IDLI - I Don't Like It

When you talk about South Indian cuisine, one of the first food item that comes to a person’s mind is Idli. As Wikipedia states, and here I quote, “Idli is a savory cake, 2-3 inches in diameter, made by steaming a batter consisting of fermented black lentils and rice. The fermentation process breaks down the starches so that they can be readily absorbed by the body.” Wikipedia also details idli’s history and states that this food could be at least 1000 years old, if not more. It is also, without doubt, the most consumed breakfast item in South India.

With such an impressive record, one would wonder that everyone would love idlis – but I don’t! It isn’t exactly that I have vowed never to eat idlis, but I don’t eat them outside nor at my home. There are those rare instances when my bowels decide to misbehave, and then I have no choice but to down these white, fluffy, tasteless cakes, but otherwise, they are a strict no-no for me. I have been impressed and even marginally tempted after seeing a few others eating idli, but all it takes is one munch for reality – that they taste yuck – to set in me. In fact, I can say with some certainty that idli is the only food item I take great pains to avoid.

It wasn’t always that I hated idlis. My mom never tires of telling everyone around me who’d care to listen that I used to eat at least 3 idlis when I was 2-3 years old. For all those who have seen me later in life, let me just mention that I was indeed a rather rounded child. All my earlier photos display me in a football-like pose with a bee-stung face. Anyway, over time, this overexposure to idlis must have worked on my psyche, and I remember it was around the age of 10-11 that I toned down to having strictly 2 idlis. Whether it be the fluffy, soft ones which my mom prepared (and which was pretty famous in my family circles) or whether it be the marble-like ones prepared at certain relatives’ place, I never had more than 2. Chutney, sambar, sugar, or pickle, regardless of their quality, never made any change in my idli intake. The fact that we had 15 people in our home ensured that idli dominated the breakfast table. This single-handedly helped in me losing all that extra flab and having the trim figure of present.

I am still unsure about the overexposure to idli theory mainly due to my younger brother. He had as much exposure to this food item, but that has never seemed to affect him adversely. In fact, I see him gorging on them even more enthusiastically nowadays. In fact, my mom generally has two cookers running at full steam when he sits down to eat idli. While I can match him in dosas, I don’t even attempt to keep up with him while having idlis. In fact, I’ve ducked many a challenge if the competing turf happens to be idli. The margin of defeat would be just too big compared to others.

After marriage, my mother hoped for a change, but this was one item where even my wife couldn’t make a difference. She did try all her womanly charms to coax me into eating this, but it just proved that in certain areas, I was above any kind of temptation. This does put considerable amount of stress when we go for marriage ceremonies where the breakfast is mainly idli. Let us just say that the fact that we continue to be married is proof that we have managed to overcome that major hurdle in our life together.

My dislike towards idli is rather well-known in my side of the family as well as my wife’s. For others, I hope this is helpful. To me, IDLI means I Don’t Like It.

Common Man

Coming into world the usual way
Bawling at the top of his voice
Wet and heaving, the baby lay
Wanting to get back, given a choice

Sleeping through day, crying otherwise
He spent his life wrapped up
Mother took care after an early rise
At night, his father stayed late up.

The baby grew slow and steady
Showing signs of being just normal
He said “mommy”, he said “daddy”
Had nothing that looked abnormal.

Seasons changed, the baby became
A kid, ready for school
Books and bags and tears came
But soon found everything cool

He was good but never great
Just another face in his class
Failure meant it was all fate
But proud when he won some brass.

Grandeur dreams he always had
Of wealth, women, and wine
Earning respect of good and bad
And a waiting list to dine.

When he finished, he had no clue
What path he wanted to take
Life hit him just out of the blue
He realized it’s no cake.

Dreams did always live with him
Drive for them just did not
He prayed to God and sang all hymns
But talent, he had not.

That’s the story, true and sad,
Of someone who also can,
Lack of will, and some luck that’s bad
Makes him a common man.

Stray Dog City

For long, Bangalore was known as the Garden City. One could see trees lining almost all the roads, there were parks to be found everywhere, there was hardly any place in the city which didn’t have leafy canopy, and it had the best climate among the cities in the country. Then, probably in the 1980s, pubs sprung up across the city, and the city began to be known as the Pub City. Most of them weren’t much better than a local bar, but that didn’t deter people from calling them pubs. What probably did differentiate a pub from a bar those days could be that all the bars in those days were named after Hindu Gods or other celestial beings. Probably that ensured that they stayed in touch with our rich culture even as they were selling alcohol brewed using a Western culture. Then came the IT boom, and Bangalore successfully tapped it first and became the IT City. Anyway, nowadays, Bangalore is the undisputed Stray Dog City.

In 1985, when I first visited Bangalore, I remember seeing these fancy dog breeds being taken for a walk by their proud owners in the mornings. Even though people didn’t exactly know each others’ names, they definitely took enough time to smile at each other. This was a city with a hill station’s trappings. By 1998, when I returned back to the city, things had definitely moved along. With its enviable weather, the city was able to successfully project itself as the IT destination in the country, and all the major companies flocked to set their units up in the city. The old-timers were beginning to complain that the city was no longer the way it was. People came to the city from all over the country; so did the stray dogs.

