Max In Chennai

Savai Gandharva Music Festival

2007-12-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, SGMF kicked off here at Puné, on a coldish December evening.
This is the 55th year running that this behemoth of a music festival has swung into action.
My 12th year running, having hardly ever missed a session.
I may bunk a concert or two, for my musical tastes may not match the organizers'.
But bunking a session is unthinkable.

The reigning deity of this city musically speaking is Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, a vocalist who looks and sounds like a lion amids a zoo composed of many beasts. His personality, singing style and individuality are all so towering that he has failed to produce a single disciple who could come within earshot of his resounding reputation. "Nothing grows beneat a banyan tree..." so goes a saying, and he epitomizes it.

There may be a hundred explanations possible here but I like mine the best, ahem. I strongly feel, all his disciples, including his son Shrinivas Joshi on whom the mantle of Chief Organiser of SGMF has fallen this year (who likes Pink Floyd too, a bit of trivia worth pondering upon) are so much in sheer awe of this genius, they have failed to allow their own style to grow. Indian audiences are way too finicky -they cannot stand a musician imitating another. One who gets fame and can sustain is one who is original. I have heard six or seven of his disciples and believe me none of them sound any different from the grand old man himself. Some of his disciples, tend to copy his mannerisms, his wild repertoire of facial expressions, his forceful hand gestures, his total involvement in performing... one feels overpowered by a sense of deja vu when listening to any disciple. Thus one knows, none of them will reach the first heaven, if he is sitting on the seventh, reputation-wise.

All these years, I have been very chirpy on the first day, but yesterday was an exception. The place seemed dull somehow -except for the chilling breeze coming over from the river within shouting distance, nothing major seemed amiss. The concerts kick off with a Shehnai player, at an ungodly hour (musically speaking) of 1600 hours (4.00pm) -and that is too late to be day and too early to be night. So I end up giving the first concert a miss. Yesterday as I lazily prepared myself for the ordeal of eight hours of non-stop music, I gave he second concert a near-miss too.

Whilst I hugged myself to keep warm, despite the absence of chiling wind, there was a foggy sort of cold evening setting in, the sun had just set. I heard the most melodious voice of a youngster, sounding startlingly like Pt. Narayanrao Vyas or Pt. Vinayakrao Patwardhan. It brought to my mind the incredible voices of Vidhyadhar Vyas or Prabhakar Karekar -something very 'old world' and charming about them all. I mistook it for the voice of Shrinvas Joshi, since Pt. Bhimsen Joshi was attending the festival despite his frail health -he is nearly fully paralyzed and a couple of brain surgeries have left him weak. He sits in his car, which is driven close to the dais, and the camera manned by some music lover who worships him, keeps worrying him too often.

I read in the papers that the last twenty minutes of that vocal recitals were by Anand Bhate, a new vocalist singing for the first time. He had been buoyed up enormously by the fact that Pt. B. Joshi himself was watching him. I felt sore about having missed the khayal... and had to contend with only a natya sangeet snatch.

What I had come especially to listen to, was next. The famous Gundecha Brothers. The famous duo who sing the old fashioned Dhrupad Dhamar style with a high fidelity. How time passes, I too wondered, sitting on a thin rug spread out over a long distance. I had to sit because this sort of serious music is no fun when one is shifting weight from leg to leg, and casting longing looks at the urinals behind the main shamiana. I sat quietly next to a young lady whose hand gestures gave her away as a music teacher -they all keep a tab on the rhythm religiously, tapping their right palm on the right knee, once facing upwards, once facing downwards. This is a vey 'South Indian' way of keeping track of 'taal' to my mind. After all Puné is 'dakkhan' meaning south in Urdu or Hindustani which the Britishers corrupted to Deccan... the gateway to south. Thus one who has not spent a lifetime here in this music studded city nor in south, all these south Indian mannerisms are very obvious, as obvious as a foreign accent.

It has always been difficult for me to slip into a raag easily when someone is singing the leisurely laid out alaap, so the raag they were singing sounded like Jayjaywanti and Jhinjhoti to my muddy ears.... and miraculously turned into Adana in their Dhrupad rendition with rather a forceful bandish 'Shiva Shankar Mahabali'. The raag was Shree, chosen rather aptly since it is a sandhi-prakash raag, sung during the twilight hours. Though their faces have not changed much in the last 15 years, one of them has a mottled grey head. The younger one still looks youthful. The last time I heard them and drove them from their host's place in the University Area in Baroda, to the Music College where they were performing, it was in 1992. nearly 15 years ago. Due to the increasing rush, and the higher level of security for the performers, it seemed nearly impossible to approach them, so I dropped the idea of meeting them.

I didn't stay long, after they had brought the house down with their rendition of raag Shree which is rather a dry and abstract melody. The next performer turned out to be a sarangi player Murad Ali with links to the legendary Ustad Sabri Khan of Delhi. I somehow failed to get into the skin of the performance, listlessly wandered around and walked out several hours earlier. The main performer to follow would have been Arti Anklikar-Tikekar whom I have heard very often at Baroda, and who has never seemed five star material to me at all.

On the whole, a satisfying visit. Friday I am bunking, but will surely go on Saturday.

Cheerz!

Living Out Of A Suitcase

2007-09-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

Life teaches us a lesson every single day.
Most of us disregard each lesson since we led mechanical lives.
I have written elsewhere that most of us sleepwalk thru' a life.
That's a fact.

The more stubborn you are the more stupid repetition of a
lesson will re-occur. Some of us are stupid enough to defy God,
or Nature if you like because Life that perpetual prankster acts
like beer on an innocent. One may feel smarter, handsomer, richer,
more powerful.
Less inhibited, and dangerously reckless.
This reckless part fascinates me no end.

Recently I put up this question at my Facebook Wall where
people ask weird queries mainly with the intention of gauging
the smartness, depth and wit of the friends who may choose
to reply. Why are people so aggressive whilst using emails?
Very few replied and the general tone was that most people
safe from physical attacks on email circuit...
however, my feelings are slightly more 'expansive' here.
The scenario is not as simple as that. The older you get, the
more complex scenarios get. Nothing remains as simple as the
world used to be through a school-kid's eyes.

There's an element of 'intoxication' involved here... not in the
wine-drunk sense of the word but 'power-drunk' sense. Just as
twelve- year old boy may feel if the controls of a twin-engined
Cessna were in his hands. Or a twenty-five old Simian mind-set
owning adolescent may feel with a Formula 1 car under his command.
Or an older one with an automatic rifle in his hands. That sense of
power, and a sense of total invincibility brings out the animal inside.
We as very prim and proper citizens keep this animal under multiple
wraps out of sheer habit.

But boys in Sri Lanka who grew up with rape arson killing and
marauding have a tattered rag for a wrap. So do the boys who
grew up up killing killing - have heard stories about school-age
boys who have never seen school, go to 'the mountains' to relieve
themselves, with loaded rifles for company.
These boys shoot to kill the moment they spy a movement.

I deliberately used the adjective 'Simian' because the adolescent
mind at times is too 'monkeyish' to be human. Thus the same
recklessness you can find in a youth busy writing and shooting
off reckless emails, as you find in the youth in LTTE areas or
Afghanistan, heavily drunks with gun power.

Women have a civilizing effect on men. Some wag very rightly
said : when women have nothing to do and are bored, they go
shopping -when men have nothing to do and are bored, they go
and invade a country. It's too true. Because women are the first
to get dehumanized in war, they are wary.

Are there women designing new weapons of war? A better
bullet with a hollow space inside so that it collapses on itself after
piercing the flesh of the 'enemy' and then going berserk? Or a nuke
bomb with much more devastation power? Or chemical agents?
Are women adapt at drumming up a frenzy to declare a war on
the neighbouring country in the name of national pride?
Do they covet the strange men they have never seen whom they could
rape, maul, maim and then hang from the nearest pole?

That the western women today 'power dress' by wearing manly suits,
and claw their way up the corporate ladder with more masculine
aggression than was drilled into their genetic material -makes sad
reading / watching. Women cannot be expected to bring about long
-lasting peace between fighting neighbours. Golda Meyer, Margaret
Thatcher and Indira Gandhi fought wars and caused more harm to
peace than their male predecessors. Women politicians can be equally
cold -blooded in eliminating their adversaries, as if ordering a snake to
have its head crushed by a paid commando.

Long term abuse of human body (which is intimately connected to the
brain and hence the human mind) may perhaps bring about fundamental
changes in human DNA too. Two or three centuries down the line in future,
males and females if they are around, may be born with the 'kill kill kill'
instinct uppermost in their minds.

Sad.

No cheerz.

(c) Max Babi

Inspiration can come in from any direction...

2007-08-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

My associates at Nashik, as a company, must seem to an outsider like me, a gangling teenager, full of itself and usually unable to learn much from the daily knocks that life deals us all regardless of our power, prestige and station in life. They are indeed at a delicious juncture in life.

I have often discussed the vital importance of HR -creative approaches, incentive, motivation and all tha jazz which generally fail to impress a small scale industry -regardless of its position, potenital and potency, if that is the word I seek. Hmmm, yes -that's it.

Frankly I had several friends in the corporate training world who may have shown a keener interest in doing to this company what I would have certainly loved doing, if I were not positioned as a technical wizard offering consultancy. No matter how creative I am, howsoever intuitive, insighful and even effective in 'prognosis' (ahem, a word I picked up from my friend Dr. Ram Chattopadhyay, one of the pioneers in advanced surface engineering, now teetering on the last phase in retirement... once a deadly foe with blind power who refused to help me -but then, what's the point. Past is relevant only if it brings a smile to your face. The rest is junk. Unless you are a masochistic junkie.)

So they gave me a pleasant surprise by showing me, along with 70+ other colleagues some with kids in tow, the new hit Chak De India! I whiled away the Saturday by doing odd jobs like getting my prepaid 'e-charged' and wearing my shoes out in the process. Yesterday was uncharacteristically hot and humid, with a fierce sun showing off its unmatched power. Today it is back to dark clouds and occasional showers, the sort of weather I have come to love very much.

I have a poor memory for faces, and of late my short term memory has been shot. Reaching the cinemahall Fame something like 45 minutes early was a 'faux pas' indeed. I got embarrassed umpteen times by strangers smiling, saluting, even offering a hand to shake... for they were all workers from the Precise group. Out of context, I didn't recognise a single face! Their dark green overalls and bright yellow helmets were missing, and they all looked 'scrubbed' free of oil and grease and worse, that their hands show me. Like Benazir Bhutto the ex-PM of our naughty neighbours, I generally hide my dainty hands behind my back to avoid getting greased. Wilson, came early too. He is a truly kind soul whose help to me in fabricating a complex piece of machinery has been precious. When the boss is away, it is this shy-ish middleaged man who drives to the Nasik Club, by now my second home, and picks me up on the dot. Once he found me a laundry too, when I had extended my stay and ran out of clothes.

Now he has a college going daughter whose name I didn't catch but she reminded me (again lets blame my short term memory having deserted me wholly) that she was a final year student in mechanical engineering. Thus we had a nice little tete-a-tete, I had to keep telling her to do some post graduation in CAD/CAM i.e. computer-aided design/manufacturing. She stressed her drawing is good, which on her third repetition, I had to dilute a bit by saying drawing is the language of engineering. I think she wasn't sensitive enough to take umbrage, indicating how simple a soul she must be. We had to chat for a long time, for the show seemed delayed. Well, in good time the show started.

I found this movie quite good -it's rare that I find a movie so good I don't sleep thru' it... I am banned by wife and daughter from snoring thru' movies, so they leave me tinkering with the computer and assault quite a number of movies. Chak de India, has been directed well, and Shahrukh Khan the current heart-throb about whose movies I have never been too encouraging, seemed to have executed a complex role well. One lives thru' the story, as it were, and that's saying a good deal indeed.

I was more astounded to find a serious meeting at the factory next day, and even another day after that. Six workers had to get up and speak for 90 seconds, too brief I thought, but many struggled after 30 seconds flat and had to give up. Public speaking does not come to most folks. Period.
More later... as this practice continues.
Cheerz!
(c) Max Babi

Not Being Able to See The Mountain

2007-08-24T03:22:00.000-07:00

When Dr. Murray Banks, one of the top speakers on psychiatric problems, who combines his wit and acting talents amazingly said : eight out of ten Americans are neurotics, it shook me up. Personally I would have put the figure at four at the most -but reality is always waiting round the corner with a sockful of sand to hit me hard at the medula oblongata and knock me out.

Now the logical corollary to this finding would be : if the average person is mad (sorry I am not using 'neurotic' to be politically correct, for this sounds to me like a catastrophy rating 9.5 on the much-abused Richter scale, God help those poor two, who think they are sane. When a majority thinks you are mad, even when the majority itself is quite mad -you have the chance of a snowflake in an overheated steel plant to survive. It can be so darned hot there people often remove their shirts and vests, and walk out in the mid-day sun even if it is the Mid-may scorching heat. It is a relief beyond the pale or words and phrases.

So when a mad world, or a representative chunk of the world declares you are mad, just because you happen to be one of the two sane persons being judged by an overwhelmingly insane crowd, what do you do? Rather akin to facing a murderous crowd of people hellbent on killing you, and not in the mood to listen to logic or explanations or prayers or pleading or invoking the name of God either. You get killed.

Some really great scholars have been butchered this way by a transient wave of insanity that goes through like horizontal lightening through a crowd of good for nothing rioteers : and no city in the world has the mesmerizing fascination for rioting than Ahmedabad. Some celebrated Gujarati journalists cum authors have admitted, gloatingly, that the public there loves a riot now and then... given a free hand they could have a year long orgy of attacking, maiming, killing, raping, shoving impossible objects into the genitals of a person (this shocks you? Then you don't know much about our illustrious past. The Hindi saying 'Shooli par chadhana' always foxed me till I asked my good ole mother about it one day. She said in her matter of fact tone that it was a punishment where the offender was made to sit on a sharp pointed cone of steel. With his -never heard of a woman having suffered this ignominy- own weight, he would feel the point piercing his anus and slowly sink downwards. The crowd of idle onlookers, and there has never been a dearth of them anywhere in India at any point in time, would cheer lustily as the slow progress to death would go on...the more he writhed the faster he sank, the wider his arsehole got. I nearly retched -but reality has managed to stay a step ahead of me in this respect. The brutality, the cruelty and the raucous laughter at someone dying shorn of all human dignity seems to have fascinated mankind above all pastimes. My head usually hangs in shame, every single day, because the TV channels today are showing much more shocking reality with a benign sumptuousness, a smug orgy of reporting minus emotionality. Tchah!). Riots have their own un-pretty history.

Why do people fail to grasp the enormity of a catastrophe close at hand?

Like most of us are least bothered by scientists warning us about the ozone layer depletion or worse still, the global warming. I have been sneaking into seminars and reading up material on all this and as a human being capable of thinking, I am disgraced every moment by the smug callousness of a wide majority of people. No one seems to think it is right to believe that because the arctic snow is melting, or the Ganges Glacier is melting, there could be floods devastating enough to destroy millions upon millions of people.

I got a similar feeling when I saw a forest fire for the first time, in the Saputara jungles, in south Gujarat. There was a raging fine measuring sixteen kilometres by six or so, and it was rapidly coming towards a settlement of tribals. The heat was so intense, standing two kilometres away we were feelng singed, but even then most of my friends refused to believe the fire could reach the village in a few hours. I believed the forest officer who predicted that. In fact, it reached much earlier, fanned on by a strong breeze.

I feel, this is rather a stupid human failing. If you walk in the shadow of a mountain, and if you have just been transplanted there without knowing even an iota of the local geography, chances are when I tell you : " Look at the mountain....!" You will whirl around and ask me the inevitable question : " Where, where, where?"

We have always failed to know trouble, real soul-curshing existence-smashing trouble, if it is standing next to us. Homo sapiens, after all.

Einstein rightly said : " Two things are infinite. The universe and the human stupidity. And I am not too sure about the former."

Welcome to a mad mad mad world, getting madder by the moment.

Cheerz!

(c) Max Babi
Nashik 230808

OneIndia.org Calls This A Premier Blog...

2007-08-17T04:53:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks!

OneIndia.org chose this blog as one of India's premier blogs !

I received this bit of glad tidings with a mixed bag of emotions, akin to slurping an icecream cone and banging your head against a low entrance. Frankly it came as a shot in the arms to a writer who had given up on the fickle crowd reading his raves and rants. No matter what you do, writers, your readers will not be faithful or loyal to you. Remember these prophetic words... it will save you heart-burn.

Thank you Oneindia.org, I needed your support. I had been neglecting this blog for too long. Now I shall write more regularly. Hopefully.

It's been almost a year now since I relocated from Chennai, despite several warnings and oodles of well-meaning of advice, I continued with the name which surely is highly misleading for I haven't seen Chennai even once during the intervening period. Am likely to be visiting it very soon, but that's an another story. So the name shall continue.

There indeed are some loyalists amongst my well-meaning friends who tell me they enjoy reading my rambling thoughts about various travels. 'Zen Writer' aka John Mathew, suggested I call it 'Max Tracks'. My wife said I run into trouble every time I travel so the name 'Travel Travails' would be more apt. I guess so. Why travel travails, you will get to know by and by, there are stories crawling out from the basket like restless eel-like fish one sees jumping up and about in an open rectangular tray under a Pipal tree, on the road to the Anna Nagar East side Poonga (the park for the Tamil-challenged).

The latest story here, is my trip to Ambernath -where I had been in Feb. this year and written a detailed couple of blogs -never posted. The laptop that supported me brightly through my Chennai days, concked out in the cooler confines of the hill station-like ambience of Bavdhan, the valley wherein we stay, in Pune. It didn't die out like a man with a massive heart-attack. It died slowly like a chronic case of diabetes, funnily, it revived itself so often, I erroneously concluded it was a mechanical fault. According to several repairers it was not a loose connection or some such mundane thing. It was the 'motherboard' -I have become a bull to tht red rag of a tag, 'motherboard'. There are lusty swearwords prefaced with 'mother' and I know several of them in several languages but none makes my bile levels hit the roof like 'motherboard' does. God help the next pretender who wants to take my Toshiba Satellite laptop and come back saying the 'motherboard' has kicked the bucket. It can't I keep telling them.

The first such adventurer was a UP-ite running a so-called 'we do chip-level repairs' sort of laptop repairer. It took me hours to reach him and since I have done extensive electronics repairs, even manufacturing, something no one will believe, I could see they were under pressure. Under way too much pressure to be free to do chip-level repairs. It is an easy way out to replace whole cards rather than replace chips... it was plain to see. I left the laptop with this young dark and ugly specimen, who said he would keep it for four days minimium. We were to go to Goa for the X'mas holidays, so even a week didn't matter.

His 'take-it-or-leave-it; attitude, coupled with a superb arrogance befitting the Prince of Xanadu, that only easy money, ill-begotten wealth can breed, didn't go down well with me at all. 'The motherboard is gone.' he said when I met him next. He said it pontifically, a statement five other guys with very different looks and outlooks on life were to repeat as shamelessly as experienced street-walkers. The cost would be Rs.19,000/- he also added. Since i had bought the laptop at just Rs7,000/- more, it sounded like the engine of my second hand car had conked out. I tried every trick with him but he clung to this mother-freaking motherboard like a desperate lizard sticking to the outside wall in a cyclone. I gave up.

Next to get my goat was good old Lalit, my hardware man who fixed my PC so well, I sent him to three more friends. He avoided looking at my laptop the way one avoids looking at the luscious sister of a new friend on the first visit. Instinctively I knew something was amiss. When a guy doesn't look you in the eye there's mischief afoot. Something terriby dishonest. He sat on my poor laptop for another two weeks and finally rang me up : 'The motherboard is gone.' I whispered extremely naughty words beginning with mother- but he was deep into some hardware explanation that sounded like a fairytale.

The third torturer exists in Nashik. I lugged my heavy laptop -why does it get heavier when it doesn't work? And he came to the factory where I have spent months designing, assekmbling and now testing India's largest and most sophisticated plasma ion nitriding system -fully automated. He seemed in charge of the seemingly advanced 'bluetooth' multistation internet services etc. I gave him the laptop and it rotted further for nearly a month with him. Today, tomorrow he went onmakin excuses and giving false promises. Whenever I increased pressure he sent the laptop back saying he was not free to look into it. Finally he too rang up and told me what I didn't want to hear :' The motherboard is gone.'

Now the mother of all hopes is gone. I have learnt how to live without a laptop.

Sigh...

Here's Another Post... erratic as ever....

2007-05-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

I am in Nashik.
Been here for nearly a week now. Came with wife and daughter who were free. They hung around for a while and then pushed off. They are back now in Pune -and am staying on for a while.

Pune despite its reputation as an air-conditioned city, has been boiling of late. Of course this is dry heat, not the pressure-cooker type that Mumbai or Chennai subject you to. Even Kolkata does that. For those not used to humidity, that
constant feeling of being soiled, is something impossible to get used too. Three baths a day don't help. I feel soiled the moment I emerge from the bath -it's horrid.

On the whole Nashik seems cooler than Pune these days, though the rains are a week off. This must be my tenth visit here in the last year or may be a shorter period... and the spacious roads, some times as many as three roads with good width, make me wonder. Pune's road building and maintenance went to the dogs many years back. With the building of flyovers and things, Pune has been torturing its citizens sadistically. A crying shame.

Hitched up with a local company for buildng a sophisticaed sort of surface treatment system, and now a Mumbai based environment preservation company wants us to develop a waste destruction system using very high temperatures, something which only thermal plasmas can do efficiently. But the development isn't a cakewalk either. The gas to be used air, which maks the design and runnng of the system pretty tricky. Have completed the first draft and enjoyed doing what I used to some 20 years ago... challenges like this are certainly the adrenaline pumping types and I do enjoy them.

May have to stay here for longer periods, it seems. So went around seeing houses, actually saw just one, and liked it. May not have to stay at the Nashik Club. The club, mind you is a peaceful haven. This time they gave us a suite
with a terrace and no other room could be sexier. However for the first three days there were weddings, and the club lawns were mauled just as our eyes and ears were too.

