I have a friend who works for a software firm in Pune. He is a mango aficionado. He salivates over the varieties that flood the stalls of Pune in summer. He, also, likes to drink and tell stories.

He comes from an area north of the Ganga in Bihar. This is a land famous for it’s mangoes, for it’s poets, for it’s profligate royalty. In the olden days, Amrapali lived here – the famous courtesan of the eponymous movie. Even before that, this is where the world saw, perhaps for the first time, a republican form of government.

It is a fertile land, and agriculture is the primary occupation. I have heard that Akbar planted mango trees in Darbhanga – maybe it’s just a story. It’s so difficult to separate myth from history in India. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. History is a set of facts that have come down to us, through different narrations. The narration will occasionally subsume the facts, sometimes just colour them subtly, but the act and the entity of narration will always bring their own personal history. So, you see, history is perhaps not very different from myth. Myth is richer, of course, since it carries a cultural intent; it abstracts things out of the universe of thoughts and leave them for posterity to discover.

Aah, but we’ve neglected the mangoes. Mango trees are grown from grafts. You take a stock tree, graft in a cutting with the right qualities, and you have your mango tree. These stock trees are, by themselves, very tall, and though their fruits are not distinguished, the trees have a great sense of dignity and, a very obvious, massiveness. Apparently, these trees are grown in this area for a very peculiar reason. The wood from these trees is used for stocking funeral pyres. My friend talked about an old relative who, as he moved from active life, into that period of discontented contemplation, awaiting death, planted a set of stock mango trees in front of his house. He was preparing his funeral pyre.

Stories, myths, luscious fruits... what a heady combo this thing called India is.

An evening of odd love

We waded on the shores of intimacy
Looking for channels in the sands
That would take my unspoken words to you
And the channels we made in the sands
Rolled over in the wave

The evening still leans against us
Unrequited, its deed is not done
The evening is still ours.
Shall we bid the evening on its way
To other shores and better fortune

My hair gleams in the last efforts of a helpless day
My hair that that will
In strands of desperation, cling to refreshing towels
Its deed is done, the evenings of love
Are over

We were never lovers in the meaning of word
We were never lovers in the twilight
We were never lovers
Until the stars twinkled
With mirth, at our niggardly ways
Unspeaking, while the dark night rolled us in
Its sleepy clasp
That pardons the futility of our lives and our love

I could never see the easiness of age
Blinded in mine that was over,
And we let things of the world strew our sands
With approximate equalities
What indecencies will pass the guardians
While we watch the waves wipe out our shores.

An interlude of reality

When the evening pales on my skin,
On it’s wrinkles, and on it’s sag
And the wind blows down
Fancies and dreams like dry leaves,
That will scuttle through parking lots of city malls,
They had their day.

While moments of achievement have scraped away layers
Of my carefully preserved realness
While we played boyhood truants in late office jousts
While we gave to the Books, in their statutory avariciousness,
Little pieces of our soul
Proudly

i missed the point during the circumlocution of my last post. i really wanted to talk about the homegeneity of modern day culture and how all life turns into practising-to-be-like-TV. TV so dominates your senses, you really find it difficult to do anything else. indeed, TV, more than anything else, teaches modern humans how to socialize, and is probably the biggest reason why democracy will last foreever.

For some time I have been thinking about the purpose of my life. I work for a mid-tier software company in India. I have spent almost all of my professional life in this firm. I saw it grow from a small group of enthusiastic collegians writing code for fun, to a serious consultancy oriented company geared to improve the lives of it’s customer, and to make their wallets lighter, through careful calibration of human productive capacity, it’s organization by means of carefully tuned processes, and it’s delivery by means of structures aimed at capturing the hearts of customers. I see myself as an improved version of the merchants of the hoary past – indeed this improvement is not a choice but a necessity arising out of competitive global markets.

Permit me to launch into a large leap of thought – indeed, to touch upon the event which stimulated me to write today. I visited my daughter’s school today. We were invited to a function called the school’s annual day. It comprised mainly of students performing plays, songs, dances, and so on. In the midst of this was a beauty contest of sorts, except it was cultural talent, rather than beauty being judged. As is common amongst public contests of such nature these days, the public were also asked to rate the best student.

