How Kerala produces champions

It’s 6 am and I am on a bus to a hamlet where, in a lovely little home with low doors and tiny windows, now alas demolished, Dad was born a hundred years ago in mid-June 1923.  The bus stops by the turn on the road and I get off to walk the distance to the ancient village temple.  With its long outer walls – kept in immaculate condition – and neat little garden and the silence within but for soft invocation, the temple exudes an olde world charm.  A rush of memories, now tinted sepia and fraying at the edges.  Leave Time in a bag at the door.  And take the shirt off too, tucking in the tummy instinctively, for you want to present your best self in Higher Company. 

 

Beyond the back wall is the large temple pond that I haven’t seen in years, so, a while later, I walk up to take a look.  A man in a corner washes his dhoti, another shoots the breeze, yet in the pond a dozen children are swimming.  Not thrashing around and gasping or gulping water down or chasing each other around but Swimming, I emphasise, with practiced ease across the exhausting length of the pond - that must be about a couple of hundred metres -, skilled technique, speed and grace in evidence. Some swimmers are wearing snorkels and are slower, others tear freestyle through the water. A couple of coaches are instructing more kids by the side, and, heartwarmingly, there is an equal number of boys and girls.  I am a swimmer too, but I can see that I am in Higher Company here as well, these kids are pros and this spectacle of open-access, professional training is awesome, absolutely extraordinary.

At the tea shop by the temple, I see a poster of the champions this little village of Kakkayur has produced and at my cousin’s lovely old home a few steps away – now in its 101st year – I meet a grand-niece and nephew just back from an hour in the pond, now heading to junior school.  Their favourite stroke, I am informed, is the butterfly (I admit immediate defeat and swallow all remaining pride).  How much do you pay for your coaching? I ask.  About a hundred rupees a month, my cousin replies with a shrug.  
And that is how this village has produced champions.  

And those champions have won medals and jobs as coaches abroad, in the army and the railways.  And some champions have returned to produce more of their kind from this little hamlet.  I remember that one of them grew up in this very house, next to the temple.

We have the best team in Kerala, my cousin says with pride and a fetching smile and, while she just might have stretched a point there, what can be more inspiring than to know that you live amidst coconut and palm trees, fine paddies and finer champions, all in a little hamlet of the winding road to the hills of the Neliyampathis?  

..err. there was a toddy shop right there, once upon a time and path to it that was made for walking....

The Old Order Changeth.....

Mangalore
5.30 am.  A cloudless sky

I think of Mangalore as a precocious teen that has grown a trifle too soon.  On the main roads, I walk past malls, shut at this early hour, and the rest of urban paraphernalia: endless rows of shops and restaurants, buses rushing by and tall apartment towers with awful names like Elite-something and Vishwas-I-am-Ugly something and an eyesore called Stone Heights, which should be called Stone Heights-of-Hideousness.

So, I turn off the road at the first possibility and enter a side road – of not much help – so, then a side road off the side road.  

It is an entrance into a different, ancestral world; an old stately house, now in ruins, its porch a remnant of colonial grandeur, each window seeking solace in repair.  A cattle trap and a road beyond that is now home to Colocasia.  

A lovely villa called Howzaat! – the owner wants you to know that he lives the game and retired from LIC – and walls of laterite and tile that live, if you know what I mean, carrying a profusion of biodiversity and memories of better days, yet holding tenaciously on to a fragile present.  

Sometime later, I cross the main road and enter another lane and the stately houses live on, here in better, occasionally impeccable, condition.  The designs reveal their vintage, some built in the early years of the 20th century with heavy mortar, thick walls of laterite stone and round pillars, tiled roofs and all-wooden windows, others in the immediate post-colonial years and yet others in the 70’s and 80’s when cement became ubiquitous and grills were implanted in windows.  About the only thing I disapprove of are the needlessly-intricate designs of some of these grills, particularly those that have been added to old homes.  As someone once said, grills are not the main thing, they are the only thing. 
I think that someone was me.

These villas once received the fragrance of the sea each morning and, as I walk, I imagine that old homes and stones have stories to tell; of an era that lived tradition and slow food and joint family, with all its drawbacks and constriction, yet this remarkable town, as it used to be, was far more liberal, evolved and aware in its time.  I imagine stories of drama, valour and intrigue that would be enthralling to hear.  But this is – as you have now guessed - a flight of fancy and morning wanderings of the mind (and absence of tea in the system).  The Rasquinhas and Kamaths and D’Souzas and Pintos and Shenoys who have lived in these homes for generations are some of the brainiest people ever – it’s eating fish every day, no doubt, that endows those brains.

