We Walk In Those Footsteps....

 It is one of those mornings in Coorg in the early days of the monsoon when the sun peeps through low clouds that bring in short spells of light rain.  I am walking away from the little town of Ponnampet with no destination in mind, but a hope that the clouds will stay away till I am done with the stroll and get to the meeting I am due to attend.  

The road leads down to the valley and winds by the little brook with lush, dense grassy banks, its waters gurgling as they drop over small rocky outcrops.  I stop to see the stream and to listen to the sound of the gurgling water, for this isn’t just a sound, it is music, with the richness of being - alive, vibrant, throbbing and percussive, all at once.  The sound of the stream is romanticised in advertisements but - here is the irony - when people are by a stream, they pay little attention to it or hear its rhapsody or even hear their voices within.  To listen to the music of the brook takes time and no one has any to spare, save for the cackle of conversation and a photograph that will be soon forgotten.  So, the waters of the brook flow on, the gurgle a rich sound of musical silence….

The paddies in the valley are yet to be planted and the road leads up a gentle slope, so, after a while, I walk on, past the ubiquitous coffee. A small road spins by to my left and, on impulse, I turn in by a signboard to a Bhadrakali temple both to see the temple and get off the main road.

And then, about fifty metres in, is an astonishing sight on my left: a pristine sacred grove, impenetrably dense with trees, creepers, orchids and shrubs jostling for space and weaving within each other.  The trees here are giants in this wet deciduous forest, reaching for the sky and bursting into sartorial elegance at its apex, the canopy, while strangler figs form gorgeous patterns of stiflement as they encircle their host. 

As I stroll in wonder, I see a huge raptor take to the air from its vintage point in the canopy, with slow, heavy wingbeats after it spots the homo sapien below.  The lighting precludes conclusion; what was that, a black eagle? I will never know, of course, and just this once, watching it fly away is what matters, for a spectacle without a name has an aura of its own. In 'Otherlands', a beautiful book by a paleobiologist Thomas Halliday, he echoes the thought (and I could hardly better this!): "...a flurry of wings in a thicket, a half-seen hide or the sensation of something moving in the dark, is an integral part of experiencing nature. A little ambiguity can generate as much wonder as a fixed truth."

A minute later, a hare bolts out from the sacred grove and makes a dash down the little road, as hares always do.  They are Nature’s Great Dashers and this one stays true to type, disappearing around the bend. I see a path through the grove, one that has been created by human hands, but in the monsoons, it is one that is less trodden by us.  What other species have walked that way?  The answers - when we do find them - are often surprising, for many forms of wildlife have learnt that humans bring with them both trouble and food.   They learn as much as we do, but the price they pay is higher and they have learnt that too.  

The sacred groves of Coorg are strange silent places for the most part, protected by devout belief and unnamed fear of the divine and the supernatural.  These groves are a treasure trove of ethnobotany and natural history, of the past in the present and of form over fashion.  Isn’t it odd that the antidote to greed is a fear of the unknown?  

And when I am done and retrace my steps, I see a gorgeous restless bird, with a distinct jagged tail that it perks up, much like the fantail flycatcher - it is the white rumped shama and I watch it fly away into the canopy but Richard Bach said it well: A farewell is necessary before we can meet again…..

Some days are meant to be perfect. 

Photo by Chaitanya Patankar (from FB)

Milky Way with a Galaxy of Options

Some years ago, I was travelling abroad and first came across a packet of organic milk. This got me all excited but the minor issue was that I didn’t quite know how organic milk was different from the non-organic version.  Actually, I didn’t know the difference between slim milk, full fat milk, mild-fat milk, fertiliser-masquerading-as-milk, almond milk, soy milk, A2 milk and diluted whitewash, because they all tasted horrible (and still do), unless richly fermented into curd. 
And the organic stuff (in British Pounds) costs fifty percent over the other version.  A monthly subscription to this was about the same cost as a roundtrip on business class by British Airways to Heathrow, with a Wimbledon ticket thrown in.
  
So, like udder, sorry, other homo sapiens who need to Know Everything But Don’t Know Where To Begin, I Googled. Here is the summary of what I learnt (after being warned that drinking milk causes hormonal imbalance, stones in the kidney, liver something-something and various heart conditions, including feeling sorry for the cow).
Stuff I learnt:
- Organic milk is when cows munch on stuff that is organic. It does not mean that someone cleans the inside of said cow with neem oil.  This was, of course, news to me, because we all had thought that the cow was organic too.  
- Generally (unless informed to the contrary), this means hormone-free (which in its definition does not preclude the presence or otherwise of oxytocin, which merits unique categorisation)
- Substantially (with minor aberrations, accounting for outbreaks of bad behaviour by bacteria) it means antibiotic free, except for such antibiotics as may be presumed to co-exist with biotics.  
- A2 milk is milk containing the A2 variant of beta casein protein, about which there are 7,844 opinions on 7,844 different links, most of which tell you that the others are lying.  

