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”

 

 

 

Jalscifi #1 – Sabarimala, circa 2287 A.D

Like most kids, I used to love sketching. And like most kids, I gave it up the moment I realized that I wasn’t very good at it. This whole business of wanting to do only things one is good at is one of the first adult corruptions of a child’s mind. But I recently bought an iPad and after several hours of AppStore surfing, decided to buy this $4.99 app called SketchBook Pro from Autodesk and all of a sudden, the app made me feel like a kid again. I’m still not very good at it but all of the brushes and effects made it rather addictive to use. Using ones hands is so much better than mucking about with the mouse on Photoshop. One of the first things I drew was this:

It then struck me that I could do something I’ve always postponed because I was too lazy to do it in Photoshop. When I was in Vidya Mandir, I used to draw space battles featuring my classmates in the back pages of my school notebooks, and thanks to Sketchbook Pro, here’s Jalscifi, a new Tampunk series at the blunt edge of Scifi, Madras and Pop culture.

 

Click on the image to see a larger version

Still rough at the edges (and the middle as well) but hopefully my iPad sketching skills will get better with time. But sometimes I wonder if it’s really about skills anymore. I get this feeling that technology is getting better at polishing mediocrity more than anything else.

 

 

Kentucky Fried Creation

It is rather uncommon of me to spend more than a couple of days in any city I visit on work. There’s usually only enough time to grab a Baja Chalupa (beans instead of beef) at a Taco Bell for nostalgia purposes in between the time spent commuting to the Chennai airport, standing at the checkin counter and sweet talking the counter person into giving me a free upgrade, encountering annoyed Govt of India employees at Immigration, wading through a crowd of old Indian people who do not understand that their seat numbers are not between “30 and 45” which are boarding right now, spending 20 hours in seats designed for mid-sized rabbits, eating food that’s been microwaved to oblivion, dreaming of using silencing anti-vocal-cord rays on annoying Indian babies, opening the overhead luggage compartments and doing a Ranganathan St with fellow passengers in the aisles well before the pilot even shifts to landing gear, running ahead of everyone to get to the front of the Immigration line at JFK, switching on my American accent (which turns on like a tube light usually) and explaining that I’m here for “business discussions”, searching for my luggage, telling customs that I really do not have any cigarettes, “curry” or “pickles”, dropping my bags off at the Delta counter which is manned entirely by kiosks and uncommunicative bots, taking the JFK Airtrain to Terminal 3 to find 1 Delta employee and 400 kiosks attempting to deal with 800 passengers all of whom have a flight to catch in the next 10 minutes, stripping down bare for the TSA security guys (and also peeling off my epidermis just to be on the safe side) and finally reaching Cincinnati, a place I seem to travel to more often than Sholinganallur or Siruseri.

Cincinnati is a large city with levels of urban excitement that slightly exceed that of a doped bear in hibernation. So when I found myself staring at a 2 week long stay, I was worried about what I would do in my leisure time. That was when my colleague Harish, who, by the way, coined the term amit_123, pointed out that the Creation Museum was just a few miles from downtown Cincinnati, my religious (and blogging) instincts fired up and we found ourselves at 2800, Bullitsburg Church road, Petersburg, Kentucky on a Sunday afternoon. Kentucky is filled with places that end in “burg” and for some reason it reminded me of whiskey and hooded white men wielding torches that burned crosses, so we decided to play it safe. I became Christopher (“Chris”) Asher and my friend, Harish Ravindran became (as a result of his undying fanboyism) Harris Jeyaraj. I even told him that he could explain his last name to evangelical Christians as “Victory of the Kingdom of God” or something to that effect.

For the uninitiated, the Creation Museum is a 21 million USD attempt to prove Darwin, Science and General Common Sense wrong. It is a museum dedicated to proving that the Bible was literally right and that the universe was created in 4004 BC. Nice vanity year no? Palindromic too. Like custom registration plates for one’s car. Not 4372 BC or 4197 BC. I’m sure God’s plates must read “D00D” or something

But my fear of shotgun-wielding redneck evangelical Xenophobic christians turned out to be entirely misplaced. Bad science apart, the place was thoroughly pleasant. Our carefully crafted Christian avatars were about as useful as a comb would be to Patrick Stewart.

I am always disappointed when my precisely nurtured stereotypes fail to come true.

