My Farmily and Other Animals

I reach the farm around 9 this morning, the morning after a night of gentle, persistent rain.  The air is heavy with moisture and the tall grass greets me with a fragrance, while its bushy heads brush against my skin.  I pick my way carefully on the soft, wet earth, for the-morning-after is time for the Kingdom of Animalia.  This is mid-day already for the birds – white-headed babblers (damn their new name), bushchats, bulbuls, tailor birds, sunbirds, white-eyes, mynas and the odd bushlark me thinks, though I am missing the chatter of the white-browed bulbul family that’s usually around the young mango.  As I open the house door and deposit the bag, a wasp from the in-house nest greets me with a buzz, a menacing keep-away whirr.  Two of her female ancestors had given me a nasty sting some years ago, so I get this message well (males are the benign, retiring type who’d rather curl up with a book than pick a fight, and that’s why we’ll get along well if we e’er meet).  Over the years, I have removed the wasp nest often (after saying my prayers), but they always return and the last time Anand, my extraordinary brains trust, was asked his opinion, he lit a quick small fire and finished them off, which destroyed not just the wasps but my heart as well.  So, I have decided to let live (and not provoke the females, after all this #MeToo stuff).   

Anand and I walk to the back of the farm, a patch of horse gram (huruli) that is as nutritious as it is unfussy to grow.  The lush sight is a delight to see, the little saplings waving excitedly in the breeze.  He shows me the impressions of the hoof of wild boar as it traversed through the patch to the ragi across, being grown, thankfully, by my neighbour (who is not averse to occasional flavouring of rice-and-curry with some bacon).  Even as we stand there, a small flock of baya weaver birds descend on the guava tree by the small pond and their excitement suggests that it’s nesting time – indeed, monsoons is when they work their magic.  The path is dotted with gorgeous lemon-yellow butterflies – the Common Grass Yellow – flitting about with purpose, in which pursuit, of course, they differ vastly from me. 

Did I just hear a Crested Serpeant Eagle?  It isn’t to be seen, which is odd, but the call – that deceivingly plaintive cry – is, as an Ornithologist would say in his tongue, diagnostic. “Do not enter the Tuvare (toor dal) patch, Sir,” Anand says, “there is a bee hive there.”  Which, of course, is great news for pollination.  I would not have entered the Tuvare anyways, for it has grown taller than I am and is densely packed – a walk through this would have had the heart doing a lively gig.   

We begin the walk to the front of the farm – the Western side, so to speak -  and, a few steps ahead, a grey francolin (a big name for a partridge) takes off just ahead, giving me quite a start and Anand a hearty laugh.  A month ago, I had seen their dainty little nest with eggs under a clump of grass.  They are generally heard more than seen, yet they are lovely birds, tubby and compact, in the line of evolutionary thought that includes quails and pheasants.  Thankfully, in our area, they aren’t caught for the table (well, at least to my knowledge). 

We are now past the little patch of greens that I am looking forward to eating next month (if not beaten to it), and Anand stops all of a sudden and points to a solitary scat on the path.  “Jungle cat,” he says with assuredness, and I feel a thrill, for this is a first.  “It seems to have gone this way last night.”  As we walk further, he points, with disappointment, to the now-sparse patch of jowar by the water-channel.  “The monkeys came a couple of days ago and destroyed this,” he says in irritation, and I share the emotion, not being particularly fond of bonnet macaques.   

Even as we stand there, staring at the soil, he bends down and examines a paw print in the soft earth.  Hares, two of them, went by last night too, their prints and droppings pointing the way.  At one point they seemed to have both stopped to deposit an entire load of droppings and I can, in my mind’s eye, see them now:  the male standing up and sniffing nervously, looking around all the time, with his black-tipped ears twitching like vibrant antennae.  I love to see hares bound across a field in a sprint that can leave you breathless and awed.  They are, in a phrase, Nature’s great dashers.  When in my teens, I read an eerie story called “The Rabbit’s Paw” (read it at your peril), but it only enhanced my fondness for rabbits (and, by extension, their Indian cousins).   