A typical stray dog seen in Bangalore would be a muddy orange in color. Will we see a different color if we were to give these dogs a thorough wash is a question which I’ve never found an answer for. Of course, there are the spotted muddy orange or completely black varieties as well, but they aren’t as commonly seen as the fully orange ones. Color apart, they share a lot of similar traits. They are all fiercely territorial and don’t entertain any attempts of border transgressions. In fact, any attempt to sneak in and capture an inch of foreign land could result in the whole pack stopping all that they were doing, which would be nothing, and barking at the top of the voice. While most intruders take this as a sign to retreat, there are indeed a few adventurous ones which feel like testing out the proverb that barking dogs seldom bite. Of course, there’d always be a dog in that pack who had not heard of that proverb, and he would run towards his adversary at full tilt, barking all the time. This is the final sign for the intruder to retreat gracefully. When the pack sees one of them willing to disprove the proverb, they all decide to join that member and rush to the sensitive spot and take care of the terrorist.

Another common trait is their base camp generally being close to a bakery or an eatery. While this is no surprise, it is very surprising to see them happily munching on buns, glucose biscuits, and what nots. In fact, I’ve seen a couple of them having rice and sambar and occasionally look up at the hotel boy to wonder whether they’d get a small serving of either curd or rasam. Due to this strategic location, I am yet to find a struggling stray in Bangalore city; they are all pretty healthy. A couple of them near my office have even started dieting and refusing to eat anything other than biscuits with nutrients and low on sugar, milk, etc.

The way these dogs detest those that aren’t clean is another trait commonly seen. Whether it be people or vehicles or anything else, if they don’t see stuff that isn’t of the better quality, they start off. I have personally seen a dog take a monstrous truck on just because the wheels had a bit of mud in it. That dog can still be seen in Koramangala 8th block, near the National Dairy Development Board, walking around with a malformed fracture in one of its forefeet. Of course, that was one lucky stupid dog!

Due to their impressive network, these dogs have a great mechanism to evade law (read: the dog catcher). The moment they see a vehicle, or even a person, closely resembling law, these canines show great skills in vanishing from the face of the city. It won’t be until a day later that most of them would come out of hiding. That said, they are always pretty confident about their lawyers (read: PETA, CUPA, and other dog lovers) who would do all that is in their power to get these animals back on the city roads. When an owl met with an accident near our company premises and a few animal-loving colleagues had called these lawyers, they weren’t pretty interested. After all, owls aren’t dogs, and they definitely aren’t stray dogs.

Apart from being a threat to the general public, this Orange brigade is a threat to science too. All the neutering procedures carried out by the officials seem to have little effect on the reproductive capabilities of these fellows. The claims continue to be strong regarding their birth control; only, their births continue to be more. With such a strong network backed by strong powers, it is little surprise that the city has a orange hue to it nowadays, and not all of it is dust.

Slumdog Millionaire - My Selective Blindness

No, I haven’t watched Slumdog Millionaire yet. And no, this is no review on the movie. In fact, my knowledge about this movie is purely hearsay. Now, hearsay might or might not be accepted in a court of justice, but in this blog of mine, I definitely am going to accept it and key in my thoughts based on it. I have received positive comments on the movie as well as negative ones, so I hope this entry of mine doesn’t end up being absolute balderdash.

I remember reading about it first in Indianwatchdogs.com. Very soon, views and reviews on the movie started appearing everywhere. People were all raving about it. It was almost as if anyone was willing to say anything against it. Then, Big B commented against it, and suddenly the naysayers found their voice. Now, the print and visual media had two differing views respectively supported by SRK and Big B. Arindham Chaudhary too joined the bandwagon and probably found more viewers for that blog entry than for all his movies put together. As if to sustain the interest levels, the movie started winning awards in almost all of the major functions, including the Golden Globes and BAFTA (and tipped to repeat it in Oscars). Each time the movie won a clutch of awards, the debate started all over again.

The first review I personally received, not surprisingly, was from my brother. He had seen it while still at sea and talked to me about it in one of our chat sessions. While he wasn’t exactly scathing, he made it very clear that he didn’t enjoy the movie one bit. It wasn’t just showing India in unflattering terms, according to him, but also just a mediocre film. So, while I had been pretty enthusiastic about watching the movie in a multiplex near me, now I was skeptical. The last thing I want is to go for a movie, pay a bomb, sit amongst people who pay more attention in biting on the crunchiest portion of popcorn or downing their sodas with the loudest slurp, having heard I’d be disappointed, and then to actually find out that I have indeed been disappointed. I do make an exception, of course, to those people who prefer to examine their companion’s anatomical structure inside the relative coziness of a cinema hall. I’ve been saved from a few movie disasters thanks to these enterprising people.

The second review was from a colleague. He told that he didn’t like the movie that much and that he was pretty disturbed by it and that it was revolting. Now, that got me thinking. Didn’t some of the Indians not like it because it was disturbing? For an average middle-class Indian, let us take myself for example, poverty and slums and such is an embarrassment. It is a part of the country that I wouldn’t want to discuss. In fact, I would rather close my eyes while passing near a slum and feel it isn’t there than open my eyes and look at the real India. I would read about a Reliance or Infosys, IIT or IIM, but I would not want anything to do with Dharavi. I would read and talk over and over about a rare beggar who died with a small fortune hidden in their rags, but I wouldn’t glance twice at one lying helpless on the sidewalk. That me is now having to sit in a darkened hall, having to view all that I’d been closing my eyes to, forced to face facts which I know are true deep down but isn’t willing to accept, and it isn’t any surprise that I come out of the hall feeling revolted. I feel whether all this hype around the movie was only for me to see a person rising from a pile of shit or seeing a kid’s eyes being gouged to be made a beggar, etc. These are actually scenes I either see around me or I glance through in the newspapers but don’t bother to think twice about. Now, someone’s saying that I can’t act blind anymore and have to watch it, and I am not liking it one bit. All this might be happening in my country, but why does anyone have to show it? Even if someone had to show it, why did it have to be a foreigner? Why don’t they make a movie on one of India’s success stories rather than its slums? The movie might be about triumph against all odds, but I just don’t want to see those odds.

