The Great Leveller

We all have memories from school days. The strongest memories about school are either the sweetest ones, or the bitterest ones. I remember a teacher in school who was the worst there ever could be. Very harsh and bitter by nature, she almost hated children. She used to rap our knuckles with all her might, and derived sadistic pleasure when we writhed in pain. I don’t remember if I dreaded her more or hated her more, but I’m sure she had a strong dislike for me. I never really forgot her, and like a recurrent nightmare she was often in my thoughts even decades after I left that school. Then one fine day as I sat in my hospital office waiting for the next patient to come in, I saw a frail old lady walk inside with a smile on her face. She kept on looking at me as if prompting me to recognize her. I did in an instant, and froze. Here she was, in front of me again. Clutching a polythene bag in emaciated hands, she was dressed very differently now in a full-body hijab, as her sparse, grey hair peeped out of the head-piece. Sunken and dull eyes, high and prominent cheek bones under paper-thin facial skin made for a sorry picture. She continued to smile as I looked at her dumbstruck. Despite her appearance I felt as if I were the same puny child in front of the monster of a teacher.

‘May I sit down?’ she asked.

Inadvertently, I stood up and blurted out, ‘G- -Good morning miss, please have a seat.’ (Irrespective of the marital status, we addressed all our lady teachers as ‘miss.’)

‘How are you Ishtyaque,’ she said, ‘you have become a doctor; I thought you’d not recognize me.’ How cold I ever forget you, miss. And perhaps this was the first time I heard her address me by my first name, else, I were either a ‘hey, you!’ or at best, ‘hey, Ansari!’

I did not know how to respond. So I didn’t. I just stood there.

Then slowly and fastidiously, she went on to narrate the plight of her family and how poverty gripped them over years, resulting from a succession of misfortunes. I listened in rapt attention and watched her eyes well-up when she talked about her brother’s hip fracture.

‘He slipped and fell in the bathroom, doctor,’ she said pulling out a couple of x-ray films from the polythene bag. From ‘hey you!’ to ‘doctor’ was a big transformation, and I could not believe my ears. The fracture was bad, and needed a major surgery.

‘How much would the surgery cost, doctor? My brother does not have an insurance and..’ she trailed off and I knew.

Two weeks later when her brother was about to be discharged from the hospital, recovering from a successful surgery, my teacher said some words to me that I cannot write here in order to preserve an elderly person’s self-respect. But she pressed into my hands a ‘taveez’ which she said would protect me from fearing anyone in my life ever. I wondered if she could have given it to me in class 5.

Breaking News

Many years ago, when we had only the radio, those jumbo-sized wooden cases, News was a twice or thrice a day affair that started and ended with the trademark bip.. bip.. beeeeep, prompting sometimes my dad to set his wrist-watch. The ten minute broadcast included some humdrum political news, some international news, and finally some sports news. The one thing that I liked about news then was the deep-bass male voices of news-readers like Devaki Nandan Pandey and Ramanuj Prasad Singh, speaking in crisp, refreshing Hindi. Even when television arrived, there were no dedicated 24x7 news channels. The quintessential Salma Sultan presented the news every evening on DD without much fanfare, but I always waited for her to smile ever so lightly while signing off. Among the men, I liked the macho Tajeshwar Singh, who read the news in English. Then, Aaj Tak set the precedent of private news channels and now we have 24x7 news channels by the dozen.

These days there are more news channels than there is news. And since TRP is of more importance than the quality of content, the channels have started telecasting anything that can attract the interest of viewers- from crimes like petty burglary, murder and rape, to freak accidents like a child in a bore-well- all in the name of ‘news’. Such news items run all day long, repeatedly; the same content in every channel, each one of them claiming the news to be its exclusive! When the channels get sensational issues like the recent Ramdev-governament spat, they spare us the trivialities. But when there is no major news for the day, not even the petty ones, they resort to showing us clips from comic and family-drama TV serials. ‘Breaking news’, once supposed to alert the viewer of a major recent happening, can now mean anything from triplets being born to Farah Khan to rumors of Kareena breaking up with Saif. Some news channels have dedicated shows for major criminal events of the week- Sansani and wardaat being a couple of them, anchored by dreadful-looking anchors speaking loudly and theatrically, scaring small children in homes. Curiously, such shows are a big hit what with the public having turned sadistic and voyeuristic- we derive thrill from watching real-life criminal happenings- as long as they don’t happen to us.

