Th3 G1t4

There’s a reason why certain cultural artifacts stay relevant across the ages. The beauty of the language and the powerful symbolism of the poetry give every generation the ability to derive  contemporarily relevant messages. Insightful commentators have managed to do this with the Gita over millennia. I am not one those insightful commentators. But that is not going to stop me from providing internet-era relevant commentary on some of the most well-known verses.

If this post makes you angry, hurts your religious sentiments or causes you to wake up with a skin infection the next day morning, please read this.

dhyaayato vishayaanh pumsah sangasteshhupajaayate |

sangaath samjaayate kaamah kaamaath krodho abhijaayate ||

When a person dwells longingly on sense objects like stuff on ebay, or a sale at Koblerr, an inclination towards them is generated. You don’t need to make in-game purchases in Angry Birds to finish that game. That is cheating. Only I am allowed to do that. That’s why gamers call it God mode. You don’t really need that antique oak-finished bedside coffee table because you can carefully balance your bed coffee on the bed itself. It’s a form of yoga. But people don’t do it. This inclination develops into desire and desire gives rise to anger.

krodhaadbhavati sammohah sammohaatsmritivibhramah |

smritibhramshaadbuddhinaasho buddhinaashaatpranashyati ||

From anger comes delusion; from delusion, confused memory; from confused memory the ruin of reason; from ruin of reason, man finally perishes. When you read a blogpost or tweet that makes you angry, just hold your horses. Think for a bit. Just because someone is wrong on the internet, you do not have to correct them, unless they use poor grammar. That is absolutely inexcusable. It’s “your anger”, not “you’re anger” because the latter applies only to God because only He can say “I am Anger, brighter than a thousand suns, tanning your face into the kind of dark shade of brown that Indians dislike in their brides and force them to use Fair & Lovely for” and that sort of thing.

uddharedaatmanaatmaanam naatmaanamavasaadayeth |

aatmaiva hyaatmano bandhuraatmaiva ripuraatmanah ||

Let a man raise himself by his own efforts. Let him not degrade himself.Don’t plagiarize. Don’t copy entire college projects from the internet. Don’t copy others blogposts and post them on your blog. Don’t copy entire blogposts and post them on Facebook. Don’t copy previously copied Facebook stuff and send them over email. Because a person’s best friend on Facebook can become his worst enemy because of this kind of spamming. If you ask someone to share a photoshopped photo of Tejo Mahalaya with the message “Share if you are a proud Indian”, it does not bring pride to India. It drives users away from Facebook to Google+

karmanyevaadhikaaraste maa phaleshu kadaachana |

maa karmaphalaheturbhuu maatesangotsvakarmani ||

A person has the right towards action alone and not towards the fruit of action. Don’t crave for Twitter followers and RTs, Facebook likes and shares. Self express on the internet because you derive joy from the creative process. Let not the fruit of action be the motive for acting. Don’t be fooled by TV ads that tell you that mangoes are the fruit of action. That is not true. In real life, Katrina Kaif probably does not like having mango pulp poured all over her. Also, Let there not be any attachment to inaction. And don’t send large attachments via email.

vaasaamsi jiirnaani yathaa vihaaya, navaani grihnaati naro aparaani |

tathaa shariiraani vihaaya jiirnaanyanyaani samyaati navaani dehii ||

Just as a person casts off worn out garments and puts on others that are new, even so, the embodied soul casts off worn out bodies and takes on others that are new.That is why people frequently change profile pictures on Facebook and Twitter. If you have skin blemishes, one of those “worn out” Instagram filters will help you refresh your soul.

yato yato nishcharati manashcha.nchalamasthiramh |

tatastato niyamyaitadaatmanyeva vasham nayeth ||

By whatever cause the mind, which is restless and fidgeting, wanders away, the yogi should bring it back from that and concentrate only on the Self. When having discussions with a girl on Twitter, there is no need to parallelly check her profile picture in full screen mode. Discuss as you would with any other human being. Let not her gender cause restlessness and fidgeting. And do not google for “Shilpa Shetty hot yoga” as a solution.

divi suuryasahasrasya bhavedyugapadutthitaa |

yadi bhaah sadrishii saa syaad hbhaasastasya mahaatmanah ||

Even If the radiance of a thousand Suns, bursts forth all at once in the heavens, it would still hardly approach the splendor of the mighty Lord, who will never give you up, never let you down because he is no stranger to love as he runs around deserting all manner of young Yadava pulchritude.

Adventures of an engineering dad – part 1

It is interesting how everyone becomes an expert in the general theory of kid management on the basis of having just one or two of them in a lifetime. It’s a bit like reading Shashi Tharoor’s tweets and claiming to be an expert on post-independence Indian literature. Everyone has theories on how to put them to sleep, for instance, but that is a silly notion because babies have their own theories on how and when they will sleep, and that rarely seems to match with the suggestions put forward by these experts.

