Good Old Y.M.C.A. Days

The YMCA, Nagpur, in the late 1980's was a cool place to live in. Bang in the heart of Nagpur city, it encompassed a space large enough to cover two football fields. It was here that I spent two years while I completed my post-matriculation.
The original British built structure that faced the main road was rented off to small businesses and it shielded us, living in a newer structure, from the city traffic and noise, to do our own thing. Nagpur was in those days considered the third greenest city in India, and you had to visit the YMCA to indeed experience the fact that there could actually be a vast stretch of shady wooded land in the middle of this hot sweltering city; a part of the city's colonial legacy. We woke up each morning not to the honks of traffic on the road but to the trills of songbirds.
The inmates were mostly Bengali, Keralites, Manipuri and Africans, and a few engineering students from North India and Andhra Pradesh.
We inmates knew each other on a first name basis and shared jokes, vibes, fights and banter; and the food of course.
The YMCA warden in those days was a shady guy with a distinctly Marwadi name, though a Christian. And he went about his ways in a business like fashion that lived up to his name.
In those days, when a two-wheeler was a luxury, this chap had a Maruti van, a Kinetic Honda, a Bajaj socoter in addition to his trusty Ambassador car. His son, and I studied at the same college, and I could often spot this spoilt brat come to College in his Maruti van, bunk all his classes, and party with his friends. But then he was in the commerce stream which was what rich kids of rich businessmen did those days, while I was into Science and had to mark my attendance each day, lest I miss my Calculus lectures and have to sit with my books extra time.
Of course we had our fraternity with our counterparts in the YWCA which was just behind our building but the approach to which was a full circle across the central junction in Nagpur. One of my Manipuri friends had a sister staying at the YWCA and whenever he got a chance he would pester me to accompany him to meet his dear sister, though I suspect this "sister" was not of the actual blood kind!
I saw gradual changes coming to the YMCA in the second year of my stay. The entire area in front of the British built facade was built over and turned into a lavish wedding reception hall and lawn. Not a bad idea, we thought. And when the food at the mess got too boring, we would sneak our way to the reception hall at night and have a feast at the unsuspecting groom's expense!
In the middle of the second year I moved over to another hostel, on the outskirts of town. And it was then that the entire YMCA land was sold off for an ultra-modern medical college and hospital to come up. Nobody staying in Nagpur is unaware of the Lata Mangeshkar College of Medicine and Hospital, named after the great singer. Well, the very ground on which we played football, where the Manipuri's roasted their pork in mustard oil, the Africans cut their hair in punk style, was now teeming with construction workers, and in just a couple of years mighty buildings replaced the YMCA Men's Hostel. What happened to the YMCA then? The present day YMCA Hostel in Nagpur is a small building which might be able to house just 1/10th of the original capacity it had.
What happened? we wondered. How come this blatant commercialization by an institution that was supposed to do social service? There were rumors that the warden had made a good commission selling off YMCA land for commercial purposes, and every person on the YMCA managing board, including those at the very top, had their share of it too.
Those days corruption was fashionable, and the sooner you made money selling off land that was not yours, smaller the chances of getting caught.

North Bridge is Falling Down!

