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.