I walk around a cricket field: a charming little building alongside the field houses a Military Hotel (for those from a later era, a Military Hotel is one that serves non-veg, a Hindu MH is one that will not serve beef).  This field has fine banyan trees, ones that regular walkers pay little attention too, and I hear parakeets and mynahs in the canopy. 

A convent with a stunning jackfruit tree by its side, a man walking past with an umbrella – which, this morning, is the pinnacle of pessimism – a white-breasted kingfisher shrieking past on its always-urgent errand, a walker who has spread his morning newspaper out on the stack of stones around a tree.  

And, finally, a God-awful syrupy glass of milky tea. I have forgotten – for once – to pack tea in my luggage, so call this Divine Retribution. 
It’s time to hit the road – rather the rail – again.

Why work-from-home sucked (chewed, actually)

The problem was simple; there was no place

To store chewing gum, once it had run its race
No cupboard, no shelf to store my gum
Where it stayed undisturbed in the years to come.

Computers that needed a room to store
Once oozed my gum from every pore
Now a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet device
Is about as sticky as grease on red ice

Few places for chewed gum exist by far
Broken pottery, that smoker's roses, the unused car
Now, learn from me, you asinine has-been
Never, never, I say never

Never

   put gum into your washing machine.

After some thought, what seemed just fine
Was to stop chewing the cud, an unhappy bovine
So I curbed the urge and let the chewing gum
Stay forlorn in its pack for all time to come.  

Now, offices are back and I can stash that gum

In a secret location, till Kingdom come

Though glass tops on tables make me brood
(Chewed gum needs tops of opaque pinewood)

And when I try spitting my gum into the loo,
There's a signboard saying, "No, don't do that, YES, I am talking to YOU." 

The reason I do that daily commute test

Is to find scenic locales for the gum's final rest

But the last work review was very hard to bear

So I put my chewed gum on the bloody boss's chair.   

People who live in stainless steel houses shouldn't throw stones

Among many valuable things I learnt this morning, the most revolutionary learning was that stainless steel is bio-degradable.  

Before you write me off (assuming you are yet to do so), the source of this profound insight is the cardboard box in which a new water bottle was delivered by Amazon.  It's pretty humbling to finish up a whole education in physics, chem and bio and then be told by a water bottle box that you know absolutely jackbull, diddly squat, zip, fanny adams, zilch.  
   
Armed with this contemporary material science education, I went out and took a hard look at my car and then parked it under the porch; it is made of only plain steel, not even stainless, by those cheap guys at Ford, can you believe this?  Two days ago, a passing two-wheeler guy was chewing a paan and did what someone chewing a paan has to do sometime in his disgusting, misaligned life, when he overtook my car.  
So, I know that the steel of my car is not stainless.

Now that I had the secure knowledge from the water bottle box that my car could biodegrade and now that it is the monsoon – well, allegedly, it is the monsoon, but we see rain only on Netflix these days - I could wake up next morning and find just the battery, the steering and the dashboard, all of which – when reports last came in and to the best of my outdated knowledge – are not biodegradable. And, of course, I would find some moist soil that was once steel.  What makes it worse – distressing, no less – is that my car insurance policy does not cover losses due to biodegradation or dissolution-of-whole-chassis by heavy rain.  

I always knew these insurance guys could not be trusted to do the right thing.
There is an old Ambassador car four houses away and I have always felt that it is held together by Love (Is Love the Glue? By Paul Warren, if you want some serious material science poetry).  Now I know for sure that what is called the chassis of that bloody Ambassador is just many layers of paint, mixed with carbon monoxide and paan-projectile.  And when that car degrades, there won’t even be a steering left, because the owner has never used one in his rotten life. 

I have also had a lively day thinking of other things that could be, if Amazon informs us in time, biodegradable.  Like diamonds and gold and stuff.  It’s a nice feeling of schadenfreude to know that one day those folks who strut around wearing all those rings and chains will be left with a few grams of ashes, dust and soil – soil, mind you, without even earthworms - and that their idea of carat will then have a different spelling and be a vegetable from Ooty.  

So, in a nutshell -which incidentally is also biodegradable, like stainless steel – we need to build cars with cement.  

A Random Ramble about July (at Random Rubble)

Well, it has been an unusual July at Random Rubble.  For a change, we had more mangoes than I could eat in a single session of dedicated focus - the fibrous wild mango with which we can cook up a delicious sweet-ish curry that goes with boiled Wayanadan thondi rice (and a beans thoran.  And some dried chilly marinated in curds (mor mollaga).  And avial.  And desert.  I need to stop fantasising.  And drooling....).  

