it will certainly not be due to lack of trying. All the best friends!

Remembering the relevance of what Kumari Balakrishnan taught

2007-02-11T20:23:00.000+05:30

रे रे चातक सावधानामनसा मित्र क्षणम् श्रूयताम्
अम्बॊदा बहवॊहि सन्ति गगने सर्वेपि नैताद्रुश:
कॆचित् व्रुष्टिभिरार्द्रयन्ति वसुधा, गर्जन्ति केचित् व्रुथा
यम् यम् पश्यसि तस्य तस्य पुरतो मा ब्रूहि दीनम् वच:

Thus taught Kumari Balakrishnan while we were in Class 8th of the MCC in 1977. This shloka means something like this:

A mythical bird called the chataka drinks water in a peculiar way because it has a hole in its throat. If it drinks water the conventional way, the water spills out of this hole. So it waits for the rains, and then, when it rains, it flies upside down so that water enters through its throat and becomes useful to quench its thirst. Now this bird, when it is thirsty, runs from cloud to cloud begging for it to rain, so that it can satisfy its thirst. The poet advises the chataka thus: Hey chataka bird! listen to me with a cool mind for a moment. There are many clouds in the sky. Some drench the Earth with showers, but some some thunder in vain. So oh chataka, do not detail your grief before each and every one you meet without knowing their nature.

What a great piece indeed! If only all of us understand everything that our teachers teach us and follow them verbatim!! Wouldn't this be a heaven on earth? But we dont. We write posts like "A dilemma and a request for advice " and get upset when guys stop visiting our blogs! In 2007 "Jo jeeta woh Sikandar, jo Haara woh Bandar"

Holiday trips

2007-01-28T16:40:00.000+05:30

The last post was my 50th post in the blog and hence cynicism2euphoria has crossed a new milestone with your encouragement.Thanks to Gomathy and Deepa and all others who had faith in my resurrection and stayed with my blog. I will talk about holidays in detail, Gomathy. About what the girls did – I leave it to you to fill in the details.

Our family as I have mentioned in earlier posts hails from Kerala. My father had nobody left, back in Kerala, whom he would have liked to visit periodically. In fact, I suspect he with Thangi left Kerala for Dwaraka in the first place, to escape the suffocation of life as a fatherless kid in his maternal house. But my mother had her parents and six siblings back in Kerala at Moovattupuzha. So she yearned to visit Kerala occasionally. Wadi was about 1200 kilometers from Moovattupuzha but they were not connected by a direct railway line. Matter of fact there was just one single line in Kerala. The southern parts of the country were as neglected by the railways then as they are now. Most Railway ministers from Independent India hailed from Bihar, and over the past sixty years, have crisscrossed Bihar and UP with railway lines. South of Vindhyas, these ministers had a vague notion that there was a city called Madras, where possibly a railway station could be built, and to which place some black people called Madrasis sometimes went. Names like Moovattupuzha were (and still are) unpronounceable, unknown and non existent in the railway map of India.

Wadi as I had mentioned in an earlier post, is an important railway junction connecting Madras (Chennai), Hyderabad (Bhagyanagar?) and Bombay (Mumbai). To reach Kerala from Wadi, in those days, one took the Bombay Madras Mail, which had a coach going to wards Ernakulam. This coach was disconnected from the main train at Arakkonam Junction and waited there with its passengers till a train going from Madras to Ernakulam came and picked it up. AC and First class coaches were unaffordably costly those days and we invariably took the third class coach – the one that the Mahatma favoured. Sometimes it was a reserved berth. It was just me and mother who traveled alone most of the time. We reached Arakkonam around 9 or 10 AM and stayed there for over 6-8 hours. We were then picked up and reached Alwaye (Aluva), which was our station by early next morning. Somebody would pick us up there and we would take a bus to Moovattupuzha which was about 20 Kms. away. Even allowing for inflation tickets were ridiculously low priced. It cost us 55 Rupees for a ticket from Wadi to Alwaye by Express trains. One of the earliest trips I remember was in July 1969. It was then that my uncle bought a transistor radio to listen to the report of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon – on 20th July. I also remember being sick with fever at that time and uncle also bought a packet of fruit bread along with the transistor. The Transistor radio still exists and works in my uncle’s house though my cousin Sreeram, born to that uncle in March 1973 seems to have become a big electronics engineer who designs chips and systems for electronics multinationals.

The ancestral house in Kerala was a fascinating place. One got to see several things here that one had only heard about in Wadi. Water was drawn from wells. One saw mangos, coconuts and Jack fruits growing on trees. Food was cooked in earthen vessels (a special container called the Kachhatti – carved out of a block of slatestone was used regularly) in ovens burning firewood. People hardly bought vegetables in Kerala then. Yams, colacasia, other tubers, mangoes, plantains, jack fruit and coconut - in fact all native Indian vegetables, were abundantly grown and freely available at all homes. Cows gave milk and other dairy byproducts were also made from milk at home. Even oil was obtained from coconut at home. Each tiled house had a few acres of land in the back called the Parambu which was home to all kinds of trees. There was a perennially running river behind the house called the Moovattupzhayaar in which we bathed and washed clothes. One needs to describe these experiences in greater detail so let me postpone it to another post.

Back to the past

2007-01-21T20:44:00.001+05:30

Some of you posted comments commiserating my present predicament at office. A few phoned. While I continue to suffer, I also realise that the show must go on. Hence we get on with the blog. Welcome back to a better and far more pleasant space time coordinate.

Holidays were glorious days. Schools in Karnataka, affiliated to the Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (to which both Saint Ambrose Convent School and Mount Carmel Convent were affiliated) normally closed on 10th of April every year with the distribution of progress reports. The distribution of progress reports were a source of great anxiety and expectation among students who thought ranks were important. I was one of them and while in SACS, I normally stood first with Geeta Menon or Rafique sometimes taking the honours, in Mount Carmel Convent, it was invariably Ramprasad who stood first. Inserting myself into the system at Class eight level was not easy but I did. Eventually I stood second to Ramprasad, with guys like Christopher sharing honours with me. One difference between SACS and MCC was that, in SACS first rankers were first rankers – whatever and were respected as such. But in MCC, first rankers were looked on as a bit of nerds, unless this academic achievement was backed up by macho skills like sports, interest in girls, bullying etc. for the guys and ‘look good’ factor and outgoing nature for the girls. On second thoughts, SACS had only kids, while I was there but my surroundings in MCC was predominantly teenaged –hence this difference was only to be expected. India was not yet shining then and hep accessories were not yet in. Also there was no media to talk about. The only way we knew about the outside world was if we listened to the AIR news on radio or if we read the newspapers which were delivered rather late in the day at about 4 PM. Telephones were nonexistent for normal people. We had to walk down to people’s houses to talk, which we did. If kids went out, they couldn’t be tracked down by mobile, and frankly parents weren’t worried about them. The worst that could happen to them was they could fall down and sustain a bruise. It was thirty years and 2000 kilometers away from Nithari.

By the way, there was an article in the Week recently, which asked why people insisted in calling the killings of the innocent in Nithari as the “Nithari killings” rather than the “child rapings and slaughter in Noida”. Why indeed? It happened in the heart of Noida mind you. The upmarket Sector 31. I stay very near and have visited the place several times for lunch etc during my wife's hospitalisation when Gayatri was born. Doesn’t the media want to admit that dirty things happen in the posh suburbs of Delhi? Shouldn't we then talk about the Chunnambukkalavai or Kottaimedu blasts, rather than the Coimbatore bomb blasts? Let’s admit. Behind the glitz and shine of the malls and multinationals, primitive carnal urges lie hidden in those upmarket urban agglomerations. Thankfully they didn’t exist in the Gulbarga district of 1977, and that delayed the greying of the hairs of a lot of parents of those times.

Sorry, I strayed away from the topic. As I said holidays were glorious times. Schools that closed on 10th April reopened on 22nd May. This went on like clockwork every year. There were no projects to be done, no holiday homework to complete. It was sheer fun. Also there was no Cartoon Network to be watched, and no computer games to be played, so sheer fun again. Books there were aplenty. We read Enid Blyton, Alfred Hitchcock and the Hardy Boys. Girls read Nancy Drew instead of Hardy Boys. We graduated to Agatha Christie and some other authors too. Suri introduced me to highbrow writers like Orwell and Wodehouse (Thanks a lot Suri). Also there was a lot of outdoor activity. For people like us who hailed from places other than Wadi or Shahabad, there were trips back to Kerala during the vacations. The planning for trips was elaborate and the trips themselves were much awaited and stimulating. More about them in the next post.

A dilemma and a request for advice

2006-12-31T22:07:00.000+05:30

Dear Friends,

Many of you may have been wondering why the blog I started with such enthusiasm in July this year has petered out so soon. Though I don’t normally like to bother my family and friends with problems in my office, my unhappiness with my professional life sometimes spills into my family and social life, thereby causing great distress me and also to all concerned. It has, in addition, during the past few months sapped all creative urges and strength out of me Having secured a Masters degree in Applied Electronics, with a Gold medal, I expected, when I joined the National Council of Science Museums as a Class I Gazetted Officer in 1991, that I will have a peaceful life, if not a very bright future. The National Science Centre, where I work, is the northern zonal headquarters of the National Council of Science Museums which is an autonomous organization working under the aegis of the Department of Culture, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The Council runs 27 science centres all over the country, but after more than 15 years of service in this organization, I find that I am still treated with such contempt that I am not really able to sustain a sense of self esteem.

While the job provides for promotions every three or four years, I have had just two promotions in the past 16 years, due to which all those who joined with me have moved ahead to positions of prominence. The reason, as most of you who have known me, is not because I have been incompetent in my job. I have been a student who has excelled in academics during my schooling and college days, and many of you have still testified to this. Many of you may also know that my interests are diverse and I am a versatile individual. I have performed as well as, if not better than many of my colleagues. But the top authority of this organisation – a person whom I wouldnt care to name, the Director General - seems to have developed a dislike to me and has been putting undue pressure on me. I don’t comprehend the reason for this unreasonable antipathy, especially when I have been working overdue. Since this is an autonomous organization, the Director General has a lot of power, which he has been using in a focused way to harass me unnecessarily. This has put me into a lot of mental and emotional strain that it has been affecting my family and social life and my health. Even taking a few days leave has become impossible so that I am not able to attend to my aged parents in Coimbatore or my family here at Delhi. My parents have undergone surgeries which I haven't been able to attend and help. My grandmother who brought me up, and about whom I have written in detail in eariler posts, died without my even being able to see her body. My wife admitted herself into the hospital and delivered Gayatri on her own while I was was refused permission to be beside her and was toiling at the office. Looking back at such incidents I am ashamed that I have neglected my family so much just to please he ego of a sick superior. I have never hesitated to work even for 24 hours a day, and have consistently done so, but all one looks for is recognition and reward.

My job profile itself is very interesting and well suited to my temperament and I have problems only with the people who are running the organization and the kind of working atmosphere here. On the other hand, having spent 16 years in the present job, I would like to complete atleast 20 years after which I can opt for voluntary retirement and be eligible for pension. As a matter of fact, if the conditions in office improve, I would like to continue till retirement, but then only if the conditions improve. I already run two establishments one here and one at Coimbatore, which places me in a delicate financial position.

Since my job profile as the curator of the science centre is so specialized that I will be practically unable to secure a job elsewhere, in the private or public sector, especially after so many years in this profession, I am also apprehensive of leaving at this stage.

As you may have understood from the above, my aim is not to quit immediately, nor to seek employment elsewhere in the private sector, if the situation within the organization improves. I would like to stay protected from unwarranted harassment, and be allowed to do productive work peacefully and with self respect. My family deserves much more of my attention which I am prevented from giving by my present superior officers. So does my health. Is loyalty and dedication to such superiors deserved? Considering your close association with me during the early parts of my life, I would seek your advice on the above issue.

Good old Rafique!!!

2006-12-27T21:22:00.001+05:30

I have written about my days in Wadi at great length before. I had also mentioned Rafique in my posts. I got in touch with Rafique today and it made me really happy. Rafique is doing business in Hyderabad and is as much in love with Wadi as I am. We talked for long over phone and he was as excited as I am. I would now like to work out a trip with Rafique and Jayachandran to Wadi for old times sake. His contact number is 09849124519.

subhashitani

2006-11-29T22:31:00.000+05:30

In memory of Mrs. Kumari Balakrishnan. I found this excellent site on Subhashitani. Many of the teachings are relevant today. I am sorry I am not writing these days. I will soon. Till then bear with me. subhashitani

Anjali and Adarsh Part II

2006-10-25T19:58:00.000+05:30

People with whom Adarsh and Anjali stayed as tenants before they bought their own house would remember the routine. Anjali would normally be home before Adarsh, having picked up the kids from the crèche. There would be a great deal of laughter and mirth to be heard from the house and sometimes the loud voice of Anjali chastising the children. Invariably contained in the chastisement would be a judgement that the kids were turning out to be exactly like their father, thereby implying that it was not a desirable state to be in. Rather than turning out to be a direct reference to the shortcomings of the child or suggestions for improvement, it turned out to be a charter of grievances against Adarsh. Soon Adarsh would be back home and invariably with a frown on his face. The kids now knowing that the battle was to begin, went about their own work with trepidation and contempt. Like a shower of the North East Monsoon, the ground would be set with a darkening of the eastern horizon. A few rolls of thunder and some lightning, the rains would begin as a sudden heavy downpour. It would last for over an hour with all the usual ferocity of a NE Monsoon shower. Uprooted trees, flooded roads, electric poles blown away, a few buildings collapsed and several dead. All sorts of demeaning statements were hurled from either sides, many of them carrying so much venom that it would have driven a normal family to divorce or suicide or worse. It all stopped as suddenly as it started. There was then dead silence till bed time.

The landlords wondered when the cooking took place if at all, when the children did their homework, when did the family dine etc. Mundane chores like washing and hanging out the clothes to dry, and purchase of sundry grocery items all took place during the storm. It is wisely said in Uttara Karnataka “Genda Hendati Jagala, Undu maluguva tanaka”, meaning the fights between a husband and wife lasts till they go to bed after dinner. The landlords wondered, was that what was happening? For there were two children to support this theory. But sadly, they were wrong. Adarsh and Anjali carried their fights to bed. They were too educated to let things be. There was no point in giving up dinner and a good nights’ sleep just to oblige the bastard or the bitch as the case may be. So a period of ceasefire and truce during Ramadaan, and hostilities to resume after the Eid – meaning the next day. The routine was repeated with sickening regularity for days after months after years that everyone including the dramatis personae lost interest and performed just for the sake of performing. In fact though the Tom and Jerry routine bored all concerned, it had to be kept up. It was a trap into which the couple had pushed themselves and their kids into, and from which there was no turning back. James Hadley Chase talks about it in his novel “Paw in the Bottle”. Did you know how they caught monkeys in Brazil? They tied a narrow necked bottle with a single peanut inside, to a tree trunk. Monkeys put their hands inside the bottle, which they could easily do. They then grabbed the peanut, in which process their paws became fists. Once their paws became fists they could not take their paws out of the narrow necked bottles. It never occurred to them to let the peanut go and escape themselves. So they were stuck there with their paws inside the bottle till the hunters came for them. Thier greed for the peanut did them in. So it was with Anjali and Adarsh. Their egos did them in. They waited for the hunters.

…………..to be continued

Ravi Rahalkar

2006-10-25T18:30:00.000+05:30

I tracked up Ravi Rahalkar of our batch today. When you think about it, it is fascinating how the country has been networked over these years to an extent that if you are determined to track out someone you can. It took me exactly 7 minutes, and therefore it is surprising that our intelligence agencies are finding it unable to track down some criminals who leave long trails even after years and crores worth of expenditure. Ravi, as he told me runs two autorickshaws and naturally has no long trails behind him. So maybe I should belong in some other profession.

I had vaguely heard someone say that Ravi Rahalkar is in Gwalior running a transport business. Starting with this premise, I checked out the BSNL website for Gwalior and found one entry under Rahalkars. That was Dhananjay Rahalkar. I called them up and asked the lady who picked up if Ravi Rahalkar stayed there. She naturally said no. I said I am calling from Delhi and that Ravi Rahalkar was a friend and that this number was given to me by mutual friends. I also told her that Ravi Rahalkar was my classmate in Karnataka over 25 years back. She called her husband and I told him the same thing. He vaguely seemed to remember that one of his uncles worked in Karnataka around that period. But that those people were now in Baroda and not in Gwalior. He didn’t have their number. I requested him to get it for me and that I will call back. Very soon I called back and got a number. I called up that number in Baroda. Initially there were a few hiccups since the STD code of Baroda seems to have become 0265 from 01263. Finally I got through and talked to him. He was as cheerful as he used to be. Married and with a son and a daughter. His parents stay with him.; He seems to be driving CNG autorickshaws. Now that we have got hold of him lets keep in touch. His number is 91-265-6584919

I must remind Jayachandran and Usha Shankar at this time that their assignment of locating Usha Ramachandran and Kumari Balakrishnan are pending still. Godspeed guys!!! Also if Silent Saikrishna is still reading this blog, we would request the phone number of D M Murali if he has come back to India. Prasanna (one hopes it is Prasanna Ramakrishnan) sent me a surprise Diwali greetings. I asked her to reply and confirm but as usual she has gone underworld. She needs to join the NSG commandoes in Delhi with her hit and run kind of approach! Also received Diwali greetings from most of you and reciprocated. Not much updates. Will get back to the blog in its original spirit soon. See you guys.

Anjali and Adarsh Part I

2006-10-23T20:32:00.000+05:30

It was turning out to be a regular feature these days. So regular that both of them were sick and tired of the ritual. Occasions which give pleasure, pain, happiness of grief, shock or solace, lose their capacity to induce their usual feelings in the appropriate dosage when administered daily. Such was the boredom induced in the life of Anjali and Adarsh today, eight years from the day they married.