Long lines! Most people in the queue did not strike me as fundamentalist nutjobs out to destroy the Western intellectual tradition. They struck me as tourists who thought it might be a decent idea to take their kids to a museum that advertised dinosaurs.

Now, lifetime members are a different species altogether. They pay $495 and are people who seriously believe that (barring the engineering that built the museum itself) science is generally bad and that (a specific English version of ) the Bible is literally true. But then I have met VHP-RSS type uncles in Chennai who believe that India had the Pushpaka Vimaana thousands of years before the Wright brothers. And people drop jewellery into the Hundi at Tirupati, so to each his own I guess.

This is what one sees right before one walks into the first exhibit (the Grand Canyon). Man, coolly going about his work while a dinosaur greedily inspects um..leaves. Confused? Don’t worry. Have Faith. Things will become clear soon

There you go. Clearly Wyoming Tyranoswareshwara Iyer was, before he was corrupted by the West and the temptations of McD and Taco Bell, pure high-class vegetarian. But given reptiles’ general bad breath, I am assuming garlic and onion were OK. Perhaps they were Doubting Tamasiks

A little further in, I found this, and if you have any common sense at all, it will now be crystal clear. If God wanted you to eat thorny thick-skinned pineapples, he would have given you flesh tearing teeth too. It’s called Intelligent Design, you canines of the feminine kind

I must say that this line of reasoning is wickedly brilliant and it’s all over the museum. Compare complex and hard-to-understand scientific reasoning with the powerfully simple “God created it” and it’s really like giving a small kid a choice between “Vitamin enriched protein augmented Spirulina fortified Ginseng extract” and “Chocolate ice-cream”

Yet another application of this beautiful trick. What are you gonna believe? Some terribly complicated explanation involving genes and evolution OR the “Vadivel Theory of the Origin of Man” – Why flood? Same Flood.

There was so much irony in this poster that it could very well become a shrine for anaemic patients. It’s one of Hubble Space Telescope’s legendary photographs and it’s being used here to prove the Biblical view that the “firmament” was created in 4004 BC. Yes, Hubble (of the expanding universe fame) Space (which is billions of light years across) Telescope (made from glass -> sand that is billions of years old).

After the Grand Canyon exhibit, I ran into this. Clearly, the family is breaking apart in the modern irreligious world primarily because in the past, women were expected to simply STFU and listen. As @cgawker points out, if there’s one thing all religions agree on, it’s that women should be given a hard time

In keeping with tradition, here’s a teenage Eve tempting a teenage Adam to visit the next exhibit

The next exhibit turned out to be the Garden of Eden. And as you can clearly see, Adam is Kabir Bedi and Eve has dual-purpose long hair. I looked around for an “A” certificate and a “Directed by Jag Mundhra” tag, but could not find it

A little further into Eden, I caught these 2 Miohippi in a compromising position. After a careful gender inspection of both of these proto-horses, I can confidently declare that this was the first Biblical lesbian couple. Perhaps only human same-sex relationships are disallowed

Ah well.

Once in a while, the museum tests you to see if you got a hang of their essential message. On lifting the knob:

Duh. Of course no. There you go. Simple, is it not?

Suddenly, Harish pointed it out, and it all became clear to me.

The Four Prophets of Peterology. They made stuff up in the past. I make stuff up now.

And finally, I saw this and it struck me that pretty much every thing in the world can be explained by these 7 steps. Let’s take this modern day example. Adam “creates” a fight with his girlfriend. His mind is “corrupted” with all manner of doubts. It becomes a “catastrophe” when she walks out. He is then “confused”. He says “Jesus Christ, what do I do now”. He calls her and she is still “cross” with him. He apologizes and they make up, and then they make out, thus leading to “consummation”.

So hahaha, LOL and all that at all these creationist duffers etc. But then, the only difference between a 21 million dollar Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY and people who consult astrologers is budget. It’s easier to laugh at dinosaurs eating pineapples than it is to smirk at someone breaking coconuts for Lord Ganesha. One’s own way of life is always superior no? “Our” philosophy was more advanced than this sort of simplistic nonsense no?