At my foot is a tiny LadyBird beetle.  Can Nature be more resplendent than this?  “We call it Guruganji vola (insect),” Anand says in reponse to my question and, on reflection, this is a brilliant name.  Guruganji is the local name for Abrus Precatorius (or the Crab’s Eye), which is Kunnikuru in Malayalam.  The LadyBird looks just like the Crab’s Eye, so what could be better than naming an insect after a seed that it resembles?  Damn the science, admire the simplicity.   

After Anand leaves for lunch, I stroll on my own – there’s a treepie up there, and his cousins, the crows, come around when I have lunch.  They know that I will give them a piece or two, not just of food, but of my mind as well.  My Great-Grandmother, a woman of incredible fortitude with a toothless grin and a yawning earlobe, used to keep one ball of rice for the crows on the low roof at the back, for these were, she insisted, her ancestors reborn, who would keep an eye out for her.  I share no such sentiment (or perhaps I do).  She, my Great-Grandma, lived to the age of 98, so the crows have a trick we don't quite know about.

I am in the porch and, taking a step forward, I see a movement on the stone patch a few feet to my left.  A striped keelback – a beautiful, harmless snake – is moving rapidly away from me, for the last thing it wants is to be near humans.  The moment it enters the grass I know that I have lost it for good. 

I must be honest, I miss Colonel Haathi.  It’s been a while since he visited, but I know that when the ragi is ready to be taken, you can’t keep a good elephant away. 

A Rhetorical Question To a Common Sense Economist

Allow me to ask you a question, well, a rhetorical one, after I present some essential macroeconomic data, basic stuff at that: 

Your Government has a historical record of budget deficits, more recently at around 4% of the Gross Domestic Product, but at earlier highs of 6-6.5% of GDP.  In the current Financial Year (2018-19), the Government will borrow around Rs 6 lakh crores to fund a deficit of 3.3-3.5% of the GDP.   

Now, here’s the question: what is your opinion of the following plan that your Government might present?

The Government says – let’s suppose – that it wishes to run a long-term project over the next twenty years which has the following characteristics:

- It will cost a minimum of about Rs 1 lakh crores a year (that’s Rs 1,00,000,00,00,000).  Once begun, this investment cannot be stopped without delaying the project and increasing its cost.  This alone will, at current price levels, increase the budget deficit by about 0.5% of GDP every year and contribute to inflation.

- The overall cost therefore would be about Rs 20 lakh crores.

- All of this money will be raised by borrowing, within India and abroad.

- The project has never been done earlier in any part of the World, never tried out at anything close to the scale that the Government is proposing.

- The benefits from this project are entirely in the realm of speculation and subject to a number of assumptions – including one on weather patterns.  None of these assumptions have been put up for scientific review and educated scrutiny.

- There is no peer-reviewed independent project report by a ‘non-interested’ stakeholder that has detailed the net benefits of the project after a cost-benefit study.  

- The employment benefits from the project are, relatively speaking (ie, in comparison to alternatives that could be done with that kind of money), marginal to the point of being irrelevant.  The agricultural unemployment resulting from the displacement as a result of the project is likely to be – there are no reliable estimates here – greater than the employment generated, resulting in significantly higher migration to the cities by both landless and landed (but now ‘de-landed’ agriculture workers)

- It is likely – indeed, probable – that some parts of this giant project will be stalled due to land acquisition issues, local stakeholder protest and intervention by the Judiciary (though such intervention may be years in the future, making the project even riskier)

- Which brings us to the issue of risk management; the project has no public risk management profile or document, nothing that alerts us to possible show-stoppers, unintended consequences or accidents.

This utterly insane white elephant is the loosely termed ‘river-linking project’, which was budgeted in the year 2002 to cost about Rs 5.2 lakh crores.  The project targets thirty rivers in India and seeks to inter-connect them in the hope that floods will be prevented by such connection as waters seek their own level.  