The first wedding was a real 'class' affair, meaning, the royal class type. No one made any uncivilized noises nor went around harassing others. The decor was tasteful, the guests were all polished and soft-spoken, even the body language seemed highly groomed. The next day, oh Lord! Some country bumpkins came by the busloads, and produced enough noise to split the skies wide open. Urchins went about pressing doorbells and mutilating the lifts, orgiastically. A garishly uniformed country band came with two pathetic looking Micky Mouse and some other horrid cartoon character dressed up to be eight feet tall. A genderless singer screamed like a Banshee on drugs, and the band-mates played mainly between the keys. To make noise was their aim, none else.

The second day another country bumpkin lot came and occupied various halls for dressing and undressing - I ran smack into groups of ladies engaged in such activities and returned without reaching my room. Thank God, there has been no wedding for last two days.

More later.
Ciao!

Things musical...

2007-03-30T05:25:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Music is one prime reason why I continue living in Pune, though at times, like millions of others well the city treads on my toes and yelps emanate at time with a gush of profanities... have had many fights uselessly. My silver beard lets me get away with reactive assaults on ill-mannered youngsters.

Baroda or Vadodara as it is called, used to be my nowhere-place, my private little heaven where for years I would have prospered in total anonymity for the city never had any pretensions of being a metro -and if that has contributed to my solitude-seeking nature, well... so be it.

Pune has often been described as a bigger and brighter version of Baroda. Not for nothing, that has been said often. Countless times I have parked my car or got rid of an auto-rickshaw to walk around aimlessly in the labyrinthine mazes of Sadashiv Peth or crumbling houses crowding Kasba Peth or Bhavani Peth with their indelible stamp of poor Muslim families herded together in sub-human conditions... and Baroda swings back in my mind like a steel pendulum and knocks me nearly unconscious. All the mazes of bylanes around Nyaya Mandir or Mandvi even parts of Champaner Gate area would be very similar to what I experience here. Nearly the same architecture, the same passion for a spot of greenery -which could be teeny weeny potted plants, a great amount of cleanliness, quite a lot of useless junk thrown in heaps in the courtyard or in a tiny veranda depending upon the size of the dwelling. People show the same friendliness to a lost stranger, and give very precise, correct and true answers.

'True' may be an odd man out in the sentence above, but I do recall several friends in the upmarket Alkapuri area who used to sit on compound walls to while away the hours every day from 4.00pm to midnight -colossal waste of time, but then does it matter, when you are an adolescent? Now it does perhaps, in our times it did not. Several of my cronies, otherwise good sons and disciples, good boys nicely brought up, used to be averse to stranger stopping and asking :" Which is the way to Baroda People's Society?" One of these boys would point in any random direction and send the guy on a wild goose chase. Many times, the same guy would be back sweaty, fatigued on his bicycle and with glowering coals in his eyes : " Waah yaar, aavun karvanun? (hey pal, why did you do that?) and with profuse apologies the same guy will direct him to another wrong lane... we would disperse long before the guy would return with loud abuse and intent to maul.

Baroda had its musical overflow -one could hear some singer or the other practising virtually in every lane. Some of my best evenings in that unforgettable city were spent listening to the heavenly voice of Ranjana Dharwadkar, then an All-India Radio artist and a huge celebrity for us to rub our shoulders with and exchange civilities. We were a bunch of unwashed college students, or guys who had just taken up jobs and the university still attracted us so much we would be spending most of our wakeful hours either in the university, either at Fine Arts faculty (now called Performing Arts) or in the Science/Arts section where we had buddies. Many of us would cancel appointments when Mrs. Dharwadkar was scheduled to sing on the radio. A borrowed transistor radio would be arranged and a hold-your-breath sort of silence would prevail. The occasional teas-shop boy with his loud voice and loutish manners would be violently suppressed into silence when the lady would be singing. Endless bidis and cigarettes would be rolled and smoked with rapture in everyone's eyes.... some of us were very knowledgeable, apart from yours truly and his music-crazy younger brother, for instance Simeen Punegar who had trained for 14 years under Pandit Dinkar Kaikini. She would do her own riyaz in the tiny cottage where Renjan lived -with his larger than life reputation of a painter who painted, not talked but really produced paintings... there was every year a profusion of young girls barely out of teens, who woud descend upon this ex-drug abuser who had seen it all, and spend days and nights at his place. Talented youngsters flocked to his place -soon we found out why. He could tell stories.

And that can be a huge attraction -it has been so for millenia. More about music later.

Ciao!
(c) Max Babi
Nashik

More On Benumbing Denumbing

2007-03-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Well, my numb foot didn't bother me hugely, for I had been told by a doc that diabetics do get now hot now cold sensations in their feet.

During the last year's whole body check up I mentioned to the young lady inspecting my nervous system that numbness in feet is normal amongst diabetics. She reacted, rather reared up like a scared horse, and told me in no uncertain terms that no numbness can ever be normal.

That dart stayed in the stormy petrel that my mind happens to be, and the haunted chamber with whimsical flashes that it can become now and then... and when I started stumbling too often on wobbly feet, I sought expert help. Well that was two months or more, ago. Things had come to a sorry pass by then, I was slipping and falling in bathroom without any soap on the floor, and at times I felt hallucinations. The floor, hard solid ceramic tiled floor would feel as if muddy up to a depth of an inch or more. Sometimes the floor would tilt. But the worst effect was being helpless whilst falling. How many face-smashing bone-crunching and blood-curdling accident possibilities passed me by would make a litany of miracles.

The youngish doctor at a speciality hospital laughed at the idea of a brain scan (been an incurable hypochondriac, so new symptoms and tests get my adrenaline pumping like nobody's business. Almost with the fierceness of a Russian pump. Why Russkie? Well, they like to do things big. In the 1960s their science magazines had reported a pump large enough to empty out a whole river in spate....whew, mind boggling indeed. That was the time when they had made cranes big enough to dig out and lift up five storeyed buildings from a street to the next. Wow.
At the end of my fatigued list of symptoms the good doc laughed again and started me off on a regime of tonics and medicines aimed at the nerves.

The first month seemed like a chain of miniscule miracles stringed up together... my benumbed feet became alive. I could feel the sensations creeping right back into portions that must have been dead for months not weeks. It was rather like the temporary numbness induced by sitting in some clumsy posture for hours... even the pinpricks that a normal person feels whose nerves have not been mauled by long term diabetes, returned. It was fun to realize and tell myself :
hey I used to feel like that before 2000 or like this before 1996.

On my second visit to the immensely good doc I made the mistake of telling him, based on his explanations and my extrapolations that probably my sensitivity, newly gained was a bit too much, so he changed one medicine. Another time I told him my motor nerves had not gained so much as the sensor nerves. Another doc would have seen to it that the bouncers threw me into the river nearby. But not our cool cat. He looked amused, as if his pet dog had claimed he could ride the bike... so he made me lay down on the couch and hammered my ankles and pressed here and there. Finally he made me stand up with feet touching each other and watched me sway a little with my eyes closed. I have been doing this, a little cheating during the Friday prayers at the mosque -where nine out of ten guys around me seem to be swaying much more than me.

Strangely enough, the doc said my diagnosis was right. Whew, I was thrilled. This probably coincided with hearing from a lady adminsitrator at a medical institute in Chandigarh. I have been mailing proposal to such establishments to run a 1-day o 2-day workshop on advanced materials for surgeons and medical folks. There are indeed magical new materials available in the market and not too visible. Materials like shape memory alloys that remember a particular shape given to a piece at a certain temperature. Plunge this piece into cold water, and the shape changes. For yet another shape, shove it into boiling water.

Doctors today carry one surgical device instead of several... cold water makes the tool it had serrations (like a hack saw blade or a file) and hot water makes it remember it had a sharp piercing point. To lend a little panache and flair to my feeler I had sent a list of ten queries to be asked to the good docs, if anyone could answer even two, he or she didn't need my course. Another medical society in Bangalore has bitten the bait too. So things are taking a positive new turn in a new direction, these days. A whole gamut of new challenges cropping up...

cheerz!

(c) Max Babi 040307

Waking Up...

2007-02-06T23:12:00.000-08:00

Ah, a wake up call.
Been slumbering a-la Rip Van Winkel for long.

Gods are angry at me, perhaps.
In the last six months at Pune, when the extended rainy season
provided us all with a bonus, low temperatures and slow breeze
to live up to the reputation of an 'air conditioned' city, misfortunes
trickled quietly in.

In the manner of spy soldiers, sneaking into a slumbering village.
Dark shadows bodiless, soundless, noiseless, never stumbling,
always creeping.

The first kill was my ageing car. It died. It died at the hands of my dear
anti-technology wife who is a scientist at loggerheads with science on
a 24x7 basis. It has transcended repairs, facelift, overhaul -nothing
remains except cannibalizing it piecemeal to get some cash now and then.
I haven't touched it for months. It seems to glare at me like a grandma
on her deathbed, I shudder at the implied meanings, and quietly
change my path, every blessed morning.

The second kill was my dear laptop that I got in Chennai.
Toshiba Satellite. It had grown to be an extension of my
body, and if looks could kill, well they do in my case they
bloody well do... my wife had been giving it looks as if it
were a nubile young female I had smuggled in to have
orgies with.

In a way, my relationship with the highly obedient laptop was almost sinful.
I used to wake up at four in the morning, long long before the neighbourhood
cock would get up to crow and strut about as if he were the Prez of USA, about
to order half a million troops into another devastated land...

I guess feminine jealousy transcends words, phrases and poetic expression.
It equates in terms of all-knowing chemistry with aviation fuel, plastique jelly
that explodes with a puff, and chillies that make your eyes water.

Looks, dirty looks, wordless looks, unabashed killing looks killed my laptop.
It just shut up shop one fine morning.

The born tinkerer and handyman that I am ( I have mastered practical
electronics on my own to be able to put together complex stereo systems
or repair the keyboards and industrial machinery) I couldn't help toggle
a loose connection. The power cord had a very guilty looking jack that
could be pushed slowly or hard. The results would be different. I invented
six ways of pushing the bloody jack in, and probably gave untold trouble to
the laptop that had to bear my tap tap tap for four hours in the ungodly hours.

It started switching itself off, in 45 minutes.
Later on, it got more cranky than a teenage girl, and may switch off in
five minutes. Once off, it would remain off for days, weeks, and even
a painful, agonizing month.

I made the mistake of finally taking it to a repairer who claimed they
had facilities for chip level repairs. After making me wait unceremoniously,
pining away like an adolescent male first time in love....in fact all through
our four nights and five days at Goa, that piece of Heaven on earth, I pined
away, unashamedly.

The motherboard is gone. Said the sly repairer. It cannot be repaired
and all that is possible is an exchange (so that he gives me another
time bomb or a landmine that will go off at the most importune moment,
I strongly suspect).

Now the PC, my workhorse that struggles with half a million files,
that I have either created or downloaded or allowed to sneak in, went phut.

Gosh.
More later.

cheerz!

Mind Over Matter

2006-12-14T19:17:00.000-08:00

When my physician complimented me on my medical awareness, calling me her best patient, due to the fact that I pay much more attention to any thing unusual happening to my body and even mind, I walked on Cloud Nine for weeks.

Lately, I have begun to re-analyze my thoughts. On one hand, I think of one of my best friends, whom I barely met five or six times in a period of fifteen years, but due to our common passion for high quality Hindustani Classical music, we got along like a house on fire. Girish Patel, a hunk of a man, heftily built and one who relished such a wide variety of junk food with his spirits, upped and died last year having suffered barely a week of illness. His perceptive wife, later told me, the doctors had warned her that all his vital organs had been damaged beyond redemption and he had only a few days to live. That's total disregard for your health. Dying suddenly when you have reached the point of no return, and when life has just begun -for being in late forties or early fifties is one of the best periods in life, sounds like height of stupidity to me.

Two months ago, I was summoned by circumstances to travel from Chennai to Baroda to infuse some badly needed confidence into my own younger brother, Ashphaque whose medical awareness and physical fitness fanaticism borders on pure obsession. He had got paralysed. How can a healthy young man in his late forties, who jogs three hours day, avoids junk food painfully, eats perfectly calculated diet with expensive supplements like dry fruits and juices etc., could suffer paralysis? Looking back, I was also aghast to realize that since Abbajan died when my younger brother was just an adolescent, I have been a father figure to him indeed. Today, he reflects every good taste in life exactly according to my personal likes and dislikes, barring a few.

It turned out that a lady dentist who had known him for decades, had tried to dislodge a painful wisdom tooth. Since he complained of too much pain despite a local anasthesia, she gave him a double dose without checking his papers. He has been hypertensive like all males in my family, and the result was predictable. He burst a vein his brain, after three hours. He realized he had forgotten how to swallow -and that cause a wave of panic that disturbed his family with ripples reaching me in far off Chennai.

Gujarat was reeling under an unprecedented rainy spell. I had to get into adventures to reach Baroda from Mumbai, a 12 hour journey that took 22 hours. I saw several feet of mud piled up along side road, where village folks were unearthing dead and rotting bodies. I suffer from a sugar problem too, and had nightmares when no food and water were available for such a long period. God bless the enterprising Gujarati bhais for they come to stranded buses on the highway with no hope of unsnarling the traffic jams, to sell eatables. Fresh khaman (some non Gujaratis erroneously calle them Dhoklas) never tasted so good. The best sauce in the world is hunger, according to a Spanish proverb.

I reached Baroda, and Ashphaque lying in bed, with a plastic tube going through his nose for force feeding, smiled and welcomed me. His wife and daughters were enthraled because he spoke for the first time in two weeks... on seeing me. He had to struggle through a rigorous regimen for the body and mind to come back to normal, which he did. Our two days together peppered with hours of music, helped too. Within a month he was back to normal, and left for Oman on a teaching assignment.

The heightened sense of medical awareness can really help.

I am applying that to my vexing condition. My right foot went numb, one day, when I kept the laptop pressing on some nerve near the right side ankle, as I sat writing on the sofa. For two months it went on becoming worse. I started stumbling and falling at home, especially in the bathroom, on stairs and even once on a busy road.

The good doc said I need a brain scan, that scared the daylight out of me. I decided to put my sense of medical awareness to a test immediately so that a brain scan could be avoided.

More soon.

(c) Max Babi
Pune

The Seasons Change...

2006-11-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

It's incredible how seasons have been changing in Pune, where this is my twelfth year of enjoying the greenery and hilly terrain. On a macro scale perhaps the entire state of Maharashtra has been witnessing progressively more rainfall. The underground water table has gone up. This sounds like prices of petrol going down, which never happens, but these days one has to be ready to take another sock in the jaw without allowing one's eyes to pop out.

Been addicted to reading The Times Of India for more than forty years now and lately it seems to have adopted the sensationalism wholeheartedly. In continuation with the ponderous para above, I was aghast to read a cat named Mimi (nickname of my daughter who didn't like this piece of news at all) in some nowhere place in Brazil has given birth to a litter with three pups and three kitten with faces like pups. Our family friend Atreyee Dey was busy sketching me, and oh boy what a pair of sketches she produced in two or three minutes -astonishingly well done. She said it is the beginning of the end of the world. Nino my wife who speaks Bengali with this zany artist agreed, though I tend to think such changes are glacial and several millenia would float by before any end could be perceptible. Unless some monkey presses the Nuke option button somewhere... anything is possible.

Traditionally Pune receives scanty rainfall in September and October and the greenery folds up and dies without a murmur. The green hills in our Bavdhan valley become as bald as a priest in a missionary school once again, and a bland, desolate sense of brown prevails. Not so any more. This year, it is the end of November, and there has been no let up. It's been raining for the past three days. Just when the winter smell was discernible in the cool evening breeze, today I got the old familiar rainy season smell after a few days of no rain. No wonder my neighbour's rooster gets up in the middle of the day, to do his cockadoodle-do bit as if dawn were breaking. Nino thinks he is going crazy with the imminent end of the world looming up larger and faster. I think he is showing off to the brood, some dotty female may fall for him. Hope never dies.

Our neighbouring city of Mumbai has been at the receiving end for a while, with amazingly heavy rainfall. All the shortcomings of the rain drain system came once again to the fore this year, with flash floods raising blood pressure all around. Horror stories matching last year's didn't accrue but people were restless all right. Perhaps infrastructure is improving now.

Pune city has bad roads. Nowadays we have forgotten what roads are. We clamber over ditches and potholes, with an occasional glimpse of a grey matter that used to be a road centuries ago. The highly corrupt and lethargic municipal corporation has been brazenly awarding the road making contracts to proven defaulters, thus sinking spirits sank lower this year.

Congestion, traffic snarls, inefficient cops, road rage... one wonders if this could be the genesis of a Prachanda avatar here too? It was rather amusing to see World Bank seek an appointment with the dreaded Maoist leader in Nepal's capital Kathmandu where the banned leader is staying in a posh hotel. If you want to be amazed at crazy turns, study politics, I tell many youngsters. The unthinkable always happens.

Finally, the Supreme Court called the city of Chennai 'unlivable'. Ah, much fodder for thought... and gruel for future posts.

Cheerz!

(c) Max Babi

My Continuing Holiday Mood...

2006-11-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

With Chennai I seem to have left the hustle and bustle behind me. It is obvious that being a link in a chain whirring daily onwards to greater economical gains, the temptation to return to Pune as a tourist and not another chain in a smaller but whirring chain, was always strong. I am glad that holiday mood continues, for I do walk around in Koregaon Park and Bund Garden feeling as much a tourist as I used to do in 1970s.

Had a lunch date with a jazz-loving friend who sits lording over an empire of business, sharpening her skills and yet not letting her soft feelings for people take backseat ever. A compassionate heart is rather rare to find these days, and she is one for sure. Due to some unforeseen work, she had to postpone the meeting at Shisha Cafe, one of my favourite haunts at the ABC Farms complex where a lot of jazz live shows are taking place these days, by one and half hours.

Thus I decided to take a bus to Bund Garden, since my car has died completely, and take a leisurely walk through Mangaldas Road onwards to Koregaon Park. Others had reached early too, so on receiving a desperate sms from my daughter I had abandon my last leg of this long and leisurely walk to reach earlier. Shisha Cafe looks bewitchingly unreal at night. The day somehow lends a duller touch due to one's ability to see things outside. All my guests who ever visited this high on stilts, wooden masterpiece with its Iranian decor and glass-moulded hookahs that are called Shishas in Persian, have always commented on the ambience.

Two weeks back we had a lovely time with Julien Derek, an ageing Rocker on electric guitars, very ably accompanied by a younger set on drums and electric bass, and on a keyboard. I had my own doubts about a rockstar switching over to jazz, but Julien did that with consummate ease. His jazzy renditions of Summertime and Autum Leaves went down very well with Mimi, my daughter who is barely 15, with a decidedly pronounced inclination for jazz. Mehdi Noormand, the almost fully bald pinkfaced Iranian with thick glasses, had met me earlier at his other restaurant Sunrise Cafe in the Deccan Gymkhana area and asked me to show up with friends. I did, and nearly ten guys showed up, enthralling Mehdi. Though I guess, Mimi enjoyed the music, perhaps she did that all the more in mid September when Pune Jazz Club celebrated its fifth birth anniversary. We had four live bands, and she did have a gang of cousins with her to enjoy the music with. Will write about that experience in a separate post.

Cheerio!

Looking At Chennai

2006-09-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

Like I said in a recent poem posted at gather dot com,
Astronomy taught me the immense usefulness of 'side vision'.

All of us who drive vehicles decently without substance abuse or
other professional hazards, which are likely to cloud up the vision or
lend fuzzy edges to one's thinking, sooner or later realize the vitality
and import of side vision.

It is known scientifically (I was talking to Ajay Zaveri, one of my most
perceptive jazz loving friend at Mumbai whose flair of things poetical and
philosophical is nearly as great or deep as David Israel's) that the human
eye has a very complex structure. What is not known to most is the ability
of those 'rods and cones' which surround the retina, to be able to gather
even the faintest light and produce a cogent picture.

When trying to discern a nebula, so fain in some far off corner
of this vast universe (or universes?) one is better off NOT
looking at it but slyly taking a peep through side vision.
We all do that, the drivers amongst us, when someone is trying
to sneak into our force field and overtake us. No one will miss
the slightest movement.

I think I would gladly quote my poem here, since it seems very
relevant, here we go :

" A Heightened Awareness "

It's not all that difficult.
Looking at the universe in a loose
and nebulous fashion.

Astronomy taught me, if you want to
glimpse that diffuse twinkle, do not
stare at it -
use your side vision.

It never fails.

A stark and focused look
can make another person feel ripped
skin and flesh all gone from
the embarassed skeleton.

A Japanese custom demands
at least one piece of cloth should
intervene between two passionate bodies.

A heightened experience.

(c) MB 091506

So some of my future posts are predictably going to be
jelling into words through this phenomenon.

Thanks everyone who reads and chooses or not, to comment.
More soon.

cheerz!

Renaming This Blog

2006-09-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

Max In Chennai will continue for another few months.
The moments I have described are nothing compared to moments still lying like unused bank balance in my mind.... I could write three times as much as this, so let me mentally remain in Chennai though I will be soaking up life in Pune from tomorrow onwards.

Lets see.... I am not in favour of detaching Max from Chennai as yet.

Bella Ciao !

2006-08-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

On my first visit to her place, we spent an hour gaffing whilst she made tea for me putting sugar into it absentmindedly, and then profusely apologizing. I had to explain to her several times that it wasn’t such a disaster after all because I usually feel run down in the evenings and have to suck on a toffee to replenish the dangerously dipping blood sugar. The place is still bare, worse off than my place initially where the company had sent a truckload of furniture, and may remain so till things are bought and installed. But I am sure that under a woman’s hands a vacant flat takes up the appearance of a home much faster than under a man’s control. My place after four months still looks like a refugee camp even to me. So metamorphosis of her place would surely be faster.