The students themselves showed up all that they possibly had. Some sang, some recited poems they had written – very poor stuff, mind you. There was a student who delivered Antony’s speech on Caesar’s death – I doubt if he realized that this was a meant to rouse the audience. But anyway, my judgment of the quality of the event is not the point. The point was massive participation in public demonstration of talent, its evaluation, and possible recognition.

Indeed, if we sit up a bit and look around, this is a major theme of modern Indian life. Reality shows, song and dance contests of every possible form dominate the TV scene. The entire educational system is dominated by competition to qualify for the jobs that pay the most money, or else, substitute power for pelf. News is dominated on one had by the inane resurgence of democratic judiciary, and on the other by reports on the heroics of our business lords – Ratan Tata, Laxmi Mittal, Sunil Bharti, and others. Indeed, India as an economic state is looking at itself with awe, confidence and vigour.

Folks of my generation never had it so good. I remember mocking Americans because they wiped their tables with paper with retro-Marxist glee – now I do the same. It’s a bit of an irony. We never anticipated this rush of well-being when we were young. During school, I remember reading numerous newspaper essays on the pernicious effects of population. Today we live, and indeed thrive, in a global economy, where our multitudinous hordes, give us a rare advantage.

I don’t think it’s just the numbers. I think early civilizational progress set the tone. We’ve been wondering about stuff since before it became fashionable. That wondering is really what pushes civilization. (I’ve been reading a translation of Siva Purana by someone. I highly recommend it.)

It’s been a long time since I wrote. I haven’t been laying off the drinks; rather the contrary. I’ve been gnawing on some private grief.

Been reading some wildlife stuff – Kenneth Anderson, Jim Corbett. Then I took up Marquez – Autumn of the Patriarch. If you haven’t read Marquez (or Dostoevsky), you haven’t read fiction. There are great books that others have written – lots and lots, but you can’t find two better authors - these two guys are geniuses. They define fiction. I think neither wrote natively in English, but if you haven’t read either, you’ve missed life. Of course, if you don’t read as a habit, you have seen better things than I have!

I’ve been wondering about deodorant, and air-travel, and DVD’s, and corporate salaries – and such stuff that make up the core of modern life. I was also reading about some experiments that seem to indicate that the speed of light may not be as constant as we thought. I read about India looking for scientists – except that salaries of scientists is too low, even in comparison to call center employees. Who’ll wonder about the sun and stars, while someone needs to know her credit balance!

In the line of my work, I’m faced by people who will give up all good work that they’ve done because another guy pays some more. I seem to be faced by an entire generation that lives by the pay cheque.

I used to earn about 3000 rupees a month when I started earning. (At that time a small refrigerator used to cost 8000 rupees – just to give you an idea of the purchasing power of the rupee). And I was only worried whether my algorithm had any corner conditions that I had not foreseen. Today guys join companies at more than 10 times that salary, while fridges cost the same, and they seem to feel that their pay cheque determines their sense of self-respect.

I remember sitting under the benevolent winter sun of Kanpur hearing someone talk about the twist of time-space that accommodates gravity. And I am surprised that graduates that join my company today even acquiesce to be taught C++ - a common programming language.

I see, quite clearly, that I have lost the act. By having become quietly, a citizen of this corporate arena – that trains people to suspend thought, and do as the manual says, in order that the author of the manual notch another corporate achievement; that we all think of how to make the profit number that someone, in a dull state of greed, made up. How small have I become while the sun shines as strongly as it used to, and the moon is as smooth. It’s just that I’m too used to AC and nights are reserved for phosphorescent monitors.

