Of Love, Greed And Revenge - A True Life Story

Preeth and Preethi met each other by fluke of chance at a cafe inside a Technology park in Bangalore where they both worked in different software companies. They were soon blindly in love.
They were as unlike each other as a peahen is to a peacock. Preethi was practical, logical and a go-getter with a calm demeanor. Preeth was boisterous, temperamental, impulsive and prone to wild moods. Preethi fell for Preeth for his wildly care free attitude and typical north Indian good looks, while she herself was short, diminutive and a little short of pretty.
A year after their marriage, their relationship floundered. Preeth got a placement in the Noida offshoot of his parent MNC company, while Preethi continued her job at Bangalore. Preeth was still in love with Preethi, this time with an eye on the lucrative salary that she drew as assistant manager at a mediocre company, in-spite of having just a year's experience in the field. To him she was a source of easy money, in addition to the hefty salary that he himself drew. When Preethi brought her parents to Bangalore to look after her toddler daughter and to keep her company in an increasingly alienated world, Preeth fell all the more spurned. He called her many a times a day trying to  persuade her to join him in Noida and warned her in no uncertain terms to keep away from her parents. To him, they were the devil incarnate. Torn between the vows of marriage and her comparatively happy life at Bangalore, Preethi managed to take a month's emergency leave from her company and flew to Noida to join Preeth, leaving her daughter in the care of her aging parents.
When she arrived at Noida, she was surprised to be met by repeated, sometimes threatening demands from Preeth to mutually subscribe to a one crore flat in Noida payable over a period of twenty years. Being the rational and thoughtful person she was, Preethi refused. Firstly, she didn't want to stay at Noida, and secondly to her the idea was foolish, their married life still being in infancy. After a stormy month together, she returned to Noida with her parents. She rejoined her company and the status of her communicator at office read - "Finally glad to be at my workplace".
Her co-workers noticed she was subdued and frequently late at work, which was not her norm. The reason was she had late night calls from Preeth and they argued heatedly into the late night hours.
Preeth, at Noida, was meanwhile undergoing a metamorphosis. He was on the verge of paranoia. His hatred for Preeth and her parents, who to him were mere parasites, reached unbearable levels. The only thought on his mind now, day and night, was Preethi and her parents and an unexplained urge for revenge.
One night, a day prior to the festival of lights, he packed his bag and a kirpan (a Sikh ceremonial dagger) that he found in his father's collection of memorabilia. He was not a Sikh, but at that moment, that was the only weapon he could get hands on at short notice, that could destruct . He felt the edge of the kirpan, and satisfactorily noted that it was still sharp since the last time his father had got it polished.
Preethi meanwhile was just returning from office with a heart shaped mud oil lamp painted a deep red, in her purse, that her friends had gifted her that day, along with ceremonial Diwali sweets. Early morning that day she had adorned her hands with the deep reddish brown "mehndi", the temporary tattoo that Indian women decorate their hands prior to an auspicious event. She was not to realize that the red fetish she had was going to have ominous overtones that night.
That same night Preeth was on the 3 am flight to Bangalore, a place which now he loathed, which to him was now Preethi's new home. He arrived at Preethi's rented flat at dawn. He was greeted by Preethi's parents, but they felt something was amiss when they looked at Preeth's blood red, sleepless eyes. Preeth barged in without a word, found Preethi at the kitchen and a loud altercation followed. Preethi's parents sensed something was amiss and carried the toddler kid to the open garden four flats below.
Preethi was stabbed five times in her stomach with the kirpan. Preeth had lost all sense and rationality. He just wanted to finish his torment and tormentors once and for all. Preethi screamed and lay bleeding. Preeth, felt a strange mixture of nausea and relief sweep him and he calmly waited for the police to arrive, to turn himself in.
****
"Education does not make an educated man...", the old man commented, to no one in particular. He was a Bangalore old-timer and had just read the Preethi Arora murder story in the next day's morning newspaper. "Well, these things happen all the time," commented his wife. "Especially with these software people".
"Yes that's true", said the old man and soon forgot the sordid news story he had just read and turned to page 3 to glance at the day's TV schedule for the Friday night Bollywood blockbuster.

