Music transcends languages

It’s that time of the year when painting happens at home before Christmas, We end up changing wall colors once in a while to break the monotony and it was the time to do so. The painter assigned to me by the facility management team of the real estate company landed at home on the day sporting a broad smile and with the help of an interpreter explained French and Arabic were the only two languages he spoke.

Day one started with my wife taking a day off from work and explaining to him with the aid of google translate the rooms he needed to start with and the shades she wanted etc. Wife ended up learning broken French and bits of Arabic as she managed to learn all terms related to painting in these two languages.

Day 2 was my responsibility and here I was armed with 2 Years of elementary French tried explaining to him that I spoke very little French in French and Arabic…It went something like this…Je ne parlez pas Francais, Je parle shwayye shwayye!!! Roughly translated as, I don’t speak French but only little…little in a mix of French and Levantine Arabic. Though he understood he just laughed off my illiteracy and continued working rather uninspired cursing his fate on landing up with an Indian family who spoke no French or Arabic.

I ended up striking a conversation with him and I understood with the help of a globe and animated gestures he was born in Tunisa but spent time in Algeria and Morocco. That’s when an idea struck me. I played the number ‘Didi’ sung by Khaled, the first Arabic song we Indians fell in love with in the early 90’s. We had only fallen in love with the beats and rhythm and till date; do not know the lyrics or its meaning.  As soon as he heard it, his face lit up bright and started to sing along. I could see a marked difference in his approach to the job on hand. The efficiency level had gone up and there by the productivity. We ended up discussing other Khaled songs and as I started to play one after another sacrificing my Friday afternoon slot for Illayaraja music, I realized I was really making him feel at home.

He then came up to me and mentioned Maami, Maami and frantically gestured pointing at my wife when I look bewildered he started raising his hands and also pointing to his ears. With my little knowledge of French I realized he was trying to connect my wife with an elder version as in a grandma or Maami  in French and it was also something we should listen too. It was then it struck me that Mami was also an Algerian singer like Khaled. I kicked myself for that, how could I forget the Arabic piece in Desert Rose by Sting? We ended up listening to Khaled and Mami and he had completed more work in a day than the previous one.

This is when I realized that music transcends language and can be a great catalyst in promoting efficiency at work and harmony in the society. Both of us were expats in a foreign land. We can take a person out of the country but never the country and culture out of the person.  When I sacrificed an afternoon of Illayaraja for Khaled and Mami I made a Tarek smile along with me and made his day. This year thanks to Tarek the monotony was broken not only in the colour of our walls but also in our music. This was not only a learning take away in life but also in our professional space where cross cultural interactions are so vital.

This is what a Global citizenship is all about. It’s all about love & humanity sans frontiers!!!

Inking your memories!

It’s that back to school week and we are rushing completing assignments and projects at the nth hour as is the norm in our household. My daughter screams that the printer cartridge has run out of ink! She was midway printing the project on memories of the vacation she had. The vacation image came out with half the Chinese fishing net picture we took.

Ink has always been associated with memories. It was always a nice feeling to smell ‘Brill’ ink on your answer sheets provided it was a History paper and you knew the answers well. They would simply flow and smell so good…unfortunately by the time it reaches the teacher who corrected, it would turn dry and would be overpowered with the fresh red ink smell imprinting far less marks than what you expected. Ink on inland letters smelt of exchange of emotions between loved ones. Ink in an early morning newspaper smelt of the joys and sorrows of the world around us. The inked emotions in an autograph book smelt of memories even after decades.  Finally we waited until we turned 18 for that spot of indelible ink on our finger nails and would proudly display our role in electing the governance, but the life of it was also only a couple of weeks.

And then it happened. The young started to ink their bodies. Though history of this practice could be traced as far as ancient Egyptian mummies, today we see millennials all for inking themselves. The irony is that though they belong to a generation of shortened attention / interest spans and lead a life lead by the pleasures of instant gratifications they find great pride to flaunt their body parts indelibly inked with permanent images and symbols of their instant experiences or their instant expression of love. An engagement ceremony these days happen in Tattoo parlors.

They do not realize a ring is far easier to be done away with than tattoo. ‘I do’ has made way to ‘I ink’! But when we said ‘I do’ it was followed by ‘until death do us apart’. With ‘I Ink’ these days it can also mean even death cannot do us apart. Yeah you heard it right. Even though the relationships today do not last the drying time required for a tattoo, people now want to be connected to their loved ones after they are gone by having a Memorial Tattoo. A pinch of the funerary ash of your loved one mixed in ink is all that you need to get you connected. The world continues to amaze me every single day with the level of craziness it is capable of throwing at me!

It is easy to ink your lady’s name if it is a ‘Priya’ and later on when a Russian ‘Yanka’ walks into your life, you simply amend the tattoo and make it 'Priyanka' in the ‘Nick’ of time.  So before inking each other’s names please choose a partner with an amendable name and even death cannot do you apart!

 From Dust we came and to tattoo we return!

Sangamam ‘94

Circa 1989, the month of December… Virat Kohli was in his diapers and Mark Zuckerberg was 5 Years old, an entire bunch of teenagers in the city of Madras were honing up their skills in Calculus, Organic Chemistry, Optics etc. The only street corner discussions were…Machan DOTE 1 or DOTE 2?