I think Pink Floyd were right… we saw the truth when young, and now we deceive ourselves with delusions, born of the coupling between greed and MBAs.

all this talk of iit's and stuff makes me nervous. will i die without having taken my share of it's everlasting charm? was it particularly special to have spent time at an iit, rather than anywhere else in the world. for god's sake, there are books being written about iit's - one of the my office-mates wanted to know if i write as well.

it's all so peculiar. i remember my stay at iit very well. there are flashes of memory, like a photo album, which i can browse through. i remember counselling, when i saw a couple walking the summer flower laden paths of IIT/K, holding hands. i had never seen a couple holding hands in public. i was with my father, and i was embarrased for his sake. i also remember the intensity of heat in kanpur; my fascination with heat, which i wrote of in some other entry, probably dates from those days.

i remember reaching kanpur - a raw teenager - and being ragged to tears almost every day. i remember hiding in the sports grounds. i have not known deeper misery than i experienced in those days. there was a sunday afternoon i remember measuring the length of my hostel wing with a 25 paise coin. i remember that coin being kicked out of my tired hands half way through the wing - deliberately - and starting again. i remember feeling that this must have been how jews must have felt when they'd just been carted over to the concentration camps.

i remember getting through ragging, and receiving a late night march from residents of hall2 with buckets of water. i remember my seniors encouraging me to feel enthusiastic about this, and i remember feeling entirely bored with the proceedings.

i remember a lot. i won't tell you all - for fear that i'll lose my potential book royalty to my gentle reader. but really because i don't think my life at iit was really anything special. i would have had as much fun, if i'd studied at XXX Engg College. fun is a function of will.

i also remember spending drunken evenings with folks who passed out of other colleges, and whose faces, redolent with memories, were more evocative than any i know. it's clear that these iitan's are just setting themselves up for royalties! believe me...

i was in Delhi recently. went with my folks and returned alone. lonely travel pushes the writer's pen, or keyboard, if you will.

i went by train. 2-tier AC. it was uneventful and boring. somehow train travel is incomplete if you travel in an AC coach. it has this dessicated feel. you see India passing by through tinted windows. sometimes if you look really hard, you can convince yourself you're really seeing a video stream, and the train never moved.

on the way back i took a flight. the usual exercise in self-induced silence. i wonder which is more boring - AC trains or flights. they both have their points.

Delhi was pretty. i'm always amazed by the trees that line the roads. and the flowers you sometimes see on the narrow strips between the main road and the service lanes.

Delhi was pretty and ugly. if you go over the flyovers, you see black plastics tanks arrayed over the roofs of pale yellow blockish buildings, going on for ever. but Delhi has something going for it. it's the kind of place you'll see a massive building for something like "Continuing Care for Cancer Patients", sounding like a place where they take care of the terminal cases. it's a city where money has done things that make you proud - monumentally proud, i guess.

i reached the domestic airport in Delhi early for my flight. it was early afternoon and i decided not to step into the crowded terminal right away. outside it was hot, over 40 degrees. there was a mild breeze - the kind that feels so dry that sometimes you wonder if you hear it crackling. the heat dries up your outer skin, and you almost feel psychedelically focussed on the process of putting foot in front of foot and going where ever you are. i have always been amazed at the kind of bareness and minimalism that such weather brings out. it's just your thoughts and the heat outside.

somehow, it's in that heat, in the bleakness of the hot searing urban landscape, that i really see the sensuousness of India. it's in that heat that i feel the pulse of a primitive instinct, and somehow feel that i share it with the men and women who lived in these plains for hundreds of years.

this is the India that i know as mine.

around December we (i.e. my family and i) went on a trip to a tourist spot - to Aurangabad. the idea was to do the fashionable sites of Ajanta and Ellora.

there was a lot of medieval history on the way. all that i had read about the Mughals, in musty books, seemed to melt away while standing in sight of Aurangzeb's grave. that's the marvel of ruins.

and we went over the hills of Ajanta and Ellora - through dark caves, chiselled, shattered, carved, chipped away generations ago by a people blinded (or illumined) by a belief. and a desperate need to live and do beyond the immediate.

while i browsed the dim interiors for just the right photographs to grace these pages with, the irony of my quest never really hit me until much later. most tourists reach this place on their own quests (except for the many young who were being dragged by their parents or wards). but why do people go to places like these? were they, like me, just looking for a way to vacate their minds of a humdrum job and life. or were they, like the original sculptors and painters of these hills, looking for something beyond the immediate? indeed, was the quest of the original painters and sculptors more important than mine?