It was planned that we meet at her office, one of the major offices hardly five or six KMs from my place in the evening around 4.00pm, so I turned up there earlier and went for a long walk to stretch my legs since sitting in the office or driving both give me a cramped up feeling. She sent a series of SMSes saying there was delay so I got another hour to walk around and get a feel of the area which is rather congested, though bordering on the main Poonamallee highway sort of road. Finally she came out and we drove down to her place as planned by the time we reached I think the sun was setting. Thus it was almost eight-ish when we set out for the visit to the beach that is close enough from her flat to make one hear the sounds of the sea. From the terrace one can glimpse the Bay of Bengal, but it was too late to see anything by the time we made it.

A long walk on the beach made me tired so I sat down on the edge of a precipice like structure, since erosion has been taking place wherever the high tide comes and does things, I guess. She preferred to stand by me and talk down rather than sit side by side. I didn’t pay much attention to it, for she had refused to sit down on the mattress that lay in her bedroom, and with two or three pillows I had to use it for rest.
On the way back, I happened to see a signboard yelling Bella Ciao! It explained that it was an Italian restaurant. I was in the mood to try out something exotic, and she seemed glad to join me in the merry making since she is definitely more informed about the continental cuisine…I usually don’t bother to remember their exotic names and trivia that goes along with them, but I enjoy the cuisine anyway. We decided to try out some pasta that she says she loves, lasagna if I didn’t mind, of course I didn’t –but the seafood part we decided to go and check upon.

It turned out to be a huge bungalow with its entire garden converted into a rather well landscaped restaurant. There were these hut-like encampments with lights and even an electric fan [something that must be redundant since the seashore is so breezy all the time]. As we sat down, a squall turned up suddenly as if Nature’s invisible band had struck up a noisy but warm welcome for us. We were both amused indeed, and soon issued orders for the food since it was getting late.

The food was indeed great, we had squids after crab soup which tasted worlds apart from my sturdy Chettinaad soup indeed. Then pasta with lasagna and lamp slices with white sauce and things… it was pretty good. There were no drinks on the menu, so I took it for granted that alcohol may not be served. As if reading my mind she said white wine would go with the stuff we were having…and this bombshell felled me instantly.
“ Do you drink?” I asked incredulously.
“ Some times. On special occasions. Wedding and things, and suchlike.”
“Wow.” I didn’t know what to say because the waiter informed us that indeed they had white wine and could be served… she refused of course, and I let the matter hang.

On the way back we were intercepted by the rather friendly owner, an Italian young man in his mid thirties with a pretty wife who looked like she were a peasant from the countryside, very focused on her supervision of the kitchen and pantry, and the small army of waiters. The man, I forget the name Ricardo or something was thrilled to give a copy of the menu to her because she wanted to be able to order food from home. Not a bad idea, but she said it would be possible only on some event, something special.
“ I’d rather walk down here and eat,” I said.
“ Me too,” she agreed, and chatted with the Italian owner who spoke in rapid-fire Italian that she failed to understand. He shrugged his shoulders and made a wry face at me, saying she only told him she had learnt Italian… we made small talk and congratulated him on dreaming up such a fine place with such fine items on the menu too. He seemed enthralled indeed and bade us a warm goodbye.
“ You should write about this in your blog,” she suggested. Indeed, I reassured her, that I would be doing that, “ shall we go and ask him his name, it would be good publicity for him-“ the marketing person in her often springs forward like a hidden side of a bipolar person. I said it didn’t really matter because millions were not thronging at my blog site as yet.

As we walked back another tiny squall came and hit us, this time we were fully exposed and had to seek shelter under a tree. A watchman from a nearby building with pitying looks kept watching us, but the squall ended as abruptly as it had come. Lightly wet, feeling buoyed up we walked back slightly faster to her apartment and I bade her goodnight from the parking lot where the Beast was waiting for me patiently, silently and reliably. I had no problems in working my way out of her locality. It was only in Adyar that I took a wrong turn and managed to get hopelessly lost in Nugambakkam area. It took me an hour and a half to be home, and in five minutes the phone rang. She asked me if I had reached home safely, so I explained my predicament and bade her good night again. I crashed in my bed immediately and slept the sleep of the dead. It had been a long day.

© Max Babi 080806

Kuppuswami -The Sky Is His Roof...

2006-08-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

Kuppusami is a short, wizened old man. Like an extra-smart micro-organism he has built himself a pseudo-house on a side of the road. It is not a house at all… it is just a two feet by five by five feet parcel of odds and ends. He keeps his stuff there, may be those are ply-wood sheet samples for business, may be leftovers. He has used kilometers of plastic sheets for wrapping and winding it all up.

He lives on the pavement, that is, he keeps wandering around in our street –which is the holy of the holies as far as streets go in Anna Nagar, East – a stone’s throw from Roundtana. The current minister occupies a palatial mansion three houses down the lane, and every time I see this man surviving kilometers below the poverty line, right next to ministers and lawyers and doctors rolling in sheer affluence and luxury, I smile.

Perhaps the very rich man staying in the house where Kuppusami’s three wheeler, the human powered tricycle with a very clean, neat and well-maintained carriage that may be something like four feet by four feet, is parked forever, is a soft-hearted creature. God knows why everytime I look beyond this old man into the affluent mansion behind his rickety holdall and the tricycle that serves as bed at night, an incidence flashes through my mind…. I had been to a tiny hotel for a beer and had emerged onto the lane that spurts into wild action every five or ten minutes. Traffic like uncontrollable dam waters gushes into the lane in four to five rows, two wheelers taking unnecessary risks and blowing their horns as if celebrating the latest college election victory. Two wheelers tend to make old men in their sixties and seventies behave like teenage school boys here, I have noticed. They especially are rapists of the horn.

Disgusted with the traffic, I was walking on the edge of the road, when I crossed the first junction and saw a man lying under a tree. Drunk, I thought in a mild haze of slightly speeded up thinking after the beer. I tend to write good poetry with a bottle or two, after that I turn into an introvert, not giving a damn about anything. As I inched closer I saw a passerby stop at the man, feel his chest, convince himself he was alive and slip in a twenty rupees or fifty rupee note into the shirt pocket. He got up and was leaving when I stopped near him. He seemed a little shellshocked to find a man stopping because the city folks with their impenetrable apathy never do that… a slight tremor went through the good man, I noticed.
Dead?” I asked.
“No,” he said breezily,” he is breathing.
“ Drunk.” I said ironically realizing I was talking to a sober man.
“Perhaps exhausted. City life can cripple you if you are sloppy about your food habits…may be he walked too long, may be he hasn’t had food to eat….” Thanking me, he left on his errand, our good Samaritan.
Hesitantly, I too bent put ten rupees in the shirt pocket of a man who seemed to be sleeping the sleep of the dead.

I have often thought of giving some money to Kupusami, whose eyes light up in a smile the moment he sees me…and our relationship is four months old now. I am scared of talking to him because people of his class, those clinging to the bottom of the lowest rungs in society usually know only Tamil and my vocabulary may be insufficient to extract sense out of whatever philosophical utterings he may have for me. The song and dance routine some follow does not really offer any substance. But then I feel nervous about doing such a thing –there’s the unmistakable gleam of pride in his shrewd little eyes. His smiling eyes that stare at you a moment longer than ordinary, and if you happen to harbor even an iota of guilt like most of these hangers-on at the honorable minister’s place do, you may find his scrutiny voyeuristic, even transgressional.

It rained one balmy evening in May, an unseasonable squall some one told me, since rainy season was months away. As I rushed past the three-wheeler parked on one side, on my quick errand –I noticed the old man was missing. But the carriage had turned into an impromptu tent of plastic sheets off-greenish in color, seemingly as wizened and weather-beaten as his own face. He had obviously put up two wood posts and turned the plastic sheet into a great little tent. There’s a professional neatness in everything he does, I have noticed, an inbuilt elegance which teeters on being artistic. As he is usually in bed long before eight o’ clock, curling up in that tiny four by four carriage like a satiated pup, I can imagine, and since we have an early sunrise well before six in the morning –I see him up pretty early. By the way we have vicious little mosquitoes in here, that’s another reason for the plastic tent, it occurs to me now. He wears a turban kind of headgear that makes his head look more bandaged than dressed up for an occasion, for rituals or out of sheer habit.

He sits smoking a bidi, a tobacco leaf rolled into a flattened cigarillo sort of a thing, with his rheumy mole-like eyes staring at nothing. A couple of times he has smiled at me in an absentminded manner, perhaps there is a sense of brotherhood between us. Both are bearded in an unkempt way, that’s the only link between that jumps to my mind. Or he thinks I am a foreigner, which is a very common reason for folks on the streets to smile and offer help, perhaps all foreigners look helpless and lost I suspect. I have been bailed out of sticky situations just for that reason, so I am not complaining.

© Max Babi 080806.

Antidote to loneliness

2006-08-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago a lady chatting with me asked me how could I manage to handle 450 friends at Ryze network [I didn't tell her about my 352 friends at Gather network], and I vaguely answered they don't write to me nor chat with me daily. Some haven't written for two years... thus friend management is easy.

Since I have failed to make a single friend from the opposite sex here for the past four month, I mean the sort of friend who could accompany me to places, enjoy Chettinaad cuisine, discuss books and music, perhaps share her latest writings with me, go for walks on the beach, so on and so forth, I shall refer to her as 'She'. There is no other 'she' in my group of friends as yet.

Little did I realize that she was herself planning to be the antidote for my loneliness. It worked out very fast indeed... in a matter of few weeks she was already here, having joined India's largest software company in its travel and hospitality section. No that is neither Wipro nor Infosys. Well, during a chat she mentioned she may perhaps be the only family I have here, and I said the same to her too. To cap it all, she can speak Gujarati since her Dad is one, though she has not learnt Konkani which her Mom speaks. But looks like once she gets her kitchen going I am going to be treated royally with Guju dishes, especially Guju Muslim delicacies like Khichdo. Wow, thinking about it makes my mouth water. That's as close to a family as it can get, I presume.

Went to the airport to fetch her, and having once had coffee with her at Mumbai during my last disastrous trip that began with the bomb blasts, we clicked as anticipated. Took her to a Chettinaad restaurant en route to her hotel in Nungambakkam but she kept nibbling at the food, seemingly worked up about lack of accommodation. Having no house to live in for nearly six weeks didn't drive me up trees as three days of staying in a hotel did to her. Set me thinking, and I told her too, women are homemakers and they can think straight only when they are at home... give a man most uncomfortable quarters with an interesting day job and he will scarcely notice. Generalizations are dangerous I know but he means me here and she means her. The rest if the homo sapiens has gone to sleep.

Since she was traveling light we saw no point in driving to her hotel just to dump two small suitcases there. We therefore drove off to Thiruvanmiyur onwards to her office at Karapakkam, in the fabled IT corridor. I chose not to get inside for the high security and other irritants. Having driven quite some distance, my limbs needed stretching so I went for a walk and a coffee. A mobile demo van was exhibiting Lenovo laptops, with fancy music and decor, the whole setting on the highway was so full of incongruity, I wished for a camera...must buy one soon. I am missing some real action that I could have captured on digital scape for the posterity. Youngsters or geeks with jaws dropping, blank expression behind thick glasses -ravenously ogling the laptops, with the dhabas selling snacks and savories in their wholly unorganized glory right behind them...what a scene.

She finished her courtesy call and we drove off to meet a colleague who didn't actually meet us but sent us to see a flat that may be getting vacated, in Jayaram street, in Thiruvanmiyur. It took us quite a while to locate it. By then my poor back was in need of a longer rest, after having driven for nearly a hundred kilometers so far... the owner of the flat and his wife were very sweet to her, who went and explained her predicament. I guess the only unforced faux pas on her part was that she told them she loved the smell of fish coming from the sea hardly five minute's walk and that she would cook non vegetarian meals herself once in a while. This was received by the chatty hosts with a chilling silence and looks that could penetrate inches of steel. I thought the chance was gone, she was hopeful.

Finally we went for a walk to the beach. It was fairly clean, though in some place it stank of human shit since there was a village of fisherfolk that we had driven through by mistake, having missed the cluster of flats with copious greenery hiding its own name too. We walked about for half an hour and I had to finally sit on the slightly wet sand as she stood and tried to fathom the sea... inbetween her long spurts of chatting and loud thinking. By the time we returned to the car parked off the road it was probably eight in the night and we still had to find our way back to the heart of the city.

The drive back was nearly a nightmare, we had to stop at a hundred places and ask for directions. I usually switch my mind off on such occasions, tending to suffer from low sugar problems. It seemed like ages, driving through the maddening traffic that plagues the mid city in areas like T.Nagar, Teynampet and on to Nungambakkam. We found the hotel, she checked in and after freshening up we decided not to go for another walk with the horrid traffic outside the hotel. We crossed the road into a fast food joint and had some quick food over a leisurely chat.

Bidding her goodbye, I drove back home, managing to lose my way from Nungambakkam and turning up at Ashok Nagar and reaching home when it was nearly midnight. I just crashed into bed, realizing the antidote to loneliness had sapped my strength in a way. I had nice dreams, for a change, I thought.

Another Round Of Summing Up

2006-07-22T02:54:00.000-07:00

David asked me what on earth is Chettinaad cuisine.

Well, let me be vague on this point and tell him it would be difficult to explain.

Brings to my mind the story of a blonde lady accosting Einstein in a party and insisting on explaining his famous theory of relativity.

Einstein the irrepressible wag in him surfacing immediately, said : ' Dear lady, once I met a blind man. He asked me what I was having. Milk with sugar, I said. Sugar I know but what is milk? He asked. It is a white liquid, I said limply. Liquid I know but what is white? He persisted. It is the colour of a swan, a bird that lives on water of lakes. Lake and water I know but what is a swan. I lost my patience, put my glass of milk aside and twisted his arm, to bend it from his elbow and the wrist, and said this is what a swan looks like....' The blonde lady got the hint and left him alone.

To define Chettinaad cuisine in its absolute terms for David my dear friend from Washignton, would be a calamity for he would not be intersted in the recipes nor the ingredients nor the methodology of cooking. To tell him it reminds me of Malvani food from the famous Konkan coastal areas of western India would be to put him in the class of the blindman that Einstein got so thoroughly confused... or Goan food, to stretch it the analogy a little more, would be equally a limp act.

David, suffice it to say that Chettinaad food stands out like a typical Indian Muslim butcher dressed in his chequered lungi with a huge knife in his hands, amongst a kutcheri of pious Brahmins chanting their holy mantras... though it is not a cuisine of the Muslims at all. Best Chettinaad items are all sea-food, or other non-vegetarian dishes and those stand apart from the overwhelmingly vegetarian dishes in Tamil Nadu.

Perhaps the effect of the food may illustrate my point better, David dear? Again what comes to my mind is Dr. Gunther Mark of Munich who came to meet me at Mumbai and both I and my the-then boss Ravindranath, decided to spring a nasty surprise on him. We took him to Ghazala, the Malvani seafood joint in the adjacent building.

'A little spicy food will do, Dr. Mark?' I asked tongue-in-cheek, and the jovial fellow still snickering over the latest incidence of misunderstanding , agreed to have it. What had happened was, he was unfamiliar with the basically South Indian trait of shaking the head from side to side in approval. The typist-secretary, a chirpy young lady named Savitha had been doing that, and he had been repeating the same instruction again and again, thinking she was saying No! She meant to encourage him, by nodding her head.... so, now he kept spluttering till the food arrived, dressed to kill. He didn't suspect whom.

He finished one roti, struggling with the spicy fish curry, his handkerchief totally soaked with sweat, and he called the waiter to know why the air-conditioner was not working. The waiter put it on the coldest setting, and in five minutes he was sweating again. His pink face was purple and he looked like a dying fish himself. We kept our faces like poker players with difficulty. Water water, he kept yelling, though he had already consumed four glasses. In desperation, he took two gulps of Soul Kadi, the innocent looking pink appetizing drink which made his tongue loll out and eyes go rolling....he nearly passed out. He could not talk for an hour later on.

David, Chettinaad cuisine is like that. I have felt my tongue smarting for half an hour after the dinner with desserts was over...and unprintable stuff emanating from me [from the right end] next morning. But the food is celestial. Five stars, I would give it. Once in a while, I put my head on the block in such a restaurant, and willingly get robbed -for it is quite expensive. They have inventive menu too, I mean, Kheema dosa [stuffed with minced lamb meat, with a surplus of spices] or chicken or fish dosa are really very imaginative items, though the vegetarians may cry foul.

A restaurant called Karaikudi, I suspect in honour of the place which used to be the capital city of the Chettinaad empire in the hoary past, near where I live, serves heavenly crab soup. It is built on two levels, and the sprighlty young fellows dressed in spotless white dhoti and kurta [don't yet know what they call these in Tamil] bustling about give it a very authentic ethnic flavour.

More later !

(c) Max Babi

Three Whole Months....

2006-07-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

Just completed three whole months in Chennai... the realization gives me a weird mixture of feelings from bright silver of hope to deadly gray of despair. First of all I am sorry for a long spell of silence, for no reason -I guess everyone needs a break. Who knows I may post faster and more regularly now onwards, who knows, my erratic posting may get worse. There is travel on the cards, first postponed by the deluge in Mumbai and now teetering on rescheduling because of riots... Looking back at my first quarter here : What did I enjoy the most -the squirrel, the singing squirrels of Chennai. I failed to notice for weeks that the sweet songs in the morning were not from the birds, there are a good many here, but from the squirrels to my great surprise were producing those incredibly sweet long drawn-out musical notes. I failed to see squirrels in Pune or other places in Maharashtra, but they were plentiful in Gujarat where I grew up. On a couple of occasions I befriended them. There is a legend there about them, that the squirrels have five black strips on their body because the first one had been caressed lovingly by Lord Rama himself when he was sitting and brooding over his lost Ladylove in some forest. I found them most irritating creatures, making loud chirruping sounds, with the bushy tails going up and down in time, beating time helplessly. These melody-makers here, gave me a pleasant surprise and I love listening to them exchange lovey-dovey messages from dawn up to coffee time when the heat cools them off…

I enjoyed discovering the simple pleasures of life, with a gentle throwback to my frequent trips to this city in 1970s. Like the roadside vendors masterfully tossing the green coconuts in left hand whilst chopping it in slices with a force that makes me watch with bated breath. None have chopped their palms nor fingers off as yet, and they manage to babble forth whilst producing a readymade green coconut replete with a hole to push the plastic straw and suck to your heart’s content. The pulp, whenever it comes out, is scooped with a spatula fashioned by these violent absentminded strokes, tastes like heaven. Reminds me of my childhood vacations in Cambay [now Khambhat] where the palm-fruit used to taste exactly the same, though thicker, more pulpy and sometimes harder too.

The really heavenly taste of the vada sambhar made in Chennai cannot be compared with the bet of the restaurants anywhere…there is something in the air and water which makes the sambhar so heavenly and the crisp vadas so irresistible. Every morning, they taste exactly the same. To my great surprise, I have found I hanker to chew on those tiny black bomblets, black pepper seeds. All my life I’ve been pulling curry leaves [kadi patta] out of such preparations, along with the eye-wateringly strong pepper seeds. Not so here, and for a reason too. My grandpa used to tell me listen to your body, and you will never go wrong… if you crave for mangoes in summer, eat them. Watermelons and raayans too [those are tiny black gooey berries which are sweet but if unripe, your lips get stuck so bad, it takes minutes to get back to reopening that vital orifice.
I read somewhere, black pepper is an important ingredient here because it helps you dry up the moisture deep inside you. Makes sense. I have never felt healthier in my life, as compared to Chennai… because, strong coffee and these spices, keep my blood sugar under check. In fact, if I am not careful, I teeter on the dangerously low blood sugar [always cross check with my glucometer whenever the whole world starts to close in, on to my head…] which means the diet out here is most scientific anywhere. Kudos to the slim Madrassi [now a vanishing breed, thanks to Gupta Sweet Mart and Goyal Sweets and Sharma Sweets and junk foods aplenty…even the ubiquitous Chaat from North is here].

Amongst the non-vegetarian delicacies, seafood always tops the list for me. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that the cheap rice-plate, ‘meals’ as they are called here provide me a sumptuous feast every day during lunchtime. I have had to curtail the rice quantity, by one third, I cannot hope to finish a small mountain of white rice [give me yellow, brown, green, even purple but not white-some childhood phobias refuse to go] . But the eight or nine tiny vessels with sambhar, rasam, three vegetables and a surprise fish curry are enough for me to last me till evening… I usually finish off the insipid sweet dish, for it contains minimum sugar and gives me a kick to get my spinning head back to balance in no time.

Chettinaad cuisine is famous, and it took me a while to visit one. These restaurants are unnecessarily expensive, warned an ex-IITian friend who himself is a vegetarian. People must express second-hand, third-hand opinions, if they are negative, I have seen… and so, I splurged once or twice. It’s the medium class restaurant that makes one feel so. The upper grades have food too delicious to have the customer complain about the prices. Karaikudi within a stone’s throw from my place is an experience. In fact my first visit saw me conjure up an idiotic menu according to my low sugar-suffering brain’s needs… Crab soup, Kheema dosa and fruit salad. Wow, what a meal. I shall cherish it in my memory for years to come. In fact I sent out copious sms messages all over to friends and relatives to make them hang their tongues out with temptation whilst mine was lolling out due to over-indulgence in spices…

Discovery of pavement booksellers and the specialist shops should come next, for Chennai is a booklover’s paradise. I have indulged myself in that department shamelessly… by now in three months, I have acquired more than 40 books, which I could not do in years at Pune.

Cheerio !
(c) Max Babi 20th July 2006

Tidbits...

2006-06-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

I've not checked my blog for more than two weeks, shameful indeed.

But then, life always stands around the corner with a sandfilled sock to hit one behind the head. Lets see what all transpired in this intervening period.

I've locked myself out of the car on two occasions. Ahem. Not a very nice thing to do when you have to go and launch the jazz club...of course I could have jumped into an auto-rickshaw to get robbed in royal style. But in the nick of time I remembered the rear door had not been locked properly.

