Papa's girl turns a bakers dozen!

It suddenly dawned on me a thirteen year old was going to make her presence felt at home in a couple of days time and the significance of a thirteenth birthday hit me. I don't remember when I turned thirteen nor does it rank among the significant events in my life. The first in the list of birthdays with numerical significance I would say. This will be followed by the sweet sixteen, then by the I-can-do-anything-except-fund-my-birthday-party-eighteen, followed by the leave me alone 20's. In my opinion the only birthday that you can afford to celebrate well with your money or with the help of your bankers is the 40th. That's the age you turn credit worthy and debt ridden at the same time and end up becoming a complete (balance sheet) man.

But 13 is the new 21. My daughter who is turning thirteen in a couple of days time asked me to drive her down for shopping. Our first stop was Forever 21. I was a bit confused. I said you are just13 and you should be dreaming about staying 13 and not forever 21 because that's the threshold year in an Indian academics life, the post sophomore year and it's not fun. A shop named Forever 21 made me wonder why a Forever 42 doesn't exist. Guess forever forty does more poetic justice than the forever 21.

We then went to the Zaras, the Mangoes, New Yorkers, the H&M's she picked a few that her mom wouldn't approve of and then she picked a few that I wouldn't approve of. The reasons for the disapproval was totally different, my wife's approval was directly proportional to the quantity of raw material that went into the making of the garment, while I was amazed at the direct proportionality of the quantity of material and the thickness of my wallet, the shorter the dress the thinner my wallet would be....Finally we found the middle ground that just about covered the knee and saved my wallet from looking economically malnourished.

My little one is entering a stage in life that could draw parallels to Thomas Harris's "Im ok you are not ok" phase and this stage is in for the long haul. I am preparing myself to be on the 'Iam not ok' phase for the next couple of decades since just when my elder daughter reaches the stage of acknowledging the fact that I was as a 'matter of fact ok' my younger one would get there and tell me I'm still not ok. In short I will remain perennially NOT OK for some time!!!

On her way to 13 she befriended a youtuber guru called Lilly Singh who apparently preaches the same stuff we have been trying for the last 13 years day in and day out. Guess I got parenting all wrong. Instead of making her sit down and talking to her I should have made YouTube videos on stuff I wanted to tell her and uploaded it. Looks like the order of channel richness in the modes of parental communication is all skewed these days.

As the bundle of joy who came into our lives 13 years back on 31st December is all set to enter a stage where she could turn out to be bundle of rebellion that could last a full 7 years. All I can do is pray....for me and for all those prospective victims who could cross her path. Jokes apart... God bless my darling and  wishing all her dreams come true!

The colour of money.

In a country that is obsessed with anything that is fair, fair as in appearance and not so obsessed with anything that is fair, fair as in reasonable, the newfound love for something black perplexed me, but at the same time encouraged me to delve deep into my understanding of the colour of money. Yes, the pursuit of black money hoarded across the shores was brought to light accompanied by huge media frenzy and political brouhaha over the last couple of weeks. Political parties had promised to bring this back as part of their election manifestos. One of the media houses went to the extent of claiming that they had beaten the rest by a clean 2 hours in being the first to track, expose and reveal the ‘black’ money hoarders. It was one of those rare moments when something that was black was in the limelight in India.

My understanding of economics was slightly skewed as a child, I always thought the rich had white money, the poor had black money and the middle class had brown money. Now, that was some 'classification of my understanding of the monetary policies around me. The rich always flaunted nice, crisp and fresh notes / wads of currency that were thick enough and could be held together with a rubber band and were stored in suitcases and safes. The poor had crumpled, soiled, hand me down currency where even the promissory clause ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of rupees…’ had vanished and was often secured in their sweaty palms. The middle class as the name suggests found itself in the middle of things receiving white money from the rich in lesser thickness and stored it in wallets or shirt pockets which turned grey as they were holding on to it far too long before changing it and then handing over the left overs in a darker shade of grey to the poor which ultimately turned black in their possession. I thought this was in line with social order of things I was taught to believe as a child.