While I haven’t watched Slumdog Millionaire, I have read Shantaram. There is quite a description of a Mumbai slum in that book, but the author paints such a romanticized picture of it. They were planning to make a movie out of it with Johnny Depp playing the lead and Big B too playing an important part. While words can paint a romantic picture, the movie camera is much harsher and might have shown up a different picture, and I might have come off the hall cursing the director for not having understood the essence of the book. A Bollywood movie, on the other hand, would mostly show the lead actors in a foreign country or in the upmarket sections of the country’s main metros. I can sit through movies on mafia or terrorism, but I don’t want to sit through a movie on poverty. It is as if seeing it would be an impediment in my journey to the other end of the spectrum. Regardless of the advertisement campaigns by various governments, it is a fact that more than half the population lives below the poverty line in our country. It is also a fact that despite India’s success in IT/ITES sector, we have farmers committing suicides across the country, famine/floods happen each year, epidemics frequently break out in various parts, etc. We are still unable to provide uninterrupted power supply throughout the country, and drinking water is still a luxury for many. Many of my countrymen still earn less than a dollar a day. Of course, don’t ask me to open my eyes and see that!

Every Once In A While...

Through summer heat or wintry times,
Smiling spring or gloomy rains,
She sneaks in to be with him
Every once in a while.

Many have fallen to her wily charms,
And more will follow suit,
Even as he falls slave to her,
Every once in a while

His wife’s worried with these visits,
And those around him too,
As he tangos with her all time,
Every once in a while.

Shaken up each time she kisses,
Body with goose bumps,
She leaves his body shivering,
Every once in a while.

The time spent with her he hates,
But finds no escape route,
He’s tried to evade her clutches,
Every once in a while.

Having had her way, she leaves
Him all tired after that
Common cold, you attack him,
Every once in a while.

I, Me, Myself

For the last 2 days, I have been wanting to write something here but was quite clueless about what to write on. Then, I got talking with my colleague, who’s been acting as my unofficial editor about how long it took me to reach office this morning, and she told me that that would make a good topic. I guess I’ve mentioned this earlier in my blog as well, but a drive around Bangalore is always worth another write-up.

As always, I started from home sometime between 8:25 and 8:30 a.m. After a year’s careful research, I found that particular timeslot to be the best for my journey from my home in Vignan Nagar to my office in Koramangala. Anything after 8:30 made the traffic quite a bit worse whereas anything before 8:25 was out of the question thanks to my detailed attention to the morning ablutions. Of course, I could get up earlier, but hey, didn’t I mention I was lazy!

Anyway, there I was, driving up the Kaggadasapura Main Road and aiming to take a right turn to head towards BEML Gate when I noticed a small traffic jam ahead of me. Considering the fact that there were only 3-4 vehicles stuck, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but I had thoroughly underestimated my countrymen’s ability to make bad things worse. Within a minute, there were 3 autorickshaws that wiggled their way into the middle of the jam. Soon, there were about 5-6 motorcycles pushing into the tiny space between the autorickshaws. Then, a couple of people decided that they had to cross the road at that exact same spot and stepped over the front wheels of a couple of two-wheelers before they too got stuck.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, people started honking. Now, I’ve always felt that we honk just because there’s a horn. Due to such incessant honking, most people have come to ignore it to the extent that when I give a polite hoot to let a cyclist in the middle of the road or a person standing all lost in deep thought to make way, they don’t give a damn. Though I’ve still managed to refrain from non-stop honking, there have been a few instances (when) where I’ve lost my equanimity and participated in the rowdy act.

Coming back to today, after about 10 minutes, sanity seemed to temporarily prevail, and people began to realize that this wasn’t getting anywhere, so everyone became quite cooperative, directing each other one or the other, and we did move off. By now, each of us had gotten that much more late in reaching our destination that we were all unrelenting, not giving any space to each other. That ensured that it was crawl all the way past GM Palya, but as we reached the BEML Gate, it just got worse.

While earlier there was a semblance of a crawl, here it was an absolute stop. People weren’t even honking, they were all that tired. Dust was swirling around, sun was heading to the top, and I was beginning to get quite irritated myself. To prove my point, I gave two meaningless hoots and looked around to tell others how exasperated I was with it all. While most just ignored my feeble horns, there were a few who looked at me with an expression which meant they were much more exasperated at me than I was with either of them. Finally, when we all started crawling, all of us had the same brainwave, to go through the vacant plot in front of the BEML to rush to the main road at the other end. That meant we just made it a bigger jam.

In order to prove how emotionally high-strung everyone was, there were a couple of slanging contests. I did manage to learn a few more choice words without really knowing their meaning. That is one big drawback I feel with these words. They are at their deadliest in one’s mother tongue, but they lose their potency if the person at the receiving end doesn’t understand that word. So, I am sure I won’t have much of a chance to put this newly acquired knowledge to great use.