I have an unusual fad. From as far back as my college days, I remember going to the railway station at the dead of night to have a cuppa tea. What began as a break from late night study during college days turned out to be a habit. Those days my nightly cycle rides to Nagpur Central Railway Station was not only to enjoy the cool serene night air but also to enjoy the exotic tea served at a corner tea stall. The tea was laced with cardamom and you just didn't swallow it, but swirled it around your mouth like some wine taster tasting his favorite choice. Another reason was that the railway station was the only place which had some semblance of night life, the only place where you could get tea at 1 at night.
The habit lingered and I still find myself making a short trip to the railway station in the late evenings or early morning, this time on my two wheeler; to have that cuppa tea, this time at Kochi Town railway station. And yes, railway stations are the only places with night life in Kochi too.
My job at the gig where I worked some years back ended at 2 am or 3 am at night since I was supposed to work in tandem with my US counterpart. So on Friday nights I was dropped off at the North Railway station by the company cab so that I could catch my night train to Kottayam on my way home. And I had the chance of savoring the tea at tea stalls in front of Ernakulam North railway station, though I wouldn't say the tea is very exotic.
Ernakulam North has a very important landmark - the North Overbridge. Life teems not only on it, but below it too, and the North Railway Station is a stone's throw away from it. I would say my favorite landmark in Kochi is the North Bridge, an arterial bridge over the North-South railway tracks. Before I caught my night train home, if I got the time, I browsed the internet at an all-night internet parlor just below the North bridge. Ernakulam North Railway Station and it's North Bridge was my favorite haunt in Kochi.
The North Bridge is going to be pulled down shortly since it is deemed as being too old, having being built along with it's counterpart, the South Over Bridge, in the early 1960's. This reconstruction work is going to throw Kochi into near chaos as many native to Kochi know. The North Bridge links two very congested and busy parts of Ernakulam (Kochi). It's so important to the city that the bridge won't be pulled down before some dry runs on traffic management, and widening of alternate roads happen. Kochi will be missing one of it's very important landmarks for some time, once the North Bridge is pulled down to make way for it's successor.

Mallus and their Civility!!

In the heartland of Kerala, in a calm town called Kottayam, you will find a people who are the most decent of the lot.
The other day while passing through this sleepy town, one early morning, the bus I was travelling in stopped at a small bus stop. A young man having a cup of tea, who obviously wanted to board the bus, was caught unawares and his immediate dilemma was to gulp down the cup of tea, throw it away or carry the disposable cup into the bus to finish his drink before the bus started moving again.
My bet was that he would carry it into the bus. For many a times I have carried my cuppa coffee all the way from the cafeteria at office, down four floors to the smoking area in full public view.
But decency and civility overwhelmed this guy. Drinking a cup of tea inside a bus was too non Kottayamite he decided and so he carefully placed the half drunk cup of tea on the road and got into the bus.
It was a simple gesture, and perhaps hardly anyone noticed, but I could not but admire his sense of civility, perhaps bordering those of the eccentric English?
Early that morning I had arrived at Kottayam bus stand to catch this very bus and it was early in the morning, too early even for the bus services to start. I found a group of well dressed natives in shirt and mundu smoking away to glory. Now this was a strange sight since Malayalees have self-enforced a ban on smoking in public areas of their own accord, not out of fear of the law. But as twilight came, and the presence of females at the bus stop came to their notice virtually all of them abandoned their cigarettes and again took the role of the self righteous Malayalee who will never slight a lady! Do you know that one of the first smoking bans in India was implemented in Kerala after a PIL raised by a Kottayam Lady College Lecturer?
Another trait of the malayalee that defies explanation is their total agnostical reaction to the large number of Biharis, Oriyas and Bengalis coming to Kerala to do menial work, in recent times.
Given that Kerala has one of the highest unemployment rates in India, not withstanding the high levels of literacy, outsiders taking their jobs should be anathema to Malayaless, much as North Indians are to Bal Thackeray. Of course earlier there was menial labour pouring in from Tamilnadu, but they were the equivalent of the Mexican janitors to the affluent Americans.
Compounding to this problem is the high density of population in most parts of Kerala. Natural and artificial resources would definitely be strained with a huge influx of outsiders.
But nay, malayalees are not xenophobic to any extent. If you hear a Malaylaee talking to a Bengali or a Maharashtrian for that matter for the most part it would be to give them some tips to reach some place or sometimes purely for the fun of practising their school learned Hindi on the unsuspecting "victims".

