8:34 AM

The Acid Bomb!

I have had my share of cranky teachers as I am sure all of you might have had at some time or the other.
My Chemistry teacher in my tenth grade was an eccentric gentleman named Joseph K. He was particularly notorious for his habit of bringing just one match in a matchbox to light the bunsen burner for his chemistry experiments and when that one fizzled out as it inexplicably did, there was the usual frantic search for a matchbox, much to our amusement and his annoyance.
There was one memorable incident that lies etched in my memory.
The event was the annual school science exhibition when each of us students tried to outdo each other to win the coveted first prize for clever tricks that could captivate the audience of the learned gentlemen who would turn out on the great day.
Mr. Joseph, MSc ,BEd was as usual in the lead with his bag of tricks which he delegated to us students. There was a mini oxygen plant, a chlorine plant and even a miniature soap factory. The sky was the limit to the imagination of our dear Mr.Joseph, post graduate gold medallist.
I was delegated with our teacher's pet project as I was known to have a keen interest in Chemistry which the other students found drab and usually boring.
The exhibit was a crude fire extinguisher contraption that consisted of simply a test tube of hydrochloric acid floating on a dilute solution of washing soda enclosed in a plastic container. I was aware of the technological working of the contraption but did not pay much heed to the practical implications of this seemingly harmless device.
For all I knew when I was asked to turn the enclosing plastic container that held the compartmentalized acid and bicarbonate of soda combination the acid would come in contact with the soda solution causing a lot of carbon dioxide gas to be produced which would vent out through a hole punched on the top of the container onto the source of a small fire, extinguishing it in the process. That was the basic idea of the fire extinguisher and how it was supposed to work.
On the great day we were all excited and in a mild tizzy. The chief guest was a high ranking official from the collector's office.
It was decided that the demonstration of my exhibit would be a one time affair and only to be performed in the presence of the chief guest. I waited anxiously as the chief guest escorted by the school principal, who happened to be my father, wound their way through the various exhibits on the way to mine.
At last the defining moment arrived. In the presence of the honored quests I briefly described the mechanism of the fire extinguisher and proceeded to turn it upside down trying at the same time to point the vent towards a small paper fire kindled explicitly for the purpose.
What happened next dumbfounded everyone including me. The reaction that occurred took place so rapidly and vigorously that the gas produced caused a mild explosion shattering the container that held it, spraying the guests and me with corrosive acid. I looked down to see my clothes drenched with acid, the cotton of my terry cot uniform having dissolved leaving threadbare terry line. There was a minor commotion as everybody checked to see whether anyone was hurt in this scientific experiment gone terribly wrong. Fortunately nobody was.
The chief guest had the grace to ask me if I was all right, ignoring the acid stains on his shirt and coat. Once the initial uproar subsided I slinked off unnoticed to change into a pair of new uniform.
When I returned Joseph sir had the brashness to offer me the opportunity to host his soap producing exhibit. I flatly refused, realizing the lesson I had so unfortunately learnt that day, on the danger of untested theory and practical use.
Later that night during supper at home, we all had a good laugh at the follies of our dear Joseph sir.

