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.

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.

Oh, the joys of being a multi-linguist!

I am sure most Indians who have gone through high school are well versed in at least three languages - English, a regional language and Hindi - the national language. In case of people residing outside their native state, one could add the mother tongue to this list as well. When I say well versed I mean speak, read and write in at least one and at least speak or read in the other two.
I have mentioned that I speak English, Hindi, Marathi and my mother tongue in Malayalam for good measure in this post. I am sure there are many such stories out there.
What are the not so obvious advantages of multi-linguism?
On the lighter side, I would say would be that I can watch a Bollywood masala movie and experience the typical euphoria that a good flick does without caring much for a true depiction of real life. However if I would like to watch a cold calculated, well researched and realistic movie that has a storyline worthy of a novel, I would go watch a Hollywood blockbuster. And I would undergo a totally different set of emotions for either one. It would be like a switch turning off on one set of perceptions and turning on another.
I am sure a monolingual person can never in his life experience that.
A more useful result would be one where a person would be wearing a different thinking hat each time he converses, reads or writes in a different language.
When one converses in English, he would tend to be formal, business like and professional - the language of the work culture. In a regional language one would switch to a more rustic ambience and try to share the bond of the local language. In Hindi one would be speaking the lingua franca that binds all of us together as the most understood language pan-nation. In one's mother tongue, like how this video parodies, he would be striking a bond that relates to nativity, a bond among Indians that binds better than any other. Not only this, when one speak in any of these languages, he would actually become part of that culture, transforming himself for that moment to a representative of that culture.
Any more ideas out there?

Oh, Those Coloured Bits Of Paper!

Stamp collecting is dying a slow painful death, or for all I know, already dead, as the world made a total shift from snail mail to electronic email. I do agree that the convenience of email is a million times more than the older system but oh, my mind so wistfully wanders to the days of snail mail and the joys of stamp collecting when I see the occasional envelope with the inevitable stamps pasted on it, a rarity these days.
The only way to expand your stamp collection these days is to subscribe to your postal service's philatelic bureau or buy them straight from a shop which may not be stamps in the true sense really, just some postal service of some exotic country trying to make some money by printing bits of paper and placing a careful seal on it.
I remember the first shot in the arm to my stamp collection when my uncle who was a store supervisor at the Matsusthita Electric (now called Panasonic Corporation), himself an avid stamp collector in his heydays, handed me all the stamps from his collection of a thousand, of which he had more than one copy. The store he worked at was an intermediary ware house of electronic goods from Japan from where they were shipped to all corners of the world mostly in South, South East and South West Asia. Naturally they had a lot of snail mail, and it was from these that he extracted the colourful bits of paper that reflected so much a country's culture and heritage not to speak of it's history and natural resources.
The next big boost came when I requested one of my uncles in the Sultanate of Oman who was a teacher at the governmental ministry of education, to send me some Omani stamps if he had any. Much to my joy, he went one step further and requested the students in his class to contribute any stamps they could get hold on, for his nephew. The oil boom in full swing, the students who were from all parts in the middle east from Syria to Lebanon, and from Pakistan to Qatar, diligently collected stamps and handed them over to my uncle.
My uncle took the pain to stuff all these in an envelope once in three months and posted them to me; and I had the additional bonus of getting hold of some really grand Omani stamps on the outer envelopes too.
Mind you, stamp collecting is not just tearing stamps off the cover and putting them in an album. For starters, let me explain. You first soak the stamp attached to the piece of envelope to which it is still stuck, in lukewarm water for about five minutes. By the time the gum loosens itself and the stamp comes loose. You need to dry the stamp by pressing them between two water absorbing paper sheets and apply light pressure on them at the same time.(This prevents the stamps from shrivelling as they dry). At the same time you need to make sure that the stamps that you have just peeled do not get stuck to the paper you have placed on which to dry, by shifting them to another paper pad in a reasonable time period. Since I didn't have access to blotting paper this task was the most challenging. And the golden rule: wash your hands with soap before handling stamps, they do have a tendency to attract a lot of dust, especially when wet.
I hope you now appreciate the effort that goes into building a decent stamp collection!
I have a particular grouse againt stamps from the USA, the problem being that the US postal systems use very strong adhesive and this causes the stamp to tear when you try to separate from the envelope. And since mutilated stamps lower the total value of your collection, I mostly discarded them.
And one more tip - if you wanted your stamp collection to increase manifold in a reasonable time, God's own land, Kerala, the land of expatriates was the place to be. Here almost every household had at least one or two bread winners working in some alien land; Indians being attached to their homeland, they frequently communicated with their family by air mail.
I remember, as a child of ten, going to random houses, asking puzzled householders whether they had any letters from abroad, with those precious bits of coloured paper stuck on them, that I could add to my collection.
Some grandmothers/ grandparents who were sometimes the only residents of the palatial expatriate houses , became suspicious of my request and wondering whether stamps were actually worth real money, started refusing to part with stamps, envelope and all!
I still have my treasured stamp collection, a bit less in number, countlessly pilfered by enthusiastic kids who visit our house after glancing through my collection, but all the same, more or less intact.