It is an idea that is as foolish as it is quixotic, as unequivocally disastrous as it is costly and as useless as it is destructive.  Everything about this project has ideology sans reality written all over it and yet, over the last two decades, the project has received undue impetus.  

Beyond all of the above – each of which should by itself be enough to halt the progress of the project – is the issue of planetary geoengineering that is being attempted, possibly beyond the scale of the Three Gorges Dam.  Could such effort have unintended – and unpleasant – consequences?   

Indeed, yes.  Take dams, for instance.  Over the last sixty years, the construction of dams in India alone has displaced four million people, arguably the biggest cause for refugees – ecological refugees – after partition.  Despite all attempts at water distribution from these dams, desertification and land degradation is growing as never before, with such geoengineering resulting in other unintended consequences including the decimation of fish habitat and concomitant loss of fishing livelihoods.  

A second example.  In an excellent article titled ‘The Risk of Planetary Geoengineering’, Rahul Matthan writes of a crazy attempt in the 1950s to seed clouds in the US and control the weather called Project Cirrus.  Read this:

“ In their first attempt, they took on a hurricane heading to Jacksonville.  A Project Cirrus plane dropped dry ice along the edge of the squall line and almost instantly, the clouds shed rain over the sea.  This was the result they were anticipating and they hoped that this would cause the storm to change its direction.  

While the storm initially turned away as they hoped, it soon made a dog-leg turn over the Atlantic and headed back to the mainland with renewed vigour.  The resulting Frankenstein’s monster of a storm was more vicious than before, its winds gusting at a hundred miles an hour by the time it made landfall over the Savannah.  It smashed windows, flattened sugarcane fields and caused upwards of $23 million of damage.” 

The consequence of river linking are too frightening to contemplate – and these are the intended ones.  The ecological cost of the project includes the destruction of swathes of forest and vastly increased human activity in protected areas, while the benefit of flood mitigation is, at best, a hope – just how can one predict if this will work? 

The Government of India should be doing quite the opposite of what it proposes – it makes excellent economic sense to protect the river courses as they are, remove encroachments, spend a fraction of the funds that would go into linking rivers to clean them up instead and protect the riparian forests that then mitigate flood impact.  Watershed management and river conservation must be given the most important place in Government policy, for our human capital’s productivity depends on it, more than on anything else.  Is common sense too much to expect?

Duck-in-mud

It's approaching dusk on a cloudy, overcast day.
I am by the open, harvested, muddy and puddled paddy field, squelching a way through the mud to look at my favourite sight: busy ducks.
There’s something about ducks that has always fascinated me: the way they waddle around and squawk at each other, dipping their beaks in the tiny pools and eating away with the rapidity of mindless chatter. There’s something about the way they all seem to move together, without even looking up and seeking directions or leadership. There’s something marvellously enticing about the egalitarian-ness of this whole troop (the collective noun for a group of ducks is a flock, of course, but that’s when they are flying. A group of ducks can also be called a brace, raft, team or paddling when on water. That’s your education for the day). And there’s something in their busy-ness - call it living in the moment - that is fulfilling.

So, here I am, standing next to Satyan and his young boss, Murali (whose mobile number I have stored as Tarav Murali, the prefix meaning duck in Malayalam). Here, off the lovely village of Somnathpur, with its historic never-prayed-at temple and an equally historic but abandoned shrine, I meet these two men from the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, simple men of leisure, watching over a thousand ducks with benign care. The vast majority are females (ducks), with about a tenth of them being males (drakes). When I mention that the ratio is a happy one for the drakes and should be an education to us all, Satyen’s lined, weary face breaks out into a grin, showing teeth that could do with repair, a crooked, chipped set that has held its share of beedis over the years and his voice – a scratchy, gravelly smoker’s voice – attests to the habit. He communicates with the whole flock using clucks and the odd grunt and they seem to know just what to do then. Fascinating, utterly engrossing.