Outwardly the couple was well matched. Both well educated, both relatively good looking, both employed and reasonably well off financially, owning a house in a proper suburban locality, a four wheeler, living as a nuclear family, reasonably healthy, at the prime of their lives, with relatives to look up to for support and finally two healthy sweet children, one a boy and the other a girl. Shouldn’t that have been reason enough for unlimited happiness? Shouldn’t such emotional and physical proximity have encouraged the nurturing of a deep and satisfying love affair between the two? Apparently not. For Anjali and Adarsh fought each other. Neither of them remembers how it all started in the first place, but they had had their first fight within 100 hours of their marriage. They were both possibly primed not to give in if a difference of opinion ever occurs.

Anjali possibly was a subject of the indoctrination that a woman is in no way inferior to a man. Especially if she were to be equally educated, employed and potentially independent. Gone were the days when women served tea with a coy smile when men came back home from their offices. If a child was sick, who says it was the mother’s duty alone to stay awake and nurse it? If a woman could chair a meeting in office couldn’t a man cook a decent meal at home? The mother in law and the father in law, having done their sacred duty thirty years ago, will be appreciated if they stay well away and refrain from advising. If I require any advices, I have a mother of my own and I will take it from her, Thank you. And for God’s sake, why only Geoffrey Boycott or Rajdeep Sardesai? Why NOT Eaktaa Kaapooar?

Adarsh was, on the other hand, possibly primed the other way. So what if a woman serves tea when her husband comes home tired? She may well have come back from office herself just a moment back but then who asked her to go to an office at all? No doubt the income she brought in made life easier financially. But if it makes life tougher in every other way, then why work? After all, tell me honestly, was she really working to share the family burden? She worked to escape the chores of domestic life. Women like his mother who stayed back at home and anchored the family were not to be scoffed at. Homemaking was backbreaking. Anjali worked to retain financial independence just in case she tired of Adarsh and wanted a life of her own. A father’s role in child rearing came when the children grew up. Men don’t go about wiping asses and changing nappies. A man married because he wanted a woman. And frankly, if the woman of the house worked, earned, drove a car, cut her hairs short and wore jeans and generally behaved like a man, then pray why not have a homosexual marriage? An orgasm is an orgasm however way it comes and atleast one problem, that of child rearing, can be dispensed off with. Kids, anyway were a bad investment.

And so it was that Adarsh and Anjali, so uniquely matched, physically, educationally, financially, astrologically and socially, were locked in a marriage, which while being immensely successful on the physical plane, was a mess on the emotional plane. So it was that Adarsh developed Hypertension, secondary diabetes, ulcers, alcoholism, impotency and anxiety while Anjali developed cervical spondilytis, irritable bowels, skin problems, falling hair, menstrual problems, depression and frigidity. Significant parts of their incomes were spent on doctors and pharmacists. Their children, brilliant and lovely to start with, became reclusive, irritable, constipated short sighted couch potatoes. On the one hand, they wanted to love their parents like other normal children, but on the other, were repelled by the quarrelling monsters they saw daily. They sincerely wished one of these bastards would die. The parents of Anjali and Adarsh on the other hand, who had fuelled the divide religiously, like Frankensteins, were shocked at what they had created.

…………..to be continued

Ramdas Iyer tries to get converted to Vishnusarman

2006-10-21T21:07:00.000+05:30

I DEDICATE THIS POSTS TO READERS LIKE MY SON ADITYA AND DEEPUCUTE TO WHOM I HOPE I WILL BE IMPARTING WISDOM LIKE VISHNUSHARMA DID IN THE PANCHATANTRA

(This story is not from the Panchatantra)

A washerman had a donkey. He used it to carry his load of dirty cloths to the river bank, to be washed daily. One day, the washerman heard that there was a village fair going on in a neighbouring village. He took a day off and went to visit the fair with the donkey.

In the fair, he saw a beautiful image of Goddess Parvati made by an artisan. The Image looked so real and divine, that the washerman felt compelled to buy it. He haggled with the artisan over the price and ultimately bought it. His wish was, to take the image back to his village, build a small temple and install the image in that temple. He placed the image on the back of the donkey and started walking back home.

On the way, the washerman passed through three other villages. In each village, the villagers, seeing the beauty of the Goddess, fell to the floor and prostrated before the image. They chanted prayers to the deity. In two of these villages, the village Headman himself prostrated before the deity and prayed to her. Such was the divinity of the Goddess. Now the Donkey was amused. It didn’t really know what was it, that it was carrying on its back. But it saw great men falling at its feet and prostrating and praying before it. By the time the donkey reached its own village, it was convinced that it had somehow, during its trip to the neighbouring village, assumed some form of divinity. Well, it thought, I am a god now!

Soon the washerman reached his village. Having reached his home, he brought down the image of the deity and installed it in their pooja room. He then asked the donkey to proceed to its shed. The donkey was shocked. Imagine a mere washerman asking it to go to a shed, when the headmen of two villages had prostrated before it! Wasn’t it DD, the Divine Donkey? The poor washerman must have gone mad!! The donkey therefore refused to budge from the place.

Thereupon, the washerman brought out his stick, beat the donkey severely and kicked it back to its shed.

MORAL: People in high positions, like our bosses (and many a time, we ourselves), do not understand that the respect that one commands, is on account of the seat that one occupies, very much like the donkey who did not realize that the respect accorded to it was on account of the image of the Goddess placed on its back. Once the Image was removed, the donkey became a mere donkey again. Similarly people in high position need to realize their source of their power, and refrain from idiotic postures, lest they get beaten up like the poor donkey. HAPPY DEEPAVALI TO ALL OF YOU. I THOUGHT I MUST WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN MYSELF, THIS DEEPAVALI, HENCE THIS PIECE. IF YOU LIKED IT, LET ME KNOW. I WILL QUIT WRITING ABOUT MYSELF COMPLETELY, AND WRITE SUCH THINGS INSTEAD.

A lunch with the Arons

2006-10-11T20:41:00.000+05:30

My father called up to tell me that he saw my blog today. He was happy with the overall content but he had some corrections to suggest. Dwaraka, he says was not in the least affected by the Pakistani shelling. The destruction was almost nil except for a shell landing on the railway line. This was owing to a protective shell around Dwaraka, cast by the presiding deity, Dwarakadeesh, is what the people there believe. The migration of ACC employees from Dwaraka to other parts of the country came over a year later, owing to losses in the ACC Factory there. Sorry for the error.

MCC had a big playground on the northern side and a large garden on the southern side. In between both, the school building stretched East-Westwards. It had three floors. The High school was on the top floor. Students from the ABL Colony normally went home for lunch like we used to do at Wadi. Students from ACC colony or the Bajaar, normally had their lunches in the school campus itself. Cycling was a popular mode of transportation both for the students and the teachers. We Wadi students, stuck to our own kind, partly because of the stigma of being poorer cousins from the south, and partly because of the Ghetto mentality. The garden mostly consisted of golden oleander shrubs, casuarinas and pines. Our lunches were carried in stainless steel tiffin boxes, inscribed with our names. I mostly carried curd rice and a pickle or what we used to call Thayir molagai. As soon as it was time for lunch all the boys of our class from Wadi (Me, JC, Santhanam and Sriniwas and sometimes Hariprasad, Sriniwas’s brother) assembled under a particular oleander shrub (each group of 4-5 had their own shrub under which they had their lunch). Unlike these days, I was then stick thin, weighing about 35 kilograms.

There were occasions when we got to eat out sometimes. Though our mothers never tired of cooking and packing lunch for us before we left for school in the mornings, we sometimes begged for money from our parents. For 10 rupees we could have a royal meal or Poori Subji in Nandavan Hotel. There was a shriveled old woman whom we called Nani or Buddi depending on our mood, who sold soaked salted and roasted grams (chana) for 5 paise. We bought that sometimes. Mostly we had about 25 paise in our pockets. Sometimes our classmates from ABL colony felt for us and invited us for lunch. It happened rarely, but I remember one occasion, when one Rajat Mohan Aron, the son of a Manager (remember there were several in ABL) invited all us Wadi guys for lunch one day. Please Please do not ever get the feeling that I am disparaging the event, but it was a novel affair for us kids from Wadi to say the least. We were served in bone china crockery on dining tables, and had to eat out of bowls with spoons and forks and things. We learnt of a dish called Raita, which is what you get when you cut vegetables and mix it with yoghurt. Frankly we all had eaten better Raita at our homes, calling it Kichadi or Thayir pachadi or Koshimbiri depending on where you came from. Raita in Kannada meant a farmer. This meal was, I believe our first introduction to Punjabi or North Indian cuisine, what with phulke, alu dam, sookhi sabziyan, tariwali subzian, dal makhni and the rest – not to mention chawal and raita. Also novel was the concept of servants serving us, with Rajat’s mother supervising. Till then, at our homes, servants were never even allowed to see what we were eating. This was another kind of education on its own. An Iyer boy from Wadi could not have done so well in Delhi High Society without such educating experiences. Thanks Rajat wherever you are for this. Thanks to you I can acquit myself honourably today if I am invited for lunch by the Prime Minister of India. Thanks Rajat too, for your thoughtfulness, whereby you thought us guys from Wadi fit to be invited for lunch at home. We had lunch in the houses of other friends like Ramprasad and Prasanna and D M Murali and Ramarao later but they were routine lunches like we had at home. While they filled our stomachs they didn’t contribute towards training us in etiquette.

Some memories of eighth standard in MCC

2006-10-01T20:19:00.000+05:30

Eighth Standard in MCC was an eye opener to us kids from Wadi. The standard of education was suddenly elevated. This is not to run down SACS. Some readers may find the comparison odious (I would have written this without a second thought had my readers been all male, but some of the most respected readers of this blog happen to be women.), but having lived with your mothers till marriage, after marriage one finds that there can be further scope and more modes for enhanced companionship with women. Thus it was with us kids from Wadi. It was like a Ranji Trophy player getting into the National team. While we had excellent teachers like Lakshmi Pathy and Sr.Leonie in SACS, the teachers in MCC were professional. As I went on to become a teacher in the later years of my life, I realized that there are two things that make up a professional teacher in the Indian educational setup. You need to make the subject interesting and each class memorable to your students and at the same time keep on the beaten track – stick to the curriculum and complete it in time. I haven’t studied in an institution other than MCC where these two principles were adhered to by most teachers. Guys like Suryanarayana had already inculcated in me an attachment for the scientific way of thinking, but Beloor and Devaraj carried it to a much higher plane. When Beloor said that ‘the cell is the structural and functional unit of life’, he explained the definition in such lucid terms that the definition of a cell today for me explains a lot of the new fangled concepts that I hear about. What Devaraj taught me about Newton’s laws of motion, gave me as good an idea of the way the universe functions, as Newton himself. Being from a Brahmin family I had picked up a few phrases of Sanskrit in the course of my life, but like most Brahmin kids, for me, Sanskrit was but a language in which prayers to Hindu Gods were composed. Mrs. Balakrishnan took Sanskrit out of the realm of the spiritual and showed us its vibrancy. I learnt that there are several thoughts that can never ever be expressed as accurately in any other language of the world as in Sanskrit. I would be erring if I do not mention Hegde Master. Vinayak Hegde was a soft spoken man who taught us History and Sanskrit as well. His personality was somehow overshadowed by the titans Beloor and Devaraj, but he was erudite in his own way. He unfortunately passed away of a kidney ailment but I remember a picnic which we had in Malkhed, where we, the students of the batch of 1980 were taken by our teachers Sr. Angel Mary, the Headmistress, Mr. Devaraj, Mr.Beloor, and Mr. Hegde. Malkhed is between Gulbarga and Sedam and is about 40 kms from Gulbarga and 10 kms from Sedam. It is the seat of Sreemad Teekacharya, a revered Madhwa Philosopher and the Guru of Swami Raghavendra of Mantralayam. There was a photograph of the four masters taken on the bank of the river there, which I had, but seem to have misplaced. There was a grinning N H Vasanthi in a frock in the background and H S Murali is also seen. If anyone has the photograph the same may be sent to me so that I can post it on the blog. It is probably the only photograph we had of those days. Bell bottoms were a rage in those days. All three masters were bell bottoms. Sr. Angel Mary, who was a mild mannered nun, was our principal for the year 1977-78. The Headmistress before her was a terror called Sr. Rosanda, and the one after her was the redoubtable Sr.Angelita. But Sr. Angel Mary was a real Angel. An old dear, who was too kind to rebuke.

This post is so dilute it has no title

2006-09-29T20:42:00.000+05:30

I am gratified to have received a comment from Deepa at last about the blog. Frankly, I was really busy and was not in a position to put my fingers to the keyboard. What with the new arrival in the family and all the negative vibes from the office. But I didn’t really want to continue till I was sure people were reading my blog. One gets put off when one sees a big cyberyawn. So Deepa’s post has started me off again I guess. I may take a few more days to get back to Wadi and Shahabad and will possibly continue to sing the praises of my new daughter, but I hope too that the readers will tolerate me. Another fear I have is that, I may not get the kind of enthusiastic responses for my posts when I move to my Shahabad days, as I used to for my Wadi posts. I plan to write about Shahabad a little more and then if I feel there are no takers, may be I will move on to Gulbarga or back to Wadi. After all one writes to be read.
Having a new child 10 years after the first has its disadvantages. The elder one has gotten into the habit of thinking that his parents are his own and he has their undivided attention. I got my kid brother when I was 14 years and 9 months. My son got his kid sister when he is 9 years and 9 months. It sometimes feels like your wife has got a new husband. You grow up thinking you are “THE” child of the family and then you find that you are “A” child of the family. This shocks you. Since I remember how I felt at the birth of my kid brother I guess I am equipped to handle the feelings of my son. The only problem is that my workplace doesn’t grant me enough peace of mind to dedicate time for solution of this issue. It is well known that Government of India organizations are run by Babus who interpret the letter rather than the spirit of the law. I plan to get a free day on Sunday after many many days , so I guess I will post something significant on Sunday. Till then.

Two significant events on 24th September 2006

2006-09-25T21:52:00.000+05:30

It was the Punyahavachanam and Naaamakaranam ceremony of my daughter on Sunday the 24th of September 2006. I hope those of us who have learnt Sanskrit under Mrs.Balakrishnan will not find it difficult to understand the meaning of these terms. In Hindu religion, the birth of a child is considered an event which requires quarantining for a few days. In the earlier days, the birth of a child was a hazardous affair. It introduced the possibilities of infection for all concerned. So on the eleventh day after birth, the mother and child were bathed in the waters of the Ganga and were thus sanctified. As the Vishnu Sahasranama says “Shareere Jarjaree Bhoote, Vyadhigraste Kalebare – Aushadham Jahnavee thoyam, Vaidyo Narayano Harih”. Meaning the ultimate physician is Lord Vishnu and the ultimate medicine is the water of the Ganga. Also, the child and mother, as also the close family members of the family were considered impure, and not fit to perform their religious functions as specified in the scriptures till they were purified. Child mortality rates being what they were in those days, a child wasn’t even considered viable till eleven days had passed. Those crucial eleven days passed uneventfully yesterday and certain ceremonies were performed. The Naamakaranam, where the child is given her name. My girl was given four names – Radha (my mother’s name), Gayathri (my choice), Shweta (my brother’s choice) and Ananya (my son’s choice). The child is also put on the cradle on this day, and is adorned with protection devices called Kaappu. All the ceremonies went on well and I seek all your blessings for Gayathri and Aditya.

Another significant thing that happened yesterday was that I met Arvind Agarwal. Now Arvind was a very good friend of mine from my days in Gulbarga. We were roommates in Jain Hostel in Gulbarga during 1982-87. He was a smart guy. They were four brothers. Pankaj, Neeraj, Rajeev and Arvind. All named after the lotus. And they were all lotuses no doubt. All four sons of the Agarwal family were excellent academically. The first three were sober while Arvind was a fun loving guy. As long as we were in school I did know him but we weren’t close. When he came to Jain Hostel, we became roommates and we became good friends. I have a little interest in astrology and palmistry, but I am really a Ponga Pandit. I made some predictions about Arvind’s academic career which turned out to be true. He seemed impressed with that. Anyway we had a cup of coffee over candle light at the Taj Mansingh. It was too strong, and so were our memories. We spoke for several hours in the lobby of Taj Mansingh and he dropped me back home. He is doing well in his career and I wish him more and more happiness in his life. When I get to our life in the Jain hostel, I will talk more about him.

Two pictures

2006-09-23T21:33:00.000+05:30

Guess who this gentleman is. He was the classmate of Usha Narayanaswamy and a room mate of mine while I was doing my PG in Gulbarga. I am going to meet him tomorrow. More about him later.

This is how I look these days. One of my recent photographs for you all to view and pity.

Some Pictures of Gayathri taken 21/09/2006

2006-09-23T08:29:00.000+05:30

We have a new Baby

2006-09-15T21:34:00.002+05:30

I and Savithri were blessed with a baby girl who was born at 1:28 PM (Indian Standard Time) on the 14th of September 2006. I mailed, SMS'd or called almost all of you, who read this blog regularly and have received your best wishes and blessings. My elder one is a son called Aditya, born on 29th January 1997. This baby daughter occured 9 years and 9 months after Aditya. We pondered hard about giving Aditya a sibling. Possibly we pondered too long. But all is well that ends well. Since the baby daughter is a gift/tribute to Aditya, who has been a great son, and since Aditya means Sun in Sanskrit, and since the Gayatri Mantra is a tribute to the Sun God, I think it would be apt to name the baby daughter Gayatri. I havent decided yet and would seek all your comments on this. The delivery was by cesearian section since there were some complications. Mother and daughter are fine and recovering from the ordeal called "The Birth" in hospital. Savithri as you know works for the Ministry of Defence at Delhi. Since this will keep me busy for some time now, I may not be able to proceed further in the blog for a week atleast. I will post pics of the baby daughter in my next post. Till then keep blessing the child and pray for us.