While I was engrossed in expanding my vocabulary, the horns around me gathered momentum, and I realized that a huge inch of space had opened up in front of me. Barely could I release the gear before I had to brake myself to a stop yet again. After another 10 minutes or so, when I got a chance to expand my carbon quotient in this world, I was back to jostling with others for space on the road. This one-upmanship on the road continued all the way till most of us took a turning to Jeevan Bhima Nagar at which time things eased because the roads got a bit more wider, and the traffic was generally in just 2 directions.

After stuttering through Indira Nagar and the initial part of inner ring road, traffic opened up until we came to Ejipura. That is one of the spots where motorists generally tend to lose their brains. While some decide to take a right while traveling in the middle lane, others decide to cut lanes from the inner to the outer one right in front of the signal. Others suddenly turn color blind or just plain blind as they never seem to see the red light. Now, if you were to be correct enough to stop at the red, there would be at least 5 of them who would feel you’re making a big mistake and would want to correct you by blowing their horns some 100 times.

Finally leaving Ejipura junction, I came to the next major stop, in front of the Sony World in Koramangala. Among the various traffic obstacles, I feel this to be the most orderly, thanks mainly to the strong police presence at this point. When I did make the right turn to my office from there, I was still apprehensive, because right in front of the Yo! China outlet in Koramangala, there are some crazy traffic jams most of the days. Today, one bugger did try his best to disrupt the smooth flow of traffic by driving his scooter into the middle of oncoming traffic, but when he realized that I, who was heading the traffic, was driving in a much more insane manner, he decided to put a price on his own life and backed off. By the time I parked my car in my office, I had only spent 1:15 hours on the road, trying to cross a meager 12 kms! Each day, when I put me and myself above others, I tend to reach that much later. I wonder why.

Yahoo! It's a Spice-y Connect-ion - Part III

It was Yahoo! which introduced us to each other and Spice and Connect too played a huge part in developing that introduction into something wonderful along with Yahoo! But despite such technologically advanced love affair, we were now left to tradition as we got ready to get engaged to each other. There were a sizeable portion of my relatives who felt that my parents were making a big mistake in proceeding with it, especially since she was a rung lower than us in the Kerala Hindu sub-caste ladder. Having confirmed my seriousness with it, my parents didn't really bother much with what others thought and really didn't heed to their views on it.

A week before the actual engagement, my parents and grandma, along with few of close relatives visited her parents, who had come down from Kolkata, at their home in Kerala. So, despite being in love with each other, it was my parents who got a chance to meet my wife before I could. Somehow, that rather lent a traditional touch to it and probably pleased both sets of parents. When all felt that the drama was all over did my brother (it had to be him) cause yet another flutter. My parents got a shock two days before the engagement when someone rung the door bell in the middle of night. My father really got a shock on looking through the peephole when he saw my brother standing there. Considering my brother, my father was pretty sure that he had been kicked out by the Singapore institute. It was only upon opening the door that they realized that he had come down for the engagement as a big surprise for me. Needless to say, it wasn't the kind of surprise my father was looking for, but once the shock had worn off, all of us were happy that he did what he did.

We started off early to her place for the engagement. I was pretty anxious to see in person that I was in love with. When we first reached her place, I saw lots of her relatives but my roving eyes couldn't find what they wanted to see. I guess they really wanted to test my patience, because it wasn't until another hour, almost, before I could meet her. It was rather unnerving, considering the fact that we both were in love and eager to really see each other, but there were about 100-odd pairs of eyes following us, quite curious to see how we'd react. After all the traditional customs were followed, we were allowed a bit of free time with each other. We might as well have been in the middle of a crowd, because there were a few children who were pretty interested in knowing what we would do and would peep into the room where we sat in a not so discreet manner. I'd say we had a very British kind of an hour, talking more about the weather than anything else.

After the anticlimatic meeting at engagement, I felt I needed to meet her again. While her dad wasn't very sure about it, her uncle impressed upon her dad that it was perfectly okay for that to happen. So, two days later, they came down to Thrissur, to her uncle's place, from where I took her out for lunch. We still were getting comfortable around each other, and the easy manner of communication which we displayed over the past so many months was missing. I did present her a pair of earrings, though that would very soon provide lifelong amusement for me and embarrassment for her. She called me up later to ask whether the color of those earrings would wear off, and I said no, wondering what in the world prompted her to ask something like that. It stuck me then that she probably didn't have a great opinion about my finances (rightly so) and thought I'd bought her imitation jewelry. Well, let me just say that it has been one of those rare stories that I have to embarass her with.

Once again at the mercy of Yahoo!, Spice, and Connect, we were back to being our usual selves, communicating freely with each other. There were a couple of occasions wh I got carried away and shot off a few risque messages which landed up in my brother's mobile to whom I was sending cricket scores at the same time. It didn't help matters that their names appeared one below the other in my phone's contact list. The fact that I'm still alive and kicking proves that it didn't cause much damage. During this time, I also got to meet my fiancee's close friend who had got a job in Bangalore. This was the friend who had stressed to my wife before her engagement that I could be a danger to the society for all she knows, so I knew I had to try doubly hard to prove her wrong. She did look rather guarded initially and probably kept her pepper spray too ready, but for once, I didn't give a person a chance to use such things on me. The next day's mail from Kolkata confirmed the fact that I had indeed passed the test.
Our wedding was initially planned for April, when the heat would be at its worst in Kerala, but sanity finally prevailed and it was forwarded to February. After all the twists, turns, and drama that accompanied our journey from that first chat session in Yahoo! till our marriage, the function itself was rather a smooth affair. Perhaps it was the novelty factor, but quite a lot of relatives who hadn't shown great interest in our family affairs turned up to witness our marriage. She played her role to perfection of an Indian bride, crying through most of the function. I, on the other hand, was an embarrassment to most, sporting a huge smile through the entireity of the function. In fact, the photographer had to ask me to smile a bit less at one point! Little did he know how happy I was.