There are questions of course, from me, and none, it seemed, from them, for I must surely fit a prototype. Why are the ducks here? Why now? What’s in it for you? How do you protect them? What’s your life like?.....and the questions flow on at a high pitch, above the chatter and din of the team of ducks hard at work on the paddy.
The answers return in monosyllables and it’s a struggle to connect the dots. They have come a long way, of course, but the rest of Murali’s large family, all of whom breed ducks – over a hundred thousand of them – are spread out over the southern states. The crop here has just been harvested and the land is fallow, prior to the next crop being sown in perhaps a month.
The ducks waddle in rows over the paddy, picking tiny pieces of grain from the muddy puddles with their beaks working like whirring motors. And, not just grain, but pests too. Along the way, they enrich the soil with their droppings and churn the mud, all practices that we could classify as Deep Ecology. But that’s for the farmers. What’s in it for Murali? Do they sell the ducks for meat?
Eggs, he says. His current flock of a thousand would give him about four hundred eggs a day and each egg fetches – at the moment – eight rupees, a handsome return, FOB (free on board – because a truck comes in the morning to pick them up). I tell them – jocularly, of course - that my life, in immediate retrospect, seems wasted and I’d love to give it all up and join them. Four thousand tax-free and the company of a thousand ducks; is there a better Heaven?
Satyen laughs again- he’s clearly certified me as a stand-up comic and now laughs at anything I say or ask – while Murali hastens to add that it’s not that rosy. “There’s transportation in a truck that’s expensive and other costs too,” the voice trails away, leaving me unconvinced, and he continues, “and ducks don’t lay eggs around the year.”
Ducks lay eggs apparently for about three quarters of the year, and for two years.
What about after that?
Murali’s face changes colour a shade. ‘We sell them away,’ he says.
‘For meat?’
He nods in assent.
‘Do you get attached to these ducks?’ I ask. It’s not a nice question, you will agree, provocative in its tone, and seeking a response that he is clearly unhappy to provide.
‘Yes, I do. But what to do?’
‘Do you get really attached to any one or two ducks out of these?’
‘Yes, then I leave them at home and allow them to lead their lives.’
“Do you keep any eggs for incubation?”
“No. Eggs are incubated artifically nowadays. We buy little chicks.”
“And, where do you take all these ducks to, at night?”
“We corral them. No sleep, Sir, because there are dogs and jackals waiting for a meal.” Satyen chips in, “And elephants in some places!” “Yes, elephants, back in our home range.”
So, these are not men of leisure, I can see. Over the past quarter of an hour, an empathy – perhaps even a bond – has developed between us, who inhabit different worlds as removed as possibly could be. With his family dispersed, Murali’s mobile phone – a basic button-phone – is his lifeline for communicating with them, the truck driver, customers and farmers.
It is a world that has changed slowly. Thankfully.
There’s just the one question that I don’t get an answer to, and perhaps it should remain this way. Why don’t these ducks fly away? Ducks are amongst the longest flyers in the world and these – Mallards, clearly – are known to migrate over continents. They never leave us, Murali assures me, and I wonder why? What is going on in that little brain at the apex of an incredibly dexterous neck? Is it loyalty to the flock (brace/raft/team/paddle – to reiterate the education)? As there is no leader (or so it seems), is this a collective decision to opt for a sort of free-slavedom, a curious twist in the machination of Nature?
By now, the ducks have changed direction, unanimously it seems, and are heading the opposite way, much like a disjointed march of a rag-tag army. I marvel at the ease with which their beautiful webbed feet step lightly on the mud, and the discerning eye with which they pick their way. This is visual, noisy, asynchronous poetry, these thousand ducks on their daily rounds. We stand in silence watching and listening to the chatter of a thousand waddlers. And then it’s time to turn around and go home, a long way away. The ducks don’t miss us though.

