just passing by

Courtesy can assume ridiculous forms. Take this example of passing communication for instance.

I was descending the staircase after class. I saw a girl climbing the stairs my way. There was no one else in the vicinity. She looked at me. I looked back at her. She didn’t look away. I smiled at her. She smiled back. I smiled back again. She greeted me, “Hey! How have you been?” I replied “Good! What’s been up with you?” She replied, “Usual, catch you around later anyway… Gotta rush for a class”. I bade her farewell, “Sure, see you around later”. We crossed each other. She left for the class and I left for the grounds.

And I am almost certain that neither of us knew the other.

What you saying, woman????

“I think the purdah system should be abolished”!!!. Oh dear! There goes the dodo.

I wasn’t really too excited by the prospect of Pratibha Patil being made first citizen of my country because of some instincts which were inexplicable to me then. She just had to open her mouth and make some noise for me to dawn upon the realization that my instincts had already unobtrusively comprehended the irrepressible truth- that there were no brains behind all the big talk.

Her first public utterance after being chosen by the U-Pratibha-Alliance as the nominee for the post of the president was audaciously characteristic of self flattery- one that seemed to hail the decision of the ruling party coalition of having chosen her. What cheek! And then you go as far as asking age old traditional customs to be abolished in a night’s hours.

I confess that I have a proclivity of siding with the conservatives generally. Disregarding that too, in the pure spirit of enquiry, I wish to ask what essentially is wrong with the purdah system? In countries like England and America, it has, of course, come to be identified with a suspiciously-eyed, even hated, community- the Islamists. So much is the attention even the Sikhs attract, as much as does every brown man or a black man. I, for one, trust human ingenuity enough to believe that it can identify a south asian or an east asian, for example, rather comfortably, even without a burkha or a pagdi or a kimono. We are different races of people all over the globe and all races have physical charachteristics typical of them. Thereby, even as the question of the burkha or the pagdi being prospectively banned in England sounds perverse to me; the suggestion of my probable president, Pratibha ji is something I simply I cannot digest.

The purdah is a tradition that has not harmed any woman till date. I fail to see what this lady is trying to arrive at.

She calls her nomination a big step for the women in the country. I am not too sure too many women think so. I, for one, don’t.

Let's play

The guardian quick crossword, appearing 6 days a week in the Hindu, has been one of my favourite spaces in the newspaper. Unlike the Sunday crossword, I do not end up developing a ‘I – know- nothing’ complex after solving the crossword. Quite often I end up filling in all the white boxes (albeit many a time wrongly) and what follows is a sense of complete elation at having beat the crossword at its own game.

The crossword is after all one impish gamer.It dodges you and you chase it. And when you think the chase is almost over and there's just one clue left to decode, it throws at you a googly. Try which way, you can solve that clue only by stepping into the shoes of the troublemaker. Take for example, the clue that reads: ‘old sphinx (6)’. You have just one letter of the word from a cross word (s_ _ _ _ _). You break you head, search up all your neurons, still finding nothing you decide to make use of technology (yes! After long moments of debating whether or not to give the final credit of solving the crossword puzzle to the artificial world, you decide in its favour) and wiki arrives! But alas, wiki doesn’t give you any synonym for the sphinx.

You google and you arrive at no results either. What in the world was the sphinx called earlier and why in the world does wiki not know that, and If wiki doesn’t know it, and nor does google, then how in the world do they expect someone to decrypt the clue? A mania of sorts grips you and an obsession to outbeat the crossword. And that’s just where it ends. The crossword has won.

The next day you inquisitively pick up the paper and turn first to the second page of metroplus ( and without first having a look at calvin and hobbes), frantically look for the answer that dodged you all of the previous day. ‘sphinx’. You read and you re-read aghast. You are angry. And then suddenly you are amused. Of course! The old sphinx was never called anything else. It was always the sphinx. Wiki knew the answer after all. And so did you all this while. But the crossword won because it played while you competed. There’s a fine line between the two but what makes all the difference is which side you choose.

