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.

Board beyond relief

I realized that I mentioned board games in my last post but never ended up getting to it, so a quick followup was in order. I have always had an unhealthy obsession with board games. Having grown up learning chess at a very early age from my grandmother (She called the Rook “Elefend” and the Queen “Kyoon”), I soon developed a taste for turn based dice games, after realizing that cheating at chess, what with “Elefends” taking liberties with the straightness of their movements and bishops deviating slightly from their diagonals, just to win against my grandmother wasn’t really fun anymore, especially when I realized that she was letting me cheat and get away with it.

The first really sophisticated and downright addictive turn based game I was introduced to was a relic from the 1940s called Wembley. It was a full fledged simulation of the FA cup from that era. You managed teams, bought star players and calculated probabilities with a unique set of 6 loaded dice (3 favourable ones for home games, and 3 unfavourable ones for away games) to coax one of your teams to victory in the grand final at Wembley. This game kept us thoroughly engrossed through Chennai summers, sometimes to the point where we would get through about 4 or 5 games in a single day.

Having the bar set this high rather early, we found the Indian board game market rather disappointing. The very best games hardly ever made it here, and Wembley was starting to get a little repetitive. That was when we decided to design our own board games. Actually, “design” would be a rather specious thing to say. We mostly “adapted” good board games and set them in a local context. For instance, we created a Ranji Trophy version of Wembley, although the notion of buying and selling cricketers was unheard of in the late 80s.

I have always wondered what were the rules of the dice game the Pandavas played with the Kauravas. The original texts are rather obscure on this particular point. I mean, it couldn’t be a simple “Let-both-players-roll-and-the-highest-number-wins” sort of yawn-inducing game right? Surely, that cannot be spectator friendly. After all, we are told that the entire court was watching. So surely, there was some underlying board involved? What was it? Snakes and Ladders? Ha! Son of Dharma, your 3 leads you into the Snake infested forest while my 4 leads me to the Ladder to Draupadi. Was it some early form of Monopoly? Did Yudhisthira lose Draupadi at the Hotel on Hastinapura Avenue or the 4 houses on Indraprastha Place? Did Shakuni win the 400 gold coin Bank error in his favour? Did Yudi get assessed  for  “Street Repairs” on Chance after he built 3 houses on Dwarka Street? I don’t know.

On the subject of Monopoly, yet another game that I spent many an hour on, I quickly realized that playing by the official rule book made the game rather one-sided pretty quickly, sort of like how Tamil audiences in the 90s could predict, to the accurate nanosecond, when Goundamani was going to beat Senthil. Monopoly gets too predictable too quickly.

Perhaps I overestimate the number of board game geeks in this city, but should there not be a Madras edition of Monopoly? At least this gentleman and me seem to think so.  Perhaps it should be named Saravana Stores, after the nearest synonym for the original name. But I’d like to introduce some serious changes in the game play, to make it more Madras specific and in general more competitive.

First off, Free Parking has got to go. TANSTAFP (There aint no such thing….) . That dysfunctional location will be replaced with a Chance like set of cards that deal with various Chennai traffic motifs such as:

• Pay Rs 200 towards end of month collection drive bribe to constable
• Pay Rs 100 fine for having wrong kind of license plate.
• Music system stolen from car. Rs 200
• Miss a turn – Stay stuck here because the CM’s motorcade has blocked all roads

Those 4 boring railroads will be replaced by

• MRTS
• MTC
• Madras Autos
• Call Taxis

And each of them will have their own set of rules. Opponents landing on “Madras autos”,  for instance, will pay an “over-the-meter” rent, in other words, 25 multipled by whatever they rolled on their die + 1 (if one is playing during day time) and + 4 (if one is playing at night). If you land at the MRTS square, you need to pay rent only if there is a blue moon visible through the window. Yes, the train frequency is pretty rare, after all.

Chance cards will include Madras staples such as

• Pay Rs 400 for whitewashing P James Magic Show graffiti from your wall
• Rs 100 – Medical expenses incurred due to questionable fish fry at Elliots beach
• Pay 200 for post-deepavali garbage cleaning operations

Water works and Electric company will be replaced with Saravanan Thanni Lorry Inc and TNEB. Owning the Thanni lorry, you can strategically deprive certain areas of water and lower their rents. People landing on TNEB will miss one turn in addition to paying the rent because hey,have you ever stood in a TNEB queue?