5:06 AM

Chills at Frankfurt Airport


I have been reading several hilarious incidents at the airport by Mac and one by 3inOne. Well I too have a tale - one that happened on my visit to Germany a few years back.
I was working for a fully German owned firm and I had to be onsite for a couple of months as part of the job.
This incident happened on my return trip back to India.
My German boss had an intuitive dislike for Indian office products and he wanted his newly started office at Kochi to have the latest German stuff, right to a German-make stapler.
The night before I was supposed to leave Germany, I was awake late. After I had cooked supper, washed the dishes, had a bath and did a hectic quick luggage packing before I fell into bed like a log after putting the alarm for an early morning rise.
Next morning I overslept and when I woke I found I was just in time to board my commute to the railway station from where I would proceed onwards to Frankfurt to board my flight to India.
My boss had earlier mentioned to me that he wanted to add some stuff for his office in my luggage.
My check-in baggage was already fully packed, so there was only some space in my carry-on baggage where he could put stuff in. I didn't have a chance to notice what all he stuffed into the remaining space as I was busy with my last minute travel check list. I knew he was putting a dismantled CPU of a computer, because he had mentioned that earlier. All this he was packing into my carry-on baggage which I was supposed to carry onto the aircraft, the check-in baggage having to go into the freight section, to which I would have no access during my journey.
I arrived at Frankfurt airport in good time ( The train terminates just below the airport complex).
At the airport I had my luggage checked in and awaited the frisk of my carry-on baggage by the airport security. The guy who checked my luggage was a tall slim blond haired guy - a stereotype German.
As he passed my rucksack through the X ray machine, I thought I was finally done.
But staring at the screen he called me aside, and conspirationally asked me whether I had a pair of scissors in my luggage. I said I had: a small pair of surgical scissors that I used to trim my moustace. But he said it was something big, gesturing with his hand- did I have anything like that? I was nonplussed. Then he showed me an image of a huge pair of scissors that was silhouetted in blue on the X ray screen. He handed my rucksack over and asked me to open it. Nervously I opened it and put my hands into only to come up with a huge pair of scissors.
It came to me in a flash. This was one of the German stuff my boss wanted for his German office. There was sticking tape, a stapler and some other office riff-raff. But the scissors posed the immediate threat and I would be hard put to explain its presence. And the times were not too auspicious for this to happen too, it was not long before that 9/11 had happened and the security was as tight as ever at most of the airports I had passed through, particularly Qatar airport, on my transit.
Breaking my reverie, the security guy asked me if I would be returning to Germany again. I said no, which was the truth. But he seemed unhappy with the answer and repeated the question. Putting two and two together I got the point he was trying to make. "Yes", I said. "I will be returning soon. Or someone else from my company will for sure", which was not untrue.
Satisfied with my answer, the security person took the offending object wrapped it in a brown envelope noted my name on it and placed it on a rack. He then handed me a receipt and told me I could collect the item on my return back to Germany, but it was surely not allowed on the aircraft. That was indeed very diplomatic of the security officer. Thanking my stars for this not too sad ending, I boarded the plane with a light heart. A mallu hijack indeed!
You can read more of my German adventures here.

2:43 PM

Set a thief to Catch a Thief!


Kumily is a picturesque stop before you cross the Kerala - Tamilnadu border. It also has a border check post where the police occasionally check passenger vehicles for contraband, read liquor, from neighboring states where the stuff is much cheaper, Kerala heavily taxing liquor sales.
I recently had the opportunity to pass through this route on my return from Bangalore.
As usual there was the routine police checking, but this time round, to my surprise, the guy who frisked our baggage was reeking of some cocktail he had imbibed a little while back.
Still he was steady on his feet and nimbly tiptoed to check the baggage stored on the overhead racks.
Next time you see liquor being confiscated, don't wonder where it disappears.
It probably is put to good use filling some ill-paid policeman's overfed belly.

2:08 PM

Call Center Nights Tales


My take on India's best selling English author, Chetan Bhagat:

It was after a long break that I actually got down to read a book and that book had to be ON@TCC(One Night @ The Call Center) by Chetan Bhagat. Spurring me on to read it was Chetan’s worthy credentials as a highly educated person who as one would think might have a really good viewpoint of things in general.
It's all about a night at a call center when God himself makes a call to a call center called "Connexions" where our protagonist works.
Well the book failed horribly in every aspect. Though he does touch a raw nerve on the subject of Call Centers some of the points which he raises I admit are almost as true as if GOD himself might have enlightened poor Bhagat, but it seems Bhagat did not get the message completely correct.
Hence a poorly conceived story line, things happening without any rationale and one event leading to another without any "connexion"(forgive me the pun).
I would rate it as a book fit for kids (around the age range of 10-15) but the story and the language used would hardly suit that.
The only thing that makes one keep on reading is that there must be some treasure at the end of the rainbow (which the blurb so enticingly promises) - turns out to be a mirage.
One fact, the rationale of which I could hardly understand was Chetan voicing Xenophobia or US- bashing through one of his more admirable characters, Vroom.
Could have been a good book.
After the editor edited and rewrote at least two thirds of the book
Any way best of luck Chetan.
You might get better at this stuff someday. Keep trying.

