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.

Of Arson and Violence

In the wastelands of Western Vidharbha, in a small hamlet, in the eastern shadows of Maharashtra's vast geography, you will be surprised to come across a hillock on which are perched a dozen, tall futuristic buildings. This is the private Science and Technology college that would not have existed had it not been for the fact that this was the village that gave the state of Maharashtra two Chief Ministers. In the midst of parched farmlands and dry wasteland sprung up a miracle in architecture, equipped with one of the best scientific equipment in the country, well skilled lecturers from every part of India, and creme de la creme alumni of the local government college of engineering.
It was no wonder that the reputation of this college spread far and wide. The college had prospective candidates from as far flung states from Bengal to Gujarat and from Kerala to Kashmir.
All went well for a long time, though the college inmates segregated themselves state-wise and then caste-wise, thereby preserving their sometimes aggressive culture instead of assimilating the local. There was always someone from this elite colleage who topped the ranks in science and technology.
A cult of Muslims had made their home in this god forsaken place many centuries ago. They were mostly small time businessmen and consequently higher up the social pyramid. They differed in physique and you could say they belonged to some different race. While the locals were dark skinned and stunted, these muslim migrants were tall and of a very fair color. It was as if there had been an exodus many many years back from some Himalayan region to this wasteland which they had now decided to call home.
The females of this muslim clan were fair skinned, tall and had aristocratic features with grey blue eyes much like Persian women, though they did wear the burkah, some of them the hijab and some even the purdah in the intolerable heat.
It was for one beautiful damsel, the daughter of a wealthy muslim businessman, that a Kashmiri student(lets call him Vikki, son of a DSP in Kashmir) of the college fell for. He promsised to marry the girl and take her off to his native Kashmir once his studies were over. He consulted this young beauty's parents and they readily agreed, considering the fact that they were both muslim and shared a common culture in the vague sense.
But it was the girl's brother who did not take it that easy. He took umbrage to the fact that Vikki and his new girlfriend had take a vacation to Kashmir, with the girl's father's permission of course.
Vikki was stabbed twice in the back by his love's brother when he was out in town one evening. News, or it could be rumour reached the college that Vikki was hanging betweeen life and death in the local hospital.
The Kashmiri conglomerate at the college took serious note of the matter and held an impromptu meeting. They were soon joined by Delhiites, Punjabis... and everyone soon forgot their cultural differences and were out on the road in the mid of night, baying for local blood, calling out "Revenge!", deciding that the event was an insult to the college inmates. There was rioting and arson. Several shops, the very shops whose services they availed of, the local video parlors, cigarette vending shops went up in flames. The Head of Department, computer Science lit a cigarette as he coolly watched tea stalls, ramshackle eating joints, laundry shops going up in flames in a matter of hours just in front of the college gates.
Police arrived in the wee hours of the morning with arson continuing to the early hours. The policemen were small in number; they were local police not trained to handle something of this magnitude.
The unequipped police were pushed back by bricks and stones thrown by the college inmates. Some of the more enterprising and shady of the Gorakhpuris were ready with country made guns(katta) they had smuggled in, and others had cycle chains; and hacksaw blades sharpened at the edges in the mechanical department's workshop to serve as knives.
The police force that arrived that afternoon, however, were not the ordinary policemen these rampaging students had faced earlier. These were the State Reserved Police Force(SRPF) specially trained in handling riots. When the rioting students welcomed the SRPF with stones and cycle chains, they fired at the crowd. Some Kashmiri youth, who had been in riot situations in their native Kashmir before, spread the rumor that the firing was just a ruse, the rubber bullets would not harm anybody.
But what the SRPF fired that day were real bullets, and two Kashmiri students were fatally shot.
Seeing their fallen comrades, the rampaging college students fled in all directions.
As usually what happens in such situations, it was the innocent bystanders who were caught in the cross-fire. The real perpetrators of the riot locked themselves in their hostel rooms and it was 210 mostly innocent students who were simply witness to the goings-on, who were led to the Central Prison that bloody day.
After one month in the central prison treated as ordinary criminals, sleeping next to proclaimed offencers and sharing their meals with murderers, these poor young men were released on bail from judicial custody. The political guardian of the district being a high profile hot-shot hushed up the whole matter afraid of a political undertone. Not a single national newspaper reported it, except a miniscule local newspaper that published a small column that everybody soon forgot about.

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 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!

The Acid Bomb!