Having studied Operations Research (in my MBA, in which course I scored a ‘B’ after promising the Professor that he could have all my future earnings and, if I ever became PM, a share in the Treasury as well), I saw this correctly as a linear programming problem and, after an hour on the OR software, I chose low-fat, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, oxytocin-precluded, organic milk.  

But Google was not done.  It then sternly asked me if the milk should be from cows tied up or allowed to roam? (These cows are called free-range, which is how they differ from Airtel, which is no-range.)  Being an abiding liberal, I chose the latter, regretting the decision almost immediately because Google let me know that free-range cows munch grass (the original stuff that’s green and full of nutrients, not the other stuff you are thinking off, you corrupted mutant) which has insects hanging around and doing their daily chores.  

So, when these cows munch through the grass and the insects, they are not technically veggie, if you see what I mean and the last thing I want to have in my tea is a grasshopper that’s gone through a ruminant’s digestive system and become milk, so I changed my Search to ‘stall-fed’ which then told me in ominous tones that there could be trace residues of dangerous stuff, so I went back to grass-fed, A2, low-fat, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, oxytocin-precluded, organic milk, in a fully renewable carton which was so expensive that my prepaid Forex card asked me to confirm with, “Are you sure, you ignoramus?”.  

For the rest of the trip, I became a committed vegan and had black tea.  Except for two weekly organic, free-range, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, full-yolk, medium-sized, happy-hen eggs that I paid for by redeeming flying miles.

In a corner of the garden, lies this pot by the side
Into which I used to compost any food I’d want to hide
I kept it closed and alone, for a pot likes to brood
Anyways, you could argue, it makes compost out of food.

When I picked the lid up that day, I heard a buzzing refrain
But (being a genius, you see), I thought it was my brain
Out came a thousand petulant bees, in an angry mood to sting
That is bad manners, I think. The bell they ought to ring.

All the lessons that they teach you on diving from the bees
Are completely useless, I promise. They just want the fees
The only thing to do is Run, over land and over sea
Followed in your wake by a very determined bee.

So I sprinted (having seen videos of the Jalikattu Bolt)
Yet the visible parts of me were hit by a hundred and forty volt
Bees don’t like writers anymore (and they like poets even less)
And this is their malevolent display to rid themselves of stress.

A stinger here, a stinger there, treated with ice and salt
(The ice had been forming nicely for an evening’s single malt)
I now stick to Dire Straits and skip Scorpion and Mr Sting
Never push your luck, I reckon, for what will music bring?

But every cloud, they say, has a silver perimeter
I have a ghastly ex-boss, a Glassdoor history-sheeter
Who thinks he’s bright & capable (the idiot) and boastfully intrepid
I will call him home one day and ask him to open the lid.
 

AI For Washing Dishes: an encyclopaedic history of private equity in Bangalore

 In parts of Bangalore, until recently, when people were done with washing the dishes or online yoga, they registered a start-up and appointed an investment banker to raise a hundred million dollars or multiples of that modest figure.  Generally, everyone created an App to do something that has been done perfectly well since the Vijayanagar empire.  Like milk delivery.  

The next step was to write this idea down in a Business Plan, which is a document that nobody pays any attention to, unless they are done with work for the day and want to settle down with a cup of tea and some fiction. 

During this stellar period in human history, the only goal of every start-up was to burn cash in super-quick time, which process was - with the usual complexity that is intrinsic in private equity - called Cash-Burn.  The enriching idea was that once they had raised money and lost it, they could raise more money that they would lose quicker than the earlier pile, so that they could raise even more money - this is called Series C for the important and deeply intellectual reason that it follows A and then B.  The National Record in this Event, when reports last came in, was held by a company called Cred which, at a highly impressive stage in its life, earned Re 1 for every Rs 732 that it spent. Even a spendthrift friend of mine, who is utterly incompetent and runs a chaotic NGO, is in awe of such stellar performance.  

They kept on raising money till Series AH or something, at which point they became Unicorns. A Unicorn is a company that people who are permanently affected by smog-induced shutdown of the frontal cortex of the brain think is worth a billion dollars or more. Like the setup - which is run by a phony tail guy - that sells an electric scooter that has a front wheel which, like the yogis of old, believes in being detached and therefore has an independent free mind.    

