Rain, Ragi and Some Philosophy to Boot

Random Rubble
August 2026

A shroud of ennui - a feeling of weariness and boredom and lethargy, an absence of purpose - is cast over the village and the occasional sound of a tractor revving its engine in a field is reassuring, the aural equivalent of comfort food.  August is simply not meant to be this way.  

On my evening walk, I meet men and women doing the odd job, women bringing home a small load of firewood on their heads, the sombre expression replaced by a hesitant smile of recognition as they pass by.  It is a chore they would not have done if the rains had been on time and, of course, that smile would have been broader if I had walked past a ragi field they were deweeding.  

We, who aren't, and never can be, farmers, knew well in advance that el Nino, the little boy, was on his way.  The memory of the drought of 2023 lingers in my mind and the sight of the lake by Random Rubble, dry to the bone in the summer of 2024 made me wonder if all that I had done to harvest water and restore the biodiversity of the farm would outlive the challenge.  When you are against a Force, the Big Question is inevitable: Do My Effort Matter?  

The tank bed - mid-2024

...and the tank itself that day

Yet things turned for the better in the second half of that year and stayed that way last year as well.  The birds - swamphens, moorhens, storks, egrets, spot-billed ducks and a flock of whistling teal - returned.  Hope did too that season.  

I am an optimist, defiantly so, and have planted ragi in a quarter of an acre this month, my annual ritual of justification for being a farm owner.  Yet optimism is an uneasy guest, making a forced entry into an unquiet mind, and an excuse is all that is needed for it to be asked to leave and it does so this month, with a promise to meet again.  

To a farmer, the land has a right to its rain, to those little puddles, those frivolous channels that wend down, those rushes of an overflow from a thunderstorm.  So, they - these intrepid men and women - speak of the absence of rain with the despair of abandonment, of having been giving the shrift in the dealing.  It is a feeling I have learnt to recognise.

In mid-August, the lake looks as worn as the people, perhaps as forlorn as well, the gorgeous sunset a faint consolation.   

  

August ends in a deficit - as much of rain as of optimism, cheer and purpose - the sky remains clear, those nights of thinking-about-nothing under the moon uninterrupted. 

No, that isn't true: I think of many things, desultory thoughts of the future, what this year would look like when viewed a decade hence, the emotion of creation and loss, and I wonder if a belief in fatalism is an essential human condition.  

Mid-September 

Two weeks of summer sunshine in the time of the monsoon, the ragi is wilting and in serious trouble.  Then one evening, the day before I reach, it rains.  

A quiet breakfast of oats and ragi on the 14th morning.  Two waterhens - this is their day to rule - walk hesitantly past the kitchen, lifting their dainty feet up and carefully stretching them out to the next step, much like you would see in an absurd pantomime.  But they are beautiful!  A few minutes later, two mongooses follow their path, trotting busily away.  

It rains the next day, and the next.  Optimism will cut short its sojourn and return and the puddles will reflect the clouds and the moon will hide its splendour and the nights will be filled with the call of frogs and a swarm of winged termites will crowd around the light.  The brown will turn to green and  blue banded bees will hum around the flowers.

Last night, it is the rain of the year, a ceaseless, steady, filling rain, the one I have dreamt of all year.  I wake up and listen till the sound of the rain and the earth merge into sleep again. 

And somewhere in this unending cycle of weather and belief, of hens and drought, is a lesson worth knowing.  It is a search, yes, that it surely is.

The blue banded bees kept their word

Two months to go, miles before I sleep

  

Romancing in Himachal (with a bus driver attached)

If you’d like to have your pulse racing sometime – and if romance is not an available option – I suggest that you take a ride on a Himachal public transport bus.

These buses were made in the early stage of the Industrial Revolution, around the time when candle making was considered seriously high-tech and hence headquartered in Palo Alto.  The driver’s seat is surrounded by wires, some emerging from the engine, others just lying around in case…(though I never have figured out in case of what).  Where an accelerator is supposed to be are metal stumps emerging from the debris, like desolate trees in a dammed river and the only concession made to the 20th century is the steering wheel.