Master of the game

Long family lineages remind of Sidney Sheldon. If you fail to see the relation, most probably you have not read ‘Master of the game’. The only masterpiece of Sidney Sheldon and his only work I would recommend. It happens to be the first Sheldon I had read and all his other books after that seem to me to be scripts of C grade A rated movies. And no, Master of the Game’s no book you’d give to an underrated child still. It does have a generous demonstration of Sheldon’s most prized art (else, how in the name of Merlin, would his books sell?), but as a bonus, this one also has a soul thats not prostituted. It’s a wonderful tale spanning three or four generations, I forget how many, and has insightful accounts of various kinds of human personalities and how their interplay defines destinies.
It’s a pity Sheldon exhausted his genius with one book.

Love your family!

It’s all about loving your family! Who’d know that better than Rahul Gandhi? Maybe, Karan Johar. But its not Karan’s family the country is interested in, and the country doesn’t comprise all of film industry sychophants, who flatter him and are all praises for his 3rd grade movies, only made on a kingly budget, just to get a chance to act in his ‘annual blockbuster’. I thought even Ekta Kapoor outdoes him after I sat through half an hour of KANK! (coincidently, it even rhymes with Skunk.. poor creature! )
Him and those stalkers aside, its Rahul’s family that we are worried about. Fool us once, fool us twice, but his family has played the same trick for four generations and want us to be fooled everytime. What fools! Those self abnegating individuals, having been forced to take up the office of the highest executive of the country for four generations! By Merlin! That makes my country sound handicapped!
Nehru hesitantly became the prime minister (Gandhiji was the citizen deemed for the popular honours), Indira didn’t have a political inclination and joined the fray only for the good of the country ( and what good she did!), Rajiv was a happy go lucky pilot, not bothered about politics at all. Sonia was forced too, but didn’t accept the office, smart girl!. The old trick would have become rather too patent!
And then isn’t Indira Gandhi the one who had made oh, so many bloody mistakes- the most criminal being the Emergency? She is also infamously rumoured to have killed her son. I do not know about the veracity of the last rumour but most of her contemporaries would probably swear by it.
I can gladly say thus, that I am no Indira fan, even though I wasn’t even born when she ruled our country, to know her politics too well. I wasn’t born even during Nehru’s days, but I have come to admire him immensely as a passionate idealist and a human from the little literature that I have read of his and about him. There’s not much literature on Rajiv though, but people’s accounts of him are often praiseworthy and he seems to have been a committed prime minister. His wife’s, however, turned out to be no nationalist- Indian definitely not, Italian I don’t know. She was the one who didn’t want Rajiv to make his foray into politics, he did it and yet did she. And what was the reason espoused by her? – to raise congress back to its past glory. Not once did she speak about Indian interests. The only preoccupation of her mind seems to have been to preserve her family legacy- and that legacy is the party. Its all about the family after all. Rahul’s no alien to that blood.

Sorry boy! I don’t hate you. But I am not too fond of your family- blame it on the womenfolk.

oh, Merlin!

Oh, Merlin!! NO dear, he is not a creation of J.K Rowling. Her books do not even tell his story. They just use his name as most wizards do. He is a fictional legend ( the earliest instance of his name is in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, as Merlin Ambrioses) who is reinvented again and again. Some use him as their villain, some name humanitarian societies after him. It all boils down to convenience in the end. I prefer to know him as a frivolous sage(yeah! Talk of paradoxes!) and best read him through these lines:

*Of Merlin wise I learned a song,

--Sing it low, or sing it loud,

It is mightier than the strong,

And punishes the proud.

I sing it to the surging crowd,

--Good men it will calm and cheer,

Bad men it will chain and cage.

In the heart of the music peals a strain

Which only angels hear;

Whether it waken joy or rage,

Hushed myriads hark in vain,

Yet they who hear it shed their age,

And take their youth again.

*-MERLIN'S SONG by RALPH WALDO EMERSON

By Merlin!

she: by Merlin! why by Merlin?
I: why not?
she: what do you mean by by Merlin?
I: by by Merlin I mean 'by Merlin' and 'By merlin!'
she: by Merlin! You mean it!
I: In Merlin's name I do and Merlin does so too!