It was interesting that I did not find the sort of people Richard Dawkins always seems to find when he goes about pwning creationists. I just found regular folk who didn’t particularly care much about the complexities of the origin of life, the universe and everything else, not even two score and two times. To them one explanation is as good as the other and while we can bemoan this collective failure of rational thinking, there isn’t much one can do except build a better real science museum right next to this one. Even then, I’ll still visit this place to feed the alpacas

Rupee only is the God

I hear that the Cabinet is going to decide what the new symbol for the Rupee is going to be. Apparently, after a long and arduous contest involving, among other things, SMS voting and reality shows, the final choice is to be made from these 5:

But while these can hog the limelight for now, I am more interested in the ones that got rejected.

This was submitted by Iyers International (I-squared for short, “Minus One” for geeks) and was rejected by the TN ruling party for being casteist. When it was pointed out that the Hindi letter “Ra” was used, the party headquarters had a collective aneurysm trying to figure out which part of the symbol they were now opposed to

Not to be outdone by the Shaivites, the Iyengar Design Institute Of Typography submitted their stylized vision for the Rupee symbol. Being a politically shrewder lot, they pointed out that the choice of English will keep the Southern political parties happy and what’s even better, the “naamam” part even looks slightly like the rising sun. But it was rejected on the basis of a massive protest by the Association of Pencil Manufacturers (led by Natraj) who complained that the symbol looked too much like the nib of a pen and therefore was offensive to pencils.

The Association of Sarcastic Sitizens, in yet another display of pointless metaphorical adventurism, submitted their version which apparently symbolized the culture of corruption in India. The stroke rises boldly upwards only to be chopped into smaller and smaller pieces towards the end as it falls ignominiously to the ground. It typifies the average citizen’s (or sitizen) struggle with getting things done as money keeps leaking as bribes and commissions all the time, they said. Needless to say, it was rejected as a result of the judges falling asleep while reading the A.S.S’ 15,000 page explanation of the symbol (they had commissioned Umberto Eco to do the writing). The organizers further pointed out that any association willing to misspell “Citizen” just so they could have a more descriptive acronym must not be trusted.

The Union of Plastic Surgeons (UPS) felt that they could use this contest to subtly slip in an advertisement of their services. Their version distinguishes between real money and fake money.

The RSS suggested that since we use this man’s image on all our currency notes, it is only fair that he be the new Rupee symbol. It was rejected on the basis of being cynical and non-pseudo-secular. Critics of this version called it the “Kill Bill” since the submitters were implicated in the killing of the chap on the bill.

The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments folks suggested the use of the “Pillaiyaar Suzhi” (Auspicious Ganesh Squiggly) because, in keeping with the rich Hindu tradition of highly abstract thinking, Ganesh represented Knowledge and Knowledge was wealth and wealth was well..money. It was rejected for being insensitive to Ganesh’ younger brother, Karthikeyan (Muruga)

Mukesh Ambani sent in this symbol,pointing out that he has most of India’s money anyway. It was rejected for being too capitalistic.

The Tamil chauvinists sent in a curvy, stylized Tamil “Ru” symbol, commonly used to represent Rupee in TN, but it was rejected for looking like an offensive finger gesture

The Tale of Gregory, part 1

If you are wondering what this post has to do with some one named “Gregory”, it will be clarified at the every end (like an S Ve Sekar play)

In a another couple of weeks, I will finally move into my own apartment. What took us so long, one might ask and the response to that is, I felt, worth a blog post.

I got married in a fusion Iyer-Nair wedding, but the fusion part is a bit misleading. An Iyer wedding is like saying:

“Jesus reflected on his situation and felt irrepressible sadness. His tear-ducts filled to a point where they could hold no longer and had to be released”

A Nair wedding on the other is more on the lines of:

“Jesus wept”

I wrote in detail in about that a while back, so long story short, that my wife managed to wear a 6 yard saree instead of the traditional 9 yard Madisaru was, by itself a coup of unimaginable proportions. The only Nair element of the wedding was the traditional white “Neriyal” saree she wore during the Oonjal ceremony, and white is a colour that repels elderly Tambrams like sunlight repels zombies. Otherwise, the wedding was yet another homogenous sequence of homams, loud-mouthed priests and badly pronounced Sanskrit imploring the newly wedded couple to produce offspring exclusively of the male kind.

Once the wedding was over, there is usually this small matter of deciding where the couple would start their new life before families get down to the more serious business of nagging them to procreate (unlike the priests, there is no gender preference for babies specified here). Typically in middle class families where new flats cannot be purchased at whim, the couple usually moves into the boy’s parents’ home. In our case, the problem was that we were spoilt for choice. It was between a smallish old flat in Besant Nagar, close to my parents’ home OR the first floor of my wife’s parents’ home, which was a separate place by itself.