The typical Himachal driver is a fair, good-natured fellow, with a big tummy and a bigger burp.  He seems to know exactly what the wires are for, as he gets the vehicle lurching forward and then eases back to drive this bus with one hand.  Yes, you read that right. With one hand.

His other hand – generally the right one – has more important endeavours.  For much of the time spent going up the steep slopes of the Himalayas, taking turn after curve after hairpin bend, the driver uses his right hand to expertly eject projectiles from his nasal passage or investigate his ears or other parts of the anatomy that one must refrain from describing.  

On one memorable occasion, the driver had a long-ish straw that he inserted into his right ear, contorting his face and tilting his head to a side, even as we climbed up a narrow road on a wet day.  In keeping with the tradition set by the finest explorers, he was persistent, removing the straw once in a way to closely inspect the inserted length in puzzlement and then repeating the caving exercise.   What did he expect?  That it would emerge from his nose with the sinus at its tip?  Or that beyond the ear drum, there'd be a vast emptiness with a hollow sound?  I was riveted not just by this, but equally by the fact that the tyre below me was about two feet away from a seven hundred foot drop and my heart thudded at a lively pace right through this journey.

Himachal drivers are chatty too and believe in the basic principles of eye contact in communication, which is most unhelpful when you are palpitating uncontrollably.  But try to give them feedback, such as “Could you please look ahead?” or “Watch out, there’s a cow in front!” and what you will get is a considered, elaborate stare (which, of course, gets you palpitating more than before).

So the best thing to do is to shut up and pray.  Till you see that he too is doing the same, joining his palms and half bowing reverentially to a roadside temple that the bus streams past, even as about  two feet away from your side is what is now a nine hundred foot abyss.

Donald Duck in Cowboy Gear

In the early 1990s, I began a corporate career working with TDICI, then India’s premier venture capital fund and, almost at once, I was handed over a portfolio of companies in which we had invested over the years.  Of the two vexatious companies in this portfolio, Gum India was, by far, leading the charts.  It made Big Fun, a rather disgusting pink bubble gum and Gum India was, to use an equally disgusting pun, a sticky mess.    

The bubble wasn't in the gum though, but in the financials (call it a hot air bubble) and the Income Statement and Balance Sheet were products of inspired fiction.  The company owed money to nearly every pedestrian in Chennai, was a marginal player in most markets and made a product that destroyed kids’ teeth, which didn’t quite put it on a pedestal anywhere. The company was driven by its sales people who, inspite of an alleged business education, understood nothing of finance, collections or profitability, leaving all of that to the man who will shortly be introduced as the Chief Protagonist of this story.  

And, if this was not enough, the company founder, a tall, lean chap called Naru, was (and still is) quite a character: full of bluster, grand ideas (never supported by reality, which he perceived to be but an irritant), and an ability to talk the hind legs of the most skeptical donkey you’d meet. In us, he had found not just a donkey, but a pack of them. 

This chap had a mean streak of arrogance, sometimes communicated in the vein of sophisticated humour.  This was partly a result of what he saw as superior breeding and partly his opinion of himself and his education from IIM (blame, Calcutta). Naru knew everything.  Naru had the last word.  This hauteur meant that he consigned me to his beleagured finance manager.

This note then is about Ramk, Gum India’s finance manager. He was a short tubby chap, grey haired, with a moustache and an ingratiating, sly smile that hid more than it revealed. It was a slyness that was cast within, for his was an unenviable position to be in: hounded by creditors, harassed by employees and impaired by a management team that found him to be an impediment in their grandiose plans.  There is no doubting the stress he was under, which at some point presented him with a slipped disc (he wore the collar to every tricky meeting to generate sympathetic vibes).

This is not to imply that Ramk was a suffering, silent saint; on the contrary, he was a skilled manipulator, generating superior, highly convincing fiction on a spreadsheet.  His job was to convert a complainant into his victim - a job he did with unmatchable skill - each of whom was guided gently down a primrose path to nowhere (ask me, I was Victim #1).   