It is safe to assume that ours was probably among the first 1000 (maybe even first 100) internet love marriages in India. In this, I am not taking into consideration marriages through matrimonial portals. Having said that, I really don't see us as trendsetters. We were two ordinary souls destined to meet in an extraordinary way, that's all. That way also assisted us in opening up to each other in a way which might not have been possible if we had met each other in person and fallen in love. The fact that we started as friends helped us reveal certain things which you wouldn't if you were trying to impress the other person. All that did help provide a solid foundation for us to build upon. But a solid foundation isn't any good if the rest of the construction is substandard, and we are constantly working on the structure, making it look as new as ever. It is hard work, but we have stuck to it. When people express surprise at how long we've been married, we realize that we must be doing the right things. We complete six years of married life, and it is still as fresh as new. To my lovely wife, I wish you a happy anniversary, dear. Thanks for everything!

Yahoo! It's a Spice-y Connect-ion - Part II

As I get ready to write up the second part, I remember all those soap operas with their major recap sessions which last until the first break, and I’m wondering whether I should have something similar – a recap that would take up half of this current blog entry. That, though, would not serve my purpose, so I guess I better get on with it.

It was rather amazing that even though Yahoo! Chat introduced us to each other, we never had a chat over the internet after the first session. What followed that initial chat session was daily exchange of emails and frequent phone calls. The mails were initially generally about our previous day and such, but it was in her mails that I first saw a change. I am, by nature, like an ostrich. I’ll close my eyes and think I’m blind or its dark around me. Sometimes, it is like a defense mechanism; other times, it is because I’m stupid. In this particular case, though, I was the former as I wasn’t sure where it would all lead to. Not trusting my judgment, I discussed this with a couple of my friends – taking into consideration both a male and a female perspective. Both my friends agreed that there definitely was something, but they didn’t make it any easier by saying it is up to me. Now, I didn’t need them to tell me that, but I realized that I had no choice.

Just as I realized that I’ll have to make a choice one way or the other, I decided to play my final card and see. Ever since we’d started correspondence, we hadn’t seen how each of us looked like. Deep down, I knew that it didn’t matter, but my reluctance to face reality told me that I could probably have a way out. So, I suggested to her that we should probably be seeing each other’s photos. The next day, I was off from work, but I went to a cybercafé to see whether she’d sent me that photo. My roommate accompanied me along because he didn’t have a great opinion about my ability to judge feminine beauty. Not surprisingly, the email with her photograph attached had arrived. In it, I could see a pretty girl with a pleasant smile but that’s about it, but my friend went absolutely ballistic, claiming she’s much more beautiful than I could ever hope to get and a few more dramatic dialogues like that. As one can see, he didn’t have a great opinion about my looks as well. Anyway, I couldn’t find anything wrong which could have provided me an opening to escape.

Now that she’d sent me her photograph, I had to sent her one of mine. Having found nothing specific to criticize in her photograph, I decided to have a final go at escape and chose one particular photo. That was a photo of mine at dark (people who’ve seen me will know what I mean here), wearing a dark shirt and a cream pants. I myself could only see my pants, teeth, and the camera’s flash light reflecting from my glasses. I knew that any ordinary girl would not proceed after having looked at it, but I was slowly beginning to realize that I wasn’t dealing with any ordinary girl here but someone really extraordinary. She didn’t hesitate one bit with the photo (and I somehow knew by then that she wouldn’t) and asked me questions as to whether I liked anyone special and who it was if there was one. Here was a girl, one whom I really liked but was afraid to surrender my heart to, asking me who I specifically liked, and I decided finally to throw caution to wind, at least once in life, and told her that it was she who I was interested in. Later, I would come to know from her that if my answer would have been in the negative, she wouldn’t have ever spoken to me after that; that was how close I came to being a total fool.

Now that I was committed to her, I had to tell this to someone in my family, and I chose my younger brother for it. He was at Singapore at that time, doing the final year of his marine engineering course. I messaged him regarding this, and he called me up. Although he was a bit skeptical at first, it was pretty evident that he was quite excited about it all. If I remember right, he even wrote a mail or two to her to just get introduced.

With the confusion of decision off our shoulders, we decided that we should meet up before proceeding further. Now, that provided bit of a problem in that she was in Kolkata while I was in Bangalore, and neither of us had much of a reason to visit the other city. But since we’d gone far too deeply into it, it was decided that I’ll travel to Kolkata some time in October and meet her to confirm (even though we both were sure) that we were indeed right for each other. The fact that it was only August didn’t help matters, with another 2 long months stretching in front of us, but we started making our little plans of meeting up.

