Hilarious story of an inter-state marriage by Chetan Bhagat

Well, here's another review of a Chetan Bhagat Book. Excuse me, but I never get tired of writing on him. This time it is "2 states", a possibly semi autobiographical part-fiction novel about an inter-state marriage - Punjabi vs Tamil.
The fact that the book is about the contrast between two states and not two religions is something that could well have avoided Chetan from being in the midst of a controvery and the probability of his book being banned -a la Taslima.
Chetan takes a hard dig at South Indians - in particular Tamil Brahmins, their traditions and their mentality, but I find it not a least bit offended, inspite of me being South Indianer. He balances this by making fun of Punjabis too - he has a Punjabi background.
You can of course take his opinions expressed through the book in good spirit, as he makes it known that he himself is married to a Tamil ex-classmate and expects his writings to be taken that way.
That Punjabi women come in two sizes - the overweight, obese elderly Pujabi women who tend to push wads of notes down their cleavage; and the young anaemic Punjabi girls who go for the zero size salwar kameez, is funny to read.
The strange rituals of Tamils, and South Indians in general is sometimes really weird, I agree, for I myself had the experience of being served water poured from a tumbler into a glass reserved for visitors, when I visited a Tamil Brahmin friend's house - to prevent the home from being desecrated by a non-Brahmin, probably a meat eating one too!
Chetan says South Indians have a love for rules, and feel safe when there rules to adhere too. I agree to that, but I also want to note that North Indians in general have a disdain for not only rules, but also the law and experience strange satisfaction in bending them, even breaking them.
That elderly south Indians tend to speak in monosyllables while addressing the not so old, and their great love for newspapers that they read from end to end, is a non-dispuatable fact. In fact Malayalees, be it the auto rickshaw driver or the filthy rich, go for the newspaper and do some heavy duty reading on local politics first thing in the morning.
And in fact I have several uncles, who when I go a visiting, say "sit", "come", "eat" - as if they were addressing an alsatian dog!
In all, a very wholesome book, that would satisfy a regular reader as well as an occasional one, thanks to the simple way in which he writes, and the fact that he writes not for a global audience, but an Indian one, who can relate well to what he writes, and have a good laugh at his black humor too - he claims he has sex with his wife for the sake of national integration! He brings out pretty well the contrast between South Indian vs North Indian culture and the mutual disdain these two groups have for each other.
Chetan is a man to watch out for, particulary after "5 point someone" was made into a box office hit, recently.

On Cerelac(R)(TM)

I feel a slight tinge of embarassment as I write this.
The whole of last week I was plagued with an intestinal infection that kept me away from work and made life in general miserable for me. My diet was restricted to bland food; any experiments with the more spicy foods resulted in a bad case of diarrhoea.
I thought I had managed well when all of a sudden a state wide hartal(non-Keralites: this is general term for a full fledged strike when every damned business puts down shutters and life comes to a total standstill).
Normally I would have been at my company office on such a day and it would have been business as usual. The office environs allow for meals, morning, night or day, hartal or no hartal.
Unfortunately I was holed up in my bachelors quarters far away from office when this particular hartal played out.
I had arranged for cigarettes the previous night, betting that the good old Anand Hotel would be open next day even if there was a bandh as they normally do(under police protection of course).
But my luck ran out. The hartal had been called by the party in power in the state, and that meant it was severe than usual.
I got up morning to find that even Hotel Anand had not dared to open up.
Now, I had these courses of strong antibotics to take, three times a day for my stomach agonies. Normally I can go without food for an entire day without getting any more tired or fatigued.
But that day before I took those damned antibiotics I had to get something into my stomach: I knew that, otherwise there would be serious trouble.
I went out, did some investigating and found that not even a tea shop had opened. The only shops that were open were medical shops. It seems the strike organizers at least had some pity for the sick.
I browsed through the contents of one such medical shop searching for something edible. They had cornflakes. I thought I could give that a shot. But when I asked for condensed milk to go with it, they said they didn't have any in stock.
That was when I noticed Cerelac (R) (TM) for infants 12 to 24 months. The blurb said this was stage 3 baby food and included vegetable extracts- "to encourage the child to chew". I decided to go for it, especially when the label read that it already contained powdered milk.
So anyways, I was passing a lot of baby like poo for the past few days, so I thought some more of it would do no harm.
I bought one for a hefty price, wondering how could neo mothers spend so much on baby food. :-)
Took it to my room, mixed it with sterilized water till it was thick and gooey(no, I could not arrange for any lukewarm water as the instructions demanded).
And the only thing that came to my mind as I consumed it was whether any of those doting mothers who so dutifully fed this stuff to their kids had ever tried tasting it!
Jeez, what things life makes you go through!

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.

The Sinful Penance

A major slice of my life was spent in a factory colony. The person with the highest resident post on campus was that of the Joint Vice President, held by an obese gentleman named Bordia. He was know to indulge in the most unhealthy of habits and hence the couple of extra kilos.
At a certain time of the year, anually, he took a ritualistic fast. It was supposed to be a religious affair, to wash him of all his past sins, which I suppose he really did need.
During the two week period he only had water and lemon juice to drink and a diet of dried grapes, almonds, walnuts, pistachio, cashews and exotic fruits and nuts which would surely make him a bit more ship shape.
We always knew when his fasting began, because precisely at that moment, the factory provision stores were in short supply of all the available fruits and nuts they kept. The big man is going on a fast was the rumor. I guess that period of sacrifice did him a lot of good and extended his blessed life for a few more years.
Once the fast was over he went back to his usual ways until the period of cleansing the next year!

Digested, Discarded....

Just a little time back a small news item made its way into local magazines. Reader's Digest was filing for bankruptcy and was on the verge of closure. It just made my eyebrows a little but I was not really surprised. Read it here.
Reader's Digest was my favorite reading material for a long time. It always motivated you, inspired you and made you think. It was not exactly a self help mag but what could rather be called a reality guide. It didn't ask you to do things to do better in life or even live a happier life, but told inspiring stories of those people who fought impossible odds and achieved all these.
I was so fanatic about RD that when I was in college I collected all past issues of RD dating back to the 60's from roadside book stalls selling second hand books. And I didn't regret spending my meagre pocket money on that.
Once I got hold of a copy there was no putting it down till I was through. The stories of other people in far away lands seemed to happen right in front of my eyes, so mesmerising the language was.
There were stories of people who had insufferable physical disabilities and how they beat the odds, ordinary people who achieved great feats or performed amazing tasks with just hidden inner strength as armor. There was entertainment too, with lots of word games, quizzes and puzzles and the inevitable jokes sections.
If anyone of you is/was a fan of RD I need not describe more.
Then I sensed the quality of RD declining. It was as if there was nothing more for them to write, or as if all the good writers had left RD lock, stock and barrel. The only stories they ever told was of people lost in some blizzard or some person fighting some animal in the Arctic wilderness, or surviving a dangerous avalanche or snowstorm. These stories I could not relate to, but RD kept repeating the theme again and again till you got dead bored.
I have never seen snow in my life and I could not visualize what agonies some person was undergoing in sub zero temperature. But what piqued me was that RD started having little variety from then on.
Late into my twenties I stopped reading RD completedy save for a copy or two a year, and even then I felt I was not missing anything much. RD had already dug its own grave.
And finally came the story of the collapse of the great RD.

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!