While we formed an internal committee of 2 to investigate this matter and come up with value-added suggestions on the course forward, we found an intermediate arrangement that seemed satisfactory to all stakeholders. We spent weekdays in Anna Nagar (my in-laws home) & weekends in Besant Nagar (my parents’ home). It did not take me long to realize that, at least on the Tambram side of things, this was not a comfortable state of affairs.

It turns out that it is more acceptable for a boy

• to be unfaithful,
• kill a couple of kittens,
• beat one’s wife
• to demand dowry and lose it on horse races

than to spend more than a few nights under the roof of his wife’s parents’ home. The Tamil term to describe a chap who (even temporarily) takes residence in his father-in-law’s house is “Veettodu Mappillai”, which, if I may translate metaphorically, is someone who lacks several crucial internal organs (like spine, heart, blood at high temperature, reproductive system etc).

You see, everything about the Tambram wedding ceremony screams “Agreement between 2 parties for the transfer of female property from the Vendor, who will hereinafter be called the Girl’s father to the Purchaser, who shall hereinafter be called “The home of the Mother-in-Law”. There is even a mock “Grihapravesham” during the wedding when the daughter-in-law (more precisely, her right foot) makes an auspicious entry into a small room that, for symbolic purposes, is designated as the boy’s house, and more importantly, her future home. There is also a formal “Gotra change”, where the girl moves from her father’s cow-pen to mine. This posed a bit of a problem because when that annoyingly bigoted priest who officiated at my wedding asked my father-in-law what “Gotra” he was, his response was “Manusha (human being) Gotram”. As I said before, we dispensed with this particular ritual, so my wife continues to be a human being while I claim to follow some ancient chap called Sage Vadoola.

What made this situation even more piquant is that my wife comes from a matrilineal family and didn’t quite understand why this would be a problem. Even her name (Vijayalakshmi Smitha) keeps with the Nair tradition of daughters  taking their mothers names as their surnames (sons take fathers’ names) and every time someone in my family would refer to her as “Mrs Ashok”, she would correct it to “V Smitha”. She had no intention of going through that silly charade of changing one’s name the marriage, and I had no intention of sharing my name with anyone else.

But we stuck to our shuttling routine, blissfully ignoring subtle hints from my side of the family that I was starting to resemble a slightly dark complexioned grazing animal with wool. I must admit that my parents accepted this with equanimity of the kind that’s rarely seen in middle-class Tambram families. There were no honour killings involved and somehow, they made peace with me living in Anna Nagar.

That brings me to another point. If you are an unmarried middle-class chap, take this from me – there’s nothing better in life than to be treated like nobility at your in-laws place. Your wife, on the other hand, will always be a second class citizen at your parents’ home, not because your parents are bad people, but because that is simply the social norm. She will be expected to help out in the kitchen and household chores even if she is a working woman. In my case, that wasn’t such a big problem. It’s the subtly forced culture shift that I found not too palatable. If I was living only at my parents’ house, my wife would have had to give up her daily need to consume something aquatic. She doesn’t mind helping out in the kitchen etc, but I definitely mind forcing her to turn into a vegetarian.

So, we had got so used to this arrangement that it was only occasional conversations like these that reminded me that something was mildly needle-gone in the state of Denmark.

Mom: So, when are you planning to look for an apartment of your own? (Subtitles: When are you going to spare us the ignominy of being parents of a “Veettodu Mappillai”)

Me: Ah yes. I am looking. Since this arrangement is comfortable, I am not in any raving hurry to find a new place. I mean, right now, we have no household responsibilities anywhere. Cooking, washing et al are taken care in both homes and I get lots of time to blog haha..

Mom: Yes, but don’t you want a home of your own, something that you can invite your friends to (Subtitles: When are you going to spare us the ignominy of being parents of a “Veettodu Mappillai”)

Me: Ah well, that’s not a big deal really

Mom: Sigh

Eventually, it was our carbon footprint that convinced us to find an apartment a little closer to our places of work, and that began our 18 month long search involving all manner of unsavoury real estate agents and other assorted brokers who finally led us to the place we eventually bought, after several shady dealings with banks over loans, EMIs and interest rates. But that’s for another post. Next week perhaps, after I move into “Gregory” (yes, that’s the name of my new home, named after the only man my wife is likely to leave me for)

A quick roundup

As many of you might have assumed, I have not been slacking off, lazing around and being generally unproductive. I’ve just been slacking off and lazing around while doing a fair bit of writing (and diagramming) as a result of the Indian Premier League. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, this is a bit of a roundup.