It’s been a year since this curious object with fully grown nails and a mildly peeved expression came into my world and I have been making certain observations of the changes in my life. The wife now preens and struts around family weddings, baby in tow, with a look that says “Duty over. Now let me go back to reading Transmetropolitan“. Tambrahms have this great fascination for doing things early. We wake up early to do holy rituals at unholy hours. We wake up early to study for exams. We have our lunches at 9.30 am. Grandfothers will extoll the virtues of proper early morning bowel movements before early morning baths and early morning Sandhis and grandmothers will insist on an early booking of the uterine tract, much like how we book train tickets. If you don’t do it early, there will be problems later. 

But these social games apart, the subject in question has been, in his own way, going about the business of growing up in what must surely seem like an alien world to him. My observations of the subject have stretched across several pages of cloud synchronized iPad & iPhone notes, Evernote clippings, text files on my laptop and a large number of visual recordings of the subject. Um..and a few carefully designed experiments that did not sit well with the ladies in the house but well, for science, I say.

For the first 1 or 2 months, he was largely asleep most of the while and when he was not, he was making strange movements with his mouth that originally seemed to suggest that the Klingons wanted to send us a message. Despite detailed internet research, the messages were indecipherable. After a while, hand movements accompanied mouth movements and I was pretty sure that mankind was missing something important. By the third month, we had cracked it. He was hungry. Pouty expression, fingers to mouth accompanied by Klingon phrase meaning “I shall destroy you to dust” – I am hungry. Random transition from smiling face to intense wailing – I am hungry. Frantic handwaving indicating imminent invasion of the Earth by Romulans in American sign language – I am hungry.

With a strategic eye towards ensuring the safety of my many musical instruments, I was keen on inculcating in him, an early interest in the arts, or shall we say inculcating a lack of interest in creatively destroying fragile instruments at the first available opportunity. I first had to establish what genres of music the subject had a preference for. Blues was attempted. St James infirmary. Not bad. Despite the crushing sadness of the song, It did not induce crying in the subject. If anything, subject proceeded to turn my stringed instrument into a percussion instrument with a dramatic vocal accompaniment that was clearly off key. Second experiment – Air – by J.S.Bach. The long violin notes immediately induced crying. In true scientific spirit, I had to find out if it was the plaintive notes of the piece or the sound of the violin itself that was the root cause. So I played the Schindler’s list theme next, but the experiment remains inconclusive because the baby’s mother arrived on the scene with implements designed to destroy my instruments if I continued this experiment any further.

Subject does not like objects placed on his head. Despite very poor hand eye coordination, such objects are flung away with great force. At this point, it takes about 14 or 15 repeated attempts to cause subject to get annoyed. This is based on a poor sample size because the baby’s mother has put a stop to further validations of this number.

Subject now moves around in a walker. And to considerable consternation of the ladies, the subject now conducts scientific experiments on the temperament of household dogs post high velocity impacts from babies in walkers. Strict territorial delineation had to be done to avoid further escalation of the situation.

Subject now constantly executes Houdini like manoeuvres to extricate himself from adult hands and be set free on the floor, and much like characters in Hanna Barbera cartoons, the legs and hands are perennially in a state of motion to the point where setting the subject down instantly results in an exploitation of Newton’s laws towards nearest small object that can be eaten.

Subject will attempt to eat any suitably sized object in his hand. If said object is not in his hand, subject will marshall his limited mobility and hand eye coordination to grab said object and then eat object in hand. Subject often unleashes extreme violence on objects that are beyond his ability to grab successfully. Subject shows great fascination for the Hindu newspaper, but we are unable to discern the scale of his political philosophy and the moral compass of his mind’s geometry box because subject ate the newspaper in question. If subject is held very close to one’s face for a detailed examination, an attempt to eat one’s nose will be made.

When subject gets hold of contraband substances (such as smartphones, balls of dust and fossilized food particles), subject initiates stealth protocol. He turns away from the line of sight of adults present in his vicinity and attempts to eat said contraband. However, if eye contact is established, subject smiles, leading to an embarrassing giving away of aforementioned stealth. Subject may not be suitable for RAW recruitment on the long run.

Subject has a precisely defined micturition schedule. Just after every nappy change.

Subject now recognizes his nickname, Sumo, and the tone of voice that means “Do not continue to do what you are just doing”. But subject smiles, as if to say “Here, take a smile in exchange for your tacit approval of this banned action” and proceeds with illegal activities till he is physically lifted and transferred to a neutral zone. Subject uses the airlift time to plan his next moves.

Subject, after extended periods of action, does not, as common sense would indicate, fall asleep. Subject goes into an intermediate stage, much akin to hibernation of MS Windows and indicates that to us by plugging in his tools of mischief (index and middle finger of his right hand) into his USB port (his mouth) for charging. Subject then also seems to require a small piece of cloth for moral support before eventually proceeding to close his eyes. Subject presumably has dreams involving the Wehrmacht because when he is asleep, the bed turns into the map of Europe circa 1939 as he rolls across with impunity to colonize and subjugate all parts of it.

Subject, despite possessing very poor knowledge of basic science and mathematics, is keenly aware of the melting point of the cardiac region and one hopes that as he grows up, he does not forget this all important secret to a happy life.

