What's in a name?

Some decades ago, when I was in my early teens, we had an occasional visitor – an acquaintance of Dad’s – who was an interesting character. A portly fellow with a heavy paunch that rolled over his belt - the result of deep, unbiased affection for starch and red meat and pudding - he was from the rubber country of Kottayam.  Being a brainy dude, he did his Chartered Accountancy and worked for a leading CA firm in Bangalore, but, far from numbers, was principally interested in 3 things (in increasing order of importance):
1. Any beverage that had been fermented, particularly if it rhymed with frisky
2. Horse racing
3. Himself.
 
To this last topic, he devoted much of his research, fascination and his conversation, usually after downing a Patiala peg. The chap would speak about himself in hushed, reverential tones, and the anecdotes attesting to this Superior Intelligence were as awe-inspiring as they were fictional.  Dad would sit there patiently listening to excruciating details of how this Whizkid had won money at the races or shown his boss that he (the boss) was an ignoramus, while the rest of us would smirk and giggle.
 
But here’s the catch: none of us were quite sure of the fellow’s name. Dad vaguely remembered that he was a Mathew, but was there a George too in it?  I disagreed immediately because the initials on his briefcase did not match (I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes at that time, as you can infer).  My mother recalled meeting his long-suffering wife, who had referred to him by another name – she would have been justified in calling him names of a different genre too, as you will agree, but let us not divert from serious reportage.   To resolve this vexing issue, we had a short family conclave, where we recalled earlier conversations and short-listed the possibilities to George, Mathew, Abraham and Thomas. Unable to proceed further, the fellow was now named GMAT.

The name, I am glad to report, stuck and any call from GMAT on the landline had me covering the mouthpiece and yelling, “Dad, it’s GMAT for you”, which is likely to have transmitted clearly to the other end even in those primitive Bangalore Telephone days. 
 
(If you are shocked enough to delete my name from your friends directory, note that this is hardly the only blooper I made, having once asked my mom, “Is Dad at home?  Pesticide Radhakrishnan wants to speak with him.” I was immediately given a lecture by mum, after which I asked her if, in future, I should refer to this senior manager of Pest Control India as Pesticide Uncle instead.  Apparently, mum then decided that  she would let sleeping dogs - and sons with inadequate appreciation of niceties - lie.)
 
My Dad, had the last word on GMAT, comparing the human to the exam: spending an hour with the test paper was a test of skill, he said, while an hour with the other was one of will. 

Why I Am Likely to Win The Nobel Prize

I am deeply touched that millions of people are buying cryptocurrency.  For years, I had been searching for a reliable way to measure the percentage of idiots in a population.  My ultimate goal, as you have now shrewdly guessed, is the Nobel Prize for Economics and Literature combined, and I was, until recently, about as far from it as Orion is from Earth.
ps: Orion is getting closer at the rate of six inches a year.  Persistence pays (but not in cryptocurrency).
 
The current population of gullible, naïve, inept, self-delused, infatuated, doting, obsessed, asinine, gauch, gumptionless, bird-witted, desipient, unstable idiots on our planet is officially at about 240 million, which translates to about 72% of the population of the United States (do not read anything more into this).  These are people (crypto buyers, not Americans) who wake up all animated in the morning and say, “Is there a new scheme to defraud me?” and, if they hear an echo, they do a funds transfer.
 
The most heartening news, of course, is that the population of idiots is exploding and new precious insights are a daily occurrence. For instance, one recent discovery is that crypto buyers do not know the difference between a virus and a cryptocurrency: apparently, Omicron, a cryptocurrency that was launched at the beginning of November moved from $65 to $325 after the virus variant was named.  They assumed (with crystal clear, profound, incontrovertible logic) that since both are invisible to the naked eye, they are the same.
 
Another one called Dogecoin that was set up as a joke even has its founder screaming, “Don’t buy, it’s a scam” Dogecoin buyer-idiots, who will not recognise a mistake if you present it to them in a lava-encrusted pressure cooker-with-weight, are convinced that this is reverse psychology at work, so they buy even more.  There is even a coin called SafeMoon that has been thoughtfully named by its creators who live there and prefer that the idiots stay on Earth. 

 

Then, there is the ultimate scam called Bitcoin that is today priced at Rs 37 lakhs a piece, which is the same price as a BMW X1 (which is where the similarity ends).  If someone had bought it years ago, being an Early Idiot and held on for years and years, he would now be worth Rs 37 lakhs in fake money.  Which, I must agree, is a lot of fake money to have, because I play Monopoly regularly and have never seen so much.
 
More later.  My Nobel is waiting. 

Car Seva

Exactly a year ago, I took my seven-year old car for its annual service.  I look forward to this day about as much as you would look forward to a new virus taking Corona maami’s place. 

The service technician walked around the car like a frowning radiologist and was the most demotivating guy I have seen in 2020 (and that year has had no shortage of such folks, so he dominates a highly competitive field). 

“Sir,” he said, “there’s a dent here,” This was so small that it took an electron microscope inside a binocular to view it.  “Leave it alone,” I weakly suggested, feeling that sinking feeling you get when you are feeling that feeling, if you see what I mean.

He then told me that it will rust in the rain, and the door will be eaten from within and will fall off when I am on a highway at top speed and that I will then be on an Instagram video the next day with the caption, ‘…and CAN YOU GUESS what happened next to the car behind this hideous monster’.
Actually, he didn’t say all of that, but you get the picture. 