In our regular meetings in his office in Chennai, I was always prepared with stern messages and sometimes rehearsed my lines.  One hour into the meeting, I would be putty in his hands and rich fodder for his spreadsheet-led fiction recital.  The next quarter, he would assert with what I can only call Inspired BullShit (which he had learnt from his boss), would be spectacular for the company. Since that quarter never ever arrived, the next quarter would be a repeat in an astonishing display of chutzpah.    

Ramk’s room was a drab, grey cabin, with little to please the eye, except for a worn poster that was stuck on the wall behind him. It had Donald Duck in a cowboy suit, hat, holster, the works, twirling a gun on his forefinger, with a broad grin across his engaging face. The byline said, “Nothing will happen today that I can’t handle!”. 

And everytime I met him in his room, my eyes would fix on that poster and then on him.  And then back to that poster.  That sly smile, the chutzpah and brazenness....

As the years have passed by, Donald Duck in Cowboy Gear has stood me in good stead, much before the film '3 Idiots' popularised "All-is-well"!  When faced with a fire in my family home in the middle of the night, an airline employee who had closed the flight gates when I reached them or a child who ran headlong into my car (he ended up fine), I have despaired, only to see that poster on the wall and breathe again.  Followed by a picture of Ramk in my mind, his easy, at times sly, smile reflecting confidence in his deft hands and in getting out of this one, skin (and neck collar) intact.  

But then, I hope the writing on the wall - the poster and the idiom - is the only thing I learnt from the inimitable Ramk.

I Once Lived in a Vacuum

About thirty years ago, a company called Real Value, that made fire extinguishers that did not look like they were for exclusive use by the Asian Weightlifting Champion, decided to make a new product called the Vacuumiser.  The principle of this gadget was to put your leftover food in their specially-designed dishes, which were then vacuumised under a motor, making it last forever (make sambar in summer, consume in monsoon, sort of thing.  You get the pic, even if it seems yucky).  

The company I worked for then had a ‘hard furnishings allowance’ (which is the dumbest idea for tax-saving ever.  Ever.  Take it from me).  Not needing any furnishing, hard, soft or in-between, I bought the vacuumiser with that allowance, because the ad by Trikaya Grey, an agency that specialised in doing funky ads for gullible imbeciles who had hard furnishing allowance, looked good.  The product was clearly useless for us, since we had a cook who used to come in everyday, and hence I bought it (most of my decisions follow this pattern.  If you are looking for someone to take charge of a nuclear reactor, ignore my job application in the larger interest).

The first day, I vacuumised the leftover idlis from breakfast in one of their dishes and put it in the fridge.  On day 2, the idlis had shrunk like a Chinese T-shirt (XXL to M in one wash, guaranteed, says the label, but in Chinese).  They were also flatter than a helipad and were now a colour best described in the Asian Paints brochure as Zinnia Bloom.

The math is as follows:

Idlis without air inside = bricks without air inside

Remove ‘without air inside’ from both sides.

Idlis = bricks.

After nearly losing two of my finest teeth, I abandoned the effort to eat them.  So did the neighbourhood cow that, with a look of disgust, deposited some dung in clear expression of opinion and  I briefly considered shipping that dung (vaccumised in one of their bloody dishes) to Real Value.  In a week, we realised that anything with air inside – which is about 97.245% of all food that I know – would no longer have air inside and hence needed rehydration therapy, meditation and motivational speeches and tender loving care before consumption.  

Yesterday’s vaccumised chappatis tasted like the ones found while excavating Harappa, and the chana could be used in construction, particularly of highways, no questions asked.  And the khichdi was transformed into a grim forbidding cake, needing a knife, protection glasses, two hammers and GPS-type navigation. 

When I told my friend and senior at IIMB, Aloo, who was at Trikaya Grey, that I had bought a vacuumiser, he seemed aware of it.  He told me this after he had stopped laughing, which, from a guy who is the closest human form to a potato, was the last straw (no, not a vacuumised straw.  He liked his carbs.).  

He was thoughtful for a minute and then let me know that it wasn’t the vacuumiser, but the fifteen customers who were the only purchasers of this bloody liability who were the Real suckers. 

Alvida once more....

When I reached Random Rubble on the evening of Feb 21^st, about a fortnight after I had last been here, I knew that Winter was leaving shortly: the evening was warmer than it had been and the canopy, that had begun its Great Annual Shedding of Leaves three weeks ago, was partly bare and open.  