An Expectant Father

For a country that is mostly conservative, elderly family members are sure able to suspend any and all manner of delicateness when it comes to the serious matter of issues, or as The Hindu matrimonial ads would have it, encumbrances. Short of bluntly saying “Put sattney, produce baby”, there are several unsubtle tricks employed. An example -  “The caterer for my grandson’s Ayush homam makes an utterly delightful sambaar. You should seriously consider him, I mean, after you produce a baby of course”. There was also a “haha” at the end of that.

So after five years of what felt like the Battle of Helm’s Deep, waves of orcs throwing themselves at the battlements of our “free wille and righte to make babies at a tyme of our choosinge”, the wife announced one day that we were successfully enrolled in the dastardly plan to make economy class airflight more uncomfortable for fellow passengers. I said “Oh!” and went back to drawing rage toons. A few months later she told me we had to go for some sort of scan, where doctors take that most beautifully romantic idea of a baby inside a woman’s womb and turn it into a cryptic medical report written seemingly by crows who had dipped their feet into a bottle of Bril ink and walked all over the paper. Pregnancy sort of whizzed past without much ado, aided in no small measure by the fact that it was the wife who was doing all of the work while I pondered long and hard about what it would eventually mean to become a father.

I kept pondering as the wife increasingly complained about the baby’s tendency to kick a tad more than Wayne Rooney on coke. I offered to play a soothing prelude by Bach to see if the baby would kick less. It didn’t help.

The wife then seemed visibly discomfited by the Chennai heat and TNEB’s tendency to shed more load than snakes shed skin during this time. Since I didn’t have any influence in the matter of regulating the the earth’s movements relative to the sun, I really couldn’t help. In fact, she helped herself by going to work pretty much the entire 9 months because office had reliable air conditioning.

As we got closer to the due date, I thought perhaps now is the time for some serious discharging of fatherhood duties and prepared myself by installing several baby related apps on my iPhone and doing a whole lot of reading online. That didn’t help much. You see, the internet has this habit of telling you about Brain cancer when you google for headache. I asked her if she wanted any of those apps. She politely declined and asked me to install board games like this instead.

Eventually, at 3 am on the 11th of May, she woke me up and asked me to get ready. At that moment, I didn’t feel much like a to-be-father. I felt like Kamal Hassan in Tenali about to do a solo sky dive. I was as shaken up as my wife was chilled out. I attempted clumsily to take control of the situation and asked her if she was experiencing labour pain. She gave me an expression that suggested that Messrs Holmes had some serious blockages in his digestive system. We had to climb down a flight of stairs and I was worried if she could manage it. She then told me to relax, climbed down with the grace of a ballet dancer and got into the car and I drove. She even navigated as I didn’t know the route and once we reached the nursing home, an assortment of nurses descended on her, took her inside, and asked me to wait outside.

After hours of nervous pacing, the doctor came out with what appeared to be a mildly peeved small sized male human being who seemed more bothered about the harshness of the corridor’s tubelight than gazing upon the mien of his creator. He further reiterated his distinct disinterest in his dad by starting to cry.

After a few days, I offered to pacify the babe to give my wife a break from the routine. I somehow managed to reach some kind of resonance frequency with my patting and he seemed reasonably peaceful. I then put him down with the gentleness of a bomb disposal expert and gazed into his face as he still seemed to be looking around, eyes wide open. Now Wikipedia had told me that newborns are short sighted so one needs to get real close for them to see you. I had this feeling that we were having our first dad-son moment. What Wikipedia didn’t tell me was that newborns will mistake your nose for being a nipple, expect nourishment, get disappointed and start bawling.

When he was a week old, the wife asked me to cut his nails because he was scratching his own face with them. He was born with longish nails and my wife did not have fond memories of them as he had quite often attempted to draw scratch graffiti on the inner walls of the womb when he was inside. She handed me a “baby nailcutter” and I asked her where the rest of the equipment, namely a powerful magnifying glass, was. I wasn’t going to risk hurting his tiny fingers. She gave me a vote of confidence and I went through 3 nails successfully before the nailcutter pinched something other than nail and his cry pretty much came with the subtitles “Who hired this incompetent baby-attendant?”. A while later, I was changing his nappy and my inexperienced hands took way too much time as he ended up peeing in a projective path that was aimed at his own face before I finished. Womanly intervention was required again to pacify him.

What does fatherhood really mean? There are cliches about being a friend, philosopher, guide (and add-on credit card provider) but those come much later. What’s a father to a newborn mean? For several months I have no role to play in the arrangement of his full meals and tiffens. And the women in the house have mostly kept me away from nappies and once in a while they amuse themselves by watching me try to burp him while he attempts to extract milk from my ear lobe. Any attempt at googling for information and passing it off as advice is generally met with a “Do you have a womb? No? Then let us handle this” response.