The Magic of Polaroids

The camera is a routine thing nowadays. But once upon a time, 30 years back a camera was one of the most precious possessions in our house. It was a Polaroid camera - the type that gives instant hard copy photoes.
We now have digital cameras that are much easy to operate, process and finally print; with the most advanced features and intuitive ease of use. Those days cameras were a rarity, and Polaroid cameras an extreme rarity.
In the modern world polaroid cameras are still used by the police, detectives and health personnel for its capacity to produce instant documentation, on paper of course, though very rarely, and based on unusual requirements.
Well this Polaroid camera, my father bought from an Anglo Indian who could ill afford to spend money on the film cartridges it required to be loaded for each shot, and the films were to be available no where in most parts of India those days.
One day I had a brainstorm and decided to request my uncle in Oman to send us a couple of film cartridges(each could be used for only one shoot), which he agreed to do so. However, out of the dozen he sent each time(which were imported all the way from the US), half of them invariably turned out to be damaged of mishandling by postal/ custom authorities.
So my father became an expert Polaroid cameraman and we had our childhood memories saved for eternity in insta-color(I just made up that word, excuse me). You took the snap, waited for a manual timer on the camera to run, and at the appropriate time pulled out the cartridge, separated the negative from the snap, wait for it to dry for a few minutes, and hey, pronto, you had the snap on paper ready to be put in an album. The negative contained lethal poison and had to be carefully disposed off.
I think the proliferation of cameras today has its advantages as well as its bad points. On one hand photography has been made so easy that we shoot anything and everything. Out of a 100 digital shots I guess only 30% of them are really worth preserving. On top of this the tediousness of separating the good ones from the bad ones forces us to preserve all of them, maybe write them on a CD, and forget them.
But when you took each photo in those good old days, every photograph mattered, and was taken with great care and diligence, and of course they were carefully preserved!
I know of a friend who took several thousand photoes at an event, but half of them turned out to be in bad light, but since he didn't have the patience to separate the good ones, he simply wrote it onto a CD which he finally disposed with the trash.
So now we have a battle between quantity versus quality, and quantity is winning, at the cost of quality.
The most wonderful thing about Polaroid snaps to us as kids was that it gave instant gratification. You pointed, carefully shot and the paper version was in you hands in about 3 minutes! It was nothing less than magic to us then!
When I learnt a bit of science in my later years, I appreciated the fact that Polaroid cameras used very complex technology using the physical phenomenon of light polarization and the chemical properties of light sensitive compounds.
Now that very camera lies unused, in a dusty corner of a cupboard (still under lock and key) since newer verions of Polaroid cameras have emerged, the films are available in India, but alas the film cartridges for our outdated camera is out of production. I had often nursed the dream of using that very camera when I grew up, but well, all good things must come to an end.
The cute photo you see by the side is that of my youngest bro(here) with a toothless grin, taken with the Polaroid camera when he was just around three.

The Rise and The Decline of the British Broadcasting Corporation

What did I have in common with Rajiv Gandhi, the day his mother Indira Gandhi was assasinated? Yes, both of us tuned to the BBC World Service Radio broadcast to catch the latest news on this ghastly incident, while All India Radio played it cool by playing classical music the entire day.
Those days Indians had limited exposure to the media and the BBC was often a gateway to unbiased truth and often wholesome entertainment.
This was perhaps why even now with the media explosion, when BBC announced the shutdown of its Hindi services there was a mass public outcry and the pullout was delayed for another year.(http://ibnlive.in.com/news/bbc-hindis-last-broadcast/146024-55.html)
I was a staunch fan of BBC World Service Radio broadcasts when I was a kid. I was often made fun of by my friends and their parents as the "radio kid" because of my habit of spending hours with one ear to the radio. While the newspapers highlighted domestic news and the certain events were often overlooked, I was enlightened on the war in Serbia, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the partisan war in Lebanon, the Israeli invasion of the Sinai peninsula, the Bhopal gas tragedy, and countless assasinations and rebellions.
I was for some time given the duty of collecting news that was to be read out at the school assembly by students who took turns to read it.
For this purpose, every day at BBC news bulletin time, I was glued to the radio set scribbling down the news headlines in a shorthand that I evolved and that only I could read.
My news extracts were for the most part of happenings far away from the realm of Indian interests and I doubt whether even a few of the students assembled actually grasped what was read out, not withstanding the fact that their parents hardly read even newspapers so busy they were with their daily jobs.
It was not just for the news that I tuned into the BBC. I was a regular listener of pop music programmes, dramatized versions of short stories and even quizzes, all on the air. Those days, the BBC correspondent in India was Mark Tully and he was a familiar voice on the news reportings. (Mark Tully eventually retired, has written a couple of books and has now settled down in India).
BBC had a special programme on Christmas where a popular writer read out excerpts of his own book for BBC listeners. Once such Christmas I was introduced to Frederick Forsyth's classic short story "The Shepherd".
I experimented with other radio channels too. But the Voice Of America was unashamedly biased to US interests and the anchors had an annoying yankee accent, Radio Moscow reeked of propaganda, AIR always began with "The Prime Minister today...", Radio Ceylon was just a golden oldies Hindi music channel, Germany's Radio Deutsche Welle had powerful radio transmitters that ensured a clear reception but lacked in content.
So it was the BBC for me. I owe a lot of my soft skills to that early on exposure to BBC newsreaders and anchors. While reading books taught me spelling and grammar, the pronounciation, the accent and most importantly the tone in context to the subject was a result of BBC's tutoring.