The advantage of news arriving at the speed of light notwithstanding, I don’t know if such news channels are helping us in any way or not. Even when there was no TV, we all were fairly well-informed on current affairs, thanks to the metered dose of the news three times a day on the All India Radio, and of course with some help from the newspapers.  

Beep, Beep &%@# !

Whenever we’re watching a movie, I let my wife and daughter get the popcorn during the interval. I stick to my seat primarily out of laziness, but then, off late, I have started enjoying the trailers they run during the break. I had discovered my current all time favourite ‘Chak De India’ during one such interval- a pearl that I’d have otherwise missed because of my decade-long dislike for SRK movies (Not that I made up with SRK after CDI). The last time we were in the theatres for Bheja Fry-2, my bheja was so fried by the interval that I almost volunteered to get the colas but then my laziness got better of me. As I sat watching people around me fiddle with their mobiles, the theatre started playing the promo of ‘Delhi Belly’. Aamir Khan, the producer, looking funny in Charles Bronson moustache, actually warned the audience that the forthcoming flick was full of gaalis, and that it was not fit for children and other ‘boring’ and ‘pakaau’ kind of people. Excuse me? In fact Aamir was addressing the youngsters saying, ‘Be sure to watch this one, only not with your parents around’. Then the promo trailer played its trump-card number, ‘Bhaag, Bhaag DK Bose, DK Bose, Bhaag Bhaag! What the?? The film would be surely released with an 'A' certificate, but what about the children watching the promo? The next day I saw the same promo on TV !!

I remember it all started with Shekhar Kapoor making Seema Biswas shout in the opening scene of ‘Bandit Queen’, ‘Main hoon Phoolan Devi, ##@$%%$!!’ Since then, Bollywood hasn’t looked back- Omkara, No one killed Jessica, Kaminey, Ishqiya, Gangajal- there are so many flicks these days that have their dialogues garnished with blatant expletives- all allegedly for the sake of authenticity. Some directors hide bad words with beeps but then others are much bolder. The beeps don’t help much either because the audience then spends time thinking which gaali it was. Some branded multiplexes strictly don’t allow children for 'A' certified movies, but there are several others who do allow. As such there is no point of such exercise because who’ll censor the DVDs and the downloads? When our daughter was too young, we took her along for all movies as she wasn't expected to understand anything and she too only looked forward to the popcorn and the colas, and to eventually spilling both items on us. But once, when she was seven years old, she asked what *&^%$ meant. Since then I started choosing our movies carefully. Now-a-days it is getting more and more difficult to choose a movie to watch as a family- And most such flicks are downright boring (I did tell you about Bheja fry-2). I wish they make cleaner movies with audible language.

The Leak-Anywhere Men!

Disclaimer: This write-up is biased in favor of the fairer sex; and though I may sound holier-than-thou, I myself, at times, have been guilty of practising the ungentlemanly habit described here.

A few days ago I came across this news item in The Times of India: ‘Lake in Oregon (USA) drained after man pees into it.’ Nearly eight million gallons of water was siphoned-off from the said lake after security cameras caught a man urinating in it. The Oregon state administration clearly over-reacted to the episode, considering that urine of a healthy human is quite harmless, more so when just a couple of hundred milliliters of it goes into 8 million gallons of water. However, a similar administration in India would need to empty practically all water bodies- everyday.  Because irrespective of age, class, education and status, an average Indian male would unzip and take a leak just about anywhere if a loo is not found nearby, and sometimes even if it is. If they happen to be in water- in a river, a lake, the sea, and sometimes even the swimming pool, they’d piss underwater (no need to even unzip then). Don’t look too hard around a car parked by the road with the blinkers on- there is a high possibility of finding at least one man with his pants down. What do men think while peeing this way? They think- I don’t see anyone means no one is seeing me. That’s thinking like the ostrich that has its head buried in the sand. The fact of the matter is that such men are very visible to everyone- even when they stand obliquely behind a tree. This (un)manly habit goes against the women folk in two ways: One, not only do they have to bear the disgust of witnessing such a scene, they have to act unfazed at all times, as if they’ve seen nothing at all. Second, this being a ‘man’s’ world, and hence the civic bodies being ‘for men’ too, nobody in the administration has ever felt the need to build enough public loos for the sake of the ladies. How many times have we heard our ladies whisper to us when in public, ‘Psst! I need to go!’ Every time we’re on the highway on a long drive, the ladies traveling with us are the most discomforted lot. That is why, perhaps, the most innovative ‘dhabas’ on the highways specifically advertise the presence of a ‘clean ladies toilet’ on their premises to woo motorists. The signboard would read, ‘Pure Veg. Ladies toilet available’. And we do pull up at these places irrespective of the quality of food served. In cities, ladies ‘go’ in public places like malls etc. Many times this is detrimental to us men. Once, my wife and daughter went into a mall to relieve themselves. They returned half an hour later carrying bag-loads of shopping. Their trip to the loo cost me Rs. 8335 that night. Therefore, I am in favor of construction of more and more public toilets- the ‘sulabh shauchalays’ are painfully too few, and that too only in the metros and few other big cities.