Well, growing up, I was even more confused as I started to read that black money was stored in the pristine white snow clad regions of Switzerland. What an irony I thought, a country draped in white hosted black money. This, I call the yin and yang of Indian economy. I realized that darker the shade of black the money had, the more colorful use it was put to, for example the colorful song and dance sequences of Bollywood shot in scenic locales of Swiss Alps or the busy Times Square was claimed to be funded by black money. The colorfully lit skylines that sprang up in most metropolitan cities were supposedly funded by black money. Certain self-gratifying activities engaged in red shaded regions of a city were also occasionally funded by Black money. Basically these were all easy prey to be funded by unaccounted, untaxed money.

While I appreciate the efforts taken by the Indian authorities to bring unaccounted money back to India, I am against giving a colour to this currency. Colour classification has always spelt doom to our society and the Indian public has been quick at lapping it up, be it a fairness cream or a darker shade for the color of money.

Was Made in India!

You could often spot her around the city wearing a bright yellow top and a short black skirt. She wasn't size zero, which incidentally was unheard of those days, instead was curvy and cute. They told me she had a British lineage and it showed. The attire I described above was her uniform at work; she was also spotted at times wearing stunning white gowns with roses at the right places bringing the bride or the groom to the venue on their big day. She was the flag bearer for people in authority and on these occasions she was dressed in black, above all she had a big heart and could well accommodate the entire family and take them safely through the travails of rough rides in life. She was the pride of many households, who were very reluctant to let her go. When they did, they ensured she found an equally loving home. She would engage herself in self-improvement and took efforts to make a new ‘mark’ for herself each year. Even when her place was threatened by the trendier looking other woman, true to her name she stayed her diplomatic self.

She was punctual, she was elegant and she was the one every 18 year old aspired and depended on as they were put to test on their big day. She had many a beautiful face with slender hands that worked constantly and ensured that you were reminded that little time was left to achieve whatever you endeavored to. She was a legacy and sometimes stayed immortal over generations. She was workaholic, and her timings were perfect. Even when the Titans were out in force and threatened her very existence she did not stutter or stop, she held on to your wrists steadfastly like a loyal friend would. She was truly the maid from India who worked tirelessly to ensure you planned every second, minute and hour of your life meticulously. She was the first to bring about a culture of punctuality in every Indian when this virtue was a rarity; she kept time for the nation.

The irony is that, in the year the leaders launched Make in India campaigns with all pomp and splendor both of them have been euthanized. One, who true to her name stayed her diplomatic self, the AMBASSADOR car and the other who kept time for the nation for generations, HMT watches, shut shop for ever. I would have been happy if the Make in India campaign had been kick started by rejuvenating both these iconic brands.

Pee Pee!!! Poo Poo!!! – Trumpeting Cleanliness!!!

The new found penchant for cleanliness awareness in India has made me light-headed. The leader who has vouched ‘sweeping’ reforms quiet literally nominates celebrities in a fashion that resembles the ice bucket challenge. What you see next is the celebrities adorned in their Sunday bests flashing brand new brooms. Netas go to the extent of dumping waste before they can sweep it away for the photo op. Soon a sweeping selfie using the broom as the selfie stick would be the most in thing to post on social networks. A cricketing celebrity poses with it as though he is all set to execute his trade mark cover drive, a lady minister who is responsible for the resources presently and who is not so new to the art of posing poses like a devote daughter in law all set to impress her mother in law on her first day. This comparison might be archaic in today’s world, don’t bother about the relevance; I want you to focus only on the symbolism here. Since the image of a woman with a broom in hand could symbolise more than one interpretation, witch, (oops looks like the spell check did not do an auto correct) which, could also mean a damsel out to clean the society of all evils.

A clean India is every Indians dream from time immemorial. Having lived outside the country for close to 2 decades, it has been my dream too till date. We don’t need symbolisms; the need of the hour is a paradigm shift in civic sense. I grew up cycling or walking past streets in Madras following an olfactory GPS, though I have elucidated the olfactory enabled GPS in a positive way in an earlier post on Madras, I am forced to write on the negative side of the very same olfactory GPS in this post. The characteristic smell of Madras as we cross the Cooum river, once a navigable source is today an open drain. I was also a laughing stock of my cousins from Kerala who used to tell me that the sight of squatting men lining up the tracks leading to the Madras Central would remind them both visually and olfactorily of reaching the city. However over the years the so called clean Kerala was closing in on Madras with poor waste management and overflowing waste bins due to bad waste management. The sad part was that even in an Oscar winning movie, the poor state of sanitation in India played a key part. Remember the toilet scene in Jai Ho! What a pity? Cleanliness is next to Godliness goes the saying. However the recent emphasis on cleaning the Ganga is more out of Godliness than cleanliness, out of fear of the super natural.