I wonder if there is an expression for that feeling of being over prepared for what everyone around tells you is going to be a whole new difficult experience in life and then realizing that one’s help is not really required for quite a while. I suppose every man goes through this. 9 months of just twiddling ones thumbs as the baby chills out in the womb and a few more months of watching the women nurse it to some semblance of mobility before you have any kind of role to play. It’s like nature is trying to remind us men what insignificant role we really play in the production of the next generation. Visitors keep telling me I must feel like a proud father. I keep telling them that I feel like a manager who takes credit for someone else’ work.

Of course, I know he will grow up to become someone I can play with, buy Darth Vader suits for and introduce to T Rajendar, but till then, I suppose I am still an expectant father, and I just can’t wait.

On Valentine’s Day

Ever since I was 14, Valentine’s Day has always been interesting for me, and not necessarily in just good ways. I grew up in Madras, a city not particularly known for its sense of romance. As school kids, Valentine’s day was spoken in hushed whispers and was an urban legend that only some chosen seniors had a clue about. The whole idea of expressing your love for someone to that very someone was a fantasy that had no existence outside of Tamil movies (and the occasional Hindi movie at Melody theater).

So when I found myself in Delhi, surrounded by classmates who had smoked actual cigarettes and spoke of multiple girlfriends like they were pairs of jeans, it was a bit of a culture shock for me. What was even more of a shock was the very existence of girls whose response to non-study related male conversation was not a tear-filled visit to the principal’s office and a subsequent visit by the girls’ parents to one’s home, horoscope in hand, and a “your son spoke to my daughter so they must get married” proposal.

But my teenage mind took to the whole Valentine’s day thing in Delhi with alacrity. I mean, if you were a gawky, socially maladjusted kid (as all South Indian kids are in the capital) with a thousand crushes assaulting you from every direction in school, the only way to deal with it was to focus all your attention on that one day when it is marginally acceptable to express your feelings. I sure as hell couldn’t go and tell every girl I had a crush on that I had a crush on her on a daily basis. That wasn’t going to happen because I would have died several small deaths everyday. Instead I put my bet on being tragically and massively rejected just on that one day instead of going through several mini-rejections.

I approached the problem with an engineer’s mindset, which might explain the substantial rate of failure back then, but I stuck at it nonetheless. I first tried to find out what manner of magical things boys did that made girls not want to go crying to the principal’s office. I noticed flowers were involved. And Archies cards. I then paid a visit to that store. There were essentially 2 kinds of cards. Cards with cloying images of flowers in an orgy of pink and cards with snarky American humour that I wasn’t sure wouldn’t work. I found the former clichéd and the latter designed solely for display in a store than for actual giving to a girl one has a crush on. Honestly I didn’t think any Indian kid would ever take the risk of giving a girl a card that made jokes about cleavage. Where I came from, doing that usually entailed the dispatching of several goon-laden Scorpios to deal with the situation.

So I didn’t like any of those cards. Honestly I felt that if the female of my species had heartmelts reading the soul-sapping inanity on those cards, the future of humanity was quite dim. So that’s when I decided to make my own cards. Unlike now, I had passable sketching skills back in the day. I drew a violin eating a hearty meal telling the reader of the card “Hey, I’m your violin. Dine?”. It was contrived but I was 14 ok?

Now when the day actually arrived, despite being vegetarian, I chickened out. I couldn’t muster enough brave rebel neurons to convince me to put my name on the card. All of that Madras upbringing came roaring at me like an MTC bus on GST road and I painfully turned ASHOK into ANONYMOUS (ps: the top bit of the S extended to the bottom left of the H which was completely thickened into one line and the K was made N-like with just an extra line on the right) before leaving the card in the girl’s schoolbag just before lunch break was over.

So that was how it all began. An anonymous self-drawn card with a cheesily un-grammatical pun. If Darwin was watching, he’d have put very few odds on me. But within that year, I had my first real crush, and when I say real, I mean “Ashok’s academic performance has slipped as he seems quite distracted” on the report-card kind of real, if you know what I mean. And I realized that hand-drawn musical instruments with appetites was not the sort of thing that might appeal to this girl. So I went all literary and starting churning out poems. But by the time my first V-Day with this crush came, I was nervous again. I couldn’t just tell the girl I loved her in rhyme. This time, Madras upbringing formed a coalition with Engineering mindset and went wrote a cryptographic election manifesto.

I wrote a long and rambling poem about nothing specific and made the first letter of every line spell “<GIRL NAME>, YOU HAVE AN UTTERLY BEAUTIFUL SMILE”. Even with all the steganographical chicanery, I still couldn’t get myself to tell her what I really felt. The girl didn’t get it. I asked her a few days later if she got the hidden message. She gave me a “Should I go the principal’s office” kind of dubious look but when I did tell her how to um..extract the message, she was all smiles and said it was very sweet.

You know, the problem with the “It’s very sweet” compliment when one is 15 is that it is almost always misinterpreted. Well, I did end up interpreting this miss quite wrongly and it eventually ended a year later with me watching the Rakhi horror picture show, if you know what I mean.

Once I left high school, I did end up studying to be an engineer with all of that mindset business I was speaking of before, so quite expectedly, there was a 4 year break in Valentine’s day activities and I was back in action only when I got a job in IT.