Immoral Signs

It was when I saw a dugong – a sea cow – in Singapore zoo that I thought of Father Dennis Coelho, who taught me in high school. 

Dennis was a rather sleepy looking fellow, with a generous waist and three chins, a genial air and a loopy smile, all of which seemed genetically linked to Suspect Number 1, the aforementioned mammal.  We called all the priests ‘Fa’ (ridiculous, as it sounds), but amongst us he was known as Babyface.  For much of his life, he taught English, in which subject his competence was commendable and hence of no interest to a biographer.  Of much greater interest to us was the School’s decision to ask him to teach Moral Science.  

He must have committed some unforgivable sin to be given this task.  When anyone takes Moral Science classes for fifty ninth standard boys, their only real knowledge from the class is a clear identification of which moral they had carefully abandoned yesterday.   

The Moral Science class, I remember well, succeeded the noon break, after we had played cricket, sweated it out in the sun and then had lunch.  We returned to the class for a well needed rest under a fan that had been last serviced around the Sepoy Mutiny.  This meant, of course, sleeping or lounging around, both of which apparently are not Moral Science.  Alternately, we’d use our compass to inscribe names on the desk in front, a task that was incredibly creative, for over the last few decades, every available space on it had been taken and one had to have a careful strategy.  Playing Battleship or Book Cricket – both games requiring compulsory brain-deadness - were options too. 

But Dennis did not get the idea of win-win at all.  He could done his thing, allowed us to do our thing, and a peaceful, shared, mutually respectful co-existence would have ensued.   

Instead, he would trundle langourously in, with heavy steps, heavier eyelids and the heaviest foreboding and take his chair.  Then would begin the most boring - lemme emphasise that for effect - THE most boring, incredibly dull, profoundly inane, utterly pointless, predictably tedious, uncompromisingly dreary, scathingly lifeless, monotonous litany.  You get the picture.  He would attempt, with some pompousness and mild assiduity, to get us to see morals in stories in a book that was written for the limited readership of Certified Angels, when the kind of stories all the Ninth Standard boys wanted to hear cannot (unfortunately) be revealed in public.   

So I slept.  There were times when I made a valiant effort to stay awake, but lost the battle, only to wake up when I was shaken and stirred by my neighbour, who had just been woken up when his neighbour poured the leftover water in the waterbottle down his back.  Once, I tried to sleep by holding my book up, but the afternoon peace was broken by the dull thud of my head banging against the desk after I had nodded off, causing much merriment for the citizenry.  It was hopeless.  And, without fail, Dennis would pick me out as one who was the principal sleep-catalyst of the class, a villian and a wastrel and a blot on the Moral Science landscape.  

I was once sent to the Vice Principal’s room – whom we called Small Cop, but was a gentle, smiling soul, unlike The Cop who was a gorilla in disguise.  Well, Small Cop asked me gently why I was sleeping.  Is this a question?  I mean, he should have asked Dennis why he wasn’t allowing all to sleep?   

As the year ended, Dennis – a normally mild-mannered fellow who, when awake, wouldn’t harm an anopheles mosquito – cursed me to hell. I had slept again and, dreaming that I was playing for India and facing Andy Roberts, had woken up with a sweat and a start, apparently exclaiming ‘Shit’ aloud (in justification, anyone facing Roberts would say much worse things).  “You will never succeed in life,” he said with feeling, his face turning a shade pink and the third chin swaying in the breeze in excited anger. 

About twenty years later, while having lunch with our team in CDC, I remembered Dennis and spoke about him to an attentive group.  I imitated his walk and his langourous style and recited a story or two to much local approval.  A little later, Annette, my boss’ secretary gently informed me that he was her uncle.  

I should have paid attention in that class, me thinks.

Health Is Wealth. Insurance is neither

If you are part of the 80% + of India’s population that does not have health insurance (and are therefore a blot on the GDP landscape), here is what it is:
1. You pay
2. You fall ill
3. You claim
4. They reject
5. You plead
6. They reject
7. You beg
8. They reimburse cost of toothpaste used, up to 60 days before and 90 days after hospitalisation
9. You renew
10. You fall ill….and so on.