Then, the headlights had a side scratch of 2 mm that could diminish lumens sufficiently to distract oncoming aircraft, and the top red light at the rear (I did not even know there was a top red light at the rear) was not working which was a threat to no one in particular (for a change) and the sunglass compartment – which I have never used other than to once hide dog food from Oscar (who is the greediest Labrador in the world, and let this be the last word on that issue) – was unhinged and the press-button to open the back door caused a slight noise that is only heard with sound recording equipment used by AR Rahman and the back window wouldn’t roll up right into its terminal socket which could, if the car was next to a Nasa rocket launcher, generate a wind tunnel effect and one back tyre had a width that was 1 mm below recommended operating standards on German Autobahns in winter.  He also noted that my rear-view mirror had insulation tape on it, which, in levels of sheer depravity on the Crime Index, ranks next to assault.

I took a break, announced bankruptcy-in-advance on WhatsApp and asked Anil Ambani to join me for a Buddies-who-are-bust beer. 

Then he saw the big scratch on the side door at the back and the eyes rolled upwards unbelievingly.  I told him to not do this job till I got a housing loan sanctioned (the Finance Minister had just announced her twenty-second economy-revival package in which cars are classified as movable houses).

“Are you sure?” he asked, with a look of Don’t Blame Me If You Are Fined For Driving An Ugly Car Near Cubbon Park and turned away in sheer disgust at the sort of customers who infest Bangalore these days.

The only good news is that the housing loan has been approved, so I can first fund that dinner with Anil bhai, who is the only chap more bust than I am at the moment.

post script: Every story should have a post script, so here it is: whatever be the quality of work done on your car, never (repeat, never.  Just in case you missed this, NEVER) rate it anything less than five-star (repeat, 5*.  Let me get this right: star+star+star+star+star) .

If you do not follow my priceless advice, you will receive the following (free of charges):
a) about 27 phone calls from customer service, of which twelve will be in the final over of the finest T-20 that you have ever seen.
b) each such call will begin with an apology that sounds as fake as Trump's hair colour.
c) one call from Head Office - Customer Service, Gurgaon, asking you politely for your address, so that you can be kidnapped. 

Roles Re-verse(d)

 A snake and a purple heron in plume

Engaged in an argument (they weren't on Zoom)

The twist and the thrust

Was the question of, first

Who should do what and to whom !

Dhan

 Above everything else, it is helplessness that gets you angry. 

At a nearby Reading Room, I browse through the Business Standard and stop at a page that should not merit a second glance.  The next page looks exactly the same.  Turn over.  The same.  And a half-page more.  On these three-and-a-half pages are thousands of account numbers in tiny print, so small that they seem like lines of badly sewn stitches.  
It is a gold auction notice.  

This we – you and I - know: there is an alternate universe where men and, more significantly, women pledge their gold for small loans to address a medical issue or perhaps admission fees for a child in a private school or, unhappily, the costs of adhering to social mores for an unaffordable wedding.  Often, one loan repays another, one crisis ends, another begins, but they soldier on, sometimes lurching and stumbling their way through the maze of crippling interest rates, processing charges, late fees that choke and unforgiving penalties. They never forget that the gold loan needs to be repaid, for gold is never sold, only pledged.  Gold – though I am no fan of it – is social acceptance, comfort, protection, insurance, even identity.  There is a hidden language in that metal in this alternate universe. 

In this auction notice, read the signs of a crisis in that universe. 

That universe isn’t far away: our domestic help’s family could be living there, as could a family in interior Karnataka struck by Covid or a welder in Pudukottai whose machine shop shut for good after two waves of perdition.  It is their gold that will be sold to feed the collection-and-recovery frenzy reported with diligence to anxious collection managers.  In the old days, these gold hand-loan sort of guys were called ‘blade companies’ in God’s own country, but one can buy respectability:  get the  Kaun Banega Crorepati mascot to endorse you (he was once bust too, but has misplaced the experience).  Or, better still, IPL.   

To take my mind of this, I pick the Business Line up.  Lost reprieve, for it comes right back, this time through an ad.  The same lender has, on this same day, yet in another newspaper, announced its financial results: record profits and collections are the highlights.  As I read this, I wonder if that distressed family in interior Karnataka made this financial performance happen.  I know the answer.
And that makes me angry, in a feeble, helpless way. 

But in the universe I inhabit, the stock markets are booming, Dhanteras rocked while the crackers wouldn’t cease and economic news is about the recovery that the experts did not expect.  The chimera is real here and only a party-pooper would think otherwise, for the collateral damage is below the bonnet.  Only the paint matters. 

Yes, those three-and-a-half pages of badly sewn stitches in the Business Standard tell a story.  We need to listen. 
And help in every way we can. 

 

 

The Stock Market Bull Is On My Heels

 “It’s not, like, fair.  All the guys from my class have, like, made heaps of money from crypto and investing in stocks in the last year.  The girls have been left out and are only now beginning to put money in….”  my 23-year old daughter complains  (this Gen says ‘like’ 224 times a day, plus/minus standard deviation of 30.  Even when they have a problem with someone they say, ‘I like dislike him’, which drives me, like, nuts).  