Now that I had a salary, my outlook towards V-Day changed. I felt that I could buy expensive jewellery, roses and those sorts of things instead of doing what I used to before, which was actually taking a personal effort to do something special for someone, no matter how cheesy, corny or low-quality it turned out to be. It took me a while to realize that women value the time and effort taken to make them feel special more than the actual gift itself. I went through the “romantic candle-lit dinner at the Taj” phase but in retrospect the only characteristic I ended up displaying to the girl was financial imprudence.

Once I was in the US, I think I learned quite a lot about life in general. No, not women. Life. Anyone who claims that he understands 3.5 billion human beings is likely lying. About the only thing I have learnt is that every stereotype for an entire gender likely came out of the nether regions of a bull. On the contrary, I prefer to listen to personal anecdotes for what they are, personal anecdotes and sometimes, they turn out to be useful.For e.g, I find myself asking the girl in my life “What’s wrong? Why are you looking dull?” and I always remember a bit of advice I got from an old chap I had met a long time ago, who was married to a French woman. He told me that there’s a reason it’s called a mood swing and I felt that his advice was best captured by a visual

 

His point was that as men, we sometimes act selfishly by even assuming that we are the only problem and then annoy the hell out of the girl with some shameful displays of self-loathing.One just needs to let go sometimes and things will be back to normal.

While I was in the US, I realized how American men were an order of magnitude more romantic than the average Indian man. Perhaps their women expected more from them than Indian women do, but all the same, within a year, I decided that dinners at Olive Garden had to stop. I started learning to cook and while my first Valentine’s day special dinners were quite unpalatable (I used to follow the “with-enough-oil-and-masala-any-dish-tastes-nice” approach) , I eventually got better and once even made Tandoori kebabs in my apartment’s oven. Well, the leasing office slapped me with a $100 fine for destroying the oven but it was the most satisfying fine I had ever paid in my life till that point.

To the girl I eventually married, for our first V-Day, I wrote and composed an unbelievably cheesy song, recorded it amateurishly on Garageband, burnt a CD, hand-drew a label and even used a calligraphic pen to write lyrics inside the sleeve. I don’t know if that sealed the deal, but she did accept the Cubic Zirconia ring I gave her a few months later (I was cash strapped at that point ok?)

Looking back, I think if I learnt anything profound from all my V-Day experiences, it’s that nothing makes one more creative than being insanely in love with someone. I have learned musical instruments, picked up sketching and cooking skills and found more creative ways to be productive at work (in order to find time to do all of the former) while pursuing a mad desire to do something special for someone on Valentine’s Day. It hasn’t always worked, but I have always ended up enriched no matter what happened.

Fiddle away the moments that make up a dull day

Hello everyone. Just in case you thought I was wasting my time on Twitter, starting pointless Tumblr memes, whiling away precious hours recording corny music and writing columns for newspapers instead of blogging, well, you’d be right!

I am not given to Web 2.0 prognostications like “Blogging is dead” because that would be like saying that music died when the gramophone was invented. Online self-expression keeps taking different shapes and a blog is but one instrument in the Social media orchestra. Damn, I should copyright that sentence.

So now that I’ve used advanced verbal douchebaggery to slyly justify my own absence on this blog for 5 months, I am informing you that I am back. The country is awash with the white Gandhian caps of rebellion and the Zeitgeist of the times is urging me to add my cogent wit to the flaming conflagaration of opinion already setting the Indian interwebz on fire. So I am going to politely decline and start writing, instead, about a long time obsession of mine, learning to play instruments.

I started learning the violin when I was 7. No, I was not a child prodigy. Legend has it that a colleague of my mother’s played the instrument at an office picnic and a blinding flash of light from the heavens did not light me up and a thunderous voice from the firmament did not tell me “Son, this is your instrument, your calling”. My mother simply noticed that I was paying a few seconds more attention than I normally did to pretty much anything else at that age, so she quickly enrolled me into a music school boot camp gulag run by this chap’s sister and before I could say “Shankarabharanam”, I found myself with a half-sized violin, facing the Tambrahm equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, the Music Teacher Maami From The Depths of Hell.

The unfortunate thing about most classical music education in India is that it does not answer the unwilling student’s biggest question “What’s in it for me?” What’s worse, it’s the super-talented junior savants, the ones who can play the Bhairavi varnam at quadruple speed while the rest of us are still making industrial noises with our bows, that get all the attention and ironically, they are the ones who don’t need teachers. It’s almost as if the only function of most Indian music schools is to clearly communicate to its vast majority of students that they suck. Thankfully for me, my mother decided that she didn’t have a problem with my teacher having a dim view of my skills.

Another problem is the instrument itself. The violin, despite its beautiful shape and inarguably sensuous sound, has, what I call, an unacceptable MTTSP (Mean Time to Sonic Palatability) – the average time it takes a student to play something that sounds tolerable to his own ears.