When the IPL started, Sify commissioned me to do a bunch of “Jalsa and Jilpa visual guides” and I started with an unofficial introduction to the IPL as viewed through the bogus lens of cricket history as I saw it. (One of the advantages of claiming to be a humourist is saying that it’s a joke if someone points out a factual error. We have it easy really)

Then once the ads were in full swing (with some cricket thrown in between), this

After that, I took a dig at the IPL’s Web 2.0 push

Once the Modi-Tharoor saga took center-stage I had to explain the difference between the 2 gentlemen’s responses to the accusations made against them

And finally, when the IPL drama faded away, it was time to look at the life of an Indian scandal

And on an unrelated note, a few friends of Twitter had a doubt about the difference between Ammanga and Atthanga and one cannot have a Brampunk movement if people don’t understand something as basic as this. So, I made a “Tambram Guide to Terms for Relatives” that all of you can use the next time you attend a wedding or have a family gathering for Deepavali (Click on image for a larger version)

Let me know if any of you want the psd source for this, in case you wish to translate to other languages

Right ho then. I’ll be back soon with a new post.

S Meenakshi (1917-2010)

As I sit here, in yet another quintessentially Tambram function, observing several folks busying themselves with rituals, odd jobs and other paraphernalia, listening to brusque orders given by a couple of priests who are constantly interrupted by their mobile phones, with custom sloka ringtones, I almost entirely forget that the event is actually a funeral. Tambrams have a way of turning every festival, every celebration and even every death into a homogenous sequence of homams (havans), coconuts, kalasams (brass vessel), priests and arcane minutiae in no particular order. Somebody who isn’t steeped in this tradition can easily confuse a wedding with a funeral.

I am told that this particular event is called “Kirekkiyam” and that the 13th day after a person’s death is the day that they are finally sent off, with food, clothes and an assortment of fortifying mantras, to their next birth. There is nothing about this function, and every preceding one (the 9th and the 10th days) that brings people’s attention to the person who has passed away. There are no memorials, no remembrances and barring the obligatory entry in the The Hindu obituary column (curiously located on the sports page), no collective declaration of any sort that the person who has died will be missed.

I suppose that an ailing 93 year old’s death is, in a strangely rational way, not an occasion for too much grief. In fact, the person who just died used to tell me that the 2 week sequence of highly elaborate rituals that happen post-death serve the social function of diminishing grief as it keeps people busy while letting the oldest psychological medicine in the world, time, do its work.

This 93 year old was my paternal grandmother, Meenakshi. The gender insensitive customs of her era had forced her to declare herself a widow when she lost her husband by adding “Ammal” next to her name, but I am going to dispense with that for now.

I’ve generally stayed away from personal and autobiographical posts for a long while now, but I am going to make an exception for this lady because as a child growing up in a family where both parents went to work, I (and my brothers) are products entirely of her upbringing, and she is, in large part, responsible for this blog (at least, the few nice parts of it). In the interest of readability, I’ve split this post into several anecdotal paragraphs, each of which can be read in any order at any time.

Meenakshi Paati (or simply Paati as we knew her) was born in 1917 in Nagercoil, then part of the Travancore state in British-India and spent the best time of her life going to a convent school for a brief period till she was ready to be married off. Notice how we Indians say “I got my daughter married off”, with the “off” serving to indicate the transfer of property rights over a human being to the groom’s family. One day, when she as 13, she was asked to serve a not-so-young gentleman visitor some coffee, which she did and then asked her grandmother who the man was. She was told that the 31 year old widower that she had just served coffee to was going to be her husband. She protested but some “bug” in her horoscope meant that she had to get married to a widower.

She had her first child when she was 15 and by the age of 25, her family was complete with 5 children, the youngest being my father. Her precocious younger brother went on to do his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon (in the 1940s) and became a highly respected research scientist. She, on the other hand, ran a household with 20 children as she took into her fold several nephews and nieces who had lost their mothers early. Her husband was an aberration, a not-very-educated, atheist Iyer businessman (ever heard that combination before?) who ran a thriving petrol pump business in Tirunelveli before letting the depression arising from the questionable death of his eldest daughter at her in-laws place run his business to the ground, taking with it all land, savings and towards the end, Meenakshi’s jewellery as well. She finally left Gopalasamudram, where she had lived for over 50 years of her life, and moved in with my father at Madras in 1971.