Now The Beast is singularly unattractive with its dull red colour and its attachments hanging loose like a witch fallen on bad times. An old hag of a witch... I mean. Also the size of the vehicle, being an SUV [sports utility vehicle] I suspect is anti-burglarly. So I coolly opened the rear door, slunk in and crawled up to the front seat. In the bargain I found a pair of spectacles, lost during late March when I had visited Hans and Ameeta in Velachery. What a pleasant surprise. The second time I locked myself out it was past dinnertime and I was so fatigued, I just went for snacks and went to sleep quietly.

What a full night's rest can do to a tired mind, can be rivalled only by having a banana. Some doctor sent me an email forward saying bananas are wonderful anti-depressants, so I have been keeping some in the car too. They work wonders, near-miracles. I was in the morning, experimenting with all sorts of devices, and toying with the idea of bothering my landlady's enterprising son, who seems to be driving four or five different cars, that a bunch of keys could come in handy. The device that nearly came close to the shape and thickness of my car keys was too humble to mention here [lest someone steal my car!] but it opened in a jiffy. What a relief....

Today morning I outdid myself. I dropped the housekeys somewhere on the way to my morning coffee, newspaper and a bit of snacks at Dr. Terror's. Of course I dropped them, in spite of the main key being close to six inches long because I found a biggish hole in my pocket. Someone should have videographed me, when I returned after the long walk and snacks. My face must have gone through a rainbow of emotions from tickling voltage to hair-raising jolts... when the truth dawned on me. Saying a litany of prayers, I retraced my long trek, at least three kilometres in the scorching equatorial sun -oh yeah, this is a thrill I was using a website to see Chennai through a number of satellites and it chilled me to the bone to see we have Zero Degree latitude passing through our city.

I sweated a bucket, my knees were bending involuntarily, hope was diminishing in my sleep-starved body and sinking heart. The last night, a gang of mosquitoes had invaded my bedroom God knows from where and how. They kept me awake half the night. What's more, I was nearing the climactic end of John Cheever's " Falconer", a spine-chilling tale of a high security prison by the same name. Sleep was turned out from my place like a rabid dog, till the shy sun peeped over the horizon. Mischievously like a schoolboy up to no good.

There's no happy ending to this sordid tale of my forgetfulness, lackadaisical attitude and mounting worries... it was nearly ten o'clock before I could enter my own house. The landlady's son was very gracious and handed over about one kilo of keys, none of which fitted. I have developed a feeling, that Kaka knows things, the manservant in the dog house, if the readers recall. He had after all fixed a leaking tap early on, when I had just taken possession of this oven I call home. Late at night the temperature hovers between 33 t o 34 degrees Celsius, obscenely challenging my new Plasma A/C. The latter always wins, but the challenge seems idiotic. This Plasma effect, how befitting for me, a plasma technologist is nearly as anti-depressant as a sudden banana.

The landlady's smart son, shrugged his shoulders and made a lousy face when I suggested Kaka would know. Who him? He seemed to imply, why the moron doesn't know a thing... I didn't argue but I knew for sure the old man knew which key. He is better informed than the landlady herself. By the time I had time I had exhausted one full kilo of keys, Kaka ambled up holding just one single key in his long artistic fingers. He smiled, he turned it and the lock opened. I smiled copiously back at him, and said with a joyous whoop : Nalla joli [good work, it means in Malayalam, though I wonder if Tamil meaning is the same?].

He gestured me to pocket the key, something the landlady's s one would not have liked. There was talk of getting a duplicate key made, carpenters to be invited to fit a latch, since someone who found my original key could rob me blind. In the mean time, Chalta hai as we say in North... let things work, let things roll on.

(c) Max Babi 220606.

Chennai Jazz Club

2006-06-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

My friend Ashok Gupta, originally from Kolkata and now a full-fledged Chennaite, had been revitalized by me, to go and meet Dr. Gabriele Lendwehr -the director of the well-appointed Max Muller Bhavan here in Nugambakkam, a prime property in virtually the heart of the town some weeks back.

I reached at 10.30am, though the show was slated to start at 11.30am. My friend Dr. Purnima Rao thought I was mad to go so early -but whilst organizing events, it's alway better to reach early than late.

The first one to turn up was a bright and sharp young lady, Anuradha whom I patronized for a while thinking she had come to join the nascent jazz club. When she told me she was from a music channel and her crew was about to materialize, and would I mind giving her some 'sound bytes' [ I like this jargon, sci-fi maestros, we are nearly there...where you always tried to take us...] I froze. Before I could gather my thoughts gone haywire the gang was upon us, straitening my shirt and passing a collar-mike through my shirt, tickling me pink in the process and making me look into the camera, and all that video jazz.

Soon Ashok ambled in, he who ambles around like a tourist on a lifetime vacation, he who never seems to be in a hurry and he who goes around with a mob following him. Well, later on Madhav Chari -Chennai's own brilliant pianist, whose renditions of Duke Ellingtonian classics on 28th April, a day before the giant jazzman's birthday, were a huge treat indeed, came in quarreling with his father. Both guys are 'hyper' or super-hyper to give them a better epithet, and both seem to argue over trifles like a much-married couple. I was treated to five or six of their juicy arguments, in typical high-class Tamil Brahmin style, which I am beginning to isolate very easily now.

Dr. Gabriele came all a fluster, looking hurried and tied up -for her it was a working day she said

Purnima and hubby Sashi also came, waved and settled down. Over 20 persons turned up including Brian, a very soft-hearted guitarist [I talked to him to find that out], good ole Dr. Placid Rodriguez, ex-chief of the atomic research centre near here, and one of the most revered metallurgists. Also Mr. Laxminarayan, the ex-President of Madras Jazz Club [now defunct for perhaps for over a decae], quite a character, came looking uncertain... introduced himself and got lost in the crowd.

Ashok told me later when we were alone, that he went looking around for Max Babi.
Where's she? He asked Ashok.
The mischief-monger Ashok said, there she is sitting, one with the red beard...

The MMB has a fancy plasma screen display which made the DVD look amazingly crisp and clear... there was Diana Krall, my favourite singer, pumping away at her funky piano and singing to a huge audience, Live In Paris. Those who were really into music, despite the people chattering around us, loved the music in snatches. Those who were more into social contact and things, were busy talking in clusters.

Purnima wanted me to ask someone to explain what is Jazz... to begin with. I suggested Madhav Chari -who usually speaks very articulately about these matters. Once he got going, I got worried he may put some people completely off music... since my own experience earlier had been a disappointment. He did well, though well-meaning dad kept interrupting.

Ashok played a little bit of Charles Mingus Dynasty, which I thought was a risk with so many newbies in the audience but it seemed to go well. I noticed the video guy focusing on my feet, tapping in rhythm absentmindedly. There in lies the rub. If the music gets your feet tapping, you are bound to come back for more... that has been the philosophy of our jazz club at Pune, now in its fifth year and growing daily.
Chennai seems all set to rock !
(c)Max Babi

Wandering Around In Madras Central

2006-06-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

Sundays are a pain for me.

Work keeps me busy all day long, in the evenings I take long walks in the lush green Anna Nagar, have endless cups of coffee, visit a cyber cafe to write something, visit a new restaurant, try out a new cuisine. But Sunday hangs heavy on my hands rather like a wet carpet that I can't figure out what to do with.

Last Sunday was different. I didn't want to spend half of it in bookstores or poring over used books on pavements, or go to a 'Sale' and one of the many exhibition halls here. If I have read six books in two months, I still have eight unread ones. Old habits die hard, I was to discover soon. They just fade away, to hide at the street corner with a sand filled sock in hand.

At first I finished my customary walk around Thiru Vee Ka Poonga, I love this name as much as I love Charlie Kattampally's God-given handle. I was late, and sweated profusely what with one short spell of rains having made Chennai soggy and litres of water I keep drinking finally doing its thing. After my fourth cup of coffee I got so tired and sick of walking and imbibing the strong brew, I decided to go to Broadway. Why Broadway, you may ask, very legit query. Because, from Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, belching coffee I walk towards the famous cemetery in Kilpauk area, right next door. What I see on turning my head is something like five to six buses per minute, all going to Broadway.

With Sound Of Music and My Fair Lady's ditties ricocheting in my fatigued mind, for the long walks in the sun can take their toll indeed... I passed the Redeemers' Church where a morning service had just ended. All the redeemed souls nearly crushed me to bits, or pushed me into the middle of the road where the Bus route no:7F to Broadway would have unwittingly crushed me like a cockroach. Saving my soul and body both, I hurried on to the next bus stop. None of the drivers liked my red beard nor my attitude much. Even the buses which were half empty did not veer towards me, poor ole me sweating like a pig under the shed and looking piteously at them. No effect.

With a reluctance as heavy as a set of ball and chain, I dragged myself from shade to shade, and thank be to God, there are many tall well-spread trees everywhere on that route, till the next stop. One bus had to stop for some people were desperate to get off. I sneaked in and paid a royal sum of Rs3.50/- for the whole journey. Paying such a paltry amount would necessitate your removal from the bus, in Pune where the local transport seems ten times more expensive to me.

Before hitting Broadway with its total lack of theatres or theatrics, I got off at Madras Central, as Chennai's main railway station used to be called before the nationalistic fervour got the better of local politicos. Felt a little sentimental, a tad nostalgic at the huge railways station where thirty years ago I used to arrive so often, stay at a hotel close by, and take a train to Thiruvottiyur, for work at an old engineering company that's defunct now, I heard. It's changed a lot, become much bigger and better managed, but the character has been protected very well.

Went around walking, bought a ballpen, had coffee and emerged out towards what used to be Moore's Market, my old haunt for used books. Thousands of books I had purchased on my numerous trips -during my early career I used to miss a meal to be able to buy a book, a record... since the travel allowance used to be a pittance. Or walk for kilometres to save the bus fare. Saw that the old booksellers have been thrown out and they hog the pavements. One of the largest collection I saw inside a sort of gateway connecting the huge compound of Madras Central to the road that leads to the market.

Spent nearly an hour and chose five books, all very interesting, in good condition. At twenty rupees a book, it seemed a bargain. Been reading some, am very smitten by Gustave Flaubert's book of three tales. Those who do not believe in translation, should read this book and see how competent the English translation is.

Went for a longer walk, and the sun shone fiercely, making me scared of catching a sunstroke. So stopped for a cold drink. One particular beggar had been chasing me for a half a kilometre, which tried my patience. I had run out of change. So I kept saying No No No... endless number of times. He wouldn't stop his litany with 'khana' and 'chai' two words I could understand. Finally I turned, yelled " A hundred times No!" and taken aback, he shuffled away.

Wound up my walk and returned the same way. Tried 'meals' at a Khwaja Hotel, close to the Masjid, which I had noticed when the bus arrived via Vepery. The surprise was a piece of chicken in rice plate as this meal would be called in Bombay or Pune. Lovely food it was. On may way out I saw the same 'khana' and 'chai' asking beggar hogging the entrance with another equally dessicated female counterpart. He smiled expansively and softened by food, I gave him a coin of good value.

Nothing notable happened on my way back, having taken a bus to Broadway, which is total washout as a locality. That being a bus terminus, I waited for fifteen minutes to get roasted medium-rare before the driver climbed in ponderously and took us back via the same route.

Thiru Vi Ka Poonga...

2006-05-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

Poonga means Park in Tamil.

Pretty fluffy, well-rounded and easy-going word I would say. Anyway, this park, perfectly circular in cross-section lies almost three kilometers [two miles] from my place. Nearly every morning, after a soul uplifting coffee at Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, I keep meandering through the lanes of Anna Nagar East and take a full circle of the park with all intentions of sitting on one of the benches and watching the world go trickling by.

That has neve happened. The walk makes me hanker for one more cup of the huge kick-giving coffee and a copy The Hindu [which they local populace calls Dee Indu, meaning the egg in Gujarati]... the limitations of the Tamil script send me into a tizzy now and then...

I mean Baank in place of bank is fine, but Oot-lent in place of Woodland recoils me in horror... the first prize goes to Bilibus. Guess what name is that? Phillips, good old lighter up of homes and breaker of deathly silences and thrower of moving images plus the hoi polloi that must follow. I'm glad I taught myself how to read Tamil by comparing the ubiquitous signboards mostly written both in English language and Tamil script. Decades before Madras became Chennai, I had been reading that name as Sennai [since they seem to have a single letter for both 's' and 'ch' sound...].
Joining the consonants is hell for them, Piribakaran is what the name reads -the one we know as Prabhakaran.

Long before reaching my coffee place or Thiru ['Shri'] Vi Ka [both initials] Poonga [Park as we saw] I have to watch a hundred neighbouring houses with strangely tilted compound walls. This fascinated me no end, most likely reason could have been an earthquake or two... however, over the weeks, I noticed none of the new houses like ours, had tilted compound walls, competing with Pisa's leaning tower, but all the old ones did have sometimes cracked and partially tumbling down compound walls. The day I realized it was the tall palm trees -that seemed to grow all wonky, seeking sunshine due to taller houses all around, which were exerting pressure on to the walls... one old palm tree or coconut tree, whatever, fell down two buildings away. I was a little startled to see the tree across the road, taking down telephone wires and electrical cables along with it. As I neared the spot where it had fallen on the road, I was a little more startled. There was a spot of blood, most probably human blood, in a spot that spanned nearly six inches. Somebody got hit on the head, I presumed. I didn't ask Kaka who would have come out of his Dog House to do the song and dance routine to tell me what happened. Sometimes that hits me like a door in the dark, this routine, especially without a cup of coffee in the morning.

The merciless sun by six thirty, truly an ungodly hour, has climbed up in the sky so high, that it would be nine o'clock in Pune or Mumbai.

Back to the Poonga, it's sheer fun to see the local early morning walkers and joggers jostle in the park. I have at least a dozen favourites. There is this old old man who walks crisply throwing his arms up forwards and backwards marching to his own tune... there is this extraordinarily funny young man with a walkman plugged into his ears and his hands dancing in a choreography none of us can ever figure out... and the various ladies with generously proportioned behinds, that wiggle and waggle with a life all their own.

Another favourite is the Yoga class teacher at whose command nearly a hundred souls lie flat on the ground as if dead, or contort themselves into rubbery mutilated postures that seem to scream with pain... or breathe in and out noisily. The fact that he controls a crowd of nearly 200 persons early in the morning, makes me jealous. I hurry over to the next part, rather than watch them. He uses a public address system with a huge microphone stand like a political leader.

There are many more... we shall examine them later.

(c) Max Babi

The Man In The Dog House

2006-05-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

We call him Kaka.

Reminds me of the cowboy (may even be a redneck variety)joke. When a newspaper reporter asked an oldie, did he always call his wife honey? Naaah, he said, been doin' that only for five years -eversince I forgot her name.

Kaka is a big burly man. Sort of a de-clawed tiger. In spite of huge frame and a dead pan expression, he seems very soft at heart. He has probably looked after my landlady's kids in various roles, gatekeeper, watchman, babysitter, vegetable buyer, kitchen help, even a bulldog.

One day I went looking for him to tell him a pipe leaked in my bathroom. Couldn't find him anywhere... the entire ground floor block usually remains open -I am amazed, with hardly an occupant around. I thought of going in to the Dog House. There he was. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating rice and his meal... at eleven in the morning. Probably a throwback to his farming days in the village they all come from, eight hours journey from Chennai. Early to rise, early meals, early winding up and hitting the sack circa eight in the evening.

That odd construction, sort of an architectural miscarriage if you take a hard look at it, seems like a giant dog house, not a sentry's cabin. It is built at the farthest end of the huge house, not in the front, which gives is a secondary importance in the scheme of things. The architect God bless his soul, has put sort of tiled roofs, turning every window into an ornamental object, and this Dog House has one too. The overall effect has been ruined, quite unintentionally.

Kaka knows as little English, as I do Tamil. I can count up to ten. So telling time when someone (and ten persons do that every day) ask me yenda mani? I confidently round up the hour to the nearest figure and say anja mani (five o'clock it is is quarter to or past five) or moonu mani (three) so on and so forth. Both of us need to deal with each other daily and the sign language comes to our rescue, causing ceaseless comedy... to his relief and my chagrin. Things don't get done if one of us misunderstands.

He asked me once to start paying him two hundred rupees to wash the car daily. My tomato red old Beast, is positively a magnet for dirt, dry leaves, birdshit and worse. The first day he did it with a vim and vigour that surprised me, and he gave me a wonky smile, many of his tobacco teeth have parted company with him for good, and I said nalla nalla [good good]. He disappeared for the next five days, to my horror and disappointment.

We both would have gone through our wordless song and dance routine to explain his absence, me asking and he replying, but a casual remark from the landlady's son who is the only person speaking English in four families staying around me, said Kaka had gone to his 'native place'. So I tried to think kindly of him, instead of mentally conjoining him with the outlaw and brigand Veerappan. So many people have taken me for a ride, I am becoming distrustful of the populace.

The battery finally died, as it is the air-conditioner was drawing lifeblood from it so I had stopped using that... usually the late afternoons are breezy and one doesn't need the AC. I left it at the service station and walked some distance to catch one of these ugly "Meter Taxis". They do carry fare meters that are as redundant as nipples on a man, and even the fare is quixotic. Not according to kilometres but according to your state of exhaustion and need.

The nearest thing I have experience to using a vibrator is an electrical etching tool for marking metals. So I can imagine the effect of the other variety used for physical stimulation...but oh boy. A Meter Taxi is a whole vibrator itself, you go right inside, and it stimulates every inch of your skin, muscle and tickles the bones too. It shudders, judders, throbs and rattles... when I got off after twenty minutes, the whole body was was itching as if I had been given a powerful massage.

The car's battery didn't charge up as expected so next day also I had to resort to the use of three wheeled auto rickshaws. A friend, God bless her soul, asked me to come for dinner, and I caught an auto to reach early. Getting off, I gave the driver a hundred rupee note, plus a ten rupee note and he returned a fifty rupee note. Instead of sixty he charged me seventy, which was not bad. After walking for five minutes I realized the single note in my wallet had been a five hundred rupee note... so I had paid the driver 470/- rupees instead of 70/-.

Sigh, I do have suicidal tendencies.

(c) Max Babi

The Pending Connection

2006-05-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

I am about to get myself a laptop, so that the lonely hours I spend at home in the evening, can be put better use than reading novels, lying under the fan, sweating half my body mass off... but that needs a landline and broadband connection too, to be able to surf the net….

About ten days ago, instead of going in for the government-owned service providers who gave me hell in Pune, I went for a private company. The salesman turned up sooner, much sooner than I had imagined. Yes, their office was five minutes' walk from my place.
He made me fill up a simple form, asked for a minimum number of documents and those silly 'proofs' of my existence and took a small cheque. Free broadband with the landline...wow. I was on cloud nine when he left. Minimum five day, maximum seven days.

Today it's the eleventh day.

He rang me up and said his people had come to fix the phone line, but I was not at home.
Didn't you remember, I asked him, that I am staying alone? How do your people expect anyone excepts ghosts to be here at eleven o'clock when I leave at nine thirty?
Sir, sir sir... listen sir..
Don't you also remember I had asked you to give me a ring before coming here?
But my people came -
What use is coming here when you know I am not there...
But sir...
You said five days, remember? At the most seven days...
But sir...
What is your excuse for this delay, Mahesh?
We will give it to you in two days.
I don't trust your word, my man. Stop playing games.
But sir, listen sir...
Give me a date, my man. Two days will stretch to two months, I am beginning to know you guys very well, that's how things work here...
Ummmm....sir...
Mahesh did you hear me? I was a date. Say four days from now, but don't come back to me with lame duck excuses like your people came...
Saturday sir. Honestly I promise.

I knew it in my bones that he was lying. The honeyed manner in which these young salemen talk when they want your money or have taken your money and are at fault, gives them away.

I thought I'll give him a scare.
Mahesh, do you know I am from Gujarat.
Yes sir, NO sir... I mean yesssah.
Do you know I used to play marbles with your managing director?
Yes sir.. I mean glad to-
Half your company executives know me.
Yes sir...
If you don't install the phone on Saturday, Mahesh, start looking for a new job.
Oh no..
Oh yes. I mean it.

I cut him off. I recalled his office was being shifted to some place near Thiruvanmiyur, that's one and hour's drive from here.

Now I have to sweat it out till Saturday.

© Max Babi, 052506

Domani never comes !

2006-05-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

When I was at school, Radio Ceylon [Sri Lanka now] used to broadcast popular songs for six hours in the morning and six hours in the evening. Now when I sit with the Chennai map, wow, most of the names of the areas seem so familiar though I have never visited them, because the requests for songs used to come from Royapettah, Mylapore, Egmore, Parry's, Triplicane... places I have whizzed through without knowing them.

Domani never comes! Or tomorrow never comes, was a very popular songs with all those saddlesore Sinatras, as the lovers of country music were called by the real cowboys in US. Amazingly the largest body of popular music in India then was country music. So I grew up listening to heart-broken melodies by Hank Locklin, Dean Martin, Don Williams, Slim Dusty, Neil Sedaka, Patty Page... and hundreds of singers from the 1950s and '60s.

This is what my supplier of AC tells me. I booked an air conditioner on 8th May, selecting him since he is well known to our organisation. It was to be delivered on 12th. Today is 22nd, and I have produced I think no less than three tubfuls of sweat, cursing him in four languages I know fluently. Every time I remind him, he says he is sending it tomorrow...

That fateful day when I jumped into an auto rickshaw to reach T.Nagar, a lady on the phone gave me very precise directions. She made a subtle mistake that cost me dearly. She said I have to reach Natesan Park, after some Dakshinamoorthy temple, and then their office is 'inside' on the left hand side. I did that, and no one out of a hundred souls I stopped and asked new where Park Street was. Thank God, no wag told me it was in London, I was ready to climb up the nearest tree and yell my head off like Tarzan after three pulls on a loaded cigarette.

It's right here, someone told, misleading me away from the actual site, like a lapwing does. That's one helluva smart bird. It goes on screaming Did You Do It? away from its own nest, so that you end up far away from the target. The same thing happened to me. After an hour of searching, I seemed to have walked three sides of a rectangle, several kilometres in all, and finally in a dizzying moment, asked the AC supplier to get me picked up. I had almost reached his office, five more minutes of walk... though from the opposite side.