Nehru's Tryst With Destiny

I recently completed reading "Freedom At Midnight" by Dominique La Pierre and Larry Collins. I must say I discovered a lot of things absolutely not mentioned in the history books right from third standard to the tenth. Our history books seem to have been written by people with selective amnesia which goes to show how much our education system has degraded. The book is not totally without flaws since it is written by a Frenchman and an Australian two decades back. They have been more than a bit patronizing in the way they have written the book, but can be forgiven for that, as Europeans and Australians can write only the way they think - as Europeans and Australians. The book tells a lot about what happened during partition and the inner story which finds just a mention in our history books as a line or two. The saddening part is that after nearly 65 years, India is still fighting the maladies that has plagued it for centuries - communal riots, poverty, illiteracy and a newer malady - corruption. Why do Indians deserve this? After being guided through the earlier years by visionaries such as Gandhi, Nehru, Menon and Sardar Patel does it still have to be known to the world as a nation of illiterates, of religious bigots and where literary authors have to sell their books by depicting India's poverty in all its glory? I do agree that Nehru's and Gandhi's ideas might not hold much water in a modern world and Indians have indeed taken mostly wise decisions throughout the years, post independence, but still the old demons remain. India is the world's largest democracy, but are our elections just a token public relations exercise as one wiki leaks cable pointed out? Do Indians really benefit from this independence and has it done them any real good? Why are politicians still elected based on caste, class and religion and not on their individual merit? Is independence and democracy just buzz words that has no meaning to the ordinary man out on the farms, out in rural India? Gandhi had preached that every Indian politician and bureaucrat should first learn the ropes of his  trade in the villages of rural India. This might not sound very realistic in a modern world but it is true that most of our doctors and engineers live in the cities and the farmers in rural India have improved their lifestyle just a tad bit, migrating to cities where they believe their future lies. Rahul Gandhi and few of our politicians have lived with villagers in villages for a day or two in what might be a lesson out of Gandhi's book, but was this nothing more than a PR exercise? Has it really benefited the villagers or Rahul Gandhi? India did have it's white revolution(milk), green revolution(food self sufficiency) and technology revolution in the recent years and it's growth rate is enviable. But why can't we still end our past maladies after 65 years - those of communal riots, rural poverty and corruption? And why are basic infrastructure such as quality education, basic sanitation, quality medical care, human rights and rural jobs still a precious luxury for the vast majority of Indians? Gandhi talked about these seventy years back but sad to say our politicians are involved in their own private games and hobbies and know as much of Indian history as an Italian does. Our politicians are the modern day maharajahs - who Nehru and Patel hated so much in their heydays.

The weirdest elections in Indian History

I am apolitical. In fact I think politics only when I read the newspapers or read news on the internet. But some of the events happening around us have involved almost everyone - including the aam aadmi (common man).
Let me give an anecdote that happened on a busy road in the middle of Bangalore a few days back.
I was returning back from the center of Bangalore city after some personal work on my Activa scooter when I was stopped by some traffic policemen who had set up an ambush along a curve of the road.
My first thought was that I was on a one way road. No. Had I inadvertently jumped a traffic signal? No, that was not the case too.
The policemen seemed to be checking expired vehicle insurances. They had already stopped a dozen motorists and were going through their papers. A brash young traffic policeman pointed out to me that my papers were all right - but my insurance would expire the next day. I nodded sheepishly, mumbling something about getting it done tomorrow.
Then he got interested in my registration plates. My vehicle was a Kerala registered vehicle bearing the tell-tale KL letters. "Aah! Out of state vehicle I see", he said delightedly in broken English for my benefit. "I need to see your Road Tax papers from Karnataka Road Transport Office or the No Objection Certificate from the Karanataka RTO!"
I said I did not since I was planning to be in Karnataka for just a few months, which was a perfectly valid reason. The RTO rules do not mandate an NOC or payment of road tax if the duration of stay is short. How else would one motor to Chennai to Goa on a holiday trip in that case?
When I was in Chennai for a short period of 6 months, I had paid the lifetime road tax for the same Activa to avoid being hounded by Tamilnadu traffic

