Masters, minions and pangas

We'd won the Fresher's quiz that evening. After almost a month of trying to adjust to living alone, quickly dropping standards of meals, and even more quickly changing moral baselines, it felt good to have the familiar feeling of working out an answer from abstruse clues. It was to set the tone for the next few years in Roorkee - the transition from adolescence to (pretences of) adulthood was a lot about working oblique hints.

For now, though, I was only focussing on the chapo we were at. Dela and Prondu were the only second-years around, as the others didn't want to crowd out the three first-years - Pulkit, Rishabh and I - at the Ganga canteen. This was the autumn of 2007, mind you, so names such as bun panga and patties bhujia that are now considered ancient relics, were quite in vogue, if ever such a phrase could be used in the context of midnight grubs at hostel canteens.

I don't quite remember what we'd ordered, but I distinctly remember Lefty dreamily sauntering in from his abode in the neighbouring Cautley Bhawan, and extending a warm hand accompanied by a warmer smile. "Hi, I'm Saagar. I'm a third-year in Lit, so even though Dela and Prondy are probably going to ask me to pay, I'll leave them the honour." After a couple of minutes of exchanging names and introductions (and Prondu controlling his violent urge to ask Lefty to shut me up), he had to go back to join the friends from the farmhouse. Not before he said - "You should try cola shikanji. Trust me, you'll love it."

***

Living alone is no easier, standards of meals can go up at will because I can finally pay for it, and moral baselines continue to flutter about dangerously, and I am now working in Kolkata, a city I've said enough about in person and whatever is publishable here. It took me a while to figure out the most convenient bus route and get past Google Maps' skullduggery in the name of walking directions, but I finally made it to Bhojohari Manna, in southern Calcutta's Gariahat. Two courses of food went by in a flash over fleeting conversations, and dessert ordered by Lefty with no attempt to put on a Bengali accent, was on the table.

As Dela and I hung our spoons tentatively over Nolan Gud (ice cream garnished with jaggery), Lefty nonchalantly said - "Trust me, you'll love it." Grandmaster, Master and Minion may have years of other more refined social milieus behind them, but even under the suitably understated lighting on that restaurant's table, it could easily have been three soon-to-be tweens waiting for their shikanjis, wondering what in the name of Bhuppi gave the bun panga its name.

Waterworks

The ripple as rubber meets water sounds like a series of notes in perfect harmony, like the many violins in the orchestra coming together in a singular resonance - distinct yet as one. The sight passes much faster than the sound; the blur of brown making the accompanying music sound much slower than it is.

All in all, a motorcycle splashing mud is much like the swing of a sword - it's a beautiful sight, even if only as much as a blur, and the accompanying slow-motion swoosh does have a musical quality to it. All only if it's not coming towards you…

***

I've been witness to monsoon in different parts of the country over the past few years. In Visakhapatnam, it's either hot as hell or it's pouring - there's no other alternative. Delhi's is as erratic as the city predictable. Ahmedabad isn't too far from Mumbai, and the distant relation shows up often. If it rains, it rains for at least a couple of months until every single avenue of human translocation is disturbed, at the very least, and disrupted, more usually.

Now, I've only been in Calcutta a little over three weeks, but it's bang in the middle of the rainy season, so allow me a brief dissection. The Calcuttan monsoon has a much more versatile range of behaviours, when compared to the previously mentioned cities. As the lottery is a popular pastime for the many residents of this metropolis, the rain gods above, too, (Borundeb is the Hindu one, in Bengali) indulge themselves in the passion of the hoi polloi every year. Based on how often you work in a week, which hours you work during, the colour of your pants and the amount of love for your new Hush Puppies leather shoes, you may be the recipient any of the following kinds of watery precipitation.