Thanks guys!

The class of 1980

2006-09-10T17:48:00.000+05:30

There were 39 students in our class in MCC. Ahmed Bary, Bilal Ahmed, Anthony James, Vinayak, B Y Ramesh, M Ramesh, H S Murali, Santhanam, D M Murali, M Srinivas, Ashok Ratnam, Usha Ramachandran, Geeeta Menon, Minal Dalal, Prasanna Ramakrishnan, Glory, Poornima D K, Shahin Farhana, Rama Naidu, Pushpalatha, Rosy, Ramarao S, Ramprasad S, Shirin, Chander, Shabir Ahmed, Budesh, H Prakash, Xavier, Abdul Jabbar, Ataur Rehman, Christopher Anil Rao, Ramdas Iyer, M R Jayachandran, Ravi Rahalkar, Ravi Shankar, Jairaj, Roslyn, Mohan. Of this Geeta Rama, JC, me and Santhanam were from Wadi. Mohan and Rosy are alas, dead. As I understand, Mohan killed himself and Rosy was murdered. Mohan was even then morose, but Rosy was fat and jolly. We all liked her company. She used to laugh a lot. Her violent end shocks and pains me. We all remember you Rosy and love you for what you were. We wouldn’t have called you Moti and hurt you had we known that you wouldn’t be laughing for long.

The Layout in Shahabad was slightly different. Since it wasn’t as important a railway station as Wadi, there was no railway colony as such. There were some quarters, but that didn’t make a colony. The Bal Vidya Mandir was located there. Many of the readers in this blog may be surprised to learn that I have never seen the Bal Vidya Mandir myself, even though several students from our class in Wadi, including Vidya Narwate was in BVM. If you came to Shahabad by rail, having emerged from Shahabad railway station, we walked straight ahead, passed part of the bajaar (many readers may wonder why I continue to write ‘bajaar’ rather than ‘bazaar’. That’s how we pronounced it there) and also part of the ACC colony – we actually never entered bajaar or ACC colony and walked straight to the ABL colony and joined the road coming from Wadi and onto ABL colony. First came the SSQs, then the JSQs, and then we turned left to the road that passed Chi Chi Po Po to reach MCC. On the northern side of MCC were the STRTs and the TRTs (they were the equivalent of LTRTs in Wadi, but they didn’t call them LTRTs there). Further north was Bhankur and on to Gulbarga. Bhankur was to Shahabad, what Rawoor was to Wadi. There were some excellent Jain era rock carvings in Bhankur. Jainism has a significant presence in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, contrary to the perception in the North of India. Gomateshwara of Sravanabelagola is a very well known site, but like Bhankur, there were several other unknown sites.

Unlike in Wadi, Shahabad had at that time two cinema theatres, one in the ACC colony and another called Tirandaz, owned and operated by the Iranis. It was in all respects a much bigger town than Wadi, and was like an elder brother. While recently talking to Ataur Rehman, he happened to mention that having seen my blog, his daughter wondered why people in those days traveled from Wadi to Shahabad to study, while now, it was the other way round. I, on the other hand wondered why children from Shahabad were now traveling to Wadi to study.

Khalvato Divaseshwarasya Kiranaih

2006-09-06T22:59:00.000+05:30

The bus ride from Wadi to Shahabad took 45 minutes. It started at about 8 AM from near the ACC club. There were three drivers who were assigned duty from time to time. They were Muhammad Rasool, Sudhakar and Eashwarappa. Rasool was the most popular driver. He was mostly bald and had no respect for people. He drove the bus very fast, but had good control. His speed and brashness made him an apt hero for half baked kids like us. Sudhakar was the antithesis of Rasool. He was diminutive. He drove with caution. In fact one wonders how he managed to control the bus at all because he had to haul the gear handle with both hands to change gears and had to stand to operate the pedals. It was he I think (JC correct me if I am wrong) who once, while driving through Rawoor – enroute to Wadi from Shahabad one evening – hit a bull and broke its horn. The bus was held up by irate villagers for over three hours. Any incident, good or bad was exciting to us and so we enjoyed this incident too. The third driver Eashwarappa wasn’t a regular. He came when Rasool or Sudhakar weren’t available. He was dark, stout and phlegmatic and didn’t talk much. He was the least popular.

Girls sat on the right of the aisle and boys on the left. The first seat on the left, near the door was the right of the most powerful boys, normally of tenth standard. I and JC sat on this seat during the academic year 1979-80. Sometimes, it rained so heavily that the river Kagna was flooded. It flowed over the Bridge and it was dangerous to travel through it. So We had to take another route via Chitapur, which took us over two hours to reach Wadi from Shahabad.. This again was an adventure and we enjoyed it. One August, Lakshmi Pathy had come to Shahabad for some reason and returned with us by the bus. That day we had to take the Chitapur route. It was the evening of 14th August 1979. During the 2 hour + journey Lakshmi Pathy kept us entertained with a story, so that we didn’t know when we reached Wadi. It was 8 PM. The next day we had to start early, in white and white uniforms for the Independence day celebrations at MCC. The bus didn’t run that day so we had to go by rail. We got into a steam engine and were traveling on the tender (will tell you what a tender is, in another post) midway, the driver of the engine got annoyed with us, so he commanded us to get onto the coal heap. We reached MCC, with our carefully washed and ironed white dresses as well as our faces black with coal dust. Naturally, the Headmistress Sr. Angelita didn’t let us join the parade and we were made to stand out.

On a normal working day, we reached MCC by around 8:45 AM. The classes started at 9, before which we had the assembly. This ritual was similar to what we had at SACS, except that songs were played over the public address system and we lip synced. There were separate Christian hymns for every day of the week, most of them sung by Christopher Reeves and played back on LP records. One hymn I remember was “Jesus – in the morning, Jesus, in the evening” The headmistress spoke to us over the microphone everyday. Then we marched to the classes which began at 9. There was a tradition that the class teacher took the first period. In eighth standard our class teacher was Kumari Balakrishnan, in ninth, it was Nagendra Revanasiddappa Beloor and in tenth, it was Mysore S Devaraj. Since Mrs. Balakrishnan taught Sanskrit, it was always Sanskrit during the first period in eighth standard. We also got into the habit of referring to our teachers by their initials in MCC. So Mrs. Balakrishnan was KB, Nagendra Revanasiddappa Beloor was NRB and Mysore S Devaraj was MSD. Mr.Vinayak Hegde wasn’t a class teacher. Sadly, Mr. Hegde passed away of a kidney ailment in the 80’s.

NRB stayed in Shahabad Bazaar area and traveled to the school in a bicycle. MSD stayed in an STRT near the school and so did Hegde Master. KB’s husband was working for ABL, so she stayed in an STRT with her family. KB was pregnant during the time when we were in eighth standard. She taught Sanskrit with a Malayali accent. One Subhashitam I remember having been taught by her even now is,

Khalvato Diwaseshwarasya Kiranaih Santapito Mastake
Vanchan Deshamanaatapan Vidhivashaat Aalasya Moolam gatah
Tatrapyasya Mahaaphalena patatah, bhagnam sashabdam shirah
Prayo gachhati yatra Bhagyarahitastatraiva yantyapadah

Meaning in a nutshell, wherever an unfortunate paerson goes, misfortune follows him. And that is what is happening to me right now!!!

PS: Chatted with Janaki today and felt gr8. Went back 27 years in time

My first steps at MCC

2006-09-05T22:03:00.000+05:30

Shahabad was a new world to us from Wadi. The standards of living were higher. Many people in the ABL colony spoke chaste Hindi, the roads there were rather clean and in general it was as if we were off to a foreign nation to continue our study. In my seventh standard board exams, I was second and Geeta Menon was first from our school. Thangi could not accept such a situation. She was of the belief that her grandson can never stand second to a girl! She drove my father to seek a re evaluation of my paper. For this we had to travel to Chitapur, the Taluk headquarters. The re evaluation was done and as far as I remember, I gained some more marks( I suspect that whoever asks for re evaluation gets some more marks – I learnt about that when I became a college lecturer later in 1989 – a corollary of the saying “The crying baby gets milk”). I therefore became first and was presented an abridged Oxford dictionary by SACS and twenty rupees and a letter of congratulations by the ACC Factory in February 1977 for this achievement. In the meanwhile I was admitted to the Mount Carmel Convent (MCC) and also, significantly, in June 1977 got my eyes tested and started wearing spectacles. SACS had small classrooms and one could see the blackboard wherever one sat, but MCC had larger classrooms and ones inadequacies were brought to the fore. I have been wearing glasses ever since.

Also in SACS, I had 14 classmates and it was a small family, while in MCC, I had 38 classmates, which is the normal strength in a class. We had to carry our lunch boxes with us as we could not go home for lunch as we did while at SACS. I must also mention that the students from Wadi were treated a little below par compared to students from Shahabad. From among my classmates from SACS, Jayachandran, Santhanam, Srinivas, me, Geeta, and Rama joined MCC while Vidya joined Bal Vidya Mandir. It was in MCC that we really started learning. It is not that SACS did not measure up to standards, but till High School, we had subjects like science, social studies etc. But once we joined MCC, the subjects were further subdivided into Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, History, Geography, Civics etc. MCC also had a very good library run by the faithful Gangadhar. I started my reading habit (both fiction and non fiction) in MCC. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I matured intellectually while at MCC. The Teachers were in a class of their own. I am yet to meet such erudite teachers even though I have, since then,seen teachers from all over India and some even from abroad. Nagendra Revansiddappa Beloor taught Biology, Chemistry and Hindi, Mysore S Devaraj taught Mathematics and Physics, Kumari Balakrishnan taught us Sanskrit which was the first language at MCC, Vinayak Hegde taught us History while we were in 8th standard, Sr. Angel Mary taught English (Vinayak Hegde has alas, passed away due to a kidney failure). Each teacher was a master in what they taught and what is more they knew how to teach. Sometimes they taught, sometimes they told stories. I still remember the story “God sees the truth but waits” by Lev Tolstoy as told by Beloor Master, and Julius Ceaser, as told by Devraj Master. And I call them Masters because they were masters. The Subhashitanis that Kumari Balakrishnan taught us, I still remember and teach to my son. I state with conviction here that what my son learns today at a cost of Rupees Four Thousand a month, is much inferior to what I learnt in 1977 at a cost of Rupees twenty five a month.

It is said in Hindu philosophy “Mata, Pita, Guru, Devah”. The child knows who its mother is, because it was born out of her. But it does not know who its father is. The prime responsibility of the mother is to point out to the child its father, that is, to provide the child a status and name in society. Having found out who its father is, the child progresses further. The father’s duty now, is to point out a Guru or teacher for the child, who will teach the child what to do and what not. Having pointed out the Guru, the father withdraws. The Guru now comes into play. It is his or her duty to point out God – the Ultimate truth - to the child. That is what N R Beloor, M S Devaraj, Kumari Balakrishnan and other teachers of MCC did for us. They pointed their fingers at truth and that is the path we follow today, inspite of several distractions and irritations from people like our superiors in our jobs. If we are equanimous in the face of petty irritants like our bosses, it is because of the courage that our teachers in MCC taught us.

Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu Gururdevo Maheshwarah

2006-09-03T19:39:00.000+05:30

I talked to two of the greatest people whom I have had the fortune to have been taught by, Mr.M.S.Devaraj and Mr. N.R.Beloor. Both were extremely kind and gentle and were very happy that I had called. I consider myself thoroughly trained in scientific thinking and pose a scientific problem to me and I am sure I can reason it out. I am now a non formal science educator and have the occasion to meet many international experts in several fields of science. Having completed my post graduation in Applied Electronics, I recently made a Gallery of exhibits on Human Biology, the contents of which were greatly appreciated even by the doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. I can talk genetics knowledgeably with scientists involved in the Human Genome Project. I owe this confidence in and love for science because of the foundations laid by two great souls Devaraj and Beloor. Devaraj Master is with the St.Philomina’s High School in Mysore and has 3 years to go before his retirement. Beloor Master is the Principal of a Pre University College in Shahabad and retires in 2010. We see that neither of them have become the Managers or Directors that some of us have become. But the combined knowledge and wealth of us all, came from those wellsprings. My head bows in reverence to them. Simultaneously, I urge any of you who read this blog to render to them any service or help that they may need at any time. I will be writing more about them as we progress.

Chi Chi Po Po

2006-09-02T10:08:00.000+05:30

The only mode of transport in Wadi in those days were trains. The Factory had a Jeep or two and a car for the General Manager – an Ambassador. Whenever anyone needed to undertake a journey which couldn’t be achieved by walk (which was rather rare), like when one had to go to the railway station to receive relatives arriving by trains, one requisitioned a jeep from the factory. The jeep arrived at ones residence and having picked us up went to the station, did its duty and returned back. The jeeps were of Willy’s make and rather rickety. But other than that, the only mode of transport in those days were trains. There were trains and trains. Wadi was a Junction that is the Railway line didn’t just pass through Wadi; it came from Bombay, bifurcated into two at Wadi, one line went to Madras and another to Hyderabad. So most trains stopped there. The DOWN trains, which had odd numbered names like 9 DN, 11 DN etc. came from Bombay and the UP trains were Bombay bound. More about these trains later. But when the time came for us to go to Shahabad to study, ACC bought a bus. It was a Tata and it carried the number MEP 6210. It was painted blue and had a white stripe across its middle. Actually, as JC points out, we were the third batch to venture out of Wadi to study. (Actually that is not strictly true because people like Lakshmy and Shashi Pathy, Hemant Soley (Hemant was Bundoo’s brother, who later Married) and others before us had gone to Shahabad to study, but as individual students. Going to Shahabad for continuing education as a batch and thereby necessitating the provision for a bus by ACC, Wadi was started, if I am not wrong, in the academic year 1975-76, with Latha Thankachan’s batch. As JC rightly reminds me in advance, we were the third batch.

As mentioned earlier, this necessity to go to Shahabad to continue our education was because SACS had facilities for only upto Class 7 in those days. There were two schools in Shahabad which had high school sections. The Mount Carmel Convent School(MCC), located at and patronized by ABL colony, and the Bal Vidya Mandir (BVB) in the Shahabad Railway Colony. Most Wadi students (upto 70%) went to MCC and the remaining to BVB. I propose to go into the details of MCC proper in the next post, but a little background information. The MCC was run by the Carmelite order of nuns, who were also affiliated to the Roman Catholic Church as was the SACS. But unlike the sisters at SACS who only wore pure white habits, Carmelite sisters wore white and a dark shade of brown. They also wore pure white sometimes, but their habits were more colourful than those of SACS sisters. Suri (P V R Suryanarayana) informs me that sisters in SACS these days were sarees. Having seen a lot of things in my life, I am not easily surprised but this bit of information threw me. SACS sisters in sarees!!!! Might as well imagine the Pope in a Dhoti!

It was also in Shahbad that we saw a hotel – or call it a restaurant – for the first time. Wadi didn’t have any restaurants, though there a few seedy khanavalis. Khanavalis were eateries serving traditional Lingayat food and were typically named after Shiva or Sharanabasaweshwara. The hotel in Shahabad was located adjacent to MCC and went by the rather curious name of Chi Chi Po Po. I will never understand why the hotel was thus named (in Tamil/Malayalam/Telugu it roughly means “Bloody Shit, get Lost”). Not many patronized this hotel though it was clean and spacious. The hotel eventually shut down and was taken over by another management, which promptly gave it a more acceptable name - “Nandavan”

Shahabad

2006-08-31T00:00:00.000+05:30

With a promise to myself, and to those I omitted mentioning in the posts that have gone by, that I will be coming back to the years from 1969 to 1977 in Wadi, as often as I feel necessary and responsible, I step out of what was once my womb. In real life, whatever promises one makes with respect to coming back to the womb – and every neonate, I am sure makes such promises to itself – one cannot and hence one doesn’t. But in a literary attempt such as a blog, once can and therefore, one does. With this solace I proceed further.Shahabad is a slightly larger town than Wadi. It is located to the north of Wadi at a distance of about 11 kilometers. The two towns were connected by a railway line which extended from Kanyakumari in the south to Mumbai in the north. By road, the distance was slightly more about 15 kilometers, for one drove parallel to the railway line till Rawoor, turned east, traveled about a kilometer through the village of Rawoor, turned north again and went parallel to the railway line towards Shahabad. Very near Shahabad, one crossed the Kagna (It was actually Kagina but we called it Kagna), a tributary of Bhima, which in turn is a tributary of the Krishna that ultimately flows into the Bay of Bengal. Bhima along with Tungabhadra are two major tributaries of Krishna. Kagna was an ordinary river and was rather dry during the blazing summer months from March to May. Sometimes during the monsoons, the river got flooded and the water touched the Bridge running across it. Having crossed the Kagna, you entered Shahabad. Travel further and turn right for the ABL colony and right for the ACC Colony, Bajaar and the Railway station. From the above, it derives that Shahabad had two Factories, ACC, as in Wadi and ABL – means the ACC Babcock Limited. The ACC factory here was much older than that in Wadi but smaller and used the wet process of cement making unlike Wadi which employed the Dry process. ACC, Wadi subsequently became the largest cement manufacturing unit in Asia and the first 1 million tonne per year plant in India and remained so, till the Larsen and Toubro Plant in Chandrapur overtook it. I am not aware of its current standing and Jayachandran, who is a leading light of the Indian Cement Industry can enlighten me by his posts. During 1977, when we started going to Shahabad, ABL was actually called AVB or ACC Vickers Babcock, an ancilliary of ACC, which made heavy engineering products like boilers and things. Before we left Shahabad in 1980 Vickers had withdrawn and it became ABL. Unlike ACC (both Wadi and Shahabad), which was pretty downmarket, with a dominance of Madrasis (by Wadi definition, anyone to the south of Wadi were Madrasis, and by Shahabad definition, anyone to the south of Shahabad were Madrasis and and by Gulbarga definition, anyone to the south of Gulbarga were Madrasis. But I use the term Madrasi in the real sense of the term here – the sense in which the thoroughbred Kapoors, Chawlas and Chopras use it), ABL had several Managers, who were actually the real McCoys , as the Americans would call them. Shahs and Wadehras, and Agarwals and Kapoors abounded. Also there were hardly any managers in ACC. There were people like burners and watchman supervisors and overseers and timekeepers, but the number of managers in ABL was a source of awe to us who came from Wadi. That is to say, ABL was pretty upmarket.