Things took a turn for the worse when she rang up one day, towards the end of August, telling me that the situation was getting a bit worse for her as her parents had started searching for a groom for her. She told me that she was having to inform her parents earlier than we thought. Couple of days later, she said that she did inform it to her parents, and they just blew the fuse. They apparently asked her what she was thinking, falling in love with someone she hadn’t seen (other than a pair of pants, a set of white teeth, and glasses), and for all that they knew, I could be a psychopath or a pervert or something much worse. Can’t really blame them; if it was my daughter and I had seen the photo she received, I also would have surely reacted in the same manner. There definitely was a shady look to me in that photo. But then, as I said earlier, she’s someone extraordinary, and she stuck to her guns, and her parents finally decided to see how it would all pan out.

I wasn’t sure about the reaction at my own place, but I decided to present it during a 3-day visit to Thrissur. I was going there to attend 2 weddings – of a colleague’s and of a close friend’s. I called up my brother and told him that I was going to present the case, and he gave me full support for it, saying that he would also chip in with his thoughts on the matter later to my parents. She had been made to send a photo of hers wearing a saree by her mother, but to me, that looked a bit of a disaster because she wasn’t at all like the girl I saw initially. Although I have subsequently claimed it as a tactical move to give enough time for my parents to act on it thoughtfully, it was another exhibition of top-class cowardice when I called my mom aside and presented the photo to her, quickly explained who it was, gave a copy of her horoscope which she had enclosed along with the photo, and went off to attend my colleague’s marriage. Since it was rather far off, it was quite late by the time I came back, and as I had hoped, my parents had slept off. Next day, once again, I left early in the morning, because the second wedding also was at a far off place, and I was pretty sure it would be late by the time I returned from there. Moreover, we were shifting our house that day, and I was convinced all of them would be tired by evening. As I had expected, they weren’t in a condition to discuss anything serious after all that hectic activity.

The next day morning, we all got down to cleaning the new home, arranging stuff, etc. My parents were moving out of their independent house and moving in to an apartment, but since the work hadn’t been completed yet on it, they were going to stay in a rented home for a few months. I was quite tense, expecting either my parents or my grandma to ask about this, but they seemed to have forgotten all about it. Then, just as I was beginning to relax, my dad called me. The way he started, I knew he was quite uncomfortable doing it, not really prepared for something like this. I guess it would have been a bit different if it had been my brother in my place, because I guess my parents expected such crazy things from him, but not from me. Now that I had indeed done something crazy, they weren’t sure on how to proceed. In an awkward manner, my dad asked whether I was really in the right frame of mind and lots more question to confirm that his son hadn’t really gone loco, and having confirmed that, he asked whether I was sure about this girl, about her family, etc. By now, with my mind made up, I was feeling much more confident than I generally would have, and I stuck to the fact that I don’t want them to reject it outright, and I would appreciate it if they really thought about it seriously. Finally, we arrived at an uneasy truce when we decided that we’d leave it up to matching of horoscopes and take it from there. Meanwhile, her dad had made it quite clear that my parents had to call him first for this to proceed, and I mentioned the same to my parents, and they said they’ll think about it. Their body language conveyed to me that they indeed would, and I felt a bit more confident about it all working out.

It took almost a week since I came back to Bangalore for my parents to finally call her dad. Let me just say that it hadn’t been an easy week for me or her. Anyway, they talked to each other and felt that the other side wasn’t as much barbarians as they thought to be. After a tense week, this news came as a great relief to me, and I slept peacefully that night. But then, as was the case in this affair, we weren’t done with the filmy twists. My brother, hearing about the earlier delay in my parents establishing contact with hers and not waiting to get the latest update, called up my parents and blasted them for not considering my happiness. This got my dad worked up, and he stated emphatically that he knew what best to be done for me. By then, my brother realized that he probably had done more damage than help and then called me up and apologized about it. I waited until evening before I called up home and talked to my parents, by which time they also had cooled down. My mother told me that they were proceeding because my grandma impressed upon them that if I were to come up with something like this, I would have been pretty serious about it all and that they shouldn’t take it lightly. She once again asked whether I was sure about it, and I assured her that I’d have this girl and no one else.

It was probably my grandma’s influence, as well as a rare case of intransigence from me, which finally helped turn the events the way it did. A week after all this had happened, my mom called me up saying the horoscopes really didn’t match. That, to me, sounded almost like death knell. I still stuck to my point about marrying her, which then made my mom come out with the next piece of news. Apparently, the astrologer told that even though it wouldn’t automatically match, he had enough knowledge about mantras to forcefully match our horoscopes. Now, as long as they matched, I didn’t care whether it was by hook or crook, and I mentioned as such to my mom. If my mom needed any further confirmation, that was it, and she said she’d again talk to the astrologer. Meanwhile, my dad and uncle had gone to meet her uncle and aunt who stayed in the same town. They were pretty impressed with her uncle and aunt, and that too helped in strengthening our case.

Things were going at a much quicker pace than I thought, and I knew that there was no way in the world that I would see her before our engagement. Apart from me and her, one other person who really was happy with all that was happening was a telephone booth operator at Domlur. During those few months in 2002, I provided so much revenue to the man that I received royal treatment there. I would never have to wait, as he would shoo away anyone who was using the booth as soon as I arrived. By the time I finished the call, he would have a glass of fruit juice ready for me. Before long, he had opened another telephone booth, and it won’t be exaggeration to say that I was the prime contributor to it. That said, our contribution towards BSNL was still considerably lesser when compared to what either Spice or Contact enjoyed, but then again, we weren’t complaining and neither were they.