• The Hammer of the Gods - Zeppelin said it drove the Vikings' ships to new lands, and it is also probably how explorers in the far reaches of the Indonesian archipelago, too, could discover the inner nooks and crannies of northern Calcutta's suburbs. As the skies thunder, rumble and belch loudly above, rain water instantly convalesces into an insanely simple connection of drains, streets, footpaths, highways and the whole Hooghly river. The hordes, obviously, sing and cry: Behala, I am coming.
• Crazy Train - Winds often accompany piercingly sharp pins of rain droplets, forming a winning combination of irritants. They slide under the umbrella's weak protection, sometimes even finding the most itchy spot that is the back of the neck. They find their way through the gaps between raincoats' buttons. And most irritatingly of all, they somehow find the gumption to stop churning mind-boggling angles, and fall straight into the gap between the trousers' edges and the shoes. These socks are dripping; driving me insane!
• The blanket blowing in the wind - You see the skies darkening, and sense a moistness in the air as the bus slows down. Quick equipment check - raincoat, umbrella, small plastic bag for phone, big plastic bags for shoes, and most importantly, five rupees in coins for the grumpy auto driver. You get down, and the gods do another little number on you - there's water in the air, but it's flowing in soft, thin quilts in the air, slowly hanging for you to feel it, but not enough to rub it into your face. It's almost as if the air is sweating light beads, working out hard, upping the ante on that treadmill , but not able to break that sweat it so desperately needs to lose some weight. You let it all soak in, but are left asking a question - How many minutes in this light, pretty rain; before I can save my favourite pants?
• The birthday bumps - You know the attackers, you know their weapons, you know your weak points, but does protection really make a difference? At the end of their blitzkrieg, your butt will hurt, and some shoes will lose a few years off their lifetime. All you can do is pray you get some good food at the end of it all. But you pay for it.

***

The water runs up to my shins, it's drenched my socks, and god knows what is swimming near my toes. The cycle, after making a daredevil exit from an open gutter, has given up to a devil it can't even see in the muddy waterway that used to be the main road to the railway station. A few minutes ago, when the water ran only till my ankles, it seemed like the cycle could conquer all these obstacles, and how grateful my footwear were for that. But, just like the Elder wand, it now seems to have sensed a more powerful master. Its allegiance is slowly shifting, and about just as slowly, its faltering balance has demanded the sacrifice of my right shoe.

I gather my resolve - only two more shops need to see the light of these packs of Maggi noodles. There are kids demanding tasty morning snacks, and mothers tirelessly looking for foods with enough calcium, protein and fibre that don't taste like hospital porridge. They are probably depending on one sales trainee to get his front wheel out of that patch of mud; shoes about to be destroyed be damned.

I bend my head down, as much to show Rocky-like determination as to get enough weight down to my arms to push. Water slides off the PVC poncho I call a raincoat. God knows what is still wriggling somewhere near my toes. But the cycle begins to crawl, inch by painful inch. The hammer continues to strike. Newer drains are coming alive to join the waterway. And then I hear that beautiful musical ripple, like the swing of a sword…

Population in East are fun guy

More quick notes from another day in Kolkata. Incidentally, almost all deal with stereotypes.