An apology, a promise and Christopher

2006-08-28T19:29:00.000+05:30

I am very sorry to have stopped the blog for some time now. I had a chat with JC in the meanwhile. There are too many incidents, too many characters, so numerous, yet so significant that one is amazed how many people and events have influenced us in these forty two years of existence. I am at a threshold in the blog now. I had talked about 7th Standard and I will now be leaving Wadi for Shahabad – in the blog. But let me tell you, the transition from Phase I to Phase II of my life in the blog is proving to be much more difficult than it was in real life. Have I missed someone? Have I left out anything? Should I have talked about this – or perhaps omitted mentioning that? As I sit brooding, characters and events rise like ghostly figures from the mist of forgotten yesteryears. It is like random flecks of memories floating in and out of consciousness. Characters like Khapate, Malleshappa, S R Iyer, Anuradha Ramiah, events, which could have been rumours, whose whiff could inadvertently wreak havoc in someone’s life somewhere, but interesting rumours nevertheless. The blog which started as a reminder of my life to my own self has acquired a new character, all its own, and is asking me these questions. It is, as all parents know, difficult, when what started out as a sperm, meeting an egg, grows up into a strapping young man or a smart young lady and asks you questions for which you have no straightforward answer. Call it the writer’s block, but I shall overcome. Tommorrow is another day. There will be a brand new post tomorrow.

Christopher Anil Rao, Director, Goodrich Aviation, Bangalore, had come to Delhi. He took some time off to meet me in the lobby of the Maurya Sheraton Hotel. Sounds impressive doesn’t it? But deep inside, he turned out to be plain good old Chris. Warmer and more mellowed with age. He got me to speak to Ataur Rehman over phone. Repeat previous sentence again for Ataur. Deep under we from Wadi and Shahabad and Gulbarga will all be the same, such was the influence of the soil. Whether in a pub in Bangalore or in the lobby of a Five star hotel in Delhi or elsewhere, we still retain those basic amalgam of characters – Lingayat, Muslim, Lambada, whatever – which has made us what we are.

The ancestry of Radha

2006-08-24T23:03:00.001+05:30

Pachainayagi, known popularly as Pacha Paatti (Paatti meaning grandmother) was married to Ramaswami Iyer of Moovattupuzha. They had no children for a long time and the couple had been visiting several temples in the quest of a son. They had finally done a divine deal with Ramanatha Swamy of Rameshwaram in coastal Tamil Nadu that they would visit His temple and pay obeisance to the Lord, when Pachainayagi became pregnant with her first son. So delighted was Ramaswami Iyer with this development that, without waiting for the child to be delivered, he heeded the call of the spiritual and embarked on a pilgrimage to Rameshwaram. He was not destined to return, and his first and only son Sreemoolanathan was born in the first decade of the 20th century in a small mud hut in Moovattupuzha. News of Ramaswami Iyer’s death soon followed and Pachainayagi adopted the costume and way of life of a traditional south Indian Brahmin widow. As with Thangam, whom we talked about in the earlier post, Pachai Paatti learned early to fend for herself and tend her son. But unlike Thangam she did not opt to go back to her parents’ house. Instead she settled down in Moovattupuzha and built for herself and her son a house. She also learnt several skills like rudimentary ayurveda and the method of bringing down jaundice and such other diseases and poisons on account of insect and reptile bites by means of prayers etc. Being a chaste widow with such powers, she was much sought after and was respected in the community. Ramaswami Iyer’s brother whom we only knew as Kunju Patta lived in another house alongside. The house that Pachai Paatti built had five small rooms with mud walls and tiled roofs on the bank of the river Moovattupuzha in central Kerala. She lived in one and the others, she rented out to people. Mother and son lived with the income they got from renting the other four rooms. Since it was ahouse that had five rooms, it was called Anchu Muri Madhom or the five roomed house, located in the Kavumpady locality of Moovattupuzha. During those times the Kavumpady area was a locality occupied exclusively by Iyers like the Koovappady village. The area was called Kavumpady because it adjoined the Puzha Kara Kavu, a temple dedicated to Goddess Bhagawati on the river bank.

Young Sreemoolanathan was called Raman by his mother in gratitude to Lord Ramanatha Swami of Rameshwaram. He was adequately educated and set up a small grocery shop in on of the rooms of Anchu Muri Madhom. When the time to get married came, Sreemoolanathan married Seethalakshmi of Moncombu village in the Alappuzha District in southern Kerala. Seethalakshmi belonged to a well to do family of Kuttanad. Her father was a Licentiate Medical Practitioner or LMP which means he was authorized to practice allopathic medicine. So was her brother Moorthy. We understand her family owned a boat, which was a symbol of prestige in Kuttanad.

Seethalakshmi and Sreemoolanathan had seven children, two sons and five daughters. Ramaswamy or Ponnanna, the eldest, Rajammal or Raasam, Ananthalakshmi or Ammini, Annaporni or Annam, Radhammal, my mother, Balasubramaian or Baalan and Krishnambal. Radha was born on the 29th of December 1938 or on the Utrattadi day of the Malayalam month of Dhanu. Radha, with her six siblings therefore, lived a life full of her own people, unlike Thanga Mani who lived amidst a lot of people though they were not really his own. She did her schooling in the St. Augustine’s High School, a missionary school for girls. Education in the whole of Moovattupuzha, I believe now, is now the sole right of the Nirmala Institutions, but apparently it wasn’t so in those days when Radha was being educated. All the daughters of Sreemoolanathan studied in St. Augustine’s High School. Radha did her typewriting and shorthand courses after her matriculation and a course in Hindi, that is recognized as a graduate degree. She tutored some students in Hindi for sometime before she was married to Narayana Iyer or Thanga Mani of Koovappady on 6th June 1963.

PS Since I started this blog I have got in touch with 72 old friends of mine with whom I had lost touch. Out of this 20 were my classmates from MCC. I mailed or called up almost all of them. Some are overwhelmed; some remain in touch, some respond and lapse back into silence. The greatest contributors in locating these lost souls were Gomathy, Jayachandran, Datha and H S Murali. Deepa and Usha closely monitor the blog. Thanks to all of you once again.

Mami's Collegium

2006-08-20T19:08:00.000+05:30

Narayanan Mama had retired from service in the Indian Armed Forces and had taken up reemployment in ACC. He was in the technical services in the Armed Forces, and hence he joined the Electrical Department in ACC. They came to Wadi several years after the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ like us. Mrs.Narayanan was Bhuvana Mami. They were Kerala Iyers like us, and stayed in STRT 31/2. Though their daughter Gomathy was around our age she wasn’t born in Wadi. We also knew that they had an elder daughter, much elder to us, but I don’t remember having seen her. She turns out to be the mother of Deepa, one of the persons who keeps this blog going. We remember Gomathy as a jolly young girl – more boy than girl. She wasn’t coy or aloof and we weren’t uncomfortable when she was around, unlike in the presence of some other girls. I think Gomathy inherited her no nonsense attitude from Mami.While Narayanan Mama was a quiet presence in the background, Mami was a versatile person. She had quite a grasp of mathematics and religious matters and was an astrologer to boot – the first serious rival to Seshadri Mama, Santhanam’s father, whom you may remember from my earlier posts. While Seshadri Mama mostly gave very positive readings, Mami foresaw problems and suggested remedies. I remember her diagnosing some problem in my horoscope (I think it was the Swadasa swaapahaaram of Mars) for which she prescribed that my mother read the Venkatesa Suprabhatam every Saturday morning. The religious duties in my house were mostly looked after by Thangi, my grandmother and sometimes my father (by the way, when I started this Blog, I didn’t think THIS was the direction it would take. I thought it would be a personal reminder to myself, so I didn’t introduce my parents. My father is Narayana Iyer and mother Radhammal. I will, in view of the direction this blog is taking, write a post about them and others in my family later, because I need to be introduced to the readers in the proper perspective), and my mother mostly looked after the secular aspects – what the Iyers call ‘Loukikam’ in the house, like cooking, cleaning etc. Her philosophy is that keep the lamp burning in your house, and the Lord will look after himself in the temple. I haven’t seen her indulge in religious rituals except when they were mandatory, but Narayanan Mami made her take up ritual chanting of Venkatesa Suprabhatam.We were sent to Mami’s house mainly for maths tuitions, but we learnt everything. To be frank, it wasn’t anything like a class at all. We would – 5 or 6 of us sit wherever we wanted, one on the cot in the front room, one in the kitchen, two people near the main door on the floor, someone in the balcony, many times Mami, cooking in the kitchen or nowhere to be seen, Mama gone out. It was somewhat like a collegium in ancient Greece during the time of Socrates. We used to indulge in intellectual arguments amongst ourselves, one would be seen memorizing the names of the members of the Morarji Desai’s Cabinet (I even now remember most ministers in that cabinet though I would strain to remember the names of today’s ministers). Some would be working out mathematical problems and suddenly Mami would materialize where any mistake occurred. Having corrected it, she would disappear into the kitchen. More than a maths tuition teacher, mami acted as a facilitator of learning, creating the proper ambience. We learnt what we wanted, the way we wanted. Every single day we came out feeling fulfilled. And we were as eager to proceed to Mami’s place for the tuition as we were to go out to play, because learning in STRT 31/2 was a novel experience. Those were not the times when tuition teachers charged huge fees like today. It was all for free. Mami’s method of teaching left a deep, subconscious influence on me. When I became a teacher in later days, (I am even now a teacher – a non formal science educator), I adopted Mami’s style of teaching, letting the student learn, rather than teach the student. Latest theories in Education also tell us that this is the best for of teaching. Throw a problem in the midst of your students and stand back, leaving them to solve it. If you see them proceeding in a wrong direction, make a course correction and stand back again. Mami therefore not only influenced my learning but also my teaching.Another sphere where Mami influenced me (I must give equal credit to Seshadri Mama too here) was in Astrology. I subsequently learnt astrology and practiced it for a long time, and was a very successful practitioner of the art too. I have since given up Astrology as I now feel it is a fraud.

The ancestry of Thanga Mani

2006-08-19T20:51:00.001+05:30

In an earlier post (Part 11 of my life in Wadi) I had mentioned about the family of Venkatachala Vaadhyaar of Koovappady. In around 1917 (I remember Thangi saying that she was born in the same year as Indira Gandhi so that would make it 1917, I guess), as far as I could gather on the 23rd of May 1917, or on Makayiram day of the Malayalam month or Edavom that year, Thangammal was born as the tenth of the sixteen children of Sankari Ammal and Venkatachala Vaadhyaar in Koovappady. Koovappady was a small village near Perumbavoor town and was at a walking distance from Kalady (the birth place of Adi Shankaracharya), located in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. Of course it wasn’t Kerala at that time, it was Thiruvithankur Kochi province. Koovappady was an exclusively Brahmin (Iyer) village, with most of the families belonging to the Ashtasahasram sect, in which the Vaadhyaar lived with his family in a house called Puthan Madhom. The Madhom still exists. Thangam’s father died before she was thirteen. I have heard many tales of those days from Thangi. The Vaadhyaar saved money for his daughters’ marriage in bronze kudams or pots. Eight grams of gold (one sovereign or pavan) in those days costed thirteen rupees. That means one tola would have costed sixteen rupees. The Vadhyaar allotted about 10 sovereigns of gold for each daughter. But it is understood that the Vaadhyaar died before Thangam could be married off. Possibly around the age of sixteen, Thangam was given in matrimony into a family in the Thrippaloor village (near Alathoor) in the Palakkad District, to Ramaswamy Iyer. Not much is known about this family, except that they were extremely well off. Most of what follows is hearsay as a lawyer would say, but the information is gleaned from authentic sources. Their house was huge and Ramasawamy Iyer had brothers. There appears to have been some curse on the family and all children in the family were male. No daughter was ever born in the family. Ramaswamy Iyer’s parents were Narayanaswamy Iyer and Bhuvaneshwari. There was a pond belonging to this family in which lotus flowers, which were used for poojas in the house, blossomed. Certain customs in this house were different from that in Thangam’s paternal house since this family belonged to Palakkad. Narayanaswamy Iyer seems to have been an astrologer and a Sanskrit Pandit in the court of Kochi Maharaja. Ramaswami Iyer seems to have been in Governement service as a forest ranger.Eventually, when she was 17-18, Thangam became pregnant with her first child, and as is the custom in those days, went to her parents house after her Seemantham, for the delivery. But it so happened that, when she was at her parents place, news reached her that Ramaswamy Iyer had passed away. I would never know the reasons for this unfortunate incident because all people who knew what could have happened are now dead or lost. However that condemned Thangam to the life of a widow, which wasn’t as happy a state of a woman’s life as it is, today. She gave birth to Mani or Narayana Iyer on the Ayilyam day of the Malayalam month of Karkidakom in 1933 (26th July 1933). Since atleast one male child of each daughter in Venkatachala Vaadhyaar’s family was called Mani, Narayana Iyer was called Thanga Mani to signify that he was Thangam’s son. Widows went back to their parents house most of the time after their husband’s death, so Thangam stayed back in Koovappady thereafter. There also appears to have been some wrangling over property, as a consequence of which, Ramaswamy Iyer’s brothers declined to settle anything on Thangam. Her brief sojourn to Palakkad was thus over. Subramania Iyer, the elder brother of Thangam – popularly called Manian Vaadhyaar (he also appears to have been the local postmaster), built another house to the north of Puthan Madhom called the Vadakke Puthan Madhom and took over the moral reins of the family, which consisted of the widowed Sankari Ammal and her several widowed daughters and younger brothers like Hariharan, Kuttappan, Sivan, Raman etc. Living as a dependant of one’s maternal uncles after the death of ones father is never a pleasant business, but unfortunately this was the fate that destiny had crafted for Thangamani

Kids in Public Schools of Indian Urbania and Kaddu's Jawa Bike

2006-08-17T23:47:00.000+05:30

It was also during the time when we reached 7th Standard, where we had to appear for the Board examinations, that our parents thought that we should study a little harder and more systematically. I, as a Delhi parent of a Public school student – more than me, my wife – am so seriously involved in the education of my son that more often than not, one gets confused as to who is the student and who is the parent. Like during summer holidays, little kids who need help washing their ass, are given projects like “The differences between a platypus and a pangolin”, Different adaptation methods of plants in arid climates” etc. And the parents who know little more than the kids (I know, thanks to people like Ms.Lakshmi Pathy, Sr.Leonie, Mr.N.R.Beloor, Mr. M.S.Devraj etc.), burn the midnight oil creating these project reports which are then proudly displayed and evaluated by teacher who again know little more than the parents.. And the next morning the child wakes up and asks us whether we have completed the report. This is not confined to parents in Delhi alone. During my days in Kolkata, I learnt that parents take several days leave and accompany their 15 and 16 year olds to school during their class tests, sit around under the trees till the tests are over, and bring the boys and girls back home. It happens in every city these days. The parents know their child’s curricula more thoroughly than the kids. Well, things in Wadi during the seventies weren’t quite like that. Kids of today may be shocked to learn that it was the other way round. It was the kid who did the homework and it was the parent who asked whether it was completed. And that too only conscientious parents. Most parents assumed that all work that needs to be done has been done, and if there were indications from the school to the contrary, necessary corrective actions, often physical, (or corporeal, as they say these days) were taken. That was what parents were for. Child psychologists these days say that such upbringing, damages the child’s psyche irreversibly. Well, I and the other kids in Wadi were brought up precisely that way, and frankly I don’t see irreversibly damaged psyches within any of us. Be that as it may, as I mentioned, our parents thought that we should study a little harder and more systematically pending our Boards. Looking around, they found in Narayanan Mami (technically Bhuvana Narayanan but we called her Narayanan Mami or simply Mami for all practical purposes) an ideal teacher, so most of us were sent under her tutelage during 1976-77. Narayanan Mami wasn’t really my first tuition teacher though. I learnt Kannada, which was a strange tongue to me, first from Prabha Auntie or Mrs. Nuggehalli Srinivasan, whose son Kiran was a good friend, and my junior by two years. Kiran’s sister Kanchu also studied from SACS and MCC. They being Kannadigas from the Mysore-Mandya area, also spoke Tamil, though their accent was much like that of Rajnikanth. My next tution teacher was a girl who was the sister in law of Mr.Kaddu, who was the Rural Development Officer. (ACC, Wadi, even in those days, took seriously what Samsung. LG, Intel, Microsoft etc. call their ‘corporate responsibility to the society’ today). They developed acres of land in the outskirts of each ACC colony, growing crops and vegetables, training local farmers and artisans, providing free fertilizers and seeds to them, advising them on scientific farming techniques etc. This stretch of land was called the Farm. Part of the produce of the Farm was sold to ACC employees in a subsidized rate. The person who was in charge of such programmes was called the Rural Development Officer. During the period of discussion, one Mr. M.R.Kaddu was the RDO. He had a Jawa Motorcycle which he used to ride to the Farm. Now we boys of Wadi were no angels. We would sometimes fill the keyhole of Kaddu’s Motorcyle with fine sand. Now anybody who has had that done to his ignition lock will know what a pain it is to start the vehicle thereafter. This Kaddu stayed below our house. He had a sister in law called Gulabi. This girl was my second Kannada tuition teacher. I learnt the alphabets and phrases like “Idu Mane”, “Idu Basavana Mane”, Eeta Ganapa”, “Eeshana Maga Ganapa” and things like that from my first two tuition teachers. Real life Kannada like “Sariyo nimmayee, yakk benn hathlakathee” etc. - a far cry from “Basavana tande Badava” - were learnt on the streets later. (Mrs. Srinivasan, a devout Madhwa Brahmin from the South of Karnataka will kindly ignore and excuse this kind of Kannada that I later substituted, for what I had learnt from her early in my life. Frankly I am not even sure she will understand what I am saying when I say “Sariyo nimmayee, yakk benn hathlakathee”).