A Black Christmas For A Black

Long before I got into the high-tech business when I got to visit foreign countries and video-conferenced with White clientèle, I still had contacts with foreigners - yes, blacks, in Nagpur - who stayed in the same lodge where I had taken shelter during my college days.
I had one particular friend called Roy Nyale, a Kenyan, who I am afraid was not a very bright guy (hope he forgives me if he is reading this), but jovial, witty and fun-loving that made up for it. I often went over to his room and he gladly prepared a cup of black coffee spiked with lime juice and occasionally shared his meal of boiled potatoes and cabbage which was usually was all that he had for meals.
He also had a tendency to lose his cool once he had one too many, and one for the road, which I am afraid was quite often.
One experience I can't brush off from my mind happened several decades ago on Christmas eve.
Roy had a very muscular build not unlike Ben Johnson, the guy who doped his way to the Olympics gold medal around that time.
One night, after having visited the bar, Roy returned fully sodden and very uncool. He had an ongoing spite with a couple of Bihari students who shared the same lodgings, which was run by a Nagpur settled Rajasthani Rajput called Tomar. Roy went to this Bihari group's room and demanded the keys to the bike which belonged to one in this group. When they refused, not without reason considering that he was drunk beyond coherence, he started lambasting them in English. They locked themselves in and shouted obscenties at him in Hindi, which only enraged him further.
Roy got into a rage, grabbed hold of a window frame and with his immense strength pulled the frame right out of its hinges. The verbal harangue continued for another half an hour, till the venerable but loose tempered, short, but heavy weight Tomar arrived from his business. He tooks stock of the situation and when he saw that the bulky Roy had damaged his property (one window lacked a frame), he went into battle mode. He awoke his older brother, who ran the other half of the lodge, and their children who were just past their teens but who were brawny all the same.
Together they tied Roy to a electric post with leather belts and proceeded to lash out at him with belts and an iron rod, till poor Roy was crying out in pain and begging for mercy.
But I guess mercy is not in the dictionary of an angry Rajput and the group of young and old Tomars hit him again and again the more Roy cried out. The landlord Tomar threatened Roy that he would throw Roy into the compound well with his hands and legs tried.
I watched all this with horrow and believed that Tomar would very well carry out his threat and that Roy would end up in the well.
An hour of beating later, Roy was released and he unsteadily stumbled off and we all onlookers returned to our rooms discussing that night's happenings with animosity.
I had a Manipuri friend at that time and we toyed with the idea of reporting the incident to the police station, but later gave it up considering that the Tomars were not too all in the wrong.
Next day we went to have a look at Roy in his room and he proudly showed off the red welts that had sprung all over his back from the beatings. He nursed a black eye as well and limped a litte. Anyway we were glad that at least he was alive after that horrific beating.
Roy, however learnt nothing; he went back to his old ways and was involved in a brawl at at bar where we went together not many days later on New Year's eve. But I will leave that for another post if I dare recall what happened that black day.