3:21 PM

The joy ride after the wild goose chase


Recently several media publications were bold enough to expose the sham that lies behind police interrogations involving narcoanalysis. Injecting suspects with a so-called truth serum, before they have been proved guilty, exposes one of the extremely crass and crude methods that the law condones (in India).
On the lighter side why don't these so-called preservers of the law take their suspects to the nearest bar and make them have their fill of the strongest liquors. Surely some of these "guilty" offenders might just spill the beans for all we know or maybe even "sing" for them. Or how about Cocaine or hashish, and if thats too costly for these guys in mufti, they could try good old marijuana.
The interrogators too could have a sniff at the substance on offer just to test whether it truly works. Once both the parties are "high", they could swap truth stories with each other and perhaps the "real" truth would spill out in the bonhomie.
These are the Dr Deaths' of today in the garb of forensic experts. The description of it being "scientific" just makes everything seem very sophisticated to the lay man.
The basic intention is the age old classic manoeuvre. When things go very wrong, and the law enforcers are clueless as to what went wrong they are under pressure to produce quick results - from the public, the politicians, the higher-ups and in order not to lose their credibility they have to produce results fast. What way other than a quick fix(pun intended) for this? In fact, the situation for them would work the other way round if they solved the entire mystery in a short spell- pats and kudos from everyone.
It's high time the law enforcers and others who condone it, recognize narcoanalysis for what it truly is.

2:06 PM

Ahoy Ponmudi!


The rain gods had played truant in much of Kerala, and there were hardly any rains at the beginning of monsoon which is usually marked with heavy downpours day in and day out.

So I decided I would go to meet the rain makers themselves by making a pleasure trip to a picturesque hill station near Trivandrum called Ponmudy. Nobody goes there at this time of the year since the heavy fog and pouring rain makes movement difficult not to say that you miss seeing all the scenic views from the "points" due to the heavy fog. But since the rains had been feeble this year, I thought I would not face many problems.

Another point to note is that though Ponmudy is quite near Trivandrum, very few Trivandrum residents, not to say Malayalees themselves, have actually gone there. They would rather prefer to go to Ooty or Kodaikanal but not to Marine Drive at Kochi, Koavalam beach, Silent valley, Athirampuzha(for its waterfalls), Thattecadu (famed for its bird sanctuary) or a tourist resort nearer home. This is something I still don't understand.

I had once before gone to Ponmudy when I was a teen. But that time it was in a small mini bus that made its way up through 22 or so hairpin bends. I remember that whenever a vehicle came from the other direction the vehicle maneuvering the curve from below would back down making leeway for the oncoming one. But it was risking your life either way. One wrong move by the driver and you would be hurtling down the steep precipice which was always present one or the other side of the road.

This trip proved more memorable and an adrenaline pumping one too!

The roads were still the same size; maybe better tarred, but all the same risky to traverse.

The bus that took us up was a full sized KSRTC Anandapuri transport vehicle. Before boarding it, I remember wondering how these behemoths could manage winding up through those treacherous mountain roads where one moment you are moving in one direction and the next, when the bus makes a 360 degree turn on a hairpin bend, you find yourself moving in the completely opposite direction.

But anyone in Kerala would vouchsafe that for a KSRTC driver such work is a piece of cake.

And it was true.

Our driver took a break and had a hearty breakfast at the foothills of Ponmudy before he started on the nerve-wracking trip navigating the curves and bends that led to Ponmudy as if it was just another drive for him. There were some family people too making their way to Ponmudy or back in cars and vans at this off season time of the year, and the KSRTC bus stopped several times to let them pass, backed off at certain curves to make way for them and at one instance another KSRTC bus came hurtling down the opposite direction, but both of them expertly stepped out of each others way and smartly proceeded.