Having acknowledged the contributions of Mrs. Nuggehalli Prabha Srinivasan and Gulabi I come back to Narayanan Mami and her influence on me, but this post already having exceeded its word limit, and Narayanan Mami needing a full post for herself, I will come back to her in the next post.

A typical day in the life of a student of SACS in 1975 AD

2006-08-16T16:54:00.000+05:30

As I have often said before, there wasn’t much by way of entertainment in Wadi in those days. Our routine was something like this. We got up and got ready for school and by 8:45 AM were in school. SACS was a 2 minute walk from my home. Past STRT 32 where JC stayed, on to the main road, cross it, enter the ACC football ground, walk across its width and you were at the gates of SACS. The students gathered outside for the Assembly from 8:50 to 9:00 where we sang prayer songs, wished our teachers in a singsong voice, took the ‘Pledge’ which started with “India is my country. All Indians are my brothers and sisters. I love my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage………..” and so on. (this pledge is on the agenda of most schools. I would like to learn of its origin and history if anyone can tell me) Most of the words in the pledge like heritage did not make much sense at that time. We then sang the National Anthem and filed to our classes which started at 9:00 AM.

There was what was called an interval at about 11:00. Then at 12:50 or so we were excused for lunch. Most of us, living as near the school as we did, didn’t carry lunch boxes. We ran home, had lunch and ran back to school and were back by 1:30 PM. School then went on till 4:10 PM whereafter we left for home. Most serious subjects were taught in the pre lunch session. Afternoons were for lighter subjects. I remember we learnt many interesting things like grafting of rose plants, embroidery, gardening etc. Except for some strict disciplining, if we did our work well, studying per se in SACS, was a pleasant experience.

Evenings were mostly spent on playing. India was not yet shining, and most of us had, apart from our school uniforms, just a pair or two of dresses, mostly sewn by the tailors Ghanate out of clothes brought from the Kankurtes to wear for the evenings. Shoes were strictly for school. There was just one shop of everything on Wadi. Gaurishankar Pyarelal Khandelwal for grocery, Kankurte for clothes etc. We had one Sanjay in SACS in our class during 4th and 5th who was from a Marwari family of Sedam, who also had grocery and stationary shops in the Bajaar. I forget the name of their shop. Maybe JC can nudge my memory. Thanx JC, it was Sanjay Sutrawe. There were also two old brothers called Poonamchand Something-or-the-other Jain who dealt in grocery. But these shops slowly declined giving way to G P Khandelwal.

We didn’t have much to play with, so one game that was popular among us, was called Lagori. Variations of this game are played all over India with different names. It consisted of making a pile of flat chips of stones in the middle and attempting to dislodge the pile by throwing a ball on it. While the team which dislodged the pile rebuilt the pile, opponents tried hitting the members of the team with the ball. The goal was to rebuild the pile without getting hit by the ball. Srinivas and Hariprasad who came from Andhra while we were in 7th Standard informed us that the game was called Lingocha in their part of the country.

After the game some of us went home, some went to the Club. I was to reach home before 7 PM, where I bathed and was to chant the Vishnu Sahasranaman. Afterwards it was dinner and bed. A dull but very healthy way of life for a kid. No Pokemon, no Kurkure, no ice creams, no malls or multiplexes, no shopping. We ate what the adults ate.

We enter Class VII

2006-08-16T12:37:00.000+05:30

The period 1976-77 was an exciting time. We were going into class VII. SACS then had only seven classes. After 7th we had to leave for Shahabad to continue our education. So it was a sort of graduation from SACS, the only school we had seen. It was also time to grow up and travel 11 kilometers to Shahabad daily and stay there the whole day to study. I also started wearing spectacles from June 1976 There were fifteen of us in the class, eight girls and seven boys. Very different from today’s classes which have 6 divisions with 50 students in each. All our teachers knew each of us personally, and we knew our teachers too because of this highly advantageous teacher student ratio. There were some who left us by the time we reached 7th standard, like Bhaskar, Kanniappan etc. Seshasayee was the Store Keeper in ACC Wadi. His family was in Andhra till then, but now, they came to Wadi. Srinivas and Hariprasad joined us. They didn’t study in SACS as far as I can remember, but came after our 7th and joined us in MCC, Shahabad. It was at this time that a new nun by name Sister Leonie joined SACS. She was not exactly our class teacher, because it was tradition that the Headmistress be the class teacher of class VII. That was Sr. Mary Clarissa. But Sr.Leonie was our de facto class teacher. Sr. Leonie was dark and frail. But she was totally devoid of mercy, and beat the hell out of us if we were less than meticulous in our studies. Also anyone speaking in Hindi in the campus of SACS was dealt with severely. We had to speak English. Sr. Leonie enforced this in letter and spirit. She taught us English, specifically English Grammar. She taught us so much English Grammar that we thought that ‘Wren and Martin’ was as sacred to the Christians as was the Bible. The stupidest of us, were thorough in concepts like oxymorons and metaphors. We could unerringly distinguish a metaphor from a simile. We knew the figures of speech better than the figures of more interesting girls in our class. It was around this time that a Hindi movie called “Jai Santoshi Ma” was released, in which the myth of Goddess Santoshi Ma, the daughter of Lord Ganesh was created. (I must mention that such phenomena occur in Hinduism periodically. There is hardly any mention of Santoshi Ma in any scripture. But suddenly a new Goddess was conceptualized in the 70s, waves of frenzy surrounding her was created, traditions and rules for worshipping her set up – like never eat anything sour on Friday or the Goddess will destroy you – and a whole lot of people become devout followers. Recent times saw the creation of another such Goddess Vaibhavalakshmi, who also has claimed Fridays and seems to have dislodged Santoshi Ma much like Ganguly did Azharuddin) Why I mention this is that Leonie to us seemed to have as much power and fury as Santoshi Ma and so we promptly names her Santoshi Ma. We hated the nun with all our hearts, but in hindsight, when one sees the kind of English spoken by students of reputed public schools in Delhi after paying outrageous sums as fees, one feels extremely grateful to Sr.Leonie who set our foundations right with a vengeance. I was discussing this with JC and Datha, and we agreed that to be able to come from Wadi – a one horse town as the Americans would say - and be extremely comfortable with the Queen’s English, is an honour for which Sr. Leonie claims credit. Thanks sister wherever you are.

There was also a Chapel in SACS, where we prayed every day. As the 7th Standard Boards approached, we took to praying there three times a day. We chanted “Hail Mary” with such devotion and in such numbers that would put some sinister characters of a Dan Brown novel to shame. We followed several Christian traditions. Though after and before school, we did visit the neighbouring Ram Temple, during school hours we were strictly Roman Catholics, all of us. Also Wadi with a significant Muslim population, had a Mosque in the Bajaar area. I must mention here that in the language spoken in Wadi, all festivals Hindu, Muslim or Christian, were called Id. On days like Ramzan, I visited the Mosque and the Rafique’s house, where we had “Surqumba” a sweet dish. Also I would accompany Rafique to the Mosque, where I learnt to perform Namaaz, which I can do even now.

Being a Tamilian from Kerala, brought up in that area of Karnataka which borders Andhra and Maharashtra, in a town rich in Muslim culture, in a neighbourhood which had atleast ten people who spoke each of the Indian languages, and educated in a Catholic School, broadened my linguistic, religious and cultural horizons more than anything. Nehru and Indira Gandhi spent decades travelling in Europe and Gandhiji traveled all over the country by Third Class coaches for years to achieve just this, but I am proud to stand up and state that the kind of upbringing I had in Wadi made me a more complete Indian at a monthly cost of Rs.5/- (which was then the monthly fees of SACS. Actually it was Rs.10/- but I was given a 50% concession by Father Anthony of Moncombu, to whom I have referred to in an earlier post). And that is what makes Wadi my Mecca, My Kashi, My Jerusalem.

A postscript: Datha called me up today and gave me the phone numbers of Janaki, Arvind Agarwal and D M Usha. By then Arvind also called me up and we caught up on old times. Arvind was a dear friend and my roommate from the Jain Hostel days in Gulbarga and I heard he was in Baramati, working as the Engineering Head of a Clinical Research Company.

Addendum: JC reminds me of an incident which had slipped me. Our hatred for Sr.Leonie, the wounds she had physically and mentally inflicted on us was so fresh in our minds, that we had no thoughts to spare for the good she had done. It was on one such day that she, for some reason visited Shahabad and took the school bus with us. By deliberate design, we, who had studied under her in 7th standard, scrupulously ignored her presence all through the journey. It must have hurt her and if did she was too proud to show it. She also ignored us equally scrupulously. Isnt it sad how egos screw up relations?

Thanx Datha and Gomathy, JC and Deepa

2006-08-15T00:08:00.000+05:30

Thanks JC for your close monitoring and valuable inputs. You and Deepa seem to be ardently following the blog. I am encouraged. Datha called this morning to report that he had located several key characters in our plot. Dr. Surya Rao leads a retired life alone in an apartment in Hyderabad. His second daughter Bhavani stays a floor below in the same apartment block. Suryanarayana, my senior, of Rapheal’s batch in MCC, is in Dallas and Janaki is in Bangalore. She seems to be working for some company called iFlex IT Solutions as far as Datha could tell me. It seems he also spoke to her over phone, and all those who follow this blog from me, to Deepa who called her Janaki Peddakka, will hopefully get her contact details soon. Three cheers to Datha. Datha also spoke to D M Usha, of the Mohanmurthy family and our junior by one year. D M Murali, our classmate is in Indonesia, and I hope he will find out about D M Saikrishna too. Sai, though very much our junior was a close close friend from my Jain Hostel days in Gulbarga. Ashok Ratnam from our batch is also in Hyderabad and has been located. Gomathy meanwhile is in Kerala and will get in touch with the families of Aravindakshan and Menon, and has promised to mail me photographs soon. So the blog and its readers have turned up quite a few characters of the story, who were presumed lost. Insofar as that, I consider my objective fairly successful. But with all your help, I will continue to unearth all those kids from 1970s Wadi and 1980s Shahabad and Gulbarga and get to meet them all. So keep at it guys. Godspeed!

At this stage, I am taking up an exercise for which I require the help of Jayachandran or Geeta (through Gomathy) or Rama (through Datha). I try to name all our fifteen classmates who came to class 7 from class 6. If I have erred, I need corrections from JC, or Geeta or Rama. Here goes…..Ramdas, Jayachandran, Santhanam, Nazir, Rafique, Ambernath Das, Farook, Rajender Singh, Geeta Menon, Pushpa Parameswaran, Vidya Narwate, Rama Naidu, Sreelakshmi(chinti), Apsara, and Sandhya. I feel there is something wrong with the list. I am doubtful about Rajender Singh, Farook and Rafique, so pick your collective brains and post comments.

Bundoo, Gundoo and such others

2006-08-13T18:51:00.000+05:30

Three families that come to mind from ACC, Wadi at this stage, and whom I feel like talking about a bit, are Rego, Soley and Isiah. Not for any particular reason except that all three men were built physically more or less alike. Atleast Rego did not have any children who were our classmates. Two of Soley’s children were much older to us, but Bundoo was our junior by two years. Isiah had several children of which Anand or Stanley was senior to us by two years, Gundu or Mary Magdalene was our junior by one year and Samson and Milton were kids. So it is not as if they were in class with me but they were interesting families for different reasons.

First Rego. He was a Fat Anglo Indian, who was at ACC, Dwaraka with my father before he came to Wadi. They spoke Hindi like Pramnath and family of the movie Julie. “Kya Kartai man? Kaiko Kitkit kartai man. Jesus Dekhtai” etc. They had children called Stany Rego and Claudie Rego, one of which was a girl. She became an airhostess, we heard. There was once an earthquake in Wadi. Rego was at our house at that time sitting on a reclining chair. He toppled and fell. It was the only earthquake I remember to have occurred in Wadi. We now hear Wadi is on the Deccan Plateau and is rather safe as far as earthquakes are concerned. Thank God for that. I don’t know where the Regos are now.

Soley and family were an orthodox Marathi family that lived above the house of Jayachandran’s neighbour Mathews, the Compounder from Valakom. They came from Kymore. (You will see that whenever I talk of people in ACC Wadi, I mention their ACC ancestry very much like the Gotras followed by Brahmins). I don’t remember their elder childrens’ names but they were of the age of Lakshmi Pathy and her brother Shashi. Mrs. Soley was a strict character, and the Soley’s didn’t encourage us to play around with their children or enter their house much because of their orthodoxy. Their son Devendra Soley, whom they called Bundoo, was our junior. Bundoo couldn’t pronounce “r” clearly. He was ordinary throughout, except that by the time we graduated, Bundoo had developed a debilitating form of arthritis, which severely handicapped him. By then Soley had retired and had taken a rented house in the Bajaar area near Kismet Talkies. This handicap made Bundoo rather special to us and his house became a favourite hangout for us, most evenings. Then on, the Soley household also eagerly welcomed us and for all of us they were very pleasant evenings spent, watching TV, sprawled on the floor, and having all sorts of snacks and tea regularly provided by Mrs. Soley, and Mr. Soley joking and enjoying our company much more than Bundoo himself. When we talked about Uncle or Auntie, we meant Mr. or Mrs. Soley. I don’t know where they are now either.

Isiah was a more curious character. P.D.Isiah. A Telugu converted Christian who came from Mancherial. He was a trade unionist. He ran a Network, much like the Bhais of Bombay. He stayed in our building, on the ground floor below Gomathy’s second floor house. (Between Gomathy’s house and Isiahs, on the first floor, were the Binny’s, another interesting family). He had 6-7 children I guess. Most people in the Colony were in fear of their family since Isiah was a leader and Mrs. Isiah was a shrew. An incident which we had heard about, was that, when their daughter Mary Magdalene ran away from home once (as the Isiah children were wont to do time and again), she was caught and brought back by the Network and Mrs. Isiah promptly shaved off her luxuriant hair. She thus became bald, and in Telugu Gundoo means bald. The name Gundoo stuck and we called her that thereafter. We kids of ordinary folk didn’t have much courage to mix up with their kids. Samson and Milton, the youngest ones were born while at Wadi. They used to run around the neighbourhood in the nude (as little children of course!). Anand was a sort of a hero, looking smart and well dressed, and was a classmate of Latha Thankachan. He harboured pretensions of being close to Latha, whom as I had already mentioned in an earlier post, was rather winsome. There were many terrifying stories surrounding the Isiahs, but as time passed and the Eighties came, Samson became one of my closest friends, and stayed so till I left Wadi.

Postscript: I heard that Mr.Soley passed away under tragic circumstances, and that Bundoo and his mother are not doing very well either. I dont know if what I heard was true, but if it is, then there is a lot, Humanity has to be ashamed about. If anyone who reads this blog, knows anything more about it, please post your comments so that atleast we, if not the world, may know.

Movies in Khani

2006-08-12T11:07:00.001+05:30

There were no means of entertainment in Wadi in those days. Except for the few movies Mr. Menon arranged. But even before the advent of Mr. Menon, there were movie screenings in what we called Khani, near the Rawoor village adjoining Wadi. Wadi lay on a bed of excellent quality limestone. It was over 99% pure calcium carbonate. The whole belt was rich in this resource and that accounted for over 500 cement factories – big and small – for which limestone was the major raw material, in the area. The stone was also an excellent flooring material called Shahabad stone. These slabs of limestones were used by the local population for paving roads, building walls, laying roofs, flooring, making cement and for practically everything. Dig a few inches down the black cotton soil of Wadi and you reach rich limestone deposits. It was possible to mine it by hand. The ACC factory had a huge quarry for mining this raw material. There also were other landlords who had smaller quarries, called Khanis. (People speaking pure Hindi would call them Khaans). Some well known landowners with Khanis were Irani Seth in Rawoor and Devappa Maharaj in Wadi Bajaar. The Irani character was a mysterious personality. None of us had seen him. His residence was about five kilometers from the edge of ACC colony. My father apparently knew him. Incidentally, when my father was first transferred to Wadi in 1966, there was no ACC factory, no ACC colony, nothing. He stayed alone in the very same Irani Building which housed our school later as a tenant for a year or so. Since the Irani building belonged to Irani, father possibly knew Irani that way.

Iranis owned a lot of property in Wadi, Shahabad and Gulbarga. They were all related to each other. They were all also very enamoured of movies and the bollywood, so they owned and operated cinema halls called Tirandaz (Archer) in Shahabad and Gulbarga. Since operating a cinema Hall in Wadi wouldn’t be economically viable, The Irani there got prints of movies from Gulbarga and screened them in his Wadi Khani for his servants. It was all open and me and my father occasionally traveled to Khani in Rawoor for a movie. I recently learnt that this Irani’s son, who must be our age, ultimately made it to Bollywood and became a director called Kaizaad Gustaad, with whom current heartthrob Katrina Kaif started her career. So I have a tenuous Bollywood connection you see. Irani eventually opened a movie hall in Wadi which was called the Kismet. That was in April 1977.