• Piano: 0 days. As this man demonstrates, unless an entry-level Casio model is involved, anyone can produce pleasant sounds on the piano.
• Didgeridoo: 10 minutes. My good friend Harish built himself one using a PVC pipe and a Google search and if you can expel air at high pressure, you can join an Aborigine tea party in the Outback.
• Flute: 2 days. Buy yourself one from a Balloon wala and you could be playing Pardesi Pardesi Jaana Nahin (which is what 95% of flute sellers play by the way) in no time.
• Guitar: 1 week. With the help of Youtube videos, it takes less than a week to learn D, A and G chords and play close to 60% of all popular music. The guitar also has the unique ability to make its players sound more talented than they really are. Not surprising therefore that it is the world’s most popular instrument
• Violin: 6 years. 

The Violin is a troll instrument. It might as well have been designed by 4chan.

Yes, even the instrument’s making involves trolling poor Mongolian horses.

Once you train your right hand to finally stop making the sort of sounds that disturb the local dog populace, you start thinking “Ah finally I will now play some songs”, the teacher smiles (like that Troll face) and says “Not so soon. We need to work on your left hand” and for the next few months, teaches you a principle that Werner Heisenberg might have internalized as a kid while learning to play the violin.

You can either bow properly or find the right finger position for a note, never both.

Millimeters can make the difference between a proper note and sounds that elicit  growling disapproval from the teacher. The worst part – you wouldn’t even know if you are making the mistake or if the instrument is wrongly tuned. Of course, as an adult, one realizes that it’s its fret-less design that makes it such an expressive instrument but as a kid learning to play it, one couldn’t care less.

The thing is, most kids want to learn an instrument to satisfy a fundamentally human urge to master something, to achieve a sense of cosmic purpose and go on an adventure to discover the beauty of music. Well, that, and to impress the short-haired pretty Mallu girl in class. So let’s evaluate the violin on these 3 parameters, shall we?

Sense of Mastery and all that: The violin takes years to master. Pretty short-haired Mallu girl would’ve got married to the eldest son of the proprietor of Chemmannur Jewellers by the time one can play Raravenu Gopala without abaswaram. Verdict: Fail

Cosmic Purpose and Adventure: Imagine Carl Sagan narrating “Pale Blue Dot” set to the background music of Sarali Varise and Alangaram. Or Darth Vader arriving at the Death Star to the strains of Vara Veena.  Not working no? It takes years of training before you learn the first tune that sounds remotely interesting. Guitarists play the chords to Hotel California in a few months. Here’s a reason many people give up on Indian classical music. They don’t teach you interesting things till you get your basics right. That sounds like a good idea per se, but it does little to motivate any student. No one wants to be playing Varnams and Geethams for years. Why couldn’t they teach students who can play geethams, simple film songs? Like this for instance

I am reminded of an incident that happened when I was in my second year of training (I was about 8 then). My parents had bought a cassette tape of this superhit movie called Sakalakalavallavan (Jack of all trades) starring #Grand (occasionally known as Kamal Hassan) and one song in particular caught my fancy. Ilamai Itho Itho. It was the first song whose notes I worked out and I taught myself to play it on the violin. I did, however, make the cardinal mistake of demonstrating this achievement to my violin teacher whose face turned into something resembling Mt Etna on the morning of August 24, 79 AD and she proceeded to lecture me on why I must not dishonor a western instrument that was introduced to Carnatic music about a hundred years ago by playing Ilayaraja’s western music on it.

But as I’m finding out now, Western classical music has a much better pedagogical culture. There’s always some immediate performance goal to look forward to all the time. One learns to play simple, popular songs that everyone knows right from the outset. While the eventual goal is to play Mozart and Beethoven, playing Yankee Doodle went to town as part of the learning process isn’t frowned upon. Carnatic teaching, on the other hand, is ridiculously insular and frowns upon any kind of popular music.

Pulchritude Entrapment: Ok. Let’s even assume the short-haired pretty Mallu girl has a thing for Mohanam and she swoons every time Vara Veena is played. You are all set with your violin to serenade her, and that’s when you realize that you look like this

Do you see this working? No. You cannot be seated on the floor, legs spread in odd directions and expect to be romantic.

While guitarists and flautists cavort around trees indulging in terpsichorean antics, the Carnatic violinist is stuck, grounded and seated in the most ungainly and unromantic position playing the most blade sounding songs. Western violinists laugh at us all the time. It’s almost as if a cohort of Tambrahm maamaas decided in the past that they only way they could keep young boys away from pretty Mallu pulchritude is to teach them to play the violin Carnatic style. And then they all had filter coffees and laughed like this

So that’s the story of my violin. In retrospect, I have the greatest respect for every teacher of mine. For all the childhood frustration they caused me, they did leave me with the ability to make reasonably pleasant sounds on the violin. I have 3 now.

I have 2 goals in the next six months. One is to learn to play the violin standing up so I can dance around a pretty short-haired Mallu chick while playing Nalinakaanthi instead of being stuck like this

And the second goal is to learn to play the only instrument that sounds better than the violin. It’s an instrument that looks like a violin that has spent some time at McDonalds and Pizza Hut. The Cello. But that’s a separate post.