The formalities took an hour. So on the way back the auto-rickshawallahs here direct descendents of Veerappan, quote astronomical figures. I kicked myself for having left the car at home. Had to pay through the nose, and coming home found every single restaurant closed. Except a fishy looking place that specializes in Arabian delicaces. They had only roasted chicken left, which turned out to be a delight indeed. Had been hearing rave reviews about 'poshte moorg' from my foodie father, though had my own doubts, since the chicken skin is usually for the cat to eat, at home. Incredibly tasty, indeed.

This rhino-hide wearing seller of ACs, made me wait from three in the afternoon to eight in the night, on the fateful day when his driver with my AC and a carpenter were coming. The next day, I rang him up, he had fled the city and the poor lady who answers the phone most unfortunately got the high temperature blast from me. I could visualize her throwing up her hands in the air and implying it's the boss, it's the boss.. tell him.

He doesn't look at the calendar this seller of ACs, and he doesn't realize that I have been reading the newspapers and they tell me there is an acute shortage of ACs in this blessed town. My colleague who recommended him, was tres cool. If I had ordered a split AC, he put it logically, clinically with a sickening precision, I would have got it the next day. What wisdom in hindsight.

Today also the AC didn't come.
Domani never comes.
And yes, amongst my more morose schoolmates, a guy named Wilson whose mother tongue was Tamil and who found English a tough nut to crack, used to sing this song.
"The money never comes..." how right you are, my dad with his wonky sense of humour would pat his back. Quite a philosopher young fella ! Whatever you do, the money never comes...

(c) Max Babi, 052306.

Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors

2006-05-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

There's tiny restaurant at a busy junction, about fifteen or twenty minutes walk from my place.

I've been waking up around six o'clock in the morning and since I have decided against having a gas stove or an electric hot plate at home (as these lead to much more complication like buying a fridge to keep milk from fermenting, pots and pans and the whole hassle of cleaning up...) I have to hunt for tea or coffee. A sort of madness descends on me, if I am without a stimulant in the morning for more than ten minutes. The highly aromatic coffee they feed is out of this world, all the Cafe Coffee Days and its avatars pale in comparison.

It's sheer fun to sit and watch the giant, lets call him Naikanappan, who standing tall with his back to me, puts a ridiculously small amount of coffee powder in a glass [not those stainless steel pair of one wide pot and one narrow one which singes my fingers] and then adds scolding hot milk (plus water) to it. Then he "stretches" the brew by transferring from a brass pot with a handle to my glass, this is an expression I learn from Charlie Kattampally -how I love that name, it rolls on your tongue and comes out with a small explosion... He was a wag whom I had as a neighbour and colleague in Baroda. He was a chemist and his explanation for coffee being heavenly in South, was this "stretching" which causes rampant oxidation of the brew... there is some solid argument here. More later.

The nearly six feet tall giant, stretches it three times, banging that brass cup on the granite base of his work table, turn around dramatically and hands the glass to me in a threatening manner. I've never seen this Frankenstein's creation smile once, though he's fed me more than sixty cups till now. I didn't hear him speak for weeks, till the time he got mad at the hunchback... ahem, now you're getting suspicious about the title, eh what, dear reader?

Well I sit at least six feet away from Naikanappan whose fierce movements strike terror in my heart, early in the morning when I'm busy gathering my wits and hankering for coffee. This distance, is covered by the Hunchback, a tiny boy, God alone knows he may even be a midget, whose croaking voice lends a shiver to my hands, whenever he croaks. Whatever tumbles out is gibberish to me, and usually we all communicate with a few words of English. The boy, unless he is a dwarfed man, brings the cup to me, giving me those voodoo looks which I avoid so early in the day.

The third character I suspect is the owner, who comes nearly half an hour later, with four white horizontal stripes and a red sun in the middle, painted on his deep coffee brown forehead. His eyes seem all artificial, as if made of opaque glass with a black circle painted on them. He looks through me, never cares to hear what I have said, and like those two he usually keeps staring at my dainty little feet, shoeless and without socks. The morning heats up obscenely within minutes so I go around wearing my old jeans cut off at the knees to fashion Bermudas. The rest of my body has developed brown shades, but my feet are nearly translucent. Their English and my Tamil are too inadequate to discuss this foot fetish they all seem to possess in plenty. They keep trying to figure out where I am from... no doubt about that.

The fourth character, nearly as large and looming as Naiakappan, is probably related to the silent giant. The same build, the same negroid complexion, the same penetrating eyes... I call him the vada man... he refuses to serve me anything, if I don't say coffee, automatically bringing two vadas floating in sambhar. I have found this practice abhorrent -but three radical changes have occurred glacially in my own persona.

One, I have started having only coffee.. one day the giant didn't turn up and a puny little guy trying to mimic his original style in a gauche manner, produced a glass of tea and banged in front of drowsy old me. One sip and I nearly choked. My decades of tea sipping first thing in the morning are a thing of the past. Second, I have discovered, instead of spitting out the black pepper, I am crushing it with my ageing molars and relishing the damned thing. I used to hate that particular group of spices. Third, as hinted above, I am enjoying the crisp fresh vadas swimming in an ocean of sambhar. By now I am a slave to this habit. Two vadas with two coffees.

And yes, one day when the giant spoke -his voice gave me goose bumps, and a coughing fit too. He sounded like an eight year old schoolgirl, lost in a forest with some evil spirit chasing her.

What a motley crowd pulls the blanket of sleep off my eyes every morning !

(c) Max Babi, 052026

The Incredible Intransigence -Episode Two

2006-05-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

I had been using a particular mobile phone service for nearly five years at Pune. We all tend to stick to the same brand be it a product or a service.

Like a wise guy I thought I will discontinue my Pune-based service that was costing me an arm and a leg here, and then apply for a local one. It takes two days to get a connection, my knowledgeable colleagues reassured me.

When I tried locating the local branch of that service, it took me half a day to go through the phone book and the yellow pages...ultimately an assistant helped me find it. Not very far from the hotel where I was staying, so I went there with a song on my lips and a positive spring in the step. Little did I know...

The office was being raided by half the population of this city. Three pert young things snappily dressed and fluently speaking English, tried to help me. None could grasp the complexity of my problem. Giving up Pune connection, and getting a new connection. They passed the buck for half an hour, asking me to sit in one of those ultra-modern chairs that ruin your back though they seem so attractive. One particular lady, slightly more senior to the trio, kept reassuring me that I would be attended to in 20 minutes. She did, actually did. She just took a blank form and made me sign for a new connection. She asked me to come back again after my return from Pune, where I was to be for four days.

When I came back the young lady had either left the job or had got transferred, so the trio of those greenhorns with their ready answers and zero knowledge of the job, confronted me. I showed them the paper and they went into a solidarity-strengthening huddle. Emerging triumphantly, the sharpest of them, master of dodging and finding excuses, said they could not help.

The sky seemed to be falling down. I had requested disconnection, and in a couple of days I would be without a cellphone service... I felt like my car when it runs out of diesel, the faithful Beast. A youngish executive, more snappily dressed than all the females, with a broad tie and a broader smile, snatched the application out of the pretty young thing's hand... and asked rudely : " What's the problem."

She made a botch, a total complete and thorough botch of explaining the problem, so I had to intervene and tell him the facts. There ensued the very familiar dialogue, that I had faced on three earlier occasions, the worst being at the bank.

" Sir," said the slimy manager smiling unctuously, " do you have a ration card?"
" Yes, but at Pune." He made a face that revolted me.
" Residence proof? Phone bill? Electricity Bill? Gas connection?"
" Dear sir," I said testily, knowing well that he had heard me talking to the young girl," I am new. I have no home here, am staying in a hotel."
" Voter Identity card?"
" Who will issue that to me, I am a visitor here."
" Driving license?" I happily produced mine. He seemed more doubtful than before.
" Ahem. The address is not Chennai. It is Pune!" He seemed horrified.
" I have been explaining to you and your assistants that I am a visitor."
" Sir, how can we issue a connection?"
I reminded him that the lady who used to sit earlier where he was sitting, had told me it was possible, easy and would be done as soon as I apply.
" Any other proof?" He wanted the proof of my existence. I suddenly felt like Caspar the friendly ghost. Couldn't harm him though I could easily go through him.

In total desperation I gave him my freshly printed visiting card.
" Sorry sir, we cannot issue an individual connection to you."
I was speechless.
" So what option do I have?"
" Go for a corporate connection."
" Hey I don't own the company, I have to consult a number of departmental heads..."
" But it says Chief Executive on your card."
I realized that my proof of existence had gone against me. He wanted a bigger kill.
Must be trying hard to meet monthly targets, despite the thronging, milling mobs.

Resigned and fatigued, I left the office in disgust.
It took me nearly three weeks to get a corporate connection, so many channels had to be plodded through.

(c) Max Babi 052006

The Incredible Intransigence

2006-05-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

Dictionaries define this favourite word of mine as :
" Refusing to moderate a position, especially an extreme position; uncompromising."

There are times in one's life when one seems to feel one's hanging by the end of the rope... and one feels like roaring like a gorilla and...

I must share two such experiences here. The first one happened at an internet cafe, near the Thirumangalam circle. One look at the old man, quietly manning the counter and I knew he thought I was trouble. The feeling's mutual boss, I felt like telling him but he pretended to be checking his register. Hardly a few lines in there, I spied into his record and convinced myself, he's a Big Pretender.

Name? I gave him.
Address? I wrote Room 101, So-and-so Hotel.
Can't you give a proper address?
Well, I am staying in a hotel, am new, looking for a house...
Give me a house number, street number, road number -
It's not possible, sir. It's like asking a bachelor the name of his future bride.
Look here, I am serious.
So am I sir.
The police are strict with us. Times are not good.
Okay sir, I know that...but I don't have a 'pucca' adress how can I-
Give me a proper address.
I don't have one-
I am sorry but-
I know-
Law is law,it does not bend nor-
Look here, my address is what I have written -
Why don't you give me proper address like House no.:420, 22nd Street, Anna Nagar...
You mean to say I invent an address, and-
NO! I didn't say nor mean-
Then how can I produce an address that I don't have?
My dear sir, try and understand my position -
I do, I do sir.
So give me an address...
I don't have one.
Everyone has a proper address-
I am from Pune, shall I give you that address-
No.
Why?
I want your local address -
I don't have, I have just come here last week, have not found a proper house as yet-
Why don't you try and understand sir?
What?
That the police will catch me.
Do I look like a terrorist, a hacker, an embezzler, or an enemy of the state?
Did I say so?
You implied so, dear sir.
Why don't you give me a proper address and finish it off?

At this point I thought either he was insane,stark staring raving drooling mad or I was. One of us was.

I just went and started surfing the net. The young boy who usually mans the counter, spluttered unable to control guffaws that were racking his chest. Tears rolled from his eyes.

That's your Tamil bureacracy for you. Employ the scrap from government, at cheap labour rates and get your customers rattled nice and thoroughly.

I never stepped into that particular cyber cafe ever -after having told him so.

(c) Max Babi 051706

Reaching Home, Via Koyembedu

2006-05-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

When good old Ramaswami selected a bus, I was so overjoyed, I forgot to read the signboard... which bus number destination what.

The breeze felt heavenly, when the bus finally moved after loading half of Chennai into its belly. The driver, must have been suffering from piles or fistula, since he kept honking uselessly at an hour approaching midnight. People can see the huge glare of the headlights, but he would honk shrilly, get madder and swear at them. One tanker in front broke down, our driver leaned on the horn for something like seven minutes which seemed like seven lifetimes to me. I wanted to go and strangle him with my bare hands, this sort of intransigence is common with the Puneites, deliberately becoming a pain in the ass. They seem to be doing it here too.

After a small eternity, whilst I tried reading Tamil signboards when passing through areas I didn't know, Ramaswami kept staring at one point in far off space, thinking heavily, so heavily I didn't have the heart to make small talk. The bus finally stopped. He had gotten off long before me, having explained patiently that his destination was something like 20 minutes before the last stop of this bus. He told me repeatedly to keep sitting till the bus finally reached its last stop. It did, and to my great relief, the stop was a stone's throw from Koyembedu from where my bus to Pondy had started in the morning. I was overjoyed. I wanted to sing and dance, but unfortunately my sugar level seemed dangerously low and the toffees in my jeans pockets had been consumed long back.

I caught hold of an unwilling auto-rickshaw driver who wanted roughly fifty percent higher charge to take me back exactly where I had started from. Haggling didn't help, he would lapse into Tamil, make faces, act out some emotional scenes that I couldn't interpret... finally I agreed and he dropped me near Roundtana, within walking distance of my place. The only place open for eating at nearly midnight was Arabian Delight, a small shop with a huge oven that remains like all through the evening. There was no choice in the menu. Only grilled chicken, so had one, couldn't finish half of it. My father used to rave about 'posht-e-moorgh' or the skin of the chicken, usually we feed that to our cat. The damned thing turned out to be terribly tasty.

Trudged home and collapsed.
(c) Max Babi, 051506.

Lecturing On Jazz

2006-05-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

Purnima, a neighbour and my mentor in matters related to Chennai and more specifically my area, rather our area since she's an oldhand at solving local problems, asked me once if I could lecture a group of her club on Jazz.

I said I would, and prepared myself for the task with a powerpoint presentation, using utmost loving care to ensure no major genres or styles and giants of Jazz were left out. She gave me just two days notice, which usually suffices for me, since I have often been asked to do impromptu things too.

One of the most mortifying moments in my jazz lecturing career happened about two years ago when I was to speak on a rather specialized subject, heavily advertised with posters and advertisements in papers, in Mumbai. The Influence Of The Blues On Jazz... lots of friends I had called over, two of my nieces who happened to be in Mumbai were asked to travel by bus for nearly two hours and be present. They did.

I sat up the whole night, since things were very tight with my work at the factory and I had been postponing the preparations till the last night. I remember I was working on the presentation, running into two CDs, till half an hour before the bus departure. I hurriedly had a bath, breakfast and ran to catch the bus. Getting off at Dadar, as I boarded the train to VT to reach Planet M, suddenly the realization struck me, I had forgotten both the CDs at home.

Two options stared at me, a] chickening out and taking the train back to Dadar en route to Pune, thus making over fifty of my best jazz pals enemies for life, or b] to get up and talk. I may make mistakes, leave out portions, may fumble, may get stuck, may get booed or jeered, but I would save my neck.

I chose the latter option.

Reaching Planet M, I explained the quandary to one of the shop assistants who said the whole store is yours, go and select any number of CDs, man. You can speak, we know it. So I went around, and that day none of the show organizers had shown up except Ashok Gulati of Jazz India who is very supportive.

The lecture went of smoothly. One jazzman and musicologist Jason Beaster-Jones from some university in US was present. He came up to congratulate me when my heart had stopped fluttering and fibrillating... he said he had a couple of bones to pick with me on technical points but when Jehangir, the owner of Jehangir Hospital and Jehangir Art Gallery said I had forgotten the CDs, he not only forgave me the inaccuracies, he thought the job was greatly executed.

Well, Purnima drove me to the Club, we had a grand lunch in style, her air-conditioned car took the edge off the beastly heat in Chennai and I had not withered away by the time we reached Egmore. I finally got up, she had wired her laptop to the LCD projector and I started defining jazz, giving names of styles/genres and the jazz giants.

I distinctly got the feeling I lost them. The crowd seemed to be listening patiently, trying to understand. It seemed as if they were trying to lip read me rather than listen to me... as if I were talking in Kirghizi or Armenian. Half way through the lecture my heart sank down to somewhere near my ankles. Purnima sat in the front row, giving me encouraging nods and interested looks. It was a total disaster, and a big let-down. I had thought a metropolis like this would have lots and lots of people who were knowledgeable about Jazz. Here I was, facing the crème de la crème and none one single soul could understand me. The only name that clicked was Louis Armstrong.

On the way back she told me, my lecture was too high flying, which it was not. The obvious problem was unfamiliarity of the crowd with the chosen topic. Food for thought indeed.

(c) Max Babi, 21st May 2006
.

Return To Chennai -Getting Lost in Tambaram...

2006-05-13T07:03:00.001-07:00

One gets used to any infernal situation, indeed.
I soon forgot how crowded the so-called luxury bus was, how smelly were my neighbours pressing on to me mercilessly, how slowly the time crept on...

The bus was going to Tambaram and not Koyambedu from where I had started. My new friend the village school-teacherish fellow, one with the mono-syllabic answers,
allowed a shade of deep doubt on his face whenever I asked him if Tambaram was very far from Anna Nagar. He's open his mouth, like a fish pulled out of water, make some piteous faces, mumble something and then clam shut. I gave up, and went on watching the perilous traffic on the road. Suicidal maniacs seemed to be aiming at our bus and miraculously missing us by a hair-breadth all the time.

After what seemed like a mini-eternity the bus offloaded us at Tambaram... aha, I said to myself, the place seems familiar. Only a few years back, wasn't it this place from where I had caught a bus to far-off Shollingnur? Yes, it was. The same huge bus-terminus, the same amoebic clusters of worried looking people forming, deforming, reforming their clusters and suddenly parting when a maniac on a two wheeler or inside a four wheeler came speeding onto them.

I religiously toed the line, for my silent companion was rambling around like a lost soul, very obviously searching for something. From a safe distance I could see he wanted a payphone. He found one, punched a number and after a while put the receiver down, shaking his head ruefully. As if his only son had turned out to be a really bad egg. He looked devastated. I thought of helping him, after all he had been my lifeline to sanity.

"Phoning up your family?" In this class of people, you don't say wife, you say family, I have learnt. They feel we are being obscene by mentioning the relationship. Sigh, classes ! Well, I punched the numbers he recited very patiently. I couldn't get through.
"Network congestion." I said dutifully and he smiled laconically, like he knew the connection would not come through.
" Bus number 18M will take you to somewhere near Anna Nagar," he spoke to no one in particular and I gathered he meant the missile to hit me. Wayward one, but it did hit me. I welcomed it, Anna Nagar, the name itself sounded like Chicken Biryani to someone who has been fasting for long.
We both loitered along, snaking our way through lost-looking outsiders and slimy looking local ones. He would very dedicatedly read the dim-lit signboards on the buses, always in Tamil, and tell me where the bus would be going.
" Somewhere near Anna Nagar?" I would anxiously look at my watch and ask like a moron. With the patience of a teacher who has been a guardian to a mentally retarded child he would cautiously explain it was some other route.
Up and down, up and down we walked. My low sugar symptoms reared their ugly head, my head was spinning, my vision had blurred, my legs started imitating those Paris supermodels who put right foot in front of left and vice versa, mimicking the poor cat. To someone else, I may have seemed drunk or on drugs. But I knew what it was. I would be passing out soon. That fear got me hurrying to nearest fruit stalls. Apples are the best remedy for low sugar, and depression. Both had been straddling my back like a pack of wolves, digging into my sparse flesh in an fiendish manner.
The fruit seller refused to sell me one apple, though he seemed to be lording over tonnes of apples. He wouldn't listen to me at all. I went to another -then, another and finally a Hindi-speaking fellow sold me one at an exorbitant price. I munched on it and my guide refused it when I showed it to him. As he looked much more worried, I retrieved my cell-phone and re-dialed his home number, this must have been the thirtieth time. Some lady spoke and I pushed the phone onto his left hear.
"Just talk.." I said, making him confused.
He did talk and a cloud lifted from his face. He seemed as if that brief case with a million rupees he had dropped somewhere had been returned by me. He had a very brief talk like much-married men will have with their wives and gratefully returned the phone to me. By now about a hundred buses had gone by, none of them 18M. About three fourths of them were M18, going to some weird sounding place.
Just when I stopped cursing no one in particular, for I was hopping mad at the whole world, not only my shirt but my jeans were completely soaked with sweat by now. What a muggy day...
" Do you speak Hindi?" A woebegone face materialized in front of me, carrying a suitcase on his head. I said yes, nodding my head.
" We are from Maharashtra," he began his much-practised tale, " we lost our suitcase with money..." I excused myself and he chased me, " we don't want money sir..."
But I lost myself in the maze of sweaty bodies so quick, because my head was splitting with worries, and I had just asked an auto-rickshaw driver how much it would cost to reach Anna Nagar.
"Three hundred rupees, saar." He said without batting an eyelid. I made an obscene face and asked him to go home and sleep.
Thus I joined my good friend Ramaswami, I like giving names to faces, and waited.
(c) Max Babi, 13th May 2006.

Pondy - The Infernal Return Journey...

2006-05-08T02:00:00.001-07:00

Whilst boarding the bus, my fatigued mind had coolly overlooked the newly acquired piece of wisdom that there were two types of buses. One taking the ECR -East Coast Road, and the other going through a maze of villages. I obviously got into the less crowded bus, without bothering to check.

" Will this bus go to Chennai?" I had asked the driver, an ageing man with thick glasses who said ama ama... yes, yes, very enthusiastically.

I settled down on an aisle seat right in the middle of the bus where the jumping motion usually is less. There were the usual drowsy, tired and bored faces all around me. The only person I noticed, with a different cool aura about him sat across the aisle on a seat behind our row. Cool, calm and collected -seemingly a school teacher with decades of experience, I surmised. Someone you could trust.

When the bus started stopping at every possible village on the way, after giving the picturesque ECR a miss, only after ten kilometres of actual travel, it made me wonder. Two guys would get out and twenty would fight their way in. Mentally I imagined the bus as a highly pregnant fish, with a burgeoning middle. Ten thousand eggs would spew out... if the middle burst.

Sending and receiving SMS messages,I settled down comfortably, watching the monontony of Tamil Nadu villages, now nearly cities of small size. About 100 KMs from Chennai, in a perfectly nowhere place, there was an onslaught of something like 50 person, but the bus remained stationary. Usually the driver would be in a tearing hurry, but this time the bus wouldn't leave. Tempers rose, cackling and yelping increased. The freshly inducted standees who had no hopes of getting seats, took our leave. When the bus was nearly empty, the thick glasses wearing schoolteacher got up with a very determined air. I meekly followed him, for no one seemed to be heeding my queries and please including the blessed driver.