As I said earlier we cannot win this war on cleanliness by just symbolisms and other media gimmicks but by a committed population that is willing to change, change should be from within and there needs to be an entire clean culture revolution that needs to happen, it might not happen during a 5 year term or even the next 5 year term of the leadership which believes in sweeping reforms overnight but will definitely happen if we educate the present 1 year olds and set examples that they can follow. So it might take at least a couple decades before we see a clean India. Unfortunately the leadership would be interested only in stuff that they can take credit for during their term. That’s exactly the reason why cleanliness drive across different governments has not gone beyond acts of symbolisms.

What we need is not just cultural revolutions and symbolic blitzkriegs but a substantial investment in infrastructure particularly in sanitation, all we need to do is that for the next 10 Years CSR initiatives of private sector should be restricted only to sanitation related projects. A toilet connected to the drainage system will hardly cost anything to the corporates. A dustbin revolution, source segregation and proper disposal of waste all are the need of the hour.

The celebrities endorsing the Swach Bharat campaign who are busy attending their call of nature in designer glamour rooms lined with Italian granite and have their dirt washed down with the best of German fittings have no clue on what it takes to stand in a queue to empty ones bowels and bladders.

Trumpeting with slogans like Saif for Safai or Sachin for Swach is not enough to dream about or create a clean India. What we need is an infrastructure revolution that can facilitate adoption of cleanliness by the common man.

A sound and smell take on Madras

I see so much being written about the city I grew up in as it celebrates 375 years of it's coming into existence. The reason I write this is also because of the fact that I keep reading articles on Madras by people 30 and below who write about Saarang and not Mardi Gras or from people who were 50 and above who write about the time when the Adyar river was still used as a means of transportation. The other reason is the fast narrowing gap on the difference in the number of years I spent outside Madras and in it. As though, prophesied, I left the city of Madras the year it changed its identity to Chennai, circa 1996, after having spent 24 years in the city. I dread the time I will turn 48 because that's when I have to end up equally sharing the period of my domicile status with a couple of other Middle Eastern cities.

Here is a take on how nostalgia can trigger you, courtesy wikepedia.

‘The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but a few studies have attempted to pin down its essence and causes. Smell and touch are strong evokers of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time. Music and weather can also be strong triggers of nostalgia.’

So here I am trying to use sound and smell to bring to you the nostalgic journey of a die-hard Madrasi.

You can go to bed in a neighborhood called Border Thottam, where the lullaby would comprise of the sound of the choicest words from the original Madras Tamil literature the kind of o..., kasmaalam, kaidhey and the likes, addressed by a rickshawkaaran high on a round of sarayam, the local brew or the potlam the local potent smoke, followed by an interlude coming from vessels being thrown around and conclude with the so far patient wife thrashing the day lights out of him and then the thuds of thumping her heart, not as a sign of victory but as an act of cursing her fate . In the very same city in another part you can wake up to the strains of suprabadham making its way through your windows. Or a song from an Illayaraja number playing in your next door tea shop. The strains of 'sa re ga maa' from the paatu class or the 'thyyum thatha thayyum thaha' from a dance class in the neighborhood. The call of the old newspaperman or the kaikarikaran, the mobile vegetable vendor breaking the afternoon silence with his call for business which actually sounds like it follows all fundamentals of Carnatic music or the late night arrival of the cotton candy (sonpapadi) man ringing a bell. Or simply close your eyes and stand in T Nagar and hear the din, for some, but music for others like me, or the call to business in the zambazaar fish market. The kaaapi kaapiy call as the Madras Mail pulls into Arakonam junction and after you alight from the train the ‘side, side’ call of the coolies or the ‘meter mela 10 rubaa savaari’ negotiations with the omni present autokaaran who you can hear before you can actually see them. The mother of all sounds of Madras ironically is the music associated with the final rituals en route ones heavenly abode. I have always wondered that the rhythm associated with the ‘Saavu mollam’ could actually bring back the dead.