Drab as the Desert

When I was young, I once came across an article in a children's magazine that posed this hypothetical question: "Suppose you had everything in this world, but no friends, no relatives - no one to talk to or communicate. Would you be happy?" The answer was obvious- that man is a gregarious animal, he cannot live without some color in his life. Even if he had access to the most modern technologies that made his life easier, toys to play with to spend time, machines and technology to do everything and anything at his beck and call, he would not survive without the need to communicate and socialize with his kin.
This I believe has parallels with the current peaceful unrests which started in Tunisia and has spread to other Arab regions like wildfire, to Egypt, to Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and to even comparitively stable Arab lands such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Oman.
Were these people short of wealth, or afflicted by poverty and the likes?
No, as we are told, these lands are some of the richest in the world, abound with natural oil. The citizens of these oil rich countries are in fact paid a bonus by their government for doing nothing particular at all, are not taxed, and handsomely assisted by the state to run businesses, or more correctly sponsor them. They just need to exist and the money comes rolling in. So what went wrong?
I have never stayed in an Arab household, and what little I know of an Arab's personal life is through books and articles.
But one glance at the national newspapers of these lands will convince you that something is seriously wrong.
When I was in Kuwait(here) I read the national English daily whenever I got the chance to do so. (In Kuwait, newspapers too are sponsored by the state and you don't pay a penny to access them!)
The articles I read were extremely boring, drab and definitely followed a pattern. One article mourned, "What would we do without our housemaids? How would we adjust to our busy lives without them?". In fact housemaids are the most ill- treated and underpaid labour force in the Arab lands. The article went on to do a feeble job of educating fellow Arabs in treating their house helps a bit better. And I could not help laughing out loud when I tried to imagine their "busy lives!" For I have never seen an Arab busy other than when he is pushing his subordinates to work harder, directly or through appointed cronies. Another article spoke about chicken. How could the Arabs survive without their daily chicken?! Well that was as close to gluttony as you could get to in public. And the editions went on and on in this drab fashion without a break in the monotony.
The only slightly colorful article I came across was one which described an encounter by a journalist with a supposed homosexual, when he hired his taxi. The aricle went on to hurl colorful epithets at this enemy of God.
What came across from these un-inspiring literature was that Arabs really do not have much variety in life. How can a person live I wonder, without enjoying the thrill of experiencing the success or failure of a business venture or a job? What is life without the so-called drudgery of work? If the government pays you to do nothing, what can you strive to achieve in life? I am afraid I am getting philosophical, but how can the brain work without stimulation?
The peaceful protests in all these desert lands are not against Islamic law, not against dynastic rule either, neither for a full fledged democracy. Just a cry to be able to make a choice for themselves; and the choice not to be made for them. A bit more color in their lives, freedom and liberty to have a mind of their own. And what did the unimaginative rulers of these lands do to quell the unrest? They quietly deposited an extra bonus into the bank accounts of every citizen of the land and cut off all tools of freedom and liberty, the internet, facebook and twitter!
Let's remember the prophetic poetry by Tagore, still relevant today for any people:
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free..
...
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...