She continues “This investing, why is this, like, a guy thing?”  

“That’s because girls, including you, generally have much more common sense,” I counter.  Good strategy to apply praise with a butter-coated spoon, but lost on her.  Completely.

We are in a traffic jam, approaching an intersection and an argument (in reverse order).  I try to tell her that the stock market has been insanely over-valued for a long time and has now gone completely cuckoo (Cuculus canorus, if you are a micro-details bird-watcher with disdain for writers and other fungi).  “If the markets are crazily high and risky, how did these guys, like, make money?” she demands, and quite rightly so.

“Well, they could have lost too, because this is not investing, it’s gambling.”

“But they didn’t!  That’s the point!  And, like, K has made 12 lakhs this year…”

“Which bank did he rob?”

“Serious, Pa!”  

“Ok, tell me what he did then?”

“He lost in crypto, but has been, like, buying and selling shares in the last few months everyday.  He quit his job last month and four of them have taken up a flat where they, like, play video games all day and invest in stocks.”

“Correction.  They gamble in stocks.”

“HOW is it gambling if they are winning all the time?”

Well, she has a point there.  

“A crash is overdue and can happen, like, anytime.  Will you stop saying Like, it’s getting infectious.”

“Like, the crash last year?”

“No, that was like the pothole, like, on 9th Main.  This will be a big crash.”

“Like, when was it last?”

“Long ago, when you first got on to Harry Potter.  K is making a big big mistake by quitting his job.  I knew he was weak in the head, this confirms it.”

“At the moment, he is way richer than me, Papa!”

“That means Jacks**t and bull string.  It’s not real money, just the current value of his shares.”

She’s not understood what I said, so she changes the topic. Good thinking, I do the same (these things run in families). “Ok, so he’s agreed to, like, help me invest some money.”

“No.  Not invest, gamble. Plus, don’t do it.” Anti-Nike.

“Then, what should I do?”

“See if visas to Argentina are being issued now.  Backpack a month in Tierra del Fuego.”

“Pa! That doesn’t make any sense.”

Another argument lost.  It’s time to ask that driver in front if he has any idea how important I am.

The Mammoth from Mannuthy

The only useful thing I learnt last week was that, thirty years ago, a chap from the Vet College in Mannuthy in Kerala changed the course of inter-disciplinary science by developing a mathematical formula to calculate -hold your breath, no, not breadth, I said breath - the surface area of the elephant.

You read that right.

He had been trying to solve Fermat’s Last theorem and, in the haze induced by that process, decided that the best way to do so would be to ask an elephant to lie flat on a carpet (“Stay still, Jumbo”), while he took out his tailoring tape. 

I just made this up, sorry.  

Apparently, he used the least-squares method – whatever that is (and may mathematics and its mother-in-law never torment my life again).  From all accounts of this method that I looked up online written in (reasonably) lucid English, it does not involve drawing the largest possible squares on parts of the elephant. If it did, any elephant with self-respecting nerve endings would be tickled to bits, each such bit including the remains of an erstwhile researcher as well. 

So, the question that now haunts you no doubt (and for which you continue to hold your breath – it’s getting dangerous, so think of roses) is: why did this genius, this doyen, this man-of-substance, this Einstein-of-Mannuthy do this?  (All this talk of haze and substance is controversial.  Curb the urge.)

Well, he was sipping his naadan chaya one day, when he saw a mahout struggle to climb his charge and it struck him (no, the elephant did not strike him, that would have been the end of the research using the least-square method) that all he had to do was to give the mahout a formula.  (A mahout who knows elephant-surface-area climbs easy.  Old Jungle Saying).

Sorry, I just made that story up again. 

The most notable feature of the task was that they even measured the elephant’s tail, missing no detail however slight (Sherlock H, not me). The tail was considered – for the formula – to be a cylinder, which, if you stretch your imagination with chewing gum and a rubber band coated in coconut oil, it is.  But, if the elephant’s tail is a cylinder, what is its leg, a parallelogram? (this qualifies him right away for a senior job in the Forest Department in some states in India, because that is how they count tigers). 

Finally, he calculated the areas of about 13 parts of 24 elephants (this can only be done in Kerala, one must emphasise; if you try this in Bandipur, there will be 13 parts of yours with 24 elephants, but, in serious matters of reporting facts, one should not digress).  Once that was done, he did some nifty correlation and then declared, in the spirit of Darwin, Wallace, and other luminaries who preceded him, that the formula only needed the elephant’s height and its forefoot pad circumference, both of which, of course, the said elephant is always ready to provide when (politely) asked.  Every elephant, be assured, is salivating to know its surface area.  

But, being the damp squib that I am, I have a problem with this research.  What you need to worry about with an elephant - trust me - is not its surface area, but its volume.  

And, therein, lies a tale (no, not cylindrical).

You will never have the measure of me.

The Poker Table Called Farming

Often, a photo hides far more than it reveals.  
These flowers – white chrysanthemums –  are pretty to the eye and, as I walk past fields filled with them, farmers – more women than men – are hard at work, plucking them in time for the Ganesha festival that could fetch them decent returns.  Some have – to use a metaphor entirely out of place – missed the boat, for their plants are yet to flower and, if that happens before Dassehra, the crop falls between two stools (another metaphor out of place, you point out?).  It will then fetch just a modest return which belies the effort that has gone in.  Hard work, investment in saplings, labour and pesticides and risks to each individual who sprays these toxic cocktails, a risk these farmers accept as punishment and perdition. 