In a recent tribute song called the Madras song by Murugappa Group and The Hindu as part of the Madras day celebration the lyrics went thus 'Vasanai thaan enga GPS' literally translated as we use our olfactory enabled GPS. I know it is debatable and taboo to talk about the scents of Madras. However I intend venturing out on it. Sitting in a window seat of an erstwhile PTC bus, try and do a Parrys to the South of Madras trip, the fragrance in the air to begin with is jasmine from the flower bazaar which gets a little adulterated as we pass the Napiers Bridge this turns to a musky smell of salty air from the Bay of Bengal and then we smell the strong aromatic balm we associate with colds and coughs as we cross the Amrutanjan factory on Luz Church Road. On the way we cross a shrimp processing unit followed by a cookie (more commonly known as the butter biscuit) factory. This gives you a feeling that you have had a seafood meal followed by the choicest of cookies on cream as deserts. Small joys I say. As the bus passes a funeral procession, this is when the smell and the sound of Chennai get juxtaposed. You smell the rose petals and tap your feet to the rhythm of the saavu mollam. So if you ever were to be kidnapped in the city blindfolded you exactly know the route you are taken.

The landscape of the city may change over the years, the memories that one has from the senses above are the ones that are retained for decades. Madras might not look the same anymore but it still does smell and sound the same for me always though with some minor variations.

Happy Madras Day to all.

Ice bucket challenge!

When I first heard about this, me being me, thought it was a game played at the neighborhood whiskey club. The challenge that might decide the fastest finisher in an on the rocks contest!

After a couple of hours of research, I sometimes squirm at the abuse of this word research, a word that was reverently and sparingly used and associated with some serious cerebral indulgence by individuals and corporates in the past is nowadays associated with a 4 year old checking out stuff on google. That's another story for another day.

Coming back to the ice bucket challenge that is doing the rounds on the social networks, is actually an act to create awareness of a disease called ALS which in itself is a noble cause. The participants pour a bucket of ice water over their heads and challenge others to do the same by recording their act and uploading it on social networks.

During the last weeks I saw videos of celebrities from the Silicon Valley, the wannabe celebrities, getting-there-but-not- yet-there celebrities and a couple of good friends doing and daring others to drench themselves with a bucket of ice cold water in the 'harsh' summer weather conditions of the Northern Hemisphere. For me sitting in the Middle East where the current midday temperature is around 45 deg C, wished someone challenged someone to pour a bucket of ice cold water over me every afternoon for the next couple of months.

In fact watching a couple of them reminded me of a scene out of a majority of Indian movies of yesteryears. Don't see them too often in contemporary films, who knows they might just make a comeback. It goes like this, as soon as the girl elopes with the boy next door the father or the mother depending on who was not a partner in crime, would barge into the household and grab the nearest bucket of water and pour it over them thereby symbolically disowning their kin. The difference here is that the legacy is passed on.

This is a sure no do in a city like Madras where buckets are lined up in a serpentine fashion awaiting the arrival of the elusive Metro Water tanker. Can you dare someone in that queue to do it? All you can do is to challenge them to run behind the leaking water tanker and get drenched. 

Taking a cue from this I would like the corporates in India to challenge  each other as part of their CSR initiative in providing every employee with a bucket of water to keep their surroundings clean. The media houses could do their bit by daring Arnobs and the Barkhas during the news hour every night that will at-least cool matters down and could well end up prolonging their life spans.

The politicians on their part could think about national river integration with the Chief Ministers daring their counterparts from neighboring states to pour buckets of water from the rivers from each other's states. On the international relations front imagine the likes of Obama challenging Putin, Modi daring Nawaz and so on and so forth. Suddenly a bucket of water over your head would make the world a better place. Think about it in your shower today. En Seau d'eau sans frontiers...or in plane english a bucket of water without borders.

This was initiated for a truly noble cause and is well appreciated by the writer. The blog is written in a lighter vein only on the chosen act of expressing solidarity for this noble cause.

The Lost Childhood.