"Brakes failed." Said the cool calm and collected neighbour when I tugged at his sleeve. He waited outside with a thousand others, for the bus to Chennai. In ten minutes' time he had become rather restless, some of his cool exterior having been chipped off like crushed ice by the constant hustle and bustle which failed to affect me. I had this wild hope another bus would come and we would be restored our dignity. I found out he could speak. Very good English too. So I pestered him no end, trying to reassure myself.
“ There will be another bus? “
“ Yes.”
“ Any alternative transport?”
“ No.”
“ Will auto-rickshaws come to Chennai, if we both share the expense?”
“ No.” Here he raised his eyebrows as if I had made an indecent proposal.
“ Will we reach Chennai before nine thirty?”
“ God alone knows.

Nearly forty minutes we spent together on that nameless road. Walking up and down, checking each of the hundred odd buses that came and went away without taking us in. The driver of the abandoned bus turned to be so pigheaded, he tried fixing the 'failed' brakes sitting at the steering wheel and pumping the pedals. I told my new friend, that it seemed like a doctor was trying to cure a case of piles, by hitting someone of the head. He chuckled mirthlessly. Decidedly a man of few words, with a dry sense of humour. I shut up.

Luckily, the bus that arrived finally was what is euphemistically called here, a 'luxury' bus, with better quality of body building, better seats, less congestion in spacing of seats and garish colours splashed in gay abandon all around. I trooped in with my humourless friend. I stood near the door, for nearly thirty odd souls had been traveling in the painful standing mode already. One very determined looking young woman, buxom and stylish for a villager, strode in and place a huge bag crushing all my toes. The more I wiggled, the more she stared and glared at me as if I had been tickling her open midriff.

I thought I would die, with ten kilogrammes of dead weight on my toes, and this slow slow journey ahead, cramped between profusely sweating bodies. I twisted and turned, I changed my grips from the upper holding rods to the seats handles for support. I slanted my body, I squirmed and turned. Nothing helped. The buxom young lady, yelled at me for having kicked her bag which appeared to have been filled with cast iron slugs. It was so infernally heavy.

Finally, I had to stretch my body and look up in the fashion of dog howling at the moon, to get a breath of fresh air. It was all right when the bus moved. When it stopped, two guys disembarked and twenty more got in. Yes I know I am repeating myself. But that's what happened. I nearly had a panic attack. I wanted to jump out of the bus and walk the rest of the distance, hitch-hike, do whatever possible, go to a farm and sleep the night off... but not this.

However the saner part of my big brain did take over and I started to breath easy. Low sugar, low sugar, low sugar my brain told me, and juggling my hands to keep standing, I removed a toffee and sucked. In minutes, sanity prevailed. More later. (c) Max Babi, May 2006.

Looking At The Positive Side...

2006-05-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

Mimi, my daughter sent me a 'positive' poem by SMS today morning. Obviously meant for children, but it has a message for us forever-grumbling adults.

A little birdie in the sky,
You look up and it shits in your eye.
You don't mind, you don't cry,
You only thank God that cows don't fly.
- Anon.

Well, well well -these 'bluesy' lyrics came in handy because only yesterday I was fuming with indignation after a foolish purchase. Walking around in the shopping areas around the Second Avenue in Anna Nagar, close to the Roundtana [what a fascinating name for a traffic circle... a friend told me it is the Tamil version of 'Round Turn' -the last consonant gets stretched here with every last word in each sentence].

Setting up home is a heavenly pastime for young women, less so for married and frequently relocated women. But for most men it is a RPIA. A royal pain in the arse. I bought two buckets for the bathroom when the taps started going dry without a warning usually around midnight in my new house -as if a ghostly housekeeper was watching me rub soap all over, and then whoooosh, no water. With soap on your face and eyes tightly shut, you can't even remember where the god-damned towel is. I shiver to recall three such incidents before I bought the bucket to store emergency water.

Taps in Chennai, give off blood. And I am sober right now. The first day, I left my dirty hankie in the wash basin, and remembering some errand, left the tap slightly, ever so slightly leaking that it would not make any sound. When I came back, horror of horrors, my spankingly new white spotless hankie had a red sun in the middle. Printed by some amateur lithographer high on marijuana or stronger stuff. Approaching it as a booby trap, very cautiously, as cautiously as a male hedgehog would approach the female in heat, I lifted a corner. The blood red spot remained, mind you the lights in the bathroom were not on, a streak of faint light was coming from the other room. I touched the bloodied spot. No spooks sprang up, no vampire came flying through the window. I thanked God Chennai does not have gekkos that go tchut tchut with a loud croak in the bathroom. Had that happened I would have screamed...

The bloodied spot vanished when washed with water. I surmised, there must be dirt in the olden plumbing. It has to be rust, for the reddish colour matched the colour of my beard. Purnima, my email friend and now a neighbour, who has been helping me like a local guide, had warned me there is too much iron in the water. Don't ever drink. Yeah, do drink bathroom tap water, being highly disorganized, and feeling thirsty in the middle of the night. But iron meant iron oxide, the metallurgist in me protested.

So I had to march to the store selling plastic goods, a huge store with at least six or seven young girls who insist on talking in rapid fire Tamil, and I bought myself a dull pinkish coloured translucent plastic mug for those forlorn buckets holding enough water for two baths. Pouring the whole bucket seems so uncivilised... I saw a heap of plastic shopping baskets, which one finds in all shopping malls. Meant for helping you carry your knick-knacks, those you purchased.

The Tamil-insisting girl, came like a mouse sensing cheese, snatched the basket, and got me a matching pink coloured basket instead. She beamed, I beamed right back, and put my things in the basket. The Tamil-insisting girl at the counter billed me, I paid up and she got a huge laundry basket type plastic bag, stuffed my purchases and bade me goodbye.

At home I discovered to my horror, she had billed me for the pink basket too. I am being very careful with my purchases, and I didn't want to waste money nor stuff my new small flat with useless items. My blood pressure would have burst the manometer glass bulb, and I was fuming from my ears. The sun shone fiercely outside, my feet were more than warm, nearly impossibly warm and they ached. So I took a royal bath instead, a wash really, without soap, just to cool off.

Looking at the positive side, I patted my back. It was a good purchase. I had been buying apples and oranges for a quick midnight bite, and they had been rolling off the dining table, off the bed, as if they were automatons impersonating fruits. Now, ahem, I could imprison them in this lovely pink basket with big slits to air them and keep them fresh.

One lives and learns, I guess.

(c) Max Babi, May 2006.

Pondychery -Sizzling Breezily...

2006-05-07T03:06:00.000-07:00

It was a huge relief to pay up and slip out from the de Bussy bar.

The politically charged youngsters had left long before me, but to my utter horor the incompetent waitors had turned up the volume of the near-sleaze channel showing nonstop Tamil film hits. That is songs, or videos, if you like. This Tamil torture is too mind-numbing for words, so lets leave it.

My sense of direction took me to the seaface in hardly ten minutes of leisurely walking around, reading the romantic streetnames and trying to memorize them too. Quai de Guinchy, was an offshoot from the Rue de Bussy, but I strode on. Pretty soon the sky sparkled with a whitish hue, as it does over any large water body. I hit the esplanade suddenly without a warning, and the clean seaface with benches liberally strewn around seemed just like what the doctor would have ordered. Walking in the sun, I avoided by choosing to walk in the shade of the buildings.

It had been a tiring day so far. Within minutes, I chose a bench near the Tourism office, took of my shoes and socks -and overcoming the innate fear that my pink toes and soles will attract unnecessary attention, sparking off conversation, I lay myself gently down and throwing all caution to the wind, went to sleep.

There was very little traffic, just a few stragglers who seemed tourists like me, passed me at all. The sea presented an awesome view. The feeling of sheer endlessness, timelessness, a glimpse into eternity is what hits me every time whenever I sit near a beach. This was even more effective. The cool breeze nullfied the sun's nearly put-on act of being fierce, and it lulled me into a snooze all right.

When I came to, pestilential clerk, a tall and hefty guy with Keralite features -big white teeth that sparkled when he smiled, tooth brush mustache, wavy hair, was loitering up and down the part of the pavement where my bench was located. Every thirty seconds he would go and try to crack a joke or ask a question to some people in a seemingly emptly plot. Obviously there must be a young and pretty girl amongst the labourers sitting and cooking there. He returned at least fifteen times to make comments, and laugh a forced life, his eyes fixed on someone. Finally when I got up, I took a small walk to see what was so fascinating about the vacant plot. There was a gaggle of labourers, with just one young and pretty girl amongst them. She had an electric smile, which she flashed at me too. So the clerk was abdicating his duty, returning to them every half a minute, and making small talk.

Whilst I was tying my shoelaces, three local fellows dressed in spotless white mundus passed by. The one in the middle, seemed like some political agent from the polished tone of his voice, came and held both my hands reverently. There ensued a monologue with an intimacy that may have been the scene of a Tamil film being shot with me in the leading role. Perhaps he was mildly sozzled, like me, and wanted to treat every fella as a long lost brother. Perhaps he was mistaking me for some French professor who have tutored his kids. Perhaps he was just a politician asking me as an old well-established citizen of Pondy to vote for his nefarious party... he waved his hand with five fingers separated. Meaning, he will expect me to see him at five o'clock. Or attend his political rally at five.

As soon as the highly charged trio left, I walked a bit more towards the auto-rickshaw stand and caught one to take me to the bus stand. I never suspected what excitement lay in store for me, in the coming journey.

(c) Max Babi, May 2006.

Velachery to Thiruvanmiyur

2006-05-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

Hans managed to talk to me despite one child bawling for its feed, and the other one, wow what a kid he is, Nandham, tugging at his sleeve.

Barely four years old, with ears wiggling forwards like an ET -the professorial kind, if you please, and using a vocabulary in fluent English that could put even politicians [or orators] to shame. He tried to get me interested in whatever was the most exciting project in his mind, whilst I was trying my best to squeeze nuggets of gossip about common friends from Hans.

I got very peculiar looks from Hans's scholarly looking father, three generations with thick spectacles, I noticed, and his bespectacled mother too. His father was gracious enough to end my curiosity about them being curious. It was my name, they chorused -Max Babi. His mother thought it was Mahes Babi [the 'sh' sound is conspicuously missing here from most names. The famous actress Shridevi used to insist her name was Sridevi -guess it sounds much more cute with the softer sound.

The boy with the gleaming spectacles, reminding me strongly of Calvin of the Calvin and Hobbes fame, finally brought his toys and upturned the school bag seemingly chockfull with a library of toys. Turning to me with the solemn look of an undertaker, or a Bishop with acute stomach ache, he said : " I am going to make a dinosaur that flies."

Well well well, both I and Hans thought this was a creative thought. He asked his free-wheeling intellect holder boy what he meant, how could he make that? The boy replied with redoubled seriousness, quickly putting four pieces of Lego to make a huge rectangular block and putting two curving pieces on sides. It looked like a huge bird gone all wrong during conception or gestation -ah, mutation is the word escaping my fatigue mind. But we both said the project was tremendous.

In five minutes the boy, adjusting his spectacles as if they were a pince-nez, suddenly turned to me and asked me urgently : " When will you go?" I found this query delicious. Only a child can be so disarmingly frank with you. I told him I could leave there and then itself, but had things to talk over. His mother, blushing furiously, unable to hide her scandalized expression explained : " Your papa and his friend are meeting after twenty years!"

I think the time span was too huge for that tiny brain to comprehend. I told Kaveri so. He didn't look impressed in the least. Disregarding her as a senile old woman, though she seemed to be in her late twenties or early thirties, he again came close to me :" But when will you go?"

To evade him I said half an hour. I drew a blank with Hans, my old friend. Almost all our common friends were out of touch with him. He was up to his ears in theatre and related activities... like a digital alarm, the boy rang out :
" You said you were going to leave in half an hour...why aren't you leaving?"

I laughed him off whilst the parents yelled. Much later, Hans, being the superior IQ chap that he always was, whisperingly explained that they all had been watching Lion King, CD 1 and now that a guest had been taking up time, the boy was desperate to start CD 2. Well, I didn't have the heart to break his smaller heart... so I rang up my friend Dr. Rodriguez at Valmiki Nagar. He was reaching home in half an hour.

Taking my leave I asked him how far was Valmiki Nagar, he said six or seven kilometres and she said three or four. A sense of deja vu struck me. The same discordant replies ! Husband and wife had disagreed at my earlier visit, and now the same disagreement here too...

Hans explained :" As the crow flies it is right there, but you have to go around quite a bit." He came down to see me off and promised me to keep abreast of the theatrical happenings. I drove off to my journey of discovery, finding Thiruvanmiyur with its road leading to Mahabalipuram onwards to Pondichery.

Ciao!

The Last Mile...Deliciously Difficult.

2006-05-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

I managed to find Velachery and due to the mad rush of thin traffic -actually traffic always is madder when fewer vehicles are rushing to nowhere... I managed to miss the signboard announcing the existence of the Regal Palm Gardens.

Now my overworked mind often plays tricks on me, especially with the sun fiercely shining outside and the car's air-conditioning behaving like a demoralized army. So I was asking for a Royal Palm Gardens, and searching for one. The local populace seems such sticklers for precision; they refused the existence of the locality giving me Goosebumps.

Was I in the wrong place? The damned place was right there under my bulbous nose, but it was not registering on my mind. Hah. So I overshot the famous RPG area and drove like mad to a flyover on the western side of which seemed to be a huge project with arches built with truly gay abandon. Reminded me of similar projects in banana republics under utterly despotic tin pot rulers. God knows what it was, a railway station? A super-duper factory with avant-garde architecture or a special new project for the moneybags returning to India? On asking some vegetable vendors, they said I had overshot the RPG project indeed, so I made a U-turn and stopped finally where I should have earlier.

Ameeta's locality turned out to be a superb clutch of condos, as our American friends would call them. All nicely designed, built with quality material, and most of all, with wide open spaces in-between. A very breezy place too. It was like a township, a small city on its own. Her husband, a non-writer and rather a non-asserting executive in the corporate world, opened the door, expecting me to turn up the appointed hour, and we gaffed on for half an hour. She was delayed I gathered.

Sandeep, with his peculiarly mellow facial features and a sardonic smile strongly reminded me of someone. I am lousy at remembering faces, however, and when it comes to remembering an old half obliterated face from my overcrowded memories, the exercise becomes a royal pain. For that matter, even Ameeta seemed very familiar, rather like a cousin of mine, but her husband, soft-spoken and very genteel person, bothered me with his familiar face for hours.

It struck me, long after I had parted, the fact that he reminded me of my schooldays buddy Gautam Desai of Baroda. Quite a character he was -rather is, since I met him recently to trade stories. Now this weakness of mine bothers my better half no end. She can never figure out how I manage to remember ten digit cell phone numbers of hundreds of friends, or complete postal addresses of thousands of business associates, and email ids of countless others... even landline numbers. I can never explain that. I have a photographic memory for trivia, perhaps, but when it comes to faces, I do incredible things.

Once I refused to recognize my own brother in law, married to a dear cousin. He sensed it, and expertly maneuvered me into confessing I didn't recall who he was... and then he went on torturing me with this lapse for years. That's one helluva low spot in familial networking, which thankfully has been dwindling down for years, now that I keep away from all sorts of relatives, and travel much more. Having gray hair, is a good excuse to tell someone I have forgotten his or her name [not likely in the least, but in reality I have forgotten the visage.] I am very gallantly forgiven every time.

The lunch was nice, and after a little more socializing I left since Hans Kaushik my theatre-struck friend was waiting in the wings as it were. His flat was within walking distance, and I found him sitting behind a screen, nursing an infant daughter.
"Come, come," he yelled and I hesitantly entered. Like a one-way mirror the cared wood screen prevented outsiders from peeping in, whilst he had a gala time watching the world outside. The whole building is one great commune, I could see, it has a round cross section. From any point you can look into anyone else's place. This principle is probably borrowed from the Bombay chawls that used to have a rectangular cross section. Some Hindi films have used that; I guess some small screen serials have also dwelled on this topic. I had the good fortune of living for a few days amidst such communes, in the heart of chawl-land, Pydhonie -the place where the Paav bhaaji of Mumbai was invented in the late 1970s. My the-then boss took me; Jayant Amin now deceased, to the particular laari [handcart], which used to appear like a ghostly apparition only around midnight. With a reverent look on his pleasantly drunken face, he showed me the hallowed precincts where the nightlife began so late, and the revered cast of three over-busy bhaiyas [guys from Eastern U.P.] who had invented this rare delicacy.

Families have been ruined by the love of paav bhaaji, and courting couples have smashed crockery on each other's heads, if one is to believe the urban legends floating around in Mumbai. PB, is a hot topic, and a fertile one -so fecund that the folklore seems to burgeon with new stories with every passing year. The other PB was Parveen Babi, another source of endless myths and fabricated stories, my poor cousin who died rich in wealth and dreadfully poor from the social angle. I guess I am digressing too much, so ciao!

More later.

A Little Less Merry Version Of Goa...

2006-05-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

This title I have borrowed from my creative-minded friend Jhumur Ghosh, who exchanged some SMS messages, as I sat ogling at the blue ocean on the Pondichery esplanade very recently.

She's very right too, for the city of Pondy as it is called here, has the same laidback colonial ambience, the same profusion of bars and pubs, the same romantic names of streets... but the overwhelming Tamil influence acts as a moderating effect too. It is a less merry version of Goa, lets make no doubt about that.

On a sunday morning, with monday off too, I decided to take a bus from Koyembedu -which to my surprise turned out to be CMBT -central moffusil bus terminus, not far from Anna Nagar where I live. I leisurely walked around, wondering if my writer friend at Pondy may respond to my request to meet her or not. Soon I discovered there were at least six different buses going to Pondy.

One oft-repeated description was ECR -sounding rather like some electronic acronym but it exposed itself to a much less romantic East Coast Road, euphemistically called a beachway too. For most part, the beach remained invisible, except in some occasional saucy glimpse here and there when the road swerved and lurched, snaking its way past Mahabalipuram and Chingleput onwards to Pondy. Saucy glimpse, like a thundering thigh from a slit skirt that was more than ample to cover evey inch. In another post my past experiences at M and C above, for memories have got triggered inside me, would need airing. But for now lets focus on this less merry Goa visit.

The bus I chose was nearly full when I boarded, and a very gentle looking youngster, lanky and simply dressed without any filmy airs about him, turned sideways to let me sidle into the window seat, within whispering distance to the driver. The road all through is really excellent, and my companion hesitantly started helping me. I knew, dressed in fading jeans and a knitted T-shirt, he had taken me for a foreigner. Every second person here does that. I had nothing to carry, not even a book nor a plastic bag with eatables. Since the temperature had crossed 40 degrees C already, I had just a water bottle with me.

This solitary piece of luggage started coming to life, very soon. It would topple over, slip away, roll away and do other cartoonish mischief mongering acts, and our man would offer to hold it. Whenever an SMS message arrived and I had to retrieve my glasses, our man would offer to hold the bottle. How very sweet, I thought and smiled at him like an indulgent grandpa. For some inexplicable reason, he wouldn't look me in the eye nor smile directly and make small talk. He would just do sweet things like holding the bottlen or retrieving it when it slid down finally.

But after Mahabalipuram -nearly an hour's drive, he tentatively put out his fluffy tentacles and asked me where I was from. This simple question always rattles me, and I am always tempted to say " I don't know" -which is a fact, too bizarre for simpleminded man on the streets. So I said Gujarat, which is right too since I was born and lived for forty years there...and the language is like my mother tongue, almost. He looked very doubtful. I assured him I was not pulling his leg and said my ancestors came from Afghanistan, and that we had been intermarrying like the Parsis.

From the uncertain smile flickering on and off on his face I could easily make out he didn't digest this piece of trivia at all. Small talk followed, and before he got off some fifty KMs before Pondy, he finally said what was struggling inside him like a huge python without finding the right outlet. He said " Your face-cut and dress is like a foreigner." Now these are Indianisms, which imply that my jawline or the overall shape of the face was un-Indian, something I can't really come to grips with because half the time people are mistaking me for a Punjabi, a Sindhi, or even a Pathan -the last one is closest to the truth but I am not six feet tall and not built like King Kong either. With that filmy sounding parting shot he waved and ambled off into his village. Sweet boy, Sankar, something. Doing his Master's in linguistics.

The bus offloaded us all, at the Pondy bus station, and I found my knees had jammed. Sitting in a cramped position for four unending hours is not good for ageing joints, and for half a KM I had to hobble along like a man in his late nineties. After nearly half an hour, I found an internet cafe on Rue de Bussy, wow, what a name for a non-descript Tamil-like street rather startlingly similar to hundreds of them in Chennai. The name must have been changed to Lal Bahadur Shastri street, but it didn't stick.

The outside temperature seemed six to seven degrees lower than the boiling Chennai I had left far behind. Walking in the shade made sense, though in some places without tall trees, I had to hurry up. My writer friend had probably not accessed her email or didn't want to contact me, thus I decided to walk around, have a beer and lunch and spend some time at the Esplanade. I casually checked my emails, and after an hour, resumed my ramble. By then I was ravenously hungry.

The nearest bar was De Bussy, quite predictably so since half the street seemed to belong to M. de Bussy whoever he was. Or is. Rather disconcertingly, the bar had a huge sign outside announcing it was closed from 13th April to 12th May due to elections. This bad news seared through me like a gentle streak of lightening, and I walked out without opening its door. Within minutes of leaving the bar, I saw a gang of youngsters, six or more, seemingly rich men's sons with nothing better to do, pushing open the same door and trooping in. So I too returned and was startled to see forty or fifty males inside, cackling like mad hens and arguing over politics. I guess it was politics with the election fever in the air. It could have been anything.