This flowering field is their poker table.

What is missing in this picture is the crop that should rightfully be growing in this season.  Ragi.  

An economist will argue, from his armchair, that this is the way markets work.  I will argue, in turn, that he, like most armchair economists, should go to hell. I am a hobby economist, so I guess I can pass judgement without indicting myself.

The story is familiar: the price of ragi collapsed at the time of harvest this January and has inched back to about Rs 25 a kilo.  At that price, the few farmers who grow an acre of ragi will make a return of around Rs 8000 in six months – the family pitches in with labour (that is not added in the calc) and the male farmer spends two cold winter months guarding the crop at night from a machan on a tree (which is why we have some big trees left), for elephants and wild boar will visit with food on their mind.  

The Minimum Support Price for ragi is close to Rs 34 a kilo, but the TN Government has never bought ragi from farmers.  Never.

So, these farmers – call them the Last Resistance - grow ragi for their daily mudde, and for the stalk that is fed to cattle: milk provides them their weekly cash flow and insurance. The surplus ragi – heaps of it – is sold to middlemen, often to repay a debt.  
Ragi is a perfect crop: hardy, with minimal irrigation needs, no pesticide and sparse fertiliser, if any.  As nutrition, it cannot get better.  Much of this is true for all our millets, each of which is now, in the hyperbolic symbolism used by modern day dieticians, a Super-Food.

Try telling a farmer this, when he gets twenty five bucks a kilo. 
.…and, oh, lest I forget, on Flipkart, ragi flour sells for between Rs 90 and Rs 200 a kilo.

Make a difference: buy ragi from the family that grows it or a farmers’ collective, at market price.  
And do take their photo, for they are heroes, no less.

A Sozzled Cook and a Guest who came to dinner

 When Sanjiv Handique posted this fetching, beautiful painting of an old little home in Digboi, the town he and I grew up in, my heart skipped a beat and an old story – one I grew up with – returned.  

Mum and dad lived in an identical home a stone’s throw away from this one, just after their wedding in the mid-1950s, when mum was a nervous eighteen and dad at the first rung of his accounting ladder.  A large central room with a fireplace, which was what the Brits gathered around in those chilly winter evenings, a bedroom each on either side and a pantry - dry kitchen of sorts- at the back.  The kitchen was well behind the house – the small building at the back in the painting - and had a paved covered path leading to it (this is crucial for the story that follows, so, as Rajni would say, Mind it).
 
The bungalow was surrounded by evergreen jungle, a rich, wet forest of an explorer’s dreams.  Dark, forbidding, terrifying mass of green, is how mum saw it, so she awaited dad’s return from office every day and wouldn’t walk beyond the garden (gardening, hence, became a lifelong passion).  They had an old loyal cook, Pillai, who, after his day’s cooking was done, would retreat to his quarters and knock off a couple of pegs of his ‘braandy’ before heading back to lay the table for dinner (these were Brit days.  Mind it).
 
One evening, mum was startled to see Pillai’s sozzled face pressed against the closed glass window outside; he had a look of a man who had seen a nasty, unfriendly ghost and he was gesturing wildly, but could not speak.  Should she let him in? When he looked like he was about to faint, she opened the door with trepidation and he rushed in and dropped to the floor in fright, gesturing to the back of the house.
 
When mum hurried to the pantry and looked out of the window, she stood frozen: resting on the paved path to the kitchen was a large tigress with three cubs. Mum stood there, in a daze, staring in fascination as the cubs played around, while the tigress watched on – I am told – in amusement (an amused tiger is something you have not heard of.  It endorses mum’s storytelling capability).  She did not seem to mind being ogled at by a dumbstruck human and was in no hurry to leave.

 
A while later, there was the sound of a Fiat (1100, that quaint old car) driving up the road to the Bungalow – dad was returning home.  The tigress got up and the family – mom and cubs - walked over behind the kitchen.  Mum saw her take a short jump over the little drain and then wait for the cubs to do so.  A moment later, they were gone.
The guest left behind a story that would traverse seven decades, a hundred re-tellings, much embellishment and a deep family nostalgia for a fairytale world that had once been.  

 
And, yes, Pillai turned teetotaller for good.

The Over-Achiever Bias

 Humans were never genetically altered to over-achieve.

The rarefied class of those we call over-achievers – people who, by general consensus, have done more than anyone (or the vast majority) could – is one that I am familiar with.  In this layer of the atmosphere of  achievement, I have met many in the thirty-two years since 1989, but no one I have met – not one – has been compassionate or outward-focused or unhurried or caring in a way that would make them humane.  Or a good listener (but, that shortfall, as you know, does not limit itself to over-achievers).  

Every one of the overachievers I know has been egocentric, stressed because he (or she) was unkind to himself or herself and to others, engendering conflict in the process, and self-focused to the point of ignoring the basis of our genetic heritage of a hundred thousand years: sociality and community bonding, that the tribal societies we now consider primitive prioritised above all else.  The language and actions of the modern day overachiever, even when they do yoga to ‘de-tox’ or set goals of weight-loss, are  aligned to a self-centric compelling desire for overachievement that is as incomprehensible as it is unreal and damaging.  Or take the running of a marathon: some – very few of the many runners I know – are the natural marathoners who run for the joy of running and would stop when they choose, to laugh with a child, or greet a friend on the road and shoot the breeze.  Most run because it gives them validation of some sort; they are in competition mode with themselves or others and conviviality is an unaffordable distraction.   