Once at Ponmudy I realised I had made a mistake. It was still late morning and heavy fog covered the hill station. There was nothing to do, see nor anywhere could I move around. My co-passengers on the bus (hardly 2-3 people) straight away headed to the KTDC sponsored Beer bar, others had a heavy lunch at the restaurant, and that was all for them. After it started drizzling mildly they got restless waiting for the return trip back to Trivandrum.

The tourist lodgings at Ponmudy had an unusually large number of visitors at this odd time of the year. But then I noticed they didn't prefer to venture out of their rooms, preferring to sip beer, brandy and whisky and watching the clouds floating across the hills through the fogged up windows of their stay.

The trip back was uneventful except for the fact that I found that my leg had been punctured by a huge leech up there at Ponmudy and that my leg was soaked in blood though there was no pain.

I checked into a hospital, got my legs bandaged and had a course of antibiotics for the next week.

Lesson learnt: If people don't go to Ponmudy during a certain time of the year there might be a good reason for that. Going against the grain may not always work out well. :)

5:28 AM

To do or not to do, that is the Question!

Just something I noticed offhand that seemed rather odd to me.
I have noticed that people in the more secular Kerala have started observing symbolic gestures that I noticed were more commonly performed by North Indians.
FOr example, a perfectly ordinary looking young man travelling on a bus makes a symbolic religious gesture by touching his chest twice and then his upper abdomen when he sights a temple through the window. Older men make more dramatic gestures like folding their hands in reverence and then touching the forehead under similar circumstances. Christians are not far behind in adapting this new trend. They fold their hands and make the symbolic gesture of the holy cross on sighting a church from a moving vehicle.
What if they hadn't happened to notice the abode of God and instead had picked thier nose, or worse, farted?
Would than then amount to blasphemy?
And what about the passengers sitting on the other side of the aisle on the bus? Should they be deprived of performing the same symbolic ritual just because they happened to sight a garbage dump on their side of the bus while the pious fellow on the other side of the aisle crossed his hands in relgious fervour for having the luck to sight a temple/ church at the same time?
These symoblic gestures to sound to me little less than hypocrisy and sycophancy. I hope we imibe the more sensible of symbolisms from other cultures.

3:01 PM

Walk a Mile in My Moccasins

This event comes to my mind when I listen to Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colours".
The most interesting time of my life, I feel when I was in Nagpur doing my pre-degree. It happened so that I was in a college which happened to be the place where most of the children of Nagpur's affluent families did their studies. I had a Colonel's son as a friend who used to call me Matz long before anyone else started calling me by the same nickname. In fact he made everybody's name sound to end with a "Z". So Bhopardikar was Bhopz and so on.
Sometimes I felt intimidated by the elite crowd that surrounded me. For instance, the Colonel's son used to boast that he took just four mintutes to shave with his electric razor, boasted about his computer and his plans to go to the USA after TOEFL; and all this was at a time when the television was yet to become a fad in Indian homes.
I used to wear plain white canvas shoes to college. Tired of the plain-Jane attire, I had a wicked idea - I would paint my shoes in myriad colours, just for the fun of it. So off I went and bought a can of fevicol and a set of oil paints.
Once in my room at the hostel, I carefully mixed the fevicol with the oil paint till I decided it was a perfect mix. With a large paintbrush I painted my shoes in shades of five or six colours till I thought it was a job perfectly done.
I wore the shoes next day to class, hoping everybody would admire my bright newly painted canvas shoes and pass it off as some sophisticated imported model.
But the colonel's son, he came to me and in a conspirational tone whispered, "Matz, you have painted your shoes, isn't it? HA HA HE". That got my goat; I had that shrinking feeling and I wished I could just vanish into thin air. ;)
On the day of the pre-degree model exams I decided to get back at those who had made an ass of me that day.
I had a friend from Manipur called Thokchom Gambhir Singh (He was an ardent fan of the Manipur freedom movement and denied being a Hindu and preferred saying he belonged to the Meitei religion, which existed long before the Bengalis and the Hindus overran Manipur, according to him).
Manipuris as a fact are well dressed and like to flaunt the latest smuggled(?) electronic items that they most probably get from China or Burma. I decided that on the day of the prelims, I would dress like a North Eastern would.
So I did one more of those crazy things.
I asked Gambhir whether I could borrow his outfit for a day. He readily agreed, being on good terms with me, not like the other Bengalis in the hostel who had a mutual distrust for him.
So I pulled on a Chinese made T-shirt that clung to my body showcasing my physique, with a leather jacket pulled over it. Then the thick blue stretchable jeans that you get only in the smuggled markets. Then the Adidas shoes over the thick cotton socks. And to cap it all I borrowed Gambhir's flashy wrist watch that had a calculator as an accessory on it. I sprayed myself thorougly With imported deodorant and then I was ready.
I arrived at college with a clear mind having prepared well for the exam and prepared for any eventuality.
The inviligator in charge, a nerd, who knew me well coz most of the time I was top in class, gasped in disbelief. I didn't turn to look at the girls, being too shy to acknowledge any giggles, if they happened to come.
When I returned the stuff back to Gambhir, I felt that I had been a different man for one day. I had been literally walking in Gambhir's shoes!