Wadi Railway Gate which you had to cross to get to Khani, Photo Courtesy: Khurshed Irani

Prabhu

2006-08-12T11:04:00.000+05:30

Deepa writes to say that she was born in the ACC Hospital. Was surprised to learn that. Well, I guess, while WE were the devout Muslims, SHE was the one born in Mecca. Datha also called yesterday to let me know that most of the Saint Ambrose and Mount Carmel fraternity were in or around Hyderabad or Cochin. Hope we get to meet one another. Back to Wadi now. I plan to go back a little in time in this post and talk again of the late 60s and early 70s. While we were at the Irani building premises of the school, in the second and third standards, we had a boy called Prabhu (pronounced Parbu – in true Wadi style) in our class. Prabhu was tall for his age and I guess quite a bit older than all of us in the class. Also unlike others, who came from ACC colony or Railway Colony, he came from Tanda. He belonged to the Lambadas. He, like most boys of his age liked to imitate the filmstars of those age and times. He wore tight pants and sunglasses. Being older he was a bully. He used to harass us kids. But it wasn’t the done thing to report these harassments to the teacher. We had to deal with it ourselves in a manly way. When I reported this problem at home, my mother wrote out a note to out a note to our class teacher saying “please ask Prabhu not to trouble Ramdas”. Since it would have meant that I was seeking outside help to deal with the problem and since I thought that the note should have read …..”please tell….rather than …….”please ask…..”, I did not actually deliver it to the teacher but threw the note into a marsh on the eastern side of Irani building. Prabhu was part hero part villain till we were in third standard. I remember praying that I be rid of him. One day when we went to school we heard that Prabhu had died! We went in a line from the school, accompanied by the teacher to his house in Tanda. He was lying on the floor in the school uniform, which consisted of green pants and lemon yellow shirt – which, considering their economic conditions was the only decent dress he had. His father was a drunkard and his mother sold milk for a living. He had on the sunglasses too and lying on the floor lifeless, he looked much smaller than us. Death has a way of shrinking people physically. We kids, seven and eight years old, didn’t really know what death meant, But we knew Parbu wouldn’t be coming to school any longer. We felt a curious admixture of grief and relief.

My son Kartik, who is now of the same age, was yesterday talking to me about a classmate of his. He said, “Vedant’s dad died a few years back in Malaysia in a road accident. He was driving a Scorpio. Vedant lost both a good car and a dad”. It seemed a curious viewpoint, equating a dad with a car. But possibly that’s how kids think. The place things more in perspective. Possibly that’s how we thought about Prabhu too.

A Tale of two compounders

2006-08-09T20:18:00.000+05:30

I couldn’t update the blog for a few days for the plain reason that I was tired and bored and listless. It happens once in a while. One cannot communicate intelligently and at those times, one doesn’t want to communicate and be dismissed. So I thought I will give things a break. Jayachandran SMS’ed me as early as 4th August, to ask why I am not to be seen. He also sends some other hilarious SMS’s. Thanks JC for the fun. Deepa has posted a message wondering what’s happening. So I thought I will get back to business.

Now, when we talk of doctors, we have hospitals. These days when we buy property, we take care to see that there are plenty of doctors and clinics and hospitals around. We are worried about getting into serious health problems and not having a specialist around. Wadi had two hospitals, one in the ACC colony, of which, at that time Dr. Surya Rao was the doctor. By then, there was also a lady doctor. The hospital initially functioned from a TRT and eventually, (I think it was in 76 or thereabouts, that a real hospital building was built.) It was a good hospital, very spacious. Space was never a problem in ACC Colony. One encountered congestion only after leaving Wadi. Each ACC employee and each of his family members had a medical record book, with a yellow cover and a few pages. Mine carried the legend Master Ramdas, 48(the hospital record number), male, 10(age). If you fell sick, you first went to the record room of the hospital and got your record book from one Pandu – basically an attender, but doubling as a dresser (one who dressed wounds). You then waited in line till you met the doctor, got your prescription and went to the compounder (meaning pharmacist) and got your medicines, or to the nurse to get your injection, or to Pandu to get wounds dressed. Most illnesses were mild and were cured very soon. Serious cases were rarely seen. One serious case I remember was when my classmate Vidya’s mother Mrs.Narwate, doused herself with kerosene and burnt herself. She battled for life for over five days in the hospital, which was housed in the TRT building at that time and then passed away. That was, if I remember right, when I and Vidya were in class sixth. Vidya’s younger brother Mukesh was one year junior to me. The compounder in the hospital was one Mr. Mathews, who hailed from Valakom, in the Ernakulam district of Kerala, which was very near to my mother’s native place, Moovattupuzha, where I was born. Mathews had a daughter Mini and two sons Vinu and Viju. After names like Santhanam and Jayachandran, such names sounded trivial to me till I reached Kerala in 1980 and learnt that children in Kerala were named very oddly. It is only in Kerala and to some extent in Punjab, that people do not take names very seriously. Hence you have names like Dijo, Shinoy, Joji, Mobi, Tiny, Gibi etc. in Kerala and names like Jolly, Happy, Shunty etc in Punjab.

Another hospital in Wadi was the Railway hospital in the Railway colony. I was not very familiar with this hospital except that the son of the compounder of this hospital, Farook, was my classmate. Farook was extremely mischievous. He led the class in nicknaming teachers and other people. Devassia who built the Saint Ambrose, liked to talk as though he hailed from Texas, but his traditional Kerala Roman Catholic Malayali upbringing seriously interfered with his linguistic ambitions, that he sounded ridiculous when he spoke English. Farook took great pleasure in goading Devassia to talk in English and then imitating him for our entertainment. JC points out that one phrase that Devassia was fond of delivering and Farook immaculately imitated was “ollee choo” meaning “only two”. It was the time when in the bustle of Emergency (1975), the Government of India started of with the “Family Planning Programme”, distributing free, condoms called “Nirodh” to people through Government Hospitals. Farook, by virtue of his being the son of a Government Hospital Pharmacist, had access to large quantities of Nirodh. Not being able, nor inclined to use Nirodh in ways in which it was intended to, we, in the company of Farook, in half baked knowledge of their real purpose, blew them up like balloons and had a lot of fun. Thereby, I can vouch for their quality. Unlike ordinary balloons, Nirodhs, even when blown up to cylinders of over 4 feet in length and one foot in diameter, withstood. More about Farook and others later.

A deviation

2006-07-30T21:09:00.000+05:30

I am now going to deviate a little. The last few posts took us chronologically from class 3 to 4 to 5 to 6. Lest things become monotonous, and start feeling as if Wadi was just Saint Ambrose Convent, I will deviate and insert several posts regarding some other aspects of life in Wadi. Wadi as I had said, had four distinct geographical divisions. The Railway Colony, the ACC colony and the Bajaar and the Tanda. The first two areas were house to outsiders, bajaar was house to the indigenous people, and Tanda to the Lambadas. People in this part of Karnataka had a totally different way of speaking Kannada, which the south Karnataka Kannadigas did not even understand. The names here were also totally different from those in South Karnataka. Follow this link for some North Karnataka surnames http://www.ourkarnataka.com/states/nk_familynames.htm. The form of Kannada used here was rough and earthy. It was liberally sprinkled with slang. On buses and trains, it was not uncommon, even for women, to ask people sitting on seats to “move their ass a bit” so that they can accommodate themselves. “Solpa kundi sarsiriyappa. Naavu ondsolpa kundi hachhthivi” was what they said. Like the Jats of Haryana, the northerners are a volatile lot. Most conversation starts with references to the others sister or mother. While visiting people, we would expect to be welcomed with warm words like “Barri nimmavun. Eshtu divasagyada bandu”, and we would reply “Yakri nimmayi? Monne bandinalla? Soole makkalu helilla nimage?” Such usages are so delicate that translating them into English renders them impotent. So I am not even trying. If those of you who read this blog and do not understand these sentences, find authentic north Karnataka people to enlighten you. Such way of talking, made the language more comfortable, unlike the chaste Kannada spoken by the Achars and the Murthys of South Karnataka. These days everyone in India believes that Karnataka is a land of Pubs and discos and software engineers who “live together”, a silicon valley clone of sorts. That’s not the case. It may be true of Bangalore, but Northern Karnataka is a real, earthy, wonderful Indian place even today where real Indians live and die. Thank God, there is nothing Silicon Valleyish about it.

The population was a mixture of Marathis like Kulkarnis and Deshpandes, some Telugus, Muslims, Marwaris, Lingayats, Waddars, Lambadas, scheduled castes and tribes, and other expatriates like us. We knew no difference between each other. Since many did not speak the earthy version of Kannada, we spoke a curious sort of Hindi. It was hardly the Sanskrtised BJP Hindi nor was it the Hindustani variety so favoured by the likes of Khushwant Singh and Kuldeep Nayyar. It wasn’t even the “Bhai ko ek dum ich tapkaneka” variety of Mumbaiyya. It wasn’t the Hyderabadi or the Bangalore variety. I can only call it the Hindi of Gulbarga. It consisted of simple phrases like “Kya be?”, “Kaiku aara?”, “Terku Kaiku” “Merku Hona” etc. For us, the people of Wadi, people who wore lungis and traveled northwards by 10 UP Madras Bombay Mail were Madrasis and those who wore Pyjamas and traveled South by 9 DN Bombay Madras Mail were Seths. We were supreme and were located on the middle of the Earth, where 10 UP crosses 9 DN.

Part 12 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-30T20:28:00.000+05:30

Lakshmi Pathy was a popular teacher. It may be remembered that my grandmother Thangi was the aunt of S V Pathy, Lakshmi’s father. Pathy’s mother Naani had passed away. So, had his father. Thangi therefore regarded herself as a guardian and mother figure of Pathy and his family. When my father got into ACC and went to Dwaraka alone on his first posting, it was in Pathy’s house that he stayed initially, because Dwaraka was a strange place for a 17 year old lad from Kerala, and Pathy was already married and settled. Also, when the Pathys were away from Wadi for some reason – I don’t remember why, Lakshmi and Sashi who were in High School in Shahabad, used to stay in our house. Sometime during this period Pathy had some health problem. The incidents following this are rather vague in my mind, and except for a very few people who were concerned, I am not sure many people knew what happened. Having looked after her own self and her fatherless son all her life, Thangi was bold and courageous to the point of being extremely acrid when she wants to. I was not privy to what transpired but for some reason, there was some bitterness between our family and that of Pathy’s. We were not on talking terms for over five years I believe. It was during this period that Lakshmi finished her teacher’s training course and joined St. Ambrose Convent as our class teacher in 6th standard. That was 1975. Unlike untrained teachers and nuns, who used to teach us till then, Lakshmi was young and trained and secular (I mean not a nun), and hence her teaching methods were bold and interesting. We all therefore liked her. After timid Thavaseeli and lethargic Syeris, Lakshmi was fresh and popular and different. Now my relations with her as a cousin, complicated by the bitterness between our families, combined with her capabilities and skills as a teacher was a cocktail that stimulated me. In fact she was one of the first teachers I remember to have shaped my thinking and created an impression that teachers can be interesting.

SACS then had only seven classes and after the next year we were to leave for Shahabad for further education. Our seniors had already taken that path, and the class just senior to us would be doing so soon. We had, what we called Board exams in 7th standard then, which was a big deal. The question papers were set by the Board, in Bangalore (or was it Gulbarga?) and evaluation was also done elsewhere. So there was no question of familiarity between teacher and pupil, influencing evaluation. So we were all afraid of the Boards. As is normal, we the juniors were supposed to give a farewell party to our seniors before the board. This was the first instance when we did it. March 1976. Thirty years ago. I recently read newspaper reports of similar farewell parties in Delhi, where lakhs were spent, and liquor, drugs, cigarettes and even condoms flowing freely in late night orgies. I am not being judgemental – times have changed - but we didn’t do such parties. Under strict supervision of nuns, we wished the seniors well for their forthcoming exams, played some very sober games, gave them gifts, ate small pieces of cakes and sang in groups. Above all we said prayers to Jesus, Mary and Joseph asking for our seniors good performance. I remember a song Lakshmy Pathy composed for this occasion and taught us.

“Hurry Burry dash and Bang, We now introduce our 7th Standard Gang” it went. The song then listed out humorous peculiarities of each of the seventh standard students. Some of those guys were particularly colourless, and I appreciate the work and imagination Lakshmi Pathy must have put into composing the song.

Another reason why I remember the Sixth standard was that, it was then that a new doctor came and joined the ACC Hospital. He was transferred from the ACC factory at Mancherial in Andhra Pradesh. His name was Pudipedda Surya Rao. He had a big family. His parents, wife and 4 children. Now a doctor in the ACC hierarchy is high above a clerk, which my father was. They stayed in SSQ (refer my earlier posts in the blog for what an SSQ is). Also doctors came and went, but except that we went to them for treatment, there was no other connection between us guys and doctors. But what made Dr. Surya Rao particularly interesting to me was, his children or atleast 2 of them. His eldest was P V R Suryanarayana, who was my senior by one year. The next was Janaki, my junior by one year. The next were Bhavani and Arunakanti. The influence Suryanarayana and Janaki had on me directly for the next several years – say a decade- and indirectly, even today deserves several posts. I will be coming back to them time and again in the blog.

A corrigendum to the previous post

2006-07-29T20:54:00.000+05:30

Frankly, as many people who know me will testify, I am what the feminists would call, a “Male Chauvinist Pig”. Hence when I talk about the family of my paternal grandmother, I will be unhappy if I do not talk about my paternal Grandfather. It grieves me immensely to state that I only know that my paternal Grandfather was called Ramaswamy Iyer, after whom I am named, and that he belonged to Thrippalur, near Alathur in Palakkad district of Kerala. He died, I do not know how, when my grandmother was pregnant with her first child, my father, Narayana Iyer or Mani. If, through this blog, I am able to locate the family of my paternal grandfather, then nothing would be more pleasureable than that. It is terribly frustrating to lose the link of ones patrilieal lineage just two generations before. Not knowing about ones paternal grandfather can be terribly frustrating. So if anyone can shed any light on this matter, I beg them to do so.

Part 11 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-29T20:25:00.001+05:30

I am extremely happy that atleast some people for whom this blog is meant are reading it and commenting. I acknowledge Gomathy and her niece Deepa for their continuous support. Here I would like to request you all to send me any old photographs you may have of Wadi and its people in the 60s and the 70s so that they can form part of the blog. I learn that Geeta Menon is not with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, but with Mahatma Gandhi University, God bless her. For Deepa, I will include a separate post, at a later date, on what I understand to be the philosophy of Hinduism.

Having said that, we now move to 6th Standard. In 6th Standard, we had a new teacher Lakshmi Pathy. I should now tell you a little about Lakshmi Pathy. Her ancestry is linked to mine, from somewhere in 19th Century Kerala. There is, in the central Kerala district of Ernakulam, a village called Koovappady. Koovappady, when I visited it in 2003 was a well developed locality. But it was 19th or probably 18th Century Koovappady that was a part of my ancestry. Towards the end of 19th Century, there was a family in this place of which Venkatachala Vadhyaar was the head. The Family stayed in a house called the Puthan Madhom (or was it Vadakke Puthan Madhom). Houses in which Kerala Iyers stayed in Kerala were called Madhom, to distinguish them from Manas in which Namboodiri Brahmins lived and Veedus in which Nairs lived. http://www.keralaiyers.com/history / is a good site to learn about this vibrant community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyer is also a good link. I strongly recommend anyone who stumbles across this blog, to read a little about the Palakkad Iyer community, of which I am a part. I assure you, it will be a pleasurable experience. I understand I belong to the Ashtasahasram branch of the Kerala Iyer community. Anyway, Venkitachala Vaadhyaar married Sankari Ammal and they had sixteen children. My grandmother Thangi was one of them, and that makes Venkitachala Iyer and Sankari Ammal my pater-maternal great grandparents. The eldest son was Easwara Iyer. The other brothers, as far as I remember are Subrahmania Iyer (Manian Vaadhyaaar), Harihara Iyer, Sadasivam, Rama Iyer, Krishna Iyer(Kuttappan), and the girls were Chellammal, Naani, Raasam, Thangam and Lakshmi. I know that makes up only eleven. I am sorry I don't remember the other names.

Were I to describe this family in detail, this blog will run out of space, and also it will deviate from its purpose of gloryfying Wadi, so I talk of it in brief in this post. This post may therefore be treated as a prelude to my relationship with Lakshmy Pathy, my teacher in Class 6th.

Easwara Iyer died young. Manaian Vadhyaar became the head of the Family early, soon after Venkitachala Vaadhyaar passed away, Harihara Iyer went to Bombay and took up a job in ACC, and got most of the young Iyer men, including his brother Sadasivam of Koovappady into the rolls of ACC (that's how my father got in), Rama Iyer, suffered from a bout of TB, was cured in a sanatorium in Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh and subsequentlymarried one Raaji and went and settled down in Karol Bagh in Delhi. Kuttappan Vaadhyaar stayed back in Koovappady as a Vadhyaar. You may have noticed that I use terms Iyer and Vaadhyaar alternatively. Iyers, who are priests, are called Vaadhyaars. This house was therefore called Vadhyaar Aam (meaning the house of Vaadhyaars or priests). Of the daughters, Chellammal and my Grandmother Thangam were widowed very early, Lakshmi lived a full life with Parameswara Iyer, a bhagavathar, or carnatic classical vocalist in Secunderabad, Naani with Sambasiva Iyer of Vaikom and Raasam with Raasa of Koovappady. One of the sons of Naani (her real name was Naarayani) was Sivavenkatachalapathy or S V Pathy, who was one of the guys Harihara Iyer brought into ACC. S V Pathy eventually married Ganga and they had five children, Lakshmi, Sasi, Usha, Uma and Lallu. So now you know where Lakshmi Pathy came from.

Part 10 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-28T21:32:00.000+05:30

Deepa, did you see the post "Part 7 of my life in Wadi"? Your Grandfather’s house has been marked as “Gomathy’s House”. Should bring back some memories. Frankly, I also see no relation between Ram and Saturday, and I couldn’t find any reference for this fact either. But then Narayanan Mama must have found Saturday a convenient day, since the next day was a Sunday. So he must have made it a sacred day for Ram too, so that he could visit the Lord at his convenience. That’s the beauty of Hinduism. I can't think of a person from another religion redefining sacred days to suit his convenience. A Hindu’s Gods are his own. I put an elephants head on one’s shoulders, a monkey’s face on another. I affix 8 arms to one God’s body and four heads to another. I say this day is sacred to that God and another Hindu says otherwise. For Hindu’s, Gods and religion are their friends and a way of life respectively.