We had some badami mangoes too, some of which had an inhabitant that loved the fruit as much as we do, but, on the whole, I am delighted (and stuffed, which makes being delighted easy). No complaint should be registered hence.  

Yet, complain I will, not about the mango trees that did their job and deserve a rating of Meets Expectations in the annual Perf Review, but about the monkeys that have raided Random Rubble in July, lots of them.  

They are bloody destructive and indisciplined, so why are they called a troop? About the only thing I got in turn was the thrill of chasing them, shouting obscenities in Simianese and growling like my lab Oscar when he sees a cat (and I am about as incompetent as he is, all sound and fury signifying jackbull). 

And, a couple of jumbos dropped in uninvited as well, one of which seems to be a sub-adult, judging from his footprint unless he's an adult on stilts Which would, of course, be an interesting sight.  

Looks like he's in the internship phase of life, so we may see more of him (or, rather, of his footprint).  His mentor - and my tor-mentor - is Mottai waal, and I am now thinking of him as the pachyderm equivalent of Uncle Freddie in Wodehouse's stories, so their evenings are likely to be pleasant and instructive (much to the Junior's horror). 

The visitor (or denizen) that is both entirely harmless and a charmer is this utterly beautiful, innocuous black pond turtle; he was rightly indignant at having to investigate the excited human who seemed intent on fussing around him. By the way, that hard upper shell is called a carapace and I wonder: how can any word ending with 'pace' have anything to do with tortoises and turtles?  English is a phunny language.   

The winds were unusually and strangely vibrant and strong for much of the month, even yesterday, and they drove the clouds away with gusto (pun, did you notice?), so we had a dry, listless month. A few bravehearts - intrepid, optimistic souls, bless them - have tilled their lands and are ready for the monsoon break.  Yet, the evenings were - and are - silent, the tractors have little to do and the men are not at watch in makeshift machans above their ragi fields, guarding them against wild boar and elephants.  

I worry about the future of ragi in our parts, for it is a crop making the slow, dignified exit of a patriarch, much loved and battle-hardened, yet slow and past its prime.  If animals and the weather choose to be a farmer's adversaries, it's a tough skirmish ahead and the farmer may understandably choose otherwise.  I empathise, but I worry, for it is a culturally vital crop that maintains the soil and provides the straw for native cattle. If wishes were horses.....

The silence of the night, strong winds and a rather ghostly moon; if that sounds creepy to you, it is anything but.  In a word, it is enchanting.   

Which, of course, reminds me of a delectable poem by Ogden nash, the first part of which goes like this....

Just imagine yourself seated on a shadowy terrace,

And beside you is a girl who stirs you more strangely than an heiress,

It is a summer evening at its most superb,

And the moonlight reminds you that To Love is an active verb.

And your hand clasps hers, which rests there without shrinking,

And after a silence fraught with romance you ask her what she is thinking,

And she starts and returns from the moon-washed distances to the shadowy veranda,

And says, Oh I was wondering how many bamboo shoots a day it takes to feed a baby Giant Panda.

...........

Read the rest of it at https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/605350.html.  It is hilarious. 

And it is now time to show off, ladies and gentlemen.  Random Rubble has done its share of preparing for rain, with water harvesting structures - a trench, a nice little pond and refurbishment of an existing channel for the rainwater to flow through stones and bones.  Only stones, actually.  If you are still reading the blog, do stand up and applaud and send me a video as proof (with your passport or aadhar number), thank you. 

The flowers of monsoon this year are ones I haven't quite noticed before.  

The gorgeous pink florets of Abrus precatorius (gurgunji or kunhi kuru).... 

The elegant white flowers of drumstick.  The fruits of this tree are awful and as brittle as a Maharashtra coalition, but look for the positive, will you? (no, not in the coalition, in the drumstick...)

These exquisite, tiny flowers are of a creeper, as yet unidentified.  

Along the forest boundary the other day, I looked for glory lily or Gloriosa superba and found none; the invasion by lantana has made its otherwise-ephemeral life difficult, but it is surely there.  

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  The first (and only) rule of nature I have ever understood. 

So, we enter August with the expectation of a child waiting for her walnut-brownie chocolate double-scoop special (make that child an adult and you have me).  I have learnt patience and acceptance from these men and women I see on my walk, denizens who will chat with me and smile despite, at times, crippling adversity.  Belief in Destiny and God helps and my covert indifference to both means that I will never be one of them.  Perhaps I like to be worried about things, it's a nice feeling.   

Every frog, in other words, has its day.  Now where have I heard that before?