policemen; but Bangalore is different; there are vehicle rolling on the roads from all over India - Delhi, UP, AP, HP, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the like. And the traffic policemen never bother. And Techies are literate - they usually know their rights.
What surprised me was that the brash traffic policeman suggested that I pay a bribe.
I protested saying that I had already paid Tamilnadu road tax, and I couldn't be expected to pay road tax in every state where I go for short stints.
He was unrelenting. "The only option we have is to confiscate your vehicle. And you will have to appear in court", he said with a smug smile.
"Or", he added, pointing to the elderly traffic inspector casually leaning against his bike."You can pay our respected Sir Rs. 300. Just a small nominal fee for you. Kindly request him".
I thought about the strange existing political situation in the country now. A maverick group called the Aam Aadmi Party was counting on its battle against corruption to win the general elections in just a few weeks and all major political parties were engaged in a debate against corruption. How the hell did these traffic policemen aspire to get away with a corrupt act in such times? The AAP was then actively campaigning against all sorts of corruption bottom up and such an action weeks later would have caused the traffic inspector's summary dismissal and probably a jail term too if the AAP came into power! However Karnataka State was then ruled by the Congress, which was expecting major losses in this general elections.
Was this traffic inspector's last attempt at a bribe before he retired or was he just thumbing his nose at the authorities in power or who planned to come in power? Was this his message to say that AAP or not, I am still the man in charge around here.
For me this was a crisis. I either pay the bribe or have my vehicle towed away. And court appearances was unthinkable.
So I handed over 300 rupees to the elderly traffic inspector, who looked at me carefully and handed 100 rupees back. I had bribed someone for the second time in my life!
Is this the beginning of a new era for corruption? Just as there are loopholes to escape the law so there are loopholes to get trapped. No person would prefer to get his vehicle impounded under some arcane law, than paying a couple of hundred rupees to get away scot-free, for example.
Is the Indian way of corruption only going to meta morph into the sophisticated corruption that exists in Gulf countries called "vaasta"? Or the criminal sophistication of the organized Mafia in countries such as Italy?

On Penpals

Today we have Facebook and a host of social networking sites where we have people whom we know intimately, those who we know well and even those whom we don't know that well. We all come on a common forum and associate digitally. But did you know that long before this happened there were old timers(like me) who had friends called penpals - who had never met each other, who had never talked to each other over the phone, but communicated all the time through ordinary post? Yes, and they trusted each other with full conviction and there was no need for subterfuge like the ones we see on Facebook or Twitter, such as fake profiles, gender and age faking. There was no subterfuge of the kind we saw sometime back on Yahoo chat rooms and Messenger profiles, either. The pen did the talking - hence the name - penpal.
When I was just beginning to read Enid Blyton novels for children of the age group 8-10, I had this deep seated wish to have a penpal, if possible several penpals.
Those days, some magazines had a special page dedicated to penpals - mostly international, but that didn't go very well with me. You might face the same subterfuge we now see on social networking sites.
So I asked my Non Resident uncles and aunts, who were scattered all over the world - Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Oman, Kuwait, et al- all of them science or English teachers, and even two uncles who worked on merchant navy ships, travelling all across the globe- to find a suitable penpal for me. Yes, this was sometime in the early eighties.
One aunt in Nigeria responded that her students even in the teens could not put together an English word. I got the same response from my other relatives working in the other African countries.
My aunt said, "It would be very difficult to find a penpal for you here. We don't want to connect you to an idiot." She did send a short note describing the politics, geography, trade and tribal groups of Nigeria.
I had a cousin of nearly my same age who stayed with his parents in Kuwait at that time, so I asked him if he could be my penpal. We could start by exchanging postal stamps, I said. I had a sizable stamp and coin collection those days, mostly inherited from another uncle also in Kuwait.
My cousin in Kuwait replied to my letter with the customary - how are you? how are your dad and mum?  - the "Dr Livingstone I presume" stuff. That was the first and last mail from him. Either he was not very good at English, or didn't have the patience or time to write letters or found postal communication boring. But he did include a couple of dozen Kuwaiti stamps with that air mail.
And let me add one thing - air mail from the Gulf countries took about one month to reach, unlike the spontaneous email!
My desire for a penpal went unrealized for some years.
I had a series of postal communication with one of my uncles in Oman who worked as an English teacher in a government school there, following a suggestion by my father. My uncle replied to each of my letter diligently.
He became my de facto penpal after that! I must mention that I had at that time never met this uncle in person and neither the cousin in Kuwait I mentioned earlier, for the times they visited Kerala never coincided with our annual migratory visits to Kerala.
Communicating with children is not as easy as some people make it to be. It is not coming down to the child's level, but just the opposite! Successful communication with a child is rather complex, and there is a need to see through the child's eyes. I think that is why we don't see a lot many successful children's books in the market. An adult forgets how it feels to be a child during the growing up period.
But this uncle was special. Whenever he wrote to my dad and mum he would include a short note for me and sometimes he wrote to me with a short note for my parents. I eagerly awaited his letters.
Oman at that time was facing an oil boom and was one of the richest countries in the world. Following modernization by the then Sultan Qaboos, it was a liberal place to be. There were migrant workers from all over Africa, the Middle East - Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Sri Lanka to name a few.
And these migrant workers wrote home, and didn't use the dollar phone cards as they do now.
So when I requested my uncle for stamps he made a public request to the students in his class to gather any stamps they had at home and come to class with them; complete with instructions(which I had given him) on how to tear off the stamps from the cover without damaging them. I got a flood of stamps in each letter from my uncle after that. That made waiting for those letters from Oman all the more exciting notwithstanding the fact that a letter took one or one and a half month to reach either side, though air mail.
The remoteness of the village in Maharashtra where we stayed at that time must have added to the delay.
The process of communicating to and fro was painful but I would never swap that for the modern day social networking that caters to instant gratification and causes the addiction of the likes Facebook users report.