For the uninitiated DOTE stands for Directorate of Technical Education, 1 falls into the tier of the erstwhile Government Engineering Colleges while DOTE 2 comprised of a bunch of Private Colleges at its infancy in Madras.

The objective was getting into one of them. The buzz words that did the rounds were cutoffs, management quote, DOTE 1, DOTE 2, Mechanical, Civil or Electronics Engineering. The options were few then.

Finally come August 1990, destiny brought a bunch of guys and girls from very diverse backgrounds,  some first time literates from their respective families, some first time graduates, some first time Engineering aspirants  and finally some children of Professors of Engineering in the erstwhile Institute of Technology in Madras. That was how diverse we were. Yet on day one, the fateful day, we made our journey down the muddy two lane highway called the Old Mahabalipuram Road to our destination for the next 4 years, Hindustan College of Engineering, as one bunch of naïve unsure teenagers dressed like POW’s with shirts out, bathroom slippers and all, fearing the wrath of the ‘Seniors’ and their unwelcome initiation ceremonies. After spending the first year mostly in fear and anxiety with a close knit bunch, we went our ways in the sophomore year to pursue careers in Mechanical, Civil or Electronics and Communication.

The drafter was the aspiring Engineers Stethoscope; we took great pride in flaunting it just to keep our neighborhood aware that we are pursuing what every Indian parent dreamt of. A Degree in Engineering.

In Mechanical from where yours truly is from we encountered, TOM, SOM and DOM. It translates to Theory of Machines, Strength of Materials and Design of Machines and all these books were written by one Khurmi who ended up giving us nightmares for the next couple of years. My favorite though was a book on Thermal Engineering by one P. L Ballaney. It was hard bound book and had just the right number of pages when wrapped with a towel would support your cranium well and thereby transferring the contents directly to your brain, or so we believed.

We were a special bunch of kids is what I always felt. We entered the last decade of a millennium looking forward to a new one with aspirations and ambitions. While the Berlin wall was torn down and Nelson Mandela walked free the first disruptions in technology were also happening.  The internet was at its infancy, Email was just taking shape, transition from rotary dial to digital keypad phones were making its appearance, and by the time we reached our final year mobile phones were making its way  in developed countries but was yet to reach the shores of India. The seeds of disruptive technologies that we see today were sown during the period we spent in college.

25 years on, here we are with distorted waistlines and receding hairlines, but armed with titles & designations  prefixing and suffixing our names that mean nothing when we are with our bunch of  old friends to celebrate the emotions we went through on day one and the subsequent years we spent at HCE in the then sleepy hamlet of Padur.

Back to the city and the campus filled with emotions and rightly so.  They say Madras is an emotion and Chennai is a city. We have returned to the city 25 years on to celebrate and relive the emotions we left behind.

The Fourteen Idli Annachi is no more!

Given his misgivings people might raise eyebrows on a tribute to a man convicted for life imprisonment for murder and died a few days into his sentence.

For me he is a man who revolutionized vegetarian food in Madras. A kind of disruptor in his business almost 3 decades back.

Madras was famous for its Dosas, Idlis and other delicacies primarily dished out by all the ‘Vilases’ and dominated by the Udipi restaurants serving filter kaapis. The sad point was the kaapis were served with a couple of fingers of the waiter dipped in it and the idlis were served by the same hands. The cutlery was predominantly made up of highly dented and beaten up sheen less stainless steel plates and serving dishes.

Then Annachi happened… and he focused on the most important ingredient in any restaurants recipe for success and that was cleanliness which was missing all along in the industry. Cleanliness was confined to the Five Star rated restaurants or the second tier restaurants, frequented by the celebrities.

He employed revolutionary management techniques that were well ahead of its times.  A very distinct one comes to memory. You sit peacefully having a meal in one of their outlets and suddenly have burly bouncer looking men dressed in Full Black or in White shirt and khaki pants alighting from a Maruti Omni and rushing in and landing on your table and pick up, what was in your opinion a spotlessly clean glass and shouting aloud why the Glass wasn’t properly washed. You can call it a gimmick but I call it a very successful Management Technique since if I can recall that incident almost 3 decades later, that definitely left an impression in every other customer present there including me and prompting us to revisit Saravana Bhavan for its focus on cleanliness.

As a friend correctly mentioned, he kind of McDonaldised Vegetarian food in Madras. He came up with innovative dishes, predominant among them were the Fourteen Idlis.  He did this when the whole world knew of idlis that were made of a particular diameter, he reduced its diameter and called it mini idlis and made 14 of it and made them float in sambar.  Though down the line as inflation caught up and many competitors came up with versions called Floating Idli in which the numbers of idlis were less than fourteen. This in turn made the makers of the Stainless steel Idli moulds to reduce their diameters too and cater to an entirely new market for mini idlis.

If this was not disruptive what else is?

RIP Annachi and thank you for entertaining our taste buds all these years.

The Idea of India!