I have had my share of cranky teachers as I am sure all of you might have had at some time or the other.
My Chemistry teacher in my tenth grade was an eccentric gentleman named Joseph K. He was particularly notorious for his habit of bringing just one match in a matchbox to light the bunsen burner for his chemistry experiments and when that one fizzled out as it inexplicably did, there was the usual frantic search for a matchbox, much to our amusement and his annoyance.
There was one memorable incident that lies etched in my memory.
The event was the annual school science exhibition when each of us students tried to outdo each other to win the coveted first prize for clever tricks that could captivate the audience of the learned gentlemen who would turn out on the great day.
Mr. Joseph, MSc ,BEd was as usual in the lead with his bag of tricks which he delegated to us students. There was a mini oxygen plant, a chlorine plant and even a miniature soap factory. The sky was the limit to the imagination of our dear Mr.Joseph, post graduate gold medallist.
I was delegated with our teacher's pet project as I was known to have a keen interest in Chemistry which the other students found drab and usually boring.
The exhibit was a crude fire extinguisher contraption that consisted of simply a test tube of hydrochloric acid floating on a dilute solution of washing soda enclosed in a plastic container. I was aware of the technological working of the contraption but did not pay much heed to the practical implications of this seemingly harmless device.
For all I knew when I was asked to turn the enclosing plastic container that held the compartmentalized acid and bicarbonate of soda combination the acid would come in contact with the soda solution causing a lot of carbon dioxide gas to be produced which would vent out through a hole punched on the top of the container onto the source of a small fire, extinguishing it in the process. That was the basic idea of the fire extinguisher and how it was supposed to work.
On the great day we were all excited and in a mild tizzy. The chief guest was a high ranking official from the collector's office.
It was decided that the demonstration of my exhibit would be a one time affair and only to be performed in the presence of the chief guest. I waited anxiously as the chief guest escorted by the school principal, who happened to be my father, wound their way through the various exhibits on the way to mine.
At last the defining moment arrived. In the presence of the honored quests I briefly described the mechanism of the fire extinguisher and proceeded to turn it upside down trying at the same time to point the vent towards a small paper fire kindled explicitly for the purpose.
What happened next dumbfounded everyone including me. The reaction that occurred took place so rapidly and vigorously that the gas produced caused a mild explosion shattering the container that held it, spraying the guests and me with corrosive acid. I looked down to see my clothes drenched with acid, the cotton of my terry cot uniform having dissolved leaving threadbare terry line. There was a minor commotion as everybody checked to see whether anyone was hurt in this scientific experiment gone terribly wrong. Fortunately nobody was.
The chief guest had the grace to ask me if I was all right, ignoring the acid stains on his shirt and coat. Once the initial uproar subsided I slinked off unnoticed to change into a pair of new uniform.
When I returned Joseph sir had the brashness to offer me the opportunity to host his soap producing exhibit. I flatly refused, realizing the lesson I had so unfortunately learnt that day, on the danger of untested theory and practical use.
Later that night during supper at home, we all had a good laugh at the follies of our dear Joseph sir.

Walk a Mile in My Moccasins

This event comes to my mind when I listen to Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colours".
The most interesting time of my life, I feel when I was in Nagpur doing my pre-degree. It happened so that I was in a college which happened to be the place where most of the children of Nagpur's affluent families did their studies. I had a Colonel's son as a friend who used to call me Matz long before anyone else started calling me by the same nickname. In fact he made everybody's name sound to end with a "Z". So Bhopardikar was Bhopz and so on.
Sometimes I felt intimidated by the elite crowd that surrounded me. For instance, the Colonel's son used to boast that he took just four mintutes to shave with his electric razor, boasted about his computer and his plans to go to the USA after TOEFL; and all this was at a time when the television was yet to become a fad in Indian homes.
I used to wear plain white canvas shoes to college. Tired of the plain-Jane attire, I had a wicked idea - I would paint my shoes in myriad colours, just for the fun of it. So off I went and bought a can of fevicol and a set of oil paints.
Once in my room at the hostel, I carefully mixed the fevicol with the oil paint till I decided it was a perfect mix. With a large paintbrush I painted my shoes in shades of five or six colours till I thought it was a job perfectly done.
I wore the shoes next day to class, hoping everybody would admire my bright newly painted canvas shoes and pass it off as some sophisticated imported model.
But the colonel's son, he came to me and in a conspirational tone whispered, "Matz, you have painted your shoes, isn't it? HA HA HE". That got my goat; I had that shrinking feeling and I wished I could just vanish into thin air. ;)
On the day of the pre-degree model exams I decided to get back at those who had made an ass of me that day.
I had a friend from Manipur called Thokchom Gambhir Singh (He was an ardent fan of the Manipur freedom movement and denied being a Hindu and preferred saying he belonged to the Meitei religion, which existed long before the Bengalis and the Hindus overran Manipur, according to him).
Manipuris as a fact are well dressed and like to flaunt the latest smuggled(?) electronic items that they most probably get from China or Burma. I decided that on the day of the prelims, I would dress like a North Eastern would.
So I did one more of those crazy things.
I asked Gambhir whether I could borrow his outfit for a day. He readily agreed, being on good terms with me, not like the other Bengalis in the hostel who had a mutual distrust for him.
So I pulled on a Chinese made T-shirt that clung to my body showcasing my physique, with a leather jacket pulled over it. Then the thick blue stretchable jeans that you get only in the smuggled markets. Then the Adidas shoes over the thick cotton socks. And to cap it all I borrowed Gambhir's flashy wrist watch that had a calculator as an accessory on it. I sprayed myself thorougly With imported deodorant and then I was ready.
I arrived at college with a clear mind having prepared well for the exam and prepared for any eventuality.
The inviligator in charge, a nerd, who knew me well coz most of the time I was top in class, gasped in disbelief. I didn't turn to look at the girls, being too shy to acknowledge any giggles, if they happened to come.
When I returned the stuff back to Gambhir, I felt that I had been a different man for one day. I had been literally walking in Gambhir's shoes!