Asian Vegetarian Hell

Single celled organisms swimming around in the primordial ooze met up with each other for dates, eventually forming multicellular organisms that then evolved the ability to move around and meet up with other like minded organisms to be fruitful and multiply into early fishes that, several million years ago, walked on to dry land on clumsy fins that served as the first legs, only to evolve into reptiles and eventually mammals. One branch, of a particularly resourceful ape-kind, eventually colonized the planet, achieved the pinnacle of nature and then, for some inexplicable reason, invented air travel and started eating that unnatural abomination known as airline food.

If those early bacteria knew that the crowning achievement of Life on Earth was going to eat dubious organic matter microwaved to oblivion and served in aluminum foil, they’d have stopped going out on dates and stayed at home posting updates to Twitter and Facebook.

Airline food is the sort of nightmare mommy stomach cells warn their kids about. If kitchens were reactors, airline food would be nuclear waste and as a frequent flier, I experience Chernobyl every time I fly. And for this reason, I decided to stick to the “Asian Vegetarian Meal”, which, in the manner that tear gas is better than Agent Orange, is slightly safer to consume than fauna based offerings. But as you will soon find out, airlines manage to serve the sort of Asian vegetarian meal that would have justified George Bush’ claim that Iraq had biological weapons.

For starters, I cannot imagine that kitchens populated by regular Homo Sapiens can produce this sort of food (and I use the term “food” rather loosely here). In fact, I strongly believe Flight kitchens are located here:

And look somewhat like this:

Here is the anatomy of an airline meal. It is a plastic tray adorned by several accouterments such as a tea cup, a small paper bag of cutlery, a cup of something indescribably seedy looking which the flight attendant will claim is a salad, a small dessert that will usually be dry enough to deserve the loss the extra “s” and finally, the 2in x 4in aluminum foil box that holds what can only be charitably described as “food” and only hypothetically described as “edible”.

In the middle of this box, is something that resembles rice, rice that was apparently banished from the wet fertile fields of the tropics to the Gobi desert in summer.  It is also heated to near plasma temperatures in a blast furnace. Then it is stored for several years along with large amounts of Silica Gel. Any renegade, insurgent water molecules are dealt with the swift brutality of Moammar Qaddafi. Then the flight attendant blowdries it using a hair dryer on “High” setting before serving it to you. Just in case.

To its left is a yellowish ooze. If any pasty looking off-whitish cubes are visible, it’s probably paneer. Paneer after a stint at Abu Ghraib. If it isn’t, it’s likely Dal. Dal tends to vary between #5c2700 and #d5ad42 in colour and can occasionally contain a few green lumps that Popeye would have consumed (and thrown up). The amount of Dal is also adjusted to ensure that it either outlasts the amount of rice OR leaves behind several spoonfuls of dry rice that is waiting to poke holes in your oesophagus.

To the right of the rice is an amorphous dark complexioned mass of coagulated vegetables fried till kingdom come. Occasionally, it promises to be Potato, a vegetable that is remarkably hard to make a bad tasting dish out of, but the airline kitchen staff at Isengard have mastered this. The combination of terminally ill potatoes, age-old spices of the kind found in Indian grocery stores in the US and the extreme microwaving make any potato dish taste metallic, somewhat like the oven itself. It’s as if the dish gave up any semblance of individuality and freedom under the harsh supervision of Isengard and let itself be subsumed by the Ferrous elements involved in the entire cooking process.

But no meal is complete without some form of bread, and the standard “Asian Vegetarian Meal” comes with a bun that is a choking hazard even for one of the Transformers. If one does not have dental insurance, it is best left alone. And the demoniacal chefs at Isengard also seem to like irony. They also give you a small slab of butter, as if to say that you can “try” softening the bread with it. But one does not entertain Genghis Khan with a Karan Johar movie, kill Bill with a Deepavali cape gun or try to soften the “Bun” with butter. The “Bun” scores higher on the Mohs scale than Diamond. The “Bun” was likely baked in the depths of the Earth’s core. In fact:

India is a nation that personifies unity in diversity. The diversity comes from the million different ways in which we get outraged. The unity comes from the fact that every “Asian Vegetarian meal” served on every airline is homogeneously alike.

But as always, I am not one to simply crib and leave the scene without offering a solution. I believe airlines can learn from trains.

ps 1: This post is an extended version of a short column I originally wrote for DNA (warning: pdf)

ps 2: I’ve been told that it’s been ages since I blogged. If you are referring to the act of pressing several keys on a keyboard to generate some form of digital output that finds it way to the interwebz, then I’ve been doing a fair bit on http://soundcloud.com/krishashok and http://soundcloud.com/parodesynoise

ps 3: Do me a favour and go get yourself the Mozarellasura Linguini Stotram callback tone. Instructions here

Indianizing the Facebook “Like” button

In India, we do things differently.