11:57 PM

Darwin and the Dodo


A colleague at work once happened to touch the topic of "Survival of the fittest". He said the same principles apply in the work place too. According to him it was not for the meek to inherit the earth. The earth belonged to the fittest.
I begged to differ.
What about the Quit India movement, I asked him. Were not the whites who ruled India at that time much more fitter than the natives who had nothing with them except for a weapon called "Satyagraha" devised by a man who was much ridiculed by the rulers at that time? The whites had fire power, they had money power, they were definitely on top of the survival pyramid than most civilizations. What could explain their downfall and subsequent expulsion from the Indian sub-continent?
To this, my friend did not have a ready answer. And I felt I had made a point.
Let us look at Darwin's principle of "Survival of the fittest" in another light.
Man is now the fittest living creature to inhabit the earth.
But what had he done to consolidate his position.
Right, he had made life easy for himself with his countless inventions and discoveries. He has made most of nature to his advantage.
But at what cost?
Factories spewing smoke into the virgin air, water bodies polluted with filth which would take ages to clean, non bio-degradable plastic dumped with the least caution all over the place, as remote as the top of the Himalayas!
True there are a lot of organizations who have woken upto this fact and are actively working to prevent such a disaster from happening. But what are governments doing? Most developed countries give a damn for the Kyoto protocol which is responsible for keeping in check climate change. The US in fact has not even ratified the treaty.
Is this how man is consolidating his position as the fittest on planet earth; as his own destructor?

12:37 PM

Conductors or Semi-Conductors?

Kerala State Road Transport Coporation was again in the news this time. No, not for breaking the loss-making record again. KSRTC now is paying more money as pension to its employees than the salary it is paying its regular employees.
KSRTC is just another State government tool to ensure employment to a few more people in a state where literacy rates are the highest but the available jobs are among the lowest. Or, was supposed to.
I know a good friend of mine who was a computer instructor at a mediocre computer training institute. The outsorucing boom had just started and software companies were inducting candidates in hordes. Suddenly one fine day my friend said that he had been selected by KSRTC as a bus conductor. And he was accepting the offer.
I was aghast. He was a promising computer engineer who could write reasonable good software and could manage steep learning curves. I tried to change his mind. I told him that with his strong logic and reasonably good exposure to the hot technologies of the time, he would make an excellent software engineer with some real time exposure to software projects. Would not all that talent go to waste?
But he would not budge. He said, his parents considered a goverment job a secure one, with minimal risk and well-paying too. He too agreed with his parents and that was that.
I didn't see him after that.
But whenever I catch the night bus home at 9 pm on Fridays to my native place, I sometimes think of my friend. Where is he? Was he enjoying his work? Or did he turn back to computers again?
My journey lasts 4 hours(half an hour less than in day time due to the empty roads) as it courses most of MC road to my destination. The first one hour the bus is packed with commuters, most of them standing. By the end of the first hour most of the remaining people are seated, the others having gotten down at nearby destinations. The next half hour the bus rumbles on and at the midpoint of the journey where the driver and conductor take a break for a cup of tea and a smoke, the bus empties with only a few dozen Tamil Ayyappa devotees clad in black bound for Sabarimala, the famous religious destination in Pathanamthitta district. They too get down in another half an hour. The remaining one and a half hour the bus rumbles on carrying me and just one or two other odd passengers. When the bus finally reaches its destination there is usually only me and sometimes an odd co-towner.
No wonder KSRTC runs at a loss. All that matters is that the buses be running and the drivers and conductors do their job, passengers or not!