Generally, anyone who made money from a business and therefore did not need multiples of hundred million dollars was considered a Supreme Idiot by everyone, including the critically-opinionated experts at WhatsApp School of Advanced Debris.  A typical Founder spent all his time pitching to investors, using words like Traction, Machine Learning and Network Effects which no one understood, but since anyone who does not use words like Traction, Machine Learning and Network Effects is considered to be Supreme Idiot, version 2.0 and escorted to the lift, everyone nodded sagely (especially if they were awake).  

And some of these investors have made money by selling to some other investors who then made money by talking up the story to more investors who will make money if they hold on till 2074.  This process has, like Cash-Burn, a technical name in private equity: the Bigger Fool Theory.  

My next update will be in 2074.  Stay posted.

Dad - A Tribute on a Day of Peace

May 12th
On this day, forty-one years ago, Dad was gone.

It took, of course, years for everyone - and that included his large circle of friends and family, with him in the centre, a larger-than-life gregarious, humourous figure- to accept his absence with a sort of detached equanimity.  In modern language, with its epithets and attempts at neat labels, it is often termed ‘closure’, but it never is, if the memory wishes it to remain, often preserved in the sepia of an old photograph and those conversations that begin with, ‘If Vasu were here…..’  

When the drumbeats of war shook us up this early May and the memes, messages and meandering underscored the restlessness of anxiety, I thought of him and, of course, I have thought of him today too. 

For he had faced conflict far more often than any of us who read this will have: twenty-five years old and returning from his day’s work in a train in the summer of 1947, with bodies of victims bearing the scars of conflict on both sides of that metre gauge track; being asked, at the age of forty, to drop his wife to an air field to be evacuated, while the men stayed back to face the possibility of a Chinese invasion that was reportedly hours away and, after which, the family would be gone forever; a 1965 war and another one in 1971, of which I have a dim memory of a darkened home, hooded headlights and a mum who had endured another sleepless night.  

It wasn’t just him, of course, most men and women of his generation had heard those drumbeats roll, their echoes a distant ominous portent, the beats conflating with those of the heart, so there was consolation in knowing that others were in the same boat on a turbulent river.  But little else.  Each such conflagration brought forth the likelihood of never seeing his beloved Palakkad again, with its palms and paddy and politics, and his family, particularly his grandmother, my mutashi, who was his life (and I have often wondered what she had gone through in her ninety-eight years, but all I remember is a fetching toothless smile, a hanging earlobe and that half-bent body). 

He loved Nehru, admired Mrs Gandhi and hated Nixon and he loved the idea of India above all else, for he had lived with it all his adult life.  That emotion extended to idealism, perhaps even quixotic idealism, with decency and kindness at its core.  I know he hated war because there is never a winner and he had seen enough of it.  He hated war for its consequences on simple, ordinary people who are the ants scurrying out of a battlefield of two raging deranged tuskers.  I know he hated war above anything else because his father, Dada, had been an officer in the British Army in the Second World War and a continuance of that tradition is taken for granted in the Nair community, with its history and pride and affirmation of battle.  

But it was, for Dad, never an option, partly because his grandmother took a promise from him that he wouldn’t fight and partly because of his idealism and resolution.  No, war was never an option: the armed forces were there as the crucial institution for defence, not aggression, a view that he had learnt from listening to Nehru, reading the Mahatma and those insightful books about partition, all of which formed his pacifist view where peace was the central tenet of human existence.  This meant that he was liberal too and could live comfortably with those who disagreed, as Major VR Menon, his best friend did, but those views of his would never change. 

Today, I think of those views - which are mine too - and realise, with some solace, that I remember Dad for much more than any gift he had given me.  Idealism and kindness can be preserved in sepia too.

The Fab Four: Uncles Sawant, Rathnam, Vish and Dad.  They saw it all. 
And they were kind and idealistic.

April for the Blues

It is a cool morning in end-April  in this part of our forest and as we walk on the track with prodigious quantities of dried elephant dung, one eye out for the pachyderm if he is somewhere, the trees and bushes draw attention.  Pongamia is everywhere here, yet, as we go in further and rocky outcrops abound, jalaari - Shorea rox - takes over.  This is my favourite tree and the flowering season was over about a month and a half ago, but thousands of light coloured winged seeds - those helicopter ones which twirl and twist as they fall - droop on the branches.