I’ll sign off with this joke I heard somewhere: Santa opened a new account on Facebook. After thinking hard about the first thing to write on his ‘Wall’, he wrote: Yahan su su karna mana hai! I’d say Balle, balle to that.

Remembering Kallu

We grew up in ONGC’s cosmopolitan colony in Ankleshwar- now home to the largest industrial hub in Asia but back then in the seventies, it was no bigger than a small village. Our flat was a modest two room house with a generous balcony and it comfortably accommodated our family of six. I can write a whole blog on our way of life in those days, but right now I want to write about a ritual that took place at our home on the last Sunday of every month. Sharp at nine in the morning of the prescribed Sunday, Kallu nai (Barber) would arrive at our door-step with a wide grin on his deep brown face, revealing a set of teeth horribly stained from years of smoking. As an eight year old, I remember being extremely fond of this cheerful, middle-aged man who always wore a not-so-clean white linen kurta-pyjama, and a pair of never-polished, worn-out heavy leather shoes that he dutifully removed at the door of our house. He carried his tools in a battered-out tin box which once had two pink roses painted in oil on its lid, now almost fully flaked-out from repeated use. He always stank of tobacco and for this reason our mother stayed miles away from him, and strange as it may sound, I used to stick around him for the same reason! For me, anything that was a mark of being ‘grown-up’ was appealing, and the bidi stink was one of those things. Except for his scissors, mom never let him use any of his things, and certainly not his dirty ‘barber’s cape’, the one that is used to protect customers from getting drenched with loose strands their own hair.  So, mom used to give him a clean sheet for the cape, a comb, a tin of talcum powder, and a small bowl with water in it. Kallu would set shop in the shaded corner of the balcony, and one by one, chronologically from youngest to eldest, we four brothers would sit on a low wooden stool and receive a thorough hair-cut, followed by a short, swift head massage- the champi- something that I loved so much. I also loved his cool water spray and often urged him to do some more till he shut me up with mock anger. Our father’s turn was always the last, and for a good reason. After the hair cut, and a generous dose of champi, he used to get his nails clipped, and his under-arms shaved leisurely. Seeing this, I often ran to the nearest mirror and lifted up my arms to scan my under-arms for the tiniest hair follicle- another of my marks of being a ‘grown-up’. While getting thus serviced, dad used to chit-chat with Kallu, talking about anything under the sun; the talk getting periodically interspersed with later’s loud and crackling smoker’s laughter. It was from them that I had heard the first mention of the words, ‘Emergency’ and Indira Gandhi. The session with Kallu folded up with mom serving dad and him brimming cups of hot tea, and us she massaged with warm mustard oil till it dripped from our sides. By the time we emerged from the bathroom, feeling crisp and smelling of the eternal ‘Hamam’ soap, Kallu nai would have been long gone, leaving behind his trademark tobacco scent which used to linger till late afternoon, reminding me of him every now and then. By evening we used to forget him, only to remember him exactly four weeks later. I don’t recall when Kallu nai stopped coming to our place, and instead we started visiting the ‘Lucky hair cutting saloon’ in the town. Slowly the tribe of such house-to-house barbers became extinct but I still remember with great fondness Kallu, his crackling laughter and his unmatched head massages. Recently I had treated myself to a session at Jawed Habib’s but the uniformed stylists’ text-bookish massages there were no match for Kallu nai’s dextrous champi. 