12:00 PM

Man Versus Machine

Sorry for the delay in posting.. My posts were going through several beta versions :-)
What spurred me on this topic of Man Vs Machine was after I had the experience of losing a sizeable amount in an ATM transaction.
Just as my cash was about to pop out the ATM machine went dead.
I checked my balance at the nearest ATM and found that the money that I had not recieved had been debited from my account.
After several visits to my bank I found that they had found that there was no record of the transaction in the ATM logs, none on the website that keeps record of all these transactions and absolutely no proof that I had actually got the money, the money was dispensed or whether the ATM machine simply had a mind of its own.
At the Branch Manager's office, who happened to be a graduate in computer engineering, I told him my sad story and on cue he told me one of his sad stories.
"I don't know why they introduced computers in banks in the first place", he started. "Ever since we have been plagued with network failures.. blah.. blah.. blah.... In fact even I have also lost some money. I even know which account it went to, but I can't do a thing about it."
Since the cash I had intended to give to a certain person wanted it immediately, I decided to deposit the money directly to his bank account. As soon as I entered the branch, I found chaos inside. A large group of people were milling around the cash transaction windows but not a single transaction was being done.
Eyeing me accusingly(I was decorated with one of those access tags software engineers hang around their neck while at office), one of the distraught ladies behind the counter exclaimed once more to added effect, "The systems have hung up.. You will all have to wait till we get back the network." And she got up to do her thing, which all government employees are known to do when they get or make some spare time- she went off for a cup of tea, and possibly an early lunch.
At the LIC office..
I had dropped down to my regional LIC office to get some personal work done. Me and the branch manager were in earnest discussion on how I could proceed with a certain transaction, when he was interrupted by one of his subordinates.
The guy said agitatedly "The good lady's husband has died and she wants the record now. Unfortunately the computer..."
A smile played on the manager's lips as if a death was one of the good things that happened in his office.
"You could get that detail if you do this," he said, turning to his computer. He opened a site, clicked on a link and bingo, there was the information.
The computer was playing truant, but this old man who headed the office had learnt enough of the loopholes to beat the machines at their own game, though he most probably didn't know a thing about the software! That was probably why he was the branch manager. Beating the odds!
I need not mention the mayhem at the railway reservation counters when the network goes down. The wisest thing to do would be to return home and come next day with a prayer to the network gods on your lips!

1:44 PM

Being Mobile


Road Safety Signs have never stopped to baffle me. Some of them are outright indecipherable, others misleading and many, a big laugh. One of them that comes to my mind right now and that can be seen all over the place is the one which ironically says "Left is right!" How true, if you take that literally. In some countries vehicles ply on the left, in others on the right, in some hot countries, they drive in the shade, I have heard, and in India they have the choice to drive either on the left or on the right based on convenience.
If the traffic police really endorsed the left=right equation, no wonder one has this chaotic situation on our roads.
Yet another quizzical road sign says "Speed has five letters, so has death!" Well so has "birth", I think, sarcastically.
Is the traffic police in our country so completely void of humour that they can't come up with a few witty road safety mottos?
Or does it reflect on their generally illiterate status? One wonders...