Today, I hope to see a variety of flowers though: Careya in all its beauty or perhaps Firmiana colorata (toes crossed and walking on stilts).  But then we come to a dense crop of these trees with tiny, beautiful blue florets in clusters of deep blue.  Aren’t they utterly beautiful!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the iron wood tree, a small hardwood, called Memecylon something-something in Latin & Greek (I think that suffix is umbellatum, but it could be edule, no matter).  In Malayalam the tree is Kashavu or kannavu and the flower has a lovely euphonious name: kaayampoo

We stop to study the tree and, at a later point, I look it up in my book (Neginhal sir, bless you wherever you are). But it is when I search India Biodiversity Portal later that I see an entirely unexpected connection with a small piece of musical history.

In my collection of old playing records is an EP from the 1969 Malayalam film, Nadhi, with an immensely popular song sung by that maestro, Yesudas.  

Kaayampoo kannil vidarum

Kamaladhalam kavilil vidarum

(The kaayampoo blooms in your eyes

Lotus petals on your cheeks……)

Yours to listen to…

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Go3xe8Sdu27plq98uyxoz

This photo with three flowers: these are Shorea rox, Firmiana and the Ironwood tree, photo taken in March 2022

Just Another Story. Just Another Scam

February 20th 2024

I see the name of the driver on the app and it is clear, at once, that he is a Malayali.  He arrives fifteen minutes before schedule – which used to be a Blusmart feature (not a bug) – and I walk up to the gate and request a few minutes to get ready. ‘Aren’t you from Kerala?’ I ask, for we Mallus tend to pop that question sooner than later.  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replies, with an enthusiastic smile, ‘and I thought you were a Malayali too, from your name.  Please take your time, we can leave fifteen minutes after schedule as well, not a problem.’  A cab driver saying that; doesn’t the surprise make your day?

As I get into the cab, his dignity and bearing are evident.  He speaks fluent English, is courteous to a fault.  After I tell him the time of my flight, he thanks me for booking the cab three hours earlier.  He is at the fag end of a twelve-hour night shift and I feel deep sympathy for him (along with, of course, the hope that he is awake enough to drive a car).

So, we get chatting; the stories of mortal men and women – pedestrian tales of existence, resilience, connections and hope – are the most enthralling, aren’t they?  Those beguiling encounters of comfort and dissonance offer so much for reflection, certainly as an alternative to reading the short-term, high-intensity feeds of transient inanity on the media on my phone (which I cannot do anyways as it makes me queasy in a moving vehicle).

I learn that he is a Bangalorean and has been a Blusmart driver for a couple of years and enjoys the experience.  ‘I occasionally meet someone like you, sir, who speaks Malayalam and enjoys conversation, which is special (vishesham, in Malayalam).’  For two decades, he drove night buses to Mumbai – a twenty-hour journey – and rested for a few hours before driving back to Bangalore.  A seven-hour sleep at night was reserved for one day a week and he had made a deal with the devil on that, but then he missed his wife.  No kids, he says without my prompting.  He begins to speak about his wife and then checks himself.  I wonder why. 

Education did not really interest him, which was a source of great stress for his well-educated dad.  There was contrast too: his two siblings – a sis and a brother, both older to him – studied well and have done well in the Great Game.  While on the airport flyover, he points out an utterly grotesque apartment-city (no other term will suffice in vehemence for this apparition) and says his brother, who is a techie in the US, has a four-bedroom apartment in there.  

‘Yet, I am happy as a driver, no regrets’ he says, and there is a stubbornness, a sense of indignation in that tone which makes me feel that he is talking to himself, justifying, quieting the inner voice of dissent…..

An hour of conversation and we are on the final stretch to the terminal.  ‘My wife is a Maharashtrian,’ he says, ‘and she has a physical disability. Ours was a marriage no one wanted to attend. Yet, today, my parents are deeply attached to her. She has a job too, but this income from driving keeps us going.’  He pauses. ‘She is everything to me.’  

I can feel the emotion in the voice, sitting there in the back seat of a car driven by a stranger I will perhaps never see again. I hope my short reply, in words and tone, has been one with empathy.  We complete the journey in silence.

As I step out of the car with my bag, he smiles with that now-familiar enthusiasm.  ‘Please call me anytime if you need a car,’ he says, and I nod in assent, though we both don’t really mean it.  

And, today, I think of his future.

And I am angry at the flagitious and greedy men who ran this company and have played with human lives.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/who-is-anmol-singh-jaggi-blusmart-gensol-founder-banned-sebi-epc-11744787594839.html