To sip a beer for an hour is difficult, but I managed to do that since the waiters were either dumb or deaf or disorganized. Three of them took the same order and vanished into the air as if they were Harry Potter clones. The fourth one took pity on me thinking I was a French professor with my red beard, and got me the beer with some peanuts. To kill time, this combination is unbeatable. You can chew on one piece of nut and take a miniscule sip and let the whole world go to hell.

More in the next part... coming up soon.
Ciao !

Venturing Out Finally...

2006-05-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Driving a big car like The Beast, Tata Sierra, in a city like Chennai is more a psychological burden than anything else. Will the danged thing stop in time, will I hit someone on the side, and there are half a million kamikaze two wheeler riders who usually overtake me brazenly from the wrong side, and my heart jumps into my mouth like a frightened pup. Will I crush someone under its wide wheels? Some drunken driver ram into me from behind? In fact I have hit the car in the front on three occasions, no serious damage, so the drivers came out each time, inspected and went back with no sign of aggression. You do that in Pune, and you can't reach home in one piece.

By the third Sunday in Chennai, I was a total wreck, mentally, emotionally and psychologically. I had promised two friends, no sorry, three friends, at the other end of the city, to taste their hospitality. Ameeta, one of the more active Caferati writers, had given me perfect instructions and with eyes closed I had conjured up an infernal picture of poor old me getting lost in the maze of roads with narrow lanes that would get choked with The Beast crawling like an unhurried elephant through them. Human mind is a genius at slapping up mountains of improbable fears, isn't it?

By saturday night, I had decided -no taking wild risks, I'd rather jump into that crowded looking bus which starts from Ambattur, and trundles along till it hits Anna Nagar -it looked like a true saviour to me, for its long and winding route ends at Velachery. The magical name of the place I had never been to, and which seemed to lay at the very bottom of the roadmap that one of these yellow pages book that the thick-glasses wearing manager of the hotel had very kindly sent up. The more I studied it, the more my confidence eroded. The distance seemed to burgeon into an impossible magnitude... almost a light year.

By sunday morning, a nice sleep preceded with some beer and fried fish had bolstered my sagging nerves spectacularly. I decided to drive come what may. Ameeta in the mean time rang up asking me if I could come to her place at one o'clock instead of eleven thirty... I agreed. It seemed sensible to start out rather late, so that morning rush would have petered out. Accordingly I pushed the other two appointments, one with Hans Kaushik a full-time theatre personality and the other Dr. Rodriguez, ex-head of a nuclear research facility and a jazzhead to boot. They both said fine, to the postponement. Now driving through Anna Nagar onto Vadapalani and Ashok Nagar [both places where I had stayed in more fancy hotels on earlier visits] was easy.

Following the clues provided by Ameeta, I did emerge onto the Anna Salai and Saidpet area too. However on hitting the Guindy area, some no-entry or diversion made me emerge not near the Raj Bhavan but heading towards the airport. I had to ask a couple of cops about the road to Velachery. It seemed near enough. By then the sun had become too fierce, past noon, and the air-conditioning of the big car was becoming less effective. One of my dreams, like that about meeting Bill Gates and pestering him about some fundamental flaws in almost every programme we all use, is to meet the Tata motors design team. They've done some incredible moronic tomfoolery with this car.

You leave it in the Chennai sun, and the thick steering wheel becomes a darker version of red hot coals. I cannot hold it for a second. I keep doing a jig with the hands, and patting like a potter it instead of manipulating it. Okay there may be solutions. But for this funny air-conditioning, no apology will hold water. Some cars, smaller ones, make the head of the driver ache with cold, whilst the lower body is drenched in sweat. This car being massive, does a weirder thing. After half an hour of half-hearted cooling, it makes the steering wheel frozen, you fear frostbite. The rest of the body mind you, is teetering on the sweating thresh-hold. Makes one very uncomfortable. God help the others sitting with you. I don't want to make this a very long post... so readers, please take a break and come back for more ! The journey will continue...

A Little Cheating

2006-04-30T00:41:00.000-07:00

Ismael is one of those faceless room-boys or bell-boys who throng the place I live at, in their multitudes to the point sometimes you have to shoo them off from your tiny room. He particularly hangs around uselessly, of course he leaves on greasing his palm with small change.

It took me weeks to realize he was talking to me in Hindi. Another Hindi freak in this Tamil land? Yes, his Hindi is totally unintelligible. And his machine gun staccato rapid fire delivery makes it all the more hard to catch. For all I know he may be shooting a hundred Tamil words a minute at me, with a dolefully small dose of Hindi words here and there... usually I get the meaning.

I know the context, and there are very few things I need from his erratic services. So we get along fabulously. I started noticing, lately, he would chop off the bill. Now that's like a lady kicking off her shoe and using her dainty toes, tickling your shin. The possibilities are immense, the implications mind-boggling, provided one follows the clues. It may all end there and then itself. So Ismael giving me hints without using Hindi nor Tamil, led me up the garden path indeed.

One day after a three course meal he produced only one item on the bill, plain salad. I got the hint and paid him a tip that must have been ten times larger. His smile, spanning his dark face from ear to ear, wouldn't go away... actually I was more worried about his not going away, since there were things happening in the evening news on the TV. If he goes away, so does that idiotic smile too, I logically analyzed the situation. So I waved him off and he reluctantly parted from me.

A little cheating goes a long way in establishing a relationship, so said my idol John Steinbeck, writing in his inimitable style, in his memoirs [sort of] " Travels With Charlie" -where there is no human male with such a name accompanying him, but his canine friend. It inspired me to write a collection of short stories that I have called " Travels With Zakir" where the human male companion, my driver Zakir who once drove me over 44,000 KMs in south India, taking minimal breaks, over four whole months... and it's a sort of journal full of every kind of comic to tragic happenings, including car breakdowns in middle of nowhere...some times in jungles with nearest city being a hundred KMs off.

The denouement to L'Affaire Ismael would have been he would have cheated his employers blind, and then expected an unreal, astronomical amount from me, as I could guess. Actually, I timed the whole experience so well, that before such a thing could happen, one day I upped and vanished. I had found accommodation. I moved out suddenly, leaving him high and dry with his dreams of illbegotten riches...
(c) Max Babi april 2006.

The Thin Thread

2006-04-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Communication has attained gargantuan proportions in our lives.

The daily grind without emails, SMS messages, phone calls and whatnot, would suddenly look like a TV set with its antenna connection pulled out, I suspect. I can't stand those black and white worms crawling up and down the TV screen, it has something to do with a recurring nightmare I used to have in my teens. I would imagine myself as a spaceship, either part of it or the damned thing seemed to have grown around it, hurtling at unimaginable speeds through what seemed like a never-ending cosmos. I used to wake up screaming and incoherent. They say Elvis Presley's favourite pastime was shooting bullets into innocent TV screens. With those worms doing their own thing, I wouldn't mind shooting a bazooka into one.

Pune to Chennai and back to Pune, and back again to Chennai. The Pune-based cell phone company gave me a special privileged status with my orgiastic SMS messaging and calls too. They were so reluctant to see me go, they went on dilly-dallying for three long weeks. My bills went on mounting but who cares. Twice they rang up to request me to transfer it to some relative. I emphatically said No. Finally I got the dreaded message "SIM inactive". One week of frustrating suffocation, one whole week of total peace... my friends had crossed the 460 mark, and it was a struggle to keep in touch with all. So the lull after the continuous storm came as total bliss.

This thin thread of communication is all so important, now I have realized. It's almost like depending upon the car to take me around in this huge city. Without it, I am totally at the mercy of the erratic auto-rickshaw drivers who refuse to come or charge you astronomically. The buses I have not tried due to time constraints, but the idea of getting sandwiched between sweaty bodies for kilometres with the badly maintained buses, is nothing short of a nightmare either. So the cell phone becomes a lifeline under all circumstances. One hears heart-rending stories about people caught up in situations and the cell phone coming in handy, like in life-threatening accident cases, highway robberies and worse. One also hears how the cell phones were used wildly during the long and tormenting days of riots in Gujarat in 2002. Every technical advance, brings its own horrors with it.

Having worked in the plasma technology for more than three decades I used feel proud that this is one branch of science where no misuses seem possible. Not any more. The Russians are rumoured to have developed electro-static guns which shoot bullets that have a 100 times worse impact than ordinary guns. The laser-beam based huge guns they also have are said to be able to create an acoustic resonance in the atomic structure of a metallic object so effectively the whole piece disintegrates into powder. If they aim this gun at an aircraft... use your imagination. Stuff for horrid science fiction is becoming real life now.

Were it not for the cell phone, I shiver, my visits to all my new friends in Chennai would have been several times more torturous indeed. Weirdly true, one thing about these right-angled streets is that the human mind finds them much more confusing than the older, chaotic streets with their individual identities. It's so much easier to ring up the friend and get spoon-fed about the left or right turns, huge landmarks and then like a trained paratrooper land right there where you intended to. Wonderful !

Ciao for today, winding up early tonight.

Killing An Omen

2006-04-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

It was as soon as I shifted to Room no.:101 after four or five days of my arrival, that I noticed a soothing greenish flash from a plastic socket on the ceiling located right behind the fan. The glow was really soft and green as I said, and simply impossible to miss. A firefly!

My mind raced back immediately to the early 1970s, to the highly verdant campus of IIT, Powai, Mumbai [Bombay] where I had been to console two classmates. Funnily, only two guys out of the 32 graduates in the very first batch of metallurgical engineering produced by the department of metallurgical engineering, Maharaja Sayajirao University, of Vadodara [Baroda] had made it to the IIT for their Master's. Both were miserable. Some of us jobless engineers who had relatives in Mumbai, would pop over to provide solace to them.

Once I happend to be staying with my late cousin Khush-hal baaji in her cozy flat opposite the Bhavan's College campus in Andheri for a couple of days and on an impulse decided to visit my suffering friends at IIT -being within affordable distance. These two youthful scholars away from home for the first time ever, were so painfully homesick, they wouldn't let me return to my sister's place long after dinner. Deven Bhavsar knew me more intimately so he was aware of my passion for music.

Now IIT Powai with its famous Mood Indigo Rock Festival [where I was to judge a national contest for instrumental music in 2003 -how future plays tricks on us!] used to have a sophisticated music system installed in each hostel, in their common room. I was easily trapped by the sly Bhavsar who showed me a stack of LPs, including one by Carlos Santana. That did it. I stayed back. Music was fun, so was coffee.

But well past midnight when I returned to Bhavsar's room, the sum effect was that I became so excited, I couldn't fall asleep. The hostel was on the shores of Vihar Lake, with a huge forest extending towards the Borivali region, the forest sounds of crickets and other insects plus the water slapping the banks lulled me into a trance. Bhavsar was snoring in minutes, having been solaced enough by his ex-partner in college, we used to be paired up for ‘practicals in every lab, and I thought I heard the roar of a leopard too. These beasts often’ prowl about in the college campus too, and after about ten at night the human movement on the streets or roads dwindles down to precious nothing.

A firefly wandered in, when my mind was busy recounting the exciting events of the day. Having grown up in dry regions of Gujarat I had rarely seen a firefly inside a room... only on long journeys I had seen flocks of these green flashes in bushes, in other parts. At the ripe old age of twenty two, this was the first experience for me to see it upclose. The glow worm, lurching and swerving drunkenly like a new pilot who has just taken a solo flight and veered away from the hawk like eyes of the instructor, the insect seemed to be having pure fun. I kept watching it with mounting excitement. Once it came as close as a few inches from my wide open eyes, and the flashes were so quick from under its gossamer wings, I couldn't get a clear view but the sight was unforgettable. My imagination went haywire...as if a miniature flying saucer from some other galactic civilization had been sent to talk to me... there were delicious possibilities bubbling in my sci-fi riddled mind. It flitted away as whimsically as it had come.

The same scene was going to be repeated here at Chennai, where I doubt there exist fireflies at all, that too in this weather when only Englishmen and Mad Dogs go out in the mid-day sun. Without the air-conditioner even the night remains warm and humid, temperatures as high as nearly 37 during the day and 26 at night. A long career in hi-tech science and engineering has taught me to be highly sceptical -so the whirring mind got down to routine analysis : - What was a firefly doing here in an air conditioned room on the second floor? - Did it wander in got trapped inside this carefully sealed room? - How did it survive, what did it feed upon? - Did it drink water? From where? From my glass lying open on the table? For several nights I watched the friendly firefly carefully for hours. It stayed glued to the same spot. On nights when I had returned from the pub having imbibed a controlled quantity of no more than 750 ml of strong beer, it seemed to dance.

Disturbingly, it started fading off after three or four days. Poor thing, I consoled myself, it not only keeps pining for its consort who never shows up, it's starving itself to death. Like the lady on TV protesting against the Gujarat state government fighting for increase in height of the Narmada river dam. She seemed to be ageing by years in the fourteen or fifteen days that she fasted and the wily cameramen kept showing us harrowing facial features, worsening day by day. In between I had to leave for Pune and return in about four days.

Again I returned by an evening flight and the same professorial-glasses wearing male receptionist was in charge. Miraculously he gave me the same room. I was itching to check up on my silent friend the firefly. It must have died, I kept telling myself. No insect can live as long as that without food and water. Hadn't it been glowing less and less before I vacated the room? In an email to a friend, a rather idealistic romantic poet in Lucknow, Natasha, I had mentioned about the firefly. Don't you believe in omens? She had shot back. No, I said, is that a good or bad omen? It is a good omen, very good, you dummy, she had implied though not in so many words. Like astrology and zodiac signs, omens have given me a total pass like the wild wild girls used to do to me when in college.

After an evening namaaz, I happened to look up, the same day. The firefly seemed not only dead, but seemed 'stuck' with some powerful glue to the spot. That was weird. It was flashing weakly, but when it went blank the dark colour spoke of approaching death. Finally I climbed up, wrapping up my namaaz and the musallah or the janemaaz. I stood on the bed, having switched off the fan. The truth dawned on me, hitting me like a sand-filled sock. It was the flashing LED [light emitting diode] attached to a sensor inside the plastic holder. Obviously a temperature sensor for the auto-shut off for the a/c to save power. I felt sheepish. I had just killed a mythical omen. A good one.

Meals Ready

2006-04-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

I like these cryptic signs in English here. Most restaurants have such a signboard hanging outside, or painted on a prominent place inside. Meals usually are ready. My wife Nino at Pune must be thrilled that I am turning into a rice-eater. I was so rabidly anti-rice most of my life, that I have never learnt how to eat rice. I need a spoon, and some people find that very amusing. Apoorva's Sangeetha is a fancy restaurant in our Ambattur Industrial Estate. This whole industrial belt strongly resembles a bombed out place. Or like a time-machine trip back to the seventeenth century, complete with bullock carts, stray animals hogging the road whilst buses and trucks are driven with maniacal speed. Motor-cyclists here, if sent to Grand Prix, could put Valentino Rossi into early retirement, ruing the day when he saw the devil riders. Thank God, the roads are bad and the infrastructure creaking at the seams. That helps in controlling the speed maniacs. AS is a fancy one in the sense it is nicely done up, not run down, dark and dingy like most other rivals in its neighbourhood. The owner is so ambitious, he has installed two automatic taps for the largish wash basin near the toilet. You put your hands underneath and within two or three seconds, water spurts out hissing like a snake, giving you a startling jolt. Pull away your hand and like a genie returning to the bottle, the hissing gush disappears... wonderful. One may see these gizmos in five star hotels, not here in this humble 'Meals Ready' joint. Due to the run-down image in my mind, the first day I lifted the conical platic cap right off, which seems to be some sort of magnetic device complete with sensors and all. The water didn't come. I went to the third wash basin meant for drinking water and with a guilt feeling gnawing inside, washed my hands and gargled there. Next day without thinking I put my hand underneath the auto tap and it worked. Most men here seem to find this terribly amusing, they keep playing with the device, till one of the half a million serving boys comes and yells a stream of what I suspect are obscenities in Tamil. The fun part is, this modernity business ends as soon as the meals are ready for serving. Up comes a whole banana leaf, you have to sprinkle some drinking water and wipe it clean with your palm thoroughly or else a stream of Tamil instructions comes to rattle you. Then you must make a mound of white rice [ to which I am allergic, give me yellow, brown, green any colour but not white] about three times larger than what you can hope to finish and a guy carrying four types of sambhars or its cousins, comes rushing like a mouse on having sensed cheese. He goes on dumping eatables that I have no names for -must learn these fast- and if you do not stop him a trickle can sneak into you lap in seconds only. The lime pickle is heavenly, and the appam -fried paapad, nearly the same. They give one single mirchi [green pepper] deeply fried. The rest of the food is eminently health food. I hope I got the names right. Look at the Tamilians, most of them are so slim ! So said a friend who is Konkani, from the Mangalore side, so very different from the local unsmiling ladies. She is right too, most of them are slim, and the obese variety of youngsters is something new to me. I have never seen so many sweet shops, cake shops, shops selling junkfood any time as I am seeing here now. The new generation, the couch potatoes with their gizmos, are almost like rhinos growing up with lean goats like they have in Kutch region of Gujarat. Slim and fit. Tamil food no doubt is healthy, though dosas and idlis are fried. However this fried stuff seems to be having an antidote in the form of various green, yellow or brown chutneys that come every morning. The taste of these snacks in incredibly good, for this is the original dosa land... or idli land. All the imitators elsewhere pale in comparison. I quite like these snacks, and the best thing is you don't belch or burp like a beerhead gorging on gluttonous meals. You don't feel heavy or lazy either. The ant-like local fellow goes bustling about because of this sensible food, I suspect. And the heat which keeps everyone on their toes. Have tried out many places in the industrial area, but Apoorva's seems like the best deal. Efficient, clean, cheap and usually well-managed. One enjoys the meals there as one should. For the industrial workers, a light lunch is always good, and that's what comes my way everyday.

The Midnight Knock...

2006-04-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

So far I have been writing in an orderly fashion, day by day, so as to keep close to the reality that comes like an ugly hag and emerges like a supermodel in Paris after my special treatment.

Today, I have an uglier reality to face. Last night there was a knock on the door well past midnight. Insistent ringing of the bell, as if someone was in a tearing hurry. I felt befuddled to a degree that is possible only when the brain is addled by lack of sleep.

Fumbling with the lock, I opened my room door. The receptionist, the male receptionist with professorial glasses and a ready smile was standing there as if he had grave news. Half a million possibilities flashed through my mind in a few milliseconds. Bad news from home? Or from some close friends who do have this hotel number? But before my drowsy brain could finish the logical analysis, my eyes perceived six cops, standing there a little coyly like school-girls rehearsing a play.

Watching me carefully, was the leader, a dark faced man, who had not smiled in years. He had his gun ready in his pocket. Being a fulltime cop's son, I didn't miss the bulge there.

"Checking sir." Someone said, and added as an afterthought, "just general checking." You don't wake up people at 2.45 in the morning, for 'general checking' I wanted to tell him. Something forced me to hold my tongue. Cops can be hellishly nasty when they choose. At an ungodly hour like this even the night duty fellas get touchy, so I smiled and said : "Please come in." The boss with the ugly expression rushed in.
" Where are you from?" " Pune."
" How long been here?"
" Three weeks, may be more..."
" What are you doing here?" Now deliciously witty answers surfaced in my fatigued brain, broiling and sizzling but I held my tongue once again.

I could have said I love getting half-fried without oil, in my own sweat....waiting to get boiled when the weather turns better...

" I am working with a company at Ambattur." The answer seemed to interest him.

" What's in there?" he pointed his baton to my briefcase. I opened it and he saw jazz CDs, a book, a shaving kit that is useless for me, my passport, and knick-knacks. A whole gamut of facial expressions streaked past, on the dark side of the moon that his face seemed to me.

" And in there?" he pointed the baton to my shoulder strap bag.

" Books" I said, opening those compartments that had technical magazines and books only. By now the cop was ready to believe anything I said, because books seemed to be emerging from where pistols and ammunition should have. Or whatever he wanted to see. Drugs or banned aphrodisiacs or...

" And in there?" now he pointed to the fat bulging suitcase, with one whole month's clothes making it look fatter, like a well-fed cat lying on the sofa.

" Clothes." I said with an equipoise and nonchalance that was getting on everyone's nerves, except his.

" No need to open..." he said softening. So I left the bag alone.
" What are you doing here?" again his query sounded like an affront. But I held my peace, cops can be really merciless if wisecracks are used by a suspect, I knew that for sure, too.

" Working for a company in Ambattur." I repeated parrot-like. The paralyzed receptionist bubbled to life. He had been sleeping in upright position like a horse. He gave the name of the company, probably its postal address too.

" Hmmmm." Said the serious faced cop, reminding me of the unamused spokespersons from the ministry of foreign affairs who never smile. They give us pieces of wisdom, as if reading obituaries.

" Is the company yours?" he asked softly. Implying that I must be cat's whiskers, owning several companies and living in hotels for months. Sigh...
" No sir." I said, giving him a piercing look.
" Okay, goodnight." Going out, rather straggling out, he gave me one last interested look and said :
" Dhanyavaad."
That came as a jolt. I suddenly realized the solemn-faced cop had been talking to me in good Hindi all along. This fact was more bizarre than the whole interview. That 'dhayavaad' gave the game away, I thought, closing the door.

The word means thanks in chaste Hindi. It is never used by common folks who say Thank You all over India. But if you have learnt Hindi through books, or through some impractical teacher who has never crossed India's northern regions, or you've been watching Hindi news on TV, you will use that rare phrase. May be they had been watching me, and the Beast too. My luxurious beard, the huge car big enough to smuggle in God knows how many automatic rifles, my unusual disappearances, my lack of communication with locals... they must have been watching.

Till Muthukurppan [ I like to give faces, arbitrary names] came on the scene and said let me talk to him. Itching to try out his shuddha Hindi on a North Indian. May be Muthu dear wanted to play-act and feel like a supercop he must have seen in five hundred Bollywood films throughout his lack-lustre life. Sighing in resignation, I switched on the TV to watch FashionTV where the catwalk and the drowsy models doing the same stuff over and over again, acts like a sleeping pill on me. Once again it did.
(c) Max Babi, April 2006.

The Beast Rolls Out...