What I find remarkable about her personality was what she was *not*, despite the rigid orthodoxy of her upbringing. No, she did not sit under a Peepul tree and have an epiphany but she lived her entire life with a sense of wonder at the world that never diminished despite the early loss of her father, the grind of married life, the cruel culling of her desire to study (she loved reading), the multiple tragedies of one mentally retarded son and the suspicious death of her favourite (and pregnant) daughter at her in-laws place and the financial woes of her late husband.

Her greatest strength was the ability to not be rigid about anything, not her beliefs, not tradition or for that matter, her opinions.

I am reminded of a few years ago, when we took her back to Gopalasamudram, her last ever visit to the village where she spent most of her life. We stopped at a distant relative’s house in the agraharam and since there was another 90 year old lady living there, we felt that these two might hit it off, speak about the old times et al. I was eavesdropping on their conversation and I heard the other lady say this (and I translate) – “Nowadays, not many people live in this agraharam”. I didn’t quite understand that. After all, almost all the houses seemed to be populated. My grandmother’s smiling response eventually clarified it for me. She said – “All these folks here are people too”. In case you did not quite understand that exchange, let me “translate”. The other lady had said – “Nowadays, too many non-brahmins live in the agraharam”. Apparently, they did not qualify to be “people” in her estimation. She assumed that a another 90 year old from her generation might share her bias. Her response, without the need to make the situation uncomfortable was – “Aren’t the folks living nowadays in this street people too?”. The other lady quickly changed the topic. She had this unique ability to package profundity without seeming pompously intelligent.

No sane parent would have entrusted their kids to her for the simple reason that she never stopped them from doing anything except the most dangerous things. She sat back and let us creatively (and often highly inappropriately) express ourselves, embarrass our parents, relatives and in general try everything there is to try and getting bored of it ourselves instead of being mollycoddled, pampered and closeted. We grew up without boundaries of propriety being defined for us ahead of time. When we did something improper, she would tell us that it was wrong, but never before we did it.

Uncharitable people might call her naive, but I prefer to call it a constant belief in the possibility of progress. Having seen a light bulb only when she as 60 or so, she did not, like most other people from her generation, close herself from science and technology and live in an artificial world of their own, frozen in time at the moment of their greatest comfort. She continued to wonder at how large objects lift themselves off the ground, how TV works and how operations could fix her cataract problems. About 7-8 years ago when I video chatted with her for the 1st time on Skype from the US, the 86 year old Meenakshi Paati’s immense curiosity and wonder were still there. When I came back to India, she wanted to understand how this internet thing works, and if 7 year olds could have a tenth of her enthusiasm to learn about the brave new world that’s always beyond the horizon of their current understanding, they’d all become astronauts and video game designers.

She once asked me what job I did and I attempted to explain – rather unsuccessfully.

When I got married, despite younger relatives pressurizing my wife to procreate quickly, she was the only one who told her to focus on her career and when she felt like it, have maybe, a kid or two. Having lived an entire life pinching pennies and being a second-class citizen as a result of her gender, her proudest moment was when one of her granddaughters went the IIT-IIM route and landed a job whose starting salary continued to amaze her till the very end of her life. Many women from her generation silently feel proud of their daughters’ achievements but somehow are still reluctant to change the marriage-resign-deliver-kids routine that women are consigned to. When she saw what her granddaughter achieved, she was quick to adapt her advice to girls. Her first question on meeting any young working woman would be the rather inappropriate – “How much salary are you earning?” and would then followed by “Continue working, and don’t be in a hurry to give up all of this for marriage and kids”. When successful career women advice young girls this way, it’s good for them, but it’s only when women like my grandmother, who’ve never experienced financial independence in their lives undergo this shift of mindset that serious change becomes possible.