in general, am i wasting my time living through modern day life - stuck like guilt to the perennial schedule of my job, and other appurtenances of modern life? or were they wasting their time cutting into volcanic rock amidst deep forests, seeking to leave a trace of passion in the Deccan plateau? or am i asking silly rhetorical questions, just to amuse my gentle reader?

i'll never know...

it's Holi. up at my office they had arranged a Holi bash. there was colour on demand, a very large music generator, heavy bass music, and water was being pumped up out of a water tanker through a series of showers.
this was in our parking lot. while driving out of the lot, just outside the gate, i saw four or five young men. their bodies were covered with some kind of white dust - they had probably been white washing something. each of them was dusting their body with some rags. probably on their way home...

there was that Holi and this.

as i wrote some time ago, i had gone to Bangalore on a brief visit. this was late December. verified the common complaints of slow traffic; verified also the lovely gardens and trees, and loads of elegance in the common architecture and planning. it is clear that the city hasn't managed to grow as fast as its population has grown, but that's kind of like regretting a diamond isn't as heavy as a boulder.

on the way back to the airport, i chanced upon the signboard of a company, where an old friend of mine works. he's a friend from undergrad college days, and just as i passed the signboard, i called him up on his cell phone. he was busy and promised to call back. he didn't and i sympathize with him. the sheer effort needed to live through a usual day of work in a modern company is enough to take the best out of a guy.

but that was sort of beside the point. the memory of my friend led to a rush of memories from those days. memories and dreams - a pet dream, which we often bandied amongst ourselves, was to form a rock band. hah! looking at us now - getting into our 40s, wearing out the synthetic fabric of corporate chairs. it's so incongruous to even remember that we had such dreams; a travesty, no less, of that youthful exuberance.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/T.S. Eliot)

Bangalore is changing names; it's growing at break-neck pace; it's people are thirsting for water, but probably don't really care because there's always Bisleri or beer; Bangalore is a lovely city turning into a commercial warehouse of software programmers. but Bangalore will always be special because the city made me feel, and remember, and regret.

feminism has an amazing place in Hindu religious narrative. while returning from Bangalore the other day, i happened to glance through the in-flight magazine. it had a piece on West Bengal as a tourist destination. Bengal and Assam are really the places where the female elements in Hindu religious tradition, are most developed and popularly accepted.

the most striking narrative is that of Durga. as the story goes, there was this demon, Mahishasur (mahish = buffalo, asur = demon), who had, as a culmination of extreme penance, obtained a boon of immortality from Brahma - "no man or god can kill you...". Mahishasur dominated over earth and heavens, and cast the gods out of heaven. the balance of good and evil was upset by the practices of the followers of the demon king.

exasperated, the gods got together in the standard delegation and sought relief from Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma's boon was unassailable. however, there was a flaw in the boon, and the female element creeps in here. Durga was a woman, and Mahishasur was immune only to man and god.

Durga was blessed with the pick of godly weapons. i remember only some - Kubera's club, Indra's thunderbolt, Vayu's arrow. i think Himalayas gifted her the lion, which serves as her vehicle. there were other gifts to her - her garland of serpents, et al. she was stronger than
any god - even Shiva could not match her powers because she had concentrated the collective powers of all gods.

note the contradictions. women are associated with weakness and fragility (abala in Hindi = lacking strength, is a synonym of woman) - Durga was the greatest power the universe had seen. women are associated with beauty. Durga was hideous, even grotesque. it is said
that brave warriors could not even survive looking at her form. women are associated with compliance, discipline, and control - Durga was the antithesis of all these qualities - she was uncontrolled and audaciously reckless.

it is very striking how this narrative contrasts with the Ramayana treatment of women. repeatedly in Rama's narrative, we see women in subservient and helpless positions - almost possessions of the men they are associated with. we see paramount purity in Sita's role. we see their association with earth or nature, but we do not see displays of power or independence. what we see in Ramayama is more or less the archetypal image of women in early modern India.

ps: by "early modern India", above, i mean the India that existed before the advent of TV, IT jobs, and other such stuff, which are rapidly transforming India into just another "developed nation state" - lacking in any form of social character. i like to call this degraded India a junk-country, like junk food. i dislike this degradation, though i can't reverse it. indeed, i do a lot of things that typical folks in junk-countries do. i just have one peevish protest - i don't watch cable TV.