Winter is one for leaving quietly: she picks her moments well and I have learnt, with experience, to anticipate her departure. There were moments in those early years when I would think of the many months to come before her return, weeks of stifling heat and evening showers, of two fickle monsoons and flooding, of squelching tyres and a sliding car as it worked the last lap, months of waiting….Today, I enjoy the days of every season, which is probably a testament to the self-help reading that each of us is assaulted with.     

Siddharth, a friend with a passion for wetlands and their conservation, had turned up and was waiting for me, for we had planned a birding trip to the Big Lake of the Mother-of-the-Forest the next morning (and that went reasonably well).  We sat under the stars after dinner and spoke of viruses, birds, science and venture capital and, about a quarter of an hour after I had gone to my room, getting ready to hit the sack, the howls of a pack of jackals filled the silent night.  It has been some years since I have heard them – far too long – but this is, to use a rather atypical phrase, such a February thing, for my notes seem to suggest rendezvous around Valentine’s (they have much in common with otters, which is a reason for my affection).  A minute or two later, the calls went silent and the village mongrels began their reply, one that was far too persistent, me thinks.

I know Winter is leaving when the palash and silk cotton flowers begin to bloom and the noisy rosy starlings busy themselves up in the tree, darting from one flower to another with an urgency that makes them seem like behind-schedule postmen checking post boxes in those days of yore.  

Stand below and a light shower of falling wine-red silk cotton flowers – gorgeously designed, shaped and coloured by evolution -  is destined to bless you (if Nature’s blessing is what you seek.  If you seek photographs of starlings, a sore neck will bless you as well).  And, just as Winter does, these starlings will leave when their time here is done, which is about as philosophical as we can get in natural history. 

When she, Winter, did leave two nights later, she left behind an enveloping mist that rolled in late – around 7 in the morning -  delivering you softly into the lap of Spring.  The morning mist, with its fragrance that suggests poetry and tea and langour, is what she leaves behind, much like a handkerchief with a delicate perfume that a girl would tuck into a boy’s palm.  So, it must be felt, savoured, inhaled, absorbed.  A cup of orthodox organic tea (preferably one in each hand) is strongly recommended.

And when the mist lifts, with the sun up in the sky and the portents of a warm day, the fragrance of mist recedes into transient memory.  I have learnt to live the moment in memory too - some call it nostalgia - with the expectation that the mist will roll in early on the morrow.  That the day after this day will be as today is in some way.  

Which, if you think about it, is a slice of some philosophy too.

The sunsets of Spring

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Day Time

Ok, I don’t know about party poopers and negative people who will read this post, but I have recently become a huge fan of Galgotia, whoever he is, and of his parents who did the initial hard work that popped out one fine day as Baby Galgotia.  Apparently, he was in a typical utterly boring business when someone asked him if he had ever been in Univ.  So, he set up a Univ, having misunderstood the question.  This is more than I can say for you, so let’s give him some respect and treat him as 67% human (for now).

Then he recruited some unsuspecting passers-by and trespassers as faculty and got it all going. Some years later, there was a silly hype on something called Artificial Intelligence which his students badly needed because, if they had non-artificial intelligence, they would have preferred to become toll gate operators in the Atacama Desert to his stellar university. So, Baby Galgotia (who had, in the meantime, grown up despite Societal pressure to have him extradited to the Cayman Islands in a rubber dinghy) set up the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, with himself as the Centre, some batata pav and samosas, and a dog from China as his sidekick that was not a dog but a robot that looked like a dog and fooled everyone into thinking it was a dog because it did to Galgotia’s car tyres what dogs do when they see car tyres.

Then there was some conference in Delhi on this (no, the conference was not on what dogs do when they see car tyres), so he signed up the dog which had an IQ greater than all those trespassers-who-are-now-faculty combined. To keep a close watch on the dog, he sent the trespassers, sorry, the faculty and to keep a watch on the trespassers, sorry, the faculty (why is this autocorrect thing not working when I key in trespassers?), he made a drone out of thermocool that looked so stupid that it did not even fool a reporter from a TV channel called Times Now-or-Never (the answer is Never). Then they occupied a Stall, which, if I may digress with a pithy comment, is a perfect verb to answer the question, How is technological progress best described in India?