If you don’t claim anything, they give you thank-you-for-not-pestering-us-so-we-can-watch-the-world-cup bonus.
 In April, I applied, after considerable research on options, to Cigna TTK.  My sophisticated reasoning was that a company that makes pressure cookers headed by an Iyengar who did not follow Ramanuja to Melkote must be the best at health insurance.  

In a moment of utter asininity – induced by a neighbour who was smoking pot and talking to the moon – I applied online.  Once you are done, you will get about 43 calls, between which you are allowed daily duties. 

The calls begin as follows:
“Are you so-and-so?”
“No, I am his labrador retriever.” Actually I did not say that (not quick-witted enough), but strongly recommend that you do. 
“For the sake of verification, can you provide your date of birth?”

This is ridiculous.  They call me and ask me to identify myself, when telephone etiquette since Alexander Graham Bell has been the reverse.  When I said this, they asked me how I was related to AG Bell, which of course warrants not an answer, but an education.  

Next they need everything, and by that I mean anything.  Actually everything that is anything (or the other way around).  If there was a pimple on the dimple of your baby bottom, that is vital information.  And they always end with, “You have been speaking to Rajesh Khanna,” as if the said R Khanna is a neurosurgeon in disguise, adding to his income by toiling in a call centre.  

I fetched up for tests at a diagnostic clinic in Koramangala where the only technology in evidence, other than the syringe, was an ECG machine (honest, I mean this.  Ok, I also saw a desktop).  The ECG machine, judging by the stains, had been used in its free time to remove bits of intestines and to lay roads in Defence Colony (this is a joke by the way.  There are no roads in Defence Colony, only wide jungle trails.)

The young doc who examined me had both his eyes on the pretty nurse and his fingers on my pulse (the other way around would have caused him trouble on social media: “Doctor assaults nurse in presence of legendary writer”).  He asked me if I had something called a hernia and I smiled and said, No, I have always been a Honda buff and have a City.  He then stared at me, which was the only time he took his eyes away from the nurse, and shook his head questioningly and I shook mine in response; no doubt he was checking if the ball bearings around the skull base were well oiled.  
And when he told me that the heart was pumping along satisfactorily, I told him that his wasn’t at the moment.
(No, actually, I didn’t.  I am lying again).

And then he said that I was done.

I agreed with him on this.  

As I really was done, I cancelled the policy.  

If you are Japanese, then this is a bathroom

 As I have not trained to be a commercial pilot, I find it hard to use the bathrooms in new hotels.

Bathrooms here seem to be full of buttons, switches, knobs, taps, rods, handles, levers and joy sticks, some of which seem to be there because there was a buy-one-take-one free offer.  The only thing missing is a geographical positioning system.

And even as I find my way around this instrument panel, the thing that drives me nuts is that the bathroom wall that separates it from the main room is made of glass.  You can therefore come to  one of three clear conclusions:

Conclusion 1: Hotel architects can’t see through glass

Conclusion 2: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake (unlike the lights in the bathroom)

Conclusion 3: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake and can’t see through glass and think that others are as blind as a bat (without Nipah. I don’t know if a bat with Nipah is as blind as a bat without it, but it’s a piece of research I am not enthusiastic about.)

So if you happen to have guests and are taking a shower and press the wrong button, the blinds lift; and you are presented in birthday suit, armed to the teeth with soap, shower gel, conditioner, body lotion, loofah and shampoo, to the mass of visitors (most of whom are on their third drink and hence ready to laugh at anything, pickled morons).  The towel rack is helpfully about thirty feet away, which only strengthens Conclusion 2 above, unless hotel architects dry themselves by whistling loudly and think others do too (in which case refer to Conclusion 2 above). 