The Infinite Monkey 2.0 has a go at 2008

I sat down today wondering why January 1 was considered the beginning of the year. Turns out it’s nothing astronomical (it’s about 10 days after Winter Solstice) or even anything religious (It’s 6 days after Christmas) for that matter. It was apparently the day when Roman consuls, Voluptuous Arteriosclerosus and Gluteus Maximus began their year in office in 153 BC.

I was also reminded of the word “laconic” and the slightly apocryphal story of its origins. Apparently Philip of Macedon threated the Spartan state of Laconia thus:

If I enter Laconia, I will level Lacedaemon to the ground

The Spartans apparently sent a brusque, brief, and yes, laconic message – “If”

So I was inspired to write a brief summary of important global events in 2008 in a laconic manner, if you will. But that was when I was interrupted by Infinite Monkey 2.0. For those of you who are not aware of this peerless simian, let me remind you. The 1.0 version of the Infinite Monkey spent many millennia randomly hitting keys on a typewriter. Once in a while (usually aeons), he would produce Shakespearean verse by the sheer force of probability. Now, Infinite monkey 2.0 is an improved version. He doesn’t use typewriters. He uses Web 2.0, and therefore rearranges tags (keywords) instead of letters.

I had originally written:

In 2008, the black dude won. China pulled off the Olympics. The original Windows guy stepped down. The Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the world. Mumbai burned, rich wall street crashed and became poor and Firefox released 3.

And the monkey decided to extract all the keywords and rearrange them. But I was surprised because he came up with this.

In 2008, the black dude won 3 at the olympics and the Large Hadron Collider promised to open some windows into origins of the world but foxed everyone as it crashed. China erected more firewalls and a movie about a poor guy from the streets of Mumbai struck it rich.

Oh well, he got lucky I guess. But then, he had another go.

In 2008, the large and rich city of Mumbai made movies that most dudes would not buy black, even from poor (fired) wall street guys who hadron out of jobs, even in China.

Now wait a second. This was getting out of hand. And then, Mr Infinite Monkey hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button once again and came up with:

In 2008, one could collide with cars, walls, windows, foxes, black and chinese people, all while driving around in a large city and firing at other dudes.

The year was also interesting in the sense that several potential “The Onion” headlines became real headlines

• Black man with a name that rhymes with Osama defeats rich white Vietnam veteran to become president
• Jews ghettoize and kill innocent people in Gaza.
• Indian wins gold medal in the Olympic games
• Banks give lots of loans to folks who have no intention of repaying and then say “Oops”
• In revenge for years of bombing and collateral damage, irate Iraqi throws a size 10 shoe at Dubya.

Anyway, wish you all a Yappy Hew Near, Nappy Yew Hear, and that other combination as well.

It’s that time of the year again

Hillary and Obama are fighting over primaries.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, primarily, February is the time when men go “Oh Bummer” and ponder at the upcoming loss of hilarity in their lives.

It’s that time of the year when one needs to decide what would make a suitable Valentine’s day gift for The Girl. And it’s not funny at all.

Admittedly, I am supposed to be an old hand at this, but..

Every year brings the same nerve-wracking pressure. What is a suitable symbol of undying love in commemoration of a priest in Rome who suffered martyrdom about AD 269? Here is a quick chronology.

My experiments with Valentine Day gifts

Cast

• Ashok
• Inner Narada

Circa 1990s

Many years ago, I stepped nervously into an Archies showroom to buy a vaguely pinkish piece of paper that professed undying love for a girl whom I had not even made conversation with. I found a suitable candidate, picked it up, forked over Rs. 20, and walked out.

That was when the Inner Narada announced lugubriously – “Archies? Thoo. Is that how you profess undying love? By buying a mass-produced piece of paper with words authored by some one else, probably an overworked clerk who mostly spends his time cursing his boss for not giving him free time to meet his girlfriend? Aah, the sheer irony.”

I threw that card away.

I walked into a Cassette shop to buy the next girl in my life, “The greatest hits of Richard Marx”. Apparently in the 90s, Richard Marx tapes were chick magnets.

The Inner Narada intoned sarcastically – “Thoo. So where ever your girl goes, whatever she does, Richard Marx will be right there, waiting for her. Is that what you want to tell your girl? Are you the one professing love or are you simply a messenger for Mr Marx?”