just finished White Mughals by William Dalrymple. it's an interesting story, but not really fascinating, as a book on history. indeed, the book provides little insight into the fairly complex political history of the period. of course, the high point of the book is the expansive descriptions of the social history of the period, as reflected in the social behavior patterns of the English, the French and the aristocratic Indian strata.

some day maybe i'll get a chance to write about the political history of this period. it's interesting stuff.

one of the thoughts that did flow from reading this book was about English-inspired architecture - those stately mansions, with tall imposing pillars bordering expansive verandahs, (column arch decoration???) even in commonplace buildings like post offices and railway stations. there is no doubt that there's character in those buildings. if you've strolled through the area around Writer's Building in Kolkata, or the Fort area in Mumbai, or in many areas of Delhi, you will, no doubt, have felt the sense of resplendent ascendancy - dignified and celebratory - that this kind of architecture inspires in one.

but, just as a thought, compare them with the Taj, or the numerous buildings dotted all over the areas of medieval Muslim kingdoms, or the more modern buildings that emerged from the sybaritic culture of Oudh, or the dramatic temples of Orissa. think of all those human hands and eyes that had shaped the intricate inlay work and trellises, the twisted lines of stone. and how these art forms would have been patronized by the older rulers of India? masons and architects, who for years on end, would have risen with the dream of a shape in their mind, would have worked through the day, with primitive implements to realize those shapes, and how those tired bodies would have been lulled to sleep by some ineluctable madness to create. no, these English buildings don't bind me in their spell anymore.

i had started White Mughals, while i was still about two-thirds of the way through the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. lovely book, I'm reading it for the second time. (it helps that i forget easily.) i have always been amazed by the manner in which Hitler transformed Germany into the monstrous state that Nazi Germany was. it is perhaps one of the most successful attempts at behavior modification at such a large scale. like i said it's a lovely book, if you're inclined towards history.

no one who grew up in India, after the 1970's, will really know the meaning of romance. that was a sense of romance carried through the air of Vividh Bharti, from the pens of aging song writers of the Hindi film world; a sense of romance brought on by the imposition of emergency and India's miraculously dramatic recovery. these were the days when telephone connections and cooking gas was rare, and Amitabh Bachan stimulated a sense of angst that held the country together.
today, as i grow old, and watch young kids holding hands in the bazaar; as the bazaar gives way to malls; as everything becomes a calculation of EMI, there is no romance left in life.
sometimes, this realization hits me so strongly, i see little value in living in such a world.
yet, we still can savour the frisson of middle-aged marriages, though we may survive to see their decline as well.
if you ever, wonder about the name of my blog, it's simply a promise that i'll post when i'm drunk.

winter has come to Pune. and the Cassia Fistula (amaltas) in my garden, which i had given up on, has come back to life!

i heard an ad on a local FM channel, about a talent search competition for radio jockeys for the (FM) channel, sponsored by a big BPO company. the auditions were to be held at galleries of BPL mobile, a cellular phone service provider.

what was amazing about this ad is that, 10 years ago, none of this really existed - private FM channels, BPO companies, and cell phones.

since i was small, and i guess this would be true of most folks, whenever it rained, i felt either happy or sad or frustrated, whatever, but i never felt scared. today i feel scared.

it has already rained more than it should in the city in which i live in. in fact, it has already rained more than it ever has, and it's still going strong. while i write this, there's a gentle drizzle outside. my periwinkles, lovingly cultivated, have succumbed to fungal infections. my young Amaltas (Cassia fistula) has lost all leaves (in August!).

my entire garden is in a disarray and i don't think this is just some careful pattern of middle-age human angst.

i am not really scared of the prospect that the world seems to be reaching it's end due to global warming. i'm scared of what happens when other people also start feeling scared.

this is the beginning of a world. the real trouble is that there are so many worlds...

yesterday, a post-graduate of metallurgical engineering, 13 years after his post-graduation undertook a 2.5 hour training course in employee retention (retention = the opposite of attrition) and no one laughed!

somehow it doesn't make sense.