When you read the motivational spiels about achieving your true achievement-potential, have you thought of just what that means?  If you have, and if that thought has resulted in an answer, I would be grateful for the clarity, for I have – I really mean this - no idea of what a human’s potential is; we can measure it for a vehicle based on its horsepower and torque and for the boiling point of water, but for a human?  It is not the desire to create the next best app or a cool electric car – that, as Elon Musk demonstrates in his behaviour vividly, is egocentrism at its zenith and leaves in its wake the usual collateral damage that today’s businesses see within: team members running hard to stay in the same place and using meaningless, trite language to seek affiliation to a peer group, extraordinary variations in pay and inequality in society that engender trepidation, neglect, jealousy and retaliation, the creation of an utterly fake public persona by equally stressed PR folks who are asked to transform a beast into a butterfly in the media and the endless desire to seek validation and praise from everyone, as a billion posts on Linkedin demonstrate. 

This made me often wonder, when I was in my thirties, if I was built differently (and wrongly) and hence, if there was a need to course-correct and try to achieve more.

I now know better.

The people I know to be overachievers have used phrases like, “We must work hard and play hard” or “Conflict is inevitable” and are glued to entirely fictional tokens of perceived excellence with convenient logos that include the now-familiar ‘stretch goals’ ideology, all of which repel those who hear them (that includes me!) and seek to divide rather than unite.  Competition of this sort and with this attitude bears a cost that society, and now the planet, is unable to bear.

The only goal post that we need to see everyday and to aspire to reach is to be happy with oneself: at times, this results in achievement of the kind that is recognised as such, but for most part this itself is the achievement, for its own sake .  It takes, as a dear friend of mine once said, very little to be happy.  Yet, it is a goal post that seems to recede into the distance as the chimera of cheers keeps the castle aloft in the sky. 

The real mirror before us shows no chimera, so let us listen to ourselves while in front of it.  Time has never been our enemy and let us not make it one.

Money In The Exit

 

B for Absent-Minded

 Sandy B was the most – THE most – absent-minded person in our batch at IIMB.  Today, he is a prof in the US, which is appropriate placement for that absent-mindedness (as distinguished from his brain, which is formidable and has awed me no end).

Sandy B was my neighbour in the hostel, so I saw a lot of him.  I mean this literally because he often forgot to wear all his clothes or remembered to wear but forgot where those clothes were.  He would emerge from his room that had last seen any attempt at organisation around the time of the Chola kingdom with a loopy apologetic smile which - given the sore sight he presented – was necessary to mollify viewers, even those in our close circle who were inured to the spectacle.  He could never remember if he had had a bath and would then employ some utterly questionable methods (on which I shall not dwell) to determine the answer.

He had heard of exercise as being a human activity, but never thought of it as something that was applicable to him (from more recent photos of his, it appears that there has been an education).  In stout (and, how did this pun get here?) defence of the generous adipose around his tummy, he would quote Obelix, “My chest has slipped a bit…” with an endearing grin, which then got two other worthies, Santy and Sampy (no, they weren’t twins), to jiggle his belly a bit. 

The other part of him that interested the citizens of Bangalore were his hands. If you asked him for directions to somewhere, his hands would come to life and twist and turn in impossible ways, until you recognised that you were dealing with a Superior Talent and chose to figure out the route yourself (stuff like Google Maps has made our life immensely boring and I am all for banning it). 
ps: his dad forbade him from using his car, for which, of course, the larger populace of our city is immensely grateful. 

Sometimes he would sing (in a fetching voice with the superior talent that Bongs – including those who walk around modestly clothed – possess), but while singing, the arms would move and his fingers would keep the voice company, twisting and turning in scale progression, his head nodding away, the eyes with a far away look. This was because he thought he was on stage. On other occasions, he would speak to himself with a puzzled expression, saying, “Now, how did that happen?”, with his forefinger on his chin and a look of surprise, while surveying the fifteen others who were clutching their bellies (not his, for a change) and grinning away.    

Of course, if there were any assignments to be done, Sandy B had forgotten all about them immediately after.  To prevent that, he decided to make it a point to write them down diligently.  He would then misplace that book.  But, in his support, he never forgot to ask us to inform him of where he had misplaced the book that would remind him of the assignment.  So there. 

But the best stories were (and, probably, still are) of his travels, for he seems to reserve that raw talent for the larger world.  We learned from his engineering batchmates about his train journeys to and from Bangalore and the general impression was that miracles do happen, else he should have been an illegal immigrant in Colombia.  Once, we were told, he exchanged his second-class berth for an army man’s first-class one, because the fauji wanted to be with friends.  Later that night, of course, he got himself into hot water when the ticket examiner came around: absent-mindedly, he fished out his ID card and then tried, in vain, to convince a stern, disapproving, unbelieving ticket examiner that he had done no impersonation. The experience, in the words of our stellar representative of the human race was, ‘harrowing’. 

The next time we meet, if he remembers the place and the time and fetches up, I shall have to put my forefinger on the chin and say, “Now, how did that happen?”