Oh well. The cassette tape, in addition to its claim of being a chick magnet, was most definitely a magnet magnet because it got stuck in the head of the tape player and caused Mr Marx to sing in the scale of an MD Ramanathanesque C instead of a Kumar Sanuesque E

So I moved on to Soft toys. Teddy bears holding I heart you signs, Monkeys holding roses, Gorillas playing guitars,  Grizzly bears playing Antaakshari, Duck-billed Platypi playing the harmonica etc.

The Inner Narada stated softly – “So yeah. Underpaid, overworked, Southeast Asian kids are currently saying ‘I love you so much that I don’t mind missing out school and playtime making this for you so that talentless losers like the one who spent Rs. 100 buying this from a company that pays me Rs. 0.5, can try to impress you‘”

Ah surely jewellery then must be the right thing. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, Rubies are her facebook friends, Emeralds must be on her blogroll and surely Sapphires must be her Orkut fans.

The Inner Narada informed insouciantly – “Blood Diamonds. Platelet Rubies. Lymphocyte Sapphires. African Warlords. Guns for Gems. Is that what you want to tell your girl? That you love her so much that you don’t mind sacrificing thousands of African lives to buy her a piece of Carbon?”

Ok. Surely, flowers are a safe bet. After all, that was the tradition in the middle ages, when Valentine’s day first became popular.

The Inner Narada smirked sardonically – “Plant reproductive parts, plucked out cruelly before they could bear fruit, only to be bunched together to die a slow, dehydrated death in non-biodegradable plastic covering, do not, I believe represent the concept of love. Would you like it if the sturdy Elm gifted the swaying coconut tree some human private parts?”

Fine. No flowers. But before I considered sarees, watches, chocolates, wolf pups, ventriloquist tarantulas and other goods that could be purchased in exchange for the swipe of a plastic card, Inner Narada interrupted thus -

“You are missing the whole point, Ashok. You do not express love by buying stuff. Buying is easy. Essentially, its like saying that you just don’t have the interest and inclination to spend your time doing something special for her, so you just get it done by some one else in exchange for cash”

Ok. I got the hint. I vowed to stop buying things. And that was when Inner Narada took a vacation.

Circa 2005-07

Sketches

The first thing I ever made as a Valentine Day’s gift was a pencil-sketched card that had 2 sparrows in Bollywood-movie-kiss-scene-censored-replacement pose. But at the last moment, I decided to dump it.

But eventually, I felt bolder. More confident. And that was when I attempted a portrait.

Bad Idea.

The first one looked like something that the creators of South Park discarded. The second one, one that I spent many hours on (even used unethical tools like tracing paper etc) came out much better but in the end, didn’t quite look like The Girl.

Music

I then tried writing songs dedicated to The Girl. Wrote the lyrics, sang, played the guitar and sequenced other instruments on Garageband, and gifted a small, miniature CD with an inset containing hand-written lyrics.

But after doing this twice so far, a third attempt feels like Terminator 3. Cliched and jaded.

Circa 2008

Ok. Now my wife is out, presumably shopping for a gift for me, and here I am, still planning what to do. Buying is passe, and I’ve run out of manufacturing talent. Some shady ideas come to mind,

1. I could dedicate a blog post to her

2. I could SuperPoke her on Facebook (But she is not on Facebook)

3. I could create a website, and search-engine-optimize it so that it shows up as the top result for the query “I love (name)”

4. I could post a video of myself professing undying love on youtube and send her the URL.

5. I could flood the social web with “I love her” messages. Twitter status, GTalk status, Orkut status, Facebook status, Email signature, Blog title etc.

Sigh.

One more day. And no good ideas yet.

Newtonian alternative histories

So the apple fell on him and all of us learnt about gravity, rates of change and other cool things. Right?

But what if a penguin had fallen on him?

And what if?

A large, bloated window with lots of loose and sharp edges would have hurt Newton very badly.

A Madraasi in New Delhi

I had the pleasure of living in New Delhi during the 90s. 1992 to 1999 to be precise. In ’92, I knew no more Hindi than “Mera naam Ashok haii avoor mye East of Kailash mein ragutha hoon”.