Was at an intra-house cultural festival at my kid’s school over the weekend. This was a revelation of sorts for an easy going, laid back, and lazy parent like me. Here I was telling my kids on my way to the fest, fear no more, the champ is with you and rattled laurels I had won as a kid in such festivals, little did I realise that I would get hammered and return home bruised and empty handed. I ended up realizing that competitions were serious stuff and not anymore the fun thing I was used to. Sadly I understood a tad too late that the fun element had long disappeared from these competitions.

Professionalism had taken over the innocent performance of kids, expressions were taught, costumes were outsourced, the props were built, and backdrops were no longer the plain boring whites, the make ups were made up of foundations and super structures. Hey, this is no civil engineering, just make up, wake up to reality and smell the coffee, I told myself. The costumes were Fedexed over night from Mumbai. And then it sunk, gone are the days when I could make do with my mom’s old 'pattu' sari to do a King Herod or one of the three wise men who visited Jesus.

Shocked at the competition levels and the outsourced resources at hand I witnessed, I was telling myself, my kids are missing on so much fun; sorry, this is definitely not a, I-told-you-I-have–seen-it-all story nor is it a story of sour grapes. I realized that parents walk that extra mile or more to fulfil THEIR lost dreams through their kids.

Half sleepy, barely interested, and un-enthusiastic kids were adorned with the best of costumes and jewellery and were literally pushed on stage to perform and they did perform, just like most of us corporate slaves do, expecting an incentive.

Their performances were brilliant, but something was missing. Their eye movements were (dis)oriented towards their anxious parents and appeared as though they were pleading 'am I doing ok, am I doing well, am I meeting your expectations' an expression in which the child was lost in the dreams of his / her parents. I could sense that the child was living some else's dream.

On my way back I told my kids it is not about winning or losing it is all about enjoying your 3 or 4 minutes on stage. I’m not sure I was wrong or right. But once back home I asked them to rate their performance sadly they rated themselves low. But little did they realise that it was their dad who let them down…. on second thoughts, Did I???

I was a know-it-all dad, who had not grown up to accept the realities of the world, a dumb dad who thinks competing is still fun, and a stupid dad who still thinks winning or losing doesn’t matter.

My kids had lost competing with the dads/moms of their co-participants; they lost to kids who actually did not know if they enjoyed what they did because they were doing it for their dads or moms who were busy shooting pictures and videos, looking for brownies (aka Likes) on their next Facebook posting.

As I now tuck them in bed and see them sleep peacefully, content with no worry in the world I’m happy I won when all those parents lost, even though their kids brought THEM laurels.

Sadly even this piece in which the protagonist was the kid with lost childhood ends on a note where the parent wins!!! In short it is the battle of the parents trying to win their dreams these days.

God save us from the tribe of selfish parents, I’m happy I was born in an era when God still made selfless parents!

I, me, myself and Cheese!!!

The latest obsession of mankind is HIM. Well some might say this is not new, mankind was always obsessed with them. Some of those self-obsessed men have also altered the course of history. I wrote a couple of years back that prefixing a series of gadgets with the letter ‘I’ was in a sense a symbolic representation of the transformation our society was going through. Every man unto himself was the order of the day and the mushrooming of social networks just increased it. Social fellowship with the help of your smart devices was enabled from the confines of your living room were you renewed your emotional connect with your high school chums. Well this is not certainly my idea of a healthy social behaviour until you smell the coffee, bite the cookie and pinch your friend.

Around 600 odd years back the acclaimed artists of the Renaissance period started to paint themselves, thus was born the art of self-portrait. With the advent of mirrors in the 15th century the artist had a new tool to express themselves. It is said that in some of the works the artist depicted themselves without a hand, the hand that was actually painting. Mirror technology was still at its nascent stage, larger mirrors were hard to find and transport and hence the images were only as big and as good as the mirrors. Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Van Gogh you name them, they did it, their Self-portraits.

You might wonder at the reason I am hoping from modern day social network behaviour in one paragraph to 15th century self-portraits in the next. Well the link is the obsession of the modern day man to selfies. Yes SELFIES is the newly coined word for a picture of you taken by yourself using your own smart phone and posted on the virtual world and then waiting for comments, likes and shares to happen.