It all unravelled sadly when the robot dog did to a pole in the conference what it otherwise does to tyres (what the pole was doing in the conference is one of 3,247 questions that are engaging the attention of Informed Society at the moment) and someone who was observant saw a Made-in-China sticker in a delicate part of the dog’s anatomy that I refuse to describe in further detail out of sensitivity for reader sentiments.

Then hell broke loose, of course, as you may have read, and Galgotia’s Brigade was asked to vacate the Stall, which is such a pity because they were just getting started and, no doubt, hens, geese and cows - with real methane, mind you - were waiting to be let in. I have written a strong letter of condemnation about such extirpative tendencies of these conference organisers who, when reports last came in, had failed a competitive intelligence test where the only other competitor was the thermocol drone. But I am deeply impressed with the bureaucracy that has ordered an Inquiry and taken action with impressive speed: it has neutered the Principal Offender, the dog.  

Nanju's bete noire

On this day a couple of years ago, when I met Ananda, my friend and occasional philosopher-cum-guide, he was all excited. ‘Sir, you remember Nanjundappa?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I remember him,’I said; he has worked occasionally at Random Rubble and is one of those silent sorts with wide open sparsely populated spaces between his ears.

‘Sir, a leopard bit him!’ he said and sat back with satisfaction at seeing the shock on my face.
It turns out that on an earlier day, the leopard had picked up one of Nanjundappa’s lambs and returned this day for another. The man heard the commotion in the pen, rushed out and charged at the leopard. In the ensuing melee, the leopard dropped a lamb and bit Nanju on his palm and then bolted away.

It was a nasty bite, deep and bloody. Now, the thing you expect to read next is that Nanju was rushed to the hospital but then he, as with many others in Doddi, his hamlet, has never visited one in his life and wasn’t about to grace the premises of an Emergency ward with his Divine Presence now and the only thing more daunting than a leopard that bites is a doctor who injects (old jungle saying). So he tore out some old cloth and wrapped it around a heavily bleeding palm and then wondered how he’d manage the excruciating pain.
And then an idea struck him.

So Nanju and his friend then headed out to the local bar about four km away and tucked in a robust round of pegs of potent intestine-churning stuff like PowerBolt, Napolean 65 and BigBang 10000, which meant that in about half an hour, he was pain-free, sozzled to his gills, seeing two bottles where there were none and leopards behind the grill on the counter. He was, to use Ananda’s immortal words, ‘Full tightu, saar.’

Which is the condition in which Ananda and a couple of forest guards, who had been informed, found him. They took a most reluctant Nanju in the jeep to a clinic but the doctor – quite rightly – refused to inject a pain-killer into a guy who was seeing two leopards where one doctor stood, and asked them to go to the Government hospital. At which point, Nanju did what these strong, silent types do when they are plastered to their pinkies: he gave everyone present and voting a piece of his mind - that tiny piece that was still left inside the cranium. In most colourful language, he cast grave doubts on everyone’s ancestry and their parents’ marital status, and continued the performance in the hospital until the effects of PowerBolt + Nap 65 + BB 10000 had worn off.

All in all, he lost about two litres of blood (after we deduct the sales tax in the narration). He was then sent back to Doddi and was taken everyday for an injection and told that, if he so much as breathed BigBang 10000 in, he would be locked up in hospital with a leopard or two for company and, if leopards couldn’t be found, doctors - the kind who carry sutures and thread and sing praises of the devil - would substitute.

I met him the other day in front of his ragi field; the stalks were tall and handsome and richly productive and he proudly told me that he guarded it all night from the machan on top of a nearby tree from elephants and wild boar and the odd nocturnal writer, the keen scrutiny no doubt aided by a generous helping of Napolean 65.

His hand has healed well and the leopard, having learnt that you do not mess with some, has moved to greener pastures (which, you will - one hopes - understand, is an idiom and not a suggestion of a cathartic change in diet).

Now, if this story does not have the happy ending you often dream for, which one does?