1. People in Kolkata love football - well, at least during the World Cup. Everyone talks about last night's game- salesmen, shopkeepers, flatboard rickshaw drivers, flatboard rickshaw squatters, bus conductors - almost everybody I ran into today. Most watch it, too, as their droopy eyes constantly being rubbed would suggest. Contrary to most other cities in India I've seen, the sport penetrates all class barriers. Even in snaky bylanes next to ponds where kids secretly bunk school to take a dip and their mothers wash clothes at the other end of the same green mess, you know each house's loyalty by the flag sticking out on its door. Barbershops carry huge posters of Neymar or Messi, and of course, bars conveniently located next to software companies' offices offer happy hours well past midnight, too. Possibly the only flags that are as common as those of Brazil and Argentina here are those of…
2. …unions. They have offices everywhere, and their political affiliations are also pretty clear by the face or colour pasted all over these flags. It's mind-boggling how there's a union office at every single local train station. Just to give context, if you're in Mumbai, there's a union office at the end of platform 1 of not just Dadar, Ghatkopar or Churchgate, but even Bhandup, Sewri and Titwala. Or if you're in Delhi, a union office not just at Rajiv Chowk or Central Secretariat, but even at New Ashok Nagar, Jasola and GTB Nagar. Their coverage is immense, and truly awesome- something FMCG sales organisations could possibly learn a lot from. Or not - the ideal economy would possibly pave the way for them, but that's a story for another time. Speaking of paving the way and ideal economies…
3. Public transport here, save for those few aforementioned marshy stretches, not just has massive reach, but is extremely affordable, too. One thing Delhi, with a bit of political will, could pick up to ease its traffic woes could be how autos in Kolkata are strongly regulated, being allowed to run only on set routes, and registered as such. Government-managed buses do the little corners autos looking to make steady cash miss, and for everything else, there are the imitable yellow cabs, who don't mind making the most of the little space for economic rent-seeking by taking long shortcuts.
4. People often talk of Kolkata reminding them of an old-world city. Yes, the hand-pulled rickshaws are gone, but there remain carts with just flat boards behind them which act as replacements! There're the fancifully archaic names, with many roads named for past dignitaries' visits but of no other relevance today - there's probably a road named after every single visiting monarch or capital of a visiting head of state's country. Yet, there's a charm about it all - I won't go so far romantically as to feel a je ne sais quoi - but in a way one finds their grandmother's stories fascinating. In fact, if anything, Kolkata has a distinctly European feel - great public transport, the omnipresent love for football, the gaudy women, the pretty women, the omnipresent smoking, women smoking, and countless anachronisms which are just part of the city's daily hustle and bustle.

P.S. - Oh, that horrible much-exploited joke. Sorry, had to squeeze some Easterly thing in there.

East is East

Schooling in the South, undergrad in the North and postgrad in the West of India meant it was inevitable that work would at some stage take me to the East. Placing the happenstance of being posted in Kolkata for my very first stint outside my locus of control helped cope with the initial irritation at being allotted the one zone out of four I'd have least preferred. Some people like to call it force majeure, others just desserts, but I just think it's a neat idea to get these few months out of the way in an area I might either have deep misconceptions about, or was horribly right about all along.

Here's to finding out in the next six-seven months. A few quick notes from the two days shuttling between the hotel and the office:

1. I think the brief hiatus I'd taken from learning German on Duolingo has just become indefinite - I spend an inordinate amount of brain force on wrenching out words I know from the uniquely Bengali-fied English and Hindi I hear every day.
2. The Ambassador may be out of production, but Hindustan Motors better not shut down its servicing business - a few thousand more dysfunctional yellow cabs is the last thing this city needs.
3. I like to think I've more or less mastered the Mumbai locals now, especially after the almost-daily peak time fast train rides from Kurla to Thane last summer. Kolkata, let's see what you've got tomorrow.
4. Mota-moti: I think I've understood what that means, mota-moti.

Mental Notes

I keep telling myself I should read more. Right after I finished India After Gandhi, I was convinced that reading the footnotes, and at least some of the sources mentioned therein, had to be my objective for the next few months. The rigours of a rat race are imperiously impatient, though, unlike my insolent indolence, so that resolution got dusty pretty quickly.

I was lucky enough to have got at least 15 or more books, though, as part of a course on leadership -  and just about not lazy to have started reading a few of them. The ideological war raging inside Hugo's head in Sartre's Dirty Hands was intriguing - and led me to a long night spent on the Encylopaedia Britannica page for World War I. I couldn't finish a quarter of it before I eventually crashed - the link lies in my long read-it-later list of links that I keep intending to read later, along with a cumulative total of 136 e-mails across three Gmail accounts.

I also managed to finish reading the delightful The Little Prince. Many of my much better-read friends (Yes, Rapu and Kitty, you are right on top of that list) wondered what took me so long to get my hands on it, but I think there was no perfect time to read a book described as "a children's book for adults", what with aforementioned cynicism raising its resilient head ever so often through the dying winter.

The holidays after college and before work afford way too much free time. I've dozens of books I've wanted to read, and another dozen my father wants me to - not to mention most of the stack that I'd bought with that first stipend in Roorkee. But these holidays are eerily similar to those after the first year in R-land - eating, sleeping and a mad urge to learn a programming language even after it being proven a million times that I'm as out of my depth at coding as one David Moyes at Old Trafford.