Having acknowledged Deepa’s comments, We now move on to 5th Standard. I should mention here that I was a studious student. I did very well and was First in the class most of the time. Some competition was forthcoming from Geeta Menon, (daughter of K P Menon), who was a very serious sort of person. She didn’t gossip, didn’t laugh or smile, didn’t joke, had good handwriting, highly competitive and what else? Had she been born and brought up in Delhi, I would have expected her to end up in the IAS. But I learn she is a teacher in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Ernakulam these days. Mrs.Menon was a very outgoing and social lady, but all three of the Menon children, Suresh, Geeta and Ramesh took after their father, K.P.Menon, (one enduring image of Mr. Menon is of him checking people’s movie tickets with a torch with great tension, lest some unauthorized people gain entry), a very serious sort of person. Also a little bit of competition was forthcoming from M A Rafique, son of M A Hafiz, a Guard with the Indian Railways at Wadi. Rafique was an OK sort of guy. I visited his house sometimes and he came to ours. He was one of the guys who passed my grandmother Thangi’s test for acceptance. I must say here that though an orthodox Hindu widow, Thangi was extremely secular in outlook. She approved of Rasheed, one of my father’s best friends, and liked him a lot. She herself was a great friend of the Arokiasamy family (Christians) and the Joseph’s ( whom we knew from our days in Dwaraka). Joseph is now dead and gone to Jesus, and Thangi to Kailas or Vaikunth or wherever Hindus go after their death, (I again am reminded that we Hindus don’t just have a Heaven or a Jannat, but a choice of several Heavens), Kunjamma, his wife is still one of our closest family friends. More about Geeta and Rafique later.

But the Class teacher in Fifth Standard was a new teacher. I don’t remember her real name. Two things I remember about her was that, she taught English and, that she was pregnant. For the half baked guys of our class like Kanniappan, her pregnancy was a cause of a lot of mirth. She was a dark, large slow moving lady. There was in our English syllabus, a lesson on Ulysses’ Iliad or Odyssey or whatever. There was an evil witch in this story called Circe. I still don’t know how Circe is pronounced, but this English teacher pronounced the name as “sye-ris”. She also used to cane us on our palms sometimes. Since her looks and behavior matched those of Circe, we all called her Sye-ris. She left after our 5th standard exams, obviously for her delivery and didn’t return.

I was also a reasonably good dramatic talent. It was in 5th Standard that we enacted Shakespeare's "Othello, the Moor of Venice" in prose. I was the villain of the piece, Iago. Santhanam was my friend Roderigo.

Part 9 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-26T20:07:00.000+05:30

Kanniappan joined our class while we were in the 5th standard. Again we didn’t understand what his name meant. Frankly we in Wadi, were more acclimatised to names like Saibanna (our barber – the one who ran the Modern Hair Cutting Saloon), Appanna (the priest or poojari in the ACC colony Ram Temple), Yenkavva (our maid servant) Devappa (the local quarry owning landlord and the one who dominated Milk supply to the ACC colony – a local Verghese Kurien), Ghanate (tailor to the rich people of ACC colony) etc. or Muslim names. Other names were odd sounding to us. In other words, even our own names sounded alien. For example, frankly I couldn’t see much sense in the name Santhanam, which was the name of one of my closest friends. Even the names of Hindi film actors or cricketers made little sense to us. For long, till I was in 7th standard or thereabouts, the Indian Cricket team was so filled with Marathi’s that we thought that “Kar”, like “Sir”, was a honorary term attached to the name of an individual who happened to get selected to play for India. Hence Gavas”Kar”, Sol”Kar”, Wade”Kar”, Vengsar”Kar” and the other bunch of Kars. Also names like Amitabh Bachhan and Shatrughan Sinha made no sense to us, except that we liked watching them bash up the bad guys in the open air movies that K P Menon screened.

The above mentioned Santhanam and his whole family of 2 sisters, five brothers and parents were musically talented and sang with a nasal twang. Ability to sing Hindi film songs made Santhanam, a sort of an authority on Hindi films. He explained to us that people like Shatru Bhaiyya (Shatrughan Sinha) belonged to far away North India and had superhuman powers. They could really fight off 10-15 villains single handed. Rajesh Khanna was a guy who had the power to ensnare girls by his songs, (though why one should ensnare girls, we didn’t really know at that time) but not fight as valiantly as Shatru, we learnt. A new fellow by the name of Amitabh Bachhan could really fight off bad guys. Girls fell for him on their own. He didn’t have to ensnare them with songs, like Rajesh Khanna, but frankly he didn’t care for girls. That was real manly, we thought. This was the essence of the briefings we received from time to time from the likes of Santhanam.

Back to Kanniappan. His parents it seems were in Madras. He was staying with relatives at Wadi, we didn’t know why. It was also rumoured that he was an orphan and had no parents. It was also rumoured that his parents were too rich, they didn’t much care for him. He was a dark small fellow who told us wicked things like sexual activities involving our classmates. He was an interesting, but mysterious character. He used to create a lot of mirth when he said that he had a paternal uncle (chacha or chitappa) who was younger to him, and whom used to carry around. He suddenly left after 6th standard as mysteriously as he had come.
The other one who left us was Bhaskar, the son of a railway engine driver called Kalyanaraman. Belonging to our community of Iyers, his family became friends of our family though they stayed in the railway colony. They visited us sometimes. Bhaskar had a brother called Balu, who was much junior to us and a sister, whose name I don’t now remember. Anyone who can remind me wins a prize. Bhaskar was not very good in studies. He dropped out soon. I hear his father passed away in an accident after we lost touch with them, but I really don’t know for sure.

Part 8 of my Life in Wadi

2006-07-26T19:16:00.000+05:30

Jayachandran called me up last night while I was posting my blog. When I started I hoped that the blog will attract attention from people who existed in the vicinity of those space time coordinates I am writing about. I also hoped that people who knew me well and those who didn’t know me as well, would gain a deeper understanding into what it was like growing up as the son of a clerk in a factory township in the 70s. I am glad to see that my hopes are not being belied. My only request to those friends who stumble across the blog and find it interesting, please forward it to all you know so that Wadi, like Malgudi becomes an iconic town.

While we came to the new school that Devassia built, (I guess I have been calling it “the school that Devassia built” for too long now. Let us call it by its proper name, The Saint Ambrose Convent School now. Or to ease up on the typing, let’s call it SACS, though such abbreviations hadn’t quite become the norm in those days. The SMS culture was too far in the future and even HAHK, DDLJ etc. were two decades in the future. QSQT, the first in these series was a decade away. Still let’s call it SACS. As I had mentioned, we had 17 students while in 4th Standard. We got a class teacher called Thavaseeli Miss, who was a Christian girl who hailed from Tamil Nadu. Frankly the name sounded really silly and meaningless to us at that time, but as time passed, I learnt that Thavaseeli meant a person who practices penance as a matter of routine. This teacher didn’t betray the meaning of her name. She was very soft spoken. She stayed in the convent, which is what we called the nunnery attached to the school where the nuns stayed. A nunnery I have seen, and since, learnt from experience and from reading authors like Dan Brown, is a very harsh place for a young girl like Thavaseeli. We used to see her weeping silently many times. It was assumed that the sisters may have been harsh to her. We all liked Thavaseeli. The first Principal of the school, the one who took over from Mrs. Saldanha was Mary Jane. We called her Mother and the other nuns, sisters. Frankly with their Habits and names we didn’t really at that think of these sisters as women or men, but a new formidable gender altogether. Mother Mary Jane was one of the kinder sisters I have encountered. By the time we reached 7th Standard we were 15 students. The two who dropped out were Kanniappan and Bhaskar. It is about them that we will talk about in the next post and talk about the other 15 at a later time.

Part 7 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-24T20:47:00.000+05:30

I got in touch with an old friend Dathathri today. He was an old timer of Wadi. His elder sister Rama was my classmate. He was my junior by one year in school. But let me not put the horse before the cart. Let me talk about the school first. The school in which I was studying, was called the St.Anne’s School by default as long as it was functioning from the Irani Building. But when it shifted to the new building that was built in ACC Colony, it was renamed St. Ambrose Convent School, ostensibly because the Bishop of the Diocese of Bellary at that time, under which the parish of Wadi fell, was The Rev. Dr. Ambrose Yeddanapally. We shifted to the building in 1973 when I was in 4th Standard. In Third standard, at St.Anne’s School in the Irani Building I was taught by one Fatima miss, whom I remember was in love with one Francis, Son of Arokiasamay, a civil overseer in ACC. I remember Arokiasamy as a dark fat man, who wore an English Hunter’s (Shikari type) hat, while he went about overseeing construction work in the ACC colony. They stayed in the quarter below us – at 31/11 at that time. Now this Francis was a young man who used to come to Irani building, stand outside the window and whistle while Fatima Miss was taking a class. Miss used to get all flustered and soon went out to meet Francis. Francis eventually joined ACC as a burner – or was it a Chemist?
Burner and Chemist are Technical terms for professionals engaged in certain types of works in a cement factory. Burners were responsible for keeping the output going, and chemists were responsible for the quality of the output. Both types were required to have a degree in chemistry but chemists were considered to be more elite. Chemists eventually became Chief Chemists and Burners became Chief Burners. It wouldn’t probably hurt a bit if I talked in brief about the cement making process a little at this stage and I copy from the Wikipedia the relevant parts. Thanx Wikipedia – I acknowledge you –
There are three fundamental stages in the production of Portland cement:
Preparation of the raw mixture
Production of the clinker
Preparation of the cement
The chemistry of cement is very complex, so cement chemist notation was invented to simplify the formula of common molecules found in cement.
The raw materials for Portland cement production are a mixture (as fine dust in the 'Dry process' or in the form of a slurry in the 'Wet process') of calcium oxide, silicon oxide, aluminium oxide, ferric oxide, and magnesium oxide. The raw materials are usually quarried from local rock, which in some places is already practically the desired composition and in other places requires the addition of clay and limestone, as well as iron ore, bauxite or recycled materials.
The raw mixture is heated in a kiln, a gigantic slowly rotating and sloped cylinder, with temperatures increasing over the length of the cylinder up to ~1480°C. The temperature is regulated so that the product contains sintered but not fused lumps. Too low a temperature causes insufficient sintering, but too high a temperature results in a molten mass or glass. In the lower-temperature part of the kiln, calcium carbonate (limestone) turns into calcium oxide (lime) and carbon dioxide. In the high-temperature part, calcium oxides and silicates react to form dicalcium and tricalcium silicates (C2S C3S). Small amounts of tricalcium aluminate (C3A) and tetracalcium aluminoferrite (C4AF)are also formed. The resulting material is clinker, and can be stored for a number of years before use. Prolonged exposure to water decreases the reactivity of cement produced from weathered clinker.
The energy required to produce clinker is ~1700 J/g. However, because of heat loss during production, actual values can be much higher. The high energy requirements and the release of significant amounts of carbon dioxide makes cement production a concern for global warming. Cement manufacturing emits 0.2 Pg C/yr as CO2. (1 Pg = 1 thousand million metric tons.)
In order to achieve the desired setting qualities in the finished product, about 2% gypsum is added to the clinker and the mixture is finely pulverized. The powder is now ready for use, and will react with the addition of water.
Francis and Fatima Miss married each other soon. Far as I remember they had no children. Why I mention this is that, love between a man and a woman was not really known to us while in third standard, and this perhaps, was the first exposure I and my classmates had in such affairs. Within a year or two we were to know all details about such things, though unlike students of elite public schools of today, we didn’t rush to experiment, but were content with developing theories on the subject. It was mostly a matter of mirth for all of us. We were 17 students in the class at this time, of which Rama was one. It was her brother Dathathri Naidu with whom I got in touch with today.

An interruption

2006-07-23T01:36:00.000+05:30

I am sorry I could not continue my story of Wadi at the speed at which I was proceeding due to some unforeseen problems. Blogger was shut down by some ISPs after the bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai some time back. So I couldn’t publish. I will now continue. I am just back from the handing over of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Panorama, a mega project at Amritsar, to the Municipal Corporation of Amritsar. Hence I will be writing my next post tomorrow. This is just to let you all know that I am back with a vengeance and will be writing a lot in the coming days.

Part 6 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-13T21:45:00.000+05:30

I received my first comment on my blog today from a person I have not seen. Thank you Deepa. Keep in touch with the blog and send me your email id’s all of you who record their comments. I can reply them individually. And for Deepa, I will be writing a whole post on your grandparents and their influence on me and on Pedda Akka Janaki and HER influence on my life. Keep reading and supporting. Also please remember that I am simply recording my thoughts as they occur to me. Since it involves some real people, who as I realize from Deepa’s post, may have become grandparents or great grandparents or such other venerable figures, some comments of mine could offend some of you. But I write this recollection of my days in Wadi with such a deep sense of reverence that no reference to anyone in the blog is ever meant to hurt. Some Hindu readers may remember the epic composition Soundarya Lahari on the Goddess Parvati or Lalita by Adi Shankaracharya. It is a detailed description of the body of the Goddess. But at no point does one take offence because it is done with such reverence and devotion. The only thought that occurs is that one worships every aspect of ones mothers body because one emanated from it. The ultimate homage that a male pays, by virtue of his nature, is sexual. Do not please be offended, but this could possibly be the source of incest fantasies and the Freudian Oedipus complex. For me Wadi is mother, Gulbarga my grandmother and Karnataka my ancestress. From a measly 14 kilogram child of three in 1967 to a strapping 25 year old young man of 55 kgs in 1989, every single milligram of those remaining 41 kgs was added out of the soil and water and air of Wadi. So, once again, I reiterate that no reference to anyone in the blog is ever meant to hurt on demean anyone. I wouldn’t dream of that.

Having said that, a brief post for today. When I was in third standard, the Sisters of St. Anne, who had taken over the school I was studying in, and had changed the name of the school to St.Anne’s school solicited and collected enough funds to build their own building. The authorities of ACC allotted them land in the midst of the ACC colony. The Club I had mentioned in the earlier post had a huge football ground on one side. The land allotted for the school was on the other side of the ground. The school duly appointed one Mr. Devassia, who was the brother in law of Mr. Verghese, owner of Santosh and Mini Theatres in Gulbarga and about whom we will talk more at a later stage, to build the school building. Mr.Devassia, a Malayali Christian like Mr. Verghese was a curious character. He was dark and had a head full of curly hair like that of the Saibaba of Puttaparthi. He insisted on speaking Englinsh in a curious Malayali+American accent which made him a butt of joke amongst us, the students of the school. However he built a beautiful building for our school, of which we were all proud. There were schools that were built in Wadi after this, like the DAV Public School, in which I taught, but the school that Devassia built was the first real school of Wadi.

Part 5 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-12T21:49:00.000+05:30

Before I begin, I have many photographs and pictures which I would like to upload on to the blog so that readers can see what I am talking about. But I am not able to upload them for some reason. I mean they are uploaded but they are not visible on the blog. If someone can enlighten me I will be obliged.

The ACC colony had a club. This was basically a grotesque structure of steel angles and pipes welded together. The walls were cement (most things in ACC colony was made of cement. I had not seen a tarred road for the first 20 years of my life until I went to Kerala. The roads in ACC colony were cement) and the roof, asbestos. There were three halls laid out in a C shape. The large central one was the badminton hall. One one side was the table tennis hall and on the other was the bridge hall, the ladies club and the library – and this was what used to attract me frequently – not the ladies club, I was too young for THAT – the library. There were two bookshelves full of books mostly in English. For sometime my father was the librarian and it was at that time that I took to visiting the library regularly. There were magazines like “The Illustrated weekly of India”, “Stardust”, “Filmfare” etc. The Panickers also bought “The Illustrated weekly”, so I got to read it while I went to see Jayachandran. I borrowed books by authors like James Hadley Chase, Desmond Bagley etc. from the club. But that was much later. I am probably putting the horse before the cart here but then this is not, as I said earlier a chronological sequence of events but a rambling of random thoughts, so it doesn’t really matter.

The area enclosed by the C was again – you guessed it – cemented. And the ACC sports club screened movies there every Saturday night. The tickets were sold in the club office for two classes. The chairs – Godrej steel chairs – for Rs.1/- each and 25 paise for the floor. I must mention that the chairs were green painted cane chairs with curved fronts and comfortable wide armrests in the first two rows reserved for the General Manager, the Chief Engineer and the like, then three or four rows of slightly less comfortable green cane chairs for lower officers and then Godrej steel chairs for other men and women. All chairs cost you a ticket of Rs.1/-. Films like Aarzoo, Dus Lakh, Jungal me mangal, Daag, Prem Nagar, Aaradhana etc any more were screened. Mr. K.P. Menon, father of Geeta Menon was the Culture Secretary or Entertainment Secretary or whatever I guess, so he was the one who sold the tickets. And when the viewers were comfortably seated on their chairs, as darkness fell and the movie was about to start, K P Menon would come around with a torch and check our tickets. He was a soft spoken man but he was also in fear of the law so when he saw a Malayalee whom he knew did not have tickets he asked in great consternation "Entha Ticket Undo?" (Do you have tickets?). These tickets were in great demand because there was no other source of entertainment in Wadi. No movie halls, no Television, no Malls, no nothing. Just sit at home and pray or talk or go to the club.

Now, my Grandmother Thangi was a woman of strong will and many idiosyncrasies and one of these idiosyncrasies was that we wouldn’t go to club, buy a ticket and watch these movies. Whether this was due to any Puritanism or parsimony or any particular animosity with K P Menon, I do not know, but if Thangi said no, it stayed no. There were several who shared such a predicament with me. They didn’t have tickets. What we did was innovate. And the club and K P Menon didn’t mind the innovation. While the paying patrons sat on chairs on one side of the screen watching the movie, we sat on the other side. The screen being transluscent we could see equally well from the other side. The only disadvantage was that we saw the textual matter laterally reversed. This was my first lesson in symmetry for we saw the As and Ts and Ys correctly while we misread the Ds and the Rs and the Gs. This was a wonderful discovery for several of my batchmates in 1991 when it was pointed out to us during our training as curators by Dr.Saroj Ghose and other such luminaries, but it was old hat to us WKPs. More about Dr.Ghose and others to do with him later – much much later.