Just as mirror technology was making its way in the 15th century the camera resolution technology and it’s positioning on a telecommunication device like a phone was becoming more and more relevant so much so that phones are being designed with higher resolution on its front facing cameras to facilitate the projection of a better self-image. (Irrespective what your actual self-image in the social realm was)

This selfie bug has caught on like a virus so much so that politicians, artists and people from all walks of life don’t miss out on an opportunity to take a selfie of them. Be it at the Oscars, award functions or even at polling booths or an illegitimate union, the last two of which recently got a couple of high profile politicians in trouble.

We are suddenly seeing multiple offshoots of a selfie, the most famous of them being the recent pictures of inked fingers as testimony to exercising one’s franchise. This I named impulsively as fingfie when I first saw it but the media were quick to rename it the fingie getting rid of one redundant alphabet, redundant for me, but valuable for the twiteratti where an alphabet saved is an alphabet expressed. So going by this, you can take a picture of any part of your anatomy and suffix it with an ‘ie’ and viola you have selfie of ‘IT’. My dirty mind does think of a few but they sound so unprintable and hence I refrain.

Today we call it a selfie, even when more than one are present, shouldn’t it be called wefie or an usfie. Yours truly would like to patent it along with ‘selfiegram’ for a website on which you could post only selfies but digitally modified to look better, slimmer or fairer.

There is a beeline among celebrities to get longer arms, the six packs are passé. The longer arms at least will prevent us from getting a sneak peek into sweaty or hairy armpits of the selfie taker. So all you smart phone makers listen to the end users, along with better resolutions we need wide angle capability too to keep our arm pits out of the frame.

I intend to take a selfie of myself facing a mirror cutting off the arm with the phone from the frame to symbolically represent the coming together of the art of 15th century and the technology of the 21st century.

Disgusting Democratic Discourse!

With the month long Indian elections meandering its way to an end, one thing that stood out this time was the political lingua that played out during the entire campaigning phase. It was a joy to hear political debates of the yesteryears when the focus of the debate revolved mostly around the agenda and promises of the rival parties. The fact that these promises or agendas never saw light at the end of the day is another story for another day; at least the language and the dignity with which these electoral speeches were scripted and delivered were exemplary.

The words and phrases that have been used in these elections have marked a new low in the discourse of parliamentary democracy. The political parties have vied with each other to raise the bar or rather raise the belt so that they get sufficient terrain below the belt to play with. In fact they were competing with their rivals to earn black points from the Election Commission that they considered electoral brownies.

The would be parliamentarians have indulged themselves in a verbal free for all which made it appear like a curtain raiser of their presence and performance in the next five years inside the august house. The only solace was that the un-parliamentary behaviour / language was outside the sanctum sanctorum during the curtain raiser, but would soon move in, come the 16th of May.

Some of the points / words / phrases around which the debates revolved were, the importance of a 56 inch chest to rule the country, abbreviated family names, scurrying rodents, a soft drink slogan, one called the other a butcher, while, someone said the other was honeymooning and furthermore some came up with very harsh communal overtones. However the clincher was, when one senior parliamentarian claimed he was better at hiding his girlfriend than the aspirant to the big power seat was, at hiding his wife. Can it get any better? It sounded more like a street fight among 5th graders after losing a game of cricket. Comparison to 5th graders is actually a compliment to these guys, because they discussed toffees too which normally figures in 2nd grader conversations. Each and every one of those above phrases was picked up and deliberated on prime time by the TRP hungry media. 

Well it is understandable that when the stakes are high, tempers are bound to fly but unfortunately what I found was most of the modern day politicians have been too naïve and played their way into the hands of the media who have had a professionally fulfilling last 45 odd days.

My only prayer and wish is that, good sense prevails amongst these would-be parliamentarians and they realise how fortunate they are to lead a country so diverse yet united given all the shortcomings. Somewhere amongst the discourse of toffees, butchers, rats and 56 inch chests, the fact that we nudged Japan to become the 3rd largest economy speaks volumes of the efforts and resilience of WE THE PEOPLE. Democracy they say is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Fortunately or unfortunately the ones who were found squabbling over trivial issues in their political discourses are one among us. I’m not sure if they will be FOR THE PEOPLE when they enter the gates of the parliament later this month.

I was certainly disgusted with the democratic debates of this elections and hence the title, and as rightly pointed out by my daughter who made a passing remark asking me if I was writing about the 3rd Dimension of Democracy since it had 3D’s.