The Ugly Duckling

I am going to be a bit philosophical in this post, but I can't help it.
The idea that is the gist of this post came to me one fine day at office premises. I was working for a computer service provider startup in a building that housed many other such setups. One day my colleague friend and I watched with amusement as a very obese programmer of a rival software firm shuffled across the floor, his entire body heaving and groaning under his weight, his bottom twitching as if he was performing a small dance. The wise guy in our team could not help but chuckle as we beheld this scene.
However my friend remarked, "But he looks comfortable with himself!".
That set me thinking. Obviously others held this guy to be a weirdo, a freak, but he himself had come to term with his looks and his unsightly body, and that came through when you looked at his face, his demeanour, his way of carrying himself. Being comfortable with oneself! - be it gait, physique or outward looks. If that was the case what point was it to make fun of him? After all nobody kicks a dead dog, as the saying goes. There are handsome/ beautiful people who are unhappy about their looks and quite a few plain people who have come to terms with their looks, and compensate for it.
I know of some obese people I know who respond to this question on Facebook - "What is the first thing you will notice about me?" with the remark - "FAT. I am FAT!"
I know another guy who when asked at a team building exercise to say a few words about himself who could just say these words - "I am FAT! As you all know I am very FAT!"
There are many in this world who would like to disown their body for an Adonis like physique, even spending lumpsums of money on gym subscriptions where they would of course never turn up except for the first few days or two.
Or consider girls, who have a complex about their looks. I know some plain Janes who seem to glow with a strange inner beauty - is this the inner beauty that poets and writers of years begone have written about, sung about?. There is always a twinke in their eyes, a welcoming smile on the lips which make up for what they lack in physical looks. Some of them I am happy to say are married to handsome men who don't lack in intelligence either. And this cannot be said of many of the so called cute/ pretty women you meet.
Be comfortable with yourself. Accept yourself - is a message all self help books scream. I am just giving my two cents worth of validating that as a fact.

A deed in turn, deserves another!

This is a strange story of both deceit and honesty.
The other day I misplaced a couple of monetary bond ceritificates at work. Next day when I returned to office they were not there. I strongly suspected the night cleaning staff of being responsible for the disappearance, but I decided it was of absolutely no use to anyone else other than me, so there was no need to worry.
I even arranged for duplicates to be procured, from my agent. No money lost, but some tedious paper work to be redone.
That week I did not make my weekly pilgrimage home. But something else turned up at home instead, travelling 150 kilometers in the process.
Monday morning, a week later, my father called me up saying that a couple of bond papers with my name on it had been posted from a bank in Trivandrum, the city where I work. It turned out some good Samaritan found the bonds by the roadside a few kilometers away from where I work. He saw my name and address on it and dutifully handed it over to some officials at the nearest bank. The bank officials promptly sent it over by mail to the address on the certicate, and woah! the lost was found!
Obviously whoever had come across the bond had decided it was of no use to him and discarded it. But the amazing part of the story was that a government bank official(government officials are notorious for corruption and laziness) had taken so much trouble to return the lost papers.
I was dumbfounded when Dad related this story over the phone.
This was not the first time that a bank official has come to my rescue; call me scatter-brained, but I had the ill luck once to leave my pocket diary in the bank premises after a transaction.
The bank manager noted that my permanent address and phone number were scribbled on the book, and he promptly called home.
That time too, Dad called up saying someone at a bank had called him over a misplaced notepad. I was abashed but promptly went over to the bank office and was repossessed the notepad. Call that efficiency and honesty! Then I had thanked the bank official profusely; but in the incident of the lost and found bond papers I am only aware of some faceless people each performing a good deed in his turn knowing well that no reward was in store for him!
I too have done my share of good deeds. I once found an ATM card on the floor of an ATM kiosk. Without a second thought I handed it over to the bank officer at the bank. And I have no doubt that the bank officer would not have passed it on to the rightful owner.
As they say pass on a good deed, and it will come back to you.