But 7 years and a few Pnjaabi friends subsequently taught me how to use expletives as nouns,

(Expletive) ! Idhar aa.

as pronouns,

Usko Bula. (expletive) kar kya raha hai? (where the expletive takes the place of the pronoun “Woh”)

as conjunctions,

Main paas hotha yaar (expletive), merko copy karthe pakad liya yaaru! (where the expletive takes the place of the conjunction “lekin”)

as question marks,

Ho kya raha hai (expletive)

as adverbs,

Main usko (expletive) maaroonga

as adjectives,

Tu aur tera (expletive) gaadi !

and finally, as exclamations.

Usko dekh yaar. (expletive said in a slow and stretched manner)

But all of the above took time to sink in. In my first few years, I felt so out of place in school that I became very defensive and refused to speak Hindi no matter what. Some kids saw it as arrogance, but back in 1992, I was conscious of being laughed at like the actor Mehmood.

But back at home, things were very interesting. For one, it was hilarious observing my grandmother use advanced dumb charades to communicate instructions to the servant maid. So she would essentially go

“3 words. 1st word. Split into parts. 1st part. (Hand wave). No. Not Mozart’s 40th symphony. Yes. Yes. Jhadoo. 2nd word. (aggressive movement of hands). No clue. (facial expressions indicate approval). Yes. Yes. Accha. 3rd word. (more hand movement). No clue. (Bow and arrow movements). Mahabharatha? Yes. Yes. (hand movements request further guesses). A Character in the Mahabharatha? Yes. Yes. Yes. Arjuna? No. Karna? Yes. Yes. Got it. Jhadoo Accha Karna“

I am just kidding of course. But you get the picture. It was not easy. She even asked me to buy “Learn Hindi (through Tamil) in 30 days” and I did. And here is my adviced to everybody. If you ever wish to learn a language, never ever buy the “30 days” series of books. They don’t just suck. They vacuum clean.

And then came my Delhi based relatives. And we felt – “Aah. We can now learn Hindi from people who speak Tamil”, and guess what. Most of my relatives spoke a weird language that can only be heard in New Delhi. It is said to have originated in the murky depths of Karol Bagh. It is called Tambramindi.

(Wife asking for 10 Rs from husband at Vegetable shop) Yenna. Oru dus nikaal pannungo

Neenga onnum fikar panna vendaam. Avar maaf panniduvaar.

Dei. School khathamaa?

Exam eppididaa irundhudhu? Che, kela aaiduthu.

Kadaila enna kareed panninna?

And the best of all,

Naa oru kaamaa poittu varen

Update: As usual, the commentspace has outdone the post Here’s some more Tambramindi samples.

From Kamesh

There was this mama from Madras, who during the deep delhi winter insisted to his guesthouse keeper – “bahut cold..bahut cold…ladki lao….ladki lao…” (he wanted the fellow to bring wood for the fireplace)

From farkandfunk

Naan dhaan sambhar khatam panniutaen.

Onnaku konjam kude sharam varalai? Chi.

From KK

My dad grew up in Bombay – Matunga, to be precise, which is, or certainly was back then, a Tam Brahm stronghold… He remembers a Tam Brahm lady across the street saying this to a a vegetable seller:
‘Dus aana ko deva to deva, devatta poda!’

From comfortablydumb,

abe payya…ghar pootke aaya kya (did u lock the house)

thayir sadam kharab ho gaya re (the curd rice has gone bad)

kal raat ko tookam nahi aaya (last nite didnt get sleep)

my grandama’s first hindi words..
milkman – maa ji, dood
grandma – kaun bi nahi kaun bi nahi…kal vaa (come tomorrow) (since we had warned her not to open the door and say come tommorrow)

Temple Matters

This is a sequel to Priestly matters, where I had an interesting discussion on Hindu Wedding rituals (of the Iyer Tambram variety) with the priest who eventually conducted my wedding, and Sacred Threads, where I shared some varying viewpoints on what the thread was really about. This is not a sequel like say, Empire Strikes Back. It’s more like Munna Bhai, where the tale is set in the same universe, but does not quite follow the previous one logically.

The dramatis personae here are assorted mamas from my family. Mamas with whom I have had several conversations in the past. And more importantly, mamas who had the nice habit of not using Argumentum Ad Antiquitatem to dismiss my questions. Mamas who aroused my curiosity enough to attempt a corny, uninformed, modern day Abhivaadaye. (You can read about that episode in the Glossary page under the term Jilpa)

And oh, all of this didn’t quite happen over a single evening, with bajjis and filter coffee. It’s snippets of conversations over the years woven into a messy tapestry that is likely to be sold only in the export-rejects shops in Burma Bazaar.