That’s when I realised this was certainly the 3rd, but the ugliest dimension to the democratic process I have been witness to in the last 4 decades.

Signs of Democracy

As the world’s biggest democracy gets ready for polls across the country spanning a good 35 days, sitting miles away I miss the poll frenzy and the accompanying vote mongering. They say democracy is on its last leg and the world is full of pseudo democracies tapering towards crony capitalism. This is not an effort to analyse the state of democracy or weigh its pros and cons, but merely an attempt to analyse the symbols and its associated significance to the democratic process in India.

The symbols of parties have always fascinated me, the importance that this has in our democracy is of monumental proportions since in a majority of the game changing regions across India the voter votes for the symbol ignorant of the party / candidate or his / their credentials if any.

The sprouting twin leaves competes bitterly with the rising sun even though a knowledge of elementary school level science will tell you the leaves are dependent on sunlight to survive. People supporting Sickle, hammer and star could actually see stars and die of hunger if ears of the corn or paddy on the woman’s head are not reaped with the help of a sickle.

How good a lotus is when there is no water, so in comes another party with hand pump as its symbol. Lotus symbolises divinity and sanctity but the very same divinity could prove to be their downfall being branded anti secular.

Then the omnipresent palm that can be interpreted in different ways depending on its orientation, a palm facing up is seeking money and could well be the hand behind the scams, a palm facing down says I don’t have any to spend on infrastructure, a palm positioned vertically says you get beaten black and blue if you fight for your fundamental rights. The lines on the palm along with planetary alignments dictate the electoral fortunes of the would be netha. The lack of confidence amongst most of them, their ideals and their symbols is what makes them go celestial and be dependent on the movement of the stars and planetary positions. Unfortunately the very same celestial interventions that are favourable to them make their subjects see stars for the next 5 years.

This is one of the main reasons that India has moved from an Aristocracy to Democracy and now to Astrocracy.

Other interesting symbols are the ladder that shows that sky is actually not the limit for this party but they stoop to much lower levels, bicycle is the next, you elect them and you are taken for a ride. A top for one that could leave you in a spin, the elephant that could well trample over you, the chair that they would be busy holding on to for the next 5 years.

The new kid on the block with good intentions came up with a broom thinking of making sweeping changes, little did they know that some amongst them were sweeping stuff under the carpet using the same broom, what they needed was a vacuum cleaner to cleanse a deep rooted malfunctioning system.

Stepping out of the voting booth many of us proudly display the ink on our finger as proof of exercising our franchise. Sadly irrespective of the symbol we voted for, the elected representative will soon show you the correct finger that had to be inked was, the one to the left and right of your ring finger on both your hands!!!

And irrespective of the party he is affiliated to, this will symbolise the democracy that he will represent for the next 5 years!!!

Pappu can't speak saalaa!

From at the stroke of midnight when the whole world slept, to at the stroke of modern day primetime news when the whole world listened, a great grandfather and a great grandson duo proved that the art of speaking cannot be inherited.

A good public speaker can be made but an exponent of good extempore speaking is always born, and that skill unfortunately cannot be inherited or be passed on.

Public speaking today has taken a whole new turn, when I was a kid I was taught to get on stage and speak my mind, emphasise on the words, express myself and be loud and clear where I ought to be. Today there are public speaking classes and clubs that drive in the fundamentals of speaking to the young minds. In my opinion they are becoming a tad too formal. With timed pauses, grammatical error counters, the movements being measured and the vocal chords being strained to achieve the desired modulation level of voices. The worst is when the accents are being monitored closely so much so a Malayalee trying to express a SIMBLE concept is brushed aside, as is the Bengali who has a brilliant OIDEA or a Tamilian Physicist who wants to find out waaaaat is behind the Maaaatter all because they did not sound like the perfect Englishman.

But here we are, listening to the Oxford and Cambridge educated ones with perfect English accents delivering hollow speeches with a pause too long, not for the poetic effect but for the want of substance to speak. Any person can be a public speaker in my opinion if he or she knows and believes in what the he or the she wants to convey.