 

 

A Soldier Never Dies

A soldier never dies, they say, he just fades away. 

As I walked past the empty plot of land that once had an old house on it, I thought of a remarkable fauji who had lived for many years there.  It had been a tiny little non-descript home, painted an unappetizing shade of green and its demolition left the city no poorer.  

Yet the elderly couple who had once lived there were a fascinating study.

About a couple of years after we moved to Bangalore, my father was delighted to meet his classmate from college, a now-retired Major from the Military Police, VR Menon. They lost little time in renewing their friendship and found an interest that brought them together for a couple of hours each evening, a passion for brisk, long walks, often followed by a small drink at either person’s home. 

VR was a fauji to his last atom and about as different as could be from Dad. He had a luxurious moustache, every strand of hair in immaculate position with Brylcreem (alas, no longer a staple in the contemporary bath), while Dad abhorred moustaches and never had one. If Dad was a fun-loving, jovial person, VR was overtly quite the contrary, his demeanour - aided by Brylcreem moustache - forbidding and as stiff as his fauji backbone.  When amused, VR’s moustache would twitch a bit and the eyes would narrow for but the briefest moment, which provided much relief to those around. And, if my father was easy going, VR had a temper that was legendary. 

Indeed, it was his fury, sharpened by a keen sense of right and wrong, that had plagued him for much of his life. A story was often heard in the Malu circles in Bangalore of an incident in the 1960s in the Kashmir Valley, when VR came out of his house in the Army base on hearing his elder son yell for help, followed by a dog’s snarl. The Alsatian belonging to the Brigadier of the base, no less, had bitten his son. 

Now, the rule in the Army is simple: a Brigadier’s dog is to be treated broadly on par with the Brigadier. VR took his son in, brought his gun out, and shot the dog. The Bangalore Malu circs were unanimous in their view that this incident, possibly aided by other bouts of fury, decreed his retirement at the level of a Major. VR seemed to agree as well. He once remarked, with candour, to my Dad that a donkey that joins the army cannot but retire as a Major. I do not quite remember his tone of voice when he said this. Was it regret? Pathos? Humour? Yet, notably, he never quite saw the need to change. In conversations over an evening drink, he would have the most simple solutions for the World’s ailments, each such solution aided by the liberal use of a Point 22 automatic that he believed was useless when kept in the armoury.  As a discussion on corruption, for instance, warmed up, his moustache would move an inch upwards, the eyes would narrow (that’s the smile quotient) and he would say: ‘shoot the bloody fellow, that’s the answer,’ and the ladies in the audience would either be in splits or full of ‘Aiaiyoo’s or ‘Guruvayurappa’ or some such invective. 

VR’s family was a study in contrast. Ammu aunty, his demure wife, was small and rotund in appearance, with a sweet high-pitched voice and open smile. She, so the Malu circs opined, channelled her husband’s behaviour with skilled gentility that no Point 22 could answer. It was impossible to not like her and VR was devoted to her, recognising her ability to moderate his own impulsive nature. 

VR and my father became so close in the three or four years that they walked together that, when my father died in 1984, he went into a depression, refusing to talk to anyone for days. He must have picked himself up as only a fauji can, for, some time later, I began to see him on his evening walk, now alone. The pace of the walk was brisk, the back erect and, when he saw me, the conversation would be formal and brief, yet those expressive eyes under the bushy eyebrows would mist up for a brief moment.  Or did I imagine this? But I knew that he missed Dad, as much as I did.  Theirs had been, like the odd friendship we experience in our lifetimes, a meeting of souls.  

A couple of years later, the family shifted from that home in Indiranagar – the one I had walked past – to a small apartment off Richmond Road. While Ammu aunty and mum stayed in touch, for VR the link had been broken. 

Some years later, his wife passed away. 

I have yet to meet someone who has been as devastated by a spouse’s death as VR was. She was getting on in years and wasn’t in good health, yet he was inconsolable. Many months after her demise, I knocked on his door and did not quite recognise the old, gently bent man who opened it for me, the eyes half-lidded, the expression one of disinterest. He had stopped his walks and, instead, moped about the home in the evening of his life, in search of meaning, avoiding the company of those who knew him well. It was hard to visit him again, for there was nothing to talk about, no connection to bond.  We were a chasm apart.  

So, I did not visit him again.

I once read an article by a surgeon where he describes a surgery as a partnership between the surgeon and the patient. A surgeon can only, he had said, fix an engine; the patient must provide the spark for it to run. VR had lost the spark and passed away in the early 1990s. 

The fauji had faded into the sunset.

The SSence of Maths

If you get off your vehicle on Ulsoor main road – a busy arterial way where pedestrians are uncooked meat, buses are uncrowned emperors and vendors of flowers, footballs and filters the unnamed nobility – and turn into a sidelane into which the market overflows, you will see a higher level of chaos, if indeed that is possible. There are carts, two wheelers, cycles and shoppers, a noisy mass, an agglomeration of diligent humanity that has little room to stop, think or look around.  The movement, the smells, the colours and the diversity represent old Bangalore, once detested, now captured with evocative eloquence in an occasional coffee table book. 