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this blog are purely apolitical and I am not a Lutyens Liberal but a person who believes that a blend of left, right and center give a better dimension and image to this country called India.

Whenever I meet my colleagues & friends from different parts of the world and when they ask me about India, I keep telling them India is the most complex country in the world. Some of them still believe it’s a land of snake charmers, I simply laugh it off and say they have now moved on to the Silicon Valley and have set up companies like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, just that the snakes have been replaced by humans. They perceive this country as the mystical, magical land of Sadhus and Yogis, the land of the mantras and sutras. They associate us with anything to do with poverty and we are often the poster boys for poor sanitation practices and infrastructure. But in the same vein they also ask about our big fat Bollywood weddings, about the Millionaires, both the soon-to-default-ones and the defaulted ones now languishing in the mansions of the erstwhile sahibs with whom their ancestors hunted Tigers. For the British in their heydays of Colonialism it was the most prized possession of their Empire.

My analogy always was, imagine Europe as a single country, with a Prime Minister from Germany, the President from France, the Defense Minister from  Russia and the Home Minister from UK…(Oops are they in or out) and finally the Finance Minister from Greece! At this they stop me and order the next drink.

That’s how complex we are, our language, food, dress and culture changes as we move approximately 200Km from where we stand anywhere in India; East, West, North or South. One size does not and will not fit all in this country. So one might ask how are you bound to the idea of India, we simply say we are  a bunch of Patriotic Indians not necessarily Nationalistic Indians. Sadly in recent times these two terms have been abused and misused badly. There is no better quote to sum it up as the one below.

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility while the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to a war.” – Sydney J Harris

Let us become a billion plus of Patriotic citizens who can force a sense of responsibility in our leaders and also be personally accountable for what the country does and stands for rather than a Nationalistic bunch of citizens who will only blindly lead the country and its leaders to arrogance and from there to ultimate doom!

Of Designer wears, Limousines, and after parties!!!

It’s that time of the year when the Oscars are due in another 8 Weeks and it is but natural for you to be misled by the title and think this is a blog on the red carpet antics of celebrities who grace the biggest entertainment event. Well, you are mistaken; this is all about a bunch of 17 years olds planning to celebrate the end of their 12 years of rigorous intellectual pursuit. The ‘end’ I mean, not the achievement of the same.

The whole concept of farewell parties in schools is taking a leaf out of the Prom nights in the US; after all they need to be indebted to the people who gave them the Instagram, Google and Snapchat. Guess, you guys must have got a clue that this is a rant by a 17 year old’s father coming to terms with the build up to a farewell party looming large in the horizon along with the Oscars.

These days I try very hard to avoid beginning a sentence with ‘When I was your age…..’ but unfortunately get drawn into that time and again. Well this was one of those times. I sat back and reminisced on my farewell parties. I had 2, one in my year 10 since the school at that time had classes only till year 10 and the other in Class 12.

I remember the Class 10 farewell quiet distinctly for the fact that we were the first batch to arrange for the video recording of the proceedings on a VHS tape. A disruption of sorts, some trendsetters, we were in those days. The irony is that after 3 decades I am still trying to trace that tape which none of us have seen. Apparently there was one copy and it had to stay put in the Head Master’s room.  My class 12 graduation afternoon (no nights then) consisted of a piece of cake/Pastry (Colonial appeasement), a Vada (to bring in the local flavor) and a samosa (to please the public hailing from north of the vindhyas) followed by thirst quenchers on a hot Madras afternoon….a diluted glass of Rasna, from the colour of which, we could actually calculate the concentration of the drink. So this kind of acted as mock Chemistry practicals too.

Ah!!! Enough of the boring 80’s, let’s move over to the more happening millennials and their celebrations. If the first 4 paragraphs sounded like the script out of a Satyajit Ray / Adoor Gopala Krishnan movie you ended up watching on Sunday afternoons on Doordarshan the next few will sound more like a Rohit Shetty film.

Haute Couture was a term that was normally heard in Milan but the last few days it is doing rounds within the four walls of my household. The farewell suddenly became the doomsday looking down upon us, being the proactive family we are we were equipped with the wear for the farewell the last time we visited India and we made a Tarun Tahiliani out of our poor Shankar, the neighborhood tailor. Alas! little did we know the colours or trends of last vacation were no longer ‘in’ and they were in the end of season list six months down the line.  Move aside the Taruns and Sabyasachis, it’s the after party time, and we need the Donna Karens and the Pradas in the shades that are in now. And so the hunt continues.

Kids booked Limousines from the stables of top European brands to reach school on their day, forgetting that it was M/s Ashok Leyland that safely brought them to school all these 12 years. Well they all learn from a leader who loves to sell the make in India concept while secured in bullet proof German car!

The world has come a full circle, and this is definitely not a rant, but introspection on the evolution of the nature of celebrations. If we were trend setters arranging a VHS recording of our farewell 3 decades back, applying the same logic of inflation that is applied to finances, we need to apply an inflation factor on the aspirations and accept that these kids have not gone overboard with their celebrations.

As they celebrate like there is no tomorrow, I wish to remind them that the memories of a farewell are even sweeter when they ‘fare well’ in their lives ahead!