So, reading must wait until I'm convinced that the only reason I'm trying to learn said programming language is so that I can make the many jokes hiding in the endeavour to be an articulated Python. (Ugh.)

At least I'm not lazy enough to rant about it. For the second time on this blog.
I keep telling myself I should write more...

P.S. - That alliteration was verily verbose, rambunctiously redundant, ineptly ineffective and... you get the point.

Demented

Mentor.

The “word of the day” mails I got every day for a few years in Roorkee (without solicitation) threw up a few gems every once in a while. The one which said the word of the day was the one above was particularly interesting.

Actors act, curators curate, and orators orate. But doctors don't doct, victors don't vict, and pastors don't past. Such is the English language. And we certainly don't want ancestors to ancest, traitors to trait, or gators to gate.
This week A.Word.A.Day will feature five people, real and fictional, whose names may appear to be derived from a verb form, but aren't. Mentors, for example, don't ment, though that doesn't prevent people from forming nouns such as 'mentee' and verbs like 'to mentor'.

Mentors don’t ment. That made me chuckle.

***

I’m yet to investigate the whys and hows of it, but a lot of people love their hand to be held as they walk, both literally and metaphorically. Having been unknowingly led through school by my brother, and through everything else by my mother, Roorkee was to be a profound shock.

The walk to Ganga Canteen from the Senate Steps after the first Kshitij meeting was about all it took, though, for me to be mented again. I think it was the following conversation that sealed it for me.

Me (after about 30 minutes of chitchat about what books we read): So, what’s your CGPA?
AP: 7.6-something. I’d have liked it to be higher. I’m sure that makes no difference to you, does it?
Me: None. When you told me the number, I just said “OK.” in my head.
AP: Hehe, I did that one year ago, I think.

***

Winter of 2009. Lefty had just bagged an internship with an FMCG major. There was this other firm he interviewed with, too, he was telling me. Some acronym that reminded me of the tuberculosis vaccine.

As was wont, then, I glided to F-61, Ravindra Bhawan. AP was in one of his more cynical moods, I think.

“Just think about it, Murty. Six or seven years at the very top of India’s educational cesspool, and you want to be selling soap at the end of it?”

***

Actors act, and orators orate. Doctors don’t doct, mentors don’t ment. Meanwhile, on a surprisingly chilly February morning, here I was.

“… So, you see, sir, a brand is a promise. It should be the aim of the marketer to ensure this promise doesn’t go unfulfilled.”

Your Move

I suck at chess. And as fate would have it, I happen to routinely run into and befriend too many people who don't. My brother gleefully checkmated me for a good ten years before I made it to college, where Pandu continued to do the honours, if only on his computer and not with one of those magnetic chess pieces. Further west from R, my dorm currently houses a guy who holds an ELO rating almost good enough to complete one of the requirements for an IM norm. I've been wise enough not to chalenge the last of those buggers, but while frequent encounters with my brother and Pandu left me baffled, obviously, I didn't fail to stump my opponents, too. For someone they didn't mind considering fairly bright and one who could get the game, my performances were quite surprising. I'd often challenge them, in response, to a rapid game, with less than 30 seconds fr each move. My win-loss record registered at least some non-zero entries in the first column, and it wouldn't be too hard for me to connect the dots.
I loved playing chess - making moves and waiting for their results was the fun part - not evaluating one of the myriad possibilities for the fourth move after the current one! This spur-of-the-moment, zero-response-time, all-action approach won few games, but was fun while it lasted. The only learning I thus got was from moves or patterns seen in past games, which rarely mattered when I played moves that were never to be repeated impulsively again!

I remembered this aberration in thought games when I wrote the very first words of this little piece. I had no plan for where it was supposed to go. While I knew the result would be something like this, the path was uncharted.
Hell, come to think of it - I think it was this very approach that's brought me to the two colleges I've been to. I'm really hoping that I'm not castling blithely while life watches on with a knowing shrug.