The Story of the Aimless Policeman

This is one anectode which did not make it to the last post, but should have. I was not a witness to this, but was recounted to me by someone who did.
I have seen policemen in uniform smoking in public and in public places, when they are actually supposed to nab people who do this, and fine them. But this story is about a more conscientious one of his lot.
I was returning home from office and hastily flagged an autorickshaw for the trip.
This auto driver was in a good mood and out of the blue came up with an experience he had recently.
Apparently one day he had been flagged down by a policeman.
"Where to?" asked the auto driver, apprehensive that he may have been on the wrong side of the law.
"Nowhere in particular", replied the policeman. "I just want to have a smoke. Just drive around till I finish it."
Saying this the policeman took out a cigarette, lit it and added, "Don't worry about the fare. I will pay you for this trip."
The auto driver recounted this to me and looking back at me, said with a knowing smile, "You know policemen aren't supposed to smoke in public. So I took this guy around in circles in my auto, till he had smoked his cigarette and dropped him at the very place where he boarded it."
"And he did pay me the fare," he added with a twinke in his eyes.
Talk about policemen on a wild goose chase!

Oh, the Pleasures of Sin!

Two rather funny incidents concerning government officials come to my mind and looking back at them I can't help smiling.
The first happened when I boarded the night train to my hometown when I usually board a reserved compartment forsaking the unreserved one which is smelly and unhygienic. Malayalees are a conscientious lot and they adhere to rules no matter how slight the risk of being in the wrong. So following the rule, be a Roman In Rome I usually ask the TTE for a reservation to Kottayam from Kochi trading my unreserved ticket for a reservation, though the distance is almost negligible and does not really warrant a reservation and usually the TTEs turn a blind eye to those who board the reserved compartment on this short trip. Most often it happens that the TTE asks me to first get into the train, but I never see him again!
This night the TTE was an old fatherly gentleman who had alcohol on his breath. I approached him and asked for a reservation.
Come with me he said, and I followed him like a meek lamb.
Pointing to the Air Conditioned coach he asked me to board it. I protested saying I wanted just an ordinary reservation, not an A/C.
He patiently explained to me like a father admonishing an errant child that there was not much difference in the fare of an air-conditioned coach and a regular one.
I decided to humour him and boarded the train.
A few minutes later I saw the old gentleman again. I paid him the difference in fare, and to my surprise he asked me- Do you want a receipt?
Nonplussed, I said as you please, then hesitantly, 'yes'. Don't worry he said, pocketed the money, and trundled off without handing me the upgraded ticket, maybe to find a seat to sleep off his intoxication.
I could almost sense Anna Hazare turning over in his sleep.
The other incident happened when I went to a government office in search of a gazetted officer to attest my identification proof. On entering I was told that all the officers were in a meeting, and I would have to wait.
As I waited near the security guy's desk a cup of what looked like black coffee was sourced from the meeting hall. The security smiled contentedly, as if this happened regularly during the meetings, took a sip of the evil looking decoction and mumbled, Really good strong stuff! And he smiled at me as if he was sharing a dirty joke with me.
I had a faint feeling that all the officers at the meeting were having sips of black coffee laced with alcohol. In an official business meeting! In the presence of female employees!
That turned out to be true. When I met the officer for the attestation, I caught a whiff of alcohol on his breath. The coffee had indeed been laced with liquor! The conclusive hint was that the government beverage outlet was just opposite this government office, and maybe the alcohol was a business complement.

The Intrepid Malayalee goes travelling

You see a person in a train, whom you can't place. You doubt whether he is a Malayalee because he does not have the usual walrus moustache, the oily hair or the malayalee accent.
Well when you notice that he has got into the train at 3 am in the night and has set his mobile alarm for 6 am in the morning, and having slept for just 3 hours still goes to the basin to wash his teeth for an infinite period of time, a homespun towel draped across his shoulders, you can be sure then that he belongs to the malayalee tribe. As Douglas Adam quotes in the HitchHiker's guide to the galaxy
<quote>
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
</quote>
It may not be for these reasons that the malayalee carries his threadbare towel (homespun, because it is easy to clean it by just wringing it), but all the same it is a malayalee trademark - a symbol of hygiene.
In fact most labourers in Kerala can be found with a red towel wrapped across their head as they go about their menial tasks and when he comes home the first thing he will do is wring the sweat and water out of the "toowal" and have a long renovating bath with the costliest herbal soap available in the market.
Mark these actions. You can bet he was brought up in the best of malayalee tradition.
To a malayalee sleep is sacrosant. He will never disturb his body clock, come what may, I think even if there were to be a mild earthquake.
Another malayalee trait is the habit of constantly worrying. If he reaches a bus stop and has just missed a bus by five minutes, he will spent ages fretting about it. And he can be even verbal about it. "If I was just five minutes early..." to all who care to listen!
This is in sharp contrast to the laid back attitude of rural north india. Time does not flow, it stops. If a bus is missed, of course there will be another bus coming, even though it might be after a good six hours!
I am posting a flowchart that shows what we must worry about, and when nothing can be gained by crying over split milk. But that goes against the malayalee mindset!

Good Old Y.M.C.A. Days

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

North Bridge is Falling Down!

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

Mallus and their Civility!!

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

The Magic of Polaroids

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