It all began with,

M1: Dei, come to the temple.

KA: Why?

Ok. To elaborate a bit, I never really liked visiting temples as a kid. To me, the cost-benefit analysis didn’t quite pan out. Standing in long winding queues, getting startled by the frequent high-decibel exclamations of Govinda Gooooovinda, all for a 2 second view of an idol wearing unholy amounts of bling while jargandis were being dished out with physical shoves, was not my idea of how to spend a weekend.

M1: Dei chinnapayale (hey kiddo), a temple is the place where people come, after leaving all their bad qualities behind. When you are in front of the deity, you are one with the community. No egos, no pride, no hubris. Have you ever wondered why we ask devotees to take their shirts and footwear off? The idea is to create an atmosphere where everyone is equal in front of the idol. There are no rich and poor in a temple. Just devotees. Isn’t that something worth preserving?

KA: (now miraculously grown up) I agree that temples were the way you describe them, in the past. But are they like that today? How can one talk about equality in front of the deity when the temple presents me a menu card of offering options? Ill take the Kalyanotsavam for Rs 5000 please. No thanks. Ill settle for the basic archanai. Isn’t it is a blatant display of pride, hubris and ego to shell out all that money for a grand offering of some sort? And all the crowds, the jostling, the rudeness..what goodness are they leaving behind anyway? My point is, are temples what they used to be?

M2: Granted. A lot of commercialism has crept into many temples. But you are missing the point about all the offerings. Again, I am afraid I have to take a trip to the past to explain this. A temple, if you really think about it, is an indirect form of taxation. It was a very subtle way of getting very rich people to redistribute some of their wealth in ways other than direct charity. Nobody wants to receive charity. Most people want to work for a living. A temple provided the perfect platform. It created job positions. The bell ringer. The flower decorator. The cleaner. The lamp lighter. The fruit vendor. And many more. A Mahakumbhabhishekham sponsored by the local zamindar meant that a large section of the community found itself employed and earning good money.

KA: I have always had this confusion. Did economic disparity between professions create and solidify the caste system or was it the other way around? But anyway, are you saying that a temple played a caste-system-neutralization role of a kind? And does it do it today? Electronic drums, outsourced cooking and koyambedu flower mafia seem to be the order of the day. Further, how many temples truly operate as non-profit entities? I mean, how many temples do a fair enough job of redistributing wealth today? In today’s world, I am not even sure such redistribution is a good idea. Shouldn’t temples be playing their social parity fostering role by focussing on children’s education, especially for the downtrodden? Instead, we have these large profit making enterprises that run universities and create millionaire priests. I am not out to denigrate the value of temples in today’s world. I want to understand how they could possibly adapt to the times. I am just not clear if they are adapting in the right way.

M3: Temples adapting aside, I think it is more valuable to think of this from a personal journey perspective. The Upanishads do not call for rituals or offerings. They call for a personal realization of the grandeur of the cosmos. The rituals and offerings are merely symbolic reminders of the nature of this universe. A visit to a temple is intended to constantly remind you of the ultimate truth. Of course there will be distractions, but an ideal temple is an outward representation of an inner journey of realization.

KA: Ok. Here is my problem. It is perhaps my not-so-stellar IQ, but I have trouble understanding something like that. When I visit a temple, my mind is mostly focussed on the which pillar I am going to rub my ash/kunkumam smeared hand on. It’s always observing the priest who visibly shows disdain for poor people by brushing them aside to ask me and my family “Vaango. Eppidi Irrukkel”. (Come. How are you).

Let me tell you what makes me realize the grandeur of the cosmos. Images from the Hubble Deep Field Telescope. Books by Stephen Hawking. Star gazing. The Orion Nebula. The Andromeda Galaxy. I always get the feeling that religion never really adapted symbols to suit the times.

M4: Maybe, and perhaps maybe not. Symbols tend to have very long shelf lives. But I do agree that the exponential growth of science and technology has caused an overall crisis of faith in old religions. But the solution is not to throw away temples.

KA: True. I am not saying that. For one, I love their architecture. But I want to know what a temple should mean to me. They are not the primary centres of art and culture. The music has moved to Sabhas (Vaataapi Ganapathim), Kollywood movies (Thirupathi Ezhumalai Venkatesa) and the Unwind center (What if God was one of us). They are not community meeting points. They are overcrowded and noisy. And nobody ever explains why most of the rituals are done in the first place.