Part 4 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-11T20:58:00.000+05:30

I have mentioned about LTRT and STRT type of quarters in an earlier post. By the time I got admitted to school, we had shifted from LTRT 3/5 to STRT 31/8 which as I have already mentioned was to be my home for a large part of my life. There were changes in my school after the Sisters of St.Anne took over the reins of the school. But I will talk about it later. Let me ramble a bit on Wadi and some people whom I remember from those times for now.

We, in the ACC colony didn’t mix much with the local population atleast those who were not WKPs. For WKPs all Wadiites were one and we knew neither caste nor creed, religion nor language. THAT was real secularism. Wadi was surrounded by places like Rawoor, Halkatta, Tanda (where the Banjara or Lambada people lived) etc. The major crop was Jawari – I think that’s sorghum bicolor in botanese -, groundnuts and tur dal – cajanus cajan – and though Wadi was said to be in the midst of the Black cotton soil belt, I personally haven’t seen a single cotton tree in Wadi. Most of the time the ground was cracked and the sun shining down bright on the earth, and hardly anything grew on the hostile soil. A lone farmer ploughing his measly field with his measly bull as the sun was setting was one common sight. It did rain sometimes. A river called Kagna which flowed between Wadi and Shahabad used to get a bit flooded sometimes but rains were not very frequent. Walls in our quarters were hot to touch even at nights and we used to plug drainage holes in our balconies and terraces and flood them with water in the evenings so that there would be some relief from the oppressing heat during the nights.

There was a Hanuman Temple in Railway colony which my father used to visit religiously every Saturday. Saturdays were sacred to Hanuman in those parts of India unlike in the North where Tuesdays are dedicated to Hanuman. I accompanied father on many Saturdays and eventually took to visiting this temple on my own. It was a 30 minute walk from my house and one had to cross the Railway bridge to reach the railway colony and the temple. There was a book stall in the railway station run by the ubiquitous A H Wheeler, who run book stalls in railway stations all over the country. I learnt much later that this was a company established by an Englishman and presently run by a Bengali. It became famous when Laloo mistook it for a multinational and tried to ban it in a railway budget of his. The book stall was manned by a person who looked a little odd to me. For long, I thought HE was A H Wheeler. I had by then learnt reading Tamil and got into the habit of reading two magazines called “Kumudam” and “Kalkandu” - then edited by the redoubtable Tamizhvanan which were two very popular Tamil weeklies. There was much in it for kids those days in both these magazines. Kalkandu had the popular “Shankarlal” detective series and Kumudam had comic strips like “Professor Mitra”, who hypnotised people - I learnt the words "Hypnotism" and Mesmerism" from these stories - which appealed to kids. A point I would like to make here very strongly is that I have learnt most of what I know from reading fiction and not from reading textbooks. I therefore urge kids to read as much fiction as they can. Kumudam has since deteriorated into a tabloid, I regret to say. These magazines arrived by the 10UP Madras Bombay Mail on Monday and I coupled a visit to the Hanuman Temple with a visit to the A H wheeler to buy these magazines.

And some people whom I remember from those times are Seshadri mama and his son Santhanam who was my classmate plus his several siblings starting from Vasudevan and ending with Santhanam himself (this character deserves an entire post), Jayachandran, who spelt his initials as M R, I suspect for the sole purpose of being refered to as Mr. Jayachandran and feeling grown up, his parents, the Panickers and his siblings Usha and Anil, Narayanan Mami and Mama, and their daughter Gomathi, Geeta Menon and her parents, The Nairs and their kids Sundaran(we called him sundar bandar though it was Sreedharan who was more of a Bandar), Sreedharan and Anitha, the Aravindakshans and their daughter Radhika(Radhi), a prim girl, who from someone received a copy of the children’s’ magazine Chandamama every month and which I was eager to borrow, and several others about whom we will talk about in detail as we proceed.

Part 3 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-10T20:57:00.000+05:30

Wadi started slowly getting populated. Young men who had left their homes in faraway parts of India with nothing more than an SSLC degree, in search of livelihood got their places in Wadi. Many were Tamilians or Malayalis working in lowly positions like peons and drivers. Once their jobs were confirmed, they went back to their hometowns and came back with brides. Eventually the brides got pregnant and the first lot of second generation expatriate Wadiites came into existence. We will call these creatures by their authentic name “Wadi ke potte aur pottiyan” – (say WKP for convenience of future reference). I may claim to be one of them. Though for out parents and elders, Wadi was but a remote godforsaken outpost of civilization, which MUST be deserted the moment they retired for their ancestral hometowns in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for us WKPs Wadi was a powerful emotional presence. Even today when I live and work in the Capital of India (about the landmarks of which we used to learn tentatively in classes in Wadi), I wouldn’t hesitate to place Wadi on the top in many factors which make a settlement livable. It could be mistaken chauvinism, it could be jingoism but I am not ashamed of it; nor would I think any single one of the WKPs would hesitate to emulate me.

Strictly speaking, I was’nt a WKP by birth, but by domicile. I was born when my father was working for ACC at a place called Dwaraka, in Gujarat, in the Western border of India. The place where I was born is called Moovattupuzha which happens to be the hometown of my mother and which is in the Ernakulam District of Kerala. I learn that it took four changes of trains and as much as six days to reach Dwaraka from Moovattupuzha in those days. Anyway I was duly taken to Dwaraka when I was five months old, which was around the March of 1965. Soon after the Indo Pak War of 1965 started. I have heard that one could see the lights of Karachi from the seashore of Dwaraka. The outcome of it all was that the Pakistanis bombed the hell out of Dwaraka and I spent most of the nights of my first year of life in sandpits, sheltered from the bombs landing all around us. My lifelong aversion to exploding firecrackers and the festival of Diwali could have had a Freudian root in this experience. I still do not like firecrackers.

Now when Dwaraka was thus destroyed by the Pakistanis (There could be people who may disagree with me when I say that the Pakistanis destroyed Dwaraka in the 1965 war, and they may be right, but the ACC factory and colony pretty well became unhabitable and unusable thereafter), It left the management of ACC with no option but to transfer their employees to their other Plants. So like a handful of scattered grains, people went to such remote places as Madukkarai, Shahabad, Wadi, Kymore, Lakheri etc. And as had been pre ordained I with my family reached Wadi. I was little when I reached Wadi – less than a year old – so I claim my rightful position as a WKP. And like Musharraf who went on from the bylanes of Delhi to become the President of Pakistan, I slowly became more loyal than the king becoming a militant WKP and a militant Kannadiga in the later stages of my life.

Part 2 of my life in Wadi

2006-07-09T22:40:00.000+05:30

Thursdays in Wadi were what were called bazaar days. There were relatively more vendors in the bazaar area and everyone invariably went to the bazaar on Thursdays to buy weekly rations of vegetables. Things were cheap. I remember we could buy upto a dozen good ripe mangoes for a rupee. We at home were in the habit of drinking water which was boiled with a spoonful of cumin seeds in it. Also coffee was regularly consumed. There was what was called a store in wadi. This was a sort of a grocery shop run by the ACC wadi and was also initially located in a TRT. I would every alternate day be asked to go to the store to get 100 grams of coffee powder(what was called Jayanthi coffee) and 50 grams of cumin seeds and occasionally 50 grams of coconut oil. The bill would come to something like 2.15 rupees. There was a man called muralidhar who had a limp and who wrote out the bills and collected money at the store. This muralidhar often wrote out a bill for jayanthi coffee, jeera and coconut oil whenever he saw me. This was for some time a cause for acute embarrassment to me because this Muralidhar wrote out the bill for me before even I could say anything since that was what I always bought.

We did not have refrigerators those days. As the temperatures soared during summers, we used to need ice cubes to be put into water or lime juice or the then new fangled synthetic flavoured powder called Rasna which had just come into the market. We young ones were sent the houses of those who were fortunate enough to have refrigerators to collect ice cubes. Those who gave us ice cubes, often behaved in a superior fashion, but tradition demanded that they give us ice cubes. So we young ones went with stainless steel containers to collect ice cubes. Mostly we returned with ice cubes, which were soon consumed.

The school which Mrs. Saldanha started, about which I had mentioned in an earlier post was taken over by Christian Missionaries of the Saint Anne soon. Wadi soon became a parish. There came one Father Antony, who was a Malayali from Moncombu in Kerala. With him as a patron a group of nuns arrived from Kerala and Tamil Nadu and took over the School in Irani Building from Mrs. Saldanha. It is not clear whether Mrs Saldanha was upset or relieved about this development but soon, the school came to be known as St. Ambrose Covent School. One Sr. Mary Jane was the first headmistress. A Roman Catholic Church also came up in Wadi, near the Irani Building. Father Antony, being a Malayali Christian was a middle aged kind man, who had equal affinities for malayalis as well as Christians. We being partly Malayalis, and my mothers maternal grandparents being from Moncombu, Father Antony soon became a family friend. Thangi was his spiritual equal and since Father Antony knew enough Hinduism and Thangi knew enough Christianity, there were no ego clashes. He was an occasional visitor to our house and loved the Adai and dosai that my mother used to make. His proximity to the family also made me a favoured student of the nuns at St. Ambrose Convent.

TO BE CONTINUED

What exactly is this Wadi?

2006-07-09T22:09:00.000+05:30

Now some people have asked me where this Wadi is, about which I have written and about which I will be writing a lot. Wadi, like Malgudi will be defined as I go on, but for those who would like to know in brief, in advance, Wadi is a railway junction in the main Bombay Madras line from where a line diverts off to Hyderabad. It is in the midst of the Deccan Plateau, where the black cotton soil heats up (or atleast used to heat up) to a terrifying 52 degrees Celsius during summer. It is in the Northern part of the southern Indian state of Karanataka, in the Gulbarga district. It abounds in castes like the Lingayats, the followers of the Saint Sharanabasaweshwara and Banjaras, who are also called Lambadas, a gypsy like tribe. I have not visited the place for 20 years now, so I do not know what it is like these days, but I sincerely hope it is as it was when I was growing up there.

Wadi, where I became what I am

2006-07-09T21:47:00.000+05:30

I BEGIN A SERIES HERE WHICH WILL COMPRISE MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO MAY CARE. IT IS INTERESTING, TRUST ME, THOUGH NOT AS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BUT AS A CHRONICLE OF THOSE TIMES

I had had a relatively problem free life for the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life I think. Wadi was a problem free place in itself. There was dust all over from the chimneys of the cement factory, which sometimes caused severe problems to some. But probably because I was for all practical purposes native to Wadi, I was not affected by it in the least. At least that is what I think. Dust was endemic to wadi. I was even proud of my ability to tolerate a lot of dust and pollution (which was just a fancy word that I had in my proud portfolio of vocabulary – along with floccinaucinihilipilification and antidisestablishmentarealistacally – but I didn’t experience at all till I was thirty one when I came to Delhi) until I realized that I was violently allergic to a lot of things as soon as I left wadi. Otherwise wadi was relatively tranquil and problem free. Not only problem free but free of a lot of blessings and evils too. I had not seen a car till I was fifteen. Nor a bus till I was 10 or 12, when ACC wadi bought its first bus.

Trains I had seen since wadi consisted of just the ACC colony and factory and the railway junction and its colony. These two colonies were separated by a railway bridge and somewhere in between, loosely scattered, was what we called the bajaar. Every Thursday there were a lot of men vending their wares ranging from vegetables to clothes in this place. On other days there were shops here which catered to the daily needs of the people of wadi, like a few tailor, cobbler, provision and butcher shops and much later a medical shop. People in the ACC colony were highbrow, those in the railway colony relatively lowbrow and those in the bajaar – which was the real wadi, positively menial. Atleast that is how they were classified. We spoke a Hindi, which was a curious admixture of hyderabadi an mumbaiya.

There were strict classifications in the ACC colony too. There were about six categories of quarters. LTRT, STRT, JSQ, SSQ, SSB and Manager’s Bungalow. The LTRTs were for the low level workers in the factory, labourers, C Grade clerks etc. The STRTs were for slightly higher level workers. But the ones who made the leap from what was called wage board to officer grade, were in the JSQ. The JSQs were occupied either by elderly people who had joined as workers and made THE transition or by those young ones who were graduates and officers to begin with. The difference between the two classes in the JSQ was also obvious. The ones occupied by the elderly ones were full of old furniture and household belongings accumulated over a lifetime, while the ones occupied by the young ones, were relatively empty. The JSQs were in pairs and single storied. The TRTs were three storied. The move from a STRT to a JSQ was every workers dream. I lived my life at wadi almost entirely in STRT 31/8. 31 was the building number. 1,2,3, and 4 were second floors, 5,6,7 and 8 were first floors and the other four ground floors. My father was a clerk. He joined as one and retired as one though there were a few promotions in between. Hence he never made the THE transition. It is probably this which subconsciously makes me a little contemptuous of the high and mighty, and their posh ways, though I personally have never been a worker and was always an officer ( a Class I gazetted at that). The SSQs were for the further higher ups, and the SSBs for deputy manager level people. The General Manager occupied the Managers Bungalow, whose interiors and occupants the TRT people seldom saw. To us they were royalty. You saw the Manager in whites on Republic and Independence days, hoisting the flag and inspecting the guard of honour given by the hundred or so watchmen. Not otherwise. And I , a clerks son became the friend of a General Manager and one or two deputy managers in later days – but more about that as we go on.

We had everything we needed in wadi. What we didn’t have we didn’t need. Initially there was a hospital in a TRT, a club, and a store. I remember a doctor called Sujaan – a bald headed fellow who gave me injections accompanied by sweet talk. It was all free. The company paid for it. Then there were other doctors. One called Surya Rao, was particularly remembered for reasons I will come to later.

There were hardly any old people in wadi. People came there in search of work at the prime of their youth and left around retirement to their native places. Everybody in wadi had a native place. Nobody belonged there – except the menials in the bajaar. Some stayed with their parents, though the parents themselves weren’t old. Our family had an old and respected member in my grandmother and so we were sought after socially. Since most people in Wadi were young they had to go somewhere to get their problems in spirituality, traditional medicine, recipes and general secular problems solved and they used to come to grandmother. The grandmother of the Iyers house was a known figure both in the ACC and the railway colony to whom even managers wives came for advice. Though grandmother didn’t like being called grandmother because she thought she was still young. Apart from astrology and the predictive sciences grandmother could dispense advice on almost anything. For astrology there was Seshadri Mama who himself was a devotee of grandmother. Grandmother was the head of the iyer community in wadi and seshadri mama of the iyengars, though mama subordinated iyengars to iyers in grandmother. For the records, I called grandmother Thangi, from her name, Thangam. Father was a respected figure too though not classy, and mother was a shadowy background figure to Thangi. Thangi solved all sorts of problems like adultery, love triangles, lack of firewood to cremate the dead, pediatric and gyeanacological problems, auspicious dates etc. I learnt a lot from her like the Nayagan’s son from the Nayagan of Kamalhaasan fame. Though she didn’t tell me stories particularly, I knew Ravana’s sword was called the chandrahasa and other trivia like that, which could fetch upto 50 lakhs in todays TV Quiz shows.

I went to my first school when I was over five. It was run by Christian missionaries, most of them from Kerala. The headmistress however was an enterprising anglo Indian lady – the wife of a railway engine driver called Mrs. Saldanha. She had a child called alice, who was a year younger to me and it seems to be with the express purpose of giving her an education that this lady actually started a school in wadi, a place which earlier did not have any schools. That was the beginning of education in wadi. She had taken a few rooms in a building called the Irani building, which was owned by one Irani, who was a local landlord who owned a lot of limestone mines in wadi. He had a place called Khani – or mines a little away from wadi and lived in a bungalow there. Most in wadi had heard of Irani but had not seen him. He was a mysterious figure about whom myths abounded. Anyway, this Irani had a double storied building in wadi and Mrs. Saldanha took a few rooms there to start a school. Initially the school seemed to have only one class. I was one of the first students. The school went by the name of St. Anne’s Convent, though it was yet to be taken over by Christian missionaries.

School admissions were generally done in April or May. I had what is called vidyarambham as is traditionally done on Vijayadashami day in the year of 1969. Thereafter, one auspicious day, Thangi, alongwith my father and mother took me to the school for admission. We also had a packet of toffees alongwith us. Toffees were freely distributed to all the students of the school because as Thangi said, my school education maybe a sweet experience. The fees was something insignificant though as I remember there was a lot of pomp and splendour surrounding my school admission. I must admit that my school education and all education thereafter was indeed sweet, and I developed a lifelong love for learning things. I developed into an academic sort. The walls of the school rooms were decorated with paintings depicting scenes from nursery rhymes and I was, by virtue of my age admitted to what is called the upper KG. I studied in upper KG for six months. The school was a little away – say a kilometer from my house at STRT 31/8 and my mother used to take me to school and bring me back for lunch daily. I don’t really remember what were the school timings but I learnt that timings were sacrosanct. There were a few girls in the same area as our house who also used to attend the school and when we saw them going to school from our first floor window, we knew it was time. One of these girls was called Latha, who was the daughter of a malayali Christian called Thankachan and she was supposed to be a good looking girl. She eventually grew up to be one of the dream girls of wadi.

TO BE CONTINUED

2006-07-09T21:23:00.000+05:30

I am starting this blog today. I took some time naming this blog but then it came naturally because that is what describes my nature, my behaviour best. In Hindu mythology Lord Shiva is said to be a Kshipra prasadi or his nature is said to be kshanam chitham kshanam pitham meaning cynicism2euphoria.