Continue to walk a bit down this lane and do the unthinkable: stop for a moment (after looking around you to avoid moving objects, such as shopping bags).  Look to your left and you see the tiniest of houses with a narrow staircase in front leading to the little room upstairs.  If this was the 1970s or the 80s and you were a student, you would turn in, take the stairs that led to the room and then join the melee of young students standing in the short, narrow corridor, speaking in whispers. 

For, in the room, was the finest Maths teacher that I (and a thousand other students) have ever known.   

SS – which is how S Srinivasan was called by everyone – wasn’t just a teacher; he was an institution into himself, far above the prosaic identity of St Josephs College of Arts and Science where he taught and where the men-in-frock ordered allegiance but got none.  SS asked for nothing – he charged no tuition fees, was perfectly fine with your neglect of homework or indeed your absence from class (it perhaps did not even register) and was happy to admit a late entrant.   What he did get in ample measure was respect and awe, and a reputation that preceded him by miles.

   

SS was devoted to the science of mathematics; indeed, the word ‘devotion’ hardly does justice to his approach which was absolute, whole-hearted, involved, considerate commitment for its own sake and nothing else.  The sweetest words to his ears were when a pupil-to-be said, “Sir, I want to study maths.”

He would then reply, “Why-uh? Are you writing an entrance exam-uh?”

“No Sir.  Actually, I only want to study maths to learn more” (though most who said it didn’t mean it; they had been tutored by the more experienced).

A beam would then appear on his face. 

“Ok-uh.  Come from tomorrow.  You can join the 4 pm batch.”

And that was that.   

The door upstairs would open early in the morning every day of the week (including Sunday, when he’d often work through the day).  The queue of students – those in their under-grad or studying for CA, ICWA, engineering, post-grad or anything else – would have formed by then.  SS – a small, fair, rotund man with a triple chin, white hair and a stubble, wearing a veshti and shirt – would enter the room, after his morning coffee and take his seat behind an old table, as the students shuffled in and occupied every inch of the room.  He would then take the notebook of the nearest student, pull out a pen that was a fixture in his shirt pocket, spend a few seconds flipping the pages to get an idea of what had been covered (he taught so many groups that it was a miracle he could pick the threads up this quickly) and then continue.   

After years of experience, he needed no textbook to look up problems from, for even these were embedded in that razor-sharp brain.  If a student fished out a textbook and asked deferentially, “Sir, could you please look at this problem?”, he would take the book, narrow his eyes, examine the problem in question and then begin writing out the solution, speaking more to himself that to the student. 

“Yes-suh,” he would intone, “this-uh is a simultaneous equation-uh.  Now, let me see……” and, in a low-toned monologue that was accompanied by lucid steps, the problem would be laid to rest.  

The retinue of students around him would write furiously, trying to keep up with him, or watch with fascination.  A few who had given up hope would stare and wonder if their parents could be persuaded to let them study fine art or music – with these students, he’d spend extra time most often to no avail, for the battle had been lost in their minds years earlier, under teachers who were trained to damage learning, not foster it.  SS saw his task as getting the subject to be loved, just as he did.  And he loved solving problems, a logicist par excellence.

There is no doubt that SS was a genius.  It may have been the curd rice that he had for lunch or the genes or perhaps both.  As an aside, while the second factor – genes – has been much researched,  the the impact of the first – curd rice – on intelligence must be the final frontier of brain research, as the empirical evidence is compelling.   

At about 8 am, he would wind up, go downstairs for breakfast, change from the veshti to a pair of trousers and, in a slow, deliberate way, pedal his way on an old cycle to college that was twenty minutes away,  steel tiffin carrier with curd rice securely held in the carrier at the back.  He’d return in time for an afternoon coffee and then get back into the room upstairs again, tutoring batch after batch till it was time for dinner. 

During his sessions, everyone had a purpose and there was little room – forgive the pun - for banter, humour or, indeed, harangue and his eyes rarely left the notebook in front of him.  When the results of various exams were announced, there would be sweets all around and a student would deferentially place an envelope with some cash in front of SS, which would then be gracefully accepted with a brief ‘Thank you’.    

There was just the one thing he was allergic to: the IIT entrance exam.  If a student fetched up and said that he wanted maths coaching for the IIT entrance, the fair face with the triple chin would morph into a frown, the eyes would narrow and his plump body would draw itself to its full height (about five feet five inches at best).  An icy voice would then reply, “I do not prepare students for IIT-uh.”  And that, too, was that.

So, obviously, those who did prepare for the IIT entrance were creative.  In those days, one prepared for IIT in one’s 11^th standard, not when one fell off the pram as happens now, so some quick thinking was easily done with inputs from other students and creative answers such as, “I want to learn maths because it’s my special subject” emerged.  

In St Josephs, he was part of a vanishing breed of old-school teachers, each an expert at his subject with a devoted fan following and larger than life, yet humble personality. Yet, it was the tuitions that made him the rockstar – for two years, while studying for ICWA, I was in that little room three hours a week, as notebook after notebook filled up with his prose and mine (which wasn’t a patch on his, of course). 

For thirty five years, I have carried these precious notebooks around in the hope that I will go back to Permutations and Combinations on one dark, monsoon day.  A hope that, as I read those now-indecipherable pages with puzzlement,  the odd smell of that room will come back along with images of the devoted bunch in front of that small man, who lived for his craft, expecting nothing, yet generous with the astonishing knowledge that was stored in those special grey cells.  