I mean, look at the Sabarimala temple for instance. I have nothing against the place, but what messages is it sending me? We live in an increasingly gender-neutral, technological world. That temple has got to do better than ban women and put on Makara Jyothi displays, orchestrated by the Kerala State Electricity Board from a furnace situated in a nearby hill. Today’s generation will question everything. I think it’s high time we faced that and stopped considering it bad attitude. I do agree that the questioning should be polite and respectful. But temples have got to start engaging in a conversation with the youth today. I mean, get on Facebook and Orkut dude.

Ok. Perhaps not that. But still.

M5: Ok. Pesardhu porum. Come let’s go get Puliyodharai from the Parthasarathy temple. They make the greatest Puliyodharai in the world

KA: Yeah. Come, let’s go. I also like the temple elephant. It’s such a joy watching him.

The end.

ps: A lot of very wise people comment on this blog. I may have arm-twisted my mamas by the cunning use of my immaturity. But what are your thoughts on this? I want to understand what relevance temples/churches/mosques have in today’s world, from your perspective. I also want to understand what religious institutions ought or ought not to be doing to stay contemporary and relevant.

ps 2: No fighting please. I generally do not moderate comments, but I probably will, if things get rude or heated. And no inter-religious debates.

Furlongstones

Why do I blog? Because it calls. Beckons. How long do I spend daily? 30 minutes to an hour. I respond to comments from my mobile phone when I am on the road. Why do I never read through my posts again for spelling/grammatical mistakes? Correcting grammar mistakes and spelling is for school assignments. Not for sharing thoughts.

This blog is now 4 months old. For some strange inexplicable reasons, it continues to have readers. For even stranger reasons, it keeps getting occasionally desipunditted (4 times so far). My immediate blogging social network (blogrollers, commenters) have become good friends.

So I thought it might be a nice idea to do some Jalsa and Jilpa historical analytics.

The ancient past 

It all started when I lost my purse in Bangalore. Purse Matter. The first commenter on my blog was Mr WordPress, who so very politely reminded me,

Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.

The first post that got any sort of attention was Rucking Fules . I managed to get hold of a scanned image of the ID card from one of the most notorious jails in Chennai. For some reason, they continue to call it an Engineering college.

The first post I really enjoyed writing was An Advertising Case study . I did not want to make open fun of the creative geniuses who design political ad posters in Chennai. I wanted to read their minds.

The first post that attracted a major comment debate was Who is a Hindu (anyway)? Frankly, it was a pompous and opinionated piece that was thoroughly unfunny. But then, I hadn’t entirely embraced the profound philosophy of the absurd fully yet. Not that I have now, but I’m improving.

My first movie review, Ettukkaal Peter

The first time a commenter said “hilarious”. Tulsi Tulcome Tulconquer Tuldie

The first time I thought I had really got creative, but the blogosphere didn’t think so. You’ve retro-got mail 

The first restaurant review. Soul Food

The first really popular post. Madrasi Machi . Seemed to touch a chord with all South Indians who have had to fend off incorrect generalizations thrown at them by certain uninformed North Indians.

The Desipunditted posts

Random Soap serial concepts.

Comic strip dedicated to his holy hawtness himesh.

An ambience based classification system for restaurants.

And the unexpectedly popular Priestly Matters

The really bad puns

In case one didn’t notice, quite a few post titles are highly contrived puns. English language enna paavam pun-niccho teriyala, it seems to have become a bad habit of mine. What, in your opinion is the worst title pun of all time? I’m too lazy to link to each post. So plis excuse. My 30 minute quota is coming to an end for today.

Comfortably Onam?

Inhi Logo ne?

Some Orkut some are bad.

Purse come purse served?

Saree state of affairs?

Clutch Clutch hotha hai?

Deccan, but they usually don’t?

Auto Paato Kondaato?

It was the best of times. It was the vaastu of times?

Priestly Matters

In November of 2006, I got married. To a girl who comes from a family tradition where weddings last approximately 75 seconds and 5 different kinds of payasams (Liquidy puddings for the Tamil/Malayalam-challenged) usually feature soon after. My parents’ tradition, on the other hand (Incidentally, I personally follow only one tradition – blasphemy) involves weddings that tend to look like South Indianized versions of Doordarshan’s Mahabharatha episodes. Lot’s of silk, gold and poorly pronounced Sanskrit. There’s even the verbal arrows that meet in the middle and cause fireworks.