2006-04-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

After good ole Manikandan gestured wildly to me, I stopped trying the ignition. He had discovered, after opening the huge bonnet [the hood for the non-British] of the car that one cable had been disconnected. He got some workers and got that fixed. Even then the long-dead Beast lay dead, like a drunk elephant. Promising a lot of fun, but not even twitching.

When nothing works the brute method works. I was told by a computer engineer that some of the mini-computers which preceded the micro-computer, the one I am writing on and you are reading on, or PC in the parlance, used to come with elaborate instructions for re-starting if it failed. There was this mysterious 'KO' choice which only the maintenance guys knew about. One day when the mini comp failed to start whirring, my friend heard the service engineer mumbling, ' ah the KO!'. It started when the engineer gave it fat kick. The 'kicking option' it was.

Well, shove came to push, and M/n hollered to the security staff to come and push the damned thing out. Diesel engines are incredibly easy to start when you push the vehicle. I remember having pushed a huge Mataor 16-seater mini bus myself, all by myself, right here in Chennai when it had stalled at a junction on Mount Road. It started easily. The Beast rolled out in style, I coud imagine its eyes popping open and taking in the scenario. There were these ant-like creatures all around, to be crushed, and there were these noisy three wheeled insects darting in and out of the narrow strip of road that lay just ahead. In its throbbing leaps, I could feel its impatience to go around crushing things with abandon.

Using the clutch pedal, which required real strength, I allowed the engine to roar but controlled the speed of the car to nearly that of a bullock cart with a limping animal pulling it. The first traffic junction barely half a kilometre away was the fire test. The green light takes an eternity to turn on, and the fast-moving buses, trucks and two-wheelers make a dash for it. I was surrounded on all sides by all manner of self-propelled vehicles under control of speed maniacs. So I kept the engine running, knowing the battery was nearly dead. I cursed the design engineers since the controls were as hard as a truck's. The spacing between the clutch pedal and the brake was ridiculousl small, making me sit -rather forcing me to sit like a prim old lady with her thighs tightly shut. But the accelerator pedal was too far off to the right and at a ridiculous 40 degress angle. I felt goofy, with right foot going wonky and the left one straight.

The green light came on, and I rolled away. The vehicles all around me were clamouring like undisciplined children in a sweet shop. When I honked, the sound was so shrill and loud I very nearly jumped out of my skjn. On hearing my horn, a delicate looking lady doctor in the small car in front gave me looks that could have motlen a steel bar. How did I know she was a lady doc? There was the big red cross sign on her rear window. I smiled at her fatuously, but she wouldn't smile back. Not only because my horn had ripped through her existence, but also because I realized later, local ladies do not ever smile at strangers. I have to watch out for my ever-ready smile. In this confusion the green light had turned amber, and before I could make it, amber had turned red. The traffic cop didn't like all this cavalier attitude and creeping huge cars. He gave me a stern look, higher in voltage than the lady's. I just sped away, waving at him like a buddy.

The Sierra's seat was adjusted for a person perhaps 4 to 6 inches taller than me - I kept on pushing it forward it refused to budge like a pig being dragged by its captors. This necessity to stretch my body and drive, as if I were inside one of those go-carts, albeit huge in size, irritated me no end. But my attention was focused on keeping the damned engine going, so I tried to get used to the position. After one kilometre of trying out three gears, the damned car has five, I took a leisurely U-turn to see how sharply it turns. It turns like a rhino. Very good at going straight ahead but awkward when you try to turn it. You need a huge circle.

I came back to the same mad rush at the over-busy traffic signal with two cops struggling to manage the chaos that seemed awfully scary. Before actually reaching the signal, the car stalled for some reason, precisely as I had feared. Desparate honking by a small car, a white Indica behind me, nor the cops' shrill and frenized whistling helped maters whilst the green turned amber to red to amber to green. I allowed the car to roll backwards as thee was a slight gradient in the road, but some damned fool or the other was always sniffing the Beast's behind. Too close for comfort. The lights turned green three times and I remained glued like an adamant, rogue elephant blocking the path of all and sundry. I expected to see one of the cops come scurrying to me, but that was not to happen.

Trying Out The Beast

2006-04-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Though Assam produces helluva lot of tea, the largest consumption is attributed to Gujarat. No wonder then, I get this tea craving every hour. So when the next attack came, I sneaked right outside the factory, and walked into a shabby little dhaba [a lean-to sort of teashop]. There were six or seven guys, mostly unwashed urchins, catering to only three customers. These top-heavy management type dhabas entail long delays. Everybody thinks somebody is helping the guy at the first table, poring laboriously over the tattered Tamil newspaper. No one moves till the lone customer gets really restless, and makes the right noises. Got my super-syrupy tea, fearing my blood sugar will hit the ceiling -what the heck, I slurped right down to last dregs. Almost everyone can speak English in Chennai, and when the urchins fail to catch your accent, there is always a kindly soul around who not only intervenes, but ensures that your about-to-be-shaken-up faith in humanity is gloriously restored. More of that Good Samaritan stuff later.

I was to take the tomato red Tata Sierra for a spin, as the boss suggested to get used to it before plunging into the suicidal traffic that chokes the Ambattur Industrial Estate on almost every road, right up to Anna Nagar. He had ominously added, 'Before the traffic starts'. Yes indeed around six thirty in the evening all hell breaks loose here. Nasty surprises awaited me round the corner. Armed with a sandfilled sock in their hands.

If I do not descibe my on-going struggles with The Beast, my blog would remain a mere 2-D skeletal caricature of real life. So lets see how the situation developed. After getting the keys to the sinister looking SUV, I went and rather confidently opened the door. I climbed into the high seat, nearly several inches higher than all the cars I have driven so far. I figured out the controls, and the auto-winding feature of the windows was working all right. The stuffy air moved out. The indicators were all lit up at the dashboard on turning the ignition key, and there were two keys to fox me. The smaller one was the turning ON key, whilst the big one was the real ignition key. However the battery seemed dead, for the car made no noise on giving ignition.

Manikandan, the man for all seasons, who had been helping me in house hunting, materialized from nowhere. How he senses someone is facing trouble anywhere in the office or the factory , and how he turns up at the right time everytime is a blessed mystery. He is a shadowy entity, lurking everywhere all the time. He reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's tiny automatons that keep flying in the air, turning up to help the hero or heroine in distress. After materializing, he asks all the right questions, provides all the right solutions, in a jiffy. An amazing Man Friday for me.

I had already figured out most things before the apparition arrived. The battery seemed dead, I indicated to him. The thought that The Beast will roar into life any morment, casused a bunch of butterflies dancing in my tummy orgiastically. The vehicle is a truck in car's clothing, I reminded myself, for the controls seemed very hard indeed. I sat wondering, whilst M/n fiddled with the car, that driving a huge vehicle is double-edged problem : (a) it takes a long time to spatially absorb its size i.e. how wide and long the damned thing is, and (b) you have to wrestle with it physically. Little wonder then, having wrestled with the Sierra, next day I found my legs and thighs cramped and aching.

A lot of coaxing was required before The Beast could roar to life.

Into The Thick Of Things

2006-04-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

The auto-rickshaw driver despite his dissipated looks drove like a maniac on sleeping pills. His driving was as furious as that of Schumacher in his Ferrari, but with a somnambulistic touch to it... he was letting the vehicle carry us forward, like a starship with a brain of its own. To slow him down, and to give my overworked bladder a respite I asked him to stop. I raised the pinky of my right hand, to tell him I wanted to take a leak. His face wreathed in an unlikely smile, he veered off from the fast lane into the slow one, and to my horror, didn't stop for many more kilometres.

When he ultimately did, raising his chin to show me a vacant plot, where another huge industrial estate could have been built, just at the tip of our own Ambattur estate, I got the point. There was a break in the wall, and five or six auto-rickshawwallas lolled about looking as vacant and bored as only they can be on a hot morning with the traffic shooting past them in the opposite direction. My driver pointed to a bush lurking behind the broken wall, indicating it to be a safe spot to take a leak at. I did. Urinals and stray cats are invisible in Chennai. Mighty weird thing, indeed. Once I walked fifteen kilometres without finding a single urinal. Not a single stray cat sighted once in three weeks so far...

There was a tepid welcome at the factory. The boss grunted and mumbled -the sidekick was more forthcoming though. But what's boss if he can't surprise you. When we were walking around the factory, he pulled the keys to a tomato red Tata Sierra car, lying parked in the lot meant for vehicles. Handing the keys he mumbled
' Use this Max, whilst you are here...'
I loved the idea of being mobile but the layer of dust on the car, an SUV [sports utility vehicle, spoke of long disuse, which sank my heart. Old cars can be terribly temperamental. The dull tomato red colour is an eyesore too.

The presence of a diabetic in a massive cluster of sugar-lovers is always a source of ripples. Somewhat like a dying rhinoceros submerged in a shallow pool. Every time the animal shifts, ripples stream out in all directions. Every time I get craving for tea or coffee, the whole office comes to know. In the first two days that I spent here, I tried everything to get myself a proper hot brew. And I have fallen flat on my face every time.

There is a fancily done up visitor's room on the ground floor with plush sofas, a fan, an air-conditioner. Magazines, books, even a computer. There is spotless white and black machine for brewing your own coffee and a white and red machine for brewing chai [tea]. Well, after trying out different combinations, I decided the tea tasted like heated dishwater [Tetley of UK, meant for the hoity toity and not the hoi polloi] Certainly not for poor old me, addicted to tea, overboiled and strong made by urchins at dhabas, the roadside lean-to type tea-shops. The coffee comes out terribly weird. It is strong enough to give me a kick that sends me scurrying upstairs to work at wrong speeds, but fails to satisfy. Two or three cups result in severe acidity adding to my woes.

Morning and post-lunch tea arrives via an unwashed-looking urchin with penetrating black eyes, there's something voodoo about him. He seems terribly averse to simple mathematics. If there are four persons in my biggish office. where the CAD-CAM geeks work orgiastically, the boy gets only three cups. If there are three guys, he gets only two cups. However, Kishore my design assistant, yelled at the boy using a torrential stream of Tamil admonition [ I go by the tone, not knowing a word of the language] and he conjured up yet another plastic cup with lukewarm, terribly sugar-laced tea. I had to have it once and the aftertaste lingered on threatening to last till Kingdom come. He was yelled at again, and asked to bring one cup of tea without sugar. Giving me a piercing look, muttering under his breath the boy vanished for the day. No more tea for me.

So I ran back later to the visitor's room, hoping to try out one more cup of coffee. I brightly figured, I should allow the water to boil more. The white and black machine hissed and got into a bout of vicious gurgling. The sound emanated from somewhere, impossible to pinpoint the source, as if there were live creatures inside it. If I had caught hold of a stone-age primitive from the Andaman Islands, he'd have prostrated in front of this glass-walled apparatus housing a hundred invisible gods at war. The boss turned up accidentally, just as I was turning to the tea maker instead. He caught on, and very patiently explained the whole sequence to me, showing me each delicately carved wooden chest with consummables, all prettily hand-carved and tastefully arranged. Tea bags, whitener, sugar etc. Since someone called him on the phone, he abandoned me with my tentative attempts to brew myself a cup of tea.

My First Day

2006-04-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

Anna Nagar in western parts of Chennai is probably the decent most colony beyond which depressingly endless areas begin. My hotel happens to be one of those low-brow establishment with pretensions, perhaps delusions of grandeur. It was designed and built to be a replica of a star hotel but something somewhere went terribly wrong. It’s like a failed Bollywood starlet who dreamt big but ended up as a discreet call girl –ageing, decrepit and silently desperate. A three level lift covers four floors, thus one has to either walk up or down half a set of stairs to reach a particular floor. The black and white uniformed room boys or bell-boys take you to the 3rd floor and then make you climb down half a floor to reach room number 204 on the 2nd floor. There’s a pub on the top floor, in the open terrace, which the room boys avoid as if they are mortally scared of fraternizing with the enemy. The same applies to the two restaurants on the ground floor –the ever-changing male receptionist flatly denies the existence of the restaurants. In spite of that you do see people sitting, eating, and drinking too. They perhaps call these ‘Permit Rooms’, a leftover from the semi-dry era when drinking needed a permit, a health permit as it was euphemistically called. One restaurant is in the permanent state of repairs and interior decor re-work. The only logical explanation may be, I wondered idly sipping coffee in my room, that the owner has hived off both the restaurants, and perhaps also the pub open to the sky. A sudden and catastrophic loss, as if lost in gambling overnight. Worse still, there may have been several brothers who cannibalized the father’s property as soon as he kicked the bucket. People turn to fantasy when mildly drunk, for me, good old coffee does the trick. So I couldn’t suppress a guffaw, when I remembered a famous Gujarati anecdote rather resembling these circumstances. It’s about a 90 year old bully, the unquestionable patriarch of a Marwari [Rajasthani traders] family who lay comatose on his death-bed, eyes fixedly staring at the courtyard. He’d shiver uncontrollably in a rage if someone blocked his view. ‘ Father has buried a treasure in the courtyard!’ Up went the cry, ‘ Or else why would he stare ouside like that?’ The eldest son philosophized. The younger ones equally greedy, agreed. None of them wanted hard work, just easy money. A doctor was summoned who finished all his testing meticulously and grimly proclaimed : ’ The old man’s vital organs are all very nearly gone. He’ll die any moment now.’ A chorus of wild protest went up. The sons said the old man can’t just up and leave then without telling them where the treasure was buried. ‘ I can revive him just for five seconds, with this hugely potent injection. But it will cost you Rs.35,000/-' said the wise doc. They all cried that it was daylight robbery, and tried haggling just as the old man would have. The doc got up, buttoning up his coat and zipping up his medico briefcase. ‘Okay, okay,’ said the sons, now that the meagre chance of unearthing the treasure was also melting away. The medicine man gave the injection to the old trader. Within seconds he opened his eyes, searched out a place in the courtyard, and yelled, half getting up : ‘Bakri jhadoo khay chhe!’ [The goat is chewing up our broom.] Then he collapsed and died. Well back on terra firma, I made the mistake of asking the boss if he would be sending me a car. I recall I was sitting on the throne, talking to him before pulling the flush –had just impulsively rung him up. He probably smelt the offensive odours and hissed, ‘ Max, you’d better get used to managing on your own. Take an auto or something.’ The Chennai heat had not begun, and it took me nearly half an hour to search out an honest looking auto-rickshaw driver who would take me to Ambattur. One fatigued looking fellow volunteered, and took me there.

My Lodgings

2006-04-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

Hotel Sky Park, unlike my previous two temporary abodes, turned out to be a quiet place, a bungalow turned into a hotel with limited rooms.

I recall the weather was warm but not at all beastly as it turned into, slowly, over the weeks. Right now after a little more than two weeks, Chennai alternates between virtually a hot plate where I feel like a fish being fried without oil, and when it's cloudy, I feel like being inside a pressure cooker with ten million souls to keep me dubious company. The two wheeler riders here can beat the crazy Puneites hollow in purely kamikaze style of stunt-riding.

It was a Sunday, and late afternoon. Not having to report to work, I eased up and watched the umpteen channels on TV most of them making no sense to me. The news channels in English these days have lost their originality to the extent each one seems to be going overboard be it the flash fire in a trade fair that claimed two thousand lives or more, or creatively bankrupt politicos riding their Raths [chariots] to whip up hatred between communities.

It gets very depressing to see seven views of the same thing happening at all the channels, sigh, copycat channels seem to be the order of the day. The first surprise was a musical one. I had completely forgotten that I was in Mecca of Carnatic music -something I have loved intensely since schooldays. North Indians are as a rule allergic to this great art form, and though I owe allegiance to my own father, dear Abbajan whose exquisite tastes percolated down my childlike conscience like filtered coffee -well, I used to resent his contempt for this noble genre of music.

The only exception he used to make was, the redoubtable M.S. Subbuluxmi whose Meera bhajans have been unparalleled in music history. He would ask me to play them every morning, and oh boy, what a day it would be when I got my batteries charged by this angel of a singer, always putting her heart and soul into whatever she sang.

The surprise then, was two youngsters sitting soberly facing the camera. One played the violin, nearly every second person here seems to be a virtuoso on that difficult instrument and the other one was playing a slide guitar like a country star from Texas. Seemed rather odd to me, and my reaction was, as if I had suddenly seen two matronly ladies from South sporting mini skirts or hot pants or worse... but the music was divine.

It just enveloped me like a well-meaning miasma, lifted my soul to heights unsuspected and let me float around where even eagles won't dare. The raag sounded very similar to Kirwani, which in the Hindustani stream has been borrowed from the Carnatic stream I believe. The violinist seemed to be playing his instrument with much practised ease, and the slide guitarist gave him solid support.

When I spied notes of Bhairavi [can't remember the Carnatic name] I squirmed. After a few minutes, I thought there were strains of Piloo, even Khamach... and then I lost track. It was a raagmala, a medley or raags... but there were more jolts to come. When I heard the unmistakable strains of Mozart's symphony number 40 in D minor, my heart skipped a bit.

Before I could gather my jaw by now lolling at my feet on the floor, I heard Für Elise by Beethoven, one that my pianist daughter Mimi keeps playing daily. There were plenty more blasphemies to come creeping in, and though I am not at all a conservative, I felt violated for some mysterious reason.

There were credits in what appeared like Telugu script to me [ I go by the visuals of bird flying, sitting, looking up, or lying dead with feet up in the air, that's what the characters look like] it was a sort of clue for me to see the English alphabets USA in their names. So the youngsters were NRIs trying out their own brand of fusion. Went for a long walk, had a good dinner, watched more sickening news and went off to sleep long before midnight, something unusual for me -the night creature who hates sleep.
(c) Max Babi, April 2006.

At The Airport....

2006-04-12T01:39:00.000-07:00

I reached Pune airport something like three hours before the scheduled flight, the second one, in the morning. I like doing that. Sit watching people and the free drama that most of them put up for my assessment.

The security staff, the bumbling cops, the lazy young men and women 'manning' the counters and flirting outright, the highly unhelpful ground staff, the over-important officials [increasingly fat ladies are now becoming that species], the VIPs with their twisted sense of importance, the nouveau riche with their standard regulation baggage on wheels, the carefree teenagers who show their derriere cleavage when they bend, the always-fighting cleaning ladies.... amazing assortment. The same everywhere in India.

The flight was delayed. So that meant lots of waiting. Tired of sending sms messages of goodbye to many friends, I climbed up to the lonely restaurant to restore myself with a beer and some French Fries. It helped. The overcrowding of the skies reflected itself on the rotten street like scenes at the airport lounge too. There were these small airlines potting up portable kiosks, like the bank guys setting up shops right next to smelly urinals [what logic drives them?], and noisily quarreling with one another or the clients, which is worse. Well, after an indifferent flight, ruined by a fat Tamilian who snored and leaned on me for support, with me jerking him straight every five minutes, I landed in Chennai. I lumbered out with my huge suitcase plus two brief cases was catching the sight of a banner, with six inch high letters proclaiming MAX BABI.

The driver told me his car was far off in the parking lot, so why don't I walk up the passage and he will retrieve the car. I walked up. I waited, and he didn’t turn up for nearly ten minutes. I got to watching traffic cops hauling up taxis stopping on this passage way and allowing passengers to embark. One cop, driver of a tow away van was yelling feverishly in his mike to ask drivers to move or get towed. Drivers shouted back at him. I wanted to tell my taxi driver, we never look cops in the eye, just ignore them and they don't do a thing. If you look a Pune cop in the eye he slaps you with Rs.500/- fine, finding weird things wrong in your papers, or totally missing papers.

Getting more and amused I watched the well oiled team catch drivers and get them booked. Suddenly a small car slowed down, a grayish Indica with a taxi type yellow number plate. The driver smiled at me, and his dark complexion his toothbrush mustaches, seemed very familiar. Thinking my guilty feeling driver is back, I hopped on to his vehicle, whilst he frantically gathered my bags and stuffed them in his small boot. We were driving away but car wouldn’t move. Two guys had swooped down and put a huge lock on the front right wheel. A huge calliper shaped like and same in size as garden shears... the driver coaxed and cajoled, all to no avail. He yelled, honked, beat his fists on his steering wheel and they moved away to the next car. The driver of the tow away truck smirked ominously.

The driver jumped out and went to whisper sweet nothings in to the ears of other cops. He came bounding back like a fox being hunted. Give me six rupees saaar... he said. I fished out a tenner and asked him to keep it. Fifty more, Sixty-aaa he yelled. So I gave him a hundred. He ran out and brought the small emaciated urchin who was going around locking more cars. We were free to go. Suddenly after going ten metres, he screeched to a halt. An ambassador car had come to intercept us. The white uniformed driver, was dancing up and down and knocking on my closed window. When nothing worked, he took out a crumbled note from his pocket and unfurled it in my face. It said, MAX BABI.

Holy shit, I had got into a wrong taxi. We quickly swapped taxis, and before we could say Puratchi Talavi Jaylalitha, the towing truck had come latched onto this taxi too. Whilst my official driver yelled at the cops, the other driver, took out my last bag and sped away. With the balance forty rupees, in other words I had paid for his short sojourn at the passage way. End of Day One.
(c) Max Babi March 2006.

Max Tracks....

2006-04-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

My good friend John Mathew the writer and poet, active at Caferati, Sulekha and Shakespeare & Co. once suggested that I should write a blog entitled Max Tracks...since I travel a lot.

Here it is, John.

Max In Chennai is a humble beginning to what seems like an attractive way of penning my thoughts, reactions and reflections when in an alien culture and climate.

Due to errors made in floating my own blog -I have several others which are botched attempts, and the Big Brother sitting somewhere watching me canoodle and freak with controls has whammed me into a pit of confusion. Lets not dwell on that. This blog seems to be behaving, for whatever mumbo jumbo the IT guys would sell me.

I propose to write my Chennai Diary here. Today is probably my 20th day in Chennai, haven't bothered to keep track -but two weeks to absorb the local conditions seem decent to me.

This is a test introduction. My next post will be more juicy. So hang around and make copious comments, dear reader.

Ciao !

Max