Perhaps then, caught up in that imagery, I will look at my son and say, “Why-uh are you not doing maths now?”

The Grass Is Greener On The Other End Of The Other Side

One of the notable aspects of my life occurs when people who know I have a Kerala origin and genes to match learn that I am a vegetarian.

For almost all non-Kerala folks, these two are entirely incongruous and cannot happen simultaneously at least in one individual (in the same lifetime).

The tendency is then to do the following 4 things, in sequential order:

a) I am sized up, examined with raised eyebrows and assigned a sub-species name such as Homo Sapiens Malu-bogus. They all want to now see if those veggies have done something to the way I pronounce coconut or quickly or corner or braandy. None of them can pronounce Malampuzha or Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum to save their life, so I see this as downright seditious.

b) They ask me when I became veggie. I once thought of employing a call centre to answer this question, but that was before I read Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, which is the only guide you need to deep existential issues.   

Question: When did you become veggie?

Inspirational answer (since you have now read above book): “I became veggie the year the ring worm shifted residence from pig faeces to human intestines.” Keep serious, introspective expression.

This answer is greeted by a surprised silence (though a couple of folks will come close to throwing up, so do not attempt this at home). Some, who have not experienced a real call centre and hence are unspoilt by civilisation, then ask, “Which year was that?’ to which, of course, you must reply with, “The year I became veggie.” And, then promise yourself a Corner House Ice cream.

c) They – almost always - earnestly plod me on to try non-veggie stuff at least once. The tactic here (forgive the advice mode again) is to fully agree that, yes, we need to try it and that Life is all about excitement, adventure and ringworm side effects, but could I please use the washroom now? Once you enter the washroom, do watch Sholay on your mobile Netflix account from beginning to end, missing no detail however slight and rewinding the songs. Hopefully, when you are back, the topic would be Should We Call the Doctor and the division of the bill.

d) And finally, I am asked if there is any real Malu food that is veggie, while they order appam-and-stew and steamed banana, all of which I suppose they think is grown inside a goat. The ones who ask this question with a smirk deserve solitary confinement on Easter Island. Others really want to know, for Indians have an urge (it is scientifically proven to border on mania) to accumulate information of absolutely no value to themselves. These were moments when I would forget the names of everything that I have eaten all my life and stutter for credibility but I now ask the person to ask Ramu kaka or Google chacha, for the subject is vast and nuanced (a word everybody uses these days, when they don’t say like or bro or dude or herd immunity).

The key, I have learnt - after considered thought - is to put on a certain condescending authority when you answer: that disdain is the difference between your success and mutton keema curry.

Those Little White Pills

 February 15th 2021

Yesterday, five of us took a walk to the top of a hill in the memory of a fellow-walker.  Doc was a thinker, part-philosopher part-iconoclast, consummate team mate. 

Above all, we walked together.  
Over the last twenty years, when we walked the hills – the ancient rock formations around Bangalore, above the stratus clouds in Coorg and across the narrow Pass of the Gaddis at Hampta in Himachal - he was a quiet, reflective, inspiring companion, his lithe frame skipping over the rocks, his breathing even, the eyes curious to explore.  When we shivered and cursed the biting, unrelenting freeze, he would swap short notes with our trek guide on local medicines – the cold was in the mind and if you convinced yourself that it wasn’t there, well, it wasn’t.
 
Every plant had a story to tell him, for wasn’t his homeopathy based on the science of the botanical? His was a life inspired by these plants, a life that was happy to seek answers to quotidian questions of pagan mystique, an uncomplicated, disciplined life of meditation, with gentle humour and an inner smile.  If he felt unwell, we would never know of it, for much of that conversation was with himself.  If he felt angry, he too would never know of it, for it was an alien emotion.  When the walk was done and we were back in our homes, he’d disappear till the next walk happened.  Attachment was like anger, an alien emotion.
He was built to be a walker.
 
On one walk, he reflected that he was becoming aware of his own mortality, which despite having had the occasional deeper conversation surprised me.  That is what walking does to you sometimes, and that reflection – when you see a giant of a hill by your side, the result of four billion years of utterly miraculous evolution – is evocative, humbling, meditative.  
Doc was a meditative walker.  The journey mattered.  Time did not.

We laboured up the beautiful Kaiwara Hill last morning – a
drying forest of waiting tinder - and exchanged our Doc stories and the odd one he had left behind in that noiseless, unassuming way of his.  We laughed about his little white pills, thinking of the times when he had defended his science with a knowing smile and allowed us our earthly mirth.  Had he been on the walk, that smile would have been teased us back in turn.  

We trundled our way up, with even DV – whose legs had last been pushed to perform three years ago – making the grunt to the top, and laughed and joked for much of the time, for Doc would have wanted it that way. 
 
“Don’t pay attention to me,” he would have said, in that dismissive way of his, “just move on.”
Doc was a walker, you see.
 

And as we dropped our bags at the top of the hill, and took the odd photo – sunlight reflecting off grey hair, stomachs in, shoulders up – he must have been smiling down on us behind that neatly trimmed beard in that bright way of his.  For nothing better could be expected from this motley bunch of stragglers, all of whom would remember him as The One Who Walked Alongside In Meditation.

The panorama from Kaiwara betta
Circa: February 14^th, 2021