When the tweets never stopped.

This post is a trip down memory lane. And it might not be very accurate since it reminisces my childhood days and today I am much much older and might miss many of the beautiful things I might have noticed as a child.
The first thing that comes to my mind on my visits to my native Kerala these days is the change in the flora and fauna since my childhood days.
Not drastically but still quite subtle changes.
The weeds that lined the country roads then were some type of fern like plants that folded their leaves on touching them. We used to call them the "touch-me-not"s. I have never come across these plants lately.
The farmlands used to teem with insects and it was not rare to find a couple of scorpions hanging by their venomous tails, the sting being tied with a string to a banana shoot by some naughty schoolchild who didn't want to decimate the poor scorpion but neither let it escape his torment.
There were these huge centipedes that crawled anywhere and everywhere and which would curl into a spiral on physical contact, making them look like bulbous one rupee coins - the "atta". The roads teemed with them during the rainy season and vehicles and pedestrians using the road squashed them pretty hard. The scorpions are no longer to be seen (for the good?!), and neither these centipedes and millipedes.
If you dug the earth it would be impossible to go a few inches deeper into the earth before scooping up these giant earthworms. Earthworms, they say are good to keep the soil fertile - for vermi-compost. Now they use fertilizers in the tonnes. During the rainy season the rivulets sprang from springs that were almost perennial. No longer! Now the water table has sunk deep and to get water the year round you would need a very deep well. The streams are a once in a week affair that dry off soon after the rains.
I remember as a child we used to play a little game. When we visited our uncles and aunts in their houses in the vicinity we first checked the water wells. And since it was in the monsoons that we visited Kerala, the water table being quite high we could touch the water surface in the wells with our small hands. No longer. The water no longer comes to arm level now and the traditional mode of using bucket and rope is now replaced by motor pumps to reach the receding water table.
And the ants. I remember at least three varieties of ants - the big black ants, the small red ones - which you could never avoid getting bitten by if you used the small trails that crisscrossed the farms, and the smaller harmless ones that could be found all over the kitchen and store rooms.
And how cam I miss the sparrows? The chirps of the sparrows is now just a figment of memory - they are nowhere to be seen.
I remember one night, one of us kids had a cold and one electric light in the house was kept on in case of an emergency. I got up that night to a sight I have never seen before. The light in the room had attracted thousands of migratory locusts so thick that you would think there was snowfall. In suicide missions they rammed themselves against the light as their wings fell off and they lay twitching on the floor. Seems my grandfather was accustomed to this sight and he let loose the Alsatian dog we had and the two cats, and all the three pets had a sumptuous feast of butter soft locust meat.
I wonder whether we are actually changing the world around us in a time bracket of just quarter of a century? Traditionally cocoa, pepper, tapioca (kappa) and coffee were grown along with banana plantains in the midst of rubber trees. But now the cash crops are solely rubber, pineapple and vanilla. The rubber trees tend to draw a lot of ground water, the pineapple and vanilla in addition to the coconut trees, are protected by massive sprays of insecticides.
All these chemicals that we inject into the soil, are they changing the face of the earth? A point to ponder.

Being Thankful For Life's Smaller Mercies...