Film Review: Bheja Fry-2

Saturday night we went to watch Bheja Fry 2. My daughter’s quarterly exams had just got over and we were looking forward to unwind with some laughs. But the movie only lived up to its name literally and fried our brains. How many times has it happened that the success of a movie has prompted a film-maker to make a sequel, or a part 2, and has ended up spoiling the whole thing by overdoing it? It is not that Bheja Fry-1 was exceptionally good, but Vinay Pathak had made us laugh in that 2007 flick.

The start looks quite promising but ten minutes into the movie and everything starts to fall apart. The director starts so many things simultaneously but fails to hold on to anything at all. Kay Kay Menon is a fraudulent business tycoon squandering his father-in-law’s money much to his wife’s dismay. Kay Kay’s character looks promisingly villainous with his eyes darting across anything dressed skimpily in his vicinity. He is shown having an affair with his secretary, and perhaps on the verge of having another one with his best friend’s wife- Aditi Gowitrikar- obvious by the way they both look at each other in the first few scenes. But then Aditi vanishes from the film altogether, appearing only briefly here and there doing nothing at all. Kay Kay then stalks Minissha Lamba but lets her go when she says ‘I’m not that kind of a girl’. Villains would soon be out of business this way.

There isn’t much of a story, but income tax officer Vinay Pathak happens to win a holiday on a cruise on a reality show. The producer of this show is Kay Kay’s friend and Aditi’s husband, who persuades Kay Kay to join them on the cruise, who in turn agrees on learning that Minissha Lamba too would be on the cruise as a part of the show’s team. Suresh Menon, another income tax officer, and on Kay Kay’s trail for tax evasion follows him on the cruise. With everyone on the cruise, and Kay Kay confusing Pathak to be the income tax officer who’s after him, and Suresh Menon disguising himself to evade Pathak, the plot finally seems all set for some good comedy of errors but suddenly Kay Kay and Pathak fall overboard and reach a remote island full of jungles. Perhaps the financers fell short of funds for the cruise ship’s rental  The second half of the film is spent on this island with the two actors making a buffoonery of everything, including tackling a monkey to recover Kay Kay’s pants. The director probably thought of this scene with the primate so good that he notified the audience in the beginning of the movie, along with the credits, that this particular scene was shot in Indonesia. So? It might as well have been shot in Timbuktu, who cares? Then, out of the blue, they suddenly discover a fully-furnished house complete with electricity supply, a telephone and a radio set- in the middle of a jungle!! The owner of that house is another of the many unsolved mysteries of the movie.

There’s nothing much to write home about the performances. We fail to understand what Minissha Lamba is doing in the film. If she’s there for the glamour, she isn’t producing any. In fact she looks awful in heavy make-up. Bad looks cannot be hidden under tons of paint. And despite her surname and the pencil-sharp heels, she looks awkwardly short when she stands next to Kay Kay- as if he’s talking to her from first floor to ground floor. And even this singular piece of better-than-nothing glamour is entirely missing from most of the second half of the movie. Therefore the director, perhaps by the way of compensation, makes a foreign model run helter-skelter on the island’s beach in a flimsy bikini for a few minutes. This plastic-like girl is so thin that one would think that her legs were candle sticks and arms incense sticks. The saving grace of the film is a few comical lines by Vinay Pathak. Kay Kay has acted according to his abilities. Suresh Menon has been thoroughly wasted. The rest of the cast are so impact-less that I don’t remember them as I write now. Rajat Kapoor is terribly missed. (He was very good in BF-1). Don’t waste time and money on this one. Go and have Bhel-Puri at the road-side thela instead. It’d be more fun.