Serpentine Tales

My Dad has been catching snakes for as long as I know. Not the usual snakes, but the more venomous types like the Krait, Viper and the occasional Cobra.
If you think he's the equivalent of the typical village snake catcher who is called when a snake is spotted in the village, then you are wrong. With a Masters in Zoology he knows the in and out of snakes, or for that matter most animals, birds, flora and fauna found in the Indian wilderness.
I remember during my childhood, his field trips to the jungles with school students whom he taught and I was totally awed when he returned with a catch of a venomous snake at times.
The unfortunate reptile would then most probably end up preserved in formalin solution, its jaws kept wide open with a pair of clips exposing evil fangs; or be skinned of its shiny hide and stretched out on pins hammered into a wooden plank.
He caught a lot of snakes, and surprisingly was never bitten by one.
Fearing that I too might have the idea of following his footsteps, he told me once, to never attempt to try to catch a snake, venomous or not.
As for me I am frightened of snakes, to tell the truth. The sight of a mere rat snake sends shivers through my spine and I can't distinguish a rat snake from a cobra!
Snake catchers are rare, and the fame of my Dad's snake catching skills spread far and wide wherever we stayed especially since we lived in snake infested areas. He was on call whenever a snake was spotted, but Dad only watched out for the poisonous sort. Armed with just sticks, he would incapacitate a snake with one hit behind the head and with another stick kept the snake's tail from flailing back at him in a whip like action.
Though I watched him several times doing this(mostly in semi darkness), the action was too quick for my eyes to discern so I cannot divulge the exact snake catching technique to would-be snake catchers who might be encouraged.
Once I had a talk with Dad about this snake catching business. I told him that snakes, venomous or not never attacked unless provoked (which was of course what I learnt from my schoolbooks :-D ). But Dad was adamant about one thing: snakes were not welcome where humans dwelled; they had to be got rid off.
One hilarious occasion occured on a Nag panchami day. This is the day when snakes are worshipped in many parts of North India and some parts of the South.
A King Cobra was spotted near the front door of our local Doctor's residence. My Dad was on a visit to a nearby house and on coming to know of the perilous discovery, prepared himself for one more serpentine encounter.
When he reached the doctor's house, a strange sight met his eyes. The Doctor's wife (who was also a teacher at the local school) was standing in front of the upright cobra, her hands folded in prayer, and a platter with vermillion and milk on the ready. No, she told my Dad, she wouldn't allow him to catch or kill the snake. It was Nag Panchami day and the appearance of the snake was a miracle!
Later, Dad told this story many a time to his friends,and us, and had a good laugh at the poor lady's expense. Superstition still held, even though the person was a teacher, and that too a Doctor's wife!

The Medicine Man

Venu was one of the three compounders of the hospital in the industrial colony where I spent most of my life. This unassuming guy had a very special skill when it came to medical knowledge. He knew exactly which medicine treated which ailment best; what could be the possible side effects; and his encyclopedic knowledge far exceeded those of any of the doctors who served at the hospital.
I would say his way with medicine and illness came from a gut instinct and not from any medical course of study since he was not even a matriculate.
It was rumored that he once practised as a "doctor" (cum midwife) in some remote village in the hinterlands and it was there he brushed up his medical skills to finesse.
Venu was also my close friend. By some strange coincidence he always happened to be on night duty at the hospital, the nights before I had my crucial graduate exams. Those days I used to stay up late at nights and to break the montony made a casual visit to the dispensary. Venu played the genial host by pilfering some of the resident doctor's imported filter tipped cigarettes from the locked drawer in the consultation room (which was a welcome change from my cheap filterless cigarettes that I offered him).
Once in a while, he brought out some antacid pep fizz from the dispensary store and we both had our equivalent of pepsi at hospital cost of course!
While we both puffed guiltily at the cigarette sticks, Venu, more at ease, would recount the latest rumor in the colony. Working in a colony hospital exposes you to all sorts of people and you get to hear the strangest tales from the myriad of people who come in daily. Many of those who reported ill were hypochondriacs. It seems their unhappiness with life gave them all kinds of imaginary ills ranging from stomachaches and backaches to chronic headaches, and Venu realised that rather than seeing a shrink they would feign physical ills. He would try to lighten their load asking some inquisitive question that he could later share with some other visitor for a few laughs. Most of these guys poured out the woes to the patient Venu; and the grouses they had against their superiors, their wives or the guy next door.
So Venu was a walking encyclopaedia of not only medicine, but the who's who and what and when of the colony!
The doctor who served at the hospital was one of the greedy types and he had a special arrangement with the private medical store that was just a short walk away from the hospital. The doc had a habit of prescribing costly antibiotics or anti-virals for the most common of ills, which would not be available at the dispensary and for which the poor patient would have to shell out a good amount of money at the medical store. Of course, it was Venu who spread the rumor(from reliable sources) that the good Doctor took heavy commissions from the medical store keeper in return for the favor. Venu even told patients to first see the doctor, then see him. He would then reduce the long list of medicines on the doctor's prescription to a shorter list and add some of his own. He sure had guts! But he was never wrong.
His treatment was highly effective and some of the patients came to the hospital only when Venu was around. Pregnant women made a beeline to him and he would dispense the best he knew of the do's and dont's of pregnancy.
For me, he was almost like the medicine men of lore for his treatment of illness had a magic touch to it. If it was just gut instinct, well then the voodoo men had that too!