Sometime ago, the hotel I stayed in had a secret shower on the ceiling.  Now, in my considered opinion, there should then be a knob in the wall which says, ‘Secret Shower – ice cold water refrigerated in liquid carbon dioxide.  Please look up’ so that there is the excitement of a treasure hunt and you look up and leap out of the way.  But I turned one perfectly normal looking knob, got soaked in water that had just been shipped in from the polar ice cap, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to stop my teeth from involuntary chattering.  This Marriott had, trust me, three showers, one on the ceiling, one flexible contraption that went up and down a rod (which was a wonderful past time once you figured it out and got the right temperature, all of which takes about 24 minutes) and a final shower at knee level.  At knee level?  Are they trying to give you an enema?  (No, I know there is another shower thingy at knee level in the toilet, but I wasn’t referring to that).  I saw later that all three showers had icons showing their location in a nano print that needed an electron microscope, which should compulsorily be provided in each bathroom.  

And the switches in these new bathrooms are embedded in the wall and look like art in the Louvre, but most of them don’t work on two times of the day – before 6 pm and after.  I pressed one of these, thinking (foolishly) that switches mean lights on or off.  But a panel by the side turned to reveal an unkempt beast staring unblinkingly. Quite a shock to see, I tell you, till I realized that it was me staring into a concave shaving mirror.  

So, I am applying for a commercial pilot’s licence.

Aap ka Manpasand

I miss the 1980s.  

It was in the Bangalore of yore that I delighted in being the third person on a phone line, when I picked up the receiver and found a cross connection. These were utterly fascinating: I would listen in for a bit and then ask, “Excuse me, which one of you has loose motion?  This is Doctor Sharma speaking’ and wait for the response.  Sadly, not once did this ruse work, despite a heroic attempt to mimic a doctor.  
And then the BSNL phone service got boringly efficient, much to my dismay.  The private operators too don’t give you a cross connection even if you are willing to pay for it.  But recently, a new invention has brought charm back to existence again.  I am referring, of course, to the tethering of the phone to the sound system in the newer cars.  

Last week, a chap parked in front of my house and made a call on his phone-cum-sound-system.  The ringtone sounded like distant thunder.  The moment the other fellow came on line, they began to quarrel and I craned my neck to receive better audio.  

Evidently, the fellow at the other end was a stock broker who had, sometime ago, recommended Manpasand Beverages – a juice maker – and the guy in the car had punted on it.  Apparently, the problem is that it isn’t just the stuff inside the Manpasand tetra packs that is fluid, it’s the stuff in the balance sheet too.  
So, these two chaps went at each other, the broker defending himself, and it was most enrapturing to hear, so I listened intently, making mental notes and silently cheering when points were scored.  

The fellow in the car had a clean shaven, fine North Indian face.  From the voice and the Hindi, it was clear that he had spent three quarters of his life in Delhi and, judging from the volume,  the remaining quarter in a maternity ward for frogs.  
Once he had hung up after twenty minutes of mutual recrimination, I opened my gate, walked over and tapped on his car window.  
‘I agree with you,’ I said, ‘The broker was wrong to suggest this.’
He seemed surprised, almost agitated and said that I should not have overheard their conversation.

What stupid logic.  It’s like announcing in front of a child that the ice-cream tricycle is coming and then getting worked up that she heard it.  ‘I did not interrupt you or defend the decision, both of which the broker did.  Also, remember I am agreeing with you.’  As you can see, I was justifiably indignant.  
But, I must say, he wasn’t impressed and said something about regretting having used the sound system.
‘Please don’t say that,’ I pleaded, ‘I found the conversation most interesting and you’d ruin an afternoon if you turn it off.  Do use the parking area in front of my house anytime to call your broker.’

Besides, I wanted to ask him about a couple of invectives he had used that I had not heard earlier, one of which seemed a very musical word to summarise the stock broker’s father’s ancestry, but before I could enrich the vocabulary, he drove away.

The problem nowadays is that it’s hard to find someone who is not a spoilt sport.