This will be the first of my posts on what I earlier titled the Great Nair-Iyer Wedding of November 2006. This particular post will deal with the lengthy negotiations we had prior to the actual event. Specifically, the rationalization of the fact that Nair weddings feature approximately 0 priests and Iyer weddings, well, tend to teem with them.

Now my original plan was to remove all traces of ritual and religion from the wedding and keep it entirely a civil affair, but my father convinced me that priests of today are getting used to “fusion” weddings and that frankly, those tend to please the old folk in the family far more than purely civil weddings. I accepted, on one condition. I reserved the right to examine every ritual in detail, understand the symbolism and weed out the male-centric and obsolete content before the event happens. My point was that tradition and ritual need to be relevant and cognizant of changing social mores. Actually, neither do I understand tradition properly nor am I fully cognizant of social mores and anto-social yogurts. But they (My family) said OK.

I made a trip to the venerable “Giri Traders” near Kapaleeshwarar Temple and bought a copy of Vivaha, the definite guide to Vedic weddings. All rituals are explained in detail and every Sanksrit verse traditionally chanted at Hindu weddings was translated with a decent amount of clarity.

My first broad area of concern was the unholy obsession with giving birth to male kids after marriage. There were several repeated references to “Putra” (boy child) and I insisted that they be changed to “Putra evam Putri” (Little Dudes and Dudesses). The rest of this episode is presented in dialogue mode (the events are real, the dialogue is well..marginally fabricated for mythological purposes).

Priest: This is traditional. It’s a mantra. It should not be changed. The effectiveness of it will go away if we unqualified people make such changes. These were composed by wise sages in the ancient past, and must not be tampered with. Boy children are good for the family.

Me: As Limp Marie Biscuit once said, It’s my way or Ranganathan Street. If you are not willing to change it, we will find another priest.

Priest: (seeing wads of money preparing to fly away with little flapping wings) Ok. Fine. What else?

Me: What’s this whole Kanyaa Dhaanam thing?

Priest: Er. That is the entire wedding. The girl’s father gives his daughter to your family.

Me: But why? Nobody’s giving anything here. A Marriage is a meeting of 2 people who wish to live together till divorce do them part.

Priest: But that’s a western definition. In India, a marriage is a union of families.

Me: where the girl’s family settles all the bills? And gives his daughter away in the bargain?

Priest: Ok. So what do we want here?

Me: Fine. For starters, let’s not call it “Dhaanam”.

Priest: But that will change almost every mantra…

Me: Ok. Fine. Let’s mostly assume it’s just semantics and let this one slide. But the really outrageous “My daughter is now yours to do as you please” bit needs to go. And I will not have the girl’s father wash my feet. Only one person is allowed to wash my feet and that’s me.

Priest: Ok. What else?

Me: Explain to me why I am to act this Kasi Yatra charade out?

Priest: It’s customary for the boy to have second thoughts about marriage and instead undertake a symbolic trip to Kasi (The holy city of Benares that is filled with an unholy amount of cow dung) for his higher studies

Me: 1. I am not interested in studies, leave alone the “higher” type. 2. Kasi? Are you kidding me? Who goes there nowadays for higher studies?

Priest: Sigh. It’s the T word.

Me: Well..I don’t intend having second thoughts about this, so can we like skip this?

Everybody else in chorus: But it’s so much fun. Wearing dhoti, holding an umbrella and throwing tantrums about going to Kasi. Pleeeease let this one slide too

Me: Couldn’t the girl also do a yatra of her own? A Nalli yatra perhaps? Having second thoughts about the wedding and instead making an educational trip on the subject of Fenestral Bartering to Panagal Park, T Nagar?

All Ladies: Very funny.

Me: Ok ok. Ill let this one slide. Explain this “Sumangali” stuff to me

Priest: It is an honour for women to die Sumangali. Before their husbands.

Me: But why?

Priest: That is the sign of a lucky wife. For happy life. He he rhyme.

Me: Thaangamudiyala (Can’t bear it) That stuff goes. No Sumangali business. Unless you add an equal amount of Sumangala references. And oh, don’t get cheeky on this one. The verse about praying for 120 years of life for the groom and 108 for the bride. Make that both 108.