With things finally settling down, our engagement was fixed for late October. By this time, I had also obtained official permission to call her up and talk to her at home. Needless to say, her parents were unaware of the fact that we were constantly talking to each other through mobile, but with the permission, we decided to switch to landline since mobile rates were still pretty high in India at that time. Calling her home meant talking to her parents, which was a bit awkward for me as well as for them. My brother too took their number, wanting to talk to his “bhabhi,” and as is the case with him, had no trouble easing into conversation with her parents or to her. Meanwhile, her dad asked whether I would feel okay to see his uncle who was residing in Bangalore. Knowing this was my first chance to impress my FIL, I turned on a double dose of charm and pulled all the right strings. Later, my roommate who accompanied me, told that I had overdone it all, but they didn’t seem to mind, and that was what I was looking for. By the time October rolled towards an end, I was as ready as I would be. (To be continued…..)

Yahoo! It's a Spice-y Connect-ion - Part I

It was about a year or so ago that a friend of mine suggested to me that I should write about the way I got married. Since I can’t really do justice to the beauty and wonder of it all, I refrained until now. So, what has changed now, you might ask. My writing skills have definitely not improved dramatically. But I thought I’ll write it up nevertheless as a gift for my wonderful wife for the sixth wedding anniversary of ours.

It was in 1998 that I first read about chatting. That was the year when I first obtained an email ID, one which was very short-lived. It was hari_prabha@hotmail.com, but no one I knew had an email ID, and I wasn’t expecting to receive any mail, so I didn’t bother to check until about 3-4 months later by which time the email account had been closed for lack of usage. It was then that I opened my next email ID, again in Hotmail, hari_prabhakaran@hotmail.com (both these email IDs are defunct now). This time, even though I still didn’t receive any mails, I kept checking it every 1-2 weeks. That ensured that while there weren’t anyone in the world to send me a mail, I was prepared if some such person were to suddenly pop up. By 1999, though, few of my cousins and friends also had opened up IDs, and I was becoming a more enthusiastic user of emails.

Even though I had increased my usage of email, I still hadn’t started chatting over the net. I used to wonder what pleasure people derived by typing out messages to people around the world whom one couldn’t see. As is the case with most things with me, first-hand experience changed my opinion. With me, it wasn’t until early 2001, when I got a job in Bangalore, that I started chatting. The job required me to open up an ID in Yahoo! as its chat feature was used for intra-office communication. This led me to slowly explore the open chat feature as well, and before long, I was hooked on to it. Suddenly, I was spending my free time at cyber cafes, chatting up with people all over the globe. In all this, I hope I helped alleviate a few of the misconceptions about India as well. One was when a friend from Alaska asked whether she could have a baby elephant for a gift since she thought elephants roamed freely around Indian cities and roads, and I said that wasn’t the case. Another was convincing a lady that I couldn’t possibly use a blow pipe of the kind used by snake charmers and attempt to tame a rattlesnake. A guy from Belgium was surprised to know that I didn’t practice the 60-odd poses described in Kama Sutra or that I don’t take hashish for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In fact, his opinion about Indians actually went down a notch or two, I guess, when he came to know that I don’t smoke at all and haven’t done drugs and there are others too like me in India!

My roommates at that time were pretty adept at striking up a conversation with all and sundry in person, but they somehow found it quite difficult to find a similar success in the virtual world. What was even more irritating to them was the fact that a reticent guy like me could effortlessly do it. This resulted in a few attempts by them to create fake IDs and chat with me but I generally found them out after a few minutes. This didn’t take any great deducing from my side, because while they changed the IDs, they never managed to change their thought processes, and it wasn’t difficult to see through that, considering the fact that we were all staying together at that time. So, when a mail landed in my Yahoo! inbox sometime late in May 2002 from a girl in Kolkata who was claiming that I had chat with her a week back, I felt it was a more sophisticated approach from my friends. What made me suspicious even more was the fact that it was Malayali girl who had written that mail to me, and I didn’t even vaguely remember chatting to a Malayali girl. Although my initial reaction was to let it go, I decided I’d play along and expose them sooner or later. So, I kept my reply very much to the point. I wasn’t very surprised to see another mail the next day, but I was impressed with my friends after reading the contents because that mail looked so unlike them. I carried on with the charade for about a week when I decided that this couldn’t go on like this and decided to test her out. I wrote to her that I would like to talk to her, though I kept the real intention of the whole thing to myself. As I was hoping, she said that she would ring up my mobile since she didn’t have one.

While my friends might have created a fake ID, I knew them to be too stingy to arrange someone in Kolkata to carry on with the game. So, when she called me up and I saw Kolkata area code, I was convinced that this person was much more genuine than I thought. Since we had been writing to each other in English, we started talking to each other in English, and I remember thinking to myself that she did have an easy laugh which I liked. With the confirmation that she is indeed someone real and not a figment of my friends’ imagination, I first apologized to my friends and then opened up a bit more in my mails to her. There is something in the virtual world which would put a person at ease, making it easier for him (or even her, I guess) to open up. I, for one, am more candid while talking through the keyboard than through the mouth.