And in keeping with the rich tradition of orally imparted knowledge and MMS scandals, we rarely like to write things down, and that is why when we go to “foreign”, we spare no chances in pontificating, elucidating and prognosticating on the Great Indian Difference. In India, we have history. In India, we have ancient culture. In India, we have the world’s most unhealthy kind of vegetarian food. Etc. Of course, elderly Indian gentlemen with NRI children play it both ways, hitting forehands down the line glorifying Western infrastructure and orderliness while slicing backhand drop shots edifying the sanctity of Indian chaos when the audience is melanin-challenged. Even the murderous Blue line buses of Delhi will derive philosophical inheritance from the cosmic randomness of Shiva, especially if there’s a white chap politely paying attention.

For all of the intellectual vainglory, we still steadfastly refuse to update Wikipedia articles – that is left to small minority of passionate enthusiasts, right-wing zealots and Rediff commenters. In fact, the entire Indian internet can be, in the keeping with our ancient tradition of classifying stuff, divided into 5 castes.

• Bloghards – People with blogs titled with a combination of the words “Random”, “Thoughts”, “Scribbles” and “Rants”. This crowd is also almost exclusively on Facebook because Orkut is totally like..um..untouchable. They are also too intellectually dense to be on Twitter
• Twithers – Folks on Twitter. Tend to be slightly pretentious and RT. This crowd also stays away from Orkut
• Mahipal – A whole generation of Indian men who believe that any girl on Twitter is like a personal ad on Craigslist, except the responses here are public too
• Orkutiya – Dey rite lyk dis
• Rediff Commenter – The visible visceral online manifestation of the Indian National Mood – Outrage. Note: Rediff commenters are everywhere, not just on Rediff

But unlike the Chinese, who are forced to live in their own Internet behind the Great Firewall, the Indian Billion has a greater potential to stamp their “difference” on what is today, a mostly Americanized web. Case in point – I can’t seem to get Urban Dictionary to add “Amit” and “Madrasi” despite providing them with a detailed definition and several usage examples. Apparently, they prefer Pop culture to Appa culture. So we need to change our ways. We need to do the online equivalent of the salt march (which of course means a Facebook page + Orkut community + Adobe Flash based candle lighting mass campaign through email attachments) and stamp our Indianness on the web. All of this talking will get us nowhere.

I believe we can start with the Facebook “Like” button.

There’s a simple reason for that – it’s already ubiquitous. And it’s very western. We Indians don’t just like something. We are so nuanced that we believe that there are nuances to the word nuance itself.

For starters, we don’t just “like” stuff. We have opinions too.

When we listen to Rahman, we have to point out that Ilayaraja had the best bass lines, and I suspect that Indians will much prefer to see this on Cricinfo player profile pages, where they might as well hard-code “Sachin Tendulkar” in the text box above.

And speaking of Sachin, Rajni and other luminaries, frankly, a thumbs up just does not cut it. In Indian culture, we fall at the feet of our elders and celebrities

Also, after falling at people’s feet, it is part of our culture to take the respect to the next level and “like” something to the point where one wishes to felicitate the author.

Nothing screams “felicitation” more than a silk shawl (called ponnaadai in Tamil).

And what logically follows a felicitation? Yes, a lamp lighting. The largest amount of “like” one can give another human being in India is an invitation to light a lamp at at a college function.

And do we simply “like” something and leave it at that? Have you not seen comments on blogs that go “Hi. Loved your post. Can you read my post on the same subject”? We rarely listen to people. We are usually busy formulating a smarter response in our heads while someone else is talking. So to represent that behavior, it is only fair that we have a custom popup that appears after one hits the “like” button.

It will allow us to quickly select from a drop down list of old jokes, marginally funny pop culture references and dubious facts and send it to the author.

What about women? In the land of a million maruding mahipals meandering motivatedly to misunderstand, misconstrue and misinterpret the slightest mark of civility as an invitation to marriage, women cannot just “like” anything without making their intentions absolutely clear.

Do not forget. We are a nation of men that get strange ideas when we see that a girl has visited our Orkut profile, commented on our blogs or RTed our tweets. And when they use smileys, we notify our parents to initiate horoscope exchanges, so this is no laughing matter. You women might laugh, but for men, it’s matter.

Speaking of mahipals, we also need a “like” button for the citizens of Orkut

We are also a nation of permission takers. What do you mean you can go around liking anyone? In the nation of arranged marriages, you first need approval

After that, a printout needs to be sent to a gazetted officer who will notarize and approve it. Then a copy of the attested form will be sent to the Facebook headquarters where a clerk will make the neccesary “like” entries in the database

India also believes in viral effects. We have been mass forwarding emails decades before upstarts like Youtube and Twitter redefined viral propagation. With Hotmail, Outlook Express and Microsoft Word, we understand viruses better than anyone else, in every sense of the word. So it is only fair that the “like” button also send out mass emails to everyone in everyone’s contact list (not in the Bcc: field, but in the To: field). The email itself can go something like this

“If you forward this link to 10 people and get them to click the Like button, Bill Gates will make Lord Balaji grant your wish by making a 10 million USD donation to TTD which will then be used to rename the Taj Mahal to Tejo Mahal and also find an Ayurvedic cure for cancer, impotence and Pakistan”