Priest: Ok. Will you be tying the thaali (mangalsutra, knot) or is that out too?

Me: Very funny. One other thing. No Gotra (Sanksrit word meaning “Cowshed” which incidentally also refers to a sub-branch of Tam-Bram lineage) change for her.

Priest: But she has to. She is coming to your family.

Me: Then change me to her family’s Gotra as well. I have told you a million times that this is not one-way traffic. If some maal is comin’ over here, some maal gotta go over there too.

Priest: Sigh. Ok. No Gotra conversion for the girl.

Me: Explain to me why we are trying to stare at Alpha Ursae Minoris (Arundhati) in broad daylight.

Priest: It’s symbolic. One’s marriage must as fixed and steadfast as the Pole star.

Me: Sounds ok. In another 12,000 years, you have got to find another star though Precession of the axes.

Priest: What?

Me: Never mind.

And so, the wedding happened. The priest’s Sanksrit pronunciation was so unclear that I had absolutely no clue what he was saying. I vaguely mumbled along, hoping that he was abiding by our detailed agreement. I tried to do my part and inserted a few random “Putra evam Putris” here and there when I imagined he was saying something that sounded approximately like “Putra”. Well, after inhaling several cubic metres of smoke and later in the evening, standing for 3 hours wearing a Sherwani, I didn’t really care any more. I got married. Families tend to want to preserve tradition. In a coffin. I, on the other hand, want to bring it out, and do jalsa with it. I had my share of fun. So did they.

Innaadhu. Tag-aa?

For the Tamil challenged, the word “Innaadhu”, pronounced with a sharp nasal twang on the first syllable and an open-mouthed scowl at the end, means

“Whatay? You are trying to givings me unnecessary more work-aa? And I should really do it aa? Che. What jobless people ya”.

Chennai Tamil is a very expressive language. As you can see, nasal twangs, animated expressions and monosyllablic sounds with a few actual words thrown in between, manage to convey long complicated meanings that can cause a movie scene to pause while 4 page subtitles scroll across the screen for poor Tamil challenged readers to keep up with the cutting edge conversation. (Note to self: When doing jilpa, cool it down a bit. This is over too much)

Another example – “Aeei”, in which the “A” sound is more of a muted “Uh” sound that comes straight from the throat, and the length of the overall delivery is in direct proportion to the threat level that the speaker wishes to indicate to the listening party. Optionally, stick out one’s tongue at the end for additional impact. If this was a dialogue, the subtitles should read

“You insignificant, impotent, slum dwelling, crow biriyani eating cockroach of a non-person. If you do not drop what ever useless work you are doing and pay attention to me right this moment, I will do some really bad things to you”

So there. Where were we? Oh yes. I have been tagged and ordered to write “x” number of factoids, where x is apparently a random variable of personal choice. Since Pri did 7, I have decided to do 4, because there are 4 vedas and 4 varieties of Chennai Autos (more on that later).

Factoid #1. In 1984, while the clocks were striking thirteen and all that, my father bought me a Rubik’s cube. And I solved it in no time. Parents got overjoyed. Visions of NASA rocket scientists and Nobel winning mathematicians came to their mind. But that was before they found out that I simply rearranged the colour stickers because actually rotating the thing wasn’t getting me anywhere.

Factoid #2. About the same time, my vertically unchallenged first cousin saved my life by pulling me out of the railway track before the Durgapur-Kolkata train hit me. I had fallen off the platform while I was trying to lean over to see if the train was coming. He was the only person who could have pulled me out, because there was no time for anybody less than 6 feet 4 inches in height to get down from the platform and lift me up.

Factoid #3. The first film song I ever learned to play on my violin was Ilayaraja’s “Ilamai Idho Idho” (meanings Youth. It is here. It is here). Got severe scoldings from my first Violin teacher (who was Lalgudi’s sister no less) for blaspheming the instrument. So now, several years later, I can play that song note for note on my guitar as well. With full flange effects. Appidi (like that)

Factoid #4. When in class 6 in Vidya Mandir, Mylapore, I was part of a group that recorded 10 minutes worth of laughter on All-India-Radio. I remember having a feeling that my ribs were doing a boa-constrictor manoeuvre on my stomach area after that ordeal.

Ok. Now I am supposed to tag a few more people, I presume. Mahendra, Munimma and Marc. (sound of baton being sawed into 3 equal pieces and handed over)