Very soon, a routine was set wherein I’d check my Yahoo! inbox before I’d start work. I’d start writing a mail even as I’d be working and list out all that’s happened on the previous day, something that happened in my life earlier, and a few tidbits about my family as well. Her mails also would follow a similar pattern, though she couldn’t match me when it came to long-windedness. She would occasionally call me (she didn’t want me to call up her home and she didn’t have a mobile at that time), mostly during weekends, and we’d chat for some time on whatever we wrote over the mail. In 2002, the national call rates were on the costlier side, and telecom companies charged the customers even for incoming calls. So, while Yahoo! facilitated our meeting, it was Spice who started enjoying the fruits of it first. Finding it increasingly difficult to call me from outside her home, she decided to purchase a mobile for herself, thus making Connect too join Spice in making some extra profits thanks to us.

It could have been the fact that we weren’t trying to impress each other which helped us to be so open and free with each other. I didn’t find any difficulty discussing my disappointments and failures with her as much as I enjoyed talking about my successes. That also probably solidified the foundations for a stronger structure that was slowly but surely coming up. (To be continued…..)

Discovery of Smile

The first time I attempted to write something on smile was at my school. I remember not feeling any reason to smile as I, as did most others, struggled to find 120 words to finish up the write-up demanded by our teacher. While she wasn’t generally all that well liked by the boys in the school (I was an exception), she was an excellent teacher when it came to English. So, there we were, sitting and scratching our sweaty heads in a stuffy classroom in the sweltering heat of Thrissur. I don’t know what exactly I managed to write, but I do remember stopping after struggling through each sentence and counting to see whether I’ve crossed the mandatory 120 words. What I realize now about that exercise is that it was one of those little things which definitely improved my ability to write.

Come to think of it, I guess I struggled to write because I never used to smile much as a kid. Either I guffawed, at times I laughed, most times I sulked, but rarely did I smile. So, it must have been the unfamiliarity of it which made it difficult for me to write on it. Whether it was the lack of a fake smile during the social occasions or the presence of a genuine boredom which reflected in my face that caused more worry for my parents I do not know, but they sure did worry that I couldn’t smile. Of course, there must be a psychological mumbo-jumbo explanation for all this, but I’d like to believe that I didn’t want to or didn’t know how to fake it up. After all, I was much more innocent then.

What they say about schools being the place for your development is indeed true. It was in school that I lost the sheen of innocence. I guess it is a bit like a cricket ball losing its shine in a test match. You get hit to various parts by the willow-wielders, you get spat on by friendly bowlers who even scratch or hurt you in case they feel like you aren’t losing your shine fast enough. At the end of the day, unless and until you lose your shape horribly, you’ll last 80 overs before you get a rest, a battered and bruised product which is now ready to face the outside world. In my case, the smile got developed during my school days.

Being the dullard that I am, I realized later than most that displaying your indifference or boredom in some teachers’ class was a sure-shot recipe for disaster. They suddenly found a question to ask you for which there would be no answer or a reason to let your palm or knuckles come in contact with the wooden ruler they’d be carrying. I noticed that others who shared similar sentiments almost always escaped similar punishment, and I asked myself – “what’s he got that I ain’t got?” You see, this was before VIP Frenchie came up with that ad, so I still didn’t have an answer to that question. I saw that the only difference was that they would have a smile during the class – stretching their lips lightly with a zen-like expression in their eyes, the kind most teachers love in their students. So, I decided to give it a try myself to see whether it really does make any difference or not.

The initial attempts at smiling was not much of a success. I would stand in front of the mirror and try out a few smiles, but they always looked as if I was sitting in the loo, trying to pass stools while having constipation. I termed it as my “constipated smile.” Even to my untrained eye, that smile didn’t look effective, but I didn’t give up, and over the course of the year, I developed a fairly passable one to deflect the question, and the fireworks following that, to my neighbour. I managed to improve it vastly during my college days when I hardly ever attended the class and wasn’t sure who exactly my professors were. This made it mandatory that I have a smile ready for each and every one of them. It was only much later that I realized that more than half the guys I took to be professors were just the standard thick-mustached Mallu guys who were my fellow students.

By the time I got a job, I had developed my smile greatly. From the initial thin stretching of lips at school, I had slowly begun to show a bit of teeth at college, and my smile showed considerably more teeth at my workplace. I had read in books about a person having a cold smile or a warm smile depending on whether your eyes smiled along with your lips. That was one thing which I didn’t have to worry about much since my glasses hid my eyes from others, so it was open to their interpretation as to whether it was a warm or a cold one they received.

The pinnacle of my smiling was during my wedding. For once, the smile was there not because I wanted it to be there, but because it wanted it to be there. I was so happy that the smile just refused to leave. In fact, probably for the first time in the history of Indian marriages, a groom was asked to smile a bit less because I clearly was overdoing it. In fact, my cheeks had some difficulty getting back to their original positions after smiling through the couple of receptions and numerous visits that we had to undertake. But in all this, what mattered was that my smile was at the peak of its form.
My dental problems did cause some injury to my smile, as has been chronicled earlier in this same blog, but what mattered most is that my smile was indeed back after a brief hiatus. It sure had matured, but it sure was mine. My discovery of the smile has indeed helped me a lot in life. Many a time, I have managed to soften my sharp tongue with a big smile. Also, I’ve found that depositing a smile gives great returns because it works on compound interest. Nowadays, I try to find something to smile about with most things in life, and I do manage to. Laugh at oneself, smile at others is what I keep telling myself. I hope I managed to bring a smile to you too while you were reading this.