12:30 AM

Stale News

Just before leaving for work, I had a hasty look at the newspaper.
"Four killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq." "PM hopeful of an amicable settlement on the nuclear deal." "Famine in Africa." "Bird culling after Avian flu epidemic." "Blast in Israel kills two Palestinians." "Tamil militants attack army convoy."
These were the main stories of the day.
I usually have only a cursory look at the front page of the newspaper while the sports section and the editorial hold more appeal to me.
That reminds me of some great soul who had said: The first page of the newspaper is full of lies, the editorial is a half truth and the only page with truth in it is the sports page!
But I am digressing.
Having gone through the headlines I ritually moved onto the comics section. The newspaper people had messed up again I thought with disgust. They had printed the same comic strips that had appeared a few days back.
Suddenly struck by doubt I turned over to the first page.
I checked the date on it. The newspaper I was reading was more than a week old.
But why did I mistake it for the day's newspaper?
The news has so little variety today that I think last week's newspaper would be as good as today's!

10:07 AM

Fruits of Perseverance

Pandurang was the only gardener at the Engineering College. He tended to all that grew out of the soil on the vast campus. For a gardener, his was a really hectic schedule.
In the monsoon he cropped the newly grown grass and made it an art in the way he did it. In the summer he sheared off the dried grass. He clipped the outgrowths from the hedges on the driveway, watered them daily, cut off the occasional branch of a tree when it became too unwieldy, mixed manure to just the right mix and dug them below the red and white rose bushes. His work made him busy but he loved his work. But today he was in a rather grumpy mood. He had just left home after a quarrel with his son who had failed five subjects for the thirteenth time.
Losing his patience he had got into an argument with Anil, his son, the gardener's son, the engineering student who studied in the same engineering college where Pandurang tended to the lawns.
Pandurang was wary of the engineering college students and tried to keep away from them as much as he could. But he wanted his son to be an engineer. Like them. Not become another gardener with a thankless job who toiled on the soil, come rain, come winter, come summmer.
Anil had desperately tried to make his case. "Daddy, I can do it", he had said. "Please give me one more chance and I am sure I will get through."
Pandurang had often seen the children of the rich come to the college in Porsche cars, move around with girls in the gardens among the rose bushes, and return home without attending a single class.
He wanted his son to succeed. But not at the cost of becoming a parasite to him and his extended family, very much like those spoilt brats he hated so much.
Initially he had kept his patience. But Anil's twelth and thirteenth attempt was getting him down.
"Look Anil", he had said sternly. "I am a gardener. And you are a gardener's son. But that doesn't mean I want you to continue the family tradition. I sent you to engineering college to make our family proud, not the disgrace that you are now. And remember, I have financed your education as well as I could, but money doesn't grow on trees. I will give you one more chance. The fourteenth attempt will be your last one. If you fail again, you may as well join me in the campus gardens."
Shaking his head at the challenges of life, Pandurang woke up from his reverie and went to a long forgotten part of the campus lawns. A prickly bush grew in an inaccessible corner surrounded by tall trees. It was a mousambi(sweet lime) tree, he knew from the way the leaves gave fragrance when he rubbed them on his hands. But it was not an ordinary tree. Since the very day he had joined the college as gardener, five years ago, he had watered that tree, tended to it. But neither did it grow. Nor did it flower. It remained the same height, its prickly thorns scratching his hands when he watered it.
Six months later..
Pandurang was back on the campus lawns after an extended illness that had left him weak. Sadly he thought that he would have to retire soon. And his thoughts bitterly went back to his 'wayward' son.
After the regular chores he went to the clump of trees in the midst of which stood the mousambi tree. He could not believe his eyes. Every branch was laden with fruit. All of them a rich mellow. The fruits must be sour, he mused. Tenderly, like a groom touching his bride he plucked off one fruit and peeled off the thin yellowish skin. He put a slice into his mouth.
Pandurang just could not believe it. The fruit was the sweetest he had ever tasted in his life. My efforts were not in vain, he thought, as he shook his head in wonder and headed home, his last chore done.
When he reached his shack which he and his family called home, he noticed something was amiss. His son, Anil was standing at the doorway extremely excited, waving a piece of paper.
"Daddy!", he shouted in glee. "I have covered all the five papers. I am an engineer now!"
Pandurang was speechless. His mind went back to the barren mousambi tree that had suddenly borne fruit. Uncomparably delicious fruit.