I’d call her highly tolerant and broadminded, but those are vapid expressions that don’t capture the essence of a complex human being. The best I can do is say that she was alive to possibilities. In the back of her mind, despite what tradition demanded of her, she knew that all of these rituals and customs were obsolete bunkum, frozen in their own time, reluctant to be contemporarily relevant, but she was never brazen in her opposition to them. She played along and was a model, nine-yard-saree wearing woman who enjoyed MS Subbulakshmi while secretly admiring Michael Jackson because in her mind, she still believed that Jackson had overcome the barriers of slavery to be successful. Sometime in 2003 I had discovered a band named System of a Down. I decided to see if there were limits to her ability to find excitement in anything new that she discovered. Now, Chop Suey is unlike anything that a 88 year old Tambram woman is likely to have heard and in general, metal and rock tend to be categorized as industrial noise among elderly Tambrams. I put the headphones on her, and after about a minute or so, she said – “This must be very difficult to play no?”. No criticism. No dismissal as incoherent noise. Just a recognition that there must be something good in things she did not quite understand.

She was a voracious reader. As long as her eyes held out, she had a book in her hand. For someone who studied till class 7 before getting married, it’s incredible that she could read Tamil, Malayalam, English and Sanskrit and while she enjoyed RK Narayan and Sudha Murthy for their simplicity, she never shied away from trying to read heavier tomes in English. In keeping with her philosophy, she never gave up reading anything she did not grasp. She lived her life with the constant assumption that there will always be new and exciting things that she may never understand and, like her response to System of a Down, she refused to criticize things she did not fully appreciate.

Another unique way in which she was different from the rest of her generation was her private belief that “old was not gold”. She was more the “old is mold” sort of person. Her only problem with modern times was the cost of stuff. She preferred the trappings of modern life but wished that gold would cost the same Rs 13/8 grams that it did back when her grandfather made jewellery for her. Inflation is one of those concepts I was never able to convincingly explain to her (apart from the Software industry, of course), but perhaps that reveals my ignorance of economics more than her inability to understand it.

While she was ailing, I decided to shoot a few videos in an attempt to capture a bit of her wisdom for posterity, and this bit, I felt, was worth sharing. Despite her flexibility with rituals and custom, she was a deeply spiritual person and I asked her what exactly devotion meant. “Bhakti”, she said, comes in three varieties. The first one is about praying for material success. Money, land, career etc. It’s usually accompanied by rituals of various kinds, sacrifices in the past, homams and poojas in the present. The kind of devotion higher than that is to pray for one’s own mental strength and the fortitude required to lead a peaceful life. This happens when people read the Upanishads and realize that it’s all really about the inner self and things like that. The last, and the highest kind of devotion, she said, is to pray for the wellbeing of everything around you. And she ended by qualifying all of this with a “That’s the way our ancestors saw it. The rest of the world might see it differently, and they might be equally correct too”

I write this while being interrupted once in a while by a bunch of priests performing the 13th day rituals of her passing away. One of her hobbies, in the last decade or so, was reading the Obit column in The Hindu to see if anyone she knew from her generation had died, and even kept count. Eventually, she had outlived all of them, and in her memory, the rest of the family conducted an elaborate series of rituals she wouldn’t really have cared for.

She was a story teller par extraordinaire. Every lunch of mine from when I was a year old to a shameful 11 years old was accompanied by a side dish of enthralling tales from the epics, stories from Tamil magazines she read (Serialized tales in Ananda Vikatan) and even randomly made up tales featuring me and my brothers as heroes (Yes, we liked hearing those). I would also ask her to tell me tales from the Asura perspective, and she would, without telling me off for preferring the dark side

Most Tambrams associate their grandfathers with Hindu crosswords, Wordsworth, Test match cricket and a passionate love for intellectual pursuits. Most grandmothers are remembered for their killer Sambar, special avials and delectable snacks. Meenakshi was never interested in cooking. She had managed a household of some 20 kids and her sense of proportion of salt and spices never really re-adjusted to a small nuclear family, but I will only remember her for the vastness of her knowledge (ah, the number of times she has politely corrected pompous maamas’ pronunciations on tradition and custom), and the boundless curiosity that lulled everyone into thinking that she was simply yet another behind-the-scenes denizen of the kitchen.

This blog is dedicated to her. No, not the Lonely Planet rants or the scathing criticism of Phir Mile Sur. That’s not her. She would have said – “Poor guys, Lonely Planet. They just don’t know about Chennai. Leave them be” and “Good effort by the new Phir Mile Sur producers but I don’t think it’s as good as the original” and left it at that. She would also offer angry commenters some filter coffee

ps: I had a bunch of other things to post, but they had to wait because I wanted to do this first