Facebook Mania

Mania: n: An excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; a craze

Nothing has touched the lives of the internet users across the globe like Facebook has. With over 500 million users, it is easily the most popular social net-working site ever. So, love it or hate it, you cannot ignore it.  People of all ages are now hooked, and though the official age for being on FB is 13, I have seen 5 year olds updating their statuses with innocent mirth. My own daughter has an account since she was 11 years old (she’s 13 and a half now). I had shown her the relevant ‘Terms and conditions’ page, but it didn’t take long for her to discover that all she needed to do was tweak her DOB just a bit to take the plunge. Recently there was news of a group of pregnant women opening accounts for their unborn babies! They even made their fetuses have mock chats with each other online! -I’m kicking now, I'm somersaulting. God!

Like everything else, FB has its advantages and disadvantages. In real life, we all have passed through time-zones- Early and late childhoods, adolescence, youth and adulthood. We all had friends in each stage of life. Growing up, we separated from the old friends and made new ones, seldom remembering the oldest ones, often forgetting what they looked like. Before FB, most of us had a ‘current’ group of friends, and probably had been in touch with people who crossed us within the last five years or so, through as much as annual phone calls. Then, came Facebook- Bang! We started re-connecting with our oldest friends, dating back to even the kindergarten! The thrill of discovering long-lost friends from two, three decades ago, and sharing with them old sepia photographs; enquiring upon parents, siblings and teachers; reminiscing first crushes and dates was unmatched. Suddenly FB made us board a time machine and fly back to those times! Such virtual reunions re-kindled old-times’ emotions and prompted scores of people across the world to arrange physical re-unions. Apart from old friends, has FB allowed us to make new friends sharing common likes and dislikes.

It is not that only those people, who are thousands of miles apart, and belonging to the older times, connect through FB. Even people concurrently living in the same city, area and street prefer connecting through the FB!  Spouses talk with each other on FB, wishing each on their birthdays and anniversaries!  Children extort new gadgets from their parents- My dad is giving me a new I-phone on my birthday! Yippee!  Yippee, my foot.

Log in any time of the day and you’ll find a variety of status updates- happy and somber; romantic and poetic; angry and frustrated; bored; thrilled; tired and pissed-out etc. People also make all kinds of announcements on FB- A new car, a new house, a new kid, and perhaps a new wife, career achievements, children doing well in exams, or a recent holiday- garnished with carefully chosen and photoshopped snaps from the trip. In short, FB is about everything- one can chat with someone across the street, or across the seven seas- dressed in as much as a pair of pyjamas! No hassle of dressing up and becoming presentable! And no matter how you actually look like, you’re free to choose your best picture from ten years ago and use it as a profile picture. It is easy to display talent- art, poetry (original and plagiarized), photographs, or simply tell jokes- FB is a ‘everything-goes’ or ‘do-your-stuff’ kind of site.

FB is also a number one gossip site. Check other people’s statuses and put a comment or two; update your own status and see what others have to say about it; ‘like’ a comment, laugh at others and scoff at some… keep a tab on everything around the world all at your convenience.

Like all things with advantages, FB has loads of disadvantages as well. Foremost disadvantage is addiction. If not checked in time, FB can become as addictive as marijuana, if not more. Recently, perhaps sensing such malady afflicting him, a friend of mine on FB declared that he was tired of logging in and out, checking statuses and comments, and had decided to say good-bye to FB for ‘a good 6-7 months’. There were congratulatory messages for him for his brave attempt, some were sad that he was leaving the scene. Others, like me kept quiet, because we knew that he would come back much earlier than the ‘6-7 months’. And indeed, he did come back- in just 2 weeks, announcing his return with much fanfare! Such is the pull of FB…Jaani, yahan log aate apni marzi se hain par jaate hain Mark Zuckerberg ki marzi se!

Another disadvantage is the embarrassment of finding an old flame on facebook, and worse is finding your wife’s old flame on the next page!

On a serious note, the worst disadvantage is perhaps the loss of personal, physical touch in relationships. Now-a-days we seldom call-up friends, meet-up even less. Everyone is online. Have we become data? Thousands of gigabytes of data in form of pictures, videos, text messages and updates? What has the future in store for us? Will we all become humanoid robots similar to the ones shown in the Bruce Willis starrer sci-fi movie ‘Surrogates’, where the real flesh-and-blood humans lead a life of misery, while their surrogates put out a bright but false and deceptive version of themselves to the world? Think. Somehow, I love and hate Mark Zuckerberg at the same time.