7:15 AM

Hot wheels

Have you ever been in an accident? Many of you have I guess, at some stage of life, witnessed a ghastly accident. But how many of you were actually were a victim of one and lived to tell the tale?
Well I have.
Kerala has one of the highest average annual injury and death rates in correlation to it's population, perhaps next only to Maharashtra. But Maharashtra is a heavily industrialized state with a corresponding high figure of vehicles on the road. So why Kerala? Food for thought for a demographer. I am digressing from my tale.
I was in Maharashtra in a rural village studying my degree course, returning home in the company sponsored college vehicle that did trips from our colony to the city college and back. The weather was cool for an unusually hot summer. The driver, a hefty man with a huge veerappan moustache was cracking jokes in between pan chewing, spitting and deep laughter, and seemed to be in a generally jolly mood.
Suddenly a tipper lorry approached head on narrowly missing collision. In his confusion, Veerappan moustache sharply swerved left and lost control of the vehicle as the bus slid down the road embankment and continued sliding till it came to rest on its side in a marshy ditch which still had some water from unseasonal rains.
All of us were thrown bodily from our seats to the side on which the bus had come to rest blocking all exits.
Pandemonium broke out within. Some women and little kids shrieked; there were moans and somebody shouted to keep calm. My friend Ajay, reached the rear end of the vehicle and broke open the rear glass pane that had on it painted in large letters "EMERGENCY EXIT". That was cool of him I think, considering the circumstances. All the passengers in the nearly half filled bus made our way out.
Out of the mess, we looked at each other.
I have a deep intuition that in a life and death situation, one always searches for someone he/she holds really true to his/her heart which he/she would not normally express. And I found that I was eyeball-to-eyeball with this cute little college classmate on whom I had a deep crush but was wary of expressing. Was that a proof of some tender feelings?
Someone made a head count and we were relieved that no one was hurt except for a few scratches and one person with a minor injury that had let out a little blood, nothing more serious.
Soon replacement vehicles arrived and ferried us back to the colony and home.
As soon as I reached, I went off to buy a pack of cigarettes and with shaky hands took a few drags at the cigarette.
I wondered what would happen to the driver? Would he get fired for his shoddy driving? Unlikely, coz he was the protege of a worker union leader.
But we noticed something the next day.
The same driver was on his seat the next day, but minus the veerappan moustache. Some sacrifice!!

3:07 PM

They flash upon that inward eye


Long back in primary school, we students of a rather inspiring English Teacher, let me call him Mr.A, were instructed to learn by rote classical poetry of days long gone by. We did this dutifully and sometimes the words were so stuck up in the back or our minds that we even mumbled them when asleep, so our parents joked.
Until one day I questioned this teacher's wisdom of rote learning.
"What use is learning-poetry-by-heart", I asked. "Its not going to supplement our knowledge in any way!"
At this point Mr. A's eyes turned grave.
And then his eyes shining bright, he said, "Boy, you know, once you are out of school, out of college, out of university, the one thing that you will remember long after you have forgotten the theories of Einstein and complex mathematical equations, will be these poems you have learnt. And even if you do remember a lot of the stuff that you did learn, the only one thing that is going to give you pleasure right to your old age will be these poems and you will look back at them in an enlightened way."
Pondering over the wisdom of Mr. A's words now, I guess he was right. I might find the theoretical stuff of science and maths, I learnt back in the school days useful in some aspsects at certain moments of my life, but the poetry I learnt has given me pleasure and a blissful kind of satisfaction at times both high and low.
And sometimes I find myself subconsciously wording Wordsworth's line "They flash upon that inward eye....which is the bliss of solitude.." And I smile to myself at the truth in Mr. A's words.
Yes, even when I grow old I shall remember those soothing ,calming words of classical poetry and appreciate the gift it is to mankind.