Handling questions from a seasoned TRP hungry press journalist spontaneously is an art that is a forte of a few these days. It’s an asset when it comes to a politician. Since a momentarily slipped tongue or a tied one can make or break a politician’s career in this media hungry society. It seems to be a lost art. A political discourse is good for democracy and the nation; however these days more than a discourse what we see are monologues by the journalist who put words into the mouths of the less seasoned politicians and thereby deriving the sadistic pleasure of achieving TRP ratings. Gone are the days when a politician used to hold his ground and will be all of verbose.

The latest display by the scion of the India’s political first family was far from impressive and abysmal compared to his ancestors particularly his grandmother whose Bhaiyoon aur Behanon start to her speeches still reverberate in my ears, mind you, that was quite a lot of summers back. She knew how to deliver good speeches and could easily hold her ground at questions thrown at her from acclaimed journalist from around the world representing the likes of Newsweek and the Time.

For a politician to be successful in a democracy he needs to possess these skills where under the pretext of freedom of speech will be confronted with questions that are both rude, blatant and pretty personal and most of them could be below the belt too and the way he handles those will go a long way in shaping a leader.

But that is only the talk part, and that’s not enough in governing the largest democracy in the world the more arduous one is the walking part too in which many fail. So let’s hope the next general elections gives us a leader who can talk well and also walk the talk taking this great nation along the path to prosperity.

To Scoubidou or not!

My daughters were nagging me for some time to get them Scooby doo which I later realised was spelt scoubidou. Thinking it was either a cartoon channel subscription or an app for a game to be played on one of those tabs that needed to be downloaded for a price, I refused, not for the money but for the reason that I had enough of them walking around like zombies with their gadgets, banging into stuff at home and the annoying update notification tone from the installed Subway surfers and Temple Run apps waking me up in the middle of the night.

I bluntly refused without even giving them an ear on what it was. Today I happened to see the stuff and was flabbergasted. It was just lengths of multi coloured PVC strips. I googled it immediately, what else can a retard like me do to find more about what my children confront me with every day. I found out that it was a game that came into existence in the 1950’s that taught kids craft, the kids these days know KRAFT the Cheese not CRAFT as an art.

This took me back a few decades when as a kid I used to visit my grandparents in Kerala who lived in a village and I from Madras would visit them every summer. I used to be fascinated by the creativity of the kids there who would intertwine strips drawn out from coconut tree leaves. They used to make great stuff from that, balls to play cricket with, boats, figurines of snakes to scare people, puppets accompanied by skilful ventriloquism to embarrass people, all this just by artfully interlocking / intertwining any flexible stuff that they could lay their hands on.

My initiation to automobile engineering happened too at that age and thanks to these kids who taught me that. The steering rod was the trunk of a tapioca plant stem which was light, the axle was a combination of a strong piece of stick from the coconut tree leaf passing through a papaya stalk that was hollow, the wheels were circular pieces from used up Bata flip flops measured and cut without the use of a compass or other engineering drawing fundamentals. The hub that prevented the wheel from slipping off was the very small tender coconuts that fell off the bunch, the under privileged ones who fell short of making it to the big league of nuts, in this case the mother of all nuts, the coconut. These tender miniature coconuts would also serve as wheels in places where even worn out flip flops was hard to find. Green technology in all its sense.

Exactly 64 years later Scoubidou suddenly makes its appearance as the most popular game among kids, and I’m happy for that since its been a long time a game has caught the imagination of kids that doesn’t come in the form of an app. This is something that they have to be hands on rather than straining their retinas staring into pixelated screens of these tabs. Wish more games like this make an appearance to keep kids away from the virtual world.

Scoubidou is a simple game that is sold as multi-coloured PVC strips that can be used to make different things by interlocking them in different shapes and forms which can be crafted to a key chain, a snake, a basket. It comes with instructions on the different knots that they can try. In other words they have brought back the craft of basket weaving and knitting back in vogue.The different kinds of knots are box stitch, the square stitch is the most common knot used in making key chains. A double square (or triple) stitch can be made using four strings, thus doubling the size of the keychain made, Spiral knot, Double spiral, Cobra stitch, The Chinese Staircase, The Butterfly stitch, Super-16 Square etc.

Let me quickly get them a kit before an app for all these knots or the game itself surfaces and they start virtually trying them.

What they don’t realize is that the only knot that doesn’t make a difference either virtually or in reality is the nuptial knot because the difficulty level remains the same.

For the uninitiated here is the link where you can read about Scoubidou