Quiet flows (?) the Manimala

The mighty Manimala river winds its way through the heart of our hometown, Mallappally.
When I was a child I remember going to the Manimala river in the evenings, to have a bath with my two brothers accompanied by an elder. The water was warm and inviting, in sharp contrast to the cool evenings. I remember the golden sand on the banks glistening in the rays of the sun setting for the day.
The spot where the local people preferred to bathe was on a bend where the river made a sharp turn on its short trip to the sea. Vehicles crossing the river on the suspension bridge spanning the Manimala, one of the oldest of its kind in Kerala, could be seen making their way to the next township, a short distance away.
A clear stream that collected water from the numerous springs on the hilly countryside converged with the Manimala at that very place and the cool stream water intermingled with the warm river water to make it an ideal place to have a dip.
As the women from the water deprived homes left for the day after washing their dirty linen, we were left to ourselves to bathe, wrapped in our tiny threadbare cotton towels. We didn't know how to swim so we were warned not to venture into the midstream where the water flowed a lot faster due to strong undercurrrents.
All that has unfortunately passed.
Today nobody goes to the river to have a bathe any longer. Some women folk still go to wash clothes but that is out of sheer necessity as the summer dries up the household water wells.
In the rainy season the water swells and wreaks havoc in the low lying areas as usual, but the water is a muddy red and unfit to bath. In the summer the river all but dries up. People have started treating the Manimala as one giant garbage dump. The various streams that feed the mighty river are polluted with garbage of all sorts right from excreta to electronic waste. All these get carried to the river and going there to bathe is akin to drowning in poison.
The golden sands that adorned the banks too are no longer there. It has simply vanished thanks to the intense sand mining by the sand mining mafia out to make a quick buck selling the sand for building purposes. The suspension bridge is no longer stable thanks to the sand mining. Its pillars are weak and have been strengthened with concrete struts.
My mind misses goes back nostalgically to those days when we used to make the short trip to the river for our weekly bath and prance around on its once golden banks in utter glee.

All that glitters...

This incident took place in the early eighties when I was still in my upper primary class.
We had a lot of stuff to read in our house. My father subscribed to The Blitz, The Times Of India and the now defunct Illustrated Weekly of India (then edited by the most venerable Khushwant Singh). So we were never really short of reading material.
The Illustrated Weekly reserved its last page for classifieds and one advertisement insert that appeared week after week caught my fancy. It was an advert for a mini printing press. It promised to print wedding cards, visiting cards and anything that came to your imagination.
I was intrigued by this product and I mentioned this to my father one day. He brushed it off as a child's immature fancy. But week after week I saw the ad and got more and more excited about it.
Finally my father told me he would order the product. It cost 30 rupees which was quite a sum in those days. The order was supposed to be placed by VPP(Value Post Payable) which meant that we would have to pay the postman the amount before we could open the package.
I waited anxiously for the mini printing press and started dreaming of all kinds of thing I would be able to do with it.
It was a long wait but one day finally the printing press arrived. The postman handed over the package, my father paid the money and I tore open the bundle as soon as I could.
To my dismay what was supposed to be a "printing press" was just a collection of rubber blocks with inverted letters embossed on it. There was a small holder for the these blocks and an ink stamp pad came with it. It was just a crude rubber stamp.
I tried arranging the letters on the holder to spell out my name. I pressed it against the pad and tried to make an impression on paper. But it was a clumsy process. The letters fell out and if they didn't, the impression was imperfect with some letters not producing any imprint, being misaligned.
I was dismayed.
My father laughed. He said,"Let this be your first lesson in life about buying. You always have to be careful of being cheated".
I wondered whether my father indeed had an idea of what the so called printing press would be, when he placed the order.
I never bugged my father for anything after that, until I reached the 10th grade when I asked for, and got a typewriter which proved out to be a real utility and on which I drafted my first story which appeared in a local english magazine in serialized form.
I had learnt an important lesson in life - things are not always what they seem.
Later in life I saw some weird products some of my friend bought on the internet. A mosquito killer arrived in the form of a hammer and a plate. There were spurious products which promised to produce rays which would repell anything from flies to rodents.
I smile now, when I think about that mini printing press and what it turned out to be and what it taught me.