The average man leads a quiet life of desperation, said Thoreau.
This is but natural, to submit to the lowest common denominator. But need it be? There are three main spheres that concern the average man today.
The first is himself. Every organ in his body is performing its function to make him live a full fledged active life. Every piece of his flesh is coordinating with another to breathe life into him. His whole body functions like a well oiled machine. Should he not be grateful for this? That each passing day, his body has endured the forces of nature, performs its duty well and makes him move on, even as the clock ticks another second, his heart beating muffled drumbeats to the grave - to quote Longfellow?
Should he not be grateful for this? That not one part of the complex structure that he is, has not had a major malfunction, so far?
The other sphere is his interaction with fellow human beings. The average man has a family or at least is known to a certain ring of people around him. That is his social environment. He has good friends, enemies and others who don't care but know that he exists. Should he not be proud of his existence and his contribution to such a complex social structure. Friends may come, friends may go, relatives may turn against him, or he may find neutral companions at his office; considering the complex social politics that make all this happen. All this is his social environment around him, his own little world. Should he not be proud, that come what may this private social world is intact? Minus a friend or foe now, add a fried or foe next, or just plain onlookers who know his name and or where he lives?
The third sphere which is more of a lifeless nature are the machines around him that have so inconspicuously crept into his life that he now takes them for granted. Should not a man be grateful that each passing moment not one electronic, mechanical, electro-mechanical, digital, electrical device - et al, has never ever failed him in a way so as to cripple him, stop him in his tracks where he is helpless or grind his life to a stop. These man made devices that were introduced into human life ever since the stone man started creating tools, have now evolved into machines and devices, has never failed you in a manner so as to drastically reduce your quality of life. Should you not be thankful for this?
Every man should learn not be desperate about the larger forces of life beyond his control, but be thankful for the smaller mercies of life, if he has to appreciate the purpose of his existence.

Hunters And Gatherers

"Some men are born hunters, and some gatherers. This has been inherited from our primitive ancestors who gathered fruits and nuts for survival, or hunted animals to survive."
Albert Figurado was a born tinkerer and a collector of riff-raff. He was a vehicle mechanic and he saw value in everything he stumbled across - a nut-bolt on the road, washers of varying sizes, discarded screw drivers, ink pens without caps or caps without the pen, refill points, electric wires of varying lengths, a broken kaleidoscope, an ancient mariner's compass of no real utility, discarded magnetic compasses, disintegrating rubber tubes, broken plugs, unusable hardware, an old bust Polaroid camera, an ancient radio, a ballot box he had once bought at an auction.
Each of these he collected and stored them in neat little boxes in his garage. He would find use for each of these objects, which to any other person would have been worthless, and constructed odd looking pens ,with parts from three or four discarded pens; created objects of utility from discarded objects which other wise would have found its way to the town dump or lay rusting on the road. If anything in his house needed repair, he never went out shopping to buy the needed stuff, he made use of his collection to fabricate contraptions that served his purpose. He took pride in this activity and anything and everything he came across was recycled to create hybrid odd but usable instruments.
As he grew old, and his five children were scattered across the world in five different continents, his passion evolved to a finer variation. He no longer collected discarded parts, in fact he disposed all of them with the garbage one fine day. He was now interested in a new passion. He asked his sons abroad to send him stuff that he could use to make his life easier.
But the point was he never in fact used any of these. So he became the owner of a dozen Maglite torches of varying models - some that ran on batteries, others on rechargeable batteries, some with LEDs, others with bright fluorescent bulbs. He asked for cameras, and each of his sons sent across cameras of different variations, for what they thought was their duty as obedient sons. Albert was the owner of a microwave, an induction stove, a flat TV.
But one fine day when there was a massive power surge and each of them went kaput, he still kept them. They were beyond repair but he collected them, the born collector he was. His sons as usual came to his rescue, and bought a replacement for each of these. His collection of ceramic pottery was carefully preserved, but never used, hopefully bearing the prospect of some use in the future. He asked his sons for mobiles, and he got five of them, one each from his five sons. But he never used these and they lay charging all day long on the electric sockets.
He became the owner of laptops; but alas he was technology illiterate, so he never used them. He owned three of them at once and each of them disintegrated for want of use. That folks is the story of Albert Figurado, the born collector. His sons waited and waited to see when he would become hunters, like them....